Then we kiss in a narrow toilet cubicle, and he tries to undress me, his hands shaking, but this whole sudden fantasy-come-true situation seems to be too much of a turn-on for him. He’s done while I’m still fully dressed. Actually, I expected just that. It feels like being a scientist experimenting with monkeys – the result is predictable, all that’s left is to carry out the experiment and get the proof.
“Sorry, I got too excited,” he mutters as we return to the table. The bill is there already, so Eric leaves some money and helps me into my coat. It seems he’s eager to talk now, while I’m suddenly not in the mood.
Outside it’s raining again, and Eric holds an umbrella open for me.
“I’m sorry!” he shouts, trying to block out the noise of the rain. “Can we meet again? I just didn’t expect it! But it’s great, you know, it’s actually kind of my favorite fantasy, to do it in a public place…”
“I know,” I say, getting into the car.
“So, can I call you?”
“Sure. But I’m not a call girl, you know.”
“Of course, I’m not forcing you into anything…”
He waves, then turns around and runs to his car, jumping over puddles.
~~~~~
2020 (June 10, 21:01)
It’s quiet in the studio. Multiple spotlights glare and heat the set.
“Tomorrow it’s going to be cloudy in Tampico, humidity quite high but no rain,” I say to the cameras. “In the afternoon the sun will come out.”
“Tampico is in…?” the host interrupts.
“Mexico,” I say. “At seven thirty in the morning, a school bus driver will fall asleep at the wheel, hit a car, and the bus will fall off a bridge. Four children will be killed in the accident, another eight injured. The driver will die in the hospital later.”
“Tam-pi-co,” the host repeats, nodding to the cameras. “I guess a lot of kids will not be taking the school bus tomorrow in Tampico, Mexico.”
“Jonathan Smith, age eight, lives in Great Britain in a village called Sling. Today he was playing in a forest about a mile north of his home and fell down an abandoned well. Search groups should concentrate on that direction. He broke his arm; apart from that he’s okay.”
“Jonathan Smith, Sling, Great Britain,” the host repeats. “Let’s hope the boy will be found soon.”
“Irina Vorontsova, Russia, Tver. About an hour ago she began to experience discomfort, pain in both hands and shortness of breath. She intends to visit a doctor in the morning, but her symptoms signify the beginning of a heart attack. Without immediate medical intervention she will not survive the night.”
“Vorontsova, Russia, Tver.”
The studio is packed with viewers, but they keep quiet and look rather scared. Each time there are different people, and each time they turn into the same mass of pale faces, wide eyes, and arms crossed on chests.
The show used to last half an hour. It was the highest-rated show in the world, and it still is, even though it was cut to five minutes. Now it’s transmitted live to all countries by all TV channels, radio stations, and the Internet. Somewhere it’s midday; somewhere else it’s midnight, but everybody wants to know if something is going to happen to them in the next twenty four hours, if there’s going to be an earthquake, or maybe a train they bought tickets for is going to derail. Sometimes I just tell them about the weather. The papers say that power is making me cruel. But the truth is I just know it’s impossible to save everyone.
When I began to gain access to more and more information, it felt like I was going crazy. At first it took some concentration to get answers, but with time, information learned to creep into my brain without much of an invitation on my part. Sometimes I just found myself sitting and staring at the wall, trying to stop thinking, to disable all curiosity in me, to prevent new information from breaking in. It worked, but you can’t stare at the wall forever.
One morning I was standing by the window, warming my hands on a cup of coffee. It was gray outside, and the crossing near the house was full of children heading to school. Some waited patiently, others ran the red light, cheering each other on. Cars were crawling at an even slower pace than the people walking by, and every minute horns were honking impatiently.
One of the children caught my attention. He was heading to school like everyone else, but something about him seemed different. He looked like a first grader, and was being dragged by the hand by a tall man, probably his father. The atmosphere around the boy looked strange to me. The air seemed denser, like some kind of aura was surrounding him. Almost involuntarily I concentrated, trying to figure out what it was, and received the answer right away.
He was seven years old, the younger of two siblings, his mother pregnant with a third. After school he usually went home, had dinner, did homework, and then was taken to a pool for swimming lessons. After each lesson, he played with his friends in the water, jumping in from the pool deck. They were all fascinated with the high diving board, but none of them ever had the courage to jump from it. They egged each other on, and the bravest climbed up when the coach wasn’t looking, but the fear was too strong. As I watched the boy, I knew that tomorrow he was going to climb the diving board and jump. He was going to fall badly, passing out when he hit the water too hard, and his friends were would try to resuscitate him instead of calling for an adult. As a result, the boy was going to die.
I don’t even remember how I made it onto the street, still in my robe and slippers. Pushing aside kids, I ran to the place I had just been watching from the window. But I couldn’t see the boy anymore. Blue, gray, and red jackets flashed before my eyes, confusing me, making me feel lost. I ran in one direction, then the other, then I just stopped and concentrated on the question – where was he?
