Psychic City

by Page Turner

  Ms. Banks and her father focused more on Temple precepts than on one another, on feeling as little as possible, pleasant or unpleasant. It was all a form of unnecessary distraction from the purest essence of being, which as far as Karen could discern (having never mastered the art of Temple ritual herself) involved a state of completely thoughtless, emotionless meditation.

  Or at least this was what the Temple followers claimed.

  As a young empath, Karen had noted all too well the disparity between what they reported went on inside of them and what seemed to be happening. Practitioners who were bored, hungry, tired, or even lustful during their ritual meditations would tell her father afterwards how calm they were, how centered, how delightfully empty. These testimonies were lies, but they were ones her father happily believed.

  Karen learned through those sessions that there was a big difference between how people actually felt and how they wanted to feel – and in a wrestling match between the two, it was often the latter that won out. She’d note an absence of the remorse that people often felt with deception when the practitioners told falsehoods. This meant that they weren’t consciously lying – instead, they’d managed to engage in self-deception, to get themselves into the mental state where lies felt like the truth.

  It was based on these observations that Karen was first shipped off to the ranch. She’d come to her father in earnest, feeling as though he should know of his followers’ hypocrisy.

  Instead of thanking her for the intel, he’d become enraged, an intensity of emotion from a man who most of the time had the disposition of a buoy in calm seas. Bobbing slightly at times but never straying too far from a state of perfect equilibrium.

  “I’m just telling the truth. That’s how they really feel. They’re lying to you,” Karen said.

  Augustus scowled. “You’ve put me in a terrible place, I’ll have you know.”

  “I know,” Karen said. “And for that, I’m sorry.” But she had misunderstood what he meant by that, a fact that would soon become clear.

  “There are three possibilities here. And none of them are easy,” he said.

  “Three?” Karen asked.

  “The first is that you’re telling the truth, you can feel these other people’s emotions,” her father said.

  “That’s what it is. I’m telling the truth,” Karen interjected.

  “Don’t interrupt,” he said.

  Karen frowned.

  “I highly doubt that you’re telling the truth. But if you are, it’s bad news. Because that means that my only daughter is defective… a psychic.” He shuddered at this thought.

  Karen sighed.

  “The second possibility is that you’re lying to me and acting out in order to get more attention. Probably because you’re upset that your mother left. You’ve never really warmed to Sissy, you know,” Mr. Cross said. He sighed deeply, getting a faraway look in his eyes.

  “It’s only been a few months. I haven’t really gotten to know Celia,” Karen replied, after a few seconds.

  “Don’t interrupt,” her father said.

  Karen chewed on her lip, puzzled. Interrupting? It had certainly seemed to her like he had completed his thought, seeing as he managed to get carried away on another silent train of other ones before she began to speak. But Karen had noticed over the years that whether someone else felt interrupted was an entirely subjective phenomenon.

  Pauses in conversation were often ambiguous.

  Karen had noted that laidback people rarely seemed to complain of being interrupted, even when they clearly were. And control freaks constantly claimed they were being interrupted, even after quite luxurious pauses.

  The whole interruption issue seemed less based on clear-cut behavioral cues and more based on the subjective belief of a given speaker that they should still be in control of the discussion.

  But she didn’t tell her father that. Of course. Instead, she waited. And hoped he wouldn’t expect her to beg him to continue, as jaded interrupted people often did.

  (“What were you going to say?”

  “No, it’s too late now.”

  “Seriously, I want to hear what you have to say. I’m listening.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Okay, so – “)

  Karen knew that when an interruptee came to this particular emotional point, they would typically glower and brood until begged to resume sharing their previous thought.

  Mr. Cross did indulge in a bit of glowering and brooding on occasion but thankfully broke into the next phase of conversation this time without the need for supplication.

  “The third and final possibility,” he continued, “is that you’re emotionally lazy. You lack emotional control. Those feelings you thought you felt from my followers were always your own, and you’re simply projecting them onto others.”

  Karen sighed, not daring to speak, lest she be accused of interrupting yet again.

  “I’m inclined to believe it’s not the first possibility. Because I love you, and I’m not giving up on you. You’re not a psychic. You’re redeemable. My daughter is redeemable. You are a normal girl. You are,” he said, making intense eye contact that made her deeply uncomfortable.

  Karen felt panic from her father, the same sensation one gets when they’re being chased in a dream by some unseen force.

  In a moment, however, that panic in him switched over to his usual sense of calm – perhaps laced with a bit more self-righteousness than normal.

  “No, nothing’s fundamentally wrong with you. Something’s wrong with your behavior. Or your attitude. Probably both,” he said. “And I know just the thing to help.”

  It was that very day she was shipped off to the ranch.

  Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

  One Eighty Acres on its most basic level was a reform school for troubled teens. It was, however, also a reform school that was trying awfully hard to be a charming ranch.

