Never Enough Time, page 23
“Shiva is the soul of the universe,” Lachesis says. “He’s everywhere.”
Lachesis and I are walking toward the nearest mountain, which must be twenty miles from here. But that’s just a fucking guess. I’ve never been here before, despite Hal’s telling me I’ve been here for five years.
“What about the seven of diamonds?”
“It’s precious. Like diamonds. And, for you, it’s the last of the seven cards.”
Lachesis picks up the pace, and I match her, stride for stride. I suddenly need to get to that mountain, no matter what. If we can walk four or five miles an hour, we’ll get there by lunchtime.
“So?”
“So—”
“But . . . wait. It’s not the last of the seven cards,” I say. “What about the seven of hearts?”
“How long do you think it’ll take us to reach the mountain?” Lachesis says, pointing at the mountain I’m aiming for.
“Five hours, give or take,” I say.
“You were always very good at math,” Lachesis says. “Investment analysis was an excellent choice for you.”
“No! It wasn’t! I hate it!”
“Really? How much time have you actually spent doing it?”
“Well . . .” Lachesis has hit on something here. Something significant? “None.”
“How can you hate something you’ve spent no time doing?”
“Easily,” I say, but I doubt myself. “Maybe I just hate the idea of it. But why did I choose it?”
“Why did you choose the path of the sevens? It’s your fate. Your destiny.”
“You mean I have no choice?”
“You have every choice,” Lachesis says. “And before you start arguing with me, Delaney Archer, let me remind you that today’s your last day. And, as such, it’s the day you’ll be choosing your next life.”
“Is that why you’re here?”
“One of the reasons.”
“And the other reasons? And really. Fuck. Why is it so hard to get answers from you? And from Bennet?”
“I answer all your questions. You might not like the answers, but I do answer.”
“You are so fucking difficult.”
“In your opinion. Others find me easy. And, really, Bennet is the most easygoing spirit guide around. I can’t imagine that you think he’s difficult.”
“You are just fucking kidding me now. He’s impossible.”
“He’s in love with you, Delaney. That puts him in an odd position.”
“Is that why I haven’t drawn the seven of hearts?”
“Perhaps it’s not in the deck,” Lachesis says. “Sometimes a card can get lost.”
Chapter 80
“Can’t you walk any faster?” I say. Lachesis has started to drag. Almost as though she doesn’t want us to reach the mountain. I don’t know why I want to reach the mountain, but it seems necessary.
It’s calling to me somehow, drawing me toward it. A destination. A goal. The culmination of the cycle of sevens.
“I’m walking very briskly,” she says.
We’ve passed no one and nothing. The route from my house to this mountain is uninhabited, and if there are roads near here, I haven’t seen them.
“How did I fuck everything up so much?” I say.
“Only you can answer that,” Lachesis says. “Unless Hal can.” She laughs at her great joke.
We walk another maybe it’s a mile, maybe it’s a parsec. Out here in the desert, I’ve lost all sense of time, space, distance, and their relationship to one another. Doubts are identical to certainties here.
“Hal, how did I fuck everything up?” I say out loud. It’s not like I have to hide that I’m talking to an inner voice. It’s just me and Lachesis out here. And Hal. In here.
You fucked nothing up, says the fucked-up Hal. But if I expect to get great information or advice from him, it’s only because I’m getting kinda desperate. The hours are slipping away.
The mountain is closer, maybe, a little small bit, but still too too far off. Lachesis is walking ever slower and slower.
And I have to admit that I’m getting thirsty. We left the house with no supplies. Yet if a salamander can live in a desert, then so can I. And Lachesis is a myth, so she can survive outside the pod, floating in space, her lifeline sliced open.
“We need to get some water,” Lachesis says, contradicting all my thoughts.
“Lead on,” I say, too thirsty to argue.
We walk for another hour, maybe—or maybe it’s seven minutes that seem like an hour, since the heat and the sun and the dried earth are starting to affect my mental processes.
