After Owen had left for work, she got down to the business of divination. In the spare time between her work as birthing counsellor and sex telephonist Friday considered herself a medium. A techno-mystic. She understood the world through communications technology and she could see patterns, interpret them, predict outcomes. Nothing was random. She could feel herself within the tangles of the fates, and when she achieved a calmness, a stillness, she could sense the movement of destinies on the threads of a great web; she could place herself at any point on that interconnected membrane and read the movements, the rumours, of others. The Web.
Friday played wiki-tarot. It was a divining game of her own making, connecting with her mystic Web through the World Wide Web; witnessing the ripple of weird in the broadband download of ones and zeros. Calling up pages of information for interpretation through the function of random searches, Friday could see the layers of pattern, the signified and signifier, the relationship between the sign and the symbol, the intention. Nothing is random. Owen could probably explain that in strictly mathematical terms, if the inclination took him. (If he had warmed up. If the hour was late). But Friday understood it as the workings of the Sisters who weave the web of fates.
Irritated by Owen’s distraction before breakfast, Friday found it difficult to meditate that morning. Her thoughts came back and back to his still, silent disruption. He had this notion that everyone might be born with a predestined allowance of words, and once you had uttered your allowance, your time was up. His life was often about being prudent with his allowance. In some ways this gave Friday the platform she often needed for her own generous allowance, as Owen saw it. They did not compete for word-space. But a speaker needs a listener, and while he had never mentioned any concept that a person might have an allowance of words they can hear in a lifetime, he often acted like he believed it. It was this aspect of silence, his not letting words in, that frustrated her.
Disparity in their character was as much the foundation of their relationship as a matter of contention. For Owen, her vitality connected him to the world, to other people, when he might otherwise withdraw. He recognised in himself the recluse waiting to happen, but he could not decide whether this was a good thing. Friday made the decision for him – she would not let him withdraw into himself. For Friday, his stillness, his calm, was a haven. Though this morning it was an irritant, on the whole Owen provided the peace and sanctuary and space for self-discovery.
She stared at the screen, cursor ready to hit the random page option, but to do so was to enter into a contract. Once the process is started, you have to accept what comes, feel it, and begin the interpretation. Each page relates to the next and the previous, there are no gaps, no exceptions. Each page is a join on the web, and vibrations pass between them, diminishing and amplifying according to their place and the forces at work on them. You can’t choose to skip a page if you can’t feel it. And Friday was not feeling it. She ought to have left it, but settled instead for a single page reading. She would not have to be concerned for connections, only connotation:
Tangaroa. Maori god of the sea. As powerful a single page as she could ask for. Auspicious. Nothing is random.
