Alexander Chee

This was a period, I would learn later, when psychic abilities enjoyed a certain level of respectability with Republicans, due to the CIA’s involvement in trying to develop them as a military tool, but this still doesn’t explain it. My memory of the day begins only with the announcement that the doctor was coming, and the level of seriousness with which the visit was proposed to the class. “Dr. Tanous believes that all children are psychic naturally,” my teacher said. “That it is just a matter of training your abilities. Tests and games that anyone can do.”

You turn the cards face-up as you lay them out, one by one, and consider the symbolism of each, as well as the fleeting impressions you get as you hold a card in your hand. Each card acts as a separate scene or chapter within a larger story, and as you go through the reading, you create a relationship between them. In that sense, it is, whatever truth it tells you, a terrific narrative exercise.

Perhaps the only way to escape your fate is not to know it.

The writer Lorrie Moore calls the feeling I felt that day “the consolations of the mask,” where you make a place that doesn’t exist in your own life for the life your life has no room for, the exiles of your memory. But I didn’t know this then.

This, it seems to me, is why we have teachers.

Lipstick crowns the golden Marlboro filter.