The Changed Man Page 15

  “Cross my palm with silver,” said Alvin. He thought he was making a joke but his anger spoke too loudly in his voice. Joe looked up with shame on his face. Alvin cringed inside himself. Just by speaking to you I wound you. Alvin wanted to apologize but he had no strategy for that so he tried to affirm that it had been a joke by making another. “Discovering the secrets of the universe?”

  Joe half-smiled and quickly gathered up the cards and put them away.

  “No,” Alvin said, “No, you were interested: you don’t have to put them away.”

  “It’s just nonsense,” Joe said.

  You’re lying, Alvin thought.

  “All the meanings are so vague they could fit just about anything.” Joe laughed mirthlessly.

  “You looked pretty interested.”

  “I was just you know wondering how to program a computer for this wondering whether I could do a program that would make it make some sense. Not just the random fall of the cards you know. A way to make it respond to who a person really is. Cut through all the—”

  “Yes?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “Cut through all the ?”

  “Stories we tell ourselves. All the lies that we believe about ourselves. About who we really are.”

  Something didn’t ring true in the boy’s words, Alvin knew. Something was wrong. And because in Alvin’s world nothing could long exist unexplained he decided the boy seemed awkward because his father had made him ashamed of his own curiosity. I am ashamed that I have made you ashamed, Alvin thought. So I will buy you the cards.

  “I’ll buy the cards. And the book you were looking at.”

  “No Dad,” said Joe.

  “No it’s all right. Why not? Play around with the computer. See if you can turn this nonsense into something. What the hell, you might come up with some good graphics and sell the program for a bundle.” Alvin laughed. So did Joe. Even Joe’s laugh was a lie.

  What Alvin didn’t know was this: Joe was not ashamed. Joe was merely afraid. For he had laid out the cards as the book instructed, but he had not needed the explanations, had not needed the names of the faces. He had known their names at once, had known their faces. It was Creon who held the sword and the scales. Ophelia, naked wreathed in green, with man and falcon, bull and lion around. Ophelia who danced in her madness. And I was once the boy with the starflower in the sixth cup, giving to my child-mother, when gifts were possible between us. The cards were not dice, they were names, and he laid them out in stories drawing them in order from the deck in a pattern that he knew was largely the story of his life. All the names that he had borne were in these cards, and all the shapes of past and future dwelt here, waiting to be dealt. It was this that frightened him. He had been deprived of stories for so long, his own story of father, mother, son was so fragile now that he was madly grasping at anything; Father mocked, but Joe looked at the story of the cards, and he believed. I do not want to take these home. It puts myself wrapped in a silk in my own hands. “Please don’t,” he said to his father.

  But Alvin, who knew better, bought them anyway, hoping to please his son.

  Joe stayed away from the cards for a whole day. He had only touched them the once; surely he need not toy with this fear again. It was irrational, mere wish fulfillment, Joe told himself. The cards mean nothing. They are not to be feared. I can touch them and learn no truth from them. And yet all his rationalism, all his certainty that the cards were meaningless, were, he knew, merely lies he was telling to persuade himself to try the cards again, and this time seriously.

  “What did you bring those home for?” Mother asked in the other room.

  Father said nothing. Joe knew from the silence that Father did not want to make any explanation that might be overheard.

  “They’re silly,” said Mother. “I thought you were a scientist and a skeptic. I thought you didn’t believe in things like this.”

  “It was just a lark,” Father lied.”I bought them for Joe to plink around with. He’s thinking of doing a computer program to make the cards respond somehow to people’s personalities. The boy has a right to play now and then.”

  And in the family room, where the toy computer sat mute on the shelf, Joe tried not to think of Odysseus walking away from the eight cups, treading the lip of the ocean’s basin, his back turned to the wine. Forty-eight kilobytes and two little disks. This isn’t computer enough for what I mean to do, Joe thought. I will not do it, of course. But with Father’s computer from his office upstairs, with the hard disk and the right type of interface, perhaps there is space and time enough for all the operations. Of course I will not do it. I do not care to do it. I do not dare to do it.

