Tarot Sour (6 page)

“It was in November, as the harshest winds were blowing in from the sea. The sheep slept in temporary shacks erected specifically for the winters. Food was scarce for all of us. As tragic as it was whenever another sheep fell dead from frostbite or starvation, we all secretly cheered that we might have a bite of its tough meat that night. I went hiking through the hills to keep my blood circulating, it was the only thing you could do there to keep warm. Mrs. Han-Yoon's fire pit was barely a crackle, and I was in no way accustomed to the thinness of the single lambs-wool blanket I'd been granted upon moving in. I found myself navigating the rocky end of the island, as nervous about snapping my ankle on a slick of ice as I was set on getting to the high point of the cliff where I could watch the waves slide the ice sheets around like spilt dominoes being tossed in the air by a flock of Baptist soothsayers.

“It was there that I saw him, scuffling along the icy shore with a small video camera clutched in one hand. I could tell right away that he was an American, from the flat lifeless haircut and the flannel jacket that he wore over denim slacks. He had a small kayak tied to a rock among the frozen reeds that looked like saber-teeth. He was there documenting poverty conditions in the Japanese farmlands for an independent film he had been commissioned for. I climbed down to talk to him. It had been months since I'd been able to have a real conversation with someone who could understand me. Maybe it was the loneliness, maybe it was the fact that when I'd left home, I'd been all too ready to settle down, only unwilling to do so with the wrong person. But three hours later when he boarded his kayak to head for the larger Ryukyu Islands to the east of us, I boarded with him.

“Two weeks later, we were walking hand in hand in Tokyo when a mugger accosted us in an alley, knocked him to the wet ground and pushed me up against the wall. He shook a knife in my face screaming something in hurried Japanese as I clutched my purse to my chest. Arnold simply stood calmly, dusted the muck off of his clothes, and stepped between the mugger and me. ‘Do you ever think this through?' he asked in as casual a manner as you've ever heard. The mugger was just in
shock
from Arnold's gall, he held the knife out at his side, and just stared at him with the widest eyes an Asian could muster. ‘You have no idea what this woman means to me. You have no idea whether I would be willing to fight to the death to protect her. What would you do? Would you
kill
for whatever might be in that purse?' The mugger cursed. I knew it was a curse because I'd heard Mrs. Han-Yoon say the same thing every time she pricked her finger with her darning needles. I knew then that I was going to marry him. And when we came back here, to America, that was the first thing we did.”

“That's a beautiful story, Mrs. Engel,” I say. “What happened with the mugger?”

She laughed, a wheat-dry laugh that should have shaken her apart by the fibers. “Well I had nothing of worth in there in the first place. Remember I'd just come from Ie, where the economy was based on geniality and returned favors. Arnold took out his wallet and tossed a few slips of paper yen to the ground, turned his back on the man, and ushered me with all the propriety of a President back to the main road… When Arnold died, he told me to fight for as long as I can to hold onto life, because whatever comes after certainly can't be as beautiful as this. But, Nurse Fasch, I'm tired of fighting. Do you know that my mother was in the hospital for
seven years
before she died? And every evening after the first that she'd been admitted, the doctors went home expecting her to be gone the next day. We have strength in my family. And I'm
tired
of it. Sometimes, I just want to be weak. Sometimes, I just want to do what's easiest, even though I don't believe it's the right thing to do. I miss my Arnold. Do you believe that there is only one person in this world anyone ever really belongs with?”

I nod my head without realizing that it's something I actually believe.

“So do I, Nurse Fasch. And I feel like the longer I hold on here, the less likely it is that I'll find him after I go. When he kissed me that night of the mugger, I felt that fire that I'd never felt with Julian. The fire that made me want to spend the rest of my life dying, just so that I could spend eternity with that man. I would do anything in this world to leave it, so that I could be with him again.”

She rolls onto her side and reaches her bony hand out to grab my forearm. I look at it.

“I'm strong, but I'm not strong enough to do it myself.”

