I went to the window and bent the blinds a little to look outside. The shadows had swallowed up the bottoms of the buildings; it was nearly sunset. “How long have I been here?” I wondered aloud.
“Forever,” Sher answered from the kitchen. She came in and sat down on a heap of pillows on the other side of the metal cabinet. She had a new cigarette pinned in the corner of her mouth. She set a glass of water in front of me and sighed. “I had to cancel three other appointments. I don’t know why the fuck you come and bother me. It’s not as if you believed in any of it.”
“Of course I believe in it. You, as someone who has more insight into me than I do, use the cards to reveal my sins to me and make me meditate on them. It used to be called psychotherapy.”
“That’s not what happens.”
“Well, if it works, let’s not fix it.” That, at least, I could say with perfect sincerity. There was no point in arguing with Sherrea over how she did what I hoped she was going to do.
“There’s no food in the place,” she said.
“That’s okay.” I didn’t think I could eat, anyway. My stomach felt like a sink drain full of hair.
“No, it’s not. You ought to eat before a reading, and leave some as an offering. It draws the energies to you.” She shrugged. “Well, screw the energies.”
“No.”
She glanced up, the young look on her pointy face again.
“Let’s do it right.” On one thumb, I found a rough bit of cuticle, at the base of the nail. I bit it until it bled. “Offering,” I said, and held out my hand.
“Santos, Sparrow.” But she whisked the tapestry off the cabinet/coffee table, and from somewhere in all the black-and-purple, she produced a wad of white scarf. When she laid it down, it fell open to show the deck of cards inside. “Let a drop fall on the table — no, over there on the corner. I don’t want it on the scarf.” I squeezed a decent-sized drop onto the very edge of the metal, and blotted the rest on one of the sheet’s red stripes.
She mashed her cigarette out on the side of the cabinet and began to shuffle the deck. It arced between her hands, over and over, two parts folding into one like a flower blooming backward in time-lapse. “Wish for something. D’you think maybe you were on polygons?”
“If I had any idea, I wouldn’t have had to come to you.”
She fanned the cards on the table, flipped one out of the deck onto the scarf, shuffled again. Page of Swords.
She said she’d found the deck in a botánica in Alphabetland. It was luridly colored, worse than Saint Bob, and the figures moved when you tipped the cards, like printed cardboard toys and kitschy postcards. The iconography was a schizoid blend of Christian saints, African deities, and pre-Bang SouthAm pop stars. The Page of Swords was Joan of Arc at the stake, holding a sword over her head. The flames leaped and Joan’s head nodded up to look at heaven, down to study hell. “You don’t know what you took. You really black out completely during these things?” Sher asked.
“I told you I do.”
“You’ve told me lots of dumb shit. That was the seventeenth card. Whatever you just wished for, you can’t have. Cut the deck.”
I wondered what it had been.
She snapped cards down on the scarf, growing the layout like a crystal. Joan of Arc’s suffering was overlaid upside down by Death as Baron Samedi, all bones and grin and tall black hat, with a victim under each arm: a fat white man in a pinstripe suit, and an old black woman almost as thin as the Baron. The Baron opened and closed his mouth — laughing, I’d guess — and the victims flapped their arms. Beside him went a card showing a naked brown prettyboy holding a violent yellow solar disc in front of his hips. The rays of the sun rippled when the card moved, which seemed like a waste of technology.
Snap — an overdressed black man juggling two bags, each marked with a white star. That one was upside down, too. Snap — a grinning masked figure stepping into shadow at the back of the card, a fan of five bloody swords over his shoulder. In the foreground two more thrust, point downward, in a puddle of gore with no apparent source. Snap — a man and woman dressed in movie-medieval, she in white, he in red, hands clasped; a huge, well-fed cherub like a scrubbed pink pterodactyl hovered above. Snap — a nearly naked blond woman with a quarterstaff, blocking the attack of six ninjoids, also with staves. Snap — a dark-haired, dark-tanned man or woman, lying on his or her back on a beach. The posture I’d awakened in on the river flats. He or she had ten long swords for company, the points in the palms of the hands, the knees, the belly, the groin, the breasts, the forehead, and through the open mouth. I stopped paying such close attention. Sherrea laid three more cards down.
“Swords,” she muttered, tapping her long purple index fingernail on the spiral made by the first seven cards. “Swords here in the country of flesh. There’s fighting over this, has been and will be.”
Between me, myself and I? I wanted to ask.
“Death, the Sun, the Lovers. Lots of major arcana. Your future’s controlled by others. There’s powerful people playing with it. You’re gonna have to fight to get it back. And over here” — she slid the fingernail down the silk next to the upright row of four cards next to the spiral — “this is the country of truth. There’s the Devil, the Star, the Tower. In the country of truth, where your spirit lives, your life still isn’t your own. Other stronger spirits, or maybe gods — they’ve got the say in what happens to you.”
A nice metaphor for my blackouts.
She touched the juggling man. “Something got out of balance in the past, yours or somebody’s. Stuff that’s supposed to shift around, change, grow — it’s all gone stagnant and sick.”
Sherrea looked up, but it was a blind look. “The air’s not moving around you,” she said, “but there’s a wind that’s trying to blow. Somebody’s gotta pull the windbreak down.” Her voice was changing. Now she wasn’t looking at me at all; she was looking at the tops of her eye sockets. All I could see were the whites. I rocked slowly back from the cabinet.
“Sit still, munequita,” said the new voice. It was lower than Sher’s, and thick with an accent that ought to have been Hispanic and wasn’t. Sherrea’s lips, making the words, moved differently than they usually did. Her face looked suddenly much older. “You afraid of me?”
Munequita meant — I felt the infinitesimal shift of new knowledge. Little doll. I shivered. “I wouldn’t say that. Not yet, at least. Who are you?”
A hooting laugh. “Nobody you know. Listen now. It’s time you was doin’ what you supposed to. You got work to do, and all you do is look out for your own self. You not ready to do your work. That’s bringin’ danger on you, and all the ones bound to you.”
“Nobody’s bound to me,” I said firmly.
“You think that? Where you been, sittin’ in a hole? You wait ’til le Chasseur comes. But you dangle those lives over the fire and that’s all for you. I give you warning.”
Sherrea’s lips had drawn back from her nicotine-stained teeth in a big nasty smile. I stood up carefully. “Well, thank you. I’ll be going, then.”
“Sit down.” I can’t describe that voice. I sat down. “But you can save your ass. You gotta learn to serve, and let your own self be fed by the spirits. Serve the loa, serve all the people, and go hungry and cold yourself. Then all the parts of you gonna come together and make you well. But strong people want to keep chained what you gotta make free. There’s gonna be blood, and fire, and the dead gonna dance in the streets. But if you give what I tol’ you, the light of change’ll shine in the tower of shadows.” I felt like someone who’s gone to get a wart removed, and been told he needs radiation and chemo. I am not good at hungry and cold. “So what is it that I have to do?” I said.