The Reluctant Psychic

by Suzan Saxman

  The Lord of Death. Could this being I thought of my whole life as the embodiment of malice and evil only be the ferryman between this world and the next? Was that who I’d been afraid of all these years?

  But that would make sense. Terrifying as he was, he was only the navigator, the messenger, the guide. Of course I saw him. Only he didn’t just take souls away—he brought them back.

  I thought of the mothers, the boyfriends, the children, the snakes, the dogs, all the spirits who, through me, had come back over the years. Ankou had brought them to me. I always used to sense his presence in the mirrors when the voices would flow like a river towards me. I had seen him, too, the night of the London hurricane, but that was also the night I had seen the angel. Ankou had been her guide. Still, as a child I must have thought, like this girl, that his appearance signaled my own personal death. No wonder I’d been terrified. Death is terrifying. But would I have been so terrified if I had known even one of his many names?

  Was that why some people, my own mother among them, were so frightened of me? Because I commune with the dead? Most people don’t want to think about death at all. Our old people disappear into nursing homes; we’re not washing the corpses of our loved ones and laying their bodies out in our own parlors to pray over; we don’t dig their graves. Sometimes we don’t even give them graves. We’ve lost so many of the meaningful rituals connected to death, the dying, and the dead.

  The dead are right here. If I have one message that I want people to hear, that’s it. They aren’t scary, they aren’t ghouls, but they would like us to acknowledge their presence. The dead are everywhere.

  We try to pretend we’re not going to die. But we are. At any moment. And we should be ready to meet that moment. If I have learned anything over the years, it is that.

  We’re frightened of death, of the night, and of the darkness, of the earth, and of our graves. An image of the Black Madonna arose in my mind. She’d been taken out of the darkness and put in the sun and wrapped in pastel robes and made white and infertile and inaccessible … and lost her power. But like Ankou, she was originally a figure of darkness, the womb we come from and go back to in the end, which is also the beginning. Backwards and forwards. It’s not a one-way journey. If Ankou leads us to death, he also leads us to life.

  “Why don’t you come into the shop?” I invited this girl whom the hurricane had blown to my steps to answer a lifelong mystery. I stood up, collecting myself. I was light-headed but also strangely relieved, exuberant even. “You’re not going to die for a long time,” I said to the girl, because she wasn’t. “But together maybe we can figure out why you’re seeing this Ankou. I think children do because they are close to the spirit world. Writers and poets do, I’m sure of it, and musicians, at least when they let themselves be channels. And people like me do.… Let’s go to my reading room and I’ll tell you what I can see about you.”

  A new client called up to announce that she was canceling her appointment.

  “That’s fine. Do you want to reschedule?”

  “No.”

  “Okay then.”

  “All right, all right, I’ll be there.” I could hear her sighing heavily over the phone and muttering to herself.

  “Whatever,” I said. “I’m not filling your appointment time.”

  About an hour later, a very old women peeked through the door. She was dressed all in black and had three different crosses hanging from around her neck. She was clutching rosary beads. I was surprised she wasn’t dragging a huge wooden cross behind her. She looked like she was walking into a nest of vampires.

  “I came,” she said. She was visibly trembling.

  “Okay then.” I led her into my reading room and she sat down tentatively on the edge of her chair. She looked liked she might bolt at any moment.

  “Who is Joseph?” I asked her. “He’s standing right beside you.”

  “That’s my father!” She started to cry.

  “Everything’s all right, he wants you to know. You don’t have to be so frightened.”

  “I was afraid to come here. My daughter made the appointment for me, but I thought it might be evil. I go to church every Sunday, you know. This is against my religion. It’s forbidden.”

  “There are prophets in the Bible; people have visions; two psychics recognize Jesus when he’s a baby.”

  “Do they?”

  “Anna and Simeon. They’re the ones who welcome his mother at the temple.”

  “That’s right. They were psychics, weren’t they?”

  “They were.”

  “Is my father really next to me?”

  “He is. He’s always with you. He loves you very much. He wants you to know that.”

  “You’re not evil, are you? You’re really a very nice lady to show me that. Is there anything else I should know?”

  24

  After the Apocalypse

  All of my clients were getting so worked up about the Mayan Apocalypse. Was it going to happen? When? Was it really going to happen in 2012? Should they get canned goods or would canned goods be pointless? A small part of me couldn’t help wondering if the end might not be coming.

  You don’t need a psychic to tell you that the Earth is in a sorry state, and that technology is interfering with the natural order of things. We’ve become obsessed with our computers and our cell phones and our YouTube videos and our music and our buttons for this distraction and that amusement, and we’ve stopped paying attention to what’s happening right in front of us.

  The Earth has been raped, and not enough people are listening to her weeping. The birds hear it and they drop from the sky, filled with sadness. The whales and the dolphins hear it and beach themselves on the sand in despair. We have forgotten that everything in nature is divine. The animals we eat (or choose not to eat), the trees, the flowers, and especially the ground beneath our feet. People used to know that the mountains were goddesses, that the rivers were gods, that fairies were the souls of nature. There was a sense of divinity, not as something out there or up in the sky, but all around us and within us.

