I sighed and stroked Mattie’s face. “I wish you’d still been around…back when the news hit. Y’know how Dad tortured us all by watching at least two hours of news every night? That night, it was just the one story, over and over and over. The Federal government released a 20-year study involving something called a ganzfeld experiment that purported to definitively prove psychic powers were real. It was like someone discovered Atlantis, then plugged the coordinates into a GPS for everyone else to come and gawk.
“Dad kept flipping channels because he thought it was all a big load of crap. Maxine, though, she wasn’t so fast to pooh-pooh everything. I remember how I kept catching her looking at me, and then she’d look away real quick, like she wondered if I understood what was going on. Dad finally found a BBC broadcast and declared the Brits wouldn’t dream of jumping on the psychic bandwagon. But all they did was haul out more complicated numbers from the same damn reports.”
I picked up the photo and cradled it in the palm of my hand. There were a few times when I was really young that my father got downright hostile when he overheard Mattie telling me I had the gift. “Would you have been vindicated, hearing everyone on the national news going on about talents and levels? Dragging out scientists for the talking heads to interview and plastering the screen with infographics? Probably not. You always knew the score, and I never once heard you say I told you so.”
Since I had a few hours before my shift started, I stepped outside with Mattie for some air. In certain neighborhoods, it’s not uncommon to see guys loitering in parking lots or leaning against buildings—and not all of them are out to panhandle your spare change. So no one gave me a second glance as I propped up the building’s façade and watched foot traffic roll by.
Most folks were heading for work, either walking to the train, or trying to figure out where they’d parked the night before. At least, that’s what I presumed they were doing. But that was my logical mind piecing together hints like their wardrobe and facial expression and gait. When I tried to ignore that information and focus instead on how they might have felt, I wasn’t so sure of myself. I couldn’t help but notice the way a person was scowling and deduce that they weren’t exactly thrilled.
“This is getting me nowhere fast,” I told Mattie’s photo. “It’s completely unscientific. What I’d need to do is blindfold myself and….”
I trailed off as an older guy in a suit strode past, talking very seriously on his cell. He glanced at me—no more than a fraction of a second—with his frown firmly in place. And yet, the slap of the Vibe was so obvious, he might as well have ground to a stop, dropped his pants and pummeled me with his businessman dick.
He didn’t break stride, even when our eyes met, and before I could convince myself there must be dozens of subtle non-verbal cues at play, he was halfway down the block. I craned my neck to watch him walk away until he turned a corner and was gone. And I told myself not to get carried away. Not until I knew for sure.
I picked another random person out of the crowd, and another, and another. I was out there for at least an hour by the time I registered another dozen Vibes. Searching for that particular vibe without actually wanting to hook up was a major eye-opener. A few of the hits came from women. Some of them were pretty conservative, too. Age didn’t seem to matter. But only the people who actually looked at me stood any chance of registering on my emotional Geiger counter.
In the end, I reminded myself, I could’ve been making it all up…but I strongly suspected I wasn’t. No, Gaydar wasn’t one of the six official psychic talents, but there must be a reason I was uncannily good at spotting Vibes.
I took Mattie’s photo upstairs and parked it back on the bookshelf for safekeeping. “What would you make of my ‘gift’ nowadays?” I asked her. I supposed I would never know.
Irrationally worried that I’d let this photo, this last memento, slip through my fingers again, I angled the glossy surface away from the glare of the overhead light, pulled out my phone, and snapped a picture of the picture. Not bad, though it needed cropping. I pulled up the photo editor and picked out the edge of a book to use as a guide for straightening the shot. I’d been fiddling with the angle for nearly a minute before I noticed the title: Mindfulness Methods.
Red’s book.
Whether or not I had talent, I’d never believe the universe was guiding me through a series of obscure omens and signs. Miss Mattie was not reaching out from beyond the grave to tell me to read the damn book already. The spot where I shoved Red’s book was within easy reach, and therefore it was the easiest place to prop up her photo. That’s all.
