by K. Chess
“My throat feels funny.”
“Fine, go lie down with your eyes closed then, cancer-face,” Seff said. “I need to clean up in here.” Helen knew that she was spoiling the orphan lie her sister liked to use at new schools to seem impressive. Seff would invite over her new gang, telling them that she lived all alone with no parents and that she could do whatever she wanted at her apartment. Indeed, the place would have been perfect for one person, with its fold-down table and miniature washer and dryer and the sweet little shelves under the windows.
But Helen existed. With pleasure, she considered the inevitable discovery of the lie. No matter what, her sister’s schoolmates would find her out when they asked to use the bathroom, which could be accessed only through the bedroom the sisters shared. How did Seff expect to explain the two beds crammed inside, one of them outfitted with threadbare Rocket Pig sheets? How would Seff explain Helen’s toys, her Pony Whisperer and Dusty Peach posters, unless she planned to tell those big high-form kids that they were hers?
Helen dosed herself with two tablespoons of the sapphire-blue cold medicine their father kept in a drawer in the kitchen, then went into the bedroom and lay on her own bed with the door cracked, where she could hear the angry scratching of the broom and the cabinet doors opening and then banging shut as Seff hid stuff inside and, under those sounds, the music playing on the player—a new band whose sixer Seff had just purchased with money from her cashier job at the public steam baths. The pink curtain over the window in the back wall made the light warm. Helen watched the leaves of the ceiling fan rotate, the motion slowing, blurring, until she slipped off to sleep.
When she woke up, the apartment was dark and noisy and a boy she didn’t know was groping between the beds, trying to find the bathroom door. Helen waited until he’d gone inside, then got up and padded into the living room/kitchen. Seff perched on the edge of the coffee table, and her friends took up all the chairs and the couch too. They stood against the walls. Helen saw the twelve or fifteen crushed Mack Bullets lined up on the mantelpiece and an empty pouch of sniff drowning in a puddle of beer spilled on the counter. As she entered, the music on the player changed from a fast electro number to something slower, more nostalgic. Everything in the room moved in time to the new beat: the gesticulating motions of the kids who were deep in conversation; the cones of light cast by the twin table lamps; the upward-drifting bubbles in the empty fish tank; even the leaves of the philodendron their father kept on a chipped plate on top of the cabinet, which shouldn’t be moving at all. Helen’s own blood traversed her veins slowly, as sticky as the cough medicine.
All attention in the room was focused on a girl sitting cross-legged on the floor at Seff’s knee, wearing a see-through dress. “I don’t know how to do them,” the girl said. “I just saw the woman do them for my mom a couple of times in Atlantic City. She was psychic. I’m not psychic.”
“Just make something up,” Seff urged, holding a deck of oversized cards that Helen had never seen before in her hands. “It’ll be fun anyway.” Then she seemed, all of a sudden, to notice Helen’s presence in the bedroom doorway. “Hey, doll. What are you doing up? You look so tired—are you feeling a little better?”
Helen hated the fake kindness with which Seff always treated her when there were witnesses around. She didn’t answer. Some of the partygoers turned their heads in mild interest. “Who’s this?” asked the girl in the see-through dress, and Helen waited to see how Seff would lie, but all her sister said was, “This is Helen.”
Helen went to the cold box and stood there patiently until the boy blocking it moved. She got herself a glass of juice and sat down on the carpet in the middle of the room to watch what would happen next.
“Done shuffling?” asked the girl in the see-through dress. “Give them here. Good.” She began to deal out the strange cards. “This card is you, Seff—all right? This one I’m putting on top is your disguise—it’s who you’d like to be. This card is your past, where you came from. Then, this one is your future, where your path will lead if nothing you do changes.”
“Slow down,” Seff urged. “You’re going too fast.”
The cards showed people with pale faces in bright, old-fashioned clothing. Animals and fruit. Swords and stars. They pulsed with life, too. The girl continued her litany. “This card is above you. It represents your influences. This card is below you. I don’t remember what that means. Sorry! What you must overcome, maybe? It’s something like that.” She’d laid them out in a cross pattern without pausing to look at what they were. Now, she placed another card to the right of the cross, and piled three more on top. “Um, this card is your house, this one is your lover, this is your riddle, and this is its answer.”
