Andromeda Klein (4 page)

“You should let me do your makeup for you sometime,” said Marlyne. Translation: You look like shit, Andromeda.

A visit to the bathroom confirmed it, to no great surprise. Her “look” was one big ball of terrible. She had started the day with decent, straight hair and a subtle hint of Egyptian eyes, but both had rapidly degenerated in the wind and drizzle and heat and anxiety. She did what she could. Hair up was slightly better, even if it meant people could see her ears and more of her neck, which she felt was far too long and narrow. As at school, the heat in the library was deathly. She visited the thermostat on the way back from the bathroom and turned it down from the maximum (which was so high it didn’t even register on the gauge), though she knew it would get turned right back up again as soon as an elderly patron complained that the heat was “blowing cold air.”

“The new you,” said Marlyne. “How’d you get here, on your bike? You need to get your license.”

Andromeda was aware.

“Or a boyfriend to drive you around.”

“Mm,” said Andromeda Klein. Marlyne was wearing a sweater. How could she stand it? Even in her light, cotton button-down men’s dress shirt from Savers, Andromeda felt like melting cheese. Marlyne never broke a sweat, somehow. The crisscross pattern of her sweater evoked, once again, the Two of Swords, yet another minor synch.

Andromeda retrieved a couple of cartomancy volumes from the 133s and took them to a table in the deserted Children’s Annex, one of four trailerlike structures joined to the main building by covered paths they called breezeways. If, in your head, you divided the main building into three sections (for Reference, Periodicals, and General Fiction upstairs), the library complex as a whole could be viewed as an astrological temple in the classic Renaissance Hermetic style, with a room for each of the seven traditional Ptolemaic planets. This Andromeda had arranged by discreetly consecrating each room or section to the appropriate planetary demon and placing charged sigils—in colors drawn from Agrippa’s gemological-planetary correspondences—in hidden spots at each location. She made a point of visualizing astral diagrams of the appropriate planets when she entered each room, in order to strengthen the links. Thus had the Clearview Park Public Library become the Bibliotheca Templi Hermetici, known and seen only by Andromeda Klein and whatever spirits might happen to notice. The Children’s Annex had small tables and chairs and was a little uncomfortable, but it had been consecrated to Mercury—so it was the appropriate area for drawing down influences of use in studying and interpreting the Book of Thoth, she reasoned.

No one was near, so she risked a very quick, very low-key Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram and followed it with a truncated Invocation of Thoth. The Sign of Harpocrates, a finger or thumb over the lips, looked perfectly normal in a library, but once, she had been caught doing the Sign of Horus in the Temple of the Moon and an elderly lady had complained that there was a “crazy person loose upstairs.”

She carefully laid out the Two of Swords and the nine cards she had drawn before it earlier that day in the girls’ bathroom, working backward from position ten at the top of the column at the right, to the circle of future, past, crowning, and grounding, ending with “this crosses you” and “this covers you.” This procedure always gave her an odd sense of going back in time. She gasped slightly because card number one, the “covers you” card, denoting the general situation, was in fact the Magician, who appeared to have played such a prominent role in the Daisy dream. Major synch, if only to indicate that Andromeda was on the spread’s wavelength and vice versa.

There was no law against it, but she always felt just a bit furtive and nervous about spreading the cards—especially in public like this, though there was no one there to observe.

Traditional tarot readings often begin with a significator, a card chosen to represent the querent or questioner, over which the other cards are laid. Daisy’s method had been haphazard and unpredictable, but she had tended to use the Lovers to signify Andromeda in readings, because the Golden Dawn attributions specifically associated this card with the Andromeda legend in Greek mythology. This was, obviously, a terrible idea, since it removed a very important card from the divinatory possibilities at the outset. Because of this, many authorities question whether a significator should be used at all; most tend to reject the traditional method of selecting a significator from the court cards on the basis of hair and eye color. The significator should be chosen, if at all, on some basis with more depth: psychology, astrology, level of magical attainment. That was Andromeda’s view. However, it occurred to her that, rightly or wrongly, she had begun to think of the Two of Swords as a kind of significator, a symbolic picture of Andromeda Krystal Klein. Perhaps that was the sense in which it was “the outcome.” She was being shown her own, rather counterintuitive significator.