I leap up from the chair, almost throwing her back into her place, and hurry out into the hall. I think of Benjamin again as I leave.

* * *

I remember when sunsets were beautiful things. Now the sun is the color of the dirt. This entire town is the color of dirt. And when it sets, it is simply a merging of two identical things. Only the night looks different, when the land becomes cold and blue. I want to hurry home where Frank will be ordering takeout for Emery's last night. But I can't.

The church, a tall building with a ruddy steeple, the only building in town other than village hall that really stands apart from the others, is only a block from my normal route between the hospital and home. A great imbalance lingers in my mind. I have only hours left to spend with Emery before the moon rises fully and he leaves. And yet this great unsettling pain is a thick pool of sinus pressure in my head, it is a weight on my lungs, my joints hurt, my muscles are tired. And so I find myself standing at the great church doors with my hands on the demon-horned handles, ready to sacrifice what little time I have to relinquish myself of this burden. I need absolution.

I pull the doors open outward with what can only be called gusto, and I march in. There is a wide wood-paneled crescent hall separated from the sanctuary by a barrier reef of tall glass doors. The pews are empty, the body of Christ hangs dolefully above the altar, his ribs casting diagonal zebroid shadows upon his stomach along with the dancing flicker of the candle-lit chandeliers that hang modestly and randomly above the aisles. The pneumatic spring of the doors sucks them closed behind me and makes me jump. I step up to the glass doors. I can hear my footsteps as you can only hear them in an empty church. In the silence I can hear the muffled thoughts of the stain-glassed saints as they discuss amongst themselves my presence.

A short old man slides open the door of the confessional booth and steps out. I look over my shoulder and when we make eye contact, he pulls his hat tight over his bald head and scurries out as though I can see his sins written upon his face. I watch him go, behind me, out the heavy doors. Beyond them, the world is just turning blue. Emery will be home by now, having picked Ingot up from her school just down the street. Frank will be there, sitting on the sofa with his shirt off, sweat built up in the shallow folds of his fat even though he hasn't done a thing since coming home from work, watching the TV and fondling his mistress in the folds of his brain. Completely ignorant to the fact that only hours earlier, I sat right there naked with my Benjamin and bade him farewell. The dampness of our own sweat probably still lingers in the thick foam cushion beneath the veneer, rolling along the wide steel springs like gumballs seeking their rest.

I make my way to the confessional and stand there for a moment with my hand on the thin folding door. Through the adjacent door I can hear the rustling scratch of human movement, the phlegmy rattle of an old man's throat. I pull open the door and step in. I have to sit before I can see again, and I have to winch my knees in tight against the wall. As my eyes adjust, I see the violet walls, I see the silhouette of a tired bearded face behind a screen. There is a small bulb above his head, I can see its twisted filament grinning. His face is hidden in long shadows, but I know who he is.

His head bobs, and only then do I know he is still alive. “How can I help you?” he asks.

I don't say anything. He turns and looks at me through the screen. When he moves, he looks to have scales, and the motion makes him appear to be swimming.

He squints and peers forward until his nose is almost touching the screen. “Do you seek penance?” he asks.

“Do
you
, Father?”

“I'm sorry?”

I think for a long moment. “I'm a nurse, Father. Today an old woman asked me to end her life because she didn't want to struggle anymore.”

He takes in a deep breath and leans back away from the screen. “I see. And…did you?” His voice is reviling. I have never truly understood what it means for someone to be speaking through his teeth until Reverend Wiley had deposed Preacher Johns from the pulpit, because that is how he speaks. Through his teeth, like a hissing snake.

“She asked me first thing in the morning, as soon as I got there. There are not many people who might know how that feels, Father, to walk around all day knowing a life rests in your hands.
You
do, Father.” I direct that at him in a hardened voice before softening it again. “I saw her old, pitiful face in every patient I saw. I heard her voice when I knew there were no voices there to be heard. Every vial of morphine my fingers grazed froze them there for just a second longer than they should have been. But, no. I couldn't do it. When my shift was over, after I signed out, I went back to her room with something in my pocket I'd stolen from the drug storeroom, something that would have killed her without pain. But as I stood in the doorway, as I stood there looking at her sleeping body hidden in the darkness of the curtained windows and the setting sun, I could not bring myself to contribute to ending someone's life. Even if it meant she might suffer awhile longer. I believe, as I've always believed, that life is a gift from God that shouldn't be squandered.”