“Is that it?” Seff asked.
“Yes. I’m done.”
From her spot in the corner, Helen examined the nearest card, the one on the far left of the pattern laid on the carpet, the one that the girl said represented Seff’s past. It depicted a woman sitting up in bed, as if she’d woken from a bad dream, with nine swords lined horizontally behind her, all of them pointing the same way. The woman’s hands covered her face. “What does that mean?” she blurted out. Seff shot her a look for interrupting, but Helen didn’t care right now; she felt impervious to her sister’s disapproval.
“I don’t know,” the girl said. She looked over with kind eyes. “What do you think it means? Maybe you can help me interpret.”
“Something bad,” Helen answered immediately. Seff glared, as if she’d told everyone a terrible secret, but Helen was sure she was right. “It stands for worry, too many worries.”
“Makes sense to me,” said the girl with the cards. “It’s frightening, isn’t it? What about this one?” She pointed at the Answer card, the last on the pile. A man in a turban whirled in place, unconcerned with the ships tossing on a rough sea in the background. In each of his hands, the man held a round loaf of bread. “The Two of Loaves. What do you think?”
“It’s a happy card,” Helen said. “He’s juggling with only two things—easy. One for each hand. So he’s not taking on too much.”
“Cheating?” the girl suggested.
Helen didn’t think that was right. “No. Balance.”
“That’s good!” one of the boys said. “Make her do more.”
“This one,” Seff said, won over. “Do this one.” Her nail flicked the edge of the card that supposedly represented her future. “It’s the prettiest.”
“That’s because it’s a trump card,” the owner of the deck said. She pinched a lock of Helen’s hair between thumb and forefinger and tugged it gently, an odd, affectionate gesture, then let it fall. “Go ahead, little psychic. Do it.”
Helen looked around her at the faces nodding with interest, the light pulsing out of them as they waited for her to speak. Their collective outward breaths heated the small apartment and the music buzzed dully from the player. Her sore throat stung and her head pounded.
She took in the card’s details. Words along the bottom read THE CHARIOT, and the picture showed a male figure seated in a sort of throne with two sphinxes in front. The man held a scepter but no reins. Over his shoulders, small buildings stood on a hill, receding into the distance. Several human figures stood on the hill too, watching him drive off.
Helen thought she understood the card’s warning. That was Seff in the chariot, leaving the city behind her in ruins. Helen had always suspected just this: that her sister would leave the world they shared. Not here and now, while the music played and the friends crowded close, but someday. Seff would escape.
She found her sister’s eyes. “No,” she said. “Stay.”
Little did she know, she had it backward.
“Who is this?” Dwayne asked, eyeing the man Vikram had brought to his doorstep.
“This is Wes,” Vikram said. “He’s from my Reintegration Education group. I’ve known him for a while now—he’s a good guy.” He watched Dwayne take Wes in. A white guy in his for
ties with a short, reddish beard, Wes wore a short-brimmed trilby—UDP men who hadn’t made a conscious effort to break the habit (as Vikram had) were likely to wear hats out of doors—and had tattoos and decorative scarring on his arms. There was also an ominous-looking burn mark, four inches square, on the side of his neck, its edges and corners too precise to be the result of an accident. Wes’s right hand drifted up to the mark, half covering it. Then, as if it took effort, he extended it in a handshake instead. “Nice to meet you.”
One room at a time until the job was done: that was Dwayne’s plan. He would sort everything into piles—charity, sell, curbside, trash—then haul each off to its respective destination, load by load, in the wire cart his grandmother had once used for laundry. Hard work for a man with a full-time job, no car, and no help. “Don’t you have any friends?” Vikram had asked, last time. “Neighbors? People from your grandma’s church or something?”
Dwayne had covered his sweaty face with the tail of his T-shirt as he spoke: “She kept everybody out of here while she was alive. Seems like she knew what she was doing enough to feel ashamed of the way she lived. How am I gonna disrespect her by giving away her secret?”