It was because of this train of thought that Andromeda snickered out loud in spite of herself when, just to see, she drew a card at random to serve as her significator, and it turned out to be the Page of Cups—the traditional card for females with light brown hair and eyes like hers. That was a big, and fairly weedgie, synch because the figure Pixie had depicted as the Page of Cups had played a role in the weedgie Daisy dream. Also, it was, perhaps, the Universe telling her not to dismiss traditional customs and practices so lightly.

The other cards in the spread were mostly small cards, bristling with swords, though the King of Pentacles in the “hopes and fears” space might allude to—had always seemed to allude to—St. Steve, who was certainly a hope and a regret, if not exactly a fear. There he was, staring at her with A.E.’s sad eyes as Pixie had drawn them. It was hard to decide how to relate A.E.’s court cards to the Golden Dawn’s
Book T
attributions, but if A.E.’s Kings corresponded to the Golden Dawn’s Princes rather than to the Knights, then he was also, apparently, Emperor of the Gnomes.

Swords are spiritual, creative, but couldn’t they also be dangerous? They could slice you up. All depends on who holds them. In position seven was the Eight of Swords, another “hoodwinked” girl (in A.E.’s phrasing), this one tied to a post amongst a garden of eight swords: conflict, crisis, betrayal. It had never struck her just how many blindfolded girls there were in this deck. Besides the Magician, there was only one other major arcana card in the spread, in the second “crossing” position, the High Priestess, who has a crescent moon under her foot. She represents not only the moon, but also the Egyptian goddess Isis, as well as the priestess of the Temple of Thoth, according to Mrs. John King van Rensselaer, whose book lay open before Andromeda.

As for the Two of Swords, the Shemhamphorash attributions assigned to it the angels Ieiazel and Mebahel; and also, of course, by implication, the Goetic demons Sallos and Orobas.

“Mmm, Orobas,” Andromeda said, nodding, as though that explained a lot. Andromeda’s cards were covered with her own careful notes, fit into the margins and around Pixie’s figures: Hebrew and Greek characters, Qabalistic attributions, planetary symbols, page references to Agrippa’s
Three Books of Occult Philosophy
and other important works. But she hadn’t thought to note the small cards’ Goetic demons and the Shemhamphorash angels till now. She wrote the names in the upper and lower margins of the card, the angels’ names on top and its demons’ names upside down on the bottom; then she carefully drew their seals lightly in pencil, so that they could be traced over in ink when she got home. She would have to find the time to inscribe the names and sigils on the rest of the cards as well, for the sake of completeness. “And for the sake,” said Altiverse Andromeda K, “of providing evidence, should you ever be put on trial for a crime you did not commit, that you are not guilty by reason of insanity.” Andromeda’s mind formed silent words to the effect of “Shut your trap,” though AAK did not actually have a trap.

Aside from the Magician and the Page of Cups, none of the figures depicted on the cards in the girls’ bathroom spread had appeared in her dream, that she could recall, though she had seen the High Priestess’s pillars, minus the High Priestess herself, flanking an empty chair. They had looked like a large number eleven—the number of magick.

She took a breath. Numbers are living things, the key to understanding “euery thing hable to be knowen,” as Dr. Dee had rendered Pico della Mirandola’s famous thesis in his introduction to the English edition of Euclid. They are their own worlds, every one of them infinite, and each a gateway to the others. The spread vibrated with Two-iness, Six-iness, Airiness, and a kind of Mooniness, too. For a fraction of a tick it was a vision of deep, dramatic beauty, of numbers and planes and spheres and things inside and beyond themselves, of abstractions and embodiments and their emblems pulsing beneath the mercurial sector of the heavens represented by the astral symbols on the annex ceiling. Such moments were priceless and felt like falling. But she failed to hold the flash in her mind, and it faded to darkness and confusion almost at once, as though someone had suddenly extinguished a lamp and kicked everything over in the shadows. That was how it always was.

