Tarot Sour

by Robert Zimmerman

  He questions why I am really earning the money, why I am keeping it and paying bills out of a separate account that is entirely in my name while the money that he makes from the lumber mill is kept in a shared account. He accuses me of making him look a fool in front of his children, whom, he reminds me, he never wanted in the first place. Without whom our lives, his life, would have continued exactly as he had planned for it, comfortably and adequately. His face grows red as I’ve never seen it. He tells me not to follow him, to leave him be, and when I don’t, he throws furniture and he leaves because I refuse to. In my defense, my half of the argument is nothing but earnest apology, all of which fall upon uninterested ears.

  * * *

  Breakfast is forgotten by the time I finish dusting the remnants of his final piece of furniture into the garbage can. I stand there for a time wondering if I will be able to drag it down to the corner by myself, without him. I drape my robe over the sofa and step outside. The sun that had shown itself in the window had seemed warm. Outside, the wind is biting, a symptom of the coming winter. They say it will be a bad one, and with many of the boys and able-bodied men off across the woods under the General’s watch, it is going to be that much more difficult keeping things viable. I will probably need to find myself a more permanent job, now that I will be living completely off of my own income. Yes, I was paying bills out of my own account, but at the same time, I could never really afford to pay all of the bills out of my account. With the shortage of hands, though, and the reputation I’d gained doing odd jobs for the past few years in secrecy, it shouldn’t be too much of a problem to find something.

  We live at the end of a dirt road. Actually, all of the roads in town are dirt. There is only one paved road, and that runs from town hall, a small shambling shack whose only claim to superiority is a paraplegic clock in the bell tower, out into the desert and on to the interstate which itself begins to web toward a dozen other towns that supposedly still exist. This entire town is erected on an expanse of cracked alkali flats, hard and fetid. Behind our house is the foot of the low rolling dunes that rise high above us all, that shadow us early in the afternoons and shield us from the worst of the Atlantic winter winds. The forest rises out of those foothills and wraps around to the south. It is a sparse deciduous woods sprinkled with pine trees amongst the oaks and maples. The ground there is still cracked and hard, and made unnavigable by the rise and fall of tree roots like serpentine spines. The space between them is filled with leaves, brown and crisped, built up over years, and a scattering of pine needles. The desert is the only horizon for the other two sides of our city, and it is only the most imaginative who can convince themselves that there must still be more of the world on the other side of that sand. For most of us, the vultures and the occasional cacti are all that exist outside of town. Them, and the trucks that come every two weeks to re-stock the shops with foodstuffs and the hospital with medical supplies. Well, those, and the coast where so many of our people have been taken over by the General.

  My hand is a dull toothache, pulsing wet. I have wrapped it rudimentarily in a strip of gauze pulled from the medicine cabinet before leaving. I do it without turning the lights on. Now that I’ve faced the garage, it seems I need a place to focus my insecurities. I can’t yet face the caramel-red stains in the bathtub.

  The first time I try to kill myself is four days after the unfinished pine rocking chair makes its graceful angel-arc over my head into the wall of the garage, showering my hair with splintered jags of wood and carpenter’s tacks. I wake before the sun on that fourth morning, with an ache in my head, a quaint little throb in the upper right quadrant of my brain. I can feel the blood sliding through its veins, a slow and unsteady flow that shouldn’t be there. I am dehydrated and weak. I haven’t eaten in three days and I can’t remember having had anything to drink in that time, either. I pull myself up out of the bed like a fly from a web, with great difficulty, with reluctance to persevere. I want the great dangling bug to descend and devour me. When I wash, I wonder if perhaps I should scrub raw a patch on my throat to give off the scent of blood for it to find me in my sleep.

  My eyes are rotten little peach pits hot with the tears that have burnt up all my water. I am a skeleton loose about all my joints. It is only the rotation of the earth that creates my momentum and spins my bones forward where the wind will have them go. And so I find myself marching along the footpaths along the alkali flats and into the foothills of the high dunes. It is a slow path with smooth rocks like Jurassic eggs scattered to either side in the hard sand. I used to take them up there, Kyra and Nickolas, to picnic upon those rocks.