Still, it was good to know I still had the darn thing. Not because it was Red’s, but because I needed more information, and Lydia’s wi-fi was being especially patchy again. I flipped the book open to the contents and scanned, and just like I figured, there were a few obligatory general chapters about psychic ability before the meat of the book began. History, terminology. I’d been schooled in that lately, and plenty. But the section on drugs? That was an eye-opener. The side effects of antipsyactives included dizziness, nausea, and a splitting headache. And psyactives were no better; while they might cause psychs to test higher on their scoring scale, they also had the unfortunate propensity for neurological damage.
The languaging in that particular section made me leery. It was a funny combination of specificity and vagueness, a bunch of hyperbole peppered with carefully curated statistics. As far as I could tell, the main purpose was to try and convince the reader that meditation was just as powerful as drugs, and a hell of a lot less risky.
I’d always figured meditation was just another way for middle-aged women with too much money to one-up each other. After all, who can afford to sit and do nothing unless a crew of underpaid Mexicans handles the lawn’s perfect manicure? (Plus, there were so many cushions and beads and other meaningful accessories to consider.)
But according to the book, meditation was critical to harnessing one’s psychic abilities, and the only thing it need cost is your time. It even pointed me to a page where I could download some guided meditations for free.
I picked one, popped in my earbuds and sat down cross-legged on the floor. The music began. Annoying music. Like a dog walking across a keyboard. But once the narrator began, the music faded to the background, and I felt my annoyance ebb.
Her voice was pleasant, even soothing. I closed my eyes and settled in as she instructed me to find a comfortable position and ensure I would not be disturbed. Inhale. Exhale. Relax. Not bad. I could do that. Exhale completely this time, making a whoosh sound. Silly, though it wasn’t as if anyone but the roaches would hear me. Inhale through the nose for four counts. Okay. Hold for seven…which, for me, topped out at around five. And exhaling for eight? Forget it. The only way my lungs would abide such deep and lengthy breaths would be sucking the goodness out of a Camel Light.
She counted. I breathed. And just when I thought I might get the hang of it, she stopped counting breaths and started telling me to imagine things. A shoreline. The ocean. Glittering waters and azure sky, with sand between my toes, palm trees swaying on the breeze, and—get this—the scent of coconut in the air.
I did breathe deep, then, when I sighed a vigorous and gusty sigh. Because, come on. Could this meditational fantasy I was supposed to buy into possibly get any more cliche? Blue sky, sandy beach, blah blah blah. How was that supposed to help me relax? All I could think about was the way it didn’t match a single beach experience I’d ever had. Finding coins and bottle caps on the rocky shore, checking out the manflesh, staring off into the horizon and wondering how far away Michigan might be, getting pounded by bracingly cold waves and coming home waterlogged and sated. That’s how I remembered the beach.
Why presume everyone’s idea of a good time involved some kind of kitschy island tourist trap? It only reinforced my belief that all of this namby pamby meditation B.S. was designed for bored housewives.
I clicked through a few more meditat
ions, but each one was more irritating than the last. Once annoyance took hold in me, it festered and grew. Pretty soon the pseudo-soothing voices took a mental cheese grater to my brain, and I seethed with the urge to give the speaker a good, solid smack.
I opened my eyes yet again and glanced at the meditating guy on the book cover. He didn’t seem to be struggling with the urge to whack someone upside the head. But now that I got a closer look at him, I noticed the small half-smile on his face looked less like contentment, and more like mockery.
Red Turner can do this. Why can’t you?
“Fuck you,” I told him. And he kept right on smiling.
* * *
I showed up for my shift so ticked off and frustrated that I didn’t even remember to be dismayed by the ridonkulous uniform. According to the smug book left behind by smug Red to remind me of his smugness, sense number six wasn’t anywhere near as reliable as the other five. Its sensitivity varied, both from person to person, and situation to situation. Imagine if you could only see when you were well-rested and emotionally primed, and the rest of the time you had to flounder around in the dark.
