Not until that night, in bed, did I fit a critical piece of my daily puzzle together: Bonnie
trashed the context of living in conflict that she believed was my general focus, ergo the world’s,
because she faced her days within the cosy context of metaphysics. This meant that something
bad must have happened, something particularly cruel for her to have run so far away that she
needed me to filter her life through specific levels of damage, to regain her sense of safety. I was
her disco ball.
***
Zzz: Drifting from a conversation on an El Al flight, my thoughts melted into a camera crew
eating lunch at a Kibbutz patio, which became the deck outside of the Horse and Hound. Across
the street, a family was having a picnic in Hyde Park, a loin clothed jogger stopped to feed a
Chinese chow scraps, and the animal turned into a statue of a lion. A small crowd admired it
while a weeping man herded sheep into Starbucks. The aroma of coffee wafting from the kitchen
lulled me into the present.
Annoyingly, this colourful dream left me feeling enthusiastic about the Tarot card reading, a
feeling I fought by abbreviating our ritual exchange of small talk when I saw Bonnie the next
morning. This change in our routine felt transparent even to me, but Bonnie said nothing about it
as she led the way to the dining room table.
Sitting across from each other, she said, “I'm going to deal nine cards face down in a cross
formation, then a key issue card to the side.” She handed me the deck and mimed shuffling. “I'll
turn them in order, explain the metaphorical significance, and as we go on I'll integrate the focus
of each card into the next to refine the big picture until the tenth one brings everything together.”
“Dabble?” I said
“I didn't say I was sloppy. Cut them into three stacks.”
I did as she asked, and Bonnie lay out the cards. Without emotion, she plucked meaning
from the first four in clipped tones, spot welding sentences together with what for her were
unusual “ums,” and “ahs” she seemed unaware of uttering.
The first card signified impending wealth, the next death, which she said could mean the
death of a person, a relationship, or a belief. The third card was about personal development,
which turned the death card’s meaning to the end of a debilitating idea, and wealth toward
knowledge gained from opening my mind. Go figure.
During this first run of cards, the pitch of her voice dropped as she repackaged information
from previous cards, until we came to the ninth card. Haltingly, she said it was about journeys,
but not the getting on and off planes kind. She closed her eyes. Speaking in a distant manner, her
words became more formal than her everyday vocabulary while still flowing with the easy
rhythm of forethought. A cynic might call it “well rehearsed.”
Occasionally speaking in the plural, such as, “We see that you will travel extensively on a
sojourn that has rippled through time,” she served up information that went well beyond the
parameters set by previous cards. I managed to wrangle my smirk into a stingy smile over her
contrivances aimed at enhancing my interest, until she said I had lived some lives as a soldier.
For reasons unknown to me, I took offence.
"This occupation performed different roles at different times,” she said into my derisive
grin. “In one period, they were deterrent peacekeepers watching over their borders, and those of