Now, Vikram listed Wes’s qualifications: his physical strength, his discretion, the fact that he was chronically unemployed and would therefore be willing to work for cheap, for cash under the table. Wes’s most important attribute went unspoken: his very strangeness made him seem less intrusive. He definitely hadn’t known Dwayne’s grandmother, or anyone she knew. Wes was so out of place that he belonged.
“All right. Man, this place is just a UDP magnet, I guess.” Dwayne turned back to the house. “I just picked up some Coronas. We can have us a drink and then we’ll talk numbers. Vikram, want to stay for a beer?”
The yellow delicate-necked bottles that sat sweating on a pile of newspapers on the counter were some of the only things in the kitchen that looked like they belonged there. Unopened cardboard boxes with red As Seen on TV logos obscured the burners of the stove and blocked the cold box. Between those and the dusty magazines in the sink, Vikram guessed the old lady must have eaten takeaway or else lived on frozen dinners warmed up in a microwave that perched on top of a bale of plastic-wrapped toilet-paper rolls. Wes picked up a curious plastic vest with straps that hung down loose, attached by two tubes to a suitcase-sized machine that rested in front of the dishwasher.
“That was my brother’s airway clearance system, for his chest wall oscillation therapy,” Dwayne said, before anyone could ask. “It would, like, rumble, to clear out mucus clots from Shawn’s lungs. He had cystic fibrosis. He’s dead now too.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Vikram said. He put his palm on the cap of his beer and twisted, but it stuck fast, and he frowned as the metal cut into the skin of his palm. “Shit.”
Dwayne tossed him his keys with a laugh. “Blue thing. It’s a bottle opener. Here, let me. Beer bottles you’re used to mostly twist-offs?”
Vikram took a swallow without answering. “Have you given any more consideration to what you’re going to do with the place? I hate to disillusion you, but Hel’s not going to be able to come up with the money you’re asking for.”
“It’s a fair estimate! Got it off a realtor. Besides, I thought she had a hustle going to get some business partners to pay for it.”
“She doesn’t tell me much, but I don’t think that’s going so well. What about giving up your apartment and living here yourself? You said you rent in Bushwick now? You could save, moving out here.”
“Nah, man. Nothing good’s happening in Brownsville. I’m going to be a dad someday soon and I don’t want to raise my kid in a neighborhood like this.”
Vikram thought again of flowers growing in pots, of the yellow-bricked synagogue and the clumsy, vivid mural on the side of the child-care center that had once been. A small park with a bust of forked-bearded Sleight. “Your . . . Heaven? Is that her name?”
“Eden.”
“She’s having a baby?”
“No, I don’t mean like that. We just planning ahead. Eden earned her degree already, and I’m bar manager now at a bowling alley in Williamsburg—and I book the live music acts.” He pulled on his beer. “If I’m going to get more into entertainment, I want to sell this place and get out of here.”
“Good for you,” Wes spoke up. “I think that’s romantic.” Dwayne shot him a skeptical look, like he wasn’t sure if he’d been slighted, but Wes shook his head. “No, I mean it. I think that’s good. Really. It’s good to meet someone who’s not scared of the future. Don’t you think so, Vikram?”
“Sure.”
Vikram had a name now, the name of the tenant who rented the storage unit from which the light had come. L. Cristaudo was listed on the rental paperwork he’d pulled from the front desk records. So far, the name had proven amazingly uncommon—no hits when he searched online for addresses in New York, no listing in the rotting old paper telephone directory Sato brought in as a reference text for their unit on Using City Services—but Vikram wasn’t out of ideas yet. He’d track the man down—or, if he had to, ambush him. Ask what he knew about the Gate. Make him open it again.
Years ago, in graduate school, Vikram had been plagued by a recurring dream. While his body slept in Boston, his mind returned to suburban New Jersey, over and over. Given the strict personal transport restriction system and the high fuel prices, the coveted areas in his world for middle-class families had been the convenient inner cities; his immigrant parents had finally worked their way into half of a duplex in prosperous downtown Trenton, a new town house off a nice courtyard with a clay pitch for quoits. But that didn’t feel like home. Instead, the run-down split-level in Morristown where he’d grown up remained locus to his subconscious mind.
