Seeing with Sylvia

You could say I had a soul sandwich today. I woke up early this morning and half-asleepedly accepted a subbing job at the middle school I used to teach at, pre-graduate school. Then I tried to cancel, realize this would mean I couldn’t sleep and goof off all day, but it was too late. Bah. I need the money anyway, I told myself as I drank my orange juice. Gladys Knight sang Midnight Train to Georgia and Stevie Wonder sang As on Sirius 53--Soultown on the way to school. That seemed to be a good sign.

The morning was uneventful. Benchmark testing. Make kids sit for 4 hours and not talk while they do math. Fucking torture. At lunch I went home, slapped together a sandwich, and sat down to watch Montel. He had Sylvia Brown as a guest today, a gravelly-voiced, psychic toad with bleach blond hair, who looked either bored out of her mind or stoned out of her gourd. I don’t say that in a mean way. Just how she looked. If you don’t know, Sylvia Brown is an internationally known psychic and fraud. I began keeping a tally of her responses to questions from one wavering, wondering, teary guest after another about their recently departed friends and family members.










To add that special Montel spice, there was even a voicemail from beyond the grave and a photograph featuring a translucent figure for old Sylvia to decipher. Other inquiries included “who should I marry?” uttered by a normal-enough-looking young woman. I waited for Sylvia to tell her, “No one, if you go asking questions like that to psychics on lame daytime TV shows,” but instead she paused ever so slightly, then said, “Anthony.” Although it was clear she didn’t know any Anthonys, the lady sat down, satisfied. The frustration of keeping silence for the last four hours slipping away, I marveled at how she lobbed vague, ambiguous answers up to the serious and neurotic questions being asked. Was that my dead husband who left that voicemail? Yes. Are my dead parents disappointed in me? No. What should I do with my life? Medicine. What college should I go do? It doesn’t really matter, you’ll do well wherever. Am I going to have any more children? A boy. Is my dead mother-in-law watching over my child? Yes. Sylvia was on a goddamn roll, nonchalantly discussing the why’s and how’s of the afterlife, the difference between ghosts and spirits, and the difficulty of crossing over. It was like she had, floating somewhere above her head and whispering in her ear, every dead person related to an audience member, like Whoopi Goldberg in Ghost. There wasn’t even an interested hum when a Mexican lady stood up and said her son had been killed 2 weeks ago and she didn’t know who murdered him. Sylvia said he had been out of his mind when it happened and for Mom to not worry about it. They lapped up each answer, nodding and wiping away tears as if some real answers had been given. Even when Sylvia interrupted a grieving widow to ask abruptly, “Who’s Reba?” (McIntyre? I thought), who stared blankly in response, no one questioned that she was on the up-and-up. Insecurity must be stronger than common sense, I guess—the need to know must be satisfied, even if it’s with trite, pithy pronouncements that could apply to anybody.

The devil you say? See you yourself:


I’m not saying I don’t believe in “that stuff,” I think it’s sort of fascinating—the unanswered questions about life and death, the questions that are unanswerable in the here and now. I read my horoscope on occasion. I don’t know how people know the things they know sometimes. One weekend, I asked David what time we were leaving for the beach, although he hadn’t said anything yet about the plan for some friends to go to the coast. I swear sometimes I feel it when my phone is about to ring, it feels like a little whoosh of energy about two seconds before someone calls. I don’t know what that means.

They call people like Sylvia “seers,” and I don’t mean to disrespect them—seers were common in many cultures and eras and only recently have had to compete with science and the age of reason. I’m sure some of them aren’t even frauds. But here’s what threw me for a loop: returning to school, the benchmark testing was over and I was to read The Lightning Thief with the class (who weren’t exactly calm after hours of testing). See for yourself:

(from Chapter 19)
Imagine the largest concert crowd you’ve ever seen, a football field packed with a million fans.

Now imagine a field a million times that big, packed with people, and imagine the electricity has gone out, and there is no noise, no light, no beachball bouncing around over the crowd. Something tragic has just happened backstage. Whispering masses of people are just milling around in the shadows, waiting for a concert that will never start.

Annabeth, Grover, and I tried to blend into the crowd, keeping an eye out for security ghosts. I couldn’t help looking for familiar faces among the spirits of Asphodel, but the dead are hard to look at. Their faces shimmer. They all look slightly angry or confused. They will come up to you and speak, but their voices sound like chatter, like bats twittering. Once they realize you can’t understand them, they frown and move away.

The dead aren’t scary. They’re just sad.

We crept along, following the line of new arrivals that snaked from the main gates toward a black-tented pavilion with a banner that read:

JUDGEMENTS FOR ELYSIUM AND ETERNAL DAMNATION
Welcome, Newly Deceased!