The Reluctant Psychic

by Suzan Saxman

  Our first Christmas together, David and I drove back to New Jersey. The holidays were about being with family, after all. But when I arrived at my mother’s, she stood in the doorway and wouldn’t let us in.

  “What are you doing here?” she said. “You’ve got your own family now. You’re married.”

  “It’s Christmas.” I could already feel my heart starting to break.

  My mother shrugged. “I’m not letting you sleep with that man in my house.”

  “But he’s my husband!”

  She shut the door in my face.

  I was hysterical. I had brought presents for everyone. David and I went to church, and we both cried together through the midnight mass. Our families had completely rejected us.

  But when Daddy came down with cancer a year later, David and I moved back to New Jersey to be close to my parents. I’d grown up with them. I needed to be close even if my mother didn’t want me to be.

  The Bleekers had retired, and they gave me all of the remaining toys from the shop. David and I began selling them at yard sales. It was when we were coming back from one big flea market out in a rural part of New Jersey that we first passed the Church of the Mystic Light.

  It was a small, sweet wooden building that looked like an Episcopal church. But the name of the place intrigued us, so we stopped for a peek inside.

  The moment we saw the floor was painted with the signs of the zodiac, we were excited. The stained-glass windows showed scenes from all different religions—from Bahaism to Catholicism, Buddhism to Native American spirituality. The church was run by a married couple, Reverend Earle and Susan Hoskins, who were studying the ancient religion of Mithras but brought in speakers each Sunday for presentations on everything from Gnosticism to Tai Chi. It was a very open and inclusive place.

  David and I had been looking for a church and we both felt like this was it.

  David had been brought up Methodist and we’d been married in the Catholic Church, but neither of us felt much connection to mainstream Christianity. I had this hatred within me of the Popes, all of them, and of the Inquisition. It was more than having had to endure a few mean nuns as a kid; it was something else and I knew it. Sometimes I had visions of myself being burned in front of a huge cathedral, and I was pretty sure the Church had killed me. I used to joke with David that if I died, I didn’t want to be cremated, I’d been turned into ash too many times before. I’ve never understood why people have such a hard time understanding and living the teachings of Jesus, but they do. Especially, it seems to me, most of the Popes.

  Susan and Earle were very compelling people. Earle did some kind of computer work during the week and would give sermons on Sundays drawing on themes and ideas from world religions. He was very into Mithras and Gnosticism. We’d all sit in a circle and talk about it together afterwards. It was like Father Bob’s, only there were whole families of all ages coming together to investigate spiritual topics. It was the early eighties and the New Age was in full swing. Susan was a beautiful middle-aged woman who also happened to be psychic. Early on, when David and I started going to the church, she held a séance that I attended.

  It’s surprising, I know, but I always go into these kinds of experiences with a fair amount of skepticism. You’d think, given what I’ve seen, I’d believe anything. But I don’t. Still, I was amazed when Susan’s head dropped back during the séance and she began speaking in an Austrian accent. She raised up her head and looked directly at me. “I am Agatha,” she said.

  My mother’s mother.

  Unlike my Transylvanian grandmother, Agatha had been a fearful, anxious woman all of her life. I was surprised she’d shown up.

  “You must return to the old ways,” she said to me.

  It was unnerving.

  She’d been a very conventional Catholic, but I knew that’s not what she was talking about. My grandmother was talking about those visions I’d had of a time before Christianity. After the séance, I confided in a much older cousin of mine who had known my grandmother better than I had. My cousin told me that my mother’s mother had been a very different woman than I’d always imagined. Apparently she was able to heal with her hands and knew a great deal about herbal medicine. She was very secretive about it, but she would say protective spells around the house. Her daughters even thought she was witchy. Maybe this was what my aunt Mary had recognized in me. Maybe this was what had frightened my mother.

  My mother refused to talk about any of this with me.

  It made me so angry that this woman had hidden who and what she was until she was dead, and I resolved at that moment to listen to her and return to the old ways. I wasn’t going to be ashamed of what I could do. I wasn’t going to hide my talents and isolate myself. My Transylvanian grandmother had been beaten by her husband for her psychic powers. My mother’s mother had been afraid of her own power and goodness. But I was going to honor them both by being who and what I really was.

  Susan offered classes in the Psychic Arts, which David and I began attending together. I learned about chakras and chi and trance states and hands-on healing and prana energy and the Tarot. The strange thing was, no matter what Susan talked about, I already felt like I knew what it was before she described it. Sometimes when I’m doing readings I’ll be given information. “Put salt around your bed and the nightmares will stop.” “An amethyst crystal in your pocket will shift your energy.” I’m not remembering something I’ve learned. The information just flows through me. It’s there when I need it, but I don’t have any access to it when I don’t.

  Perhaps that’s why I didn’t feel the need to believe everything I heard. David was completely gung ho about the Church of the Mystic Light, as were a lot of the other people in the congregation. It was a kind and creative place. But something essential was missing, although even now I can’t tell you what it was. Maybe it was that everybody wanted so hard to believe in something. I never felt like I had to believe in anything, and that group-think mentality always unnerved me. Once you start believing in one set of ideas, you stop seeing a whole other reality.

