Clarity

by Myanne Shelley

Chapter 4

  I made my way downtown the following Wednesday, after a hasty early dinner. I’d been prepared to go a couple rounds with Doug when he got wind of where I was headed. But he was preoccupied – he’d brought home a stack of case files to review, and barely nodded when I said I had a New College sponsored talk to attend. Probably he was relieved to have the place to himself; I think he felt bad when he had to work in the evenings and tune me out while I moved around quietly, trying to stay out of his way.

  Early evening meant the streetcar was pleasantly uncrowded. I eyed my fellow riders over the edge of my newspaper, wondering idly if any of them were headed to the same event. A herd of loud young men boarded at Van Ness, and loomed over the seated passengers, all talking in a profane laden rush and shoving at each other.

  No one said anything, some people didn’t even looked up. One woman frowned and tucked her bag close under her arm. But I could tell at a glance that these were harmless kids. Though I wondered, suddenly, just what made me think that so quickly and without doubt. Were subconscious forces at work? I doubted it very much, and turned back to my paper, lest I be tempted to start dialing the psychic hotline with my newfound skills. I was just glad that Sam was beyond that age of public obnoxiousness.

  Downtown, I quickly found the place. It was in a rundown looking building at the cusp of where new redevelopment met the seedier environs of the bus station. I had managed to be early, so I walked purposefully around the block.

  Approaching a second time, I could see several people gathered inside and a couple more lined up by a paper sign in sheet. I joined them, attempting what I hoped was a nonchalant expression. I debated for a moment whether to put my real name. Feeling silly, I hedged my bets with sloppy handwriting. They wanted an email too, and I put down the yahoo one I used for public type transactions.

  A young woman beside me smiled as I handed her the pen. “Fake email?” she asked.

  “I thought about it,” I acknowledged sheepishly.

  “I haven’t been to one of these before,” she said. “But my friend has, and she said they just send you announcements once in awhile. New College stuff.”

  “I’m new to these events as well,” I told her while she scribbled down her information, glancing around the room to see that no one – so far anyway – was dressed up in fortune teller type gear.

  “Well, good, then I’m not the only one,” she said. “My name’s Kylie.”

  “Clarissa,” I said.

  “Ooh, pretty,” she exclaimed. “Did your mom like Virginia Woolf?”

  I smiled that she would get to that right away. “I think so. Oddly enough she wouldn’t say so directly. But I think she had the idea of giving her child a name that represented someone completely different from herself.”

  Kylie tilted her head slightly. “And?”

  “Didn’t work. I’m turning out to be more like her year after year, I’m afraid.” Except for the part about ESP, I cynically amended to myself. I walked with Kylie into the meeting room, and we seated ourselves on bright plastic chairs about half way toward the front. Other knots of people were sitting, chatting, and I was relieved not to be self-consciously alone. No one looked out of the ordinary, paranormal-wise, though several were demonstratively friendly.

  “Does she tell you how you shouldn’t make the same mistakes she did? My mom does that a lot.” Kylie shrugged off her light jacket and fluffed out her hair, which was a warm chestnut brown and wavy.

  “Oh, she’s been gone for some years now,” I answered gently. “These are just things I notice, little habits that I recognize. Although she tended to keep those sort of judgements to herself, that I recall.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Kylie whispered, dark eyes wide and locked to mine.

  “That’s okay.” I smiled to indicate this was all far behind me. But even as I did, an image of Yvette came to my mind, and I wondered if my eyes could fool her. There was, after all, a tiny part of me that missed my mother every time the word was casually mentioned.

  Kylie looked young, in her early 30s probably – in other words, not of an age where dead parents were the norm. She dressed young too, and she was slender without the appearance of caring about it. But something in those wide eyes was intriguing. She seemed to drink in everything around her, as if she could draw something interesting from each person in the room.

  The murmurs around the room hushed suddenly, as a trio of energetic young men seated themselves at the table up front. I watched people find chairs, some taking out laptop computers, others pulling out their ear buds. Was I the only one in the room not prepared to take notes like an erstwhile student? A woman seated a couple rows in front of me was even holding one of those little video recording devices.

