Saturnalia

It’s not the life I planned for, telling fortunes during the end of days, but clients are plentiful. They believe there’s magic in my rare divination deck. The cards are bigger than my hands, gilt-edged with an embossed pattern that emerges in the proper light, like a layer of snowflakes. The drawings beneath are lush, peacocks and queens and church windows, all glowing like trapped candle flame. On the back of each card, an S extends into a wave of curls. S for the Saturn Club, Philadelphia’s oldest social club and, more important, its most exclusive.

Tomorrow it will be three years since I quit—technically, the deck is stolen—and in all that time I’ve never read the cards for myself. But I woke up unsettled, and Max’s surprise invitation has unsettled me further. I don’t want to respond too quickly, too desperately, so I draw five cards and lay them on my worn bedspread.

THE DROWNING GIRL

THE LEYDEN JAR

THE SPHINX

THE HORSEMAN

THE TREE OF LIFE

If these cards were for a client, I would reassure them that the Drowning Girl—blue-skinned, pearl-eyed, torso wrapped in eels—doesn’t represent impending death but a promise of transformation.

I have no client to pander to, though, and I know the cards are a joke. Still, these days I feel like I’m gasping for air, too. My rent is going up and my income remains erratic. I spent the summer house-sitting in Society Hill, walking from townhome to townhome, confirming the windows were intact and the dehumidifiers were functioning. I religiously wore my second skin of poison, a slick of mosquito repellant, until Summer Fever season died down and the rich came back, just in time for the tornado that wrecked the power grid and leveled Liberty Place. No more mirrored tower in the skyline. Now the city’s floating another bond and I’m nearly broke, dependent on what I can make telling fortunes. I can’t imagine losing my place. I like living alone, and it’s a luxurious amount of space, even if it’s a deteriorating rowhome in a cancer cluster.

I look back to Max’s message.

Happy solstice, Nina! I have a job for you. Come over?

It’s the first I’ve heard from him since his bout with Summer Fever. I had offered, in July, to help—to bring soup, crushed ice, anything—but he declined. I was too embarrassed to press and risk showing that our friendship means so much to me. But not too embarrassed, now, to jump at his last-minute call, even if it’s just a gig for his vanity publishing company.

I start with a face-saving lie.

Actually passing through your neighborhood later. Can stop by.

The Drowning Girl swims to the surface, roused by the dinging of her bank app: a little freelance cash, enough breath to get through the end of the year.

Outside, Saturnalia candles glow through the morning mist, a flame in every rowhome window. The brick facades eventually give way, at Broad Street, to glass high-rises and banks with ivory scrollwork. Barricades line the curbs, where spectators are already gathering along the parade route. Every year, the world gets a little worse and the winter solstice carnival gets a little longer. Ten A.M., but people are already out, or still out, if they started the celebration last night, eating dumplings and rice balls, round for the cycle of the year, and drinking sweetened chicory and spiked cider at aluminum carts, the open-container laws suspended for the day. A woman with a feathered tiara and a man with a hook-nosed mask jump in front of me as I cross the street. "Here we stand before your door, they chant, walking backward, as we stood the year before. Give us whiskey, give us gin …"

"Open the door, I answer the rhyme. And get the fuck out."

They laugh and let me pass. I continue on past the social clubs that founded the parade—the Pan, Baldur, and Saturn—and now stand side by side on Broad Street within sight of The Ritz-Carlton and city hall. The buildings are costumed, too, robed in evergreen like ancient lords at Yuletide. The real second half of the rhyme keeps echoing in my mind. Give us whiskey, give us gin. Open the door and let us in.

September brought tornados, October delivered floods, November birthed blizzards and three nights of seismic cracks as the ground froze solid. Early December turned to balmy t-shirt weather, and the melting snow flowed into the rivers, reviving the periodic bottled water advisory. Today, the temperature’s hovering around the freezing point, perfect Saturnalia weather, as if even the climate will play pretend for the solstice celebration.

I continue on, to streets named for trees, to numbered streets, and back again, finally onto Delancey and some of the most expensive blocks in the city. It’s segmented, coming to dead ends and then beginning again half a block north or half a block south. Delancey was built for horses and carriages and remains a tunnel of bright brick, painted shutters and coal doors, gleaming black window grilles, and a mush of wet litter at the curb. Just before Twentieth Street, I stop at the familiar gold plaque: GALANIS PUBLISHING. Half art books, half vanity titles to pay for the art books.

Before I can press the bell, the red door falls back and Max smiles. Nina. I’m glad you were nearby. Come in, come in.

He’s dressed in black, a fine sweater and thin, black-framed glasses. His hair, cut before it can curl, is black, too, though the gray at his temples has expanded, and there’s a faint rash of pockmarks under his eyes, a remnant of the fever.

