What the Psychic Saw

What the Psychic Saw

She set up her stall just as the others had done. She didn’t have much to set up. A table, a couple of chairs. She didn’t use tarot cards. She didn’t display a crystal ball. She wore a Burmese ruby on her finger. The color of pigeon’s blood. The fluorescence of the ring made it difficult to ignore. The ring had nothing to do with her psychic readings.
     She put out a sign on her table: “The Broadway Psychic’s Psychic Readings.”
     Around her, the netherworld of a street fair continued. Vendors selling corn on the cob. Vendors selling junk jewelry. Artists hawking their paintings of the Malibu seashore. A seashore currently engulfed in fire, though you wouldn’t know from the paintings.
     The netherworld of the street fair is a New York tradition. As spring becomes summer, the street fair begins on lower Broadway. With each passing Sunday the fair advances uptown, twenty blocks or so at a time. By mid-October, the fair reaches the Upper West Side. The material sold doesn’t change from week to week, month to month, year to year. Ordinary earrings, fried foods, lots and lots of socks.
     I watched the psychic from some distance. She sat alone. Nobody approached her stall. Customers ate corn on the periphery of her stall. Customers looked at Salvation Army-like furniture. Customers bought socks. Nobody purchased a reading.
     I approached. Cautiously, at first. Timid perhaps. When I reached her stall, I saw the identifying mark. A mole on the psychic’s cheek. Bigger than a beauty mark. Various shades of black. The closer to the center, the darker the mole became.
     My timidity grew. I should explain. A decade ago I began a book project, chronicling the 20th century. In my research, I came across a psychic. She seemed to turn up throughout the century. Various figures – from politicians to athletes to celebrities – came in contact with her. She appeared in many diaries over the years. She was easily identifiable. She wore a Burmese ruby on her finger. She had a mole on her cheek. Bigger than a beauty mark. She never aged, even as the century did.
     Three First Ladies – Ida McKinley, Lou Hoover and Nancy Reagan – described the psychic as a middle-aged woman, slight of build (Nancy didn’t like fat people and would never have visited an overweight psychic), with an open face and wide eyes. None of them mentioned any sort of aging process. Eighty years separated the reflections of Ida McKinley and Nancy Reagan.
     The first President of the 20th century, William McKinley, noted his one and only meeting with the psychic. According to his diary entry, McKinley entered a shop called “the Polk Street Psychic’s Psychic Readings.” The psychic asked for his hand. Not as a palm-reader might. Not with the expectation of seeing a timeline etched into skin. The psychic wasn’t interested in his palm. The psychic was interested in a handshake.
     As she shook his hand, the psychic closed her eyes tightly. President McKinley, according to his diary entry, felt a bolt, a tremor. His entire body shook. In reflex, he slipped his hand free of her grasp. His palm was throbbing, swelling, he noted. It felt like a bee bite.
     In her eyelids, the psychic saw two bullets, one grazing the President’s ribs, the other smashing into his abdomen, piercing his heart. She saw this man dying on the hard, crowded floor.
     McKinley wrote these details into his diary entry of September 5, 1901. The very next day, at the Pan-American exhibition, an assassin fired two bullets into McKinley’s body.
     The psychic, however, was not totally accurate in her vision. The first bullet, though smashing into McKinley’s abdomen, didn’t do much damage. The second bullet ripped into his thigh. That bullet proved terminal. McKinley died a few weeks later of gangrene. He did not die on the hard, crowded floor.
     The evening before the assassination, Leon Czolgosz craved a psychic reading. Moments after McKinley, he entered “The Polk Street Psychic’s Psychic Readings.” She asked for his hand. In her eyelids, she saw the gun, she saw the bullets fired, she saw his escape west across Canada. She saw him eventually escaping to Hong Kong.
     Leon Czolgosz noted her reading in his diary entry of September 5, 1901. He shot McKinley the next day.
     As with the reading of McKinley, the psychic’s reading of Czolgosz was not totally accurate. She had the wrong Leon in sight. She had the right direction.
     Leon Trotsky, a few months after the assassination of President McKinley, busted out of Siberia and trekked west across Europe. Leon Trotsky settled in London. Leon Trotsky’s historical journey was just beginning.
     Meanwhile, Leon Czolgosz’s historical journey was ending. He died in a new invention, an electric chair. He became the first victim of the electric chair in the state of New York. The 20th century got off to a killer start.