  At two in the morning he got up from his bed, where he could not sleep, went downstairs, and began to program the graphics of the tarot deck upon the screen. But in each picture he made changes, for he knew that the artist, gifted as he was, had made mistakes. Had not understood that the Page of Cups was a buffoon with a giant phallus, from which flowed the sea. Had not known that the Queen of Swords was a statue and it was her throne that was alive, an angel groaning in agony at the stone burden she had to bear. The child at the Gate of Ten Stars was being eaten by the old man’s dogs. The man hanging upside down with crossed legs and peace upon his face, he wore no halo; his hair was afire. And the Queen of Pentacles had just given birth to a bloody star, whose father was not the King of Pentacles, that poor cuckold.

  And as the pictures and their stories came to him, he began to hear the echoes of all the other stories he had read. Cassandra, Queen of Swords, flung her bladed words, and people batted them out of the air like flies, when if they had only caught them and used them, they would not have met the future unarmed. For a moment Odysseus bound to the mast was the Hanged Man; in the right circumstances. Macbeth could show up in the ever-trusting Page of Cups, or crush himself under the ambitious Queen of Pentacles, Queen of Coins if she crossed him. The cards held tales of power, tales of pain, in the invisible threads that bound them to one another. Invisible threads, but Joe knew they were there, and he had to make the pictures right, make the program right, so that he could find true stories when he read the cards.

  Through the night he labored until each picture was right: the job was only begun when he fell asleep at last. His parents were worried on finding him there in the morning, but they hadn’t the heart to waken him. When he awoke, he was alone in the house, and he began again immediately, drawing the cards on the TV screen, storing them in the computer’s memory; as for his own memory, he needed no help to recall them all, for he knew their names and their stories and was beginning to understand how their names changed every time they came together.

  By evening it was done, along with a brief randomizer program that dealt the cards. The pictures were right. The names were right. But this time when the computer spread the cards before him—This is you, this covers you, this crosses you—it was meaningless. The computer could not do what hands could do. It could not understand and unconsciously deal the cards. It was not a randomizer program that was needed at all, for the shuffling of the tarot was not done by chance.

  “May I tinker a little with your computer?” Joe asked.

  “The hard disk?” Father looked doubtful. “I don’t want you to open it, Joe. I don’t want to try to come up with another ten thousand dollars this week if something goes wrong.” Behind his words was a worry: This business with the tarot cards has gone far enough, and I’m sorry I bought them for you, and I don’t want you to use the computer, especially if it would make this obsession any stronger.

  “Just an interface, Father. You don’t use the parallel port anyway, and I can put it back afterward.”

  “The Atari and the hard disk aren’t even compatible.”

  “I know,” said Joe.

  But in the end there really couldn’t be much argument. Joe knew computers better than Alvin did, and they both knew that what Joe took apart, Joe could put together. It took days
of tinkering with hardware and plinking at the program. During that time Joe did nothing else. In the beginning he tried to distract himself. At lunch he told Mother about books they ought to read; at dinner he spoke to Father about Newton and Einstein until Alvin had to remind him that he was a biologist, not a mathematician. No one was fooled by these attempts at breaking the obsession. The tarot program drew Joe back after every meal, after every interruption, until at last he began to refuse meals and ignore the interruptions entirely.

  “You have to eat. You can’t die for this silly game,” said Mother.

  Joe said nothing. She set a sandwich by him, and he ate some of it.

  “Joe, this had gone far enough. Get yourself under control,” said Father.

  Joe didn’t look up. “I’m under control,” he said, and he went on working.

  After six days Alvin came and stood between Joe and the television set. “This nonsense will end now,” Alvin said. “You are behaving like a boy with serious problems. The most obvious cure is to disconnect the computer, which I will do if you do not stop working on this absurd program at once. We try to give you freedom, Joe, but when you do this to us and to yourself, then—”

  “That’s all right,” said Joe. “I’ve mostly finished it anyway.” He got up and went to bed and slept for fourteen hours.

