Andromeda Klein

by Frank Portman

  The books she had donated, True and Faithful and Night-side of Eden, didn’t have the notation—it would have been rather weedgie if they had had it, because she had data-entered those records herself, but of course she checked just in case.

  Andromeda was in the break room eating her plum baby food and paging through Daisy’s teen vampire book when she noticed a little folded plastic cardholder inside the book. Inside were Daisy’s student-body card, her driver’s license, and her library card.

  Andromeda paused to consider. The card wasn’t expired, and she doubted that canceling a dead person’s library card was something anybody ever thought of doing. Would the card work? If it did, fifteen more books could be saved right away, bringing the total to forty-five. At this rate, the “Friends” of the Library’s plan would really be in trouble. If Andromeda had been the sort of person to rub her hands together and cackle gleefully, or to punch the air, or to do a little triumphant butt-shaking dance like the mom, that was what she would have done. Instead, she clicked her tongue and said, “A.E.”

  She had to choose her moment, when Marlyne went on break and she was asked to fill in. But she managed to get all the books scanned in fairly efficiently. It felt a little strange when she saw Daisy Wasserstrom pop up on-screen, but it did work. Was that Daisy’s scent faintly coming through the heating vent? She sniffed. Yes, very faintly, but maybe it was coming from the card.

  She accepted Gordon’s offer of a ride, because all those books wouldn’t fit in her bag.

  “I get off work here, the last thing I want to do is read,” he said. “And that,” said Altiverse AK, “is the difference between you and him.” It’s the difference between me and pretty much everybody, replied Andromeda’s thought waves.

  “Some light bedtime reading?” he said. She looked down and realized he was pointing to LaVey’s Satanic Bible, which she had checked out on Daisy’s card. Not, it must be understood, because she approved of it. She found it shallow and almost completely worthless, a relic and a curiosity from an earlier, misconceived dead-ended strand of the mid-twentieth-century magical revival. However, she wanted to keep the library as intact as possible. And it was certainly conceivable that she would have the occasion to quote it someday in the spirit of irony.

  “If you weren’t so cute,” he said, “you’d be scary.”

  “You should poke his eyes out one by one with pencils,” said Altiverse AK.

  “Oh, he’s not that bad,” replied Andromeda, and she must have said that one aloud, because Gordon heard and seemed to think she was talking about Anton LaVey.

  “You know way too much about this shit,” he said finally.

  Andromeda Klein didn’t like the idea of anyone, even someone as inconsequential in actual real life as Weird Gordon, walking around under the impression that she had defended Mr. A. LaVey. But there was nothing to be done. She’d just have to take it. Andromeda Klein, CoS. Ha.

  Rosalie van Genuchten had wanted Andromeda to do another reading for her that night, and to come with her to the station. (This was a gas station at the top of Ridgemont Way. Rosalie was interested in a guy named Darren who worked there, and she was always trying to persuade people to go there with her to hang out.) Andromeda said she didn’t feel good, and managed to get out of it. Was it normal to have to call in sick to your friends?

  “Just do me over the phone,” Rosalie said, “real quick. Am I going to make out with Darren?”

  “Yes,” said Andromeda. “If you want.”

  “Come on, you didn’t even check.”

  “Okay,” Andromeda said, pretending to shuffle some cards. “Yes, you will. If you want. And how.”

  “Seriously?” Well, yeah: it was pretty much up to her, after all. “How much? Can you do bases, maybe?”

  Andromeda laughed, but that was actually kind of an interesting idea, so just for fun she laid out three cards. The first two were Cups and the third was the Ace of Pentacles. Why not? Water, the third element, and Earth, the fourth, depending how you count them up. Earth would definitely be a home run, and Water …

  “Third base,” she said abruptly. “Rounding third, but I wouldn’t try to go for home.”

  “Charlatan!” Alt AK was hissing in the center of her brain.

  “Okay, but what is third, then? What’s the base system we’re looking at here?”

  “Hold on, I’ll look it up in Liber Baseballius,” Andromeda said.