  One of the men passed around handouts, as another introduced himself and spoke about the lecture series. I glanced down at the papers, glad to have something in my hand but hoping this wouldn’t be one of those PowerPoint things where they give you the whole text and then read it to you. Next to me, Kylie produced a stubby pencil from her backpack and started doodling little sketches of the speakers.

  The first fellow sat, smiling when introduced, but otherwise scanning the room with intelligent looking eyes. He gave a nod here and there, and I again had the impression that I was sitting with a sort of extended family, people both long acquainted and a little impatient with each other.

  One of the nod-ees ducked into a seat just in front of Kylie, whipped open a teensy notebook computer and began tapping furiously. He cast his eyes around the room for a moment. His gaze was hard, probing, although perhaps a little inappropriate for the setting, I thought. Maybe he was having a vision or reading our thoughts, my sarcastic inner voice murmured. I hushed it and turned my eyes to the front.

  The guest speaker looked young to have the number of degrees he apparently had, and not geeky enough to be an expert in brain chemistry. But when he spoke, beginning with a rather dull blow by blow analysis of the details of each nanosecond of the brain’s thought processes, I believed it.

  I had a rudimentary understanding of all this. I had picked up a fair amount of medical knowledge just by osmosis, working where I did. There were neurons, each with 1,000 synapses to other cells, information passing from the axon of the presynaptic neuron to the dendrites of the postsynaptic neuron. Recent discoveries pointed to the importance of glial cells, once thought to be just background matter. Regions of the brain controlled this and than function, the left and right sides and their different focus areas. Injured regions could be rerouted.

  Here, I tuned out a bit. Wished I didn’t have such familiarity with left and right capacities and the struggles to regain function. I skimmed the handout. The illustration of brain regions was detailed, and quite interesting. The last page had a list of news articles about paranormal instances. It looked interesting too, although quite a bit less factual.

  I glanced at over at Kylie. She had underlined a few key words on the pages, in addition to her little charactures. Now she sat flicking the pencil as she concentrated on the speakers words. Waiting, a bit impatiently, I guessed, for the paranormal stuff. Other people in the room were following along with varying degrees of intensity.

  But they all seemed to snap to attention when the speaker drew our attention to the page in the handout with the news articles. A little charge went around the room – and I’m not suggesting I was visited with any sort of other worldly perception here; a five year old child would have noticed it.

  “For all the certain knowledge we’ve developed about the chemistry of brain function, the things people think and perceive are much less easily measured,” the speaker continued. “Each of the stories summarized here was reported by a reputable source, and has some basis in fact.” He paused, gazing around the room, taking in the rapt expressions.

  “But what to make of them. A person can say what they believe has happene
d. A chain of events can occur with some of the pieces seemingly out of place. But it’s another thing entirely to imply that this proves precognition, as previously defined.

  “One of the most commonly reported circumstances involves mothers sensing that something has happened to their children. The first article referenced here reaches back to the Civil War. The local reporter there in,” he squinted at his notes, “Cumberland, Maryland obviously believed that the mother of the dead native son ‘fell ill with grief’ before the news of his death reached her.

  “But who’s to say whether this poor woman was taking to her bed regularly from the stress of both her sons being at war? And that this particular instance just happened to occur the afternoon he reached her with the news?”

  He continued in that vein for a bit. I could see people around me expressing their own silent skepticism. They had come for the stories of the paranormal, not the debunking of them. I recalled Della’s story about her brother, and her fainting at the same time as her mother did. How would he explain that one. Or had it just been a minor thing that had taken root and grown disproportionately in Della’s own memory?

  He then spoke about instances of so called mind reading, offering an interesting, if rather dense, overview of the way people learn to read facial expressions and even the ability some have to subconsciously pick up on things like breathing patterns and variations in skin tone. In essence, he was saying, certain abilities exist in all of us, and those who are particularly perceptive to start with might learn to hone their abilities. It wasn’t that little thought bubbles pop up above the other person’s head, it was more that a sensitive person could develop the ability to interpret tiny nuances in the face combined with physical manifestations of emotion. He delved into how sociopaths can sometimes fool lie detectors, and the implications of their chemical misalignment in normal people’s reading of their emotions.

