Andromeda Klein

by Frank Portman

  She tried to listen for Huggy in the refrigerator fan and the sighing freeway sound. She ran the water in the kitchen tap. No words of comfort or abuse bubbled out.

  Calls to Bethany and Byron reached voice mail: of course, they would be in switched-off school mode by then.

  Oh my gods, she thought all of a sudden. The photos.

  Andromeda had decided to turn herself in to the school rather than the library or the police. But as soon as she walked into the office of Mr. Venn, the counselor, she regretted it. Rosalie’s summary of the charges against her were by and large accurate, and neither Mr. Venn, nor the assorted principals, nor even Baby Talk Barnes, was interested in hearing about the “Friends” of the Library and their scheme to destroy the International House of Bookcakes for personal gain. They certainly weren’t interested in her own personal journey of spiritual discovery.

  Here’s what they were interested in:

  “‘Joy to the world,’” said Mr. Venn, clearing his throat. “‘The teacher’s dead. We cut off his head …’ Did you write that?”

  “No,” said Andromeda.

  “So you deny it?”

  “No. I quoted it,” she said, realizing as she did so that this could well add plagiarism, or citing without attribution, to the list of charges against her.

  Mr. Venn said he’d come back to that, and fiddled with his computer’s mouse. Up popped a dark, grainy, blown-up picture of Andromeda making a kissy face in candlelight.

  “We take these matters very seriously, Andromeda.”

  “May I go to the bathroom?”

  One of the few benefits of being seen as a mousy, shy, nonthreatening girl is that no one imagines you will try to make a run for it when you ask to go to the vacuum. Andromeda slipped out and dashed for her bike. She could ride very fast when she had a mind to.

  That accursed Rosalie. Only the thought that the dissemination of that photo might have been unintentional and Andromeda’s own good heart prevented her from uttering a formal, exceedingly harsh curse directed at Rosalie. There would be time enough for curses by and by.

  Andromeda was halfway home when a call from the Precious Sponge vibrated in.

  “Do you have your Agrippa with you? You’ve got to help me check something. This gematria can really wreck a person’s mind. I was up all night but I think I found something, I mean I found a lot of things, I think—”

  Andromeda brought her bike to a stop in front of the Safeway.

  “Just tell me if you knew about the phone,” she said.

  “Oh, is this the Rosalie thing?”

  Fuck. She hung up.

  Byron was in his car waiting for her outside Casa Klein when she got there, and he did look like he had been up all night. It took a full half hour of back-and-forth between them before Andromeda satisfied herself that the Precious Sponge hadn’t known about Rosalie’s prank impersonation of St. Steve. By “the Rosalie thing” he had meant that Rosalie had called him earlier that morning to ask if he knew where Andromeda was because, Rosalie said, she had taken Rosalie’s phone and had hidden it somewhere.

  When Andromeda told him the story he said: “So all those texts from the mystery Waite man really came from Rosalie van G.? Wow, that’s twisted.”

  “We should go inside,” said Andromeda. “The cops are looking for me.”

  “What, because of the phone?” He was to remain confused for some time thereafter.

  “I went a little gematria happy,” said a slightly sheepish Precious Sponge. His legal pad had pages and pages full of scribbled numbers and calculations. “But check this out.”

  He flipped a few pages. “I tried it different ways—”

  “Boy, I’ll say,” said Andromeda. Byron had listed and calculated the values of hundreds of names and terms related to their recent activities and discussions in various forms and combinations, including Two of Swords (2320), Houses of the Holy (1090), GAAP (69), International House of Bookcakes (1125), and even the Gimpala (241) and Rosalie M. van Genuchten (1434).

  “Detroit Tigers?” she said quizzically.

  “My dad’s favorite team,” said the Precious Sponge. “Six-three-nine. But check it out,” he continued. “E. James Madison Jessup, two thousand. Twice Holy Daisy, One-nine-nine-nine. Same number.”

  “That’s not the same—”

  “It is according to the Rule of Colel,” said Byron. “You can add or subract an aleph, a one.” He gave her a “Come on, get with it” look.

