Psychics

TW: sexual assault

My grandmother bought me a psychic named Don for my fifteenth birthday. She had given him my birthdate and birth time so that he could plot out the exact positions of the planets when I left my mother’s canal. He told me that I was an old soul. That I had been a teacher, a musician in past lives. He told me that I was very close to reaching my full potential as a human being. But then he said that my father’s spirit was in the room. My father, Paul, had been dead for five years— after chugging four liters of vodka every day for years, his liver had failed him. The psychic made me turn off all electronics (spirits don’t want us to have audio proof that they exist), then let my father’s soul take over his body. My father, through Don, announced that he wanted me to know something, but I would have to guess. The psychic may have been fishing for something here, but it was like my father to rest my emotions on the end of some childish game.

I guessed that he wanted to proclaim his love for me. “No, that’s not it, Sophie.” I started sobbing—you’d hope it was because this psychic was clearly extorting me, but I really did feel my father’s spirit. “He wants me to know that I don’t have to keep the family together,” I blurted.

I don’t know why I said that. Until two years ago, I would have argued that my father told me to say it. But I also had a nightmare that week where each person in my family played tug-of-war with limbs until I finally separated at the joints and my family fell apart. It’s quite possible that my insistence on being the linchpin of the family simply convinced the psychic I’d reached an emotional pressure point, forcing him to end his act of possession. When Don “returned,” he said the 45 minutes were up. I was unsettled by the wad of cash my grandmother handed him—she would have paid anything.

My family has always believed in souls. We never practiced psychism as one would practice a religion, we just lived as if it were the truth. With religion, it’s clear even to children that faith is the driving force. My family believes that God exists, just like some people believe that life is fair. With psychism, my family didn’t believe in anything—we just knew. We talked to our animals as though they were reincarnations of our dead relatives. We promised to find each other in the next life. We thought that our familial relation connected our minds telepathically. My father even claimed that LSD gave him the power to predict each of our deaths.

Our family’s knowledge of psychism started with my grandmother, Joan.  She was born at the tail end of the Great Depression to Winnie, who was also a housewife. Over the years, my grandmother has told me stories about growing up in Brooklyn: visiting the freaks from Coney Island, stealing candy from the corner shop, catching frogs in the park with her bare hands. She can’t imagine how I grew up in a suburb without any freedom.

But when she was fifteen, she met Paul Sr. He was eighteen, so he wanted to fuck her. And Paul had a car, so the feeling was mutual. They got married as soon as it was legal, and Joan announced to me, 50 years later, that she had saved her virginity for marriage.

Paul became a fireman, a career which Joan was proud to support by taking care of the domestic work. But that meant Joan was alone most nights, waiting for her husband to come home. They had two kids—Paul Jr. and Debby—pretty quickly, which gave Joan something to care about. But soon after that, Paul Sr. got hurt in one of the fires. He couldn’t be a fireman anymore, so he became a cop.

My grandma was all for this until Paul Sr. started treating her like one of his arrestees. He would beat her with frying pans when things weren’t done correctly. And after becoming a cop, he also became an alcoholic. He drank with his cop buddies until they all got drunk enough to piss on the poor and arrest the needy. When you’re drunk, it’s hard to tell the difference between your sex doll and your punching bag.

So she divorced him, went to college, raised two kids on her own, and became a real estate agent. It was quite a leap of faith at the time, and I truly respect her for the sacrifice.

But then she met another man, and it was all over. Jerry, another alcoholic, always washed the dishes, which was enough to make Joan trash her independence. Though she kept working as a real estate agent, her career became a reason to get out of the house instead. Jerry hitched her out to Missouri, replacing family and friends with suburbia.

Psychism became important to her when her son became an alcoholic. My father started drinking when he was thirteen—he developed insomnia over the nightly domestic abuse, then drank to fall asleep.

