by Mark Teppo
Piotr's smile widened. "Influence is the butterfly which flaps its wings and changes the weather a thousand miles away. Pender is not a butterfly."
"Nor am I," said Nicols. "But I'm starting to wrap my head around the basic concepts of your special style of chaos theory."
Piotr turned his eyes toward me. "When the calf is born, accidental or otherwise, the farmer cannot put it back. The animal must learn how to stand, how to suck from its mother's teat. The farmer may assist the calf when it first learns, but if it is to survive, it must find its own strength. Wouldn't you agree?"
"My dad owned a potato farm," I said. "They didn't need much coddling. You just put them in the ground, and they grew all on their own."
"Ah, the life of the vegetable farmer. So dependent upon the cycles. So trapped by the wheel." Piotr pushed a hand through his game, dissolving them into a haphazard mix of red and black.
The trouble with fortune tellers was their constant exposure to the vicissitudes of chaos, which gave them an unconscious ability to know the course of a thread throughout the Weave. They were oracles, unconscious soothsayers who spoke in enigmas and mysteries. Most of them weren't even aware of the esoteric precognition that underscored their words.
I hadn't told Piotr anything about my past, neither stories of the farm nor anything about my initiation into magick. And yet, he always seemed to be readily aware of my mood and my intentions, as if they were warning labels printed across my chest. This one is hunting, and has become lost in the woods. Devoured by darkness.
Piotr's hands, like the brush of palm fronds back and forth, moved across the cards, and they became a deck. He shuffled them twice, and all the cards, regardless of their previous orientation in his motley deck, flipped themselves face-down. The backs of the cards were green with yellow and red lettering-a garish logo for one of the Indian casinos that haunted the curve of I-5 through the tulip fields up north. With a deft motion of his hands, he cut the deck, and turned over the top card of the bottom half of the stack. The jack of spades.
"The jacks are but mere princes," he said. "Swords to spades; the work in the field remains." He put the deck back together and set it aside. "Do you come under the influence of a sword?"
"It's the sword hanging over his head," Nicols offered.
Piotr smiled again. "And you wish to know why your hand isn't on the hilt?"
I nodded. "Yes, I do."
Fortune tellers. I could see a vague shimmer of the Weave when I tried, but real precognition always made my skin itch. A Deterministic Universe was not a model I found very comfortable. I, like Pandora, hoped that Free Will was what was left in the box.
"Please," Piotr said as he stood. "Sit." He crossed to the miniscule kitchenette where he put the deck of playing cards in a drawer. As Nicols and I squeezed ourselves around the other side of the table, Piotr opened a cabinet and got out a wooden box. Inside was a large deck of tarot cards.
The deck was his own design, hand-painted and enchanted over a period of four years. On one of my previous visits, he had told me its history. This was the third deck he had done since coming to the United States. For many years, he had worked menial jobs-washing dishes, picking fruit, detailing cars-and the casting of fortunes was done on the tailgate of pickups, in cramped storage closets, and over upended crates behind gas stations. When he had saved up enough money to open his own shop, he burned the set that had given him life, and made a second, one meant to give him security. The third was meant to show him the way to freedom.
Dark with color, they were based on the original Visconti-Sforza designs that Bonifacio Bembo had painted in the mid-fifteenth century. Piotr's flourishes came from personal knowledge of Persian and Oriental motifs as well as Aleister Crowley's unavoidable influence upon twentieth-century magickal thought. My efforts to read the world, Piotr had told me when I had asked about the designs.
He took the deck out of the box and offered it to me. I took the cards, and started to shuffle them. Cold and slick, they stole heat from my fingers as I made them dance cheek to cheek.
"Tea," he asked, and Nicols nodded for both of us, more out of politeness than need. In the cupboards, Piotr found a small teapot and matching china cups-frosty white with tiny inlays of blue fish. He set the kettle to boil, and after putting several spoonfuls of loose tea into the pot, he returned to the table. I laid the shuffled deck between us.