  The readings of auras, as summarized in three different articles, he pretty much glossed over. Yes, a machine might pick up certain bio-chemical emanations from a human body (or from other living bodies, for that matter), and these might spike or recede. Technologic means could assign color or shape to these impulses, and the images might give the appearance of melting toward each other in proximity. I could hear murmurs, see nods. Even I was vaguely familiar with such photos, of silhouettes of couples kissing, bathed in vibrant yellow halos that flared up from the point of contact. But he pretty much dismissed the phenomena as lacking any sort of meaning. Any life form would react in similar ways, in close proximity to another.

  I wondered if a mini riot would occur at this observation, but the audience remained quiet. Polite and attentive, as we had been asked to be from the start. The speaker wrapped up. Hedging his bets, he allowed that nothing was certain and that new scientific revelations happened all the time. The host turned, clapping and nodding for the audience to clap, which we did, albeit tepidly.

  About half the audience zipped their hands up with questions. But instead, the host asked that we form groups of five or six, preferably with strangers, to go around and share one question and one observation each. One to be chosen by the group to share.

  It sounded juvenile. I thought about Sam’s school years, the endless time he spent learning in “teams,” the careful way each child was required to both talk and listen. How everybody got recognition or a prize of some sort, for even the tiniest accomplishment. Keith and I had been united in our annoyance for a good part of that world, I recalled, both of us wishing to instill in Sam that not everybody wins as well as the value of genuine achievements.

  So I just sat there as Kylie gathered a group around us, drawing in the intense man in front of us and a pair of young women sitting farther along his row.

  “I can go first,” Kylie said. “I came here with one main question in mind – whether I’m the only one who gets so affected by other people’s, I don’t know, moods, emotions. All my life people said I’m too sensitive. But sometimes I feel like I can pick up on what somebody else feels and it affects me. It’s not something I’m trying to do or be…” she trailed off. “I’m talking too much. But I guess that’s my question and observation both.”

  One of the young women nudged the other, and she spoke up softly, in that questioning tone of young people. “I’m, like, basically interested to know whether physic readings are all that accurate? Or maybe why they are? Because I went to this one in particular and she totally knew what I was talking about.”

  “She really helped,” the other woman said. “I went to her too, and it was pretty amazing. I don’t necessarily want to spend the money, but if it’ll help me make the best decisions?” she trailed off and they nodded at each other.

  “So you’re wondering if it’s worth the investment?” Kylie prompted. When they nodded, she turned to me.

  I swallowed. I wasn’t ready to share the history of my dream voices with all these people. But I said simply, “Both I and a friend I know who can’t be here have experienced unusual dreams or awareness, that could possibly be considered clairvoyant. I guess I’m looking for a scientific explanation more than anything.”

  Kylie nodded at me as if I’d confirmed her expectations. Which ones, I wondered, that I had so-called inknowing, or that I was cynical and disbelieving?

  The fifth in our team spoke up. “My name is Daniel. Actually, I’m doing research for an investigative piece about people’s possible extrasensory abilities. So I don’t have much in the way of personal experience. But I’m very interested in hearing about those of others. I guess my question is the opposite of yours,” he added, nodding at me. “I’m curious about the degree to which such phenomena reach beyond standard scientific explanations.”

  I imagine even the non-perceptive could read annoyance in my expression. Great, I’d just confessed the most bizarre thing about myself to a reporter. Daniel hastened to add that he planned an in-depth set of research, he didn’t even have a publisher yet, and would never quote someone without permission.

  When the room reconvened, Kylie, our little group’s leader, summarized my and Daniel’s question about whether there really were logical science based explanations for ESP, etc. I guess she’d already concluded that she was not alone.

  But the hour was nearly up. None of the questions, most a variety of ours, seeking explanations for things unusual, were really answered. It was more a repetition of here’s what we know, but we can’t necessarily explain what individuals say they perceive.

