The Cormorant (24 page)

The psychic’s not here.

She orbits, wanders, can’t find her.

Damnit.
Damnit
.

Ah. Wait. There. There! She’s at the far end. Near the pier. Just setting up. Wrapping her platinum-blond head in the gypsy scarf. The woman sees Miriam coming and says, “Hey, doll. Not open yet. Sorry.”

“Don’t care. Take my money.”

“Eager, are we?”

“Time is ticking.”

“Time is always ticking, isn’t it?”

“Dispense with the banter. Take my cash.” She waves two twenties – twice as much as the woman charges, per her signage. “Read my… aura or my cards or sniff my pheromones or whatever it is you do. I need help.”

The woman shrugs as if it’s not worth fighting. Then sits down cross-legged. She whips a tie-dyed cloth off a crystal ball and opens up a carved wooden box to reveal a deck of Tarot cards.

The Death card leers up. Ragged woodcut skull behind an ink-black cloak. Scythe reaping wheat that looks like people.

It’s a good start.

“My name is Miss Gina. I can look into the ball,” the woman says. “Or I can read your cards or your palm. Your call, doll.”

“I’d rather you not touch me. Unless it’s necessary.”

“It’s… not, no.”

“Then whatever. Don’t care. Chop-chop. I got a bug up my butt here, lady. I’m hankering for a hunk of psychic karate.”

She flings the two twenties at the woman.

The bleach-blond psychic scoops up the money with the aplomb of a practiced stripper. Then gets out the Tarot cards. She pulls out a small satchel, and Miriam smells the heady stink of something herbal. “This is a purification satchel in which I’ve placed sage and angelica and anise–”

“Mmm
nope
,” Miriam says, waving her arms in a way that might suggest
the bridge is out, turn back around
. “Move past all that stuff. Get to the juicy-juice, please.”
Lives are on the line, bimbo.

The woman looks suddenly nervous. She clears her throat and begins to shuffle the Tarot cards. Then she hands the deck to Miriam. “Cut it, doll.”

Beyond the edge of Mallory Square, the sun has melted into a gloppy napalm line pooling at the horizon.

Miriam bisects the deck, slaps it back together.

The woman takes it. Begins to spread out the cards. “This is called the Celtic Cross–”

“No Occult 101 please, just… read, interpret.”

The woman flips the first card.

“The Seven of Staves,” she says.

The image on the card is of a man with a pageboy haircut standing on a hill and holding a staff that looks like the knobby cock of a cave monster. He’s trapped in a prison of similarly shaped knob-cocked staves.

“What’s that mean?”

“It means you’re facing great difficulties on all sides of you–”

“Everybody’s facing great difficulties. That’s called
hey, look, reality.
We’re all besieged by assholes and inadequacies. Next card.”

Flip.

On the card: A naked nymph gazes up at a six-pointed star in the night sky above a meadow. Sheep graze nearby.

“The Star,” the woman says with wonder, as if Miriam just won the metaphysical lottery. “Hope and faith are your allies in life’s difficulties, and you’ll find that clutching optimism to your bosom as this woman does with the light of the star–”

“No, no, no, none of that sounds right. Here.” Miriam reaches across and begins flipping each card herself. Three of Cups. The Lovers. Four of Swords. Something called a Hierophant, which sounds but does not look like a type of elephant. After each flip, Miss Gina tries to explain what the card is, but she doesn’t get in more than a few words before Miriam is flipping the next. Finally, at the end, Miriam flips over The Hanged Man. “There!”

“There?”

“What’s that card?”

On the card another page-boy asshole is hung upside down by his heel. Dangling from a tree. “That’s the Hanged Man. He means you’ll need to look at your problems from another angle–”

“
You
are my other angle. You.” A carpenter’s nail of anger hammers through Miriam’s heart. She swipes her hand across the blanket and knocks all the cards out of their cross configuration. “Goddamnit! You’re not a real psychic, are you?”

Tourists look over, alarmed.

“What? Of course I am.” She laughs nervously, like this is a joke, a show for the marks all around. “I have been blessed by the–”

“Cut the hokey horseshit, Gina. You’re just looking at cards and interpreting them with the most milquetoast, mediocre interpretation. And you’d do the same by looking into that gaudy crystal ball or by looking at the lines running across my palms. Am I right?”

“I think you ought to leave.”

“I think you ought to give me my forty bucks back.”

“Fine.” The woman crumples up each twenty and throws the little capitalist boulders back at Miriam. “Take them and go.”

Miriam stands up. Sticks her index finger out like she’s trying to dissect her with the power of her pointing. “You just wasted my time. I need a
real
psychic. You get it? I need someone who can help me find something, and time is breaking apart in my hand like a chip of once-wet sand. Thanks for nothing.”

She moves to storm off.

“Wait!” Miss Gina yells after her.

Miriam keeps walking. But the woman catches up, steps in front of her, hands up. A little white business card sits slotted between Gina’s index and middle finger. She levers it toward Miriam.

“You need to find something, Sugar is your gal.”

“My
gal
?”

“She’s the real deal. She’s not a…” Gina gestures with her eyes toward the whole of Mallory Square, to all the freaks and performers and tourists. A gesture as if to say,
Not a fake like me.
“Take the card.”

Miriam takes it.

On it is handwritten one thing: MM 47.5.

“I don’t understand,” Miriam says.

“Mile marker forty-seven-and-a-half,” Gina says.

“Mile marker. Key West is at mile zero, right?”

“Got it.”

