Bone Dance

1.0: Gonna go downtown

I came up on my back in the dirt. The sun was hot on the front of me, but the ground under my body was cool. I’d been there a while, then. A white-blue glaring summer sky made my eyes water. My mouth felt like a tomb from some culture where they bury your servants with you.

I turned my head reluctantly, and found the river flats around me, deserted, smelling like dead fish and damp wood. Far away, across the baked mud and spilled cured concrete, a bridge crew worked. I could hear the cadence shout, faintly, and the crash as the weight came down to drive the piles.

I rolled half over and tried to decide how I was. This time, all I felt was a sore and swelling bruise on the side of my face. I remembered where I must have got it: in the street in back of Tet Offensive, where I’d gone for spicy mock duck and gotten two Charlies petites instead. The last thing I recalled clearly was one of the boss girls doing a snap kick, watching her heel come at me out of the dark. Probably about then that I went down.

Since the only lasting damage I’d taken was something I could remember, I must not have been into any nasty things during downtime. How long had it been? And what had I missed?

When I stood up, I had to revise the damage report. My skull was the Holy Sepulcher of hangovers. Oh, I must have been into some nasty things, indeed. I hoped I’d had fun. By the time I got to the street along the Bank, it was enough to make me sick.

I’d had thirty bucks in paper, but my pockets were empty now. If the boss girls hadn’t gotten it, then it had paid for whatever had left its residue in my head. I wished I knew what it was. Not that I could resolve never to consume any more. Sooner or later I’d go down again, shut out of my own mind, and all the resolving I’d ever done would be as useful as a dome light in a casket.

The next plunge down would be number five. The first time, I’d thought it was something I’d eaten, or drunk, or otherwise consumed. The second time, I’d wondered if it was someone else’s malice, the coup n’âme. By the third, it had occurred to me that it might be all mine. The effect of my colorful origin, arrived at last to rectify a long-neglected error. But if that was so, why wasn’t it coming closer to killing me?

I sat on the wall by the road, shivering in the sun. Suddenly I could imagine all the things my body might do when I wasn’t there to stop it, and I felt so vile they might as well have happened. Maybe they had; they just hadn’t left marks. I thought about a future full of blank spaces, and knew I couldn’t bear it. If that was the future, I had to escape it.

The obvious method came to mind, despair’s favorite offspring. It came so sharp to the front of my brain, so clear and desirable, that I made a quick little noise about it. I was down off the wall and headed for the Deeps before I could think about what I was running (figuratively) from. The human animal, when hurting, prefers to go to ground in its own burrow.

In parts of town, I could have sat on the curb and held out my hand, and after a while, if I looked pitiful enough, I would have the money to pay for a bicycle cab. There were still people in the world who were superstitious about beggars, after all, and if bruised, dirty, and disoriented couldn’t elicit pity, then what was superstition for? But the Bank was lousy panhandling territory. People there lived by the Deal, like everyone else. They lived well by it, however, and that affected their judgment. Even if they once knew the First Law of Conservation of Deals — that there are never enough to go around — they’d let it slip their minds. So they drove past in their co-op’s car, or trotted by under the twisted trees, led by dogs that ate as much as I did, and assumed when they saw me that I didn’t do as much to earn my food as the dog.

Once, even in a place like the Bank, you could hold your hand out in a certain way, and people would understand that you needed transportation. They’d stop their private cars and let you ride in them, without asking anything in return. Unnatural, but true. I’d seen it in movies. But that was a long time ago. I staggered on, the dogs barked, and their owners made what they thought were imperceptible movements toward one pocket or another. I wasn’t worried; I didn’t think even a shot of ammonia in my eyes could make me feel worse.

By the time I got to Seven Corners market, the whole world seemed to flash colors in rhythm with my heartbeat. The flapping shutter of my headache kept time, too. Seven Corners has never been a good place for my preferred sort of marketing: it’s food, clothing, housewares, and the kind of services that go with those, mostly. So I didn’t much mind having to make my way through it with my eyes squinted three-quarters shut. It occurred to me, dimly, that I might have more than a hangover.

The weight of the sun finally brought me to a ragged halt at the market’s edge. I stood under an awning, supporting myself by propping my hip against a table, and pretended to be thoughtful about a tray of tomatillos. The next stall over had crates of live poultry, and the noise and smell were unlovely. A black woman with a serpent scarred from cheek to cheek over the bridge of her nose traded the vendor a bottle of homebrew for a white rooster; the vendor popped a little sack over the bird’s head, tied its feet together, and ran a loop of string through its bonds for a carrying handle. The woman walked away, swinging a rooster too dismayed to struggle. It gets worse, I wanted to tell him, thinking of his new owner’s scar.

