A broken-hearted fellow New Yorker
THE CHARIOT
THE 7TH MAJOR ARCANA CARD
Pictured on the chariot is a prince in battle attire leaving town, strong and determined.
Two sphinxes pull his chariot.
Upright: determination, victory, tenacity, triumph, vengeance
Reversed: war, revenge, confrontation, lack of control
Pax Princip reeks of vengeance.
“We haveone day,” he mutters, storming out of the Bureau once the letter to Steuer has been sent. “No backup plan.”
I follow.
Pax hops aboard the back right corner of the Seventh Avenue Metropolitan as another customer pays; the driver doesn’t realize he’s clinging to the trolley grate two cars back.
It seems Pax hasn’t yet overcome his past pauper habits. Stead left him a lot of money. A lot. But once you’ve been so poor that you cut the tips off your shoes so your feet can grow, you can’t ever feel safe with money. Money is sham security, anyway. Money is a human construct, and no offense, sweethumans, but anything you construct is temporary. False.
Pax hops off at Houston and winds through the neighborhood. We’re in the Bowery, on the Lower East Side. He approaches a group lingering on the wide stoop of a brownstone. The group pushes, curses in Bosnian: “Cetnik!” “Jebi se.”
A police officer stands in the middle of it all, but his presence means nothing to the people in this argument; they jab past him, drag their fingers across their throats, simulate scratching each other’s eyes out.
“You skinned me, Annie Mike,” a squirrelly, bespectacled man shouts. “That love potion was useless!”
“I can only turn her eyes your way, you ratbite,” Annie Mike grumbles. “Can’t help it if a man can’t work his equipment.”
Then they see Pax.
They pause.
And every person in this group smiles like their lost dog has just wandered up.
“Well, well,” one of the men shouts. He flips his suspenders and grins wildly. “Stick your dough in your shoe, boys. If it ain’t the prince of the pickpockets himself.”
The police officer clears his throat, reminding the crowd that this is knowledge he doesn’t wish to know. The men in this group hug Pax with one arm, pound his back with the other. The women fling themselves at him, hug his neck, and smear his cheek with lipstick.
“Have some popskull, Pax.” One fellow offers him a flask.
“You need a cigarette?” Another offers him a pack.
“You want a lump of sugar, sugar?” A woman hikes her skirt to her hip bone.
Pax laughs and hugs them all, shaking their hands, clapping their backs, kissing the small, dirty kids atop their heads.
An odd pang shoots through my soul. It’s a type of sadness, that others might be this happy to see Pax. A welcome like this would be hard to walk away from. Why would he return to the others at Julia’s Bureau, to my Stella, after this?
Much of the crowd drifts away. Pax takes a few swigs from the flask the suspenders guy keeps offering him. One fella pounds Pax on the back. “Where’s your brother these days?”
Pax smells of regret at this question. “He disappeared. After Julia died, he vanished. I fear he’s dead.”
(He is not dead.)
The crowd pauses for a moment of solemnity before they elbow him, tease him:
