Talking to the dead can really take it out of a girl.
It’s amazing what a girl can get used to, though. I mean, three years ago I was showing up to my job at the Louis Vuitton flagship store on 5th Avenue, and grateful to get roughly three fifty a week to sell hideously overprices watches. I would stand there, in my tasteful uniform—which was, inexplicably, the color of raw liver—and tell basketball stars that what they REALLY needed was a watch designed for WASP professional sailboat racers in Newport. AND they’d agree with me.
These days, I am summoned-usually at a moment’s notice—to the pied-a-terres of people whose names appear on Page Six, to reassure them that everything’s going to be fine.
Which sometime? I can’t do.
The biggest difference between my life now and my life then, aside from EVERYTHING, is one simple thing: I can’t lie. Now, it’s not like I lied a lot before, but let’s face it: you can’t have a successful career in luxury retail without occasionally winging it a little. And by “winging it”, I mean “flat out makin’ shit up.” –I never thought of this as lying, since I wasn’t ever misrepresenting actual facts, but the actual fact is, I would occasionally ….embellish. “This watch will make previously unattainable women love you,” I said to one man. “This watch will make your mother in law regret every single mean thing she’s ever said behind your back,” I told a wide-eyed woman from Ireland. And who’s to say those things won’t come true? Because, as it turns out, a LOT of things I’ve told people HAVE come true. Which is how I ended up where I am.
Where I am, today is at the apartment of a young woman whose daddy is rich, and her mommy is…richer. As in, a billionairess. The apartment has the comfort and clean lined simplicity I’ve come to learn are the hallmarks of GENUINE wealth. No marble, no curlicues: those are the signifiers of the newly arrived, the trying too hard, the new ones. REAL wealth whispers: it says “there are no sharp edges here, no unpleasant surprises…everything exists to make life easier in a way you won’t even notice…till you leave.”
She’s a lovely girl. I am genuinely, tremendously fond of her. But in my new life, the life where I visit with mystery and common sense, I am not allowed-anymore-to lie. So she asks me questions, as I take her hand and close my eyes, and I tell her what I see: pictures, images, memories of my own reconstituted as signs and signals to tell me what I need to tell this girl. I don’t understand, at all, how it works. But experience, practice, and the testimony of hundreds of clients have confirmed one thing: I’m probably right.
How did this happen? How did a woman who has never believed in psychicness, let alone life after death—I mean, puh-LEEZE!!—who is the daughter of two Ivy League professors, one a scientist; a woman who loves reading history and nonfiction because fiction makes her impatient—wind up telling fortunes? How does someone who has subscribed to “The Skeptical Inquirer” since teenagehood, wind up being the poster child for credulous irrationalism? In other words….What the hell?
The answer is both roundabout and simple.
I took a course once. It was one of those weekend, life -enhancing “human potential movement” courses that sprouted, flourished and vanished with depressing alacrity in the 1980’s. There was an exercise that has always stayed with me. In the exercise, a participant would leave the room while his/her “classmates” hid an object in a 20-foot by 20-foot square box filled with sand.
When the hapless participant re-entered, he/she was supposed to find the object…with the only “help” being that, when he/she got “warm”—that is, got CLOSER to the hidden object—the other classmates would clap louder. When he or she got “colder”—that is, farther away from the object of desire—her helpers would clap softer. After a few rounds of this, it got easier and easier to listen to the “positive” reinforcement, and the objects were found faster and faster and faster. The lesson being exactly what my father used to tell me: “Go with what works.”
Which is how I got here. I always knew I was…well, if not “psychic” (a word I actively detest), then…something. Something odd. Something that could see ghosts and know what her friends were thinking. Something that didn’t fit.
I saw my first ghost when I was a lanky, sarcastic, 14 year old atheist. My parents had bought an 1840 deaconry upstate in 1963, and had spent the time since filling it with children, hope, love and bad carpeting. I was the youngest by a long shot, so much younger that my nickname as a baby was “Ooops!”. So when I was 14, all the other sibs had moved on to college, ill-considered careers in theater, and starter marriages. There was one bedroom that my older brother Evan had vacated, that I had never liked going into, but which ALSO had—and this was very important because of a serious heat wave that summer—the MOST efficient air conditioner in the house. If not the world. But I digress.
So I went to go sleep in that room, a big top floor anomaly with an asymmetric vaulted ceiling and an irrational miasma of discontent.
