Andromeda Klein

by Frank Portman

  Sacramento. The mom and the dad had met there, and Andromeda had indeed been born there, though they had moved to Hillmont when she was very small. Could the King of Sacramento have something to do with that?

  “Gods, Dave,” she said. “He couldn’t be my dad, somehow, could he?”

  Dave shuddered and stretched, which seemed rather like a no. He was in a rare needy, insecure mood, which was how she liked him best. She stroked his M and kissed his head and felt like she had at least one non-insane ally in the world. But even though she mentally arranged herself in the most secure box her imagination could construct, she didn’t feel safe in the slightest and ended up getting hardly any sleep at all. How was this King of Sacramento supposed to find her if she never managed to sleep properly?

  viii.

  Andromeda managed to avoid running into Lacey for the entire next day, leaving only one more day in the week before the weekend.

  Yet another apartment building had caught fire in the neighborhood overnight. Andromeda hadn’t heard any sirens, but the sour, wet charcoal smell was unmistakable, and she had taken a slight detour on her way to school to follow it to the scene. It looked a lot like the other one, a gaping, blackened mouth in an upper-floor, corner unit of a small apartment building on Redwood Avenue five blocks west of Casa Klein. Though there were no books in the trees this time, Daisy’s scent was certainly there. The building’s garage door had a large X on it, which felt like a synch, even though it was certainly possible that one straight line could cross another without necessarily referring to the Two of Swords.

  Andromeda had learned her lesson about the bike rack. In fact, she thought it best to avoid the racks completely, so she found a spot just beyond the far edge of the school fields. Fairly hidden from view, between ranks of eucalyptus trees, there was a metal thing, a pump or generator or meter of some kind, entirely enclosed in a metal cyclone-fence cube. There was a sign saying DANGER with a silhouette of a man being struck by lightning, but the fence itself didn’t seem dangerous and she was able to loop her new U-shaped lock around one of the metal posts and the bar of her bike. The walk to the school building was long but pleasant: damp, gray-dark, wet from the previous night’s rain. The smell of rained-on grass and trees was one of her favorite things. She could have sat there smelling everything for the entire day, and she was sure she’d have gotten more out of it than she would get in a whole day of sitting around at school.

  Empress stopped by their spot at lunch as usual.

  “Don’t you worry about that Lacey, KK,” she said before she moved on to the next table. “I’ll take care of her. I’ve got your back.” Then she patted Andromeda on the head.

  “Yeah, Cheska, what happened between you and Lacey Garcia?” asked Rosalie van Genuchten. Cheska was … well, it was short for Francesca, and people sometimes called Andromeda by that name because Flat Chest-a was a common nickname for it.

  “I heard,” said Mercedes Jackson, one of Rosalie’s outer-order hangers-on, “that you went psycho on her and she kicked your ass and you ran home crying. Then you weren’t at lunch, so …” Mercedes was Bryce’s sister, and wasn’t too fond of Andromeda.

  “No,” said Andromeda. She didn’t really want to talk about what Lacey had done to her or her bike, but she had to say something. “She thinks I’m a toe-ass butter-sucking fish, though.”

  “Toe-ass—” Rosalie almost snorted her contraband cola through her nose.

  Mercedes said: “I think that must have been “no-ass mother—”

  “Fish!” Rosalie interrupted. “Fish. Oh, man. Fish.”

  Amy the Wicker Girl was there as well. Andromeda had gotten her number, all right: she was wearing a couple of rings with eyeballs in them, pentagram earrings, and a T-shirt from some “dark”-looking rock band called Twisted Moon that looked a bit too big for her; probably a boyfriend’s shirt, Andromeda surmised. “I bet her other car is a broom,” said Altiverse AK, and Andromeda couldn’t help inwardly cracking up at that. Amy the Wicker Girl saw and smiled back at her. Apparently she had forgiven Andromeda for being a weak freak the other day.

  “You should really stay away from that Lacey Garcia,” Amy said. “She is one mean, nasty girl.”

