by Sarah Lassez
When the phone rang, I rolled my head slightly in the direction of the noise. I refused to answer. So far I’d only told a couple of people, including Gina, who’d offered to come over and clean, though even that I’d refused. My apartment was beyond repair, but it was fitting, it matched my mood, and I knew her energy would be wasted. The second she left, or even while she was there, I might be overcome with the urge to heave the couch cushions across the room or rip the flowers from a vase and hurl their shreds at the wall. Besides, being social wasn’t something I wished to attempt. Forming sentences was asking too much. I couldn’t even call psychics—which is when you know it’s bad—partly because of the inability to form sentences, and partly because I honestly didn’t think I had a future.
The phone continued to ring, and finally my machine picked up.
“Sarah, it’s me.”
I swallowed. I hadn’t moved, yet somehow I began sweating. Wilhelm—otherwise known as the Antichrist—should no longer be allowed to use the “It’s me” phrase. That right was revoked the second he spent the night at the Aryan Whore’s house. He was no longer “me.” He’d never be “me” again. In fact, he shouldn’t even be “he.” He should be “it.” It should be it.
“I cannot believe you’re serious about this,” it said. “Vot’s the big deal?”
I stared at my dresser, as somewhere up there was my answering machine, the source of the ridiculous and defensive words. I don’t know why, but suddenly its German accent was strong. Had it always been like that? How had I not noticed before? Not only the accent, but the way it spoke: level, controlled, cold, and devoid of feeling. Exactly the kind of man who would break your heart. I hated him. It. Whatever. But I also loved him. I definitely hated that I loved him. For the love of God, just make him go away.
“I did nothing wrong. It’s not like you’re my wife. I’m young; I can do vot I please.”
And then he hung up. I blinked. Some things, I must say, are just not necessary—like shooting someone in the toe after you’ve already stabbed them twenty-three times, ripped out their vital organs, and severed their head. Or like this phone call. I’m not his wife? Thank you, Wilhelm. I just adore it when people mash salt into my wounds.
Two more days passed, a fact of which I was aware only as the proof hit my door. Literally. I was lying on the floor in my living room, crying softly, when something slammed against my front door. I sat up. The shock stopped the tears. I made my way down the stairs to inspect, knowing it was one of two things: Either a crazed and blind pigeon had just met its maker, or Wilhelm, dying, had used his last bit of energy to get to my house and knock on my door, and was now slumped on the front steps with a letter pinned to his shirt explaining that a new and exotic disease had made him behave like an imbecile and that in truth he did love me and would do anything to get me back, but alas it was too late.
I opened the door. The newspaper. The Sunday paper. Which meant only five days had passed since the breakup, and also that it was currently around four a.m. I looked up at the sky. It was actually dark. Why was I awake? I went back inside, dumped the paper on the floor, and flopped into bed, where I continued to cry until I somehow, mercifully, fell asleep.
When I finally awoke, it was to one of those something-happened-what-was-it moments, one of those horrible moments when you wake and your eyes adjust to the light and everything feels right and good but for a slight nagging sensation, and you think, Hmmm, something happened, what was it? And then, then whatever it was you’d been trying so hard to forget slams into you like an eighteen-wheeler driven by a man named Travis who doesn’t do so well on whiskey but has just polished off a bottle of Southern Comfort—and once again you want to die.
So yeah, I wanted to die. And another thing I noticed was that my room was really bright, painfully so, but unfortunately the damn curtains were all the way over by the windows, and the windows were all the way over on the wall. Slowly I got out of bed to kill the light, but on my way there I happened to see my closet, which was much closer and already dark, so into the closet I went. Without much grace I curled up beneath some dresses and pulled the door shut. For the first time I noticed a very dirty tiny arched window. It didn’t let in much light, but unfortunately it let in just enough that I could see the fabric of one of the dresses that hung by my nose…a dress I’d once worn to the Cannes Film Festival.
It hit me, as I sat crouched and crying in my closet, that I had once had a life. I’d gone to Sundance. I’d gone to Cannes. I’d been a working actress. I’d had a future. I’d worn lipstick and styled my hair. Hell, I’d washed my hair. Now? Now I was unemployed, I was unshowered, I couldn’t stop crying, and I had a rather sharp ski boot buckle digging into my ass. Since when did I own ski boots? I looked around, sniffling. So this is where Onyx lived for all those years.
And that’s when I saw it, flung into a dark corner, the bag of gifts Wilhelm had given me. Okay, I admit that having kept the gifts meant part of me had hopes we’d reconcile, in which case having tossed everything he’d so thoughtfully picked out would’ve been bad. But now, now that he plainly was not going to see the error of his ways—after all, he was young and could do vot he pleased and I wasn’t his wife—now I could safely destroy it all. I grabbed the bag. Mmm. Chocolates. I’d destroy everything but the chocolates. I tore into a box and started chewing. Dare I say I was in a mild state of happiness—until, in the bag, I spotted the ugly rose-shaped stud earrings he’d also given me, earrings I immediately decided would look good only if they were protruding from his bleeding neck. Heh-heh.
