Psychic Junkie

by Sarah Lassez

  “Maybe I should call Lily,” Gina said.

  “What? Why?”

  “For a reading. You know, to see how good she is.”

  “You mean to test her.”

  “Why not? She’s getting her four dollars a minute, what does she care?”

  “Dollar. I’m only doing dollar psychics now.”

  “Even better.” She turned to Mark. “Honey, Sarah and I are going into the bedroom to call psychics.”

  He nodded, the images of full-grown men jumping on each other flashing in his eyes.

  It was an interesting idea. If Lily were right in her reading about Gina’s life, then surely I’d hear from Wilhelm soon. “Wait,” I said as we made our way down the hall. “I just thought of something. I don’t even have stockings to hang. What if she was talking about some future Christmas? Like I hear from him Christmas 2008, when I have stockings? She didn’t say which Christmas.”

  “Oh, good God. Just give me the number.”

  She called Lily, and I sat on the bed kneading a pillow. “She’s on,” Gina eventually mouthed. “Hey, Lily, do you mind if I put you on speaker phone? My neck’s been bothering me. Oh, and I’d love to hear your theories on when that’s gonna get better.”

  With that, Lily’s voice sprang from the telephone. “Gina is it? I’m shuffling and I need you to really concentrate and focus your energy on the cards, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Now this first one,” she said, “this is going to represent your situation.”

  Gina rolled her eyes. “Okay.”

  Lily took a deep, audible breath. “Gina, I got the sorrow card.”

  “I’m sad?”

  “Not necessarily. And the sorrow card’s not always bad. It’s more about a sense of upheaval in your life I’m getting. Emotional or physical. Something has caused a disruption.”

  I looked at Gina, who shrugged. I was having a slight sense of déjà vu, but ignored it. I was too busy racking my brain to identify Gina’s upheaval, her disruption. Mark had just moved in, did that count? She now only got three quarters of her closet?

  “Gina,” Lily continued, “I don’t usually do this, but I’m going to put the cards down. I don’t think I need them right now. Psychically I’m feeling your energy very strongly, what you’re going through. This doesn’t happen to me very often.”

  Now I was off the bed, hovering above the phone, glaring.

  Lily went on, oblivious to the fire in my eyes. “But it’s really strong. I’m being told that this time in your life is necessary. That it’s time to sort out your problems and allow for progress. Does that make sense?”

  I couldn’t take it anymore. I’d like to say I screamed, “No, Lily, it doesn’t make sense, because you’re reading from a script! You’re a cheat! You’re a scam!” But alas, I still had that fear of psychics putting curses on me, so instead I very angrily, and with much force, hung up the phone.

  Gina looked amused.

  “What she just told you?” I said. “That was word for word what she told me. She was reading from a script.”

  Then, like inspiration from above, Astral Astrid’s name coursed through my head, Astrid being a blind psychic I’d had a quick reading with upon my return from New Mexico. She wouldn’t be reading from a script, I figured, unless they made those scripts in braille too, which I kind of doubted.

  I forced Gina to call Astrid. The great thing about Astrid was that she didn’t waste time reading cards, because she couldn’t, and thus callers tended to get more bang for their buck. None of that shuffling business, no spreads or meanings.

  “Gina,” Astrid said, “recently you’ve been given an amazing opportunity in your career. I see this as a window before you, and it’s now up to you to shine through this window. You must seize the opportunity, take it and don’t look back. Your employers are watching, and they gave you this chance because they see you as a rising star.”

  “Okay,” Gina managed to say, right before she clamped her hand to her mouth to squelch the laughter. Not only had she not been given an amazing opportunity, but it was just dawning on her that she would most likely never be given an opportunity unless she managed to morph into a frat boy with a shaved head who burped and played golf with the partners.

  Giving her one more chance, Gina then asked about Mark, and was told that the distance she feels with him is because he’s worried he might fall victim to layoffs at work. “He’s a provider, and he’s worried he won’t be able to provide. What you’re feeling from him is stress and pressure, but it’s not to do with his feelings for you.”

  “Astrid, thank you so much for your amazing reading. Unfortunately, I just remembered I left a turkey in the oven, so I’m gonna run. Thanks again.” She hung up, and turned to me. “Do you think it’s Opposites Day?”

