Andromeda Klein

by Frank Portman

  Andromeda was feeling slightly dazed. It was true: she really should have been able to look this stuff up for herself. Why had it taken the Precious Sponge to connect those dots for her? In spite of herself, she began to feel a little irritated at him for showing off, like some kind of teacher’s pet.

  Don’t forget, said Huggy, bubbling up, you’re the teacher in this scenario. Just sit back and enjoy it and let him do the work. Andromeda sat back, but found herself failing to enjoy it quite as much as she was apparently supposed to.

  “Plus,” Byron continued, “he was a Rotarian and a Thirty-second-Degree Mason and one of the founders of the Steiner Day School in Clearview Park.”

  “I went there!” said Andromeda. “Oh my gods! We used to call it the Gnome School.”

  Byron said he knew people who had gone there, too. “It’s a weird hippie school,” he said. “With, like, rainbows and rap sessions and crafts. But I guess the founder was a little bit weedgie. Maybe some of that hung around and rubbed off on you. Started you on your journey.” He air-quoted the word journey.

  “Maybe,” said Andromeda, finding the idea a little appalling. She was still “processing” the information, as the mom would have put it. There was amazing symmetry in the fact that the same person had been ultimately responsible for both the Gnome School and the IHOB’s collection of 133s, each of which had had such a powerful impact on her life. Excitement about the symmetry was battling her customary distaste for all things Gnome School. But Andromeda had to admit, symmetry had a slight edge and would probably come out on top in the end.

  “Anyhow,” said Byron, “this Jessup character was obviously one spooky, creepy guy.” He added that he suspected they hadn’t been the first people to perform ceremonial magic in that basement. Andromeda remembered the bookmark in the Rituale Romanum and felt a weedgie tingle between her shoulder blades.

  “Okay,” concluded the Precious Sponge. “I’ve got one more. The guy they named the school after? He was a totally weedgie guy too. He was in with all those Crowley people and in secret societies and everything. Clearview was a really, really spooky place a hundred years ago, seems like. You were born too late.”

  “Tell me about it,” said Andromeda Klein.

  “So why did you call it the Gnome School?”

  Andromeda described some of their gnome activities and got out the Little One from the Daisy bag to show him. “Ah,” said the Precious Sponge, as though it suddenly all made sense. “That’s your little voodoo doll from the library ritual.” The Daisy smell filled the room when she opened the bag. Byron noticed and wrinkled his nose, saying it smelled like old ladies.

  “Crowley,” she said, ignoring this borderline-insulting observation, “had a different approach to storing up knowledge for his future self. He wrote hundreds of books, and made sure to publish each of them in limited rare, expensive editions, so that they would be valuable enough that at least someone would want to collect them and preserve them. Most of his books are in print now, but if they go out of print, some fancy collector will be sure to have saved at least one.”

  “So,” said Byron, “if anyone starts buying up all those books all of a sudden, we’ll know who it is.”

  “Actually, they say he’s already reincarnated as a girl in India.”

  “Man, I hope I don’t come back as a girl.”

  “It’s not really your choice,” said Andromeda. But secretly, she almost hoped she didn’t either. Being a girl took a lot out of a person, and she had never felt very good at it.

  Byron knew a lot of things. He had recognized the ZOS chicken scratches on the rejuvenated cassette from the description even before she showed it to him, and he couldn’t believe she was unfamiliar with the music on it.

  “What planet are you from?” he said, and he sang a bit of a song in a little screechy female voice that went “Hey hey mama” something something and asked: “Is it like that?”

  “No,” said Andromeda. “It’s more like …” She asked in the same screechy voice if he had seen a bridge.

  “It’s the wrong album,” he said, “but that, my little alien life-form, is Led Zeppelin.”

  “No, no, it’s not a man, it’s a girl,” she said. “Pamela.”

  “No, it’s a group, and the singer is a guy named Plant. And of all people, I would have thought you would know that. That was our first conversation. Jimmy Page, remember? Aleister Crowley,” he said, exaggerating the pronunciation.

