Awash in Talent (21 page)

Before he even said anything, you were measuring the distance. By the time he delivered the line—“Don’t you watch where you’re going?”—in his New Jersey accent, you were already halfway there. But they had already shuffled around, and you ended up with your arms around the mother—a soft landing, to be sure, but one that caused a more desperate shriek than your original target would have. You lost your footing and slid farther downward and soon were on your knees, your face even with the mother’s shorts.

All the foot traffic came to a halt. Passersby made quick decisions to get involved or to avoid the scene by ducking into the nearest shops. The father and the student stood in shock for a split second, but I watched the mother’s darting eyes as she weighed options: a full out brawl to defend her honor, or a quick trip to the powder room to straighten up. She opted for the latter.

“Aren’t you Providence folks friendly?” she said in an exaggerated, good-natured way that set the father laughing out loud.

“Can I help you up, sir?” the father said, holding his hand out to you. You took it, wincing from the pebbles I would later tweeze out of your palm.

I was still watching the mother’s gaze, and when she looked up from you, she sent me a white-hot beam of a thought wave I know can only come from a fellow psychic. She must have received the same kind of thing from me, because she sent me a brief family history and asked me a wordless question, which she wouldn’t have tried if she’d thought I was un-Talented. I answered as best I could, told her I wasn’t registered as a psychic with the government, then gave her the slight nod of recognition I give all my fellow Talents and looked back at you.

All psychics seem to have an honor code. If you aren’t registered, you let them know through thought energy and they act as if you have no Talent at all. That’s the only part of this whole mess that feels a little like belonging to an exclusive club.

I took you back home, hobbled from your scraped knees, and doused your hand in hot water in the kitchen sink before taking the smaller bits of concrete out with the tweezers. Then I opened some chicken soup for you to eat out of the can the way you like. I think that misses the point of soup and I looked away to contain my disgust. I no longer felt tempted to tell you I’m a psychic. If I had divulged it in the street, letting you know I could tell what you were about to do, would you have refrained from trying to punch the father?

The mother psychic had quickly assessed my situation, commiserated by giving her checkered history with her husband, and asked pointedly, “How did you end up with this bad-tempered schlub?”

The only thing I could beam back at her was, “I don’t know.”

Funny that it never occurred to me to defend you as the love of my life. In spite of all the ups and downs she showed me, and especially in spite of his fits of rage, that lady loved her husband beyond the Earth and stars.

I was getting nowhere again today. I resorted to covering old ground, but from a different angle, at least. Cognitive/behavioral therapy won’t work if Emily has a personality disorder. If she really does, of course, only drugs will be any use to her at all. But in the meantime, I tried psychodynamic therapy.

“Tell me about your life growing up in California.”

“Why?”

Questions are the best, because they prove the client is truly present in the session and has some mild interest in how the process might work for them. “The place we grow up is formative, and childhood experiences mold us our entire lives, especially if we bury them or don’t acknowledge them.”

“But I didn’t form in California,” she explained with what I thought might be strained patience. “I rejected all guidance and followed my own path.”

“Some incident must have influenced you, even to reject it,” I insisted.

“There is no trace of me in California. I’m a new person with no past.”

“No past at all?” I couldn’t help showing some skepticism.

“None.” She looked at me, and from anyone else I would have seen an epic tale of relationships and impressions that led to such an extreme statement. But here, just that nasty static, growing in volume and reaching such a high pitch, I wanted to scream.

“Then who are the people living with you now? They had a daughter named Emily. Wasn’t that you? And who is Beth?”

“Beth is a dangerous psychopath.” She answered straightaway, no preparation required.

Of course she’s probably using the word “psychopath” in an inexact, pop culture sense, but I was too taken aback to try to get her to specify what she meant. Throwing that word only at her sister was different than where we’d started, when she said
everyone
was crazy but herself. If there was only one object of blame in Emily’s life, I needed to know more about it.

