Psychic City

by Page Turner

  The planes of her face were deliberate and bold, almost as if they’d been sketched with charcoal. Karen had seen plenty of resting bitch faces in her life, but this intruder’s angry default was a taken to a whole new level. She looked as though at any minute she might start shouting.

  But she didn’t. This first intruder stood there rather quietly with that enraged expression on her face.

  Standing next to her was a very small, slight man. Hunched over and wizened, he barely made eye contact with Karen as she surveyed his face. He seemed to be staring intently at something on the ground. But when Karen looked at this apparently fascinating spot, she noted a completely unremarkable square of carpet.

  This short man sighed at regular intervals. Deep labored sighs that made Karen wonder if he had a respiratory problem. His eyes were rimmed with pink tinges that made her wonder if he’d been crying recently or just had an extreme allergy to something found on the ranch.

  What in the world?

  “Right,” the incensed-looking woman said. “You must be wondering why we’re here.” Oddly she didn’t sound mad – or even peeved. Her tone was level and completely at odds with her facial expression and body language.

  The man beside her sighed again. Loudly. With one of his hands, he covered his face and groaned. He said nothing.

  Karen wondered, however, why she didn’t sense anything from him either. Why no sadness? Exhaustion? Illness?

  He looked severely depressed. Defeated, even. But she felt nothing coming from him. Strange.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” the knife-like woman said, extending her hand. “I’m Anger.”

  Spurred on by a tendency to reciprocate social niceties, Karen automatically took Anger’s hand and shook it. A few seconds passed before she processed what the strange woman had said.

  “What?”

  Anger looked at her companion. “This is how it always goes, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” he replied. Again, the tone of his voice was a departure from his appearance. He sounded calm, even emotionless, even as he looked distraught beyond words.

  “How what always goes?” Karen asked.

  “We should really just hire some trainees,” Anger said to her companion. “Put an ad up online. Apprentice – Grief and Anger.”

  “The job duties would scare them away though,” the man replied.

  “Good Grief,” Anger said. “You really do take yourself too seriously.”

  “I think that could be one of the job duties,” Grief replied. “Takes self seriously. Takes everything very seriously.”

  Anger laughed.

  “Although it really depends,” Grief said.

  “It really does, doesn’t it?” Anger replied.

  “Maybe that’s why it would be so hard to replace me with a stand-in,” Grief mused. “I can be really dynamic and unpredictable, can’t I?”

  “I suppose you can,” Anger replied.

  Karen felt deeply unsettled that even as they laughed or joked neither of them smiled. And again, she sensed nothing at all emotionally.

  It was, she realized, exactly how she’d feel if there were no one else in her room at all.

  “Ah,” she said aloud. “I must be dreaming this.”

  Grief shook his head. “Like a broken record.”

  “And not even one I particularly enjoying listening to,” Anger replied. “Something more like ‘Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.’”

  “Ah, that’s a classic,” Grief said.

  “I’m sorry,” Karen said. “But if this isn’t actually a dream, and you’re going to barge into my room in the middle of the night and kick up a fuss, the least you could do is include me in your conversation.”

  “Right,” Anger said. “I’m being rude.” She stuck out her hand again. “I’m Anger.”

  Karen pressed her lips into a tight frown. “You did that already.”

  “Sorry,” Anger said. “You get into habits in our line of work, you see.”

  “And what line of work would that be exactly?” Karen replied.

  “You don’t know?” Anger said. “Isn’t it obvious?”

  “You look as if you’ve escaped from some costume party,” Karen said.

  “I wish,” Grief said.

  “Karen,” Anger said, “We’re emotions.”

  “Oh great,” Karen said. “Now I’m hallucinating emotional projections. Why can’t I just feel my emotions like a normal person?”

  “Karen,” Anger said sternly. “We’re not your emotions. We’re emotions. We don’t belong to anyone. In a sense, we belong to everyone.”

  Grief nodded as if to reinforce Anger’s point.

  Karen felt sick. “This. This is a first.”

  “Well for you maybe,” Anger replied. “As we were saying, we’ve visited lots of empaths in our time. And we’ve visited you before, just not in this form.”

  “Think of it this way,” Grief said. “Isn’t it about time we were properly introduced?”

  “Okay,” Karen said, still reeling from the strangeness of it all, “if you’re emotions, then why can’t I feel anything?”

  “Oh, that’s rather straightforward actually,” Anger said. “We have no heft for you in this form. No weight. You only sense when people are feeling us. And right now, neither of us is feeling Anger or Grief. We are Anger and Grief. We don’t feel Anger and Grief.”

  Grief nodded. “It’s a key difference.”

  Karen stayed silent.

  Anger asked, “Do you understand?”

  Karen shook her head no.

  “Well, think of it this way,” Grief explained. “Isn’t it different when someone else touches your arm and when you touch your own arm?”

  “Yes,” Karen said, “But I don’t see how that applies.”

  “An experience is different from the outside than it is from the inside,” Grief said. “I know it’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s the best we have unfortunately. As you know all too well, emotions are often very hard to explain.”

