At any rate, now that Daisy and Den’s mother no longer had a predictable schedule, such visits were out of the question. There was no telling what would have happened if she’d caught Andromeda there. Andromeda had once dreamt that Mrs. Wasserstrom had stabbed her through her sleeping bag, and Daisy had claimed that her mother used to threaten her with knives when she was little. Since then, Den had managed to retrieve some books and clothes, the ankh ring, and a few other items for Andromeda. Daisy’s mom was no longer Mrs. Wasserstrom, though; she had gone back to her maiden name, MacKenzie, and now called herself Ms. like some sad teacher. Andromeda and Den had called her Miz MacKenzie, or Mizmac, sarcastically, ever since the change.
Andromeda wore the ankh ring on her first finger, of course, in the manner of the classical Renaissance mage. When the ring was on the right finger, she was supposed to manifest a Jovial, vibrant, warm, and open-hearted temperament; when it was on the left, she was supposed to switch her mood to a Saturnine, brooding, inspired melancholia. The personas were supposed to have opposite tastes and opinions, which was meant to loosen the bonds of the ego and teach tolerance by showing the arbitrariness of opinion. (This was something she had adapted from Mr. Crowley, who had imposed the exercise on his students.) Andromeda constantly found herself slipping back into Saturn regardless of which Ring Day it was. Realizing she had failed again, she switched the ring from right to left and bit the back of her hand as a punishment, but breathed an inward sigh of relief because Saturn was so much more comfortable.
“What’s my percentage?” Den was saying, meaning, what would he get in return for his services. They had been trading things for favors since they were both kids.
“What do you need?” Not drugs, she promised herself, I won’t get him drugs. The ankh ring had been exchanged for candy, but since then his tastes had …
“Feel you up?” he said.
… matured, she had been thinking.
“Gross,” she said. “How old are you?”
“Old enough.”
He looked so hurt at how hard she snorted at this that she actually made a sincere attempt to straighten out her face.
“That?” she said. “Is not going to happen.” He was twelve. She wasn’t a complete degenerate. “Anyway, there’s nothing to write home about on me. I wouldn’t want to cheat you.”
“Bagel worm agony,” he said.
“What?” Andromeda pulled hair and hood back from her right ear. “Wait: did you just say ‘Naked girl magazine’?”
He nodded, a very serious expression on his face that almost made her giggle again. Hadn’t computers solved the boys’ dirty-magazine problem forever? Perhaps he wanted something he could take to the elms to share with the other cubs. Well, it wasn’t as bad as drugs. She’d try to keep it as clean as she could. “I’ll see what I can do.”
She described where he would find Daisy’s tarot deck, in a yellow and purple Eye of Horus bag inside a black box with a silver glitter eight-rayed star of Ishtar on the underside of the lid, and on the outside, a heptangle glyph—a simplified version of Dr. Dee’s Sigillum Dei Aemeth painted on it in true gold leaf. The bag and the box had been Saturnalia gifts from Andromeda to Daisy a couple of years back; Andromeda had painted the sigils herself, after carefully outlining them with a compass and straightedge.
“She’d have hidden the box somewhere, away from the light and where your mom couldn’t find it, probably. A big pack of cards about this big.” She held out her hands. She took out her Moleskine notebook and drew a clumsy star of Ishtar, a squiggly version of Dee’s heptangle, and finally an Eye of Horus. “See? An eyeball. Growing from a … stalk. And a, kind of, curly branch. And an ear. And, a nose. And … an eyebrow!” She tore off the page and handed it to him. “Ta-da.”
If only it were so easy to talk to everyone. This is how privileged socially secure people get to be all the time: comfortable, unconcerned, in charge of the situation. It was hard to draw geometric sigils without a compass and straightedge, but she was very comfortable drawing Eyes of Horus freehand, partly because the more off-kilter they were, the better they looked. If there were a way to do it professionally she’d have it made.