"Do you wish the Prince of Swords to stand for you?" When I declined, he nodded toward the stack of cards. "Usually, I do an arrangement called the Celtic Cross," he said to Nicols as I cut the deck. "It's a ten-card layout that speaks of where the significator-" he inclined his head toward me "-has been and where he is going, and what forces are available-as adversaries and as allies-to him or her. The person requesting the reading has the option to pick a card to represent themselves in the reading, a self-designated avatar, before we start. This will help ground the reading, in that it gives the etheric energy a place to gather."
"So why didn't you use the Prince?" Nicols asked.
"It's not one I would choose for myself," I said. "It's someone else's symbol."
"But it has significance. What did you call it? 'Mind without purpose.' " When I didn't answer, Nicols turned his question to Piotr. "What does that mean?"
The teakettle started to whistle, and Piotr went to the stove to turn off the heat. "The Prince of Swords represents Unfettered Mind," he said as he filled the teapot with hot water.
A redolence of ginger and mint filled the small room, a fresh scent that reminded me of the crisp Himalayan spring. Using a narrow lacquered tray, he brought the teapot and cups to the table. "The airy part of Air," he continued, "is where the Mind is released from the prison of the body and allowed to act without restriction. The actions of the Mind are based purely on its desires, and it is guided solely by its internal supra-religious logic."
"That's much clearer," Nicols said dryly.
Piotr gave him a tight-lipped smile, a slender movement of his face that was both melancholic and tragic. "These actions are not tempered by Spirit or Body. It isn't Lust; nor is it any of the baser emotions. Mind is simply Intellect. It is Force without Reason."
Nicols looked at me. "The whole reading is going to be like this, isn't it?"
"Most of what I've learned has been like this."
"And here I thought you were being obtuse with me on the ferry just to yank my chain."
I shook my head. "I tried to keep it simple."
"Apparently," he sighed. "Okay, let's pretend I understood what you just said." He pointed at the deck. "Markham opted to pass. So what happens next?"
"His unconscious mind chooses the first card." Piotr's fingers brushed the deck and the top card seemed to turn over on its own accord. A man and a woman stood face to face, and their hands touched cheek and chest of the other. "The Lovers," Piotr said.
Nicols raised an eyebrow. "Now why doesn't that surprise me?"
I wasn't surprised either. I had never drawn the Lovers before, not even when I had specifically been charting a path toward Kat. But now, here, close enough to touch, my history with her was overpowering. A burning sensation melted through the lining of my stomach, acid released into my body cavity. I didn't want to face the wrath of Antoine and the Watchers, but the Chorus wanted Kat. They wanted me to want Kat.
Piotr placed the card on the table, and picked up the rest of the deck. With a smooth motion like wiping water off a mirror, he laid out five more cards. The first one went down across the Lovers, forming a stubby cross. Then one to the left, one above, one below, and one to the right. He paused, as this was the first part of the Cross. These six cards represented the current situation, and I needed to reflect upon them before looking to the future.
He set the rest of the deck aside, and poured three cups of tea while I considered the cards. Even with his shortened fingers, his grip was firm on the kettle.
Our hands betray us. You can never really escape your past, can you? I
gnore it, certainly, but it still haunts you. Always informing the etheric world around you.
The card to the left of the Lovers was the Nine of Swords, beneath was the Eight of Swords, above was the World-the last Major Arcana card. To the right was the Prince of Swords-still caught in my threads, though now it lay in front of me-and laid across the Lovers like a prudish loincloth was the Queen of Cups.
"That's a lot of swords," Nicols noted. He blew on his tea to cool it. "The Eight, the Nine, and the Prince again."
Eight was interference, chaos strewn across the path. So many directions, so many currents of flow. They divided the magus' focus, kept him from realizing his Will. Distractions, the Chorus whispered. As it lay beneath the Lovers, the Eight was the root of my question. The entanglements of the recent past that had ensnared me. The history from which I sought to extricate myself. These eight swords were the confusion of Malkuth. The black iron prison that prevented us from leveraging Reason to effect our escape from the persistent cupidity of the flesh.