  “Okay, fine,” Karen said. “Let’s say that I accept your premise, that you’re actual emotions, and that you’ve showed up in some obvious, overstated human form, that you’re here to properly introduce yourselves… that still doesn’t explain why. It doesn’t explain why you didn’t do it sooner. And it doesn’t explain why now is the time to do it.”

  “Ah,” Anger said. “That one’s a great deal easier to explain. Would you care to, Grief?”

  Grief shook his head. “No, you can do the honors for once.”

  Anger nodded in appreciation at Grief. “The reason we’re here is simple. This is the first time you’ve ever run away from us, Karen.”

  “Run away from you?” Karen asked. “I’ve been spending hours trying to refine my powers. To better distinguish between different shades of emotions. I’d hardly call that running away from you. If anything, that seems like I’m pursuing you more than ever.”

  “Ah,” Anger said. “You’re so close, dear.”

  “She is, isn’t she?” Grief added.

  “You’re being rude again,” Karen said.

  “Right,” Anger said. “That’s something you have to understand about emotions. We’re not always bound by the rules of politeness, of courtesy.”

  “We just kind of do our own thing,” Grief added.

  “Clearly,” Karen said.

  Anger ignored the frustration in Karen’s voice. “You’ve been so busy trying to focus in on other people’s emotions that you neglected your own, Karen. That’s why we’re here.”

  “Anger and Grief?” Karen asked.

  “Yes,” Grief said. “You’ve been running from us for a very long time.”

  “Really?” Karen said.

  “Yes,” Anger said. “Ever since your parents br
ought you here.”

  “We’ve come an awfully long way to find you,” Grief said.

  “Months,” Anger said.

  “It’s odd to judge distances using time, isn’t it?” Karen said.

  “Is it really though?” Anger said.

  “Yeah, you’d think you’d talk about it in terms of miles,” Karen said.

  “How many times have you told someone something was a half hour away?” Anger asked.

  Karen said nothing. She didn’t have a good answer to that.

  “We’ve traveled months to see you, Karen,” Anger said.

  “Why?” Karen asked.

  “Because that’s what we do,” Anger said. “We’ll time travel if we have to, but you can’t get away from us. Eventually, we’ll find you.”

  “You haven’t let yourself mourn, haven’t let yourself grieve,” Grief said.

  “And you haven’t let yourself admit how unfair it is. How wrong. You haven’t let yourself be angry.”

  In that moment, Karen burst into tears, squeezing both of her eyes shut. Anger looked at Grief knowingly, and they descended upon Karen, pulling her into a tight group hug.

  When Karen once again opened her eyes, her visitors were both gone.

  She sensed the familiar disembodied message again the next morning. “Emotions will time travel to pursue you,” it said again. Only once. Just as before.

  Karen didn’t recognize its voice as belonging to either Anger or Grief. But she knew that the message was identical in every way to the first time she’d heard it, only this time it sounded less like a warning and more like a bookend. Closure. An echo.

  “I know,” she replied aloud. “And thank goodness for that.”

  That wasn’t the last time Karen would be visited by emotional travelers in her time at the ranch. Oh no.

  From time to time, one of them would drop by. Anger and Grief returned. As did Sadness, who really was a lot to manage. High maintenance. Draining. Bit of an attention whore. A small doses avatar, if you will.

  And a carousel of other emotional avatars, each with their own story and purpose.

  Rather than sapping her, their visits predictably revitalized Karen whenever she was drained. She also found that she started to see glimpses of them whenever she focused on channeling her empathic powers.

  It wasn’t as if they were there exactly. Nothing quite as tidy as that. They moved far too quickly for that, jumping from person to person, everywhere and nowhere all at once. But if she focused really hard, she could see vestiges of where they’d been. Tracer trails. Shadows of a sort.

  At first, they manifested as amorphous blobs, ones that Karen would have been hard pressed to describe to another soul, even if her life had depended on it. But as she got quicker and more precise about tuning into their movements, Karen found she could associate the faces of her visitors with the emotions themselves.

  When another person felt something in her presence, Karen would essentially see a playing card being dealt from a deck, and on its face was the emotion in question.

  At that point, emotional discernment became quite a bit easier – much akin to standing while a group of people played cards but with everyone’s hand face up.

  Once she learned to account for the background haze of resignation and frustration that came from being around so many people who felt like they had settled, Karen got very good at emotional discernment at the ranch. But one thing she never got a hang of? Confidence.

  Everything felt like a guess to her still.

  Which made it particularly devastating even many years later whenever either one of her partners would doubt her intuition.

  Had Viv understood this, perhaps she never would have made the offhand comment about using a telepath instead of relying on her.

  She certainly wouldn’t have consulted one.

  And had Viv known that Karen felt hinky about Ryan Roscoe, she absolutely would not have arranged for a consult with his investigative team.

  But Viv knew none of this, and so she set up such a consult quickly, all the while completely oblivious to how much pain she was causing Karen by doing so.

