Andromeda Klein (15 page)

The girl named Bethany said, “Andromeda, that’s such an unusual name.”

“What?”

In Greek mythology, Andromeda is an Ethiopian princess whose parents chained her to a rock to be eaten by a sea monster sent by Poseidon to punish her mother for insulting some sea nymphs. She is rescued by Perseus, who takes possession of her after turning her fiancé to stone with the Gorgon’s head he is carrying in a bag. Or it’s also a constellation and galaxy M31, or a science fiction book about a space disease …

Andromeda was so caught up in her own train of thought that she couldn’t choose what to try to say.

“It means sea-monster bait,” she finally said, on Altiverse AK’s prompting. “The Chained Maiden.”

Bethany responded with a nod and a quick though not unkind “whatever” expression.

“Our Andromeda is just a bit weird,” said Rosalie. “I’m just kidding.”

“It’s good to be weird,” said Bethany. Oh, if only the people who went around saying things like that really meant them.

Bethany reminded Andromeda of somebody, but she couldn’t quite place it. A familiar-looking face. Kind of soothing to look at.

“You’re hopeless,” said Altiverse AK, and there was no denying it.

“Come on, everybody,” said Rosalie without looking up from the laptop monitor. “Drink more!”

ix.

You could stab yourself in the heart with the pointy top of the floor lamp. You could unscrew the lightbulb and stick your fingers in the socket, sucking on them first to get them wet. If you were strong enough, you could attach a couple of long extension cords to the television and carry it out through the sliding doors to the pool, turn it on, and jump in with it, or you could simply fill your pockets with stones. You could expose the wires of the electrical outlet and hold on, or simply poke something thin and metal into the socket. You could pull the weatherstripping off the windows and door, tie the pieces together, and hang yourself from a door or window frame. You could take all the heavy objects in the room, load them on the couch, prop it up with a yardstick, position yourself underneath one of the legs, and knock the yardstick down….

Taking an inventory of the room and imagining all the possible ways in which these objects could be used to commit suicide was a reliable method of distracting and quieting the mind in stressful social situations. Andromeda had once counted twenty-nine in this room, though at this moment she was stuck on eighteen.

It didn’t take many swallows for Andromeda to feel the martini. She quickly lost track of time. The space between her and the others in the room seemed to expand. This was partly because of the drink and partly because she never understood much of what they were talking about anyway—the TV shows she’d never seen, the celebrities she’d never heard of, and all the bands, bands, bands. She couldn’t begin to keep track of them, and she failed whenever she tried to educate herself about them because they all sounded the same to her, and when it came down to it she wasn’t that interested. Absolutely everyone seemed to be in a band, and all the people in their bands were in other bands too, plus there were other bands, real ones, from other cities, who had CDs and so forth, who were exactly like the ones who weren’t famous. She couldn’t tell the real ones from the fake ones by the way they sounded or looked. The thumping machine music had been replaced by one of these bands: baseball caps, sneakers, sunglasses, growling voices saying “hey” and “whoa” all the time, and “I’m in love with” this or that.

She had regretted coming almost as soon as she’d entered the room. That said, she had to admit, the martini was helping.

Andromeda leaned against the wall sipping, more or less enjoying the faint sensation of the center of consciousness in her head falling backward and righting itself, then beginning to flip again. Mixed drinks did that much better than wine, which was what she always drank at home, when she refilled the Daisy scrying bottle with Carlo Rossi from the parents’ jug in the pantry.

Christmas trees, she thought, sipping her drink in silence. It wasn’t the best martini in the world. Everyone at the Old Folks Home knew that Andromeda Klein’s drink was a Bombay martini, up with olive. This had come about because it was the only drink whose name she could think of at the time, a choice that charted the course of the rest of her short drinking life up to the current moment. While the others occupied themselves killing zombies on video, and nodding to the monotonous music, and chattering about things she couldn’t really hear anyway, Andromeda stared at her cup and thought. The thought chain could be traced, quite far back if you stretched it, all the way to the gods and goddesses of the Egyptians and even perhaps to the formation of the earth and heavens out of limitless nothing, but at least as far back as the Water Tower Temple Working that had predicted St. Steve’s arrival. The backward sequence went: cup, Ned Ned, the Old Folks Home, the hedge behind John Street, the Gold Duster, the DMV, the IRS, the library, the copy machine, St. Steve, A. E. Waite, Daisy, the Water Tower Temple …

