lip-reader and could not make out the words. Although there was a sisterly warmth in the proximity of their bodies standing side by side in the mirror, there was also a sort of coldness—their faces opposed and their eyes meeting across the mirror.
At first, Margaret tried hard. She smiled back at her. She smiled and nodded, encouraging the apparition to speak, trying to follow her lips and divine what it was the woman was telling. But the words she was repeating over and over did not grow clearer.
Margaret strained hard, but she could not make them out.
After a while, Margaret began to feel chilled.
She spent the latter half of the day at the public pool. In the echoing hall, she swam up and down until she was hypnotized and could not think. On the way back home, she looked up at the sky.
She would later call it a spiritual aftershock. She looked up; she saw a complex grid in the sky. A grid of quasicrystals on the ceiling of the world, like the ceiling of the shrine of Darb-i-Imam, only deeper, only ghostlier, etched into the filling night. And at first Margaret was full of fear. She looked up into the quasicrystal heavens and was frightened that there was a pattern, there was a design governing behavior on earth. Past and present, a repeating pattern always circular, knowing no progress that does not loop back again. The heavens were a bureaucracy, cycle-bound, administering life on earth—playing fast and loose with Margaret’s red lips and tearing heart. And her head went weak.
That night, Margaret slept badly. She woke up several times, wondering when morning would come. Each time, she was afraid of returning to her dreams. At around six o’clock, just as dawn was breaking, she opened her eyes with Regina’s lips before her, and now, with a certainty so heavy, she felt as if she were being forced through the bed, she could finally hear the words that Regina had repeated in the mirror: the words that had been moving on her lips—retten Sie uns. Save us.
EIGHTEEN • They Played Hearts
Margaret played for the ghost of Regina Strauss, and her passion welled higher and higher. It kept spouting until finally it welled over and spilled the cup.
In the morning she had heard Regina’s message, retten Sie uns, and in the afternoon the excess began. Margaret decided to go out and buy a deck of cards.
Oh, she would buy a deck of cards. Under the right conditions, going out to buy a deck of cards can be the most exciting journey of your life, assuming you think the cards will bring you communication with a ghost. And in fact, the entire walk to the shop sent quivers down her back: the close, tight streets, dodging what dogs have done, the smell of bakeries and the cool discs of faces bobbing in stride above dark clothing draped over swinging, mortal forms, the angles raying out from the vanishing points of sentinel avenues—those angles cut sharp as scissors, and all of it was promising, and all of it was fine. Margaret went down Akazienstrasse and stopped at a tobacco shop that also sold leather goods; there was a counter made of dark oak that smelled of shoe polish and another bright counter for the sale of lottery tickets and another place for the sale of cigars.
When she got home, Margaret opened the cellophane wrapper at the kitchen table. The table stood at the end of her long, narrow kitchen under a single window, and the cold light fell on the table like a spotlight.
Margaret challenged Regina Strauss, the mother of the three dead girls, she challenged her to a game of Hearts. She was not quite insane—it was not the fever, for it cannot be said she did not know this was an absurdity: trying to make a ghost play cards with her in the kitchen. But she saw herself a scientist conducting a perhaps overly ambitious experiment that was nevertheless not unwarranted by certain suggestive trends in the data. She knew the woman might be a matter of her mind, she knew it. But now she also thought she had been given a glimpse of where the ghost resided—whether physically or psychically, she chose not to try to decide.
Here is what she thought: the woman-as-ghost was present in patterning. It had first occurred to her after seeing the sky the night before, when she looked up and saw the grid of quasicrystals