Sounding The Current: Chapter 9 – Crumbling Away

Lisa sat on a pile of fallen bricks. The uneven surface pinched and poked into her ass but that was the least of her displeasures. She was dreaming, she knew she was dreaming, and she knew just enough of the Tower card to know that her next encounter with a judge would not be pleasant. She had not forgotten her pledge to punch the next time she saw the judge that wore her face as a mask, and she was cracking her knuckles in preparation for making good on that pledge.

“Who are you angry at, Lisa?”

The judge wearing Rebecca’s face came from behind her to sit on a broken brick pillar. The face mask was emotionless like the others, but the tone was definitely Rebecca’s timber and inflection. “What will violence change here, where there is nothing but violence already?”

“You’re not Rebecca.” Lisa was not prepared for this judge’s calm and settling tone of voice. She had heard Rebecca speak this way at the masquerade ball when she was talking about uncomfortable subjects. She kept her hands clenched into fists for action, but was suddenly reluctant to take any action at all.

“No, I am not. But that’s neither here nor there. If you want to engage in violence, well, this is a good place to do so without consequences in the waking world, but it will also be a waste of time. What is a drop of water to the ocean? What is an act of destruction in an already destroyed world?”

Lisa looked down, suddenly ashamed. “It’s just…” She thought about her reaction and her words. “Okay. I need to know up front, what are you? I mean… Is this like some Greek Chorus thing, or are you a reflection of the real Rebecca the way that… other judge… is a reflection of me? What am I dealing with here? And where am I, anyway?”

The judge nodded the way that Rebecca nods when she is carefully thinking about what to say. “I am as I am, and nothing more, and nothing less. I am because Rebecca asked that you be given assistance in the places that she will not be able to help you. But I am not Rebecca, nor am I a reflection of Rebecca. There is nothing in me that is of Rebecca. I am a collection of assumptions, projections, accumulations, and dreams presenting itself in a way that you are able to communicate with and understand. Nothing more. Nothing less.”

Lisa was not prepared for such a straightforward and blunt answer. She unclenched her fists as she processed the judge’s words and the implications of their varied meanings.

“What you are dealing with here, and throughout this cycle, is an interaction with something that has taken the form of tarot cards as its physical form. That something has many names, but its name when in the form of tarot cards is merely, Tarot. I am a part of that something, seperate from that something, and nothing to do with that something.”

“Where you are, and I will speak as if you are referring to the dreamscape at present, is in a representation of the tarot card of the Tower. That card can represent both an action already in motion and the aftermath of that action. Where we are sitting is the aftermath. Everything that is false, everything that was temporary, everything that is not True, has fallen and we are sitting in the midst of that destruction.”

“So now, Lisa, allow me to ask you a question. What are you angry at and what act of violence can you do here that will have anything to do with recovering from the violence already inflicted upon you?”

The judge folded their hands in their lap the same way that Lisa had seen Rebecca fold hers when she is done talking. Lisa noted that before the tarot cycle started, she would have answered the judge’s question with gleefully vicious acts of violence because if this was all just a dream, then it really didn’t matter what was happening within it. But the successful seduction during the Moon card’s ordeal still stung Lisa, and she knew that her actions in this non-physical state could have very physical consequences.

So she rocked back and forth a few times in a vain effort to keep from crying before surrendering to the knot of panic pulling within her. She leaned forward, put her face in her hands, and wept.

After allowing her fear and her shame at not knowing what was going on rise an dissipate, Lisa wiped her face on her shirt. “I didn’t look up the card. I know a lot of people on the Internet is afraid of this card, but I don’t know what’s going to happen or what it effects. Would you… would you tell me what the challenge is, please?”

The judge’s facemask remained emotionless. “I already did. The World is your everything, but the Tower is a something. Your world is unraveling, both the good and the bad, both the truth and the lies, and as a result you are upended. But the Tower is a thing within that world. It is a house built on sand and the ground has shaken. What are you angry at and why do you think being violent will save you?”

Lisa looked around at the still decaying piles of brick and rubble. She knew that this judge wasn’t asking these questions to judge or trick her, but to help her see and understand her issues for herself. Lisa wasn’t used to someone helping her without an ulterior motive, but if what the judge said was true, then the only ulterior motive was to help Lisa better her life in a way that Tarot, capital T, would be installed in it.

She saw a three-dimensional version of the shattered mirror in the decorated deck’s version of the card. She didn’t know if the artist was of the same mindset as her, but she found a rationalization for the inclusion of the symbol. If the Tower was the destruction of a cherished lie, regardless of who created the lie, then the person responsible for holding the lie was herself. And that was a hard truth to accept.

“Listen… uh… whatever you are… The questions you’re asking… I’m not ready for the answer. I mean, I know what the answer is, but I can’t put it into words, if that makes any sense. Rebecca said…” Lisa thought about what Rebecca said at the coffee house just two days ago. “Rebecca said when Tarot came to her, that her life was already dying. I can’t imagine Rebecca being where I am now.”

The judge nodded in Rebecca’s style again. “Could you imagine being where Rebecca is now?”

