Dreamcast 3, page 7
After about 20 minutes I started probing Sky again. Cindy joined in, adding her concentration to my exertion. A large part of the brain lit up, but didn’t stay lit. Still, at times I held my breath, feeling on the verge of something. We were close, or seemed to be.
“One more try. We were almost there that time,” I encouraged my daughter. She nodded and closed her eyes to concentrate better. So did I.
Suddenly the lines started jumping, all eight of them, with more energy than ever before. The amplitudes increased, crisscrossing each other. The graphs were peaking, going crazy, the monitor was flickering with lively green squiggles.
“That’s it, Cindy, we’re almost there!” The body in the bed stirred, and the face jerked into a weird expression. I nearly burst a blood vessel trying to keep up the pressure.
“I’m not doing anything, Dad. I’m not getting through. But,” there was excitement in her voice, “I can hear her starting to think. She’s ... she’s ... waking up.” The monitor flickered into solid green, and I honed in, jumping from place to place in her mind, bombarding it with impulses.
“Just keep doing whatever you’re doing. Don’t stop!” I squeezed out through rigid lips.
Sky uttered an explosive gasp, her body tensed on the bed, and her arms began twitching.
“That’s it, Hon, bear down...”
“I’m not doing anything...”
“Just keep doing it... More!” I strained, going for all the marbles.
Suddenly the monitor alarm went off with an insistent wail. It jerked me up, interrupting my concentration. The screen was alive with crazy squiggles jumping from top to bottom. I held my breath as I watched. “Keep going, please, please, please...” I pled. The screen whited out a couple of times, flickered back on and settled into a regular rhythm.
“Dad! Dad!” Cindy whispered excitedly, “I can hear her thinking. Something about a dog... her mother... other kids... she’s hurting, something’s paining her.” Sky’s hand moved to her mouth, her fingers testing the dryness of her lips. She groaned.
Three nurses came rushing into the room, alerted by the alarm at their station. They surrounded the bed and checked on Sky, a calm efficiency in their motion. “You better get Dr. Phillips. He ought to see this,” one said to the other, who hurried out.
Holding my breath, I watched the monitor, willing it on. There were some erratic spikes that interrupted a more regular rhythm, but the thing kept ticking on.
The head nurse arrived, running. With one glance she took in the situation and bent over the patient. “Sky, can you hear me? Squeeze my hand if you can,” she commanded.
“I... can hear... you,” Sky whispered in a hoarse voice. Her hand fluttered around her mouth uncoordinated. “Drink... I need... a drink.” A nurse put a drinking box in Sky’s hand and guided it to her mouth. Sky slurped noisily, then greedily. The juice went down the wrong way, making her cough.
“Easy now,” the head nurse cautioned, patting Sky’s back. “You’re still a little uncoordinated.” She turned to the senior aid, “Has Dr. Phillips been notified?”
“Yes, Felicita went to page him.”
Sky quieted and more cautiously sipped on her drink. Her eyes roved the room, trying to make sense of it. “Where am I?”
“In hospital. You had an accident...” the head nurse explained, and slowly comprehension grew in Sky’s expression.
Thank God, I repeated in my head. I grabbed Cindy and gave her a grateful hug.
“Way to go, girl, we did it!” I was jubilant. We had jump-started Sky’s brain!
“It wasn’t me, Dad. It really wasn’t. I can hear thoughts, send thoughts, but I can’t do what you can.” She was shaking her head in denial.
“But it wasn’t all me either,” I protested.
“It was me,” Miles said from his chair, video game in hand, looking smug. “I heard you tell Cindy what to do and I did it. What’s the big fuss?”
A wave of dizziness hit me so hard I had to sit down. Miles, my Asperger’s son, also had ESP? Unbelievable! My mind was blank with astonishment as I gaped at my children. Cindy seemed surprised too, but Miles was laughing. “You ought to see how funny you look,” he chortled.
The doctor arrived and hurried to the bed.
“The patient is aware and seems lucid,” the head nurse reported.