  “Oh, I thought you said Jamie,” she said, a little lamely. “Really, his name is Plant?” It seemed unlikely.

  He hooked his iPod to her stereo and dialed it up. And there it was, filling her room, even better now that it was loud and out in the air. The snakey song. It was just too good.

  “You know,” he said, when the next song came on, “a lot of people say this song is about Jamaica, but it’s really pronounced ‘dyer-maker.’” He turned it up even louder.

  There was a sudden, insistent pounding on the door. They were sitting with their backs against it, because that was just what you did at Casa Klein, but both of them combined didn’t weigh enough to prevent the mom from pushing it open, sliding them across the floor. Byron stood up, blinking.

  The mom stared back at them silently, looking them up and down, from one to the other and back again, several times over, with a mystified expression.

  “Well,” she finally said, “all I can say is, if you get pregnant I’m not raising the baby.”

  “Nice lady,” said Byron.

  Explaining the mom to a civilian was just not possible, so Andromeda opted to say nothing at all in response.

  Three texts from St. Steve came in all at once, at that moment, reading, respectively: “baby don’t be that way,” “jj8kk!” and “baby don’t be that way.” What the hell was his problem? She just stood there looking at her phone.

  “Are you going to take your underwear off now?” said Byron.

  Andromeda looked at the floor for a long moment.

  “Do you want to see my tantoons?” she said. “My tattoos, I mean? You want to see them? No one but me has seen them all.” And he was nodding.

  In case of another mom invasion, they pushed the bed against the door and sat on it.

  “Don’t try to touch me, now,” she said. “I only want to show you.”

  It was just past dusk, dark enough for candles, so she lit the green beaded one and reached over to restart the Houses of the Holy. And then with the stop-start, sky-opening sound of track number one filling the room, she began to give him a tour of her do-it-yourself body, beginning with the unicursal hexagram on her hip, proceeding chronologically through the Daisy years, to the tiny B above her knee for Bryce, to the Guillaume de Machaut made to look like a rock band logo that Daisy had partially completed on her back, to St. Steve’s upside-down phone number on her stomach. Twice there were knocks on the door, yelling, and attempts to push the door in, but she just ignored them till they went away, and then she resumed. She raised or lowered her skirt or shirt as necessary to reveal each one. And one by one she pointed to each of the seventeen St. Steve sigils that formed a coiled downward-scrolling ring around her left thigh.

  “This is my wish to be with St. Steve. It is my will the return of Saint Steve. My will: A.E.” She couldn’t remember all of the sigil formulae, but they were all the same, basically, and she traced them around and down with her index finger as the guitar line in “The Ocean” began to paint an angular sigil of liquid fire in her mind.

  “And this one you know,” she said, pointing to the bet on her inner upper arm. “It is for a beautiful girl named Bethany. And also, actually, for you. A bet, a B.”

  Byron stared at her, and waited till the song was over to say:

  “I can’t believe you have a guy’s phone number on your body.”

  “Mm-hm,” she said. “I can’t believe it either.” Then she pulled up her sleeve and showed him the newly re-inked string of characters from the mistaken St. Steve te
xt and asked him if he would tattoo it on her.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s a password.”

  “To what?”

  “I don’t know,” she replied, but somehow she realized that this would be her final St. Steve tattoo. And somewhere in the rushing static hum coming from the overloaded signal-less stereo speakers, she heard Huggy say: Well, hallelujah.

  “You need to tie my arm to the chair now,” she said, and very soon she was floating.

  The best synch of a week laden with synchs was finding an old, faded Led Zeppelin T-shirt small enough to fit her at Savers. Byron had made her CDs of all the albums. She just could not believe the vividness of the pictures they painted in her head, unlike any music she had ever heard. No one commented on or praised her for the shirt, but she wasn’t wearing it for them, she was wearing it for her, and perhaps for Pamela Plant, and it made her feel just wonderful.

