The Reluctant Psychic

by Suzan Saxman

  I had memories, too, of other lives lived there. Sometimes I’d awaken at night to the sound of sirens and the high-pitched keening of what I later found out were doodlebugs, the bombs dropped on London during the Blitz. I knew that once, long before, I’d lived in an attic in London and that I’d been cold and hungry most of the time. How did I know these were memories of past lives and not just an overactive imagination?

  How do you know your own memories are real? Can you tell the difference between a memory and a daydream?

  What is imagination anyway? A lot of people think you can create something out of nothing inside your head, and yet I’ve come to believe that a lot of imagination stems from being able to tune in to other lives, other lifetimes, and other dimensions. We’re not making things up; we’re experiencing things that are real. We’re like Harry Potter finding himself inside Voldemort’s head.

  I started traveling to England in what I called, for myself—because I didn’t tell anyone about this—instant dreams. I’d be out shopping with my mother and suddenly I would disappear. I would look like I was there, but I wasn’t. I was roaming the streets of London, checking out the miniskirts, the plastic earrings, the Mary Quant makeup on the girls. Sometimes I visited a boy who went to a British public school. I could see all the students in their uniforms walking to classes. When Jack was making a movie, I found I could transport myself to the studio and see him. Years later, he would confirm that all I had seen had actually happened. My instant daydreams were real. I was inside of other people’s memories and experiences. When I finally went to London, I knew how to get around effortlessly because I’d been there so often.

  A woman I did a reading for years later told me that she had been in therapy for three years when her psychologist finally told her that she had been dreaming about his life in ways that had completely unnerved him. Twins who grow up apart meet each other in adulthood wearing the same outfit or discover that they both broke their legs in eighth grade. Writers wake up in the middle of the night with whole novels in their head. Who’s to say they haven’t been sharing memories and experiences?

  We think our skulls are fortresses around our minds, but consciousness is much more free and loose than people realize. I think a lot of writers are capable of finding their way into other people’s minds. They’re mediums and channelers, too. In the late eighties when I met Marion Zimmer Bradley, the author of The Mists of Avalon, a feminist rewrite of the Arthurian legends, I was stunned to find that the author of this epic, visionary book was a complete and total potato. Solid and mannish, she didn’t feel like she had any creativity in her at all. No way did she imagine those characters and that reality. She saw it; she channeled it. But she never did it again, and you know that if you’ve read any of her other books.

  One of the framed pictures in my childhood bedroom was of Dickens sleeping, surrounded by tiny pictures of the hundreds of characters that he had created. He was tuning in. People used to know that artists and poets were channelers, and because of my psychic abilities, I know that they still are. When I saw the movie Hereafter, about the psychic George Anderson, I was not surprised to find out that he, too, had an obsession with Dickens and knew about that picture.

  Ordinary people dismiss their daydreams and their experiences of déjà vu, whereas more-aware people will arrive in a new town and realize that it’s familiar because they’ve visited it while they are sleeping. Truly crazy people I’ve tried to do readings for seem to be flooded by other people’s perceptions and memories. They literally forget who they are in the cascade of other sensations. There’s too much electricity crackling around them for me to see what’s going on just for them.

  I often worried that I was crazy, but I never lost myself in my adventures. The little old woman inside of me kept me on a short leash and wouldn’t let me fly away forever. She told me who I was, what reality was, and let me know that I was only visiting.

  But I never traveled anywhere in my instant dreams but to England. I didn’t hop on down to Florida to visit Steve. I didn’t drift away to some tropical island paradise. I went to Carnegie Street. I walked along the Thames. I went to Eton.

  That little old lady inside of me wanted to go home. And home was in England with Jack Wild.

  A man in the middle of a contentious divorce came in to see me, but I didn’t think he and his wife were actually going to split up.

  “I don’t see you in court. I don’t see you apart from your wife. I don’t see any more fighting between the two of you.”

