Tarot Sour

by Robert Zimmerman

  When we finish, I stand to leave, but I feel his withered old fingers flinch in my palm, trying to grasp me. They feel like salted sardines, long and slender but baggy. “It won’t be much longer now, Father. I can feel it.”

  “Oh, come now, Mr. Henrik. I’ve seen men in worse condition than you with years left to go. As long as you put your faith in the Lord, He will watch over you.”

  Mr. Henrik, his eyes closed, the lids sunken as though there is nothing beneath them, shakes his head slowly. The sparse bundle of whiskers that still clutch to the back of his head rubs against the silk cover of his pillow. “No, Father. Not this time. Please, I know you’re busy, but just a minute longer?”

  I check my watch, though these days there’s not much reason for me to do so, and I consent. I take my seat again with his hand still gripped softly in my own.

  “What’s troubling you, Father?”

  “Nothing’s troubling me, Adolphus,” I smile to him.

  “Oh, come now. You come every week, and every week you pester me until I tell you about my every aching joint and sore spot. You’ve been a godsend to me these last few years, Father, a true godsend. But I’m not nearly sick enough not to know that there’s something deeply bothering you. I haven’t got much left to say of myself, I would appreciate it if you would let me return just an ounce of the comfort you’ve given me.”

  I think for a long moment. What’s troubling me? My mind wanders to the rats. The gnawing, scratching, crying rats. I can’t tell him about those. I think of my dead wife. She must be disbanded into the plump bodies of a thousand squirming worms by now. I try not to think of the daughter I abandoned, the daughter I was so certain would have caused nothing but misery for myself and everyone around us. I wonder if I could confess that I’m no longer a priest, that I’ve been dethroned and replaced by a man whose agenda belongs in the hands of a crooked man. “You know the Fasches?” I finally ask.

  “Next door? Of course I know them.”

  “The boy, Emery, he left two weeks ago. I watched him board the train and disappear, from a hill on the horizon, hidden in the midnight. His mother was heartbroken. I watched her try not to cry, for the little girl, for Ingot.”

  “Emery? He used to come and tend the yard for me. Where did he go?”

  I tell him, “The coast.” These days, even the shut-ins know what that means.

  “The coast,” he repeats. He tests the words on his dry lips. If he still had his eyes, they would be looking straight up at the ceiling right now, tilted high up toward his forehead. “Emery has gone to the coast. So General Anselmo is still at it.” I nod. He can’t see it, but he seems to feel the vibrations of my old creaking vertebra. “That old miserable bastard. How does he keep conniving our boys to come to him, Father?”

  Because, Henrik, the good General bribes the archdiocese to place one of his men in the one place where the people of this town will listen and obey unquestioningly, and that man repeats week after week that the General’s cause is patriotic, holy, righteous, and whatever opposition there is to his cause is, by his definition, demoniacal. “I don’t know, Adolphus. It’s a sad state we’ve found ourselves in.”

  “I suppose I can’t blame them for having their reasons. Lord knows I had a reason.”

  “You?” My body stiffens. The General has only recently begun recruiting grown men. Before that, it was only the young and the strong ones, which is the most prominent reason for the undoubtedly false rumors that the General’s war was simply an excuse to host hedonistic homosexual orgies where the boys dance naked around him as though he is a god, hoisting him above their body, then laying it down again for worship. The General is a deranged man, but certainly no pervert. In any case, it can’t have been possible for Mr. Henrik to have been conscripted. By what little was known about him, the General couldn’t have been much older than myself, and his Cannery not much than a decade or so old.

  He must sense my confusion. He says, “Oh, I’m not as old as I may look, Father. That’s just a symptom of the times. Things are coming to an end, and not just for myself. Things happen differently than they should. I was there. I was one of his boys. That’s where I got this.” He points to his chin where a long, baby-pink scar runs down the side of his throat and disappears into the collar of his shirt. “He gave that to me himself, right after I stuck a knife into his gut.” I pity him for a moment in his growing senility and decide he must have the facts of some past war confused with those of the current state of things. Still, it does not seem right not to deny him his glory.

