“You have to help me. Please! For the love of God!”
It’s late night in the City. I’m headed home after stopping by the Café-on-Main. I had been reading tarot cards for a mostly curious audience and to nearly everyone’s delight. (Certainly to the proprietor’s income sheet.) One of the cards got wet and the colors ran. The kids volunteered to recolor the card for me. The result was macaroni art quality to the eyes and was barely tolerated by the adults who tutted them for ruining the deck. I happily shuffled the card back into the deck and continued on. When the card reappeared, the coloring was back to normal to the surprise of the adults and to the delight of the kids.
But this isn’t about what happened in the café.
This is about what happened in the alley behind it.
He was hunched over and hiding his face. He had gripped my coat with the grasp of the desperate. “Salva me!” His throat whistled as he gasped the words.
“I can not be commanded, no matter what language or liturgy you use. It is clear you are in distress. If you can tell me or show me what’s wrong, I may be able to help or obtain proper help for you.” I did not pull my coat out of the man’s grip. But I did not help him to a more stable position, either.
He wheezed and coughed and fell to his knees as a wracking chill shuddered his bones. He released my coat and braced himself against the wall. He looked up at me, clutching his gray coat tightly. “You…” He struggled for breath. “You use the tarot.”
“I read tarot yes. But you require the services of medical professionals. No paper and ink is going to get rid of that gurgling. The Café-on-Main has a phone. I’ll be right back.” I took a step backwards with intention of turning around.
“No!” He lunged forward and grabbed the hem of my coat. “No. You…” The effort drained him and he slumped against the dampness on the ground. He focused his efforts into keeping a grip on my coat and speaking. His grip never wavered. His speech did often. “You use the tarot.”
I knew I was dreaming. I knew where I was. I thought of several ways his insistence that I use the tarot could be construed. “You have a fever, and your lungs are filled with fluid. You are hallucinating, which for being in a dream, is saying something. You need to wake the fuck up and attend to your physical health. Nothing I do here will be able to help you.”
He started laughing while prone on the ground. It sounded like the grinding of sand fouled gears in his chest. “Yes.” He wheezed more. “I am ill. My body… hurts… so much. But you… you can help me.” He brought his other hand to his first, grabbing a double hold on the hem of my coat. “You must help me! Salva me! Salva me.” His voice trailed off but I was able to recognize Latin phrases among the mutterings. Not quite commandments, but the recitations of prayers nearly forgotten.
I pulled my coat from his grip and tipped a trash can over on its side. I pulled the praying man up off the ground and sat him on the metal can. “You have to tell me precisely what you expect of me. I do not guarantee that I can do it, or that if I can, that I will. But just shouting garbled Latin at me is only going to piss me off.”
He barked in his coughing and spat out horridly hued gobs of mucus. If this was how his dreaming body was affected, then his physical body was in great distress, indeed! “You read tarot. But here, you read tarot differently. You can read and write fortunes.”
I straightened before the man. I had left my coat unbuttoned because of the barely cool temperature, but now I formally buttoned it closed and cinched the belt. Flatly, I distanced myself from him. “I can not help you. I will call for a paramedic. You should do the same when you awaken.”
I started out of the alley with his gurgling cries clinging to my shadow. “No! Please!” He coughs “Hear me out! Woman, come back!” His coughing breaks into sobbing. “Oh Blessed Maria…” His voice breaks and I hear him slumping off the trash can back onto the ground. His lungs are so compromised, his sobs sound like wet rubber flats rolling against each other.
But I have stopped at the mention of Mary.
I am not Catholic.
I do not recognize the Catholic god over me.
I have a history of “altercations” with his angels and his minions… er… missionaries.
So why the hell did the mention of Mary stop me?
I turn around and walk the few steps back to the stricken man. He was lying with his back on the tipped trash can. His legs are splayed out before him. He looks ragged, as if he had been on the streets long enough to forget the trappings of society, but not long enough to learn how to care for himself yet. His grey coat was slowly turning brown. I wondered if he was dying in front of me. I wondered if I should reveal myself as a Boneburner.