“Then you've done nothing wrong. What is it that you're seeking penance for?”

I take another long moment to think. Then finally I say, “I'm not here seeking penance, Father. I'm here to offer it to
you
.” He doesn't say anything, though I sense a shifting of his soul beneath those robes. “You, Father Wiley, you're scarred with your misdeeds, and everybody ignores it because they say you're sent here by God. But I know who it is that's sent you.”

“And who is that?”

“You
know
who it is. General Anselmo. We all know why you're sitting in there right now instead of Father Johns. And the lives you're stealing here, Father, the boys you're shipping off for
him
to steal, those lives will not be forgotten. And when enough of them are lost, Father, they'll remember who sent them away.”

“I think you're confused, Daughter.”

“
I'll
remember who sent them away!” I cry it with quieted tears, tears quieted to respect what little solemnity remains in these, the hollowed halls of what was once my church.

I rattle the screen and propel myself from my seat and out of the booth. Those heavy, demon horn doors are closing behind me by the time the old man manages to slide his side of the confession booth open. He sees my back as I dissolve into the blue night. Half a block down, I turn back and I see his silhouette standing in the orange candlelight of the church as he holds the doors open trying to find me.

* * *

The sea breeze smells sweet. Ingot's hand, the warm little thing, picks at my lifeline. The moon above us is nearly full. In half a week's time, it will be. There is a single set of railroad tracks that run near town. They run to us from far in the desert and then turn toward the dunes where they disappear, winding around those hills. As it pulls away, Ingot's little hand goes still and she pulls herself against my leg. Her last vision of her brother will forever be his taut body vanishing into the train, dressed in the starched cloud blue uniform of the General's army.

As we watch it pull away from the station, a thin long building erected on the sand without a foundation, I decide two things. The somber mood of the evening has remained plastered in good cheer and optimism. As Emery sat there picking at the last hunks of kung pao with chopsticks he will never master, dressed in the uniform, unbuttoned to show his white t-shirt beneath, I begin to think about what it is that I really want out of all this. The train shushes slowly away, until all we can see is the moonlight caught in the plumes of steam, and then even those dissipate around the curves of the dunes, and Emery is gone.

The station is abandoned. But as we turn to walk, I see the unmistakable outline of Preacher Johns' fedora in the distance near town, watching us from atop a short hill. Frank puts a thick arm over my shoulder. I twist my torso to pull away from him, take three quick steps, and then maintain my pace there. I guide Ingot to go before me so I can pretend to be catching up to her, but it is obvious. The shadow of Preacher Johns descends into the shadow of the hill as we approach. Tomorrow, I am going to call my Benjamin. I want to tell Mrs. Engel that I have claimed my fire, and that I've done so because of her. And
then
, because I know the pain she is struggling with every day,
then
I will kill her.

Three: The Magician

At first, I try not to notice the masquerade. I try not to notice the way faces transform as they approach me. The wincing, the drawing up, as though monsters are born in my radius, as they orbit toward my epicenter, and then revert again to normalcy as they approach and escape the imaginary perimeter drawn around me. I watch children become sniveling buzzards. I watch men become the shadowed drooling things feared in the backs of closets and I watch women become haggard witches with hex on their dirty minds. It's a sour sight to see.

