car can be heard speeding past on the nearby interstate. Closer, but less frequently—every several minutes, maybe—a car passes slowly behind before it picks up speed on the nearby interstate onramp. On the other side of the rest area and welcome center building, a truck’s airbrakes will make that squonking truck airbrake sound. Sometimes people talk on their phones or to each other as they walk to the restroom, but never loud enough to make out their conversation through the car window that’s rolled down just an inch to let out the cigarette smoke. Me is talking to Other Me, but the conversation is taking place entirely in my head while Me does his best to dictate the conversation verbatim.
ME: Thanks for visiting your psychic advisor in the front seat of my car. This is Antonio. May I have your first name and—
OTHER ME: Why are you talking to yourself?
ME: I’m not talking to myself. I’m thinking to myself.
OTHER ME: Whatever. Why are you thinking to yourself?
ME: I’m trying to make this feel like a real reading. I figure maybe it’ll work better that way. I give people advice all day, so I—
OTHER ME: That’s scary.
ME: Do you want to do this or not?
OTHER ME: You know you’re not really a psychic, right?
ME: All of us are born with inherent psychic abilities. It’s just that some of us were raised in an environment where—
OTHER ME: Cut the crap. You don’t even believe in this.
ME: I sort of do. Sometimes. There’s Irene, at work, she’s totally psychic.
OTHER ME: Maybe she’s just better at lying than you are.
ME: Okay, but what about when I have those nights at work when the cards are exactly right on every single call?
OTHER ME: That’s just the law of averages. When you do twenty or thirty readings a night for a year, the cards are bound to be right every now and then.
ME: You don’t believe that. You think, at the very least, that there’s some subconscious Rainman part of our brain that knows the answers and is shuffling the cards just right to show us what those answers are. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
OTHER ME: Just shut up and deal the cards.
ME: Okay. I need you to quiet your mind as you think of your question.
OTHER ME: What’s my question?
ME: You want to know if you should go back to training or not. On the one hand, if you go back to training, you won’t have to worry about getting fired. On the other hand, you’ll make three dollars less an hour, which sucks, because you can barely pay your bills now. On the other other hand, training is boring, and it’d be super boring the second time. But it’ll also be easy, so you’ll get paid to do basically nothing, which would be nice. On the other other other hand, everybody will think you’re an idiot for going back to training, but since when do you care about what everybody else thinks anyway, especially everybody else at ATS? On the other other other other other hand, training is at nine in the morning, every morning—for three whole unholy weeks—but you’d also have normal weekends for a change, instead of Tuesdays and Wednesdays off, when all the bars have their stupid Eighties Night or Lady Gaga Night or Drink This Crap We Found Under the Sink Night.
OTHER ME: Whoa! How do you know all that? Maybe you really are psychic.
ME: See? Maybe this will work after all. Now quiet your mind and tell me when you feel I should stop shuffling the cards.
OTHER ME: What’s that noise? Is somebody chanting in the restroom?
ME: No. That’s me. My landlady’s been playing this crazy music nonstop since yesterday morning and I can’t get it out of my head.
OTHER ME: E-jean boo lawn chi wren ling Ming John she ah me toe foe you chew shin John Zen’s eye Cheech in she wren John she zing booed yen Dow gee duh wan shin ah me toe foe gee lug whoa two—
ME: Please stop. I can hear it just fine without you singing along. Just ignore it and tell me when to stop shuffling the cards.
OTHER ME: Stop.
ME: Okay, a lot of cup cards, a lot of swords. From the looks of these cards, I’d say you have an active love life.
OTHER ME: Dude, you totally suck at this.
ME: You don’t have to be a butthead. I’m just reading your cards.
OTHER ME: What’s up with the Death card in my first position?
ME: We like to call it the card of transition.
OTHER ME: That’s just so your callers won’t hang up on you right away.
ME: True. But if you look at the picture on the card, you see a guy swinging his scythe in the middle of a burned field. Farmers do that all the time so their crops will grow better in the spring. I’m more interested in this Queen of Swords in your second position. It suggests a quick-witted woman in your life. Plus you have three different Cup cards. Cups are the cards of love—
OTHER ME: Yeah, yeah. And Swords are the cards of the mind, and Coins are money and Wands are strength. I know all that. But I don’t have any kind of love life at all.
ME: But this inverted Four of Cups in your sixth position. A new, loving relationship in your future—
OTHER ME: Dude, I’m telling you, I’ve only had sex once in the whole last year. Remember? two months ago? after I got kicked out of that stupid Halfway to Halloween party? Catwoman? the bushes behind Konneker Hall? How could you forget that?
ME: As I recall, that was followed by a campus police escort to my dorm, where they saw my Hawaiian themed room and all those plastic plants I borrowed from Shively Hall.
OTHER ME: Yeah, that part sucked. Catwoman was fun, though. But that’s as close as I’ve been to a girlfriend since Ashley.
ME: Maybe there’s somebody else. Somebody you don’t know about.
OTHER ME: How could I not know about it?
ME: Your eighth position represents the people around you, and the Two of Cups is one of the clearest signs of love in the Tarot deck. As you look at it, you see—
OTHER ME: As you look at it, you see there’s another card stuck to it, Mr. Psychic: an upside-down Knight of Cups. What’s that supposed to mean?
ME: The inverted Knight of Cups here suggests that you also have a romantic rival, somebody sneaky and distrustful. Who do you think that is?
OTHER ME: Dude, seriously, I don’t have a love life.
ME: The rest of these cards look right, though: transition in your first position. The Three of Coins representing your recent past. The Hanged Man in your seventh position—you feel like you’re in limbo right now, right? The Knight of Swords in your ninth position says you hope to act bravely when the need arises.
OTHER