  I sighed. “Tell me.”

  “Well, for starters I’m going nowhere in that company. You know that, I know that, and the partners know that. To them I’m a shape at a desk, I’m the reason a phone stops ringing. That’s it. Nothing more. And she used the word ‘career.’ I don’t have a career. I have a job. There’s a difference. Second, I feel no distance from Mark. I mean, he just moved in. We’re completely in love. And third, Mark just got a huge raise this week. This week. A raise. We’re talking a thirty percent raise. They love him there, and the company’s doing great. Astrid was high.”

  I was teetering on complete and abject depression, though was slightly comforted by having recaptured my tarot cards when Gina wasn’t looking. So Lily was a fake…and perhaps Astrid was just off? Surely psychics had bad days. The bottom line was, it was hard to accuse a psychic of being wrong, because until you dropped dead there could still be a chance they’d be right. For all we knew, Astrid was picking up on events that would occur in Gina’s life years later. Timing, I’d learned, was the most difficult aspect of a prediction to get right. Of course, this way of thinking was exactly why I was snared in the psychic trap; it essentially strung me along indefinitely.

  I needed the opinions of others who believed, so the second I got home, I pored through the feedback on Psychicdom. Some user names I recognized, people who rated and left feedback for just about every psychic they’d spoken to, which, by the way, was a lot. Perfect. I figured, they’re addicts like me, psychic connoisseurs.

  The first thing I noticed was that these callers now seemed miffed. For instance, KatyKate922, who used to leave glowing feedback for Erlin and many other psychics—all of her comments interspersed with smiley faces and LOLs—seemed to be…well…possessed. I wondered what the hell her problem was, and then found one particular rant/feedback concerning Erlin that seemed to convey what was on her mind.

  You’ve LIED to me. How much have I paid you? And for WHAT?! For WHAT, I ASK YOU? You are a SCAM! For the last three months you’ve had me waiting for him to dump his girlfriend, and you know what? He hasn’t! I’m still waiting! You told me we’d be together by Thanksgiving, but T-Day’s over and I just found out he’s taking her on a cruise to Mexico!! To what, break up with her? I THINK NOT. People don’t go on cruises to dump people! Once more I will be alone and BROKE on Christmas while the man you said I’d be with is dancing on the deck of some ship I HOPE SINKS with his GIRLFRIEND. Have fun counting MY money, you FAKE!!

  Geez, I thought. She’d only been waiting three months for this prediction to come true, and she was this angry? Talk about overreacting. Three months is nothing. Hell, I’d been waiting for some predictions to come true for years!

  I paused.

  Years. I had been waiting for years.

  When a belief system starts to crumble, it’s like being thrown off a raft. You hit the water, there’s a shuddering chill, and then there are choices to be made, directions to go. But at first? At first there’s a whole hell of a lot of panic.

  That was me. Flailing in the water, trying to figure out what to cling to if not my belief in predictions. I didn’t know how to face the unknown. I didn’t know how
to deal with uncertainty. I didn’t know how to surrender control. For years, if I was confused, I called for an answer. If I was scared, I called for comfort. If I was nervous about rounding a corner, I made a phone call to find out what was on the other side.

  But now I had nothing. Without my readings, I had only myself.

  The next few days were spent reading through pages and pages of notes on past predictions. I don’t know what I was looking for. To believe again? To find proof that things had come true, that there was still something in which to rest my faith?

  Sure, sometimes psychics were eerily accurate, but it was sinking in that they weren’t reliable. To anyone else this might have seemed obvious, but to me the realization was as shocking as when a friend told me that no, the national anthem did not begin with “Jose, can you see.” (In my defense, I was an immigrant, and from an immigrant’s point of view this interpretation makes perfect sense.)

  But this realization, that psychics weren’t reliable, really hit home once the government got involved. Okay, it’s not nearly as exciting as it sounds. My mother, in a very sweet attempt to understand what the hell her seemingly intelligent daughter was going through, ended up doing some research online. With happiness she e-mailed me an article she’d found, one she thought would make me feel better. With horror, I read it. It seemed that our own government had spent around twenty million dollars employing psychics as part of some Pentagon defense intelligence program. However, and here’s where the horror kicked in, they scrapped the program when they finally realized that the psychics were accurate only around 25 percent of the time. Twenty-five percent! That’s practically the same, I figured, as an educated guess! Maybe it was even worse than an educated guess? I had no idea. All I knew was that these government psychics must have come very highly recommended. Their feedback must have been stellar if they’d been handpicked by the Pentagon. And yet, if they had only a 25 percent accuracy rating, what did that say about the psychics at Psychicdom?

