He holds up the third card, the Lovers, and I read the explanation: “Connections, kindred spirits, important choices. So whose card is that? I’m guessing Dominic?”
My father examines the card for a long moment, then puts it down and looks at me with certainty. “That one is Seth.”
I don’t know much about oracles or clairvoyants or soothsayers, or whatever we’re calling them these days—but I think my dad might be one.
Historically, I’ve been skeptical of self-styled prophets. I’m aware that there’s a long tradition of seers in nearly every culture of the world; but I also know that a psychic on MacDougal Street once charged me $50 just to tell me that my soul was “dangerously adrift”—and I could have told her that for free. During my years at Actualize, I heard Gemma claim on many occasions that she herself had “intuitive gifts” and could “see our auras,” but I always thought that was just her way of subtly threatening people.
Undoubtedly, there are charlatans out there who seek to exploit other people’s uncertainties and insecurities. But the psychic glimmers that my father has demonstrated feel different from all that. They pierce our monotonous days with little flashes of magic. Plus, his mini-prophecies are legitimate; I’ve seen them come true before my very eyes. Even Carl has affirmed that my father is uniquely prescient, which makes me wonder: Did he have this gift when I was growing up? I don’t think so, but it’s possible I wasn’t attuned enough to notice it. It’s also possible that his Alzheimer’s is clearing out stale informationto make way for some kind of higher knowledge. It’s also possible I’m going insane.
After we put away the tarot cards, my father lies down for a nap. I start a load of laundry, empty the dishwasher, and realize this is the second time he has mentioned Seth in the last few weeks. He doesn’t seem to remember the accident, but Seth clearly occupies space in his subconscious, and it seems like something is surfacing.
The afternoon is slow, golden, and in no rush to become evening. My father is still asleep when I pull out my laptop to search:Can losing your memory make you psychic?The results are chaotic. Rather than travel down a series of dubious internet tunnels, I decide to seek a more historical perspective. I type:Oracle at Delphi.
I first learned about the famous oracle during our Greek mythology unit in sixth grade, but I need a refresher. Was the oracle a person? A python? A rock that emitted wisdom?
My research yields the following: the oracle was a woman, or rather, a series of women, who each served for a time as the High Priestess of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi in ancient Greece. People would come from far and wide to seek her counsel—the pilgrimage itself was an integral part of the experience. Upon arrival, these visitors, known as “supplicants,” would make offerings. Next, they would enter a meditative state and ask their questions. Finally, the oracle would respond. There are conflicting accounts about exactly what form her response would take. Some claim it was abstract rambling that required interpretation, but there was widespread faith that the oracle’s prophecies were well worth the journey. Wars were waged, alliances formed, marriages consummated, plans made, and projects abandoned—all based on the oracle’s visions. Her prophecies were enigmatic, but so what? If the truth was in the eye of the interpreter, then maybe incoherence was the point. An oracle doesn’t just hand you the answer; she nudges you toward finding your own meaning.
Chapter 20
It begins as a game.
When I ask outright if my father thinks he might be an oracle, he laughs and says, “Me? An oracle? Well… I don’t see why not.” So I devise a project: for each day in the month of October, we will try out a different form of divination. It turns out there are more to choose from than I had ever imagined. There are the well-known ones, like palmistry (palm reading) and tasseomancy (the analysis of tea leaves). But then there are the more obscure varieties: scarpomancy (telling someone’s fortune by studying their worn-in shoes), tyromancy (the reading of cheese), and apantomancy (the interpretation of chance encounters with animals). There are some we decide to forgo, like anthropomancy (which involves human sacrifice) and umbilicomancy (the reading of umbilical cords), but most are fair game. The format of this project works well for us because it is open-ended. Unlike games with complicated rules or films with opaque storylines, our divination process allows us to interpret the signs as we see fit. My father can ramble in any direction. There is no need for logic or linearity. We are free to make our own kind of sense.
