Andromeda Klein (6 page)

The Sylvester Mouse list was great, consisting almost entirely of books she had read, or had pretended to have read, or felt she ought to have read, or had been meaning to read, or had not known about but which were thoroughly up her alley. She had looked ahead to the selection of 133s, “her” section, Parapsychology and Occultism: it was particularly impressive, including nearly all the good ones and leaving the wicker behind. Here was Mrs. van Rensselaer’s rare and quite underestimated
Prophetical, Educational, and Playing Cards;
and there was nearly everything the library had of Waite and Crowley, as well as Agrippa, Bonewits, Mathers’s translation of the
Abramelin
text, Eliphas Levi, Dame Frances Yates, Francis Barrett, all the classics …
Abramelin the Mage
wouldn’t be on the shelves. She knew because it was the library’s only copy and she herself had had it and somehow managed to lose track of it sometime during the past year. Currently, she had the Eliphas Levi and one of the Yates volumes at home—she would have to replace them by the time she got to the 133s, she supposed. She decided to staff-check A.E.’s
Book of Ceremonial Magic
, because she had just been using it to look up the sigils for Sallos and Orobas, and she wanted to note the sigils of the remaining Goetic demons on her cards.

Those who had made the Sylvester Mouse selections, whoever they were and whatever their purpose, really knew their stuff. The 296 section was great as well; it included the classic texts and left behind the dumbed-down self-help mumbo jumbo. It was a kind of showcase of the best the IHOB had to offer, which was considerable, and Andromeda caught herself feeling weirdly proud of it.

Books could get her excited, not just reading them but touching them. She had been known to caress her van Rensselaer or her
Magick Without Tears
. That is, she thought of them as hers, though they belonged, strictly speaking, to the library, which meant the county and ultimately the state. But they were from her section, and she was the only one who cared about them. The library’s copy of
Magick Without Tears
was particularly fine, a small quarto, bound (or possibly rebound) in quarter calf and white buckram with gilt edges, a strange, obviously limited edition she had been unable to find on any official bibliography. Such books were themselves talismans, or they could be, powerful as objects. Hands laid on them could absorb their power, and even, some said, their contents. Living with them or around them could influence and transform your world.

There were three of the library’s six Crowley books on the list and they were excellent choices:
Magick in Theory and
Practice
, of course, and
Magick Without Tears
because it was a rare special edition, and
The Vision and the Voice
, or
Liber 418
, an underappreciated classic documenting the exploration of the Enochian Aethyrs of Dr. Dee in the Sahara with Frater Omnia Vincam in 1909 e.v. It could also be read in
Gems from the Equinox
, but the stand-alone edition on the list was a far better text. It was odd, though, that
True and Faithful was
not one of the selections, as it was one of the library’s most impressive volumes and a text of great importance.

The Sylvester Mouse list had its reasons, evidently.

iii.

Andromeda Klein was thinking of “her”
Magick Without Tears
, the way it felt and the way it smelled, so her ride home was much more high-spirited than her previous ride had been.

But the Klein household killed high spirits with striking regularity and precision. Andromeda made sure the red phone was turned off, in case she got a call or text from the mom on the wrong phone as she was walking in. It was a complicated system, but it was necessary. The mom had gotten her the blue phone, on a shared-minutes plan, a transparent scheme to keep track of whom Andromeda was talking to by means of the bill, which registered both incoming and outgoing calls and texts for all numbers on the account. The mom was not above calling numbers and interrogating whoever answered. The “Why have you been calling a health clinic?” conversation was infuriating and humiliating nearly a year later. And it still amused Andromeda to think about the mom’s response to the Old Folks Home (“Dromeda, it’s wonderful that you are volunteering, but you shouldn’t let it interfere with your schoolwork or work around the house….”). Yet it had been clear that the mom had to be stopped if Andromeda was going to have any privacy.

St. Steve had suggested the solution, an additional prepaid phone, same make and service but red rather than blue so you could tell them apart. Switch the SIM cards and use the blue phone with the pay-as-you-go chip, so the mom would think it was the family-plan phone if she saw it, but the calls made on it wouldn’t turn up on the family bill. Keep the red phone with the family-plan chip hidden, and use it only for mom communication and for decoy calls to make it look like the phone was being used often enough to be believable. The decoy calls could even be fun, to the degree that they could elicit questions like “Honey, are you thinking of having something upholstered?” It kept them both busy.

