Do you really want to know the future?

Once again, hanging out at my local café has tossed someone fascinating into my path. This time it’s a middle-aged Eastern European guy who goes by an extremely American name, does entertainingly deft card tricks, pleasantly allows me to practice my rusty French with him, and can put on half a dozen fairly good accents, from Texan to Scottish. Oh, and he’s kind of psychic.

I know, I know. According to the stereotype, I should assume he’s a con man and keep my guard up and my hand on my wallet. But I’m also a decent researcher, and I remember small details that people tell me, and, well, he is who he says he is, and he doesn’t need my money, that’s for damn sure. So I enjoy talking to him — about language, about magic, about tai chi and yoga, about cities each of us has visited. And about what he sees when he looks at people.

The first day I met him, he turned to the woman sitting at the table next to mine and said, “Your name is Audra, isn’t it?” She blinked in surprise and said, “It’s Audrey.” The next time we met, he pointed out someone sitting on the other side of the room and said, “He drives a truck or a car for a living.” I happened to know that the man he was pointing at is a retired cabbie. I once asked him to tell me what he saw when he looked at a friend who was standing at the counter ordering coffee; he rattled off a few sentences that were accurate and perceptive and pretty damn surprising, considering that I knew for a fact my friend and my new acquaintance had only met once before, and that very briefly. Psychic? Intuitive? A champion eavesdropper? All I know is, it was fascinating. So you can understand why I couldn’t resist asking him to draw a bead on me.

He got a couple of things wrong. For example, he assumed, as many people do, that the name I go by isn’t the one I was given, that it was a middle name or a nickname or something I adopted in adulthood. (For the record, it is my real name, on my birth certificate and everything.) But he nailed a few extremely specific details that someone who barely knows me really shouldn’t know. Then he said, “The only thing that really matters to you right now is love.” That’s a reasonable assumption when you’re talking to a single woman of a certain age, right? Except that he immediately added, almost apologetically, “You’re going to find him, and it’s going to happen in three years. He’s 35 right now, so he’ll be 38 then. He’s the love you’ve always been looking for. But it will only be temporary. Two years, maybe three.”

He was so specific, I couldn’t help asking: Then what? He breaks up with me? I break up with him? One of us dies? He shrugged and moved on to another subject.

I’m not saying I believe that that’s how things will happen. I don’t; I can’t. But it turned a cliché I’ve parroted mindlessly into a Zen koan I’ve been pondering ever since. If you knew, without question, that you could have the relationship you’d always dreamed of, but that you would have to relinquish it it after just a short while, would you still be willing to embark on it in the first place? Or would you pass up the pleasure in order to avoid the heartbreak?

In other words, if you knew in advance that the loss was inevitable, would it be better to love and lose than never to have loved at all?

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