Now, in the library’s Temple of Mercury, as she was closing up the cartomancy books and sniffing the air to determine whether she could smell Daisy mingling with the book smell she loved, she noticed something. Why had she thought the blindfolded girl in the Two of Swords was kneeling? She had looked at the card hundreds of times, and the kneeling image was clear in her mind. But looking at it now, she saw that the girl was not kneeling at all. She was seated on a bench or box of some kind. Strange how Andromeda had never noticed that before. The girl also seemed to be peeking from behind her blindfold, and her hands were … not very feminine—they were huge, in fact. What would happen if the Two of Swords girl was actually a boy?
This question strengthened rather than diminished Andromeda’s sense of the card as her significator, as it pointed to one of the recurring anxieties in her action-populated head, one that had resulted in several attempts to charge sigils derived from the statement “This is my wish to become more feminine.” Boys tended to lack enthusiasm for aero dynamic bodies like hers, though some girls could make it work. Despite Bryce’s claims to be attracted to her during the brief time they had technically been boyfriend-girlfriend, he hadn’t seemed too interested in touching her, despite considerable encouragement. And St. Steve: she hated to admit it, but he had been the same way, the main difference being the intensity of her wishes. Bryce was sweet, and Daisy had averred that he was cute, even, but he was not the sort of person to inspire passion in anyone.
The number two—that is, Chokmah—lies on the masculine Pillar of Mercy; perhaps that was what A.E. and Pixie were getting at with their Two of Swords design.
At any rate, when she really looked at the Two of Swords, it was a totally different card. There were no shallow pools as she had thought, like on so many of the other Swords cards; rather, the aerodynamic girl-boy was in the foreground of a lake or sea, with an island in the distance and two rocky formations in the midground. And she wasn’t really sitting on the box; it was more like she was floating above it. Or maybe she had just gotten up from kneeling and was now in the act of sitting down on the box. No wonder the Two of Swords made Andromeda think of her own box: there it was, underneath a hovering girl who was not quite feminine enough and who now looked to her a bit like a cemetery angel with swords for wings, the box a marble sarcophagus.
She put the cards back in the box, but then pulled them out again because she thought she had seen, out of the corner of her eye, the Tau-robed figure on the crest of the larger island behind the Two of Swords girl. She was mistaken. There was no one on the hill in the picture on the card. As an afterthought, she wrote down the cards she remembered from the dream, just in case they might have any divinatory or forensic significance: the Fool, the Hierophant, the Page of Cups, the Five of Cups, the Hermit, the High Priestess, and the Tower. That was seven of the ten cards in a Celtic Cross spread, leaving three unknown, unless the dancing Tau-robed one represented a card as well. If so, the Magician was a strong possibility—the figure might have been conducting a rite of some kind, and he might even have been juggling as well as tumbling. The fact that the girls’ bathroom spread had placed the Magician in the first “this covers you” position seemed to confirm that supposition. Strangely, Andromeda noted, Pixie’s Magician rather resembled the Two of Swords figure, giving the whole spread a curious symmetry.
Her quick, mouthed, surreptitious banishing ritual was interrupted by Darren Hedge, the reference librarian who supervised the pages. He was standing in front of her when she looked up.
“Do you feel like packing up Sylvester Mouse tonight?” he said. “Picking up some extra hours,” he meant. “We need to pull these books.”
Marlyne was going home “sick” again, and Weird Gordon, another page, was going to fill in for her at the desk. (“Sick” probably meant Marlyne was hanging out with Tommy the maintenance guy, with whom she was having a not-too-discreet affair.) Darren Hedge handed Andromeda a list that had been printed on the library’s ancient machine-type printer, a thick stack of paper accordion-folded along perforated lines, with the strip of holes on either side. Nearly an inch thick, which meant hundreds of books, probably.
“What’s it for?” she asked, but he had already disappeared, leaving the list behind.
