Contact (10 page)

At eight a.m. my cell
phone alarm wakes me from a deep sleep. I shower, dress and snatch a yogurt from the kitchen before heading outside to wait for David. He arrives in a bright orange sports car with black racing stripes. Hopping out, he opens the passenger side door.

“Nice wheels,” I tell him, dropping into the black leather bucket seat.

“Thanks. ‘77 Celica GT. You don’t see many of these around anymore.”

Once he’s in beside me, he revs the engine and puts it into gear.

“David, are you sure about this?” I ask, suddenly doubting myself. “Taking me to this appointment, I mean. If you have something better to do, I can get there on my own.”

He grins at me in a way that melts me from the inside out. “I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than spend a couple hours with you. Ready?”

The car jumps forward, quickly gaining momentum. The car is an old stick shift model. Even the windows are manual. I roll mine down and let the wind whip through my hair. David does the same.

“The car,” he shouts over the wind and engine noise, “is my uncle Ramón’s, but he lets me drive it since he can’t anymore.” Pride is evident on David’s face. Here, in this car, he seems confident and relaxed. I like seeing him this way.

We jump on the 2 south and then take the 134 west toward Glendale. I printed a map off Google, but David insists on using the GPS app on his phone to locate the clinic instead. We arrive about twenty minutes later, park in back, and walk around to the front door. Inside, we’re greeted by an elderly receptionist with cotton candy hair and bright red lipstick.

“Do you have an appointment?” she asks, glaring at us over the rims of her bifocals as if we’ve somehow disturbed her bright and shiny day. “Or are you here for the tour?”

“An appointment, I think.”

The woman looks over her desk calendar and suddenly she’s all smiles. “Miss Ortiz, is that right?”

“That must be me.” I laugh nervously, but she doesn’t seem to notice.

She hands me a clipboard with a blank Patient Information form and a pen clipped to it. “Fill this out,” she says.

I stand at the desk and scrawl the answers to the questions: name, address, phone number, reason for visit. I’m not exactly sure what to say for the last one, so I leave it blank. When I’m finished, the receptionist asks David to wait in the lobby. She escorts me to a roomy office in the back where she introduces me to Dr. Frank Felton, a lean man in his late thirties sporting a scraggly goatee and a pair of black gages.

“Nice to meet you, Mira,” he says, standing behind his desk. He extends his hand, but then quickly retracts it. Dr. Walsh must have filled him in on the details beforehand. “Why don’t you take a seat?”

I sit in a chair in front of his desk and note the chaos; papers are sprawled everywhere, a coffee mug filled with pencils, and an open one pound bag of peanut M&Ms. So different than my father’s uncluttered desk at home. I feel immediately at ease here.

“So, your therapist set up this interview for you. Trisha Walsh and I go way back. We went to the same high school. Did she tell you that?”

“No, she didn’t.” She didn’t have to tell me. I recognized him the moment I came in.

“Yeah, well…I’m glad she thought to contact me about your gift.”

“It’s not a gift.”

Dr. Felton leans back in his chair and taps his fingertips together. “Okay. What would you call it then?”

“A curse. I can’t touch anyone without being deluged with all their mental crap. I hate it.”

“And you have no idea how this so-called curse developed?”

“I think I’ve always had it to some extent,” I reply. “I remember as a child I would get impressions or insights into how people were feeling or what they were thinking. It wasn’t a big deal, and it didn’t bother me then. I didn’t even know I was doing anything out of the ordinary. It’s only been the last few months that it’s morphed into what it is now.”

“Was there any catalyst that may have triggered its development? A physical or psychological trauma of some kind? An illness?”

“Not that I’m aware of. In fact, I’ve been pretty healthy. Except for my two recent visits to the ER, the only time I saw a doctor in the past decade was when I got immunized.”

“Right. The new Gaudium law. Wish they had that when I was your age,” he says, smiling. “Would have made adolescence a hell of a lot easier for me. So, you received your Gaudium injection on your birthday then?”

I nod. “Just like everyone else. But I guess it didn’t take, or maybe it was a bad batch. Because when all this hit, I couldn’t handle it.”

“You became depressed.” Dr. Felton selects a pen from the container on his desk and tests it on the corner of his notebook. Then he scrawls something inside. “Trisha—I mean, Dr. Walsh, said you’ve attempted suicide twice despite being immunized and being given oral Gaudium as well,” he continues, setting his pen down again.

At the mention of suicide, I tense up. Exactly how much did Dr. Walsh tell him about me?

“You know, I think I’ve changed my mind about this,” I say, getting to my feet. “I shouldn’t have come.”

Dr. Felton holds his hands up, defensively. “Whoa, whoa,” he says. “Did I say something wrong? If I did, Mira, I apologize. Don’t leave. Please.”

I glance between him and the door, then cautiously sit back down.

“It must be intense,” he says, tapping his lips with the side of his forefinger, “seeing inside another person’s head.”

“Intense is a major understatement.”

“Can you describe it for me?”

Describe it. I’ve been trying to do that since day one, to put it into words, but somehow words always fall short.

