Andromeda Klein

by Frank Portman

  “I can’t remember what he said,” Andromeda conceded meekly. “You’re right. I’m a horrible person.”

  “You are not bad as people go. Would you like to know what your problem is? I will tell you: you think you know everything. Also, you tailor your behavior so that you appear to be tasteful and humble, and you fool yourself quite easily, so you are not even aware of the fact that you think you know everything. But now you know. I just told you.”

  “Sorry,” said Andromeda, not really sure to whom she was apologizing. Was this what it felt like to go crazy? Was this how it had started with the dad? Had someone slipped her a drug somewhere along the line? Could it be the belladonna? Your own second thoughts weren’t supposed to argue with you like that, much less shower you with abuse and boss you around. Most confusing of all, Alt AK’s voice seemed suddenly to have some pretty good advice.

  “Say sorry to yourself. It is nothing to do with me. So yes, that Master was serving up some pretty hot stuff, but of course you weren’t paying attention. Fortunately, I was. He gave you some numbers—no, you don’t need to write them down. I’ll remember them for you. Ask when you need them….” The voice began to replay the King of Sacramento’s words exactly as he had said them, in a mechanical monotone. And it was remarkable: as the recitation continued, the vanished memory of the dream came rushing back as vividly as ever. This could be a useful system.

  “So I need to work on my lantern anchors,” she said, when the voice got to that part.

  “No, dopey,” said the voice. “He said you need to work on your Latin, and he called you an anchoress.”

  “What’s an anchoress?” asked Andromeda.

  “Look it up” was the reply. “Do I have to do everything around here? Ahem. Oh, and the verses about the anchoress and the Popess and Henry Cornelius just about killed me. A clever, clever Master.”

  “So,” said Andromeda, not sharing the voice’s sense of humor. “Now you have a crush on the King of Sacramento. Great.”

  “Don’t be so ridiculous,” said the voice. “He seemed well familiar with the one you call Twice Holy, and clearly implied that if you were half the Henry expert you claim to be, you’d have fewer fortune-telling problems.”

  “The Henry expert,” said Andromeda. “Are you going to make me ask?”

  “Henry Cornelius Agrippa!” said the voice. “Duh. Try to keep up.”

  The question was on the tip of Andromeda’s tongue, though she hesitated to say it. Conversing with someone who is in your own head can be confusing, though, since to think it is the same as saying it and the voice proceeded as though she had said it.

  “My name? Honey, you could not pronounce it. You have always thought of me as Alternate You, and that suits me. So does ‘It,’ or ‘That.’ Carry on as usual.”

  Carrying on as usual was going to be difficult.

  Andromeda thanked it for its help but admitted, as deferentially and politely as she could, that she was still rather confused and didn’t know what was going on.

  “Going on?” repeated the suddenly loquacious Alt AK. “Lord of the Aeon, you are slow. This is what is known as Knowledge and Conversation. That is what is going on. As in, I’m your Holy fucking Guardian Angel.”

  And her Holy fucking Guardian Angel chattered relentlessly at her deep into the night.

  xiv.

  The Holy Guardian Angel would answer no questions about Itself. “And what manner of creature art thou, O Holy Guardian Angel?” met with content-free, rushing silence no matter how Andromeda phrased the query. It was good at math. It was good at remembering things—the name of every doll Andromeda had ever had, for instance, in the order she had had them; the pharaohs of Egypt; the entire list of Sylvester Mouse books, saved and unsaved. And It could be quite funny, even if Its jokes were most often at Andromeda’s expense. But It was not a splendid conversationalist: It tended to fade out after short bursts, often, it seemed, as punishment for questions It didn’t like. Then, just as Andromeda would settle down and begin to drift off to sleep, the voice would return, buried yet discernible amidst the sound of the cars on the highway or the wind, jabbering on an entirely different subject, keeping her awake.

  This was going to take some getting used to.

  “Why the Two of Swords?” Silence. “Where do you go when you’re not talking to me?” Nothing. “Where is Daisy’s tarot deck?” In response to this, Andromeda detected, in the distant buzz of the refrigerator motor down the hall, what sounded like a snort.

