MAJOR ARCANA: Part Four, Chapter 5

The Law

Major Arcana is a serialized novel for paid subscribers. For more details, both about the novel and about subscriber amenities, please see the Preface. Previous chapters are accessible (in reverse order) under the Major Arcana tag.

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PART FOUR

Chapter 5. | The Law

A week later, a Saturday morning, Ellen Chandler put a record on the turntable. Yes, it was the same turntable she’d had 30 years before, back when she lived across the river, in the big city the comics called Cosmopolis, in the railroad apartment, when she was on her own for the first time in her life, not knowing then that she’d be on her own forever. You could go through—she had gone through, she thought; Christ, I’m old, she thought—four CD players, two mp3 players, nine laptops, and five smartphones in the same period. The turntable still worked, though. She had some of the same records, too, the old standards, Miles and Chopin and Joy Division. She put on A Love Supreme.

An early snow, a premature snow, a late-November snow slanted down in the wind, began to powder the grass and then to mount, to deepen. Snow was general, she thought at the window, watching the intricate crystals crumble to formless water on the pane. How many times had she taught “The Dead” to snowbanks of indifferent teenaged faces, only one or two sets of eyes awake and alive, quick as foxes in the white dunes, white-capped as mutinous waves? She lived for those one or two students a year, those for whom this life of temporary things and vain talk wasn’t enough, the ones who knew how to gather still more life, imperishable and world-making life, out of the written, the printed, and even the digitized word. 

Here was the printed word. She held it in her hands: a letter that had come in the mail that morning. Nobody had sent her a letter in years, generations. Her name and address were badly typed on the envelope, typed on a manual typewriter so old and well-used that the letters on the typebars had evidently become blunt, had dully flattened into the metal; she could tell (Christ, I’m old, she thought) because the printed letters appeared on the paper in rectangular outlines of ink, as if each lay in its own small coffin. There was no return address, just a rippling American flag stamp and a postmark from darkest New England. She knew who it was from. 

She’d been pacing and circling the room, her anxious dogs keeping pace, nosing the folds of her nightgown, for an hour. Finally, she opened it with shaky fingers; finally, she read it. There were almost 10 typewritten sheets, typed with such force that the periods had punctured holes in the paper. Snow-light came through the pages in tiny pinprick rays. A story from Simon Magnus, to whom she had not spoken in over 20 years, fresh from the typewriter. Just like the old days. With the record on, she read.