The Cloisters

by Katy Hays

What if our whole life—how we live and die—has already been decided for us? Would you want to know, if a roll of the dice or a deal of the cards could tell you the outcome? Can life be that thin, that disturbing? What if we are all just Caesar? Waiting on our lucky throw, refusing to see what waits for us in the ides of March.

I had already learned that no one wanted to hear what loss was really like.

But my mother was afraid of travel—of planes, of places she didn’t know, of herself—and

future.” I looked down at the Queen of Staves. Clothed in deep navy, her bodice dotted with gold-leaf stars, she sat upon a throne, a knobby

But that was the hardest thing about death: the unrelenting march of time forward, away from the person you’ve lost.

I gestured around us, relieved. “I hear it’s the greatest city in the world.”

Wasn’t that, after all, why we had become academics and researchers in the first place? To discover art as a practice, not just as an artifact?

I never felt as alive as I did when I was being tossed around by New York.

every ounce of information and intimate knowledge was hard-won.

Because perhaps one needed a little magic to make a narrow childhood more bearable.

“I think I do believe that people can tell the future,” I said quietly. “But I don’t know why anyone wants to know how their story ends,” she replied.

an Upper West Side two-bedroom,

But to do that is not to be with the living, Ann. You must remember that. And some of us survive all this death better than others.”

I waited until I was the only one left standing on the stairs and settled into the sound of the cars on the street, a steady stream of activity, the sound of things alive.

the way we all lived, on a knife’s edge, so easily pushed by fortune onto one side or the other, success or failure, life or death.

fate was as brutal as it was providential.

Wasn’t this what the city taught you? That it was your job to climb to the top, to hustle, to take chances?

“We are all obsessed with our fates,” said Aruna, dreamily. “For they are the one thing we cannot control. The one thing we are blind to.

“Humans have a tendency to be easily romanced by the promise of knowledge.”

After all, who were oracles if not women who guarded temples of knowledge?

“Careful, Ann. The top of the wheel is a scary place to be.”

And now that I was older, I wasn’t plastic enough to mold myself into someone else. New York had taught me that I no longer cared if I fit; I preferred to stand out.

The duality of the two, the patience and symmetry of temperance, the intuition I needed to trust but that only ever found me in unpredictable ways.

“Real New Yorkers don’t go to the High Line.”

“It can be fun to do touristy things,”

I hadn’t expected to fall in love with New York, but falling in love can make a city burn brighter.

I loved the bigness and the smallness of it, the weirdness and the joy. It wasn’t home, and I didn’t know if it ever would be, but it was where I was supposed to be, in that moment. Then, maybe forever.

The city had a way of making everything feel cosmic and inevitable—magical.

“Because this is what happens when you go out into the world—when we go out into the world, Ann. We lose. The deck is always stacked against us.”

You ignore everything that isn’t anointed as special or valuable or rare.

I had never believed in asking the cards specific questions; it seemed such hubris to know what to ask. Instead, it was the feeling I was after, the web they created, the impression they gave.

“But there’s a big difference between could have and did.”

Throwing away these little things—things that make up a life, make up a career—was somehow the worst of it all.

New York didn’t show me what I was capable of, it had left me no choice but to be that capable—the

Even so, I couldn’t wait to feel the winter wind come off the Hudson.

Your interpretation of choice is a luxury, a curtain that separates us from fate. From a fate you’re authoring.” “Choice is the one thing we all share,” she said, brushing off my comment. “It’s the ultimate level playing field.”

If things were meant to work out with Leo, I knew they would, no matter how much I resisted or he pushed.

It hadn’t been my fault. That fate had been meant for me, it was always going to find me, no matter how long I hid from it.

The past, I now know, can tell us more than the future.

We are, you see, both masters of our fate and at the mercy of the Moirai—the three Fates who weave our futures and cut them short. And while I still believe we can control the little things in life, those small decisions that add up to the everyday, I think, perhaps, the overall shape of our life is not ours to decide. That shape belongs to fate.