In the dream, which reoccurred at least a dozen times while Vikram struggled to write his dissertation, he rode on the back of someone’s motorbike—the type of noisy rig held together with wire and luck that was popular with people his age who hadn’t gone to university—as it moved through familiar streets. He could never see the face of the driver of the blazer, but certainly it was another man, a trusted man, with a broad back clothed in denim. Sometimes, Vikram knew it was Keith Chen to whom he clung, sometimes his cousin Sanjay. Other times, the driver was a complete stranger. It didn’t matter. Vikram wrapped his arms around that back as they sped down the Delaware Canal towpath together and bumped their way up onto Pennsylvania Avenue. They took the corners tight as they raced past the Keeper Hall, past the athletic club, past the two food stores and the gambling parlor. Poultry called out to them from backyards and dogs barked, but there were never any people in sight. It was as if everyone in the world had fled in the middle of the night. The doors of houses were closed, the robbery bars locked down over doors and windows. Sometimes in the dream—but not every time—vacant vans and pods scattered their path like obstacles, as if abandoned in some sudden evacuation. In those dreams, the driver skillfully slalomed around them without reducing his speed. Whoever he was, he never spoke to Vikram.
Bastard fuel fumes in his lungs, wind in his blinking eyes, Vikram would have the strong impression that he should know where they were headed—though, upon waking, he was never able to say where that was. He felt a sense of purpose and anticipation. He recognized every house, every food garden, trash heap, and ditch. Every hydrant was the same as it had been, every locked security gate. Each NO TRESPASS sign seemed to be placed just the same as it had been the last time he visited Morristown. This world—this teenage world—was static, preserved in amber. Nothing about it could ever change.
The dream wasn’t frightening or threatening in any objective way, but it used to upset him. As he lay there in the bed in his student apartment two states away, it was the memory of that sureness—that it was all still there, just as he had left it, unchangeable and unchanged—that convinced him he could never escape where he’d come from. The past, the future—indistinguishable. At the time, it f
rightened him.
Now he longed for that return.
Seff’s Truth deck had origins in the Before that were long and well-documented. For centuries, the leisure classes of Europe had used a deck with four even suits overmatched by a fantastic array of motif cards to play a trick-taking game. As the cards traveled across the continent, the trionfi became triunfo, triomphe, tromf, Trumpfen, and at last trump, a concept used in a variety of games, including the Italian tarocco.
At the end of the eighteenth century, enterprising fortune-tellers began to use the special trump cards for cartomancy. A hundred and twenty years after that, the esotericist and mystic A. E. Waite commissioned English-born illustrator Pamela Colman Smith to bring to life a version better attuned to the spiritual frequencies he felt were inherent in the deck, which he would call Tarot. Throughout the summer of 1909 and into the fall, Waite described to Smith the images he saw in his head and she realized them, using for reference tarocchi like the Sola-Busca deck that was on display that year in the British Museum.
But something went wrong in the first tender months of the vanished epoch of Hel’s After; instead of publishing the deck together as they would in this world, the two occultists quarreled, and Smith fled London. She brought the drawings with her to the city of Smyrna, where she showed them to her self-styled dervish lover, an Armenian convert to Islam, born Hovsep Hovnanian. Yusuf, as he called himself, encouraged her to incorporate Mevlevi Sufi teachings into her next version of the deck; Yusuf imparted to it also a sort of lapsed-Catholic savor. She sketched the cards over and over, refining them. The two of them lived together in material poverty; Smith’s journals showed that hunger inspired her decision to turn the European suit of coins into round Turkish bread. When it came to the deck’s name, though, West trumped East; Yusuf urged her to call it turuq—a Sufi-Arabic word for “divergences”—but Smith preferred the resonance of another source, the libretto to an oratorio by Handel named Il trionfo del Tempo e della Verità.