I had to wear a bedsheet out into the living room. The sheet was striped in red, white, and blue, and I wondered what Sher did with it when it wasn’t wrapped around a damp customer. I couldn’t imagine her sleeping on it. The living room had a reprocessed nylon/cellulose carpet in green, and walls like the outside of an eggplant, shiny and dark purple. I don’t know what color the ceiling was; it was draped with a parachute, suspended in tentlike folds and billows. The genuine item, complete to the stains and scorches and holes it acquired during the festivities just before the Big Bang. I don’t know why Sher had it there. I liked to think it was an icon of the second Fall, a new apple. There were things sewn to it, and hanging from it: a child’s mitten, a blue rosary, a half-melted 45 rpm record, a clutch of shiny foil-cardboard stars. On one wall was a print in overwrought colors showing Saint Bob holding a broken guitar. The furniture was all cushions, except for a sofa that sat too low because the legs were lopped off, and a metal cabinet lying on its side, painted black and draped with a tapestry that seemed to be not quite a view of the Last Supper. The shades were drawn, and the room was dim and smelled of candle smoke and flowers. I felt a little guilty, adding the red-white-and-blue sheet to all that ambience.

I went to the window and bent the blinds a little to look outside. The shadows had swallowed up the bottoms of the buildings; it was nearly sunset. “How long have I been here?” I wondered aloud.

“Forever,” Sher answered from the kitchen. She came in and sat down on a heap of pillows on the other side of the metal cabinet. She had a new cigarette pinned in the corner of her mouth. She set a glass of water in front of me and sighed. “I had to cancel three other appointments. I don’t know why the fuck you come and bother me. It’s not as if you believed in any of it.”

“Of course I believe in it. You, as someone who has more insight into me than I do, use the cards to reveal my sins to me and make me meditate on them. It used to be called psychotherapy.”

“That’s not what happens.”

“Well, if it works, let’s not fix it.” That, at least, I could say with perfect sincerity. There was no point in arguing with Sherrea over how she did what I hoped she was going to do.

“There’s no food in the place,” she said.

“That’s okay.” I didn’t think I could eat, anyway. My stomach felt like a sink drain full of hair.

“No, it’s not. You ought to eat before a reading, and leave some as an offering. It draws the energies to you.” She shrugged. “Well, screw the energies.”

“No.”

She glanced up, the young look on her pointy face again.