Sometimes the results are whimsical. On the day we try bibliomancy—foretelling by choosing a random passage from a book—we begin with a simple question: “What does the universe want to tell us today?” I have my father close his eyes and select a random book from the hundreds of spines that line our shelves. We ready ourselves for profundity, but he somehow bypasses the deep thinkers (Kafka, Rumi, Laozi) and lands on a faded cookbook of Canadian recipes, where his hand fumbles beforefalling on the page for “Nova Scotian Hodge Podge.” We laugh at the name for what is essentially a vegetable stew, but not wanting to defy the fates, we make it for dinner that night.
Then there is the day we try favomancy, which involves throwing a handful of beans on the ground and interpreting the pattern in which they fall. Dad is in a low mood on this day, and although his bean toss reveals what looks like a rainbow to me, his eyes well up with tears when I ask what it means to him.
“I shouldn’t be alive,” he says, weeping. “See?” He points to all the beans but one. “All of my friends are dead. I’m the only one left.”
My instinct is to try to talk him out of his sorrowful interpretation, but that wouldn’t be in the spirit of our project. He sees what he sees. So I comfort him, assure him I am happy he is still here with me, clean up the beans, and make him a cup of cinnamon tea. Within a few minutes, he is his usual upbeat self. For him, it’s as though nothing happened, but for me, it’s a flash of his hidden inner world. There’s so much still bubbling there—fear, despair, delight, awe—if only I knew how to access it.
Nina thinks our divination project is ridiculous. I try to keep her in the loop when we have our weekly catchups, but she has little patience for mydispatches from the occult, as she calls them. She says I’m overtaxing our father and compromising his remaining capacity. I explain that it’s a creative pursuit—it gives us new things to talk about and helps me meet Dad on a different level where he can be an authority.
“But he’s not an authority,” she says one day over the phone. “Just remember that.”
“How do you know? He’s insightful and inventive. He’s not just a lesser version of his former self.” I can tell she thinks I’m in denial, and it’s possible she’s right, but I continue: “I just don’t see why Alzheimer’s has to be so depressing. Why is it all about decline? Why can’t it be about creation, too? It’s not like I’m making him do things he doesn’t want to do. He enjoys it.”
I can hear Nina sigh.
“Anyway, we’re almost done with it,” I say. “October is nearly over. Then we’ll move on to something else.”
“How about something rooted in reality next time?” she suggests. I realize that Nina is having trouble relinquishing control of my father’s care, even from across the ocean. But the more time I spend here, the less I subscribe to her philosophy of trying to keep him “on track.” It seems more humane—and interesting—for me to go where he leads, not the other way around.
When we hang up the phone, I stare out the kitchen window. It’s true autumn now. Long gone are the bright days of September that might as well still be summer. Now is the brown crispy time when death is in the air. There’s an urgency to it (savor every fleeting moment of sunlight) but also a futility (winter is close at hand). I sift through a bowl of apples and bite into one that tastes both fresh and fermented, rich with a hint of decay, like the season itself.
“Who was that on the telephone?” my father asks from the doorway of the kitchen. I hand him an apple, and he crunches into it with gusto.
“Nina,” I say.
“Nina. Nina… Now, who is Nina?”
I noticed he had stopped referring to her a few weeks ago, but I wasn’t sure if that meant she had left his memory entirely or if he just couldn’t remember her name. I don’t have the heart to say “She’s your daughter” for the thousandth time—it feels too confronting. So I offer another version of the truth: “She’s my sister.”
That satisfies him, but I know he doesn’t comprehend the relational web that connects us all. “I didn’t know you had a sister. We should have her over sometime.”
“Good idea,” I say, as we chomp our apples. Then I venture a question I have not yet had the courage to ask: “Do you know who I am?”
“Of course.” He pauses as if second-guessing himself, but then continues with confidence: “You’re my comrade. My canoe partner. My aide-de-camp…”
