Tarot Sour

by Robert Zimmerman

  “Look, Margot,” I relinquish, “I’m sorry. That was—I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Hey, Elizabeth, don’t be sorry.” She puts a hand on my knee, my other knee, and squeezes it consolingly. “Don’t be sorry.”

  She finishes plucking out the glass shards in silence, and then rinses my hand with a stinging disinfectant. I don’t wince or whimper. I don’t want to break the silence. Ms. Fasch suddenly seems to me just as trapped in her own cocoon here as I am. She turns her back to me when she’s done and begins washing her hands and calipers in the sink. “Have a good day, Elizabeth. I’ll see you—” She wants to say at the next PTA meeting but she catches herself. This time, she turns and makes direct contact with my eyes, before turning back to the sink where she disappears.

  I bid goodbye to an empty room, “I’ll see you, Margot. Have a good day.” I want to ask her, before she can no longer hear me, Are you afraid, Margot? Are you afraid to disappear? But I don’t. As the winter rises, she will fall, a withered husk of a moth. Her legs will jerk for a bit, her wings will spasm weakly to flip her off her back, but eventually the frost will claim her. This is the life of moths.

  * * *

  As I walk home from the hospital, the sun has risen almost to its peak. In this state, days get lost as instants, and hours get lost in daze. The ice cream shop where I used to walk hand in hand with them, with Nickolas and Kyra, for hot chocolate late after dinner on days like these, on days when the summer seems further in time than the frozen oceanic winter, is gone. I stop for a moment and peer through the old splintered plank of wood that has been nailed up over the storefront. CONDEMNED, it says, drawn in faded red paint. The window is starched with patterned dust. The glare of the sun makes it difficult to see. But as my eyes adjust, as I put my toes right up against the wall and my nose almost touching to the glass, I can see the frayed wires hanging from the broken ceiling tiles. The long counter where we used to sit in the high stools has been pulled from the ground. Ripped, it appears, because there are strands of dry wall and steel piping sticking jaggedly out of the rough foundation where it was once planted, like roots left behind from a devoured plant.

  The end of my arm has been re-wrapped once again in gauze. This time, professionally. My hand is balled inside of it and I feel like the whole thing has been lopped off. The glass, what little of it remains smooth after the dust, is fogged from my breath so I move on.

  As I wait for the light to turn green, a bus pulls up and the doors swing open. A man in a tweed suit with a torn leather briefcase shambles down. I see him in my periphery but ignore him, keep my eyes down, and cross the street when the light turns. There is a quick flap of wings behind me as a flock of tired moths appears on a current of wind and climbs aboard the bus. They pay their fare and sit down. Ms. Fasch is not among them. She has never worked the night before in her life, because of Ingot, and has most likely just begun her shift this morning. The bus vanishes in a cloud of dust and exhaust. I feel its momentum and see the impression of its heavy tires on the dirt of the street as it passes, but there’s nothing to see.

  This whole damn world it seems is winding down to something slow and worthless. We’re a town at the end of it, at the end of the world. The only thing further than here is the beach on the other side of the woods, lorded over by the General. He used to talk about the General as though the General were a demon. A manipulative spool slowly drawing in the thread of the world. Soon, he would have the whole thing collected, neatly coiled, and secured in his pocket. At his disposal he would re-sew the world as he sees fit. But those are the things I keep unconcerned with.

  I continue home. At one point I become caught up in the current of a crowd of businessmen and women hurrying on their way to an early lunch. I am a leaf in an updraft, scurried along the sidewalk scratchingly. They drop me off in a gutter and go on their way, and I find myself staring at the opposite corner where just yesterday I saw Preacher Johns sitting in the gravel with his knees clutched to his chest and wrapped in the elbow of a torn flannel shirt, unbuttoned with a stained white tank top underneath. His other hand is a fist about a rolled-up newspaper as he repeatedly raps on his skull with his knuckles.