“Thanks, Gina. You’re not as awful a person as I thought.”

Gina shrugs. “You’re Sugar’s problem now, bitch.”

THIRTY-NINE

NEW OLD FLAME

Purpose has its leash and collar on her. It drags Miriam forward through the streets of Key West toward the car. Through the drunks and the pot-smoke haze and the clouds of suntan lotion and Axe body spray. She’s trying desperately not to touch any of them, not because she can’t handle the visions (or so she tells herself) but because they’re a distraction from the task at hand.

And then:

Gabby crosses the street in front of her.

Miriam thinks to hide, thinks to dart into the crowd but it’s too late. Gabby’s not crossing the street all casual-like. She too is a woman with a mission, and hers is to cross paths with Miriam.

She’s got the tips of her blond hair dip-dyed pink, and Miriam thinks,
A girl after my own heart. Can’t settle on a single hair color.
But then that momentary ember of affection is cast away in the wind of Gabby’s anger.

“You’re here,” Gabby says.

Miriam tries to juke past her but sees the crowd has closed ahead of her, sealing shut like the wall in that Edgar Allen Poe story.
The Cask of…
something-or-other.

“I’m here,” is all Miriam can think to say.

“And you weren’t going to call.”

“I kinda thought we’d reached the culmination of our time together.” She clears her throat. “Also, I forgot to actually get your number.”

“You can’t just do that to a person. I like you. Liked. Whatever.”

“Listen, we’re both adults and adults do this sort of shit all the time. They… they crash into each other and they rub their genitals in and around one another and then they move on–”

“No, adults do the
adult
thing and take responsibility for when they have somebody else’s heart in their hands.”

Miriam winces. Still looking for an exit. “Bad news: I’m not a particularly good adult.”

Gabby grabs her hands – Miriam flinches, a knee-jerk reaction whenever somebody touches her and she doesn’t expect it. But then she remembers: whatever death is in store for Gabby is lost to Miriam, sucked under the raging rapids of a rum-drunk.

“Come home with me,” Gabby says.

Miriam smells the alcohol coming off her.

“You’re drunk,” she says.

“And you’re not,” Gabby answers. “So get drunk with me.”

“Gabby–”

Gabby runs her hands up Miriam’s arms. She gets close. Miriam smells not just alcohol on the woman’s breath but wine – red wine, lush and assertive, wine that darkens her lips, wine that stains her teeth. “I could make you feel good again. We had a pretty good thing going. I like you. You like me even though you won’t admit it. We do fun things naked.” Her knee presses up against Miriam’s thighs, trying to tease them apart.

It starts to work. A deep heat spreads.

Miriam’s got that little twist inside of her – like a knot cinching tighter, like a whip pulled taut between two strong hands. And she thinks,
I want this.
Her id is like a monkey in a box, hooting and howling and desperate for egress and she wants nothing more but to let this crazy love-monkey out so it can run rampant once more–

But she instead grabs Gabby’s wrists – gently – and pushes her back.

Gabby scowls.

“I can’t,” Miriam says. “Not now. I have something I have to do–”

“Shit,” Gabby says, looking and sounding deflated.

“Listen, this is a big moment for me. Any other time, I’d have just given in. OK? I have the self-control of a lamprey. I smell blood and I need a taste. But I… I have something important to do. I’ll come back. I’ll call you. Maybe we can do dinner. Like a real date.” Even as she says these words, she fears they sound like lies. She fears they
are
lies.

“Sure,” Gabby says in a way that suggests she knows they’re lies, too. She runs her hand along the side of Miriam’s head, flipping a crow’s tail of hair over the top of the ear. She gives Miriam a light peck on the cheek. Then she presses something into Miriam’s hand. “My phone number. Since you
forgot
it last time. Just in case you really are serious.”

Miriam says nothing. She pockets the number.

Gabby staggers across the street.

Miriam wants to call her back. Or follow after.

It’s time to get the fuck out of here.

FORTY

GIMME SOME SUGAR

Mile marker forty-seven-and-a-half.

All that’s there is a burned-out… well, it’s not a storefront. Not exactly. It’s like a concrete hut cast over a little shop – a shop like a place you might go to buy bait or ice cream or corn dogs.

The glass is smeared with soot. Half-shattered but still clinging to the frame. The concrete too is smudged with licks of old fire.

Above it all is a sign that says: PSYCHIC.

It’s crooked. A bird nest sits at the top. Spiders weave webs between the protruding letters.

It’s empty. Like it’s been bombed out.

Miriam’s itchy, edgy, tense, like she’s dancing on the point of a sword, like with every plié or pirouette it’s driving the blade deeper – and now she’s here at a fire-gutted stop-off on the Overseas Highway. Alone. Entirely alone and no better than she was before.

She thinks:
Go back. Find Gabby.

Then:
Or call Louis. Tell him everything. He’ll come.

He’ll save you
.

A meaner, cockier voice inside her counters with:

You don’t need saving. You’re the one who saves people, remember?
Then, a question:
What am I, a fucking superhero?

The world shudders at that thought.

Time to curtail all the internal dialogue.

“Hello?” she yells.

Her voice echoes under the curve of the concrete.

A little lizard darts out in front of her. Scurrying along like the ground is on lava and even a moment’s rest will cook him up good.

No-see-ums bite into her arms. Mosquitoes hover, too, waiting their turn. All of them looking for blood.

It’s then she feels hot. Stung all over. Like her skin is tight,
too
tight, pulled taut over her muscle and bone.