Uptown Local and Other Interventions (14 page)

The booth where she sat suddenly loomed very close in front of him. He staggered to it, put his hands down on the table and levered himself into the seat across from her: nearly fell into the seat, exhausted by the effort it had taken him to get here. She didn’t look up from what she was doing, just let him sit there and get his breath back.

She was shuffling cards. A few of them still lay out of the deck on the table. He blinked, for he could see the grain of the cherrywood counter through them.
Glass cards?

“Ah-ah,” she said. “Don’t dwell on those too much, not right this minute. You’ll spoil the result.” Her voice was sharp to match her face, but a little rough and soft underneath; the heavy steel that backed up the single sharp edge of the sword, giving it weight.

The thought was so odd that he couldn’t imagine where it had come from. “An older sister,” she said. “Stepsister, actually. She has a blindfold, too, but she doesn’t wear it at home. Now pay attention,” she said then, “because we have only a few moments before he notices.”

“He.”
The sheer lightning-strike novelty of hearing someone say something he’d never heard them say before now left him momentarily speechless himself. When he recovered, he said, “You know about him—"

“He’s one of mine,” she said.

“One of your
what
?”

She thought about that for a moment. “Devotees,” she said. “Maybe even worshippers.”

The word was bizarre. Maybe she caught his thought about that in his look, if his face still worked enough to generate its own expressions. “I know,” she said. “Not one of the more congenial ones. But it’s not my business to judge. The line between art and artifice is thin at the best of times, and it’s always moving around.”

She kept shuffling, then picked up those last few cards and tucked them back into the pack here and there. Finally she put the pack down on the table, pushed it toward him. “Shuffle,” she said.

 “Why?”

She glanced up at him under her dark brows, a look both thoughtful and provocative…but there was an edge of impatience on it. “In another little while,” she said, “you might not have anything left to ask that question with. I wouldn’t dawdle, if I were you.”

He reached out and touched the deck, hesitant, expecting it to be cold, like everything else here but the coffee. But the cards were warm, warm as skin, and they stayed that way. The sensation was so novel, after all this time, that he didn’t want to let them go. He picked them up and shuffled.

“Tell me about the problem,” the dark lady said.

Her voice was so calm that for some reason it made him want to shout; but he controlled himself. “I’ve been sitting in this damn diner forever, now, with that woman and the counter guy,” he said, under his breath, half afraid that he might be overheard by something that would punish him for it. “The Other-thing, the thing outside, It stuck me here down at the end of that counter, with nothing to do for eternity but listen to
her
inane jabber, and nothing to see but a bare counter, a bare diner, an empty dark street outside. And that other guy.” He shivered. “The sun never comes up, everything’s just dark and bleak and—"

He ran down, shaking his head, feeling helpless again. “And pretty soon I won’t even know that there’s anything else, that there
could
be anything else,” he said.
 
“Pretty soon now he’ll have finished work on me. He’ll have me the way he wants me. And nothing else will ever change again.”

The dark lady nodded slowly, a couple of times, not looking into his face—just watching him shuffle the cards. “Okay,” she said. “That’s enough. Cut.”

He put the cards down on the table with some difficulty, not wanting to let go of that warmth, the only moderate thing he’d felt here in ever so long. He cut once, rightwards.

She shook her head. “Once more,” she said.

He cut the second pack once more, toward the right. She reached out, took the outside stacks of cards away and left him with the middle one. She tapped the top card. “Turn it up,” she said. “Put it here.” She tapped a spot on the table.

Shaking, he didn’t know why, he reached out and turned up the first card. A rush of that alienating cold went through him again, but differently. It was as if, for a change, he was doing the looking, rather than the Other that was looking through him. In the glass of the card, images rushed and tumbled as he held it in his hand, staring at the face side. Light bloomed and faded and bloomed again in the card, cold even when it was warm. Yellow light,  sunlight that was still somehow wintry, and a man sitting alone on a curb of an empty street lined with empty storefronts; a dusty street, the man’s feet in the dust, his head bowed, his gaze lying flaccid in the middle distance.