  Byron had done a pretty good job on the password tantoon, though as with magic, he had had no idea how to do it and every step had had to be explained to him. That had been a mood killer, but only a slight one. She had enjoyed how intently he listened when she explained what she wanted, exactly like he did when she was explaining magic to him.

  Andromeda had gotten quite good at controlling Huggy’s appearances, using continuous sounds like running water to provide a background against which its voice could be discerned and dismissing it by suddenly switching off the source of the sound. She tried it with every appliance and noisemaking item in the house, one by one. The vacuum cleaner and washing machine were particularly good. The only problem was that after doing a lot of this, the distracting rushing sound in her ears seemed even louder and more distracting. I know what you’re doing, said Huggy in the blow-dryer, and— Andromeda switched it off. Oh, this was too much fun. Finding the on-off switch made having a Holy Guardian Angel much, much easier.

  “Sorry,” she said, switching the blow-dryer back on. “I just had to test.”

  Yes, aren’t you clever, said Huggy. Okay. Okay. Actually, you know, I’ve got nothing right now. Switch me back off. So Andromeda did.

  She was sitting in the living room before school with her Agrippa open on her knee, in her T-shirt, singing quietly to herself without quite realizing it the sigil-ish guitar line of “The Ocean,” when she looked up to see the just-got-up dad staring at her.

  “Jebus,” he finally said. “My own flesh and blood. Don’t you know the family motto? Death before Zeppelin?”

  There was no accounting for taste, it was true, but that was maybe the stupidest thing she had ever heard him say.

  “As the rope said to the piece of string,” Andromeda replied: “I’m a frayed knot. Anyway, I thought it was: Remember, if the world didn’t suck, we’d all fall off.”

  “There are two family mottoes, actually,” said the dad, still shaking his head.

  Rosalie said it too when she picked Andromeda up in the Gimpala and saw her in the shirt. “Really?” she said. “Really? Death before Zeppelin.” How in Malkuth did that ever get said by enough people to become an expression?

  “I’m just kidding,” said Rosalie. “But you need some bell-bottoms with grass stains on the butt and like a wide leather belt and a gauzy fairy top, or maybe a halter. And a huge silk headband. And war paint.”

  There had been yet another explosion overnight, this one in the mock campanile of the old, long-closed-down, boarded-up Hillmont High School. A meth lab at a school? Well, they even put them in other people’s parked cars sometimes. But Rosalie said no, they were actually saying on the news it might have been a bomb. She backed up the ramp and into a fairly tight space.

  “You know, I think this is actually easier than driving forwards. You have more control. I don’t know why everybody doesn’t do it.”

  “Well, I don’t know why they don’t just admit they’re meth labs,” said Andromeda, gathering her stuff and scanning for any hostile Lacey or Empress minions.

  “I know you very, very much want them to be meth labs,” said Rosalie, “for reasons known only to you and the Hammer of the Gods. The world’s gone mad, Andromeda. People are driving backwards and bombing empty bell towers and wearing heavy-metal T-shirts out of the blue all over the place. By the way, is your phone working? I’ve been trying to get through.”

  Andromeda checked and told Rosalie she had no missed calls. There were, however, four texts from UNAVAILABLE. She hesitated with her thumb on the Select button. She thought about the “jj8kk!” tantoon healing on her upper arm, and about the Precious Sponge’s song and his eyes fixed on her in rapt concentration; she thought about always dancing backwards and having to do all the work and being every one’s third choice. A smooth, mechanical cadence, the clicks of a delicate lock’s oiled tumblers, sounded somewhere in her head. And Andromeda quickly deleted the texts unread.

  Now, that was freedom, right there.

  “I don’t know why I never thought of this before,” she told Byron back in her room later that afternoon. And by “this” she meant pushing the bed up against the door and sitting on it every time she was in the room. The only drawback was having to pull it back to let Dave in and out, but that was a small price to pay for mom-less-ness. Not only that, but ever since the mom had all but accused her of trying as hard as she could to become pregnant by the Precious Sponge, she had stopped talking to Andromeda for pretty much the first time in recorded history.

