“You could do that,” he said, in a way that suggested that he knew I wouldn’t. I folded the paper and put it back in my pocket. He had answered nothing, really; he spoke almost exactly like Anna—saying only what he wanted to say and ignoring everything else. A worried sadness suddenly came over him, and I thought that he might cry. He didn’t look at me, but dropped his gaze to some indefinite spot on the floor between us. “She’s not coming back,” he said.
I couldn’t believe that he would say it. Out loud. We had all been thinking it—it was the thought we tried to avoid, had to constantly push aside—but no one had said it out loud. You’d never think that the first person to say it would be one of the parents. I stared at him in disbelief; I didn’t know what he wanted from me, agreement or denial. I had come to him for help. I stood there, afraid to say anything. I was afraid that the next thing he might say was that she was dead.
Mr. Cayne’s attempt to reach out, to make contact, made me want to do the same. I called a telephone psychic. I was embarrassed and didn’t expect anything, but the woman on the phone was friendly and something about the way she spoke made me feel better. She was calm and comforting and positive. She told me that good things were going to happen. For a few minutes out of the day she could almost convince me that I wasn’t depressed and desperate, or at least wouldn’t be that way forever.
“I see things changing for you real soon,” she said. “You’re not staying in one place for long. It’s bigger and better things. It’s someplace sunny and warm, where people love you and will take care of you. It’s going to be good. I’m telling you, it’s going to be good very soon.”
“Where will I be?” I said.
“It’s a place marked in red. There are tigers. And it’s warm. You’re going from a place of water to a place of water. There’s a connection there somehow.”
“That’s vague.”
“It’s all I know about it,” she said. “I can try to get more, but you’ll have to stay on the line.” I didn’t.
“What’s your name?” I asked when I called again the next night.
“Cassandra. What’s yours?”
“Carl,” I said. “What’s your real name?”
“It’s still Cassandra,” she said.
“Good-bye, Cassandra.”
I called the next night too. When Cassandra came on the phone I could tell at once that it wasn’t the same person. I called back a few times before I recognized the voice from before. She gave me the same story, and I thought that maybe she described the same vague sunny scene to everyone. Then she startled me.
“You called before,” she said.
I didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know what city it is, but it all looks the same,” she said. “You don’t have to worry, Carl, things are going to be okay.”
We talked for a while, not even about psychic stuff. We just talked. For five or six nights I lay on my bed in the dark and listened to her. It was a kind of infatuation, I guess; I was infatuated with the world Cassandra was describing. I liked it when she described all the good things that were coming my way. Actually, they were coming Carl’s way. That I could believe.
“I’ll call again tomorrow,” I said.
“Okay.”
“But I want to talk to you. You have to tell me your real name.”
“I can’t do that,” she said.
“I won’t call, then,” I said.
She was silent for a moment. “I can’t give you my name, but how about if we use a code?”
“What kind of code?”
“When you call and ask for Cassandra, also ask for extension thirteen.”
“That’s not a code,” I said.
“I know, but it sounds better that way.” She laughed. She thought it was funny. My heart was racing.
I talked to her for a few more days and then finally told her. “My name’s not Carl,” I said.
“I know.”
“I’m trying to find somebody. I’m waiting for a message.”
“I can’t help you with that,” she said.
“I want to find out what happened to a friend of mine,” I said.
“I can’t help you.”
“That’s not what you’re supposed to say.”
“I know. But it’s the truth.”
I didn’t want the truth. I had that the rest of every day. I wasn’t calling for the truth. “Tell me what you’re supposed to say.” She didn’t want to. “I’m paying for the call,” I told her. (My father was, but she didn’t need to know everything.)
She started to tell me some vague things, but it was no use. Her voice had changed. Everything had changed. I stopped her.
“She had something to say to me,” I said. “Something specific.”
She didn’t say anything.
“You have to tell me what it is.”
“I don’t know what it is.”
“Come on, tell me.”
“I don’t know anything about it.”
“Tell me.”
“She says that everything’s going to be all right. She says don’t worry. Not to worry.”
“I thought you could help me,” I said.
“I thought I was,” she said. “It doesn’t change what I said before. Things are going to be better.”
“You shouldn’t lie to people,” I replied. I wasn’t angry. I was sad. I wanted to keep calling her. I wanted to have a few minutes in the day when I could feel better. It was just like it had been with Melissa—all of a sudden there was nothing. I didn’t know what the attraction was.
“I wasn’t lying,” she said. “I’m trying to help you.”
“You’re not helping,” I said, and hung up.
I was awakened in the middle of the night by a beep on my cell phone. I opened my eyes and saw the brief green flash inches from my head. I must have fallen asleep with the phone still on the bed, although I didn’t remember doing so, but there it was. I had a new text message. I opened the message and saw the letters “SaSaS.” That was all. It didn’t mean anything to me.
I tossed the phone onto the floor and put my head back down into the pillow to go to sleep. Suddenly I sat up. “Something as simple as snow.” It couldn’t be. I grabbed the phone and looked at the message again. “SaSaS.” There was no one listed as the sender. There was nothing except for the tiny document icon on the left. I had received the message at four a.m.