I was waiting, I realized, for my wits to disappear into darkness. As if it would happen when I was ready for it. There would be some consolation in knowing what it was. Brain tumor, bad food, the heat? The heat would kill cactus. Perspiration was trickling out of my hairline, warm as the air, too warm to be doing its job.

The poultry dealer had a pair of doves in a wicker cage, velvety gray and sullen. Doves in paintings were never sullen. They seemed, in fact, to have managed a permanent state of exaltation, like the mindless fluttering ones around a chalice in… Sherrea’s… cards.

I stood clouted with revelation amid the produce. I wanted knowledge. Sherrea claimed to call it up out of a seventy-eight-card deck. I didn’t believe in the cards, but I might, if pressed, admit to uncertainty about Sher. A little mind reading, with tarot as its rationalization — however she explained it to herself, she might locate my missing memories. If she was a mind reader, if the memories were there, if there was any help in them. But I had to try.

The brown grandmotherly woman who sold the tomatillos was shooting ungrandmotherly narrow-eyed looks at me, so I turned to move on. But I missed my step and stumbled against one of her awning poles, rocking the whole canvas roof, and she shouted something about mi madre. That made me laugh. The sun hit me over the head with its hammer when I came out of the shade, and I stopped laughing.

The Ravine forms the western edge of the Bank, only a few hundred yards from Seven Corners market. It’s full of the cracked pavement of an old interstate highway — still a perfectly good road, in an age that requires less of its road surface and has no use for the concept of “between states.” From the lip of the Ravine I could see the Deeps on the other side, hard gray and brown brick and wood on the nearest structures, shading farther in to rose, bronze, black pearl, and verdigris in spires of stone, metals, and brilliant glass. The empress of it all, rising from its center, was Ego, the tallest building in the City, whose reflective flanks had no color of their own, but wore the sky instead — relentless, cloudless blue today. The towers of the Deeps, rising in angles or curves, were made more poignant by the occasional shattered forms of their ruined kin. If I’d reached them as quickly on foot as I have in the narrative, maybe I’d have no story to tell. Or maybe I would. Coincidence is the word we use when we can’t see the levers and the pulleys.

The bridge over the Ravine was scattered with vendors who hadn’t found a place in the market. Very few had awnings, or even stalls; they spread blankets on the scorching sidewalks, and kept their hats and shawls and parasols tilted against the sun. The heat rose with the force of an explosion from the road surface below, and the whole scene wiggled in a heat mirage. Near the center of the bridge, I stopped to press my hands over my eyes, trying to squeeze the aching out of my head, to replace it with a firm sense of up and down, forward and back. I shivered. Maybe the sweat was working, after all. Except that I didn’t seem to be sweating anymore.

A warm wind brushed past me. No, it was the sudden breeze of people going by. So why didn’t they go! I opened my eyes. A skinny arm reached out, bony fingers slapped my shoulder and spun me around. Faces splashed with black and gray, stubbly scalps, a flurry of ragged clothing — I was at the eye of a storm of Jammers.

I’ve heard them compared to rabbits in the spring. Maybe the people who do are afraid of rabbits. The Jammers were pale, thin as wire, and as they danced their arms and legs crisscrossed like a chainlink fence of skin and bone. They weren’t dressed for the heat, but I understand Jammers don’t feel it, or cold, or much of anything besides the passion of the drum in their veins.

The nightbabies, who every sunset brought their parents’ money down from the tops of the towers or from the walled compounds of parkland at the City’s edge, would follow a cloud of Jammers like gulls after a trash wagon. They’d try to copy the steps. But that dance has no pattern, no repeats, and the caller is the defect or disease that makes the Jammer bloodbeat and the shared mind that goes with them. The hoodoos claimed the Jammers as kin, but I never heard that the Jammers noticed. The nightbabies pestered them for prophecies, for any words at all that they could repeat down in the clubs to give them a varnish of artful doom for a few hours, until something else went bang.

But I didn’t open fortune cookies, or feed hard money to the Weight-and-Fate in the Galena de Juegos, or seek out prophecies from the Jammers. No one could prove to me that the future was already on record. And if it was — well, the future is best friends with the past, and my past and I were not on speaking terms. Prophecy was a faith for the ignorant and a diversion for the rich, and I was neither. The Jammers couldn’t know anything about me.

“Infant creature,” sang one of the Jammers, “ancient thing, long way from home.”

