Nine Bar Blues. Sheree Renée Thomas
me relief. With its smell of damp roots and weeds, its Old Testament-like list of names all handwritten by Dissys, reaching back generations, its hand drawn apocryphal images and inked sacred numbers, the dream book offered the key to others’ fates, but for me it offered no answers at all. For all of its passages, handwritten and collaged, Aunt Dissy’s dream book remained an enigma full of hidden, unwritten codes I struggled to decipher, blank spaces I filled with fear.
And it was clear that no Dissys dreamed of their own deaths, for where one scrawling hand ended, sometimes mid-sentence, another began.
“What you see is not writ,” he tells me, “not like in the Book of Life,” he says. “You can be wrong, can’t you? Sometimes it ain’t all clear?”
I lie to him. After he tells me everything, about the unseen woman who haunts his dreams and makes him lose sight of his days, the faceless phantom, the haint that sabotages every attempt at love he makes. A lost love, perhaps, an old flame, an unforgettable ex? Most people who sat in that chair had more than a sore bottom. They came with stooped shoulders, bent from carrying the dead weight of the past. A relationship that would not be resurrected. Memories that should be put to rest and forgotten. But this was a different kind of hopeless, one unknown to me. I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead, a finger at my temple, lying because despite the smoky tendrils of his dream, I couldn’t see a single thing. The serpent slumbered, spent.
Sky released rain. The day was leaving without me but this man was still here. I could feel the spirits around me, hear them pounding the streets outside my window, but I couldn’t get this man out of my chair. His sadness was a long, unbroken note slowly descending into madness. Anything else I could say would sound reedy, hollow to his ear. I could tell from his face. He was one of those hard-headed, fingers-in-your-split-side souls. I would have to show him. This is where the cards become more than props.
I pull out the pouch. Its worn purple velvet is smooth in my hand, the royal yellow stitching now only reads “CROW.”
“You’re going to read Tarot?” he asks, incredulous. He glares at the discarded crystals and the bowl of red brick dust, both silent failures atop the lacy table. I have already tried everything. He is not impressed. “Been there, done that,” he says. His old genteel Bojangles act discarded, too. “Death card comes up every time, don’t mean shit.”
He’s right. Skeletons and bones, black knights on white horses. Mine is a great dying baobab, the tree of life, cut down with a bone ax. A Dissy from the 1920s called the weapon the Bonecarver. She even sketched the ax, a drawing I used to make my tarot. I stroke the purple velvet pouch, unloosening the yellow cord even as he protests. Death, the thirteenth trump, a major arcana, represents significant change. Transformation, endings, and new beginnings. I shuffle and reshuffle the deck, stall for time, hoping for some kind of inner vision. Nothing comes through, not even a dirty sock tossed out a window.
He shakes his head. He doesn’t want to hear any of this.
“You got to close one door to open another,” I say, stalling.
“Whatever. Just tell me what you see.”
I’m tired. I drop the cards. He is closed to me. Just like Aunt Dissy. Distrustful and secretive, she never let me see her dreams. “That’s the problem. I can’t,” I say. I can’t look him in the eye. “I, I have to sleep with you.”
His brow shoots up, his sad mouth almost turned to a half smile. “You what?”
“No.” The words aren’t coming out right. I feel like I’m already sleepwalking in a dream. “I mean I am going to have to sleep, to see…” my voice trails off. No sane way to explain it.
He studies me coolly. “You’re telling me you’re trying to go to sleep in the middle of the job? Go ahead then. I’ll be here when you wake.” That’s not what I expected. I study his face again. Now it’s my turn to protest, but he stops me, bloody fists still hitting that wall. “I don’t know if I can explain it, but Mrs. Bannister—”
“Cassie. Mrs. Bannister was my aunt.”
“Cassie,” he said it as if it pained him. “It’s really important that I get some closure here. I can’t—” He stares at the backs of his hands. “I can’t keep living like this. I was engaged. We, we could have been happy but I—I need to know who this woman is, what she is. I don’t care about being with her or not. I just want this not-knowing to be over. So I can make a decision.”
Something in his words tug at me. He is ripping up the whole damn script. Most people sitting in that chair wanted that other relationship no matter what. They wanted assurance. A sign that what they hoped for would come true. But this man didn’t even know who he was pining for. This one just wanted closure. He wanted to sleep at night—but don’t we all? Wanted to know and to walk away—or so he claimed. I wasn’t yet sure if he was the letting go kind or, like my upstairs tenants, the kind with the stranglehold.
He told me how he first encountered her, in some old childhood nightmare of a dream that clearly scarred him for life. Typical guilty conscious mess. But as he spoke, suddenly the silvery threads of his dreams circled around his throat, coiled in the air, weaving and unweaving themselves like silk webs, shrinking then growing longer as they covered me, a gossamer cape until my eyes closed. A sea of blue green sapphires opened up and I stepped inside to see.
In this dream the ground is chill, wet underfoot, the air laced with sweet perfumes. Honeysuckle and moon musk sting my eyes; sibilant leaves prick my scalp from up above. I walk to an aged willow tree, groaning its complaints to a brook. Aunt Dissy taught me the language of trees. Sometimes they offer you real clues. Most of the time they’re just bitching. This one complains about a bruise, a burden too heavy, a man named Iudas. Old dirt he needs to get over. I tune out the trees and adjust until my eyes grow accustomed to the darkness. I know the woman is there but cannot see her face.
She is hiding from me. I am not in the mood. “Look, lady,” I call out, trying to keep up with her. “I’m not trying to get in your business or nothing, it’s just that…” Wait. Is this woman running from me? Oh, hell no! As she flees, she’s stripping, dropping whole swaths of cloth, brightly colored, glittering in the night. By now she is probably buck naked and there is no way I am following her into those woods. She is going to have to Hansel-and-Gretel on her own.
Night is never quite as dark as you think. There is always some starshine, some moonbeam, firefly glow. But not here. Wherever the woman disappeared to is like a black hole floating in the middle of the night. The backs of my eyes are itching, my eyelids and elbows twitching like a needle scratching on a record. I waver in the narrow band of zodiacal light, the faint luminosity of the horizon, the memory of a day that will not come again, the promise of a new one that has yet to begin. Ravens circle my head—a really fucked up sign—I swing at them and moonwalk my way back out of his dream. Like the others, he knows what he wants but he has no idea what he needs. He is asking me to peer into the darkness, asking me to see past what was to what could be. I tell him there is no harder work than imagining a future.
“Hold the deck,” I command, eyes still closed. Time for some theater. He hesitates. “Don’t worry,” I say, opening my eyes slowly. “They won’t hurt you.” Bless his heart. He thinks I’m talking about the cards. He grips them, his sad mouth now a defiant frown. I take the cards from him, still warm from his touch, and spread them out in a fan. “Choose three.” He studies the backs of the cards, his eyes narrowing at the design, a raven caught in the thick limbs of the blossoming world tree.
As I watch him decide, I wonder if I could love someone with the same unforgiving force that pushed forests from the deep ground. People think because they forget their dreams, that they are gone. They are not. The body holds them, the way rich soil holds water. Dreams are hidden somewhere deep in the bones, and flesh, and skin. The residue of his recurring dream hovered around