Lily was here
I looked up at the copper pipes of the brewery, the ornate ceiling tiles, the many lightbulbs screwed into hard metallic sockets. A competent director could have panned up from my glance to the ceiling and it would appear like a soul ascending to heaven, like a scene in a horror film. Some rerun was playing on the bar television — nothing really new on TV since ‘wide right’ a couple weeks back. When I saw ‘my date’ emerging from the loo, she signaled to me she was ready to go.
After perambulating with Laura, the goth girl, we waited on the dark porch of my friend’s building for her to buzz us up. It was bitterly cold — the middle of winter. I had invited Laura to have a beer with me. She listens well. Otherwise, there’s not really any chemistry in that way. Laura listened well, but I knew that she had been sober for a while.
“Actually, I’ve been dry for years,” she said leaning back against the cold concrete wall. I think Laura wasn’t really interested in drinking because she said she didn’t put anything into her body that would potentially harm it, because she regarded the human body as a temple and that was her nature.
In any event, the host buzzed us up and I told her my tale of woe as we ascended the staircase in the townhome. I remember the feeling of relief when we entered the warmth… but I had really wanted to have at least one beer seeing that I was in a revelrous mood. But then again I am now, as I’m reporting this, envisioning cozying up in my bed with a spot of tea next to a dark window — zero outside, nice warm light inside and my inviting bed, and it occurred to me that there were only a certain number of things that I could get done in the time left.
Upstairs, at the party, people languished in second-hand furniture, under the illumination of string lights that resembled icicles. This was Maggie’s place, a hippie girl majoring in biology. The whole place smelled like patchouli and the booze flowed. Maggie was dressed in a flowing bohemian style gypsy skirt of dark green and black, one of those light cotton wrap-around boho skirts that they wear to the beach. Maggie had long curly red hair and pale skin. She mingled with the company making sure that everyone had beer, but mainly commiserating with the natural science folks by the breakfast bar.
Laura and I sat to the side of a group of partygoers seated around the circular, white modern dining table with three wooden legs. People carried on and on in Maggie’s apartment, amid hanging plants with leaves and long vines that spilled over their pots. The string lights (reminiscent of icicles) were strung through the hanging plants, providing a warm glow for the party to the edge of the scene, the dark windows. It had been bitterly cold outside.
“ATU XII is about being suspended in time,” said the woman seated two over from Laura between two guys at the white table. Charlotte, a brunette, political science major. Great tits. Third year. She was wearing an emerald party dress. “The pittura infamate, an historically accurate punishment for traitors. In the case of love, this is about being suspended in time.”
“I totally disagree,” said Laura, leaning forward to raise her voice above Maggie’s soundtrack. In the background, Maggie passed around a bol, took a hit. “It’s got nothing to do with Love. The Hanged Man represents a trial, intuition, sacrifice, prophecy — ”
“What makes you so convinced of this?” said Charlotte.
Laura was seated on a beanbag chair, and I was next to her on her right in one of those wicker chairs that hangs from a metal stand planted on the floor, like being seated in a wicker egg. I swiveled around and listened.
To her left, silently, sat Matthew, a lanky guy with a beard that he kept stroking. His hair was pulled back in a curly ponytail. He smiled wryly. Matthew was a behavioral economist in training, so everything that was being said no doubt he was analyzing in terms of personal stock markets. Charlotte sat at the table between Matt and Eldar, a Serbian student. A bit scrawny, he similarly had his hair pulled back into a ponytail. He wore a stripped shirt and black velvet jacket. He listened intently to every word that Charlotte said, leaning forward toward her and examining her facial expressions intently.
Laura continued, “This is about self-sacrifice on a cosmic level — the sacrifice of the ego and the self, a recognition of the relativism of all ego and perspectives in the universe. A letting go — however, if you notice le Pendu in the Marsailles Tarot major arcana is suspended from wands that are sprouting from the Earth.”
The New Jack Swing continued booming in the background, some hiphoppery.
From the deck on the table, I produced the card, The Hanged Man, leaning forward in my chair to show them. “The card is all about a recognition of the absence of personal will. We could say, God’s will, or, the Universe’s will.”
“Buddha would say, there is no doer,” Laura responded.
“So we are in agreement?” said Charlotte.