Lucky guesses didn’t count. I could be, when I wanted, as close to invisible as flesh and blood came. Nobody Particular in a street full of the same. It didn’t seem to be working now. “Blow off!” I shrieked.

“Barely a step away from home,” piped another voice.

“On one side.” A third Jammer.

Fourth: “And on the other.”

“Ain’t got no home at all.”

“Have you no homes? Have you no families?”

They all seemed to think that was hilarious. Given that they’re supposed to share a mind, it was the equivalent of laughing at one’s own joke.

By that time I couldn’t tell if I’d heard any voice twice. “Get away from me,” I said, “or I’m going to hurt one of you.” The part of my mind that was doing my thinking, far away from the rest of me, was surprised by the screech in my voice. “Maybe two of you,” I added, just to prove I could.

“You are the concept immaculate,” caroled a Jammer, shoving her/his hollow face up close to mine. The skin, between streaks of gray paint, was opaque and flaky-looking; the breath the words came out on was eerily sweet. “You are the flesh made word. Whatchoo gonna do about it?”

“Which way you gonna step?”

“This is the step, this is it, right here.”

I folded my arms around my head, as if to protect it from angry birds. “Go away!” I screamed, and now even my thinking mind, cowering in its comer, didn’t care if every living soul on the bridge saw me, and knew I was afraid.

“Step!” “Step!”

I was closed in by a fence of bones singing in the voices of crows, and if I didn’t get out now it would club me to my knees with my own secrets. I shut my eyes and punched.

They whooped, and it was a moment before I realized I hadn’t connected with anything. I opened my eyes. There was a gap in the circle, so I bolted through it, through the forest of pedestrians and parasols, and if I hadn’t stumbled over a blanket full of pots and pans and tripped on the curb, I wouldn’t be writing this. Or perhaps I would. Those levers, those pulleys… Amid the ringing of aluminum and cast iron, I hit the pavement on my backside, inches from the path of the tri-wheeler that was scattering foot traffic to either side. The driver honked, swerved, and slewed to a halt.

The Jammers were yelling and — cheering? Who knows what Jammers cheer about? Had I just taken the going-home step, or the no-home-at-all step? Or did it mean anything?

The trike carried full touring kit and weather shell, and had a mud-and-dust finish from someplace where there used to be roads. When the hatch popped, clots of dirt cracked away from the seam and fell to the blacktop, and the driver unfolded out of the opening with startling speed and economy. It was hard to tell what pronoun properly applied under the tinted goggles, the helmet, the crumpled coveralls, and the dust. She or he was squatting next to me before I had a chance to think of standing up.

“Are you hit?” Quick, sharp-cut words, the middleweight voice cracking out of roughness into resonance. The skin on the angular jaw, under the dirt, had never needed shaving, and when the stained leather gauntlet came off the right hand, the battered fingers seemed relatively light-boned. I hazarded a “she.” Those fingers grabbed my chin before I could dodge them.

Everything tilted forty-five degrees. My vision was clear, but for a moment I felt as if I were sitting on a slant with nothing to hold on to. Then the world snapped back to true. The driver’s dark goggles showed me two views of myself, slightly bug-eyed. What was this hangover from?

“No,” I said. “You didn’t hit me.”

She peeled off the goggles, snapped them closed, and dropped them into her breast pocket. Her eyes were black, and surrounded by clean tanned skin where the goggles had sealed out the dust that the tri-wheeler’s shell hadn’t. She was frowning, as if I’d confessed to something more offensive than not having been hit by the trike. Then bland and lazy good nature replaced the frown — no, was held up in front of it like a mask on a stick. “I could make another pass, I suppose,” she said thoughtfully. “No? But you seem so offended.”

“Not by your aim, honest. Excuse me,” I said, and stood up. A bit too fast. She grabbed me around the rib cage.

“Whoa, Paint, old girl. It’s that way that’s up. Put one foot there, and the other — that’s it.” She stepped back, and I swayed, but that was all. “Now, is there someone to carry you away, or are you doomed, like a public works project in cast cement, to grace this bridge forever?”

It was true that nothing I’d said or done up to then had indicated I ought to be allowed out alone. “No. I’ll be fine, I’m just going into the Deeps.” Now there was a mindless utterance. Still, if I could reach the Deeps, I would be all right. Or at least, the burrowing instinct told me so. I looked around and realized that the Jammers were gone. I must have stopped being interesting.