  A lot of our SCA friends joined the church, including Richard. Susan wrote a play about King Arthur, and cast Richard in the lead and herself as the Lady of the Lake. I was Guinevere, which delighted Richard and David, who was Galahad. We all took it very seriously and immersed ourselves in the Arthurian legends. And, for a change, I was the star of the play. I was beautiful. I was powerful. I reveled in it all.

  Nowhere did I feel this more than in the psychic fairs that Susan held at the church. When I first began participating, all the psychics would sit in a circle around the signs of the zodiac on the floor. There were a lot of big, fat mediums. They were huge women. I think they were so heavy because they needed their weight to keep them close to the earth. Not me, though. I was tiny and lost in the ether.

  Quickly it became clear that I was a different kind of psychic from the others—different even from Susan—and I became very popular. I began sitting in the middle of the circle. Lines of people would be waiting to talk to me. The other psychics would be flipping through paperbacks with nothing to do. It was all very intoxicating.

  This was bigger than anything I’d ever imagined for myself. There was now a waiting list to come and see me. People were stopping by the church hoping to get a reading from me. Word was getting out about what I could do. I felt powerful. I felt like every time I walked in the room people would turn to look at me, not with disdain or contempt like they had when I was in school, but with awe.

  I stopped dressing like a medieval princess and fashioned myself into a sorceress. I wanted to be noticed. Every day I’d check the list of people waiting for readings. Ten people. Twenty people. Thirty people on the waiting list. Everyone wanted to see me. I was a celebrity.

  My mother heard about me from someone who’d seen me, and one day she came to the fair to see me in action. The moment she walked into the room, I shriveled inside. She made me feel like a nervous, stutteri
ng child. My confidence evaporated. I was still able to do readings in her presence somehow, but I mistrusted what I said. I fumbled. I apologized for myself.

  I think she was shocked to see that I was the star of the show. She couldn’t figure out why I was so popular. “It’s because I’m real, Mommy,” I told her. “I can really do this.” But she didn’t understand that. She couldn’t understand that I was special.

  Still, I saw her watching the line of people waiting to talk to me, and I heard her say, “That’s my daughter doing the readings.”

  Yet any pride she had in me was because she was trying to fit in with the people around her. She was just copying the behavior and attitudes of the other people in the room, but she wasn’t really interested in understanding what I was doing.

  “My daughter reads Tarot cards,” she would say, always rhyming Tarot with carrot no matter how many times I corrected her. And I didn’t read cards anyway. That’s not what I did. I was doing something else altogether, and when I tried to explain it to her she just shut down.

  I shared the books I was reading on the ancient goddesses and spirituality, but she just tossed them aside. I gave her books on animal spirits, but she never opened them. Any pride she expressed publically was a kind of camouflage she threw off when she was alone with me.

  There was a program that listed all of the biographies of the psychics, and at the end of the day my mother told me that she thought it was terrible that I had said I was of Gypsy descent.

  “It’s so low class,” she said, shaking her head.

  “But it’s true. Steve’s mother was from Transylvania, and she said that her grandmother—”

  My mother sighed. “You don’t want to have anything to do with those people. You shouldn’t say that.”

  “What difference does it make?” I said finally. “They’re coming to me for readings, aren’t they?”

  Those were busy years, but when I look back at them, I remember almost nothing with any clarity. David will remind me of a mystery play we did together, or talk about the old Cherokee chief who came to chant with us, and I’ll kind of know what he’s talking about, but it’s really a blur, like a half-forgotten dream. I was doing so many readings, and I didn’t have any idea how powerful that was. I simply wasn’t there a lot of the time. I was gone so I could be an open channel, so I don’t have many memories of those years.

  Someone took an instant photo of me during that time, and right where my third eye should be there was a blank hole. I was open all the time. It was like being blackout drunk to do that many readings every day, and I stopped feeling responsible for what I said and did.

  I was very young still, only in my twenties, and I didn’t realize yet what a danger that kind of arrogance could be.

  I knew he was a corrections officer the moment he walked into the room and hunkered down in the chair opposite me. And he hadn’t even said a word when I knew why he had really come to see me.

  “You want to kill your wife, don’t you?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  “You think you’re going to get away with it.” He was making my skin crawl.

  “I just came here to find out if that bitch is cheating on me. Is she cheating on me? Can you tell me that? That’s what I want to know.”

  “Get out of here,” I said, standing up. “Right now. And let me tell you one other thing I know. If you do kill her? You won’t get away with it. You’ll go to jail. They’ll lock you up. And the other prisoners will kill you. Get out of here right now.”

  I don’t know if I saved his wife’s life. But I tried.

  10

  The Sword in the Horse

  Erik Jasper showed up at the Church of the Mystic Light to sell crystals. He was tall and thin, with long black hair and a long black beard. He wore lots of silver rings on his fingers and lined his dark eyes to make them look darker. It was as if he’d stepped out of the Russian Court at the turn of the last century. He radiated an intense energy that reminded me of Rasputin. Erik’s very presence stirred me up and gave me butterflies. I’d never felt this nervous around a man before. He radiated chaos and danger and power and I found him both attractive and repulsive.

