Nineteen
Roughly the shape of an old-fashioned phone booth, the machine stood seven feet high. The lower three feet were enclosed, and the upper four featured glass on three sides. In that display case sat a female dwarf in a costume of the kind Gypsies wore only in old movies starring Lon Chaney or Bela Lugosi, or Boris Karloff. Black ballet slippers. Black silk pants. A red-and-gold scarf for a belt, a red-and-black scarf tied around the head. She evidently liked jewelry: two necklaces, a pendant, several rings with large stones, and big dangling earrings.
Gnarled and withered, her bejeweled hands rested palms-down on her thighs. Her fingernails were green, perhaps not with polish but with mold.
Her skin appeared to be as crisp as paper, wrinkled and yet stretched so tight across the skull that it seemed as though at any moment it might split open from the stress. Her eyelids and her lips were sewn shut with black thread.
According to a plaque, here before me sat the mummified corpse of a Gypsy dwarf, a renowned fortune-teller in eighteenth-century Europe, so accurate in her predictions that she’d been summoned before royalty in three kingdoms to consult with monarchs. In truth, the figure had most likely been sculpted by a low-rent artist who worked best when inebriated.
Regardless of its origins, whether mummified flesh and bones or clay and wire and latex, there might be some magic in Gypsy Mummy. The source of magic in this world is more mysterious than all the explanations that sorcerers and wizards have given for it, and it is more prevalent than can be understood by those who live according to the constricted form of reason so prevalent in our time.
On the night that Stormy and I had come here, when we were but sixteen and expected to grow old together, a man and woman in their early twenties were already consulting Gypsy Mummy. They appeared to be mystified by the predictions that they received, though the meaning seemed clear to us.
Each time they fed a quarter to the machine, the woman asked, aloud, “Gypsy Mummy, tell us, will Johnny and I have a long and happy marriage?”
Johnny read the cards as he received them. The first declared A COLD WIND BLOWS, AND EACH NIGHT SEEMS TO LAST A THOUSAND YEARS. Thereafter the machine produced THE FOOL LEAPS FROM THE CLIFF, BUT THE WINTER LAKE BELOW IS FROZEN, followed by the even more ominous THE ORCHARD OF BLIGHTED TREES PRODUCES POISONOUS FRUIT. They were not pleased with Gypsy Mummy, but by the eighth card, they were more annoyed with each other than with the mummified sage, bickering over their interpretations, which in every case failed to grasp the most obvious meaning.
With our first coin, Stormy and I received YOU ARE DESTINED TO BE TOGETHER FOREVER. We didn’t spend a second quarter. There was nothing else we needed to know.
In the six years since my previous petition to Gypsy Mummy, the machine had been modified to require two quarters per fortune. When offering their divinations, even deceased Gypsies needed to account for inflation.
“How long do I have to wait,” I murmured, “before your promise to me comes true?”
For fifty cents, I received a card that offered no prediction on either side.
I supposed that in any stack of pre-printed fortunes put into the machine, there might be a blank or two.
Another fifty cents got me a second card with not a word on it.
Wondering if I had been expected, if someone might be watching me right that minute, I looked around, but the other patrons were preoccupied with their claptrap prophets. The cashier had her nose in the romance novel.
I studied the stitched eyelids beyond the glass. Stormy used to insist that after we received the card so desired by Johnny and his girlfriend, the mummified dwarf had opened one eye and winked. It made no sense that sewn-shut eyes could wink, especially when the coarse black thread wasn’t broken. Whether the wink might have been a moment of magic or whether it was nothing more than a little fantasy that Stormy wanted to believe, I never questioned her claim because it gave her such pleasure to think it had happened.
Again I asked, “How long do I have to wait before your promise to me comes true?”
I paid two more quarters, listened to them clink into the machine’s cash box—and received a third blank card.
After a fourth of the same, I pretended interest in some of the nearby soothsaying contraptions and waited for someone to feed coins to the Gypsy.
Maybe ten minutes passed before two girls, about fourteen years old, approached the machine. Each spent fifty cents for which she got a printed card that she shared with her friend. They conferred over the meaning of their fortunes, giggled, and then swapped cards, each apparently preferring the other’s future. They wandered away, sharing the popcorn.
Neither girl had spoken aloud to the Gypsy, as instructions above the coin feed directed, and I’d had no opportunity to see the messages on their cards, which they took away with them. Clearly, however, they had not received blanks.
You might say that it was just a machine, that the cards were stacked in the mechanism in no particular order, that getting four blanks for two bucks was nothing more than happenstance. All of that is rational, and certainly in the case of the two girls and others who consulted Gypsy Mummy, your point would be irrefutable. But in my life, uncanny things had happened to me with some regularity, not just related to my ability to see lingering spirits and to find my way by psychic magnetism. Because of my other experiences, I could not be shaken from the belief that the four cards without fortunes would have come to me if I’d consulted Gypsy Mummy hours earlier or hours later.
Besides, for six years, I had believed in the message on the card in my wallet, and for most of the past two years, that promise—and sometimes it alone—had sustained me. I could no more stop believing in Gypsy Mummy than I could stop believing in my own existence.
Leaving the arcade, I was able to imagine two meanings that the blank cards might have been intended to convey. First, that the promise to me would not be kept. Second, that I had so little time to live that I didn’t have any future on which the mummified oracle could comment.
I much preferred interpretation number two.
Just outside of the tent, watching the people who busied along the concourse, I had a sense of time running out. I checked my watch—7:40. The crowd would keep growing for another couple of hours. Because of the jackpot drawing, the carnival wouldn’t close until well after midnight, perhaps not until one in the morning. If there was something important for me to learn here, I still had plenty of time to discover it.
I concentrated on the name Wolfgang and tried to hear his whiskey-soaked voice in my mind’s ear. Had I seen his face when he and his companions had pursued me through the dark mall, psychic magnetism would now be more likely to draw me to him. But because his voice had been so distinctive, perhaps it would serve nearly as well.
Turning right, I joined the crowd and headed along a length of the midway that I had not yet explored. I had taken no more than a dozen steps when I turned abruptly, colliding with a woman in a green fishnet top and red culottes. I apologized, though considering her outfit, she should have apologized as well, and I set off back the way I had come. Past the Dodgem Cars, where drivers crashed into one another with glee. Past the high-striker, where a muscular customer swung the sledgehammer and rang the bell. Toward the flatbed truck with the two huge swiveling spotlights. Toward the major sideshows that occupied the east end of the southern concourse. Psychic magnetism had never before worked so quickly, had never drawn me with such power and urgency as this.