Ed King (25 page)

Ed wasn’t surprised, in the fall, to hear that Elarth had been relieved of his teaching duties. His lectures had become antagonistic to colleagues and fanciful beyond any value to students. There was a rumor that, in defending himself to a committee, Elarth had mentioned hearing voices in his head. Stanford got a think tank to take him on and, Elarth having disappeared from campus, Ed got transferred to a new adviser, who urged him toward an advanced class on information theory
. We have a table around which are seated
N
philosophers. In the center there is a large plate containing an unlimited amount of spaghetti. Halfway between each pair of adjacent philosophers there is a single fork.… How should the philosophers go about their rituals without starving?
Or:
Imagine you’ve trained your St. Bernard, Bernie, to carry a box of three floppy disks
, etc.
For what range of distances does Bernie have a higher data rate than a 300 bps telephone line?
Ed killed these kinds of problems. His abilities were celebrated. And not just by faculty but by females generally. At Stanford, he was surrounded by hundreds of girls who were patently obvious as fantasy fodder, good-looking young women in all colors and stripes who were brimming with intelligence, purpose, and style as they
leaned toward equations on overhead projectors and thrilled to the voices of genius professors waxing eloquent on everything. Of course, he undressed these attractive peers in his head, but, having gotten started with Darlene Klein down the path of older women, ended up in bed not with peers but with—for example—a computer-security consultant who cruised Stanford for associates. After a month of complicated liaisons with this married, driven tennis ace, Ed, against his better judgment, joined her for a Napa weekend. They laughed at their mutual lack of wine knowledge. They played tennis, with Ed in the role of student. She sprang for a couples aromatherapy steam bath. During sex, she made a lot of primal noises. Ed stopped programming for her and took up with a woman in Stanford Admissions who, during a first, long, casual chat, wondered if he wanted to get acquainted with an art museum in Belmont. They went immediately. After forty-five minutes of combing galleries, she told Ed she needed a glass of wine, so they went somewhere for wine, which she fidgeted over before asking how old he was. Ed said, “Twenty-nine,” adding extra years because he thought she could use them, and she replied that she had a nineteen-year-old daughter volunteering at an orphanage in Senegal. “Is that not interesting?” she added, laughing. “Am I not a scintillating, fascinating person?” Then they went to her house in Redwood City, which was available because her husband, an anthropologist, was on sabbatical in Papua New Guinea.

None of this felt dark enough for his post–Darlene Klein erotic interests, so he took up with a Palo Alto patent attorney he met by responding to an “Adults Only” personal stating, “Tumultuous and complicated professional woman seeks boy toy with brains, brawn, and soul for tête-à-tête in pied-à-terre. BHM only, BD yes, LS, FS, X.” Sex with the patent attorney called for role playing (delivery boy, friend’s son, neighbor kid, piano student), and was often informed by a tearful cruelty that left Ed less than 100-percent happy with his role as a punching bag. She called him a bastard or threw something at him if he wanted to leave her pied-à-terre before she was ready to let him go, and she squinted at him with wrathful distrust whenever he came out of her powder room. In a mood, one afternoon, of pre-farewell appeasement, Ed agreed to accompany her to a Halloween party sponsored by a software company. The invitation, in embossed gold letters on black paper, read:

Followed by the details for:

They got there at ten. Guests hurried past. A spotlight swept the sky. The patent attorney had dressed in gartered stockings and lingerie; Ed, stubbornly, attended as himself. Even before they were in the door, his date got swept away by gregarious connections. Ed slipped off gratefully and wandered as a lone prowler. Most of the people who’d gravitated toward Miller Mansion—a gigantic turn-of-the-century Victorian lit like a bonfire down to glowing coals—were elaborately and enthusiastically got up. Packed into a foyer, Ed was stumped by three guys who’d come in action-figure ensembles featuring Adidas running shoes, striped warm-ups, and sunny circus jackets with thick belt closures; they turned out to be hosts hired to greet revelers, or to bounce them if required.

