John C.P. Warner

It had occurred to him, at the age of forty-three, that he had become an embodiment of Zeno’s arrow paradox. Motion was, for him, impossible. He was trapped, imprisoned in an endless series of frozen moments. He had successfully fooled himself into believing he was progressing, yet had somehow contrived to remain still. It was all pathetically existential he knew, yet at that moment of realisation there came another epiphany – as though piggy-backed into his subconscious by the dawning knowledge of his static, unlived life. He had quit his job the following day, sold his house and bought the lease of a small boutique shop on the Charing Cross Road.

He was surprised by many things – how quickly he developed an affinity for the steel blades, how relaxing he found their sharpening, the glint of light on their edges – but above all he was awed by the feeling of motion, as though he were hurtling along some unfathomably traffic free road so quick as to induce a feeling of nausea. The first few times he had used the blades he had made a ghastly mess; ugly, jagged cuts which disfigured the test subjects. Slowly, however, he had mastered them. With time and patience he began to create works of art, his cuts refined, his hand steady as the blades flew. Yet this, he knew, was barely half the battle. He would give to London what it would be unable to refuse, a combination so unrelentingly metropolitan as to make him for life. He would be the toast of that diseased accretion of ancient hamlets.

 

Once he had mastered the blades he began the second phase of his study, devouring reference material on the I Ching, the three-thousand year old Book of Changes. He studied the trigrams and hexagrams, their formation, their meaning, the ways and manners of interpretation before beginning to apply them to his new craft. In all, almost twelve months had elapsed by the time he felt ready to take down the black paper that had lined the window, disguising the metamorphosed interior. Where once there had been a small, trend obsessed haberdashery, there was now, perfectly aligned according to the principles of feng shui, a single seat, a series of mirrors, a water feature and a number of stands holding lycee shaped incense and various aesthetically aligned five-element objects. It radiated tranquillity and, like many things that radiated, it would have a half-life. He could only hope it would be a long one.

 

There would come a time when the nonsense would be exposed, he knew, but the wealthy, who love the bizarre, are often so keen to be parted from their money. He would tell them the answers they wanted to hear and for which they would pay vast sums of money. If he was lucky, and the right woolly minds were convinced, he would begin to train practitioners for even greater sums of money. Until then he would begin small, placing adverts in The Metro that would studiously avoid mentioning prices, referring only to his credentials as a Master of his art – true in some respects, as the only practitioner – and keep his yarrow stalks crossed.

 

The sign outside read Hairvoyance in ornate calligraphy and, on either side of the, perhaps lamentable, neologistic pun, were two of the eight trigrams: Qián (the Creative) and Dui (the Joyous) on one, with Xùn (the Gentle) and Kūn (the Receptive) on the other. It was not long before he had his first call. The fortean nature of the service had, it seemed, been irresistible. Using his deep, well practiced stoic tones - both halting and soothing, he had set a price of fifteen-hundred pounds for his first appointment with a Kensington socialite cum actress. He had her reading ready before she had even arrived. Xùn and Kūn – growing upwards – an encouragement to continue doing whatever she was already doing, perseverance in the face of inertia, an encouragement to the adaptability and flexibility of a spring shoot which would lead to influence and affluence.

 

Sure enough the starlet sought career advice, the banker sought investment advice, the minister absolution, the comedian reassurance, but all wanted to be told to continue as they were, each and every one paying fifteen-hundred pounds to ensure they need not change. He placated them all gladly, one after the other. He required a telephone consultation for booking – to establish Qi, he said – during which he was able each time to discern what they wanted to hear, he would then book an appointment for his client to visit him. They would arrive with an aura of utter credulity, their eyes bright with fervent belief, more than that, perhaps, the desire for belief which is often stronger. He would sit them on the stool, light the incense and begin to ask simple, open questions, allowing them to talk, to relax. Eventually he would have them phrase a question for him to ask, taking care – no matter how well or clearly they phrased their query – to subtly alter the terms of the question, asserting his command of situation, his understanding of the powers he purported to channel for them. They would meditate for a short time on the question and he would ask them to focus, to hold their question clearly in their mind. He covered them with the smock he had had custom designed with motifs of harmonic hexagrams, yin and yang symbols and generic Far-East imagery and set to work, snip-snipping with his well honed scissors. Never anything too far removed from their original hair style – a slight updating, the promotion of asymmetry here, a slight movement of the parting there – all the while, as he cut, he burbled a stream of reassurances, promoted focus on their question.