I spin with the slowness of a planet, rotating the gravel beneath me as I do, to secure the hot wax sun in place behind the bubble of the old water tower. That sun is an accusing eye. Ironic as it is that I use the water tower to duck away from it, I cannot quite stand the thought of staring directly into its fire. As a boy I go out to a wide empty field, and as I stand on the edge of the great shadow cast by a palm willow, I
do
stare up into the sun. My eyes bleed tears that I let sit upon my cheeks, and the wires of muscle try to shut the light out but I snap those with pliers of will and they fall limpid beneath my sockets. I stare until the planes of my eyes become burning solar flares. I imagine two small mounds of fire on the surface of the sun that give way to blooming irises in tandem. I stare to decipher the sun and its secrets, stare until the liquid surface becomes a series of distinguishable strands and fibers. If I choose to concentrate, I am sure that I will be able to pluck any of those strings, let it reverberate with the crackle of embers and the cackle of hydrogen, or I can snap the strings one by one and watch the atoms slide piecemeal away like beads until the sun is nothing but a filament shaking lifelessly within a bulb of hazy atmosphere. But I have no interest in
that
, in destroying it. I want the knowledge of the sun to seep into me. I want either the answers to the millions of mundane questions or the secrets of the three great ones: What do I do? What had I done? What does it mean that I am?

As a boy, I feel the sun drain me, pull everything from me, all intelligence, until I am left there dumb, an empty socket of skin attached by gravity to the wide planet. A scarecrow.

Eventually I become vaguely aware that a caterpillar has descended from a fine diamond string to crawl across my foot. At the time, I believe that caterpillars are the souls of the dead come to watch over us until they are sure that we have adjusted to their absence, at which point they will cocoon themselves. It is only when they sew their angel wings within those webs and hatch as butterflies that they will be able to travel to the afterlife. At the time, there is only one soul I have ever lost to the great sea of death. That is the first memory sent back to me by the sun after we have switched minds.

My solar flares extinguish, the bloomed irises wilt and are swallowed in the lava. The sun and I had traded eyes and come back. I tear my gaze away with the fear of becoming altogether lost between here and there. I step into the shade, beneath the striated curtain of the great willow, to cool. My face has burnt. It is hot and flaky to the touch and it hurts to cringe or blink. The very pressure of the pads of my fingertips gives a twang to my nerves. I look down. The caterpillar crawls off my shoe into its tangled mess of a nest of cool grass.
My dearest
, I think.
It is for you I sought out the wisdom of the sun
. I realize, watching the segmented pulse disappear beneath a thick blade, that my wish has been granted. I have come to know things that I hadn't known before. I have battled the sun and stolen its sight. Since then, it has hunted me down to steal that knowledge back. I exist in shadows, tucked behind corners, manipulating the principles of occlusion to my advantage. But in my age, I feel as though the earth has come to find me out and is trying to change its spin so as to point me out to its master.

I see Mrs. Hesse hurry down the sidewalk, bundled in a coat unnecessarily thick for the temperature with the collar turned up. I lift my arm in the air and wave the old rolled-up newspaper I'm clutching at her and scream something about the coming end of the world. She looks at me and pauses. One of the saddest, pitying looks crosses her face and then she hurries on again. Poor woman, one of the few who refuses to transform in my presence. She always was a devoted one, and though I could always tell that her husband wasn't nearly as interested in my sermons as she was, and of course who can blame the children for lilting their eyes toward the domed ceiling, they always came with her. When Reverend Wiley strolled into town, it was Elizabeth Hesse who led the protests, who wrote the petitions to the archdiocese, who picketed outside the church every Sunday morning. It touches my heart to see how deeply I have affected her, but at the same time it has been deeply troublesome as well.

I go to her one Sunday morning, as she marches back and forth with her children playing jacks on the sidewalk nearby, and I say to her, “Elizabeth, I think you've placed too much importance on me.”

“I haven't, Preacher Johns,” she says to me.

“But you have, dear. You have. What I do in there—” I nod my head toward the thick oak doors that, for some reason, have been jeweled with a horridly snarling gargoyle face, intricately carved, split straight down the center with a long curling horn on each side to grip. “What I do in there,
anybody
can do. It's a profession, no different than a doctor, or a businessman, or a chef. I lost my job for reasons that, whether valid or not, were real. Going in there, Elizabeth, it doesn't mean that you're accepting what happened to me, it just means that you aren't giving up on your faith. Reverend Wiley is a messenger, just as I was. It's the message that matters, Elizabeth, not the voice delivering it.”

