James Baldwin - Stained Glass

“All religion is essentially legalized schizophrenia.”

She laughed. “Then I guess, yeah. I know a bit about them… we had some members in my… my friends. The Voicers are pretty huge in Chicago and the Midwest now. You’ve never heard of it?”

“No.”

“The Pastor has a show on TV. You’ve never heard of Zachariah Goswin? ‘Father Zach’?”

“That explains why I never heard of him” I said. “I never owned a TV.”

“But you know Jimmy Swaggart?”

“My friend liked to watch shows,” I replied, with a small pang. “When we lived on campus together. He used to do Swaggart impressions and pretend to hit people with his ‘magic coat’.”

When the bagels came out, they were warm and crisp on the outside, buttery on the inside, and blessedly fresh. Talya watched on indulgently, a look I hadn’t seen on a woman’s face since leaving Mariya’s home for boarding school.

“You must have been starving.” She spoke like the way you would to a hungry kitten crouched over a can of tuna.

There was no way to respond with dignity, except to let it pass as one patronizing piece of bullshit in a sea of social errors. I wiped crumbs from my gloves, and cupped my hands around the coffee. Real china, the first I’d used since escaping the warehouse. “So. You want a reading. What’s the question?”

“Okay. But before I tell you… I want you to do it cold,” she said. “No hints.”

I looked up at her past the end of my cap. “You’ve done this before.”

She nodded. “Many times. But not this question.”

I gave the cup a habitual little twist, relishing the old ritual, then took the first sip. It was bittersweet, strong, a little frothy. Wistfully, I set it aside, took out the cards and mixed them. To my surprise, Talya glanced around the shop, and then quickly and discreetly drew a pentacle figure from breast to brow, brow to breast, then shoulder to shoulder, the way one might do a rosary.

“Here.” I held the deck to her, face down. “Ask your question aloud as you shuffle.”

Talya licked her bottom lip, the pink tip of her tongue flicking out. She paused after taking the deck in hand, and when she spoke, it was in Russian. “Two of the four fires have been extinguished. Can we find those who were in their keeping?”

The wording seemed unnecessarily arcane, and fluent as I was, I mulled over the question to try to find a better translation while she shuffled, intent on her hands.

“I know it probably doesn’t make much sense…”

As she spoke, I held up a finger. Regardless of what I knew, the deck would respond with the correct answer. I might not be able to access my Neshamah, but she could talk to hers through the cards, and it was that which mattered. “Focus.”

Lips pressed together, she nodded. I silently drew the Kabbalic cross over my chest. From Mercy to Severity, the Kingdom to the Crown. The energy didn’t build up the way it used to; there was no intoxicating rush, no flare of energy, but there was still something. My will, my discipline, my intuition. The outside reality of magic was real.

Talya shivered and abruptly stopped shuffling. Without being asked, she cut the deck nearly three quarters towards the bottom, switched it over, and handed it back with squared shoulders. “Here.”

Unconventional questions called for unconventional spreads. There are a few tried and trues – the Celtic Cross spread being the most famous – but this was a ten-card question. I lay three cards out at the top, four below, and three to the side. The background of the question, the circumstances, and the result.

The first three gave an unmistakable background. The King of Swords, the Tower, the Empress reversed. “This is about a large group of people. The King and Queen of that group are gone. A large, stoic, intelligent but possibly violent man, dark in coloring, and an emotional, motherly type of woman who may have been somewhat emotionally unstable. She was the dearer of the pair to you, personally. Are they… deceased?”

Talya nodded, her lip in her teeth. The momentary confidence in her chin and shoulders disappeared as both slumped, folding in towards her chest. “I don’t know if ‘unstable’ really applies, but… yes.”

“There is an ongoing crisis…” My eyes flicked from card to card. The King of Pentacles reversed was present in the line showing the circumstances, the only court card in the second row. “…caused by a tyrannical, narcissistic man. Dark-complexioned, rooted in materialism, corruption. He has the outward bearing of wisdom, but the inside is rotten. He’s trying to topple an established order of some kind. A man with a cause.”

“There’s no more death, though?” She sounded hopeful, the kind of hope which stemmed more from need than rational estimation. “I don’t see Death there.”

So she had some experience receiving readings, but not any actual study of the cards. I tapped my nail on The Tower, looming out of the center of the reading like a tombstone. “The Death card rarely indicates literal death. The Tower, on the other hand, often does. The Empress – the card of generation, life, motherhood – is reversed. In a question about mortality, that is not a good card to have.”

“Oh no.” Her voice had dropped low and breathy.

Unmoved, I looked down once more. To either side of the King of Pentacles, we had three difficult cards: The Six of Pentacles, The Sun reversed and The Moon. I looked to the result, and frowned slightly. The Lovers reversed, card of choices, and the Fool. In tarot, the minor arcana cards are mundane, the infantry, so to speak. They represent human actors and the actions they make. Major Arcana were the battlefield: immutable, often commanding the threads of fate from on high. There was a fork in the road at the end of this question.

“This man, this adversary… he is subtle and clever. He is driven by longing for something he doesn’t really have.” I tapped the cards. “The King of Pentacles likes certainty. He is fond of absolute control. They tend to be religious people, or embedded in some other ideology. As for what he wants… he wants power. Material power, specifically. The appearance of generosity.”

Talya chewed her lip, her body language beginning to express signs of real panic. “Okay. We… there were some children that went missing in this situation. Can you see what happened to them?”

“The Sun reversed can mean a loss of innocence,” I replied. “The Moon represents things that are hidden, things that take place in the shadows. This is not a reading that presages a good outcome for children, especially with the dark mother card in the form of The Empress.”

“Does it say how it ends?” She was looking at the spread with sorrowful recognition.

I let my eyes flick from point to point, finding patterns. Much divination relies on patterns. Time and circumstance is hardly unique, operating on archetypal cycles even as each moment rises fresh along the spiral of time.

“There are two possible outcomes, depending on the choices of the people in question. They make the difficult decision to change their tactics, resist the deceptions and lures which their adversary is apt to employ, and come out mostly whole. Alternatively, they stubbornly adhere to their old ways, and they fail like the others before them. They are tempted to stay their current path, and The Lovers is a strange card. Reversed, it often signifies a kind of fall.” I looked up at her. “Is that—”

The question faded as I spoke it. Talya was crying. Tears tracked though her foundation, streaking it like powder.

“Tell me more about the reversed King,” she whispered.

Dutifully, I lay out the next three cards. Every single one was upside down: The Magician and The Devil framed the Hanged Man. Three major arcana cards, a total of eight in a spread of thirteen, and most of them were upside down. My stomach fluttered. Whatever force had influenced this reading, they were telling us that there was more at stake than Talya’s feelings. This many cards of power meant the issue was serious, perhaps even beyond the scope of the woman asking the question.