  If you were a book of unbound leaves, where would you hide? was the response.

  “It? It?” she mentally called, and moved her lips in a slight whisper. (The voice would respond to silent thoughts, but she found it easier to articulate thoughts when she spoke or whispered.) “Look,” Andromeda finally said, “I can’t just keep calling you ‘It.’ Or ‘Alternative Me.’”

  Very well, It said, roaring back, irritated. My number is 1000. So you may call me “One-thy.” It sounded too much like something Baby Talk Barnes might say, and even It could see her point.

  “You’re the Holy Guardian Angel around here,” said Andromeda. “Just tell me. Pick something.”

  Fair enough. You shall refer to me as Huggy.

  “Huggy?” She hesitated. It sounded a little … stupid. “Oh, I get it: from HGA.”

  Take it or leave it was all Huggy would say. Then It said: Farewell, and Andromeda felt Its presence receding, spiraling into nothingness, or perhaps into a fine mist somewhere inside her, not in her head as she might have supposed but in a spot in her chest.

  “Who’s the King of Sacramento, Huggy?” Andromeda blurted out, but It was already gone.

  “Huggy? Huggy?” Andromeda Klein whispered when she woke up on Saturday morning. She tried in the singsong voice she used to call Dave: “Huggy! Huggy!” That brought Dave to the door, scratching. You could say “concrete” or “tomato” in that tone and Dave would come running, treat-mad. He gave her a cold look, however, when she let him in, as though even he couldn’t quite believe she was going along with this Huggy business.

  “What a nurse is going on in there?” said the mom’s voice, followed by officious clicking as she clomped down the hall to Andromeda’s door. “On earth,” she meant, probably. Not “a nurse.”

  Andromeda managed to slam the door shut with her shoulder just in time to prevent the mom invasion. The mom didn’t need to see her bandaged arm or the remains of her tantooning gear or the ropes dangling from the chair back.

  “Strength of a tiger, strength of a tiger,” Andromeda mumbled, and braced herself against the door. The mom outweighed her by quite a lot and could have easily pushed the door in, Andromeda and all. Whether the simple tiger charm had any effect was impossible to say, but Andromeda won the battle of wills. The mom gave up and clacked off, muttering unintelligible curses along the way.

  “Huggy?” Andromeda repeated. In the down-to-earth daylight, Huggy was nowhere to be found.

  Andromeda imagined herself shaking her head and saying something like “Wow, what a weird dream” and perhaps recounting it to the dad or to Rosalie van Genuchten, or even to St. Steve if she ever got to talk to him in real time, later on. St. Steve would be the perfect person to tell such a thing. He hardly reacted even to her weirdest disclosures. “I dreamed that the voice I always hear in my head separated itself from me and turned out to be my Holy Guardian Angel, and she, or I guess It, gave me advice on how to enter the realm of the King of Sacramento.” Then everybody could laugh, and the story could end. She could finally be a regular girl again. Except it hadn’t been a dream. She could never be a regular girl. And she could never tell a soul. While they no longer burn you for such admissions, they do put you in institutions and give you drugs to disconnect your mind from your brain.

  Yet while it had been no dream, it had been dreamy. The specifics eluded her when she tried to pin them down, as with dreams. In fact, now that Huggy was no longer there to prompt and goad her, the details
about the most recent colloquy with the King of Sacramento were slipping away again as well. There was a string of numbers; there was an order to become better educated, to learn Latin and study Agrippa more carefully. Any anchoress can play the Popess. With the proper hat. The Popess was the name given to the High Priestess in the earliest tarot packs, a female Pope. And Andromeda Klein was an anchoress, which is a—a female anchor?

  “Huggy?” No response. Dave padded up and inclined his little Batman head, as though to say “Yes, mistress?” “Well, Dave,” she said, “looks like it’s just you and me, kid. And it looks,” she added, picking up the library’s copy of the Abramelin and sliding it into her bag, “like we won’t be needing this anymore.” And it was true: she appeared to have managed to skip some steps, achieving Knowledge and Conversation of the Holy Guardian Angel without even trying to conduct the elaborate Abramelin Operation. If so, it had to be one of the most successful magic operations ever completed by accident, one for the record books. It felt a little like cheating. Perhaps one day, when she had the leisure, she would perform the formal operation anyway, just to make it up and ensure everything was correct and proper. Or maybe, had she done it properly in the first place, she might have wound up with a better, less obnoxious HGA.