I was sleeping as soundly as only a 14 year old athletically inclined dormouse CAN sleep, when suddenly I awoke into full, startled consciousness. Now, to this day, it takes two hours and 13 snooze alarm button taps to render me even mildly human, so that was remarkable in and of itself. But what was even more remarkable, was the woman standing by the side of my bed.
You know when you are at a party, and ask some random lone woman which way to the ladies’ room, and she starts telling you in completely inappropriate detail about how her boyfriend just screwed some other girl? This was the same kind of energy. It felt like she was trying to get me involved, and weirdly complicit with, her “story”. The energy was needy, urgent, importunate. I was sitting up and looking at her: somehow, her appearance didn’t go with the very modern feeling energy, as she was dressed in a long, ecru lace dress, and for some reason it’s hard to reconcile period clothing with modern neuroticism. Still, she managed.
As I stared at her, I noticed that she had a remarkably oval face, as though someone had drawn a very pretty visage on an uncooked eggshell. Her hair, black and parted in the middle, fell almost to her waist. And she was, well…see through. There’s no other way to describe it. I observed myself observing the curtains behind her, THROUGH her, with the bemused detachment of unbelieving terror.
And then she vanished. After five minutes of nonverbal pleading by my bedside, futile pleading as I never did figure out what she was trying to tell me, she went “zzzzpppp!”-figuratively speaking- and vanished from the ground up.
Leaving me alone in a very well air-conditioned and suddenly incredibly empty room.
Now, I don’t know about you, but after a very upsetting situation, I need a snack. Comfort food. Comfort drink. Comfort. So I made my way two flight down to the kitchen, where pure animal instinct found me putting together a fluffernutter sandwich and a grape juice-and-ginger-ale concoction, when my mother came unexpectedly in.
“Darling! I THOUHT I heard you! Why in heaven’s name are you AWAKE?”. Mom asked, in the MidAtlantic actor’s voice she’d kept even after leaving the stage for academia.
“Oh my God, Mom! I just saw a GHOST!!”
She puttered about, making herself some cocoa. (From scratch. No Quik Chocolate Milk Mix for HER.)
“Oh, darling, you DO know that you were hallucinating. Ghosts simply don’t exist. They just DON’T! You were having a waking dream experience.”
I bridled a bit at having my True Ghost Story snatched away from me. Besides, it WAS real. What hallucination lasts for five cogent and unwilling minutes?
“Mo-OM, I DID!! I DID see a ghost! I wasn’t hallucinating!! I’m not nuts!”
She reached the Ritz Crackers down from over the stove. “Darling, did you READ that book I lent you? “The Origins of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind”? SUCH a wonderful theory. Jaynes says that the biblical prophets were simply experiencing a neurological storm between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Doesn’t that explain it, darling? Really?” She came and sat not too near me, with her cocoa and the crackers, still in their wax paper roll.
“Mom. MOM. I am SO not an Old Testament Prophet. I’m not even sure what you’re talking about. Of COURSE I didn’t read that book. NOBODY has ever read that book. The guy who WROTE it didn’t read that book. Anyway. I SAW A GHOST, Mom! Really!”
She sighed in a patented Mom theatrical, humoring-me way.
“Darling, let me ask you something.”
“WHAT??”
“Was it a woman? Did she have a very oval shaped face and remarkably long black hair, and a sort of white dress?”
“YES!! TOTALLY! Except I think it was ecru.”
She blew out a long, cocoa-scented sigh. “Oh, darling. She doesn’t exist! I’ve walked through her a NUMBER of times. On the second floor.”
I just stared at her, mouth agape, as she calmly finished her crackers.
This might explain why it’s taken me so long to come to terms with my, um, “gift”.
Let ALONE tell others.
Back to the present. I am holding Laetitia’s hand. She asks me if her marriage will work out.
I get a “hit” of Hudson, her fella.Although he’s at rehearsal thirty blocks away, utterly distracted, he somehow feels my intrusion. He is waving me away. He doesn’t want to be read. Some people can tell, completely unconsciously, when I’m rummaging around in the sockdrawer of their soul, and sometimes ? They raise an objection. I can’t blame them…I would too.