  Andromeda had momentarily forgotten all about the Rule of Colel.

  He’s good, said Huggy, rustling under the windblown curtains.

  The crazed eyes of the Precious Sponge smiled at her triumphantly.

  “Okay,” said Andromeda, “so?” and his face fell.

  “So,” said the Precious Sponge, adopting Andromeda’s own phrasing, “according to Agrippa and the Rule of Colel, both your friend Daisy and E.J.M. Jessup are forms of the number two thousand.”

  “Yeah, I got that,” said Andromeda. “But what are we saying, then?”

  “Well, just that maybe Twice Holy Soror Daisy was E.J.M. Jessup’s future self, the one he had been preparing his library to inherit, only she died. And the message of the dream was not about her tarot deck but was instead: save the Eejymjays. Come on, you’re the one who’s supposed to believe in this stuff.”

  “That is pretty good,” said Andromeda, with faint reluctance. Her mind wasn’t really on Agrippa’s system for Latin gematria at the moment. She was thinking about St. Steve and Rosalie and Bethany. And Daisy. So the final message from St. Steve had been that “hi there” after all. Rosalie had done it because, well, because she was Rosalie. As for the others … Andromeda sighed.

  “Okay, so what about the Two of Swords, then?” she said wearily, because Byron had retrieved it from Sexual Response in the Human Female and seemed to want to say something about it.

  The Precious Sponge said he still thought it was a date late in the decan, just before the transition to the Three of Swords. He consulted his notes again. “That would be right near the end of the first decan of Libra, September twenty-ninth or thirtieth of last year. With a gibbulous moon and a low tide, right? So what was going on at that time? What were you doing?”

  Andromeda sighed heavily.

  “Just the usual stuff,” she said. Crying, being yelled at, reading Agrippa, stroking Dave’s M, doing St. Steve sigils. Etc. “Okay,” she said after a lengthy pause, humoring him. “I was at Lake Shasta with my crazy family. There were Lemurians. There was a burning truck on the roadside. St. Steve broke up with me.”

  “You mean, he said ‘hi there.’”

  Andromeda nodded and felt herself blushing. “Yes, he said ‘hi there.’ And Daisy was mad and not speaking to me.”

  “And why was she mad at you, exactly?”

  Andromeda hesitated. “Because of St. Steve, because I wouldn’t tell her about him. And because I went away to Shasta on a weekend when she wanted to do some magic. But it would have blown over if she hadn’t died. She was always getting mad and she always got over it.”

  “I want to check something, if that’s okay,” said the Precious Sponge.

  Andromeda was having trouble giving the Precious Sponge her full attention, which was occupied with replaying in her mind each fake St. Steve message she had received over the past week.

  Byron rummaged in the Daisy bag and retrieved the smashed-up cell phone.

  “I’m not sure it’ll work, but—”

  The Precious Sponge pried out the SIM card from Daisy’s phone.

  “Okay, this won’t work with mine,” he said, “let me see yours.” Apparently Andromeda’s phone wasn’t the right sort to work with Daisy’s phone chip either, because he added: “Got any other phones around here?”

  Andromeda nodded and motioned for Byron to follow her downstairs to the kitchen. She used the sword to sweep under the stove and slide out Rosalie’s St. Steve phone, along with a great deal of dust and a couple o
f Dave’s fuzzy mouse toys.

  Back in her room, when the Precious Sponge replaced the chip in Rosalie’s handset with Daisy’s chip and switched it on, there was a chime.

  “We’re in,” he said, tapping his phone’s scroll wheel. “No call data. Ten saved texts. Last message received on October fifth.”

  That would have been two days after Daisy died. Andromeda took the phone. Four of the messages were between Daisy and Rosalie van Genuchten, rather poignant in a way, because the two of them were discussing plans for an Afternoon Tea gathering that Daisy would not attend, because she would have died the day before, on October 3. A fifth message appeared to be from Mizmac and was also quite sad when you considered the context: “honey where are you?”