Weird Gordon walked by on his way to the main desk, quietly singing a little song that went “Filling in for Marlyne, at the front desk, filling in for Marlyne …,” and clumsily swaying while he walked. It was perhaps the most annoying habit for a coworker to develop, Gordon’s little songs about everything he did. “Time to get out the stapler. Stapler!” “Everybody’s taking their break, in the break room, break room….”
“Gordon has a little crush on you,” Marlyne had once sung, parodying his singing style. “I’m picking up a vibe.” Marlyne was always “picking up vibes” and thought everyone had a crush on everybody else. Andromeda knew that, for her part, she could never come close to feeling attraction for a boy with such poor taste in shoes: today, despite the damp weather, he was wearing his mandals. For the love of Mike, as the dad would say in the Groucho voice when he was doing the corny dad routine, there was no excuse for that. She cracked herself up, though, imagining the song Gordon might sing if they were ever to hook up somehow: “Here we go unbuttoning, here we go unbuttoning, un buttoning Andromeda, Andromeda’s shirt from Savers, kickin’ off my mandals, my man sandals, kicking off my mandals….” Then she saw him smiling back at her and accelerating his clumsy dance, showing off, and she felt bad for encouraging him, so she lowered her eyes and turned her attention back to the book list.
It couldn’t be for interlibrary loan. There was no red I.L.L. ticket, and besides, it was just too many books. I.L.L. would be two or three at most, if any at all. The IHOB, that is, the International House of Bookcakes, had books that no other library in the system had, she knew, but people rarely requested them. When they did, and it was a significant title, it made her sick with worry, as it had a year ago when the library’s copy of True and Faithful had had to travel to Sacramento. This was a facsimile edition, now quite rare, of A True and Faithful Relation of What Passed for Many Yeers Between Dr. John Dee … and Some Spirits (London, 1659), which she herself had once owned but had donated to the library for the public good and to protect it from the mom’s predations. It was the only copy to which she was likely to have access, and it was crucial to her studies. The book was returned safely three weeks later, to her immense relief. The Blue Equinox had come back with the seals cut out, by some profoundly small-minded occult dilettante, possibly a “goth” or heavy-metal rock fan, she imagined. Such people were around, a blight on the occult landscape, though fortunately they rarely had a long-enough attention span to do much damage. Frater Achad’s Egyptian Revival hadn’t come back at all, which was a shame because Andromeda wished at present to consult its countertraditional analysis of the tarot trumps that had stumbled through her dream.
She got a cart from the back room and began with the 000s. Generalities and Information. She had never read the first one on the list, but it looked interesting and she made a mental note to look at it when it was returned: The Egyptian Miracle: An Introduction to the Wisdom of the Temple. Following were three books by Robert Anton Wilson that she had always meant to check out. Packing up Sylvester Mouse that evening only got her through the 001s, because she spent most of the time standing by the cart in the stacks reading the temple book and thinking about numbers and swords and boxes, and about how a compass and straightedge were the only tools necessary to build the world.
The Sylvester Mouse list was great, consisting almost entirely of books she had read, or had pretended to have read, or felt she ought to have read, or had been meaning to read, or had not known about but which were thoroughly up her alley. She had looked ahead to the selection of 133s, “her” section, Parapsychology and Occultism: it was particularly impressive, including nearly all the good ones and leaving the wicker behind. Here was Mrs. van Rensselaer’s rare and qui
te underestimated Prophetical, Educational, and Playing Cards; and there was nearly everything the library had of Waite and Crowley, as well as Agrippa, Bonewits, Mathers’s translation of the Abramelin text, Eliphas Levi, Dame Frances Yates, Francis Barrett, all the classics … Abramelin the Mage wouldn’t be on the shelves. She knew because it was the library’s only copy and she herself had had it and somehow managed to lose track of it sometime during the past year. Currently, she had the Eliphas Levi and one of the Yates volumes at home—she would have to replace them by the time she got to the 133s, she supposed. She decided to staff-check A.E.’s Book of Ceremonial Magic, because she had just been using it to look up the sigils for Sallos and Orobas, and she wanted to note the sigils of the remaining Goetic demons on her cards.