Now we’ve come upon a little store, something that’s from another century, one where this would be called an emporium, or perhaps this is another country or even another planet.
Maybe I was abducted by aliens, only I was never returned to Earth. Maybe this is their planet, and I’m not in New Mexico, and here, in this other world, a day is seven years long, mythological characters chat with you, tease and annoy you, and spirit guides are worthless.
Lachesis hefts a gallon jug of water and swigs it down in impolite gulps, some of the water running in rivulets down the sides of her mouth and onto the butterfly-wing-thin layers of her pale blue gown.
I get a sturdy glass bottle of bright orange soda and drink it slowly. It’s the last orange soda I’ll ever have.
Take another, says Hal, so I do. Is he trying to tell me that just because I think something’s the last thing, that maybe it isn’t? That I can have more? That the supply is unlimited? Or that I’d better have it now, since now’s my last chance?
Lachesis and I stock up on fluids, nuts, and dried fruit. The shop sells little else. If you could call this selling. As with every other shopping experience I’ve had since the sevens began, this one involves no clerk, no exchange of currency, no plastic cards, no argument when we leave the store with our supplies. There’s no one to argue with us anyway. No one, either, to help us or to stop us.
Lachesis has brought a bag with her—she pulls it out of her dress’s left-hand hip pocket—and she puts everything we’ve procured in there. I half expect the bag to disappear at this point, since I never see anyone carrying anything, but it doesn’t.
“Here,” she says, handing me the bag.
“Why do I have to carry it?” I say, but I take the bag. It’s kind of great to have something to hang on to. Even if the bag matches Lachesis’s pale blue dress.
I wonder if she has matching bags for every dress. Or if she usually needs a bag at all. Or if she came prepared. Or if perhaps she knows everything in advance. She is one of the Fates, after all. The one who knows the all of everything.
“You’re the journeyer on the path of the sevens. You have to carry everything. It’s part of the path.”
She’s just lazy, Hal says. Typical of the mythology set.
I think I agree with him, and even though I’d rather not give him the satisfaction of that agreement, I’m pretty sure he knows how I feel.
Lachesis and I walk in silence for a long while, fortified by the fluids, and our pace burns through the miles as the sun rises in the sky. Yet the mountain seems as distant as ever. If not farther away. If not infinitely far away.
Sometimes it’s impossible to know if you’re walking in the right direction.
Maybe what I mean is that in my case, it’s always impossible to know if you’re walking in the right direction.
The desert landscape’s flat, but we come to an area I haven’t seen until we fall upon it—a small garden, lush, green, blooming wildflowers startling in their variety of rich colors. I drink it in, the same way I drank in the orange soda—with need and relief.
“Let’s sit for a while,” Lachesis says, and she and I walk into the depths of the garden, relishing the cool shade. We sit at a table where Ivan the Terrible is also seated.
“You’re early,” Ivan says. “And the veil is still in place.”
Chapter 81
Those who are chosen must remove the veil, Hal says, reminding me.
“How did you get here?” I say, as though my saying it is the equivalent of removing the veil, whatever the hellish fuck that means.
“I walked,” he says. “Same as both of you.”
“I’m going to take a piss,” Lachesis says, and leaves me at the table with Ivan.
Although I’d love to know more about the physiology of mythological figures, I don’t bother saying anything. And anyway it’s obvious that Ivan and Lachesis have arranged this, and he and I are supposed to be alone now.
“Ivan,” I say. “Is it okay if I call you that?” After all, I made that name up.
“What else might you call me? My name’s Ivan.”
“Ivan. I have no veil. There is no veil. How can I remove something that doesn’t exist?”
“You should’ve asked that when you chose the path of the sevens.”
“Well, I’m asking now,” I say in exasperation. “No one has given me a clear answer. Maybe no one can, but I have to try. This is my last opportunity.”
“So you say.”
“You don’t say?” A glimmer of hope rises in my chest.