The chocolate gave me the energy I needed to get up, throw out the rest of the gifts, verge on being human, and check my e-mails. Fine, fine: check Wilhelm’s e-mails. Ever since I’d determined his password, checking his e-mails had become so routine that I’d checked them before I checked my own, and in fact now and then—when we were still together—had even read e-mails to me in his sent folder before I’d found them in my in-box.
I typed in the magic “HugBoss” and sat back, waiting to be horrified, prepared for the worst. Visions of e-mails from Nadja with the subject line “Hooray! You finally ditched the old basket of eggs!” tripped through my mind. God I hated her.
Once everything was refreshed and up to date, I leaned in. A few sale notices from Loehmann’s, a lot of spam informing him of great deals on ink cartridges. Other than that, nothing new.
Good. Maybe he’s too miserable to write anyone. Just to be sure he was suffering, I decided to ask a psychic. I admit, the fact that I’d made it six whole days after the breakup before having a reading, had nothing to do with willpower…but still, my inability to speak coherently had probably saved me a lot of money. Therefore, after the first reading failed to comfort me and once I’d had a few more chocolates, I figured I deserved the treat of four or five more readings.
And just like that, what little functioning I’d had in the world was gone. I didn’t leave my house. I barely changed. I hardly ate. I’d wake, cry, check Wilhelm’s e-mails, check my own e-mails, cry, call half a dozen psychics, cry, check his e-mails one more time, cry a bit more, have an Erlin night cap, go to sleep, and then start the process again. Let me tell you, I made up for those six days without readings with a vengeance, essentially embarking on a psychic binge to end all psychic binges. It would be an understatement to say that I was worse off than I’d been the first time we broke up, though I suppose one prime difference was that after round one I’d been sad and in disbelief; after round two I was sad and toying with mental instability.
The only thing that changed from day to day was the amount of crying I did. Eventually the tears lessened, which I saw not as a sign that I was getting better, but as a sign that my readings would be much more efficient now that I was no longer paying to hear myself sob.
Many psychics confirmed that yes, Wilhelm had cheated on me. Though those readings left me momentarily vindicated, they also flung me into a tailspin of utter sadness that forced me to
seek out another reading to be assured that no, he was faithful and had always loved me and had never cheated. No longer did I have any clue what I wanted to be told, and soon the definitions of “good reading” and “bad reading” became interchangeable. Still, I continued to call, convinced that each psychic was in competition with the last to make me feel worse. Did they perchance know each other? Were they taking bets to see how fast I’d lose my mind? Erlin, by the way, still insisted Wilhelm and I would marry.
It goes without saying that I couldn’t afford these readings. The issue of my massive debt and barely-there unemployment checks versus my tendency to spend a lot on psychics was one I knew I had to address, but the problem was that stopping just didn’t seem to be an option. No. I had to think of something else, and was thus quite pleased with myself when I discovered the free three minutes that Psychicdom and a couple of other sites offered. Yes, apparently when resting your future and your wallet in a psychic’s hands, all you need is three minutes in which to test and deem the psychic worthy. Technically each caller is supposed to get only one free call, but me, being the crafty and determined mentally ill girl I was, I decided there was no such thing as only one free call. I called from my home phone, from my cell phone, and then from the cell phones of any and all friends who made the mistake of visiting me to see how I was. “Fine,” I’d tell them, “I’m fine. But can I borrow your phone? Be right back.”
And the funny thing is that I really thought I’d duped them. Me, the obsessed girl in sweatpants with the unwashed hair and the wild glint in her eye, I thought I’d pulled one over on the machine of the psychic industry by collecting free minutes. I was quite proud of myself. The catch, of course, was that a future cannot be told in just three minutes, and since the psychics knew they were being tested, their prime concern was getting callers to love them—and that didn’t always involve telling the truth. Saying, “No, it really is you. He can’t stand the sight of you, and yeah, he did notice the twenty pounds you gained,” is not going to lead to repeat business. They need to get paid; they’re not stupid. That’s why when I pretended to be a new caller in need of my free three minutes and was told Wilhelm had never cheated on me, that he loved me and would come around within a couple months, I was disbelieving. Such a rosy reading was highly suspect, and therefore I’d been forced to call another psychic, one from my stable of regulars, pay for the call, get upset, and thus call someone else.
My system was flawed, to say the least.
Three weeks into the breakup—three weeks of calling psychics and crying and checking Wilhelm’s e-mails—I decided to spice things up. I was going to leave my house.
My car was in dire need of an oil change, even though I never went anywhere, and since I had no food except for a dangerously dwindling supply of chocolates and my requisite heartbreak meal of Pad Thai noodles, a trip to the grocery store was also urgently needed. Of course I could afford neither activity, so I instead opted to pay for a live psychic reading.
This was a huge step for me, as it involved both leaving my house and driving to the Valley, where the psychic lived. Leaving my house for the first time was already difficult, but leaving it in order to head to the Valley was a little like an agoraphobic deciding her first venture in public should be a day at Disneyland. As the land became flatter, the sky grew smoggier, and the temperature rose by about fifteen degrees, I seriously began questioning my sanity. I hated the Valley. Even the people who lived in the Valley hated the Valley, and were notorious for trying to disguise the location of their homes by saying things like “I live in Sherman Oaks,” which to the untrained ear sounds like “I live in Sherman Oaks,” but to the true Los Angeleno it sounds a whole hell of a lot like “I live in the Valley.”
