Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons

and you might just lean back to take it all in. Whereupon the train will scold you in a robot voice: “You are being delayed because someone has interfered with the doors closing. As soon as the doors close, we will depart.” I hear there’s an airport in Sarasota that’s similar; maybe there are more. I’m sure Roger DeCampo wouldn’t be half so strange if computers didn’t run trains.
    I couldn’t figure out exactly how the thing is built, but what I think is that most of the airport is underground, and so you get that odd mole-like feeling you get in a casino, with no windows, only artificial light, and a general sense, in my case at least, of claustrophobia and depression; even, sometimes, a bit of desperation, the sort of thing spelunkers report when their candles go out.
    Somewhere, somehow, after a ten- or twenty-mile journey from the gate, with robots yelling at me and my eyes trying to adjust to the dimness, I spotted a familiar sight— my own name hand-lettered on a piece of cardboard.
    The person holding it can only be described as a hunk— about six-feet-two, shoulders like Atlas, and a face that reminded me a little of Richard Gere. A face that went with that voice. He wore shorts and an open-necked polo shirt. A lightning bolt on a chain nestled into thick, lovely chest hair.
    “Maurizio?” I hadn’t expected a psychic to be so physical.
    “Rebecca. I’d know you anywhere.”
    “You’d know me? How could you know me? Surely you aren’t that psychic.”
    “Oh, but I am. I closed my eyes, and I pictured you exactly. Only I thought you’d have red hair.”
    My hair is dark, my eyes brown, my skin close to olive; surely if I had red hair I’d have green or blue eyes and pink or gold skin— in other words, I could hardly look more different. I said, “Two eyes, two arms, that sort of thing.”
    “No, really, I got your height and build exactly. And the hairstyle.”
    “No fair on the hairstyle— everyone wears their hair like this nowadays.” Side-parted, shoulder-length— my hairdresser calls it the “triangle.”
    “Not your sister. She still has long, thick, seventies hair; cascades of non-nineties curls.”
    I had no answer for that one. She did.
    We had arrived by now at Maurizio’s car, and he announced that he was taking me to my hotel, where I would be left alone until dinnertime, when Michael McKendrick would arrive to take me to dinner— at Maurizio’s.
    “You’re kidding,” I said. “All this and you’re cooking, too?”
    He shrugged. “Just some chicken and a few amusing little Cuban dishes. Most of it I made for my last dinner party and froze the leftovers.”
    “Come on. You’re going to a lot of trouble.”
    “I like Michael even if he did dump me. And anyway, it’s part of the job—Rosalie pays me to read for her, you know.”
    I stared out the window and thought you’d never guess from the cool cocoon of the car that it was a blast furnace out there. They called freeways expressways here. Did I feel free to express my doubts?
    Finally, I said, “You mean psychics have to take care of perfect strangers from three thousand miles away?”
    “I like to help people. This job has been good to me.” There was infinite dignity in the way he said the simple words, not a wasted one in the bunch. He didn’t look at me, kept his eyes on the road, just spoke as if stating he enjoyed eggs for breakfast.
    “Do you make a living at it?”
    “Reading the cards?” He shrugged. “Did I mention I read on the psychic line? You know, as advertised on TV? Call a number, get a reading? Whathehell, it’s
almost
a living. I’m a gardener, too— or I was. Right now I’m mostly a caregiver— a sort of nurse— for someone who’s very ill. I take my psychic line calls at his house. You see, I can do both jobs at once, and it almost adds up to one good job. And I do the nursing for love; it’s an old friend who’s dying. I’m all he has left now, and he can pay me something, but not much. With the psychic line I can do it.”
    “That’s how the job has been good to you?” Maybe he was a saint, but then again maybe he was just a little too good to be true.
    “Oh, no, it got me out of Miami. You know how ugly that town is right now? Anyway, I wanted to come here because my parents moved here a few years ago— couldn’t take it down there anymore. But I had a good business— a gardening business with five employees and three trucks. I was afraid to move.