She noted the spread in her tarot diary and gathered up the cards. The tarot diary was a list of dates with strings of Roman and Arabic numerals, Hebrew and Latin letters, a record of readings she had done with herself as the subject. It looked like a crazy person’s math homework. A wiser or more learned person, a Master Therion or a Giordano Bruno or a Pythagoras, or a god, could have made sense of the numbers and letters, might have translated them into a map of Andromeda Klein and the bit of her that overlapped with the Universe, but Andromeda Klein herself was lost.

ii.

Why did Andromeda Klein want Den to retrieve Daisy’s tarot deck all of a sudden? It was because Daisy was coming back to life and had instant-messaged her in a dream.

Daisy’s death from leukemia the year before had been sudden. Andromeda certainly hadn’t expected it. She had returned from the deeply regretted family trip to Mount Shasta, full of St. Steve anxiety, only to discover that Daisy was gone forever. Remission is only remission until it’s not, and what they had celebrated as a cure had turned out not to be in the end. The week before the Shasta trip, just as St. Steve had abandoned her with his horrible “hi there,” Daisy had also broken up with her, as she did from time to time. This meant a total cutoff of communication, and the cold shoulder at school, followed by a subsequent reconciliation, if Andromeda tried hard enough and gave Daisy presents.

One of the mom’s many accusations against Andromeda was that she lacked the capacity to feel guilt. There might have been some truth in that, despite the trivial nature of the mom’s complaints. Was it possible for anyone to feel truly guilty about using the wrong cup or walking down stairs on the wrong side or failing to hold toast the right way? Guilt of any kind was usually little more than regret plus embarrassment, with a bit of showing off added. Yet with Daisy, Andromeda had felt something close to guilt, not only because of the trip (which had left Daisy to do a planned Operation of Magick alone) but also because St. Steve had been a strain on their friendship right to the end. Andromeda had kept him as secret as she could, as she’d promised, though Daisy had suspected and had tried everything—from threats to pleading to trickery—to uncover the details. Andromeda had let a few things slip, and Daisy had been able to guess a few more; but Andromeda, usually a pushover, had never given in. In time, it might have blown over, as things do, but of course there had been no time. Daisy had died resentful and abandoned, and now there was no remedy.

It should have been easy to predict: everything about Shasta had portended doom. Andromeda had felt like a dead thing, and the landscape had mirrored her mood. Lemurian remnants were reputed to live in tunnels under Mount Shasta, were said to pay for provisions in local shops with mysterious gold nuggets and to conduct rituals and experiments that caused the strange light sometimes seen crowning the Northern Californian mountains. It was, ironically, the main reason she had consented to go to Lake Shasta in the first place, hoping to bring back the results of her Lemurian investigations as a peace offering to the sullen, silent Daisy. She thought she might have seen one, too, and had returned eager to tell Daisy all about the tall, misshapen shadow man she had glimpsed briefly in a headlight flash, and about the other sheets of blue fire she believed she had seen above trees beyond bends in the road. But the trip had been cursed. There had been an unpleasant, ill atmosphere around the lake. The ’rents had been grim and unbearable. On the tense drive home they had passed an overturned truck on fire. In movies, flaming vehicles always exploded, and Andromeda had braced herself for it, and might even have welcomed a fiery end, but the explosion had never come.

It was as though somehow her family’s craziness had been amplified and the landscape was reflecting it. Andromeda had attributed these phenomena to Lemurian experiments, but later it seemed they might be read as the reverberations of Daisy’s cataclysmic slide into death. The fiery truck suggested the Tower, the most ominous of the tarot trumps, and the shadowy Lemurian had looked a bit like the Hermit. As a pair, they suggested catastrophe and isolation, a prediction borne out in spades.

