Vicious Circle

“He’s really sweet,” she said. “You’d think he’d want to stay well away from Rafi, considering—you know—what he means to me. But he just wants to make me happy.”

“Ask him for a blank prescription pad before it wears off,” I suggested. She punched me in the shoulder and I took it like a man.

I’d already learned the hard way that sarcastic comments about Dr. Feelgood met with terrible retribution. He was an odd guy for Pen to be dating, in some ways; she wasn’t drawn to material things, and affluence normally struck her as a sign of spiritual malaise rather than anything to aspire to. But Dylan’s wealth and success and smoked silver Lexus were counterbalanced by the fact that he was an ovate—a sort of junior officer in some druidical training system, learning to be one of nature’s high priests. That was how she’d met him—at some solstice-related knees-up on a windswept hill in Pembrokeshire. Pen’s own flavor of paganism didn’t have ranks and hierarchies, but she liked it a lot that this well-to-do young doctor was groping toward spiritual truth rather than just worrying about his backswing. And he understood about Rafi, which most people flat-out don’t.

Yeah, the guy was clearly a saint. It was probably just as well I’d never met him: if opposites attract we’d probably fall head over heels in love with each other and leave Pen out in the cold.

“Are you feeling a sense of choking terror that you can’t pin down to anything in particular?” I asked her.

It might have seemed like an odd question in some circumstances, but coming from me Pen knows it’s like a doctor asking you if you’ve been off your food. She searched her mind. It’s both capacious and somewhat idiosyncratically arranged, so it took a while. “No,” she said at last. “Just the usual choking terrors, and I can pretty much account for those. Why, Fix?”

I dried my hands and went back out into the living room. Arthur was clashing his beak and shrugging his wings open and shut—his way of begging for more, but I was all out of goodies. I skirted around him, keeping my distance in case he decided to search me to make sure. Pen leaned in the doorway, arms folded, looking at me with some concern.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “Something coming in on channel death. Or maybe nothing. You know how these things go.”

Just by reading her face I could see her decide to change the subject. “Grambas called,” she said. “Some men tried to deliver something at the office yesterday, but you weren’t there. He’s got it in the lockup behind the shop.”

I grimaced. A pilgrimage out to Harlesden first thing on a Monday morning wasn’t a thrilling prospect. On the other hand, that was meant to be my place of work, and since I owe Pen so much back rent that she could probably legally impound both my kidneys and sell them in Hong Kong, she feels fairly strongly that I should spend more time over there than I do.

But she sympathized with my raw mood, and as usual her sympathy took a concrete form. She cleared the table—by tipping all the newspapers, magazines, coasters, and unopened mail onto the floor—and went to get her tarot deck.

“Pen,” I said, regretting that I’d said anything, “you know I don’t hold with this stuff.”

“It never hurts to get a second opinion,” she said.

“From who? Whose opinion are we getting? Pieces of laminated cardboard don’t know jack shit about what’s going down in the world, Pen. Nobody ever tells them anything.”

“It’s not the cards, Fix. It’s you, and it’s me, and it’s the weltgeist—the world-spirit.”

I winced and waved her quiet. The world-spirit. Right, because there’s a consciousness in back of the universe and it loves all its children: we get daily evidence of that in terms of famine, plague, and flood. I don’t buy the tarot for the same reason that I don’t buy religion: the hopes and fears of ordinary people stick up out of the miracles like bones out of a spavined horse. My universe doesn’t work like that, and the only spirits in it are the ones that are my stock in trade.

She gave me the cards to shuffle. I considered palming death and top-decking him while she wasn’t looking, but she hates it when I do that so I played fair.

She dealt out a triskele spread—three cards in a triangle, two more crossed in the center. Ordinarily she’d have done a full ten-card spread, but she knows my limits so she was keeping it short and sweet.

She turned over the cover and the cross—the two cards in the middle. They were an inverted ace of wands and the hanged man. Pen blinked, clearly surprised and a little unsettled by the conjunction.

“That’s really weird,” she said.

“Tall dark stranger?” I hazarded.

“Don’t be stupid, Fix. It’s just that those two cards, together like that . . . they mean exactly what you just said. Spiritual energy—negative spiritual energy—in a kind of suspension. Blocked. Frozen. Penned up.”