  Until that moment, my psychic powers had only brought me into greater light. They had led me to a marriage with a kind man, to the gentle folk of the SCA get-togethers, to toys, to yard sales and flea markets, to a kind of regular life. I had never explored the dark side of what I might be able to see with my abilities.

  Erik said he had intuitive powers and started to do readings at our small psychic fairs. I don’t think he was a real psychic, but he had a talent for saying things that unnerved people and upset them. He could tap into their emotional vulnerabilities. He could stare at people and freak them out. People often walked away from him crying or furious. Sometimes Erik even yelled at them and called them names when he was doing readings. He got right up in their faces.

  I could feel him staring at me while I did my sessions. It disarmed me the way he studied me, as if he knew me in a way that I didn’t know myself.

  At the end of the day, he would come over to talk to me and tell me about the magician Alistair Crowley and his philosophy of “do what thou wilt.” Erik told me that Crowley had been a follower of the Order of the Golden Dawn, a secret society in early twentieth-century England that was interested in spiritualism, reincarnation, and alchemy. He said they took drugs to explore their minds. He grinned and told me about their orgies. For people like us, he seemed to say, there was a different kind of morality.

  I wasn’t scared of him, but he was titillating. He was so different from my sweet and gentle David, so dark and secretive. Erik felt lecherous and seductive and forbidden. He was a Pandora’s box of secrets—and he was inviting me to find out what was inside. The women clustered around him, the way they always do around the bad boys, but he only had eyes for me.

  David was an angel, but the sad truth of the matter is that the angels are never as sexy as the devils.

  Erik ignited something in me. He made me believe there were whole realms of power I hadn’t tapped into that, at last, I was going to discover with him. Those old visions of dancing naked around a fire returned, and I wanted to go on a wild ride through the forest with the horned god of Celtic mythology, Herne. I was sure I had found him at last. He told me I was his goddess and bought me lingerie from Victoria’s Secret. He told me that he was the only one who truly understood me spiritually and the only one who could truly love me.

  He had a store called The Spear of Destiny and he invited me to visit, to see if I wanted to do readings there. “You could make a lot of money,” he told me, winking. “If you went big-time.”

  He called it a metaphysical shop, as if it was some kind of spiritual destination, but I should have known right away that there was danger there. He’d had it only a few months before we met, but the store looked like it had been there for five hundred years. It was dusty and dirty. When you work with crystals, you have to keep them clean, but Erik let everything—the crystals, the jewelry, the books—become covered in dirt. And I became one of those tarnished things.

  Behind that store was a lake, and not once in the three years I was with Erik did I ever walk out the back door to look at it. It was as if I didn’t want to see myself reflected in the water. I couldn’t be close to nature and close to Erik at the same time. He smoked and everything around him smelled like nicotine.

  My mother adored him.

  It didn’t matter that he was married, had a kid, did LSD all the time, borrowed money from me, and was basically a degenerate. Nope. My mother took one look at him and thought that finally I had done something right by bringing him home. Finally, I had pleased Mommy. But I’m not sure I was pleasing myself. There was a part of me that was truly ashamed of my affair with Erik. I knew he was bad.

  My mother would invite Erik over to dinner behind David’s back. She flirted with Erik. She’d sweetly tell him, “Be kind to my
daughter. Take care of her.”

  “I love her,” he told my mother with a kind of overwhelming intensity.

  Meanwhile, I had started doing readings in all my spare time at his store to try to keep it afloat.

  The worst kind of people came to that store—criminals, drug dealers, the absolute dregs of New Jersey. One woman was always asking me if the cops were on to her yet. I ended up reading about another client in the police blotter in the newspaper.

  But it didn’t matter. I was wild for Erik and we couldn’t keep our hands off each other. We were always sneaking off to be together—to closets, the car, the store, everywhere but outside in the forest where you were supposed to be with the horned god.

  Erik used to tell me we were going to run away together to the ocean. But we never did. We never even went to the beach together. It was just bars and psychic fairs and his dirty shop.

  One day David and Richard, like the two knights they believed themselves to be, drove up to The Spear of Destiny and tried to physically pull me out of the store.

  “Suzan,” said David. “This isn’t a good place for you. Let’s get out of here.”

  “I’m going to stay here with Erik,” I announced. He had an almost magnetic hold over me.

  Erik laughed in their faces and took a drag on his cigarette. “Get outta here. She wants to stay.” Still, since Erik was married, I went home to David and to my cat, Fiona, every night. That’s probably the only thing that saved me—their patience, their loyalty. I was awful to David and kept telling him that sooner or later Erik was going to leave his wife and we were going to be together. I felt defiant and cruel. Erik said that I was his true wife and nothing else mattered, and I believed him. I blackened my hair and we looked like a match made in hell.

  Erik told me that the store was as much mine as his, but the only money it seemed to make all came from my readings. When he needed a couple of thousand dollars at one point to keep it going, I gave him all my savings.