  Still, even with this knowledge, I couldn’t stop calling. I knew psychics weren’t reliable, I knew they weren’t the answer, but I simply couldn’t stop calling. Only twice a week now, Thursdays and Saturdays, but I could not give up those calls. They were my treats for having endured all the other days as a phoneless questioning overwrought mess. Knowing Thursday was approaching helped me make it through Tuesday, and lent me relief and comfort on Wednesday, similar to if I’d known I was nearing a picnic at the top of a mountain, the thought lightening each grueling uphill step.

  I knew it wasn’t right, the obsessive calling and checking of e-mails, and yet I couldn’t stop. I had no idea how to fix myself, but I knew I wasn’t getting the job done on my own. It was time to turn myself over to a professional. Not commit myself, of course, but make an appointment with the psychotherapist I’d seen once or twice over the years. She wasn’t cheap, and her swank office proved it, but I’d liked her and didn’t really have the energy or funds to audition new doctors. Though really, what was I talking about, not thinking I had the money? Money seemed to emerge from cracks in the floor when I needed to call psychics. And when I broke it down, my expensive psychotherapist was about two dollars a minute. Erlin was at least double that.

  Before I could think twice, I counted up what was left of my paycheck and made the call. There. Appointment set, I felt much better. Almost like I needed a treat for being so healthy. Granted it was only Monday, but really, what was the harm of one more reading?

  10

  Internet Warfare

  YOU KNOW YOU LOOK BAD WHEN A THERAPIST—A person trained in disguising alarm—gasps upon seeing you. I guess I still resembled a junkie, and not of psychics, but of actual hard-core drugs. This was something I’d not been aware of. I thought I’d gotten past that stage. Sure, I still couldn’t keep food down, wasn’t sleeping properly, and was an emotionally frenzied and fragmented mess, but no one had said I looked bad. Then again, the only people who ever saw me were my Beverly Hills employer and the employees on Rodeo Drive, and in all likelihood my gaunt, skinny, unhealthy appearance made me look just like any other Hollywood starlet after a night out. To them there was nothing shocking about my appearance. In fact, it probably made me look successful.

  Oh, and I saw Gina as well, but when she told me I looked really thin, it had actually sounded like a compliment, and she’d said it with a certain amount of longing, perhaps the residue of her anorexic high school days. After all, this is the girl who claimed life would be perfect if only scientists could invent and breed a cute and adorable tapeworm, the perfect pet who would accompany you everywhere and allow you to eat anything and everything. Seriously, the girl was twisted, and I really should’ve known she wasn’t a proper judge.

  In my therapist’s professional eyes I didn’t look good. And, I must say, I was shocked to see my therapist. Whereas the last time I’d seen her—years before, during a spell of couples’ counseling with an ex who was actually willing to work on things—she’d had short brown sophisticated hair, now she had long gorgeous fiery red hair, perfectly styled in that bed-head sort of way. I also noticed eyeliner, applied in a fashion I myself still had trouble with. What the hell? My therapist was hot.

  I soon identified what had sparked the transformation. She was, it turned out, the resident therapist on a popular reality show. Not only was my therapist now better looking than I was, but she was on a TV show and I wasn’t.

  I bypassed the sofa and went straight to the leather club chair in the corner. With the news of my therapist’s acting career, it was as if a trapdoor had opened up and dropped me into an even lower level of rock bottom. Where I now dwelled was a musty cavern with no light and no way out, yet in this cavern were two big projection screens, the first one cheerfully playing montages of my predicted life—images of love and happiness and roles on hit TV series—and the other one slowly and excruciatingly playing my real life—images of a frightening-looking girl clutching a phone, essentially paying for hope in a tornado-swept room, or scraping the dregs of a jar of apricot jam for dinner. The latter montage stopped with a shot of me in my therapist’s office, realizing that not only did she put me to shame looks-wise, but she also had an acting career, while I spent my days searching for discontinued pink nail polish and quilted Gucci dog coats. Then the film looped back around and the fun started all over.

