by Amber Foxx
“Not at all.” He reached to his nearest bookshelf and took down a small brocaded box. Untucking a metal slide from a loop of the satin covering, he opened it and rolled two enameled metal balls, one red, the other green, into his hand. Elaborate gold-edged images of clouds and dragons covered the balls. Slowly, he rolled them in the palm of his hand, making them circle each other without ever touching, then reversed the direction. He handed them to Mae. As the balls touched each other, chimes inside them rang.
She let them rest in the palm of her hand. They felt heavier than she’d expected. “Is there some trick to it?”
“Just try it. You saw what I did.”
It seemed to be a game or a test, for what purpose she didn’t know. Mae thought of what Randi had said about not letting him mess with her head—and also thought of him messing with Randi’s golf ball. She wondered if he would interfere with her rolling these. Hoping not to let him, Mae set her mind to attention as if she were in a game and the pitcher was trying to psych her out, faking a throw to first when she was ready to steal. He wasn’t going to get to her.
As she first started to ripple her fingers the way Charlie had, the balls clicked and chimed, but then she felt how she could do less and get them to move in that circling pattern. At first it took intense effort, but gradually it became hypnotic and soothing, even easy. The switch-hitter in her had to try something, and she moved the balls to her left hand. She needed to roll them the opposite way, but the technique came to her, and the clouds and dragons orbited each other without a sound.
“Very good.” Charlie sounded mildly impressed. He held out the red satin box, and Mae placed the balls into the green velvet indentations inside. Charlie closed the lid. “You can move chi in your hands.”
“Chi?”
“Energy. In Chinese medicine, everything is chi. Acupuncture, tai chi, qi gong ... It’s all about moving energy. Some qi gong practitioners emit chi from their hands.”
“Like laying on of hands.”
“Not exactly.” He frowned, put the box away on the dusty shelf. “Now, can you tell me—where did I get those?”
“I don’t know.” She remembered noticing the picture of Charlie at the Great Wall the other day. “China?”
“Hong Kong airport.” He opened a desk drawer, rifled it for some small object, which he then closed in the palm of his hand, and turned to Mae with an unreadable expression. His lips bordered on an upturn, but his eyes narrowed subtly. “What have I got?”
This was nothing she’d ever done before. But she closed her eyes and tried to see in his hand. To her surprise there was a light coming out of his hand, like he glowed in the dark. The only sense she had of anything in his hand, though, was a shape, something with a short top and two lines like little legs coming out of it, one leg more bent than the other. The light was too bright to see anything clearly. Had he wanted her to see that light? What was it? She opened her eyes.
“I can’t tell you exactly what I saw, but it looks like this.” Taking a pencil from the messy table behind her, Mae drew a figure on the back of one of the papers in the pile and showed it to Charlie.
“Ren,” he said, and studied Mae with the first genuine interest and curiosity he’d shown. “That’s the Chinese ideogram for a person. You drew ren.” He opened his hand, to reveal a small brass fastener with its ends bent asymmetrically. He tossed it to her, and she caught it easily. “Intriguing.”
She hesitated to tell him about the light. The idea struck her that he’d had a person, this ren figure, in the palm of his glowing hand. Maybe it was that lack of trust that Hubert said she had, a problem and not a good thing, but Charlie Tann made her uneasy.
“One more thing.” He got up and closed the door. Mae felt yet more uncomfortable as Charlie returned to his chair, sat, and closed his eyes. Then he smiled and looked at her. “All right. What was that thought?”
Startled, Mae had no idea. She didn’t go around reading minds. But, she was surrounded by his things. Maybe she could touch something in here and learn about him. The whole room was probably full of him in some way. He’d touched these papers under her hand, touched this table and chair. Could she find his thought? Trying to shut off the unease she felt, she used her ball game imagery to quiet her mind, to see the ball coming to her glove, and then the tunnel opened, and she shot into it strongly. But at the other end of it, she found not a thought but a wolf that ran towards her, a large gray wolf with ice blue eyes.
Frightened, she pulled out of the vision and looked at Charlie.
He sat with that half-smiling, half-serious look, drumming his fingers silently on the arms of his chair, and hummed a tune under his breath. “Ye——s?”
If he’d sent that wolf on purpose, she’d just as soon he didn’t know she saw it. “Did you think about running?” she asked.
“I did.” He leaned towards her, elbows on his chair arms, the tips of all his fingers making a steeple. Saying no more for a moment, he let his gaze travel over her, then sitting back, he lowered his steepled fingers and ripple-tapped them against each other. “What would you like to ask me?”
The light. The wolf. Had he been messing with her mind, or had she seen all this without his realizing she could? The only question she felt safe asking was an ambiguous one. “Why’d you do all that?”
“Have you play with my dragon balls?”
She ignored the risqué joke. From someone else it might have been funny, but she didn’t like it coming from him. “All of what you just did.”
“So I could recommend you for a job. If you want it, of course.”
“A job doing what?”
“Dollar a minute.” He smiled, turned to his desk, picked up his phone, and reading from something on the bulletin board at the back of his desk, punched in a number. “Deborah,” he said with three notes, as if it gave him pleasure to say the name. “Why of course it is ...” He chuckled. “Listen, I have someone you should bring on for readings ... Doesn’t matter, dear, she’s good. You can use her ... Oh, would you, for your old professor?” Another little chuckle. “Of course ... I’ll send her by. When? Sunday?” He glanced at Mae. She had no idea what was going on, but suspected he might be getting her a job doing psychic readings. At a dollar a minute. “Thank you. Stay good. Ciao.”
He rotated his chair to face Mae again. “All you have to do to be a good psychic is get one thing right, and then guess the rest. People are gullible. And predictable. Of course I got those balls in China. And of course I thought about running, after we chatted about that. All you needed to get was one thing right, my little ren. And if they ask about their future ...” He raised his hands, index fingers to the edges of his eyebrows, pursed his lips and half-closed his eyes. In a chanting voice, he said, ‘I see ... I see ... sickness followed by health ... difficulties resolved in love and work ...” then dropped the act, smiling, amused at himself. “Read the horoscopes. They do it brilliantly.”
He wrote a number on a scrap of paper he tore from an envelope on his desk, handed it to Mae. “Deborah coordinates programs upstairs at the Healing Balance Store in Virginia Beach. They have massage, yoga classes, and psychic readings. Also some of the psychics do readings in the café or the bookstore downstairs. Big health food store. You’ve heard of the place,”
“Actually, I haven’t.”
He raised an eyebrow.
“Seriously, I haven’t. I live under a rock.”
His laughed, a warm, sincere and unexpected sound, a laugh that shook his belly.
Mae said, “I’m from Tylerton, North Carolina. I don’t get out much.”
“Apparently not.” He stood, opened the door, and Mae rose, noticing the artifacts in the room again. He’d been everywhere, it seemed. He didn’t live under a rock.
“Have a good one.” Charlie shook Mae’s hand. “Tell Deborah I sent you. And I’ll talk to Bibhi about your tuition. ”
“Thank you.”
“They owe me. Consider it done.”
And now,
she thought as she returned to Randi’s office, Mae had become one of those people Charlie could say owed him. She hoped it beat borrowing from her in-laws.
Chapter Seven
“I can earn the money. We don’t have to ask them.” Mae’s breath puffed out in frosty clouds as she and Hubert ran the farm road under a full moon. The young dog, Scofield, loped ahead, a skinny black shape with long ears and a feathery tail against the pale moonlit earth.
“Earn it how?”
“Working at the Healing Balance store in Virginia Beach on weekends.”
“Retail? The gas would eat up anything they paid you. We’ll talk to the folks at dinner. I know it’s a lot, but they’d—”
“It’s not retail. It’s being a psychic.”
Hubert braked his run and stood staring at her. “Mae. Come on. Not that.”
