Psychic Junkie (22 page)

Calmly I collected my presents—because, damnit, I’d earned them—and turned and strolled out the door. It turned out that even crazy codependent girls have their boundaries, and Wilhelm had just crossed one of them.

SOME PEOPLE HANDLE BREAKUPS WELL. I IMAGINE
they’re the same strange souls who get their oil changed every three months, have their annual physicals annually, and don’t rear-end the car in front of them because they happened to be cutting their split ends while driving. Gina, for example, is one of those people. The second the words are uttered and the tearful good-byes are said, she’s spurred into action, embarking on a methodical search-and-destroy mission that involves removing any and all pictures of the ex and any and all evidence of the ex. House sufficiently ex-proofed, she cleans,
for hours
, and then drives to the store for the proper breakup accoutrements—tissues with aloe, food, wine, smokes, and chocolate bars—essentially preparing to hibernate in comfort. Once all is neat and tidy and the jagged edges of fond memories have been filed down, then she’s ready to mourn and grieve in her own little Virgo way. At this point she allows herself to collapse in tears. “Allows herself” being the key words.

Me? I’m a bit different. I break down because I have no choice. I break down in a messy house, and it gets messier by the second. I break down alongside photographs of my ex and end up wailing and clutching those photographs to my chest as if illustrating to the universe just how my heart had been broken. I break down wearing clothes he gave me, or wrapped in a sweatshirt he left behind, and I refuse to change for days. I don’t spare myself pain, I
embrace
it. It would no longer be appropriate to call me a human being. A “useless mass of pain and raw nerves” would be far more fitting, and this is only in the initial breakup stage, when my emotions are still somewhat muted by shock.

So, no, I didn’t handle the Wilhelm breakup well.

Three days into it and I was embracing my pain from the floor, though I had no idea how I’d ended up on the floor, since one delightful aspect of my states of extreme misery is a lack of consciousness. Not that I pass out, no; I’m simply not present at times. My crying jags are like supernatural events, essentially abducting me, and when I stop, when I finally manage to breathe without heaving, I find myself in situations of which I have no recollection—perhaps clutching a shoe or lying in the bathtub. So at this particular moment I’d just found the ability to breathe again and was on the floor with my head on a stack of magazines. In my hand, for some reason, was a little gold Buddha statue. With no motivation to move, I simply stared at the fibers of my Pottery Barn rug.
Hello, old friend,
I thought.
Here we are again.

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.