the other side
IT WAS EVENING, half past five on a late autumn Thursday, and the sun had already gone down on the changing season. The homely smell of wood smoke from fireplace chimneys lingered in the air of the lamplit neighborhood, and there was the smell of damp vegetation from yesterday’s rain. Nina, Art and Beth’s five-year-old daughter, was at a friend’s house where she had stayed for dinner despite its being a school night, and Art was on a mission to pick her up and haul her home while Beth fixed their own supper of steamed crab legs and drawn butter, food that no right-minded child of five would eat, any more than she’d eat onions or mushrooms or a fish head at the Chinese restaurant.
He opened the car door and sat down on the cold upholstery, and in that moment, abruptly and incongruously, there came into his mind the starkly clear picture of a possum crossing a road, illuminated by a car’s headlights. Just as quickly the image was gone, as if he had caught a second’s worth of a television program while switching through the channels. He looked out through the windshield at the empty street, his thoughts interrupted and scattered.
As he drove, he recalled the image clearly, rerunning it in his mind out of curiosity—a dark grove of some sort, the weedy dirt shoulder of the road, the big possum angling across the asphalt, caught for a moment in his headlights as it scurried toward the shrubbery on the far side. He rolled the window down an inch to let in the night air and headed down Cambridge Street toward Fairhaven Avenue, barely seeing the human shadows in the silent cars that passed him, bound for their own lighted living rooms and fireplaces and suppers.
At the stop sign opposite the cemetery he waited for a car to swing past in front of him, and then he turned left onto Fairhaven, remembering suddenly that he was supposed to stop at the market for a container of sour cream for the baked potatoes. Thinking about it, his mind drifted back on course, which at this time of night inevitably meant food, and he realized that he was ravenously hungry and that the evening ahead looked to him like a paid vacation.
Fairhaven was dark, with only a few lights glowing in the cemetery chapel. His headlights illuminated the turned earth of the first rows of the orange grove on his left and the shadowy oleander bushes that hedged the shoulder on the right. And just then something appeared ahead of him, moving across the road. He braked the car, slowing down more out of amazement than necessity: a big possum had come out of the grove and was running with a heavy gait toward the oleanders, its fur showing silver in the headlights. In a moment the animal had disappeared in the night.
A horn honked behind him, and he accelerated, realizing that he had come to a full stop there in the middle of the road, and for a moment he was so addled that he couldn’t recall his destination. The thought came to him that he should pull over and go back on foot to see if he could find the possum, just to make sure that he hadn’t imagined it, but he gave the idea up as lunacy and drove on across Tustin Street and into the neighborhood on the far side, slowly returning to his senses.
* * * *
“So you didn’t get the sour cream?” Beth asked him, setting the big plate of crab legs on the table. She poured him a glass of white wine as he hacked open his baked potato.
“I was too … shook up, I guess.”
“By a possum? You didn’t hit it, did you?”
“Heck no. I was nowhere near it. It was … seeing it, you know, after what happened when I got into the car. I don’t think you’re following what I’m saying. I’m not talking about a simple déjà vu or something.”
Nina came into the kitchen, dressed in her pajamas, skinny as an orphan. She had her mother’s dark hair and eyes. “I have homework,” she said. She held out an empty shoebox.
“In kindergarten you have homework?” Art picked up a crab leg and pulled it open along the slit that Beth had cut into it with a knife.
“She has to make a collection,” Beth said. “Mrs. Barnes was talking about it at back-to-school night, remember?”
“Sure,” Art said. “I think she told everyone it shouldn’t be bugs.”
“Nothing dead,” Beth said, taking the butter out of the microwave and sitting down. “You don’t have to kill things to have a collection.”
“How about leaves?” Art asked helpfully. He doubled a long piece of crab and dipped it into the drawn butter right up to his fingertips. “Do leaves count as dead?”
“Leafs?” Nina wrinkled up her nose in the style of a rabbit. “What’s that thing?”
“That thing is a crab leg,” Art said. “Hey! I’ll tell you what. How about a crab leg collection?”
Nina frowned and shook her head in small jerks. “Those smell.”
“And they’re dead,” Beth added. The telephone rang, and Beth stood up again to answer it.
“Anthony Collier,” Art said, looking up sharply. The name had simply popped into his head, arriving out of nowhere, like a light blinking on.
“Wait,” Beth told him, waving him silent and picking up the receiver, clearly assuming that he was starting to tell her something about his old friend Anthony, who had moved to New York the previous winter. “Hello,” she said, and then listened, double-taking just a little bit. She handed him the phone, her hand over the mouthpiece. “Anthony Collier,” she said.
“Hey,” Art said weakly. He realized that his heart was racing now, and he replied in half sentences, finally begging off to eat dinner.
“Wow,” she said. “That was a weird coincidence. What were you going to tell me?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you mean nothing? You started to tell me something about Anthony.”
“Just his name. His name sort of flew into my head. It was weird, like the thing with the possum.”
