Tarot Sour (3 page)

Finally I am summoned by one of the moths. Margaret Fasch, I know her from the monthly meetings of the parent-teacher association hosted in the cramped carpeted gymnasium of the schoolhouse. Her littlest, a tempestuous little girl with the unfortunate name of Ingot Fasch, is friends with Kyra, and I always had the sense that she has something of an attraction for Nickolas, though he is too self-interested and unindulgent to ever pay the girl any attention. Beautiful girl, ugly name. Which I attribute to her mother's not wanting to be the one people scrunched their faces at upon introductions, herself for some reason choosing to use the nickname Margot over her full name.

She emerges like a snow nymph from a flurry as she becomes distinguishable from the sterile white background. She clutches her clipboard and reads my name to the disappointment of the half dozen other patients discomfortably waiting their turns. She smiles warmly as I stand and she realizes that she knows me, and she ushers me out of the little grove of plaid-upholstered chairs and down the hall to a small room. She sits me on the vinyl counter and asks me what is wrong.

I unroll the gauze from my twisted claw, having rewrapped it after showing the receptionist. This time I take the gauze off completely and lay my hand down on my thigh, my fingers are crooked and bent and I can't move them without the sense that a poison is being distributed deeper up my arm by doing so.

“Goodness, what happened?” she asks me. She lifts my hand up into the light by the wrist to examine it. She rotates it as though it is a diamond and she can't quite believe the karat of it.

“I slipped mopping the kitchen and caught myself on a mug. Thank God it wasn't the one I'd just filled with hot coffee!” I feign pleasantry, she feigns it back to me. It is the oil of human machineries.

“Sorry to hear that,” she says, lowering my hand back to my lap. “But it doesn't look too bad, so that's a relief. Did you hit your head? Twist your back? I know you had some back problems a few years ago.” A displaced vertebra.

“No, nothing like that. I just knocked the mug onto the floor and landed on it with my hand.” She gives me a pitying look. It would have sickened me to be looked at like that if I hadn't become so desensitized to it in my mirror by now.

“I should be able to handle this myself, no need to call the doctor in. It'll save you a shitload when the bill comes.” She tries to laugh. I smile at her. “I have to check in another patient and tell Dr. Bellows not to bother, but I'll be back in five minutes. I'll fix you right up.” She punctuates her sentences with smiles, and that in itself is as patronizing as her tone. They all know what has happened. It is all really just a matter of who is going to hold out longer on bringing it up, her or me. I will win. I will always win
this
game.

I listen to the tissue paper beneath me crinkle as I shift waiting for her. There is a window behind me. I turn my head in time to see a cardinal land momentarily on a thorny branch before taking off again. It is a rare blur of color in an otherwise monochrome county. I keep my neck locked in position and observe the slow breeze move the branch and shift the faraway sands. A tumbleweed passes along the road, which is demarcated from the rest of the desert as a shallow embroidery winding away until it vanishes as a pinpoint mirage. I will the cardinal to return to the window, I will it to return to me and teach me the secrets of flight so that I can lift myself off the ground and leave it for good. My good hand goes to my shoulder and feels the two dimples where the feathers have been plucked. I regret pulling them now and wonder, if I did it again, would they regrow?

When Margot Fasch returns, fluttering her silken wings behind her, the clipboard she wears as a breastplate is gone and she is smiling, she looks more casual than she did when she'd gone. I turn away from the window, fool-heartedly dismayed by not being able to summon the cardinal back. Ms. Fasch rolls an aluminum skeleton chair from the corner to where I am sitting and pulls my hand out toward her until my wrist is resting on my knee. She unfolds my fingers one at a time, wary of my wincing as the stiff tendons flex. I feel like a gnat invading the moth's cocoon, and here it is unpeeling me layer by layer, waiting to sink its wiry proboscis into my chest to discover what pollen I might be hiding from her.

There is a line of stainless steel tools on a rolling cart at the side of the table on which I sit. She leans and grabs a long pair of tweezers. I watch the pucker of the puncture marks as my hand flexes under her guidance. She bends my index finger back and reaches into the first hole, a large opal in the wrinkles of my second knuckle. I think I can hear the tearing of the thin fibers as the hole grows but I am more fixated on the gleam of fluorescent light off the shaft of the calipers. I think of the hundred cat eyes reflecting off his workshop tools as they hang on their hooks and pegs above the table where an unfinished coffee table still sits. I wonder if God has a table like that where unfinished bodies lay with skinless, unprepared limbs sitting in an orgied pile, waiting to be assembled.

