Revenge of the Paste Eaters Read Online Free Page A

Michiganders who go on daylight savings time while Hoosiers stay the same. This is not entirely true, because “their time” depends on what part of Indiana you happen to be in: the northwestern counties match their time to nearby Chicago, which is daylight savings time in the next time zone.
    We arrived at Camp Chesterfield at either 8:30 or 9:30, depending on whose time you use. Whatever time it was, the front desk for the dormitory was closed and so we were instructed to just go ahead and pick out our beds.
    We stayed in the women’s dorm. The women’s dorm is a huge basement room filled with single beds arranged to make the best use of a big open space. Each single bed has a matching antique dresser. Each bed is made up with the clean linens from an estate sale. Everything is clean, everything has been used a hundred times before. Everything smells faintly of mildew. Almost all of the furniture in Camp Chesterfield reminds me of what my parents or their friends had in their lake cottages when I was in junior high. Lodging in the dorm costs us ten dollars apiece for the night.
    Mary is sitting on the edge of her bed. She has a kind of
how stupid is this?
expression on her face. In each hand she is holding a purple satin bag, reminiscent of a Crown Royal bag, with a purple drawstring top.
    “How’s it going?” I check with her.
    She holds up one bag. “This is what they go in,” she says. Each bag holds a plastic breast. Each breast has a small transparent form-keeper it slides into.
    “They’re lovely,” I compliment her.
    “She’s a container lover,” Susan reminds Mary.
    We come over to admire her breasts, which have not blistered her chest as she thought they had. Now she holds one in each hand. Each has a nipple and a textured areola. Each has a small flap that curves around her rib cage. The side that goes up against her skin is made of a particularly absorbent material that is designed to collect sweat. To wash them, she tells us, she has to let that material absorb as much water as it can, squeeze it out with a towel, and then lay it on the floor and gently but firmly step on it.
    She tucks them into their shape-keeper and then their purple drawstring bags, tucks them into her suitcase, and then she just shrugs.
    I would have to say, just as an observation, that psychics are not by nature businesspeople. Everyone who works and lives at Camp Chesterfield is a psychic. The desk clerk, the people who run the diner, the groundskeepers, and the clerks in the bookstore—all are psychics. Camp Chesterfield is a big grassy park, around which are a row of cottages two deep in a big U-shape, and in these cottages live the established professional fortune-telling psychics of the community. There are rules and regulations and politics involved in living in and owning these cottages, and in particular, what happens to these cottages when the original owners are no longer able or interested in living there. Since I’ve only set foot on the grounds twice and make no claims whatsoever to their world, they do not share their private workings of the community with me: I only know that there are the established professionals with their tablets out in front of their cottages where guests can sign up for a private reading, and the rest of the community fits itself in wherever it can, doing whatever has to be done while they wait for the acceptance and membership that has drawn them here.
    But everyone here wants to practice their calling, not change linens or fry burgers.
    We never checked in, and when Nancy and Mary went looking for someone to help them cash out Nancy started to say, “One of our group dropped out,” and the woman said, “I know—your friend Rae couldn’t make it.”
    Nancy just stood there, looking at her.
    “You forget where I work,” the clerk reminded her.
    At 8:30 in the morning of an all-day moneymaking event the restaurant pop machine stopped making ice and was out of four out of the eight