my life. I said, “And by the way, I’ve stopped trying to see the future. I’m going clean for love.”
My mom, she was kind of sleeping at the time. She yawned and mumbled something about me “taking good care” and “being a blessing” and then fell back into her pillow and let loose with a volley of lazy kisses. I know that in the morning, when it’s sunk in, then she’ll freak. The Revelation Book, she won’t give it up easy.
I’ve been in this garage more times than I can count.
It’s next to Paris on the Platte, this old cafe, and the garage is dark and gnarly and the walls of it are covered in a thick suit of soot like the place had been on fire for a few decades before the snows put it out. Not where I want to be waiting.
Especially since I’m on my knees behind an old Subaru.
Luckily, I’m not waiting long.
Belle shows up in her ride and steps out in a cloud of pot smoke. She’s dressed sexily. The boots, the short skirt, the unbuttoned blouse. Her hair’s all tasseled out. Teased and then sprayed still. Incredibly, she doesn’t see me.
Why I’m in the garage, hunkered down behind a car, is ’cause I realized something last time I spoke with the old man. He used the word “scryer.” I looked it up on my cell, it means a seer or like a fortune-teller.
Fact is: I find it very odd that both Belle and the old dude used the same random word. And why I’m in the garage is to follow Belle and make sure that when she took off at the end of the summer she didn’t actually find more people with abilities like mine. If she did, I need to talk to them pronto.
Belle walks over to a door I never noticed before.
This door, it’s on the back of one of the buildings that sit up right against the parking garage, only it doesn’t look like a door to a warehouse or an office building. It looks like someone’s front door with a little wavy glass window and a knocker on it. The knocker is a skull.
Oh, and there’s a symbol painted on the door in white paint. It’s like a crosshatch sort of thing and kind of looks like a hand if it were painted by a child or someone with very little time and education.
Belle takes the knocker, raps it twice, and then steps back.
Then she lights a smoke.
She’s almost smoked the cigarette down to the filter when the door opens. A hand reaches out and summons her in. It’s connected to an arm in a leather coat and the coat’s wrapped around the skinny body of a guy. Front of the leather coat, in white paint, reads CHARLIE. Charlie slaps a tattooed hand down on Belle’s shoulder. Smiles at her big with silver-capped teeth. Says, “Good to see you again.”
They disappear into the lightlessness beyond the door and I run over before the door has time closing Just barely make it, wedge my foot in. And then I open the door real slow and follow them.
Charlie leads Belle down a dark corridor that looks like something on the tenth floor of the most boring hotel on Earth. “How long has it been? Weeks, right?”
I follow them down a flight of stairs by an empty kitchen and then to another flight of stairs under the kitchen where the subbasement and the boilers are. Then follow them left past a line of storage closets and the place is like a horror movie with just one lightbulb drifting down from the ceiling. The place is spray painted with cobwebs.
End of the corridor, after I’ve passed like fifty storage lockers and walked halfway across town, I lose sight of them near a big door that’s rumbling the way low-riders with super bass do. This wooden door is like something you’d see at a fun park on a pirate’s ship. Two doors that swing open wide open in the middle and they’re shaking, jittering, in the frame from the bass doing double time on the other side of them.
I take a deep breath, let myself know that I won’t die here, and pull the doors open wide in one big gesture. Inside, it’s sick.
The walls, they’re purple. The floors, they’re purple too. Shag carpets. The ceilings, they’re tiled with mirrors. It’s like a discotheque imported from somewhere in the Baltic. The furniture is all leather. Black leather with yellow throw pillows. Only lights are thousands of Christmas lights wound up like bird’s nests across the ceiling and over the walls. Video-game consoles line the back wall. Somewhere there’s a DJ spinning. The music is raw, filthy electronics. On a circular couch in the middle of the room three people are sitting, two girls and a guy, and they’re staring hard at me. Other side of the room, two girls, maybe my age, sit on a black leather couch. They’re twins. Hands in their laps. From here they’re like ice sculptures in matching white almost Middle Eastern-looking dresses.
Charlie gets the music turned off and the quiet is nearly as loud.
Belle smiles at me, motions for me to walk over, asks, “Following me again, huh?”
“Yeah, I was bored,” I say, eyes still wide.
“Well, welcome to the Lair.”
“What is this?” I ask.
“What you’ve been wondering about. What you always hoped existed.”
“Like?”
“Like a world of people who can do what you can do. Who understand you.”
I’m stunned. Rooted to the spot. This place, these people. It can’t be real.
This looks like the present, though. It is not plastic. The scene is not overly shiny.
Leading me forward slowly, Belle tells me that there are thousands of people you will never meet trying to figure out what you’re going to do next. She tells me they’re trying to figure out what you’ll say at lunch, what you’ll eat at dinner, who you’ll ask to prom, who you won’t, what you’ll name you first child, when you’ll die and what you’ll answer for number three b on the physics final. She says, “These people will use anything and everything they can think of to see the future. It’ll be podomancy, which is reading the future by looking at lines on feet, casting lots, which is seeing the future in tossed dice or bones, empyromancy (from smoke), austromancy (by listening to the wind), icthyomancy (observing fish), or ophimancy (watching the behavior of snakes). They will drop molten lead into water and listen for the hiss. They will use precious gems. Stare at shadows. Run their fingers along the shoulder bones of sheep. Study cracks in pavement. Or if they live in Denver they’ll just be the LoDo Diviners.”
And with that, I arrive.
Charlie pulls a chair up, something padded and folding, and I have a seat across from the Diviners. The three people sitting on the couch, the one in the middle is a guy. Belle introduces me, the three on the couch don’t move, don’t even raise their eyebrows or mouth a hello, and then she says, “This is Gilberto Baumgartner, he’s the leader of the pack.”
“What’s new, Ade?” Gilberto asks leaning forward to offer me a cigarette.
Gilberto’s wearing corduroy pants and a Sonic Youth tee that looks about twenty years old. He’s got a knit cap pulled low over his head, a graying soul patch, and thin fingers like pale spiders. Black glasses. And he’s old enough to have a kid my age. Of course, he’s the guy Belle was with at Rock Island.
I shake my head. Say, “No, thanks.”
Smoking the way old people smoke, his hands cupped around his cigarette, Gilberto looks me over and then shrugs. “You think it was like a big deal, the girl in the lunchroom coming true?”
“To me it was. Is.”
He leans forward again. Leather rustling like leaves. “It’s freaking huge, man.”
That gets my heart racing.
I can’t even count the times I’ve daydreamed about this, about meeting these people, well, not necessarily these people but people like them. In my mind I saw them as super glamorous or wearing monk’s robes or floating on little colorful clouds. For the second time tonight, I’m not convinced that what I’m seeing is real. Like right now real.
Belle standing behind me, hands on my shoulders, says, “Gilberto reads palms. He’s one of the best in the world; people come from all over the world to see him. He’s like the Ayatollah of Prognostication.”
To Gilberto’s left, on the couch, is a mousy woman with thick-framed glasses like legal secretaries wore in 1983. They are electric blue and match her eye shadow. She’s wearing a frumpy housewife dress. Something even an Amish woman would feel overdressed in. She’s old enough to be a college dropout.
Belle says, “Lynne Raver can touch you and know when you’re going to die.”
Lynn says, “It’s a great party trick.”
And then, fast, silently, she reaches out and touches my hand. Her ring finger, really just the tip of it, is on my wrist for maybe two blinks and then she retracts her hand back to her lap. She says, “In your sleep, in a nursing home. Must be nice to know.”
