Mitch Reads the Tarot
Jeff
I’m wondering now if Mitch shouldn’t be in a corner doing Tarot readings for the guests, with his charming literalist interpretation of the cards and his aura sight boosting his Fortunetelling skill as he cold reads with surprising competency. “And this is the Death card, or as I call it, the horseback riding card ... ”
"Six people are going to team up to hit you with sticks. It's not going to be fun. But on the other hand, you'll have a stick of your own, and also the high ground, so, maybe you'll triumph? You look like somebody who would triumph in that kind of situation."
"Now, bear in mind they might not be literal sticks. They might be words. Or cars! And your high ground might be moral. The cards are hard to interpret sometimes."
“There’s some gardening in your future, looks like. Or maybe you’ll meet a gardener ... ? Yeah, maybe you’ve already met him.” Mitch is giving a Tarot reading for one of Archie’s bored-housewife neighbors. He’s figured out she’s sleeping with the boy who mows her lawn but is getting bored and is ready to end the affair. “He’s pretty good at what he does. Seven big star-pumpkins, see? That’s a lot of star-pumpkins. Of course here the star-pumpkin is a metaphor. This gardener, you can get seven good times out of him, and then it’s time to cut him loose. More than that, well, there’s no eighth star-pumpkin here, is there?”
“You have pets? A couple of dogs ...? One dog. You thinking of getting ... ? Nah, nah, the cards are mysterious. Two dogs standing in for one dog, that suggests maybe two towers standing in for one tower ... apartment building, sure.” Another housewife, this one it’s her husband who’s cheating on her, she suspects but isn’t sure. Lot of ambivalence coming off her.
“Someone who lives in an apartment building, yeah, I’m seeing ... a woman? Yeah, a woman. That’s the Moon there, is this girl. She’s got the attention of both dogs and mister lobster here, right? They’re enthralled. They’re intrigued. Maybe they didn’t think they were going to come crawling up on the land, but now there’s this road stretching out. It’s risky, the lobster isn’t exactly a long-distance hiker, but she’s tough. She’s got the armor and the claws, she means business. You mean business, right? You just gotta ask yourself, you wanna fight the moon and get your dogs back, or you want to go with the dogs and check the moon out together?”
“You have pets? A couple of dogs...? One dog. You thinking of getting...? Nah, nah, the cards are mysterious. Two dogs standing in for one dog, that suggests maybe two towers standing in for one tower...apartment building, sure.” Another housewife, this one it’s her husband who’s cheating on her, she suspects but isn’t sure. Lot of ambivalence coming off her. “Someone who lives in an apartment building, yeah, I’m seeing...a woman? Yeah, a woman. That’s the Moon there, is this girl. She’s got the attention of both dogs and mister lobster here, right? They’re enthralled. They’re intrigued. Maybe they didn’t think they were going to come crawling up on the land, but now there’s this road stretching out. It’s risky, the lobster isn’t exactly a long-distance hiker, but she’s tough. She’s got the armor and the claws, she means business. You mean business, right? You just gotta ask yourself, you wanna fight the moon and get your dogs back, or you want to go with the dogs and check the moon out together?”(edited)
“Somebody’s grabbing your sword.” Mitch sizes this guy up immediately as having some kind of trouble at his office job. “You’re just trying to get that crown, right, but there’s some asshole coming in and grabbing your sword. Not in a fun way. And that’s bad, you’re feeling that squeeze, am I right?” Mitch judges the man’s response. “Good news is, this guy’s a paper tiger. He’s a cloud, he’s nothing. You can take him. That’s what the cards seem to be saying, anyway.”
Mandy
Viv comes up. "Oh, hey MJ, good to see you again! ... Would you mind doing a reading for me?"
Roger struts by Mitch's table, out of Viv's line of sight, with one of the more attractive housewives in tow with an umbrella-ed cocktail in her hand. He'll flash a quick ASL, "Cover for me -- half hour tops -- [rude gesture]."
Jeff
“Uh, sure. Anything in particular in mind?” He’ll read her aura as he asks; Mitch is trying to suss out whether Viv wants to be entertainingly cold-read or to get a straight-up oracular prophetic thing going.
Mandy
Viv is comfortable with either. Her aura is very yellow- social, She's looking for bonding/getting to know Mitch more than a reading, the reading is the vehicle. That said, everything you've seen about her tells you she'd deeply appreciate a real reading.
Jeff
Mitch shuffles his cards several extra times, more than he usually bothers with, then smoothly fountains the entire deck (brrrrap!) onto, oh, let’s say a picnic table. Most of the cards land face-down, but four (five?) land face-up and on top of the others. Mitch quickly picks up the face-down cards, leaving the face-up ones in place as an ersatz spread.