The Nine of Swords, by virtue of being on the left, was my past, that empirical truth that I couldn't escape. This was the realm of the Chorus, that anarchy of cruelty trailing behind me, all the way back to the night in the woods. This card was the world as I remembered it, as I was born into magick on that night of violence and pandemonium. These nine blades, blood-tinged points piercing the earth, were symbolic of my ruptured body.
Kat had broken me and left me in the woods. As my soul bled, leaking light like oil draining from a punctured pan, something had come to me from the shadows. Yes, that was what it was. The Qliphoth. Always hiding in the shadows-of the trees, of my thoughts, of my spirit. He had whispered to me, that voice so like the sibilant echo of the Chorus. There is no hope. You are going to die. Unless. . How cruel the guttering spark of life; how cruel that instinctual craving for light. How tragically human was the desire for a second chance. Any path is better than no path at all. . Let me show you how to live.
"So many swords," I whispered. I touched the Lovers, my finger drifting across the woman's head and settling on the man's. Why did you do it? The card shivered under my touch, slippery and moist.
The Chorus retreated, folding in on themselves as they realized how transparent they had become. So engorged with the desire to find Kat, they had also allowed me to more fully see that part of the past which they had been obscuring. This proximity to Kat, this opportunity afforded me by the brush with Doug and the psychic touch of her presence, was kicking many things loose.
Too many things.
I had let him in. The Qliphoth entered through the rupture in my soul, and had shown me how to maintain the illusion of life. The way to retain light, the way to fuel the flesh: these were the secrets of the Chorus.
Piotr tapped the edge of the tray, drawing my attention away from the cards. "The tea," he said, his finger tap-tapping against the lacquer, "is good for the spirit. It calms divergent energies."
The Chorus burned in my throat, bringing tears to my eyes. He didn't flinch from what he saw in my eyes. "It only has the Will you give it," he said gently. "It only has what you feed it."
I blinked, and all the fierce heat was shuttered as if I had shut a furnace door. Lashing my Will to my arm and hand, I-very carefully-reached for the delicate teacup. As I raised it to my lips, Piotr dealt the remaining four cards.
And, like that, the past was gone. Hidden again, beneath the burr of Chorus noise. Beneath the black water in my soul. Like the Loch Ness Monster, all that remained was a nagging impression that something had shown its face. Some apparition had surfaced, albeit briefly.
The last four cards of the Cross were a vertical line just to the right of the Prince of Swords-the future as a wall to be surmounted in contrast to the cross of the past and present. From top to bottom: the Five of Wands, the Priestess, the Star, and the Prince of Cups.
"These cards are various aspects of the future," Piotr said to Nicols. "What Markham brings with him to this reading; what affect others will have; what he fears about this possible future; and, ultimately, what this future will be."
"This one is upside down," Nicols said, putting his finger on the Star.
"Please don't turn it," Piotr said. "A reversed card has an equally significant meaning. In this case, it indicates that Markham believes he has no hope of attaining the state represented by the Star."
" 'Every man and woman is a star,' " Nicols quoted. "Markham told me that. Yesterday, when I first met him. He said that we were all stars."
"Did he now?"
Crackling ice ran up my spine, and white-light explosions blew off against the nerve clusters in each vertebrae. The Chorus, burning an image with frigid clarity in my brain: a downward-pointing, five-pointed star. A sigil. One without a protective circle. The Chorus strained against their psychic restraints, sensing my confusion. My fingertips were cold, as they assaulted my nervous system.
The Star, reversed. Refused. A black hole in the heavens, a break through which the Qliphoth slipped into Eden and spat his poisons into the shadows at the base of the Tree. My roots, deep down in Malkuth, drank from a lake of venom-killing my legs, deadening my trunk, leaching toxins into my brain.
My hand couldn't hold the teacup, my fingers numb. The tea spilled, and the infused water looked like it was darkened by blood. Blood in the water. I tried to breathe, and felt like I was in the Seine again.