Those who had made the Sylvester Mouse selections, whoever they were and whatever their purpose, really knew their stuff. The 296 section was great as well; it included the classic texts and left behind the dumbed-down self-help mumbo jumbo. It was a kind of showcase of the best the IHOB had to offer, which was considerable, and Andromeda caught herself feeling weirdly proud of it.
Books could get her excited, not just reading them but touching them. She had been known to caress her van Rensselaer or her Magick Without Tears. That is, she thought of them as hers, though they belonged, strictly speaking, to the library, which meant the county and ultimately the state. But they were from her section, and she was the only one who cared about them. The library’s copy of Magick Without Tears was particularly fine, a small quarto, bound (or possibly rebound) in quarter calf and white buckram with gilt edges, a strange, obviously limited edition she had been unable to find on any official bibliography. Such books were themselves talismans, or they could be, powerful as objects. Hands laid on them could absorb their power, and even, some said, their contents. Living with them or around them could influence and transform your world.
There were three of the library’s six Crowley books on the list and they were excellent choices: Magick in Theory and Practice, of course, and Magick Without Tears because it was a rare special edition, and The Vision and the Voice, or Liber 418, an underappreciated classic documenting the exploration of the Enochian Aethyrs of Dr. Dee in the Sahara with Frater Omnia Vincam in 1909 e.v. It could also be read in Gems from the Equinox, but the stand-alone edition on the list was a far better text. It was odd, though, that True and Faithful was not one of the selections, as it was one of the library’s most impressive volumes and a text of great importance.
The Sylvester Mouse list had its reasons, evidently.
iii.
Andromeda Klein was thinking of “her” Magick Without Tears, the way it felt and the way it smelled, so her ride home was much more high-spirited than her previous ride had been.
But the Klein household killed high spirits with striking regularity and precision. Andromeda made sure the red phone was turned off, in case she got a call or text from the mom on the wrong phone as she was walking in. It was a complicated system, but it was necessary. The mom had gotten her the blue phone, on a shared-minutes plan, a transparent scheme to keep track of whom Andromeda was talking to by means of the bill, which registered both incoming and outgoing calls and texts for all numbers on the account. The mom was not above calling numbers and interrogating whoever answered. The “Why have you been calling a health clinic?” conversation was infuriating and humiliating nearly a year later. And it still amused Andromeda to think about the mom’s response to the Old Folks Home (“Dromeda, it’s wonderful that you are volunteering, but you shouldn’t let it interfere with your schoolwork or work around the house….”). Yet it had been clear that the mom had to be stopped if Andromeda was going to have any privacy.
St. Steve had suggested the solution, an additional prepaid phone, same make and service but red rather than blue so you could tell them apart. Switch the SIM cards and use the blue phone with the pay-as-you-go chip, so the mom would think it was the family-plan phone if she saw it, but the calls made on it wouldn’t turn up on the family bill. Keep the red phone with the family-plan chip hidden, and use it only for mom communication and for decoy calls to make it look like the phone was being used often enough to be believable. The decoy calls could even be fun, to the degree that they could elicit questions like “Honey, are you thinking of having something upholstered?” It kept them both busy.
By the time Andromeda had locked up her bike and had gone in and up the stairs, she was already in a bad mood again, thinking about the hoops she had to jump through just to reach everybody else’s starting gate.
The building was a Spanish-style duplex in the flats, a part of Clearview that Rosalie van Genuchten regularly referred to as “the ghetto.” The Klein family occupied the top half, left entrance. A combination of water damage and poor design and materials had caused the building to warp and settle oddly. From the outside, it looked a little strange, but the effect was really noticeable inside, where the floors slanted enough that smooth objects tended to slide if not secured. It was also quite small, which meant that the three Kleins’ agenda of staying in separate rooms whenever possible could require some fancy footwork.