  “You get what you pay for, Dave,” she said, scratching his ears. If it had been that easy for Andromeda to skip ahead, perhaps Daisy’s dabbling with the Abramelin text hadn’t been quite so preposterous. After all, if Mathers had inadvertently conjured some of the Abramelin demons merely by translating the text, and Andromeda had actually achieved Knowledge and Conversation with her admittedly substandard Holy Guardian Angel by doing pretty much nothing, who was to say that Daisy couldn’t have stumbled upon K & C with her own HGA by sticking pins in a library book? And if so …

  “Huggy,” said Andromeda. “Is the King of Sacramento by any chance Daisy Wasserstrom’s HGA?”

  “Meow,” said Dave.

  Daisy, and Mathers, for that matter, might well have done other things as well. What had Andromeda done, prior to Huggy’s emergence? Belladonna seeds mingled with the sandalwood incense, the combination used in her and Daisy’s most successfully weedgie séances and operations; restraint, an arm stretched behind her head and tied to an object; hundreds of needle pricks, in her arm rather than in a book; the letter bet inscribed on her body, or the act of inscribing it; the act of imagining Bethany Stone’s deep, enveloping, scryable eyes; energy from St. Steve’s reappearance and unusually forthcoming texts; and, possibly, Byron’s having submitted himself for discipleship and gifting her with his Simonomicon. Perhaps it wouldn’t have worked at all without a Simonomicon nearby. All this preceded, of course, by a Daisy-sparked disordering of her state of mind and the Eejymjay crisis-involving, it must be remembered, her having laid hands on each important magic book in an organized, systematic way. And finally, a lifelong habit of imagining herself bound and locked in a box and of holding imaginary conversations with a self-critical inner voice.

  In a way, it was a kind of ritual, and a rather elaborate one at that. It could be repeated and tested by science, certainly. Though, and this seemed the most important realization of all at the moment, only by her. No one without a box and an Alternative Universe voice, not to mention a St. Steve and a Daisy and the IHOB and Bethany and Byron, would have a hope of re-creating those conditions, even with detailed instructions. How would you even begin to write the grimoire of that?

  She spoke the question aloud to Dave: “Is that why the rituals in books never seem to work no matter how careful you are?” But to ask the question was to answer it. Of course it was, or at least, it was one reason why. Deliberate blinds were another. And of course, it was possible that some of them had never worked in the first place.

  She paused to allow either Dave or Huggy to confirm this insight, perhaps to congratulate her. Dave blinked at her. What would Huggy say? Something like “Bingo,” sarcastically delivered, probably, and she thought she might have heard a distant “Bingo,” in fact, though it came from far off and not from within her breast or head, so it might well have been her imagination or merely a slight variation in the faint rushing sound always in her ears owing to her disorganized collagen.

  At any rate, if Huggy’s mission was to help Andromeda sort out her King of Sacramento and Daisy situation, It was going about it rather strangely. It had certainly helped organize the interaction with the King in a way that could make a kind of sense, though she had a hard time remembering much of it now. But Its incessant chatter all through the night had kept her out of her box and prevented any possibility of another dream session with the King of Sacramento. How are you supposed to float in your box to a shadowed astral chamber with a sarcastic, know-it-all HGA prattling on and on in your ear all night?

  “And there’s another one, Dave,” she said, pulling on her jeans and checking her phones. She meant another possibly important element of what she was now beginning to think of as the Huggy Tantoon Working. Christmas trees and old-fashioneds the night before, horror films, and fortune-telling. With, let’s see, six additional possibly unwitting celebrants, two of whom must leave in the midst of the divination, and one of whom must have deep, lovely scryable eyes.

  No messages from St. Steve. Three from the mom: “I love you, honey;” “don’t forget to eat today;” and “what’s the matter don’t you love me anymore?” Sad. “I love you just fine,” she texted back.