His eyes fluttered open. “Salva me.“, he mouthed.
I withdrew a bagged tarot deck, one that had been exposed to many a questionable liquid before and survived. The deck’s 78 images looked gentle and welcoming, even the Devil card was nonthreatening. The many stains and crumples gave it a friendly appearance. In the hands of a gentle and welcoming reader, it would be. In my hands, it was a scalpel and a bone saw.
I dropped the bagged deck in his receiving hands. “Shuffle as best as you can. The deck already has several weeks worth of entropy already and is considerably randomized so if necessary, it can be used right out of the bag. But the more you shuffle and manipulate it, the more it will be able to reflect your concern. Since you seem to know a thing or two, you will draw four cards at random from that deck. And this is what you will be doing, you will be calling on the ineffable name of your god, in the form of the Tetragrammaton. Yod. He. Vau. Heh. And what those four cards reveal to me will determine if I am able to help you, and if I will.”
I retrieved the metal trash can lid and pounded the worst of the alley’s dirt off of it. Squatting, I placed it between him and I. He made an attempt to shuffle the deck just once, gave up, and sighed. Looking up into the barely visible night sky, he thumbed through the deck and pulled four cards, one at a time. As he handed me each card, I placed it face down on the metal lid. From my right to my left, I named each card as I laid it.
“Yod. He. Vau. Heh. The name of your god is the word of your god. Let us see what the word of your god has proclaimed.” I turned the cards over from right to left. “Fool. Chariot. Judgement. Death.”
I sucked on a tooth as I turned over the various meanings in my head. I then realized my grave error. The negligence to ask the one question I should have asked at the beginning.
“Who are you?”
“A pilgrim in need of salvation.” His face pleaded with me. He aged years in the seconds that I studied him.
“Bullshit. You sought me out. You have been waiting here for me. You know you are dreaming and are a Traveler yourself. This place has become a nexus for many a Traveler, and I am sure there were several better capable of helping you than I. Why me? Why wait for the off chance I would return here, when I have made it clear elsewhere that the City holds little for me.”
“Who I am means nothing.” He paused to catch his breath, but in his eyes I could see he was carefully measuring his words. “You have a gift given by God, and you are duty bound to use it for all those that call on you for help in His holy name.”
I laughed in shrieking tones. My afro burst into black corvid feathers as I threw my head back. “DUTY?” I felt my eyes change from sapiens to corvid as well. “I have but one duty here, and it is not to the living. And of my duties there, you and your god are not the beneficiaries.”
He watched my partial transformation in silence. His body trembled from his physical suffering. His eyes widened briefly in an unguarded moment of panic and fear. “All men serve God. Knowingly or not.” His words shielded his vulnerability. He truly believed what he said, and his faith calmed him.
“I should eat your soul just for the fuck of it, and leave your empty body behind to be a den for every one of your demons. It would be interesting to see how your cognition bears the weight. But the predicament you are in is greater than any act of spite I could shit down your throat. See… what your magnificent god has spoken of you…”
I pointed at the first card but did not touch it. “Fool. You have entered where not even angels step unguarded. Your naivete kept you from seeing the dangers at your feet and the poison in the sweets you have childishly devoured. You entered ignorant and puffed up on the mockery that you call wisdom. Because you refused to learn from anything external to yourself, you have sealed up your mind. Not even the light of your god is accepted by your eyes because you have placed yourself even above he that you claim to worship!”
I moved my finger to point to the second card, but I did not touch it either. “Chariot. There were many turnoffs and loopbacks on the highway to hell that you have chosen for yourself. You threw away the map and went full charge based on what you considered knowledge and wisdom. But your chariot’s load is full of hot air, and even those you forced to ride with you have abandoned you! Your horses run free without reins or restraint and you have become lost in the wilderness.”