She raised her eyebrows: delicate inquiry. “The D — oh, downtown.” She swiped at a trickle of sweat on her forehead with the back of her wrist, then snatched impatiently at her helmet, yanked it off. The hair underneath was tangled, wet with perspiration, shoulder length, and very black. “I suppose your career as a caryatid will have to be cut short,” she said. “I’m going that way myself.” Glorious smile, hiding nothing, signifying nothing.

I had a dirty shirt, a dirtier pair of jeans, and a pair of sneakers, none of which I intended to give up. I had a few useful things in my pockets, but none that would turn to gold in someone else’s fingers. So riding would entail racking up an obligation to a formidable stranger. But the thought of sitting down, closing my eyes, and effortlessly reaching the Deeps — no, I had no credit here. “No thank you,” I croaked. “It’s a lovely day for a walk.”

Breath burst out between her lips. “Oh, Our Lady of Martyrs. I missed the odor of sanctity on you. Get in.”

She meant it as one kind of blasphemy. It fell on my ears as different, and worse. Where were the lovely, familiar cadences of the Deal, the careful weighing of goods and considerations, the call-and-response of buying and selling? Hers was an alien and heretical language, for all that I knew the words. She propelled me to the trike, and I tried not to go. But I really did want to sit down under the shell of the tri-wheeler where the sun couldn’t get me, even if I paid with the rest of my life -

She stuffed me onto the back seat as if I were her laundry, straddled the front seat, and slammed the hatch. In a moment I was surrounded by engine noise and the rattle of the weather shell.

Well, one more for the debit side of the ledger. “I’ll pay you back,” I said as loud as I could, doubting it was loud enough.

She turned in the saddle, passed a quick glance over me, and said mildly, “Good God, with what?”

We crossed the Ravine. My silence was fulminating; I don’t know what hers was. She drove quickly through the hollow-hearted warehouses, briskly past the copper-roofed riverbank palace and surrounding defensible wasteland of the Whitney-Celestin families. Pedestrians and bicyclists kept out of her way, except for once, when someone belatedly driving a pair of goats toward the mall market claimed right-of-way. Her Creole was idiomatic, at least on the obscenities. I felt the back end buck and slide on the gravel as she braked. Something flickered on the surface of a gauge in front of her. “Oh, shut up,” she said, and whacked a button with her index finger.

The trike was, by its nature, intensely valuable; but it wasn’t beautiful. There was a wealth of dust and dirt under the weather shell, and cracked rubber and scarred paint, but that was all. Everything in my field of vision had been repaired at least once, with varying degrees of success and duct tape. I let my head rest on the seat back and closed my eyes. The pain behind my eyebrows was dissolving my muscles.

“Do you plan to tell me where I’m going?” came the honed and honeyed voice from the front. “Or do we drift like the Ancient Mariner? You don’t look like an albatross.”

“Well, you haven’t shot me,” I said, alarming myself. “Yet, anyway.” I opened my eyes and saw through the roof window the hard, hot sky and the ruined exterior of the Washington Hotel. “Go past the last gerbil tube and turn left.”

“I beg your pardon?” she said with delight.

“The pedestrian walkways over the streets. Gerbil tubes.”

She gave a shout of laughter. “Christ, they still call ’em that. I haven’t—” She shifted down, and the trike whined like an eager dog. “Here?”

“Yeah.” I had a moment of disorientation, watching the immense wet smile of the billboard boy on the front of the Power Authority Building sail by over my head. Conserve, by all that’s holy. You damn betcha.

“So, what do you think of the quality of life here? Are all the women strong and all the men good-looking?”

Ignoring the unnerving mixture of good humor and ferocity in her voice, I said, “I take it you’re new in town.”

“You can damn well give it back, then. I grew up here. But I’ve been gone ten thousand miles or seven long years, whichever comes first. Give or take what you will.”

For the first time it occurred to me that my chauffeur might not have all her outlets grounded. “I see. Stop when you get to the fence.”

“I’d be a fool not to,” she said, and I realized she’d downshifted as I spoke. “Unless I wanted to end up coarse-ground.” I leaned forward for a view out the windshield, and found the red-rust chainlink edge of the Night Fair before us. Quiet now, it waited for sunset. “What is that?” she asked, nodding at the fence.

I chose understatement. “A market. I can get out here.”

I expected her to pop the hatch. Instead, she cast a leisurely eye over the neighborhood. I was close enough to see the shallow lines at the corners of her eyes, the dense black sweep of her eyelashes, the precise shape of her lips. Her earlobes were pierced, but she wore no earrings. No rings, no cosmetics, no ornaments at all; no personal touches, no sentiment. She reminded me of my apartments.

