Tarot Sour

by Robert Zimmerman

  I walk around to the back door, which I remember he never keeps locked. Locked doors, he would say, are a sign of a guilty conscience. They’re for people with something to hide, if you want people to think you’ve got nothing to hide, let them know they can come and go as they please. I open the door slowly and make sure not to have it make a sound. I walk around the moonlit kitchen table, down the short hall, pausing briefly at the basement door where I put my ear and listen. I can hear the scurry of quick claws on concrete down there. Then I continue until I am standing at the back of his living room. I am just off to his side but he doesn’t see me there, he is picking at the remains of a cheap frozen dinner. The glow of the television casts a blue pall over the room. I watch him for a short time before I take another step forward so that he can sense my motion. He drops the plastic fork and gasps, and he pushes himself to the side of the sofa, knocking over the folding table and his dinner in the process.

  “Who are you?” He pushes himself to his feet and squints, leaning forward so that he can get a better view of me.

  “You know who I am, Father,” I say. I begin to cross the room.

  He squints harder but doesn’t say anything. As I approach him he backs himself away until he is pressed against his wall. He tries to recognize me but can’t quite do it, not until I am standing in the center of the room with the brightest rays of the cathode tubes glowing at my side. He gasps again now that he sees me. “Nickolas? Is it really you?”

  “You’re a worthless son of a bitch, do you know that?” I continue walking toward him. And when I am close enough, I punch him in the mouth. The force knocks him over but I catch him and pull him into the middle of the room and toss him back onto the sofa.

  “Nickolas, I—Is that really you?”

  “Of course it’s me. You’re about to spend the next decade of your life with me. You should know what I look like.”

  “I’ve been expecting you,” he says. He ignores the chipped tooth I just gave him and the little trail of blood that’s falling out of the corner of his lip and he takes my hands lovingly in his and holds the huddled collection up to his chest.

  I pull mine back to myself and I sit on the sofa next to him. I hold my head and try to think of what I’m going to say but nothing quite comes to me. It seems the past twenty years have been full of harsh words and cynical appraisals only to be snatched from me at some point during the last twenty seconds. We’re quiet like that for a long time, with him staring at me and me staring at my feet.

  Finally, because I need to say it to him, I need to say it aloud, I say, “Do you know what you did to me? You made the world think that my father kidnapped me. You made my mother think that my father kidnapped me. You locked us in your basement for a month. You called us your rats, you bastard. Your rats! You fed us dirty scraps of food. And Kyra, do you know what you did to her?”

  “Of course I know, son. I didn’t need your sister to come with us, but I couldn’t have her go back to your mother knowing what I’d done. So what was I to do? What would you have me do?” He says it calmly, but there is something hidden beneath it. He is trying to convince me, he is trying to rationalize. Because if I can accept his reasons, if I can accept his logic, then he can accept them too, and be at peace with everything he has done and plans to do.

  I think of the days I had spent locked in Father Johns’ basement with Kyra, a little girl I now only have the vaguest memories of. What I do remember, quite clearly, is how this man would come down his stairs with a plate of stale food and wait for us to come eat it out of his hands. And when we do, he snatches my fingers and he tells her, “Tell me what you remember or I’ll snap his fingers off.” And in the beginning she tells him what happened. Our father, angry with our mother and needing some space, some air, some distance, all of which she refuses to provide, takes us to get ice cream, down the highway because the shop in town has just gone out of business. And on our way back, here comes this car that forces us off the road into a ditch. It’s Father Benji, and he gets out and he pulls our father out into the street and smashes his face into the roof of the car and then shoves him in the trunk. He knocks us both over the head with a rock and when we wake up here we are. And then when she’s done telling him the story, he says, “That’s not what happened, dear. Your father took you and your brother away but decided he didn’t want both of you, so he let you go and you found your way back home.” Every night the same thing, until she stops remembering how it really happened and can only believe the version of it Father Benji tells her with the sanctity of my fingers at stake. By then she is a mindless little voodoo doll with all the sense sucked from her. I don’t think she is capable of speaking anything other than the words he’s placed in her mouth.