And then, suddenly, I was showered with a multitude of answers, instead of the one I was looking for. It seemed like concentration had opened the door to incoherent, patchy information. A girl of about twelve went by, and I found out that she hadn’t done her homework, and that her mother was a nurse, and when her mom worked night shifts something very bad was happening in their house. A teacher of forty went by, and I learned that her husband wanted a divorce, and she was planning to have a facelift. A boy of fifteen went by, and I discovered that he had a knife in his backpack, and if that guy from the other class said something to him again, he was going to use it.
People went by, bumping me with their shoulders, pushing me with their problems, with their information. It felt like being hit in the face, slap after slap. To distract myself, I looked at a building on the other side of the road, only to find out that it would be demolished two years later and a mall built in its place. I looked under my feet and learned that a million years ago this place was covered by sea, and in another million years it will be under the sea once again.
Then I realized it’s impossible to save everyone. And I closed my eyes.
~~~~~
2016 (March 1, 19:40)
Eric reaches over me, retrieves his watch from the bedside table, and fastens it on his wrist. He leans back on his pillow and stares at the ceiling, then turns to me again.
“I still don’t believe it,” he says. “That interview of yours in the news. That’s some kind of charlatanism. There’s no way you can know such things.”
“Wait a week and see for yourself…”
“But what if there is no flood? How will you explain it? If you want to be a charlatan, make fuzzy predictions: ‘On the day that the northern moon meets the southern wind, a natural disaster will hit our city…’ Then wait for an appropriate disaster and tell everyone, “That’s it! That’s what I was talking about!”
“Impressive. Ever considered doing it for a living?”
“We would actually make a good team,” he muses. “I could make up predictions for you. We could convince that journalist to take another interview. It could become quite a business…”
He darts a glance at his watch again.
“
Time for you to go home?” I ask.
“No, why would I hurry?”
“To feed the goldfish?”
“It’s fasting today.” He lies back with his hands behind his head. “I’ve got plenty of time.”
“Then stay the night,” I suggest.
“But I’ve got to go to work tomorrow,” he says, “and I have nothing here, no clean shirts, no underwear. And you know I have trouble sleeping in a new place.”
“Last Thursday you fell asleep just fine.”
“That’s because you tired me out,” he says playfully, reaching out to kiss me. “If not for the alarm clock, I would have slept the whole night.”
“Why would a person set his alarm clock to 8 p.m. if nobody is waiting for him at home, except for a hungry goldfish?”
“Are you hinting at something?”
“I’m not hinting, Eric, I’m saying it openly. Go home to you wife, she’s waiting for you. So is your son.”
A pause hangs in the air as he looks at me appraisingly.
“All right now,” he says, sitting up. “Seriously, did you spy on me or something?”
“No, I just know. I told you that I can find out anything I want to know. And many things I don’t want to know as well.”
“And I told you I don’t believe in this crap.”
He gets out of bed and starts to get dressed, avoiding looking at me. I pull my blanket up, keeping an eye on him. His exasperation together with his abrupt movements look funny; he struggles for a while to get his foot into his pants.
“Eric, calm down.”
“No, what does it say about you then?” he exclaims, gesticulating with one hand and trying to pull his pants on with the other. “Back on our first date, you said you weren’t interested in married guys. And now it turns out that you know, one way or another, but you do. Still, it doesn’t bother you, does it? Don’t you feel guilty about my wife? She is nice, by the way, it’s just that we don’t get on as well as we used to.”
I don’t feel bad about his wife because I know that she cheated on him too. Sometimes, when they “don’t get on as well as they used to,” she slips away for a couple of hours to cry on her ex-boyfriend’s shoulder. Sometimes their conversations move into the bedroom, which might give Eric a sort of moral right to pay her back in kind, he just doesn’t know that himself. And now he’s wounded and upset about not being able to go on playing the role of the fancy-free bachelor any more — ashamed, too. Thinking that I didn’t know about his wife and she didn’t know about me somehow made him feel like he was not really cheating.
“You won’t come again?”
“Why do you have to ask if you know everything?” he jeers and sits in an chair to tie his laces. “Tell me, oh wise one, will I come again?”
I turn on my side and stretch.
“Yes, you will show up a few more times. But then it will get difficult for us to meet secretly, since I will be more famous. After the flood I will give more interviews, then I’ll receive a few minutes on the local news on a daily basis. At first people will laugh, but after realizing that I never make mistakes, they will start taking me seriously. All this will snowball…”
“Wow, you have big plans.”
Maybe I should make him believe, after all.
“Eric, do you want me to tell you about your biggest fear?”
He leans back on the chair, hands on knees.
“Go ahead.”
“You are scared of frogs. When you were three years old, you sat on a riverbank and threw stones into the water, which startled a frog. It jumped out of the grass onto your leg. It looked like some kind of monster to you, and you cried. It took some time for your parents to calm you down, they couldn’t even figure out what had frightened you so much. You have been afraid of frogs since then. You even avoid going near rivers without realizing why.”
As I speak, his expression changes. His sneer dissipates; now he looks puzzled, disbelieving, and a little scared.
“That’s one of my earliest memories,” he says at last. “What color were the shorts I was wearing that day?”