  “She’s more like two mean, nasty girls,” said Rosalie, and the rest of them, even Mercedes, demonstrated the degree to which they wanted to seem like they were on Andromeda’s team by spending the rest of the lunch period making fat jokes, though they threw in some flat jokes as well to balance things out. This struck Andromeda as pretty distasteful and she didn’t find much comfort in it.

  “That’s what friends are for,” said Altiverse AK.

  Rosalie had repeated her offer to give Andromeda a ride to Afternoon Tea, but Andromeda declined and said she’d meet them there. Rosalie had the Volvo at school this week, and Andromeda’s bike would have easily fit in the back. But even though it was mostly uphill and the house was quite far from McKinley Intermediate School, she couldn’t think of a good way to explain to Rosalie why she had to make a stop to deliver a dirty magazine to Daisy Wasserstrom’s twelve-year-old brother. She had the bagel worm agony in her bag, in an envelope, along with S.S.O.T.B.M.E. and Shadows of Life and Thought.

  The dad had moved his sad little box of dirty magazines from its previous location under the parental bed out to the carport, but it hadn’t been too hard to find, hidden amongst the sound equipment and nonfunctional appliances. She hadn’t riffled through it in some time, and neither had he or anybody else, by the looks of it. She was surprised at how tame it was. If such tepid material really “did it” for the dad, she actually felt a little sorry for him. Perhaps he had some better stuff on the computer at the studio or something. She hoped so, in a way. She chose a Scandinavian magazine that was more or less like a sports magazine swimsuit issue where the girls seemed to have forgotten to bring along their swimsuits. Den wouldn’t even be able to read the text unless he studied Swedish for several years, and anyway, it looked like the articles were mostly about motorcycles. It would do little if any damage, she reasoned.

  “Ninety-three,” he said, beaming, after he had punched his fellow bear cubs goodbye and run over to her. He was carrying a big paper grocery bag.

  “Ninety-three ninety-three/ninety-three,” she said indulgently.

  “What does it mean, ninety-three?” he asked. It was a wonder he’d never asked about it before. But how to explain to a kid?

  “There are two Greek words,” she said after thinking for a moment. “Thelema and agape. Thelema means ‘will.’ And agape means ‘love.’ So in magic, letters are numbers, and if you add all the letters up, words are numbers too. And thelema and agape are connected because they both add up to ninety-three. They’re important magic words, so it’s an important magic number.”

  That was the simplest she could make it, without getting into St. Augustine and Rabelais and Mr. Crowley and Aiwass and AL. Den was nodding, but his thoughts seemed to be elsewhere already.

  He was clutching the grocery bag closely, shielding its contents from view with his oversized jacket.

  “Okay,” he said. “Ninety-three!”

  “Yes, yes, ninety-threes all around. I have something for you.”

  She pulled out the envelope and he snatched it and tore it open. He seemed quite pleased with the bagel worm agony, making her think, briefly, of the dad as a chubby twelve-year-old.

  Den’s pawing through the magazine had a frantic quality.

  “Don’t hurt yourself,” she said, and then felt weird when she realized that was one of the frequent phrases the dad used anytime anyone attempted to do anything; the mom had a similar approach, except that she shortened it to “Don’t.”

  The reason for the frantic quality, she soon realized, was that Den hadn’t been able to find Daisy’s tarot deck as arranged and was trying to absorb as much Scandinavian skin as he could just in case she decided to take the magazine back. He hadn’t shown up empty-handed, though, and what he had in the b
ag seemed like a fair trade, because it was filled with a jumble of Daisy artifacts. He rummaged through the bag, pushing aside a tangle of old, traumatized Barbies, a blond wig, and a big, floppy sun hat, digging for something.

  He explained that Mizmac had begun seeing a new boyfriend and had spent the last few days in a kind of cleaning frenzy, going through the house top to bottom and throwing practically everything away. Andromeda’s mother went through phases like that as well, but she never followed through very far and everything only ended up in the carport, or, on rare occasions, at the Goodwill or Savers parking lot, where it could be retrieved if you got there soon enough. According to Den, though, Mizmac was actually destroying things. Lots of things. A truckload of plastic garbage bags full of Wasserstrom junk had already been taken to the dump; what had remained of Daisy’s father’s papers and files had been put in the recycling; and Den even thought she had been burning some stuff as well—it had smelled that way.