The mom was in the dining room at the computer, which had been moved there from its previous, more convenient location in the kitchen nook on the advice of a television program about Predators. This move had effectively killed the Internet for Andromeda, and at the moment it seemed to be cramping the mom’s style too, which was slightly satisfying: she appeared to be IMing furtively with somebody, and even at a distance it was clear from the strobing monitor that she was riding the Hide button, as though worrying about over-the-shoulder spying. She had her ear-buds in and her butt was chair-dancing slightly. From one position at the top of the stairs, there was a “split-screen” view of part of the dining room and part of the kitchen, where the dad sat on the floor, dismantling the microwave.
“I can’t get on the network,” said the mom, half turning in her chair. “I can’t get on the network.” Then she added: “I can’t get on the network.”
“Let me guess,” said Alternative Universe Andromeda. “She can’t get on the network.” Then it added, “I guess the ninjas will just have to slay themselves.” The mom often had trouble with her virtual reality networking games because of the slow speed of the dial-up connection. Andromeda trudged down the short hallway in a slouching manner intended to reflect her state of mind.
“Oh, not more books!” the mom said.
As at school and the International House of Bookcakes, the atmosphere at Casa Klein was near tropical, overbearingly hot, with moisture heavy in the air. Andromeda deftly nudged the sliding thermostat down with her shoulder as she walked past it.
“Your father is destroying another appliance, so if you want to heat something up you’re out of luck.” Everything was quite heated up enough as it was, no oven required. Andromeda had already had a plum baby food and some red whips for dinner in the break room with Marlyne earlier anyway.
A barrage of complaints and suggestions followed, once the mom was certain she had communicated her inability to get on whatever network she had been trying to get on. Tonight’s lecture might have been entitled: “Vegetarianism as Eating Disorder: The Roots of Adolescent Depression.” Goading Andromeda about vegetarianism was the one thing her parents seemed to enjoy doing together, even though the dad claimed to have once been a vegetarian himself, but he was too preoccupied with the microwave to join in this time. In truth, Andromeda was only a vegetarian every other day, on Saturnine Ring Days, but even on Jovial days she shied away from meat because fat was gross and the smell nearly always made her feel ill.
“Just having some tea,” said Andromeda, filling the kettle. The water pressure was low, as it had been for the last several weeks, so she had to stand in the mom’s presence for far longer than she would have liked. Nothing ever functioned fully at Casa Klein.
“Tea, that’s a nutritious meal,” the mom was saying. She went on to complain about
the water pressure and to accuse Andromeda of hiding her address book and using her iPod, which had gone missing and finally turned up in the refrigerator. The idea that Andromeda would have any interest at all in the horrible music on the mom’s iPod was almost as preposterous as the idea that she would, for some reason, decide to put it in the refrigerator. The mom’s checkbook had also disappeared and was still missing; again, it was ridiculous to accuse Andromeda. It was doubtful that the checking account had any money in it. And it was a good bet that the mom had already accused the dad of hiding or losing it before Andromeda had come in.
Refrigeration hadn’t seemed to hurt the iPod; there it was, buzzing away through the slightly nasty earbuds now hanging around the mom’s neck. Andromeda immediately thought of Daisy and whether it might be possible for her in her current state to dematerialize objects and rematerialize them inside boxes like refrigerators.
“Things are always disappearing around here,” the mom repeated, with an accusing look in Andromeda’s direction, and another in the direction of the dad.
“Jesus, will you leave the kid alone?” said Andromeda’s father. “Hello, cupcake.” She wasn’t sure how he did it, but he managed to make “cupcake” sound sarcastic and affectionate at the same time. There was no person in this world who resembled a cupcake less than Andromeda Klein. It was nicer than Fence Post and no more inapt than her own name, which meant “Little Crystal Ruler of Men” in a variety of mismatched languages.
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