The Medium

by Noëlle Sickels

  Putting aside the spiky question of duty, Helen recognized that participating in the project could have personal benefits. For one thing, she’d earn a definite release date. But more important, the training might give her skills for controlling her visions. She might discover how to live a full, ordinary life and keep within it a limited but authentic space for her extraordinary sensibilities. She wished she’d been able to assure Billy she had such control. Then she could’ve belonged to him and to herself. Or could she have? Maybe even well-managed psychic abilities would have been too much for him to countenance. What would she have done then? But, oh, why ask herself that now?

  Helen moved off from the ball field and headed for the weaving room. Weaving always emptied her mind. That’s what she needed now, a bit of empty-headedness.

  On her way to the recreation building, she passed two women strolling arm-in-arm. They were speaking German. Helen caught the words Feld and Frankreich, and she knew they were discussing Normandy.

  The success of D-Day had evoked tepid reactions among many of the internees at Seagoville, but Helen knew from her newspaper-reading that it had been a shot in the arm to the rest of the nation. Since then, however, the national mood of excited optimism had become muted. Fighting on the peninsula was dragging on. The push inland was going to take longer than expected.

  The roads and fields of Normandy were lined with high earthen banks topped by hedges. Hedgerows were excellent hiding places for the Nazis’ dreaded 88-millimeter guns. Able to knock out tanks, aircraft, and buildings, versatile enough to mount on a tank or set up in a ravine or a village, the 88 was extremely powerful and accurate, even against fast-moving targets. It was by far the best and most feared gun of the war. When used against infantry, it fired fused shells that created bursts of piercing flak. Flak was a chilling new word in the language, taken from the German Flugzengabwehrkanone. Lloyd said a number of the vets at Valley Forge had been blinded by steel splinters from an 88.

  Helen looked at the backs of the women walking on. Were they pleased that the campaign in Normandy was proving to be hard? Helen was living in the midst of these people, but she didn’t know any of them well. It was easy to pick out the dedicated Nazi sympathizers. They were explicit about their allegiance, singing party songs and marching to mark anything “important,” like Hitler’s birthday or the departure of one of their own from the camp. In Helen’s short time at Seagoville, more than a hundred of them had chosen to be repatriated to Germany and had left to meet a ship in New York. Marta had told her that active Nazi agitators were soon transferred to stricter camps. Escapees and repeated brawlers, for example, were sent to Camp Kenedy.

  But what about the others? A swastika flag stood opposite the American flag on the stage in the auditorium, yet how many internees actually believed in Hitler and his doctrines, and how many were just trying to get through their internment with the least amount of trouble?

  It occurred to Helen that if she found it difficult to ascertain where other people’s feelings lay, then her own attitudes might present an equally mysterious face. She wouldn’t have it. She had a German name and unknown German cousins who might right now be fighting and dying on the other side of those Normandy hedgerows, but she was an American, and this was a time that required the firm taking of sides. She felt squeamish about becoming a link in the death-dealing chain of war, but she didn’t doubt for a moment the dire necessity of that war.

  Maybe most of the Bundists at Seagoville weren’t really dangerous. Walter had called them self-important blowhards. Maybe if they hadn’t been locked up, they’d have done nothing more than follow the course of the war in the papers in the same way people followed their favorite football teams. When Germany lost, they’d probably quietly fade away. But Helen felt sure that if Germany won in Europe and later invaded the United States, these same passive Bundists would greet them on the streets with flags and confetti and aid them however they could. She didn’t want anyone to think for a moment she might be part of such a group, or even indifferent to them. She would become a remote viewer, she decided. She would do her part.

  July 1944

  The combined bureaucracies of the Army and the INS delayed Helen’s departure from Seagoville for several weeks. Knowing she would be leaving made being in the camp harder than it had been when her release was uncertain. She felt even more apart from the other internees. The camp was a warren of subgroups. The Germans were divided among German nationals, U.S. citizens, and South Americans, and then, across those lines, among dedicated Nazis, moderate Nazis, and neutrals. No one of Helen’s acquaintance knew if or how the Japanese were aligned among themselves. In all this, Helen felt herself a population of one. She might find other like-minded souls if she stayed, but she wasn’t staying, so she didn’t try.

  On July 21st, the camp was abuzz with the news that the day before, a group of Nazi officers and others had attempted to assassinate Hitler by placing a bomb underneath a table at a meeting. The Führer survived with only minor injuries. A wave of arrests and executions quickly followed. Some of the conspirators took their own lives rather than be captured.

  “It is like the Führer says,” Marta had declared to Helen. “This only shows it is his destiny to lead and prosper.”

  Marta was conveniently ignoring recent positive news out of Normandy. Despite the hedgerows and the daunting 88s, the Allies had finally broken out of Normandy. They were racing across France, meeting little resistance on their way to Paris.

  Helen was buoyed by the news, but it didn’t alter her resolve to train as a remote viewer. The GIs might be doing a bang-up job in Europe, but there was still the war in the Pacific, with its massive naval battles and its ground fights inching along, island by bloody island.