  “Want to see my Necronomicon?” she said to Dave with a sly, flirtatious wink and a saucy pose, jeans still halfway on. She had pulled the book out of her book bag and held it up like a game-show assistant.

  Dave made a sound she had never heard from him, a kind of deep-throated whimper. She dropped to her knees and held the book so he could investigate. He sniffed it carefully, gingerly, then suddenly yowled and ran off to hide deep in the closet. She had never seen him act that way. Had this happened at night, it would have been quite weedgie, in fact, but in the morning it was only curious. For a cheesy hoax, there sure was something about that book.

  “The Simonomicon,” said Huggy, reappearing in a rush. “As powerful as a vacuum cleaner.” But it was a shadow of the Huggy of last night, more like the usual Alternative Universe Andromeda Klein, which, despite the sarcasm, was still like a gentle voice, offering a self-questioning thought here and there. The loud, aggressive, assertive Huggy of the previous night was gone. Maybe It had to be conjured. Which was another way of saying, perhaps, that Andromeda had to alter her mind so she could hear It properly.

  Andromeda made the mistake of looking at herself in the mirror at that point and realized that if she were to be quite scrupulous she would have to add yet another instruction to the preparation section of the Huggy Tantoon Working ritual: celebrant must have bad hair. Bad hearing, too, though for someone with supremely well-organized collagen, ear plugs would probably suffice. A bad mind. And no ass. How a normal adult female celebrant would swing that one, she had no idea. Males and young girls were more likely to meet the requirement, she thought, though this thought made her sad.

  “That’s where Isaac Newton went wrong,” she said, thinking it might be something Huggy would say or at least appreciate. She imagined Huggy’s “voice” agreeing, and she imagined what It would probably say, which was “Yes, he should have taken off that wig.” But no, that wasn’t right: she had been wearing a wig, Daisy’s wig. So wigs were back in, Isaac Newton’s judgment reaffirmed.

  Andromeda waited for, then imagined, Huggy’s confirming “Bingo.” But imagining it and hearing it were very different. She couldn’t make it happen. It figured that Andromeda would get assigned such a stubborn, disagreeable HGA. It just did.

  “Do you know how to hot-wire a car?”

  Rosalie van Genuchten was on the phone, and the mom was pretending to take inventory of the refrigerator’s contents while straining to hear every word through the kitchen wall. Andromeda had availed herself of a rare opportunity to use the computer in
the dining room to look up anchoress on the Internet. Huggy had popped up to tell her the word, which she had forgotten, while she was in the bath, the still-distant voice bubbling up from the sound of the rushing tap. Perhaps this is always what happens when people “remember” things; they’re just not sensitive or knowledgeable enough to realize that Some Thing is bringing it forth. Strangely, the voice she had always thought of as her Alternative Universe self had never been so quiet and elusive as it was now, when she had finally experienced it in its full, uncloaked form.

  Still, It had also, in passing, told her that she shouldn’t wash her hair so much because it deprived the scalp of essential oils, and reminded her that she had left the Simonomicon out and recommended putting it back in the bag, just to be on the safe side. Huggy could be positively momlike.

  “I don’t know anything about cars,” Andromeda told Rosalie, which pretty much went without saying. “My dad uses a screwdriver in his van.”

  “What kind of screwdriver?” asked Rosalie, but Andromeda didn’t know, and she said she didn’t suppose it mattered what kind. Rosalie had been caught raiding her mother’s supply of weed and had been “grounded.” Practically, this meant nothing, because her mother was spending the weekend with her boyfriend in Carmichael and anyway Rosalie laughed at such weak-willed attempts at parental discipline, as one does. However, her mother had taken both sets of keys to the Volvo with her.

  “Wow, mean,” said Andromeda.

  “I did get the door open, but now I’m stuck,” said Rosalie, adding that they needed to be mobile because there was a party at the station that night. “You have to come. Josh wants to hang out with you, and you have to witness the awesome continuing adventures of Rosalie and Darren, the service-station years.”

  “Can’t Darren just give you a ride up there?” Andromeda asked. Rosalie loved to bore her with rapturous descriptions of Darren’s car, which was a something-or-other.