water, slumbered in the shadows. Intimacy gave the vastness of my loneliness a sheltering look. His is the face of a man who might turn on you at any time. As if he was just born, already wary of the world.
“If I ask a question, will you tell a lie or answer me true?” he asks.
“Depends on the question.”
He leans on my table—I hate when they do that—presses his palms into the indigo Adire cloth so hard, that I can see the dark lines on his knuckles, the veins running along the top of his hand to his wrist.
“Do you have the Sight or do you just need money?”
I stare into his black pool eyes, unblinking.
“‘Cuz if it’s the latter, I can pay you for your trouble and save us both the time.”
He’s got an accent I can’t quite place. Something with a river in it, deep and Southern.
Can he see my discomfort or am I invisible? What is the right answer?
A lie or the truth?
He is not the first to sit in my chair, nor the first to ignore the signs, to will the impossible. Trying to change one’s fate is a lifelong Sisyphean task, but to change another’s is like trying to move a brick wall by hitting it with your fists. In the center of this knotted thought, your desire, is the belief that if you will it, change will be. Rest assured, the people who come to me have bloody fists. They sit in my chair, much like him, with disappointment or hope or both peering from the shadows beneath their eyes. And they expect me to move the wall for them, expect me to make a lie a truth.
I watch his hands, now cupped in his lap as if they hold a message. The remnants of his dream waft off him like invisible smoke, snaking through the air over to me. I don’t want to be bothered but my utilities are due. Mama may have left me the house but she left plenty of bills, too. Utilities and property taxes so high, I had to break down and take on worrisome tenants. The sock puppets upstairs.
“Yes and yes,” I say. He thrusts five folded bills in my open hand. I slip them in my trusted bank, adjust my bra strap, pat my breast.
Listen, telling lies is easier than reading, and reading is harder than telling the truth. It had been hard even with Aunt Dissy at my side. She greedily watched me as I slept, combed through every detail of my most mundane dream. It became even more challenging without her, because I never thought I would be. Of all the Dissys who came to me, it’s odd that Aunt Dissy never did. I waited for her those first weeks, but all I received from her defiant portrait was silence. And yet when she lived, I studied the ways and means, the art and the craft of reading dreams. And make no mistake, it is an art, the delicate task of mixing the truth with half-truths, but she joined Mama and the line of Dissys before she could tell me all her secrets. Before she died I wondered if she ever would. Her death was a final sign of disapproval. The signs and symbols of the old policy dream book remained a mystery to me.
Truth be told, mistakes were made. After one mother came, her belly hanging low, her forehead riven with anxiety, that night I dreamed of a large sumptuous table. Luscious fruit, sweets, and bread were piled high around two bright brass candelabras with candles. I was so relieved to see the fresh fruit, the loaves of bread. I didn’t notice that while one of the candles was bright, the other flickered in the dark, almost spent. I told the woman she had nothing to fear. Her son, would be healthy, safe. So when she gave birth to twins, one who wailed in her arms, the other who shed no tears but was still warm, I counted her loss as my own. I grieved, for all I could see and for all I did not.
It was with her, that first mournful young mother, that I learned the power of nuance, the strength in ambiguity. Neither was for charlatans to hide, but for professionals to appreciate. Every square-toed soothsayer and two-boots traveler knew the universal sign for the conception of a boy, but I’d failed to see that the pair of candles in my dream meant that she would give birth to twins. A novice, I could see all the signs but I misread the symbols. Instead I’d spoken to the mother as if her child’s fate was assured. A jackleg error is what Aunt Dissy would have said, a rookie rushing toward the finale instead of redreaming and working the scene.
Long after that mother buried her child, I wondered if he might have lived or if I could have better prepared her for the loss. But even if I had known, and told her that her son would die, she would have hated me still. Never to return. Each day I woke with that mother’s grief running down my face. But tears wouldn’t help me. They never did. I had learned the hard way, the danger in misinterpreting a dream. It was almost as painful as refusing to see a dream at all, and I wanted nothing more than to be rid of Aunt Dissy’s burden, my ‘best luck.’ I tried every drug and remedy I could find, lost myself in the forgetfulness of flesh, hoping something or someone would grant me the release of a dreamless sleep. But still they came, surrounded me. Dreaming awake, the Dissys watched from their gilded portraits, silent on the wall, the dream book waiting, as always, on its stand.
“A copious record of others’ subconscious travels,” one Dissy had written in her crowded, sloping pen of the late 19th century, but I could find nothing in Aunt Dissy’s book that would offer me relief. With its smell of damp roots and weeds, its Old Testament-like list of names all handwritten by Dissys, reaching back generations, its hand drawn apocryphal images and inked sacred numbers, the dream book offered the key to others’ fates, but for me it offered no answers at all. For all of its passages, handwritten and collaged, Aunt Dissy’s dream book remained an enigma full of hidden, unwritten codes I struggled to decipher, blank spaces I filled with fear.
And it was clear that no Dissys dreamed of their own deaths, for where one scrawling hand ended, sometimes mid-sentence, another began.
“What you see is not writ,” he tells me, “not like in the Book of Life,” he says. “You can be wrong, can’t you? Sometimes it ain’t all clear?”
I lie to him. After he tells me everything, about the unseen woman who haunts his dreams and makes him lose sight of his days, the faceless phantom, the haint that sabotages every attempt at love he makes. A lost love, perhaps, an old flame, an unforgettable ex? Most people who sat in that chair had more than a sore bottom. They came with stooped shoulders, bent from carrying the dead weight of the past. A relationship that would not be resurrected. Memories that should be put to rest and forgotten. But this was a different kind of hopeless, one unknown to me. I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead, a finger at my temple, lying because despite the smoky tendrils of his dream, I couldn’t see a single thing. The serpent slumbered, spent.
Sky released rain. The day was leaving without me but this man was still here. I could feel the spirits around me, hear them pounding the streets outside my window, but I couldn’t get this man out of my chair. His sadness was a long, unbroken note slowly descending into madness. Anything else I could say would sound reedy, hollow to his ear. I could tell from his face. He was one of those hard-headed, fingers-in-your-split-side souls. I would have to show him. This is where the cards become more than props.
I pull out the pouch. Its worn purple velvet is smooth in my hand, the royal yellow stitching now only reads “CROW.”
“You’re going to read Tarot?” he asks, incredulous. He glares at the discarded crystals and the bowl of red brick dust, both silent failures atop the lacy table. I have already tried everything. He is not impressed. “Been there, done that,” he says. His old genteel Bojangles act discarded, too. “Death card comes up every time, don’t mean shit.”