The doctor scanned the display, took her pulse with his finger and shone a pencil-light into Sky’s eyes, checking the pupil reflex. “Do you know where you are?”
“In hospital,” Sky replied. “I don’t remember any of this. I was on a bus...”
“You had an accident. You’re in Westchester Medical. We’re getting your mom now.” Sky nodded, trying to sort through the facts.
“What’s 3 times 12?”
“Uhm, 36,” Sky responded in a puzzled tone.
“Who is the president?”
“Obama?”
“When was the Constitution signed?”
“1787… 89.”
“Her memory seems intact,” Dr. Phillips concluded. All the bystanders smiled, one more hurdle cleared. “Stick out your tongue. Wriggle your toes. Touch your nose. Your ear...” Sky passed all the tests, perhaps there was no brain damage after all.
Led by an aide, Alexa arrived. She took one look and screaming, ran to the bed and threw her arms around her daughter. She was crying and hyperventilating at the same time.
“I’m all right, Mom. At least I think I am.”
“Yes you are, precious. You’re going to be all right.”
The rest of us stood around arrested by the drama, feeling vaguely embarrassed by the high emotions. After a while the doctor left to schedule a CT scan and a full neurological exam. The nurses also drifted away.
Amanda arrived, her face puzzled. “What happened?”
“Dad did it. Jump-started her.” My wife turned to me, trying to decide if to praise or reproach me for sticking my nose into it again. A minute of watching Alexa’s joy easily tipped the scales in my favor. She hugged me and kissed my cheeks.
“Actually, it wasn’t me. At least not entirely. Miles helped.”
“Miles?” She stared at me uncomprehending. “How?”
“I don’t know. You ask him.”
“I just did what Dad told Cindy to do, that’s all.”
“And what was that?” Amanda queried.
“I energized her brain. It’s what I do to the dog and cat. And the aliens,” he stated, unsure if he was in trouble or not.
Amanda looked to me. “ESP?”
“I think so.” I wasn’t sure if I was happy with the conclusion. How could we live in the same house with both kids having superpowers? Then I realized it was worse for Amanda; she also had a psychic husband to contend with.
Summoned by a quick phone call, Maclure arrived a half hour later. Sky had been wheeled away and was undergoing a full physical and neurological examination. Alexa ran to him and blurted out the happy details. His eyes grew moist and for a minute I thought he’d cry, but he didn’t. He just became extremely talkative as the relief gushed out of him. Sky was alive, after he’d nearly given up on her. It took another hour for him to settle down and the policeman in him to wake up.
“So you were in the room at the time?” he questioned me. “With Cindy and Miles? And?”
“And what?”
“And I don’t know what, more of the psychic hocus-pocus?”
“You shouldn’t make fun of what saved your niece’s life,” Cindy threw in, indignant on my account.
“No, no, of course not. It’s just every time I turn around I collide with the paranormal. It’s a hard thing to swallow for a normal person.”
“I’m normal,” Cindy emphasized.
“Of course you are,” Maclure voiced urgently. “Believe me I’m more grateful than I can ever say.” His eyes flew around us, trying to fix whatever was broken.
“It’s all right, Pete, we understand,” I reassured him.
“Dad jump-started her mind,” Miles butted in self-importantly. Maclure just gaped at us.
“I couldn’t have done it without your help,” I said, giving him his due, hugging him.
“Dad, you’re mashing me,” Miles complained.
30 minutes later an orderly wheeled Sky back. She seemed alert and rejoiced at seeing her uncle again. We witnessed another emotional reunion, Alexa and Amanda also joining us.
Dr. Phillips came and reported in a dry tone, “The preliminary assessment suggests that everything is functioning normally. There is a slight scarring of brain tissue, but it shouldn’t have any lasting effects. Memory seems intact and so is logic and ideation. Physically she’s a little weak, having lost some muscle mass through inactivity. Unless more detailed results indicate otherwise, she’ll be ready to go home in a week...” Alexa melted at the spate of good news.