“It’s like a brainwashing movie, sort of. You know, the ones that flash all those images on the screen so fast you can’t really see all the details but you get the general idea of what you’ve seen. Only for me it’s not just images; it’s emotions, dreams, memories. And all the details are there, everything, except it all comes at me so fast and in no particular order—like a random info dump. Every time it happens, all those other thoughts crowd into my brain threatening to push
my
thoughts and
my
memories out. I lose myself for just an instant, and in that instant it’s like I’m someone else. When I wake up the next morning I’m me again, only changed a little. Those thoughts and feelings have become part of me. But I don’t want them. I don’t want any of them.”

Dr. Felton considers this for a few moments, then he swivels his chair around, takes a book from his bookshelf, and turns back to face me. He opens the book up to a black and white photo of a man and pushes the book toward me. “That’s Edgar Cayce,” he explains. “Dr. Walsh told you about him?”

“A little.”

“He made a lot of predictions, which are very interesting, but he also did readings. Do you know what a reading is?”

“Telling someone something personal that only they would know?”

He nods. “Something like that, yes. Edgar Cayce defied all logic. He would lie down on a couch and put himself into a trance. In that state he would answer questions about people and things he couldn’t possibly know unless he had some sort of extraordinary gift. Sometimes visitors would need to touch Cayce to help him get the ball rolling, so to speak. And Cayce isn’t the only one. There have been dozens of documented cases like his, though he is the best known. My point is, Mira, that what you’re experiencing is not necessarily unique.”

He stops talking, letting me absorb everything he’s just said, which seems to be that what I am, what I experience, has happened to other people. But has it really? I looked up a little about Edgar Cayce on the internet before coming here, and a lot of what I read sounded bogus. It reminded me of those palm readers at the fair. Plunk down a fiver and she’ll tell you your fortune, usually vague stuff that could apply to anyone. Throw out enough of that garbage, and something is bound to come true.

I know one thing. I’m no fortune teller. I don’t see the future, and I don’t make wild guesses about people’s lives based on some vague impressions.

Dr. Felton must sense my skepticism because he closes the book and starts shuffling through the papers on his desk. Finding what he’s looking for, he slides a printed form toward me.

“This is a preliminary release form,” he tells me. “It gives us permission to study you. Of course, we’ll need parental consent for you to join the program officially.”

He hands me a black ballpoint, but I don’t pick it up. “I’m not sure I want to be studied.”

“I understand,” says Dr. Felton, though I doubt he does. “But I would like to know the extent of your abilities. It seems possible that you were born with a latent power. I suspect that something occurred to bring it out, to fully emerge. Perhaps that initial exposure to Gaudium. I realize that providing a reading may be uncomfortable for you, but it would give me a more accurate idea of what we’re dealing with here.”

I knew this would likely be asked of me when I walked through the door. I mean, that’s why I came, isn’t it? Dr. Walsh seemed to think this guy could help me, or at least point me in the right direction. Even so, the prospect of exposing myself to the psyche of anyone, let alone a stranger, sets me on edge. Despite my own resistance, however, I agree and sign the form.

Dr. Felton’s face lights up like a little boy who’s seen Santa for the very first time.
He can hardly contain his eagerness. He turns around again, reaching for something on a shelf behind him. When he turns back, he’s got a thick wooden board in his hands about two inches deep and a foot square. He puts this down on the desk between us, then slides open a small drawer and starts to remove plastic blocks of varying shapes and sizes.

“It seems primitive, I know,” he says, apologetically, “but the Zener test is a classic method of evaluating clairvoyant abilities.”

“Zener test?” I recall reading something about that online. “I thought that had to do with cards with pictures on them.”

“Cards. Sure. But kids prefer these.” He pauses, holding a block above the board, and looks at me as if he just realized the absurdity of his words.

“I am sixteen,” I say, and I can’t help but crack a grin.

“Right. Sorry.”

He separates the blocks with a cardboard divider so half are on his side and half on mine.

“I’ll begin by evaluating your extra sensory perception,” he explains. “I’ll arrange my blocks in a pattern. The objective is for you to arrange yours to match mine.”

“Except I told you before, I’m not a mind-reader. At least not like this.”

“Bear with me here.” He seems excited, and he uses his hands to punctuate his words. “We’ll do this the traditional way first to establish a baseline. Then we’ll do it again using your...um…ability. Ready?”

Even though playing with blocks seems rather childish to me, I wait patiently while Dr. Felton arranges the blocks on his side of the divider.

“Okay,” he announces when he’s done. He glances at me with a look of expectation and challenge on his face that reminds me of the countless games of Battleship I’d played with Mama over the years. Even though we had a virtual version of it on our game system, Mama always insisted on using the same old plastic set she’d had since she was a kid. It was missing one of the submarines and was short a few pegs, but I loved watching her face while she placed her ships in strategic patterns on her board. She looked most like a kid at those times, full of anticipation and gleeful triumph.

“Your turn,” says Dr. Felton. “Concentrate and try to recreate my pattern. Take your time.”

In front of me are six different colored blocks: red, green, yellow, orange, blue and purple—each one a different shape. I study them for a few moments, wondering how anyone could actually take this seriously, but for Dr. Felton’s sake I decide to give it my best shot. Focusing all my attention on whatever invisible brain waves might be floating between him and me, I push the blocks into place with my finger.

“Done,” I say.

With only a brief hesitation, Dr. Felton lifts the divider. He rubs the side of his jaw with his thumb, nodding thoughtfully, but I can see the disappointment on his face.