“You do what you gotta do,” I sighed. Seriously, how hard was it to find a surname that starts with A on an alphabetical list?
After three passes, Jack finally found my registration (at the top of page 1, go figure) and took possession of my big check. I thought I was in the home stretch, until Beatriz spent a baffling amount of time poring over my driver’s license. While she scrutinized the plastic, Jack turned his attention toward me. He was a muscular guy with a shaved head and a thick bodybuilder’s neck, but his most striking feature was his unsettling pale eyes. I could only hold eye contact for a couple of seconds before I had to look away.
After what seemed like an eternity, Beatriz handed my license back and wished me good luck. I suspected I’d need it.
“Follow me,” Jack said, and we headed off down a nondescript hallway. Once we were out of his colleague’s earshot, he muttered, “Women…always flying off the handle.”
“It’s no big thing,” I said. “She’s just venting.”
“You think so?”
“Piss her off for real and you’ll see the difference.”
I was beyond bored with their halfhearted melodrama by the time Jack divested me of my cell phone and parked me in a small meeting room. Blessedly alone. Just me and some bottled water, a tray of fruit and bagels, and a stack of paperwork heavy enough to brain someone. It was like high school all over again, except instead of math and English aptitude, these answers had no empirical right or wrong.
I spent nearly an hour trying to describe my baseline attitudes about myself and the world. On a scale of one to five, one being not at all and five extremely, how much did I agree with the following statements?
I have meaningful relationships. Red popped into my head, despite the fact that it hadn’t even been his Facebook page I’d recently stumbled across. There was meaning in that relationship, all right, and that meaning was disappointment. I colored in the circle beside the five.
My career is satisfying. Five—extremely. I love hair. And after all, it didn’t say job, it said career.
I had a happy childhood. Five, obviously. I grew up in the burbs, went to the best schools, no one bullied me and I never wanted for anything. Except when Miss Mattie died…and I began “acting out.” And Maxine started shipping me from therapist to therapist. And my father retreated into his incessant news-watching. Other than that, five.
I’m sure there was no right or wrong answer, they were just typing me for whatever stats they had to collect. Even so, it was grueling. It was like the silly online quiz…on steroids. There were pages of the questions. Pages. It so was exhausting I was beginning to think I should’ve slept in my own bed and pursued more hours of actual sleep. I was about to start filling in circles randomly just to get it over with when I turned over a sheet and found the multiple choice had given way to essay questions.
I supposed that required some actual thought. I cracked open one of the tepid bottled waters, and read.
What, for you, is typical psychic experience?
Describe a particularly strong psychic episode you’ve had within the past thirty days.
Do certain circumstances trigger your psychic impressions?
Well, shit. Either I’d need to make a big deal out of the smug pug, which not only was an isolated incident, but a ridiculous one—or I’d have to tell a bunch of faceless statisticians, in writing, about the Vibe.
Again, I wrestled with the impulse to skulk out to the lobby, beg them to return my cashier’s check, and run back home. But I didn’t. Because, damn it, working at ClipLand was not the pinnacle of my experience. I would make something of myself. I had to.
I can typically read people and determine if they are favorably inclined toward me.
I recently received a particularly vivid emotional impression from a dog.
Hard to say what triggers the connection, though I am hopeful a more disciplined regime of meditation and mindfulness would be helpful.
I finished all the questions as best I could, then followed the printed instructions to flip over the sign on my door letting the proctors know I was finished.
And then I waited. No telling how long, since my phone was being held hostage. But a while. The whole time, I thought about going home and slipping that checkered smock over my head. I’d figured my current circumstances for a dry spell, but now I considered the possibility that the upturn would never come. What if Luscious had been the apex of my success, and everything after was just part of my relentless decline?
I was just about ready to scrawl failure across my own paperwork and head back home when a tap on the door startled me out of my reverie. Beatriz sashayed in and gathered up my test. “All filled out?” She flipped through the pages without really checking. “Time for the fun part.”
“Fun. Right.”
Once we were so deep in the warren of identical office doors I wouldn’t be able to navigate without a road map and a homing beacon, she asked, “Did Jack say anything about me?”
“What difference does it…? Oh.”
She slid me a sidelong glance. “Oh?” she repeated playfully. Except the breezy tone was a total put-on. She seriously wanted to know what I knew.
“You and him. Office romance. Impossible to resist, I know. Been there, done that. And believe you me, it’s way more trouble than it’s worth.”
Maybe it wasn’t the smartest thing in the world to share what I’d so cunningly deduced, but at least it shut her up. She didn’t say another word until we got where we were going, and when she did speak again, it was all business. “You’ll be paired with ten different subjects over the course of the match test.” With a swipe of a keycard, she unlocked the room. No fruit platter to be seen, though there was bottled water and a box of tissues at hand. A single office chair, so new it still had tags on it, was positioned dead center. The far end of the room was blocked with an acoustic half-wall, the type of modular piece that made up a cubicle farm.