She plucks out the small triangle of off-white ceramic and tosses it into a pan along with strings of my blood and a clear liquid that must be plasma seeped from popped red cells. “So how's—?” She stops herself and a dull faux pas glare washes over her. “—your morning been?” she finishes.

“Fine. Except for this.” I let my pocked hand pulse upon my knee. “And how's Ingot?”

“Oh. Well, she's fine. Things are…well, she's okay.”

I see her refuse to look up at me. Granted, she needs to concentrate as she plucks this shrapnel bit by bit from my freshly bleeding palm. She is pretending that her entire world is a rolling marble trapped somewhere in the curves of that palm. If she loses view of it for a second, if she turns away to look up and face me, she will never be able to find her way back to that world again.

“Weather's starting to turn,” she says after she reaches the second half of my hand, on her slow approach toward my bent wrist.

“It is. I almost needed a coat this morning.”

“I don't think I'm ready for the winter,” she says.

I see my chance to pluck her wings and pin her down. Like her, I refuse to look at her. “At least I'm not by the sea. Can you imagine the winter they'll be having on the other side of the woods?”

I feel a pinch as she digs one of the pincers deeper into the pulpy muscle than she needs. “I'm sure,” she says. “Must be awful.”

I feel satisfied. I look over her head and trace the grain of the wooden cabinet. This room is analogous to our kitchen. I wonder if all of these buildings here were constructed as homes, and only later were some transfigured to be office buildings and hospitals. I keep our fine china in that cabinet right over her head, the paprika and thyme just to the right. We even have the same sink. The same counter running along the wall. In our home, though, this reclined, cushioned table coated with tissue paper is a marble island.

“Look, Margot,” I relinquish, “I'm sorry. That was—I shouldn't have said that.”

“Hey, Elizabeth, don't be sorry.” She puts a hand on my knee, my other knee, and squeezes it consolingly. “Don't be sorry.”

She finishes plucking out the glass shards in silence, and then rinses my hand with a stinging disinfectant. I don't wince or whimper. I don't want to break the silence. Ms. Fasch suddenly seems to me just as trapped in her own cocoon here as I am. She turns her back to me when she's done and begins washing her hands and calipers in the sink. “Have a good day, Elizabeth. I'll see you—” She wants to say at the next PTA meeting but she catches herself. This time, she turns and makes direct contact with my eyes, before turning back to the sink where she disappears.

I bid goodbye to an empty room, “I'll see you, Margot. Have a good day.” I want to ask her, before she can no longer hear me,
Are you afraid, Margot? Are you afraid to disappear
? But I don't. As the winter rises, she will fall, a withered husk of a moth. Her legs will jerk for a bit, her wings will spasm weakly to flip her off her back, but eventually the frost will claim her. This is the life of moths.

* * *

As I walk home from the hospital, the sun has risen almost to its peak. In this state, days get lost as instants, and hours get lost in daze. The ice cream shop where I used to walk hand in hand with them, with Nickolas and Kyra, for hot chocolate late after dinner on days like these, on days when the summer seems further in time than the frozen oceanic winter, is gone. I stop for a moment and peer through the old splintered plank of wood that has been nailed up over the storefront. CONDEMNED, it says, drawn in faded red paint. The window is starched with patterned dust. The glare of the sun makes it difficult to see. But as my eyes adjust, as I put my toes right up against the wall and my nose almost touching to the glass, I can see the frayed wires hanging from the broken ceiling tiles. The long counter where we used to sit in the high stools has been pulled from the ground. Ripped, it appears, because there are strands of dry wall and steel piping sticking jaggedly out of the rough foundation where it was once planted, like roots left behind from a devoured plant.

The end of my arm has been re-wrapped once again in gauze. This time, professionally. My hand is balled inside of it and I feel like the whole thing has been lopped off. The glass, what little of it remains smooth after the dust, is fogged from my breath so I move on.

