First guy says: you’re gonna see a UFO. Like, BOOM. He lays this on me. Right now you’re probably thinking well, if that doesn’t torpedo the whole thing for you. But it didn’t. Okay? It didn’t. I sat there and let him tell me I was gonna see a UFO because sometimes you’re in the middle of a divorce and sometimes staring down the barrel of your life and sometimes you’d pay someone, anyone, to tell you that you’re not completely fucked.
“Where do I go with this,” he says. “Do you believe?”
“In UFOs?” I ask. “Sure, what the hell.”
“You’re gonna have some kind of experience,” he says. “Very abnormal.”
Buddy led me into a room in the back of a woo shop three blocks from our apartment. The room was dark but for a salt lamp. Took my hands into his. Told me he was blind from birth, that he sees things. Takes someone’s hand and sees flashes, impressions. Big life events. Traumas, he calls them, both good and bad. His hands smelled of menthol.
“Looks like a spaceship,” he says. “With an octopus on it.”
“Feels a little on the nose,” I say.
“You will have trouble believing it,” he says. “And even more trouble convincing other people.”
“No shit,” I say.
When he was a kid this guy took the hand of a school teacher and told her she lost her ring, and that she’d find it in the couch cushions. Sure enough. My problem is that I am prone to believing these things. I am, as my ex says, suggestible. Open-minded at best, gullible at worst. I sit down and say hit me, motherfucker.
“It’s not gonna hurt me, right,” I say.
“Mm,” he says, unconvinced.
“I don’t care if I see it,” I say. “Just don’t hurt me.”
You might not believe this, but there’s logic to it. People visit psychics and card readers for control. To know everything is gonna turn out okay. Like if I only know what’s coming, I can prepare. The bad will hurt less. The good will sustain me. But nothing prepares you for a fucking UFO, and nothing prepared me for what he said next.
“Have you ever had a kiss, like, BANG,” he says. “Fireworks.”
“No,” I say.
“Not yet,” he says.
“With the alien?” I ask, helplessly.
***
Nobody tells you you’re going to get divorced while snorkelling with sea turtles in Maui. Not right that second, not exactly. But maybe one day you’ll be on a tourist boat cannonballing along the broad side of a crater into water so blue it makes you seize up, like you’d drown happy. There isn’t a word for how blue the water is. Around you there will be other sweaty tourists flapping in the water, huffing through masks, pointing and waving at sea turtles. Your husband kicks gently toward them and as you watch him hover above, giving them space, just curious, not an intrusive jackass like the others, you will see him engulfed in the blue and your first thought will be oh, no.
Maybe, I mean.
Not exactly like that.
But something like it.
There’s always a moment. The first in a long line of them which leads you to lawyers, and long talks with family, and whispered goodbyes to his back in the middle of the night, I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I love you, I’m sorry.
***
In the middle of the reading, menthol guy goes to blow his nose. I record the reading so I can remember everything and the part that I keep coming back to is the part where he leaves to blow his nose. I whisper what the fuck just barely loud enough for the audio. I remember that what the fuck because it felt like being knocked out. One haymaker after another, sitting there, being told all these, I don’t know—things—about you.
“I like this one,” he says. “You go to take hands and dance. He puts his hand on your back, like—and I can see you through his eyes. He really treats you like a lady.”
“Oh?” I say.
“There are rings involved,” he says. “You pick them out together.”
“Oh,” I whisper.
He turns a little bit red in the face.
“You really enjoy undressing him,” he says. “You waste no time, girl.”
“OH,” I cried, belting laughter.
There were other things, more specific things. I wanted to know everything about you. I wanted to know but was struck too dumb to ask anything useful. All I did was repeat, oh, okay when he found a new memory, or future, or whatever it was he was seeing, all these beautiful scraps of you, and when I did finally get the courage to ask what you looked like I inhaled sharply—the sound of it, a hiss on the recording—because the big dumb asshole he described looked exactly like the one I’d asked for when I stood in front of god.
***
When I left the woo shop we went to the grocery store. We were still living together. We gave ourselves a year and it was okay, because we were still best friends, still needed each other. Made shopping lists and fed the cat and hollered at our sports team. But I couldn’t tell him about the psychic because he doesn’t believe in them. Fair play to him. He’s very studied in science and medicine. Things that you can prove, things that don’t need wild faith or willing delusion.