At any rate I was desperate, and desperation will make you do crazy things like drive to the Valley to meet a psychic. More than anything I just needed to hear that life would once again be okay, but this psychic also came highly recommended, and she practiced psychometry, the art of reading by way of holding a personal belonging. No matter how severe my heartbreak, a new form of fortune-telling was impossible to resist.
An hour later, sweating from the grueling heat, I arrived at Carol Ann’s house, a single-story slab of stucco with windows, a door, and a street address that was six digits long (another delightful feature of the Valley). No time was wasted with pleasantries, and with barely a word I was led to a kitchen that smelled so strongly of Pine-Sol that I suspected she hadn’t been cleaning with it but had instead opted to use it as a room spray. Was she high on the fumes? Would that affect my reading? Or was it what made her psychic? Perhaps she employed some strange cleaning-agent-fumes portal into the future?
In a charming I’m-on-the-other-line-what-do-
you-need-and-make-it-fast manner, she asked to hold my personal belonging. I’d come prepared and was wearing my antique Victorian gold moonstone ring, a ring I loved and had bought for myself (no big surprise there) years ago. Without another word she took the ring and held it in her fist, her eyes closed. She was silent. And silent. And silent for so long I began to wonder if she was fighting to stay conscious and not succumb to the fumes, but then I began to wonder if perhaps she was confused by receiving information on the ring’s original owner’s life. What, what’s this? I imagined her thinking. On your trip to the cobbler you’ll meet a gentleman in a fine pair of top boots with something they call a zipper ? Rejoice, for he is a good Protestant? What’s this now about taking care while chewing the mutton tonight?
Finally she set my ring on the table and glared at me. “There are so many holes in your aura that it’s impossible to read you.”
“Oh.” What?
She shook her head. “You’ve had too many readings. Ideally you need six months after a reading before you get another one.”
I laughed.
“At least forty-eight hours. The way it works is that every time you get a reading, the reader taps into your energy to receive the messages. When they do this, you’re left with a hole in your spirit. You,” she said, pointing to me in case I didn’t understand who she was referring to, “look like Swiss cheese. You’re all holes. Come back in six months.”
And that was it. I was hustled out the door, herded back into my car, and sent on my cheesy way. I must admit, I did feel like there were holes in my spirit, but in my humble opinion the drill at fault had had a German accent. It had nothing to do with psychics or readings. Was there anything wrong with my aura? No. She was probably just incompetent as a psychic. Her Pine-Sol powers had failed her, and she’d blamed me. Other psychics could read me just fine—and to prove this I called a few the second I got home.
All right, I admit it. Her words stuck with me. At this point I was averaging at least half a dozen readings a day, the worst I’d ever been, and even I was pretty sure that wasn’t right. As Benjamin Franklin said, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. That was what I did. Day after day after day. And by the way, when a crazy person begins to question her own sanity, you know she’s got problems.
I’d hit rock bottom; I knew this. This wasn’t just your garden-variety heartbreak. This was everything I’d gone through before, multiplied times ten and woven with a despair and hopelessness I’d never known possible. I was lost. I had no direction, no purpose, and the only things that kept me going were the words of people I paid to talk to. All the built-up pain from ten years of Hollywood’s rejection and all the failures of my relationships had finally taken their toll, and at last my nerves simply gave out.
I’d reached a dead end. I was single, over thirty, and a failure, and on top of that I had evidently lost my mind somewhere along the way. With horror I noticed I wasn’t even cute anymore. I looked as though I were a heroin addict who’d just gone cold turkey, my body far too thin, my gaunt face now sporting strange reddish patches just beneath my eyes.
In a plea for help I broke down and called my parents. I’d been
avoiding them for a while. I knew they’d sense something was wrong, and I hadn’t wanted them to worry. And, sure enough, just as I’d figured would happen, my father was immediately on to me.
“Are you okay?”
“No, Papa, I’m not okay.”
I heard him say something away from the phone, and within seconds my mother jumped on another extension. With both of them listening I came clean. Okay, I omitted the part about checking Wilhelm’s e-mails, which I knew they’d be appalled by, but I did confess my psychic sins. Neither scolded me, neither yelled. They both calmly listened to everything, then told me we’d get through this.
“Remember fluctuat nec mergitur?” my father said, trying to sound strong, though his voice split with concern.
“It tosses but it does not sink.” This, this Latin motto of the city of Paris, made everything inside me lurch and my eyes sting. My father always said that these words reminded him of me, because like a ship on the high seas that’s rocked by storm after storm, I continued to stay afloat. But now I couldn’t fight anymore. It was too much. I couldn’t pretend to be okay.
“I know,” I finally said, “but this time I’m sinking.”
My father was silent, and I knew I’d upset him.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother said, always practical. “You’re not sinking. You’re my daughter! We’ll help you!”