  She is my little blonde drop of sunfire spilt to earth, a quiet and lovely little girl whose only dream is to be loved forever by her mother and father. And he, he is just as quiet, though his is out of shyness rather than the asceticism that possessed her. He is as bookish as his father, though unconfident, though gentler as well than any of us, with his sister, with the injured birds he collects amongst the neighborhood dust to tend back to health, with his mother, with whom he is bonded spiritually in a way only mothers and sons can understand. You could tell by a glance, without him sending a single word, that he is protecting me from what horrors might have been around the next corner and ready to tackle them all to the ground. Ready to let the ferocity of his love rip his teeth through anything that would have raised a hand against me. Fortunately for us all, he was also perceptive enough not to misinterpret ambiguously harmless intentions.

  He asks me one day, perched upon those lovely rocks staring at the sun setting behind the silhouette of the town, what is beyond the horizon? I tell him, the rest of the world, Nickolas, the rest of the world. He looks at me perturbed, as though I’d told him a great falsehood. If the rest of the world is out there, Mommy, why are we sitting here waiting for it to come down the road to find us?

  I find myself leaving the path, squeezing through the fields of rocks, over the knee-high cacti and roadrunner nests, the rattlesnake mounds. They are deceptively treacherous, those bland little hills. I find my way up to the highest of a series of hard, sheer cliffs overlooking the ocean. You cannot feel the wind in the city, but up there, at the peak, it blows with the forcefulness, the fierceness, of an angry Greek god’s breath, Thanatos or Hephaestus or Erobos. You can see it in the rise and fall of the foam on the water crests far below. I haven’t gone with the foresight of suicide. I haven’t gone with any foresight, without any intention at all. Yet here I am with my toes hanging over the cliff wall. I don’t jump into the ocean. If I had, perhaps that would have been it. Instead, I turn and walk nonchalantly right off the edge of the cliff that overlooks the wide desert. I remember thinking to myself—no, actually, I think it to Nickolas, who has been gone for four days now—Here I go to meet it, Nickolas, here I go to meet it.

  The first thing I notice is the cawing of vultures. At the time, I have no idea how long I have been lying there like that, like a pile of snapped sticks, like the wooden soldier scattered at that very moment about the battlefield of our garage. Later I will calculate that it must have been somewhere between seven and eight hours. My back is arched convexly upon a sharp rock. I slide off of it and pull myself into an upright position and lean against another rock. Above me is a dark circle of birds. They crane their necks down to watch me just as I crane mine up to watch them. With dismay, they leave one by one. My clothes are tattered rags, busted at the seams and threads from the mere wind shear of the fall. Whatever had been intact on impact was popped like a slapped balloon with no place to disperse its energy but outwards. I cough out blood like a soft spigot.

  I sit there waiting for the vultures to return but they don’t. For the longest time I think that if I move my body will fall apart like a tree trunk sawed in half and stacked back together. There is a Rorschach of blood on the rock on which I’d woken, and an elongated one on the sand drawn by my stretched out legs, from the rock where I’d fallen back to me. When I finally pu
ll myself up, I do so with the disorientation of knowing that I have done something while seeing none of the consequences having manifested. He once tells me about a quantum paradox wherein two particles, fired into each other, collide, scatter in a burst of proto-shrapnel, and then reappear, whole, at the point from which they are first fired. The split particles remain as an expanding cloud, and reexamination of the high-speed micro-videotape shows that the original particles never moved. Though if they watch the experiment live, as it occurs, as it is played live from that same videotape, it is clearly seen that the particles do, indeed, leave their roost and later pop back into existence. It is as though the videotape, wanting to make sense of the unusual event of the reappearance of the shattered particles, reinvents its past to reflect its future.

