Tell Me I Find Love
BY Nghiem Tran
Sometimes Cassandra wished she wasn’t clairvoyant. To have to hear a passing guy say “Whoa, that dress ain’t doing that butt justice, girl.” She felt like chasing him to protest, “No, it’s the cheesecloth skirt that’s making my legs look huge.” But then she would have to explain why she was fishing around in his head in the first place. It hardly seemed fair. She didn’t even like the gypsy outfit, which she agreed made her look like a fat mole. Nor did she believe in the healing properties of crystals. Her faith in their therapeutic value was “Pfft ! Puh-lease!” And that was her Medical Opinion.
Still, her location in an obscure corner of the market square meant she could not dispense with the reliable sales of crystals and The Celestine Prophecy. It was odd for just that one corner to be obscure when the other three identical corners of the market were always busy. Initially this seclusion didn’t bother her. She expected people would recall that the sum of the interior angles of a quadrilateral always totalled 360º. They would realise they had only been to a cumulative 270º worth of corner. Naturally at this point they would come running to explore the undiscovered right angle. Eight quiet months passed to allow Cassandra to develop an advertising campaign. She didn’t understand. Did they think the market was triangular? A ridiculous notion, as the sum of the three other angles would have exceeded the 180o total for a three-sided polygon. In addition, the place was called the Bundoora All Weather Market ‘Square’. What other clues did they need?
So that morning, Cassandra placed next to the food courts her carefully designed sandwich board displaying these pertinent rules of geometry. It aimed subtly to prod her audience’s left hemisphere epiphany and initiate a stampede to her stall. What seemed such an auspicious idea at execution slowly withered after three hours of disheartening idleness. Cassandra surrendered acceptance to the prospect that it was no longer fashionable tallying vertices to audit the validity of the polygonal interior angle sum formula “(n – 2) X 180º”, “n” being the number of sides to the polygon.
Cassandra could read people’s minds but she couldn’t figure out how to use it to save her business. She could see what a person did on their first day of kindergarten but as to whether ylang ylang oil would sell better than sandalwood incense… well, the higher powers showed her nothing. People’s memories of their pasts were open to her, but not the future. When she told a client about the future she saw, it was just bullshit.
Were it not for the intermittent clientele like Bob, Cassandra would have closed up shop long ago. Bob had entered on a whim whilst searching for the dodgy computer store that sold pirated DVDs under the counter. It being Valentine’s Day, what Bob needed more than a copy of The Wedding Planner or a psychic was a dating agency. Bob was a large yet graceful, politely spoken man whose only companions were the nasty little Maltese Terriers that he bred. Cassandra told him all about his future horticultural pursuits that would draw him acclaim alongside such luminaries as Edna Walling and Gertrude Jekyll. All this sparked by his new habit of dog walks through botanical gardens. Once Bob was out of sight, Cassandra celebrated with a silent air pump of victory for a stratagem well performed. If he walked the dog enough he would lose a few kilos and increase his chances of “gettin some” by next Valentine’s Day. As to the horticultural thing, well, “Pfft!” She had withheld her other prediction of his future as she was unsure how to say diplomatically: “Ewww, you’ll get worms doing that, not on the mouth, those things lick their arses.”
There was never a specific moment when Cassandra became aware that she was an empath. It didn’t happen like in a dumb movie, or worse, in those lame magazine stories about psychics. She grew to understand her differences from normal people in much the same way psychopaths do, but without the chopping people up and hiding them under her floorboards bit. Sure, she entertained those ideas like everyone else, but she just lacked the passion needed to make it a fulfilling career. Besides, she lived on a concrete slab and knew jackhammers would disturb the neighbours.
Early in life, Cassandra learnt that when people asked her to guess how much they paid for something, they wanted her to overestimate and not answer correct to two decimal places. Hoping to understand these and other psychic faux pas, she sought advice from others like her and visited every advertising palm reader, astrologer, clairvoyant, psychic and hippie weirdo in crushed velvet she could find. They each spun a crazy story that proved them to be a liar, except the hippies, who were just crazy spinning sticks on fire. Cassandra would politely sit through the sessions, pretending to listen to the clairvoyant read her fortune while she probed their minds to find that without exception she was alone.
Occasionally one of these fortune tellers would enthral Cassandra with a prediction of her future which she knew was fake but still found inspirational in its idealism and realistic in its attainability. Those pleasant encounters kept her searching long after she would have given up. Her efforts were not entirely fruitless as they provided an apprenticeship in her final career. Her clairvoyance made it a cinch to impress people with an accurate rendition of This is Your Life. Having won their trust she would sell them a glimpse of their future, improvising it with the finesse of someone who truly understood them.
Take the case of Joan. Cassandra could see that this wasn’t the first time she had left her abusive husband. Chances were Joan would return to him, but what could Cassandra do? She spent the 45 minutes crafting a vision of the future where Joan had successfully left Phillip after several attempts, each effort increasingly more successful. In this future Joan had finally rebuilt her life and was in fact dating this nice guy who gave her apples from his tree and sung while watering his garden. The rest was fuzzy. Cassandra had fallen asleep at that point of the Julia Roberts movie. No doubt Joan’s life would continue on like the movie, however that ended. The point was, Joan left Cassandra’s booth happy and with a sense of optimism about the future. She’s dead now. But that’s another story.
The timing for when people – eh? What about Joan? Oh, it was nothing. Really, it was nothing. All right, all right. Her ex-husband Philip killed her. No, no, I’m kidding. It was a heroin overdose. Back to the story. The timing for when people sought fortune tellers was never random. It was always triggered by a crisis. Sometimes it would be a major event that they didn’t understand or a decision they had to make. It wasn’t advice they sought, just reassurance that the choice they had already made, sometimes subconsciously, was the right one.
A widow by the name of Louise had come with such a decision. Louise had never had the children that her deceased husband had built their house for. She was finally succumbing to the sadness of living alone for five years and had made hesitant final preparations, interrupting them to seek out a fortune teller. What Louise wanted and had decided upon was for the silence to end. Cassandra told Louise that her future had a lively house filled with the activity of talking voices and barking dogs. Maltese terriers in fact. These ones purchased from a local breeder who visited often to check on the dogs while bringing Scotch Finger biscuits for afternoon tea.
Watching Louise walk away, Cassandra celebrated her matchmaking success the Irish way, with a small Riverdance. She had no idea if things would work out between Louise and Bob and it didn’t matter. She was about to continue the Irish tradition by doing something stupid that would make for a racially offensive narrative joke but was stopped by a strange rumbling. It was the sound of a crowd approaching. Cassandra realised it was lunchtime and that she had been wrong about something. They were indeed interested in the last corner, just slow at maths.