  “Synch,” said Altiverse AK.

  “This?” he said. “The Eye of Horse bag, right?” He was holding what had clearly once been the Eye of Horus bag. It was the purple top half of it, anyway, the drawstring intact, but the rest cut to shreds. The yellow Eye itself had been cut out, missing along with, apparently, the black box and the cards themselves. “I think maybe my mom did it. She could have wanted to use the Eye of Horse for a quilt.”

  Eye of Horse—Andromeda liked it. He had rescued it, along with the rest of the contents of the shopping bag, from the trash before it had been taken away.

  Miz MacKenzie did indeed sew quilts out of a wide variety of materials—she was in a quilting club at the Community Bible Center Church, which she had flirted with during her divorce and had fully joined after Daisy’s death. The idea that Mizmac would want to put an Eye of Horus on one of her Jesus quilts and would stoop to pillaging Daisy’s room for quilting material seemed farfetched. It was more likely to have been the result of one of her senseless, destructive rages. She had a reputation for slicing things up. What would she have done with the cards, if so? Cut them to shreds, or burned them, just like the dream. As had Agrippa and Giordano Bruno and persecuted sorcerers and witches through the ages, Daisy had had good reason to hide her Book of Thoth. No Hierophant or Priestess was safe. The mob had destroyed Dr. Dee’s library at Mortlake, and Mizmac was just the sort of person who would have joined in.

  “She even went through my room,” said Den, with an air of tragedy. “She says she wants to remodel. She wants to knock down walls. It’s going to be a snowy moon.”

  “What?” said Andromeda. “Oh.” A sewing room. Disaster strikes yet again. Like the 133s of the International House of Bookcakes, the Forbidden Temple of Twice Holy Soror Daisy Wasserstrom’s Lingering Nephesh had seemed eternal. They are burning down my room. That certainly seemed to explain the IM dream. No wonder Daisy, whatever state she currently was in, was agitated. Her little world, the temple that had trapped and magnified whatever was left of her presence, had been desecrated. And Andromeda had failed to rescue the tarot deck as directed. The Page and his fish and the Hierophant and everybody else had been destroyed after all.

  It was hard to believe that this grocery bag was all that remained of Daisy.

  Den could tell what Andromeda was thinking.

  “I can’t get you in,” he said. “She is scary right now. I swear to you this is all that’s left.” An exaggeration, maybe, but also maybe not. Mizmac could be relentless and, Andromeda had no doubt, thorough when she was manic. Den didn’t know where the dump was. Where were the dumps in this area? Maybe there was more stuff to rescue, somewhere. There was bound to be more in the house, perhaps even the tarot deck or its remains, if only she could search for it herself.

  “What about her camera … or her phone?”

  He said that Mizmac had the digital camera. “She uses it to take pictures of her quilts.”

  He said he would look for the phone. It might be small enough to have been overlooked, though his mom was clearing out junk drawers like crazy. After a bit of haggling, she offered him two more bagel agonies for it and any other items he might find.

  “Can I see your—”

  She looked at him warningly. No conversation with a twelve-year-old should ever start with those words.

  “—tattoo!” he said. “Your tattoo, I meant your tattoo. That’s all I meant.”

  The only one of her tattoos he knew about was the unicursal hexagram on her hip. She looked around to make sure no one else could see and dipped her skirt and tights down just a little to give him a quick look. She had done a pretty good job on it. It looked almost professional.

  He asked if she’d show him how to do it sometime. She was about to say “You’re a little young,” but stopped herself just in time. He’d have hated that.

  “Maybe one day,” she said, and she asked what he was thinking of getting.

  “Maybe ninety-three,” he said, which was kind of cute. “Or one of those ninety-three words.” He made her tell him the words again, and she wrote out thelema in Greek letters for him on a page from her Moleskine. Actually, she had to admit, that was kind of a great idea for a tattoo.

