She unzips her right palm and pulls out the first Tarot Card. It is The Heirophant. Dev could care less about its meaning. He just likes to watch her open all the hidden places on her body.
There are buttons down her left calf, a slit pocket below her collarbone, a small drawer at her hip. When her voluminous skirts get twisted in just the right way, he can see the knob pushing against them. He keeps dropping tokens into her mouth, and she keeps producing cards: each one accompanied by a tiny folded explanation. He collects the cards; the divinations go straight into the trash.
In his room beside the Elevated, an entire table is given over to the Cups and Swords and Coins. He stacks and restacks his fortunes as new possibilities occur to him. He comes to see her whenever he can, and he can every day. Not many frequent her kiosk at the sideshow—only a few homeless, there to scam tourists taking selfies against the shitty graffiti left up for them by management. Dev isn’t seedy enough to be targeted by the bedazzled smartphones held low but not at all surreptitiously. When had Midwesterners started taking themselves on urban safaris? When had their prey learned to demand micropayments? The answers don’t matter. Like the shrieky gulls that feed off refuse then shit everywhere, other people are just part of living here, being free.
Dev’s appearance is not that of a destitute man. Trimmed beard, good boots. He looks not unlike an older version of one of the private-school kids who train down from Port Chester or Rye once or twice during their high school years—winter visits, for maximum irony. Kids who take no pictures and read Camus on the train.
When Dev had read Camus on the train, he’d realized—he was sick of pretending not to care, of not caring. What-he-wasn’t was so clear on the difference.
He’d made up his mind for good after watching the Largest Rat in the World (a poor capybara, far from her climate) shiver violently in the corner of a dank cage. He would find something he could love. Something true. Two hours later, he, like an ecstatic priest, placed his first token on Miss Rina’s tongue—and it was done. More realistic than was right, from Japan, with complex, randomized gestures he was still attempting to unravel, she held his future in her most secret slots. He searched out a job hawking souvenirs and within four months had moved mere blocks away into a room above a deli where the roaches stayed within expected parameters.
For the past six years, Dev has arrived each day after his shift with a fistful of tens. He converts the cash into round wooden wafers in order to watch her take in the modest fruits of his labor and retrieve from herself what is to come. Here is mystery, revelation. Here is a transaction he can count on. The High Priestess and The Fool, The Lovers and The Moon, Judgement and The World: since their first communion, Dev has received them all. Beyond this, he needs no further instruction.
Miss Rina will never disabuse him of his dream, and she will never disclose her own.
Each day, when the sideshow shuts its doors, she retires to her own room. There, she laboriously removes the turban, the wig, the makeup that will not work forever, and she counts her tips. Two more years and she will have earned out. But how many years to rid herself of the taste of wood? Or of the memory of the tokens’ nightly removal from the trap behind her esophagus? There are worse lives, she supposes—she’d been designed and built for one. Coney Island is a minor hell, and her longest running mark a minor demon. She wishes the boy well and out, truly, even as she slides him his daily key. She knows he knows there is something more to her. His mistake is thinking it is his to unlock.