“Yes,” the dark lady said, looking at the card with some resignation as he put it down and the image fixed itself. “That’d be about right. Turn the next one up. Put it on top of that one.”

He was shivering harder now at this other creature’s awful, lonely fixity. He was finished in every sense of the word, caught in the yellow light forever, all hope gone. Desperate to be different from that in any possible way, he plucked the next card from the top of the cut deck, turned it.

In the glass, chilly light and image roiled and tumbled again, settled toward darkness, shivering with one blade of light standing up in it: a naked woman, her face quiet but not entirely empty, looking out into a stream of light from a window to one side, her shadow long and black behind her. Any moment now she might move, leave the room—

“The basis of the problem,” the dark lady said. “Now what crosses it. Go on.”

Shivering harder, he turned over the next card, held it up. It was the image of the diner, seen from outside—the place where it was impossible to get to. The hunched man’s back was to the glass of the window, and this was in some terrible way even worse than being faced by him. That turned back refused the possibility of anything ever being any other way; it was final rejection, ruthlessly enforced. Past the hunched man
he
sat, and the red-headed woman, neither of them meeting the other’s eyes, or anyone else’s. Positioned between them and any possible outside, the Hunched Man blocked the way.

He let out a long breath and reached for the next card—then stopped, looked at the dark lady. “What difference can this make?” he said. “Who are you?”

Her gaze was on the cards at the moment. “Every difference,” she said. “You asked for help. It’s the first time you’ve been able to manage it. You’ve been further under than you thought….so don’t waste the chance. Turn the cards, lay them down where you’re told. There’s always a message, if you take your time and trust yourself to read it.”

It seemed too much to dare, to believe that she knew the way. He was terrified by the thought of how it would be for him if he trusted her and then discovered she was wrong. One more betrayal, one more anguish, worse because he had chosen it freely…

“Where does it go?” he said.

“On top. The best result to be achieved if things go well,” she said.

He gulped, and turned the next card up. Light seethed and boiled in it again, then settled through blue dusk smoke-curls to a scorching sunset, reds and yellows fading up to blues and near-unreal greens, silhouetting a railside switching tower, black against the smoke-streaked, splendid light; no humans to be seen anywhere. Loneliness seethed in that fading light, but also a strange relief.

            “There’s no one there,” he breathed. “As if even It’s not there…”

            The dark lady looked down at the image. “It’s a possible reading,” she said, tilting her head a little from side to side as she considered. “The problem is, he’s so reticent…such a minimalist. A more specific painter would leave you much less room for analysis…”

            He let out a breath and pulled the next card off the top of the deck. “Here,” she said. “The foundation of the problem…”

            This card’s image swirled for a long time, resisting defining itself. Finally it settled to a cool light from above, a porch light, white clapboards, a blue door; against the porch railing, a tall man, a woman in a short red two-piece sunsuit, her long legs very bare, the color of her fair hair indistinct in the shadowy light from above. He looked at her. She looked at the pale porch floor, and no eyes met.  

            “Yes,” the dark lady said,  nodding and looking slightly rueful. “They couldn’t do without each other, but it never ran smoothly for them…”

            He looked at her doubtfully. It had never occurred to him that the cruel It-thing out in the darkness might ever have known longing for anyone, much less love. He reached out to the deck, turned over the next card. “Where?” he said.

            “To the left of the center one. The past…”

            The image under the glass of the card in his hand swirled and burned, actually stinging his hand: he could feel the frustration, the rage, as the image settled. An office, pitiless electric light, a man hunched over a desk doing work that he hated—a woman watching him, incurious, unsympathetic. “Work,” he said slowly, “but no joy…”

            The dark lady nodded. “No. That came later, if at all. Next one, now, on the other side. Future things…”

            He picked up the next card, trembling. It whirled nearly instantly into a series of ruddy brick shopfronts, a painted barber pole, a line of dark, empty windows, like the eye-sockets of skulls; no human face, not even in shadow. Everything was locked down, tight, finalized, the street streaked with long unmoving shadows, a sunset caught in mid-decline and frozen there, time rendered ineffective and emasculate. Victory for the painter, and the destruction of the hopes for freedom of every painted thing.

