Daisy Inscrutable

My name’s Daisy Inscrutable. They call me that on account of I’m completely inscrutable. Means you can’t tell what I’m thinking.

Course, it’s not my real name. Real name’s Sandy. Sandra Packing. But if you tell anyone that, I will cut your fucking face. I’ll cut your face clean off, and I swear to fucking God I will eat it.

My driver’s license says I’m twenty-two, and it is absolutely fucking right. I am twenty-fucking-two. I’ve been clean for two whole years now. I mean “clean”, not, you know, “spotless.” Bullshit like Ecstacy and pot, that’s okay, but no more H, ‘cause it don’t work so great on me anymore and besides I was addicted to it.

So, I cut and run from the orphanage when I was sixteen. Originally, I had gone there on account of my parents weren’t competent to keep a kid, and also I was kept in a closet for most of when I was staying with them. I mean, I guess you could call that abuse, I mean, of course you could call that abuse, but I don’t remember it so good. I was young.

So, six years ago I cut and run from this orphanage, and I been on my own since then and doing fine.

I work at Mickey D’s with Hiro. Most times, I work the back counter, on account of my hands are pretty fucked up and the manager says I scare the customers. It ain’t a bad job; better than the last one I had, which was mostly sucking dicks for money. Only problem is that the manager’s a total stone-cold bitch, which is why I steal all the baby quarters out of the till.

Right. It’s a long story.

It was Tuesday. That morning, Hiro had come in with all this model glue and we were in the back getting high. We get back to the counter, and he’s worried that he’ll get caught, which isn’t a bad bet on account of we were sniffing glue. He figures he’s got to do something to make some money all quick-like, on account of he’s going to lose his job. And I’m like: “Plant a fucking money tree or something, ‘cause if we get fired, that’s the only way we’re gonna get any.”

His eyes light up like bam.

So instead of planting a money tree, he draws this huge dick all over the till.. Right where everyone can see it. And then he draws a naked fat lady. Like the – uh – Wallendorf Venus? He draws a whole bunch of letters; not, like, American letters, but fucked up Chinese bullshit. So I get up to the front – this is around 11:00 – and I’m like, Shit, man, you’re going to get us both fired. I’m scribbling over it with a pen, trying to make it look better, when, suddenly, it all disappears.

This fucks with.

I figure it’s the acid I took last Thursday at the big party at Cadillac Jack’s or maybe some kind of disappearing paint and the pigboy’s fucking with me. I’m staring at the till. Hiro’s telling me about language and symbols and this guy named Young and how he’s making the quarters mate and how this never works right for him, ‘cause he’s not that good with alchemy –

– and so I’m staring at him, right, cause at that point I didn’t know much about alchemy. I’m staring at him hard, wondering maybe if you can cut glue with other drugs and if so why would you bother you bother?

Here’s the thing, though: maybe it’s the glue, and probably it’s the glue, but I’ve got a sense for what he’s saying. It makes perfect sense. I mean, even more sense than when I was this bookstore with A.J. and this Wiccan chick A.J.’s banging – he bangs a lot of girls – and she’s telling me about how reality is just a trip, and we’re all just the Goddess’s trip-toys.

So, he talks about a lot of things. About langage. About circuits. About reality being the outward manifestation of what he calls the ‘subtle realms.’ I’ve got a knack for it, too, on account of when he starts drawing out these plans for these symbols – these symbols that reflect, like, subtler things than material things? – I start correcting them. He doesn’t seem to understand that words change, depending on where you are, on where you are; he just can’t see that for some reason.

Two days later, my bitch landlord kicks me out of my apartment on account of I haven’t paid any bills for like three or four months or something, and now she calls the cops on me because I broke all the windows out of her car. I’m six-hundred dollars in the hole. How the fuck am I going to pay that? I just got back from this party in the city, and that cost me my last paycheck, and I’m into my dealer like seventy for this sweet quarter-ounce that I smoked last week –

I’m supposed to open tomorrow at, like, six in the morning, too. I’m totally in no mood for that bullshit. I’m opening with Hiro, and that’s rad, but my supervisor is going to be there, which sucks. So, I get in there – I’m the first one there – and the register is broken. It’s broken because it’s too full of quarters. They’re in the machine. They’re crawling out corners. They’re wriggling on the floor. I’m thinking I’m in deep shit. Really deep shit. Then I realize:

These are all my quarters.

I’m wearing this sweet hoodie I kiped from Gottshalks back when I was hooking. So I load up the front pocket and I call in sick. I’m somehow not thinking this is a crazy trip. Something Hiro said, it just clicked with me. I bought it. Bought it like I didn’t buy anything ever before, not even that Goddess’ trip-toy shit. I’ve got at least one-fifty in quarters. I pay off my dealer, plus I get myself this q-ounce, and I get baked for three hours in the park, just hanging out.

