It was a weeknight, very late, so the club was half empty and the only people Joel kind of knew were behind the bar—he’d dated someone who didn’t work there anymore. There were some girls dancing and their loveliness made his eyes water but his need was emotional, not physical, and he knew that about himself, how he must reek of 40-proof loneliness. The girls slowed their dancing when he walked past like they could smell it too. Someone smiled at him from the bar and she was pretty but all he saw in her gray eyes was a reflection of his own need, so he kept on walking.
Above the urinal there was a flyer that looked recently posted, for yet another psychic—a palm reader this time. The club was downstairs in a converted brick factory and according to the flyer, the psychic, whose name was Cherry, was upstairs. Joel thought that Cherry was a good name for a palm reader. cherry sloane, chirologist, the flyer said, and there were some letters after her name. Joel washed his hands and went out to the bar. He ordered a drink he didn’t want. He asked the bartender about the palm reader upstairs, and she said she hadn’t heard much about her, nothing bad anyway. Joel remembered that his ex had gone to a psychic, and he wondered if that had something to do with them breaking up. When Joel was little, his mother had taken him and his brother to a carnival and they’d put money in a “Chiromancy” machine and a card popped out that told his mother’s fortune, and she kept the card as a memento of one of the happiest days of her life.
Joel put down his drink and followed the EXIT signs to some stairs, where a piece of paper with a penciled arrow said, CHERRY’S PLACE. He climbed the stairs, which were wide and pocked, and the music from the club receded to a muffled thud that slowly died, like a heartbeat that stopped. He emerged in a room so dark and vast that he couldn’t see the edges. Dirty windows overlooked the street below, the famous smokestacks blurry behind a buildup of silt and dust on the glass. A woman sat bent over a laptop at a table in the far-left corner, the glow of a desk lamp drawing all the light in the room to her face. He heard a whispering but she had her mouth closed. A slouched shadow heaved in a distant corner of the room.
He knew then that he’d made a terrible mistake. But the minute he turned to go, the woman’s head snapped up and he froze. She was elderly with thinning white hair. Her face was covered in tattoos and there were tattoos on her hands, too, all the way to where her grimy cardigan covered her wrists. She had webbing between her fingers.
“Lines, ten bucks,” she said. “Fifteen for mounts.”
Joel wondered what kind of body-mod artist would do this to an old lady. He didn’t know what a mount was. He just wanted to get out of there, but those rheumy eyes peering from their mask of ink held him in place. Most of his friends had tattoos, and he had a couple too. A hamburger on the back of one calf, and his ex’s initials somewhere he’d forgotten now. The palm reader had the Milky Way tattooed across her throat, the entire solar system below that. He could see Venus from here, glowing malevolently between the missing buttons of her cardigan.
“Just lines,” he said. “Don’t suppose you take—”
She tapped on a credit card terminal with a long-nailed finger.
Joel sat down opposite her at the desk by the window. A streetlight infused that corner of the room with a pee-colored glow. He could hear the rumble of trucks. He listened for music from the club below but the room was silent, except for the occasional whisper behind him that he must be imagining.
“I can’t stay,” he said. “Not sure how long this’ll take.”
“Places to go, people to kill, eh?” She didn’t smile, and her voice was phlegmy.
“Just some friends of mine downstairs. They dared me, you know, so.”
She’d taken his hand in her webbed ones while he was talking. Her touch gave him a jolt of nausea; spit pooled in his mouth. She turned his hand over, touched the underside of his fingers with hers. “You don’t have any friends,” she said.
A sound like a book dropping onto the floor made him start but she seemed not to hear it. She eyed him, still with her fingers resting lightly on his, and cradling his wrist delicately in her other hand, her pinky extended so that he could see tiny veins in the webbing.
She placed his hand gently down on her filthy desk—there were tissues stuffed in a teacup—still without looking at it.
“I can’t take your money,” she said. “Sorry.”
Something in that voice said it wasn’t the money she was sorry about.
“What?” he said. But he didn’t stand up. “Did you see something bad? You didn’t look for very long. Not even at my palm.” He shoved it at her, but she didn’t move.
He drew ten dollars from his pocket and slapped it on the table. “What did you see?”
“I’m half blind,” she said. “Who am I to—”
“Tell me,” he said. “I can take it.”
“You have no choice,” she said. “None of us do.” She swept her arms out across the room, exposing a swirling geography of tattoos on her crepey old-lady arms.
“Tell me,” he said.
She slumped in her seat. “The others . . .”
“I don’t care about the others.”
She pulled a used tissue from a pocket. “None of them do. Or they wouldn’t come to me. But that changes too.”
“Tell me,” he said.
A tear oozed from her eye and began to fall down an impossible staircase inked on her hollow cheek.
“You will die—” she said.
Joel stood up so violently the chair crashed onto the floor. There was
