In Nightmares We're Alone (11 page)

I benefit the world by being open about my experiences.

Give them what they want. If they come out of the experience feeling better, they’ll come back. Leave them with a good feeling, but be wary of closure. Too much closure and they won’t come back. Don’t make it about loved ones saying goodbye. Make it about loved ones helping. Give them just enough help to last till your next rent payment.

That’s where the self-help books come in. People love empty advice that sounds nice.

‘You’re so busy trying to please everyone that you forget to please yourself,’ you’ll tell them.

‘You have so much love to give.’

‘You’re the only
you
who’s out there.’

You might as well be saying ‘You are carbon-based,’ but they’ll eat it up because there’s so little optimism left in our culture. Optimism has a bad reputation. In public we feel the need to mock it, but secretly everyone is starved for it.

If they’re regulars, you can let them have a bad time now and then. They’re not going to bail on you for one bad session, and you might find they come back faster and more desperate trying to resolve whatever problem you manufactured for them. If nothing else, it’ll stop them thinking you’re just telling them what they want to hear.

Mostly it’s women. Either they’re more superstitious than men, or they can tell I’m good in bed. Maybe a combination of the two.

The amount of money you can charge is dependent primarily on how nice your office is. The number of clients who let you fuck them is dependent primarily on how sensitive you seem. In my case I charge a hundred thirty-five for a thirty-minute reading and fuck two out of five of my regulars.

I am doing work that is enjoyable and fulfilling.

When Arthur comes in for the fiftieth time this year, I greet him with a firm handshake and a smile and tell him, “I’m glad you’re finally back. Your father-in-law has been trying to communicate with me a lot this week.”

He says, “I thought he must be. He seems so active around the house these last days.”

Arthur’s an older guy. He’s got multiple sclerosis and moves around with a cane and slurs his words together so he sounds drunk and angry all the time, but really he’s just as weak and damaged and scared as everyone. He wants you to tell him everything will be okay. Everybody wants that. You just have to learn to figure out the words they need it said in. The key to all social interaction is learning how to say ‘It’ll all be okay’ in the right tone.

“I’m terrified he’s trying to take Grace from us,” says Arthur. “She took such a turn for the worse today. She’s been talking to him, reacting like he’s right there with her, telling him they’ll be together soon. I think he’s trying to kill her.”

“Let’s see if we can’t contact him, shall we?”

I dim the lights and exhale. I turn my palms up.

“Tom? Are you here, Tom?” asks Arthur.

“I’m here,” I say, taking on the voice of a dead man to please a living one.

“Tom? Are you…? Do you…? Have you been talking to Grace?”

“Every day. To her and to you and to Edna. I’m with you always. Whenever you need me.”

“You’re torturing her. You won’t let her let go of you, just for a while, just to live out the rest of her life. Her daughter needs her. If you’d just give her space, she’d get better. You’re making us suffer.”

“Arthur… I know I wasn’t the best father-in-law I could have been, but if you think I don’t have my daughter’s well-being in mind, you’re mistaken. I don’t want to take Grace away. She’s with me always and I’m with her, even when we’re apart. I tell her to be strong, but it’s hard for her. It’s harder for her than it is for you or Edna. I’m not pulling her away from you, she’s deciding whether to pull herself to me. And I hope she’s strong enough not to do it just yet, but if she isn’t I’ll embrace her and forgive her and I hope you’ll do the same. She and I will be with the two of you forever.”

Bibbity beep bop boop.

It gets easy, trust me. A few sessions and these people spill their entire life stories. I bet I know this guy damn near as well as his wife of twenty-five years.

By the time I’ve argued with him in Tom’s voice for thirty minutes, Arthur hugs me and cries in my shoulder and tells me what a great man I am for sharing my gift with the world.

Nobody but me can do the things I do the way I do them.

* * * * *

“Hello,” says Ms. Giddings, my last client of the day, new blood. “This is a nice place.”

My office is my living room. Trish and Nikki take turns decorating it. Both keep rearranging furniture and forcing me to take the blame lest they learn about each other. Neither can abide the other’s tastes. Whenever Nikki and I agree on a new position for a coffee table or a lamp, Trish throws a fit over how it will affect my chi or the aura of my house.