“I think feathers,” Nina said, looking at the parakeets, which had started chattering when the phone rang. They had two of them, both green, in a cage suspended from the ceiling. Nina climbed onto a chair and peered into the cloth seed guard that aproned the underside of the cage. She reached into it and pulled out a loose feather, smiling and holding it up for them to see before dropping it into the shoebox.
* * * *
For the next hour Art was unable to concentrate on anything else. He tried to think out the meaning of the two incidents, possessed by the idea that they were a new category of experience, that they were evidence of … other things. He had never been a rationalist, and had always been willing to consider things he himself had never witnessed—ghosts, flying saucers, the hollow earth, New Zealand. But never had he ever been a party to a public display of these things. The paranormal was something he had read about, something that happened to others, whose stories were related in pulp-paper magazines.
During the evening the phone rang twice more, and each time his mind supplied him with a name as he leaped up to grab it, but he was wrong both times, and he realized that he had been merely guessing. With Anthony he hadn’t guessed. The information had come from outside of himself somehow, independent of his own thinking, exactly as if it had been beamed into his head.
He stopped himself. That kind of thinking sounded crazy even to him, and he wondered suddenly if this was some kind of schizophrenic episode, the precursor to a gibbering decline into nuttiness. Except, of course, that Beth had been a witness. She could misunderstand the possum, because she hadn’t been there, but she’d heard him come up with Anthony’s name out of the blue.
He went into the pantry and dug out a deck of cards, then returned to his chair in the living room, fanning the cards out on the coffee table. Coincidence wouldn’t answer the possum question. That much was clear to him. Beth came out of Nina’s room, where she had been reading the nightly story, and she stood watching him move the cards around. He could see that she was interested. This thing had gotten to her.
“Five of spades,” he said out loud, flipping over a random card from the middle of the spread. It was a queen of hearts. He tried again, naming the two of clubs, then the eight of diamonds, and then a half dozen other numbers and suits, dead wrong every time. The five of spades finally appeared, meaninglessly late. Beth had already lost interest and gone into the family room to watch television. He heard the theme song from Jeopardy! start up, and he put the cards back in the pack, giving up and going in to kiss Nina goodnight.
“Read me one,” Nina whispered, pulling the covers up to her chin so that she looked like Kilroy.
“You already had a story,” Art told her. By her bed lay the shoe box, empty except for the parakeet feather. “This is a good collection,” he said.
“It’s only one. Mom says one’s not a collection.”
“Maybe we should go feather collecting.”
“Do you know where?” she asked.
But just like that he had lost the thread of the conversation. In his mind’s eye he saw the possum again, returning to haunt him, its hairless tail vanishing into the oleander. Everything had been identical in his mind and on the road—the angle at which it crossed, the grove off to the left, the way the headlights picked it out of the darkness, the way the creature had been swallowed up by the shrubbery and the shadows. …
Something struck him then, something he hadn’t thought of before.
“Do I know where what?” he asked, finally reacting to Nina’s question.
“Where there’s feathers?”
“Sure. I know a place. We’ll go looking.” He tucked her in and went out, hurrying into the family room where Beth sat watching Jeopardy! He saw right away that the Double Jeopardy categories weren’t up his alley. “Listen to this,” he said to Beth, sitting down next to her on the couch. “The two incidents aren’t the same thing.”
“Okay,” she said, her eyes on the television screen.
“With Anthony, his name came into my mind the instant the phone rang. At the same time.”
“I still say it’s coincidence.”
“That’s all right. It might be. But listen to what I’m telling you. With the possum it was different. I predicted the possum. You see the difference? I forecast it. There was a five- or six-minute lag between when I pictured it and when it appeared.”
“I do see the difference. I don’t know what it means, but I see what you’re saying. The possum is kind of … psychic.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Actually they’re both kind of psychic, aren’t they? Unless you really think the phone call thing was coincidence.”
“I don’t know what I think. What’s the Santa Maria?”
“What?” he asked, utterly baffled by this.
“The name of Columbus’s ship,” she said. “Explorers for six hundred.”
“Oh.” He watched the game show for a minute. It was winding up. “You know why it’s not a coincidence? Because of the possum. That would make two weird things on the same night, which would be a double coincidence.”
“The Final Jeopardy subject is British History,” Alex Trebek said, looking shrewdly at the audience, and the program cut away to a commercial.
“Oliver Cromwell,” Art said, the name almost leaping out of his throat. This time he was sure of it. It was like the possum and like Anthony Collier. He hadn’t guessed. He hadn’t had time to guess. The name had simply come to him. Beth looked at him wonderingly and he nodded his head. “That’s it again,” he said. “At least I think it is.” Instantly he had come to doubt himself. Was this another guess, like the five of spades? Or was this the possum, crossing the road to get to the other side?
There were half a dozen commercials, interminable commercials, but finally the show was on the air again. Trebek read off the answer: “This Puritan Prime Minister of England was so hated by the populace, that after he was dead and buried his body was exhumed and …”
Art didn’t hear the rest of it. He sat with his mouth open, his mind swimming. Beth stared at him when the answer was revealed. “Now you’re giving me the creeps,” she said.