  “Seriously?”

  “No. Not seriously.”

  Rosalie said nothing. Even her silences were bossy, somehow.

  “Well, don’t quote me on this,” said Andromeda, at last, French accented, “but it also looks like there may be quite a bit of uh, how you say, moisture involved.” After all, there were all those Cups.

  “Okay, Klein, you got me.” Rosalie was laughing slightly. “So, curiosity: do you or don’t you have the hots for Brian? You had the library date. Your imaginary boyfriend must be getting jealous.”

  Andromeda didn’t even bother to wave away the “date” description, or to say “Byron,” but she could not resist mentioning, because she couldn’t help feeling slightly, inappropriately proud of such a weird thing, that she was seeing him again on Sunday.

  “We’re going to church,” she said, deadpan. It did get a snicker.

  “Is that what they’re calling it these days,” said Rosalie. “Well, I sure hope your God doesn’t smite thee. Remember to use several layers of contraceptive devices, Drama-rama, because the two of you would have ugly, ugly babies.”

  There was no “I’m skidding” about that one: it was hard to argue with.

  “I won’t die,” said Andromeda. Rosalie had pressed End Call after about two-thirds of an exasperated sigh, which was her other way of saying goodbye.

  As Andromeda was setting down her phone, she turned over the next card, the Five of Wands, but she didn’t call Rosalie back to tell her she might have some competition at the station because that would have been silly and she was done talking to her anyway.

  Just then a text from UNAVAILABLE came in. The sight of it made Andromeda feel like she was full of warm Jell-O. He was still in New York and he missed her. So she smiled real big. For her.

  It was a good time to sneak onto the computer to copy her bet onto transfer paper, because the mom and the dad were in the kitchen having the organic argument. With any luck, they wouldn’t even notice her doing it at all.

  The dad, in a manic phase, was complaining because the mom had purchased corporate onions. Nonorganic produce, on manic days, at least, threw him into an incandescent rage. In the down times, he would just sigh and shake his head and mutter when something disappointed him like that, and Andromeda had to agree with the mom, though she kept it to herself, that she liked him better that way, defeated and manageable.

  “It’s the same stuff,” the mom was saying over and over, and the dad was shaking his head. She: The organic sticker is just a gimmick they use to raise the prices for suckers. He: No, it is certified to have been grown with safe, healthful, and environmentally benign methods of production. Andromeda could have mouthed the words.

  Andromeda looked down at her right hand. It was a Right Ring Day, which technically meant she was supposed to take the mom’s side in disputes, as well as eat meat, enjoy country music and sports, and dislike immigrants. It was extremely rare that she could bring herself to do any of these things, especially agreeing with the mom, which was so extreme it had to count for quite a lot in the Right Ring reckoning. But she was feeling “full of beans,” as the dad might have put it, and exhilarated from the text, so she went for it.

  “So,” she said, “is this the same government that’s spying on you through the TV and tracking you with radioactive money, and staging fake terrorist attacks on its own cities? You think they’re trying to kill you, but you trust their little stickers?”

  They were staring at her, and the dad looked hurt.

  “You got to admit,” said the mom, “t
he girl’s got a point.”

  In the end, it was too much for Andromeda. She couldn’t stick with it.

  “No,” she said, stomping off, “the girl does not have a point.” She had betrayed the Right Ring yet again.

  Later on she felt bad enough to apologize to the dad, and kind of pet his arm to cheer him up, like you’d do to an animal. He blamed it all on going off the meds.

  “The state is not your friend, Dad,” she said.

  “Ah, my child, I have taught you well,” he replied. “Now let’s go eat some pesticide falafels that want to kill the planet.” That was cute, but Andromeda never ate with them, and had already eaten her lime Jello-O and chickpea salad with a tiny sliver of ham to fulfill the Right Ring carnivore obligation. A different kind of daughter might have done it anyway, but that would have been a different kind of family altogether.

  “I hate Israeli food,” she said. “It makes me feel awful.”