That feng shui crap. You know it’s bullshit because they’re both obsessed with it and can’t reach a consensus. But if you’re going to talk to the dead, these are the people you have to put up with.

“Thank you,” I say to Ms. Giddings. “I decorated it myself.”

“You certainly have an eye for design.”

“Have a seat. Can I get you anything? Water, coffee, tea?”

“No thank you. Um… Sorry. I’m nervous.”

“Don’t be. Take a seat here.”

“I’ve never done anything like this before.”

“Well, lucky for you, I have. Should I call you Ms. Giddings?”

“Elaine. Please.”

Elaine. Pretty name. Not common anymore. Most Elaines are in their forties or fifties, but this girl doesn’t look much older than I am. Thirty-five? A young forty, at most. Still old for me, but I’m not saying I wouldn’t. You’ve had one eighteen-year-old you’ve had them all, but a woman in her thirties has found her technique. Even if they’re not as nice to look at, dim the lights and they’ll do things that’ll change you.

I will not judge myself.

“That’s a lovely bracelet you’re wearing, Elaine,” I say, taking a seat.

The bracelet in question is sloppily designed, ugly as all hell, a bunch of ten-for-a-cent beads tied together with green wool. It doesn’t match her meticulously-planned outfit. Clearly it has special significance and a casual mention usually earns the story. My first guess proves right.

“Thank you. My youngest made it at school.”

“I figured. I’ve got a dozen knickknacks just like it.”

She smiles. “You’re a father?”

“I am. I have a ten-year-old son.”

“Aw. What’s his name?”

“Martin. Little Martin. Do you have boys?”

“Girls. Macie and Heather. Eight and seventeen.”

Seventeen. Shit. Mid-thirties at the youngest. Probably forty. She’s a banging old lady. That counts for something. Some of the best-looking girls I nailed in high school, you look at them now, yikes. But if good looks don’t go by the early thirties it usually means they’re not going.

“That’s wonderful. I always wanted a girl,” I say. Not because it’s true. It’s just what you say.

“They’re great some days. Others…”

“You don’t have to tell me.” I flash her my cute dimples.

“Anyway, I wanted to ask you about this, um… your…”

“Gift?”

“Yes. Can you… I mean… Can you contact anybody you want? I’m sorry, I don’t really know how this works.”

“I can try. Some spirits don’t want to be contacted, but they’re all still with us. The world’s a lot more populated than we realize.”

“Even, um… This is hard…”

“Take your time.”

“The thing is, I… had a… miscarriage? A couple years ago.” Something about how guarded she is, the way she keeps glancing around the room. Something about that baffled look on her face like she can’t believe she’s even here. She’s got it together, but she doesn’t think she does. Probably doesn’t realize how beautiful she still is either. Her life is defined by motherhood and her job is nothing but to give love. I like where this is going. I can’t wait to get into character and feel that love.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” I say.

“Is that something that…? I collect these dolls. And the one I just got, I have this funny feeling when I look at her, this profound comfort. And it… I had this feeling that because the doll is in the baby’s room… I mean, the room that was supposed to be… I’m sorry, this all sounds so crazy.”

“Not at all. It makes sense that a child would seek out a relationship with her mother. The room in which she was supposed to spend her time is a reasonable place. Tell me more.”

Elaine talks and I listen. We discuss an imaginary girl who never lived to be human. I do my best to make her feel comfortable, whether we’re discussing a miscarriage or whether I’m speaking for a dead fetus.

Talking to the dead is all about quelling the pain of the living—the beautiful, sexy, bursting-with-love living—and quelling the pain of reality is all about lying.

By the time our session is over I’ve had such love poured on me in the guise of this hypothetical human that I almost wish I really was a miscarriage. I guess we all wish that sometimes, but usually not with this much bliss.

* * * * *

I really want to fuck the sycamore out back.

