5 of Swords: The Urban Tarot Collection Books 1-5

By Nyle Kai

Philip K Dick meets The Matrix in this action-filled metaphysical tale...
Jane is a hungry prostitute who has recently been liberated from her pimp, Real Money. On a fateful night she meets Dick, a despairing hitman who is seeking an angel of forgiveness. After he reveals himself to Jane, Dick offers to kill Real Money as an act of revenge. When her pimp is murdered in prison, Jane goes into hiding with Dick, her mind reeling with a mixture of guilt and gratitude.

Then, Jane meets Monique at a seedy nightclub called The Labyrinth. Monique is a mysterious being called a Cretan who appears to control reality itself. Jane gradually begins to realize that her choices are not her own and that morality is turned on its head in the world of the Cretans. Violence has a purpose and fear is just a game in their mystical otherworld. The prostitute and the hitman become enmeshed in a dance of violence, insanity and passion as they gradually discover that free will is just an illusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nyle Kai
• Release date: Jan 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005776954

Nyle Kai

Nyle Kai graduated from The University of Vermont. She has been a waitress, bartender, painter and a student of Biology. She lives in Vermont. The Cherry Heart is her first book.

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5 of Swords

Books 1-5 of The Urban Tarot Collection

By Nyle Kai

Text copyright ©2020 Nyle Kai

All Rights Reserved

To Jesse, for showing me the way.

Table of Contents

The Hanged Man

The Magician

The High Priestess

The Empress

The Emperor

The Hanged Man

I met Dick at a poetry reading of all places. He was tall and broad shouldered, but his skin had a pallor and his eyes looked pained, as though some terrible memory was eating away at his peace. I was standing near the back of the room in the darkest corner, with a bottle of beer at my feet. I don’t recall why I wasn’t holding the beer, but this provided Dick with the perfect opportunity to talk to me. He stepped close to me and my beer fell over, spilling all over the wood floor.

Oh, I’m so sorry, Dick said. Please let me buy you another one. It’s the least I can do for you.

Dick was a name so common that it defied the eccentric man who held it. I guess he didn’t want to be called Richard because he abhorred all formality. Dick bought me another beer that night and I stayed to listen to him read his poetry. He drew genuine applause from the audience, but his material was all about suffering. A party clown in flames and a flat frog on the highway were the subjects of his two best poems. According to Dick that night, there was no mercy and no light at the end of the tunnel. We suffered and died like animals. I wondered why the audience loved this idea so much. People probably just wanted to hear someone express their deepest fears in front of an audience. Then they could go home to their safe beds and pretend it was all a fiction told for entertainment. It was 1997, the year of Princess Diana’s death. We were still reeling from the shock of the news. It was a time when celebrity deaths still carried weight in the collective consciousness. America was still relatively innocent.

People from the street then understood human nature because they had to for the sake of survival. So many of the people I knew that year were from the street, way rougher than Dick. But Dick understood people just like the best of them. And I felt he understood me. But perhaps even he could not reach the part of me that held my terrible secret. I had suffered a trauma a few months before I met Dick that altered me to my core, right down to my moral compass. I no longer knew who I was, and perhaps unconsciously I was looking for someone to show me the way back to myself.

Since the trauma I had learned that time was not linear at all. Certain moments repeated infinitely in loops. Time was twisted and coiled, like a basket of snakes. When I reflected on our meeting that night years later, each detail would seem like a part of a much longer drama. Dick always said the same things, wore the same clothes and made the same gestures. Looking back at our first night, I forgot about the newness of those things. Instead, they were remembered as familiar, each beginning and each new instance seeming like it had already occurred twenty times before at least.

You know… Prayer is a kind of insanity and insanity is a kind of prayer, I said after the readings were over.

That’s perfect! Dick cackled. Write that one down! Take it on the book tour! Dick always talked about our future book tour, the one that I knew would never happen.

It means that we pray when we’re desperate, and when we’re desperate, we pray.