  I think of her in the dark, whispering to me when Father Benji isn’t there, What do you think happened to Daddy, Nicky? I tell her that I don’t know. In the few days we have left together, I never tell her that I woke up before she did that hot day in the sun, I wake up to see that we have been taken to a wide, dark room. She is lying next to me, her wrists and ankles bound, a deep bleeding gash on her forehead, but she looks peaceful. There is only a small porthole window near the curved ceiling that lets light in. Besides that, there is nothing here of any interest other than Father Benji, I can tell it’s him because I can see the outline of his hat in the light that falls onto him, standing next to a lump of shadow. The floors, the walls, the ceiling, are a grid of bolted sheets of metal, like a curved chessboard. As my eyes continue to adjust I realize that the lump is our father, tied to a chair. His ankles are tied to the legs of the chair and his wrists are tied to the armrests. His nose looks crooked like it’s been broken, and one of his fingers is sticking up in a gruesome, awkward position. They are speaking, and I think to myself, Daddy’s still alive, we’re all going to be okay. Then Father Benji hits him over the head and it falls to loll on his chest. He comes and picks us up, one under each arm, and he takes us to a door that is hidden on the far side of the room. We enter an elevator and my head is swimming too deep to know whether we’re heading up or down but when it stops, we step out into the blaring swath of desert. The fresh air is a relief because inside, the heat was dry and thick and suffocating. He puts us into the backseat of his car and gets in. As he drives away, I feel that I am about to pass out but before I do, I lift my head high enough to look out the window. I see it there, the water tower, and know that we had just come from its great emptied bulb. Daddy is alive in the water tower, I think to myself before my head falls back to the cushion. But that is five weeks before today, and he must be rotted up there to dust and sticks by now.

  “Don’t call me your son,” I warn, sullenly, without anger or passion but simple exhaustion. “Do you know what happens? You take me to South America because you know any day now the dental records of that body at the Fasch house is going to come back identifying you, and you can’t be around to try and explain how that can be or why there are two missing children locked in your basement. So we go. And for a while it’s miserable. But I’m still young, and malleable, and because it’s all I know, I grow to learn that it’s my home, and I start to call you Father. And then, twelve years later, when I’m twenty, you just disappear one night. You don’t say goodbye to me, you don’t say you’re leaving. You’re just gone. Maybe it’s because you think I’m old enough to raise myself. Maybe it’s something I can’t even imagine, I don’t know. But you just go.”

  “Well, I’m sorry for that, Nicky. But you do understand that this is all necessary, don’t you? Everything I’ve done, I needed to do to prove that Asam Cifezzo is right.”

  I jump up and kick the fallen folding table. It goes into the television and falls to the ground. “Asam Cifezzo is bullshit, Father. I spent the fifteen years after you left me trying to find out about him, anything about him, anything at all. Because I thought that maybe it would tell me why you just left me like that. But do you know what I found after all that time?” He s
hakes his head but leans forward expectantly, eagerly. “Nothing. Asam Cifezzo is not real, he never existed. It’s a pseudonym that you use because you’re not really Father Johns. Father Johns is dead in a morgue right now, murdered four days ago when he was caught with someone else’s wife.”

  “That’s not true, Nicky. Asam Cifezzo is real. I saw it when I looked into the sun.”

  “Maybe you didn’t see the past, Father, maybe you saw your own future. Maybe you didn’t see anything but a hallucination, I don’t know and it doesn’t matter to me.”

  “No, Nicky! I did see it. It is real. How else do you explain how you can be here, and in my basement right now at the same time?”

  “I can’t, Father. And that’s the only reason I’m not going to kill you, which is what you deserve, for what you did to me and my sister and my mother and my dad.” I prophesy, hushed, “Because thirty-seven years from now, you are going to be an old man living in those woods, the woods right out there, living under the name Asam Cifezzo, the old man who abandoned me in South America when he was fifteen years younger. And, because I am here and in your basement at the same time, I’m going to go out to those woods tomorrow and I’m going to ignore the fact that you left me and I’m going to ask you what I can do to stop the General.”

  He licks his lips and his eyes dart to the basement door, which he can just see in the moonlight from where he’s sitting. “I am sorry, Nicky. The only reason I took you, the two of you, in the first place, was to prove that Asam Cifezzo is real, to prove that the things I saw when I looked into the sun are real. That I’m not insane, because sometimes I’ve wondered. And, only partly, because I wanted a son to make up for the daughter I gave up. But that’s why you’ve come back to me tonight, Nicky. To prove that Cifezzo is real, and this was necessary if I’m ever to do anything good for this world.”

  “He isn’t real yet, Father.”

  I continue, “And yes, that is why I’m here. To prove to you that Asam Cifezzo is real, and that everything you believe and think you need to do, all of that is right. But they’re your beliefs, Father, you need to suffer for them. Not make others suffer for them.” I look back at the basement door and then turn back to him. “You are going to leave for South America tomorrow, and you’re going to bring me with you. And in a year, I will have fallen in love with a woman who lives in the village you take me to. A fortuneteller. And I am going to sneak into her apartment hoping she’ll tell me my future, and she will. She tells me, ‘These cards, they’ve been infected. My son was killed by a black magic that got into him when he drank from a stream, deep in the jungle, that runs from the capital of an ancient abandoned city. And that magic ate away at his body, and it got into my cards.’ And when I snuck in to read them, she tells me, it got into me, and it started to seep back, back through time and into the lives of everyone who has ever known me. That is your future, boy, she says to me. As it works back and perverts the past, you will grow knowing it has made their lives miserable and that you are the sole source of that.