Lisa lsat up straight, laughed, and almost slipped off the rubble. “Get the hell out, bitch! Rebecca has her shit together, she has her life together! I mean, she’s getting fucking paid to tell stories to people at a fucking coffee house!” Lisa laughter broke and her face told of all the tears she was barely holding back. “I… I’m the story that she would tell as a warning to others.”

Lisa slipped off the rubble and her buttocks hit the ground hard. But no pebble stabbing her flesh would hurt as deep as the emotional wounds that were being ripped open. “I don’t know what to do! I don’t know where to go! I’m just trying to stay level and everything is turning upside down and I’ve already lost one job and I don’t know how to change what needs to be changed and instead everything is just fucking breaking in my hands and…”

She looked up at the judge. “I’m scared. I wish…” She pulled herself into a tight knot and collapsed at the foot of the broken column. “I wish I had my mom. I wish I had my dad. I wish I had someone that could teach me how to adult instead of just yelling at me for not doing something I’ve never been shown how to do! I don’t know what I’m doing and it’s all falling apart and…” Lisa’s words devolved into incoherent sobbing that echoed amidst the rubble while the judge remained still, seated, and emotionless.

Lisa woke up to find not only had she been crying in her sleep, but that she had drooled all over her pillow as well. Grossed out by the clinging dampness, she pulled herself out of bed and took care of morning obligations. No restaurant job meant no morning Saturday shift. She was happy to see she had successfully slept in until she noted that she had only slept twenty minutes past the usual morning alarm.

She remembered the entire dream from first lucid frustration to literally dissolving into tears. She thought it strange that it felt good to speak so candidly with the judge even though doing so brought unpleasant feelings to the surface to overwhelm her. She had wanted to talk to the judge wearing Rebecca’s face more about the dreams, visions, and other supernatural bullshit that she has experienced since accepting the deck from Rebecca. But she also accepted that each card was a station, and perhaps she hadn’t advanced enough along the way to be able to accept and understand the answer.

As she got coffee and sat down at the table with the cards, she finally felt able to answer the judge’s initial question. “Who am I angry at? Myself.” Lisa was angry at her parents, angry at her family, angry at the jobs she kept and the bosses who kept them for her, angry at the landlord, angry at the cops, and even angry at the grocery delivery driver who completely ignored her until she said she was tipping in cash.

But Lisa had to admit that most of all, she was angry at herself. Mostly for failing to keep a standard that was never attainable in the first place.

Lisa placed the cup of coffee down on the table as the thought echoed in her head. Her last thought was not a new one, but it did have a new ending.

“I never knew how to adult. I never knew because no one showed me. And no one showed me because no one thought I was worth showing. All this time, I’ve been held accountable to something that didn’t even exist in the first fucking place!” Lisa felt triumphant and ready to get up and do something about the deep injustice that she had uncovered.

“But I’m an adult now, and I’ve had a lot of chances to do the right thing for myself, and I blew them. Because it was easier for me to play the fucking idiot bimbo than it was to actually learn and be an adult. Why have responsibilities when you can party until dawn.” She sat down, completely dejected and unsure of herself.

Echoes of last night’s dream followed the rise and fall of her sentiments. Lisa felt completely alone in the world again until she looked up and saw the tarot deck. She pulled the cards from the bottom of the deck and started lining them up in front of her.

“Elpis needs to stay in the jar today, I need understanding more than I need hope. I’ve been hoping that everything is going to be alright, and look where that’s got me. I feel like I’m still walking in the night of the dark moon, but I have the memories of things that went right to remind me that things can go right again. Now that I’m starting to understand the shit that I’m in, I can see which things I need to work on and which things I need to get rid of. But each new thing I learn about myself puts me back as the Fool again, starting at the end of the beginning, but each time, I’m a little closer to the end of the entire ordeal.”

She laid the World card at the end. “I still don’t know what my world is going to look like when this is over, but there is a shape of something yet to come. I just don’t know what that is. But it’s there, and the only way I’m going to find it is to come through and find it the hard way.”

She sat back and looked at the cards laid out in front of her. “Hey! I just read tarot cards! Like how Rebecca does!”

Lisa looked at the list of meanings as she finished her morning coffee. “Shit. This is going to hurt.” She almost spit the coffee over the cards and the table after she did so. Gulping first the coffee, then the air, Lisa laughed deep enough to inflate her toes. The dream did indeed hurt her very deeply and very emotionally, but as the judge had said, it was the crumbling of the lies she held dear that hurt the worst. Now that she had faced the worst, she felt she could start fixing what needed to be fixed, and let the rest crumble away without her.

Lisa felt that she was now on the other side of the shattered mirror in the Tower card. She had come through, and she was hungry. The whole morning was hers to indulge in and she had fresh groceries in the fridge. It had been a while since she last had a right proper breakfast. As the bacon cooked in the pan, she resolved to spend the day like a proper adult and put together a budget to stretch the money Jean had given her as best as possible.

Lisa added eggs to the nearly ready bacon. But first, she thought, she needed to make sure her brain was well fed for the test to come. One hearty breakfast later, Lisa crawled back into bed as her body’s exhaustion could not be overcome no matter how much extra bacon she had cooked. She resolved not to punch any judges if they made an appearance and hoped for deep and restful sleep.

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