The Mystic

“Did you try the cookies?” the mystic asked.

She had calm, grey eyes and blond hair teasing white. If I were to guess, she lived alone. If I were to guess, she had one adult daughter in Florida who never visited. She was definitely a New Yorker. I had catered with her for months, though we’d never spoken. Until she asked about the cookies.

Before I could answer, the mystic backed right into a waiter, a child, a boy. The boy, who’d once bummed a cigarette off me and often walked around rapping Eminem, was balancing a tray of empty champagne flutes. He absorbed the mystic’s contact deftly, swooping the tray like a pro. Still, a single flute tipped over and shattered at our feet. The mystic’s fault, yes. But, there was no good place to stand in that kitchen, awaiting deployment.

“Oh my,” the mystic said, chuckling. I liked her right away.

All of us were dressed in black, milling about the busy kitchen of a banquet hall atop a high-rise in Tribeca. Every Italian American car salesman from north Jersey had been assembled for some kind of year-end award ceremony. Those milling—aspiring actors, sixth year undergrads, mystics, gym rats, dancers, mothers of five—were there to serve these strong Italian men.

I finally told the mystic I had not tried the cookies.

“Are you an actor?” she asked next.

I told her I was a writer.

“Well,” she said. “I’m an actor. I’m in a show actually. I’m also a mystic. I write my own meditations and I teach them too. I’m very busy. Would you?”

She handed me a few glass shards she had gathered by hand. She was in the habit, I’d noticed, of assuming favors from people like me, young ones passing through. In turn, she offered fortunes, love, and advice. I walked the shards to a trash bin behind me. I returned to find her wiping blood from her hand onto the sleeve of her black suit.

“So, what do you write?” she asked.

I didn’t have a real answer for that.

“You should write a children’s book. It would be very good for you,” she said.

I told her I would consider it, but I couldn’t draw or illustrate so I’d need to find a collaborator.

An egotistical floor captain, Jorge, tapped on our shoulders and pointed to a growing line. We roved over to its end, waiting to collect trays of hot cookies and shooters of cold milk. The car salesmen refused to touch them.

“We ain’t queers,” they’d say if you got too close.

“Do you write about the color green a lot?” the mystic asked.

“No,” I said, “No, I don’t.”

“No? Maybe you should. And how about blue, like cobalt blue?”

“Is that a dark blue?” I asked.

“It’s a strong blue,” she said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think I write like a dark blue.” By which I must have meant, I had been writing love stories full of depressing bed talk and embarrassing public incidents.

“That’s true. You do,” she agreed. “But that’s going to change. You’re going to start writing a brighter, lighter blue. Not too light though. Cobalt.”

Behind the mystic, a wiry, veteran caterer pulled on his vape and told the group of young ones circled around him about an ex-wife. A state champ boxer.

“Don’t marry before you live with a person,” he advised.

Everyone seemed to be dripping with wisdom in those cobalt years.

“That is the best advice I can give you,” he continued. “I mean, this woman drank, then she got mean. We had great big fights. I’d drive down to the jailhouse to bail her out every week. She bit my ear.” He showed the ear. There was indeed a small scar on the lobe.

“Don’t marry a woman until you live with her,” he repeated.

“Don’t listen to him,” the mystic whispered.

“I get like that,” said one listener. A beautiful dancer in a baggy black suit. As she spoke she dunked a tea bag into a steaming cup. She watched the tea bag closely, meditating on her temper. “I don’t know why. But I do.”

I began thinking about the cause of my dark blue answer.

A Moroccan man who liked to show everyone pictures of his under-construction house in Morocco reached for a sleeve of Dixie cups on a shelf. It flopped off the shelf and bopped the mystic on the shoulder.

“Hey!” the mystic said.

I watched her stare at the pearly shine of the Moroccan’s baldness as he tore open the sleeve. Then she turned to me and said, “Your life is going to change. You should be excited.”

I smiled because she was right. I decided to give her another tidbit to see what she might pull from it.

“I’m leaving New York in two months,” I said.

So, you do want to know more, she said by way of a sly squint.

“You need to escape someone, don’t you,” she said.

“I guess so,” I said.

The mystic looked into my eyes, as if through them she could see the future forming in the back of my head.

“Does she work in sales?” she asked.

“Advertising.”

“Does she have blue eyes?”

“Yes.”

“Crystal blue?”

“Yes, very powerful light blue eyes,” I said.

“They’re beautiful,” she said. “And butter blond hair?”

“What’s butter blond?” I asked.

“Very light blond.”

“No, it’s dirty blond,” I said.

“She wanted more out of the relationship than you,” the mystic said.

“The other way,” I said.

She asked where I was going.

I said, “California.”

“Where?”

“Between San Francisco and Sacramento,” I said.

“It’s very earthy there, right?”

“I don’t really know,” I said.

“California is going to be good for you,” she said. “Really good. Do you think she’d move to California?”

I shook my head.

“I think she’ll visit,” said the mystic. “Then, who knows. Something might happen.”

I wanted to explain about us. The End, so to speak. But then Jorge said, “There is no point in giving cookies to these people, okay? Abort, okay? Time for tea and coffee.” As if he’d been against the operation from the beginning. As if he’d known it was doomed the whole time. He was always changing his mind. He’d change his mind and leave you there thinking you were the one who’d made the mistake.

He told the mystic to get teacups and saucers.

I was to go gather empty glasses.

“Fantastic,” said the mystic. “Cookies are too gay, so let’s try tea.”

We parted ways. I grabbed a tray and set off. Gathered two dozen glasses from high tops encircled by drunk, gossiping men, and returned to the kitchen. While I slipped glasses into wash racks, I considered introducing myself to the dancer. Maybe she was blue too. Or better, lilac.

Then, just before I passed through the kitchen doors to gather more empties, the mystic tapped me on my back.

“Dear?” she said. She was holding a tray of cups and saucers.

She looked up at me, smiling, and briefly, my heart flushed with hope. I prepared to receive what I needed—affirmation, assurance, a final positive note.

“Would you mind taking out my tea tray?” she asked. “I have to use the restroom.” Then she set the heavy tray down and took off.

A few days later, I quit. Soon after, I nixed California. I called my mother and asked what color her life was. I borrowed her car and drove down the coast. Working my feet into the sand, I watched the moon gild the waves from Folly Beach in Charleston. I camped in Talladega National Forest and woke up covered in ticks. I teared up reading a poem about a mouse in a Waffle House in Biloxi. Sometimes, in down moments, I would Google “cobalt blue” and scroll through the infinite squares of the color, as if it was a calendar grid of days or a path.

 
 
Sam Schieren's stories have been published in The Iowa Review, Wigleaf, Bellevue Literary Review, and Gulf Coast, among other journals. He lives in Richmond, Virginia, and teaches at VCU, where he is the reviews and interviews editor for Blackbird.