Chapter Text
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
-The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot
The room was dark, flanked in velvet curtains, and lit only by a single silver candle, which burned with a heady scent on the table in the middle of the room. The only other thing on the table was a pack of cards and a shoddy bouquet of hyacinths, looking sad and abandoned on the silk scarlet cloth. Shauna had no memory of arriving here, but she knew why she had come. She was wearing a dress, not her style at all, really, more like something Jackie would wear. It felt uncomfortable on her, too small in the chest and too short and hanging all wrong.
The velvet across the table rustled, and a hand reached out through some hidden opening in the endless encircling fabric, followed by the body and then face of a narrow woman. She was tall and angular and sharp, her face covered in unsightly makeup that set Shauna’s nerves on edge, her body draped in several layers of shawls and jewels and a dress that seemed to have no beginnings or endings. She smiled toothily at Shauna.
“Here for a reading, dear?” she asked, sitting in the chair she had not pulled out.
“Yes,” Shauna replied.
“There’s no shame in wanting a little hint of the future,” the woman said, apparently out of the blue. “I know your kind, hm. Materialist. Too good for all this spiritual mumbo-jumbo, yes? But there’s more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, aren’t there?”
“That’s Hamlet,” Shauna said automatically.
“Is it?” the woman asked. Shauna didn’t answer, and she continued. “Still you want answers. So you come to Madame Sosostris.” The seer’s gloved hand opened, revealing a little iron box that had been couched there, from which she drew out a little pinch of blue powder. With a flourish, she threw it onto the candle, which sparked suddenly and flared wildly up, burning qīng and filling the room with smoke. “Now, that’s better. Let’s see, let’s see…” She began to lay out the cards on the table, her hands working inhumanly fast. Shauna watched with bated breath.
When all the cards were set out, face down, the madame smiled sweetly at Shauna. “What do you want an answer to, dear?”
“Does it have to be a specific question?” Shauna asked. “Can I just say, I don’t know, a concept I want to know things about?”
“Do you want a real answer?”
“I guess.”
“Ask a question.”
Shauna sighed. She thought for a moment. “Alright. Uh, I want to know -”
A sound like a sustained gunshot filled Shauna’s ears. She was still talking, and Madame Sosostris seemed not to notice anything amiss. The noise ended as she finished talking.
“Well,” the seer said. “As good as any.” She reached for a card on the far left of the table, felt the back of it briefly, and switched to the card next to it.
This one, she pulled up. It depicted a man, nude and dead on a gray Atlantic beach, his eye sockets dark and empty. Next to him, on the sand, two white orbs shone. “This,” she said, leaning over the table, “is your card. The drowned Phoenician Sailor. Look, those are pearls that were his eyes…” She laid it on the table in front of Shauna and took another. “Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks. The lady of situations.” It depicted a woman, two swords grasped in her crossed arms, her eyes covered by a blindfold.
Another; this time a hunchbacked old man, with three sprouting sticks planted in the ground next to him. “Here is the man with three staves,”
A circle, like a clock, covered in strange symbols and supported by a dog-headed man. “and here is the Wheel,”
A wealthy man, dropping coins from his hand into the outstretched hand of the poor, while in the other a scales swung. “And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,” she drew another one, “which is blank, is something he carries on his back, which I am forbidden to see. I do not find the Hanged Man…”
The card wasn’t blank for Shauna, but it didn’t make any sense, either. It depicted a two-headed being, one head male, the other female. A rebis, her mind supplied from somewhere, though she could not recall where she had learned that. A magical hermaphrodite. She felt she should reveal this to the clairvoyant, but couldn’t, or didn’t want to. Instead she stared at the six cards in front of her and asked, “What does it mean?”
Madame Sosostris smiled at her with too many teeth. “Fear death by water.”
“What?” Shauna looked back at the cards. She couldn’t think of her own question, but she knew instinctively that that was not an answer to it. “No, that’s not good enough, what does it mean? -” She looked back up to find Madame Sosostris gone. The candle went out, and the smog dissipated in a moment. Shauna looked back down and the table was gone, too, the six cards fluttering to the ground, along with the hyacinths. She could hardly see a foot in front of her. The curtains seemed to be closing in, or perhaps that was just a trick of the way they moved, the velvet flowing like water. Shauna dropped to her knees, her hands scrabbling for the flowers. The stems danced against her hand and escaped, then again.
Shauna woke unable to breath, her chest feeling like her lungs had been crushed and were unable to expand again. For what felt like an eternity she lay there, gasping like a landed fish, her body rigid, until sweet air finally filled her lungs and she sunk back into her mattress.
A dream. It was a dream, only this and nothing more. She got up, slowly, swinging her legs over the side of the bed. It was still dark out, but Shauna did not feel up to the task of going back to sleep.
The glass of water at her bedside was warm. She poured it into the sink, and as she waited for the tap to run cold her eyes, still squinting from the light she had turned on, flicked up to her reflection. Her face looked haggard and tired, dark circles under her eyes. The last few days had been bad. She filled her glass and returned to her room, turning the light on.
There, on her dresser, sat the offending object; an innocuous white paper envelope. The words Brown University, Dean of Arts were written in the return address. There were two people in the world who knew about the letter, Shauna and her mother. And the Dean of Arts at Brown. But he didn’t matter. The person who mattered, of course, was Jackie, because she didn’t know.
Shauna knew she had to tell Jackie. That was the first thing her mother had asked, when they got the letter. Do you want to have a little party to celebrate? We can invite Jackie. Shauna had passed over the question without replying. She wanted to tell Jackie, really, it was just… the wrong time. When will be the right time? She didn’t fucking know. She had tried a half-dozen times, but she’d never gotten anywhere.
And she didn’t have any idea how Jackie might react to the news. That was the worst part. With Shauna, every big conversation had to be planned in her head beforehand. She’d spent hours whispering back and forth to herself before she had informed her mother that she didn’t want to be Jewish anymore. But when she tried to imagine even the first thing Jackie would reply to this news, she got stuck.
It was ridiculous. Jackie was supposed to be her best friend. They were supposed to be able to finish each other’s sentences; they had been since third grade. Of course, more often than not, it was Jackie finishing Shauna’s sentences with something she hadn’t intended, and Shauna going along with it. But that was fine, because that was what Shauna wanted anyway, wasn’t it? Jackie could read her so well, she must have just known.
There was a small, dangerous part of Shauna that wanted to rip the letter up, and go along to Rutgers just like Jackie wanted, and forget about Brown. She hated that part. Another, no more appealing, part wanted to tell Jackie immediately, and let the chips fall where they may. If it ended with Jackie leaving her forever, well, said that part, that was a good thing. Shauna felt herself caught between these two versions of herself, one vacillating and the other revolutionary and both radical, and faced with these two options she could only choose the centre, which was nothing at all.
She must have been up for a half-hour now. Finally she looked at the clock; it was four-eighteen. Too late to sleep, if she wanted to get up in time, but too early to do anything but sit and wait for the sun to rise.
Shauna stood and tugged a book of poetry off her shelf. She turned it over in her hands. The cover was smooth unleavened card, the pages light and thin, stamped dark with thick lettering. She let it fall open to a middle page and read;
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and
everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.