“Is that it?” Marie says.

  “Do we have time for another séance?” Min-Jae says, but I can tell that he thinks we don’t.

  “Afraid not,” Bennet says.

  “Your spirit guide is afraid,” says Lachesis.

  “I’ve had fucking enough of you,” Bennet says to Lachesis. “You’ve got your job. Why the hell are you interfering with mine?”

  “Some subjects are more interesting than others,” she says. “And, Delaney Archer. Well, this was just irresistible to me. The cycle of sevens is open to only a few. I couldn’t just sit by and watch it happen.”

  “I understand,” Marie says, patting Lachesis’s hand like she’s comforting a child who can’t manage to learn the multiplication tables and wants to jump rope all day instead.

  “The donuts are very good,” Bennet says to Min-Jae.

  “We get them at this wonderful place on Stanton,” Jae says.

  “I’m going to fucking die tomorrow and my spirit guide is having a conversation about donuts?”

  I get up, kick off my horrible uncomfortable dark gray corporate shoes, go over to Bennet, and start hitting him on his upper arm, which is surprisingly solid for a ghost or a spirit or whatever the fucking fuck he is.

  Bennet just looks at me while I punch him, so after the third or twenty-seventh punch, I stop. Because it’s very unsatisfying to take out your anger on someone who just sits there and looks at you, spirit guide or not.

  “That’s how the sevens go,” Lachesis says. “You should’ve thought of that before you chose this path.”

  Chapter 69

  “I didn’t choose this path,” I say. “I never—”

  “Delaney,” Jae says, “you did choose the path of the sevens. We discussed that at the séance. Don’t you remember?”

  “You mean you think I wouldn’t remember because it was so fucking long ago? Twenty-eight years ago? But that was only four days ago for me. And, besides that—there was no discussion. Just assertions.”

  “They always panic,” Lachesis says. She pulls a card off the deck and throws it down on the table. The seven of spades.

  “What are you saying? They always panic. What they? You told me the path of the sevens was rare. That you’d never seen it before. Now they always panic?” Yeah, I am panicking.

  “Well, in a manner of speaking,” Lachesis says. She points to the seven of spades, like that should mean something to me, which it doesn’t.

  “Fucking hell!” I say as I start pacing around the big oval table. On my way past Lachesis I try to snatch the deck of cards from her, thinking how satisfying it’d be to toss them and see the deck, minus the seven of spades, I guess, scatter all over the floor, but her grip on them is really tight.

  “I think Delaney could benefit from another séance,” Jae says.

  “So do I,” says Marie. She reaches out to readjust the position of a candle, but stops midreach, since the candles are fine just where they are.

  A bolt of lightning slashes across the sky right outside the window.

  “That about does it, then,” Bennet says. “Delaney, your share will go to Chloe, and the rest of you will have your cash later this afternoon.”

  “You mean the building’s sold already?” How did this happen?

  “He works fast,” Lachesis says. “For a spirit who won’t touch money.”

  “And you will?” I say.

  “I do,” she says. “How else can I finance my enterprises?”

  “How’s Martin?” I say. I haven’t thought about him since I left him at dinner that night, but the image of him appears in my head, so I ask.

  “I can’t say,” Lachesis says. “Client confidentiality, you know.”

  “What time is it?” I say. Without Hal telling me, I don’t know, since I don’t have a watch, a phone, a bag, or anything, and there’s no clock in this room. Why would there be? Lachesis and Bennet don’t need one, and Marie and Jae probably don’t care.

  “Seven after nine,” Jae says.

  I turn my head and blink my eyes, hoping to fuck that this reactivates Hal, because I need him to make plane reservations for me, assuming a person still needs reservations to fly somewhere. Assuming they still have airplanes. Assuming Hal would or could do this sort of thing.

  I knew you’d come back, Hal says.

  His voice makes me even angrier than I already am, but I need him, so I don’t turn him off again.

  “London,” I say into my hand, which is covering my mouth. “Now.”