  “All right,” Olivia said, forced to sit on the couch. “Tell me what’s going on. It’s been a while since we’ve seen each other.”

  In a few sentences I recapped the chain of boyfriends since the one who’d accompanied me to couples’ therapy. The fact that I was able to just flippantly list them off like that was both intensely disturbing and enormously comforting: Each relationship had felt monumental at the time, their demises so injurious that I’d questioned whether I’d ever be able to love again. And yet there I was, feeling nothing as I reduced them to a few select words. Would I one day be able to do that with Wilhelm? To laughingly refer to him as “that bizarre metrosexual German sous-chef I once dated”? God, I hoped so. What a truly glorious day that would be.

  After bringing Olivia up to speed with my love life, I mentioned my issues with psychics and a certain ex’s e-mails.

  “Describe to me a typical day for Sarah. You wake up, and then what?”

  “When it was bad, or now?”

  “Whichever you feel you should tell me.”

  Ah, there we go. Typical infuriating therapist banter. “Okay, well, I guess I’ll tell you about when it was bad, because now I’m only calling psychics twice a week, on Thursdays and Saturdays, which is pretty normal.”

  At that, I noticed one of her eyebrows twitch.

  “Right. I said that wrong. Maybe not normal, but a huge improvement. Okay. So here it goes, when it was bad.” I rattled off my daily events: the e-mails, the translations, the tarot cards that had crept back into my life with arthritis-inducing fury, the intensive split-end cutting, the crying, and, who could forget, the psychics.
“Oh, and I have a job working for this rich woman, so I do get out of the house, which is good.” I smiled proudly, as if that one little factor made all the difference, then added, “Sometimes I do online tarot card readings at work. But only the free ones.”

  Olivia didn’t look shocked at all. On the contrary, she was nodding as if this were typical for many people. With a smile, I watched as she made one more little note on the pad of paper in her lap, then looked up at me and said, “You need to be in intensive therapy.”

  My smile disappeared. Shit. That was so not what I wanted to hear.

  “I can recommend one of my associates who works on a sliding scale. But in the meantime, I highly recommend that you join a twelve-step program.”

  My brain was reeling. I’d gone there to be cured, but had basically just been told I’d be the way I was forever. My brain was reeling. I’d gone there to be cured, but had basically just been told I’d be this way forever. Intensive therapy? And twelve steps?! Was she kidding? I didn’t have time for twelve steps. I need one step. One! No, no, no, no, no, no…

  I took a deep breath. I needed to communicate this with my therapist. I needed to be clear and rational, needed to make her respect me and my concerns. I opened my mouth, but what came out was the “No, no, no, no, no” I’d thought had been confined to my head.

  “Sarah? Tell me what you’re thinking.”

  Okay, here it goes. Be calm. Be cool. Don’t frighten the therapist.

  “It’s just that I don’t have time for intensive therapy. I’m a mess now. And twelve steps? Are you kidding me?” Uh-oh. I felt the roll I was on and knew I was about to fall victim to the building momentum. “Not only are there eleven steps too many, but which twelve-step program do you want me to join? Because I looked. Believe it or not, I looked. If I were lucky enough to be addicted to heroin, I’d be at a meeting right now, but I’m not! I’m addicted to psychics. And though there are a million twelve-step programs out there, they are for everything else. Like Messies Anonymous? Yeah, you should see my apartment; they’d welcome me with open arms. Or Debtors Anonymous; I bet my thirty grand of debt would buy me a seat in that meeting. Or what about Love Addicts Anonymous? I want love, so maybe that is me, but then of course that brings us to Sex Addicts Anonymous, which also could be me, because my stupid ex-boyfriend wouldn’t have sex with me, so I obsessed over it, so maybe I am a sex addict now and maybe we should add that to my list of dysfunctions, but I’m telling you right now that if you put me in that meeting and there’s some guy who just wants to have sex with me, I’m going to fall in love with him, and I honestly don’t think that’s good for me right now, and after all that, you know what? I’d still be addicted to psychics!”