* * * *
On Friday evening he tried again with the cards, and again he couldn’t make them work. He rolled dice, but that was a washout, too. He made a mighty effort to blank out his mind, to open himself to psychic suggestion, but it was no good. The harder he tried, the more he understood that it wouldn’t speak to him, whatever it was, and he tried hard not to try as hard. When the phone rang at eight o’clock he shouted “Jimmy Carter!” but it was the Fireman’s Fund selling tickets to a talent show. Beth humored him to the point of asking the caller whether his name was Jimmy Carter, but it turned out not to be, and the man hung up angry, thinking that she was making fun of him.
“I guess it’s not working as good as it was,” Beth said, and from her tone of voice Art could tell that her Oliver Cromwell enthusiasm had pretty much worn off.
* * * *
On Saturday morning he stopped at Rod’s Liquors and bought five dollars’ worth of lottery tickets, marking the little ovals as random numbers wandered unbidden into his head, rejecting numbers that seemed too insistent or that appeared there twice or that were clearly ringers, like Nina’s birthday or his own age. Quickly, however, every number on the lottery ticket began to seem suspect, and he filled in the last two games by shutting his eyes and pointing.
On the way home, he stopped at the used bookstore where he found something promising: a book called A Field Guide to the Paranormal. He knew the clerk at the counter, a thin, owl-eyed man named Bob who had worked there forever and, in fact, lived a couple of blocks away from him and Beth.
“You’re interested in the paranormal?” Bob asked him, taking his money.
“Yeah,” Art confessed. “I find it kind of fascinating.”
“My sister’s a psychic. She has a sort of organization.”
“Really? What do you think about it,” Art asked. “Just out of curiosity.” He realized that he wanted very badly to tell someone about his experiences, and it dawned on him that he was more than a little bit proud of himself. He wasn’t the same man today that he had been last week.
“I’ve got no problem with it. There’s a guy at Krystal’s meetings that bends spoons. That and all kinds of other stuff. I’ve seen it. How about you?”
“Yeah, I’m a believer. A couple of things happened to me recently …” He realized that he couldn’t think of any way to relate the possum story or the phone calls in such a way as to give them the punch they deserved, and he wished that something more grand had happened to him, like predicting an earthquake or a train wreck. “What kind of things?”
“Oh, you know, knowing in advance who’s calling on the phone, that kind of thing. And I nailed a Jeopardy! answer before the question was asked.”
“You mean you got the question before the answer.”
“Yeah, that’s what I meant. It was Oliver Cromwell.”
“Cromwell? The host? I thought it was that other guy.”
“It is that other guy. I meant the answer was Oliver Cromwell.”
“I got Oliver Hardy once,” Bob told him, counting out change. “The category was silent films, I think. Or maybe it was comedians. Either way.” The transaction, just like the conversation, had run its course.
“Sure,” Art said. “I guess so. Look, what’s this thing with your sister? She has meetings or something?”
“Thursday nights, at her house. It’s a kind of support group, you know?”
“Psychics need a support group?”
“Hell, everyone needs a support group these days.”
“And her name’s really Crystal?”
“With a K,” Bob said. He wrote his sister’s name and number on the back of the sales receipt and handed it to Art, who slipped it into his wallet. When he got home he sat down in the overstuffed chair in the living room and thumbed through the book, but it turned out to be volume one of a set, mostly concerned with spontaneous human combustion and the aura phenomenon, neither of which, apparently, applied to his own situation.
He had the house to himself, and he decided to take advantage of the peace and quiet to meditate in order to foster psychic suggestion. As he sat there with his eyes shut, his thoughts spun idly, and he began to develop the notion that unwittingly he had managed to access a particular grotto inside his mind, a place where the subconscious depths lay like a hidden pool, where he might swim if only he could find it in the darkness. He pictured the pool itself, illuminated by moonlight, and he wandered toward it along shadowed corridors….
* * * *
He awoke to find that Beth and Nina had gotten home from lunch. Nina had a nondescript gray feather to show him, probably from a pigeon. The thought came to him that he had wasted the entire morning chasing after psychic phantoms. It had been three days since Anthony Collier and Oliver Cromwell and the disappearing possum. Perhaps he had sailed temporarily into some sort of whimsical psychic breeze, which he would never again pick up no matter how much sail he loaded onto the masts.
The thought was disheartening, and he realized that the experiences of Thursday night were … special in some way. That they somehow made him special. They showed beyond all doubt that … He tried to grasp what it was they showed, exactly. They showed … that there were enormous things that were true about the universe, things that he now had a firsthand knowledge of. He recalled the derailed conversation at the bookstore, and he knew there must be a larger picture. There had to be. He had a handful of puzzle pieces, but he needed more if ever he were to get a clear view.
“Can we go feathering?” Nina asked him, coming out of her bedroom with the shoebox.
“Okay,” he said. “How about around the neighborhood?”
“But there was that place you said. With the birds.”
“There’s birds in the neighborhood,” he told her. “We don’t want to ignore them and go to the park, or they might feel bad.”