It took a while to sort through the next hour. Alexa talked a lot, trying to shed her store of anxieties. Maclure just wanted to know the details. Sky talked about the fall, hitting her head on the pavement, feeling sick, and slowly blacking out in the bus. She couldn’t remember anything afterwards. Throughout she kept drinking, saying her throat was still dry.
In a lull, Sky focused on me. “I think I know you, but I don’t know where from. I don’t think we ever met.” I just smiled, a little embarrassed and shrugged my shoulders. I wasn’t about to tell her that I’d read her diaries, her letters, e-mails and her blog, and that I’d walked around her mind unrestricted. I wished her a good recovery, and we left.
In the car, there was silence. There was so much to talk about, to sort through, that none of us knew how to start. It took days for it to come out. I couldn’t get over the fact that both my kids had paranormal abilities. That Cindy could hear thoughts and insert them, and Miles ... well I didn’t know yet what he had.
Amanda was worried about surviving among us paranormals. She threatened, “If I catch anyone of you fooling around with my thoughts or emotions, then I’ll ... then I don’t know what I’ll do.”
Cindy was concerned that other people must also be paranormal and worried about her privacy.
Miles seemed the least affected. “What’s the big deal? I thought everyone could do it.”
“Do what, exactly?” I asked, more than just a little curious.
“You know, stuff.” He wasn’t inclined to discuss it. Still after pressing him a bit, he conceded, “I can wish things... command things. Make things happen.” Pressed further, he added, “When someone tries to bully me, I paralyze him.” How? “I blank his mind.” He lifted his video game. “I can kill aliens with just thoughts and win every time.”
“But I hear you losing sometime...”
“Sure. Because I keep my thoughts out of it. It’s too easy. Why bother playing then? It’s just a waste of time then.” I was tempted to tell him it was a waste of time either way, but swallowed it.
Yes, we were all adjusting to a new reality.
Later, Cindy confided to me, “When it first started I thought I was hallucinating, losing my mind. Hearing voices, how unreal is all that? A little later I was beginning to see a connection between what I heard and how people acted. But was it real? I tested people around me, but none seemed to have the ability. How was it that out of all people I had this... ESP thing. Out of some million people, only me...” she stopped, finding it hard to put words to what she was feeling.
“How old were you?”
“About thirteen. It didn’t happen all at once. At first I heard only vague whisperings, but it soon grew distinct. Then the voices became recognizably individual, and I rediscovered my friends, finding out what they really thought and felt. The insides didn’t always line up with the outsides. I lost a few friends.” She frowned, remembering. “But gained a few new ones.” She thought hard. “The voices that I heard weren’t like spoken voices, they had a different quality to them, like an echo or overtones in a choir. Thank God, ‘cause it was often too confusing to decipher what was the private or the public version of what I was hearing.” She focused on me. “But I never felt... or suspected you have the same thing...”
“Not quite the same thing.”
“No. I can’t see like you can. I only hear and insert thoughts. You can fly... how weird is all that? I keep expecting to wake up.” She looked at me funny, struggling with the concept, but then shrugged. “Well I’m glad that I’m not entirely unique.”
Miles had no trouble accepting. To him it seemed to make perfect sense. “Why argue it? I have it... whatever it is and I can use it. I always knew I was somehow different.” Yes, Asperger’s different, not this different.
“What do you do with it?”
“Do? No need to do anything. It’s there like singing, but I don’t need to sing just because I can.” Thank God, since he was unable to hold a melody together.
As far as I was concerned, this reinforced my view that if I could pass it on to my children, ESP had to be a biological thing with a chromosome responsible for it. But it generated an entire structure with interrelated parts that all had to function together. A fragment alone wasn’t enough. Perhaps that’s why it was so rare in the general population.
As for me, I could never feel quite comfortable with my own ESP, in spite of all I’d been through. My children’s ESP added a new sense of unreality to the mix. Most times the whole thing felt crazy. Only in the midst of a battle with some evil, with everything on the line, did my paranormal abilities fit me, and I felt supercharged with some biblical sense of reckoning. But the rest of the time, I had to wonder why me? Why my children?