“Only those who’ve chosen truly understand the path of the sevens.”
He looks like he should be broiling hot, what with the big body, the big beard, and the desert’s big heat, but he actually looks like he’s sitting at the helm of a ship, the sea breezes doing a perfect job of cooling him off. He’s not even sweating, as I am, despite the shade.
“Yet I don’t understand it,” I say. I don’t. “I’ve never understood it.”
“You’ve come close a couple of times,” says Ivan.
“Can’t somebody just tell me, straight out, what it is that I’m missing here?”
“When the veil is lifted, you’ll know. Not until then.”
“Then can’t you lift the fucking veil?” At this point I’m pushing at the air in front of my head. Maybe this will lift the invisible veil, the thing that’s keeping me from understanding anything.
“No,” Ivan says. He leans back in his wrought iron chair and crosses his arms over his chest, looking very Ivan the Terrible–ish.
“Give me a fucking hint?”
“If you choose to ignore the signs, the signals, the leads, that are all around you, all the time, that’s your choice.”
“Is everything my choice?”
“It’s a matter of perception,” Ivan says.
“Which I’ll understand when the veil’s lifted,” I say, helping him along.
“You do understand that much,” he says, nodding.
“Time’s running out, though,” I say.
“If that’s your perception.”
“It is.” The small shred of hope I had a few moments ago has been atomized.
Lachesis rejoins us. “Any luck?” she says to Ivan, who shakes his head.
“Am I this hopeless?” I say. “Was the path of the sevens just another mistake that I chose? Along with everything else? All my bad decisions?”
Lachesis and Ivan the Terrible apparently think this is hilarious, and they both laugh, as though I’ve just told them the world’s second-funniest joke.
“Can I cast the lots now?” Lachesis says. She’s asking Ivan for his approval? His advice? His direction? I’d always thought she was an independent, except for her ties with her sisters Clotho and Atropos. The three of them with their centuries-old monopoly on life, death, and fate.
“I don’t see why not,” Ivan says. “Give the hopeless one here something else she can use to postpone understanding.”
“It’s not my fault she’s like this,” Lachesis says.
“Don’t look at me,” Ivan says. The two of them are arguing over my failings?
“Isn’t this kind of petty?” I say. “Under the circumstances?”
“It’s Bennet’s fault, you know,” Ivan says. “He is her spirit guide. The foolhardy ass.”
“I wouldn’t blame him so fast,” Lachesis says. “It’s not all that easy being a spirit guide.”
“How the hell would you know?” Ivan says. He looks pretty fucking fierce while he’s saying this.
We can leave now, Hal says to me. These two can argue for decades. Guaranteed.
“Well, I blame him,” I say. “And I blame the two of you as well. And Hal, while we’re at it. And Min-Jae. And Mary, Queen of Scots. And—”
“What?” says Ivan.
“Mary, Queen of Scots. The woman at the séance. The one with the ruffly collar.”
“She does look a little like Mary,” Lachesis says. “But just a little.”
“She looks nothing like Mary, Queen of Scots,” says Ivan.
“I think it depends on the angle you view her from,” says Lachesis, turning her head to demonstrate her methodology for the precise maneuver to effect the desired visual result, the one where the woman at the séance looks enough like Mary, Queen of Scots, that someone other than me might notice the resemblance.
“That is just a ridiculous thing to say,” Ivan says.
I told you—we can leave now, Hal says. They’re not going to stop arguing.
Chapter 82
“Bye,” I say as I get up. I’ve still got the bag, and I take out half the supplies and put them on the table. Lachesis will need them. Maybe. At any rate, they belong to her.
“But—the lots,” Lachesis says. She grabs my wrist and stops me from leaving. Her grip’s surprisingly strong, especially for a mythological character. Or for anybody her height and weight. She looks more like she could float off in a millimeter-per-hour breeze.
“Okay, I’ll bite,” I say. “What are the lots?”