“I might go after groceries,” Beth said, coming out of the kitchen.
Art and Nina went out onto the sidewalk and into a perfect fall day. The wind gusted leaves along the pavement, and again there was the smell of wood smoke, perhaps someone burning tree prunings. The sky was as clear as water, inconceivably deep and blue between brush strokes of cloud drift. Art found that he was distracted though, unable to enjoy the afternoon, constantly anticipating another psychic interlude, reassessing what had been happening to him. He tried to keep his mind on the here and now, but he had to work at it. Several houses down they found a white feather lying forlornly on a clipped lawn, perhaps a seagull feather, and then, at the corner house, they discovered a dead mockingbird beneath a curb tree, torn apart by a cat.
“Yuck,” Nina said, “what is that?”
“It’s a mockingbird,” Art told her, picking up a long mottled feather.
“But is it guts?”
“Yep,” Art said, “it’s guts.”
“That’s yuck.”
They walked on, heading up the next block where an acorn woodpecker hammered away at the trunk of a palm tree. The bird stood upside down, defying gravity, showing off. “See his red head?” Art asked.
“Can we get a red feather …? Look!” Nina shouted, pointing at the sky. An airplane blew out a vapor trail off to the east, a skywriter, spelling something out. They waited for it, shading their eyes, naming the letters before the November wind bore them away. “April,” it said, and the plane circled back around and circumscribed it with a heart, although by the time the heart was completed it was blown to tatters, and the whole thing looked like an ill-drawn parallelogram containing ghostly hieroglyphics.
Art was suddenly overwhelmed with the idea that it meant something, that it was a sign, maybe some sort of spirit writing, perhaps intended for him…
…but just as soon as he conceived the thought, he realized that he was off his rocker, lost inside his own bafflement, confusing an endearment with a ghost. He forced himself to focus on the world around him, the weathered sidewalk, the comical dog that watched them through a picket fence, the wind in his hair. He put his arm on Nina’s shoulder as they walked, and immediately he felt steadier.
“There’s one!” Nina shouted, and she ran straight to a blue feather that lay half covered with dead leaves.
“From a blue jay!” Art said. “How many is that?”
Nina counted the feathers in the shoebox, making a laborious job of it, losing track and recounting to get it right. “Five,” she said finally.
They wandered home now, having pretty much run through the neighborhood birds. Beth’s car was gone. As they stepped up onto the front porch, Art heard the phone ringing, and instantly it came to him that it was Anthony again. He sprinted into the kitchen and grabbed it just as the answering machine picked it up. He punched the star sign to kill the recording.
“Yeah,” he said breathlessly.
“Art! It’s Anthony.”
“Wow,” Art said. “I guessed it was you.”
“Unlucky guess, eh?” Anthony laughed.
“No, really. I was out on the front porch, and when I heard the phone ring, your name popped into my head. The same damned thing happened the other night when you called. It was kind of spooky, actually.”
“Yeah, well, you sounded kind of spooked the other night. You didn’t say more than about ten words.”
“I’ll tell you what, I had some weird experiences that night. If you’ve got a second…?”
Art explained about the possum, giving the story slightly amusing overtones to diminish the kook factor, then told him about the phone call and Oliver Cromwell, before starting in on the interesting difference between the various occurrences. In the middle of the explanation the call-waiting signal went off in his ear. He kept talking, but Anthony interrupted him: “If you’ve got a call, grab it.”
“To heck with it,” Art said. He hated to interrupt a long distance call, especially on Anthony’s dime. It always turned out to be Jimmy Carter butting in, selling talent show tickets. He finished telling his story, then waited for Anthony’s response.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” Anthony told him.
“I wasn’t really worrying about it,” Art said. “I want to know what it means.”
“I think it’s one of those things you never figure out. It’s better just to put it away, you know, back in the dead letter file. Worry about it when something starts to happen, like you start cutting the heads off of dogs or something. Until then, forget about it. You can’t explain it.”
“Sure,” Art said, let down by this advice. They chatted for a while longer and then Art hung up. Anthony was probably right, but right or wrong, apparently his sailboat had tacked back into the psychic breeze.
Feeling guilty about not answering the interrupting call, he picked up the receiver and punched star-six-nine into the keypad. The phone rang six times before a woman picked it up.
“Hey,” Art said, “it’s Art Johnson, did somebody there call me?”
There was silence on the other end, and then the woman said simply, “No.”
“Sorry to bother you, then,” Art told her. He hung up, embarrassed, wondering what the hell he could have done to star-six-nine a wrong number. That didn’t seem possible to him, unless there was some kind of crossed line. Wait, he thought suddenly, figuring it out. The woman probably had called him, but by mistake. Probably she’d dialed a wrong number but didn’t know it because he hadn’t picked up her call. She had assumed simply that no one was home where she thought she’d called, and …
The phone rang and he snatched it up, half expecting Anthony Collier. “Hello,” he said.
“Art …?”
“Yeah,” Art said. “Who’s this?”
“It’s Nancy. Nancy Bronson.”