Marshall glances in Mitch and Viv's direction and raises an eyebrow before returning to his conversation about the Senate Watergate hearings with a pair of Pacific Heights dads.
Mandy
"Oh!" Viv remarks, before pulling back. "Tell me, magic man, what do YOU see?"
Marshall wanders over, can of beer in hand. He silently and unobtrusively observes over Viv’s shoulder.
Jeff
"Ugh. Well, the main guy is clearly this fella here." He taps the Hanged Man. "He should be upside down but he's not. It's like, what's the point?"
"This guy over here, he got drunk and he's sleeping it off. And this rider, you'd think he was doing something cool, but no, he's just waving his stick around, upside-down. Again, pointless. Like he's psyching himself up for something but there's nothing happening."
"She's just hanging out, waiting. And finally the cobbler or whatever over here, he's making coins but he's not doing anything with them. This whole thing is just a lame party, is what it is."
"I mean, I'm having a good time myself, I dunno where the cards are coming from. Are you not having a good time?"
Mandy
"Ohhhh, I'm having a great time. Archie grills a great burger and Jo is so kind and thoughtful." Viv looks over the cards. "You're right about the Hangman. What IS the point? The rest of the cards are about this. The Two of Swords; this lady has a difficult decision to think about. One she shouldn't be too hasty on, not charge ahead wand in hand on. The choice is permanent, irrevocable ... and it leads to ... well. Diligent work and the satisfaction of a job well done, as well as true abject suffering. The choices must be weighed for sure ... but what's the point if the decision is already made?"
Jeff
"Is the decision already made, then? A fait accompli?"
Mandy
"Maybe not ... But look, the hasty knight? Upside down he represents stuck energy, dissatisfaction, a lack of flow, and it's like he's informing the inversion of the waiting-in-stasis of the hanged man. Maybe he's been waiting for exactly this decision to get him on his feet." She smirks "or maybe the Hanged Man is just doing that yoga move Marshall was teaching to the women's auxiliary. But even then, he's been in his head for a long, long time and it's time for him to be in his body, to participate in the action of the world."
She sighs. "I don't really want to knock over all my cups. I'm quite fond of the collection of cups I have around me, but the knocked over cups are upside down, so, maybe it's more like a personal sacrifice than emotional suffering... a way of giving over all that water, all that emotion, raining it down on things. Either way? My work prepares me."
She purses her lips. "So, yeah. I kinda think so." This is the most serious any of you have seen Viv, even in the reality temblor she seemed a bit lighter, her resolve less grim.
Jeff
"Well, can't argue with that." Mitch mulls this over. "I could, I guess. No reason to, I should say."
Michael
Andy sort of wanders over in the middle of this; in doing so he can't help but end up near Marshall. He's mostly paying attention to Mitch, a guy whose Illuminated aura he's only caught glimpses of thus far: surveilling him in Berkeley, wielding the Norton Coin on the roof of the St. Francis, here today at the party. It's the first time Andy's really gotten a chance to look at him, and he sees him talking Tarot shop with Viv. It seems almost too perfect, as Andy has begun to obtain a more-or-less instinctive self-knowledge on what it means to be Illuminated, bolstered only a little bit by the discourse back on Friday. He knows he was uniquely able to sense something in the lockbox of the URIEL van, he knows he was uniquely able to see the happenings on the roof. And here Mitch is, reading Tarot. Is Tarot any different than divining by taking a bunch of speed and channeling whatever allowed Andy to get a glimpse of SANDMAN through a mirror darkly? If Mitch has his aura sight up, he sees an Andy who is markedly less wound-up than the Andy of last week's interaction with Carl and Rich. Andy isn't as well-versed in Tarot as either Mitch or Viv but he knows the general outlines of most of the card meanings. He lets out a low appreciative sigh.
"Big decisions ahead, eh?"
Brant
Marshall wraps an arm around Andy’s shoulder and gives him a squeeze. “It’s no I Ching but he’s often quite good at this.”
Jeff
"Hey, man, you having a good time? I was just saying, the cards are saying somebody isn't having a good time."
Michael
Andy smiles, says, "I'm having ... a pretty good time, honestly. So I'm ... fairly sure it's not me." He's telling the truth, although there is a sense of... nervous anticipation deep down in his aura. Maybe the signs in this reading about "momentous decisions" and the seeming possibility of either "spilling one's cups or carefully building/shepherding one's pentacles" are pushing that color stripe in his aura more to the fore.
