By Laura Dawe, Arts Editor

“Free Fortune Telling” reads a handwritten sign on a foldout table in the Student Union Building. There is a seated lineup, five deep. A rapid-fire voice floats above the din, predicting the future from playing cards. A little while later, the sign reads: “Free Fortune Telling and Detective Service”. And then, days later, an additional sign appears in red: “Free Matchmaking”.
Before we’re seated, Guthrie Prentice wants to know if my friend, who’s come to have her fortune read, is single. The answer is sort of.
In a flash Prentice puts his hand to the bridge of his narrow nose. He hunches further, head down, one hand up like an antennae, to receive these premonitions about my friend and “the guy”:
He says she doesn’t think guy likes her enough. Not true. He says friends set her up with the guy. Not true. He says she is undecided about the guy, and she’s keeping her options open. True.
Nine years ago, Prentice started reading fortunes because he was annoyed with the number of people claiming high accuracy rates. He uses their “charlatan techniques” to expose them, but he says people have said his readings are accurate.
“In all honestly, I have no idea one way or the other. I’m relying on their feedback.”
Prentice is 24 and a frequently-self-proclaimed “former world traveller.”
“I have extensive life experience,” he says, and in the same breath: “I’ve read extensively on a wide variety of subjects.”
The table in the SUB is Guthrie’s “volunteer thing,” his “day job” while he’s in school. The chemistry and mathematics major rapidly spews String Theory. He says fortune telling is the same as police profiling, or the work of a good psychologist.
His front of skepticism is undermined by the sudden flashes of premonition he gets about my friend. They’re not all psychic though. Once, mid-word, a scent hits him like a message from the future. He holds his face and mulls the smell like a mouthful of wine.
“It’s wool,” he says, features scrunched. “Something that smells like wool or something like that.”
“Is it my sweater?” asks my friend, whose wool sweater is practically in his face. We decide it is.
Guthrie attended Mount Allison University for two years in political science, but the professors there were “so highly irrational” he had to switch to a hard science. He wants to go to grad school for physical chemistry: to develop the first stable chemical system for nanobots and rework human DNA to slow the aging process. Or get a masters or doctorate in mathematics so he can test a tentative hypothesis about gravitational flow backward through time.
Four months ago, Prentice transferred to Dalhousie, where he’s been at his table in the Student Union Building everyday except when he has too much schoolwork, or when he’s sick. He’s volunteered as a “professional mentalist/magician” for about five years.  Professional seems like an odd word for someone whose services are free. But sometimes he makes money, he says, “depending on the gig, depending on the day.”
Guthrie’s motivations when it comes to mentalism are as follows:
1. To help people.
2. The useful training of con-artistry.
3. To catch a crook.
4. To protect someone’s identity.
As a detective, Prentice is now a volunteer on the South End prowler case. He’s working with his mentor, trying to figure out how the prowler is getting into apartments while making it appear as if he’s going through unlocked doors. Prentice says the prowler isn’t just jiggling door handles to see which ones are undone, because then he would get caught.
“What we deduced is the guy was most likely a locksmith,” says Prentice.
He has tipped the cops off and they’re currently investigating the lead.
Prentice reads the cards quickly. He is sure my friend is looking for a logical man – a man that will care about her as much as she deserves. From the cards, he can tell she is lucky and charming. He keeps making sure he’s got her name right.
As we’re about to leave, he lowers his dark head frantically, one hand up to receive the message, and says, “OK, there’s one other thing I keep getting.”
He’s picking up that my friend’s mother doesn’t support her career choice. Not true.
“It’s just a general reading,” Prentice shrugs, smiling.
Before we go, he looks in his matchmaking book (a small notepad kept in his pocket). He gives my friend the e-mail address of John Smith, which is actually the guy’s real name, Prentice says. This man is rational and intellectual, he says, and though Smith has no money of his own, he could help her with the money managing problems Prentice read in her cards.
The matchmaker says so far he’s set up four couples based on their psychological profiles, which he deduces during their readings. He doesn’t know how any of the dates turned out. He just tells people about themselves, solves their crimes, pairs them off for romance, and continues to serve the student body from behind his foldout table.