“Sit down,” Ivan says, sighing. I guess he’s resigned himself to whatever it is that Lachesis has in mind. At least their quarreling has stopped.
Lachesis produces her deck of cards, and Ivan stretches out his impressive forearm and brushes it across the table, sweeping away the water bottles, the nuts, and the dried fruit I’ve just put there.
I bend to pick everything up, but Ivan says, “Sit,” so I do. Funny the way he can take charge yet he can’t give me one single fucking answer to any of my most urgent questions.
Lachesis goes into her masterful shuffling routine, which no longer impresses me. It’s just what she does. She probably practices every night for an hour before she goes to sleep—assuming she does sleep—to keep her skills so sharp.
When she’s finished her overdone adept shuffling display, she holds out the deck to me. “Cut.”
I take the deck from her. This is the end. I can feel it.
Lachesis has called me back to the table and is offering me the cards of my finish. My hands are shaking. Not much, but Ivan notices it and starts to say something.
“Leave her alone,” Lachesis says, and Ivan harrumphs.
“I can’t,” I say, and give the deck back to Lachesis, who pushes my hands back.
“But you have to,” she says. “It’s how this is done.”
I’m doing my best not to cry. It’s my last day here. I don’t want to spend it crying. Not that I want to spend it watching Ivan and Lachesis argue, either.
But I sense that something fucking awful is about to happen. Like maybe this is the last moment. The one I’ve been dreading. The one that will finish the path of the sevens even if I haven’t removed the fucking veil, which veil I can’t see and which I have no clue how to remove.
I cut the deck. I’ve hardly moved the cards from the position they were in when Lachesis handed them to me, but I have cut them. I put them back on the table. My hands are shaking more now. She’s going to ask me to choose a card, and this card is going to be the end. My end.
I put my hands in my lap. I don’t want to choose any card. Ever again.
Instead of picking up the deck, fanning it out, and telling me to pick a card, Lachesis flips the deck over with a dramatic flourish, and in one swift movement swirls the cards into a glorious spiral array.
I gasp. Instead of the deck of ordinary playing cards I was anticipating, the one Lachesis always seems to have with her, the one whose cards have the same ordinary card backs as this deck does, as the seven of spades, of clubs, of diamonds, did, I’m looking at images of people, of animals and birds, at delicately painted scenes of forests, cities, mountains, deserts, at houses, castles, huts, cabins, fantastical buildings, at depictions of all kinds of objects, and each card is more beautiful than the last, than the next.
So colorful, so enchanting, so mesmerizing. Almost alive, I think. As though the images on these cards are life itself, moving, flowing, rising, cresting.
“What is this?” I say.
“The lots,” Lachesis says.
“The lots,” Ivan the Terrible says.
“Choose,” Lachesis says, sitting back now, admiring her slick work.
“I don’t know how,” I say as I stare at the cards. “They’re all beautiful. All perfect.”
I want them all. I want to pick up the cards and hug them to my chest. Or climb onto the tabletop so I can mix myself in with them, sink into them, join myself with them.
I want to touch them and stare at them until they’re part of me. Until I’m part of them.
“Ah,” Ivan says.
“Yes,” Lachesis says.
But I can’t see all of any of the cards, only parts of them. They cover over one another, obscuring my view, and I reach out to move the cards so I can inspect them more carefully.
“Not yet,” Lachesis says, blocking my movement with her stare. “What you touch becomes yours. You are choosing. Consider carefully.”
Chapter 83
“Don’t just look at the pretty pictures,” Ivan says. “That’s a mistake too many have made. Too many will make. Eternally.”
“I could look at them forever,” I say. I’m not exaggerating. The images are more beautiful and compelling than any painting, than any illustration, than anything at all that I’ve ever seen.
“Use your intuition,” Lachesis says—maybe the first helpful thing she’s ever said to me. If it is helpful. If I can access my intuition. Or would know that I had if I do.
