"Self-fraud"

Today I went and had my fortune told by a palm reader off the Century freeway. I've always been interested in a reading, but never had one done--other than as a kind of gag at a Halloween carnival. A girlfriend suggested I try it; she said it had given her some clarity, and clarity is something I could use a bit of, so she took me. We walked into the front room and were asked to have a seat on a brocade-upholstered bench with a filigree back. To my right was an enormous and elaborate arrangement of week-old white roses. Their wilting musk and sagging necks inspired a slight sense of dread. Figures of saints stood in spot-lit alcoves and looked benevolently down at us as we thumbed through celebrity gossip magazines and waited to be seen. A girl emerged from the kitchen in the back of the house and asked me to follow her through a set of french doors covered by ivory lace.

We slipped into a room slightly bigger than a port-a-john. It was furnished with two chairs, a small table, infinite artificial flowers, metallic-foil images of praying hands, and Christ on the cross about a dozen times. The girl wore khaki pants and white Reeboks. She looked no older than thirty. She asked me to hold my palms together, close my eyes, and breathe deeply. She said I should make two wishes. I wished to be thin, and I wished to be happy. I don't know why I wished to be thin, being thin isn't like a million dollars or a cure for cancer--all I need to do to be thin is stop eating Cadbury Eggs, not make a fucking wish. Well then she said I should tell her one of the wishes and keep the other one private, so of course I told her about my wish to be happy (even though that felt like a dumb wish, too).

She asked if I wanted to hear the good and the bad, or only the good. I asked for both. She looked at my right hand a while but was having a hard time and asked if I was left-handed, which I am. Then she looked at my left hand a while. I tried to keep it still as I spread it open on the table, but it was shaking from nerves, and perspiration glistened in the creases. She said I'd been very confused the last three months. That I am a generous and kind person who often neglects their own needs. That I will live into my late 80s, that I am in perfect health, and that I should strongly consider working with my hands. That I believed in God, but I had lost my faith. She said that someone I cared for very deeply had hurt me; hurt me so bad I didn't even know what to do, and that as much as I had tried to distance myself from that person, I had been unable to move past the experience. Although externally I projected happiness and energy, inside I was very unhappy. Very. I guess wishing for happiness might have given that last one away.

Despite my growing skepticism, further fueled by the generalities and platitudes she spoke in, I asked her how I could overcome this relationship and leave it behind me. She said that there was no sense in trying--that this is the person I was meant for, meant to be with, and that besides all that--he still loved me, too.

Then she said it would take three spiritual cleansings to rid me of the negative energy that was preventing me from moving forward in all other pressing matters; at a mere $125 per cleansing. She gave me her card and charged me twenty-five for the reading, opened a drawer under the table, and carefully added my payment to her neat stack of bills. Then she asked me exactly what I did for a living, and then she asked me if I could get her kids into tapings for Nickelodeon shows. I told her anyone could go to tapings, and gave her the ticket hotline number. Her daughter loves Dora, she told me.

On the drive home I thought about calling you and saying, Well now there's proof, and no reason to fight it--even the psychic says we're supposed to be together. But I know you don't put any stock in those things--you'd point out that everything she said was vague or inaccurate, that we're all confused, that I haven't believed in God since 7th grade, that I am often selfish, that if I die before 80 I'll be too dead to complain, that everyone is unhappy inside, and that last (but not least), no one needs a psychic to tell them that the people we love all hurt us deeply.

I'd ask, But you still love me, don't you?

And you'd tell me that if I paid twenty-five dollars to a palm-reading charlatan so she could tell me what you'd been trying to convince me of for the better part of six years, that I should have wished for the million bucks, because I'd owe it all to you.