Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons

about as far down in the dumps as you can get, I can’t resist reading my horoscope in every magazine at the supermarket. It’s not that I expect any of them to be right— I just want a moment’s flash of hope: “Look for money when the moon goes into Aries; harmony will return to your house after the 24th.”
    “She started out by saying, ‘You’re really depressed, aren’t you?’ And then she said, ‘There’s something you don’t understand in your life.’ And she said a few innocuous things that sailed on past me, and then she just said, flat out, ‘Look, I’ve got to stop the reading and just talk to you. The same thing’s happening to you that happened to me. Tell me something, are you aware of your psychic abilities?’ Can you imagine? I nearly hung up.”
    I laughed, putting myself in her place, at my wit’s end with a crackpot on the phone. “What’d you say?”
    “I said no, I wasn’t. Rebecca, I’d completely forgotten what happened to me as a kid. Or at any rate, I didn’t connect it with being psychic— it was just some strange thing that I managed to outgrow. She said, ‘Are you seeing things that aren’t there? Hearing voices? Anything like that?’ And when she said it, I was so grateful I wasn’t hearing voices I sat down on the floor and started crying. She said it happened to her, the whole thing, and she actually went to a shrink who gave her drugs that turned it off pretty well until she did the same thing I did— happened on a psychic who knew what it was. And then she told me it was curable.”
    “Wait a minute. You mean you aren’t psychic after all?”
    “The craziness, the randomness is curable. It’s like anything else, you just have to learn what to do with it. You know how kids start out making random sounds? And then they finally say, ‘I keem,’ and their parents say ‘ice cream,’ Rebecca. Say ‘ice.’ Okay now, ‘cream.’ Psychic focusing is a skill that can be taught. It’s a whole little science, and that’s what psychic readers are all about— they’re people who’ve learned to tune in to their intuition.”
    You don’t believe that, I wanted to say. You can’t. You’re a rational person in business with me. Psychic readers are charlatans.
    “You make it sound like anybody can do it.”
    “They say anybody can. But something tells me it would take a lot more work if you weren’t already out there like I was.”
    “You signed up for the course, I take it.”
    “That one and a few more. Sanity restored— praise the lord and pass the ammunition. All’s well on the Western front.” She stopped and ate a potsticker. “There’s only one thing. When you have something like this— I hesitate to call it a gift— it nags at you.”
    My ex-boyfriend Rob has a close friend who writes fiction and who describes a similar syndrome.
    She shrugged. “Hence the Raiders of the Lost Art.”
    “Wait a second, you lost me.”
    “Well, we were all doing this kind of work, and we happened to meet— I don’t know, at different workshops and things. There’s a whole culture around this, you know.”
    I did know. You couldn’t live in the Bay Area and not know. The Psychic Fair, for instance, attracted thousands of people every time they had it— maybe hundreds of thousands. But the idea of Chris among the crystal-wearers just about broke my heart. Why? I wondered.
    Because I felt betrayed. Lied to. Left out.
    She polished off a shrimp and mushroom dumpling. “Well, actually we didn’t all know each other till Rosalie got us together. I’ve known Tanesha forever. Rosalie was my teacher once, and also hers— I lied at the police station. You know when I said I didn’t know her? I’m sorry, I just…” She let it tail off, letting me fill in the blank: “I didn’t want to admit I did.”
    “So she’s really the center of the group; she asked the four of us to join about three months ago.”
    “Wait a minute. If she was your teacher, why don’t you know her last name? Or were you just withholding it?”
    “She doesn’t use it. None of us do much. I mean I know Tanesha’s, and Rosalie knows everybody’s, I guess, but it’s a weird world— you don’t necessarily want people to know that much about you.”
    I nodded. “Okay, go on.”
    “Well, at first I didn’t want to join the group. And then, about a week ago, I just felt a desperate need to do it. I knew I couldn’t leave it alone; I really needed to work with other