It had once been a functioning water tower or storage tank, but now it was simply a great cylindrical shell of deep-rusted, flaking iron on the hill overlooking, yet far, far above, McKinley Intermediate School. From a distance it looked like a tiny reddish earthen jar or a pot missing its lid. It had been damaged by fire. The roof was long gone. There was a bit of illegible graffiti on the outside, up to a height of about ten feet or so, but there wasn’t as much as there might have been because it was actually rather hard to reach. It sat on a narrow shelf of rock, with a sharp drop on either side, created by a series of disastrous mudslides in the seventies that had destroyed several houses—the kind they built propped up against the hill on stilts—and even killed some people below, including some children at McKinley, which had been a high school at the time. (This account was in the Hillmont-Clearview land survey publication documenting the event in the IHOB’s reference collection, and it had been discussed in the news again because of the recent heavy rains and the fear of more mudslides in the softer areas of upper Hillmont.)

To get to the abandoned tank, you had to climb a steep, crumbly hill in the front, or take the long way around the back and climb down, and this way involved traversing a gulley. There were more conveniently located spots for clandestine drinking and drug-taking and making out and whatnot. Every time Andromeda noticed evidence of people having made the effort, beer cans or cigarette butts or the like, she was surprised. It was quite rare.

The only way to enter the tower cylinder itself was through a small hole in the side, where a pipeline had once been. Andromeda could make it through easily, as could Daisy with a bit more effort. Rosalie and Elisabeth would have had a tough time, had they ever been in a position to try. It was the perfect temple. They used spray paint to decorate it with the proper symbols, modifying them for this or that working, hanging silks and banners when necessary. Never did they find anything disturbed when they returned. The floor didn’t drain very well, so during the rainy stretches it would get boggy and clogged with fallen eucalyptus leaves. They had used large rocks and other objects to build a causeway through the mud, leading from the opening to the center altar and from there to all four compass points. It was even possible to circumambulate the altar, with large steps, though there were gaps in the circle of stones because it was a work in progress and it wasn’t all that easy to find stones of the right size in the vicinity.

This was the scene of their best and most effective magical workings. On a clear night with a good moon, there was just enough silver light coming through the open roof, filtered through the eucalyptus, to read by; and when it had rained heavily enough to flood it, the light reflected from the pools of water was beautiful and weedgie; the interior was sheltered from wind, so candles and lamps tended to stay lit.

One of these workings had, in Andromeda’s view, directly conjured St. Steve, who appeared exactly three days after the elaborate love spell (which had incidentally conjured a boyfriend for Daisy as well, a boy named Lawrence, who had been found parked outside Daisy’s house when they got back home). St. Steve she had first noticed trying to use the library’s ancient copy machine, which wasn’t working at the time. Andromeda had added toner, but it still didn’t work, so she offered to make copies for him on the machine in the back. It was a flyer advertising a car for sale and some tax forms from the tax form binders in Reference. She noted the name, Andrew Elliot, though she was later to regret not thinking to look for other information, like the address or birth date. She never did learn his exact age or where he lived.

“Sorry they didn’t come out that well,” she said when she emerged from the staff area. “This isn’t the best place to make copies.” She was nervous talking to him, but she was nervous talking to most people. She wondered if people in the library, Marlyne, Gordon, or any of the patrons, were watching her. Her face felt red and her heart pounded. There was nothing very special about him, and he seemed completely uninterested in her. There was no reason for her to react that way. It was as though her body could tell the future and was getting a head start, as though it knew she would soon be all twisted up mentally on his account, for his sake. There might have been a bit of the trademark Andromeda reverse magic going on, because the thought did occur to her and she might well have articulated it, as a kind of joke: What would happen if I flipped out and got totally obsessed with this guy just because of the stupid Water Tower Working? It seemed so unlikely, but it was what happened.

She was sweating, like she did all too often, and it must have been obvious to him because he asked her if she was all right.

“Yeah,” she said. “No. It’s always too hot in here.”