By the time Andromeda had locked up her bike and had gone in and up the stairs, she was already in a bad mood again, thinking about the hoops she had to jump through just to reach everybody else’s starting gate.

The building was a Spanish-style duplex in the flats, a part of Clearview that Rosalie van Genuchten regularly referred to as “the ghetto.” The Klein family occupied the top half, left entrance. A combination of water damage and poor design and materials had caused the building to warp and settle oddly. From the outside, it looked a little strange, but the effect was really noticeable inside, where the floors slanted enough that smooth objects tended to slide if not secured. It was also quite small, which meant that the three Kleins’ agenda of staying in separate rooms whenever possible could require some fancy footwork.

The mom was in the dining room at the computer, which had been moved there from its previous, more convenient location in the kitchen nook on the advice of a television program about Predators. This move had effectively killed the Internet for Andromeda, and at the moment it seemed to be cramping the mom’s style too, which was slightly satisfying: she appeared to be IMing furtively with somebody, and even at a distance it was clear from the strobing monitor that she was riding the Hide button, as though worrying about over-the-shoulder spying. She had her ear-buds in and her butt was chair-dancing slightly. From one position at the top of the stairs, there was a “split-screen” view of part of the dining room and part of the kitchen, where the dad sat on the floor, dismantling the microwave.

“I can’t get on the network,” said the mom, half turning in her chair. “I can’t get on the network.” Then she added: “I can’t get on the network.”

“Let me guess,” said Alternative Universe Andromeda. “She can’t get on the network.” Then it added, “I guess the ninjas will just have to slay themselves.” The mom often had trouble with her virtual reality networking games because of the slow speed of the dial-up connection. Andromeda trudged down the short hallway in a slouching manner intended to reflect her state of mind.

“Oh, not more books!” the mom said.

As at school and the International House of Bookcakes, the atmosphere at Casa Klein was near tropical, overbearingly hot, with moisture heavy in the air. Andromeda deftly nudged the sliding thermostat down with her shoulder as she walked past it.

“Your father is destroying another appliance, so if you want to heat something up you’re out of luck.” Everything was quite heated up enough as it was, no oven required. Andromeda had already had a plum baby food and some red whips for dinner in the break room with Marlyne earlier anyway.

A barrage of complaints and suggestions followed, once the mom was certain she had communicated her inability to get on whatever network she had been trying to get on. Tonight’s lecture might have been entitled: “Vegetarianism as Eating Disorder: The Roots of Adolescent Depression.” Goading Andromeda about vegetarianism was the one thing her parents seemed to enjoy doing together, even though the dad claimed to have once been a vegetarian himself, but he was too preoccupied with the microwave to join in this time. In truth, Andromeda was only a vegetarian every other day, on Saturnine Ring Days, but even on Jovial days she shied away from meat because fat was gross and the smell nearly always made her feel ill.

“Just having some tea,” said Andromeda, filling the kettle. The water pressure was low, as it had been for the last several weeks, so she had to stand in the mom’s presence for far longer than she would have liked. Nothing ever functioned fully at Casa Klein.

“Tea, that’s a nutritious meal,” the mom was saying. She went on to complain about the water pressure and to accuse Andromeda of hiding her address book and using her iPod, which had gone missing and finally turned up in the refrigerator. The idea that Andromeda would have any interest at all in the horrible music on the mom’s iPod was almost as preposterous as the idea that she would, for some reason, decide to put it in the refrigerator. The mom’s checkbook had also disappeared and was still missing; again, it was ridiculous to accuse Andromeda. It was doubtful that the checking account had any money in it. And it was a good bet that the mom had already accused the dad of hiding or losing it before Andromeda had come in.

Refrigeration hadn’t seemed to hurt the iPod; there it was, buzzing away through the slightly nasty earbuds now hanging around the mom’s neck. Andromeda immediately thought of Daisy and whether it might be possible for her in her current state to dematerialize objects and rematerialize them inside boxes like refrigerators.

“Things are always disappearing around here,” the mom repeated, with an accusing look in Andromeda’s direction, and another in the direction of the dad.

“Jesus, will you leave the kid alone?” said Andromeda’s father. “Hello, cupcake.” She wasn’t sure how he did it, but he managed to make “cupcake” sound sarcastic and affectionate at the same time. There was no person in this world who resembled a cupcake less than Andromeda Klein. It was nicer than Fence Post and no more inapt than her own name, which meant “Little Crystal Ruler of Men” in a variety of mismatched languages.