As if she’d heard the thought, she asked, “You live here?”

“No,” I said blithely.

When it became clear that I wasn’t going to add to that, she killed the engine and looked over her shoulder again. I smiled at her. In defiance of logic, I felt worse now that the noise and vibration had quit. “My heavens,” she said at last, “a fount of information. Loose lips sink ships.” I heard the latch over my head open; she lifted the roof off us, swung out of the driver’s seat, and offered me a hand. “At least, come tell to me your name.”

Likewise your occupation, and where and whence you came, I thought, my startled mind dropping the rest of the quote into place like a puzzle piece. Not mad — or at least, endowed with an interesting education, as well. I avoided her hand by pretending I needed both of mine to get out of the back seat. By the end of the process, it was true, and I leaned against the trike while my vision cleared. “Sparrow,” I said.

“Come again?”

“The name. And since you’ve had your will of me… ”

“Hardly that,” she replied, laughing. But I thought I saw a flash of pleasure in her face, to find that I knew the beginning of her quote. “Besides, mine’s debased coin. One of sixty or so is hardly the same as one of a kind, an original, a work of art.”

“Do you think I was born with a name like Sparrow?” I said, pretending mild offense.

She swung her leg back over the front seat, her face good-humored and distant, and thumbed the starter. The tri-wheeler broke alcohol-scented wind, loudly, and came back to life. Then she looked up at me, her eyes half-lidded, her mouth half-smiling. “We’re all born nameless, aren’t we? And the name we end with has only peripherally to do with our family tree.”

I turned to go.

“Wait; I forgot,” she continued. “You were saying you’d pay me for this?”

Well, of course she’d remember. Things could only get worse, after all. “That’s the Deal.”

She took another up-and-down survey of me. “What’s that holding your hair back?”

It was a braided leather thong with a few jet beads in it. I’d forgotten it in my first inventory, but it wouldn’t have mattered — it wasn’t fair coin for a ride from the Bank. “It has a lot of sentimental value,” I lied, reflexes kicking in anyway. “I couldn’t part with it.”

“Yes, you could.” And she held out her hand, palm up.

Once again she’d chopped through the rituals of the Deal with brutal simplicity, razored the pelt of civilization off an already dubious exchange. I felt mauled. I yanked the thong out of my hair and dropped it into her hand. Her fingers closed over it with disturbing finality, and she nodded. “Just so. I’ll treasure it always. Goodbye, Sparrow, and watch out for the cats.” With another vivid smile, she closed the hatch.

I watched until she was out of sight, and even until the gravel dust had settled. Then I went carefully around the corner to Del Corazón, to cadge five minutes on the phone from Beano.

1.1: A surfeit of transactions

Del Corazón smelled of frangipani and leather and Fast Luck incense, and was suffocatingly warm. On any day but Friday, it would have been closed against the midday heat; but some business is best done when other people sleep. Del Corazón was open, if not precisely for me.

Beano was an animated wax statue in the dim light of the shop, gleaming from a fine, even coating of perspiration. Sweat darkened the front of his tight red tank top like blood. I asked my boon.

He laid both his clean white palms on the glass counter, between a tray of glow dermapaints and a rack of patent leather garters, and gave me a long pink look through ivory eyelashes. “Nothing’s free,” he said softly. Beano never raised his voice.

I felt a sudden, incautious relief. I had escaped out from under the fairy hill and returned to the real world, safe at last. Nothing was free. Even Beano was a danger I was used to. I gathered my strength and flung myself into the fray. “Well, and five minutes on the phone is nothing. I’m doing you a favor, in fact. Beano, mi hermano, if I’m on it, it can’t ring.”

“Ain’t but a hundred phones in the City. Don’t ring very often.”

“Yes, but I know how you hate to be disturbed on Fridays.” I twitched my nose like a cartoon rabbit. “Mmm. What an interesting new smell. Almost like… ” I let my voice taper politely off. Graceless, I thought, but functional.

Beano accepted three currencies: hard money, flesh and blood, and knowledge. He preferred the first two. I mostly used the third, often pointed in the opposite direction from the one he had in mind. Usually with a lighter hand, but I felt like the saint with all the arrows, and it was undercutting my judgment. (I’d given him money, too, when I had it, when I could afford it. But never the second alternative, never skin. Never.)

“Almost like what?” he said.

I pursed my lips. “No, forgive me, it couldn’t possibly have been. And if it was, I’m sure it’s perfectly legal.”