Ed felt seized in a phantasmagoria. Miller Mansion was impeccably maintained, and someone in its history had liked chandeliers enough to impose one on every room. There were also pervasive wall sconces that may or may not have been specific to the current bacchanal. Prophecy’s atmospherics contractor had opted for a red-light-district ambience, and for steam machines cleverly calibrated to keep the floor invisible. Everyone’s legs disappeared into steam, although now and then an unexpected
swirl or clearing would reveal Turkish rugs, oak floorboards, garish shoes, and fishnet stockings. Revelers were being served a steady diet of piped-in Queen—“Bohemian Rhapsody,” “Another One Bites the Dust,” “Crazy Little Thing Called Love,” and so on. They were very excited and, at times, unruly. Many seemed to like the convergence of muddled camp and gilded money, the measured decadence, and the water chestnuts wrapped in bacon and served on toothpicks. The bartender Ed visited could pour a blood-red Merlot, or a Bloody Mary, or smoking punch, or something from a list of “Creepy Cocktails and Spooky Sippers,” but when asked for white wine, he shook his head sheepishly. Was it a coincidence or careful casting, Ed wondered, that he looked like Norman Bates?

Ed pushed on. A considerable number of zombies careened about in unraveling shards of cloth. There was a zealous Morticia Addams—so zealous, in fact, Ed guessed she’d been hired—who wandered Miller Mansion in a black hobble skirt while strumming on a shamisen and affecting ruined beauty. Indeed, there was a straggle of gray in her black hair that Ed found stirring; he also took an interest in a member of the catering staff whose job it was to stand like a figure in a wax museum while holding a platter of spanakopita triangles. Skin as if never touched by the sun, gaunt Gypsy cheeks, strong chin, black tresses—had she as well been cast by the party planner? Or was she real?

Around eleven, Psycho Youth began to play. Ed heard them from a second-floor corridor so stuffed with milling guests he felt embattled. He’d only just begun to discern a fact about this party—that each room in Miller Mansion had been dedicated to a hired act—and he felt moved to have a thorough look around. In one room, a magician was fooling people with colored handkerchiefs and pigeons; in another, a sword swallower was mock-castigating a guest who’d ventured that sword swallowing was “just a trick.” In a third, a juggler wearing ballooning trousers and a genie’s turban juggled boxes of Prophecy software; and in a fourth, a contortionist folded herself into a UPS shipping container despite the added duress of an outfit cobbled together out of foam insulation. There was a W. C. Fields look-alike with a Howdy Doody doll on his lap delivering bawdy one-liners, and a girl on a unicycle, dressed like a Chinese acrobat, throwing plates onto her head, where they stacked up. “The Sublime Cosmo” performed “rare feats of telekinesis,” such as prompting, by
sheer force of mental exertion, an antique pocket-watch to run at high speed, and compelling a small compass across a table to his hand. In a walk-in pantry, a mind reader wearing the headgear of Johnny Carson as Carnac the Magnificent, but calling himself ESP-Man, would ask someone in his tightly packed crowd for his or her name, then astonish whoever answered with a correct birth date or the name of an ex-spouse. “The Flaming Cross-Dresser,” decked out in a burning Seattle Seahawks uniform, performed a truly amazing trick—an assistant wrapped him in a kind of psychedelic tent for a second, then unwrapped him to reveal Carmen Miranda with a melon in her hat. Another second in the tent and he became the Indian in the Village People; a third and he became Snow White, complete with apple. Ed moved on. There was a fortuneteller of the gleaming-crystal-ball school in a black tent decorated with horoscope symbols, a séance beginning every thirty minutes in the attic, and a conservatory packed with video-arcade games. A man with a handlebar mustache read “The Raven” beside a candelabra while leaning, with Victorian stuffiness, against a fireplace mantel. Sales reps handed out complimentary mouse pads in stairwells. A man got up like a swashbuckler threw knives at a girl in garters and a top hat. In one room there was nothing but low lighting, pipe-organ music, and a bloodless-looking geezer, wide-eyed, in a casket; in another, Ed walked in on Dracula biting the neck of a girl in a nightgown; next door to that, a bodybuilder, painted green and exploding out of his clothes like the Incredible Hulk, performed a biceps-heavy competition routine to the tune of “Monster Mash.” And then there was the woman reading Tarot cards in a garish library on the third floor.

