To Feel Stuff (19 page)

After arranging the appointment with Vivian, I picked up E outside the infirmary at the end of the week. We had both agreed to tell the nurse practitioners that I was accompanying E to a hospital checkup so that we would not have to answer questions.

On her second visit to my home, I noticed a certain ease in E's demeanor. She sat on the couch without first being invited to do so and asked me for a glass of water.

“Where do we start?” she asked.

I shared with her my discovery that the field of parapsychology is divided into two umbrella categories. The first, extrasensory perception (which the average layperson knows by its popular acronym, ESP), encompasses those abilities resulting from exceptional cognitive powers of the mind. While this information was new to me, I am sure that the readers of this publication are familiar with phenomena included in this category such as telepathy, clairvoyance, and precognition. ESP also encompasses all forms of psychic notification, which may exhibit themselves through other senses such as smell, taste, and hearing.

The second category is “anomalous operation.” This category describes those phenomena that involve the transference of energies within or between bodies (or objects), including psychokinesis, mediumship, reincarnation, and out-of-body experiences.

While obviously there were specific areas falling under the second category for which I could not test E—reincarnation, for example—I had set up as many tests as were feasible under our restricted circumstances. There were four areas of supernatural ability that I felt I might be able to investigate successfully.

For the first test, telepathy, I explained to E that I would sit six feet away from her while holding a stack of cards. Each card contained a word, picture, or symbol. I had made sure that the cards were of a very heavy stock, so that their contents would not show through to the other side. While I concentrated heavily on a card's text or image, E would concentrate as well, attempting to read my thoughts.

For the second and third tests, clairvoyance and mediumship, I had convinced an anonymous nurse at RIH to let me borrow one of the personal items of a DOA woman. The hospital had discovered that the patient had no next of kin and no living or locatable family members. Sadly, there was also no one who had come forward to claim the body. The woman died choking on a large piece of carrot, and apparently, she had either grabbed a miniature pewter horse before she'd collapsed or had been holding it all along. (She was alone when she died, so the order of events remains unclear.) Regardless, the horse was still clutched in the body's fist when it reached the ER.

I had heard about this patient through Wainscott, and after much cajoling, the aforementioned nurse loaned me the horse under the condition that I would return it unharmed within twenty-four hours. I told the nurse that the item was needed for an “unconventional scientific experiment.” She assumed that I was going to lift skin cells from its surface.

I cleared my dining-room table, leaving it completely bare. I wasn't worried about the table itself, since it was a new, mass-produced piece of furniture from the Pottery Barn without history. I placed the horse on the table so that E could keep whatever energy or information it contained within a semi-controlled area.

“When I try to read the horse, should I hold it or leave it there?” E asked.

“Try both,” I said, shrugging. She shrugged back. Even though we were both ambivalent about the tests, there was a nice camaraderie in exploring new frontiers together.

I needed a similarly neutral surface for the fourth test, telekinesis/psychokinesis, and I decided upon a folding card table. I told E that we would try to get her to move two objects using only her powers of concentration. One would be an object without significant meaning to her. I chose an unsharpened Number 2 pencil, straight out of the box. The other would be an object to which she felt connected. For this reason, I had asked E to bring something that meant a lot to her. She chose the very first hospital bracelet she received when she was taken to RIH for Bell's palsy. She had been keeping it in the suitcase under her bed all this time.

Because I had not discovered a method for inducing precognition or psychic activity, I told E that there would an unofficial fifth test. If, at any point during the day's proceedings, she received a strong feeling or message, she was to alert me and I would write it down and note the precise time that it occurred.

I acknowledge that this last test had very abstract parameters. However, I felt it was important to conduct it for my own purposes, even if I could not include it in the final paper.

While I am sure it would be more scientific to catalog E's impressions and behaviors as she moved through each station, in all honesty, nothing remarkable happened. We went through fifty cards together; she did not identify what I was looking at once. In the beginning of the experiment we spent long periods of time trying to connect our brain waves. I would stare at, to give an example, the word “curtain” for sixty seconds, repeating it silently in my mind. After the stopwatch sounded, I would ask E if she had received my messages. Usually, she did not even offer up an answer. She told me that if she was not hearing something “clear and obvious,” she did not see the point in guessing. There was only one instance in which she suddenly said, “pizza,” although the card I was holding displayed a picture of the moon. Then, she said she realized that she'd only said “pizza” because that was a message sent from her own brain. She was hungry. We called and ordered a medium cheese.

After lunch, E spent half an hour with the pewter horse and grew bored.

At the twenty-seven-minute mark, I asked, “Is the object speaking to you in any way?”

“I heard something soft,” E replied.

“What is it?”

E whispered, barely audibly, “Neiiigghhhhhhh.”

“Where and when did you get a sense of humor?” I asked her.

We moved on to the pencil. We experimented with placing it at different distances from her body and also with conducting the test both with E's eyes open and closed. I watched the pencil carefully; it never moved. After an hour, we replaced the pencil with the hospital bracelet, but found ourselves with the same result.

The evening was closing down on us. Demoralized, I asked E if she had perhaps received any inexplicable messages during the course of the day. Did any mental images seem particularly insistent? Were there any thoughts that she couldn't explain, yet still visited her with frequency?

Instead of answering directly, E touched my shoulder and said, "You have a lot of patience for this.”

“I suppose I have to,” I answered.

E told me that she had to use the rest room before we returned to the infirmary. She disappeared down the hallway and I returned the pewter horse to its plastic bag. I also set the pencil and the cards aside in a plastic case.

She was extremely quiet on the drive back to Health Services, but this did not unnerve me the way it had in the past. Although our trials had been disappointing, I was confident that E understood that my investment in her was genuine. She knew that we were partnered. I knew, as I had not known after previous sessions, that we would speak again.