  “A knife!” I laugh. I lean back in my seat and my stomach pinches itself in the side. I can’t remember the last time I have actually laughed. I can’t remember the last time anyone in that town laughed. “I bet that showed that son of a bitch.”

  Mr. Henrik chuckles. “You’d think so, but no. It hardly even fazed him. He just rolled that damned pair of dice of his and sent me away.” His wrinkles seem to smooth over as he speaks, the deep lines twitching the way gills do as a fish breathes, as though just speaking about his youthful days draws him back closer to them.

  “So tell me, what was your reason for going over there, Mr. Henrik?”

  “My reason would bore you, Father. I went because my mother asked me to.”

  “I can’t imagine a boy’s mother actually asking him to go work for General Anselmo.”

  “It was a different time, Father. Maybe we didn’t quite understand what was going on back then. Hell, we barely really understand it now. All we know now is only one in three ever makes it back.”

  “Do you think it will ever end, Mr. Henrik?” The ruffle of the curtains over the open window on the other side of his bed catches my attention. They are canary yellow and, in my periphery, look to be chained birds trying to escape their perch. Through it I can see the slanted roof of the Fasch house. It is Emery’s room. It has to be. Posters of baseball players hang on the wall across from posters of swimsuit models, one of which conceals her wet buxomness with a fine layer of sand. I can see the edge of a bed that disappears beyond the field of vision granted by the synchronicity of Mr. Henrik’s and Emery Fasch’s windows. On the edge of the bed sits a comely woman in an open-faced robe. She sits doubled-over with a hand wrapped viciously in the long locks of her wet hair, and the other bent at a crooked angle and pressing the back of its palm against her red-rimmed eyes. Her body vibrates with the inertia of events I might have been able to control under other circumstances, under the dictum of more appropriate choices.

  “It will end,” Adolphus Henrik says, though by that time I am transfixed by the woman, Margot Fasch, as she cries silently to herself, and I barely register his answer. He slides his paper-thin hand out of mine and folds it on his chest. “It will end when there are no boys left to go to the coast, or when there is nobody left to wait here for their return.” His wrinkles re-deepen. In fact, they appear now deeper than they had been before.

  * * *

  I sleep easily that night. I always do after visiting Mr. Henrik, even though our visit ends with the unpleasant reminder of the misery that hides behind the walls of our town. It was easy to believe in a man like Asam Cifezzo because you would never expect that Asam Cifezzo might come and save you some day. That is the problem with most religions. It’s difficult to believe in something that bases itself on an event that hasn’t yet occurred, and I have never understood that. Though perhaps that is the basis of faith, and it is not religion but faith that I have never understood. The sun is set by the time I get back to my house from Mr. Henrik’s. I cut up an apple and put it on a plate in the basement for the rats to nibble during the night. After waking, I replace the plate, empty except for a few apple seeds and a tooth-chocked core, with another diagonal-cut ham sandwich. In the next day or so I will need to go to the grocer’s whether or not I think it is necessary. Soon not even the rats will disgrace themselves by succumbing to those stale and watery sandwiches.

  Most days
I dress and cap myself off by pulling the strings of my desert boots tight around their own neck, grab a rolled-up newspaper from the pile of old papers I keep in the basement, and go to work, which consists of screaming semi-cohesive statements about the end of the world and the duties still required of its inhabitants before it all comes to pass. But not today. When the phone rings, I am sitting at my kitchen table with a bowl of cereal (the milk, to my surprise, is not yet expired) and flipping casually through one of those old newspapers. If you pick up a newspaper from any era, any year, and read it, with only a few superficial exceptions, you are more or less unable to tell that none of it refers to today. How long have things been the same like this, I ask myself, how long have things been ending, no wonder nobody notices, they’re all used to it.

