Elaine knew that her keys were trying to tell her something when she dropped them on the floor in front of her bed. They landed in such a way that the deadbolt key with the green topper formed a perfect 90- degree angle with the silver dumpster key, and the Betty Boop key to the front gate fell beside a turquoise ring she’d lost months ago.
The possibilities of coincidence or serendipity didn’t even cross her mind. Since her mother’s death, she’d sensed that the entire order of the universe was inches from her comprehension. Elaine knew that all she needed was a cipher, and she believed that once she found that cipher she could use it to guide her decisions and align them with the master plan. Elaine’s mother wasn’t lucky enough to find a cipher in her lifetime. Elaine had watched her fumble for decades, and ultimately arrive at the end of her life in confusion and deep regret. Elaine pitied her mother for dying before she could understand her place in the universe, and resented her for not even trying to help Elaine understand hers.
She picked the keys up off the floor, squeezed them between her palms, and asked:
“Where should I hang the O’Keefe print?”
Then she threw them at the wall. And when the keys landed behind the ottoman, she crawled hungrily across her studio apartment to assess.
The green key and Betty Boop pointed towards the kitchenette, while the dumpster key was tangled with a souvenir bottle opener from Clearwater Beach. Elaine inferred that the keys had a hierarchy, that Green and Betty competed for dominance and Dumpster stayed out of the way unless its voice was needed to balance the vote. On the question of where to hang Sky Above Clouds IV, the keys seemed to agree that it belonged in the breakfast nook.
Elaine did as she was instructed. And every morning thereafter, as she blinked awake and the pale, orange horizon on the other side of the room came into focus, she felt an immense tranquility knowing she’d never face indecision again.
***
The following weekend, Elaine went to a bar, ordered vodka and cranberry juice, and dropped the keys on the floor. She told herself she’d go home with the first man who picked them up for her. But when her suitor reared himself, handing the keys to her with a yellow, threatening grin, she noticed that Green and Betty’s teeth were caught on each other, and they were nearly crossed to form an “X.” Elaine took that as a warning, an instruction to skip this man and look for another.
Relieved, she squeezed the keys between her palms to thank them, and 20 minutes later she dropped them again.
This time, the man who retrieved them was handsome and aloof in the ways that Elaine had been hoping for. She charmed him, brought him home, and after many consultations with the keys over the course of the next week, made him her boyfriend.
***
Before long, Elaine was using the keys to make decisions at her job. She worked in data entry at a local importer of grocery products from Poland, Romania, and a few other Eastern European countries. Invoices from suppliers and distributors arrived in various formats, and Elaine’s task was to ensure that every total that entered the accounting system was accurate down to the decimal. It was work that didn’t actually require her to make any decisions. In fact, if she was making decisions, it meant that she was probably cooking the books.
That was never her intention, but sometimes the order of the numbers in the totals unsettled her. When threes preceded fours on either side of a decimal point, or when sixes appeared more than once in a single line, she’d become paralyzed, unable to enter them into the spreadsheet.
Elaine developed a particular motion of fondling the keys to probe them for an answer, which was much more discreet than her previous method of throwing them at surfaces and assessing how they landed. When she encountered a number that felt wrong, she’d pick the keys up from her lap, close her eyes, and dangle them just above her fingertips. She’d rotate them once, very slowly, and count the number of times she felt a key graze her middle finger. Then she’d repeat, rotating in the other direction. She’d add the first result to all numbers on the left of the decimal point, and the second to all numbers on the right. Usually, this produced a total that put Elaine at ease. If it didn’t, she’d subtract from whichever side of the decimal point was still giving her trouble.
Elaine maintained this system through her remaining eight months at the company. No one ever detected the errors, but her boss recorded a significant dip in profit. He attributed it to inflation among his European suppliers, and offset the loss by laying off several administrative staff, including Elaine.
***
Papers arrived in the mail regarding Elaine’s mother’s will. Elaine learned she was inheriting a small house in Santa Fe. Her mother’s second husband had inherited it from his brother and left it in his own will when he passed, five years before his widow. Elaine’s mother lacked the ambition to make something out of the house, so it had been sitting, empty and neglected, ever since.
Elaine went to the cemetery and dropped the keys on her mother’s grave marker. They landed in such a way that they were equidistant from each other, making a nearly symmetrical star shape. Elaine stood over them for a few minutes, squinting intensely in an attempt to deepen her connection to them. Her goal was not to communicate with her mother’s spirit but to ask the keys questions that only her mother would know the answer to. She believed that with her mother’s death, those answers now lived with the universal force that the keys transmitted to her.