For a moment the name meant nothing to him. Then he knew who it was—a woman he had known at college. Bronson was her married name. She’d moved to Texas a decade ago.
“Nancy? How the heck are you doing?”
“Did you just call me?”
“What do you mean?”
“I think it was you. You just called my number and asked if I’d called your house, and then you hung up when I said no.”
Art’s stomach turned over. He sat down in a kitchen chair, too confused to speak.
“Art?”
“Yeah. I guess I did call you. What happened was that I got a call, and I couldn’t answer it, so I hit star-six-nine to call back. Apparently it was your number.”
Now it was Nancy’s turn to be silent. “But I didn’t call you,” she said after a moment. “To tell you the truth, after you called me, I called Gayle to get your number. I don’t have it in my book. I didn’t want to use the star-six-nine function, because what if it wasn’t you? I’d end up talking to some nut.”
“You couldn’t have called me by mistake the first time?”
“Not if I didn’t have your number. And besides, I didn’t call anyone. I was doing the dishes. Do you have my number? My new number? Because we moved to San Antonio last year.”
“I don’t know,” Art said, although it came to him then that he in fact didn’t have it. Not a week ago Nancy’s name had come up in conversation with a mutual friend, and Art had realized in a moment of passing nostalgia that he had lost touch with her and most of the rest of his old school friends. He flipped through the pages of his and Beth’s address book now and read off the number written down there, apparently years ago, given its position at the top of the B page.
“That’s the old one,” Nancy told him, and she filled him in on the new phone and address before chatting some more and hanging up.
Art realized that he had been holding his breath off and on, and he let it out now and walked into the living room, swamped with a strange fear and nearly reeling with vertigo. Why Nancy? Only because her name had been in his mind a week ago, fleetingly, unimportantly? And now he had connected with her in this bizarre way. …
He saw through the sliding glass doors that Nina was out in the back yard, playing on the swing, which was good, because even a child like Nina could have seen that he was blasted, and he didn’t need that. He couldn’t let this affect Nina. He headed upstairs to the bathroom, where he was impulsively sick. Then he lay down on the bed and stared at the ceiling, the pieces of the puzzle going around in his head.
* * * *
“I don’t know if I can explain it,” Beth said, putting away the groceries. “It’s pretty weird. But there’s one obvious explanation, and you already know what that is, I think.”
“What?”
“That you’re going crazy.”
“Wait, though. I’ve been worrying about that. I thought that maybe I blanked out or something and called her up using her number, but I didn’t know I used her number, because I was blanked out, and when I un-blanked I remembered it as a star-six-nine call. You get what I’m saying?”
“Yeah. Maybe you did.”
“But where’d I get her number? We don’t have it. I couldn’t get it from information, because I didn’t know her address. I didn’t even know they’d moved to San Antonio till she told me. And Anthony heard the call-waiting click, too. I didn’t imagine that part.”
Beth shrugged. Apparently she had nothing to add. He wondered if her silence was fear, and, if so, what she was afraid of. Him? He didn’t like the thought, but he realized that he was fearful himself. Perhaps she was fearful for him. He saw that he had to work this out logically, find the rationale behind the irrational before it did drive him crazy.
“The thing is, if this is another psychic episode, it’s different again. This is way more complicated than the possum.”
“That’s for sure,” she said.
“Seriously. It involves screwing around with the phone lines, you know what I mean? Manipulating them with my mind. I push a couple of buttons and come up with Nancy Bronson, just like that, out of nowhere. If she didn’t call me, then I had to have contacted her … psychically, I guess you’d say. And I used the telephone to do it. This involves electricity, numbers, distances….”
“How do you know she didn’t call you? That’s an easier explanation. Maybe she’s had a thing for you all these years and she did call you, but she won’t admit it, because she had second thoughts when she heard your voice. It’s an easier answer, isn’t it?”
“But she said she had to call Gayle to get our number. …” He stopped. Nancy’s calling or not calling Gayle had nothing to do with psychic phenomena. If this whole thing was initiated on Nancy’s end, then Beth was probably right. But the thought of Nancy “having a thing for him” didn’t seem likely, not after ten years. On the other hand, he had always thought Nancy had been attracted to him a little bit back in the old days. It wasn’t so hard to imagine that some sort of fresh spark had reignited an old flame.
Beth was grinning at him. “I love it that you came up with a lame-brained psycho explanation instead of the obvious thing. If Nancy calls back, let me talk to her.”
“Sure,” Art said, but he was somehow certain that Nancy wouldn’t call back. Beth’s explanation was too simple, too pat. There was a flaw in it somewhere. The mere fact that Nancy’s name had passed through his head a week ago had monstrous implication here, if only he could see what it was.
Now he thought of something else: who had made the first call, the call-waiting call? He could grasp the idea that a person might somehow make a telepathic phone call, that he might get Nancy on the phone for mysterious telepathic reasons. But if she hadn’t called him first, who had? Had he called himself? But how could he call himself if he was on the phone talking to Anthony? It suggested an independent consciousness—someone or something inside his head who, or which, had set off the call-waiting beep. His brain reeled. Again the specter of schizophrenia loomed in his mind.
