“Right.”
“So?”
“Remember how I had a bad feeling about it, and then a couple got killed in my old room, and-“
“I remember the whole business, Keller. What about it?”
“I guess I’ve just been wondering how much of life is destined and preordained. How much choice do people really have?”
“If we had a choice,” she said, “we could be having some other conversation.”
“I never set out to be what I’ve become. It’s not like I took an aptitude test in high school and my guidance counselor took me aside and recommended a career as a killer for hire.”
“You drifted into it, didn’t you?”
“That’s what I always thought. That’s certainly what it felt like. But suppose I was just fulfilling my destiny?”
“I don’t know,” she said, cocking her head. “Shouldn’t there be music playing in the background? There always is when they have conversations like this in one of my soap operas.”
“Dot, I’ve got a murderer’s thumb.”
“Oh, for the love of God, we’re back to your thumb. How did you manage that, and what in the hell are you talking about?”
“Palmistry,” he said. “In palmistry, a thumb like mine is called a murderer’s thumb.”
“In palmistry.”
“Right.”
“I grant you it’s an unusual-looking thumb,” she said, “although I never noticed it in all the years I’ve known you, and never would have noticed it if you hadn’t pointed it out. But where does the murderer part come in? What do you do, kill people by running your thumb across their life line?”
“I don’t think you actually do anything with your thumb.”
“I don’t see what you could do, aside from hitching a ride. Or making a rude gesture.”
“All I know,” he said, “is I had a murderer’s thumb and I grew up to be a murderer.”
“ ‘His Thumb Made Him Do It.’ “
“Or was it the other way around? Maybe my thumb was normal at birth, and it changed as my character changed.”
“That sounds crazy,” she said, “but you ought to be able to clear it up, because you’ve been carrying that thumb around all your life. Was it always like that?”
“How do I know? I never paid much attention to it.”
“Keller, it’s your thumb.”
“But did I notice it was different from other thumbs? I don’t know, Dot. Maybe I should see somebody.”
“That’s not necessarily a bad idea,” she said, “but I’d think twice before I let them put me on any medication.”
“That’s not what I mean,” he said.
The astrologer was not what he’d expected.
Hard to say just what he’d been expecting. Someone with a lot of eye makeup, say, and long hair bound up in a scarf, and big hoop earrings-some sort of cross between a Gypsy fortune-teller and a hippie chick. What he got in Louise Carpenter was a pleasant woman in her forties who had long since thrown in the towel in the battle to maintain her figure. She had big blue-green eyes and a low-maintenance haircut, and she lived in an apartment on West End Avenue full of comfortable furniture, and she wore loose clothing and read romance novels and ate chocolate, all of which seemed to agree with her.
“It would help,” she told Keller, “if we knew the precise time of your birth.”
“I don’t think there’s any way to find out.”
“Your mother has passed?”
Passed. It might be more accurate, he thought, to say that she’d failed. He said, “She died a long time ago.”
“And your father…”
“Died before I was born,” Keller said, wondering if it was true. “You asked me over the phone if there was anyone who might remember. I’m the only one who’s still around, and I don’t remember a thing.”
“There are ways to recover a lot of early memory,” she said, and popped a chocolate into her mouth. “All the way back to birth, in some instances, and I’ve known people who claim they can remember their own conception. But I don’t know how much to credit all of that. Is it memory or is it Memorex? Besides, you probably weren’t wearing a watch at the time.”
“I’ve been thinking,” he said. “I don’t know the doctor’s name, and he might be dead himself by this time, but I’ve got a copy of my birth certificate. It doesn’t have the time of birth, just the date, but do you suppose the Bureau of Vital Statistics would have the information on file somewhere?”
“Possibly,” she said, “but don’t worry about it. I can check it.”
“On the Internet? Something like that?”
She laughed. “No, not that. You said your mother mentioned getting up early in the morning to go to the hospital.”
“That’s what she said.”
“And you were a fairly easy birth.”
“Once her labor started, I came right out.”
“You wanted to be here. Now you happen to be a Gemini, John, and… shall I call you John?”
“If you want.”
“Well, what do people generally call you?”
“Keller.”
“Very well, Mr. Keller. I’m comfortable keeping it formal if you prefer it that way, and-“
“Not Mr. Keller,” he said. “Just plain Keller.”
“Oh.”
“That’s what people generally call me.”
“I see. Well, Keller… no, I don’t think that’s going to work. I’m going to have to call you John.”
“Okay.”
“In high school kids used to call each other by their last names. It was a way to feel grown up. ‘Hey, Carpenter, you finish the algebra homework?’ I can’t call you Keller.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I’m being neurotic, I realize that, but-“
“John is fine.”
“Well then,” she said, and rearranged herself in the chair. “You’re a Gemini, John, as I’m sure you know. A late Gemini, June nineteenth, which puts you right on the cusp of Cancer.”
“Is that good?”
“Nothing’s necessarily good or bad in astrology, John. But it’s good in that I enjoy working with Geminis. I find it to be an extremely interesting sign.”
“How so?”
“The duality. Gemini is the sign of the twins, you see.” She went on talking about the properties of the sign, and he nodded, agreeing but not really taking it all in. And then she was saying, “I suppose the most interesting thing about Geminis is their relationship to the truth. Geminis are naturally duplicitous, yet they have an inner reverence for the truth that echoes their opposite number across the Zodiac. That’s Sagittarius, of course, and your typical Sadge couldn’t tell a lie to save his soul. Gemini can lie without a second thought, while being occasionally capable of this startling Sagittarean candor.”
“I see.”
He was influenced as well by Cancer, she continued, having his sun on its cusp, along with a couple of planets in that sign. And he had a Taurus moon, she told him, and that was the best possible place for the moon to be. “The moon is exalted in Taurus,” she said. “Have you noticed in the course of your life how things generally turn out all right for you, even when they don’t? And don’t you have an inner core, a sort of bedrock stability that lets you always know who you are?”
“I don’t know about that last part,” he said. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Maybe it’s your Taurus moon that got you here.” She reached for another chocolate. “Your time of birth determines your rising sign, and that’s important in any number of ways, but in the absence of available information I’m willing to make the determination intuitively. My discipline is astrology, John, but it’s not the only tool I use. I’m psychic, I sense things. My intuition tells me you have Cancer rising.”
“If you say so.”
“And I prepared a chart for you on that basis. I could tell you a lot of technical things about your chart, but I can’t believe you’re interested in all that, are you?”