“But it does matter, Preacher Johns,” she answers. She up-ends her picket sign and leans on the post, looks over my shoulder at her children. “Because we both know that he isn't delivering the same message you were.”

I never quite know if she knows what she is talking about. If she knows who has sent him to town, who it was that secured the Reverend's position as well as my dismissal by becoming a profligately superfluous benefactor to the archdiocese. Or if she just senses the subliminal differences, in infinitesimal degrees, between his sermons and mine. The way he stresses his words, the places he chooses to pause for dramatic effect. The analogies he makes to current events, to the coastal front, to the General, whom I have never mentioned to an audience.

I wipe a line of sweat off of my forehead. The gravel beneath me is starting to bite into the soft parts of my thighs. Normally I would spend a few more hours before returning home, but the heat has slowly been rising the past two weeks, despite the coming winter, and I haven't come quite prepared to deal with it. I gather my hat from the ground, into which passersby who didn't know me, or who hardly knew me, have tossed three dollars and change, slide them with a rattle into my pockets, and then stand there until the streets are empty. I continue waving my hands in the air, waving the newspaper and smacking myself lightly with it from time to time until a break in traffic comes and I slink back out of the street and into the alleyways that forge the less-traveled paths of town.

The coolness of my shaded kitchen sweeps over me as I step in from the street. I toss the newspaper into the wastebasket and shut the door behind me. I never lock my doors. There is no need to. Not in this town.

I have gotten in the habit of, upon entering my home, stopping to listen to whatever sounds might be around me. There is the scurrying of the rats in the basement, hungry things with small, sharply focused eyes. There is the slow dripping of water in the sink. There is my breath. It comes heavier these days than it used to. I am older these days, than I used to be.

I go to the refrigerator. I know before I look that there won't be much in there. I don't get out much, except during the mornings when I go out to spread the good word. There is half a packet of ham from the deli, leftover from two weeks earlier and, by the smell, not quite yet spoiled. I take it out and make a sandwich on two slices of bread that, though stale, haven't quite yet begun to mold besides for a tiny white starburst on the corner of the outermost slice. The bread feels heavy, it's surface as rough and crannied as the desert floor that leads up into the dunes. I slice it diagonally. The surface resists and snaps, shatters a screen of hard crumbs onto the plate.

I open the basement door and stand there, listening again, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness. The only sound is the scratch and scurry of the rats, which stop as soon as the slow creak of the door echoes. I flick on the light. The jolt of the electricity pouring down into the cup of the filament shakes the wire from which the bulb hangs, down above the drain imprinted in the floor, above the old wash basin I haven't used in years. There is a quick flurry of long-nailed claws as the rats run to the shadows that remain behind boxes and in the deepest creases of corners.

The stairs creak with my weight. Since my
retirement
a year ago, I have dedicated myself to the sin of gluttony. Better than some of the alternatives, I rationalize late at night as I sit at the kitchen table by the distant light of the windowed stars reflecting off the desert. I keep one hand on the guardrail, one beneath the saucer that holds the sandwich, and my eyes on the spaces between the slats of the steps, the spaces where my heels are vulnerable. The basement has no windows, and the stairway bends so that the light from the kitchen cannot continue past the first half dozen or so. I stand above the drain and watch my shadow sway around me as gravity pulls the bulb in a wide arc over my head. I watch for the shadows of the rats. I think I see movement in the back corner behind a stack of boxes that contains clothes I should have donated to the church years ago.

I place the plate just to the side of the drain, step over it, and go back up to the kitchen, shutting off the light and locking the door behind me as I return to the daylight. These days, the rats are all I have left to myself. I wonder if they might appreciate the things that I do for them.

The bathroom is down the hall. I go with the intentions of showering the morning's dust off of myself. On the way, I pass my bedroom and go in to sit on the edge of the bed. From there I can see out onto the city. My house is built on a low hill, and so even though it is one of the scarce one-level ranches in town, I actually have a better view than most people. I've been lucky to find it after being dismissed from the church. The latter half of my former life was spent living in the small home attached to the rectory. Though, I suppose there isn't much market these days for homes, particularly not here where the world is closer to ending than anywhere else.