Beano leaned down and opened the back of the display case. I watched his hard white hands, their backs veiled with sparse but surprisingly long white hairs, their nails long and thick and filed sharp, moving delicately over the merchandise. It was like watching a cave spider. The fingertips passed over knives with blades inscribed in Spanish, over a necklace made from the stuffed skin of a rattlesnake, fangs intact, over a pair of engraved silver clasp bracelets welded together, back to back, their inside curves studded with little spines. I looked away.

“Here,” Beano said, and set something on the counter. I turned back. It was a little box, covered in dark red velvet and lined in black satin. Ranked neatly on the satin were six bone needles, their broad ends still flanged and rough and recalling the joint they’d once been part of, their long points polished bright. “Do you know what these are for?” Beano asked.

“No.”

“Do you want to know?”

I swallowed, because I couldn’t help it, even though I knew he’d see me do it. “No.”

He slammed the cash drawer and I jumped. He clenched his hands around the edge of the counter; the muscles in his forearm showed like rope. “Someday,” he said, “maybe I’ll show you.”

“Does that mean I can use the phone today?”

Beano smiled slowly. “Sure. Sure you can.” It’s possible to miss things you never had. Pay phones, desk phones, cellular phones, hot lines to Russia — they’re taken for granted in the old movies. Whatever it took to get a phone installed in those golden days, it must not have been as complex as the City’s system of influence, blackmail, and graft. And it must have resulted in something better than A.A. Albrecht’s collection of scratchy party lines.

The phone was on the wall of a room behind the shop, where the extra stock was stored. The thing on the front of the rack was made of paper-thin black leather and lined with rose-colored silk. The material was so light that it hung shapeless, unidentifiable. A garment, probably. But thin leather cords hung from it at intervals, and a strand of wire coiled down from one side. I tried not to look at it as I listened to the ringing of the phone on the top floor of Sherrea’s building. Eight rings. If no one answered — well, I could try again later. But that’s not how I felt. My pass with Beano seemed to have used up all my insouciance; suddenly it was desperately important to hear Sherrea’s voice, even if it was telling me to go to hell.

And at last, the life-giving click. “Eyeah?” Not one of her neighbors, but Sher herself. She sounded gritty beyond what the noisy connection would account for. Of course, I’d woken her; it was barely past noon.

“Sher? It’s Sparrow,” I half shouted into the tube.

“Mmh? Whaisit?”

“I need a reading.”

“Ah, shit. Whattaya think, I took a Hippocratic oath?” There was a moment’s pause before she said, “Call me when the moon’s out.”

“Sher—” My mouth opened to dicker, to offer her all the inducements, mythical and real, I could call to mind. In that moment, they seemed frail and faded. I shut my mouth and tried again, and found myself saying, “Sher… please?”

There was another crackling pause. “What’s wrong?” Alarm and suspicion mixed in the words, with suspicion leading.

“I just woke up on the river flats. Between now and nine-ish last night, I have a big gap where my life used to be.”

Silence on the other end. She bargained hard, but not as fast from straight out of bed. I could hear her trying to figure out how much my desperation was worth. “Uh-huh. And I can help.”

“Maybe,” I answered as the dickering impulse reasserted itself at last.

“Chica, this is gonna cost you.”

“I’m good for it, Sher.”

“What do you mean,” she said ominously, “you’re good for it?”

“One of the things that happened while I was down is that my money went away.”

“Get some more.”

“It’s, ah, in my other pants. Which are locked up in the Night Fair.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“Del Corazón.”

“What’d you give Beano?”

“Threats and promises,” I answered.

Sherrea said some things in a language I didn’t recognize. Then she said, “It’s a long walk, and you deserve it. Or are you planning to scam a lift out of some poor bastard?”

Twelve blocks and four flights. Well, after that nice restful ride… “I’m walking.”

“You’re gonna owe me, Sparrow. Got that?”

“Yes, I’ll owe you.” I felt suddenly, grovelingly, indecently grateful. Another debit for the ledger — but to Sherrea. I’d never known Sherrea to deal in flesh and blood.

“Get here in less than twenty minutes and I’ll cook your flat ass for breakfast.”

It took me thirty. I followed the route around the east flank of the Night Fair, where spindly locust trees cast a little shade. Sometimes I had to cling to the fence, when the curve of the world became too much to climb. Sometimes I just sat on the curb and panted and clutched my head. Two little black kids with the copper earrings of the Leopard Society threw fragments of paving at me. I scooped a handful of dust out of the boulevard plantings, spit into it, and closed my fingers over it, chanting at random, bastard Spanish, Creole, Lao. Then I stared at the kids. They made a great show of nonchalance, but they left. Which was nice; what was I going to do when I blew my handful of dust at them, and they didn’t turn into lumps of clay, or get leprosy, or whatever they expected?