“Take a seat,” she said, “and do not cross the tape line on the floor until you have permission.” I glanced down at the floor. There it was. Tape. Very low tech. Nothing to be afraid of. “For the duration of the study, in order to control for distracting name associations, the subjects will be referred to by a randomly-assigned city. For your first session, you will work with Subject Cairo.”
Subject Cairo? Shit. Tape or no tape, this whole thing had me spooked. I’m a hair stylist, I thought, not James fucking Bond. Maybe I should’ve worn my funeral suit after all. I’d figured I would be filling in blanks and maybe playing a few hands of spider chihuahua, but this test flew so far over my head it wasn’t even funny.
“Your subject is behind this wall. He or she has been instructed not to speak to you, only to focus on an assigned image with strong visual and emotional content. Subjects have been chosen from a large pool of applicants by high-level certified psychics as being capable of clear and sustained focus. Your highest and lowest sessions will not count toward your final scores to eliminate random lows and highs. You will have five minutes to give any impressions you receive. If you’re more comfortable writing things down, you can, but since you’re being recorded, you can speak your impressions aloud. Sketching is also acceptable. Your time begins when I leave the room. Do you have any questions?”
I liked it better when she was pumping me for information about her boyfriend. I gave the acoustic divider a dubious look. “So I just write something down? Anything?”
“Or speak or draw. Are you ready?”
As ready as I’d ever be. Meaning, not at all. I shook my head and said, “Let’s get this over with.”
Beatriz nodded and left the room. And there I was. Me, and the acoustic divider.
“So,” I said. “Come here often?” The urge to insult the person behind the wall panel was overwhelming—Maxine always said my mouthiness would be my undoing. “I thought I had no expectations coming into this screening, but apparently I did. Because this…whatever it is…I’ve got n
o idea what to make of it.”
Impressions. I was supposed to give some impressions. But without having a conversation, how could I? “Coming in here and listening to people spout off about random shit—that’s some kind of crazy job. You must hear a lot of weird stuff.” I stood and paced, noticed the tape line, and backed up a few steps. “So you’re looking at pictures? I hope for your sake it’s nothing too heinous. Though I guess there’s a 50/50 chance it might be something ugly.”
In fact, it was quite possible someone on the other side of that divider was looking at crime scene photos with bloody, nasty images they couldn’t un-see. But if they were, I wasn’t picking up on it.
I wasn’t picking up on anything.
“Maybe it’s something neutral. A baseball, a train, a park bench, a rock?” I guess even stuff like that would have an emotional charge. But if it did, I couldn’t feel it. I named a bunch of random items, colors too, but then I realized it was all just stuff I’d seen that morning, from the pale green grapes on the fruit platter to the navy flecks in the office carpeting. I spouted off random words until there was a tap on my door, and Beatriz breezed in with a clipboard in hand.
“That’s five minutes,” she said. “Any questions before we move on?”
“Just one. Is there anyone in this room other than you and me?”
She approached the divider wall and said, “Cairo, can you turn to the window?”
The acoustic divider wall was on wheels. Beatriz gave it a tug, and it angled out to reveal a woman with a ponytail facing the window. From what I could see from the back, just a normal looking person in a sweatshirt and jeans. So I was definitely not alone. But for all the “empathic” impressions I’d received, I might as well have been.
“You’re doing it right.” Beatriz swung the panel back into place. “Just try to relax.”
Easy for her to say. She had nothing at stake here, not like me.
She led me into the hall, then paused to check her clipboard.
“Certification isn’t cheap,” she said. “What makes it so important to you?”
“At this point…I have no idea.” I sighed. “It’s no state secret. I’m just experiencing some hardcore buyer’s remorse.”
“Because you think you’re not doing well.”
“Ha. I know I’m not.”
“And if you did? If you walked out of here with a big certificate that said you are psychic, and this thing, it says this is your talent? This is your level? What then?”
Then…I would be vindicated.
Which was a bizarre notion. So Maxine had scoffed at the suggestion that I was an empath, so what? I couldn’t recall the last thing I’d done that had garnered her unconditional approval. But I had to admit, if I did walk out the door with a shiny piece of paperwork I could rub in her face, I’d take great pleasure in telling her all about it.
Showing up my mother wasn’t my only motivation. Lydia would no doubt have some intriguing suggestions on how I might exploit my official psychic status. And if Jacob showed me a good time just for taking the test, imagine how stoked he’d be if I aced it.
As for me? Maybe I’d finally be able to quell that lingering voice that periodically crept in and taunted, Wouldn’t you feel like a huge ass if you were just making this whole thing up?
Beatriz parked me in a series of small offices identical to the first, with the same instructions. I did my best to focus on the subject behind the divider—Bristol, Auckland, Miami and so on—and I said whatever came to mind. I even tried to sketch, though my misshapen circle seemed even sillier than the random words I was blurting out. After several hours of guessing at nothing, worn out and demoralized, I was finally put out of my misery. My wrangler read through some statement where I promised not to divulge the contents of the psych screening to anyone, then led me to a lounge where I could await the preliminary scoring from the day’s farce, then left me there reeking of disappointment and dried flop sweat.