I couldn’t go back to sleep. My mind was racing in circles, chasing some imaginary tail, or was it real? Was the message a disturbing coincidence, a hoax, or the real thing? It couldn’t be a hoax. The code was our secret. Anna would never tell anyone. Besides, why would a hoax use only the initial letters and not the actual code? It wasn’t the code we had agreed on. But it was close, close enough to keep me awake the rest of the night. I looked at the message again and again, and even replied. “Hello. ????” The more I thought about it, the less sense it made. If it was Anna, why wouldn’t she stick to the original code that we’d agreed on? And if she could send a message, why would she send it to my phone and why would that be the only one? But then what did I know about it? Maybe that’s all she could send. Maybe it was all she could ever send. On the one hand, I was getting all freaked out about some strange coincidence, overreacting to an odd but insignificant occurrence. On the other hand, I had to keep trying to make contact. After Houdini died, his wife tried to contact him for ten years, patiently waiting for him to utter the code.
the channel
Carl’s mom drove us to the train station. I don’t remember what we had told her, maybe that my mother was already in the city, and Carl and I were meeting her for the day and she was going to take us around. Whatever it was, Carl’s mom agreed to let him go. She was safe, because I knew she would never talk to my mother.
Once we got to the city, we walked to the studio where the television show The Channel was taped. The host, Gerald Preen, is a medium who gives audience members messages from lost loved ones
. A lot of people cry. It’s really popular. I had filled out an application on the show’s website to see if I could get on; I wanted to know whether Anna could be contacted through the medium. I knew enough to be skeptical, cautious, but at the same time I was willing to try every available option. They wanted a lot of information, but I tried to keep my answers as brief and general as possible. I played up our ages and the mysteriousness of Anna’s disappearance. “I am afraid that something terrible has happened to my friend,” I wrote. “My friend might have committed suicide or been murdered or worse. My friend had a strong faith in the afterlife and believed in the ability to communicate through The Channel. I am sure that my friend is trying to send me a message. Our entire town is waiting to hear.”
I received a response the next day, which invited me to the taping. “We receive so many requests,” the e-mail stated, “that we cannot guarantee that you will receive a reading, or even that you will be selected to be in the studio audience. But if you are at the studio at the specified date and time, your participation will be considered.”
I had printed out maps from MapQuest, and Carl and I had studied them on the train so we would know where to go once we got to the station and wouldn’t stick out like dumb tourists. The city was like a hive or an ant farm, with people scurrying along their paths, looking sure of where they were going. There was something inviting about it all. When we got to the studio, Carl tried to leave me to wait by myself on line. He wanted to go wander around. “You don’t need me,” he said. I thought that maybe he’d go talk to the real businessmen, the guys standing in the park, whispering their wares as people passed by, dealing in cash and secrets. Or maybe he would be one of those guys himself, make a few deals and head home with some easy extra money.
“Come on,” I said. “I need the moral support.”
So he stayed, and we both stood there in hopes of being selected for the taping. The longer I stood, the more I knew it was crap. Anna had told me that Houdini spent the last part of his life trying to tell people just like me that it was all a lie, but I was almost ready to believe a lie. The cold of the concrete seeped through my shoes and into my bones as we waited. Somebody from the show handed me a questionnaire and told me to fill it out, even if I’d already answered the same questions before. Once again I kept my answers as short and vague as possible; I didn’t want to give any hints, do the staff ’s job for them. Finally someone came and led us inside.
About twenty of us had been selected to be in the studio audience. We were brought into a small waiting room that had only one couch and a few chairs. Those of us who didn’t sit there sat on the floor or stood. Carl and I were the youngest people in the room by far. An assistant asked me where my “parent or guardian” was. “I’m eighteen,” I told him. He looked at Carl and me for a long second, then handed us more paperwork. “Read and sign these,” he said.
Assistants walked in and out of the room like waiters, and put food and drinks out for us. They casually asked if we needed anything, and began talking to us. Though we had been instructed to be quiet, people started speaking about the relatives they wanted to hear from and how they had died, and mentioning other things that the assistants could easily hear.
After an hour or so, we were escorted into the studio and shown to our seats. There were still a lot of empty seats, and I wondered why they had turned away so many people who had been waiting on line. After a few more minutes, another group, about fifteen people, arrived and sat with us. We were told that they were audience members, exactly like us, but afterward someone in my group said that they had arrived together in a van. This group was very talkative and asked a lot of questions. I knew I had to provide some information or else the host wouldn’t talk to me, but I was careful about what I said. “I can’t believe we’re waiting around this long,” Carl said. “I could be getting things done.”
Finally Gerald Preen arrived. He was smaller in person than I thought he would be. “They all are,” Carl told me later. Preen was young-looking, like my brother, but he had to be older than that. He had dark hair, very short, and combed to the front to conceal a receding hairline. He wore a black turtleneck sweater and gray wool pants, and spoke in a calm, quiet, voice. It was supposed to be soothing, but he spoke so rapidly that you had difficulty keeping up with him. The rhythm of his speech reminded me of the first time Anna had spoken to me, in the library; the words flowed out in a steady, seductive stream. There was a big difference, though; he had nothing interesting to say. He explained what was going to happen during the show, and surveyed the audience. “No one here has met me before?” he asked. “No one has seen me in person or even talked to me before now?” No one had, or no one admitted to it, and the show started.
