by Jerry
I finished the picture carefully but quickly and went for coffee. I remember looking at his card while I drank the coffee. Robert Chamberlin, Ph.D., Paranormal Psychology. Well, that explained the bulge at the back of his head, the unmistakable sign of a Megson Implant. What the hell was someone with biomechanically enhanced paranormal abilities doing at an arthritis conference? I actually had a heart palpitation when I read the Philadelphia address. I blamed it on too much caffeine. The coffee at the hospitality suite was wonderful at that conference. I’d had a cup of cappuccino earlier before I’d started to work. This one was half coffee, half steamed milk, the whole thing flavored with hazelnut syrup. I didn’t know anyplace in Philadelphia that made coffee like they did at that conference in Seattle. It had to be the caffeine that made my happily married heart dance like that.
I didn’t see him again at that conference. Two weeks later, back home I didn’t call him as I’d said I would but messengered over the completed sketch. I’d had it mounted in a sleek charcoal-colored steel frame, a few shades darker than the mat. Mean and modern. He sent the check by return mail, no note, just a check.
The next time was almost a year later in San Francisco. I was drawing a hip prosthesis. I didn’t really like working the orthopedic conventions. Mostly I guess because I didn’t like drawing devices as much as I did real parts, homegrown parts I called them to myself. The annual orthopedic meetings were also too big, running close to ten thousand doctors. How could anybody stand being around so many of them all at once? I almost felt sorry for them myself. And then, there he was.
“How’s your sign language coming these days?” he asked from behind me as I was finishing the femoral shaft component to complete the last of the morning’s work.
If I’d turned around any faster, I wouldn’t have been able to stop before I’d made a complete circle and a complete fool of myself. I remember saying something real brilliant like “Oh, hi.” I recognized him of course, even without the moustache. His grin was as big and beautiful in San Francisco as it had been in Seattle. He was also just as tall. I came up somewhere halfway between his navel and his armpits.
He didn’t say anything else at first but took both my grimy hands in his, turned them palms down, and looked them over.
“Still married?” he asked, his eyes meeting mine.
“Still married,” I affirmed, smiling more than was proper. I had given up coffee six months ago; but I was having palpitations again.
“Is your husband with you this trip?”
“No. Someone has to stay home with the kids,” I explained, trying for some kind of barricade to hide behind.
“Good, then you’re free to come have coffee with me.”
“I don’t drink coffee,” I said, feeling stupider by the second.
“But I do,” he insisted. “Besides, I want to hear about your kids and your work and what you’ve been doing this last year, and then you can explain to me how the sexiest woman I’ve ever met could possibly be already married.”
So, sue me. I went with him. He had coffee, three cups of coffee. It was nearly eleven and I’d skipped breakfast, so I ordered herbal tea and two muffins. That was when I was still trying to acquire a taste for things that were supposed to be good for me. I told him about the twins and my husband the accountant. He told me I had bedroom eyes and a figure that would inspire an arsonist. I still haven’t figured that last one out, but maybe it was how he said it. I told him about my years in and out of art school, and he asked me to fly to Barbados with him. We could catch a flight and be making love on the sand by midnight. I told him about my contract with the drug company that got me out of Philadelphia at least once a month, sometimes more. And how I had two more days at this convention to draw. He looked wistful and said he had to go. He was an invited speaker, something about his theory on why some people develop chronic pain. I remember asking him then why he attended conferences so far outside his field. He didn’t really give me any more details then, but he did ask if he could walk me back to my hotel room before his talk, and we said goodbye at the elevators. He said he’d look for me later. I went to my room and changed my underwear.
I remember staring at myself in the bathroom mirror. It was one of those fancy hotels with a bathroom bigger than my living room at home, with lights all around. I ran the basin full of warm water as I tried to read which of the half dozen little identically shaped plastic bottles, perched so prettily in the calico lined basket, contained liquid soap as opposed to hair conditioner or bath oil. I finally settled on the boxed soap to clean my drenched panties. The face that stared back at me was my own, all right. It was what I was thinking, not what I was feeling, that was so out of the ordinary for me that I must have been expecting some visible difference. Fear and lust ought to look different, but there wasn’t any change, not that I could see. I gathered up a few more bits of lingerie and dropped them in to soak. They didn’t sink completely, so I stirred them under with my hands. I spent a few useless minutes trying to gouge the charcoal from under my nails before I lost all composure.
Grabbing my jacket, I headed out of the room, out of the hotel, away from the convention center. The jacket wasn’t really warm enough for a November afternoon in San Francisco, but I walked all the way to Ghirardelli Square. I took an inside seat at the cafe and ordered solace in the form of hot chocolate with extra whipped cream. I didn’t need the calories or the cholesterol, and for all I knew, I’d feel so guilty indulging myself I’d bring on a migraine. But what the hell, this situation was going to give me one hell of a headache anyway. I was married, I loved my husband and my kids, and I hadn’t felt like this since I was fourteen and watched Gone With the Wind for the first time. And the guy had an Implant for god’s sake; I knew better.