Elaine’s method of eliciting a yes or no answer from the keys involved slapping them against the back of her hand. If any of the keys swung up and grazed her wrist, or briefly slipped between her fingers, she’d read that as a “yes.” If the keys only made contact with the back of her hand, the answer was “no.”
She asked: “Did mother spend a significant amount of time in the house?”
No.
“Did her husband spend a significant amount of time in the house?”
Yes.
“Does his energy remain on the premises?”
No.
“Will visiting the house bring me good fortune?”
Yes.
“Will selling the house bring me good fortune?”
No.
“Am I meant to live in the house?”
Yes.
***
Elaine had a downright transcendent experience at the Dido concert. At times she felt she had astrally projected herself far away from the crowd to some sort of spiritual observation tower beyond time. And even though all of Elaine’s favorite Dido songs were about great romantic love, she arrived back at her apartment overwhelmed with the urge to break up with her boyfriend. She realized he’d never made her feel like Dido’s performance had that night.
She stepped over the boxes he’d helped her pack and slumped onto the mattress he’d promised to help her load into a U-Haul later that week. He couldn’t make the drive with her because he had to finish up a gig, but he said he would join her in Santa Fe as soon as he’d completed the job and collected his pay. He’d been displaying a lot of excitement for this next chapter of their relationship.
Elaine believed her boyfriend was good on his word, but she was suspicious of his reasons for following through at all. She had constructed a prediction for their future in which he joined her in her house only to have a place to stay while he infiltrated the local artist colony, chasing women who were more beautiful and more creative than she was, ultimately abandoning her.
But Elaine knew better than to dwell on unknowns. She asked the keys.
“Does my lover truly care for me?”
Yes.
“Will he love me forever?”
No.
That was all the certainty Elaine felt she needed. She asked one more question: “Do I have to act immediately?”
No.
Elaine interpreted this to mean that she could wait to cut things off until her mattress was in the U-Haul.
***
Elaine’s landlord sent her a text that read: “you can leave the keys in the mailbox.”
She considered her options. Maybe the keys had guided her as far as they could. Elaine was confident that every detail of her life was now exactly as it should be. She trusted the keys enough to believe that they wouldn’t abandon her in a time of need, but maybe she no longer needed them. Besides, she’d be picking up a whole new set of keys upon her arrival in Santa Fe.
Elaine stepped out onto the sidewalk and stood in front of the mailbox, pressing the keys to her lips. She figured she should let them weigh in.
“Is there more than this?”
Yes.
She nearly sprained her ankle in a frantic sprint to the hardware store before it closed.
She made copies of each key and kept the originals for herself.
The house in Santa Fe had a brass key to the front door, two silver keys to the back gate and sliding glass door, a rounder silver key to the basement, and a tiny square key to the shed. Elaine bought them each a unique topper and added them to the keychain with Green, Betty, Dumpster, and the Clearwater Beach bottle opener. Then she sat on the patio for hours, watching the sun push a large succulent’s shadows along the stucco of her new home, gently massaging all of the keys between her palms.
***
The keys told Elaine to paint the living room a pale green and hang the O’Keefe print behind the couch. They told her to put up a wooden fence and gate, for which she needed another key of course, but she anticipated this would only elevate their power. When a home inspector mentioned that the basement could be converted into a separate rental unit, the keys coached Elaine through the renovation. They helped her pick out appliances, tiles, and lighting fixtures. They even decided on the amount that she charged for rent.
She used the keys to make trivial decisions, walking around the grocery store slapping them against her hand to make sure she purchased the right brand of chickpeas, the right width of parchment paper, the right fat content of yogurt.
They advised her on big decisions, too. When a book she’d read left her with an intense compulsion to travel to India, the keys suggested she open a new credit card to pay for the trip. When she had a tenant whose lifestyle she disapproved of, the keys instructed her to evict him. When her doctor diagnosed her with aggressive cancer, the keys confirmed that going through treatment wasn’t worth the hassle she suspected it would be, and she’d be better off letting the disease determine her fate.
As she lay on her deathbed, morphine coursing through her veins while her consciousness slipped away, Elaine was satisfied. There was nothing she could have done differently because none of it was up to her. And when the keys finally slipped out of her limp fingers and onto the floor, Elaine’s eyes had already rolled too far back to see how they landed.
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