“Aren’t there Minor Arcana too?”
“Yeah, those are the pentacles and stuff. Anyhow, each Major Arcana shows a step in our life journey.”
“Which is how you use them for fortune telling,” I said.
“No, well, kinda sorta. But they’re steps that everyone goes through, the stages of life.”
“All right,” I said. I tipped the jug into a tank and drained it, frothing with heat. I sniffed the steam. Was that a last trace of vinegar?
“You should write about it,” Mike said. “A lot of great literature is based on alchemy.”
“Yeah, that’s certainly a thought,” I said. “Is that one done?”
He sniffed at the tap. “Another pass, maybe. Then let’s mop the floor, as long as we have the hot water. Call it a night after that.”
“The thing is this,” he said after a long and reflective silence in which I’d forgotten what we were discussing. “There’s these Avatars that walk around. They’re foci for the Universe’s attention, moments that get repeated over and over again, like in the Tarot cards. Sasha’s one, for example.”
“Sasha?”
“That skinny blonde who comes in around ten, reads and drinks coffee for a couple of hours, turns up in the late afternoons sometimes.”
“She’s a what?”
“An Avatar. It’s the shop. It’s a Locus.”
“I thought you said it was a foci.”
“No, people are the foci. The Avatars. The shop now, it’s a Locus, a place where foci converge. Like Stonehenge, where all the ley lines meet.”
“The Dew Drop is like Stonehenge?”
He laughed. “Yeah, crazy, isn’t it? I don’t understand why, either.” He pulled a bottle of whiskey out from behind a blocky pyramid of stacked coffee bags. “But we’ll drink to it all the same.”
The next day, I watched Sasha.
It was a little before ten, a slack hour with only a couple of customers. I appreciated the lull, since I was hung-over and queasy from last night’s drinking.
A kid came in, maybe fourteen or fifteen. He had long brown hair tied back with a red bandana, bell bottoms, the kind of teenage body that looks like one long stick. He slouched in the doorway until she gestured him over and said something.
His jaw dropped.
I’d always thought that was a figure of speech until I saw him go literally slack-jawed with surprise at her words. And I would have said something, done something, but I felt it. The weight of the Universe’s attention, just for a moment, not on me, but so close that you’d think space and time had collapsed at the point where Sasha sat, looking up at the kid.
He turned and pushed past me to the door. The back of his jacket had a picture of a chimpanzee with the legend “Got Monkey?” under it.
I gave her a little wtf? look and she shrugged at me and went back to the paperback she was reading, The Biggest Secret. But fifteen minutes later, another person came in, an elderly woman carrying a yellow flower in her hand.
She was taken aback by Sasha’s wave, and made her way over to the table like someone advancing to feed a stray dog that they don’t trust. Sasha stood and held the chair out for her, but the woman shook her head, laying her daffodil down.
“He’s not coming,” Sasha said. “He’s happily married, and he asked me to break it to you. He gave me a little money to buy you a coffee, a pastry perhaps.” She fumbled with her wallet.
“No,” the woman said. She wore a lavender pants suit and was carefully made up, her colorless hair freshly combed and set. “No, that will be all right.”
With chilly dignity, she left.
“That was awful!” I let Mike take the register and sat down across from Sasha, indignation pulling at my vocal cords. “What the hell was that all about?”
“It’s my role in life, sunshine,” she said.
“You pretended to be someone else! You’re interfering in those people’s lives!”
“It’s not as evil as all that, Clay.” She pointed at the front entrance. “It’s something about this place. Maybe it’s the dumping ground of the Universe. I noticed it when I first started coming here to get coffee and read. People come here all the time to meet blind dates that never show up. I’ve never seen anyone actually meet here, but I’ve seen plenty lingering in the doorway, looking around, trying to catch your eye to see if you, you’re the one.”
She leaned forward. “So I started leaping into the breach. I give them a reason to run, to have a story they can tell at dinner parties for the next few years, the Blind Date from Hell, who seemed so nice in e-mail, then turned out to be…” She twisted her hand. “…a little cuckoo.”
“You’re not just a little cuckoo, you’re insane,” I said. “There ought to be a law about people pulling crap like that. How many dates have you thwarted?”
“You’re not listening. I don’t thwart them. They only show up here if the other person isn’t arriving.”
“Bullshit.”
“Watch.” She pointed at a small ginger-haired man as he stepped in. “I can spot them a mile off. I can hear it in the cadence of their steps coming along the sidewalk and read it in their faces when they open the door. But I won’t catch this one, and you’ll see what I mean. He’ll linger and wait.”
I rose and took his order, a double espresso. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and a robin’s egg blue cashmere sweater. He looked around as I prepared the coffee, glance falling on Sasha. She didn’t look up, just kept on reading.
He took the drink with a thanks and sat down by the door, checking his watch. Each time someone came in, he looked them over. After forty minutes and a dozen people, he drained the coffee and exited, shoulders a tight line of anger.
I went back over to Sasha, not sure what to think.
“See?” she said.
“How can you field all of them?”
She gestured at herself. “Online I could be anyone.”
“So you stand in for the men too?”
“Sure.” She licked crumbs from her fingertips.
“How do you make them think you’re the same person they’ve been talking to?”
“They come pre-fooled,” she said. “Ready to drop into the seat and talk to the one heart in all of the universe that knows them.”
“You disillusion them.”
“I teach them what the world is all about. What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, and what you can laugh at, you can live with.”
“Is this tied in with that crap Mike was spouting last night? You’re an Avatar?”
“A whatty-tar?”
“An Avatar. Mike said something about Avatars and Tarot cards and focuses.”
“Mike says all sorts of crap and only ten percent of it actually makes sense. You should know better than to pay attention.”
“Like any of this makes sense? Sasha, it’s just weird and awful that you do this.”
“Fuck you, emo-boy,” she said.
I guess I wouldn’t have minded so much if I hadn’t been having shitty luck with blind dates myself. I’d set up match.com and yahoo.com and OKCupid and FriendFinder and all the rest.
I got replies from women who wanted me to send them money so they could come visit, one hard-core rock chick in Alaska who said flat-out that she didn’t do in person but was fine with “long distance commitments,” and a Chicago woman who said she’d seen me at a poetry slam when visiting Seattle. She wouldn’t post a picture of herself, leaving me to believe that she was actually a fourteen year old boy.
But at least I was getting a trace of hope every night. I’d log on to the computer and check my messages, send a couple of Woo!’s or raves or whatever the flavor of the flirt was. And here was Sasha, skinny unappealing Sasha, dirtying the taste of it. Making it meaningless.