It took Joan a while to realize that her son was an alcoholic—the first few years were written off as normal high school rabble-rousing. But once she did see the problem, she tried everything she could to fix him. She yelled at him, she indoctrinated him with Christ-like savior complexes, she threatened him, she exiled him, she paid him off, she sent him to rehab, she sent him to AA. She even made him go to therapy. But nothing worked. And more importantly, every solution placed the blame on him. In her eyes, he was the perfect son who never cried and who always protected her from her husband. He was a warrior struggling to slay his inner dragon.

So when my grandmother discovered psychism, a belief system which absolved Paul of all guilt, which placed the blame for his alcoholism on the soul that he was born with, she was all on board. Not only did psychics provide an explanation for his alcoholism, but they also provided a solution: since Paul was just one incarnation of his soul, the fight could simply be fought over more than one lifetime. Paul was sure to become sober over the next hundred years or so.

After my father’s death, I became as obsessed with psychism as both my mother and grandmother.  We all coped by knowing that Paul would be somewhere, waiting in line for his next life. It wasn’t just reincarnation—it was talking to him and knowing that he would be listening, seeing patterns in the earth as signs that he was watching, feeling his presence in the room with as I fell asleep. It was permeated by that mystical feeling you get when you explore a hobby or a place that your loved one used to enjoy.  I believed in it, not just because it made my father seem alive again, but because it made him more tolerable: Paul’s physical state was overbearing, hypersexual, and insecure, but Paul’s spirit was safe, alluring, and wise.

I was always in a state of confused awe when I thought of Paul, of all the things he did to our family, of all the unusual things he was capable of doing to our family. The feeling can only be described as the intersection of eroticism, hatred, and apprehensive elation. So when I found someone who also believed in psychism, I thought I had found my soulmate.

*

Patrick was in a screenwriting class, working on a script about LSD. To help him research, I told him that when my father was a teenager, he thought he could predict people's deaths after taking a ton of LSD. Before anyone in my family died, he would have a dream about them dying. In fact, my father even had a dream the night before the twin towers fell. “Sophie, did your dad predict 9/11?” Patrick asked. “Well,” I said, “none of us can say for sure if he did. But he did tell my mom about the premonition”

A couple of minutes later, Patrick asked if I liked the Grateful Dead. “Uh, yeah, my dad really liked them.” He asked if I wanted to see a Dead and Company concert with him. I said no. He then asked if we could get lunch together. I said no. Dinner? No. “But if you really want to,” I said, “you can visit me at work.”

He stayed at my workplace for four hours. He told me that he had a podcast where he recorded himself reacting to different drug trips. That he was fed up with all of the liberals at NYU. That he played in a psychedelic rock band.

“Do you know who Ben Shapiro is?” he asked.

“Oh yeah, I love him.” I had confused Ben Shapiro with Ben Schwartz, the comedian from Parks and Recreation.

“Wow. I‘ve never met a liberal who likes Ben Shapiro. You are really something, Sophie. I think we’ll be very good together.”

That was when I gave Patrick my phone number. I felt like my grandmother, searching for my father in everything, looking for his reincarnation. Maybe the next version of my father had worked out the kinks, and this one would respectfully adore me.

He texted me the next day. He told me that he had high hopes for us. That we would travel the country together. And most of all, that he wanted to fuck me. He tried to connect with me—when I told him my father died of alcoholism, he told me that his uncle overdosed in the middle of some lake. He felt his uncle’s spirit whenever he got high.

“I’m so glad that I found you, Sophie. I wish it hadn’t taken me so long. But to be honest, I was turned off at first because you seemed like a feminist. It was a big red flag when you said that all men were idiots.” He told me that he forgave me for being a feminist since I had been through so many bad times with the men in my life.

“Yeah, well, my mom’s first husband cheated on her the day my brother was born. My sister’s husband cheated on her a month after their baby was born. And my father was an alcoholic, an abusive college dropout, and a child molester.”

This is a good moment to pause: I had not yet told him my father was sexually abusive.

“What do you mean, a child molester?”

“I don’t want to talk about it right now. But I’ll tell you later.”