“It is, yeah,” he said. “Well, thanks anyway, Monique? Maryanne? Madeleine?” If he hadn’t tried out those names and pointed to her
M
pendant, she might never have thought to check his name against Agrippa’s Latin gematria tables. But he had asked and she had begun to tell him, “Mille,” meaning “one thousand.” And then he said, “Thanks, Millie,” and turned to walk away.

For some reason she’d never been able to figure out, she had blurted out: “Hey, I might be interested in that—what you’re, what you’re selling.”

“The Duster?” he said kind of doubtfully. Well, why not? Other than that she didn’t have a license or any money. “It’s kind of a handful, to be honest, but it’s still a nice car. ’Seventy-four. Slam sex.” He had added that she didn’t seem the muscle-car type. Later, researching everything she could find in the library and on the Web about “muscle cars,” she learned he had meant to say “slant six,” which was apparently some wonderful type of engine. It was certainly true that if there was a muscle-car type, she was not it, but it offended her nonetheless to be excluded. Why couldn’t she be a muscle-car girl if she wanted, except for the small matter of not knowing how to drive? As Marlyne always said, maybe she could find a boyfriend to drive her around in it. She could just pick one out and hand him the keys.

Andrew Gold Duster Elliot told her his number, squinting and jokingly reading it off his own flyer as though he couldn’t remember it.

“You gonna write it down?” he said.

“No, I’ll remember.”

She was reciting it in her head, singing it to herself like Gordon, but as soon as he was gone and she was out of sight in the vacuum she lifted her shirt and wrote it on her stomach. It was an unfamiliar area code. She looked at herself in the mirror, and tried to be objective in considering whether it was possible to see her as attractive from some angle, and was relieved that she didn’t look
too
too bad. He was just like any other patron, besides not being elderly or smelling like milk. Why had he made her so nervous? she asked her reflection, and Altiverse AK had answered: “Because he looks like A. E. Waite.” And it had a point, he did. The mustache, the sad eyes. Plus a smell that she realized later was sweat and oil (because the Gold Duster still burned oil a bit and you always smelled a little oily after riding in it).

After that, back at her post at the desk in the Children’s Annex, she calculated the Agrippa Latin gematria value of his name—1234—and thought about his resemblance to A. E. Waite and his Roman numeral I baseball cap. A discreet consultation of the cards in a space cleared out of the center desk drawer revealed the Magician, the King of Pentacles, the Devil, and the Lovers, a card that not only suggested lust but also was “her” card, according to Daisy and the Golden Dawn. She found nothing about him on the Internet. Reverse lookup of his number showed no listing, but the area code was a mobile number from Hammerfield, Illinois. She pictured a field with rows of neatly ranked hammerheads. Just visiting, then? She felt a little disappointed at that possibility, though also slightly relieved, perhaps, because the obsessive maelstrom she was anticipating and half planning for the sake of argument would obviously lead to tears in one way or another.

Illinois—a little research revealed that that was where the
I
on his cap most likely came from: the University of Illinois, the Fighting Illini. Illini was the name of an Indian tribe. She was already planning a way to try to work this knowledge into a conversation. “Ah, the Fighting Illini. Part of the Big Ten Conference, of course.” Whatever the Big Ten Conference could be. She’d have to ask the dad about it.

Maybe Mr. Fighting Illini was selling his car because he was moving back to Illinois, where he most likely attended college. Champaign-Urbana, Illinois. Approximately 140 miles from Lake Michigan. By the time she had finished this research, she had already started, she now believed, looking back, to develop a crush on him. But almost more than that, she was loving the research, the calculations, the coming together of elements, and her own slightly strange interest. If she had had anything else to do with her time, if she had not been in the desolate Children’s Annex, the whole thing might not have even happened. But it all made sense when you realized it had been foretold and ordained by the Water Tower Working, and by her own instinctive, uncontrollable reaction to his physical presence. Daisy had gone through a precocious boy-crazy phase at an early age, and Andromeda had faked it well enough to keep up with her, but now, six years later, she was finally getting a sense of what it was not to fake it, and it actually felt kind of wonderful and awful because she hated the idea of being a late bloomer like that.