Isn’t that kind of redundant? Dick looked at me with his slate gray eyes. One eyebrow arched and his forehead wrinkled.

No, it isn’t, I said. It means that we’re willing to loosen our hold on reality for the sake of our comfort when we kneel down to pray. In desperation, we need to believe that someone is listening to us. But really, it’s just a voice in our heads coming from deep inside ourselves. It’s not real. And also, when someone loses their grip due to trauma or mental illness, they cling to their delusions as a kind of religion to avoid the awful truth. I looked at my empty beer bottle. I felt like I wanted another one.

What’s the awful truth? Dick asked, looking like he already had plenty of answers for that question.

Just pain.

I would take all your pain away if I could, Dick said. I mean that. I would give a hand or a leg to do that. Believe it.

The worst part was that I did believe it.

I let Dick give me a ride home that night, even though we’d both been drinking. It was only a couple of miles to the house that I was sharing with my landlord and a yoga instructor. I could have walked if I’d wanted to, but I wanted to stay with him. He made me feel comfortable in a way I hadn’t experienced since the trauma. I drank the feeling in like I was dying of thirst.

Dick’s car was an awful custard colored compact monster with dents on all sides and a horrible rattle in the engine. He was lucky it even rode as well as it did. Whatever I thought was depth of personality at that time in my life was probably really just poor character. Dick made bad choices and suffered as a result. But to me it appeared as though he understood life with far more depth than I could. In truth, he was just good at explaining his bad choices in a way that made them sound like he was doing it all for the good of the world. This was his major downfall.

By the time we got to my house, it was almost midnight. I took a couple of my roommate’s Rolling Rocks from the fridge, promising myself that I would replace them and apologize. Dick sat down at the round table in the middle of the kitchen. It was such a small house that there was no dining room. The landlord had placed fifty poetry magnets on the fridge, each magnet a different word. Dick placed two magnets side by side on the gritty white surface, rearranging them slightly. Kill all, he said and cackled. I assumed he was a little bit drunk and talking nonsense.

There were two things I wanted that fall: an escape from the city and a return to the sense of peace I’d known before the trauma. I was reeling emotionally and spiritually all the time, though I barely even noticed anymore. I was in a new normal of pain. My parents were both middle class professionals who would have been shocked at the life I was leading in the city, about two hundred miles away. Of course, I hadn’t breathed a word to them about the trauma. I had detached from them in an effort to forget. I called about once every six weeks and spoke in vague anecdotes and platitudes. If they knew that anything was really wrong with me, they did not mention it. We were all excellent fakers.

So, what I want to know, Dick said in a low voice, is who hurt you?

I felt a terrible sadness and rage rising in me. Is it that obvious? I asked, fighting to keep my composure. I was finally getting in touch with my anger.

Yeah, it’s real obvious. Someone took your life away from you, and you want it back. Maybe the way to get it back is to get revenge.

I could never do that, I said. Besides, the person who hurt me is just too big and too powerful.

Dick looked me in the eye. Nobody is too big, he said. Hey, do you want to feel better? I’ve got something for that.

He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a clear plastic baggie filled with different colored pills. They were all pastel yellows, pinks and blues in different shapes. It looked just like a bag of candy. I reached over and picked a pink round one from the baggie. What’s this? I asked.

Dick drank his beer down with a single swig. It will make you happy for a few hours. Just take it.

Are you going to stay here with me?

Yeah.

I swallowed the pink pill with a mouthful of beer. I didn’t care what it was or how it would make me feel. At the time I was just doing everything that presented itself to me without pausing to make judgment. It was extremely liberating and horribly self-destructive at once. It wasn’t that I no longer cared about myself. It was that I no longer had a concept of self that I should have been caring about. I had disappeared. I was a ghost. Dick was just a character in a story that was unfolding in front of me, and I was a witness, not an actor.

