Tarot Sour
Page 1
Tarot Sour
Robert Zimmerman
Copyright 2011 by Robert Zimmerman
Cover Copyright 2011 by Dara England and Untreed Reads Publishing
The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.
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This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to the living or dead is entirely coincidental.
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Tarot Sour
Robert Zimmerman
Contents
One: The Feathered Woman
Two: The Moth
Three: The Magician
Four: The Soldier
Five: The Daughter
Six: The Son
One: The Feathered Woman
At first, I notice only the almost imperceptible lapping of water upon a muddy riverbank like wet smacking lips, and the noise of someone humming the most sad and dreadful tune I have ever heard. I feel the tickle, sensuous and light, of leaves brushing against my bare forearms as I progress through the night woods toward the water’s edge. It becomes louder, the water. I can hear it snaking through the reeds, which anchor themselves in the deep sandy floor. Two crescents of light appear and whiten out this gentle bog.
They widen, my eyes. My bathroom is just as I left it. The frosted window lets in the dim yellow soot of a waxy morning sun. I turn my head, which rotates like a cog balanced upon a great rusted gear. The grout between the salmon tiles is cracked and chalky. The stream of air from the vent ruffles the shower curtain, floured red to match the tiles and this deep tub. The only real color is the tarnished silver of the showerhead and the faucet, and the mildew, blue, spreading from the corners. It is a deep, deep jungle, and I am submerged. Only my kneecaps and everything above my breasts rise above the surface. I lift my arm up, out of the water. Never before have I felt the weight of such a thing. It is a leaden burden. It takes the force of gods to bring it out of the tepid tub water. How humbling it is, to not even have control of one’s own arm. I don’t let it down as much as I let it fall with the power of planets crashing into a pink porcelain desert of the tub’s rim. They say the sky will fall at the end of times, and so this must be it. The Preacher will be proud to hear it.
I lift my other arm with the fumbling grace of a neonate foal. A red sea of split water cascades down the curve of my arm, off the wrinkled skin and the soft muscles. So those were not reeds in fact but the convulsions of my sparse hairs pulled and pushed by the water’s pulse in tune to my heartbeat, over my breasts and kneecaps and upturned arms, and licking the inside of the tub with its thousand gentle tongues. I stand my arm upon the rim and test my weight on the palm. Not yet. Not quite yet.
I flex my feet and push the submerged portion of my back and chest further out of the water. My throat, it’s dry, it catches and my breath stops. So does the ambient hum, that sad and dreadful melody. So I was the hummer. As I cough, the gentle water becomes chaos, a whirlpool, a storm. It falls into low tide, and the water on my body follows like a robe slipped from my shoulders. My chest becomes heavy and acts to pull me back down. Instead I defy it and push myself up, slide my feet beneath the weight, and retain balance. I’m still coughing and my feet are wrinkled and they threaten to slide along the base of the tub. I support myself with the shower curtain and stand. Water, oceans, falls over every curve of my body. I can see it in the mirror, just as I left it. Smooth cream skin, untanned, unscathed. I’ve never much cared for the bony knobbiness of my knees. Flat but untoned stomach. It’s soft. He used to like placing his wide, warm palm on it at night, his nose on the back of my neck.
The rainstorm below and around me slows to a drizzle, the clouds move on. I step out of the tub, implant myself on the mat and stare into my own eyes as I pull the towel off the rack and wrap it around the body that stands there. I’m shivering. The bathroom door is open a crack. As a matter of habit I reach out and swing it shut. I flick off the fan because it is its stream of air against the cold water that’s making me shiver. As an afterthought I plunge my arm down and pull out the rubber plug, I let the caramel water cyclone out of existence.
My hair is a raucous nest. It sits, cold and wet, between my shoulder blades. It’s drier up top, where it slept overnight above the water, but still damp. I start to straighten it.
There are two things that I can remember. The first is the Preacher’s raving curbside sermon. “The majority of us!—are unNECESSARY! And for them, the world is dropping us like flies into the sand! But for others, there is WORK to be DONE! And it will NEVER let us go, until that WORK has been COMPLETED!” What a change, what a sad and pitiful change that overtook that poor man in just shy of a year. The last time I’d seen him, the jagged gray beard, the wild and unfocused eyes he has now, they were simply gone. He had been a staunch and charismatic man dressed in shined black robes in front of a sprouted forest hell-bent on photosynthesizing to his every word. Now the stern, clean-shaven jaw is become soft, doughy, patched with old bristles. The stark brown hair, streaked with graying tufts. The steel eyes are tempered, tired, buried in bruised pockets. He is ignored and left to petrify with the rest of the gravel.
I put down the brush and turn my back to the mirror, crane my neck. A second downy feather has grown, and the first one, which I’d plucked two days earlier, has been re-sewn in its socket. I keep my eyes trained on them, the two small white pieces of fluff that could be mistaken as assemblies of dust until a closer look is taken. I sift my fingertips through the shafts of the utensils in the pale pink cup on my vanity until I find the soft padded handle of the tweezers. I clench my eyes and feel the sickening resistance of tight skin before it releases the first feather. I repeat for the second and drop them both in the sink. There comes the lewd and suggestive slurping of the final spiral strands of stained water slipping down the drain. Two irregular orchids bloom upon a square of tissue paper when I hold it to the back of my shoulder. I dab the puncture wounds where the bolts of the feathers had been stuck to clean up whatever blood there still is.