  “The brain is designed with blind spots, optical and psychological, and one of its cleverest tricks is to confer on us the comforting illusion that we, personally, do not have any...’naive realism’ [is] the inescapable conviction that we perceive objects and events clearly, ‘as they really are. ‘ We assume that other reasonable people see things the same way we do. If they disagree with us, they obviously aren’t seeing clearly. Naive realism creates a logical labyrinth because it presupposes two things: One, people who are openminded and fair ought to agree with a reasonable opinion. And two, any opinion I hold must be reasonable; if it weren’t, I wouldn’t hold it. Therefore, if I can just get my opponents to sit down and listen to me, so I can tell them how things really are, they will agree with me. And if they don’t, it must be because they are biased.”

  -Tavris & Aronson, Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me)

  Ryan Roscoe strode out of the holding cell, his head raised high. He had a regal bearing, Viv noted. There was something different about him. The way he held himself. The way he spoke.

  Something that made others defer to him.

  In spite of herself, and despite promises she’d made to herself long ago not to kowtow to anyone, Viv felt herself deferring to him as well.

  Well, she thought. He certainly has a way with people.

  And a fabulous tailor, too, come to think of it. Always dressed to the nines in bespoke digs.

  That was another mystery all its own, how Roscoe afforded to dress like that on a psychic detective’s salary. Some suspected he knew someone, had a connection to the fashion industry. Others theorized that Roscoe himself were responsible for creating them. He could be a closet fiend with a sewing machine for all anyone knew.

  Whatever the case, Roscoe inevitably looked like he strolled off the pages of GQ.

  Even his strangely cut hair had a way of looking chic and in the moment. No one else could have made a bowl cut look like it belonged on a Milan runway. But there he was, doing just that.

  “So?” Viv prompted him.

  “I don’t have anything substantive to add, I’m afraid,” Roscoe replied.

  “Nothing?” Viv said. “You were in there for nearly an hour.”

  “Well, you may have noted that Eck’s a bit of a talker,” Roscoe said.

  “I did,” Viv said.

  “Sometimes people who talk that much have correspondingly empty heads,” Roscoe said. “But not Eck. He had a very active mind. Just most of it wasn’t terribly relevant to the case.” He tipped his chin down and smiled. “And most of it wasn’t terribly safe for work, I have to say.”

  Viv groaned.

  “He’s filthy. Truly.”

  “I believe you,” Viv said.

  “I mean, if you’d like, I could write down some of it, but I hardly think it’s what you’re interested in.”

  “You’d be correct,” Viv replied.

  “As far as the case itself,” Roscoe said, “Detective Cross seemed to be dead on. “

  “Ah,” Viv said.

  “And do forgive me for being so bold, but I can’t figure out why I was called in to check out this suspect. Have you lost confidence in your partner, Detective Lee?”

  Viv frowned. “That’s not it.”

  “Then what is it then?” Roscoe said.

  Viv said nothing. But he didn’t need to. It was an easy matter for Roscoe to retrieve the thoughts in question.

  “Ah, I see,” he replied to her unspoken sentiments.

  Viv rolled her eyes. Telepaths could be so rude. So invasive.

  “Well, I suppose I can’t blame you, worrying about what other people think. It’s difficult enough working with someone you’re al
so dating. Let alone two people you’re dating at once. It only makes sense that you’d be sensitive to that,” Roscoe said.

  His voice was tender enough, but Viv was having none of it. She felt invaded and annoyed.

  “Don’t you have better things to be doing?” Viv replied.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Roscoe replied. “Good luck with the case.”

  How Did You All Meet?

  Any time you pursue an unconventional path in life, there will be no shortage of people ready and willing to enthusiastically warn you against it.

  This was the case for Viv and Penny when Karen moved in with them.

  “A three-person marriage? I could never do that,” a PsyOps clerk with pancake makeup had unhelpfully offered when Viv had filed the domestic cohabitation forms at the office.

  “Well, it’s a good thing you’re not,” Viv had snapped back.

  It wasn’t necessarily the most prudent decision, being short with someone she needed something from. Her curtness did cause the clerk to hesitate and idly wonder if she could come up with some reason to deny the request. But whatever, the clerk finally decided, before stamping and certifying the documents. No need to punish Viv for her insolence. Surely, she reasoned, Viv’s home life would soon become punishing enough.

  Even Martin, usually quite supportive, had echoed that sentiment when he’d first learned of their arrangement. “Three women in one house? That’s an awful lot of hormones.”

  “What do you know about hormones?” Viv had snapped at him. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen your wife. I imagine you don’t see her much either. Maybe that’s by design.”

  Martin frowned. “Ouch, Viv.”

  “Ouch right back at you,” she said.

  Penny typically took a different tack whenever anyone said something like that to her. She’d channel her best Mona Lisa smile and shrug, throwing whoever was admonishing or challenging her off guard. Did it convince them? Probably not. But that wasn’t the point for her. She just wanted these tedious conversations to be as short as possible.

  Karen wasn’t one to punch back like Viv, but she couldn’t seem to affect the same flippant distance that came so easily to Penny. Karen had to say something – and typically what came out of her mouth was defensive or apologetic.