Sounding The Current: Chapter 14 – A Drink Served Cold

Lisa had walked no further than the first crosswalk from her apartment building when she thought of Ricardo’s bullshit. Did he really think she was stupid and naive enough to fall for it? The more she thought about what he tried to do, the more furious she became. That Ricardo threatened to tattle to Aunt Helen about their recreational activities only infuriated her further.

Lisa crossed another street and with it, another personal boundary. Why was she pretending that no one knew about her activities both on and off work. There was a Tumblr blog dedicated to mocking her and at least two Twitter accounts haunting her and her family.

She stopped beside the next building to message Jean about the conversation. “Ricardo tried to blackmail me into signing something about the restaurant and insurance papers. Told him to fuck off. If he comes back to you or anyone else saying anything, I didn’t sign shit and I’m not signing shit.”

She had barely moved to put the phone back in her pocket when it buzzed with a reply from Jean. “Will need you to sign a statement about what he said and what you did and did not do. Will you be available later today or can you come to the house tomorrow?”

Lisa regretted messaging Jean immediately after seeing her response. She had been doing her best to avoid becoming part of Aunt Helen’s high society machine and double best to avoid “the house” completely. But she knew she had to grow up sometime and face not only her responsibilities, but the consequences of her actions. Formally owning up to what she had been already bragging about was the least she could do.

“If I don’t catch up with you today, I’ll be at the house in the morning. I don’t want him to pin anything on me that’s not mine!”

A block away from the coffee house, Lisa felt her phone buzzing again. Jean was asking if Lisa was willing to sign the forms to get a copy of them and then bring them to Aunt Helen so the family lawyers can go after Ricardo for extortion. “This way you can get revenge on him by hanging him with his own words!”

The mention of hanging chilled Lisa. Though she was very much willing and wanting to see Ricardo held accountable for so much bullshit, she wasn’t willing to put herself in the hole that she just avoided. Who was to say that Aunt Helen wouldn’t use the signed admission against Lisa to leash her further.

Further? Lisa thought again of the Devil card and wondered if she was leashed already. Aunt Helen certainly did control a lot of Lisa’s decisions no matter how indirectly. How much of Lisa’s life has been trying to escape Aunt Helen after her parents…

Not here, Lisa reminded herself. Not here, not now. She’s not adult enough yet for that introspection. Time to focus on the immediate question. Was she willing to hurt herself again for someone else’s gain?

“I want revenge, but I want what’s right more. I’m done with him and he can fuck himself into Aunt Helen’s hands without me. I didn’t sign shit and I’m not going to sign shit.” After she sent that message, she remembered what Jean had originally asked her to do. “Except for the statement that I didn’t sign shit and I wasn’t going to sign shit. That I will sign. :D :D :D”

She looked at the three smiley faces entered into the message. How long has it been since she was silly with her sister? It felt like decades since they were placed in Aunt Helen’s care, since Jean had to grow up and Lisa was…

The shadow of the coffee house fell on her and hid her away from the echoes of pain reaching forward from the past. Lisa entered and saw the few occupied tables were all in sunlight. This struck her as odd but she wasn’t sure why until the building’s air conditioning kicked in and the freezing air coming out of the vent above her gave her flashbacks to the vision of Death.

“Sorry about that, everyone!” The barista yelled from behind a wall of espresso machines. “The service guys are here to work on the unit but it’s stuck on bloody freaking freezing until they find what’s wrong and fix it! All hot drinks are at a fifty percent discount until they do!”

Lisa was determined to speak with Rebecca today and if that meant riding out the little ice age developing in place, then it’s a good thing that she brought her jacket. She ordered a large mocha with extra shots of espresso to help keep her warm and buzzy. The back table where Rebecca usually held court was under a vent and away from a window, and thus, empty. Lisa took the table and placed her purse in the table’s center as both a declaration of ownership and a screen to review her cards. The last thing she wanted to be mistaken for was a proper card reader in her own right.

As she pulled out her paper wrapped decorative deck, the clipped handwritten deck, and the torn list of meanings, her phone buzzed with incoming messages. A mutual acquaintance of herself and Ricardo was asking her if it was okay to give him her message app handle. Seeing this as an opportunity to give Jean more dirt on Ricardo without actually getting dirty(er) herself, she consented.