Later on, I call Hiro. He’s kinda pissed about me making him open alone, but he, says, yeah, I can stay at his place, so long as you don’t mind the pigs. Pigs. Yeah, sure, I don’t mind pigs. I’m thinking maybe he means one of those potbellied Korean or Chinese or whatever pigs that rich people keep as pets. Turns out, as I find out later, I’m wrong, but that’s a different story. I ask how much for utilities, and he says, ‘nothing’, and I ask how much for rent, and he quotes me like, half of what I was paying before.

So, what the hell? I move in with him. The landlord doesn’t even come around. There’s a train tunnel in the basement. There’re pigs – square pigs – running around everywhere. Mostly, I smoke pot with JT and Keene. At some point, and it’s hard to remember when, I stop going to work entirely, but my paychecks keep showing up anyway. They keep getting bigger, too.

All I got to do, in exchange for this sweet deal, is Hiro’s homework. Mostly, it’s out of the Greater Key of Solomon the Wise, and it’s about angels. On account of I went to Catholic school, I know some stuff about angels, and most of it is sigils, anyways; like, stuff you’d tattoo (2). The problem is, some of the book is pretty much obviously wrong. The symbols are off, and I can’t read them so good. I start changing them, and showing them to Hiro, and he agrees. Xi – this guy that Hiro’s doing the homework for that never comes around – is pretty excited about it, too, and starts putting them in his theories, though they don’t make a single bit of fucking sense.

I’m so good at it that Evil Pig tells me he wants to let me in on some secrets. They’re in Jesse’s room. Evil Pig leads me to Jesse’s dresser, where there’s a bag of pills, and he says this: take it all. I shrug.

This one time, I took so many Oxycontin my eyes rolled back and I had a seizure. I came out of that pretty much okay except sometimes the corner of my mouth twitches. So I get myself a glass of water –

(A clean glass. I’m the only one that does the dishes around here.)

- and I take all of Jesse’s drugs. Red ovals. Green cylinders. A donut-shaped thing. Triangular blue tablets. Down the hatch they go.

They call it Awakening.

It’s supposed to be like everything’s been a dream, ‘til this point, and now you pass into the real world, and you can live your real life. But it’s not like that; not quite. What really happens is that you get a glimpse, maybe, out of the corner of your eye; you get a glimpse of what the real world is really like, and you can see the walls, the locked doors, the powers and potentates that ruling over it. Your entire life’s been spent moving from small prisons to big prisons, and the outside world, the free world, it’s only the biggest prison of all.

I see this, just for a minute, before I black out.

Then I’m in the water, and the serpent is awake. It’s old. It’s tired. It’s alien, and ashen, and it’s been asleep for centuries. I stood up; I stared out into the depths of the door, and there was a snake that wasn’t a snake. It was a tunnel. I stepped forward and I went down its throat, and it was so bright; so bright.

Then I was past, and into the light.

I’m there forever. There are things in this space that I can’t explain in this language, and not to you. No offense. There are some things you can’t say out loud. The Serpent is there, too: it’s the shadow cast by the bars that keep us in this prison. And he tells me the secrets that Evil Pig promised. Secrets about alchemy and death and the soul.

When I wake up, I’m here in a pile of quarters neck-deep. I don’t know where most of them came from, but I’m pretty fucking sure that Lemuria and Mu haven’t been inducted into the Union. And my alchemy works now.

So, long story short, I still work at McDonalds. I need the money, and all I can make is quarters. Hiro and JT and Keene and Pobble are pretty nervous: they think the Thigites are calling a convocation to expel us. So we’re about to go.

So I’ve got to say goodbye to Cockroach and Dodge Dart and the Fry Kids. I’ve got to close the doors and wash Eva and get onboard. I’ve got to get my stash together and go. I’ve got to never come back.

Good riddance.

This ain’t the life I wanted anyway.

(1) Okay. Let me explain. Say you’re Shakespeare, and you want to go to the store. You say something like, “Do thou wants to goeth to the store with me?” But that doesn’t make any sense anymore. Like, you could get your ass kicked for saying that. So the words that describe time, as in, this time, have changed. It’s more correct, even though it’s less certain, to say something like, “Do you guys want to hit the stores with me?”
So Hermetic magick (with a k) doesn’t work quite so good anymore because their terminology is out of date. Even the Thigs, who think they can update everything by putting these old, outdated words on computers, are wrong. The old symbols don’t mean anything.

(2) Once I drew this bitchin’ skull with a knife through it surrounded by vines, and there are these two big bad-ass Desert Eagles in the background. Fucking rad. And – no shit! – my friend Lisa who I haven’t seen in like forever gets this thing tattooed on her arm.