“Here’s what happened: the earth revolved, the rain fell on the fields, and the Little Crystal Ruler of Men earned thirty dollars before taxes working in the public sector.” That was Alternative Universe Andromeda. Regular Universe Andromeda simply left the room. As the mom continued the bone-picking she had mentioned earlier, remaining at the computer and shouting out rapid-fire complaints about insufficient this and excessive that, Andromeda settled down in the living room to study her
Teach Yourself Hebrew
book and tuned her out as best she could. There was a phrase from the most recent Language Arts handout that seemed to sum up the mom’s philosophy on parenting and domestic organization. The wizard Merlin has turned the boy King Arthur into an ant, and the sign on the gate of the ant colony reads:
EVERYTHING NOT FORBIDDEN IS COMPULSORY
. Andromeda was an ant, crushed by a heavy maternal boot of iron. The mom had presumably absorbed these methods in her childhood in Australia under the Nazis.

Downstairs, the Champlain baby was screaming and the Champlains were screaming and it sounded like there was someone on the television screaming too. Andromeda’s defective ears tended to screen out important information like syllables while still managing to pick up the irritating background noise. It didn’t help that certain low tones from the sound track of whatever the Champlains were watching made the whole building vibrate abrasively. She could feel it in her back teeth. Andromeda’s dad insisted that the cable be disconnected and the TV unplugged when not in use, so she had to stoop and reconnect everything before settling back on the couch. She picked up the remote and found the channel they were watching downstairs, not because she wanted to watch TV, which she didn’t often like, but just in order to create a slightly less chaotic atmosphere where the sounds all matched. It was a movie in which a puzzle man was drugging people and sewing their mouths shut.

Soon the dad emerged carrying a circuit board and some other bits extracted from the now-destroyed appliance, a “See, what did I tell you?” look on his face.

Andromeda’s father suspected the government of spying on American citizens by implanting surveillance devices in electronic products. All the manufacturers and the governments and the corporations that control them were in on it. He had several boxes of extracted circuit boards and other electronic parts, collected over a lifetime, carefully dated and labeled, evidence for the book he claimed he was planning to write on Surveillance and the State; accordingly, the carport in the back was filled with appliances that no longer worked, alongside all the recording and music equipment he collected from yard sales and pawnshops and never seemed to use for anything.

The dad frowned at the TV. It is well known, he often said, that the FBI keeps files on everything you watch, and that the cable could transmit information to them even as it brainwashed, which was a neat trick. It would have been safest to have no television in the house at all, but unfortunately there was no other way to watch sports. Even the supermarkets keep track of all your purchases for use against you later, which is why it was best to vary your patterns and shop at different places, and to buy everything with cash whenever possible, though new bills shouldn’t be handled more than necessary because they put toxins in the ink that absorb into the skin and can be used to track you as well.

“You hear them?” he said, shaking his head. “They’re talking about us again.” He whispered: “Stalkers.” He meant the Champlains, or the government, or some other shadowy organization; in his view someone was always stalking, or scheming, or up to no good.

The mom scuttled in. All three Kleins were rarely in the same room at the same time.

“Your tea water, Andromeda!” she said. “You should eat something, not just tea. It’s an appetite suppressant.” Then: “You shouldn’t boil the water so hot, it’s not good for the bleeding helmet.” Heating element, perhaps?
“What
are you watching? That’s terrible. You’ll give us all nightmares….”

Andromeda and the dad briefly shared a look of wonder over the concept of boiling water too hot.

“
,” said the dad, after a pause, which made Andromeda crack up in spite of herself after a moment of thumbing through the glossary at the back of her Hebrew book.

The mom glared with suspicion.

“I think he said ‘Where’s the bathroom?’” said Andromeda.

“Well, there’s a surprise,” said the mom, speaking fluent sitcom.

Andromeda had had no idea that the dad knew any Hebrew. It was difficult to learn the language from a book. Many of the letters were so similar, and she was always getting them wrong. She was studying it mainly to help with her understanding of the Holy Qabalah and gematria, the ancient art of rendering words and sentences into numbers and drawing correspondences between them, which was an important part of magick training and practice. But she also imagined a day when, after years of study, she might find herself, like Dame Frances in the Warburg or A.E. in the British Library reading room, in a vast library of ancient, secret texts of occult lore; and what use would such a library be without a working knowledge of Hebrew? She had a lot of catching up to do, as her current education was essentially worthless for her purposes.