            His eyes stung where tears should have been, and couldn’t be. “This is no use,” he said through a throat tight with pain, staring down at the cross of cards. “It’s all hopeless. Why are you showing me this?!”

            She scowled at him. “There’s always a way out,” she said. “There’s always a loophole for you to see. One of my sisters says the universe isn’t anything
but
loopholes. We just fool ourselves into seeing solid stuff instead of emptiness: locked doors instead of doorways. What’s not there takes more work to see. And we’re lazy…”

            “Then what’s the way out?” he said.

            “Not my job to tell you that,” she said. “Just to tell you that the doors aren’t locked. What you have to do, that’s for you to find out. Turn the next card—or go back and sit by her and listen to the furniture shopping list one more time.”

            The steel in the voice was harsh; it surprised him, for her eyes were still soft, softer than anything else here. The reproof gave him pause. “But you said it was the future…”

            “For him, anyway,” she said. “But then this isn’t your reading. It’s his.”

            He was infuriated. “You mean this isn’t about
me?”

            “
Everything’s
about you, you idiot,” she said, sounding impatient. “Don’t waste my time here. I’m going far enough out on this limb, crossing genres for your sake. The Great Beyond forbid my sister should ever catch
me
with a brush in my hand.” Her look went briefly cockeyed.

            “How many sisters have you got?” he said, slightly annoyed by the sudden irrelevancy.

            “Eight,” he said. “Or sometimes nine or ten, depending on which poet you believe. It hardly matters; my father likes big families. Now shut up and turn the next card. The best resolution for you. Start a new line to the right: put it at the bottom…”

            He reached out to the card and had to pause as he touched it. He could swear he was beginning to hear voices. There were not the chilly voices of this place, resonating off hard wood and gloss paint and polished metal. They had depth, and roots in some other place, another time where things were rough and unfinished, and the universe contained more ingredients than it strictly needed to for the composition at hand. There was a terrible tang of hope to the sound of those voices, a reminder of what life had been like once upon a time before the artist’s eye and brush had started making a prisoner of him. He turned the card, and as he did so and the light and color roiled under the surface of the glass, the voices shouted briefly into his heart,
Save him, save him now, save all of us! 

           
Save
him? he thought, as the image steadied. A railway car, the chair car, in which a soft green light illuminated everything—the windows blind, bland, unrevealing panes of light, and people in seats facing every direction, going away all in company, though still going away alone…

            “Escape,” he breathed.

            The dark lady’s mouth quirked. “Say the word softly,” she said. “It’s a dangerous one for use by an artist, or for art…. Next card: the best it gets for others. Hurry. It’s dangerous to be this close to the surface; where you can hear his other voices, he can more clearly hear you…”

            He stifled the urge to throw a look over his shoulder at the Hunched Man. If he moved—  Hurriedly he picked up the next card.

            The voices were louder still in his ear, a crowd-cry, a dim ballpark roar of desperation and hope.
Save him!
  Smoke-shot light boiled in the brittle warm bit of glass, steadied down to the image. A green house, a lone man mowing his lawn: alone, yes, but not strictly lonely—the curtains of the house’s windows stirred in that light, eyes perhaps closed but not empty. Stillness, peace, a settled quiet if not a permanent one; sunny weather if only for a while—

            “That’s as good as it gets for him?” he said, tempted to be scornful. Yet what had
he
ever had, even back in the real life where he walked the world, that had been as good? Could it have been that the bleakness in his
own
eye had been what had attracted the painter’s attention—

            He pushed that thought violently away, reached out hastily for the next card. It fought him, wouldn’t come up from the deck. “His secret hopes,” the dark lady said, giving him that under-the-brow look again.