“Don’t stop. You’ll get cold.” She sped up and made him follow her. “It’s not like I’m doing it around here.” Slowing down for him again, she explained the kind of business Healing Balance was. “How many people from Tylerton go to that place? You think any of them do?”
“Some folks from Cauwetska might, like the yoga teacher at Health Quest.”
“But she wouldn’t hold it against your mother if I was doing that work. Only the people who’d never go there would. And I’ll only do it until I earn the tuition money. I don’t want to keep driving to the beach every week, and anyway I’ll have my real job.”
“I still can’t see it.” Hubert called Sco back from the pursuit of some small creature in the field stubble, and the long-legged mutt turned back. “It’s like you really believe you can do this. That bothers me.”
“It’s sixty dollars an hour. I can pay off that debt in a few weekends.”
“Of being a fake.”
“I am not a fake. How can you—”
“Honey, even if you believe you’re real, you’d be ripping people off. It’s not right.”
The calm, patient way he answered her, as if she were one of his daughters having a temperamental moment, infuriated her more. “You’re wrong. And I can prove I’m right. Now leave me alone.” She took off at her top speed, letting her irritation with him fuel her legs.
“Mae!” Hubert’s steps stopped, then picked up again at a jog. But the sound quickly faded, leaving her alone with the drumming of her feet on the frozen ground. She knew he could sprint, but he couldn’t keep a fast pace on a long run, and she’d given him no choice but to let her be.
Everything was crazy—she’d fought with her mother, fought with Hubert, still didn’t dare call her father, and she was getting deeper into something no one wanted her to do. Deeper into something that might even be frightening. What she’d seen in Charlie’s office suggested there was more to this spirit world than simply finding lost cats or people, maybe something dark or dangerous.
Behind her, soft footfalls and panting jolted Mae into turning around, half-expecting to see the blue-eyed wolf. But it was only Scofield. “You scared me, Sco.” After the shock, she felt glad to see him.
They ran along the windbreak trees that separated two fields, the moon dancing among the black fingers of the branches, and the night seemed to take over with a wild, free kind of peace in the middle of her tumult. Hubert didn’t understand her lately. But he loved her. She loved him. She had to make him understand.
They finished their run, rejoining at the last mile, and said little on their way to the house. Mae didn’t want to bring it up with Hubert alone again. The only way to get him on her side was to get his parents on her side, though it was a slim chance.
She tried the idea at dinner, proposing it as a reasonable way to pay her tuition. But Sallie shot it down. “Taking people’s money because they’re too ignorant to spend it wisely is wrong.”
“Sal, she’s not selling subprime mortgages.” Jim walked around the table filling the adults’ wine glasses. “What does each person pay for? Fifteen minutes or so?”
“Yeah,” Mae said. “Deborah says most people start with a short time and then pay for more if they get interested.”
Sitting taller, Sallie asked, “And it’s less wrong because it’s less money?”
Brook interrupted, wide-eyed. “Can Mama tell fortunes?”
“No, she can’t.” Hubert shook his head. “Y'all eat one more bean each and go play in the living room. No running those trucks up and down the stairs.” The twins dropped off their chairs, each grabbing a final green bean, and scurried out, giggling. Hubert looked at Mae, turning his wine glass without lifting it. “Well, you can’t tell fortunes. Whether it’s fifteen minutes or fifteen hours, you can’t see the future.”
Mae hadn’t really thought of that. She’d never tried. What if she would have to be a fake and guess, the way Dr. Tann had implied most psychics really did?
“Doesn’t stop economists.” Jim corked the wine and resumed his seat. “And they get paid a lot more than Mae will.”
“You’re making awfully light of this,” Sallie said. “I don’t see how calling yourself a psychic is any more honest than Enron or Bernie Madoff or anything else where you take people’s money and they get nothing for it. Not to mention if word gets out.”
“I’ll be honest,” Mae said. “I know I can see the past and the present. I really can. I could help people know where their lost stuff is, or if their loved ones are okay. I don’t have to see the future.”
“Honey,” Hubert said, “nine out of ten folks, most likely they’ll want you to see the future.”