  I pick up the phone. The other end presses three numbers, releasing a trichord of notes. I hang up, put on my nice shoes, the ones I used to wear beneath my robes, and leave. When I arrive, I enter without knocking. I stand for a moment in the doorway, loosening my tie, adjusting to the quaint dim lighting of curtained windows. I undress mechanically, excited but underlined with a great dire sadness, a weight that has usually left me by this time. I let myself forget everything except the words that Mr. Henrik spoke to me the day before. For some reason, they won’t leave. His may have been the wisest words I’ve heard since the sun spoke to me about the teachings of Asam Cifezzo.

  I join her on the couch. I don’t realize how cool the room is until I feel her skin pressing against mine and the warmth that it pulses into me each time I feel her heart beat. If you could get your heat from the moon instead of the sun, this is how that warmth would feel; calm, placid, rejuvenating. When we’re done and she’s sitting with her head curled in the crook of my neck, her hand on my thigh where it would be inappropriate even if we weren’t naked, her breath florid with gentle acridity of a fresh-squeezed mimosa, she asks me if something’s bothering me.

  I lie and tell her no. I think of the first time we made love, eight months earlier. She preludes it with a question in a similar tone, “Why do you do it? Why do you go out there every day and pretend that you’ve lost your mind?”

  “I do it,” I answer her that morning, “Because if a sane man tells people the world is coming to an end, they’ll think he’s crazy. But if an insane man starts screaming it on street corners, they’ll pause, even if just for a moment sometime later, and think of all the little signs around them that the world might actually be ending. They might shrug it off, but the seed will be there.”

  “I could never do it. It would be too hard for me to go out there. I’d be ashamed to have people think I had lost my mind.”

  “Of all the things I’ve had to let go, my pride was the easiest.”

  “I love you, Margot,” I tell her now, and I run my fingers through her coarse hair.

  “I love you too, Benjamin.”

  Neither of us has quite yet noticed the heaving beast standing in the open doorway, his horns throbbing with the thick gulps of air he is swallowing into his chest. When she finally does, she shrieks and jumps up, off of me, off of the couch. “Frank!” I notice, for the last time, how truly beautiful she is despite the years of hardships and the draining effect of this town itself on her. He huffs and turns his back to us and walks out back into the desert with the door left open. She collapses back to the cushion next to me, mumbling something about god and starting to cry. She puts a repentant inch of space between us, but she is holding onto my hand so tightly that my bones are grinding.

  Then I watch my body leave itself. I watch myself stand from the couch, and while one of her hands remains in mine, her other hand is pulled slowly away as I watch myself give her a kiss on the forehead and walk away. She holds on as long as she can until her fingers slip, one at a time, away from him. Her mouth is hanging open, her eyes are as wide as marbles. I watch as her face transforms, as she rejoins the masquerade from which I managed for so long to keep her away. I have never seen the transformation from this close, and even though I know that she will never speak to me again after this, I cannot help but be in awe at the way her wrinkles deepen and her eyes dilate and her mouth twists in something alike a homogenous brew of revulsion and fear. I watch myself, as well, trying to think of how I am going to explain this to her when she regains her speech.

  The other version of me disappears out the open doorway as she and I sit together on the couch and watch him go. “Benjamin?” she finally asks.

  She wants to pull away from me, she’s afraid, but I hold her hand tight enough to keep her in place. When Frank reappears in the doorway, I am still trying frantically to shy her horror, and I wonder if she thinks that I’ve been crazy this whole time, that she’s been having her affair with a lunatic. It is only when her eyes leave me, when they look over my shoulder, that I turn expecting to see my other body standing there. Instead, Frank looms over us. My last thoughts are, “How many minutes has it been, that he has come and gone without either of us speaking a word?” With the glare of the morning sun at his back, I cannot see his face, can only see the vaguest contours of his body. The last thing I notice, as the dust sifting through the air like its own universe reflects the sunlight onto it, is the small pistol he is holding at his side.

  And I think, this time, it was I that made the right choice. This time, I decided to stay.

