Her skin is like slightly tinted milk, her eyes soft, her voice sincere, and sitting on her heels she seems the perfect person to give me some direction, not any direction, but the one direction that will lead me to the reunion with my wife. That she believes she’s psychic seems reasonable because everybody seems to be psychic, and maybe everybody is. I tell her a little about myself, tell her my experience so far has been fine but now I want to move on. I say I want to act, and that I’m willing to do it, to see the world with a new view, and because of that new view, be different. I want to fill up the minutes I have with a broader, more inclusive perspective, and that’s what I’m doing now. I’ve never had an aura reading before, never sat cross-legged in a recreation room with a pregnant girl dressed like an Indian who is about to tell me my future.
“Okay,” I say.
“Good,” she says. She decides we have to move to more private quarters, so we walk out to my teepee. She brings along a candle and some rugs, and she sits at the edge of the fire pit, lighting the candle and placing it in the ashes of the pit. At first I stay perched on the bottom bunk of the bed, watching her preparations, but since she’s brought along a rug for me, in the end we both sit, cross-legged, the candle burning between us.
At first she’s accurate, talking about loss, and tribulation. She tells me I haven’t found what I’m looking for, and that to do that, I need a new direction, a direction. So what she’s saying, so far, is accurate. When I ask her a more specific question, a question related to Anne, she advises me to move on and forget the past. “The person you’re thinking about,” she says, “is gone.”
Well at first I refuse to accept that. I ask her what person she’s talking about, but I know what person. And it’s not that I can’t get enough of Anne. She’s just there. My thoughts just naturally keep coming back to her, and the girl is suggesting I change my thoughts.
I think about what that might be like. To change my thoughts. And why not? I can exercise a little self-control. When thoughts of Anne start coming to me, I can think of something else. I can notice my thoughts and then change them. I can think about the wind outside the teepee, or the goats I saw that afternoon climbing diagonally up the hillside.
So that’s what I do. And it takes some concentration but it works. And because it works I let myself relax. And when I do, every thought that comes to me is a thought of Anne. The happiness I’ve had with her is a real thing, and every time I think of her, what I feel is the absence in my body. It’s painful, but I can’t stop it. In the absence of Anne, I manufacture her, and it isn’t even an urge, it just happens. My determination to change my mind is overpowered by an urge to maintain the sadness, because that sadness is connected to Anne.
The pregnant girl is telling me about the person she’s sensing (Anne), mentioning things I both admire and dislike, telling me that none of it matters because this person is part of the past. As she says this, thoughts, in the form of images, are coming to me. For instance, the time Anne tried to take my photograph. She wanted it to be perfect. She was having trouble with the focus and the light meter, and I saw her desire to succeed. I saw who she was — who she was and what she needed — and I loved who she was. I saw her ambition and her eagerness and her optimism, and I say optimism because optimism was the foundation of our love.
She may or may not have been beautiful, but to me she was beautiful, and what was beautiful was her being. When we love people, what we see are the flaws that make them human. Anne’s flaws made our love seem superlative, and I counted myself lucky being in the light of that love. The light was missing now, but as I remembered her, it came back to me. Her uncompromising need for perfection, a trait that at best I put up with, now I longed for. I sat in the teepee, finding Anne in my mind, and liking her there, wondering if maybe I was liking her memory a little too much, but then thinking no, it would probably help. It would probably make it easier to find her if I had her in my mind.
As I did in Cooperstown, New York.
We had taken a trip to the Baseball Hall of Fame, not that you were a baseball fan, but some friends of yours had given us a night at a bed-and-breakfast. There was a snowstorm outside and it was all amazing and wonderful and we never left the room. All that day was spent having sex, until we were numb from it, staying pretty much in or around the bed, eating and making love until, at a certain point, you were complete and I was also complete. We were both empty. And in that long breath of emptiness I felt, not the longing of wanting more, but the peace of wanting nothing.
Of course it wasn’t always pleasant. There was that time on Great Jones Street or Bond Street, off Lafayette. We’d gone to a bar after work, with friends, and you were more than a friend at that point but nervous enough about the relationship that you started drinking, we all started drinking, but you kept drinking so that when it was time to leave and we stood on the street, waiting for a cab, you’d left your coat inside. I went back to get it, found it on the floor, and when I brought it out, you were sitting on the curb, bent over, holding your head in your hands and throwing up all over the gutter. I went to you and tried to comfort you, but I didn’t know how to do it. I told someone to get some water. I put my hand on your forehead and then you threw up some more. Just an hour earlier you’d been feeling good and you wanted to feel a little more good, but that was too much, that more was too much. And now the more was gone. We took a cab home and riding in the cab, looking at your closed eyes, sympathetic or empathetic, I kissed your forehead which was hot, and your cheeks which were soft and round, and then your lips. I didn’t care about anything. I was kissing your mouth because it belonged to you.
* * *
All the time I was thinking this, the snowy-haired girl with the loose dress was talking, telling me where I was and what I had to do. She was speaking to me, but I was having a little trouble hearing her. A car was turning out of the parking lot and I was having trouble hearing her because I was paying attention to the shadows of the headlights playing across the canvas skin of the tent. I could see her, a partial silhouette, and I wanted to understand, and because what she was saying was still incomprehensible, I asked her to repeat.
But it wasn’t that I didn’t hear her words. I did. And it wasn’t that I didn’t understand their meaning. She was telling me to let go, and I couldn’t let go. I couldn’t stop what I was doing because it was what I had to do.
And of course I had reasons, in my mind, to discount what she was telling me. She was just a twenty-some-year-old imitation Indian shaman who didn’t know enough of life to tell me that my life, with my wife, was over.
And yet I suspected that she was probably right.
On the one hand I had a mind of my own, and on the other hand I had another mind, and I seemed to be somewhere between the two.
2
I could soak only so long, and once I’d left the thermal springs motel all I really remembered about the white-haired psychic girl was that she wore an Indian outfit and Indian jewelry. That became the clue, and as I drove out of the green valleys of Colorado and into the red canyons of the West, I was glad, first of all, to be moving, and second to be moving toward something vaguely Indian, and through that vague something Indian, to Anne.
Around midday I found a monument marker indicating an Indian cliff-dwelling site. I’d already driven past several Indian information centers, but something about the layout of the parking lot, convinced me to stop. I immediately noticed the dry quiet air. The sandstone walls rising up on either side of the canyon were streaked with red. I began hiking down the steps made of railroad ties, into a riverbed with cottonwood and chaparral and piñon pine. I wanted to see no people (meaning no white people) because I wanted to see and hear only what the ancient people who lived here had to tell me. This was their place and I didn’t know how they would speak to me but I was listening. To the birds flitting from branch to branch and the slow-moving stream. Even the delicate clouds, evaporating in the heat of the sun, seemed to be speaking.