I look at the blood. The two, minute dots are spreading through the cotton fibers the way the mildew has spread through the cracks in the grout and old tiles. A quick and unmistakable rage takes hold of me. I squeeze my fist around the square of tissue and toss it at the wastebasket in the corner. It takes flight, stops in midair and floats gently, unsatisfactorily to the floor. I throw the tweezers from my other hand. They clatter in the sink, rebound up the smooth basin wall and land on the floor. A bit more satisfying. The towel drops as my torso twists and then I see them, the crisscrossing of leaf veins up my arms. I turn my back to the mirror and pull aside the old stale shower curtain. The water is gone but the walls and bottom of the tub are colored with the thin and intricate river deltas of blood. I pull my thick robe off the back of the door, cinch it around my waist and hold it tightly closed over my chest. I want to hide in it; I want to disappear in it.
The second thing I remember is taking my life. The second thing I remember, is dying.
* * *
After I dress, I leave my bedroom and I go downstairs. This home seems to have become a narrow tunnel. As I approach the st
aircase I make sure not to look to my left, toward the door at the end of the hall. At the bottom of the stairs I head straight for the kitchen and take an unnecessarily wide berth around the short anteroom that leads to the garage. I begin my breakfast, searing a knuckle on the greased pan as I place the strips of bacon onto it. I’m still wearing my robe over my day clothes because the chill of having slept overnight in the bathtub is running deep in me. I pull the curtains aside and briefly praise God that there are no clouds in the sky because at least it will be warm.
As I wait for the coffee to finish percolating, I rub my shoulder. It’s sore from where I plucked the feathers, those roots planted deep. Though I know otherwise, having checked several times between layers of clothing as I dressed, I feel as though I am still leaking blood.
Nine days. I try to think of another nine-day period that has ever felt so long and I can’t. It took less time to sculpt the heavens and earths. The toaster spits up two slices of slightly burnt bread but I don’t notice them. My eyes have set themselves on the kitchen doorway. From where I’m leaning against the counter, I just make out the frame of the door, buried deep in the anteroom that leads into the garage. All these doors lead to worlds I’d rather not visit. The door is still open. I know what I will see if I take a step to my left, and so I refuse to take a step to the left. The dark open mouth. The lights will still be off, and there are no windows in there. The thought of having to close that door, having to get that close to the battlefield of our final war, has haunted me for nine days. The idea of seeing the dark outlines of his wooden soldiers lying strewn on the concrete floor threatens to collapse me. The pine remnants of the chair he had finished assembling just the day before, thrown over my shoulder into the wall and obliterated.
That surge, the unmistakably rational yet submerged pierce of anger runs through me again. This time I’m holding a glass mug soon to be filled with this morning’s bubbling coffee. It, like many things, will be left uncompleted. My fingers tense and I bring my stoppered fist down onto the counter top. The mug bursts within my palm and I feel a jaw full of glass teeth bite into my skin. Without feeling the pain I notice the beating of my heart in my hand as it starts blooming blood spots onto my white robe. I go to the sink and run the whole mess under cold water. When it numbs sufficiently, I pick out whatever pieces are stuck there and toss them down the drain. In my mind I map a chart of the places where the glass bits snap in half and creep deeper under the surface.
It is a nice distraction, when the pain finally starts to rise up my arm. It’s a noxious clawing sensation that presses a nerve in my shoulder and behind my right eye. I go to the doorway of the kitchen. For nine days I have refused to go into the garage. But in my mindless distraction, now I find myself walking across the living room and down the narrow foyer where I stop at the entrance. It is dark inside, but not blindingly so. Still, I cannot make anything out and I realize it’s because my eyes have become gauzy with tears. I hear someone’s voice. I turn because it sounds like it’s coming from the living room, but it’s not. I reach into the garage without letting my toes cross the borderline and I flip the light switch.
It is unremarkable. There is the shattered skeleton of the chair, a morbid corpse of splinter-edged pick-up-sticks. Behind it is his workbench, the dozens of stainless steel tools still lined in perfect order above it. The yellow bulb hanging from its string in the center of the room casts dozens of cat eyes on their bodies, all of which are judging me. What had compelled me to follow him in here, I don’t know. But as I step into the garage for the first time since that morning, the first time in nine days, I accept the fact that everything that followed was just the aftermath of my stubborn insistence.
I find the push broom tucked away behind the garbage cans along with the rake and the old cross country skis we used just the once and then left to mummify here in cobwebs. The hush of the cornhusks across the oily ground echoes arbitrariness, futility. Like keeping the altars dusted for the Second Coming or keeping clean the bedroom of a dead child.
