***
Dr. Fryer was wrong. Not everyone believed Joe.
"No," said Connie.
"No what?" asked Alvin. It was breakfast. Joe hadn't come downstairs yet. Alvin and Connie hadn't said a word since "Here's the eggs" and "Thanks."
Connie was drawing paths with her fork through the yolk stains on her plate. "Don't do another reading with Joe."
"I wasn't planning on it."
"Dr. Fryer told you to believe it, didn't he?" She put her fork down.
"But I didn't believe Dr. Fryer."
Connie got up from the table and began washing the dishes. Alvin watched her as she rattled the plates to make as much noise as possible. Nothing was normal anymore. Connie was angry as she washed the dishes. There was a dishwasher, but she was scrubbing everything by hand. Nothing was as it should be. Alvin tried to figure out why he felt such dread.
"You will do a reading with Joe," said Connie, "because you don't believe Dr. Fryer. You always insist on verifying everything for yourself. If you believe, you must question your belief. If you doubt, you doubt your own disbelief. Am I not right?"
"No." Yes.
"And I'm telling you this once to have faith in your doubt. There is no truth whatever in his God-damned tarot."
In all these years of marriage; Alvin could not remember Connie using such coarse language. But then she hadn't said god-damn; she had said God-damned, with all the theological overtones.
"I mean," she went on, filling the silence. "I mean how can anyone take this seriously? The card he calls Strength -- a woman closing a lion's mouth, yes, fine, but then he makes up a God-damned story about it, how the lion wanted her baby and she fed it to him." She looked at Alvin with fear. "It's sick, isn't it?"
"He said that?"
"And the Devil, forcing the lovers to stay together. He's supposed to be the flrstborn child, chaining Adam and Eve together. That's why Iocaste and Laios tried to kill Oedipus. Because they hated each other, and the baby would force them to stay together. But then they stayed together anyway because of shame at what they had done to an innocent child. And then they told everyone that asinine lie about the oracle and her prophecy."
"He's read too many books."
Connie trembled. "If he does a reading of you, I'm afraid of what will happen."
"If he feeds me crap like that, Connie, I'll just bite my lip. No fights, I promise."
She touched his chest. Not his shirt, his chest. It felt as ff her flnger burned right through the cloth. "I'm not worried that you'll fight," she said. "I'm afraid that you'll believe him."
"Why would I believe him?"
"We don't live in the Tower, Alvin!"
"Of course we don't."
"I'm not Iocaste, Alvin!"
"Of course you aren't."
"Don't believe him. Don't believe anything he says."
"Connie, don't get so upset." Again: "Why would I believe him?"
She shook her head and walked out of the room, The water was still running in the sink. She hadn't said a word. But her answer rang in the room as if she had spoken: "Because it's true."
***
Alvin tried to sort it out for hours. Oedipus and Iocaste. Adam, Eve, and the Devil. The mother feeding her baby to the lion. As Dr. Fryer had said, it isn't the cards, it isn't the program, it's Joe. Joe and the stories in his head. Is there a story in the world that Joe hasn't read? All the tales that man has told himself, all the visions of the world, and Joe knew them. Knew and believed them. Joe the repository of all the world's lies, and now he was telling the lies back, and they believed him, every one of them believed him.
No matter how hard Alvin tried to treat this nonsense with the contempt it deserved, one thing kept coming back to him. Joe's program had known that Alvin was lying, that Alvin was playing games, not telling the truth. Joe's program was valid at least that far. If his method can pass that negative test, how can I call myself a scientist if I disbelieve it before I've given it the positive test as well?
That night while Joe was watching M*A*S*H reruns, Alvin came into the family room to talk to him. It always startled Alvin to see his son watching normal television shows, especially old ones from Alvin's own youth. The same boy who had read Ulysses and made sense of it without reading a single commentary, and he was laughing out loud at the television.
It was only after he had sat beside his son and watched for a while that Alvin realized that Joe was not laughing at the places where the laugh track did. He was not laughing at the jokes. He was laughing at Hawkeye himself.
"What was so funny?" asked Alvin.
"Hawkeye," said Joe.
"He was being serious."
"I know," said Joe. "But he's so sure he's right, and everybody believes him. Don't you think that's funny?"
As a matter of fact, no, I don't. "I want to give it another try, Joe," said Alvin.
Even though it was an abrupt change of subject, Joe understood at once, as if he had long been waiting for his father to speak. They got into the car, and Alvin drove them to the university. The computer people immediately made one of the full-color terminals available. This time Alvin allowed himself to be truly random, not thinking at all about what he was choosing, avoiding any meaning as he typed. When he was sick of typing, he looked at Joe for permission to be through. Joe shrugged. Alvin entered one more set of letters and then said, "Done."
Joe entered a single command that told the computer to start analyzing the input, and father and son sat together to watch the story unfold.
After a seemingly eternal wait, in which neither of them said a word, a picture of a card appeared on the screen.
"This is you," said Joe. It was the King of Swords.
"What does it mean?" asked Alvin.
"Very little by itself."
"Why is the sword coming out of his mouth?"
"Because he kills by the words of his mouth."
Father nodded. "And why is he holding his crotch?"
"I don't know."
"I thought you knew," said Father.
"I don't know until I see the other cards." Joe pressed the return key, and a new card almost completely covered the old one. A thin blue line appeared around it, and then it was blown up to fill the screen. It was judgment, an angel blowing a trumpet, awakening the dead, who were gray with corruption, standing in their graves. "This covers you," said Joe.
"What does it mean?"
"It's how you spend your life. Judging the dead."
"Like God? You're saying I think I'm God?"
"It's what you do, Father, " said Joe. "You judge everything. You're a scientist. I can't help what the cards say."
"I study life."
"You break life down into its pieces. Then you make your judgment. Only when it's all in fragments like the flesh of the dead."
Alvin tried to hear anger or bitterness in Joe's voice, but Joe was calm, matter-of-fact, for all the world like a doctor with a good bedside manner. Or like a historian telling the simple truth.
Joe pressed the key, and on the small display another card appeared, again on top of the first two, but horizontally. "This crosses you," said Joe. And the card was outlined in blue, and zoomed close. It was the Devil.
"What does it mean, crossing me?"
"Your enemy, your obstacle. The son of Laios and Iocaste."
Alvin remembered that Connie had mentioned Iocaste. "How similar is this to what you told Connie?" he asked.
Joe looked at himimpassively. "How can I know after only three cards?"
Alvin waved him to go on.
A card above. "This crowns you." The Two of Wands, a man holding the world in his hands, staring off into the distance, with two small saplings growing out of the stone parapet beside him. "The crown is what you think you are, the story you tell yourself about yourself. Lifegiver, the God of Genesis, the Prince whose kiss awakens Sleeping Beauty and Snow White."