Our Tragic Universe

by Scarlett Thomas

  He shook his head. 'No. I don't think you're a freak. This is a nice deck. I'm glad they've re-issued it. You know who designed these?'

  I shook my head. 'Not really. I read the information card but forgot what it said. Some spiritualist guy?'

  Arthur Edward Waite? Well, yes, he commissioned them. But all the work was done by a woman called Pamela Colman Smith, who must have been born at the end of the nineteenth century in England, but grew up in Jamaica. She did illustrations for Yeats, and drawings of Anansi the Spider for books of Jamaican folklore. All the innovations in this deck were hers. The idea of illustrating every card, not just the Trumps, came from her. She died penniless and unknown, with no family except for a woman companion.' He laughed. 'God, sorry. I feel like an encyclopaedia sometimes. Lise complains about it.'

  'Sounds as if you know more about Tarot than I do.'

  'Yeah.' He looked at his glass of wine as if it was a crystal ball and he didn't like what it was telling him. 'Yeah. I know a bit.'

  'You're the Tarot reader!'

  'Well, sort of,' he said. 'Just for one summer. Probably before you were born.'

  I rolled my eyes. 'I was born in 1969.'

  'This was in...' He frowned. 'Must have been 1970, I think. So it was just after you were born. I was about twenty-two and I'd gone hitchhiking around Europe with my first girlfriend. The idea was we'd spend the summer doing that before both going back to Cambridge to do our PhDs. Oh, how our lives were mapped out. It was all so over-determined and planned. She must have thought so too, because she dumped me somewhere in France and I ended up going on to Spain and then Italy by myself. In Italy I got a ride in a hippy bus and ended up hanging out on a beach with a bunch of Cornish musicians. That was when I learned to play guitar. This woman, Maisie, taught me. She taught me guitar, and then late one night we sat on the beach and she taught me Tarot. She looked ... I hate to say it, but she looked a lot like you. A late-sixties version. A twenty-two-year-old version. Long hair, blue eyes, thick eyebrows. She was my first true love. I hope you don't mind me talking about this...'

  'Why would I?' I smiled. 'I don't mind you saying my eyebrows are thick.'

  He laughed. 'Your eyebrows are lovely.' He looked down at the cards, and then put them all in his left hand while he drank some wine. He swallowed, then took another sip and swallowed that. He looked at the cards again. 'She almost died. God, how weird to be thinking about this. I haven't really thought about Maisie for years. Or Tarot cards. I never thought I'd touch them ever again. But it's actually soothing looking at yours. I'm having a million memories. I hope you don't mind.'

  I wondered why Rowan kept asking if I minded, and realised that Lise probably minded almost everything he did, just as Christopher had minded everything I did. It seemed to be a feature of most long-term relationships that you realised you'd ended up with someone who constantly minded everything you did.

  'How did Maisie almost die?' I asked.

  He bit his lip. 'The Tarot cards—or one Tarot card—got her. Pretty wild, huh? She was in a coma for a week.'

  'Oh, my God. How is that...? What happened?'

  'When I met Maisie she had just started to give Tarot readings to tourists for money. I'd run out of cash back in Spain, and since I wasn't good enough on the guitar yet to join in with the musicians, I learned how to make friendship bracelets out of embroidery thread, and so I'd sell those out of a newspaper on the ground while Maisie did her readings next to me. Maisie was a bit of a loner at heart, and she'd had enough of travelling in a big group. So had I. We set off down the coast together with our knapsacks and her travelling card table. We stopped in villages on the way and she did readings. At first I felt a bit useless. I spoke no Italian, and I had no way of contributing to the venture myself except with my bracelets, but they took a long time to make and didn't sell for very much. While I was sitting there, I watched Maisie, and that was how I learned about the cards. I found I picked it up very easily. You've noticed that I remember historical details, especially about people. I used this—and everything I'd learned on my degree—to start doing readings of my own. If the Chariot came up for a woman, I'd imagine Boadicea. For a man, I'd imagine Caesar. I was able to pick out the archetypal elements of each card by thinking about all the historical situations I could connect with it. I saw so much in each card, in the end, and it was all new to me and so exciting. It was probably more exciting because I was in love, and charged with energy. I didn't feel that way again for years and years.' He sighed. 'Soon I did readings of my own, and for a few weeks it was all Maisie and I talked about. We really connected through these cards. If we wanted to talk about clarity and focus, we'd discuss the Ace of Swords. If we wanted to talk about decision-making, we'd use Justice. I got better and better at reading, and also at playing the old guitar I'd picked up in Genoa. We travelled and travelled, searching for English-speaking communities for whom we could do deeper readings than just "You have problem with husband." We took a boat to Sicily, and then another boat to Malta. Maisie and I were planning to keep travelling, and eventually get to Africa and maybe go around the world together. I had decided not to go back to Cambridge. It was a magical time. We washed in the sea and slept on beaches. At some point we took a boat from Malta up to the island of Gozo, where there was a commune we'd heard about, with revolutionaries from all over the world waiting to help stage revolution and help the Maltese and Gozitan people get independence from Britain. That was probably the happiest time of my life. We drank Gozitan wine, got stoned, talked about politics and, of course, did Tarot readings. Lots of the communists said Tarot was decadent and bourgeois, of course.'