“Um…I’m not sure. He’s got a very quicksilver temperament. He doesn’t live for any moment but “NOW”. Is he a Gemini?” [Even though I agree with Douglas Adams, who famously said that found it hard to believe that great whirling lumps of rock in the sky really care about what I’m doing Tuesday, I HAVE found that certain “energy dealings’” go with certain signs.} His energy “weighs” the same in my mind as other Geminis I have known: it feels light but disciplined, contained yet free, and very much rooted in intellect rather than emotion. How the hell does one describe a “feel” like that? Sorry if it doesn’t make sense to you…the only justiciaction I have is: it feels very spot-on to me.
“Um, I’m not actually sure.”
She tares at me intently. I can tell that, any moment, it’s going to occur to her that it’s my bloody JOB to be sure!! THAT’S why I’m THERE! THAT’s the POINT of me.
Except? It isn’t. My job is to be truthful always, to rummage around in people’s own personal weather systems, and report back as best I can. Sometimes I’m not allowed to “see” a definite answer. I feel there are three possible reasons for this:
That pesky “free will” thing” if someone doesn’t want to be read, I have to respect their right to spiritual privacy.-Dammit.
Sometimes? The client has to learn a lesson/make a decision/ find out an unknown BY HERSELF, and/or in her own time, for her soul to learn what it needs to larn in order to grow.
I actually just…don’t know. It happens. If this were an exact science, I would be teaching it at Harvard. Someday, I believe it will be. Maybe someday I’ll be teaching it. But right now? I’m selftaught, self-certified, and flying blind.
Thank GOD I’m verifiably accurate.
This reading goes very well, otherwise. I get the name of a close friend of hers who died last year, something I simply could not have knowm. Oddly, I remember reading about this boy’s death, and being little sneer-y about his lifestyle choices. I wince now to remember that….one of the reasons I think I’m supposed to do this work is to learn compassion, as well as commitment to truth, as well as how to say what I feel, rather than saying what folks want to hear.-In fact. I “get” this guy so strongly that I start weeping, something I REALLY try not to do, as I think it’s unprofessional. Can’t help it, though: he was such a lovely soul, and in such pain when he died. Also, he liked frogs. I like frogs. I tell Laetitia this, and she silently goes to her computer and shows me a photograph of him with his collection of toy frogs. We both start laughing, in the middle of our tears.
And that’s why I do what I do.
It’s amazing what a girl can get used to, though. I mean, three years ago I was showing up to my job at the Louis Vuitton flagship store on 5th Avenue, and grateful to get roughly three fifty a week to sell hideously overprices watches. I would stand there, in my tasteful uniform—which was, inexplicably, the color of raw liver—and tell basketball stars that what they REALLY needed was a watch designed for WASP professional sailboat racers in Newport. AND they’d agree with me.
These days, I am summoned-usually at a moment’s notice—to the pied-a-terres of people whose names appear on Page Six, to reassure them that everything’s going to be fine.
Which sometime? I can’t do.
The biggest difference between my life now and my life then, aside from EVERYTHING, is one simple thing: I can’t lie. Now, it’s not like I lied a lot before, but let’s face it: you can’t have a successful career in luxury retail without occasionally winging it a little. And by “winging it”, I mean “flat out makin’ shit up.” –I never thought of this as lying, since I wasn’t ever misrepresenting actual facts, but the actual fact is, I would occasionally ….embellish. “This watch will make previously unattainable women love you,” I said to one man. “This watch will make your mother in law regret every single mean thing she’s ever said behind your back,” I told a wide-eyed woman from Ireland. And who’s to say those things won’t come true? Because, as it turns out, a LOT of things I’ve told people HAVE come true. Which is how I ended up where I am.
Where I am, today is at the apartment of a young woman whose daddy is rich, and her mommy is…richer. As in, a billionairess. The apartment has the comfort and clean lined simplicity I’ve come to learn are the hallmarks of GENUINE wealth. No marble, no curlicues: those are the signifiers of the newly arrived, the trying too hard, the new ones. REAL wealth whispers: it says “there are no sharp edges here, no unpleasant surprises…everything exists to make life easier in a way you won’t even notice…till you leave.”
She’s a lovely girl. I am genuinely, tremendously fond of her. But in my new life, the life where I visit with mystery and common sense, I am not allowed-anymore-to lie. So she asks me questions, as I take her hand and close my eyes, and I tell her what I see: pictures, images, memories of my own reconstituted as signs and signals to tell me what I need to tell this girl. I don’t understand, at all, how it works. But experience, practice, and the testimony of hundreds of clients have confirmed one thing: I’m probably right.