On one hand, that explanation seemed like a convenient way to excuse perfectly mundane random results. Bad day? Must be metaphysical interference. Good day? Key the fanfare, you’re psychic. But on the other…I’d seen that stack of hearts and dollars in Lydia’s kitchen. Not random. Not at all.
Yes, randomness was something the researchers considered, but supposedly the key element in the ganzfeld experiment was some formula that controlled for it. However the government crunched their complicated numbers, they somehow used that formula to compute the levels of most skills…most, but not all. Telekinesis and mediumship didn’t have enough baseline scoring to accurately measure, while precognition might not pan out until some point in the distant future. For talents like that, researchers used other metrics—basically, I think, they winged it. But empaths, telepaths and clairvoyants were a lot easier to score. And controlling for things like emotional upsets, lack of sleep, or even simple distraction, studies all pointed to an increase in psychic ability among those who meditated. Sometimes as much as two full levels.
Once I cooled off, I decided it was silly to be angry at the meditation. The cover model on the book, too. (Red? I was still pissed at him.) During my next stint at ClipLand, I worked my way through one 15-minute cut after another, sending out tentative feelers to every client who sat in my chair, and getting nothing in return. Was the issue on the sending end, or the receiving? No idea. I’d have to put on my big boy panties and do more actual research.
Considering my lack of funds, the library might be a good place to start, at least until I had a chance to talk Maxine into taking me bookstore shopping. I finished my shift, grabbed myself a Big Double from the Burger Barn next door, and hopped on their wi-fi to check out the library’s offerings while I waited on my ride. Would the signal extend to the bus stop? Why, yes, it would. I was engrossed in my burger and phone when a pair of voices rose over the general noise of traffic and snagged my attention. I glanced up and found a guy getting chewed out by a woman half his size. The older woman looked like she could’ve been in Maxine’s Pilates class. The guy was a big, balding hulk of a man in mechanic’s overalls, someone you wouldn’t notice unless he happened to be following you down a dark alley.
And then there was the dog on the end of the leash he held. A pug.
The dog didn’t strain against the leash. More like he was doing a weird little dance. Not an anxious dance like the one Dumpling did whenever I stopped over, but a dance of triumph. Head high, the pug kicked one back leg, then another, as if he was trying to bury the shiny black convertible beside them. Since he was on a sidewalk, other than a few stray pebbles, there wasn’t much to kick up. But he’d settle for going through the motions.
That dog is pleased with himself. I knew it. In fact, I knew it as definitely as I’d known the dude in the suit that morning wished I would rub my ballsack on his face.
A cluster of braying car horns obliterated the majority of their argument, but when the big mechanic pulled a rag out of his pocket and went down on one knee beside the rear tire, I got the gist of it: the dog had marked his territory, and the woman was no fan of watersports. The guy buffed the tiny pee-mark off the whitewall, apologized profusely, and retreated as quickly as the pug’s tiny legs would allow. The angry woman glared at the tire, got in, and made a big show of checking and re-checking all her mirrors.
Me, I stood there, baffled, with a wad of half-chewed burger in my mouth.
I’d just picked up on the dog. The dog.
While I could deny my own perceptions of people by rationalizing about social cues all I wanted, no way could I have made up the profound satisfaction that pug was feeling. Yes, feeling.
The dog had emotions.
I was suddenly hyperaware of the wad of meat in my mouth. It gagged me. I rushed over to rid myself of the glob in the trashcan outside the restaurant door, but it wasn’t an open-topped model. I had to spit the chewed food into my hand to shove it through the flap. I followed it with the rest of the burger, and while I wasn’t exactly heaving as I did so, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t felt some pukey spasms in my esophagus.