  You have seven minutes to get to the RED one—he’s still pissy about this from earlier, I see—and get to the airport for the next flight.

  I nod. I mean, if the unoperatable-on Hal is inside my head, surely he can sense me nodding.

  Roger.

  “Gotta go,” I say, waving to everyone, pushing aside the chair I was sitting in, finding my shoes, then rescuing my run-over jacket. I figure I’ll need it, and with only seven minutes to get to the car and make the next flight, I don’t have time to shop. Even though I’d love to be wearing something other than this, the depressing outfit of the corporate crap artist.

  Jae and Marie walk to the elevator with me. Bennet waves, although he’s in the far corner of the room, near where the lightning was, and he’s not looking at me since he’s head to head with Lachesis. It looks like they’re arguing but I can’t hear them.

  “I’m sorry there won’t be another séance,” Jae says. “That was the best one we ever had.”

  “That was the only one I ever had,” I say. “So it was the best for me too.”

  The elevator doesn’t arrive instantly, like I thought it would.

  T-minus five minutes and seven seconds, says Hal. What a jokester.

  “I didn’t choose this,” I say to my old friends from Ludlow Street.

  “Denial,” Jae says. “Lachesis was right.”

  “I fucking dare Lachesis to be right about anything,” I say as the elevator arrives. The three of us step into it and I punch the lobby button, wondering if all elevators are still like this or if this one is like this only to accommodate old-fashioned me.

  “Lachesis is always right,” says Marie. “It’s one of the most annoying things about her.”

  “What’s the most annoying thing?”

  “That she exists at all,” says Jae.

  Chapter 70

  The rain has subsided into a heavy sprinkle. My red living room on wheels is at the curb.

  Two minutes, says Hal, like he’s my stage manager.

  “What was Lachesis right about this time?” I say. Maybe I’ll find out something I can use, something that will help me.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Marie says. “Have a good flight.”

  “That you’d go for denial next,” says Jae, who’s looking at Marie while he says this. “I think she should know,” he says while Marie says, “Did you have to?”

  “What exactly am I denying? I’m seven-cycling all over the place. No denial there.” Guess that shows them.

  “That you chose it,” Marie says in a very soft, very apologetic voice.

  “That’s not denial,” I say. “That’s truth. I didn’t choose it. I’d never even heard of it.”

  “Hearing of it’s not a prerequisite to choosing it,” Jae says. What is he, a Talmudic scholar? A lawyer? President of the debating society?

  T-minus thirty-seven seconds, Hal says in his most authoritative, insistent tone.

  “Jae, Marie—thank you for the candles. For the séance. For the donuts. Use your cash for something fun. And—fuck, I almost forgot to mention this—cremation, please.”

  “Delaney!” Marie says to me as I sprint to the curb, the red car’s back door slides open, and I get in.

  I wave good-bye to my former neighbors and the car takes off.

  You didn’t have to give your profits to Chloe, says Hal, whose voice, like before, is now surrounding me inside the car.

  “You wanted me to give them to you instead?” Shall I be compelled to add greedy to the list of Hal’s negative attributes?—an already overly long list.

  I have no need for funds, Hal says.

  “You’re above all that,” I say super very sarcastically.

  As a matter of fact—

  But I turn my head and blink. I’ll turn Hal back on at the airport, when I’ll need him to tell me what flight, what gate, and what my astronaut countdown is.

  Right now, though, I close my eyes and sit back in my seat. Because the sensory overload of what Manhattan looks like these days is too much for me. One more fast-moving animated sign, one more group of flashing lights, one more great tall reflecting-everything building, one more glimpse of all-all-all as it rushes by, and I’ll have a nervous breakdown.

  If I’m not already having one.

  Possibility #X+3: Nervous breakdown. That seems too likely, so I dismiss it. And if I am having a nervous breakdown, so are a few other people, especially the ones who claim to be mythological characters and spirit guides.

  Fuck Bennet. Here I am, caught in the sevens, and the best my spirit guide can do is help sell my real estate interests. Shouldn’t he be helping me? Advising me? Guiding me?