  Residents were treated to a beautiful view as they drove down the long, dusty road that separated the ranch from the rest of civilization. In the distance, mountains loomed like sleeping gods. Conspicuously perfect prairie grass waved hello with each gust of breeze.

  Ornate windmills dotted the range, not the spartan windmills you find on public land installed to produce renewable energy but smaller decorative ones that would look completely natural as a whirligig thrust into someone’s front yard.

  Or perhaps as a weathervane, Karen mused on that first day, as her parents drove her there against her will.

  In any event, One Eighty was a contrived setting. Almost like a cowboy-themed amusement park that had been erected in the middle of the desert. One that claimed it could turn your child right around. Send them in the other direction. The good one.

  Karen seriously doubted that her new home for the next however long could simultaneously be Ranch World and an agent of revolutionary personality transformation. A workshop for mending “broken” young people like her.

  While her parents oohed and ahhed at this idyllic setting, it was instantly clear to Karen that everything at her new home was artificial. The farm. The brick façade on the dorm. The smiles on the instructors’ faces.

  From the very beginning, life at One Eighty was a nightmare. She found herself in the midst of a chaotic soup of emotions, hormones, anger, and attitude. She was surrounded on all sides by teenagers who were angrier than her and had extreme problems with their own emotional control.

  The very worst had been a younger boy with piercing blue eyes and bowl-cut black hair. A boy who thought he had all the answers but in fact had none of the patience to fully understand the questions.

  Karen had sworn his name was… Mike? Matt? Something like that. They’d lived together on that same ranch for three years. But like many things in her past, she’d managed
to forget about him.

  And then Ryan Roscoe had walked into his first day at PsyOps to a row of high fives, an eerie doppelganger of the little boy who had once tormented her, and it had all come flooding back to Karen with such a force she was almost knocked off her feet.

  It didn’t help that Roscoe generally rubbed her the wrong way. He had the same arrogant air as Mike-Matt. An eagerness to respond, a disdain for listening. They even had a similar walk.

  Something about Roscoe really bothered Karen. But she wasn’t sure exactly what. Is this just transference? She found herself wondering.

  Empathic Transference

  Transference was initially defined rather narrowly, as a process that simply occurred between therapist and patient. Transference emerged as a term for the phenomenon whereby a patient would project emotions associated with other past figures in their life (most prominently, people from their early childhood) onto their psychotherapist. In essence, a patient would begin to feel for their therapist and treat them as though they were another authority figure or valued person, for example, interacting with their therapist as though their therapist was their mother or father.

  Countertransference was a similar process but moving in the opposite direction – from therapist to patient. In response to patient transference, a therapist would respond emotionally to that transference with countertransference, perhaps guided by prominent figures in their own psyche. A client could just as easily become emotionally indistinguishable from their own children.

  As understanding of the field of transference has progressed and particularly as taxonomists have devoted more study to the dynamics of empaths and empathy, it’s become evident that transference and countertransference are much more ubiquitous in interpersonal relations than anyone previously knew. Transference is not simply something that happens in therapy – but something that happens everywhere.

  Beings of all stripes – whether intuitive or not – head into new acquaintanceships carrying the impressions of every other person they’ve known up until that time.

  However, due to the high degree of involuntary social connectivity that comes with automatically feeling the feelings of others and the consequent difficulty in forming normal emotional boundaries, empaths are particularly vulnerable to transference effects and plagued by them.

  In layman’s terms, it is nearly impossible to get a blank slate when meeting an empath. They have a strong impression of you before you even say a word. Emotionally speaking, they almost always begin your acquaintanceship by mixing you up with someone else.

  from Insecta Psychica: Towards an Intuitive Taxonomy by Cloche Macomber

  Where in certain ways living at the ranch felt very much like a prison sentence, it wasn’t all wasted time. After all, even when behind bars one can get ripped pumping iron or pursue a college degree. Similarly, Karen decided to spend her years living in the desert compound focusing on emotional control.

  It was a natural choice. Emotional control was part of the basic curriculum of the program her father had enrolled her in. Now, the classes weren’t intended to help psychic empaths improve their powers. In fact, the program was in general predisposed to extreme levels of psychophobia. But the syllabus invariably focused on the residents building up self-control, emotional intelligence, and other forms of social restraint.

  Karen took these lessons a step further and began to work on what she came to think of as emotional discernment. She wasn’t sure what else to call it, lacking any sort of empath in her life to guide her and unable to even talk of her psychic abilities without fear of retribution.

  Emotional discernment. It became the focus of her life, the activity that kept her sane.

  When Karen had first become aware of her empathic abilities, it had been deeply confusing. The emotions were in her brain, but they felt distant, foreign, muffled. A bit like the sounds of a person moving about in an adjacent room with moderately thick walls in the way.