He drinks coffee while I fumble with my buttons, my gloves. I’m glad you’re better, I say. I was worried.

No reason to worry, he says, taking my coat. I’ve just been slammed by production deadlines. He pauses. I’m sorry I haven’t been in touch. His round face is drawn, his build slighter than it used to be.

My surprise at his appearance must be evident; he turns his back to hang my coat on the polished tree. I want to reassure him, but instead I say, No, totally, it’s fine. I’ve been busy, too.

I follow him through a second set of double doors and into the parlor on the left, where the fireplace is blazing. A couple miles and a world away from my rental. My oldest brother visited when I moved in three years ago and said it looked like a prison cell: patchy linoleum below, bubbling plaster above, rot in the corners. Even so, I feel safe there; I can’t lose my lease.

Plans for tonight? Max asks as I sit on the edge of the sofa. The polished table holds a second cup of coffee—real coffee—still steaming and apparently waiting for me. Or are you staying in? There are empty candleholders on the mantel and a small Christmas tree in the corner, bound in simple white lights. Max sits in the armchair in the opposite corner, where the light is dimmest. I wonder if he’s self-conscious about his new scars.

I hold the hot mug in my cold hands, but I don’t drink. No plans. Rhea invited me to the meetinghouse, but it would be impossible to get home after.

I’d stay in, too, Max says, a rare edge in his voice. There can’t be anything more depressing than Saturnalia with the Quakers.

Rhea, who quit the Saturn Club even before I did, is the only person Max doesn’t speak to. Or she doesn’t speak to him. Some falling out neither will discuss.

Max lifts a finger. I almost forgot. He plucks a small linen bag from a basket on the side table and hands it to me. Inside is a four-inch-high red wax figurine of Saturn, the ancient god of agriculture and all that goes with it: plenty and wealth, dissolution and decay. The idol is expensive, with a carved face and an exterior thick enough to hide the candy inside.

Thanks. I’m sorry I didn’t bring you anything, I lie. I can’t present him with the idol in my bag, mass-produced and purchased from the drugstore, the same kind my mother will give to my nephews and niece tonight.

He waves a hand and settles back into his chair. How’s the fortune-telling business? He’s the one who gave me the deck, months after I officially resigned from the Club and relinquished my own.

Booming. I’ve held a string of jobs since the communications firm laid me off—without the Saturn Club, I had no advocates when cutbacks arrived—but everything is temporary, grant-funded, part-time. My family thinks I’m an administrator for a charity helping kids in the Fairgrounds, the tent city in the old Fairmount Park, refugees from droughts and failing energy grids. If they knew I was telling fortunes, like my grandmother once did, my father would weep, my brothers would laugh, and my mother would flutter her eyelids and sigh bitterly.

Makes sense, Max says. The worse things get, the more desperate everyone is. Do you tell your clients to be hopeful or to run for their lives?

Depends on my mood. Anyway, I have a little time for the job. What’s the deadline?

It’s not a proofreading job, he says. I need a package picked up.

Oh, I say, my voice in a false key. Proofreading at least has a white-collar air; now I’m reduced to errand runner. What is it?

Small. It’ll fit in that. He nods at the patchwork shoulder bag at my feet. I bought it at a street fair in college and have been carrying it for the seven years since.

I should thank him, but I can’t bring myself to do it. Okay, I say, agreeing, though I still don’t know to what.

Today?

Tonight, Max says. At the Saturn Club.

A car horn blares. A log in the fireplace pops. I realize I’m clenching my jaw and release.

No.

He uncrosses his legs, leans forward, laces his fingers atop his knees. He’s wearing a gold signet ring, a gleaming coin against his olive skin. I wish you would just—

How can you ask me to go back? I snap. I’d rather appear angry, bitter, than be honest. I’m afraid to go back. I’m afraid to run into East and Amparo.

Max sighs and gestures to the idol. That’s a gift, he says.

The red wax man sweats in my hand. His face is soft, indistinct. I push my thumb into it and a slit opens across the throat. No wrapped candies inside, but a coil of bills. The top one is a hundred.

"But I will pay you if you retrieve the box. Five times that. Plus, I’m not the only person who will owe you a debt."

I imagine walking up those snow-gray stairs, presenting my ticket, passing through those arched double doors. A terrible place, I’ve insisted to myself these last three years, but it’s also a beautiful place. Marble floors, scarlet rugs on curved staircases, chandeliers bestowing golden light from the vaulted ceilings, expensive perfume in the air and expensive liquor in hand. Nothing like the spare box I live in.

I’m afraid to see East and Amparo, but there’s another secret tucked inside my fear like the bills inside the idol: I long to go back, even for just one night. And Max knows it.

Nina, he says softly, don’t you think it’s time?

He’s been doing this for three years: gently offering to help me get back on my feet, reenter society, return to the Saturn Club and all its connections. I wanted to prove I could succeed on my own. I didn’t want to trade on my friendships or mistake allies for friends. It’s a miserable way to live—though none of the members seem miserable.