  The remaining five were from Andromeda’s phone, all identical and unanswered: “Daisy?” Three of them would have been from the time when Andromeda had been with her family at Lake Shasta, and Daisy had been giving her the silent treatment and refusing to answer. The remaining two had not been answered because Daisy would have been dead when they were sent.

  Andromeda’s eyes misted slightly. Oh, Daisy. She handed the phone back with a rueful smile.

  “That was fun.”

  “Wow, there are pictures on here too,” Byron said, resuming his scrolling. “These are weird. They’re, like, bushes and rocks, parked cars, a trash can …”

  Andromeda knew exactly what they were from the description without looking. Daisy had often used her cellphone camera to take photos of landmarks along the way in her rambling walks around Clear view and Hillmont, particularly when she was drunk, so she could follow the trail back if she ever got lost.

  “Like visual digital bread crumbs,” Andromeda said. “Hansel and Gretel style. I recognize that one.” She pointed. “That’s the Water Tower Temple. We used to do a lot of magic there.”

  “So maybe she did the magic you couldn’t show up for anyway?” said Byron. “Date: September twenty-ninth. The kneeling Two of Swords, baby. See what I mean?”

  “Yes,” said Andromeda. She did.

  “So,” said the Precious Sponge. “Wanna go?”

  “I’ll get my sword,” said Andromeda Klein.

  It had never been easy to reach the Water Tower Temple, but the rain made it that much more difficult. It was drizzling when they left the car in the middle school parking lot and continued up the hill on foot, and it had started to rain harder by the time they climbed to the narrow ridge above the gulley that bordered the tower’s north edge.

  Andromeda couldn’t resist pausing to show him the Temple.

  “So that’s where the magic happens,” he said, sticking his head through the hole and pointing to the spray-painted glyph opposite. “Nice heptangle.”

  Yay, said Huggy’s faint voice, somewhere amidst the whipping sound of the wind. He can count to seven. Andromeda rolled her eyes, as if to say: Is that all you got? He had really learned quite a lot in the past week, and Andromeda was realizing she was getting weary of pretending she didn’t like having him around, just a little.

  They held hands the rest of the way. Andromeda had the sword in her free hand while Byron held the phone in front of them, like a lamp.

  The trail of the subsequent photos was not difficult to follow, though it was quite a long hike. It led them past the water tower and farther up the hill and into the little woods beyond it and finally to a relatively clear space near the edge of the woods overlooking the golf course and the Larchmont development, largely shielded from the rain and wind by an outcropping of rock. Someone had used it as a place to dump old leftover construction materials, odd pieces of lumber, concrete blocks, heaps of gravel and debris. The pile of earth and rubbish in the final photo on Daisy’s phone hadn’t changed too much since the picture had been taken.

  It didn’t take much digging to find it, not too deeply buried in the debris. A small black box, grimy and dusty, but still easily recognizable as the little box Andromeda had given Daisy to house her tarot deck: the heptangle sigil on top was still visible, though much of the gold leaf had been rubbed off or obscured by grime. The surrounding rubbish and the overhanging rock had protected it from the damp: it was still dry despite the rain. The lid had been nailed shut, and several holes had been drilled in the sides and on the top and bottom.

  What sounded like several objects rattled inside when Byron shook it.

  “Sounds like some, er, negative magic to me,” he said.

  “Oh, Daisy,” said Andromeda.

  Back in the Precious Sponge’s car, the windows fogged as the rain poured all around them, they stared at the box silently for several minutes.

  “We could just not open it,” said Andromeda.

  “That would probably be best,” said Byron, even as he reached for the screwdriver in the glove compartment and began to pry up the lid.

  The Lovers, the missing card from Daisy’s tarot deck, was in there, torn in half and attached to the bottom of the box by a nail that had been driven through it, as well as through a small bulbous object covered with an inexpertly sewn little purple velvet covering or hood, clearly made from what had once been the Eye of Horus bag.

  Byron pulled off the hood. Underneath this hood was the missing head from Daisy’s Barbie. The nail had been driven straight through the top, skewering the head and the two halves of the tarot card and pinning them to the bottom of the box.