“Yellow.”
He goes quiet. Sits, without moving and doesn’t say a word.
“And you can answer any question?”
“I think so.”
Another pause.
“Does God exist?”
Wow.
“Eric, I’m not going to answer that.”
~~~~~
2020 (June 10, 21:03)
And back to the weather.
“The hurricane raging now in Haiti and surrounding areas will peak at eight in the morning. About two thousand houses will be destroyed and all means of communication will be damaged in many areas. Among those who choose not to be evacuated, twelve will die.”
To tell the truth, it’s already too late for them to change their minds. Besides, many of them have already been cut off from the world and can’t even hear what I’m saying.
In the past, when the program lasted half an hour, it consisted mostly of questions and answers. At first it was hard for me to choose predictions by myself — after all, there were natural and man-made disasters, crimes and accidents happening in every country in the world all of the time. How could I choose what to tell people about, what to try to prevent? Even if I decided to make predictions twenty-four hours a day, I still wouldn’t be able to cover even the smallest bit of what was happening on the planet. Knowing that, I was lost, trying to pick the most important events.
My instinctive choice was to cover incidents that affected many people at once, but even then the decisions remained subjective. I was constantly accused of being biased, of mentioning some areas more often than others, of neglecting third-world countries, of having racist preferences. When I prevented acts of terrorism, the press began to argue whether it was ethical for me to interfere with the struggle for independence in countries I had nothing to do with, and then when terrorists did strike, accusations of cruelty and indifference poured in.
It was impossible to please everyone. I understood that quickly enough, and cynicism began to replace my initial enthusiasm. I announced that I would only devote a few minutes of the program to predictions of my choosing, and the rest of the time I would answer questions from the audience.
It turned out that so many people had questions that the network crashed immediately, and questions had to be delivered in the old fashioned way, in paper envelopes.
Out of millions of letters, a few hundred were randomly chosen each night and brought into the studio in a black bag, from which I pulled out ten to fifteen letters to go through during the show. Each letter had to contain one question, no more than three lines long, written in English. If I opened a letter and saw more than three lines, it went straight to the trash for deviating from the format.
People were presented with a unique opportunity to receive answers to any kind of question, but the majority of letters concentrated on obtaining information relevant only to the writers themselves. People wanted to find relatives they had lost touch with years ago, to find out why their father had left home, or who stole the mail from their mailbox every day. Teenagers asked which profession would suit them best, how their parents would react if they came out, whether they should have an abortion or keep the baby. Sometimes I even received housekeeping questions, which could be answered by a simple Internet search without my involvement. A few months after I started answering the questions, renowned psychologists and sociologists began to publish books, trying to analyze why people, given the opportunity to learn the secrets of the universe, preferred to ask about trifles. What did it say about our civilization? Are we that superficial?
Sometimes I did come across interesting letters. People wanted to know what triggered the extinction of the dinosaurs, who erected the huge sculptures on Easter Island, whether aliens really existed and visited our planet. I answered some of such questions, refusing to answer others, knowing that the truth could lead to serious collecti
ve shock, and each refusal inspired a new wave of speculation regarding the limits of my knowledge.
The only question I couldn’t answer was the one that Eric had asked. Did God exist?
I had asked this question and received an answer but couldn’t understand it. It was like trying to read an encyclopedia in an unfamiliar language. The information was there, but I couldn’t put it into words or even into recognizable images in my mind. I thought the answer was probably “yes,” but this yes was extremely far away from anything that traditional religions taught.
I tried to explain it after receiving this question for the first time. But some regarded my answer as a negative and the ensuing skepticism resulted in numerous riots in different countries. This, in turn, almost caused a world-wide economic crisis. I was requested by several international organizations to issue a refutation and to be more careful with statements on such a scale. I had to go back to this question again and emphasize that I couldn’t answer it unambiguously. That was enough to calm the storm, and since then I have considered my statements more carefully.
I answered questions for about half a year when a letter from a Mexican woman arrived. Her name was Johanna, and her question took up only one line. She wanted to know when the end of the world would take place.
Sure enough, she wasn’t asking about the end of the universe; it was the end of the world as we knew it that was important to her. I actually found her question fascinating, and I was surprised that I had never thought about it myself. I concentrated and received the answer.
The date shocked me, even though, by that time, I had acquired such a thick skin that few things could affect me. I expected a cosmic scale but received a specific date awaiting us in just a few years. I looked at the camera, contemplating whether I should answer or not. It was clear that if people learned their time on earth was limited, all mankind would descend into anarchy. But, on the other hand, why did that matter if they were doomed anyway? Should I tell the truth and allow them to spend their remaining time as they chose, or leave them a few more years of comfortable routine, sparing them the knowledge of the danger hanging over us?
I refused to answer, adding only that we had enough time. The next day, the newspapers made a whole sensation out of it. Turns out that I had touched my nose while answering, and in body language this signifies that a person is lying. One newspaper even ran a “Did she scratch her nose?” headline on its front page.
Fiction Vortex - November 2013 Page 10