“Beth is the crazy one? What about your parents?”

“Theirs is a mild and curable insanity, just a bit touched in the head for following her every whim.”

“And what’s so severe in Beth’s case?”

She rolled her eyes. “You’ve read the report, I’m sure. I never almost killed anyone, but she did.”

“The report framed Carlos’s injury as an accident, while your attempted kidnapping of him before he was fully recovered looked like a deliberate act.”

“She’s all the more dangerous because she has a Talent she can’t control.”

I felt my skin go up in flames from my neck all the way to my hairline with embarrassment, but she can’t have known I felt called out by her statement. Meanwhile, this passionate defense of Emily’s point of view was something instead of nothing from her, and it drowned out the static for a while, but overall I was disappointed. Emily seemed to think she had outsmarted us all. Perhaps instead of a personality disorder, she only suffers delusions.

“I made inquiries. Carlos has been fully compensated for what Beth did and the whole thing is being handled in the same manner as any number of these cases each year, as a no-fault situation. And now Beth is at telekinesis school and her teachers say she has more control over her Talent every day, an exemplary student, especially for getting such a late start.”

Emily’s static ratcheted up so loud I fell backward in my chair. Her face was a stone carving. She grabbed her backpack and headed for the door.

I reached out my hand through the TV snow I perceived all around me, which abruptly disappeared when she turned away. “You can’t leave yet. It’s not time. I can’t leave you by yourself.”

“Shows what you know,” she muttered as she closed the door behind her. I was so relieved to have her out of the room, I let her go. It was only ten minutes, after all. How much trouble could she get into?

I was already on a short fuse about Emily. The insurance companies were the first to start asking. Far be it from a bloated bureaucratic organization to allow a client to take the time she needs to go on a true healing journey. Apparently, I have to turn in a diagnosis within two weeks or they’ll put Emily in an institution. I wonder what her family would say about that? Whenever you’re waiting for your claim to go through, of course the insurance companies become like glaciers: slow-moving, dragging boulders. But somehow I’m supposed to perform the superhuman feat of diagnosing someone who won’t share with me what she’s thinking in any form or manner, in two more weeks.

I’ve also had inquiries from lawyers, but if you want to talk about glaciers, look to the courts.

They don’t realize I might tell them to take her just so I can get some relief from the headaches her broken TV signal sounds give me. She seems to perceive me as an inept, un-Talented therapist. Seems to—how strange to have to put it that way! I’ve got to think of something because she wouldn’t do well in an institution. I really do want to help her and, well, the mystery is drawing me in more each time. But at this rate I’ll be lucky if she shows up for her next appointment at all.

The latest research indicates that it’s healthy to think about how you met your partner and imagine how you might
not
have met. It’s supposed to create feelings of relief that you’ve found each other and awe at the way everything was “destined” to take place. That lady on Thayer Street who loved her temperamental husband asked me how I ever ended up with you. I’ve been kicking it around ever since. All I’ve come up with, and I hate to admit it even to myself, is that we got together because of real estate.

After grad school I got a two-year residency at Brown, counseling the students and getting a feel for how crazy people really are on the East Coast. I put up a profile on that dating site because I didn’t know anyone in Providence or within a thousand-mile radius and I hoped to make some kind of connection that would help me navigate my surroundings while also not being too taxing on me. I met a stereotypically greaseball Italian with thoughts so weak I hardly knew he was there psychically, a guy who talked about his yacht the entire night with a nearly identical faulty psyche, and a tall, dark man from Nigeria I really liked but who turned out to be too intense with his thought energy. I couldn’t look him in the eye at all and he took it the wrong way. I also received a disturbing number of pictures from men of all shapes and colors who felt the need to show me what they looked like shirtless. And then I got a message from you.