A strange room. The books were so tightly packed in floor-to-ceiling bookcases, lit by recessed red lamps, that they looked under pressure. The titles, all oversized and antique in appearance, were mostly Latin, though on close inspection Ed recognized some Sanskrit, Greek, Arabic, and Farsi. Ladders on runners gave access to the higher shelves. The library’s voluminous chandelier was more than just outsized—it reigned over the room like a model of the moon, a glittering, gold ball of rotating lights that produced a strobe effect, so that the books fell in and out of vision. There was a well-polished display case with three glass shelves of what looked like amulets from the Fertile Crescent, and an opposing case stuffed with the kind of medieval notions Ed associated with alchemy—a
flask, a small distilling furnace, an iron tripod, a mortar and pestle, a vapor-condensing burner, and a few cloudy tincture vials. And in the middle of all of this, at a low table, a pashmina-heavy Tarot reader held court between two censers of burning myrrh. It was hard to make her out in the strobe phantasmagoria. Things seen closely were well enough illuminated, but anything you couldn’t put your eye to with immediacy stayed fantastically and tantalizingly obscure. Between the disjointed flashes and the roiling myrrh smoke—which smelled like burning dirt and dried out his contact lenses—Ed’s view of the Tarot reader was like a view through moving water, or in a poorly lit hall of warped mirrors. “I’m not really looking for a reading,” he said. “I’m just sort of wandering around.”

“It’s free,” said the reader, in a series of broken stills. “Free, and it’ll only take a few minutes. Most people end up thinking it’s fun, but anyway I’m here for the rest of the night, if you decide you want to have a reading.”

He didn’t want to have one—he was just poking his head in—he hadn’t come up here for a reading. But other than the spanakopita-platter mannequin and the shamisen-wielding Morticia Addams siren, this was the first woman he’d come across that night who appealed to him in just the right way. Inside her collection of swaddling scarves and shawls, she was late-thirty-something, or maybe forty. This much he discerned in the fragmented light, and it was enough to make him hang around.

The reader threw some tasseled ends about in an effort to organize more dash. “There’s no creepy business with what I do,” she said. “I don’t call up ghosts.” She laughed, as if at charlatans and spiritualists. “You could just about play Hearts or Crazy Eights here,” she said, “if you set aside the Major Arcana.”

Ed sat down across from her. The chair made him feel like a giant kindergartner, and he worried that it might break. He squinted through the smoke and fireworks flash, trying for a cleaner look at her face, but she was protected by a sphere of veiling myrrh mist and by a shawl she’d pulled up while he’d been looking out the window. “Hit me with your best shot,” said Ed. “Fire away with the cards.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” said Ed. “Let’s see how you do it.”

The reader swirled her hands over a nonexistent crystal ball. “Very well,” she said, from behind her myrrh. “Let’s you and me determine your destiny by way of my ancient art.”

“Both of us?”

“The process is inclusive.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means we read the cards together.”

“I thought you were the reader.”

“No,” said the reader. “That’s not right. It isn’t going to work without you.”

She began to unfold the long silk scarf wrapped around her Tarot cards. “The beauty of this is that there’s nothing to lose,” she said. “You get a little insight into yourself, maybe an answer to a problem you’re having, maybe a little glimpse into your future.”

“From a deck of cards.”

“Plus, Prophecy is paying for it,” the reader countered, holding the cards over the censer on her left as if to consecrate them in myrrh. She removed them from the smoke, caressed them a little, and shifted them from hand to hand. “For our purposes in Tarot, you’re known as the Querent,” she explained. “That’s because you’ve got a question—you have to think up a question—but don’t tell me what it is yet. I’m going to pick a card.”

Ed couldn’t help himself. He laughed.

“The cards know—no sneering,” warned the reader, and with that she chose one, saying, “The Knight of Wands. Is that okay with you? His mantle’s got salamanders biting their own tails. Salamanders can’t be burned, you know. Which is good, auspicious, because Wands symbolize fire. Why don’t you take a closer look?”