How did this happen? How did a woman who has never believed in psychicness, let alone life after death—I mean, puh-LEEZE!!—who is the daughter of two Ivy League professors, one a scientist; a woman who loves reading history and nonfiction because fiction makes her impatient—wind up telling fortunes? How does someone who has subscribed to “The Skeptical Inquirer” since teenagehood, wind up being the poster child for credulous irrationalism? In other words….What the hell?
The answer is both roundabout and simple.
I took a course once. It was one of those weekend, life -enhancing “human potential movement” courses that sprouted, flourished and vanished with depressing alacrity in the 1980’s. There was an exercise that has always stayed with me. In the exercise, a participant would leave the room while his/her “classmates” hid an object in a 20-foot by 20-foot square box filled with sand.
When the hapless participant re-entered, he/she was supposed to find the object…with the only “help” being that, when he/she got “warm”—that is, got CLOSER to the hidden object—the other classmates would clap louder. When he or she got “colder”—that is, farther away from the object of desire—her helpers would clap softer. After a few rounds of this, it got easier and easier to listen to the “positive” reinforcement, and the objects were found faster and faster and faster. The lesson being exactly what my father used to tell me: “Go with what works.”
Which is how I got here. I always knew I was…well, if not “psychic” (a word I actively detest), then…something. Something odd. Something that could see ghosts and know what her friends were thinking. Something that didn’t fit.
I saw my first ghost when I was a lanky, sarcastic, 14 year old atheist. My parents had bought an 1840 deaconry upstate in 1963, and had spent the time since filling it with children, hope, love and bad carpeting. I was the youngest by a long shot, so much younger that my nickname as a baby was “Ooops!”. So when I was 14, all the other sibs had moved on to college, ill-considered careers in theater, and starter marriages. There was one bedroom that my older brother Evan had vacated, that I had never liked going into, but which ALSO had—and this was very important because of a serious heat wave that summer—the MOST efficient air conditioner in the house. If not the world. But I digress.
So I went to go sleep in that room, a big top floor anomaly with an asymmetric vaulted ceiling and an irrational miasma of discontent.
I was sleeping as soundly as only a 14 year old athletically inclined dormouse CAN sleep, when suddenly I awoke into full, startled consciousness. Now, to this day, it takes two hours and 13 snooze alarm button taps to render me even mildly human, so that was remarkable in and of itself. But what was even more remarkable, was the woman standing by the side of my bed.
You know when you are at a party, and ask some random lone woman which way to the ladies’ room, and she starts telling you in completely inappropriate detail about how her boyfriend just screwed some other girl? This was the same kind of energy. It felt like she was trying to get me involved, and weirdly complicit with, her “story”. The energy was needy, urgent, importunate. I was sitting up and looking at her: somehow, her appearance didn’t go with the very modern feeling energy, as she was dressed in a long, ecru lace dress, and for some reason it’s hard to reconcile period clothing with modern neuroticism. Still, she managed.
As I stared at her, I noticed that she had a remarkably oval face, as though someone had drawn a very pretty visage on an uncooked eggshell. Her hair, black and parted in the middle, fell almost to her waist. And she was, well…see through. There’s no other way to describe it. I observed myself observing the curtains behind her, THROUGH her, with the bemused detachment of unbelieving terror.
And then she vanished. After five minutes of nonverbal pleading by my bedside, futile pleading as I never did figure out what she was trying to tell me, she went “zzzzpppp!”-figuratively speaking- and vanished from the ground up.
Leaving me alone in a very well air-conditioned and suddenly incredibly empty room.
Now, I don’t know about you, but after a very upsetting situation, I need a snack. Comfort food. Comfort drink. Comfort. So I made my way two flight down to the kitchen, where pure animal instinct found me putting together a fluffernutter sandwich and a grape juice-and-ginger-ale concoction, when my mother came unexpectedly in.
“Darling! I THOUHT I heard you! Why in heaven’s name are you AWAKE?”. Mom asked, in the MidAtlantic actor’s voice she’d kept even after leaving the stage for academia.
“Oh my God, Mom! I just saw a GHOST!!”
She puttered about, making herself some cocoa. (From scratch. No Quik Chocolate Milk Mix for HER.)