Max sits beside me and lays a hand on my wrist. I wouldn’t ask you, he says, except that … I can’t let East take the box.

His fingernails are square and clean. My hand is like a child’s beneath his, my knuckles raw from the cold, my cuticles shredded. My fingernails are edged in red from the wax, as if they’re bleeding. I pull them into a fist.

It’s hard to refuse the money; it’s hard to refuse the fantasy of the Saturn Club, though I’ve done it once before. It’s impossible to refuse if that refusal means helping East.

Max always knows what to say. He would be a great card reader.

Okay, I say. I’ll do it.

It will be easy, he promises, and begins to explain: the upstairs room, the locked hatch, the wooden crate no bigger than a shoebox. He and East placed it under the floor last night. I shouldn’t open it; the contents are carefully packed and fragile.

The party’s our only chance, he says. East will be in the building all day today, and I’ll be there tonight, so he won’t suspect anything. I’m the only other person who knows the hiding spot. His mouth goes tight, betraying, for the first time, his anxiety. How desperate he is for this to go right. How much he needs me.

A car will wait for me at the Old Library, Max goes on, just outside the no-traffic zone, a mile from the Club—a punishing journey through Saturnalia crowds, but one I can make. Max gives me a key for the hatch and an entry ticket, cream stock with gilded edges and ornate crimson letters. He takes his gold signet ring off, slides it on and off my index finger, and then pushes it past the knuckle on my middle finger, where it stays. The bezel is engraved with a triangle, a smaller square inside the triangle, and an even smaller circle inside the square.

Part of your payment, he says.

Our knees touch. I take my hand back.

What’s in the box? I ask. Where will the car take me?

I’ll explain later. Trust me.

I could argue, but I’ve already made up my mind. If this is my last chance to save my rental, I have to take it. I can’t return home, the failed overachiever, the brilliant nobody, saddled with a lifetime of student debt.

Okay, I say. I trust you.

With that, Saturnalia begins.

On the way home, there are even more people on the streets, busking, carrying wares to the night markets, heading east to save spots on the Broad Street parade route. I trail behind a woman in a glittering blue body stocking, white feather wings extending from her shoulder blades. She glances back at me. Her face is painted blue, swirls around her eyes like she’s weeping an ocean. The Drowning Girl. My neck prickles. I tell myself I’m just cold, that the blue girl isn’t an omen, that it’s better to go to the Saturn Club than lock my bolt and listen to the gangs chanting on my street. Open the door and let us in.

Finally, I reach my place, a seven-hundred-square-foot slice of a brick longhouse that stretches the city block. I climb the single spiral staircase that threads my three rooms, coiling tightly like that money in the wax figure. Five hundred dollars, with thousands more promised. I lie down on the single pillow, the idol by my cheek, and hold my ticket up to the soapy light filtering through the sheer curtains.

At the top, a quote in liquid-shiny black type:

Everything that has lived, dies.

Everything that is dead putrefies and finds a new life.

At the bottom, in a crimson swirl: The Saturn Club. More information follows: Doors open at seven. The sacrifice is at 9:00 P.M. The pageant is at 11:30, with the unbinding of Saturn and the feast to follow. The dress code is, as usual, black tie, but there’s an additional instruction: blacker than the blackest black. An embossed silhouette of a peacock punctuates the command.

No doubt that East, this year’s Lord of Misrule, added it. All six hundred guests will dress in their purest, most expensive black, except for him—he’ll dress in some fantastic garb. I wonder if he’s trimmed his hair, shaved the scruff he’s worn for years to hide his delicate jaw. Everyone will be watching him, and he’ll savor it. Everyone will listen to him, and he’ll relish it. If East orders a tuxedoed senior member, in town from his Penn Valley or Newtown Square estate, to sing, to snort like a horse, to kiss a woman who’s not his wife, there, in front of everyone, the rich man will do it, and everyone will laugh.

That’s the point of Saturnalia, of all carnivals: to break the rules, to upend society, to make a no one king for the night. But it’s all a game, like the mayor turning her desk over to a third grader on my screen now. I’m streaming local news to drown out the occasional crack of smashed glass, the shouts and laughter, the burgeoning chorus outside. Give us whiskey, give us gin. On TV, the child smiles, close-cut black hair, gap in his teeth. He signs an executive order to serve ice cream for school lunch today, the last day of school before winter break. The mayor—crisp black suit, swoop of pale hair over her forehead, white teeth in a wide, lipless smile—applauds. Everyone applauds.

We all know what’s to come: the children will eat ice cream today and the adults will drink themselves blind tonight, and tomorrow, all week long. Then back to the normal routine in January, weak tea instead of wine, salad instead of meat, the strangers we work with instead