  Alvin was relieved. “I thought he was losing his mind.”

  Connie was more worried than ever. “What do you think he’ll do if it doesn’t work?”

  “Work? How could it work? Work at what? Cross my palm with silver and I’ll tell your future.”

  “Haven’t you been listening to him?”

  “He hasn’t said a word in days.”

  “He believes in what he’s doing. He thinks his program will tell the truth.”

  Alvin laughed. “Maybe your doctor, what’s-hisname, maybe he was right. Maybe there was brain damage after all.”

  Connie looked at him in horror. “God, Alvin.”

  “A joke, for Christ’s sake.”

  “It wasn’t funny.”

  They didn’t talk about it, but in the middle of the night, at different times, each of them got up and went into Joe’s room to look at him in his sleep.

  Who are you? Connie asked silently. What are you going to do if this project of yours is a failure? What are you going to do if it succeeds?

  Alvin, however, just nodded. He refused to be worried. Phases and stages of life. Children go through times of madness as they grow.

  Be a lunatic thirteen-year-old, Joe, if you must. You’ll return to reality soon enough. You’re my son, and I know that you’ll prefer reality in the long run.

  The next evening Joe insisted that his father help him test the program. “It won’t work on me,” Alvin said. “I don’t believe in it. It’s like faith healing and taking vitamin C for colds. It never works on skeptics.”

  Connie stood small near the refrigerator. Alvin noticed the way she seemed to retreat from the conversation.

  “Did you try it?” Alvin asked her.

  She nodded.

  “Mom did it four times for me,” Joe said gravely.

  “Couldn’t get it right the first time?” Father asked. It was a joke.

  “Got it right every time,” Joe said.

  Alvin looked at Connie. She met his gaze at first, but then looked away in—what? Fear? Shame? Embarrassment? Alvin couldn’t tell. But he sensed that something painful had happened while he was at work. “Should I do it?” Alvin asked her.

  “No,” Connie whispered.

  “Please,” Joe said. “How can I test it if you won’t help? I can’t tell if it’s right or wrong unless I know the people doing it.”

  “What kind of fortuneteller are you?” Alvin asked. “You’re supposed to be able to tell the future of strangers.”

  “I don’t tell the future,” Joe said. “The program just tells the truth.”

  “Ah, truth!” said Alvin. “Truth about what?”

  “Who you really are.”

  “Am I in disguise?”

  “It tells your names. It tells your story. Ask Mother if it doesn’t.”

  “Joe,” Alvin said, “I’ll play this little game with you. But don’t expect me to regard it as true. I’ll do almost anything for you, Joe, but I won’t lie for you.”

  “I know.”

  “Just so you understand.”

  “I understand.”

  Alvin sat down at the keyboard. From the kitchen came a sound like the whine a cringing hound makes, back in its throat. It was Connie, and she was terrified. Her fear, whatever caused it, was contagious. Alvin shuddered and then ridiculed himself for letting this upset him. He was in control, and it was absurd to be afraid. He wouldn’t be snowed by his own son.

  “What do I do?”

  “Just type things in.”

  “What things?”

  “Whatever comes to mind.”

  “Words? Numbers? How do I know what to write if you don’t tell me?”

  “It doesn’t matter what you write. Just so you write whatever you feel like writing.”

  I don’t feel like writing anything, Alvin thought. I don’t feel like humoring this nonsense another moment. But he could not say so, not to Joe; he had to be the patient father, giving this absurdity a fair chance. He began to come up with numbers, with words. But after a few moments there was no randomness, no free association in his choice. It was not in Alvin’s nature to let chance guide his choices. Instead he began reciting on the keyboard the long strings of genetic-code information on his most recent bacterial subjects, fragments of names, fragments of numeric data, progressing in order through the DNA. He knew as he did it that he was cheating his son, that Joe wanted something of himself. But he told himself, What could be more a part of me than something I made?

  “Enough?” he asked Joe.

  Joe shrugged. “Do you think it is?”