So I stood in the toilet paper aisle feeling tilted. Like I’d been knocked off an axis. The lights were screaming fluorescent. Carts and people flowing around me. If this were a movie there would be some kind of excellent soundtrack, something profound playing while I had my little spiritual crisis, but this is hot stupid life and so I stood there stunned while Paul McCartney’s “Wonderful Christmastime” droned on around me like my own personal Vietnam.
No proof, but possibility. You are a possibility, now. Something I can’t unknow.
***
I didn’t mean to go to more psychics. I swear.
But it became something like an experiment.
The idea was to cross-reference the data. Like if someone could tell me, again, what you looked like, or about the slow dance, or the rings, or the tearing your clothes off—maybe I could believe it for real. This was how I found myself in some grandma’s garage on a hot July day, an hour and a half out of town in a suburb. You don’t want to know what the Uber bill was.
“Oh,” she says. “Oh, honey. He’s a mess.”
“Uh,” I say.
“Does he cry a lot?” she asks. “I get the feeling he cries a lot.”
We had a couple of iced teas between us, sweating in the humidity. Her husband had half the garage, some kind of snarling muscle car with her guts falling out all over. The other half was decorated with plants and crystals and stone buddhas and wall hangings that highlighted rainbow chakra points. This lady used to have a call in show on local cable. She had been in the paper. She sat before me in a bathing suit, fanning herself with a handful of junkmail.
“I just want to squeeze him,” she says. “He’s a real turkey.”
“What does he look like,” I ask.
She considers.
“You know,” she says, “my youngest daughter is about to get engaged.”
“Congrats,” I say.
“I called my son-in-law the day he bought the ring, knowing without knowing, and told him he’d better size that thing down. He called me a spooky old bitch.”
She took a big gulp of her iced tea and drummed her nails against her forehead, frowning. Her grandbabies were in the pool out back. Screams and splashing over a steady cicada buzz. Heat rose in waves on her freshly paved driveway.
“He’s in a relationship,” she says. “He’s not ready to leave yet.”
“Oh,” I say.
“He’s sad all the time,” she says. “Feels like he has to see it through.”
“Oh,” I say.
“His eyes, though,” she says. “Goddamn.”
“Oh?” I ask.
“Bluest you’ve ever seen,” she says. “Like you’d drown happy.”
***
When the divorce was done I took a trip out west. Found myself in the tourist part of a California town. Mexican restaurants and breweries and things. Thumping baseballs at a place near the beach, a batting cage. They weren’t coming fast enough. I turned the speed up, up, up. Each crack of the bat a release I didn’t know I needed. Step in, hips before hands, follow through on that swing.
My hands hurt, after.
I found the third one because what the hell, I was on vacation with money to blow and there is not a single thing anyone could tell me that would surprise me anymore. She had a little shop at the end of the pier, a real tourist trap. I was probably better off firing money into those old Zoltar machines. The lady was dressed all in black, like you’d expect these people would be. She had some kind of accent that felt Romanian but was more likely fake. She looked haunted as shit.
“You have aura,” she says. “Psychic aura.”
“Oh,” I say. “Okay.”
“It’s purple,” she says. “Tinged with white.”
Something that might interest you to know is that I didn’t bring you up to any of these people. The psychics, I mean. Part of rolling in there like hit me, motherfucker is daring a stranger to tell you about yourself without giving anything away. The trouble is that people are predictable. They want the holy trinity of prediction: love, wealth, health. So you could say that about anyone, the love thing. I could use a good word about health or wealth but I never get it because all they ever tell me about is you.
“There’s this man,” she says.
“Jesus,” I say. “Again?”
“He’s going to be in the palm of your hand,” she says.
She held her palm out. Without warning, she brought her other one down on it with a sharp SMACK. It made me jump.
“He’s scared to get crushed,” she says.
“I’ll hold my applause,” I say.