  I guessed that was an answer in itself, though. I came looking for a simple explanation for what had happened to me, but that was not to be.

  As I gathered my jacket and bag, though, it struck me that I felt something unexpected. A tickle of relief maybe, blended in there with the annoyance of unanswered questions. All those websites were right, I thought. We all do want to think we have special abilities.

  Kylie was blocking my pathway out, standing with her phone out. Daniel the reporter had his out too, and they were exchanging information. Sweet, I thought, though he was way too old for her. But he surprised me by apologizing again for not letting on about his research right away and asking if I would consider meeting him, maybe for lunch. Just to hear more about the experiences, for background, for his own better understanding, nothing more.

  Kylie gazed back at me for a moment while I hedged, just as I had signing in. “She’d be willing,” she told him, “if it’s all three of us. I’ll take your emails, and set it up. She doesn’t want to give out her number.”

  I nodded, amused that young Kylie, with whom I’d been acquainted for just over an hour, gave such an accurate summary of my state of mind. Sensitive indeed. Except that a fair portion of me didn’t want to pursue this any further at all. But that didn’t seem to be an option. I wrote down my email on Kylie’s handout; Daniel texted her. He seemed harmless enough, I thought, watching him earnestly observing the roo
m. He said nothing to the ditzy young women from our group, so he wasn’t just hitting on young women. Perhaps he was a regular on the psychic circuit, and we were the new recruits.

  “You know each other pretty well?” Daniel asked.

  “Me and Kylie? We just met,” I told him.

  He smiled, eyebrows raised a bit.

  “But I do that,” Kylie said. “That’s what I meant. I don’t know Clarissa, but I had a good idea of her reactions anyway. It’s not that weird, is it?”

  “I know you’re not the only one,” Daniel assured her. “But it is an interesting ability. Interesting to me to observe.”

  We said goodbye and I edged out the door, tired of people and despite my earlier intentions, not up for further networking. Kylie was clearly perceptive about people. It didn’t seem remarkable that she would understand my hesitancy in agreeing to lunch and giving out my phone number. She had seen me checking in, she probably knew other middle-aged women. Yet she spoke as if it clarity had come immediately, that such understanding was easy and familiar. Maybe it was just all a continuum. Just as my occasional sense of knowing something too soon might be.

  Doug was hard at work when I got home, tired but also a bit buzzy from having been out at night. Being around a large group like that tended to make me a little jittery. I knew already that despite my yawns, I’d have trouble sleeping.

  “I’m just about done,” he said, apologetically. I don’t know if he was apologizing to me or to himself, though – these were hours he wouldn’t be billing, extra work he had to do these days just to keep up. “How was your, um, evening?”

  It was pretty obvious he had forgotten where I’d gone. “Interesting,” I said lightly. “Glad I went.” I went into the kitchen while he turned back to his work. I didn’t want to disturb him.

  But as I moved around, finishing clean up from our dinner, I wondered if I wasn’t relieved by his disinterest. Where once I would have been eager to share what happened with him (or earlier, with Keith), now it seemed easier all around not to share something so personal.

  Another continuum, I thought. As a tiny child, nothing I did seemed even real until I had told my mother about it. By my teen years, I had switched allegiances to my friends, but the dynamic was the same: to fully have an experience, I needed to talk the whole thing out. This was modeling my mom’s behavior, it occurred to me. She and her endless conversations, earlier with her sister and later with Mags.

  My parent’s move from New Jersey to California was the biggest shake up of their lives. Well, of the part of it that I shared with them. I had been too young to see it as more than a vague adventure, but for unassuming, unadventurous people like themselves, it must have been an earth shattering event.

  They did it for my father’s job. Back in the 60s and 70s, the Bay Area was just becoming a center for the innovation and technological advances that would grow into Silicon Valley. My father’s work was not directly related, but he was a manager in the production side of things, and he was drawn out for the chance to earn more money as much as anything. Living in California – which to me, looking back, was by far the better benefit – was secondary to them.

