The Hanged Man's Song

ass he’s gonna have videotape coming out of his nose.”
    “Hang on.” I turned to LuEllen, who was sitting on the end of the bed, watching the TV, and told her what John had suggested.
    She shrugged. “Always happy to see those guys.”
    I put the phone back to my ear. “We’ll be up,” I said. “Call you on the way.”
    >>> WE packed up in a half hour and I carried the luggage down to the car. A quick check of the e-mail turned up nothing. As LuEllen was shoving the last of her stuff into a bag, she said, “Before you zip up your briefcase, why don’t you try the cards?”
    “Cards won’t help us,” I said.
    “Just try them,” she said. “For me. So I won’t worry.”
    “Or you’ll worry more,” I said.
    “Just try them.”
    There’s a word for what LuEllen can be, in Yiddish or Hebrew-Russian-English or whatever: the word’s nudnik. The best definition I’ve ever heard came from an Israeli professor of archaeology: “It’s a person who is like a woodpecker sitting on your head, all the time pecking you.”
    >>> SO I got the cards out, my tarot cards, a Rider-Waite deck. I’m not exactly a scientist—I was trained as an engineer—but I’ve studied the philosophy of science, and I’m a true believer. The tarot, as a predictive system, is the same sort of superstitious nonsense as astrology. The deck is useful as a gaming device, though, and that’s how I use it.
    Like this: when we are forced to deal with complicated problems, when some of the facets of the problem are unknown or unreachable, we deal with them in terms of past experience. That’s almost inescapable. But approaches that are useful with some problems don’t work with others. The tarot deck, whenused as a gaming system, pushes you outside past experience and encourages you to think of new ways to deal with it.
    Say, for example, you were involved in a complicated business transaction and that the group you were dealing with, the opposition, consisted of six members, five men and a woman. You begin doing tarot spreads and see a number of indications of female influence.
    This does not mean that the deck correctly predicts female influence in the transaction, but suggests that you should sit back and think about the woman on the other side, who might otherwise seem to be just another functionary. Why is she there? What specific influences does she have? Is there some way to approach her that would help with your deal?
    This has nothing to do with the supernatural—it’s simply a human way, and a fairly subtle way, to game a problem.
    LuEllen doesn’t believe that. She believes that I’m tapped into the Other Side. At one time she’d hassle me for a daily reading, until finally she asked me to do a spread on how long she’d live. I did a spread, and came up with ninety-four years.
    “That’s not bad,” she’d said.
    “Yeah, but this card”—I’d tapped the Tower, I believe—“suggests that the last fifty years will be in the high security unit at the Valley State Prison in California.”
    “Kidd,” she’d sputtered, “you, you gotta, what are you talking . . .”
    “Made you look,” I said. She didn’t bother me so much after that.
    >>> I CARRY a deck with me, in an old wooden box, wrapped in a piece of silk, just like the gypsies tell you to do. Because LuEllenshowed signs of slipping into a nudnik state, I did two quick tarot spreads on the motel room telephone table.
    Like most tarot spreads, the results were complicated. What should have been a clear outcome in both spreads, the final resolution card, was, in both cases, self-contradictory.
    “The Hanged Man,” LuEllen said, tapping the card with an index finger. She knows the cards well enough to pick out the major arcana. “The Hanged Man comes up twice, as the final resolution, and you’re saying that you don’t know what it means?”
    “It’s not a very useful outcome for gaming,” I said.
    “You’re not lying to me?” She looked at me suspiciously. “It doesn’t mean we’re going to die together in an automobile accident on the way to Jackson?”
    “No.” I pulled the cards together, wrapped them in the silk cloth, and put them back in the box. “The Hanged Man indicates a kind of suspended animation, a suspense between two states—a waiting state. Transition, maybe. Okay, so Bobby’s dead and everything is in transition. Well, duh. We already know that.”
    “It doesn’t even hint at what’s going to