  A few days before she left Seagoville, Helen received a letter from Lloyd full of stories about Old Farms Hospital. He’d gone fishing and horseback riding. He was taking courses in business and insurance and Braille. He wished he could show her the beautiful rolling hills of Avon and the magnificent red sandstone buildings that the sighted staff had told him about.

  “The place used to be a fancy school, and its architecture is famous,” he wrote, “but I bet you could tell me better than the Army dopes here how it all really looks—tell me in a way that I could see it, too.”

  Helen didn’t know if or when she might manage a trip to Connecticut to visit Lloyd, but the mere possibility made her believe, in a way she hadn’t before, that she actually was going to be free again.

  CHAPTER 42

  AUGUST 1944

  When Helen saw Major Levy again, it was in Captain Fitzpatrick’s small New York office on an afternoon in late August so sweltering the whole city was as stuporous as an old dog. Major Levy had wanted Helen to go to Fort Meade in Maryland for testing and training, but she’d had enough of being away from home, so he’d arranged for a monitor to work with her in Manhattan and keep him informed of her progress.

  A fan at the open window was doing little good. It was simply pushing the heavy air around. Traffic noises rose from the streets and conspired to make the room feel even closer. Helen pitied Major Levy, who was wearing a tightly knotted tie and a long-sleeved khaki shirt. At least he’d doffed his stiff jacket and hung it on the back of the desk chair. Helen wore a sleeveless seersucker dress with a scoop neck, and she’d fixed her hair in a Victory roll. She was grateful for the exposure of her neck and arms to the currents of air stirred up by the fan.

  “The captain’s down at Camp Boardwalk in Atlantic City today,” Major Levy told Helen soon after she’d arrived. “Not a bad assignment in weather like this, eh?”

  Helen managed to respond with a weak smile, but at the mention of Billy’s basic training camp, a trap door had opened in her belly. It was like that now—she stayed on an even keel emotionally most of the time, but she could be sideswiped by a word, a picture, an unexpected object. The stimulus could be utterly mundane. In fact, the mundane prompts evoked the strongest reactio
ns because she was unprepared for them. The other morning when a toy bombsight, complete with a map of Germany and a little bag of marbles for bombs, fell out of a box of Kellogg’s Pep cereal, she’d started to cry.

  Would she ever grow a tough enough skin that such stray reminders couldn’t wound her? She was tired of the little ambushes; tired, too, of the constant kernel of missing at her core that gave the ambushes their force, and yet a part of her was afraid to let the ache of missing go. It was as if she were holding Billy’s hand in some dark place, and if she opened her fingers and released him, she’d never find him again.

  She believed what her boys had told her. She believed that Billy was content, at peace. She also believed he was going to move on, change in some way she couldn’t understand. But she wasn’t ready yet to think of him so gone, so finished with her.

  The major had an open folder in front of him on the desk. He was leafing through the papers in it.

  “Things seem to be going all right in your sessions,” he said, looking up.

  “Yes, I think so. My monitor is satisfied.”

  “Indeed.” He picked up a paper with a graph on it. “Apparently, you usually make more hits than can be accounted for by random chance.”

  Sometimes, after Helen’s monitor had given her the longitude and latitude of the remote target, she received only general impressions—that a man-made structure was present and that it was tall or squat, clustered with other structures or off by itself, or that some sort of transportation corridor existed. Other times, she perceived details of buildings, both exterior and interior, and she could distinguish a road from a river, pavement from dirt.

  “My accuracy increases if I go into a light trance first,” she told the major.

  “As opposed to … ?”

  “As opposed to just sitting with my eyes closed and waiting for pictures to come.”

  “There’s a difference?”

  “Trance is like looking out an undressed window instead of looking through a lace curtain. Same view, but more clear.”

  “I see.” Major Levy smiled his crafted smile. “If I may be so bold as to use that phrase.”

  “Of course.” Helen was irked. Would he never let up trying to disconcert her? Weren’t they supposed to be collaborators now?

  “The beacon exercise seems to give you trouble,” he said.

  Helen got only hazy images with this system. Even trying various people as beacons hadn’t improved her performance.

  “It’s too made up,” she said. “I can’t get going.”

  “I didn’t realize your ability was so discriminating.”

  “Well, it seems it is.” Helen watched Major Levy put away his smile as someone else might fold and pocket a handkerchief. “And I rather like it that it is.”

  “You like it?”

  “I’m not a machine, Major.”

  Levy closed the folder.

  “No, you’re not. None of you viewers are. We haven’t gotten a single piece of actionable intelligence from any of you.”

  Exasperated, Helen pointed to the folder under his hand.

  “Does it say in there that twice I saw things that were happening at a remote site and that both times I was correct?”

  “Simple events, as I remember. Someone washing a car, wasn’t it? But you couldn’t tell the make or model. And someone raising a flag. The American flag, you said, but that was a safe guess, whether or not you were aware you were guessing.”