  He and I used to take Nickolas and Kyra to see Preacher Johns peacock around the altar every Sunday morning. Kyra in her blue satin dress with the yellow frills down the front that she loves to flick during the quietest parts of the sermon. Nickolas dressed in his little suit and looking just like a shrunken copy of his father, walking side by side with him, their solemn visage identical yet masking entirely different views on theology and the world. Nickolas thinks God is a man sitting upon the clouds trying to sort the good from the bad. He, Jacob, my husband, thinks that God is an unknowable algorithm that controls the flow of tides, the disintegration of planets. An equation from which you can accurately predict every subtle change across the universe and across time.

  When Preacher Johns was deposed and replaced by Reverend William Wiley last year, we stopped going altogether. This, perhaps, is my penance for letting a single man be the representative of my faith. I like to think that the gibberish Preacher Johns babbles between impacts of skull and knuckle contains a message for me. I like to think he means it that there is something left for me to do and that he knows that secret which is being kept from me. But looking at him, all I can think of is the way things were only a year earlier. I had never even noticed him there on the corner until nine days ago. Of course I had seen him. But I shirk him off the same as everyone else. Most of them do it from shame of ever having obeyed a man whom the archdiocese now sees unfit to lead a small ramshackle town like ours, and out of respect for Reverend Wiley, whom they all foresee as a savior and an usher to more fruitful times. I do it out of shame as well, but mine is a shame for everyone else, and for not being able to do anything but let him rot.

  You can still see the indent his bony ass has left in the gravel. I look down the street to make sure no cars will appear out of the vagabond dust clouds, and I hurry across to where he had been sitting. I stand in his indent and turn until I am facing the direction he had been facing. You can see the defunct water tower in the distance just behind the bell of town hall. It sits past the outskirts of town, in the desert. The sun is shining brutally off of it, a great shining throb. I turn away and continue back home.

  * * *

  The door swings open heavily inwards, and the cloud of air that sweeps from it into my face is stale and smells of burnt toast. I stand there for a moment not wanting to go in. The light in there seems pale and unnatural. With the sun behind me I can see the dust floating in the strips of light cast by the blinds, a delicate universe in stop-motion. Who am I to sluice through like the rapture and throw them all from their orbits? I put my back to my house and take a long and sweeping scan of the town, or at least what I can see of it from there at the foothills of the dunes. The sun is eclipsed by the bulbous cap of the water tower. The bell tower strikes one off in the east. I hadn’t been aware that it still kept time; I imagined it had stopped nine days earlier, shaken by the shockwave of an unfinished pine chair against concrete. But there it is, still functional.

  I have known that the end of the world isn’t coming as prophesied, not crisped to the rib edge of a nuclear winter but rather nestled sleepily in the breast of a turgid fall. For a moment, as the echo of that one toll flutters my hair like the sea breeze, it seems possible that I have even been wrong about that. That the end of the world was mine alone and the rest of it— across the woods at the seaside, this vacant ghost town that had once belonged to Jacob and myself and to nobody else and now just seemed to belong to no one, along that empty road that leads to a place I can only imagine is the sheer drop off of the edge of a flattened planet or a gradual blurring of reality until you follow it straight into a solid white nonexistence—perhaps the end of the world hasn’t come at all and those are all still perfectly functional places filled with perfectly functional men and perfectly functio
nal women and perfectly functional children.

  I shake that dire thought off as grief-induced paranoia and shut myself up in the mausoleum I had turned my back on. I shut out the sunlight, and I go about and tighten all of the blinds so that the thin strips of it cannot pervade. A cloud of smoke is hovering as I pass the kitchen from the slice of bread I left in the toaster whose on/off switch has been broken for some time now. I go upstairs and I pull the ammonia and bleach from beneath the bathroom sink and begin to scrub the drying blood from the rim of the bathtub, and the shower curtain where I had clutched it, and the floor where it had dripped off of me with the water when I climbed out. I let the chemicals sting my raw wounds, each of which Ms. Fasch had plied open with her disinfected needles. It sends a pinching queasiness up my arm. Until then I haven’t imagined an arm could feel queasy, but it can and so it does.

  I leave the sponge in the tub, plumped black with my dead cells. I go into the bedroom and sit on the edge of the mattress for a time letting the earth spin outside my window and watching the light and shade create monstrous faces on my floor because of it. A knock from downstairs shakes me from the kind of stupor I am slipped into, where I allowed several hours to pass around me as I sat there on the fluffed duvet. He picked it out after we got rid of the old one. He picked out the children’s, too. I have yet to step foot in their room.