Daisy had returned none of Andromeda’s messages. Andromeda had assumed it was because Daisy was angry with her over St. Steve. But it had turned out she was not angry but rather dead; or she might have been angry as well as dead. Den eventually told her, in the same breath with which he also informed her that he was no longer allowed to speak to her himself. It had been during the week of St. Steve estrangement that Daisy had reentered the hospital, and in the midst of the Shasta week she had been dying of “respiratory complications.” Andromeda considered that she had every right to feel aggrieved that she had been kept out of the picture. Why did Andromeda experience this sense of injustice as self-reproach and guilt and regret for things not done or poorly managed? Such inversions happen when people die in the midst of things, which is the only way they ever die. At least it proved the mom wrong about Andromeda and guilt, if proof about the mom’s being wrong were ever needed.

Andromeda had not even been told about the memorial service. “You need to put those females on a leash,” Mizmac had screamed into the phone to Andromeda’s dad, in response to an e-mail from Andromeda’s mother accusing her of denying “closure” to Daisy’s best friend in such a difficult time.

Leave it to the mom to get both the etiquette and the facts so wrong. They had loved each other, but Andromeda had hardly been Daisy’s best friend. Daisy had had many friends, including but not limited to the ones who were even now watching horror films and guzzling, inhaling, snorting, or doing only the gods knew what at Afternoon Tea. Andromeda had never been in doubt about her place, and it wasn’t “best.” “Who’s the main character and who’s the sidekick?” Daisy and Rosalie and the others would sometimes ask when they were trying to flirt with boys who traveled in twos. No one would ever have asked that question about Andromeda and Daisy. Not her best friend: her sidekick, rather; her assistant, her secretary, her … minion. In the New New Temple of T ∴ H ∴ T ∴ they had been
sorors
, “sisters” in Latin, but Andromeda had been like the kid sister even though they were the same age. In formal temple mode, Andromeda had addressed her as
cara soror
, “dear sister.” Daisy usually said merely: “Klein.” Which means, and by which she meant, “little.”

At any rate, “closure” was scarcely possible. For months, in fact, Andromeda had found it difficult to believe Daisy could really be dead. Daisy had moved to Chicago, Andromeda had told herself, to live with her father; the death had been faked in order to allow her to start off fresh with all new friends, and especially to keep Andromeda’s allegedly bad influence away from her. Andromeda had even tried dialing a few Wasserstrom numbers in the Chicago area just to see if Daisy might answer. “Paranoid runs in the family,” said the mom, not shy about drawing a comparison to the dad’s worries about shadowy supragovernmental conspiracies. In fact, the Chicago calling was an idle ritual, but Daisy’s presence was very strong, particularly in those first months. Daisy, Andromeda felt, was still there somehow, somewhere, even if not exactly in Chicago.

Memories of dead people rely on standing still, and for a time Andromeda’s mind had been nearly as frozen as Daisy’s bedroom. Nevertheless, the Universe continued to expand at its stately pace, violent up close, beautiful and seemingly still at a distance. Each person’s tiny, individual world can feel the tremors. This item shifts, that article falls, while yet another breaks apart and crumbles. The new arrangement settles and becomes the norm. That is Death, Key XIII, the aggregate of tiny deaths that make up time, the new worlds that continually replace old or damaged ones. Eventually periods of several days would go by and she would realize with shock that she had hardly thought of Daisy at all. That is how dead people fade and gradually disappear from the present time. Those who survive always try to resist the process, preserving a little house for the
nephesh
, the animal soul, to inhabit and feeding it with attention and inadvertent rituals of remembrance, as Mizmac had clearly done. Eventually, though, this shadow fades to near nothingness, to sentimental memories and vague feelings of loss and guilt amongst loved ones.

That was how it had been with Daisy, until the last couple of weeks, when her
nephesh
had seemed to stop fading. It was as though Daisy’s scattered remnants were attempting to reassemble themselves and as though Daisy herself were steadily coming back to life.