How soon we would speak was a surprise, however. At around eleven o'clock that night, I got into bed. Because I have difficulty falling asleep, I always read for at least an hour and a half before turning out the lights. I do not use bookmarks. When I feel I have reached a point where I can fall asleep, I simply make a mental note of the last page I read and then shut the book.

I had been reading Capote's
In Cold Blood.
I opened to page 144, where I had left off the previous night. The book appeared to open itself to that page, as if that's where the spine naturally parted. In the middle crease I found a folded piece of paper.

Opening the paper, I saw writing that I recognized. The note read, “I WANT TO READ THIS WHEN YOU'RE FINISHED. I'VE HEARD IT'S GOOD.—E.”

I was on the phone right away. I used the speaker function so that I could record the conversation. Vivian put me on hold while she went to see if E was still awake. When E came on the line, she did not sound surprised at my railing.

“Hello.”

“What is this?” I asked.

“It's a bookmark,” she said.

“How did you know what page I was on?” At this point I began to inspect page 144, wanting to see if I had inadvertently left any signs of my place. I checked to see if the corners were folded or if there were any creases on the page. Then I shut the book and examined the way that the page looked among all the others. There was no evidence of 144's importance.

“Someone told me.”

“Someone who?” I threw the book up in the air and allowed it to land on the bed, wanting to see where it would naturally fall open. It parted itself at page 96.

“A man. He told me that he was pissed that you stopped reading at 144 last night because he was really getting into it.”

“Did you see this man?” I asked, my heart beating faster.

“No, I just heard him.”

“Did he identify himself?”

“I couldn't really understand everything he was talking about, but I think he might be an uncle of yours,” she said.

“Uncle Chris?” I asked. “Was it Uncle Chris?” My Uncle Chris had been a voracious reader, who had died five years ago in a car accident. We used to trade books with each other and discuss them over monthly dinners.

“I don't know. I didn't catch a name.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“He said that the book you were reading was really good. He recommended it.”

I sunk onto my bed and took in this information. We had spent almost six hours chasing a supernatural occurrence, and yet here it finally was—a totally haphazard moment. Suddenly, the number 144 seemed poetic. There was no possible way that E could have known my page without some form of uncanny assistance. She had never seen me pick up the book. She had never heard me speak about it. She had never before that day even been in my bedroom. How could I resist believing in her any longer?

“Why didn't you tell me this this afternoon?” I asked. “I could have noted the time and the—”

“Well, I know that secretly you want some glamour,” E said. “I thought that leaving a note was much more glamorous.”

The next morning I received a phone call from the infirmary. E had been taken back to the hospital, complaining of chills, vomiting, and a rash. By the end of the following week, Dr. Edwards at RIH had diagnosed her with ornithosis, otherwise known as parrot fever. Edwards believed that E had contracted the disease by inhaling the dust from the droppings of an infected bird.

The only bird that E had had direct contact with was Vivian's parrot. Vivian agreed to have him tested for the disease, but he came back clean.

Edwards suggested that perhaps E had become infected by one of the pigeons that sit on the ledge outside the infirmary's windows. It was impossible, however, to narrow down a pigeon for trapping and sending to the lab. Moreover, because E was the only one in the entire Health Services building who caught the fever, Edwards could not even be positive that she had contracted the disease in the infirmary.

Because of her debilitating symptoms, E and I did not hold another session until the week before Christmas. By the holiday break she had gotten past the vomiting, chills, sore throat, and rashes, and was only plagued by a slight cough. She began tetracycline treatment.

There was absolutely no doubt in my mind that E's body was reacting to her burgeoning abilities. It was then that I began to form the theory I would later call “Psychic Puberty.”

Paxil CR: Get back to being you

 

Christmas was the best in recent memory, and not just because I got an Adderall travel umbrella in my sock hung by the fireplace. And not just because I beat you at dominos three times in a row. You and I lay in bed and did a lot of tucking each other's hair behind ears. Vivian and Shawn paced the hallway arguing happily, and Vivian was saying, “I find it incredible that people feel comfortable announcing no one has ever been in love to the extent that they are. And they know that every other couple on the planet also claims this! How do they manage to feel secure with this tired pronouncement?” And Vivian's boyfriend kept insisting to her, “But that's faith! That's faith!” which seemed like an ideally Christmasy sentiment to me.

New Year's Eve was less joyous. Meeting your parents, I got scared because your mom looked so scared of me. I kept getting the feeling that she was looking at me like a car accident. She wanted to look away, but couldn't. I know I was still kind of clammy-looking from the bird ordeal, but I think it was more that she wasn't used to being around sickness. I know what you're probably thinking right now, but you don't count. You're broken, not sick.

You kept asking your parents, “Isn't she great? Isn't she great?” and I wanted to tell them, “Don't worry, you don't have to answer that,” because I could see it all over their faces. They didn't think I was so great. I worried that the look on your mom's face would be infectious. All of a sudden you'd see me the way she saw me, and you'd blink slowly. You'd turn around in a circle saying, “Whoa, where am I?” and everything between us would have to go.

The school brought in those temps for the holidays, and I was hoping to see Bethany, my Thanksgiving nurse. But when we got Lauren and Deondra, I hoped that maybe Bethany had found herself another dying home-care patient. And if that was the case, then I was very happy for her.

Those temps were fearless, because they knew that they couldn't really be fired. I liked it, though, how they had no desire to be accommodating. I felt like we were staying in a hotel with bad service instead of the infirmary. When I went out to the desk to ask them for chairs for your parents, Lauren said, “The only chairs I personally know about are the ones we're sitting on.” Then she swiveled in hers.