  I go downstairs. The clock on the wall by the front door tells me that it is time for dinner. Almost six o’clock. So I must have fallen back asleep in the meantime. I check the peephole and undo the chain. “Sheriff, what can I do for you?” Those words seem surreal. All words seem surreal now. After what has happened, after what has happened because of me, what importance could any casual exchange of dialogue have on the universe?

  Sheriff Barilla is a tall unshaven Italian, heavyset with muscle. He embraces the stereotype of his profession and as such he wears blacked-out aviator glasses from the moment he clocks in until he returns home for the night, and he refuses to get out of his dingy decade-old squad car without keeping his hand grasped firmly around the butt of his holstered weapon. The people in town refer to him privately as the ass with a hand on his butt.

  “Mrs. Hesse, how are you doing this evening?” He gives a quick nod of his chin and takes off his wide hat as he sidesteps around me and comes in. He surveys the room with his hat held at his side. “I just wanted to come and update you on your husband. Jacob Hesse.”

  “I know my husband’s name, Sheriff.”

  “Hm. Nevertheless.” He turns to face me with the rigid propriety of a Buckingham beefeater. “I spoke with a Sergeant from Sarasota County. They found the vehicle registered to Mr. Hesse abandoned in a retention pond, tangled in duckweed and coated with algae. There were no signs of him or the children.”

  “Thank you, Sheriff.”

  “My duty, ma’am.” He turns on his heels and parades back out the door. It seems to shut of its own accord behind him. I watch through the peephole as he flips his hat back onto his scalp and adjusts it properly.

  Once the car is backed out of the driveway and disappeared in the evening shadows down the street, I go back upstairs to our bedroom. There is a shoebox on the top shelf of our closet. I stretch and pry it out with my wrapped hand, catch it against my stomach, and take it down to the kitchen table. The smoke of the toast has cleared through the window I left cracked open, but the pungency of burnt toast lingers. I sit for a time with my hands on the lid of the box before flipping it off. It clatters softly on the table. I see the pressed poppy flower he takes with him from the field where we meet. I see my garter from our wedding and our first sonogram. He always called it his little box of me. I reach under the packet of pornographic photographs he has taken of us over the years and pick up the unloaded gun he keeps there.

  I wonder, if this is his little box of me, had he considered me the trigger? The first event in a long chain of cause and effect? Or am I simply a bullet? The pressed poppy begins to inflate with the water that has fallen onto it as I cry. I push the box aside and lay the gun on the table in front of me. Further in the box is a small carton of bullets. I have seen him load the weapon a number of times, simply for the sake of showing me how it is done in case I should ever need to use it. We sit there like that for a long time. I wait for Sheriff Barilla to return, to tell me that he has found them, that he can tell me what has happened to them.

  I hear the familiar pattern of footsteps run along the upstairs hallway. It must be dinnertime. The softly carpeted hall, so used to my children running along it to rush down here to the table, is thumping loudly out of habit. The front door creaks. I want it to be Jacob, come home from work as he has every day since we’d bought this house except for the last nine.

  Without moving anything but my good hand I flip open the lid of the carton and ruffle through the little steel cylinders with my fingers, counting them. There are thirty, three rows of ten. I pull one out and sit it on its flat end on the table in front of me, tangential to its lord and master which is empty, and hungry for its faith. Jacob builds this table one year, early, before the children have been conceived, to replace the gaudy folding card table we had been using before that. It still has the etching of their names from the days when they crawl beneath it while I am busy at the oven and scrawl messages to each other with pens and butter knives.

  I try to think of something I have forgotten to do. I have picked up the splintered remains of his final conquest and scrubbed the bathtub clean of what should have been mine. The images of Nickolas and Kyra run into the kitchen just as planned, then blur with the dust and the remaining smoke that fills the space around me like a finely granulated fog, and they disappear. Nobody has come in through the door. And when I realize that it is more plausible for Preacher Johns to have come marching in unannounced, berating his head with a week’s old newspaper, than my husband for whom this should have been home, then I spin the bullet slowly around on the table, inspecting its flawlessly smooth sides, and I press it into its socket.