The first thing Andromeda had noticed was Daisy’s scent. It had manifested without warning during Wellness one day; then she had smelled it again at the library, later on at home, once in the supermarket, and once even while riding in the mom’s car, coming through the vents. It was very strong, and instantly recognizable: the citrus shampoo, the candy-flavored lip gloss, the vinyl coat, and a vague hint of cinnamon, perhaps, plus a damp, sour-sweet Daisy element she couldn’t quite identify. After so many months of absence, this scent’s reappearance had been dramatic. At first she had walked around sniffing, looking, she knew, like a crazy person. Soon, and bit by bit, Andromeda became accustomed to the reality that some rooms would randomly smell like Daisy.

The smell phenomenon was soon followed by visual synchs and manifestations. Daisy, or others who looked a lot like her, would appear in Andromeda’s peripheral vision, only to disappear or assume another shape when she tried to look at them directly. Daisy also began to turn up more and more often in dreams, usually as a little girl pretty much as Andromeda remembered her from childhood, or as a corpse. She would appear in tarot spreads in the form of moon cards and Cups and watery images juxtaposed with flowers—
Daisy Wasserstrom
meant “water streaming over a daisy,” and she was, or had been, a Cancer with her moon in Aries. Sometimes the indications were tricky and clever, as when Andromeda had happened to find two twenty-dollar bills in her copy of Agrippa’s
Three Books of Occult Philosophy
. Andromeda had, of course, absentmindedly left them there and forgotten about them, but as for the significance: two twenties, i.e., 2020, just happened to be the number of the letters in the name Daisy Wasserstrom according to Agrippa’s system of Latin gematria. That could hardly be a coincidence.

She soon began to hear, or rather, half hear, Daisy’s voice sometimes, speaking unclear syllables, not in her head, but as though Daisy were standing somewhere behind her. Andromeda would respond with her characteristic “What?” and pull her hair back from her ear and turn around, but the voice would go dead and there would be no one there.

What were the powers of an unfading dead person? Could they make phones ring? Knock you off your bike? Hide your keys? Disrupt your TV reception or lock you out of your house? Bill you for unwanted magazine subscriptions and move your car to the wrong side of the street? Such things seemed to happen quite often at Casa Klein. The mom would usually find a way to blame the dad for such phenomena; the dad would suspect the government; but Andromeda always wondered if it might not be Daisy, coming back to life and trying to attract attention, and no doubt enjoying the chaos. If spirits from beyond knew all, and if Daisy had indeed become such a spirit, the truth about St. Steve would no longer be hidden from her. Indeed, she might know more than Andromeda knew herself. Perhaps she had a message to impart. Or perhaps the malice remained, and Daisy’s goal was simply to haunt her.

There was a game Andromeda had played ever since she was small, a game called “What would happen if?” More often than you’d think, the idle propositions had a way of coming out true. What would happen if she got kicked out of the Gnome School? she had once wondered: bang, the Kleins could no longer afford the tuition and Andromeda wound up in public school, though she hadn’t been kicked out. What would happen if St. Steve disappeared and no longer cared for her? Bang, “hi there.” This could be seen as a kind of perverse magic. She had learned to be very careful about questions silently asked, though some inevitably slipped out.

So when Andromeda had asked herself, in an idle moment, what would happen if spirits or demons could communicate with the here and now using instant messaging, in the same way they sometimes used Ouija boards or appeared in crystals or mirrors like Dr. Dee’s angels, the result was: bang, she began to imagine she could see, on occasion, a little instant-message window pop up in the upper left corner just beyond her field of vision, sending her a message that was usually too dim to read. When she tried to follow it with her eyes it would slide off and vanish into her peripheral vision. When it happened in dreams, her eyes were usually bound or her lids glued shut so she couldn’t see the window, or the message would be written in a language she didn’t understand.

What would happen if Daisy came back and sent her messages? It looked as though Andromeda was going to find out.

In the IM dream of the previous night, the message had read:

Call the police
.