  Anyway, we had come here, and settled in Pleasanton, back then a remote and safe seeming suburb. I had entered school, a bookish, but to my peers somewhat exotic girl from the east, and just by virtue of being new made a few fellow bookish friends. But my mom had floundered. We didn’t call it depressed back then, but I’m sure she had been. Not able to process her own difficulties in adjusting away from her friends and family back east.

  It was Mags who drew her out. Just by luck of the Henleys having moved to the same town, by the two of them meeting at some school function, then again at the grocery store. Ever after, I would see my mom on the phone with her, or often our families together, the kids having lemonade while the adults drank mixed drinks with odd sounding names, Mr. Henley wearing his wild barbecue apron and standing at the backyard grill. Always, the two ladies side by side, laughing as they shared the little details of their lives.

  And so I had confided in my friends, and later my lovers. Keith, before and after our wedding. And yet, as we had matured, as my time got further divvied between working and raising Sam and those quick get togethers I’d have with similarly busy women friends – it got so all the sharing became less important. As if I could guess their reactions and supportive praise in my head and needn’t bother having the actual conversations.

  When I had my miscarriage, only Keith knew. It had happened fairly early on, and fortunately we hadn’t told anyone about the pregnancy yet, though we were close to announcing it. But that experience had been real enough, breathtakingly real, without needing to discuss it or dwell on it. I might have talked it over with my mother, except that it happened only a few months after Dad had died. She had enough on her hands coping with her new life as a widow, trying to live independently, seeking a job at age 60.

  Huh, no premonition dreams on that one, it occurred to me. Just awakening in startling pain, cramped and feeling liquid gush as I ran to the toilet. Understanding what had happened even as Keith hovered outside the door, calling in suggestions and offering to drive me to the hospital.

  But I was losing track of my train of thought, and I shivered briefly, not wanting to recount that unpleasantness any further. The point was why I didn’t feel the need to talk over any of the evening’s events with Doug. I returned to the living room and we sat, as usual, our conversation intermittent and mild. I had kept a good deal to myself during our years together, to no ill effect to our relationship. We had interesting conversations, certainly, just not so many of the sort that I once had imagined having with a death-do-us-part mate.

  I had at least told Doug about the miscarriage early on. But only in the context of an early date, exchanging stories. His divorce and two daughters, my divorce and one of the reasons we had stopped with just one child. Nothing about the jab I used to feel every January 28, remembering that morning.

  Of course Doug himself was not the most receptive audience to such confidences and confessions. Look how he had reacted to me trying to explain the dream thing. I glanced over at him, sitting innocently, shrugging his shoulders out after an evening’s work and catching up on the sports page.

  He was a good man, a good husband in the ways that count. When I needed him, he was there, and he had at least learned to say the right, supportive things when the occasion called for it. (Another area where his first wife had painstakingly guided him.) But he also had a way of indicating his tolerance level, or his lack of interest in pursuing certain things. Especially where emotions or human frailties were concerned.

  In his work, he could be bitter and cynical about the foibles of everyday people who ran afoul of the law. He had complimented me, back when we were dating, on my lack of clingyness, as he called it, on being low maintenance. And Heather had more than once complained about him not listening, not appreciating her spiritual side. Both girls, really, sometimes seemed ever longing for a bigger piece of their father’s heart.

  But maybe I did need someone to talk to, it occurred to me. About the lecture, the people I had spoken to, the whole experience. It just wasn’t Doug. A mental image of Della appeared, talking about her husband, now dead. She had sought confirmation of her odd ability elsewhere. She told me she regretted not pursuing it further – she had kept it mostly buried and then lost her ability. Maybe I owed it to her, if not myself, to take this thing a few more steps, not brush it back away from my conscious mind, as I had those other times.

  I would explore the whole thing further with Della. I would go that lunch with the reporter and my young acquaintance Kylie – I would make a point of it and not find excuses to put the meeting off, as had occurred to me even while we were discussing it. And they knew other people. Maybe together we had a little network. No Ouija boards, I promised myself. But one day soo
n, another conversation where I could describe an unusual premonition, and the other person would get it, would have had them too.