Immediately he began a new round of barraging her phone with commands to call him, to meet with the courier being sent to her apartment in the morning, to sign the papers, and to make herself available for more intercourse. Failure to comply with his directives would result in being called more unpleasant names, threats to get her fired from her two remaining jobs, threats to provide video of her trysts to “upstanding members” of her family, and threats of unwanted intercourse forced upon her.

Lisa watched the increasing volume of messages accumulate. Without replying to any of them, she started screenshotting the missives. In a separate message tab, the mutual acquaintance started apologizing for giving him Lisa’s handle as he was now bombarding the acquaintance with threats because Lisa was not answering him. She told the acquaintance to block and report Ricardo and that she would deal with him herself.

She text messaged Jean immediately. “So guess who got my party handle and is making an ass out of himself. I got screenshots. Who do I send them to?”

Jean replied so quickly that Lisa wondered if she was monitoring the messages as they were received. “Great! Forward them to the lawyer. I’ll let him know to expect them.” Jean gave a handle that Lisa recognized as being a group handle. Whatever is sent to it is forwarded to a set group of recipients. More games, she thought. Well, if it meant roasting Ricardo by his own words without any input from her, all the better, then.

Lisa silenced her phone and set up a forwarder for all messages. Silence now restored, she turned her attention back to her homework. Unwrapping the decorative deck just enough for her to see the card front without advertising that she had tarot cards, she moved the Hanged Man to the bottom of the deck to reveal Strength as her next ordeal.

She had already guessed that the next tarot card ordeal had begun without her knowledge or preparedness, but the recent hour did not feel like it was the Strength card asserting itself, nor of the Hanged Man lingering on. Everything Ricardo was doing was tempting her to act out of revenge or a skewed sense of justice and the only strength she needed at the moment was the will not to drink the still scalding coffee at once to warm up.

Remembering that Rebecca had moved the Fool card out of place, Lisa wondered if this was another side step. She checked the handwritten cards. After “XII – The Hanged Man” was “XI – Justice”. Wait. Justice?

She checked the decorated deck. Justice was still yet to come and was numbered “VIII”, eight. She looked at the same numbered card in the handwritten deck. It was labeled as Strength.

The decorated deck’s keywords had the same numbering as the decorated deck’s cards. But the handwritten deck was following the torn list of meanings. Surely something as important as card order would have been followed religiously, right?

“Hey, Lady. You’re in my chair!” Rebecca interrupted her confusion with a happy tease for a greeting. “Don’t tell me you’ve mastered all the cards already and are setting up shop! Hell freezing over would explain what’s happening here.” Rebecca placed her purse on the table besides Lisa’s. “Mind if I share the table with you?”

Lisa was glad to see Rebecca and furious to see Rebecca. Maybe it was the cold affecting her, she reasoned, but she had little civility left after reading what Ricardo was promising to make happen. “Mastering the cards? Is that what I’m doing?”

Rebecca remained standing. “No. You’re mastering yourself and the cards are just a tool. Call me old fashioned, but you did come to this table before me and I am the one intruding. If you don’t want company, I’ll leave. But if you do, I need you to say it.”

Lisa stopped and stared at Rebecca. Something about the way the standing woman asked for permission to sit reminded her of the judges. But where the judges wore black hooded robes that covered almost all of their bodies, Rebecca wore a bright and colorful shirt with jeans, both covered by a long duster.

“Yea. I’ve been waiting for you actually. Please, sit down. Wait, should we switch chairs?”

Rebecca sat at the waiting chair opposite Lisa. “Nah. You’re used to the vent by now, I’m not. And besides, you’ll be camouflage for me. So many people expect me in that particular chair that they won’t bother looking to see if I’m seated any place else, not even directly beside that seat!”

Rebecca moved her purse so that it formed a block beside Lisa’s, furthering to hide Lisa’s cards from public view. “There. We don’t need some fool coming up asking you if he’s going to win in court tomorrow. Dealt with enough idiots last week as it was.”

Lisa glanced at her brightly flashing phone and the new set of invectives that Ricardo was blasting, at her two sets of now conflicting tarot decks, and back at Rebecca. “How did you know?”