  The rain picks up again, the red one gets stuck in traffic—and I’m surprised there is traffic, but I guess some things will never be fixed, like the ride to the airport—and even though I had oatmeal and more than half of a donut so far this morning, I’m fucking starving.

  And I feel like screaming, so I do. I mean, who’s going to hear me?

  I scream for a while. It feels good. Then I stop. I’m still hungry, but I no longer feel like screaming, which had nothing to do with the hunger anyway. Or almost nothing.

  When you get to eat only once every seven years, it builds up quite the appetite.

  The red car moves ahead a little, then gets stuck again.

  Then there’s fucking music playing in the car! Music! The lyrics to this awful dreadful disgusting heinous lousy very too loud song are “When you’re warned and do not care / Ghosts and demons fill the air.”

  “Hal, you son of a cyber fucking bitch,” I say. “Turn that fucking thing off right now.”

  The Carl Orff–esque music stops.

  “I thought you were off,” I say.

  Silence.

  “Answer me, you bastard,” I say.

  Silence.

  “Hal, I’m here once every seven years. I don’t have fucking time to play this game with you!”

  I can’t be turned off, Hal says.

  “So I see,” I say. “So I hear.”

  You’re still on time for your flight, Hal says, trying to be whatever his version of conciliatory is.

  “Before,” I say. “I mean, you know, when Chloe told me to turn my head and blink.”

  I wasn’t off then either. If Hal could hang his head, if Hal had a head, he’d be hanging it now, looking abject and apologetic and also kinda smarmy.

  “Did I have that operation?”

  No, says Hal. And there is no operation.

  The beautiful sleek posh red car does some fancy maneuver and we swish past everyone in our lane, the rain intensifies, and soon we’re at the airport.

  What used to be Kennedy. I don’t even want to know what it’s called now. I mean, what if it’s named after some fascist politico?

  Your flight doesn’t leave for two hours, Hal says—inside me, which is kind of a relief after hearing his voice booming around the confines of the car—as I get out and go into the terminal, which looks exactly like an airport terminal of the future.

  The place is like a 1950s image of the future, only more so. Maybe its design is ironic. Or maybe those guys back then knew what the future would really look like and they were right all along.

  Wait a minute. Or wait 120 minutes. My flight doesn’t leave for two hours?

  Chapter 71

  I walk into a deserted corner of the huge open terminal, a place where I think no one will notice me, and say in the softest voice I can muster under these infuriating circumstances, “How come I had only seven minutes to get to the car when the flight doesn’t leave for another two fucking hours?”

  I wonder how everyone else communicates with the voice in their head. Maybe they just think to it. But even if I can do that, I don’t want to. I fucking refuse to.

  Silence.

  “Answer me, Hal, or I will find that operation, which I’m sure exists even though you deny it, and I will have it. Right fucking now.”

  I couldn’t allow you to stay with those people any longer, Hal says.

  “Oh my fucking fuck. You are Hal.”

  Lachesis upsets you, Hal says.

  “She does,” I say. She does.

  I have to protect you, Hal says.

  “Are you my spirit guide?” I say. Damnable fucking fuck fuck fuck. If Hal’s my spirit guide, no wonder I’m caught up in this seven nonsense.

  Bennet’s your spirit guide, Hal says, but I’m not sure I believe him.

  “Clothing,” I say, and Hal says, Near Gate B there’s a shop you might like.

  But when we get to Gate B—I mean, when I get to Gate B, since there’s no us or we—the shop Hal referred to is the kind of shop that the trussed-up-like-a-sellout-corporate-bigwig Delaney Archer might like. A shop full of blue, gray, and black uptightwear. Not the kind of shop that I would like. At all.

  “Casual,” I say, hoping no one hears or sees me say this. No one else in the terminal is talking out loud to themselves. Maybe thinking is good enough for them. Or me.

  Or, as bad as that sounds—since I don’t want to think that Hal hears my thoughts—even worse: it’s possible that I’m the only person with a voice in my head. But it’s not like I’m going to stop a passerby and ask them about this.