I wandered back to the bus shelter, dazed. A pragmatic Mexican woman standing placidly in the shade of a large poster told me, “If you get a bad burger, you should take it back. They’ll give you a different one. Sometimes a gift card, too.”
Maybe so, but no thanks. I was awash in sympathy for the poor cannibal guy who’d yakked in my wastebasket. The thought of shoving a sentient creature down my gullet was so abhorrent, I knew my burger days were over.
Chapter 28
I had a lot to think about, and a long, solitary night in which to think it. If I was psychically empathic—sensitive enough to read a freakin’ pug—then how was it that I’d managed to let Ralph manipulate me? Knowing what someone’s feeling should have given me some kind of edge, right? Evidently not. Either I was too busy trying to talk myself out of what my gut was telling me, or Ralph was a psychopath speaking an entirely different emotional language than the rest of the world.
Another possibility, according to the good ol’ internet, was that Ralph had been taking steps to ground himself. Apparently anyone can do it with enough mental training—and unless you want three percent of the population to be picking stray thoughts out of your mind, it behooved you to make the effort. Made sense. Unfortunately, that’s where the information superhighway took a decidedly weird turn, blaming everything from fluoride to vaccines to bluetooth signals for causing psychic ability, and also for squelching it.
Purportedly, the other way to build up the grounding muscle was through something just as absurd: meditation. Before I could rile myself up over the stupidity of that claim, I stuck my phone in its charger, pulled my covers up over my head, and allowed myself to slip into a disgruntled slumber.
I woke the next morning to a text from Jacob. Dinner tonight?
Aww. The bed had felt conspicuously spacious without him in it. I texted back 9pm. Sent it. Thought about the pug. Then followed up with vegetarian.
If Jacob thought my request was weird, he didn’t remark on it. And as I showered and shaved and put up my hair, I considered that if anyone had reliable information on the field of psychic research, it would be the professional PsyCop. I shot him one more missive: Bring info on Psych research.
I spent my day attempting to cut hair and read minds, and found that overthinking the process was definitely not conducive to good results. I couldn’t tell if everyone was twisted up in knots or if it was just me. Plus I got reprimanded by the manager for working too slowly, on three separate occasions.
I was relieved to finally head home. Jacob was a sight for sore eyes, waiting there for me in front of Lydia’s darkened palm reader sign with a stack of books and a sack of falafel.
I’m not really one for idle chatter—I endure enough of it throughout my
workday that by the time I’m off the clock, I’m happy enough to give the talking a rest. Jacob seemed to be wrestling with something, though. Halfway through the meal, I took pity on him and said, “What is it?”
He sighed and set his messy pita on the coffee table. “I didn’t mean to back you into a corner about moving in together.”
“I know.” I nudged his knee with mine. “I’m flattered you’re so into me—and the feeling’s mutual.”
“I just wanted to put the possibility out there.”
“And you’ve been very persistent. Can we both agree that the offer’s on the table and you don’t need to nag? Living together is a big step, and I’m not gonna do it on a whim.”
He cut his eyes to me, and I caught a little twinkle—one that telegraphed, Aha, but you would theoretically do it. I’ll just bide my time and eventually I’ll wear you down. This was not a psychic transmission of any sort. Still, it was crystal clear.
Once we’d cleaned up the tzatziki sauce from the various places it had managed to drip, we spread the reading material across the tabletop and dug in. At first, I was excited. No cheesy New Age cover art in sight. These books didn’t need to market themselves to a fickle public. They were intended for professionals, so they didn’t pretty themselves up with stock photos that featured meditating douchebags blissing out on the beach. They were plain text, with scintillating titles like Understanding Telepathy and A Practical Guide to Clairvoyance. But while it seemed like they’d offer me some actionable, no-nonsense advice, once I’d picked my way through a few dense pages, I realized they were mainly lingo and statistics. Bone dry. And if they applied to my current predicament at all, I’d have a heck of a time figuring out how.
Skin After Skin - PsyCop 8 Page 21