  “The lives of everyone here, Father, they’re all going to hell, because a year from now I’m going to read my future in a set of infected tarot cards. So that’s why I’m here, that’s why I’m really here. To ask you to suffer for what you believe, and to leave everyone else out of it. If the world is ending, why take away what few good days might be left? You’re just doing the General’s work for him.”

  “And what would you have me do, Nicky?”

  “Let them go. Me, and my sister. Let us both go. Don’t take me to South America. Just let me go home. You have the proof you need now, now that I’m here. So just—just let me go.”

  “They’ll come after me,” he says. He is crying now, afraid for himself and ashamed for the things he has done.

  “I’ve always loved you, Father Benji. Even down there, with what you’ve done to us, I was raised to believe in you. So tell him the truth, and then let them go. I won’t tell anyone if you tell me why I can’t. And Kyra—you’ve already made her mindless. Haven’t you?”

  I sit next to him and he takes my hands and holds them in his lap. And he says he’ll let me go.

  * * *

  I am too tired to go into the woods and so I go back to the house of Elizabeth Hesse. I look at the pictures of myself as a child that hang on the wall, of my sister and me and our parents. When I go upstairs, I hear sobbing from the bathroom. The door is cracked open and I go to it and I push it open. Elizabeth Hesse, my mother whom I haven’t seen since the day Father Johns kidnapped my sister and I, is standing in front of the mirror naked and crying with a razorblade on the rim of the sink. Her back is covered in small white feathers, a subtle down. She turns and looks at me, sees the shock I’m wearing. I step into the bathroom and close the door so that Ingot doesn’t wake up.

  “Mrs. Hesse?” I ask. “What—” I don’t quite know how to ask the question. Dozens of little feathers are sprouted from her shoulders, from her flanks, on her back, up her neck.

  “I don’t know,” she says, still crying. “I just want it to be over. But every time I try to end it, I wake up, and one of these feathers is here. It won’t let me go.”

  “Oh,” I say it sympathetically and I walk up to her and I hug her and hold her as tightly as I can. My hands sift through the feathers she wears until my fingers are against her skin. “Maybe, it’s just a sign that you still have work to do.” I think of Father Johns’ sermons for the first time in years and I repeat one to her, “The world is ending. And for those of us who still have work to do, it will never let us go.”

  “Then tell me, what am I supposed to do? My husband, Jacob, I loved him. So much. And then two weeks ago, he just left. He left and he took our kids. What kind of son of a bitch would do that to the woman who loved him for so long? They’re gone, and I just want this all to be over.”

  I say it without thinking, and maybe I shouldn’t say it, but for years I have wanted her to know it. It is, perhaps, the only thing I’ve ever really wanted since the day I left home. “Just think about that little girl in there. Ingot. She needs you. She’s lost everything. More than you have. And, Mrs. Hesse, you need to go to the water tower.”

  She starts crying, her body jolts against mine and I can hear the rustle of the feathers behind her. I press my arms hard against her to still her and the jolting becomes a vibration that passes quietly between us. Her face is pressed into my shoulder, wetting it slowly. When she speaks, I can barely understand her because her mouth is twisted against my clavicle. “I was sleeping with a man,” she says. I pull her just enough away from me so that I can hear her. “I ended it when my husband left. But he came back to my house one night in a rage. I told him to leave, I told him it was over, but he wasn’t here for me.”

  “What was he here for?” I ask because her story demands that I ask it now.

  “He knew where my husband kept his gun. He came for the gun. It was Ingot’s father. He took it and he killed himself and her mother. If I hadn’t been—what if they would still be alive? I’ve done horrible things, and I deserve what’s happened to me.”

  “It’s not your fault, Mrs. Hesse. It will go away, I promise that. It will go away.” I let her go, which is the hardest thing I think I’ve ever done, and I go to my room. I am surprised to see Annie there, sleeping in the bed. She wakes up when I turn on the light. “I thought you had to go,” I say.

  “I do,” she tells me. “And I will. But I want to go with you to the woods first.”

  “Now?”

  “No. In the morning. We need to sleep. Can I stay here the night?”

  I nod and I turn off the light and then I undress and get under the covers. She stays on the far side of the bed. But after a few minutes I feel her move closer and she says, “Are you really going to kill the General?”

  “I am,” I say.

  “Good,” she says. And then she says, “Can you do something else for me?”

  “I’m not kill
ing him for you,” I tell her.

  She ignores it and goes on, “You should kill Reverend Wiley, too. He’s not a real priest.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He’s my husband. Will you do it?”

  “I will,” I say, finally. “For you.” And then we go to sleep. It is a dreamless sleep.