  “I focussed on that site several times. I knew it in detail.”

  “You knew it, or you have a clever imagination? With the inadvertent help of contaminating hints from the monitor, perhaps.”

  “I won’t say imagination doesn’t step in sometimes,” Helen objected, “but I’ve gotten so I can tell the difference between my imagination or other ‘contaminating’ information and true signals from a site.”

  “Can you now?”

  “Signals have their own feel. A kind of pop. An invigorating pop.”

  “A pop.” Levy sounded more than skeptical. He sounded downright derisive.

  “Have you ever attended a viewing session?” Helen asked.

  “No,” he replied, in a tone that implied such duties were better suited to men of lesser rank and greater gullibility.

  “And I don’t suppose you’ve ever attended a seance, either.”

  The major cocked a disdainful look at her. “What do you think?”

  “I think, Major, that you ought to see for yourself, at least once, what it is that you so off-handedly dismiss as preposterous and delusional.”

  “I don’t believe, Miss Schneider, that I ever used such words.”

  “You didn’t need to.”

  The major sighed and leaned forward, resting his forearms on the desk. Helen noticed a gleam of perspiration at his hairline.

  “I don’t mean to offend you, I really don’t,” he said. “I can accept that you believe in what you claim, but as for its being actual truth, that, I’m afraid, I can only judge as highly unlikely.”

  His tact was as annoying to Helen as his disbelief.

  “Would you object to attending a séance?” she said.

  “Please, Miss Schneider, we are off the point of our meeting.”

  “What about a private reading? Just you and me. No monitors or beacons. No witnesses.”

  “And you’re convinced that would change my mind?” He seemed amused.

  “No, but I’m willing to take the chance. Are you?”

  She could see he felt tempted.

  “We could do it right now, today,” she added, spurred by his hesitation, excited by her own daring.

  He regarded her thoughtfully. She knew enough not to say more, to let him chew on the challenge.

  “Very well, Miss Schneider,” he said cautiously. “Perhaps I should, after all, know a bit more about … all this …” He waved his hand over the report folder. “For the sake of the fullest evaluation of the project.”

  The major put on his uniform jacket and left Helen alone in the hot office while he went to secure a room for their seance. She stood up, plucking at her slip where it clung to the backs of her legs, and squeezed around the desk to gaze out the window. The Hudson River was visible some blocks away. She watched the passage of tugs, barges, and shad fishing boats. A ferry was docked on the Jersey side near the houseboats at Edgewater.

  Helen began to worry about what she’d rashly set into motion. She’d never before tried so directly to impress someone. Did she care so much that Major Levy doubted the value of the remote viewing project? All along she’d reckoned that its usefulness to the Army would turn out to be limited at best. In fact, at times, she’d hoped that it would prove a failure. She’d gone faithfully to her sessions and honestly tried her best to follow instructions, and she’d mostly put aside consideration of whether remote viewing was an activity she ought to be doing, but every once in a while she still had twinges of conscience.

  No, it wasn’t the project she felt compelled to defend. It was herself. Though she was a little ashamed to admit it, she wanted to bring the major and his mercurial smirk up short. It was a matter of pride. Pride goeth before a fall, she remembered from a Sunday school lesson. But what if one was already down? Couldn’t pride also be the first rung of a ladder leading up? Rightful pride, that is. Like hers.

  The ferry was plying its way across the river. Helen scanned the deck railings. She could see patches of color that must be the clothing of passengers, the dark monotones suggesting men and the brighter ones women. It was the kind of surmising observation her monitor sometimes urged on her. Before practicing remote viewing, Helen had never attempted to plumb a vision or address ambiguities within it. Now, she was not only doing that, she was getting better at it. The reading for the major would go fine, she told herself. She was strong enough to make it go fine. But she still felt keyed up.

  Levy returned, rescuing Helen from further second thoughts. He escorted her to an empty meeting room
on another floor. It wasn’t much larger than Captain Fitzpatrick’s office, but it was far less cluttered, containing only an oblong table with six chairs around it.

  Helen asked him to switch off the overhead light and lower the blackout shades. Enough light leaked in around the edges of the shades to render the room murky rather than dark, as if they were standing at the place in a cave where the rays of the sun still barely reach, just at the lip of total blackness.

  “Now what?” Levy said.

  Helen divined that the major, too, was nervous about their impromptu undertaking, and that realization restored her equilibrium. She was in charge here, a switch from their past interactions. She was the expert, he the novice. His skepticism couldn’t shield him from that. He had agreed, however implicitly, to follow her. The proverb about being able to lead a horse to water but not being able to make him drink came to Helen’s mind. Very well then, she thought, the water I show him must be irresistible.

  “First we sit down,” she said.

  Levy pulled out a chair for her at the head of the table. He took the place to her right.

  “Does it really have to be so dark?” he asked.

  “It helps,” she said. “It would also help if I could hold something that belongs to you, something that is only yours.”