I
[The Fool]
“New York can drown.” Felix Antsworth murmured, dropping his books on the cement sidewalk. They were worn and overpriced college texts, stuffed with a maelstrom of notes. The rumpled papers quivered as cars drove by, fragments of definitions flashing up at him. He cleared his throat and spat on them.
He tried to muster up more saliva for the sidewalk, but he would never have enough to drown the city; he whirled back toward his books and gave them a vicious kick instead.
All of the papers flew up into a storm and began to blow across the street. An old man standing in the doorway of a nearby apartment building shouted at him:
“What the fuck is your problem?”
Felix gave him a dirty look, then lost his confidence and decided to flee toward his own home. It was one block over; he had been close to arriving before he lost his temper. He trudged onward.
He wished he could draw in a breath and let serenity cascade over his limbs and mindset - but college, and work, they were parasites that scurried under his skin and made him shake with the frustration of that intolerable itching. It wouldn’t be so bad if he felt developed and nearly complete with his personal ideal. If he knew who he was, what he was made out of, it wouldn’t feel so goddamn awful when the stress ate at the meager muscles that did construct him.
There was a precipice at his feet; he could continue standing at the edge and peering down and around, or lean forward and feel the rush of air drag him downward.
Jump, jump, his insides sang as he whipped open his front door.
“Dear?” his mother called from the kitchen, oven mitts on her hands as she stood up straight and beamed at the blur of him passing by the kitchen doorway. “Felix, honey? Is something wrong?”
He tramped into his room, each step pumping him with excitement. Just lean forward, just lift one foot up, and then you’ll feel the rush of escape. A grin spread across his face as he dumped his backpack of all of the college notebooks and began to fill it with clothes instead.
“What’s going on?” His mother was in the doorway, still wearing her oven mitts. The little golden cross on her chest glimmered under the ceiling light and her eyes were wide and blank, staring all around. “Are you going somewhere?”
“Yes.” he huffed, winded from running all around his room, jamming clothes into the small spaces in his pack and gathering up toiletries. “I’m leaving.”
“Leaving?” His mother’s voice came out a high-pitched keel. “Where? You can’t just leave!” She pointed down the hallway with one big floral mitt. “Someone needs to feed Miss Baby Ruth!”
He couldn’t help but laugh in her face. The last thing he cared about was that ugly old cat. She stared at him, aghast, as he walked past her with his bulging backpack, his face a mocha tan from working at the carnival, his hair as chocolate as his father’s curling mess. “Felix!” she screeched at his back, grabbing at the cross around her neck.
“Mom.” He gave her one last look before exiting the house. “I’m only heading west a bit; it’s just a little trip. Later.”
She began to protest again, but it was only to a closed door.
He hailed a taxi and threw his cellphone into the sewer vent. He was going to live, he was going to acquire substance; he was rising from his roots and falling off the precipice.
II
[The Magician]
There was no room in a home more important than the study room, or wherever the library may be. Martin Weiss firmly believed that everyone should collect their books like coins, groom them like pets, and tuck them into the best arrangement on a grand bookshelf. There was not a more magnificent sight than hundreds of volumes of every hue, all erect and evenly placed on a shelf.
If only he could get others to see such majesty in the limitless knowledge bound in paper and glue. The art that was words, the exhilarating power of knowledge; looking at the world and seeing the electrical spark of existence, not just a flat image of colors.
This, at the Bayside Bar and Grill, he tried to explain to a young college student with hair the color of a Hershey bar.
“We have the tangible and the intangible.” Martin murmured into his bottle, leaning on the bar counter. “Some people merely pay attention to what they see; they are moved only by the physical. Like the main character Mersault in Camus’ “L’Étranger”, though not quite to the extreme, some people have a difficult time with emotions and can only find contentment in the physical things they experience. And the others - those that operate on the intangible - are the artists, surprisingly. They need what can only be expressed and not seen or touched. Once you understand where you can find your joy, life lowers one notch on the complication scheme, Felix, lad.”
He bent his head back and took a swig of his beer.
“But I don’t know what I am.” the college boy murmured, slouched on his stool. “I hardly have time to know. I go to class, I go to work, I make payments. I don’t touch enough to know if that’s what I live for, and I don’t express enough to know if that’s where I’m content.”
“Then make time, kid.” Martin laughed, amazed he was making this all sound so simple. Of course it wasn’t. Someday this young man would know that, too, and laugh at old men like him, who still wished they were in college themselves.
“How?”
“I don’t know. You’re young. When I was your age I was wearing a uniform in some country where the air tasted funny.” He ordered another drink.