  'So what happened to Maisie?'

  Rowan sighed again, and took a big sip of wine. 'Her sister was coming out to meet us and spend some time at the commune. We'd written to her to ask for some supplies. This was stuff like needles and thread, writing paper, pens and pencils, Bob Dylan tapes—and a new pack of Tarot cards. It was hard to buy Tarot cards then, although I'd picked up my own deck in Italy. But Maisie's were virtually worn out. We would never have thought to ask for antiseptic or anything grown-up like that. We were young and we would never die. Especially not of something as stupid as septicaemia.'

  'Is that what happened? She got blood poisoning?'

  He nodded. 'Yeah. Liz, Maisie's sister, had brought some bad news from home. Maisie was upset, and asked me to do a reading for her. We hardly ever read for each other, because it felt weird, but she was desperate. We used her new cards. She was the querent—the one asking for the reading—so she had to shuffle them. They were new, of course, and she was used to shuffling old cards. While she was doing it she got a paper-cut on the back of her little finger, just above the first joint. We didn't make a big deal of it. As the cards turned over we both realised we were seeing a pretty terrible spread.' He frowned. 'At that stage we were so immersed in the meanings of the cards that we knew every little nuance of them—or thought we did. In Tarot, Death doesn't mean death. It can mean a new beginning, for example. But however much you know that, it's still awful when Death comes up in a significant position. I think in this case it came up second, as the "Cross" card that covers the first card. There was Death, and at some point there was the Three of Swords and the Nine of Swords. I can't remember the others, but I think the Six of Swords was in the "Outcome" position. It was just terrible. Maisie became convinced that she was cursed—even though she knew the cards didn't work that way, and, unlike a lot of people, didn't believe you could tell anything about the future from them, only the present—and fell into a depression. When her finger got infected she didn't do anything about it. I hardly noticed until it was too late and she had blood poisoning. She lost consciousness on the boat back to Malta, on her way to hospital. At one point it looked as if she was going to die.'

  Rowan had been shuffling the cards, face up, as he spoke. Now he pulled out the Six of Swords and passed it to me.

  'You know,' he said, 'every deck of Tarot ca
rds is different. But the main idea on each card remains the same.' He moved along the sofa and pointed at the Six of Swords that I was holding. Our arms lightly touched as he pointed out the details. 'This card always has a boat, with someone—usually a woman—on it, and the sense is of a difficult or sad journey on water. One thing Tarot never does is depict anything literal. But this is pretty close to what happened to Maisie.' He sighed. 'I'm so sorry,' he said, after a few seconds. 'I'm all right, really. It's fine. It's just the memories, and maybe remembering being young and free and then it all stopping.' But his eyes were filling with tears.

  'It's OK,' I said.

  The wave function of everything that I could possibly have said—that Maisie would certainly have taken a trip on water from a small island, that the nocebo effect could have led to her coma, that my grandmother, Margaret, after whom I was named, was also known as Maisie, that I was jealous of Rowan's first love, that I wanted to know how Lise acted when Rowan was emotional, that it was still possible for him to be free, if not young—collapsed and I found myself holding onto him, wrapping my arms around him and stroking his soft, thinning hair and saying, 'It's OK. I understand.'

