X · Wheel of Fortune

The Wheel of Fortune is time, or the second law of thermodynamics. Your life, from birth to death, was not planned. Nobody knows exactly which of your myriad selves will be the one reading this text. We can call some scenarios likely and others unlikely, but in the end not even God knows how you'll die, where your cycles will end, or how many you'll live. Some complete an entire Tarot cycle in a day, and some never complete one. When you're down, remember that things will likely improve. When you're up, remember that the wheel always ends on the downswing of death. Fortuna issues your birth certificate, which is also your death certificate, and she doesn't bother to consult you. Fate is a DMV in hell. Take your license, enjoy the ride, don't take things too seriously, and move with sympathy and reason along your infinite paths.

Whether it's the wheel of fortune or the wheel of time or the big black clock, it all comes to the same thing. You have less of it than when you started, and eventually you'll have none at all. This has nothing to do with you. It's just the second law of thermodynamics. Don't take it personally.

Plasmodium vivax is the wheel in its purest form. A mosquito puts it into the blood, and it goes first to the liver, then into the red blood cells, where it multiplies and bursts them all at once, about every forty-eight hours. Each burst is an attack: shaking chills, a burning fever, a drenching sweat, and then a day of feeling almost fine. The ancients called it tertian fever, the fever of the third day, because they counted the first day as one. The patient doesn't keep time. The parasite does.

Medieval artists drew the Wheel of Fortune with four little kings riding it, each with a caption. At the left, regnabo, I shall reign. At the top, regno, I reign. At the right, regnavi, I have reigned. And at the bottom, sum sine regno, I am without a kingdom. A vivax patient rides those four positions every two days: the chill that announces something coming, the fever at the top, the sweat as it passes, and the empty calm at the bottom, waiting for the wheel.

Just when you think the wheel has stopped, it hasn't. P. vivax can leave dormant forms in the liver that wake weeks, months, or even years later and start the cycle over. Fortuna, Franky says, issues your certificates without consulting you. Vivax schedules your relapses the same way.

The wheel's best trick is turning bad luck into good. In 1917 the Viennese psychiatrist Julius Wagner-Jauregg deliberately gave vivax malaria to patients dying of late-stage syphilis. The fevers killed off the syphilis, and quinine then dealt with the malaria. Not everyone survived the cure, but enough did that he won the 1927 Nobel Prize for it, and for a generation, until penicillin, catching malaria was the luckiest thing that could happen to you.

The Wheel reminds us that, despite our feeling of free will, she is the one in control. You didn't choose when or how you were born. You chose neither the mind your genes gave you nor the society that programmed it. Nobody has ever chosen a native language, and our accomplishments and failures, like our languages, are products of circumstance rather than valiant will, which, of course, you also didn't choose. You didn't choose good or evil. They existed long before you and will exist long after your civilization is a cloud of dust. Even if you believe in God, you didn't bring Him into being, and you committed no original sin.

Franky's 2022 title for this card was Vanna White's Pocket Watch, and it still works. On television, the contestant spins the wheel and Vanna White turns the letters. She has been turning them since 1982 and has never once chosen the puzzle. That's fortune: you spin, someone smiles and turns the letters, and the answer was written before you arrived.

When the Wheel turns up, take Franky's advice: if you're down, things will likely improve, and if you're up, the wheel always ends on the downswing. And if you feel fine today, check whether it's just the second day.