I left the square and hailed a cab after trying unsuccessfully to browse pleasantly through the stores. I spent the rest of the day watching the buffalo in Golden Gate Park. I stayed until it was too cold and dark to keep from being scared, so I found another cab and went back to the hotel.
The message light was on in the room, and there were flowers there that hadn’t been there when I’d left. Yellow roses, it looked like more than a dozen, but I didn’t stop to count before I read the card. It was an invitation. Dinner at eight, I’ll pick you up, no blue jeans. It was signed Robert. I actually kissed the card before I replaced it in its envelope. I called the desk for messages; there was only one. The clerk apologized and said he hoped I would understand it, but the note he’d been handed just said “please” and was unsigned. But it was a tall guy with blue eyes who’d left it, if that was of any help.
I hung up the phone and began to work on my nails with a vengeance. Twenty minutes later, give or take a few, I was showered and almost ready. Ivory silk blouse with the french cuffs and gold cuff links, open one button too many to be professional. Black wool crepe skirt almost too short, sheer black hose and black suede heels. I left the matching jacket in the closet. It was the same outfit, with variations and replacements, that I’d been traveling with for several years. I reasoned it could take me from the few mandatory meetings with the drug company’s people to dinner with an old friend who happened to live in a city I was drawing in. Like a good scout, I remember thinking, always prepared, as I looked at myself in the mirror. The unavoidable decision once again, to leave my hair down over my shoulders or to pin it up. I opted for what I hoped was sophisticated and gathered it up, twisted and clipped it in place. I loosened a few strands around my face, inserted my great grandmother’s crystal and jet earrings, applied my lipstick, and was ready. For what, I wondered.
Better not to wonder about it, I thought as I checked my watch. A few minutes past seven. I called my husband, to save me, maybe; I don’t know. He wanted to know why I hadn’t called earlier; didn’t I remember the time change? It was past ten o’clock, past his bedtime, I thought. The boys were fine, but I should have called when they were still up, he complained. When he started asking me about some cha
rges on the MasterCard statement that had come in my absence, I said I had to go. He asked where? To dinner. With whom? Some of the people from the drug company, I told him. Oh. I asked him to kiss the boys for me and told him that I loved him and hung up.
According to my watch, it was still only a few minutes past seven. I left the room anyway and a message at the desk that I could be found in the hotel bar. I ordered a drink, Southern Comfort, no ice. I was still old-fashioned enough to believe that alcohol could steady my nerves. If this wasn’t a date, I didn’t know what was. I’d never liked dates anyway. I think that was one of the biggest reasons I got married. I wouldn’t have to go through what I was now going through. The waiter slid up just as Robert entered the room.
He paused for a minute in the doorway. He was quite a sight standing there silhouetted in the lobby lights. But even his eyes needed time to adjust to the relative darkness of the bar. He smiled when he saw me; I remember that. He motioned to the waiter to stay as he crossed the room and then sent him on his way with an order for tonic and lime.
He paused for a moment before sitting and looked at me. He started at my head and slowly looked down and around the small table separating us until he reached my feet, and then his eyes moved more slowly back up, retracing the path they’d just taken.
“You look absolutely stunning,” he said, his eyes meeting mine.
I stammered some kind of thank you and insisted that he sit down as I stared at my nails. It was either then, or maybe a few seconds later, that I knew for sure that I was in serious trouble. He could have taken my hand and led me right upstairs then and there, but he didn’t. Instead he took my hand and talked to me.
“You’re blushing,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’re not used to compliments. Just what kind of a brute of a husband do you have?”
“I’m not blushing, and even if I were, it’s too dark to see in here,” I insisted. Brilliant repartee I thought, mentally kicking myself.
“The candle here is enough to see you by. Besides, why else would you avert your head in just that fashion, casting your eyes decorously downward?”
I looked up at him. “Now you’re making fun of me?”
“I had to say something to get you to look at me, didn’t I? But make fun of you, never.”
He suddenly looked very serious. And then he changed the subject, sort of.
“It’s my occupation, you know. I’m supposed to pick up on responses and not just rely on the subtleties of body language and nervous system discharges. What kind of parapsychologist would I be if I couldn’t judge someone’s response to a compliment in a darkened room?”
At a loss for an acceptable answer, I shrugged my shoulders and raised my eyebrows. I think I made some sort of vague gesture with one of my hands as well.
“Now you see that means you agree I’d be a lousy parashrink if I hadn’t known you were blushing, but you don’t want to agree with me that you were blushing, so you keep your mouth shut because you want to believe that I am good at what I do.”
I had to laugh; the guy was good, and at more than one thing, or so it was beginning to look. And then I began to blush again, and then we both laughed.
“I like to get the business of my work out of the way right up front,” he said as we both calmed down a bit as the waiter brought over his tonic and lime.
“I don’t understand what you mean?”
“My being a parashrink, a paranormal psychotherapist.”
“So, you read minds, I paint pictures,” I said as lightly and gaily as possible.
“That’s just it; I don’t read minds. I think you know that.”
“I do know that. It was a joke. Don’t ask me to explain it, but it was a joke.”
He smiled thinly.
“That much I figured out. For the record,” he added, “I don’t read minds. My implant allows me access to emotions and feelings not accessible by standard processing or input.”