  “I think that’s supposed to be you,” said Byron with a kind of fascinated distaste. “Your head.” The hair had been colored reddish brown with a marker, and Andromeda’s trademark Egyptian eyes had been drawn on in ink.

  The other objects in the box were a few animal bones and a desiccated green butterfly or moth.

  “Are those really toad bones?” said Byron.

  “I have no idea,” said Andromeda, not really wanting to look.

  “Well, she didn’t follow the recipe very well, did she?” said the Precious Sponge, replacing the lid.

  “She liked to make things up as she went along.”

  “Here’s how I would choose to look at it,” said the Precious Sponge after a lengthy silence. “Daisy’s last act before dying was to attempt a final spell directed at you, meant to cure you of your bone disease.”

  She shook her head.

  “Maybe on Right Ring Days,” said Andromeda Klein.

  One thing led to another. And then that thing led to one more. Andromeda’s previous making-out experiences, in cars and out, had been, she had to admit, rather less interesting than this one. It was a floaty feeling, similar to magic. Then, just when it was getting good, there was a sharp, biting pain in her arm where the Precious Sponge had been holding her down by the wrist.

  “I think you just broke my arm,” she said.

  Byron recoiled, aghast, unable to say anything, apparently, beyond “Oh my god.”

  “No, it’s okay,” said Andromeda. “This happens. Welcome to the wonderful world of osteogenesis imperfecta. You can go ahead and finish up. But then you need to take me to the hospital.”

  But Byron was already fumbling for his keys. His vocabulary had expanded to include “Oh my god I’m so sorry.”

  It hurt like a motherfucker, but she also felt pretty badass, with such an extreme make-out injury.

  The Precious Sponge picked up on it.

  “You’re like Clint Eastwood or somebody,” he said, driving.

  It wasn’t a break but rather merely a sprain. The emergency-room doctor put it in a brace and gave her a prescription for pain medicine. But now that she realized it wasn’t broken, it didn’t hurt nearly as much and didn’t feel nearly as cool.

  The doctor was Dr. Hu, a fact that would really make this a good anecdote to tell one day.

  “Barbados patootie Polaroid pennies,” said Dr. Hu.

  “What?” said Andromeda, pulling hood and hair back and turning her better ear toward the doctor.

  “Heavy jawbone with your earring?”

  “What? Oh, trouble with my hearin
g. Sorry, yes.” She explained about her brittle bones and the disorganized collagen in her ears.

  Dr. Hu gave her an unreadable, brow-furrowed look.

  “Have you ever been told by a doctor you had osteogenesis imperfecta?” he said, slowly and loudly, peering into Andromeda’s left ear with a lighted instrument.

  “Yes,” she said. “I mean, they told my mom.”

  “I see,” said Dr. Hu, switching to the other ear. “And how long has it been since you were examined by a medical doctor?”

  That was a tough one. Not since she was very small, not since the Gnome School.

  “Well, you’ve got quite a bit of crud in there. I think we can take care of some of that hearing problem right now.”

  A suddenly action-populated Andromeda struggled for words, at a loss.

  “Wait,” she finally said. “Are you saying I don’t have OI? What are you saying? That I just have plugged-up ears?”

  “No, you may well have it,” said Dr. Hu, “but at least some of your hearing trouble seems to be caused by massive obstructions in your ears that I’m going to remove in a moment.”

  Dr. Hu left the room and returned with a plastic tub and a huge syringe.

  “I’m going to take a wild guess: you’ve never had your ears cleaned before.”

  It was incredibly uncomfortable and gross. Dr. Hu said the wax and other matter had formed a kind of shellac or varnish on her eardrums over the years and would be very difficult to remove. He used a chemical to dissolve it, and a metal instrument to scrape at it, and the syringe to shoot warm water into her ears to wash it out. It was amazing how much gunk there can be in one tiny ear. And it was amazing how your head feels when the obstruction is finally removed.

  Most amazing of all, though, was what the world is like with superpower hearing. A deafening ripping, clattering sound behind her turned out to be the sound of the doctor’s sleeve rubbing against the side of her coat. The shimmery clappy echo was the sound of her own shoes on the linoleum.