  Because I’m getting on that plane to London and not into a wagon en route to the loony bin.

  The next shop Hal directs me to has the kind of clothing that someone who has never relaxed a day in the last thirty-five years would wear when they’re pretending to relax. The kind of stuff that looks like if you washed it a hundred thousand times it’d still be stiff and itchy.

  But, fucking hell, I have to get out of this suit. I don’t want to be wearing it for six hours or however long it takes now on a transatlantic flight. I’ll die of the discomfort.

  By now I’m carrying my shoes and destroying my very expensive-looking stockings.

  “There!” I say in triumph when I see the kind of shop that I’d like to buy something from. The kind of shop where a teenager shops, where there’re bright colors and comfy jeans—yeah, they still have them, which is one reassuring note in this fucked-up future world—and flat shoes.

  Like all my recent shopping experience, this one has no sales clerk, no cash register, and no security tags. I try on a few things, keep some of them, which I throw in a suitcase I find near the store’s entrance/exit, and go back to the dressing room, where I change into a pair of fraying jeans and a black T-shirt.

  I mean, if Bennet is my spirit guide—and who am I to question the wisdom of a handsome bum I met on a bench in Grand Central and a voice inside my head?—maybe the message he’s sending me is that I should dress like he’s dressed.

  And eat a lot of sugary treats.

  So, from an attractive display of foodstuffs, I pick out a piece of carrot cake—which turns out to be nothing near as delish as the excellent funeral pastries were but still it’s pretty good—and get a glass of something pink and sweet, then sit down to eat.

  I feel almost like a person, almost like myself, or the myself of three or four decades ago. For one thing, I’ve got a bag now, and that’s so reassuring. For another, Hal has shut up. And for another . . .

  Time to get to the gate, says Hal, who’s been silent long enough.

  There must be a way to turn him off.

  As I walk toward the gate—which gate, incidentally, Hal told me about, since there’s been no announcement about gate postings and no announcement about anything at all and no signs either—I keep a sharp eye out for voice-removal clinics. An airport seems like the ideal location for that sort of thing, but I don’t see one.

  I pass only more places to buy ugly clothes, lots more food areas, a store that claims to ease your tensions although it doesn’t specify how they’ll do it, a divorce lawyer, and a fortune-teller, which shocks me, since you’d think an airport wouldn’t want to have such a person on their premises.

  I start veering over toward the fortune-teller, but Hal uses this as an opportunity to tell me what to do again.

  You’ll miss your flight, he says.

  “Sez who?”

  See if I care, says the petulant Hal.

  Chapter 72

  When I get to Gate 7—did I forget to mention that my plane’s leaving from Gate 7?—I see that Hal was correct, since the flight’s already boarding and I’m near the end of the group of passengers waiting in line.

  This hasn’t changed at all, except that there’re no boarding passes, no flight attendants at the gate, and, except for one passenger other than me who’s got a suitcase that’s very similar to mine if not the exact same thing as mine, no one is holding or carrying a fucking thing.

  Seat 7A, Hal says when I get on the plane.

  More fucking sevens. They’re everywhere, and yet they mean nothing to me, except that my life’s going to be over tomorrow when the seventh of the sevens occurs.

  Will I get the whole day? Or will I wake up dead? Or will I die at seven o’clock? Morning or night? Should I get a pair of glass slippers? And will there be a prince?

  In seat 7B, however, is no prince.

  “What the fucking spirit-ridden hell are you doing here?” I say to Bennet as I climb over him. At least Hal got me the window seat. At least there’s that.

  “Want some champagne?” Bennet says.

  “Are we celebrating something?” I say, even though I don’t want to encourage him.

  Bennet waves his hand, and a cart shows up. It’s got two champagne flutes and a bottle on it.

  “I’ve been neglecting my duties,” Bennet says as he opens the bottle with a deft touch and pours out the champagne as the plane taxis, then takes off.

 

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