  “I could have done five words and you would have been satisfied?”

  “If you think you’re through, you’re through,” Joe said quietly.

  “Oh, you’re very good at this,” Alvin said. “Even the hocus-pocus.”

  “You’re through then?”

  “Yes.”

  Joe started the program running. He leaned back and waited. He could sense his father’s impatience, and he found himself relishing the wait. The whirring and clicking of the disk drive. And then the cards began appearing on the screen. This is you. This covers you. This crosses you. This is above you, below you, before you, behind you. Your foundation and your house, your death and your name. Joe waited for what had come before, what had come so predictably, the stories that had flooded in upon him when he read for his mother and for himself a dozen times before. But the stories did not come. Because the cards were the same. Over and over again, the King of Swords.

  Joe looked at it and understood at once. Father had lied. Father had consciously controlled his input, had ordered it in some way that told the cards that they were being forced. The program had not failed. Father simply would not be read. The King of Swords, by himself, was power, as all the Kings were power. The King of Pentacles was the power of money, the power of the bribe. The King of Wands was the power of life, the power to make new. The King of Cups was the power of negation and obliteration, the power of murder and sleep. And the King of Swords was the power of words that others would believe. Swords could say, “I will kill you,” and be believed, and so be obeyed. Swords could say, “I love you,” and be believed, and so be adored. Swords could lie. And all his father had given him was lies. What Alvin didn’t know was that even the choice of lies told the truth.

  “Edmund,” said Joe. Edmund was the lying bastard in King Lear.

  “What?” asked Father.

  “We are only what nature makes us. And nothing more.”

  “You’re getting this from the cards?”

  Joe looked at his father, expressing nothing.

  “It’s all the same card,”
said Alvin.

  “I know,” said Joe.

  “What’s this supposed to be?”

  “A waste of time,” said Joe. Then he got up and walked out of the room.

  Alvin sat there, looking at the little tarot cards laid out on the screen. As he watched, the display changed, each card in turn being surrounded by a thin line and then blown up large, nearly filling the screen. The King of Swords every time. With the point of his sword coming out of his mouth, and his hands clutching at his groin. Surely, Alvin thought, that was not what was drawn on the Waite deck.

  Connie stood near the kitchen doorway, leaning on the refrigerator. “And that’s all?” she asked.

  “Should there be more?” Alvin asked.

  “God,” she said.

  “What happened with you?”

  “Nothing,” she said, walking calmly out of the room. Alvin heard her rush up the stairs. And he wondered how things got out of control like this.

  Alvin could not make up his mind how to feel about his son’s project. It was silly, and Alvin wanted nothing to do with it, wished he’d never bought the cards for him. For days on end Alvin would stay at the laboratory until late at night and rush back again in the morning without so much as eating breakfast with his family. Then, exhausted from lack of sleep, he would get up late, come downstairs, and pretend for the whole day that nothing unusual was going on. On such days he discussed Joe’s readings with him, or his own genetic experiments; sometimes, when the artificial cheer had been maintained long enough to be believed, Alvin would even discuss Joe’s tarot program. It was at such times that Alvin offered to provide Joe with introductions, to get him better computers to work with, to advise him on the strategy of development and publication. Afterward Alvin always regretted having helped Joe, because what Joe was doing was a shameful waste of a brilliant mind. It also did not make Joe love him any more.

  Yet as time passed, Alvin realized that other people were taking Joe seriously. A group of psychologists administered batteries of tests to hundreds of subjects—who had also put random data into Joe’s program. When Joe interpreted the tarot readouts for these people, the correlation was statistically significant. Joe himself rejected those results, because the psychological tests were probably invalid measurements themselves. More important to him was the months of work in clinics, doing readings with people the doctors knew intimately. Even the most skeptical of the participating psychologists had to admit that Joe knew things about people that he could not possibly know. And most of the psychologists said openly that Joe not only confirmed much that they already knew but also provided brilliant new insights. “It’s like stepping into my patient’s mind,” one of them told Alvin.