  It wasn’t until that evening while I am undressing for bed that I find it. Poking its peacock head out of my skin. For a moment I feel as though I understand his rage in lifting the chair from its place and tossing it at me. Just a moment, I feel as though everything has been justified. A breeze tossed through fluttering leaves. I claw at my back, just behind my shoulder, and I tear the feather out by its root. I throw it to the ground and step over it to climb into bed. By morning, it is gone, and it isn’t until this morning, on the ninth day, that I even associate its sudden growth with my death. Or rather, with my un-death. Or rather, with my re-birth.

  The hospital is an unimpressive building at the eastern edge of town, close to the road that leads to the highway. The most remarkable thing about the city, in fact, is the uniformity of its architecture. It is only by signs and past knowledge that anyone can tell the hospital from town hall from the shops from the homes. Well, some of the shops have wide storefront windows that differentiate them. And the town hall has its bellower. But other than that…even the hospital has a wide front porch under its canopy.

  I unwind the red gauze that has become sticky from my hand and show it to the receptionist. She examines it by prodding the puncture wounds with the eraser end of her pencil and tells me to take a seat. Perhaps if I roll up my sleeves to show her the itching scabs of my razor lines, she will take me as a higher priority. I sit there in the waiting room among the invalids and the ill. I try not to think about the time Kyra has to be rushed here with a near-death case of pneumonia, or the time my husband snaps his ankle slipping on the winter ice during an evening jog. I sit there and watch the faceless doctors amble in and out of rooms, the nurses flutter like moths with visceral white wings as they clutch the wriggling larvae of patients up out of their seats and carry them back to nests to be sewn up. There certainly aren’t enough homes in town to accommodate all of these doctors and nurses; the faceless ones, I guess, never having thought too much about it before, must be the ghosts of all the doctors and nurses who had come before, still unsatisfied with the way people continue dying by the gross no matter how hard they work at overriding God’s will.

  Finally I am summoned by one of the moths. Margaret Fasch, I know her from the monthly meetings of the parent-teacher association hosted in the cramped carpeted gymnasium of the schoolhouse. Her littlest, a tempestuous little girl with the unfortunate name of Ingot Fasch, is friends with Kyra, and I always had the sense that she has something of an attraction for Nickolas, though he is too self-interested and unindulgent to ever pay the girl any attention. Beautiful girl, ugly name. Which I attribute to her mother’s not wanting to be the one people scrunched their faces at upon introductions, herself for some reason choosing to use the nickname Margot over her full name.

  She emerges like a snow nymph from a flurry as she becomes distinguishable from the sterile white background. She clutches her clipboard and reads my name to the disappointment of the half dozen other patients discomfortably waiting their turns. She smiles warmly as I stand and she realizes that she knows me, and she ushers me out of the little grove of plaid-upholstered chairs and down the hall to a small room. She sits me on the vinyl counter and asks me what is wrong.

  I unroll the gauze from my twisted claw, having rewrapped it after showing the receptionist. This time I take the gauze off completely and lay my hand down on my thigh, my fingers are crooked and bent and I can’t move them without the sense that a poison is being distributed deeper up my arm by doing so.

  “Goodness, what happened?” she asks me. She lifts my hand up into the light by the wrist to examine it. She rotates it as though it is a diamond and she can’t quite believe the karat of it.

  “I slipped mopping the kitchen and caught myself on a mug. Thank God it wasn’t the one I’d just filled with hot coffee!” I feign pleasantry, she feigns it back to me. It is the oil of human machineries.

  “Sorry to hear that,” she says, lowering my hand back to my lap. “But it doesn’t look too bad, so that’s a relief. Did you hit your head? Twist your back? I know you had some back problems a few years ago.” A displaced vertebra.

  “No, nothing like that. I just knocked the mug onto the floor and landed on it with my hand.” She gives me a pitying look. It would have sickened me to be looked at like that if I hadn’t become so desensitized to it in my mirror by now.