She and Den had always gotten along. They both missed Daisy. They were both scared of Ms. MacKenzie. If only the rest of the world missed Daisy and were frightened of Mizmac to the same degree, the entire social landscape would be transformed in her favor…. Comfortable, unconcerned, in charge of the situation. The feeling passed.
The drizzle began to turn into actual rain. The bear cubs were gathering their stuff and trip-waddling down the field. Den kissed a peace sign and ran after them, holding his pants up with one hand and stumbling over his shoes. Why do they all want to show the world their underwear? “Because,” replied Alternative Universe Andromeda, “they don’t let you have belts in prison,” which actually did seem like a good point.
“See you Thursday,” he called out.
“Word,” she said quietly. Daisy and the texted “hi there” and the Two of Swords reversed were still hovering, darkening the world. Then she mouthed an expression that had been Daisy’s: “Oh, life.” She zipped up and pushed off down the path. She would be soaked by the time she reached the library.
“Trismegistus,” she said, looking toward where she supposed the sun might be if it weren’t for the iron-gray clouds.
“Jesus, Andi,” said Marlyne, one of the library assistants. “You look terrible.”
“What?” said Andromeda Klein, even as she caught up to what had been said. Then: “I try.” People who knew her well had learned not to answer every “What?” right away.
“Could you watch the desk for like ten minutes while I go get my lady on?” Marlyne meant fix her makeup. The chances of anyone coming to the front desk in the next ten minutes were close to zero. As always, the library was almost completely deserted, except for staff and a few elderly, half-alive patrons. It was the quietest place Andromeda knew, like a church or a museum, or something abandoned. The main building had a big, steep, pointed roof in front. It almost looked like it might have once been a church of some kind; though it could just as plausibly have been an International House of Pancakes. Whatever it had once been, it was now the most underutilized branch of the system. Most people went to Central, which was bigger, better located, and allegedly nicer, though Andromeda preferred the shabby, crumbling stillness of the International House of Bookcakes. The recently remodeled and modernized Central Library looked like a place in a futuristic movie where people take their kids to get their brains replaced so they can be controlled by robots.
She stared at the clock and thought about swords and blindfolds and boxes and robots in order to avoid glancing at any shiny surfaces: she didn’t even want to see what she looked like after that ride. Andromeda checked her blue phone. “Get your bony non driving ass over here jk,” said another charming text from Rosalie van Genuchten.
“I can’t think why you come here on your day off,” said Marlyne, when she returned looking marginally more sparkling. Then she added something else that sounded a bit like “Large bundle of Arthur eggs.”
“Mm,” said Andromeda. Sometimes it wasn’t worth even trying to figure them out, and mm was the thing to say. It meant “How interesting, and exciting.”
Andromeda only worked two weekday evenings during the school year, but she had somehow managed to leave the impression on the mom that she worked quite a bit more. At this point, though, she didn’t have anything to do on her fake work nights. Daisy had officially left this world, or most of her had. And St. Steve would not be calling up to offer to take her to the Old Folks Home. Rosalie and Siiri and Co. meant well, but they could be their own special flavor of nightmare unless you were in the mood for them—the International House of Bookcakes was the least unpleasant thing on an unsavory menu. It was quiet, and expected little of her, and it was free.
“You should let me do your makeup for you sometime,” said Marlyne. Translation: You
look like shit, Andromeda.
A visit to the bathroom confirmed it, to no great surprise. Her “look” was one big ball of terrible. She had started the day with decent, straight hair and a subtle hint of Egyptian eyes, but both had rapidly degenerated in the wind and drizzle and heat and anxiety. She did what she could. Hair up was slightly better, even if it meant people could see her ears and more of her neck, which she felt was far too long and narrow. As at school, the heat in the library was deathly. She visited the thermostat on the way back from the bathroom and turned it down from the maximum (which was so high it didn’t even register on the gauge), though she knew it would get turned right back up again as soon as an elderly patron complained that the heat was “blowing cold air.”