Your picture (with shirt) honestly looked a little bit like a terrorist because you hadn’t had a haircut or shave for a while, apparently. But I consented to meet you because you wrote about world events and hadn’t mentioned a yacht at all. We went to a screening of
2001: A Space Odyssey
at the IMAX in the mall. The choice made some sense for us both because I like cinematic history, while you assumed I liked science fiction, like you. I waited outside the entrance, peering into the faces and souls of people who only wanted to watch the movie. When I was starting to think you’d chickened out, you, almost unrecognizable after a haircut and beard trim, stopped dead in your tracks, unaware of the bottleneck of sci-fi fans you created in your astonishment at seeing me. I could tell it was you and not some other weirdo because you were amazed that I looked as good or even better than the picture I’d sent you (your thoughts, not mine). I didn’t make any sign that I’d noticed you because I was wondering, as I watched the people clamber around you to get to the ticket line in time, whether you were one more of these vapid dates and I should turn and head back down the escalator. But some force greater than me made me smile at you, which gave you the courage to walk up and hold out your hand.

Your handshake was average, and anyone who was not a psychic might have been fooled. As the evening went on and you bought yourself a slushy as well as a ticket, then sat in the calibrated geometric center of that slanted sea of seats in the IMAX theatre and started talking on and on about the differences between the book and the movie, the author’s bio and his inspirations, everything about you became increasingly, nerdily extreme. It wasn’t unexpected, but there was something unusual going on with your thoughts. I felt urged to figure it out, so I took a walk with you in the September evening around Waterplace Park. You were undeniably there, unlike the greaseball and the yachter, and yet, unlike the Nigerian, I could look into your eyes and not fall over backward with the intensity.

What I think happens is your thought energy moves outward like most people’s, and I can read it as it whizzes by. But before it gets intense, the thought energy travels back to you. I don’t know how you do it, but it’s kind of like your thought energy goes around on a wheel, cycling through space and my powers before it cycles back into your head, only to cycle back out again. This is why I can’t get overwhelmed, because your thoughts don’t burrow into me like most other people’s. It’s such a relief. I can finally be in the company of someone and still feel almost like I’m by myself. Outwardly, as I mentioned, you’re histrionic: you talk and talk and sometimes shout or throw things. But I can focus on your repetitively predictable thought cycle and tolerate you better than anyone possibly ever.

Is toleration a basis for marriage?

It was the basis for my agreement to see you again for Sunday brunch two weeks later. It had been a week of hard practicum fellowship sessions, with undergrads throwing angst at me almost faster than I could process it, so when your invitation came, I imagined being in the company of another person without feeling put upon, and it sounded ideal. The best of both worlds and the worst of none. You gave me the ability to rest psychically without cutting myself off from the world completely. Then, as our dating saga went on, you weren’t too demanding of my time or too unresponsive. You fell in love quickly, but even that was refreshing after the robots I dated in California.

I think I may have taken my craving for relief a little too far, overlooking the ways in which you are a little too much to handle, because it can’t all have appeared after the wedding. The seed of your cloying personality must have been present, and I must have unwittingly sowed it with my obstinate need to keep the peace. If there were clues that you would become the least tolerable human being I’d ever met as soon as I finished my fellowship at Brown, I ignored them.

I try to imagine how I would feel about you if I couldn’t read your mind. It’s almost certain I would never have called you back after our first night together. I’m trying hard, but I can’t think of any particular reason we got married. It’s scary to write these words.

There was a year left in my fellowship, and we had been dating for the entire school year when I walked by what is now our house on the corner of Cushing and Brook streets and saw a “For Sale” sign.

I grew up with the impression that the only people who built houses during the Victorian period were the excessively rich. In California, hardly anybody ever gets to make a tourist visit to a home older than fifty years, much less
live
in one with an epically distant date of construction and historical importance. But on the East Side of Providence, you can’t turn around without bumping into a historical marker, and the Victorian homes are the newer ones. I became obsessed with learning all the architectural movements. Vague hopes of one day being a part of that continuing history sprouted in my mind.