“What wants to happen here?”

(In 2002 I was in Sedona, Arizona, trying to find a way to make a living so I could settle there. The place was already full of psychics and crystal experts, so I wasn’t really needed. Plus, I was nursing a benign but dangerous meningioma in the dura over my left frontal lobe, though I didn’t know it… and I was becoming increasingly lost and ill. Here I’m still trying to find employment.)

Ten days ago I had spoken on the phone to the woman who runs the Vortex Deli. She had said, nasally, “Int’s supposed to be my day off! But I don’t get one! I have to run from my onther shop to this one!” And so on in this vein. And then she asked in a sharp, jealous voice, “Hanve you worked anyplace in town?? Especianlly The Center for the New Age??”

I assured her I had not.

She told me to leave my resume at the Vortex Deli for her to ‘channel’.

I did this, and time passed, and nothing happened. I phoned again and talked to someone who had a hushed, strange voice. I said I was coming down to fetch my resume, and talk to the owner if she was there.

I walked the six miles to the Vortex Deli, down the long hot road from the other end of Sedona. Down the long curving hot hill to the psychic ghetto, old buildings which have been taken over by psychic reading/cum jewelry joints. I crossed the bridge over the creek, turned left into a gravel parking lot, and was there.

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I go up wooden stairs to the covered porch. There’s a sign on the glass door: LUNCH 1:00 – 2:00.

It’s 1:40. I sit gratefully on a cushioned chair, fold my legs, close my eyes.

A van pulls in. A tall, distracted-looking woman with red hair, full lips, and a generous body steps out, comes up the steps, opens the door.

Sha-nee (for that, I will discover, is her name): “Wenre you waiting for int to open?”

Me: “Yes – ”

I follow her into the building, past the whiteboard which says, “Sha-nee, Channel since age 6, Medical Intuitive, etc. etc., Sessions Today!!!!”

Me: “Are you Sha-nee?”

Sha-nee: “Yes. You are… ?”

Me: “Madhuri. I left my resume here last week.”

Sha-nee: “I never got it!!”

Me: “I dropped it off a week ago. I gave it to a… man – who was in here. He put it right over there, on top of a bunch of stuff on the shelf behind the counter.”

Sha-nee: “Wenll, I never got it! It’s nont my fault if I never got it!”

Me: “It had stuff in it I didn’t have duplicates of. I didn’t feel so good where he put it –.” (I did not tell her that I had not had two dollars at that point to get the brochure color-xeroxed. Sedona had not been good to me – in fact, I had never been any place which had been worse. Psychics and jewelry designers were running in the gutters. When I’d brought the resume in, there had been a smiling captive psychic under a mystic mosquito net in a sort of den in the corner, hoping I was a customer. This felt bordello-ish to me.)

Sha-nee (dismissively): “Wenll, you should never leave things you don’t have duplicates of! And if you dindn’t feel good about it you shouldn’t have done it! What kind of readings do you do? Anyway, I would have to see it and channel it!”

Me: “Psychic palm-readings, and lots of other things!”

Sha-nee: “Whant lonts of other things?”

Me: “Chakra readings, dialoguing, painting sessions, colorpuncture, Ito-thermie…”.

Sha-nee: “I’ve been loonking for massange therapists! I came here lanst night looking for their resumes and I counldn’t find them! That helnper of mine wasn’t even supposed to go to lunch today! Lanst weenk she went on a vision quesnt and didn’t come back and didn’t even tenll anybody! For finve days! I don’t know what’s happened to the resumes! Who dind you give it to? A girl, Ca-something, wans she henre?”

Me: “A man – quite old, quite… cad…” (Here I catch myself just in time as the word ‘cadaverous’ starts to roll out of my mouth – or do I?) “Uh… no expression… walking around like this, not talking, with his hands behind his back – .” (I demonstrate.)

Sha-nee: “Thant’s my hunsband!”

Me: “Oh… uh… well… He put it back there. It was in a folder.”

Sha-nee: “Thant’s my hunsband!!”

Sha-nee (steam is starting to come out of her ears): “Wenll, it’s not henre! ” (She grabs up a pile of papers and starts looking through them.) “I wans looking for anll kinds of things!”

Me: “I had talked to you on the phone. You had told me to bring it. And I do hold you responsible, since it is your shop.”

During this conversation my eye keeps being drawn in a kind of compulsive fascination to her lips. They are big – and they have a distinct outline, but the outline is somehow not fitting right. As if maybe they’ve been filled with silicone and it has gone askew, starting to tip and slide down her face; or they have been turned inside out and stitched, as I’d seen once on a jazz singer in Japan, and the stitching has healed into a brownish line. But something lumpish has crawled sideways.

I start to get out the five small cloth bags of my jewelry to show her, as we had discussed on the phone.

At this point a prospective customer enters and asks about a chunk of raw rose-quartz. Sha-nee moves to her.

“Shall I put the stones there?” I ask, indicating the glass counter.

Sha-nee: “Nno! Not whinle I’m winth a cunstomer! Anyway…” – moving back towards me – “I don’t think we’re gonna git along! With younr attitude I don’t want you in the shonp!”

She is starting to freak into a rage. “Get out of henre! Get OUNT!!!!!” She is swelling, hyperventilating.

I go with alacrity towards the exit, and she is yelling behind me.

Me: “I’m SO GLAD I won’t be working here! So glad!”

Sha-nee: “Me too!! I’m so glad!!! GET OUNT OF HERE!! GET OUNT!!!!!!!!! GET OUNT!!!!!!”

So I get.

Walking up the road… around the curve, across the bridge, and back towards Uptown, with its crystal dens and Western stores… Dealing with the loss of the resume and the brochure, article, session-descriptions therein… I go up to the Center for the New Age, because it’s there, and because Sha-nee had seemed jealous of it. It’s in a big old house painted blue. A huge tree in the dirt parking-lot shades all.

…Up the wooden steps onto a covered porch, and in through an old-fashioned screen door. I am still quaking from being yelled at. Yet centered strangely – as such things seem to affect me.

A smiling woman approaches me, head to one side. “How are you? Would you like a reading???” (Ah, she is so unctuous, and all around her, glass cases full of amber, and shelves of improving books – )

Me: “I am a reader. I do it myself.”

Lady: “How nice!! How about a massage??”

Me: “No – .”

I gaze at a solid wall, from about ten inches above the floor all the way to the ceiling, of glamour-photos of smiling psychics, posed on red rocks, with brochures announcing their specialties. I see their hair, and their loose, sprightly clothing, and their rows and rows of white teeth. I look at the jewelry, 10% off. I leave.

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Later – at home – a message has come on the answering machine. My housemate listens to it; I decide to spare myself. The message, I am told, says Sha-nee is leaving my resume outside the door of her shop, and proceeds to scold me for “Lighnt wornkers treating eanch other like that.”

I’m still not exactly sure what I’ve done – unless I really did say “cadaverous” – but I do ponder the meaning of the universe’s message to me.

Walking up the long hill to West Sedona from the psychic ghetto, I’d asked the universe, “What wants to happen here?”

This is my secret request which always gets me a picture/feeling of the truth of a situation. I cherish it.

And I’d seen a clear picture: Madhuri is turning like a rotating sprinkler with showers of joyous drops all around her and above her. A voice says,

“I am free! I am free!”

Sedona, Arizona, 2002

Featured image thanks to Alex Bailey unsplash.com/@abaileyvisuals