He wandered out back to find Nina, who was in the sandbox building a fort out of twigs, and for a half hour he crawled around helping, finding sticks and leaves and rocks so that Nina could keep building. In the shrubbery he found a fallen nest, which he showed to her. Pushed down into the bent twigs was a plain brown and black feather, a sparrow feather, beautiful in its simplicity
* * * *
It was three days later, after he’d had time to simmer down again, that there was another phone call. It happened the same way as before, except this time he ignored an incoming call because he was talking to his father, who was ninety and troubled and couldn’t grasp the idea of being put on hold. After hanging up, still worrying about their chat, he punched in the star-six-nine return without any anticipation at all, the Nancy episode temporarily forgotten. The strangely familiar voice at the other end brought him instantly to his senses.
For a moment he was at a loss, but then, as before, he identified himself and asked if anyone there had called him.
“Art? Is that you?”
“Yeah,” Art said, “it’s me.” He still didn’t place the voice.
“This is Steven. Steven Nichols.”
“Steven! How the hell are you doing?” His hand trembled so violently that he knocked the telephone receiver against his teeth, and he had to force himself to ask Steven the same questions he had asked Nancy. He was distracted the entire time by the uncanny coincidence of having seen Steven’s name on their Christmas card list just a couple of days ago. He hadn’t given it a moment’s thought at the time, just a glance, but he recalled that it had been there, on the dining room table along with four boxes of Christmas cards that Beth was determined to get into the mail early. Here it was again—the same damned thing as with Nancy. He hadn’t talked to Steven in years.
“Not me,” Steven told him when Art asked if he’d called. “I made a couple of phone calls fifteen or twenty minutes ago, but I didn’t call you. Mine were local calls anyway. What the hell’s your area code?”
“Seven-one-four,” Art said pointlessly. He already knew beyond doubt that Steven hadn’t called him.
“Not a chance, man. It’s good to hear from you, though.” There was doubt in his voice, however. Evidently it wasn’t all that good to have heard from Art, at least under the circumstances: five years of silence and then a nut call out of the blue. When he hung up he wondered whether to reveal this to Beth or to keep it to himself. He remembered what Anthony had said about cutting the heads off dogs, which had seemed funny to him at the time. Now it didn’t seem so funny.
Had he made the possum cross the road, just like he had apparently made the phone do his psychic bidding? Why not? And if he had, then where would it end? Airplanes plunging from the sky? Cars veering off the road? His own car veering off the road, just as his own telephone had veered off course?
He was full of a new fear, something that he hadn’t seen before, although it had always been right there in front of him: none of these episodes was within his conscious control. All of them had simply happened to him while he was thinking of something else, like the onset of a disease. He hadn’t wanted Nancy or Steven to call. He hadn’t been in high hopes of spotting a possum. This new aspect was horrifying in its simplicity. He had a sort of psychic Midas touch, only worse, because at least Midas had to put his finger out and poke something.
He took out his wallet and found the receipt from the bookstore, then punched Krystal’s number into the phone, counting the rings, ready to be connected to any damned thing at all. The telephone had become a monster of unpredictability. The world had become a monster of unpredictability. Krystal, God bless her, answered the phone with a simple hello.
“Yeah, hey, I’m a friend of your brother’s and he gave me your number,” Art said. “I’ll come straight to the point. I’ve had a couple of psychic experiences, and I’m really … mystified. He says you’ve got some kind of group.”
He half hoped that she would ask questions so that he could unburden himself right now, but she didn’t; she simply told him to come by on Thursday night at seven and to bring cookies. He wrote her address on the receipt and put it into his wallet again. Beth might roll her eyes at the very idea of him being involved in a society of psychics, but he had to go, and realistically she would agree that he had to go. After all, Nancy didn’t know Steven from Adam, and even a skeptic like Beth would admit that the two of them couldn’t be in cahoots to plague Art with some kind of complex phone prank. Beth’s attempts at simple explanations, even the theory that he was crazy, just didn’t work.
* * * *
Beth turned out to be almost encouraging about the Thursday night meeting, not even objecting to Krystal’s name. She was simply happy that he would have another ear to bend. By now the paranormal had become virtually the only subject that he could focus on. All their discussions drifted in that direction—either that or his mind drifted that way and he left Beth and the discussion behind. He had promised Nina twice that he would go feathering with her, but had put it off both times, and Beth wasn’t picking up the slack there. She was leaving Nina’s project to him, giving him a chance to keep his promises.
Krystal’s house was in Santa Ana, a nice old Mediterranean place off Flower Street with arched windows and a tile roof. The door was opened by a small man in a goatee and startlingly thick eyeglasses, who took the cookies from him. “Welcome,” he said, showing Art in. “Krystal is meditating. My name is Roderick Gunther.”
“Art Johnson,” Art said, nodding. “Pleased to meet you.” There were a dozen others milling around inside. Art seemed to be the only one who had brought cookies, although there were pots of tea kept hot on metal racks. He could smell incense and burning Sterno.