  “Really? Really?” The man was soft-spoken and gentle and he was barely speaking above a whisper. “How can that be? The lawyers are almost done with the agreement.”

  “It’s not going to happen,” I said. “I see some kind of anguish around you, but it’s not part of you. And I don’t see you divorced.”

  “I can’t tell you what a relief that is. But how is it going to happen?”

  “I don’t know, but it is.” But I also had to share with him something strange that was coming through. “In seven years you are going to have sole custody of your daughter.”

  “How can that be if I don’t get divorced?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t. But that’s what I see.”

  A week later, the man’s wife came in to see me. She was visibly shaken. After our appointment, her husband had told her what I had said, and she had mocked him. She was getting a divorce and that was that. It didn’t matter what some psychic had said. Their marriage was over.

  “But it wasn’t.” She began to cry. “You were right.”

  It took her a long time to calm down and tell me what had happened. Her husband had gone on a routine business trip a few days after I’d met with him. He’d flown with a friend in a small airplane and it had crashed. They both had been killed.

  “I saw that he was happy, though,” I told his wife. “I didn’t see pain or tragedy in his cards, just peace.”

  “Is he at peace?”

  “He is.”

  I don’t know why I hadn’t seen him dead, except I feel like there is something so sacred about the moment of death that I’m not supposed to witness it.

  I didn’t see his wife for seven more years. She returned all those years later to tell me that her daughter had just died of leukemia. “You were right about that, too,” she said. “He has sole custody of her now.”

  6

  There Goes the Neighborhood

  I got kicked out of Catholic school at the end of tenth grade. My grades were fine, but I had a reputation as a troublemaker. Then I got accused by some of the field hockey–playing girls of “being too close” to another girl, the implication being that we were “unnatural,” a Catholic school euphemism for being gay. The girl and I were just acquaintances, we weren’t even real friends, but the nuns had wanted to get rid of me for a long time.

  My mother was appalled that I’d been expelled. “You’ve ruined your life. Ruined it. That was such a nice school.”

  But I didn’t care one bit. I wasn’t leaving behind any friends. There weren’t any teachers I was going to miss. And now I’d actually be able to meet some real teenage boys for a change.

  I wasn’t used to having them around, though, and I was very shy at the public high school in Summit, New Jersey. I dressed horribly. I couldn’t see. My hair hung down over my face. But there was a drama teacher who literally saved my life. He invited me to be in the after-school plays and helped me begin to speak up for myself a little. He was gay, I’m sure of it, and very kind.

  I ended up befriending a girl in his class who was even more unpopular than I was.

  Maya was a mess of a person, a total pathetic pigpen who smelled like chicken soup and whatever strange Greek dish she’d brought for lunch. We’d sit down at a table in the cafeteria and everyone in the nearby vicinity would scatter. She was also incredibly frustrating to talk to and so annoying that even I wanted to slap her sometimes. I found myself sympathizing with the school bullies fo
r a change, which tells you something. But I didn’t. Because Maya had a pen pal in England.

  “You’ve got to go visit her,” I urged Maya.

  “I don’t know,” whined Maya. “What if she doesn’t like me?”

  “Don’t you want to visit her? We could stay with her family.” I would have gone to England with King Kong himself, who honestly might have been more fun than Maya.

  “We?”

  “Yeah, I’ll come with you. That’ll make it less scary, right?”

  “Maybe,” said Maya hesitantly.

  “It will,” I said. “It will be great. On our own in England, you and me.”

  So I got her to write to her pen pal, and we basically invited ourselves over for a monthlong visit right after we graduated from high school.

  It was soon after we heard back from her pen pal’s mother confirming our plans that the man in the black hat returned. I’d stopped sleeping with my mother when I became a teenager, but I hadn’t seen him in years. Now every night he haunted my bedroom again. His hair was long and white, and sometimes fire crackled out of his blank eyes. I dreamed he was on a horse riding towards me, but I had a long spear now and was able to impale him and make him disappear. The next night he was back.