I had seen it, and now it couldn't trust me not to dig it out. That shadow of my past erupting through the agency of the Chorus. Blood, black in the water. Black, in the sky.
Then, suggested as an afterimage of the stars exploding along my spine, I saw through the illusion. Through the possibility of illusion. This past that had shaped me, this history I had been bound to-Kat's hand in my chest, the icy stars on my skin, my soul leaking out, the voice in the woods telling me how to live-who had built it? Was it my memory-was I its Creator-or was I just a fool following a path of least resistance? Trismegistus sought to teach his sons how to free themselves from the tyranny of the demonically touched flesh. Reason, in one hand; Insight, in the other.
Had I forsaken both?
I staggered from the table, fleeing the accusatory shape of the cards. My hand fumbled with the handle, and I forced the door open. I fell to my knees on the pavement outside. Cold air on my face, but my throat and lungs were already numb.
Overhead, the sky was black, blank of stars. The world wiped clean. Lost again within that dome of darkness.
I heard the wind, blowing through the rigging of the boats at the dock, and it sounded like the rasp of the leaves against branches. Voices in trees, whispering. It is done. It is done.
Close enough to touch.
Our hands, betraying us.
XII
This looks suspiciously like vagrancy." A voice forced itself into my head. "Or public drunkenness."
I came back to the world of the flesh, struggling to find myself. On my back, face turned toward a star-dappled sky, arms crooked like the wings of a dead albatross. Prickly heat filled my legs, making my ankles and feet ache.
Pender, on my right, wrapped in his long coat. His hands were in his pockets, and his jaw moved precisely around a piece of gum. He looked fresh-pressed and steamed. When he saw that I recognized him, he nudged me with a foot. "Lying about like this," he said. "It's more than a little sloppy. How much have you had to drink tonight, Markham?"
My mouth didn't work; all I could manage was a series of blinks and twitches. He bent down, examining the awkward movement of my face. "Having a seizure?" he asked. "Some ancient LSD payload finally detonating, or has some old curse foisted on you by a weekend witch finally taken root?"
I twisted my head to the side, and spat out a glob of black pitch. Pender wrinkled his nose at the bubble-flecked material from my lungs. "Hate," I croaked. "I'm full up."
"For whom? Your little renegade spirit Doug?" He shook his head. "You aren't interested in him. You want someone else. Doug's jus
t a means to an end, isn't he?"
I swallowed more of the blackness, sending it back into the pit of my unruly stomach. "He's my link."
"I could be your link," he said. "Maybe you're asking the wrong questions of the wrong people. Maybe you're trying too hard to find something that isn't lost."
"Maybe you don't know what you're talking about." Pender stepped back as I levered myself to a sitting position.
He pulled a Polaroid out of his pocket and tossed it in my lap. "Maybe I do." It was a picture of Kat.
Her face had become thinner over the last decade and her hair was shorter, though still streaked with red highlights. It wasn't a face that would launch a thousand ships, but it had filled my dreams-filled my head and consumed everything. Seeing a fresh image of her face, I realized how easy it had been for Paris of Troy to descend into obsessive madness, to fixate on abducting Helen from Sparta as the solution to his brain fever. Yes, yes, this is the best solution. The simple path is the correct path. Covering the picture with a cold hand, I tried to put Kat out of my mind; I tried so very hard to quit the past.
"Settle it," he said. "This is a one-time offer."
An involuntary whimper escaped my lips. My insides streaked with black lightning, a volcano erupting in that pit from where the Chorus grew. Yes. Take back what is yours. Close enough.
Pender watched me for a few seconds, a smirk pulling at his lips, before he walked away. His car was parked on the far side of the empty lot, and as he opened the door, the interior light flicked on. Before the door shut, I caught a flash of movement in the receding shadows of the back seat. The Chorus still raged within me, still thrust themselves against my Will, but I squeezed them into a knot. Squeezed hard, and focused. As the vehicle left the lot, I strained to part the shadows in the back seat.