With a heavy sigh, I headed for the bathroom to freshen up, but instead of the safe haven I’d been expecting, I discovered I wasn’t alone. Not only were there two other guys in the john, but they were arguing. One of them was, anyway, a skinny guy in a Cubs jersey. The other one, Jack, zipped up at the urinal with a shrug and said, “Look, Freddie, I don’t know what to tell you.”
The Freddie guy waved a paper at Jack and said, “It’s so vague. An irregularity? What does that even mean?”
“You’ll have to take that up with the coordinator, not me. My job is to make sure the right people are in the right room. That’s all.”
“But I’ve seen you at these things before. You must know something.”
Jack gave a humorless sniff and shook the water from his hands. “Only to expect the unexpected.”
“Come on, man. There’s gotta be something you can do to help me out. If I don’t get paid for today, I’m screwed.”
“Think about it this way. You’ve had a good run and you made a few bucks. Maybe you should just be happy with that.”
“I got alimony due, buddy. Mouths to feed.”
Jack stuck his hands in the automatic drier, which roared like a jet engine and nearly drowned out Freddie’s pleas, at least until he complained even louder. “I did my job, I put in my hours. This isn’t fair!”
I edged around them both and grabbed a handful paper towels. He turned to me as I ran them under cold water and said, “It’s not fair.”
I blotted my face, then looked over the towel wad and met his eye in the mirror. “Tough break, man.” Unlike the proctors, who were just bitching for the sake of bitching, this guy was pretty damn upset.
“A whole day’s pay. I did exactly like I always do. I looked at the pictures and I thought about them. I swear, my mind didn’t wander. The whole time.”
The drier powered down, and Jack said, “Remember the non-disclosure you signed, Freddie.”
“Screw that. If they’re not gonna pay me over some fucking irregularity, why should I care?”
“Because you’re not doing yourself any favors by freaking out. Try to calm down while I find someone for you talk to, so you don’t come off like a lunatic and blow it. Salvage today, maybe even salvage your place in the program. But if you come at management yelling and swearing and making a big stink, who do you think they’re gonna call for the next screening? You, or the next guy on the list?”
As Freddie considered that notion, Jack the government drone made his getaway. Freddie’s shoulders slumped, and he looked hard at the floor like he was fighting back tears. “And now I’m replaceable—that’s what I just heard. Am I right?”
I untucked my shirt and swabbed my pits. “That’s the gist.”
“Fuck.” He paced in a tight circle between the sinks and the stalls, shook his head, and repeated, “Fuck.”
Fuck was right. No one cared about the subjects or testers. It was all just a job, or a number, or statistic to these people. Whether they were bleeding every last cent from the poor dupes who’d come to talk to the acoustic dividers, or stiffing the people behind those dividers out of their pay, it was business as usual. As long as more ignorant hopefuls kept lining up to test and be tested, we were nothing more than cannon fodder. Totally expendable.
“Fuck,” he reiterated, weakly now.
There wasn’t much more to say, was there? I put myself back together and went out to face my verdict.
Chapter 33
So, I failed. And I suck at failure.
My senior year of college, after my father dropped dead from a massive heart attack, I kept re-living our last phone call, where he said I’d “grow out of” my rebellion and just be “normal.” And how I told him that he should stop harboring fantasies about me going to bed some night and waking up straight. I played through that conversation my every waking moment. Sleeping, too. Although in my dreams we’d been face to face, so I could see the look of disappointment—even disgust—in his eyes.
Once he died, between the assig
nments I’d missed and the tests I’d bombed, I would have needed to score straight A’s through the end of the semester to merely pass. So I did what anyone with a scrap of pride would have done, and I withdrew.
Too bad I hadn’t had the balls to do the smart thing with the psychic screening and pull the plug before we started. The impulse I’d ignored, when I’d stepped off the elevator and fought off the urge to turn back around with my cashier’s check and go home? I really should have listened to my gut.
The guy who explained my test results was a jocular old Russian with a wide gap between his front teeth. “These things can be very subjective,” he explained to me in his thick accent. “Test you on a better day, you might score a two. Today…well, today was not a good day.”
“So I was almost a two? How is that not good?”
“For certification, you need a solid level-two. You scored a high level-one.”
“But if most people score zero and the numbers only go to six, a high one’s gotta mean something. It’s practically a two.”
“It’s not a proportional scale. On a good day, you might score a low two. Maybe. But not today.”
Failure was not an option. I hadn’t sold all my worldly possessions to be scored a high level-one and go home with nothing. I looked hard at the Russian and did my best to read him. No Vibe. Pity, maybe. Sympathy, tolerance…although I was gleaning all that from his body language and tone of voice. Anybody would draw the same conclusions from his demeanor. And if I rolled out a divider wall and hid him behind it? I’d probably get nothing.
Well, fuck.
Apparently I’d bought in to everyone’s confidence that I was some hotshot empath, including my own, because I had no plan B. The Russian gave me some info about where I could download more specific results once the final tabulation was done, but it was nothing I couldn’t have figured out myself from reading the paperwork. He even suggested that if I wanted to amplify my talent, I could try meditation.
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