He was a little unnerved to see that the rest of the crowd were members of an identifiable type—bookish and unstylish and evidently eccentric, except for one blonde woman who looked a great deal like Marilyn Monroe. She was attractive, with an evident sexual allure and a dress meant to emphasize it, but the word neurotic sprang into Art’s mind within ten seconds of being introduced to her. She had apparently led past lives, the same phenomenon that accounted for the presence of several others of the group. All of them had been of elevated rank centuries past, although the blonde woman, whose name turned out to be Cassandra, had been a peasant girl originally, only becoming a queen, like Ruth in the Bible, after catching the eye of the king. Art found himself uninterested in this kind of thing—not that he had any grudge against it, but because past lives were just that, past. His life and its weird complications was on the front burner right now. He thought of the man who could bend spoons, but noticed right off that the spoons by the teapots were made of plastic, and he felt a little bit let down.
After pouring a cup for himself and spooning in honey, he struck up a conversation with the man who had let him in, Roderick Gunther, who had written a book on Atlantis, and although Gunther’s connection to the lost city was obscure, there were hints that he could trace his lineage back to that far-flung time. His face was narrow and he was nearly chinless, and his forehead tilted back at a surprising angle. His heavy glasses magnified his eyes, which darted back and forth as he spoke, not as if his attention was wandering, but simply because of some optical tic. He showed Art a copy of his book, which was full of line drawings and maps, none of them very convincing. Art told him a little bit about his own adventures, the predictions, the telephone rigamarole. The man considered what he was saying with apparent interest.
“Which direction do you sleep?” Gunther asked.
“Pardon me?”
“Is your bed oriented east to west or north to south?”
“North to south,” Art told him.
“Good. And you sleep with your head to the …?
“South.”
“There’s a problem. It’s as simple as this—you’re incorrectly magnetized. Turn around. Sleep with your head to the north.”
“All right,” Art said, nodding at the man. But it was impossible, actually. Their bedroom was set up in such a way that there was only one good place for the bed. If he turned around, he’d have to have his head at the foot end, in the middle of the room, and that seemed simply wrong to him. Sleeping backwards would certainly be the first step on the slippery slope of eccentricity Art noticed then that Gunther wore shoes with Velcro straps instead of laces and that there was a trail of hooked-together paper clips attached to his heel through a brass grommet.
“I drink and bathe in ocean water,” Gunther was telling him. “Not mere salt water, mind you, but ocean water.”
“Can a person drink ocean water?” Art thought of sailors, dying of thirst in open boats.
“Oh yes, very much so—an astonishing array of minerals in ocean water. You want it from ten miles out, though, far beyond any sewage outfall, preferably from the depths. I have a contract with a fisherman out of San Pedro who keeps me supplied. If you’re interested I can increase the order. He’ll fill a ten-gallon drum for twenty dollars, but you’ll have to pick it up at the docks, and only on Sunday afternoon.”
A strange idea came into Art’s head—that Gunther ‘s high collar was intended to hide gill slits. Time to move on, he thought, and he excused himself cheerfully and wandered over to where a woman who must be Krystal talked to an older woman, perhaps in her seventies. “I’m Art Johnson,” he said, introducing himself to his hostess. “We spoke on the telephone.”
“It’s nice to see you, Art. Let me introduce you to Mrs. Selma Vallerian. She was deeply involved in the search for Dr. Halsey.”
Art smiled and nodded, wishing he knew whether Dr. Halsey had been found or if the search was still underway.
“Dr. Halsey, of course, was related to Admiral Halsey,” Krystal said, perhaps sensing that Art hadn’t connected with any of this.
A snatch of song came into his head. “The Admiral Halsey who notified Pete?” he asked brightly. She looked at him blankly. “That song by Paul McCartney,” he said. He decided against singing it when he saw that Krystal was nodding at him in much the same way that a few moments ago he had been nodding at Roderick Gunther about the idea of drinking ocean water. She slipped away then, leaving him with Mrs. Vallerian.
“And what brings you here?” Mrs. Vallerian asked him. She had wispy blue-gray hair and was very small and laden with primitive jewelry. She had such an open and natural smile that Art immediately liked her. At last he had an opportunity to talk about himself.
“I had a few … experiences. Psychic experiences, I guess you’d say, and I guess I needed to find people who …”
“Understood,” she said, nodding seriously. “That’s a basic human need, as fundamental as food and sex. Tell me about what happened.”
He told her happily, without any of the lightheartedness that he had affected in the past, even with Beth, in an effort to lighten things up when in fact they weren’t especially light. But no one would say he was crazy here. He was free to speak his mind. “It’s the phone calls that bother me,” he said at last.
“Of course. They can’t be coincidence. That word is the world’s great shield, you know. People wear it as a mask, in order to appear very rational, but there’s nothing rational about it, because it’s merely denial.”
“That’s exactly my way of looking at it,” Art said.