“Oh.” The college boy dropped his eyes to the counter. It was almost heart-breaking to see a young well-meaning lad look so forlorn, or almost infuriating, for a man far past that age.
Martin sighed and looked sideways at the boy. “Escape. Learn.”
He whisked off the bottle cap and dropped it on the counter, listening to it ring as it wobbled.
III
[The High Priestess]
Everyone has that phase in life. The one they look back on and click their tongue at, saying “Oh, I was young and silly, then”. Life was short, but if one tried hard enough you can cram quite a bit into it.
Heather Antsworth knew this better than most. She was old now, a mother now, but she had once been a sun-kissed blonde with legs like Barbie. She had parted lips for all the boys in town and been able to drink more professionally than the entire football team.
But that was a long time ago. That had been a phase, and now she was on the right path. She gripped her tiny gold cross and kissed the four corners. Oh, how lucky she was to have spiritual guidance. To know you are loved and to love unconditionally in return.
Or perhaps unconditionally is the wrong word.
“Please, Lord, let my Felix come to his senses.” she prayed, kneeling at the coffee table in her living room, her worn fingers folded before her face. “I know of the evil and temptation that exists in this world, and he’s young and foolhardy; his trip is sure to bring about discretions, and may you forgive him in his youth.”
An unplanned and spirited taking off onto the highways of this country was something that a decent young man did not do. And she had raised her boy to be a decent young man, nothing like all the men in her young years.
But he had just disappeared on her. Walked out on his own mother, if there ever was a sin…
And to travel by taxi and train, by bus and - she shuddered - hitchhiking. Only vagabonds of the Lord’s great enemy did that.
First, he attends college for English. English! No one respected a poet. No one married a poet. And now this.
Was law school so much for a mother to ask? How wonderful that sounded: my son is going to law school. Mm-hmm. And yours? English? Oh-ha, I’m sorry. My son was going for English but then he came to his senses and now he’s in law school.
Heather let out a heavy sigh. She had been wild once, but she had learned.
The Lord reined in all chaotic souls.
IV
[The Empress]
Emma Beryl heard her phone trilling in the living room. She cursed its existence and continued her rhythmic pulling of weeds, squatting in her garden with her big round belly resting on her knees.
Carrying a baby certainly was a task; it threatened to interrupt all of her normal tasks. Which certainly would not do.
She breathed out slowly, discarding the weeds and leaning back on her heels. She could hear the answering machine kick on, but the only thing that followed was a whoosh of static and then a click. It didn’t matter; she knew who it was that had called.
Her sister had been calling nearly every other hour for the past three days. Her nephew had recently decided to be a normal young boy and go on a road trip of sorts. This had sent her daffy sister into a spin and she could hardly keep the exasperation out of her voice every time she had to tell Heather to screw her head back on and calm down.
Heather and her God. Even if an angry, omnipresent being was leaning over the clouds and watching her nephew, she doubted He would man the lightning bolts when He saw the boy run off in a bout of free-spiritedness.
She was sure everyone did this sometime in their youth. Her sister was hardly a saint, with her past of chemically blonde hair and all those boys. And for herself…well, she couldn’t admit to ever having matured.
For a mature person didn’t have the thoughts that Emma toyed with. If her sister knew her mind was cavorting with fantasies of adultery, she would never cease hearing the trill of that goddamn phone.
A woman who was eight months pregnant shouldn’t purse her lips at the man who helped assemble her baby’s crib, who was but a long-time acquaintance, an employee of her husband’s. But Heath Maverski was everything she had once wanted, before she had met her husband and changed her mind.
And here she was, changing her mind again.
But she would stop with her flirting, her teasing. For the sake of her baby, she had no more time for games for the young.
V
[The Emperor]
Be a man, Earl Beryl thought, watching one of his coworkers slink along the hallway, his shoulders sloped in a blatant and embarrassing sign of misery. No one cares.
He felt contempt for all of the sniveling, acne-pockmarked imps who he called coworkers. They all went home to their videogame consoles and drank their sorrows away in basements or bars. It was much too easy to step on their heads, climbing ever higher in the office, to more money and that white Tudor-style house he always dreamed of.
And his wife was already pregnant. That was a check on the to-do list. He was starting a family, a business, and if this wasn’t a life then he didn’t know what living was.
A baby was a nice accessory. Pictures in the office. In the wallet. Those oily coworkers of his had to respect a man who actually had something to work for.
And while they looked at these pictures of his progress, he would step on their heads and climb ever higher
Once I relocate I'll be sure to watch it though!