  With time, she’d figured out how to better discern what exactly those feelings were, but her sense of them was still fuzzy, imprecise. At the ranch, she practiced homing in on more specific shades of the emotions of others. And she worked on becoming better at discerning between the feelings of multiple people. Got better at making sure she wasn’t rolling her own feelings up into her reads of other people.

  It wasn’t always easy. In the beginning especially, the feelings around her mixed together into one large cacophony of emotions. It was a bit like standing at a crowded cocktail party with her eyes closed, the many voices all sounding like nonsensical noise when heard at the same time. But with time and practice, she became rather adept at singling one feeling out from the rest, much the way a person can listen intently to one speaker in a crowd of voices if they are determined enough and pay the right kind of attention to the task.

  While she sat with peers talking about the day’s lesson – rewriting sender and receiver language – “I feel X when you do Y” instead of “You make me feel so X,” she’d nod as though she were deeply engaged but instead try to pinpoint exactly who in the room was super hungry. Who was sad. And who was bored.

  That last emotional state was pretty easy to find, boredom. During lectures, usually everyone there was at least a little bored.

  The hidden mission statement of the ranch seemed to be teaching all of them to tolerate boredom a little better.

  Most days even the teachers were a little bored.

  Everyone seemed to feel a little trapped there. While the teachers hadn’t been dragged there against their will per se, it wasn’t exactly a dream job. It was no one’s first choice to be there.

  One Eighty was a place they’d all simply ended up.

  It had been rare in the din of other people’s emotions for Karen to ever be able to let her mind drift, but the sheer amount of boredom at One Eighty made this occasionally possible.

  Because boredom, emotionally speaking, functioned almost as white noise. She could certainly sense it, as anyone else could hear static, but it didn’t exactly captivate her attention or provoke any emotional response.

  And it was on one such occasion, when everyone else in the room was bored, that Karen heard words that she was certain hadn’t been spoken aloud.

  “Emotions will time travel to pursue you.”

  She heard it quite clearly. Well, she sort of heard it and sort of saw it. The words jumped out to her as effortlessly as the headline in a newspaper.

  However, it came to her through a different channel than any other sense she had. It wasn’t her vision, her hearing, her empathic sense, touch, taste, smell.

  It was like thinking but not really. If thinking were writing, this was reading.

  Did I just think someone else’s thoughts? Karen wondered, looking around the room suspiciously, focusing on the emotions of all who surrounded her.

  But all she continued to sense was boredom. If she’d been sent some kind of message, the sender wasn’t in the room.

  “Emotions will time travel to pursue you.”

  Once she sensed those words, she found it impossible to stop thinking about them. Running them over and over in her head, inspecting them from every angle.

  Were they a warning? A threat? A form of reassurance?

  And where had they come from?

  If this was a telepathic message, then who in the world had sent it?

  It wasn’t until several days later that she’d have the answers to any of these questions.

  Emotion is a process, a particular kind of automatic appraisal influenced by our evolutionary and personal past, in which we sense that something important to our welfare is occurring, and a set of physiological changes and emotional behaviors begins to deal with the situation.

  Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed

  “Is she sleeping?”

  Karen heard the voice, but kept her eyes clo
sed.

  She’d found in her time at One Eighty that the best defense frequently involved deception. When another resident wanted to mess with her, the best way to prevent getting seriously hurt was to play dumb, not let on that she knew that there was a trap waiting for her.

  And when the attack came, she’d have her own element of surprise: The fact that she’d known the attack was coming all along.

  This voice wasn’t familiar. But the speaker surely could be up to no good. After all, why would someone be sneaking into her bedroom in the middle of the night if not to prank her?

  Karen wondered idly if they’d be trying to write on her face with a Sharpie or stick her hand in a glass of ice water to try to make her pee.

  Maybe they had come in looking to steal something from her.

  You never really knew with an intruder. Only that it wouldn’t be good.

  And that’s when it hit her. She couldn’t sense the intruder’s emotions. She felt nothing from them.

  Normally, a would-be prankster had a certain vibe emanating off them. Inevitably, they were some mixture of excited and nervous. Really, the only thing that usually changed was the ratios.

  But this time, Karen sensed nothing.

  Nothing?

  No, nothing. Not even white noise like boredom. It was as though no one at all were in the room with her.

  Karen opened her eyes.

  And before her stood not one but two of the strangest people she’d ever laid eyes on.

  “Ah, I guess not,” the voice said again. Karen noted that it belonged to a thin woman who had to be over six feet tall. Every angle on her body was sharp, kinked. It looked as though you cuddled with her that you’d end up drawing your own blood. She was the human equivalent of a red pen that slashes lines through a student paper.

  She stood bolt upright with her chin slightly lifted, just enough so that she could look down on the person she was viewing. Her face was drawn into a sharp scowl.