As I wait for the light to turn green, a bus pulls up and the doors swing open. A man in a tweed suit with a torn leather briefcase shambles down. I see him in my periphery but ignore him, keep my eyes down, and cross the street when the light turns. There is a quick flap of wings behind me as a flock of tired moths appears on a current of wind and climbs aboard the bus. They pay their fare and sit down. Ms. Fasch is not among them. She has never worked the night before in her life, because of Ingot, and has most likely just begun her shift this morning. The bus vanishes in a cloud of dust and exhaust. I feel its momentum and see the impression of its heavy tires on the dirt of the street as it passes, but there's nothing to see.

This whole damn world it seems is winding down to something slow and worthless. We're a town at the end of it, at the end of the world. The only thing further than here is the beach on the other side of the woods, lorded over by the General.
He
used to talk about the General as though the General were a demon. A manipulative spool slowly drawing in the thread of the world. Soon, he would have the whole thing collected, neatly coiled, and secured in his pocket. At his disposal he would re-sew the world as he sees fit. But those are the things I keep unconcerned with.

I continue home. At one point I become caught up in the current of a crowd of businessmen and women hurrying on their way to an early lunch. I am a leaf in an updraft, scurried along the sidewalk scratchingly. They drop me off in a gutter and go on their way, and I find myself staring at the opposite corner where just yesterday I saw Preacher Johns sitting in the gravel with his knees clutched to his chest and wrapped in the elbow of a torn flannel shirt, unbuttoned with a stained white tank top underneath. His other hand is a fist about a rolled-up newspaper as he repeatedly raps on his skull with his knuckles.

He and I used to take Nickolas and Kyra to see Preacher Johns peacock around the altar every Sunday morning. Kyra in her blue satin dress with the yellow frills down the front that she loves to flick during the quietest parts of the sermon. Nickolas dressed in his little suit and looking just like a shrunken copy of his father, walking side by side with him, their solemn visage identical yet masking entirely different views on theology and the world. Nickolas thinks God is a man sitting upon the clouds trying to sort the good from the bad. He, Jacob, my husband, thinks that God is an unknowable algorithm that controls the flow of tides, the disintegration of planets. An equation from which you can accurately predict every subtle change across the universe and across time.

When Preacher Johns was deposed and replaced by Reverend William Wiley last year, we stopped going altogether. This, perhaps, is my penance for letting a single man be the representative of my faith. I like to think that the gibberish Preacher Johns babbles between impacts of skull and knuckle contains a message for me. I like to think he means it that there is something left for me to do and that he knows that secret which is being kept from me. But looking at him, all I can think of is the way things were only a year earlier. I had never even noticed him there on the corner until nine days ago. Of course I had seen him. But I shirk him off the same as everyone else. Most of them do it from shame of ever having obeyed a man whom the archdiocese now sees unfit to lead a small ramshackle town like ours, and out of respect for Reverend Wiley, whom they all foresee as a savior and an usher to more fruitful times. I do it out of shame as well, but mine is a shame for everyone else, and for not being able to do anything but let him rot.

You can still see the indent his bony ass has left in the gravel. I look down the street to make sure no cars will appear out of the vagabond dust clouds, and I hurry across to where he had been sitting. I stand in his indent and turn until I am facing the direction he had been facing. You can see the defunct water tower in the distance just behind the bell of town hall. It sits past the outskirts of town, in the desert. The sun is shining brutally off of it, a great shining throb. I turn away and continue back home.

* * *

The door swings open heavily inwards, and the cloud of air that sweeps from it into my face is stale and smells of burnt toast. I stand there for a moment not wanting to go in. The light in there seems pale and unnatural. With the sun behind me I can see the dust floating in the strips of light cast by the blinds, a delicate universe in stop-motion. Who am I to sluice through like the rapture and throw them all from their orbits? I put my back to my house and take a long and sweeping scan of the town, or at least what I can see of it from there at the foothills of the dunes. The sun is eclipsed by the bulbous cap of the water tower. The bell tower strikes one off in the east. I hadn't been aware that it still kept time; I imagined it had stopped nine days earlier, shaken by the shockwave of an unfinished pine chair against concrete. But there it is, still functional.