“No,” said Laura. She took the Rider-Waite card from me and indicated it. “Look, the common interpretation is that the Hanged Man is all about the stymying of individual energy — the recognition that nothing more can be done with an individual will. The encouragement is to sit with the problem and gain resolve, and to a certain extent this is true. We have an interpretation that is an appeal to lose the Ego and give in to a Universal flow, to meditate and be philosophical and work through any pain or humiliation that the circumstances might bring. But also, if you notice, the Hanged Man, ‘the Traitor’, is of a higher rank than the High Priestess — of the Church itself. So was the Tarot created by Protestant Heretics? Is it an exaltation of Evil? The High Priestess is the Popess, an allegory for the Church. Look at The Tarot Cards Painted by Bonifacio Bembo. It’s well established. Why is a heretic and traitor exalted above the Church? In some early Christian versions of the Tarot the Hanged Man depicts Judas Iscariot with the silver in his hands.”
Charlotte was not having it. “The cross of the Hanged Man is the Tau cross in Rider-Waite, or he is supsened by an ankh in the Thoth. This symbolizes a kind of stalemate. In the work of Pynchon, this is like the frozen space of the rocket at the peak of its parabola — it has never risen, it will never fall. In human terms, this means that the soul has reached a position in which it is stuck. There are no more moves. There is timelessness, and no escape. But in my mind this is also Eternal Return.
“This represents a deep surrender to the whole; you must understand me,” Charlotte continued, sitting forward on the edge of her chair now and imploring Laura to see her side. She fixed her gaze on Laura and her expression became grave. She gestured with her hands.
“Then what is the Hanged Man suggesting we do?” Laura asked.
“Ziegler would say we should draw the next card to find what happens, what awaits us when we surrender?”
Charlotte looked away from Laura briefly at Eldar, as if for confirmation. He merely nodded, still deeply intent on what she had to say.
“Okay, look,” Laura said, waiving away the offer of a joint from a passing partygoer, “the hanged man in Rider-Waite is in the form of a fylfot cross. This card represents St. Peter, this is true. The meaning, as you say, is one of transformation, but this is not merely about being a martyr. No! It is about the relationship between heaven and Earth — here, represented in this card, is the still point between humanity and the Divine according to A.E. Waite himself. What happens in Pynchon? The anti-hero ends up dangling head down in the Mittelwerke tunnels momentarily — that’s historically accurate, and later the card shows up in his reading. This card is about Power — the power to stick to your viewpoints and wait for clarity.
“And just look at it reversed,” she added. “What does it mean when it’s reversed? No change. Sacrifice is useless because nobody’s going to appreciate it.”
Just then there was a commotion. I had noticed peripherally that blue flashing lights had been creeping up in the dark windows. Now, the various guests were beginning to huddle around the windows. Someone rushed in through the door and whispered something to Maggie and she turned pale and put her hand to her mouth. Murmurs ran through the party guests.
“What is it?” I asked.
“They’re saying there’s been a murder,” Laura said, turning to me. “They’re saying it was a student.”
We looked over to where the partygoers were gathering by the window. I took Laura’s hand and we rushed down the stairs and outside onto the front porch of the apartment building, lines of dark silent houses and the silhouettes of naked tree branches all around.
It was bitterly cold.
Laura took out one of her cigarettes and lit up. We stood there in silence staring from the darkness of the front porch of the apartment building at the empty street. Just around the corner would be the police line.
The stones of the line of row houses across the street were illuminated in a dull amber color in the streetlights. From the cross street that ran just to the right of this row of houses, around the other side of them, blue police lights flashed silently, reflecting off the dark walls of the other buildings.
Together, not saying a word, we both imagined the same thing, perhaps. That if we were to walk over to the next block, what would we be confronted with? What scene? A police line of yellow tape pulled across a crime scene obscured by police cars and reflecting blue flashing lights, all silent above the cold, hard concrete of the gently sloping street and the silent houses with all the coldness of a straight-razor held by a gloved hand smashing a lightbulb in a giallo, the element burning out, faintest smoke escaping out of a vacuum; the woman in a white trenchcoat in the museum exhibit in the De Palma, a first person perspective floating through abstract art. She had just been walking home. Right in the middle of a well-lit street. Could’ve happened to anyone.
I imagined just how a cut like that would feel in such cold. I reached for her hand and she took mine, making certain our fingers interlocked tightly.