“The new you,” said Marlyne. “How’d you get here, on your bike? You need to get your license.”
Andromeda was aware.
“Or a boyfriend to drive you around.”
“Mm,” said Andromeda Klein. Marlyne was wearing a sweater. How could she stand it? Even in her light, cotton button-down men’s dress shirt from Savers, Andromeda felt like melting cheese. Marlyne never broke a sweat, somehow. The crisscross pattern of her sweater evoked, once again, the Two of Swords, yet another minor synch.
Andromeda retrieved a couple of cartomancy volumes from the 133s and took them to a table in the deserted Children’s Annex, one of four trailerlike structures joined to the main building by covered paths they called breezeways. If, in your head, you divided the main building into three sections (for Reference, Periodicals, and General Fiction upstairs), the library complex as a whole could be viewed as an astrological temple in the classic Renaissance Hermetic style, with a room for each of the seven traditional Ptolemaic planets. This Andromeda had arranged by discreetly consecrating each room or section to the appropriate planetary demon and placing charged sigils—in colors drawn from Agrippa’s gemological-planetary correspondences—in hidden spots at each location. She made a point of visualizing astral diagrams of the appropriate planets when she entered each room, in order to strengthen the links. Thus had the Clearview Park Public Library become the Bibliotheca Templi Hermetici, known and seen only by Andromeda Klein and whatever spirits might happen to notice. The Children’s Annex had small tables and chairs and was a little uncomfortable, but it had been consecrated to Mercury—so it was the appropriate area for drawing down influences of use in studying and interpreting the Book of Thoth, she reasoned.
No one was near, so she risked a very quick, very low-key Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and followed it with a truncated Invocation of Thoth. The Sign of Harpocrates, a finger or thumb over the lips, looked perfectly normal in a library, but once, she had been caught doing the Sign of Horus in the Temple of the Moon and an elderly lady had complained that there was a “crazy person loose upstairs.”
She carefully laid out the Two of Swords and the nine cards she had drawn before it earlier that day in the girls’ bathroom, working backward from position ten at the top of the column at the right, to the circle of future, past, crowning, and grounding, ending with “this crosses you” and “this covers you.” This procedure always gave her an odd sense of going back in time. She gasped slightly because card number one, the “covers you” card, denoting the general situation, was in fact the Magician, who appeared to have played such a prominent role in the Daisy dream. Major synch, if only to indicate that Andromeda was on the spread’s wavelength and vice versa.
There was no law against it, but she always felt just a bit furtive and nervous about spreading the cards—especially in public like this, though there was no one there to observe.
Traditional tarot readings often begin with a significator, a card chosen to represent the querent or questioner, over which the other cards are laid. Daisy’s method had been haphazard and unpredictable, but she had tended to use the Lovers to signify Andromeda in readings, because the Golden Dawn attributions specifically associated this card with the Andromeda legend in Greek mythology. This was, obviously, a terrible idea, since it removed a very important card from the divinatory possibilities at the outset. Because of this, many authorities question whether a significator should be used at all; most tend to reject the traditional method of selecting a significator from the court cards on the basis of hair and eye color. The significator should be chosen, if at all, on some basis with more depth: psychology, astrology, level of magical attainment. That was Andromeda’s view. However, it occurred to her that, rightly or wrongly, she had begun to think of the Two of Swords as a kind of significator, a symbolic picture of Andromeda Krystal Klein. Perhaps that was the sense in which it was “the outcome.” She was being shown her own, rather counterintuitive significator.
It was because of this train of thought that Andromeda snickered out loud in spite of herself when, just to see, she drew a card at random to serve as her significator, and it turned out to be the Page of Cups—the traditional card for females with light brown hair and eyes like hers. That was a big, and fairly weedgie, synch because the figure Pixie had depicted as the Page of Cups had played a role in the weedgie Daisy dream. Also, it was, perhaps, the Universe telling her not to dismiss traditional customs and practices so lightly.