  'We can't...' he said, pulling away only a little.

  'We're not,' I said. 'Don't worry; I'm not so insensitive that I'd...'

  And then he clutched me harder. 'I know,' he said.

  We didn't speak for a few minutes, until Rowan said he wanted to go for a pee and I pointed him towards the bathroom upstairs. While he was gone I started building a fire. B, clearly realising what I was doing, came out from wherever she had been and plonked herself down on the hearth, virtually in the fire, getting ash in her fur.

  'Come on, silly,' I said to her. 'Out of the fire.'

  Rowan came back. 'What did you say?'

  'Oh,' I smiled at him. 'How are you?' He shrugged and smiled. 'I was just suggesting to Bess that she might like to get out of the fire. She's pretty keen for me to get it going.' B jumped onto the sofa. I struck a match underneath my wigwam of logs and newspaper, and the firelighters caught immediately.

  Rowan sat down on the sofa too and poured more wine for both of us.

  'That's impressive,' he said, gesturing at the fire.

  'Oh—that's just the firelighters.' I put the guard in front of the fire. 'Just cross your fingers that the heat is enough to make the logs catch. They don't always. But this should be OK. It sparks a lot at the beginning, when it does catch—thus the fire guard—and then ... Why am I telling you this? Presumably you know about open fires.'

  'Yeah. Although we never had firelighters when I used to make them, usually on beaches. I've never had a fire in a house. We didn't have them when I was growing up, and Lise never wanted one because of the mess and the fuss. You've made it look easy.'

  'Well, it's nowhere near properly lit yet. I guess it's the same with campfires. They take ages and ages to get going, and you have to poke them and fuss over them and move the logs around so that there's enough oxygen for the fire to breathe, but not so much that the whole thing falls in on itself and suffocates. But once it's going it seems as if it will never go out. Sorry. I'm waffling about nothing. I've got quite into my fires since I've been living here. I'm sure the novelty will wear off. How are you feeling?'

  'I like hearing you talk. And I'm fine.'

  I sat back on the sofa. Instead of being at either end of it, we were now side by side in the middle, with B at one end like a single bookend. Since we'd been touching before, it now didn't seem so odd when Rowan took my hand and held it.

  'Is this OK?' he asked.

  'Yes. Of course.'

  We sat there like that for a minute or two.

  'I came round to see your ship in a bottle, didn't I?'

  'Yeah.' I took my hand away. 'I'll go and get it.'

  It was on the mantelpiece in the bedroom. I brought it down and gave it to Rowan.

  'Here,' I said. 'I don't expect you to make anything of this, but I'd be reassured if you told me that there's some completely rational reason for it washing up at my feet—especially as I'd just asked the universe for a sign. It was all Vi's idea.'

  He didn't seem to be listening. He was poring over the ship in a bottle as if it was the denouement in a murder-mystery.

  'I'm very glad you asked me to come and look at this,' he said, without taking his eyes off it.

  'Why?'

  'It's very interesting.'

  'Why do you say that?'

  He looked up. 'You tell me your bit first. Where did you find it? Why were you asking the universe for a sign?'

  'Oh. I thought you missed that bit. Well, it's all a bit improbable,' I said. 'Or I think it is.'

  'I can take it,' he said, and poured more wine. 'I'd better not have any more after this. I've got to drive back.'

  'You're welcome to sleep on the sofa by the fire if it comes to it,' I said.

  'Thanks, but ... Anyway, tell me about how you came to have this.'

  I'd always meant to simply tell him that I was walking along the beach and there it was. But instead I ended up telling him about Robert in the forest and his ship in a bottle, and Vi, and my argument with her, and how depressed I'd felt on New Year's Day, when there didn't seem to be anything worth living for.

  'So you asked the universe for help and it gave you this?'

  'Yeah. I think I was actually asking the sea for help, but it amounts to the same thing. Funny kind of help, wherever it came from. I mean, obviously the rational explanation is that whatever I saw after I asked for help would have been meaningful in some way. But this?'