  He was never happier than when you copycatted him.

  It was comforting to wear Daisy’s wig, and she liked the way it looked on her, so she put it on and wore it while she was getting everything ready.

  She positioned her straight-backed chair in front of the wall mirror and tied her left wrist to the right post of the chair back. Then she ducked under her arm to sit down so that her forearm was secured behind her head and the underside of her upper arm with the transferred bet drawn by Byron the Disciple was secure and in view, and slowly, methodically began the tantooning.

  She had banished the room with an LBRP and had consecrated her Makkuro Sumi ink and her thread and her compass point to Thoth, and had lit the room with camels at the four cardinal directions around her and in a semicircle on her side table. Feeling generous of spirit, she had tried putting on Byron’s Choronzon CD, but it was just too harsh and distracting, so she wound up, once again, with good old Guillaume de M. Finally, in honor of Daisy, who, it had to be remembered, had been the one to point her in the direction of the King of Sacramento in the first place, she added a few belladonna seeds to the grains of sandalwood incense in her censer, and fanned the smoke a bit with a feather in the traditional manner.

  The little bet commemorated her appreciation of Bethany, the return of St. Steve, the Magician, and the King of Sacramento, all at once. The very fact that she had had the idea seemed like a kind of magic. She was certainly feeling magic. And just as she realized she had somehow clicked over to magic, she added Disciple Byron to the list of significant items bound to her by coincidence and the indelible mark on her inner upper arm. By the end, she was feeling detached, quiet, drowsy, yet with a sharp, sharp mind. Beyond the shadows, the walls looked slightly liquid and the inside of Andromeda’s head felt exceedingly smooth. The bet was looking very good indeed, even Altiverse AK had to admit.

  “One down, twenty-one to go,” it had said, referring to the letters remaining. She had room for at least that many, if she kept them small. The question was, would twenty-one further things worth commemorating end up happening to her before 2012?

  Andromeda had meant to banish the room and shut the whole thing down as soon as the bet was finished, but Daisy’s scent began to drift in, discernible underneath and around the edges of the acrid remains of the belladonna and the buttery wax, so she decided to keep it going for a bit longer. She still felt the strong, comfortable low-ouijanesse magic. She settled against the door and opened the Daisy bag.

  The Daisy scent was overpowering now, far more than what you would expect from the items in the bag. There was a sharp uptick in the ouijanesse level, and Andromeda’s skin began to prickle. Was she imagining it, or was there a slight intermittent vibration in her chest? It was a similar sensation to the one that had preceded the opening of the Lacey Garcia cone-of-hate gateway, but this time Andromeda felt grounded and calm, in no danger of slipping out of control like before. Daisy was there. She could feel her.

  “Daisy, what are you doing?” she said. There was no answer, unless the slight shudder in Andromeda’s chest and the weedgie tingles on her arms and ears were a response. She spread the rest of the Daisy bag items, the Barbies, the pill bottles, the plastic horse named Jenny, the books and notebooks, the funny goggles with their strange cord, everything, around her in a large semicircle.

  Daisy’s round, precise handwriting had been more or less the same for her whole life, and it was impossible to tell when Daisy had copied the Toad Bone Ritual and the Hand of Glory instructions into the notebook, though she might well have been quite young. No one would ever actually try to do the Hand of Glory, and Andromeda couldn’t see Daisy doing the cruel, barbaric Toad Bone Ritual either, because she had loved animals and had been squeamish about even the idea of touching a toad’s squishy body. But there were indications, in the library copy of The Book of the Sacred Magic of Abramelin the Mage, that she had been studying it carefully while she had it in her last year or so of life: the telltale pin marks that Daisy regularly used to mark books unobtrusively. Beginning the elaborate Abramelin Operation with no preparation and very little hope or intention of actually following it through was exactly the sort of thing Daisy would do, in fact; she rarely completed a project. Could Daisy, like Mathers, have accidentally conjured some of the Abramelin demons by playing idle games with the book? In a flash of inspiration, Andromeda paged through the Abramelin text, but she found no incantation that mentioned the King of Sacramento. That would have neatly accounted for the King of Sacramento’s appearance, but in Andromeda’s experience, neat explanations rarely turn out to be the correct ones.