The other cards in the spread were mostly small cards, bristling with swords, though the King of Pentacles in the “hopes and fears” space might allude to—had always seemed to allude to—St. Steve, who was certainly a hope and a regret, if not exactly a fear. There he was, staring at her with A.E.’s sad eyes as Pixie had drawn them. It was hard to decide how to relate A.E.’s court cards to the Golden Dawn’s Book T attributions, but if A.E.’s Kings corresponded to the Golden Dawn’s Princes rather than to the Knights, then he was also, apparently, Emperor of the Gnomes.
Swords are spiritual, creative, but couldn’t they also be dangerous? They could slice you up. All depends on who holds them. In position seven was the Eight of Swords, another “hoodwinked” girl (in A.E.’s phrasing), this one tied to a post amongst a garden of eight swords: conflict, crisis, betrayal. It had never struck her just how many blindfolded girls there were in this deck. Besides the Magician, there was only one other major arcana card in the spread, in the second “crossing” position, the High Priestess, who has a crescent moon under her foot. She represents not only the moon, but also the Egyptian goddess Isis, as well as the priestess of the Temple of Thoth, according to Mrs. John King van Rensselaer, whose book lay open before Andromeda.
As for the Two of Swords, the Shemhamphorash attributions assigned to it the angels Ieiazel and Mebahel; and also, of course, by implication, the Goetic demons Sallos and Orobas.
“Mmm, Orobas,” Andromeda said, nodding, as though that explained a lot. Andromeda’s cards were covered with her own careful notes, fit into the margins and around Pixie’s figures: Hebrew and Greek characters, Qabalistic attributions, planetary symbols, page references to Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy and other important works. But she hadn’t thought to note the small cards’ Goetic demons and the Shemhamphorash angels till now. She wrote the names in the upper and lower margins of the card, the angels’ names on top and its demons’ names upside down on the bottom; then she carefully drew their seals lightly in pencil, so that they could be traced over in ink when she got home. She would have to find the time to inscribe the names and sigils on the rest of the cards as well, for the sake of completeness. “And for the sake,” said Altiverse Andromeda K, “of providing evidence, should you ever be put on trial for a crime you did not commit, that you are not guilty by reason of insanity.” Andromeda’s mind formed silent words to the effect of “Shut your trap,” though AAK did not actually have a trap.
Aside from the Magician and the Page of Cups, none of the figures depicted on the cards in the girls’ bathroom spread had appeared in her dream, that she could recall, though she had seen the High Priestess’s pillars, minus the High Priestess herself, flanking an empty chair. They had looked like a large number eleven—the
number of magick.
She took a breath. Numbers are living things, the key to understanding “euery thing hable to be knowen,” as Dr. Dee had rendered Pico della Mirandola’s famous thesis in his introduction to the English edition of Euclid. They are their own worlds, every one of them infinite, and each a gateway to the others. The spread vibrated with Two-iness, Six-iness, Airiness, and a kind of Mooniness, too. For a fraction of a tick it was a vision of deep, dramatic beauty, of numbers and planes and spheres and things inside and beyond themselves, of abstractions and embodiments and their emblems pulsing beneath the mercurial sector of the heavens represented by the astral symbols on the annex ceiling. Such moments were priceless and felt like falling. But she failed to hold the flash in her mind, and it faded to darkness and confusion almost at once, as though someone had suddenly extinguished a lamp and kicked everything over in the shadows. That was how it always was.
She noted the spread in her tarot diary and gathered up the cards. The tarot diary was a list of dates with strings of Roman and Arabic numerals, Hebrew and Latin letters, a record of readings she had done with herself as the subject. It looked like a crazy person’s math homework. A wiser or more learned person, a Master Therion or a Giordano Bruno or a Pythagoras, or a god, could have made sense of the numbers and letters, might have translated them into a map of Andromeda Klein and the bit of her that overlapped with the Universe, but Andromeda Klein herself was lost.
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