I don’t know what that’s about, where that impulse comes from. When I’m alone in the house I stare out the back window at an enormous tree with a hundred branches reaching out for the sky in all directions and I’m overcome with a lust I can’t explain. I’ve heard stories of unusual urges, people who live otherwise normal lives and find themselves drawn to an unusual and extreme encounter, some freaky sex experiment or murder or robbery. Weird synapses in the brain that cry out for something out of the norm, something to break our unbearable routines.

You think Elaine’s old, that tree could be a hundred.

A human life lasts a century in a lucky few cases, but life itself has spanned eons. Life on Earth goes back so long it’s hard to comprehend it in any meaningful way, and where it starts from we don’t really know. Maybe it was a meteorite from somewhere else that, five billion years prior, life flourished and civilizations we can’t imagine were born. Each human life is a drop in an ocean, a fiber in a leaf that sprouts from a twig on a small branch that makes up a fraction of a tiny arm among thousands on the tree of life. We as individuals are nothing.

Nothing on this planet is anything.

Every night I stare at the tree and think like this and I’m overcome by an emptiness and then the emptiness fills up with lust.

The tree grows where its seeds are planted. It moves where the wind pushes it. A branch snaps off not because of anything the tree did but because of what the world did to the tree. We’re the same. We’re beakers in a laboratory having culture poured into us and we react in the natural way our ingredients dictate and we think we had a choice. But we didn’t. Somehow or another, everything inside our heads got put there by something on the outside. We are the world’s test subjects.

The world, the culture, the wind, whatever it is, it told us experience was worth cherishing and made us collect it, so we started living our lives striving for firsts. The first word, the first steps, the first crush, the first date, the first car, the first job, the first kiss, the first marriage, the first home, the first child, the first divorce… But the cruel joke of life is that the firsts all come to soon. You can be in your mid-twenties and already have used up all your best firsts, then what’s left to look forward to?

What I’m getting at is: Why
not
fuck a tree?

Some days when I plant seeds in the garden or water the plants, tow the soil in the flower bed, I look up at that magnificent sycamore that stands with pride and dignity over my garden and I want to make it my bitch for a few hot minutes.

I am the universe expressing itself for an instant.

Sometimes if the neighbors aren’t out, if I’m sure no one’s watching, I take down my jeans and feed some of my nutrients to the roots.

This is me. This is a private secret of the quiet life I live.

Dendrophilia, the Internet tells me. The sexual attraction to plants. Not exactly an epidemic, I’m sure, but at least it happens enough to have a name.

There is nothing wrong with me, I tell myself. Some people are excited by bondage, by group sex, by pain or defecation, by animals, by children, by smearing foods on flesh, making love to fruits and vegetables, by amputation, the wrinkles of old age, or the smell of burning rubber. We all have our quirks. It would be boring if we didn’t. If a sycamore gives me a hard on, my mental health is as stable as the next guy’s.

If you’re going to judge me, at least clear your browser history.

I deposit my protein on the tree trunk.

You’ve heard of a green thumb. Other parts of a body can be green too.

I am how I was made; it is impossible for anything to be wrong with me.

It’s only odd that at twenty-seven years old it didn’t manifest itself sooner. I never soiled a house plant growing up. Mom gardened. I bought Rose flowers more times than one. Never did I feel the urge until the sycamore. And even then, not until these last few months. Not until the house became a cave for me alone. Then stronger each day. Throbbing sometimes. Throbbing like…

Oh, hell with your toe, Casey. Stop thinking about it.

I was repressed, that’s all. Marriage made me shut it up inside. Ever since the split, it’s anything goes. Roleplay and BDSM and water sports. It makes sense I found mine late. I never experimented young, when you’re supposed to.

Now the house is empty. All this time alone, of course I’m going to find out new things about myself. No wife or child to learn about so I’m learning about me. Nobody to connect to so I’m connecting to…

To what? Myself? Nature?

When I’m left alone at the end of each night, I watch the sycamore from the window. I come outside when all the lights are out and strip in the yard. I press the skin of my chest to the tree bark, feel the knots and the inconsistencies. And if there was a knot big enough, wide enough, deep enough…

I don’t know. I just don’t know.

I’m not sure there’s a mantra for this.