Mae sipped her wine and poked her fork at the remains of her dinner. She didn’t feel like eating any more, and set the fork down. What had she gotten herself into? She couldn’t even see the future well enough to realize people would want her to do that. Somehow she’d have to learn, have to practice, though she had no idea how. The sight was an accident; she hadn't worked on it, hadn’t practiced it like fielding and hitting and running. She didn’t have a coach. Maybe she should back out on the work. She wasn’t expected until Sunday, and Deborah, who had seemed nice in their phone interview, would understand.
“I’ll tell you what I see in the future,” Jim said. “Us needing a new tractor. And Ty’s getting expensive on us.” Ty was the old dog. “So I see Mae doing what people do in hard times. Earning the money any way she can. Even if we don’t entirely like it.”
It was thin and grudging support, but it was all she was going to get.
After the twins were asleep, Mae showed Hubert the articles from the non-Western health systems class that she had been reading. She hoped it would make him a little more understanding. Side by side on the couch, they read, saying little. Occasionally a car passed with loud music thumping over the soft country music playing in their living room.
“You making sense of this?” Mae asked. She’d given Hubert the article on the PEAR lab studies, while she read one on retroactive intentional influence.
“Yeah. Most of it.”
“I had to read it twice to get it.”
“That’s why I’m so slow with it.” Hubert glanced at the clock on the wall. It was ten o’clock. “The randomness thing—is that like, the robot moves in a random way or the numbers a machine puts out are random?”
“I think so. Like coin flips. If you did it long enough it would come out even. If it was all heads or all tails, it wouldn’t be random anymore.”
“So when the robot doesn’t move randomly or the machine starts putting out numbers that are in some pattern, they figure people’s minds made it happen.” He gave Mae a doubtful look.
“The one I’m reading, they even made the machine come up with numbers that weren't random—I know this sounds crazy—in the past. No one had read the record in the machine, and then they tried to influence it after it had done its thing—and the record was in some pattern that wasn’t random.”
“In the past?”
“Yeah.” She looked into his eyes. At least he was still listening and still reading. “Like changin
g the past.”
“That is weird. Let me finish.” Hubert changed position on the couch, stretching out lengthwise, and Mae did the same, so they lay close, legs intertwined, each with their head on a sofa arm. In this position, they read more until Mae sensed Hubert’s restlessness matching her own as they both began to fidget.
“Did you get to the remote viewing part?” she asked.
They looked into each other’s eyes across the photocopied pages and the lengths of their bodies. “Just into it now. It’s pretty bizarre. Especially where it was—let me talk like a Princeton scientist here—time displaced.”
“Do you believe it?”
“I don’t know. People can make what they want sound scientific.”
Mae crossed a leg over one of his, as if getting the upper hand in the argument. “It was done in an engineering lab at Princeton, and that should mean it was done right.”
Hubert set the pages down, looking up at the ceiling. “But they spent all those years on this for what? I mean, what’s it for? Seems like they’d do better to spend their time making a solar powered car or something.”
If Hubert were a Princeton professor of engineering he would be inventing a solar car, no doubt. But Mae didn’t agree these studies were a waste of time. “I think it’s to find out if it’s true. Or maybe to use it for medicine. Towards the end of this one I'm reading, the authors say if you can influence the past with your intentions, you could go back to ...” She scanned the page for the words. “What they call the ‘seed moment,’ when a cancer begins to mutate, something like that, and change it before anyone’s found it.”
Hubert set the article on the end table and swung his legs off the couch. “That’s a stretch.”
“No, it isn’t. People could use their minds, or some kind of energy, for healing like my Granma did.”
“That’s a placebo. People expect to get better.” He stood, stretching. “You ready for bed?”
“Wait a second. You mean you read all this, and you still blow it off ?”
“I’m saying, even if it’s real, it doesn’t even matter. It’s still a big waste of everybody’s time and money, whether it’s scientists in some lab at Princeton or you in a store in Virginia Beach.”