Mark Leyner - Gone with the Mind

“It looks like it’s totally over. But you continue to worry about it — who wouldn’t? What you worry about, you create. That was brave for us to ask that question.”

Us? I thought. That sort of reminded me of something my mom once told me (re: her brain tumor, my cancer, and how glib even the most well-meaning people can be commiserating with you), “Whenever anyone says to you, ‘We’ll get through this together,’ what they really mean is ‘God, am I glad it isn’t me.’”

“What do God and the spirits want you to know about your doctor, Dr. Samadi? Pick five.”

Again, I chose five cards. Janet appraised them for a moment or two and chuckled.

“Has your wife spent any time with Dr. Samadi?”

“Mercedes? Aside from a few minutes right after my prostatectomy, no.”

She gave the cards another perusal.

“Well, I think on a visceral level your urologist thought your wife was a very attractive lady, because it comes up twice that way. He finds her very attractive.”

(I had dinner with Mercedes that night at the Café Elysian [one of Eugene Flynn’s restaurants], and I told her about what Janet Horton had said, and she was sort of like, “I wish …” reminding me of a recent New York Post article proclaiming Samadi the highest-paid hospital-based physician in New York City, raking in $7.6 million.) There are two major potential side effects of a radical prostatectomy: urinary incontinence and impotence. My dad, who was vehemently opposed to the surgery (he’s partial to proton-beam radiation therapy), had tried to gently dissuade me by suggesting that Mercedes would leave me if the prostatectomy left me impotent. It all made me think about what an incredibly cruel joke it would be if your urologist, who’s essentially the lord of your penis, were having an affair with your wife…it would be like some…some modern, biopolitical version of droit du seigneur, wouldn’t it? Or if there were a club or a…a cabal of evil urologists gelding their patients and seducing their wives. But, to get back to reality here, back to nonfiction…David Samadi is probably the top robotic radical prostatectomy surgeon in the world…I would say he’s like the, uh…the Alexander Ovechkin of robotic radical prostatectomy surgery…and, just on a purely personal level, I think, an extraordinarily caring person. And if either of you guys ever need a prostatectomy, this is your guy. I’d be more than happy to give him a call.

Janet contacted each of my deceased grandparents:

Ray: You’re doing a great job of looking after your Mom. I really appreciate that.

Sam: You’ve done a great job as a dad.

Harriet: You’re not having enough happy-go-lucky sex.

Rose: Have sex, have fun. Life will get you in the end, so enjoy it.

The obvious implication here is that your dead grandparents are watching you fuck. Again, this is probably something the government knows and is suppressing.

Several weeks after the reading, I realized that I’d neglected to ask Janet to contact my deceased sister. I asked her if it would be possible to have a “conversation” with the spirit of someone who’d only survived a week or so, and Janet explained to me that spirits age on the other side and that, yes, it was a perfectly feasible thing to try, and we made arrangements to do it over the phone.

A couple of highlights:

“You’re my darling brother. Your sister is also my beloved…I’m still here and there are things you need to know. And I can be more released after this.” (Janet interjected at this point: “She’s a spirit in an adult state, I’d say in her mid-thirties, married. She feels French to me, as opposed to Jewish or American…maybe French in a past life.”)

“Give your father an easier time, he’s not going to be around forever. Enjoy him while he’s here.”

(I really took this to heart. I do tend to be very impatient with my father. I was out to dinner with him the other night and I was telling him about Liz’s response to my tweet Yay! Candy Crush Saga has cured me of my Internet-porn addiction! in which she didn’t even mention the Internet-porn thing and just wanted to know what level of Candy Crush Saga I was on, and he just did not understand what was funny about that. And after repeating it to him, more slowly with each iteration, which, I know, in itself, probably felt condescending to him, I tried to come up with some analogous scenario that he might understand…I said, “Okay, Dad, what if you’re playing tennis with someone”—my father loves tennis—“and you get a call that your son was just killed in a…by a bomb, okay? And you call up a friend and you tell him, and your friend’s response is ‘So what’s the score of your tennis match?’ You don’t think that would be funny?…I mean in a sort of dark way, but funny?” And he still didn’t get it. And I really became sort of exasperated with him, and I could see that his feelings were hurt, that he thought I thought he was being stupid…It’s something I absolutely need to modify…being so hard on him, so intolerant.)

“I was there when Samadi saved you in the hospital! That’s why you’re still here. You had a star for a surgeon.”

Janet asked: “Is there anything we can do for you?”

“No…I’m dead.”

After we got off the phone, Janet texted me a photo of the Six of Cups card with the message: Here’s the Six of Cups, which represents happy children and a happy childhood. This card kept coming up for you and your sister who passed. She’s around in connection with flowers. Pull up a chair and talk to her once in a while.

This is a girl who died at one week old in a Jersey City hospital in 1961, almost fifty-five years ago, who’s now supposedly in her thirties, living in the spirit realm, living “in glory” (according to Janet), and…I don’t know…it’s hard after all this time to suddenly feel close to her, to just “pull up a chair”…I sort of feel that her spirit is far away…perhaps as far as thirty billion light-years away…And I think that the farther away a spirit is, the faster it is retreating from us, measured by the redshift of its light being broadened to larger wavelengths… But I told Janet I’d try to be more, uh…more receptive to her.

A few moments later, Janet texted: Daisies especially.

And then a few moments after that: Turn on TCM! Child dying in hospital bed, nurse trying to save him, 1940 movie called Vigil in the Night …Nurse isn’t attending, he passes away.

So my deceased sister is speaking to us through daisies and Turner Classic Movies? I texted. (That sounds sarcastic, but it wasn’t meant that way at all. I firmly believe that the world is constantly producing signs for us to decipher. And I was happy…I was proud of Janet, actually…that she was reading phenomena instead of simply relying on cards. The world’s phenomena are just an infinite tarot deck, Janet.)

In retrospect, I was really struck — sort of offended, to be honest — by how garrulous, how indiscreet spirits can be. Apparently, there’s no code of omertà in effect here.

So, I want to say something to all my dead relatives, particularly my grandparents:

Snitches get stitches. Keep your motherfucking mouths shut.

To Ray, Sam, Harriet, Rose — just because some psychic or medium contacts you in the afterworld, homie, that doesn’t mean you have to spill your guts and start blabbing all over the place about who’s having “happy-go-lucky sex” and who isn’t, you know what I’m saying? Seriously. Represent.

For some reason I was reluctant to talk to Janet about the Imaginary Intern…I don’t know…maybe I thought she’d think I was weird or that it would require too involved an explanation or that perhaps she couldn’t contact someone or something like that…I don’t know…which is funny because here’s a woman who told me unabashedly and without the slightest compunction that she’d contacted the spirit of a dead hamster, right? But it ultimately just didn’t feel right to me. I decided that trying to contact a paracosmic being through a psychic would just be terribly intrusive, sort of like bursting into someone’s apartment with a SWAT team using C-4 explosives and battering rams. So I just let it rest.