“Don’t worry,” I interrupted. “Even in art school we had to be screened. They told us all about you. That you are really just equipped with extra senses, other than ours. Instead of only hearing and seeing and tasting and all that, the Megson Implant accesses other brain areas. And Megson won the Nobel Prize for proving what Gypsies and fortune tellers have known for centuries. That psychic or paranormal abilities do exist, at least in some people, and can be exploited.” I probably sounded snide, but I was feeling a bit on the defensive.
“And then she and her daughter developed the Megson Implant that enhances pre-existing paranormal abilities, and you found yourself a job,” I added for good measure, when I realized he was staring.
“They screened you in art school?”
“Why should that surprise you? Doesn’t the government want to know about anyone with any paranormal potential? Where else would they get more of you guys from?”
“I don’t work for the government anymore,” he said. “Besides, some things ought to be sacred, don’t you think? Like beautiful women, beautiful women with artistic talents, for example.”
I think I blushed again at that point but stayed with the subject.
“Anyone with latent paranormal abilities got plucked for the minimum two years government service; at least those who applied for assistance got screened. I didn’t have the money up front, so I got screened like everyone else applying for government grants. I got lucky; I got just the money.”
“You got a complete green light? No latency in any areas?”
“No, none,” I replied. That was the truth. They hadn’t found any. They’d tried hard enough all right, but I’d tried harder. That was when I’d learned that practice really did make perfect. “Why so surprised? What are the statistics now? Only one in a thousand or something have any real potential, right?”
“Something like that. But your headaches, with your headaches I’d have suspected something.”
“How did you know—”
“It hurts now doesn’t it?” he interrupted.
It had been throbbing on the right side steadily since the second sip of Southern Comfort.
I nodded in agreement.
“Part of my job, sensing these things, remember?” he said kindly. “Let me help,” he said, extending his hands towards my temples.
“No, thanks,” I said a little too quickly as I searched through my bag for the tiny inhaler. Finding it, I gave myself two quick puffs. A few seconds later the pulsing pain began receding.
“You still use medication? You haven’t had release therapy?” he asked.
“Refractory case,” I tried to explain. “They tried, even after I tested non-latent. They told me then that release therapy wasn’t very effective in non-latents. Besides, the old-fashioned vasoconstrictors work pretty well,” I said, indicating the inhaler I was replacing in my bag.
“I don’t believe it,” he said stubbornly.
“Don’t believe what?
“That you’ve no latent paranormal abilities. It goes against my whole theory.”
“Your whole theory? Your whole theory of what?”
“Chronic pain. That patients with chronic pain without any apparent physical reason are actually experiencing the pain felt by others with actual physical abnormalities. For example, take low back pain. It’s my belief that patients with chronic low back pain but normal physical exams and normal imaging studies are actually experiencing the pain via a psychic transference from individuals with actual anatomical disease such as tumors or herniated disks or the like.”
“But I don’t have chronic pain. I just get headaches. That’s all. It’s no big deal, really.”
“I disagree,” he said emphatically. “Headaches are one form of chronic pain. If you can identify and learn to control your paranormal abilities, your brain can begin to function more properly, and you shouldn’t get the headaches anymore.”
“I told you, I haven’t any paranormal abilities. I just get headaches, you know, too much stress or something, that’s all,” I
insisted.
“No, I don’t think so. Somewhere someone’s got a brain tumor or their head’s just been split open, and you’re on the psychic receiving end, so to speak.”
“Doesn’t make sense to me,” I argued.
“Sure it does. Besides, it would explain why release therapy is so successful, particularly in latents. Bring latent paranormal abilities to the surface, bring them under conscious control, and the patient’s somatic symptoms would resolve. Release the abilities, and the patient is released from their troubles. It it weren’t for the proven value of release therapy, I don’t think anyone would take my ideas about chronic pain seriously. And it was the effectiveness of the use of Megson Implants in release therapy that led to their widespread use in psychotherapy and other areas.”
“If the patient didn’t die during treatment,” I added, interrupting his lecture. It was an interesting theory all right, but we were not dealing with one of my favorite topics. I remember trying to think of some way out of the conversation.
“Now, that almost never happens anymore,” he went on. “Not since the Implant output modulation problem was fixed.”
“After how many thousands of brains were pureed into squash?”
“You’re right; I shouldn’t have been so cavalier about it. I guess I just get tired of defending what I do all the time.” He looked so sincere, I stopped my attack.
“So, why don’t we change the subject then?” I suggested. “Shall we adjourn for dinner and argue about something else?” He agreed with the first suggestion but declined the second. We ate at some little bistro off the waterfront. It had red and white checked tablecloths and candles stuck in real glass wine bottles and wonderful sourdough bread. They served real butter with no extra charge. We didn’t argue again that evening. We talked all about the cities we’d been in and which hotels we’d liked the best. Seems he attended several conferences a year in various medical specialties, anywhere they invited him to speak on his theory of the paranormal transfer of pain, he called it. But mostly we flirted. I mean we really flirted. I think I was downright seductive; I know for sure he was.