The first time I see him it is from a great distance. He has a camera slung around his neck and he is traipsing lazily through a poppy field, inspecting the ground and swiping the tall grasses away so that he can get a better look. He is a young and handsome boy at the time, with soft and mid-length brown hair, a thick and muscular build, and soft gray eyes the color of ice with just a fleck of seaweed green floating in the weatherless frozen ocean of his left iris. I approach in my Sunday dress, swooshing its frills as though I think I am alone, and whistling as I come close so that he will know I am there. He sees me and falls to one knee, pushing aside a copse of rye wheat like a curious boy peering behind a dressing curtain. I stop behind him and watch as he lifts the camera to his face, captain’s wheels and dials, and then the soft smack as he takes the picture. He lets go of the wheat and stands back up, observing the screen of his camera and finally turning to me.
“What was it?” I ask him, standing on my tiptoes to try and see past the wheat.
He doesn’t answer, but only holds his camera out to me so that I can see a shadowed slop of mud, bordered with short grass and centered with the blanched skull of a small rodent, half submerged with a stream of wet dirt, like tears, oozing from its eye socket and down its jaw. Later that afternoon, taking my hand and leading me through the deer paths I do not intuit, he explains that the skull, captured and digitized for the ages, will outlast him, will outlast me, will outlast this entire world when it crumbles away, as a string of digits floating ever further out into space. And he is to thank for it. Before we part company, he spins me around in the wheat and stands me against an old dry willow. He shoots my picture with the sun behind me so that all I am is a tumorous silhouette on the side of the tree trunk, with its strands merging into me. “Now,” he says, pressing the shutter once more for good measure, “You will never really die.”
He is a college boy, the first one I have ever seen. Where I come from, the men are bred to haul bales of hay and navigate tractors over impervious terrain. The women are there to keep the men company and well fed. He is earning his degree in quantum relativism, I pretend to know what that is. And he has moved to town to conduct research on a range of low mountains in which satellites have long detected but never explained a magnetic anomaly. He tells me, no matter what instruments anyone uses there on the mountains, no matter what they try to measure, the readings are never what they should be as defined by the laws of physics. There is something unique about it, he suggests at one point that it is because I am there. It is a signal fire so God can pinpoint the angel he has deposited on the Earth.
When he takes me there, hiking along the mountain trails with a backpack on his shoulders full of instruments worth more money than the construction of our entire town, and my hand in his, I do feel lighter. As though I can float away, and it doesn’t all have to do with the way he makes me feel as though I’ve captured a pocket of helium in my lungs. When the evening falls and we set up a small camp and make love for the first time, ignoring the pervasive cutting of stones and pine needles on our bare selves, as he flips us over and over again, there are times when we don’t return to the ground nearly as quickly as we should, as though gravity is only half-interested in these mountains and in keeping us down on them.
From then, the chain of events is somewhat typical. The lovemaking continues rambunctiously, and rarely in the sanctity of a bedroom. We marry and move east to this faraway town separated from the sea only by the long high hills of the sand dunes that neighbor us. It smells of salt and coastal air and the summers are heavenishly cool. He gives up quantum relativism because, as he puts it, everything there is in the universe to know, will eventually be known by everyone. There is no point in him trying to hurry it up for himself alone. In his heart, he has never been a scientist. In his heart, he is alive in the heat of the sun and the chill of the winter moon. He goes to work at the lumber mill, and it is enough to support us. I stay at home and I
read the books he has brought with him after finishing his degree. Some nights I ask him if he regrets giving up the field he had spent so many years studying to gain entry to. He tells me, the only reason anyone ever becomes a quantum relativist is so that he can hope to understand the nature of the universe and its most basic parts. He will tell me, as we are lying in bed together there at the edge of the world, there is only one thing that he understands, and it is the most basic and essential thing there was ever to know about the universe, and it is me.
He doesn’t want children, and I have no interest one way or the other. And so when I find out I am pregnant, I am terrified to tell him. But I do, and when I do he cries and lifts me up into the air. When the twins come, everything is alright for a time. But they begin the arguments. The subtle, cynical accusations. The financial difficulties. I suggest he go back to quantum relativism. There is always room for more scientists, as long as they have something unique and inspiring to contribute. Go back to the mountain, I say. Go back and find out why if you hold your breath and leap off the tallest cliff, you’ll land softly enough to just walk away. He tells me, the first thing you learn when you study quantum relativism is that the universe is not constant. The universe changes every day in quiet and minute ways, and without having studied those changes every day as they occurred, he would be left now working in an entirely different world were he to go back, working in an advanced world that no longer cares for his obsolete theorems and caveman hypotheses.
I begin working in town, part time, meekly in the backrooms of shops for whoever needs a little extra help from week to week. It is meager work, negligible compared to what he is bringing in from the lumber mill and the extra money he has begun making by turning his hobby of crafting furniture into a smalltime mail order business. But it is enough to keep the children fed, our beautiful baby girl and her twin baby brother. When he finds out that I am leaving the children with our neighbor during the days so that I can help make the frayed ends re-meet, he becomes furious. He storms about the house. It is dehumanizing, he says. It is slapping him in the face, it is reminding the entire town, privately and through alleyway gossip, that with all his college education and well-bred genealogy, he can barely keep his small family alive and nourished in what is, essentially, a low-rent squatter’s town.