***
There is a lady I see sometimes, on a Zoom call. I found her online. She has a big thundering laugh and platinum blonde hair and very thin eyebrows. She swears a lot and calls me hun and tells me I am not crazy; that you do, in fact, exist. You were the first thing she saw about me. I frowned at my laptop and stonewalled her.
“He’s in your energy, hun,” she says. “Ohhh, he’s coming.”
“But my wealth,” I say.
“Hm,” she says. “You’re going to get a promotion. In about two months.”
Sure enough.
“But my health,” I say.
“Fix your guts,” she says. “Jesus Christ.”
Sure enough.
She describes you exactly like the first guy did, and then some. Tells me what you look like—That hair! That build! That smile!—how sweet and funny you are, how you talk and talk and talk. Tells me about your big goofy feet and your kind eyes. How I’ll know you anywhere, when you finally get here. She lights up when she talks about you. Says one day I will email her with a picture, and she will get to say a big fat fucking I TOLD YOU SO.
“When,” I say.
“Soon enough,” she says. “These things happen in perfect time.”
She takes my money, keeps the faith. I pay her when I want to visit you. You’re not just data, now. You’re a composite sketch, someone I could describe to a police department (are you a criminal? Nobody ever says anything bad about you.) I wonder if you are just someone that everyone wants to hear about—the sweet, the funny, the eyes. Love stories recycled for a fool.
“Big feet,” she says, cackling. “Lucky girl.”
***
Two years after the divorce, I took a trip out east. I ate slices of pizza dripping with grease and bummed around the East Village until I found a tiny shop. Hole in the wall with a big obvious sign. No bigger than a closet. Two chairs, a big blanket covering the wall with a zodiac wheel on it. Incense smell. Told myself it would be the last time, though, of course, it never is. The guy draped himself over his chair and pulled tarot cards. He told me the wrong interpretations. I know, because I pull them myself.
“Oh,” he says. “There’s a man.”
“Bullshit,” I say.
“There’s always a man,” he says.
Logically, I know that he is a grifter. Most of them probably are. But I’m compelled, now. It’s like I can’t stop. Love stories are a drug I can’t quit; just one more fix, one more fix. I’m a sucker for a future that may never come.
“He hasn’t shown up yet,” he says, “because you have a block.”
“Oh,” I say.
“I can help you get rid of it,” he says.
“Oh,” I say. “Oh, I’m sure.”
“There’s a darkness in your heart,” he says. “You’re faithless.”
I’m tempted to believe him. It’s easier to think that it’s my fault, somehow. That I am undeserving of the love I want. The stupid part about this psychic thing, about playing chicken with fate, is that you’re living in the anticlimax. That if these things ever come—the bad you prepared for, the good that sustained you—you will only say, oh, okay. And if they don’t come—well, it doesn’t matter, does it? You survive just the same.
“Five hundred,” he says.
“No,” I say, and leave.
***
The day I sat my ex down and told him I wanted a divorce was like any other. There wasn’t anything special about it. It was just a day. We went to work and came home and I told him. I don’t remember the weather. March, it was March. So the weather could have been anything, really. I don’t remember what I ate. I don’t remember feeling much of anything. Except sad, I think. I was really sad.
“Why,” he asked.
“We’re not in love anymore,” I said.
“Oh,” he said.
He didn’t fight me on it. There was the love thing, and then the kids thing. The hard stop. The way he deserves them, if anyone on earth deserves them it’s him and I was never going to be the one to give that to him. We loved each other enough to let go.
“What do you want,” he said.
I almost choked on it. It felt too big an ask.
“I want fucking fireworks,” I said.
He considered for a moment.
“Does that even exist?” he asked.
I don’t know who I felt more sorry for. Him, for not believing. Or me, for wanting to. But I said that six whole months before seeing that first guy, the menthol guy. And buddy took my hands and, without knowing a single thing about me, told me one day I’d have them—the fireworks. Maybe you think I am stupid, or naïve. But maybe you could forgive me, too, for needing to know I had good reason to make my life go BOOM.
***
There is about as much chance of me getting that fireworks kiss as seeing a UFO. Maybe that’s what I’m trying to say. That I’m rooting for it. The alien, I mean. I want to stare that octopus motherfucker down and know, somewhere, somehow, that you do exist.
That one day you’ll light up the night sky, too.