  “Well, Dave,” she said in the direction of the cat’s uninterested, lumpy shape, “we’ve got Daisy’s missing tarot deck, the King of Sacramento, and the Two of Swords.” They were connected somehow. The King of Sacramento seemed like the one to ask, but it was not a simple matter. She had forgotten the specifics of what little he had told her. There were numbers carved into a post stuck at the foot of her box. If she could ever return there, she could consult the post and try to hold the numbers in her memory long enough to write them down when she returned. And there was a Two of Swords flag.

  There were, no doubt, better and more easily consulted spiritual creatures out there, but the only one Andromeda had a reasonable chance with, whatever his faults, was the King of Sacramento. He was not terribly pleasant. He was actually rather annoying. But you work with the spirits you have. There was no handbook or grimoire for how to summon him. There was only trial and error.

  On the other hand, Andromeda had been spending her nights in her box for years and years, since she was very small. Assuming the box was always in the same location, the chamber with the darkly radiant purple walls of liquid and smoke, that certainly seemed like a place where the King of Sacramento spent at least some time. So where was it, this chamber? Based on the colors and the fact that it was most easily reached in a dream state, it seemed like Yesod, the ninth Sephira, associated with the moon and Mercury-Thoth, as it appears in Yetzirah, the Formative World. And if her box and its chamber were indeed in Yesod in Yetzirah, well, it was quite fortunate that she had a map of exactly where that was. On the Tree of Life diagram, Yesod was, of course, the sphere or state or world directly above Malkuth on the Middle Pillar. It could be reached through several routes, most directly via tau, Key XXI, the World or Universe. The point, then, was, if more regular meetings with the King of Sacramento were desired: to learn how to get there reliably.

  Daisy’s scent was still heavy in the air. Andromeda felt a remarkable peace, a sense of rightness, a floaty sensation of quiet detachment. She shuffled through her cards, turning up one after another, looking for the World, visualizing where each lay on the Tree of Life diagram. The Moon, Judgement, the Hermit, the Star. Visualizing these dynamic paths, the ten numbers they connected, and the four Worlds that constituted them all at the same time was just beyond her grasp and made her feel slightly dizzy. There was a faint clicking sound in her head and the flat, monochromatic diagram suddenly came alive
and seemed to rise out of her. It was a fluid and three-dimensional, many-colored, astonishingly beautiful jewel with uncountable flashing facets, turning itself inside out continuously, hovering above her head.

  It was gone a second later. Her head throbbed and ached. The painful rhythmic flapping sensation might have been the sound of her blood pumping in her ears along with her accelerated heartbeat, but it also coincided with the sound of Alternative Universe Andromeda Klein clapping.

  And the rushing sound of the cars going by on the highway grew louder in her ears and the static formed itself into words more distinct and prominent than she had ever heard before from AAK. “Finally,” it was saying. “Finally. Thoth be praised. Amen. It only took you around a decade and a half to figure it out.”

  Plain Old Universe Andromeda Klein had no idea what to say.

  “Now, there is a relief,” said the voice, continuing. “Turn your good ear toward the window and focus on the traffic, otherwise you might lose me again. Have you ever noticed, you are very hard to talk to? Not a great listener. I know, you learned it at your mother’s knee. But that Master gave you around a googol-zillion hints and you noticed none of them. Still distracted by your quest for unavailable penis. It is a common problem down there. Unrequited love, they call it, when they wish to be delicate. Tragic.”

  It was a strange sensation. It was the same inner voice, but with a difference, not louder in her head but more present, each word vibrating with a slight flutter. The most irritating aspect of this peculiar outburst, perhaps, was the fact that her own inner voice seemed to have adopted some of Rosalie van Genuchten’s vocabulary as well as the mom’s bossiness.