He followed the movement of my hands with his eyes only. Anger and panic alternated on his face as I pointed to the third card. “Judgement. If this were the Justice card, you could appeal the sentencing. There would be time for you to make amends, to change courts, to show you have learned your lesson. But it’s not Justice. It’s Judgement. And considering your professed religion, it’s an important card to you, I’m sure. The reckoning comes, the angel of your destruction has been sent, and not even I can turn it away. Your acts, beneficial and malicious, have been recorded, weighed, and argued against each other. The only thing left is the proclamation of your sentence.”
“Death.” I placed my fingertip on the card with deliberate firmness. “Sucks to be you.”
I reached to pick up the laid cards but he suddenly lurched forward and grabbed my hands. “Yes, yes, I know this! But… BUT! You can change this! You…” His fervor left him gasping but his grip did not relent. “You can switch the cards… You can rewrite my fate.” His desperation finally showed in his face. “Salva me! Save me. I am but a man, and all men sin… I do not deserve…”
I wrenched my arm from him with vicious ferocity. I took up my bag of tarot cards from him and the four cards that were laid on the metal lid. “DO NOT FUCKING TALK TO ME ABOUT WHAT A MAN DESERVES! You are steeped to the bone in a religion that told me I deserved to be raped and beaten because I am mixed blood! A religion that declares because I am a woman, I am not fit to decide my life for myself and that I am a cow to be bred and a sheep to be fucked! So DO FUCKING NOT talk to me about what YOU think you deserve from the god you have willingly and willfully bent the knee to and wore the yoke of! You broke the tenets of your oath to him! This is the cup you have squeezed for yourself! DRINK IT! Every last drop! And let it sear your soul forever and ever, a-fucking-men!” I held my right hand in the sign of benediction and gestured a very large and sharp cross over him.
He started crying, openly crying this time, and held his hands up in prayer. He started pleading in Latin again, calling on Mary the Intercessor to move my heart once more and make me the instrument of her mercy. His pleas disgusted me. I looked up to a suddenly bright sky that reminded me of another time and another vision.
I waited for the apparition that I knew would come.
I did not expect the apparition to be her.
Tears ran down my face in unexpected falls. “Madonna. I do not serve your Father. I am broken away from your Lord. If you ask me for mercy, I will not grant it again. I offered help for his body, and he refused it. What he requests of me is not mine to grant, even if I was of his faith.”
She smiled, for what reason I do not know nor claim to understand. She clasped her hands together in prayer and nodded. She spoke no words to my ear, but my heart heard her clearly. “I bring not mercy for him. But for you. Do as you must. Be as you are.” She smiled and the apparition faded.
The man cried out as the sky darkened to night once more. His gurgling sobs testified to his despair and fear. But he no longer disgusted me. I was no longer angry at him. To my surprise, I was also no longer angry at the religion he represented to me. The abuse was in the past. This is the present.
“You don’t have long. Here or there. I can not postpone your fate or change it. I suggest that you wake up, and make as many amends as you can. Call your family.”
“Heart… less… bitch… demon!” His breathing took more effort with each word. “… HELL!”
I had no anger to throw back at him. I almost pitied him. He reminded me of someone. “Hell, I’m told, is an absence of love. You and I have resided there for many decades each. I am starting to learn what love is.” I put the four cards into the bag with the rest of the deck and tucked the deck back into my pockets. “I truly am sorry I could not help you. Whether that sorrow is legitimate or a leftover from Stockholm syndrome, I do not know. But I did not dig the pit you are falling into. Your epithets mean nothing to me. I can not save you from yourself. Goodbye, Sir. If you are who I think you are, our paths will never meet again, in this life, or any others that follow.”
I turned away from the mournful angry man and walked out of the alley into the dawning of a new day.
After writing this up, I pulled out my Legacy of the Divine deck, the same that was used in the dream, and laid out the four cards the ill man had chosen. They are pictured here in the same right-to-left order as I viewed them in the dream.
