I was at the tail end of my sabbatical in Sedona, and the goddamn quiet was starting to get too loud. I wasn’t looking for a woman, not really. I wasn’t interested in the whole song and dance.
But here I was, in my mid-forties, coming out of the Sedona fog, my standards softened by a year of quiet desperation. This woman was a psychic. Worked over at that purple crystal building. She was from Oklahoma, she said, and had a kind of spiritual, broken-down beauty that I found interesting. She jumped at the chance to go on one of my social hikes.
I got her address and went to pick her up.
She let me in her house, a small, cluttered place that smelled of incense and freash coffee. “Make yourself at home,” she said. “I’ll just be a minute, gotta take a quick shower.”
So I looked around. The usual psychic shit. Books on things I couldn’t pronounce, pictures of her and some sad-looking bastard who was probably the ex-husband, a kid. And then I saw it, on the kitchen counter. A full pot of freshly brewed coffee. A real, beautiful, ten-cup pot of it. The smell was magnificent. I thought, You know what? I’m going to have a cup of that goddamn coffee.
I found a mug in the first cabinet I opened. A big, clean, hopeful-looking thing. I walked back over to the pot, reached for the handle, and lifted.
It was empty.
Bone fucking dry. But still hot. The whole damn thing was a mirage. I stood there for a minute, holding the empty pot, my brain trying to do the math. Was I already crazy? Did I imagine the whole thing?
She came out a few minutes later, all fresh and clean in her yoga pants and a baggy t-shirt. “Let’s go,” she said.
“Wait a minute,” I told her, stopping her at the door. “Wasn’t there a full pot of coffee on the counter? Or am I just fucking with my own head now?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, with a bright, casual smile. “I’m sorry, I’m not used to having company. I would have offered you some.”
“It’s alright,” I said. “But where the hell did it go?”
She just looked at me, those big, psychic eyes all clear and honest. “I use it every morning,” she said. “For an upside-down coffee.”
“Come again?”
“Yeah,” she said, like it was the most normal thing in the world. “An upside-down coffee. I put the coffee in a bladder, hook it up to a long hose in the shower, and then I squeeze the bladder to force it in. Nine cups, every morning. It really helps me throughout the day.”
“In… in your butt?” I asked, just to be clear.
“Yes,” she said. “I lie on my back in the bathtub. That’s what I do.”
And I just thought, Oh my God. What the fuck am I getting myself into?
On the hike, I made damn sure I stayed in front of her.
A few nights later, she invited me over. We were just cuddling on her bed, talking, when her son comes storming into the room. A sixteen-year-old kid, no shirt on, pure white trash, screaming at the top of his lungs. “You whore! You slut! You’re still married to Dad, you piece of shit! You goddamn whore!” A real beautiful family moment. I just lay there, thinking, Where the hell did this little bastard come from? It was too much drama, even for me.
She wanted something more, of course. They always do. But I had a Ukrainian on the side, and I wasn’t in a relationship mode. Then one night, she starts doing my chakras. “You have so much steel around your heart,” she said. “It’s sad to see what you’ve done to it.”
“Whatever,” I told her.
“Let me at least work on your third eye,” she said. And she did. She got out some weird shit, I don’t know what, but something changed in me. I had a vision or two. I felt more spiritual than usual. Giddy. I don’t know what the hell that voodoo bitch did to me, but I was different.
“So you really believe you’re a psychic?” I asked her later.
“Yes,” she said. “I was a witch back in Oklahoma. I got pushed out. My husband disowned me. This is my calling.”
She was the one who told me when I was going to die. She saw a long hallway, she said, like a hotel, with doors on each side. The number on the door was the year you checked out. She couldn’t see the ones behind her, but she could see the ones up ahead. And at the end of my hallway? A door with the number 72 on it. My expiration date.
I eventually moved to Scottsdale, left the psychic and her upside-down coffee behind. I started dating a Romanian girl, a real bitchy, hard-to-get type. And because she was such a bitch, I made it my personal mission to rock her goddamn world. I think we spent four nights together, plus a Christmas morning. I’d learned some of that Tantra shit in Sedona, and I just remember blowing her mind. She got addicted. So, of course, I had to walk away.
A year goes by. I’m on Facebook, and I see the psychic. I send her a message, just a “hey, how’s it going.” We’re in the middle of some small talk, and then she stops.
“Oh my God,” she types. “You’re him, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I write back. “Who am I?”
“I can’t say,” she says, “but there’s a woman in Scottsdale who is madly in love with you. I’m her psychic now. I moved my business online.”
Here I was in Scottsdale. She’s in Oklahoma. I haven’t seen her in over a year.
“My client,” the psychic continues, her words popping up on my screen, a little digital ghost story from a thousand miles away. “She described you to a T. The way you talk in bed… the way you… make love. The whole goddamn show.”
There’s a pause. I can picture her, sitting in some shitty little room in Oklahoma, the gears grinding in her head, slow and rusty.
“Christ,” she types. “It was the same thing you did with me. I’m just… connecting the dots now. Oh my God… I know it’s you. It’s absolutely you.”
She wouldn’t give me a name, of course. She played me for a while, dangled the bait, enjoying the little bit of power she had over a man a thousand miles away. The usual game.
And then, when she was done playing, she just typed it. One word.
“She’s Romanian.”
And I just started to laugh.
Not a chuckle. No. A real, ugly, gut-shot laugh, the kind that starts deep in your belly and comes tearing out of you like you’re puking up a piece of your own goddamn soul. The kind of laugh you have when you finally see the whole, beautiful, rotten joke of it all.
The psychic I used to fuck in Sedona, the one with the upside-down coffee and the voodoo third eye, who was now living in some shithole in Oklahoma… was the goddamn psychic for the Romanian girl I’d fucked in Scottsdale, the beautiful bitch who I’d broken like a wild horse.
The two loose, frayed ends of my own fucked-up life, a thousand miles apart, had somehow managed to find each other in the dark and tie themselves into a perfect, ugly, and beautiful knot.
What are the odds? You can’t even calculate them.
Maybe there are real psychics out there. Maybe there are witches in Oklahoma who can see the whole goddamn map.
Or maybe, just maybe, the universe is a drunk, sitting at the end of a long, dark bar, and every now and then, just for a laugh, he reaches out and shoves two of his little puppets together to see what kind of a mess they’ll make.
Either way, you have to admit… it’s a hell of a story.