We walked up the creaky stairs to my bedroom and Dick bent down to unlace my shoes. He did so gently and slowly, taking care not to startle me. When I sat on the bed, Dick slipped them off and placed them neatly by the door. He walked over to a large storage locker by the window and sat on it, lacing his fingers together over his knees. I’ll just watch you all night if that’s ok, he said. I want to make sure you’re alright, and nobody else will do it. So, I have to.

I didn’t reply because I couldn’t speak. A wave of pleasure had washed over my entire brain like a tsunami and I was just a body lying there without words or thoughts. It was peaceful to just exist with this strange man keeping watch over me. I trusted him like I had never trusted anyone in my life. It felt so good to be free of pain. I cared for nothing except the feeling of being alive.

Dick sat in silence, watching me until I fell asleep, probably about five hours later, near dawn. He left without a sound and drove back to wherever it was he stayed. Our first night together set the tone for our relationship: I was helpless and he was the actor in the story. I was completely at his mercy and we both knew it. I trusted him not to take advantage of the situation and he loved me fiercely for that. It would occur to me much later that nobody had trusted Dick in a very long time, which was why he treasured our time together so much.

When I woke up, I felt slow and heavy, as though my brain was still disconnected from my body, but the feeling was no longer pleasurable. My head ached slightly, and all the pain of the trauma was back in full force. I realized that I had no phone number or address for Dick. I would have to wait a full week to see him again, assuming that he did show up at the same Thursday night poetry reading.

It was noon and I was four hours late for work. I put on some khaki pants and a black cotton shirt. My platinum hair was cropped so short that it did not need to be brushed. I just brushed my teeth and splashed water on my face. I was only twenty-two and felt no need for makeup. My face was so thin that my cheekbones stood out over the planes of my face. My lips were full and naturally red. I didn’t really think that I was pretty, but I got plenty of attention from both men and women. I told myself that it was the haircut. People thought short hair on women was provocative in those days.

I walked to my job as a stocker at an art supply store on the main drag of the city. The store was three levels, and I worked in the basement on most days. I was grateful that my supervisor always stationed me there, as the basement carried the least traffic and I disliked having to handle questions from customers. I didn’t know very much about art supplies and didn’t like feeling stupid. I was paid six-fifty per hour, forty hours per week. I had enough money to rent a room and eat a diet of staples. I was hungry most of the time, but the hunger gave me an odd comfort, like a secret that made me feel special and strong.

My stocking partner was Cole, an overeducated man who claimed to be only nineteen. He must have learned about philosophy in a private high school, because it was nearly all he talked about. Spinoza was his favorite, and I was flattered one day when he told me that I reminded him of the philosopher. Since my trauma, I had learned to appreciate the divinity in all things. Nothing increases someone’s appreciation of divinity like a death threat.

Cole had brown eyes with perpetual dark brown circles under them and a mop of curly, brown hair. He was thin and always wore a sensible belt with his shirt tucked into his pants. That day, Cole and I were stocking pieces of Styrofoam cut into different geometric shapes. Cole was complaining again about how he never dreamed he’d end up in a place like that, how he would and should have been doing much more with his life. I tuned him out and just let the sound of his gentle voice roll over me like background music.

So, why were you so late today? Cole asked pointedly.

Did you say something to me? I asked.

I’ve been talking to you for about half an hour, Jane. Haven’t you been listening?

Of course, I have… I was just distracted for a second because I had a pain in my stomach. What were you saying?

Cole looked at me with all the sternness that a nineteen-year-old could possibly muster, which was not much. He was too smart to believe my lie. I asked you why you were so late, he said.

Well, I answered calmly, the truth is that I met someone last night and he came over. We stayed up so late that I couldn’t get up in time for work this morning. But that’s between you and me. I’ll tell the boss that I threw up this morning and came in when I started feeling better. You know me. I wouldn’t miss a day of this for anything.

And because you’re nearly out of sick time. People notice you’re out a lot. You should be careful or you could lose your job. Cole seemed to care about me, or he wouldn’t have tried to tell me the truth like that. But I