  Four: The Soldier

  Pecker notices it first, the rise and fall of the waves on the horizon like a serpent’s back a dozen miles long. He points and throws his arm out across my chest, as though to keep me from leaving the tree line to march onto the beach, which I’m clearly not the least bit interested in doing. I look out and I see the little dots, disappearing, reappearing, and behind them a small island which holds itself up against the sky like a Viking ship. I think of my days as a boy, back home, sitting in church while Preacher Benji stands on stage reading from his book, telling us about the end of the world and the sinister idiosyncrasies of something he used to call the devil. He tells everyone to bow their heads and they do and I, I wait a moment before lifting mine back up to try and figure out why something so silly as bowing our heads in silence could be treated with this kind of somber reverence when so much else is dismissed as trivial or petty. But those bent heads, the sea of them that dot my vision, remind me of these shapes on the horizon. The only difference is that those dots in the church are there to try and save us all, and those out on the sea, those are coming to kill us.

  “What do you think we should do?” I ask him.

  “What do you think we’re going to do, Stalin? It’s why we’re here.”

  I take a step deeper behind the tree line. I don’t do it to escape. Peck’s right, I’m here for a reason, just like he is, just like Robinson, just like Ja-Ja pronounced ya-ya, just like Tens. I step back so that I can take a wider look around. Only twenty paces behind us our camp is set up, our fire is still smoldering, a snaky little string of smoke caught in a ring of stones. Tens is there tending to a snapped ankle, which Peck whispers to me two nights ago he probably gave to himself because he knew this was coming. I ask him, what’s the point of coming all the way out here to the coast just to snap his own ankle and sit back? I don’t know, Stalin, he says, maybe just so he could go back home able to say that he was here.

  “How long do you think it’ll be before they get here?” I ask.

  “I don’t know, Stalls. Two hours. Maybe three. So if you’re not on good terms, get on good terms while you still can.”

  We shrink back into the forest like clouds. Even though we still have two, maybe three hours, we tread lightly over the underbrush so that we barely make a sound before breaking out into the small grove where we’ve set camp. Tens is sitting on a log with his snapped ankle elevated on a rock he’s set up in front of him, turning over with a charred stick the withered straw in the fire pit. Each one he turns over releases another slither of smoke into the air that look like the rising crests on the sea. Our
three tents are set up on the other side of the pit. Pecker unslings his weapon from his back, an SG 550, and he props it up against a tree with the muzzle in the dirt. It’s a clean firing assault rifle, stylish. The General hands them out on the first day to everyone who comes to the Cannery. “You never know when the enemy will make its appearance,” he says to the line of recruits. A hooded woman stands behind him, handing the rifles to him one at a time as he marches down the line. None of us have ever heard her speak nor seen her face, though we all know her well. She is his executioner, his messenger, his cataloguer. When he hands me mine, the first thing I think as I feel its weight is, “Oh God I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be here at all.”

  The sad thing, the thing that keeps coming back to me on all these quiet clammy nights as we sit around small smoky fires that burn the eyes with its steam more than they warm us, is that I never really wanted to come here in the first place. It is my father who urges me to go. And he does so offhandedly so that he can never be fully assigned the blame, one evening as we sit on our front porch watching the wide eye of the sun set over the desert horizon. “That new Reverend really makes you think, doesn’t he?” he asks me. He is sitting on the front step with an unopened bottle of beer next to him, stripping the bark from a wide stick he has picked up from the desert ground. I stand against one of the porch beams, occupied with the scurry of a pack of sparrows bathing themselves in dust a little ways off.

  “How’s that, Dad?” I ask.

  “All that talk about how the world is just beginning, I just never really thought about it much. I always thought we were smack dab in the middle, not going anywhere, not really coming from anywhere, just sort of here. And you can really see the fire in his eyes when he gets started on all that jazz about the devil’s friends. How they can come in any form and without watching for them, we might all just wake up one day to see a long line of skewers pointed straight for us. How something as simple as the General’s Cannery can do so much good, and just because a thing does good, that makes anything that tries to shut it down an enemy of God, an enemy of the world. I mean, think of something like, I don’t know, let’s just stick with the Cannery. The trouble that man, the General, goes through to provide low cost food to low-income economies, it might sound simple, but it really is a righteous and providential way to live your life, don’t you think? It really would make a demon out of anything that tried to stop him. Makes you think about what the rest of us are really doing around here.”