  “I should be able to handle this myself, no need to call the doctor in. It’ll save you a shitload when the bill comes.” She tries to laugh. I smile at her. “I have to check in another patient and tell Dr. Bellows not to bother, but I’ll be back in five minutes. I’ll fix you right up.” She punctuates her sentences with smiles, and that in itself is as patronizing as her tone. They all know what has happened. It is all really just a matter of who is going to hold out longer on bringing it up, her or me. I will win. I will always win this game.

  I listen to the tissue paper beneath me crinkle as I shift waiting for her. There is a window behind me. I turn my head in time to see a cardinal land momentarily on a thorny branch before taking off again. It is a rare blur of color in an otherwise monochrome county. I keep my neck locked in position and observe the slow breeze move the branch and shift the faraway sands. A tumbleweed passes along the road, which is demarcated from the rest of the desert as a shallow embroidery winding away until it vanishes as a pinpoint mirage. I will the cardinal to return to the window, I will it to return to me and teach me the secrets of flight so that I can lift myself off the ground and leave it for good. My good hand goes to my shoulder and feels the two dimples where the feathers have been plucked. I regret pulling them now and wonder, if I did it again, would they regrow?

  When Margot Fasch returns, fluttering her silken wings behind her, the clipboard she wears as a breastplate is gone and she is smiling, she looks more casual than she did when she’d gone. I turn away from the window, fool-heartedly dismayed by not being able to summon the cardinal back. Ms. Fasch rolls an aluminum skeleton chair from the corner to where I am sitting and pulls my hand out toward her until my wrist is resting on my knee. She unfolds my fingers one at a time, wary of my wincing as the stiff tendons flex. I feel like a gnat invading the moth’s cocoon, and here it is unpeeling me layer by layer, waiting to sink its wiry proboscis into my chest to discover what pollen I might be hiding from her.

  There is a line of stainless steel tools on a rolling cart at the side of the table on which I sit. She leans and grabs a long pair of tweezers. I watch the pucker of the puncture marks as my hand flexes under her guidance. She bends my index finger back and reaches into the first hole, a large opal in the wrinkles of my second knuckle. I think I can hear the tearing of the thin fibers as the hole grows but I am more fixated on the gleam of fluorescent light off the shaft of the calipers. I think of the hundred cat eyes reflecting off his workshop tools as they hang on their hooks and pegs above the table where an unfinished coffee table still sits. I wonder if God has a table like that where unfinished bodies lay with skinless, unprepared limbs sitting in an orgied pile, waiting to be assembled.

  She plucks out the small triangle of off-white ceramic and tosses it into a pan along with strings of my blood and a clear liquid that must be p
lasma seeped from popped red cells. “So how’s—?” She stops herself and a dull faux pas glare washes over her. “—your morning been?” she finishes.

  “Fine. Except for this.” I let my pocked hand pulse upon my knee. “And how’s Ingot?”

  “Oh. Well, she’s fine. Things are…well, she’s okay.”

  I see her refuse to look up at me. Granted, she needs to concentrate as she plucks this shrapnel bit by bit from my freshly bleeding palm. She is pretending that her entire world is a rolling marble trapped somewhere in the curves of that palm. If she loses view of it for a second, if she turns away to look up and face me, she will never be able to find her way back to that world again.

  “Weather’s starting to turn,” she says after she reaches the second half of my hand, on her slow approach toward my bent wrist.

  “It is. I almost needed a coat this morning.”

  “I don’t think I’m ready for the winter,” she says.

  I see my chance to pluck her wings and pin her down. Like her, I refuse to look at her. “At least I’m not by the sea. Can you imagine the winter they’ll be having on the other side of the woods?”

  I feel a pinch as she digs one of the pincers deeper into the pulpy muscle than she needs. “I’m sure,” she says. “Must be awful.”

  I feel satisfied. I look over her head and trace the grain of the wooden cabinet. This room is analogous to our kitchen. I wonder if all of these buildings here were constructed as homes, and only later were some transfigured to be office buildings and hospitals. I keep our fine china in that cabinet right over her head, the paprika and thyme just to the right. We even have the same sink. The same counter running along the wall. In our home, though, this reclined, cushioned table coated with tissue paper is a marble island.