Emma Bull - Bone Dance

When I stood up out of the tub, my reflection appeared in the velvet-hung mirror like a doppelganger in a forest clearing. There was just enough light for me to see the discolored lump on the side of my cheek. The rest of my face was an interesting ghoulish hue. Bloodless. I decided that Sher was jealous; she always tried to look like a vampire in training. No wonder the woman on the tri-wheeler, she of the sixty or so names, had thought she’d run me down. I looked as if she had, and then backed over me, too. I found a comb among the glassware and worked it through my hair, but I couldn’t find anything to tie it up with.

I had to wear a bedsheet out into the living room. The sheet was striped in red, white, and blue, and I wondered what Sher did with it when it wasn’t wrapped around a damp customer. I couldn’t imagine her sleeping on it. The living room had a reprocessed nylon/cellulose carpet in green, and walls like the outside of an eggplant, shiny and dark purple. I don’t know what color the ceiling was; it was draped with a parachute, suspended in tentlike folds and billows. The genuine item, complete to the stains and scorches and holes it acquired during the festivities just before the Big Bang. I don’t know why Sher had it there. I liked to think it was an icon of the second Fall, a new apple. There were things sewn to it, and hanging from it: a child’s mitten, a blue rosary, a half-melted 45 rpm record, a clutch of shiny foil-cardboard stars. On one wall was a print in overwrought colors showing Saint Bob holding a broken guitar. The furniture was all cushions, except for a sofa that sat too low because the legs were lopped off, and a metal cabinet lying on its side, painted black and draped with a tapestry that seemed to be not quite a view of the Last Supper. The shades were drawn, and the room was dim and smelled of candle smoke and flowers. I felt a little guilty, adding the red-white-and-blue sheet to all that ambience.

I went to the window and bent the blinds a little to look outside. The shadows had swallowed up the bottoms of the buildings; it was nearly sunset. “How long have I been here?” I wondered aloud.

“Forever,” Sher answered from the kitchen. She came in and sat down on a heap of pillows on the other side of the metal cabinet. She had a new cigarette pinned in the corner of her mouth. She set a glass of water in front of me and sighed. “I had to cancel three other appointments. I don’t know why the fuck you come and bother me. It’s not as if you believed in any of it.”

“Of course I believe in it. You, as someone who has more insight into me than I do, use the cards to reveal my sins to me and make me meditate on them. It used to be called psychotherapy.”

“That’s not what happens.”

“Well, if it works, let’s not fix it.” That, at least, I could say with perfect sincerity. There was no point in arguing with Sherrea over how she did what I hoped she was going to do.

“There’s no food in the place,” she said.

“That’s okay.” I didn’t think I could eat, anyway. My stomach felt like a sink drain full of hair.

“No, it’s not. You ought to eat before a reading, and leave some as an offering. It draws the energies to you.” She shrugged. “Well, screw the energies.”

“No.”

She glanced up, the young look on her pointy face again.

“Let’s do it right.” On one thumb, I found a rough bit of cuticle, at the base of the nail. I bit it until it bled. “Offering,” I said, and held out my hand.

“ Santos , Sparrow.” But she whisked the tapestry off the cabinet/coffee table, and from somewhere in all the black-and-purple, she produced a wad of white scarf. When she laid it down, it fell open to show the deck of cards inside. “Let a drop fall on the table—no, over there on the corner. I don’t want it on the scarf.” I squeezed a decent-sized drop onto the very edge of the metal, and blotted the rest on one of the sheet’s red stripes.

She mashed her cigarette out on the side of the cabinet and began to shuffle the deck. It arced between her hands, over and over, two parts folding into one like a flower blooming backward in time-lapse. “Wish for something. D’you think maybe you were on polygons?”

“If I had any idea, I wouldn’t have had to come to you.”

She fanned the cards on the table, flipped one out of the deck onto the scarf, shuffled again. Page of Swords.

She said she’d found the deck in a botánica in Alphabetland. It was luridly colored, worse than Saint Bob, and the figures moved when you tipped the cards, like printed cardboard toys and kitschy postcards. The iconography was a schizoid blend of Christian saints, African deities, and pre-Bang SouthAm pop stars. The Page of Swords was Joan of Arc at the stake, holding a sword over her head. The flames leaped and Joan’s head nodded up to look at heaven, down to study hell. “You don’t know what you took. You really black out completely during these things?” Sher asked.

“I told you I do.”

“You’ve told me lots of dumb shit. That was the seventeenth card. Whatever you just wished for, you can’t have. Cut the deck.”

I wondered what it had been.

She snapped cards down on the scarf, growing the layout like a crystal. Joan of Arc’s suffering was overlaid upside down by Death as Baron Samedi, all bones and grin and tall black hat, with a victim under each arm: a fat white man in a pinstripe suit, and an old black woman almost as thin as the Baron. The Baron opened and closed his mouth—laughing, I’d guess—and the victims flapped their arms. Beside him went a card showing a naked brown prettyboy holding a violent yellow solar disc in front of his hips. The rays of the sun rippled when the card moved, which seemed like a waste of technology.

Snap—an overdressed black man juggling two bags, each marked with a white star. That one was upside down, too. Snap—a grinning masked figure stepping into shadow at the back of the card, a fan of five bloody swords over his shoulder. In the foreground two more thrust, point downward, in a puddle of gore with no apparent source. Snap—a man and woman dressed in movie-medieval, she in white, he in red, hands clasped; a huge, well-fed cherub like a scrubbed pink pterodactyl hovered above. Snap—a nearly naked blond woman with a quarterstaff, blocking the attack of six ninjoids, also with staves. Snap—a dark-haired, dark-tanned man or woman, lying on his or her back on a beach. The posture I’d awakened in on the river flats. He or she had ten long swords for company, the points in the palms of the hands, the knees, the belly, the groin, the breasts, the forehead, and through the open mouth. I stopped paying such close attention. Sherrea laid three more cards down.

“Swords,” she muttered, tapping her long purple index fingernail on the spiral made by the first seven cards. “Swords here in the country of flesh. There’s fighting over this, has been and will be.”

Between me, myself and I? I wanted to ask.

“Death, the Sun, the Lovers. Lots of major arcana. Your future’s controlled by others. There’s powerful people playing with it. You’re gonna have to fight to get it back. And over here”—she slid the fingernail down the silk next to the upright row of four cards next to the spiral—”this is the country of truth. There’s the Devil, the Star, the Tower. In the country of truth, where your spirit lives, your life still isn’t your own. Other stronger spirits, or maybe gods—they’ve got the say in what happens to you.”

A nice metaphor for my blackouts.

She touched the juggling man. “Something got out of balance in the past, yours or somebody’s. Stuff that’s supposed to shift around, change, grow—it’s all gone stagnant and sick.”