Amanda felt vaguely left out. She had only the strength of her personality, her intelligence, her love and caring to deal with the world. I consoled her, “You’re lucky not to be burdened by this thing. You can let sleeping dogs lie and not be bothered by them. It’s often better not to know how things really stand, and you certainly don’t want to hear what people are thinking...” Still she felt incomplete. But that’s how it was in life, each of us was dealt a different hand, wishing for what we didn’t have, burdened by what we did have.
Six days later Sky was discharged from the hospital. The various examinations couldn’t find any evidence of deficits. She seemed perfectly normal, fully recovered.
Alexa and Maclure organized a big homecoming party for her; the whole gang got together and celebrated our good fortune. Smythe wanted to drive north again with his family to examine some cave paintings they’d discovered. I exchanged a few words with Sky and she said again that she knew me from somewhere. I pretended ignorance and again wished her well. She lost a month of school, but I was able, as Dean of Walter Edmund College, to gain a few accommodations from her college which allowed her to make up for the loss. She thanked me, as did Maclure and Alexa, though I don’t think she knew my entire role in it.
Amanda and I went home gratified to have such friends. When I thought back to how it all started, with Jenny’s murder and my arrest, and Maclure and Smythe hammering away at me, it seemed so impossible that we would ever become such friends. But not everything in life is obvious, even for a paranormal.
In the top drawer of my desk, I found a bag of marbles belonging to Emmett Featherstone. Thinking of gains and losses, and of the speech I gave at the recognition service about not losing our marbles, I could safely say that I hadn’t lost any but gained a few: a life saved and the discovery of more paranormal abilities in my family. I decided to keep the bag to remind me to keep adding to my abilities.
I think this would be a good place to stop.
The End
The Cruise
Chapter 7
The four of us, Amanda, myself, Cindy and Miles, were staying at a seaside resort overlooking the calm bay which met the restless Caribbean on the far side of a coral reef. It was not yet midday but the sun was already mercilessly hot. A ribbon of white sand dotted with coconut palms shimmered in the rising heat, sheltering clusters of the traditional cabana guest houses. The light offshore breeze hardy made the hot air breathable. We had to constantly moisten our lips to avoid cracking them.
I don’t do well with heat; it makes me listless and irritable. I lay motionless in the hammock strung between two palms, trying to hide in the shade of the frond mass above me. Even this shelter was fraught with danger because the coconuts above were ripening and who knew when their biological clock would wake up and the fruit would suddenly became mature enough to drop on an unprotected head? Much like living under a sword suspended by a string.
The place was called Oasis, a real misnomer, as an oasis was a welcome relief in a sea of sand but here we were on the edge of an ocean. The resort consisted of about two dozen huts, a restaurant and a few outbuildings. A reed fence shut out the rest of the world, and noise from the coastal road hardly reached us, especially not at midday. I supposed from a distance the place looked picturesque on the edge of a turquoise sea, fringed with palms. But up close, it looked threadbare as if it had been assembled from a substandard kit sold by a Caribbean style IKEA. Certainly nothing like the inviting pictures on the travel brochure. A gravel pathway connected the buildings. The guest houses were very simple affairs, made of native building materials and covered with palm fronds. The accouterments were Spartan if present at all. I had expected something more luxurious for the money we shelled out for accommodations.
I’m not going to tell you where we were, in what country, or in what jurisdiction. I’ve changed the names of places, or kept them silent. For reasons that will become obvious later, it’s better that the locations remain unidentified. Sorry if that causes the reader any doubt, but believe me, it’s better that way. For my family, at least.
It was March Break and they’d all ganged up on me to make this trip south. “The diversion will be good for you. Sun, surf, and music. Nothing to do but lie on the beach and work on your tan,” Amanda had promised. Sounded enticing enough, but the reality was sobering. Yes, there was sun, but it could easily burn you to a crisp in half an hour, the surf was salty, burning the eyes, and by the end of the first day I had enough of the obligatory calypso music to last me a lifetime. The shrill cries of the seagulls scrounging on the beach cut through my brain like a buzz saw through sheet metal.