 

With his first few clients he had demanded that the clients continue to focus through his reading of the hair cuttings, nervously anticipating a time when he would be found out – yet he soon realised that by that time in the process they were so receptive that he could personally shape the hexagrams whilst they watched, simply telling them that they could see what was not there. He felt like a Jedi.  They wanted to believe and he allowed them to do so, forming the hexagrams where there had been none, even as they looked on, awed at the guru that had somehow read their inner hearts, seen through to their soul, predetermined their peculiar avarice based on a series of refined questions that allowed him to take an educated guess at the lie they would most wish to hear.

 

As the months passed, his price increased, his act grew ever more elaborate – he had, by then, even fashioned his hair into a queue – his clientele were wealthier, more influential, people had begun to travel thousands of miles to consult him on the smallest and largest facets of their lives. On one occasion a high ranking member of the US government had flown him across the Atlantic on a private jet – where, upon landing, he had been forced by men in dark suits and dark glasses to sign a document that swore him to secrecy about the consultation. He had been asked one simple question, which would begin to have meaning only weeks later. At the time he had simply done what he had always done – he had relieved the client of their guilt about doing what they were always going to do. He gave people permission to do as they would have done anyway and felt privileged to be paid so handsomely to do so.

 

Should we intervene? That had been the question and he had read the clippings as the man had so obviously required. Gèn and Gèn, keeping still – the wisdom of inaction. He had been pleased at first – US intervention had rarely, in his lifetime, seemed to be in anyone’s best interests – yet as he returned to the UK and to the Charing Cross Road, as the weeks had passed, he began to wonder.

 

Kūn and Gèn. Splitting apart – it was not a reading he had given often. Hexagram twenty-three – that which most closely relates to the Death card in tarot and like this card it can be interpreted in many ways. His only offering of the reading had been to a reality television star, torn from their pedestal by the media that had placed them there, and then given such a savage beating in the tabloids that he had felt truly sorry for the indolent and vicious naïf. She was a nasty piece of work, no doubt, but she had come to him at the end of her tether, strung out on who only knew what. He had given her Kūn and Gèn with a line six interpretation that counselled that evil, being a destructive force, does not only target good but by its very nature will destroy even itself. She would be fine, he told her, because hatred exhausts itself. Even so, when he had given this reading, despite his good intentions, it was not because that was what had been there – there was nothing there, ever; he was a charlatan, albeit well meaning.

 

He was shocked, therefore, to see it so clearly upon the marble floor of Hairvoyance. Not just once, but from that meeting with the US government official, over and over. Splitting apart – each and every client, over and over and writ clearly in the clippings as if he had put it there himself. He maintained the act, but each time, as he allowed himself to look down at the floor around the stool he felt his mouth grow dry. Splitting apart – the image of rats, undermined foundations, disintegration, no help, suffering, it appeared over and over again, hexagram twenty-three.

 

His scissors flew about the head of a foppish talent show winner, he who sought advice on where to go now that his pound store roman candle had burned a quarter as bright for a tenth as long. His skin was sallow from lack of sleep and seemed to hang from his skull whenever he caught the boy’s hollow eyed reflection in one of the precisely angled mirrors.

 

#

 

Somewhere, not far from the snipping of his scissors, a briefcase had been rested upon the ground. The man that had placed it there had simply crossed over a bridge to sit on the opposite side of the Thames and watch the case. The man smiled.

 

#

 

He finished the cut, murmuring automatic pleas of focus and concentration. The boy grinned expectantly as he returned the scissors to their place on a table, aligning them unconsciously with the energy flow of the room. The boy asked him excitedly what it said. He looked down at the floor and sighed.          

 

‘Splitting apart,’ he said, then sat down on the marble floor, scattering hexagram twenty-three as he did so. There was a flash of light.