Rebecca was holding the disposable cup to her face and relaxing in the warmth. “Hmm?”

“The court case. How did you know what’s going on?”

“Oh, with you? I have no idea, actually. It’s just been that kind of week for me. I guess this week was some kind of paperwork filing deadline because that’s been the dominant question I’ve been reading for.” Rebecca looked up at Lisa with a smirk on her lips. Lisa was suddenly very unsure if the card reader was answering true or not.

“I suppose it’s not a tedious to read for. As long as you have a client who understands that you are not only not a lawyer, but that you are not their lawyer, and that when you tell them to go see their lawyer, maybe they should go see their lawyer. But most of those folk have private readers on retainer and I’m not about to try to break into that scene. I still have personal morals, for one.”

Rebecca continued to nuzzle up to her still hot drink while Lisa attempted to understand the meanings and implications of what Rebecca was talking about. Her phone’s flashing screen prompted questions she hadn’t originally thought of asking.

“So… I get it that you can see how something will settle out with tarot cards, but can you see what’s the best way to make things happen with tarot cards?”

Rebecca switched cheeks and began warming up the other side of her face. “Hmm? Yea, sure! But then you run into a paradox. You can find out the best action to take, but the goal may not be the best goal to seek. Or you can find out the best goal to seek, but the actions necessary makes that goal unobtainable. One standalone reading is really not the best way to work these kinds of things out. But if the person being read for is not willing to do any work to better themselves and their situation, then one-time check ins is really the best anyone can do.”

Lisa looked at her phone again. “So… asking you to read about something I got caught up in isn’t probably going to do what I’m hoping it would, huh.”

Rebecca stopped making out with her cup and looked at Lisa with eyes colder than the vent but with a gaze that felt hotter than the Sun. “It wouldn’t do shit. For one thing, I can’t read for you. Not now.”

“What do you mean, not now?!” Lisa kept her voice down but was reminded of the evening she received the cards from Rebecca. Something about this conversation was very familiar and very unsettling. “Is it because of the temperature? I have money, I can pay!”

Rebecca closed her eyes and resumed warming her face with the mug. “Nothing to do with either. I gave you homework, remember? I can’t interact with you until you complete the homework. Otherwise, well… there’s things that will intertwine and tangle in uncomfortable ways for the both of us. Even if you abandon your efforts to learn tarot, until you have completed the cycle at least once, you’re hands off to me. No readings available.”

“But, that’s not fair!” Lisa started to slap her hand against the table but pulled herself to only tap it at the last second. It was her intention to only complain about being banned from receiving a tarot reading but her frustrations raced outside of her mouth before she could stop herself. “I didn’t ask for this! For the judges and the visions! To see Death as a little fucking girl! I didn’t sign on for this! Whatever the hell this magic, witchy, carnival bullshit is!”

Her voice sounded like it was screaming in her ears, but when she fell silent, she realized she had barely been whispering. She looked down at the table and at her phone in shame. Ricardo had stopped messaging her a while ago. She turned over the phone to have something to do.

“Death as a little girl?” Rebecca’s eyes remained closed to Lisa’s relief. “I only see that in very limited circumstances. She’s always nice to see and interact with.”

“You knew.” It was only two words, but they were as sharp as accusation as any chef’s knife. “You knew what you were giving me and what you were pulling me into.”

Rebecca opened her eyes to focus on Lisa’s. The normal human eyes terrified her because of the stone surety they conveyed. “I didn’t give you anything more than twenty-two cards and a torn sheet of paper. Whatever else you have received is because you pulled it to yourself. What passed through my hands was only the carrier. You’re the one that accepted it.”

Lisa recalled that first dream with the judges. She remembered the judge that wore her face as a mask, and how much shit they talked about her. She remembered the judge that wore Rebecca’s face as a mask, and how hopeful they were about her. She remembered the final judge with a blank mask, how they have been answering to her calls for Tarot, capital T, and how she literally pulled them towards her as the closing action of the dream.

“It’s real, then. It’s really real.” Lisa looked at the two decks hidden by the purses. “Then the visions are real and the dreams are real and… I’m going to lose my mind.”