Now that Andy is in the "area of effect" of Mitch's Oracle, it seems to Mitch like maybe the Knight of Wands/Hanged Man dyad might have more to do with Andy than Viv. If the Knight is Andy's furious and productive creativity, it's stifled here. If the Hanged Man is his mystical vision through suffering and ordeal (i.e. taking a lot of speed and writing for 24 hours straight), here it's mitigated and integrated into his self. It comes to Mitch in a flash thanks to Oracle and his sharing an Illuminated identity with Andy more than the cards per se: if Andy joins SANDMAN in some capacity, he's going to need to substantially change his writing.
He can't just continue publishing fairly popular sci-fi works that actually tell in cloaked and veiled form how SANDMAN fucking works. It's a security risk. It could inspire further Carls and Riches. Not just that, but given the fact we now know Andy is Illuminated, who knows what kind of "I wrote it and it came true" implications there might be if Andy refines his latent and passive psi powers and continues writing about MARPA and Atlantis. Getting back to the cards, neither they nor Mitch's Oracle ability state clearly how he's going to respond to something like that (while Mitch isn't certain Marshall or Archie is going to put a kibosh on the Atlantis series, it seems like a likely possibility). Like Viv, Andy's going to need to make a decision as well. One that will get at the core of his own identity as Author, as Creator.
(I'm not sure if Mitch has heard Andy talking about how excited he is to write Volume 4 of Atlantis Risen and have MARPA and Atlantis join forces to defeat ancient Sumerian demons just like they did in the game but holy SHIT is that a no-go. Er, unless the boffins at Granite Peak decide that's a good meme to have out there. Basically a lot of this will likely come down to executive decisions among URIEL and at Granite Peak.)
Jeff
"Uh uh." Mitch glances down at the cards one more time. "You ever stop and look around and think, man, how did I get here? In some saddle point, you know, uphill ahead and behind, cliffs on either side? And you don't know where you're going but you can't stay there?"
Michael
"Honestly? No. My life's been pretty stable up to this point. Up ... to this point." Andy reiterates.
Jeff
"Well, that's the thing about the saddle, right? It's what they call metastable. You take a step forward, you slide back. You take a step back, you slide forward. Seems like you're sitting pretty, right? But there's a whole 'nother axis you aren't considering."
Michael
This is honestly the kind of language that hits Andy right in the conceptual sweet spot, and Mitch can kind of tell Andy wants to talk more explicitly about this with respect to having his lifelong ontological suppositions overthrown and/or reinforced in the past five days... but obviously, this isn't the time or place for that. But he does manage to convey to Mitch that he comprehends. "'A whole 'nother axis I'm not considering,'" Andy says contemplatively.
"That reminds me of the little square fellow in Flatland who gets bumped into Spaceland by the Sphere seeking to spread the Gospel of Three Dimensions. The Square spent his whole life idly pondering dimensions unknown, unseen, and unvisited in the abstract, and then, suddenly with no warning," Andy looks up, taking the time to recall Abbott's words, "'A dizzy, sickening sensation of sight that was not like seeing. I saw a Line that was no Line; Space that was not Space; I was myself, and not myself.' Of course the Square's flat friends think him mad and he's thrown in prison by the powers-that-be. But you're right ... once you've seen the other axis, you can also see an escape from stasis. An opportunity, invisible to everyone else in the valley."
Jeff
"The part of Flatland I remember is the bit where the Square says to the Sphere, hey, you've shown me there's a third dimension, and I can see how the second dimension is invisible to the point on Lineland, so, is there a fourth dimension? And the Sphere gets just pissed at the idea. Like how dare the Square even suggest that the Sphere's understanding of the universe might be imperfect, when the Sphere is the one evangelizing to the poor benighted flatties."
Michael
Andy is taking a sip of Coors when Mitch says this, and his eyes bug out excitedly when Mitch completes his thought. "Yes! God, yes, that bit is especially brilliant. It just goes to show you that gnosis never ends, it just takes weirder and more novel forms as you go deeper into the universe, and the seemingly "open" mind that seems like he permits all possibilities can easily end up a closed mind that precludes a fuller, realer reality underneath if it happens to chafe against his preconceptions."
Jeff
"It's a real problem," Mitch says seriously. "People get a whiff of reality, they throw out all their preconceptions, well, some of them, and then they just get a bunch of new ones that account for what they've experienced. Sometimes not even well, like, if you're gonna get a new belief system it should at least hang together, but ..." He shrugs. "It's an occupational hazard: thinking you have things figured out."
Michael
Andy sort of silently nods as he takes a final swig of his can of beer. "Heavy."
Brant
Marshall wanders off to get some potato salad.