  Children came to me, too, in my dreams. One of them had burns down the whole side of her face. Another I saw again and again. He was a little boy with brown eyes. Years later I would discover that he was my son, Gavin. But all I could feel then was that these children wanted me to come to England. It was urgent.

  One night not long before Maya and I left, I woke up from a deep sleep to see a thick, smoky coil twining out of my body, like a spider’s web, like an etheric umbilical cord. I tried to touch it, but I couldn’t.

  What the fuck is this? I thought. Am I dying?

  I looked around my room and I could see my Jack Wild albums on my bureau, my posters on the wall, my Dickens novels in the bookcase. I was in my room. But with that thought came the revelation that I wasn’t actually touching the bed. I was experiencing myself hovering above my own body—connected to it but not confined by it. I didn’t know anything about astral traveling at that point, and I was terrified.

  I know now that this is what happens at death; the etheric body separates from the physical body. It’s also what happens when we astral travel. Heading to England was stirring me up spiritually.

  I’d never been to a sleepover; I’d never gone to camp; I’d never gone anywhere by myself. My parents couldn’t believe I was going on my own to England. But I was. I had to and they let me go. I had a little money from my aunts for graduation and I was going to liberate myself.

  I wasn’t scared on the airplane. I wasn’t scared about flying to a foreign country or being away from my family for the first time in my life. I was delighted. I was thrilled. I was ecstatic, even. But Maya began crying almost as soon as we’d left the ground. She cried like some kind of desperate dormouse, homesick and sad. We took a taxi all the way from Heathrow to her pen pal’s family, the Frumptons, in Surrey and eventually pulled up in front of a small thatched cottage surrounded by gardens. I felt like I was in a Disney movie; everything was enchanted. I was sure someone was going to burst into song and then Mary Poppins would appear.

  Instead, there were the Frumptons, all lined up in a row and waiting for us when we arrived.

  They were, to a one, red haired, rotund, and stern. Alice was Maya’s pen pal, and she barely smiled when we got out of the taxi.

  Aside from Alice, there were three other little Frumptons and Mrs. Frumpton. There was no Mr. Frumpton.

  Immediately after she met me, Mrs. Frumpton gave me a look. Her eyes bored into me. All throughout dinner she stared at me without saying anything.

  It was the most repulsive meal I have ever eaten.

  Everyone else had fish-and-chips, but because I was a vegetarian, they got me a pineapple fritter. Imagine slices of pineapple deep-fried in fish batter. I tried to eat it, I really did, and to smile, but I’m sure I was making these Elvis-like grimaces instead. I tried to break the fritter apart and drop bits of it into the potted plants behind me. It was the worst thing I’ve ever eaten in my life. I was sure that was why Mrs. Frumpton was staring at me. I was sure she thought I had terrible manners.

  But even with the fritter and this large, pasty woman checking me out, I was still ecstatically happy. I was staying in a thatched cottage in a little old-fashioned village in England, and the French doors of the guest room where Maya and I were sleeping opened up to a garden filled with roses and other flowers.

  I barely slept that night, I was so excited.

  The next morning when I walked into the kitchen, though, I knew something was up. In a voice that was almost completely without expression, Mrs. Frumpton said to me, “I’ve told the vicar that you’ve come.”

  “Oh, that’s nice,” I answered, trying to be polite.

  “I want you to meet him.”

  I smiled. “Sure. Why?”

  “Because you have the sight.”

  “The what?”

  “The sight. You’re a sensitive, aren’t you?”

  I’d never heard either of these words used this way before. Still, I knew what she was talking about. I knew she meant I was sensitive to the spiritual world. I could see things. But I’d never had a word to describe myself other than crazy. I’d never thought of myself as talented or gifted or anything but shameful or possibly insane. I thought of my mother whispering to my sister and giving me furtive looks out of the corner of her eye. Whatever I could do was embarrassing and frightening to her and there was no name for it. It was the skill that must not be named. But this woman wanted to tell the vicar that I was … sensitive. A rush of unfamiliar pride was flowing through me. “You told the priest that I’m here and he wants to meet me?”