  The Earth is shuddering in horror these days. Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, fires—we all know what’s coming. I have this yearning for some kind of primordial dragon to erupt out of the ground and set the world right again. But I fear that nobody would respect it. They’d kill it or, even worse, ignore it. I feel cynical about the human race and all that we’ve destroyed.

  People come to me and so often they know in their hearts what I’m going to say, or their dead relatives are going to say, before I say it. Is some kind of big reckoning with nature coming? You tell me.

  Maybe that’s what the angel had meant when she had said I would be safe in Woodstock.

  Around that time I had a dream about Jack. He drove up to my shop in one of those psychedelic old sixties buses all covered in graffiti and Day-Glo paint. The bus was packed with souls I knew were dead, but Jack opened the door and leaned out to me. He was young again and had long hair down to his shoulders. “Don’t worry, but the end is coming!”

  “Jack! It’s you!” I cried.

  “Sure, it’s me,” he answered in his thick Cockney accent. “I just wanted to tell you, my little sister, that even though the end is coming, you are going to be all right.”

  I reached out and touched his hair. “You have hair like Jesus,” I said for some reason.

  “We’re all Jesus, little sister,” answered Jack. “We’re all the saviors of the world if only we knew it.”

  The door closed. He was happy. He was young.

  Just before the big end-time catastrophe that didn’t happen, I went down to Mexico with some girlfriends. People were making pilgrimages to pray to the Mayans or their spirits or something to save us. All of this talk about some final reckoning was filling me with doubts. What was I doing with my life anyway? Did it matter? So what if I could see dead people? What difference did it make in the world?

  I guess everyone has doubts about their
work from time to time. But this was bigger than that. I was feeling empty and lost in a way I never had before. A lot of it was because I couldn’t connect to my mother in the spirit world. She just wouldn’t show up. All my long-gone pets were always coming to visit. My father visited pretty regularly. Everybody else’s great-aunt Margaret traipsed through my reading room. But my mother wouldn’t even visit me in dreams.

  I suppose she was angrier at me now more than ever for the things I’d seen about her. Maybe I should have just let her go, but I couldn’t.

  We were staying in a run-down resort close to the ocean. The name of the beach was La Luna, and I went out at night to walk under the moon. I was feeling lost in the universe that night. I wasn’t really sure why I was there. I had no real reason to be in Mexico. I didn’t care one way or another if the apocalypse happened. I wasn’t looking for anything—except some kind of sign about, well, something. It was very dark on the beach with no lights anywhere. No one else was out, even though the night was balmy and still. The waves lapped softly at the shore.

  As I was walking I found myself saying the old chant to the goddess, “Isis, Astarte, Hecate, Demeter, Kali, Lianna.” Over and over again I repeated these names, so many different names, all for the Black Madonna. I wanted to see her for myself. “Show me I’m on the right track,” I begged. It was a prayer from the deepest part of my soul.

  It was close to midnight.

  I sat down in a beach chair that had been left in the sand. I listened to the surf. The night was black, and the sky was filled with thousands and thousands of stars.

  My hand fell over the side of the chair and touched what I thought at first was a boulder. Until I heard it breathing. A giant flipper flopped onto my leg. Once. Then again. And again. Some enormous creature was there beside me, touching me. I couldn’t breathe. Quietly and very slowly, I turned to see what it was. Illuminated only by the moon and the stars was the hugest sea turtle I have ever seen in my life. She was right beside me, touching me, trying to get my attention.

  I looked at her, and she looked back up at me with the darkest, deepest almond-shaped eyes. I touched her head gently, and she patted me again with her flipper. “You’re my sign, aren’t you?”

  I started to cry.

  She made whooshing noises, in and out, as she breathed. There were no other turtles on the beach; she wasn’t laying eggs. There was no reason for her to be there. I got out of the chair and lay in the sand in front of her so I could gaze directly into her eyes.

  It was easy to understand how an older, more observant people had imagined a sea turtle as the Great Mother carrying the weight of the whole world on her back. She was ancient and wise. She was heartbroken.

  The turtle reached out and tapped me once more with her fin. It was the strangest thing. Me and this giant turtle alone on the beach together. She came right to me and touched me.

  Whoosh! Whoosh, she answered me. Then, slowly, she turned herself around and dragged herself back into the sea.

  I had a vision that night of the saints returning, not just the Catholic saints but also the holy ones of the old religions from all over the world, from the ancient times, from all times. They were coming back because we needed them. I realized I had met some of their incarnations already in my reading room—young people with urgent questions and old eyes. They were ready to take their place on the side of the Black Madonna and fight for the life of the planet itself. I remembered the long-ago words of my grandmother that we must return to the old ways.

  My job going forward is to speak for the dead so they can help us find our way again. They know the old ways. They remember. They’ll guide us through whatever’s coming.

  Soon after I got back from that trip, some friends introduced me to an ancient oak tree they had discovered on the side of the mountain looming over Woodstock. The tree must be five or six hundred years old, my friend told me, old enough to have remembered a time before airplanes soaring overhead and electric lights and paved roads and too many people crawling over the earth. It has a huge trunk with a heart-shaped boll that I can just barely touch if I stand on my tiptoes.