He started with easy stuff, low-hanging fruit, and with obvious methods I had read about in books Anna had given me, and things I had read about online. “I’m getting a J over here. I don’t know what this means. It’s a male name. John, Jonathan, Jack . . . He could be someone who has gone across, he could be someone here, he could be someone that you know.” A number of hands went up. After all, who didn’t know someone named John? Some of the techniques I had read about indicated that many psychics rely heavily on probability and statistics (like the fact that many male names begin with J and many female names with M). They relied on different styles of reading, both “cold” and “hot.” Cold readings start with very general information and move to specifics, gathering and building on information and feedback from the subject. Hot readings rely on information gathered about the unsuspecting subject that is then told to the subject, to that person’s amazement. I had read about psychics who had enlisted aides to go to subjects’ homes and pretend to be salespeople or people in trouble who needed to use the phone, in order to notice things about the subjects and their homes. During the reading the psychics could then provide specific details about the people while honestly stating, “We’ve never met before today, and I’ve never been to your home.” Preen seemed to be using a combination of techniques.
He continued to ask questions or make vague statements and then move to specifics, until he had narrowed his comments to one person in the audience. Now he concentrated on very specific things about John. Nothing seemed impressive, but this was exactly the type of thing I had read about. It was fascinating to see in action, like watching a magic trick when you already know the trick, but Preen’s performance was so convincing that you almost forgot it was a trick. The way he operated was magnetic, and like a magnet, the closer he got to you, the more he pulled you in. The most compelling aspect of his routine was how he reacted when the subject denied a bold statement he had made. Instead of moving to another area, Preen would insist that what he was saying was accurate and that the subject was mistaken. “You may not have been aware of this,” he would offer. “Or maybe this didn’t happen, but the deceased had wished for it to happen.” If these assertions didn’t stick he usually proceeded to another subject.
After talking to six subjects, Preen looked at me.
“You’re trying to find someone,” he said. “You’re trying to tell this person something, something important. The name starts with C.”
“Which name?” I said, fighting myself from nodding and offering him a tip.
He hesitated. “The last name.” When I nodded, you could hear a gasp from the audience, as if he had just solved some incredible problem, instead of guessing correctly on something he had a fifty-fifty chance of nailing.
“The first name is more difficult,” he said. “This person doesn’t like to be called by her real name. I’m getting a long name, quite a few syllables.”
This part was taking forever. I wanted him to get right to the real stuff. He worked the crowd, however, building suspense. “I’m receiving an A.”
He rattled off a lot of general, but true, information. “It’s a woman’s name. She was someone close to you, a mother, sister, girlfriend. She was a girlfriend. She left suddenly, recently. Very quick
ly.”
He then went down a road of wrong information, and returned to her name—which he never gave in full, only the initials—and I was afraid that he was going to abandon me. He was trying to manipulate and lead me, and I was trying to do the same to him. I wasn’t going to help him; I was convinced that he was a fraud, nothing more than a good practitioner of the art that Houdini and Dr. James Ryan, a “psychic hunter,” and others had described. Dr. Ryan had even offered a public challenge to Preen, inviting him to exhibit his skills in a controlled environment, supervised by Dr. Ryan. He would give Preen a million dollars if he successfully demonstrated “evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power.” According to Dr. Ryan’s website, Preen had never responded to his challenge.
But I wanted him to continue talking to me; there was a small degree of hope that he had something to offer. He asked to see a photograph of the person, or anything of hers. I had read that this was a familiar ploy of fake psychics, so I had made sure not to carry anything with me. Though he was agitated that I didn’t have any personal effects, he continued. “You want to say something to this person,” he said. “She wants to say something to you. You have talked about this.” He stopped abruptly, and changed direction as another thought struck him. “There is an agreement,” he said. I tried to become a stone, a blank piece of paper, but I must have given something away, a hint in my eyes or mouth that he picked up on. “There is a code,” he announced. This was dangerous. If he couldn’t tell me anything more and I confirmed this much, then everyone would soon know about the code between Anna and me. Anyone who watched the show would know, and then it would be a guessing game. I waited and said nothing, and Preen looked at me, his eyes almost burning into me, searching for something, for anything, and then almost pleading with me. Finally I gave him a short shake of my head, a tiny no, and he moved on to other wrong information and quietly abandoned the reading altogether.
This was typical. He hit only about fifteen to twenty percent of correct information throughout the taping. He stopped some readings more abruptly than mine and simply started over with another person. After a complete miss he would usually move on to someone from the group that had arrived after us at the studio, and this seemed to support the theory that they were ringers. I wondered how it would all play when the show aired, and when I saw it a few weeks later, most of the misses had been edited out, while some of the more accurate readings had been edited to appear more dramatic. I wasn’t in the show at all.
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