In the cards

Madame X spreads a line of stars across the table and asks me to pick nine cards intuitively.

Is this silly? I want to give in to the heavy smell of incense wafting in from the new age shop, to the chanting on the sound system, give up some control to chance—but I can’t stop thinking of order and odds and the power of suggestion. I gave up on healing crystals a long time ago, and accepted into my heart the truth of neurotransmitters.

I fear fortunes written on the body: an umbilical cord around a neck, telomeres with frayed ends, an imbalance of serotonin that causes dreams of exit bags, lesions on the myelin sheath, the chance chromosomal oddity, the development of amyloid plaques that will make you forget and slowly vanish—true fate.

The star-patterned tarot deck is fanned across the table. A plethora of choice. What should I be drawn to? Will Madame X know I’m picking the blue and white cards at random, unable to feel the ‘vibrations’ or whatever is supposed to emanate from the pictures on the obverse side?

She reads out names as she flips and arranges my cards.

“Four of cups, The Lovers, seven of wands, seven of swords, seven of cups, The Fool, two of pentacles, The Devil, ten wands.”

She squints at the pattern of sevens with interest. “Cool!” she says. The three sevens indicate doubt and change.

“You’re having a lot of skepticism about everything that’s going on in your life. Calling everything up for question. After going through that process we are hit by this clarity. We decide to live our path differently.”

Could she tell I’m not a believer? Maybe it’s in my face, or the way I can’t keep my hands still in my lap.

The Lovers, the Fool and the Devil are from a group of cards known as the major arcana. They correspond to life altering patterns. The numbered suits—the wands, swords, cups, pentacles—are everyday conditions, the minor arcana.

“Imagine this new weather system coming in,” X says of the major arcana.

“Early on you might experience the energy of that card in small ways. You might see it every time you turn on the T.V., in conversations you have. When it finally moves into your life, you’ll get the full impact of it. This is the baseline of your life, where it’s heading.”

She weaves a beautiful narrative into the air, measuring and lining factors together, integrating small personal details she has culled from our minutes face to face. The two of pentacles with the Lovers indicates the likelihood of an intense, love-hate relationship—a balancing act of differing forces. The sevens and the Fool, the possibility of out-of-character life choices and opportunities. The Devil says to enjoy the excess brought by opportunity, but don’t get carried away.

The delicate interaction she builds is mathematical. Fortune telling is a performance, somewhere between improv comic, shrink and priest.

She forecasts the offer of a position “that would require a great deal of commitment from you, and may shock people. There seems to be the idea that it’s far away, whether it’s Thailand or India or Toronto.”

The other major forecast is a “volatile” (“with the Devil, watch out for possible co-dependence”) relationship that shifts between extremes.

I don’t believe X’s forecasts of the volatile relationship or career success: Tarot readers solidify what is inside. They reveal doubt and indecision and prompt resolution, mirroring it with their interpretation of the cards.

At the end of the reading, she tells me to pull a card. It will predict my well-being. The image on the card I flip tightens my every nerve: a man face down in the snow, his back pin-cushioned with slender rapiers and broad lines of steel. He’s bleeding into the white. It looks like defeat and relief.

“The ten of swords is kind of fatal-looking,” X says. “We think of it as learning things the hard way, allowing things to continue until you get the slap in the face, the door slamming closed. It’s a long, drawn-out, stressful, anxiety-producing situation reaching a painful head. This is the end of the road.”

The picture is imprinted in my mind for the rest of the day. It’s a source of comfort, this message about the end of the road. I want to make it true.