  Rowan turned the ship over in his hands.

  'Yeah. This is really something.'

  'Really?'

  'Oh, yes. It's a bit fucked-up, though. You thought that Robert's ship was the original and this was some sort of copy, sent by the universe to freak you out. It's the other way around. This should be in a museum. It's quite famous.' He smiled. 'You might like this. It was famous anyway, but the reason it's really famous is because there was a book in the early seventies called Make Your Own ... You could make your own Mona Lisa, your own Roman coin and so on. You could also make your own ship in a bottle, based on this one. There was a time when lots of households had a home-made copy of this on the mantelpiece underneath the flying ducks on the wall. You don't see them so much any more.'

  'So you're not saying that someone simply knocked it up one weekend from instructions in a book and then threw it in the sea?'

  'No. This is the original. Look at the age of the cork, and the precision of the sails. The glass is thick too. I'm fairly sure it used to be part of the William H. Dawe collection, but I can't imagine how it ended up in the sea. I don't know why the universe gave it to you—probably so you could give it to me and I could put it back with the rest of the collection in the Maritime Centre.'

  'How efficient of the universe.'

  'Good old universe,' Rowan said. 'Very kind of it to give you the original rather than the copy. So much less probable, of course, considering that there's one of these in the world, and a good few thousand copies.'

  I shrugged. 'You could say that everything that happens is random, so why not this? Why is it that when something has meaning for us we assume the meaning is made by a higher force or even a tricksy human? Why can't things just happen?'

  'Nothing "just happens".'

  'What do you mean?'

  'There's always some motivation somewhere. There's always something you can't see behind everything you can see. Not ghosts and monsters, but people, usually, doing things for good reasons.'

  'Yeah. I guess that's right.'

  'Hey, tell me—why do you want a rational, scientific explanation for this? Or, to re-phrase that a bit: why do people—including me—want scientific explanations for things? Isn't it more romantic and interesting if the universe has magically given you the ship for some reason?'

  'No.'

  'Why?'

  'I don't know.' I frowned and rem
embered the scratching at the door in Dartmouth. 'Maybe because it's frightening and creepy that way.'

  'But why?'

  'I don't know, exactly. But if the universe is somehow conscious, then everything about living in it is different. It takes free choice away from you somehow. I don't want to live in a universe with a fixed meaning, and the end of mystery. The universe should be unfathomable. You shouldn't be able to fix the meaning of the universe, just as you shouldn't be able to reduce Hamlet or Anna Karenina to a sentence or say what they "really mean". I want a tragic universe, not a nice rounded-off universe with a moral at the end. And I don't think looking for a final meaning for the universe is rewarding either. Tolstoy tried, and his results are far less interesting than his fiction.'

  'What were his results?'

  'A religion called Tolstoyanism. I guess it is interesting in a way. He advocates vegetarianism and pacifism. But he also claims to have all the answers, which I don't want particularly.'

  'What led to all this?'

  'He had a breakdown when he was in his fifties. By then he was famous and successful and had a big house and a family, but he couldn't see the meaning of life. So he set out on a spiritual odyssey and went madder and madder, squeezing the universe for its last drops of meaning, desperately trying to get some sense out of it and find out exactly why he existed. When he eventually tried to explain his idea of the afterlife to Chekhov—a place that Chekhov describes as being like "jelly", where you dissolve and lose your individuality, but live on for ever—Chekhov just didn't understand it. It seemed pointless to him. He wasn't bothered about the meaning of life in general, but life as it is lived. He was more interested in what people around him said and did. He was obsessed with the detail of life. Tolstoy always saw his own writing as "teaching" and had his breakdown partly because he was so anxious that he didn't have anything to teach. But Chekhov only ever saw his own writing as the formulation of questions, and so didn't need to have a crisis about it. While Tolstoy was founding Tolstoyanism, Chekhov was gardening, and trying to cope with his TB. In the last letter he wrote before he died, he complained of German women's dress-sense. Interesting, though, that Tolstoy managed to write these vast novels—before he had his breakdown, that is—and Chekhov never did, even though he wanted to. Mind you, Tolstoy was rich and Chekhov was poor. I think I identify more with Chekhov.'