The next day came, and he told me that he loved me. But what really stood out was when he said, “I think I’m possessed by the ghost of your father. It’s funny, isn’t it? When people ask how we met, we can say that your father introduced us. I’m so proud of my baby girl.”

Honestly, I wasn’t very upset about this. The prospect of my father coming back was scary (because I knew he would punish me for all the times I talked shit about him). But I needed him back. His sexual abuse was a terrible act of violence, but his soul was entrancing. He was a traditional romantic, confessing his unconditional love for me, surprising me with unreasonable gifts, and defending me against any questions of my worth. For every harm, there was a period of renewal and forgiveness. It turned out that I really did care about keeping my family together, or, at the very least, keeping me and my father together.

So we kept talking. Patrick called me the next day. I decided it was the right time to tell him about the child molester thing. (I figured my dad might have already told him anyway.) He took it really well.

“That’s so crazy,” Patrick said. “Because ever since I’ve felt your father’s spirit in me, I’ve had the urge to just grab your sister’s tits. I’ve never even seen her before, but I know that if I did see her, I just wouldn’t be able to control myself. Do I have permission to have sex with your sister whenever I meet her?”

“Yeah, I guess. As long as she wants to. As long as you have her permission.”

I didn’t hang up, not yet. As soon as Patrick said this, I was pulled out of whatever mystical, erotic spell my father’s memory had placed on me. I thought, If he is possessed by my father, then my father is the Devil. I wanted to hang up, I assure you. But I was paralyzed by fear—it was not the sadness I felt when the psychic was possessed by my father four years earlier, nor was it the feeling I had when I felt my father’s spirit. It was concern for my own safety, something I had never felt when thinking about my father. I’d hoped that my father would change after his death, but of course he didn’t. If Patrick isn’t possessed by my father, then he will probably stalk and kill me when I tell him that I never want to see him again. If Patrick is possessed by my father, then I am existentially fucked.

So I stayed on the phone for another hour. He predicted what our lives would be like as a couple, saying things like “I’ve only ever dated anorexic women—I hope that I can make you more like them” and “We’ll have three kids in the next four years, then one of our children will die. Then you will die, and from the grave, you will help me get back together with my ex-girlfriend Sara.”

After he finished talking about his fantasies, he hung up. I texted him, saying that he was the worst thing to ever happen to me and that I never wanted to talk to him again.

The next week, I got a text from his mother saying that he was in the hospital. Fearing that he had tried to kill himself because of me, I agreed to visit him. About 20 minutes into the visit, after the nurses had locked Patrick and me in a room together to avoid being chased by a man with a hole in his head, I found out what really happened: he had told his therapist about me, and, in an act of pure love and feminism, his therapist institutionalized him for psychosis.

My grandmother, my mother, my sister—they all still believe in psychics. Until I left the hospital two years ago, I did too. But when the guy who supposedly loves you tells you that he’s possessed by your father and that your father really wants him to fuck your sister, you reevaluate the beliefs that brought you there.

I didn’t like Patrick because he believed in psychics. I liked Patrick because I could deeply relate to him in ways that you can’t relate over mere hobbies or beliefs. I found myself attracted to the trauma that he could bring me back to. My father was dead and gone. There were no more men to hurt me. So I threw myself into the trash can that was Patrick, trying to get back to the warm fire I was born into. My grandmother kept going back when she got burned by Paul Sr., and after he died, she married Jerry. She kept searching for her son after he had sexually assaulted his children. My mother kept going back to my father, the alcoholic, child molester. My sister kept going back to the alcoholic adulterer she married. And I literally went back to my father’s soul. We are obsessed with keeping the family together; when we can’t do that, we find another man to recreate it.

The funny thing is, my grandmother gave the psychic the wrong birthdate—instead of plotting out the position of the planets for my birthday, he plotted them out for six days before. I would hate to be the unlucky son of a gun who was born six days before me. Maybe all this was meant for them.

Photography by Bradly Treadaway