Frank Portman - Andromeda Klein

To the memory of Erika Hynes

The Universe is huge. The Universe is complex. Everything in it is connected to everything else. And it knows who you are and sometimes wants to show you things.

Andromeda Kleins front wheel sliced through a shallow puddle, spattering yet more mud on her boot ankle, glazing the grassy embankment on the left side of the bike path.

Trismegistus, she said under her breath, invoking the Egyptian god Thoth, lord of language and magic, and, if the theories of Mrs. John King van Rensselaer were to be believed, the god upon whose ancient temple at Hermopolis the book now known as the tarot was based. This oath, an expression of frustration, had nothing to do with the puddle or the boots: muddy boots are nothing but bad-ass. It was rather an offhand, grumpy plea for insight, for clarity. And the answer came almost immediately into view: a discarded half-crushed Styrofoam take-out box floating in a flooded storm drain had two plastic knives lying crossed on top of it.

Okay, I get it, she muttered. The Two of Swords. She had drawn it from her tarot deck in the girls bathroom before leaving school that day, and here it was again floating in the gutter. And with a box, to boot. Sometimes the Universe was subtle; other times it hit you over the head like it thought you were stupid.

One dream, one card, an otherworldly instant message, and dozens of synchs involving swords, boxes, and the vexing case of Twice Holy Soror Daisy Wasserstrom: it had been an unusually weedgie week. She rose from the seat to pedal up the hill.

The Universe, continued the silent lecture in her head, chooses to show itself in tiny flashes, revealing connections amongst its diverse elements at odd moments. Coincidence! say the unobservant or the spiritually obtuse, when they notice them at all. And such they are: points where aspects of reality coincide, or overlap, from this or that perspective. But educated people, adepts and scholars, seers and magiciansthe weedgie peopleknow them as synchs, since the common understanding of coincidence implies something accidental, and there are no accidents.

So what do you think would happen, Dave, Andromeda continued, out loud now, practicing a well-rehearsed portion of her tarot lecture, to an adept armed with a perfect model of the Universe? Dave Klein was Andromedas cat, upon whom she often practiced her orations, and to whom she tended to address them without regard to his physical presence. He was a tough audience, either way. And his steely stare would, she imagined, prepare her for the hostile response of many of her students, when, far in the future, she would deliver her notorious series of lectures on magic theory and practice in a hidden underground hall in the secret labyrinth beneath the Warburg Institute in London.

The answer, was, of course, that such a model of the Universe in the hands of the skilled adept became a laboratory for generating and observing synchs at several times their naturally occurring rate. In the ancient Temple of Thoth Hermes Trismegistusitself a compact model of the Universemagicians cast rods or arrows on the central altar and noted the results, which temple symbols they pointed to and in what number, teasing out the significant synchs and interpreting them. The modern tarot pack was in a sense a portable temple. Shuffling and laying out the cards invited such synchs, grand and trivial, though interpreting them was never a straightforward matter.

That was Andromeda Kleins best, simplest answer for why and how the tarot worked, aware though she was that her views on the matter were controversial. The tarot was a collapsible temple, a laboratory, a synch factory. If anyone ever bothered to ask, she would be ready. And this answer would figure prominently in her Warburg lectures, to be published in volumes III through IV of her soon-to-be-celebrated, as-yet-unwritten work of magical history, theory, and practice, Liber K .

The main road in front of the school parking lot had no bike lane. This period immediately after school let out was perilous. It was impossible to know for certain which after-school clusters of students would be overtly hostile, but it was wise to avoid them all, just in case. This required a zigzag pattern, crossing from one side of the street to the other as necessary. They could throw rocks at you or even thrust a stick through your spokes to knock you off your bike, and then well, it had never happened to her, but shed seen it happen to others, and she didnt want to find out what they would do next. A few kids yelled at her un intelligibly at she zipped past, or at least, she was pretty sure she was the one they were yelling at. Some unpleasant variation on her name, perhaps, or the perennial favorite No-Ass. It was nice of them to take the time to bring it to her attention, but Andromeda Klein, as it happened, needed no reminder of that particular deficiency. She was well aware.

Andromeda Klein sliced through yet another shallow puddle and whisper-shouted A.E.! It is probable that she was the only student at Clearview High School, and perhaps the only person in Clearview itself, who had a favorite nineteenth-century occultist; and of those anywhere in the world to whom it might have occurred to make such a list, it is doubtful that many would have put A.E. first. But A. E. Waite, the gentle, sad-eyed, reluctant magician, was one of Andromeda Kleins heroes. In his own way, he was as misunderstood as the very misunderstood Mr. Crowley, who owed quite a lot to A.E.s direction and influence, yet who had, as a theorist, magician, and writer, overshadowed and outpaced him in every way. And who had, incidentally, despised and ridiculed him. Andromedas heart went out to people who were overshadowed and outpaced and ridiculed and despised. She even fake-believed the dubious notion that such people might be destined to have the last laugh in the end. So she said A.E. on occasion, as a kind of casual invocation. In high-spirited moments, she and Twice Holy Daisy Wasserstrom used to giggle-shriek it, confusing the masses and emphasizing the exclusivity of their Society of Two.

Andromeda could imagine other magicians of note, long since dead, looking down from their star thrones and snorting derisively at A.E.s finicky writing and innovations on the customary design of the small cards, the minor arcana. (An exception was Dame Frances Yates, who appeared, like Andromeda, to have a bit of a crush on him.) Mr. Crowleys deck might have been more theoretically sound, but A.E.s was the deck Andromeda had learned on and still used, so the image on the card of the day was his design, painted per his instructions by Pamela Pixie Colman Smith in 1909 e.v.

The Two of Swords, reversed, in the tenth position, which in the Celtic Cross layout described in Waites Pictorial Key to the Tarot was meant to depict the outcome. There hadnt been time to do a full spread, so she had quickly counted off cards in the girls bathroom just before leaving school, saving the first nine for later and noting the tenth: the Two of Swords, reversed. A blindfolded girl kneels, arms crossed, with a sword in each hand, on guard, perhaps, against unseen foes. Andromeda closed her eyes, trying to visualize the cards image and its Qabalistic correspondences, but she had to open them again because blind bike-riding is no more practical than blind swordplay and she nearly ran her bike into a hedge.

The Dominion of Air, the Hebrew letter vau , Yetzirah, the world of Formation, Chokmah, Wisdom No matter how hard she studied she could never hold the attributions in her head. She wasnt sensitive or intuitive as Daisy had been. She needed the books, with their charts and diagrams, spread out. The feeling evoked by the image of the kneeling girl strobed in her imagination between dread and peace, but that was an emotional rather than an informed response.