     These references to the psychic were only the first. As the century aged, the references grew in frequency. The physicist Robert Oppenheimer mentioned her in his memoirs. So did Edward Teller. Both men belonged to the National Defense Research Committee, the group responsible for the Manhattan Project. According to both Oppenheimer and Teller, the psychic predicted that the entire western half of the United States would undergo “a weather change.”
     Both men recorded this prediction in their July 15, 1945 diary entries.
     The next day, the National Defense Research Committee exploded an Atomic bomb in New Mexico. The psychic was not totally accurate in her meteorological forecast. Only New Mexico felt the effects. And the “weather change” was more like the apocalypse.
     Twenty years later, the great comedian Lenny Bruce mentioned the psychic in his diary. The two shook hands. According to Lenny Bruce, she saw years of performances and travel, years of disgraces and jubilations. She saw a man aflutter. Constantly moving. Constantly chasing. She saw aggression, depression. She saw drugs and Cadillacs.
     The date of their meeting, according to Bruce, was August 2, 1966. It was his last diary entry. He died the next day of a drug overdose.
     I sat down beside the psychic. In her way, she’d chronicled the 20th century. Then, as the 21st century began, she’d suddenly disappeared. I wondered what had happened to her.
     A firefighter recorded her last known reading in his last journal entry. That reading occurred in Manhattan in 2001. The psychic and the firefighter shook hands. The psychic closed her eyes, the fireman wrote in his journal. She saw a burning building. She saw people running, screaming. She saw panic. She saw a fire truck arrive. She saw the firemen glance up at the fire, forty-some floors above. She asked the firefighter a question. “What you do,” she said, “it’s dangerous?”
     The date was September 10. The fireman died the next day at the World Trade Center.
     “Hello,” the psychic said to me.
     “Hello,” I responded.
     She offered her hand. I felt a rather pronounced fear. What would she find in my timeline? What would she see? How accurate would she be? I was blinded by the fluorescence of the Burmese ruby on her finger. The color of pigeon’s blood.
     We shook hands. She faded in and out. She seemed to disappear inwardly. One moment: crystal clear, occupying space. The next moment: a blind spot. Like staring at the sun. Retinas fried.
     In her eyelids, she saw sorrow. “Your life will be altered,” she said. “The grieving will be hard.”
     Her words smashed into me. I extracted my hand. “My dog will die?” I said, referring to my old Australian Shepherd.
     She took back my hand. In her eyelids, she saw celebration. She saw a fan’s sense of accomplishment. “The home team will win,” she said.
     I was wearing my purple Colorado Rockies baseball cap. The World Series begins this week.
     Her eyelids jumped. She smiled at the vision in front of her. Then she described it. “A woman in pink. A nation watching. A cold, gray sky. She’s giving a speech. She’s talking about the future. She says there’s work to do. She says that her job, as she sees it, is to mend fences. She wants her presidency, she says, to be about healing.”
     “You’re talking about Hillary Clinton?” I interrupted. “I don’t think she can win. I don’t think the Electoral College map works in her favor. Or any Democrat’s, for that matter.”
     “You’re talking about an old map,” the psychic responded, her eyes still closed, her hand still gripping mine. “You’re talking about red and blue states. The new color is pink. Women want a female president.”
     She opened her eyes. She retracted her hand. I asked about the smile on her face. “In my vision, I saw the sun peak through the clouds,” she answered. “I saw the Madam President look up at the sun and smile. I smiled because she smiled.”
     I noticed our surroundings then. Vendors selling corn on the cob. Vendors selling junk jewelry. Vendors selling socks. I also noticed the line behind me. When did that form?
     The psychic read my thoughts. “I have a following, loyal if late arriving,” she said. “I’ve been doing this since 2001.”
     Apparently, in the aftermath of 9/11, the psychic joined the netherworld of street fairs.
     I paid for my reading and walked away. Only later did I consider my role in her vision. Why did the psychic flash to the Inauguration of Hillary Clinton when she shook my hand? What did that have to do with me?
     Next Sunday I’ll have to journey the twenty or so blocks up to Columbia.

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The Gonzo Journalism of Brian Josepher

What the Psychic Saw