Away from the Fair, the traffic was heavier. I dodged bicycles and the occasional motorbike, as well as pedestrians more determined than I was, which was all of them. A silver sedan with smoked windows and the insignia of a northside greenkraal nearly put an end to my problems out in the middle of LaSalle. I jumped for the center island as the tires squealed. All’s well that isn’t over.

And all the while I watched for a filthy tri-wheeler, listening for its clotted growling. I had no idea what I’d do if I saw it.

Sherrea’s building was smooth dirty yellow tile and rows of too-small windows, with a door that used to be glass and was now rather more practical armor-gray steel. It was built in the last century, when prosperity must have excused ugliness. The halls had once been blank and identical, the stairwells featureless tubes of concrete block and iron stair rail. Now living ivy worked its way toward the sky at the top of the stairs, where someone had turned a trapdoor into an open skylight; wisteria cascaded down to meet it from the roof. Things peered from the leaves: grotesque carved wooden faces, old photographs of people who all seemed to be smiling, faded postcards. A painted snake twined up the stair rail: red, black, and yellow on the first floor; blue, gray, and green on the second; purple, green, and orange on the third; blue, red, and yellow on the fourth. Fat candles stood in former floor lamps on every landing.

The stairwell doors were numbered, as if the residents wouldn’t be able to keep track when they came home. The “4” was an elongated green man in a loincloth, one arm held out and bent. By the time I climbed that far, I was glad to see him. The hall behind him was painted with frescoes of vacant Roman courtyards. Sher’s door was the middle of a fountain; I knocked on a painted nymph’s tummy.

Sherrea had her face on, and layers and layers of black and purple clothing. The astral colors of sorcerers, she’d told me once. Her black hair was wet and had been combed flat to her head, but that wouldn’t last long. There was a cigarette between her white-painted lips, smoked nearly down to the filter.

Her big dark eyes got bigger when she saw me, and it made her look almost as young as she was. “Sparrow. Blessed goddamn Virgin,” she said around the cigarette. “Get in here and lie down.”

“I’ve been lying down,” I said, thinking of the river flats.

“Not in any way that was good for you. You’ve got some kinda shit in you, chica. What is it?”

Either she really is psychic, or I wasn’t looking my usual sleek self. “I don’t know. I wasn’t there when it happened. I’ve probably got some sunstroke as well.”

“Oya. Well, you’re not gonna sit in my living room like that.”

She drew me a bath. She was prepared to drop me in it herself, but I declined firmly. She insisted that I leave my clothes outside the bathroom door, so she could wash them (an unexpectedly practical gesture from Sherrea). I did, and locked the door.

Her bathroom was the place in the apartment that looked most like hers. Dark — probably where she put her makeup on. Paisley shawls, ferns shaped like visitors from outer space, incense, brass bowls. Mismatched glass jars (from jelly and peanut butter and salsa, elevated beyond their stations) full of dried leaves and flowers and powders, with a combined scent that called to mind medicines and hot metal. The mirror was like a pool half seen through vegetation; it was swagged with velvet draperies dimly printed with flowers that all looked carnivorous.

I was in the bath for a long time. I might have even fallen asleep; I know that when Sherrea pounded on the door and shouted, “Did you kill yourself in my goddamn bathroom?” I sat up with a jerk, my heart slamming in my chest like a moth against a window. Water lapped over the side and splatted on the floor. It wasn’t warm water anymore, I noticed.

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.”

Sherrea looked up, but it was a blind look. “The air’s not moving around you,” she said, “but there’s a wind that’s trying to blow. Somebody’s gotta pull the windbreak down.” Her voice was changing. Now she wasn’t looking at me at all; she was looking at the tops of her eye sockets. All I could see were the whites. I rocked slowly back from the cabinet.

“Sit still, munequita,” said the new voice. It was lower than Sher’s, and thick with an accent that ought to have been Hispanic and wasn’t. Sherrea’s lips, making the words, moved differently than they usually did. Her face looked suddenly much older. “You afraid of me?”

Munequita meant — I felt the infinitesimal shift of new knowledge. Little doll. I shivered. “I wouldn’t say that. Not yet, at least. Who are you?”

A hooting laugh. “Nobody you know. Listen now. It’s time you was doin’ what you supposed to. You got work to do, and all you do is look out for your own self. You not ready to do your work. That’s bringin’ danger on you, and all the ones bound to you.”