  “I work in a hospital cleaning up at night. I see things, too. You’re not the only one, young lady. I can see Death walking down the hall. I always know who’s going to die. You do, too. You have the sight.”

  In her gruff, granite-like way she said it respectfully. Okay, I hadn’t been a cheerleader in high school or starred in the musical, but I had the sight. That’s what it was. It was a gift. No one in my life up until now had directly acknowledged what I was and what I could do. Not my mother, who’d raised me. Not the priests and nuns, who supposedly knew about the spiritual world. Not even my aunt Mary, who clearly was aware of at least some of my abilities. None of them had been able to explain what was happening to me. They had all left me to feel dirty and ashamed and worried that at any moment someone was going to cart me off to a padded room. But this heavy, plodding English cleaning woman had seen how I was special the moment she had met me and swept away an entire lifetime of worry about what I was. I wanted to wrap my arms around Mrs. Frumpton and give her a grateful hug, but Mrs. Frumpton didn’t seem like a hugger. But it didn’t matter. It felt like the universe had opened her arms to hold me.

  I kept saying the words over and over to myself. “I am a sensitive and I have the sight.”

  A few moments later, Mrs. Frumpton had me on the phone with the vicar and he was proposing that I go with him to an exorcism.

  “No, I don’t think so,” I said, startled. It was all happening a little too fast. It was one thing to be identified as a sensitive, but another altogether to suddenly have to start performing as one. I couldn’t help but think this was all a little insane. I was eighteen years old and I was finally in England. But I wanted to go to London. I wanted to go to the zoo. I wanted to walk on cobblestone streets and dance in clubs. I had not been imagining going to an exorcism, not ever, really, and certainly not within twenty-four hours of arriving in a foreign country. Besides, it felt a little creepy to go in the car with some man I didn’t know. I politely explained that I didn’t think I could make it. “I have a friend with me,” I said.

  Maya had just come into the kitchen and was crying again.

  But the vicar wouldn’t get off the
phone. He started telling me about a local housing development that a number of people had told him might be haunted. “I think there are ghosts there and I’d like a second opinion.”

  I felt an odd mixture of confidence and disorientation. “You want me to go there and tell you what I see?”

  “Exactly!” said the vicar. “It would be a marvelous help if you can spare the time.”

  Our first day in England, Maya and I didn’t visit a castle or eat lunch in a pub. Instead, Mrs. Frumpton wrote down the name of the project on a piece of paper and sent us out with directions on how to find it and orders to talk to families about what was going on there. “You need to go there today,” she told me, completely ignoring Maya. “It’ll be a big help to the vicar if you can confirm if it’s haunted or not.”

  I sighed, because it didn’t seem like I had a choice. “Okay, I’ll go investigate this.”

  Maya was really scared now. I’d never talked to her about any of my visions or psychic experiences, and she didn’t have a clue what was happening. Besides, I was getting all the attention, and she didn’t like that one bit. I have to admit that I was feeling very important and lording it over her. After all, I was a sensitive. She cried some more.

  We found ourselves walking from house to house in this development cheerfully called Greyswell Circle. July in England was a Technicolor explosion of flowers, but there were no gardens in front of the flat-roofed low-income buildings. Greyswell Circle was gray. Gray cement, gray asphalt, gray dirt pocked with gray grass, and gray faces. As hot as it was, Maya and I both shivered and zipped up our jackets.

  Full of importance about the first real job I’d ever had in my life, I’d knock on the doors of tired-looking council houses and announce, “Hi, I’m Suzan from New Jersey and the vicar at St. Andrew’s asked me to come by and talk to you about anything unusual you might have been experiencing. I’m a sensitive and the vicar wants me to talk to you about spirits.”