And indeed, the world is ending. As a boy, my parents frequented South America, where my father owned several burgeoning mining companies. I spent the majority of my days being served by the natives who worshipped my father as an economic god. He brings with him jobs, prospects, hope, for anyone who needs such things. In fact, it is the worship and devotion the villagers pay him that will one day inspire me to become a Preacher. While we are there we live in a humble three-room hut, stitched together with bamboo and palm leaves on a bare dirt foundation (one of the reasons why I feel so immediately at home when I come here to this city for my job). It is a ravishing difference from the scaling east coast mansion we live in for most of our lives, the months when my father can outsource his duties to vice presidents and accountants and developers all who swear their allegiance to him.

It is there that I go, as a boy of sixteen, just fallen out of love with a native South American girl who dies of a spider bite, to the field in search of the knowledge of the sun. One of the village elders has, over the years, taught me the myths and legends of their people and how, though many of them have tried, none have successfully been able to commune with the god of the sun. Why I was able to, I don't know. I tell the elder who had taught me the story what happens when I go out to the field, and he falls without hesitation to his knees, waves his arms toward me in reverence. I ask him to stand up and I tell him, “Don't worship me. The only messages I've come back with, will make the world hate me.” I tell him everything I have come to know, all of the intimate knowledge I have stolen from the sun, and he agrees that we will tell no one. In fact, we agree that I should make every excuse not to come back to that village again, a difficult conspiracy by which I loyally abide. I am old enough, I argue six months later as my parents begin preparing their next trip south, to stay home without their guidance, and they permit it.

Of everything that seeps into my brain during those three hours when I stand like an Easter island statue gazing skyward as my skin crisps and peels, the most pertinent is a series of teachings by a thirteenth century Italian philosopher, Asam Cifezzo. Though he is unpopular during his own time, and in fact during all times after his, he maintains a small and thoroughly devoted cult following that serendipitously accepts his teachings for what they are. And what they are, in fact, is the knowledge of the sun. In
his
youth, Cifezzo studies ancient mythology from the furthest reaches of the world, and in a unique, some might say fateful, synthesis of otherwise disconnected strands of a greater truth that have never quite been glimpsed by any of the individual cultures who stumble upon the crumbs, Cifezzo makes the revelation all on his own. He spends four years standing on the peak of a mountain on the island of what will become Sicily, unmoving, staring into the sun. If what I gain after three hours is enough to redefine the most basic marbles of the grander universe, I can only imagine the horrid secrets Cifezzo uncovers after four years.

Wars wage around him, with his skin as blackened with char as the rocks that stand sentry around him. Soldiers are afraid to touch him because, they will later say, his eyes are boiling pots of fire with the lids peeled wide, his skin that of a burnt lizard, and they think he has become a demon or, if possible, something worse. Even after four years, Asam Cifezzo does not manage to steal
all
the knowledge of the sun, but only a slight majority of it before, fearing that he will lose the way back permanently, he decides to prematurely sever the cord he has tethered between the sun and himself. Upon waking, he returns to his home, a small village in southern Italy where he was once a sheepherder in addition to his private hobbies of scholarship, and he transforms it into a church. He does not preach, he does not advertise. But slowly, by word of mouth from confidante to confidante, friend to friend, rarely between strangers—those who hear what Cifezzo has come back to say immediately take it for capital Truth, and nobody wants to risk setting the religious authorities on him as a heretic by alerting someone they don't already trust with their lives—he gains a small following. They come to his home in the deep of starless nights, taking twisting paths and alleys that circumvent not only the most straightforward way to Cifezzo's, but also the slightly inconvenient ways. There are times when his disciples, some of which live not five minutes away by foot, take upwards of two hours to reach the man's home just so that they can listen to twenty minutes or so of dogma before treading another two hours home.