“Nobody’s bound to me,” I said firmly.

“You think that? Where you been, sittin’ in a hole? You wait ’til le Chasseur comes. But you dangle those lives over the fire and that’s all for you. I give you warning.”

Sherrea’s lips had drawn back from her nicotine-stained teeth in a big nasty smile. I stood up carefully. “Well, thank you. I’ll be going, then.”

“Sit down.” I can’t describe that voice. I sat down. “But you can save your ass. You gotta learn to serve, and let your own self be fed by the spirits. Serve the loa, serve all the people, and go hungry and cold yourself. Then all the parts of you gonna come together and make you well. But strong people want to keep chained what you gotta make free. There’s gonna be blood, and fire, and the dead gonna dance in the streets. But if you give what I tol’ you, the light of change’ll shine in the tower of shadows.” I felt like someone who’s gone to get a wart removed, and been told he needs radiation and chemo. I am not good at hungry and cold. “So what is it that I have to do?” I said.

“Donkey. Are you a little baby that I have to tell you right from wrong? You feel every day what you have to do, and you make like you don’t. But don’t ask what’s in it for you. It’s the ten of swords.”

“All I want is to quit doing downtime.”

Whatever was using Sherrea’s mouth hooted. “My brother already said he’d help with that. You know my brother? Uncle Death?”

I clutched at my knees. “What am I trying to accomplish, at least?”

“To open the way, little donkey!”

“What’re you frowning about?” Sherrea grumbled, pinching the bridge of her nose. She was back. Her eyes were where they ought to be, her face was her own.

“Is this your way of teaching me that I get what I pay for?”

“You don’t like the way I read, don’t ask me to do it.”

“I don’t mind your reading. It’s your little friends coming to visit that gives me a sharp pain.” She was sullen. “So you got a visit from Tia Luisa, huh? Better clean up your act, then. That’s for when the querent is in shit up to the chin.”

She put out a hand to sweep up the cards. I put two fingers on hers, lightly, and let go. “Sher. I’m sorry. But four times, it’s happened. I get some kind of physical trauma, not even enough to knock me out, and zip — I wake up someplace else, with the closing credits rolling, and I can’t remember the rest of the movie. Something in my head is broken.”

“Most people’s heads are broken, Sparrow. So what?”

“So I need help. And I’m scared.” That last escaped before I got my mouth closed.

She scratched her lower lip with her fingernail, watching me. “Okay,” she said finally. “I’ll try a clarification.”

She picked up the cards, all except Joan of Arc, and shuffled them. “Cut,” she told me, and I did. She picked up the piles and began to flick down cards. And slowed, and stopped, finally, with the fourth card, the grinning figure with the fan of swords over his shoulder. The third card had been the black juggler. The second had been the man with the sun. The first, Baron Samedi. Sherrea’s hand hovered over the deck, not quite touching the next card. Then she pulled it, quickly, and slapped it down. The red-and-white lovers. She raised her eyes to my face. “Don’t fuck with me,” she said.

“Funny. I was going to say that to you.” And I really was. I was angry. My vulnerability had slipped out into her hands, and she was playing me with it. I’ve seen card tricks; the randomness of a shuffled deck is an overrated quantity. But Sherrea’s eyes were a little wild, and her hands were graceless and uncertain. In a haphazard flurry, she laid the rest of the pattern. All the same.

We sat in the dim room, staring at the ugly pictures. I was holding as still as I could, so that none of them would do their foolish dance of transformation. But my nose itched, and it made Baron Samedi laugh.

“I guess you better do whatever it was I told you to do,” Sher said at last, and began picking up the cards, slowly, all her facility with them disappeared.

“You mean, nothing concrete?”

She shook her head. “If you can’t act the way the cards tell you, then react that way. Make your decisions when it’s time.”

She lifted the last card, Saint Joan. Under it, at the precise center of the white silk scarf, was a spot of fresh, vivid red.

“Do what you were told to do.” Sherrea’s voice was thin. “And don’t come back here until you’re sure you’re doing it.” She lifted her face, hard as a marble goddess’s. “The next move is yours.”

I found my shirt and pants in her kitchen, stiff from the clothesline. On top of them was a thin leather cord with a little pendant made out of dark wood: two V shapes, overlapping point to point. I locked myself in the bathroom again and dressed, and after a moment shrugged and dropped the thong around my neck and under my shirt. The pendant felt just like wood.

When I left, Sherrea was still sitting in the living room, in front of the blood-marred white scarf.