  “Aren’t you worried about your mom with that?” she asked as he was about to go, pointing to the Scandinavian agony in his hand. “You want me to hang on to it for you for safekeeping?”

  Den zipped it up in his coat protectively.

  “I have a hiding place,” he said, scampering off, as though worried that she might change her mind.

  “Good.” Of course, he would have to, wouldn’t he?

  One of the Barbies was missing a head. The two others were randomly and severely mangled. In happier days, Daisy and Andromeda had operated a Barbie hospital in Daisy’s closet that gradually transformed itself into a torture dungeon Dream House. Later on, they had attempted, on the model of the magic described in the Asclepius, to draw down powers to animate the Barbies so they could speak secrets. These attempts had been weedgie and rewarding, though unsuccessful.

  The Gnome School had banned all plastic toys, and even after Daisy had finally left and begun to go to public middle school with Andromeda, her house remained a Barbie-free home. By that time, they had moved on, but the Barbie-hiding skills they had developed were useful when they had other things to hide. It was certainly possible that Den had missed a hiding place. They were all over in that house, and all over town, too, when she came to think of it. Maybe, she thought, she should check some of their old “secure locations” as well, like the space behind the loose brick at the old, boarded-up Hillmont High tower, or the ceiling-lamp cover at the rec center girls’ vacuum, which could be reached if you stood on the sink and were light enough not to break it and carefully leaned toward the fixture…. She hadn’t been to those places in ages, and certainly not since Daisy had died. It was unlikely that the tarot deck would be in any of them, but they had used both locations as temples for performing magic. Perhaps something, material or not, still lingered.

  The blond wig had been Daisy’s. Andromeda didn’t want to get it dirty by putting it on the muddy ground under the tree, so she put it on her head instead. She doubted the sun hat had been Daisy’s, but she put it on too. She seated herself against an elm with the bag between her knees. She pulled out Daisy’s vinyl coat and her studded leather belt-she put those on too, like a little girl playing dress-up. The belt was loose at its tightest and she had to bump out her hip, even while sitting, so that it didn’t slide too far down. It would have been a different story with jeans or if her skirt had had loops.

  Andromeda herself had knitted the long, fingerless gauntlets, using small circular needles, as a birthday gift for Daisy several years earlier. Daisy had always worn long sleeves, pretty much exclusively, since Andromeda could remember, no matter how hot it was outside. Initially copycatting her, then as a way to allow more space for secret tattoos, Andromeda had followed suit. Long sleeves and tights, almost always. No one in public, and neither of her p
arents, had seen Andromeda’s arms, or her legs above her knees, since she was ten. People assumed from this, and from Andromeda’s demeanor, that she was a cutter, but they had that very wrong. Daisy had been the cutter, and that was why she’d loved the gauntlets so much.

  Andromeda put on the knitted gloves and tied them at the elbows. She had done a great job on them. Andromeda had learned the basics of crocheting and knitting at the Gnome School, where they called it handwork. It was the only useful skill she had ever learned in any school, though she rarely used it anymore. She was good at sewing, knitting, sigils, and other tasks requiring precision and attention to detail. Daisy hadn’t had the patience or precision to excel at such things.

  What else was in the bag? A pair of Daisy’s shoes, China flats. She didn’t put those on, because they were a little too big, and she was wearing her boots and wouldn’t have anywhere to put them. Some CDs. An old plastic horse that Andromeda recognized, named Jenny. One of Daisy’s empty birth control pill cards. Some crumpled receipts and other scraps of paper. Some funny glasses or goggles of some kind. (She was going to put them on, but they had a cord attached and were a bit awkward and you couldn’t see through them anyway.) A small notebook, with a bit of scribbling in it: flipping through it quickly, Andromeda noted that there were a couple of spells copied, in the grand tradition of the grimoires, from what were probably library books. “The Hand of Glory,” said one entry in Daisy’s round handwriting: “Step one—get a hand …” Oh, Daisy. Also an account of the barbaric Toad Bone Ritual. Andromeda wrinkled her nose in distaste. Daisy’s tolerance for wicker and the lowest forms of folk magic had always ruffled Andromeda’s refined high-magic Renaissance feathers.