“Nah.” Rebecca’s rebuttal was frustratingly short. The card reader waited until Lisa had focused on her with barely held fury. “You’re not going to lose your mind unless you wanted to. The tarot integrates itself with the lives of its readers on a personal level. You’re not going to lose your mind unless that is the life you want to lead. I mean, yea, we’re not exactly going to register as neurotypical on any sterile mental exam, but how tarot interfaces with a tarot reader is a private conversation between tarot and that reader.”

“Lisa. You have a decision to make. It is the same decision you faced at this table a week ago. You will be facing the decision again a year from now. You have to decide what kind of life do you want for yourself and what do you have to fix or set in place now to reach it. The gossip is that you’ve gone straight, that you’ve made an effort to be an adult. The gossip also has a spread on when you’re going to go back to old habits and be taken out instead of walking out.”

Rebecca finally took a drink from her still warm cup, giving Lisa time to recollect her composure, her thoughts, and her questions.

“So the visions and dreams of the judges…”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about. That’s personal to you.”

“Oh.”

Lisa wanted to cry, to flip the table while screaming that it wasn’t fair, and to storm back to her apartment where she could just go to bed and pretend none of this was happening. But Ricardo’s threats would continue just the same and Aunt Helen’s governance would continue just the same and her awareness of what she has learned about herself thus far would continue just the same no matter how much she tried to bury that knowledge with distractions.

“Okay.”

The two women drank their lukewarm mochas in silence. Lisa looked at the tarot cards before her and was reminded of another question. “So, Strength and Justice…?”

Rebecca laughed warmly. “Ah, the switch. I’ll leave it to the academics and the historians what the original order of tarot trumps were. The cards are a language, and like all languages, change and evolve over time. As I assume you are still in your first go through the cards, so I’mma advise that you don’t worry about anything else but the cards in front of you.”

Lisa held up the eleventh card from each deck. “That’s the problem, the cards in front of me disagree.”

“The cards will say a lot of things, Lisa, but what are you experiencing? That will tell you more about where you are in the tarot cycle than a pretty ink picture on stiff paper.” Rebecca finished her drink and stood up.

“Where are you going? You still have shit to do here, today, right?”

Rebecca smiled that strange and unsettling smile again. “I do, but not here. I just stopped by to get a coffee and saw you seated here. Remember, I’m not teaching you a damn thing. I’m just making sure the tools you need to learn are available. Catch you around, Lisa.”

Before Lisa could finish stammering out that it wasn’t fair, Rebecca had already left the chilled building. She looked back at the cards. The decorated deck’s Strength card held an image of a multi-eyed bear-something looming over a woman with a headdress and seated in red and orange robes. The same deck’s Justice card held the image of a animated hand-thing looming over an nondescript collection of praying people while under a sky filled with arcs and circles of glowing light.

Neither card described how Lisa was feeling at the moment.

The handwritten deck was just paper and ink, white background and black text titles, and nothing more. Yet, somehow, the handwritten Justice card felt more in common with her life at the moment than any other card. The Justice’s catchphrase was “The Court is not amused.” This struck her as very fucking hilarious as that will likely be the court’s opinion tomorrow when Ricardo’s recorded vitriol was revealed to the judge.

Lisa turned her phone face up. The missives had stopped an hour ago. There was one unread text from the group of lawyers whose fees she was unknowingly priming.

“Thank you. We will take it from here. Sign nothing.”

The response didn’t feel like revenge or like justice. But it felt like something long unstable had just been settled. Lisa wasn’t going to get her revenge on Ricardo, but she was going to have peace from Ricardo. As far as she was concerned, justice had been served.

“Oh.” The realization and understanding of which card ordeal she had been experiencing finally settled into her.

A sudden blast of warm air pushed her out of her reverie. A cheer made the rounds on the floor and behind the counter. The handwritten sign announcing fifty percent off all hot drinks was pulled away.

“Thank you for your patience! The heat’s working again.”

Lisa packed up her cards and her list. If the heat is working then that means more patrons. More patrons means more nosy people. More nosy people means no more peace and quiet. It was time to go back to the apartment before sunset caught her outside.

She bought another hot drink (this time a tea latte) to carry her home and left the coffee house with some questions answered and some questions demanding more attention from both her and Rebecca, together.

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