“But what we want is validation. We sensitives see things clearly, and yet here we are, finding comfort in each other’s company, because there’s no comfort in the world.”
“I’d kind of like to know what the whole thing means,” Art said.
“It means that you’re special. That you have a special insight. Our culture should honor and cherish it. In past cultures we would have been revered as shamans and mystics.”
“Yes, but what’s it an insight into? I feel like I need to get a grasp of it somehow. What good is it being a shaman if you don’t have a clue? With me it’s all … possums, if you know what I mean, wrong numbers.” Art wondered suddenly what he did mean. Had he come here for some sort of personal validation? Did Mrs. Vallerian see right into his heart? It struck him that he had come partly out of fear, too. “I’m a little scared by it,” he said, coming clean.
“Of course you are. You see the problem, don’t you? You’re taught to be frightened by it. A person is trained to disbelieve. No ghosts, you know. No alien visitations, no out-of-body experiences, no psychic phenomena. Then it turns out that there’s something in you that’s … sensitive. Something happens to you to shake your disbelief. And instead of cherishing that sensitivity, it merely frightens you, like the boogie man. But there are no boogie men here.” She gestured at the room, taking it all in, and Art glanced around in response. He saw that Krystal had taken out a Tarot deck and was giving a reading to Cassandra, the blonde woman, who was openly weeping.
He nodded at Mrs. Vallerian, considering her insights uneasily: he was sensitive and frightened, like a child just coming to know the world. Looking for validation, he had found these fellow travelers, this haven that was free of boogie men. He was among friends—lots of them, too, if you counted up their past lives. Gunther glided passed just then, heading toward the teapots, goggling at him pleasantly. “What’s the meaning of the paper clips in Roderick’s shoe?” he asked Mrs. Vallerian.
“It’s a grounding,” she said. “He’s really quite expert in magnetization and grounding mechanisms. He helped a friend of mine, in fact, who had excess energy in her joints. It was marvelous. He made her a tiara of copper washers.”
Art was suddenly deflated. He wanted a theory if he couldn’t have an outright answer—something consistent, something that added up.
He thought suddenly about Nina, and he looked at his watch. It was nearly eight, and she’d already be in bed. It was his night to read the bedtime story, although Beth had been covering for him and of course would fill in for him again tonight. Nina’s favorite book was something called Wacky Wednesday, a story about a day when everything went haywire—birds wearing shoes, turtles climbing trees, headless people going nonchalantly about their business, airplanes flying backward. She was perpetually fascinated by the book, marveling at the oddball illustrations, wishing she could wake up to wacky things.
“Would you like a reading?” Mrs. Vallerian asked him.
“Pardon me?” He realized that he had been far away—three miles, as the crow flew, but almost infinitely distant by any other measure.
She nodded in the direction of the kitchen, and he saw that Krystal was holding the Tarot deck up, as if to offer him another avenue toward enlightenment. Art shook his head at her. “I don’t think so,” he said to Mrs. Vallerian. “I just noticed how late it is. I want to thank you for hearing me out, though. You don’t know how much you’ve helped.”
“I hope we’ll see you here again,” she said to him, and he shook her hand before moving toward the fortune-telling table to thank Krystal, who was already manipulating the deck, drawing cards for a grizzled old gentleman in suspenders who wore a ratty T-shirt that read, “I crapped out in Las Vegas.”
Roderick Gunther had disappeared, which was disappointing, because Art would have liked to have said goodbye to the man. Their planets had momentarily converged, but they were spinning away again on celestial tradewinds. Art left, closing the door softly behind him, going out into a clear and starry night. In five minutes he was home, where he slipped into Nina’s room.
“Read me one,” Nina said, still awake.
“What one?” He switched on the bedside lamp.
“You know,” she said, smiling at him.
* * * *
The country park was abandoned on weekday afternoons, which was good, because no one would have picked up the feathers dropped by wandering peacocks. They found three big tail feathers behind the zoo, in the high oak-shaded grass. There was a big speckled brown feather, too, the size of a quill pen, from a female peacock probably, and then at the far end of the park, deep in the sycamore grove across Santiago Creek, they found what must have been a wing feather from a big raven.
As they searched, there was a rustling in the treetops and a rush of wings, and Art looked up to see a big hawk swoop down, its talons extended, and snatch up a ground squirrel that ran along through a clearing. Clutching the animal, the hawk beat its wings, trying to gain altitude, and after a moment it soared straight up through the branches and disappeared. Art looked down at Nina, who was busy watching a passing parade of ants. She hadn’t seen the hawk, thank God. There’d be time enough for that in the years to come.
They hiked back up to the zoo and paid their dollar to get in, watching the keepers feed enormous pigs whole heads of iceberg lettuce, which the pigs rolled around the barnyard with their snouts in complicated and unfathomable patterns before tiring of it finally and tearing into the lettuce, eating, literally, like pigs.
“What are they playing?” Nina asked, climbing up to the second rung of the corral fence.
“Wackyball,” Art told her. “Only pigs know the rules.”
“Wackyball,” Nina said. “You’re wacky, I think.”