  This oak tree reminded me of the old trees I had met and hugged on my many visits to England. Long ago people used to put statues of the Black Madonna in the hollows of such trees, which they worshiped. Long before people went to church, they went out into groves of trees to commune with the spirits.

  My friends who consider themselves followers of the Black Madonna found a replica of one of the old French statues of her, made out of silver. One day in the spring we brought it to the tree together. There was a small hollow at the base of the trunk that was exactly the same shape and size as the metal figure of the Madonna holding the child up against her left shoulder, close to her heart. She fit into the tree perfectly. The tree had been waiting for her. Something was in place at last in my life.

  I had never felt at home in any church, not even among the Wiccans, really. But out here on the side of the mountain, I had faith in the trees and in Her.

  When I got home that day, my sister called out of the blue. She had decided that day to sell my mother’s house.

  “Yeah?” I said. It didn’t really have anything to do with me. I didn’t live there. I didn’t even visit it, and I certainly didn’t own any part of it.

  My sister sighed. “We have to do something with her ashes.”

  “Oh,” I answered. My inheritance at last.

  “Do you know what we should do with them? Do you want them?”

  “I do.”

  On a hot summer day, I drove with some friends and my sister to the side of the mountain. We blessed ourselves with water from a mountain spring, and then we climbed up a steep embankment until we came to the tree. I knew already that I was going to tell everyone my mother’s secrets in the book that I was writing. But I also knew at last that this was, finally, the only thing that could really heal her, wherever she was hiding.

  Hadn’t my whole life been a testament to the healing power of communication, of speaking the truth no matter what?

  It was time to give my mother back to the earth, back to the Mother who would accept her exactly as she was and let her begin to grow again. My mother had told me long ago that if she ever could come back, she would want to be a tree next time. We dug a hole close to the trunk, and I tore open the plastic bag holding the small weight of my mother’s ashes.

  I laid my mother to rest on hallowed hippie ground. The people of my town would have appalled her, but they were also the people who were going to heal her. “You’re in my land now, at last,” I said to her. “This is my world. You’re on my turf, and you know what? It’s going to be good for you, so get used to it.”

  For a flash I had a vision of her, holding out her hand to me, a little reluctantly, a little limply, it’s true, but she was there. It was the first sight I’d had of her since she had died.

  “There’s no rush,” I said to her. “We’ve still got a lot of work to do. But we’ve got all the time in the world. We all do.”

  I spread her ashes in the hole and covered it over with dirt and moss. Thunder began to rumble and soon rain would come and bring what was left of her closer to the tree’s roots. I looked up to wipe away a bead of sweat and saw a flash of indigo in some nearby brambles—they were the feathers of a blue jay. Its body was gone and all that was left were its wings.

  My mother is not exactly happy about this book. Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom, I’ll sense her just outside the door, wearing a bathrobe, her arms crossed, frowning. She’s not saying much, but she’s there. She’s not very happy that I’ve revealed all of these things about her.

  “This is good, Mommy,” I tell her. “We need to talk about this stuff. We really do.”

  I came into this world a little old English lady, but these days I am beginning to feel younger and younger, released from centuries of suffering. More and more I am beginning to recover the old ways and
the old ways are making me young. I’m Benjamin Buttoning it, despite my crow’s-feet. Things are going to work out, if we reach out to the dead, if we help them, if we let them help us. If we remember that they are all around us.

  Things are going to work out.

  The journey goes on, the story goes on … and we go on.

  There aren’t really any endings.

  My mother

  A little old Italian man came to see me last week. He was dying. He knew it. I knew it. He had absolutely everything wrong with him, including pancreatic cancer. He had tubes sticking out of his arms and his neck, and every time he talked his false teeth nearly jumped out of his mouth. He was divorced, childless, and alone. His name was Apollo.

  Apollo, the god of prophecies and oracles. You can’t make this stuff up. I am constantly surprised by the universe’s sense of humor.

  “I took a chance you’d be here. People told me I’d never be able to get in to see you, but here you are,” he said to me. “I don’t have anybody to love and nobody loves me. I need to find somebody to love.”

  I could see his apartment. It was small, dusty, and lonely.

  There was another vision, though, beyond that one. I saw him sitting in a vineyard wearing an elegant suit, a glass of wine in his hand. His hair was slicked back. He was healthy. He didn’t have any tubes in his neck. He was waiting for someone. I told him so, and he started to cry. I didn’t tell him that it wasn’t in this lifetime. But I think he knew.

  “And my soul mate?” he said. “Is my soul mate there? That’s all I want to know. I’m looking for my soul mate. Is she there?”

  I am always amazed at how people never give up. Never. Here he was, weeks, maybe days, from death, and he was still hoping to meet that special eighty-year-old girl. What could I say to him? He was going to find her, I could see that clear as day, but not in this lifetime. First he was going to have to die, and then he was going to have to be reborn and struggle through the business of living again. The spiritual adventure has so many twists and turns.