  “Oh, blessed Silent Treatment, how I have yearned for thee,” she said. “Everybody wins, Precious Sponge. Everybody.”

  “Why am I the Precious Sponge, again?” asked Byron.

  “Huggy just called you that once. I don’t know why.”

  “So Huggy is always there talking to you?”

  “Not since I learned how to turn It off,” she said.

  “Is Huggy talking to you now?” She had to hand it to him. He was as unfazed by any of this as anyone not her could possibly have been.

  “No,” she said. But she had forgotten about the rushing sound of the highway in the distance. I am too, said Huggy. But the voice was faint.

  “You don’t think your mom would call the cops on you, do you?” Byron said, pointing out the window at a sheriff’s car that had just parked in front of the duplex. A uniformed cop was striding up the sidewalk. Byron had said it as a joke, but then they heard the doorbell ring. Andromeda made a “shh” motion for him to be quiet. No way was she going down there to answer it. Gods, the dad must be freaking out, hiding in the closet or something. Where was the mom?

  She’d been teaching Byron to read cards, using Daisy’s deck, having him practice on her, explaining about significators.

  “It’s the card that represents the querent,” she said, “so in this case, me.” Traditionally Andromeda’s significator would be the Page of Cups or Swords because of her age and coloring; and of course, since the Daisy dream she had been thinking of the Two of Swords as her significator; and, she added, back when she and Daisy had been learning tarot, they would use the Lovers to represent Andromeda. “But for now just use anything you like.”

  “Oh, by the way,” he said, shuffling through the cards, “I think I figured out your Two of Swords thing.”

  She doubted he had figured out the thing, but she was sure he had a thing. Huggy was right. He could be deceptively clever.

  He shuffled through Daisy’s tarot deck and drew out the Two of Swords and laid it out on the bed.

  “See, I think it might be a date.” And of course that was possible, since, as she had explained as part of the Liber K lecture series on the small cards, each of the minor arcana cards can refer to one of the decans of the zodiac, one thirty-sixth of the circle, a portion of the calendar year. Byron’s idea, though, was more specific than that.

  “Remember how you thought the girl was kneeling, when on the actual card she’s just sitting on the box? And how you thought the background was shallow pools, when actually the card has a deep sea?” He had been taking not
es—they were scribbled all over his Moleskine. “Well, look at the moon. Look at the water. The moon is gibbulating, the tide has gone out, and the girl, who is Libra really, right? She has gotten off the box and is kneeling. So you’re looking at a point in time just a bit after the moment and lunar phase shown on the card. Closer to when it turns to the next decan, but probably not into the next one, because then it would be a different card.”

  “Yes, the Three of Swords.” Andromeda thought of the two-sided flag in the King of Sacramento’s chamber, the Two turning into the Three.

  He flipped through the calendar function of his phone, noting that according to the almanac the lunar phases affecting tides in that fashion matched up to the Two of Swords portion of the zodiac the previous year and identified the approximate date in late September. That would have been shortly before Daisy’s death. Around the time Andromeda and her family had been in Shasta, when she and Daisy had had a falling-out, and St. Steve had sent his “hi there” and her whole life had started to go wrong.

  “That was very clever,” Andromeda said, though she was disappointed, “and you get a kiss for how clever it was.” She kissed him on the ear. “So it’s all about Daisy’s death. I’m afraid, Precious Sponge, that I already knew that Daisy died. Well aware of it. It’s never far from my mind.” She allowed her eyes to roll slightly.

  “It’s all from your mind, though, isn’t it?” he said.

  Andromeda’s rolling eyes narrowed. This was yet more of the “all in your head” argument that had begun to pop up between them. Byron had been venturing outside the approved reading list, and had somehow picked up the un fortunate modernist notion that occult phenomena were best explained as reflections of the individual’s psychology, rather than the effects of “outside” Universal forces or entities. In reality, of course, the distinction between “inside” and “outside” was far more complicated than that when it came to minds and universes.