"The cause is hidden; the effect is visible to all."

~ Publius Ovidius Naso (Ovid)

From inside the vehicle, Zandra counts the "out of business" signs hanging on the downtown storefronts as the SUV accelerates down the street. Stevens Point feels much larger than its 30,000 residents. From the university to the downtown, to the hospital to the breweries, to the largest public school district in the state of Wisconsin, it's 50 pounds of city packed into 25 pounds of pavement. As such, every out-of-business sign represents at least 20 unemployed, and 50 more in secondary effects.

This is what happens when the truth comes out in a city built on lies. They're the same scenes repeated across Wisconsin.

Zandra would normally suppress the satisfied smirk on her face, but not this time. She doesn't care who sees her tap dance on the misery of Stevens Point, especially as the SUV rolls by the charcoal lump that rests where Sneak Peek used to be.

"You gave a bad reading?" the man in Sunglasses says.

"No," Zandra says. "A good reading. A very good reading."

And the dominos fell.

"Maybe they should've confessed their sins to a priest instead. It's free," the man in sunglasses says.

"You get what you pay for," Zandra says.

The SUV stops at a gas station. Zandra waits inside the vehicle while the man in sunglasses buys an armful of cigarette cartons. A sign on the window of the gas station reads, "LOWEST TOBACCO PRICES ALLOWED BY LAW!"

"A man after my own heart," Zandra says after greeting the cartons with a hug. "Wouldn't you know, you even got my favorite brand. What a complete coincidence."

"You leave a trail of cigarette butts everywhere you go," the man says.

Maybe I should switch to vaping after all.

"Next up is breakfast," Zandra says. "Don't skip on the drinks, either. I'm thirsty as hell and constipated by design. There's nowhere to shit when you're sleeping in cars. Get it all to go, too. I have a secure location in mind."

"You do?"

"A cemetery. I know the one."

"You want to eat breakfast at a graveyard?"

"The people there know how to keep their mouths shut. It's perfect for you to play secret agent," Zandra says in a dry croak. "Besides, this one is across the road from a public park with new, freshly unpunished toilets. My psychic powers predict you're going to buy me two coffees and a magazine."

Thirty minutes later, Zandra devours the drive-through breakfast on a park bench in a cemetery, regretting not giving the fast food a chance before. It's not that she never noticed the quick-service gruel before, and more that she never bothered to get a driver's license. Or a mobile phone. Or the internet.

Good psychics have no need for that stuff. It's always better to go in raw. The celebrity psychics all use Google before their readings, and those crutches eventually turn into tells. It's just as easy for the client to double-check your work as it is for you to find it. Everyone records everything now.

Not that that can't work. Most readings "reveal" things that clients already know about themselves. The fuel is narcissism, which is always in need of a foot rub. The mysticism and drama are there to distract from how obvious the psychic's game is, because the truly clairvoyant wouldn't waste time on the most mundane details of someone's life, unless mundane people wanted to pay for it.

Not that anyone is truly clairvoyant.

"Well, it's certainly quiet here, I'll give you that," the man in sunglasses says after Zandra returns from a break in the restroom. They sit across from each other on a pair of park benches by an old oak at the edge of the cemetery.

"I like it here. These people get me," Zandra says. She keeps her eyes on her second breakfast sandwich and away from the far side of the cemetery. She knows who is buried there.

In fact, there isn't a cemetery in Stevens Point that doesn't contain the remains of someone she knows. That's the best and worst part of her "career" as a psychic.

"Shall we have that chat now?" the man in sunglasses says, snapping Zandra's attention away from food.

"No. I need to visit someone first. It'd be rude if I didn't," Zandra says. She favors her left ankle and leaves the bench for the far side of the cemetery. The man in sunglasses follows 20 steps behind her.

Zandra stops at a grave and droops her head to read the epitaph. The words engraved in the stone are as much a curio as she is in Stevens Point.

"You knew this person well?" the man in sunglasses says.

Zandra responds by taking the lawnmower knife out the sheath up her sleeve. She dangles the paracord handle with a thumb and finger so that the point of the blade faces the ground.

"The hermit who made this for me is buried here. He lived alone in the woods, even in the winters," Zandra says.

Some say he went crazy. I'd say he found heaven. Hell is other people, after all.

"I'm sorry," the man in sunglasses says.

"Not as much as he is," Zandra says.

When he was alive, he believed in my "powers," because they confirmed something he was working on ever since going rogue. I never had the heart to tell him the truth.

Chiseled into the tombstone, in a font only the dedicated would have the patience for, are six points. They're all that's left of the hermit. Zandra reads them over:

1) Reality allows for both material and immaterial universes to exist. 

2) The clearest example of the intersection of the material and immaterial universes is the human brain. 

3)  Activities in the immaterial half must precede its physical counterpart. Thought comes before action. 

4) If you can manipulate what happens "upstream," you can manipulate its echo "downstream" on the material half of the universe.

5) The immaterial and material halves can bleed into each other when the brain encounters intense mental activity, good or bad. 

6) Therefore, _______________.

The final point is left blank. The hermit never completed it, but he'd felt certain there was a there there. A reason for all of it. He wanted it on his tombstone so someone else might complete it after he died.

Plato did it better, but the hermit wasn't half-bad as a garbage heap philosopher.

Zandra coughs into her sleeve.

The hermit's problem was that he believed his own bullshit. Never believe your own bullshit. Sell it, package it, put it on tombstones, sure. But never turn it inward, not even to help sell deception to someone else. The rot of self-deception will spread to everything else in your life.

"I'll give you a minute," the man in sunglasses says, keeping his distance.

"No, I'm finished here," Zandra says. "Let's go sit down again."

Back at the park benches, the man in the sunglasses picks up where he left off at the car.

"Have you decided if you'll take my help?" he says.

"I haven't showered yet. Can't make a decision until I've showered," Zandra says.

"Why are you stalling?"

Good question.

Zandra closes her eyes and lights a cigarette.

"You know how I got to be a psychic? You've read the stories, but do you really know what happened? Twenty-five years ago, someone murdered my husband. The police were no help, because the people who did it were well connected. A vision came to me one night, and I was able to find his body. Pulled it out of the ether, just like that," Zandra says and snaps her fingers.

That part is true.

"Made headlines around the world," the man in sunglasses says.

"Yeah, and I've been riding that for a while now. You know something else?"

"What?"

"I'm tired of being a psychic," Zandra says. She offers the man in sunglasses a cigarette. He declines. "Too much to carry around. I know a lot. A lot. It's not so much that someone would want me dead, it's that they'd want what I know. It's a constant pain to manage all that."

You think I like breaking into cars so I have somewhere to sleep at night? Or that I enjoy watching my little business downtown with the apartment above it burn to a crisp?

The police aren't going to solve that one, either, but I don't need an epiphany this time.

"I'm not asking you to keep being a psychic past this point. All I'm asking is whether you feel like staying alive," the man in sunglasses says, trying to suppress his irritation. "Because if the answer is yes, we're sitting on the precipice of something that could be incredible. You could help a lot of people."

Zandra rolls her cigarette between her fingers.

"I'm not one for charity, but I'll admit I am curious," Zandra says.

"I can work with curious," the man in sunglasses says.

I've burned a lot of people in my time. Most deserved it. Not all, though. Honestly, I couldn't care less about any of them.

No, I'm curious about something else.

Something that's been gnawing at me for a long time.

Zandra looks off toward the hermit's tombstone. After a pause, she says, "Fine. Tell me again why it is that you came to find me in the first place."