“Oh, darling, you DO know that you were hallucinating. Ghosts simply don’t exist. They just DON’T! You were having a waking dream experience.”
I bridled a bit at having my True Ghost Story snatched away from me. Besides, it WAS real. What hallucination lasts for five cogent and unwilling minutes?
“Mo-OM, I DID!! I DID see a ghost! I wasn’t hallucinating!! I’m not nuts!”
She reached the Ritz Crackers down from over the stove. “Darling, did you READ that book I lent you? “The Origins of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind”? SUCH a wonderful theory. Jaynes says that the biblical prophets were simply experiencing a neurological storm between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. Doesn’t that explain it, darling? Really?” She came and sat not too near me, with her cocoa and the crackers, still in their wax paper roll.
“Mom. MOM. I am SO not an Old Testament Prophet. I’m not even sure what you’re talking about. Of COURSE I didn’t read that book. NOBODY has ever read that book. The guy who WROTE it didn’t read that book. Anyway. I SAW A GHOST, Mom! Really!”
She sighed in a patented Mom theatrical, humoring-me way.
“Darling, let me ask you something.”
“WHAT??”
“Was it a woman? Did she have a very oval shaped face and remarkably long black hair, and a sort of white dress?”
“YES!! TOTALLY! Except I think it was ecru.”
She blew out a long, cocoa-scented sigh. “Oh, darling. She doesn’t exist! I’ve walked through her a NUMBER of times. On the second floor.”
I just stared at her, mouth agape, as she calmly finished her crackers.
This might explain why it’s taken me so long to come to terms with my, um, “gift”.
Let ALONE tell others.
Back to the present. I am holding Laetitia’s hand. She asks me if her marriage will work out.
I get a “hit” of Hudson, her fella.Although he’s at rehearsal thirty blocks away, utterly distracted, he somehow feels my intrusion. He is waving me away. He doesn’t want to be read. Some people can tell, completely unconsciously, when I’m rummaging around in the sockdrawer of their soul, and sometimes ? They raise an objection. I can’t blame them…I would too.
“Um…I’m not sure. He’s got a very quicksilver temperament. He doesn’t live for any moment but “NOW”. Is he a Gemini?” [Even though I agree with Douglas Adams, who famously said that found it hard to believe that great whirling lumps of rock in the sky really care about what I’m doing Tuesday, I HAVE found that certain “energy dealings’” go with certain signs.} His energy “weighs” the same in my mind as other Geminis I have known: it feels light but disciplined, contained yet free, and very much rooted in intellect rather than emotion. How the hell does one describe a “feel” like that? Sorry if it doesn’t make sense to you…the only justiciaction I have is: it feels very spot-on to me.
“Um, I’m not actually sure.”
She tares at me intently. I can tell that, any moment, it’s going to occur to her that it’s my bloody JOB to be sure!! THAT’S why I’m THERE! THAT’s the POINT of me.
Except? It isn’t. My job is to be truthful always, to rummage around in people’s own personal weather systems, and report back as best I can. Sometimes I’m not allowed to “see” a definite answer. I feel there are three possible reasons for this:
That pesky “free will” thing” if someone doesn’t want to be read, I have to respect their right to spiritual privacy.-Dammit.
Sometimes? The client has to learn a lesson/make a decision/ find out an unknown BY HERSELF, and/or in her own time, for her soul to learn what it needs to larn in order to grow.
I actually just…don’t know. It happens. If this were an exact science, I would be teaching it at Harvard. Someday, I believe it will be. Maybe someday I’ll be teaching it. But right now? I’m selftaught, self-certified, and flying blind.
Thank GOD I’m verifiably accurate.
This reading goes very well, otherwise. I get the name of a close friend of hers who died last year, something I simply could not have knowm. Oddly, I remember reading about this boy’s death, and being little sneer-y about his lifestyle choices. I wince now to remember that….one of the reasons I think I’m supposed to do this work is to learn compassion, as well as commitment to truth, as well as how to say what I feel, rather than saying what folks want to hear.-In fact. I “get” this guy so strongly that I start weeping, something I REALLY try not to do, as I think it’s unprofessional. Can’t help it, though: he was such a lovely soul, and in such pain when he died. Also, he liked frogs. I like frogs. I tell Laetitia this, and she silently goes to her computer and shows me a photograph of him with his collection of toy frogs. We both start laughing, in the middle of our tears.
And that’s why I do what I do.
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