  The click, as I close the barrel and place the gun back on the table, comforts me. I put my hands on either side of it, palms flat on the surface, and we stare at each other until late, late, late into the night. I think of the flight of birds.

  Two: The Moth

  At first all I notice is the grunting silhouette of a beast rummaging through my dresser. I watch him for a moment and though I can’t quite explain why, I feel a great wet, mucky bubble of disgust rise up in me. I want to spit and scream and beat the monstrous thing over its horned skull until it is a pulp in the corner to be swept up with the cockroach shells and the dust. I quell the urge by rolling over and pulling our down comforter over my head. It’s not quite enough because I can hear the sliding of the drawer, I can hear his old bones groaning as he sits on the corner of the bed, and the rustle as he pulls his socks on over his feet one at a time. I have to be careful because I don’t want him to know I’m awake. I don’t want him to come to the edge of the bed, pull back the blanket, kiss me on the cheek as he wishes me a good day and then grazes his hand over my breast before placing it on my stomach as though that is where he intended for it to land. I shift my head to the side and slip it beneath my pillow, hoping I’ve done so with enough grace not to have alerted him. He has the awareness of a spider to my vibrations on his web strings.

  Fears averted, thank Whatever. The fat and unruly black hole of his mass lifts itself from the edge of the bed and the bathroom door closes. I throw the blanket aside and sit up. If I want to be gone before he finishes getting ready for work, I probably don’t have much time. I dress and go out and down the hall. I can hear Ingot, my little golden treasure, hopping around her bedroom. I press the door open slowly and look in. She’s sitting at her Little Princess Vanity set, brushing her hair with a bright pink plastic-handled brush that I don’t think even has real bristles, and talking into the mirror above it. It’s not even a real mirror, just a wide circle of silver foil-plated cardb
oard. I can’t remember ever being that gullible. Though for her sake, I prefer to wish she spend all her days in front of a fake vanity than to find herself in front of a real one and forced to see herself miserable and old. Better a happy unreality than, well, the alternative.

  I press the door open a little wider. “Good morning, honey,” I say. I bring out my mother’s smile because she deserves to be greeted with that for as long as humanly possible. She turns and good god the corners of her mouth turn up into the kind of smile you just never want to stop watching.

  “Hi, Mommy!” she pipes. She puts the brush down on her table and starts rummaging through her plastic Little Princess backpack she has leaning against the leg of the vanity. She pulls out a sheet of paper and runs it to me. I pluck it out of her offering hand and then she wrangles my legs together at the thighs by wrapping her arms around them and burying her face in the seam of my scrubs.

  “What’s this?” I open the folded sheet of construction paper. There is a crude drawing of two little girls holding hands and skipping through a field of oversized red tulips. A frowning sun that she has left uncolored sits in the upper corner.

  “Mrs. Morgan had everybody write a card to Kyra’s mommy. I brought mine home so I could give it to her myself. Can you give it to her?”

  I hold her close so that she doesn’t see the drop in the smile I’ve summoned for her. I close the card and put it in my wide back pocket. “Of course, honey. Of course I will. Now finish getting ready for school, okay?”

  She says she will and she goes back to her vanity where she picks her brush up again and takes a seat. I close the door and stand in the hall with my back to it. I reach for the card in my pocket but then he walks out of our room. He looks at me and says good morning before heading downstairs. I scratch my thigh as a diversion and ignore the card. I feel as though letting him see it will be a defeat. The truth is I don’t want him to have even the simplest peek into our daughter’s life. I don’t need to re-read it anyway. The five seconds was all it took. “Dear Mrs. Hesse, I really miss Kyra and I hope that she is okay. I hope that you are okay, too. She is my best friend and I really really love her and you. And Nicky too. With Warmest Sympathies, Ingot Fasch, Mrs. Morgan’s 1st Grade Class.” The regards are printed piecemeal, unevenly. Obviously copied from the board. But damn you Mrs. Morgan, what kind of person would think this is a good idea?