To Feel Stuff (9 page)

“Excuse me, do you see how these are whiter than they should be?

Guy With Glasses stopped. From the way he looked at me, it seemed like it had been awhile since a girl had stopped him like this. I could tell he wanted to be helpful. He squinted at the fingers before him. “Yes, the tips of your fingers are discolored. I see it.”

I pulled back my hair and leaned forward. “Do my nose and my ears look like that?”

I was breathing lightly in his face and I knew we both were aware of it. “They do, kind of. They're also exceptionally white.”

I stepped back to give him some space and kneaded my fingers. “The tingling is starting to go away, but I don't think that's a very good sign. Now they're going numb. I can barely feel them.” Then I felt the tip of my nose. “This too. It's also going numb. What could this be?” I asked Guy With Glasses. It was a rhetorical question. I didn't really expect an answer from him.

Guy With Glasses didn't know what to do with his own hands, so he kept making small movements toward me with them. I felt like he wanted to touch me, but he could only do it if he came in at the right angle. “Do you want to sit down? Or maybe you want to eat something?” he asked.

For a split second I forgot my white, tingling problem. I asked him, “Do you have any guest credits left?”

Guy With Glasses shook his head, embarrassed. “My mom and dad insisted on eating at the Ratty when they were here for Parents' Weekend. They took all of mine. I'm sorry. Did you need one?”

“It's fine.” I waved the idea away with my right hand, and Guy With Glasses gaped.

“Your fingers are turning blue,” he said.

I flipped over my hand and checked. He was right. They were turning blue. “Is there a pay phone around here?”

Still weirded out, Guy With Glasses pointed over my shoulder to the phone near the bathrooms. “In back of you.”

“Thanks.”

I walked over and dialed 911. While it was ringing, I called out to Guy With Glasses, “My nose, is it blue now, too?”

The Journal of Parapsychology October 2004

 

Once Dr. Wainscott discharged E from the ER, she and I searched for a private place to talk. She didn't want anyone overhearing us—not even strangers, she said—and I wanted a quiet environment so that the recorder would pick up the inflections of her speech. The waiting room was packed with injured adults and crying children, and so we tried the hospital cafeteria. It was surprisingly crowded; a number of staff members and hospital visitors were eating early dinners, and I didn't like the acoustics in the room. The sounds of all the dishes and conversation around us might drown out E's voice.

E suggested that we go to my house. At first I was wary about crossing this doctor-patient boundary. Under normal circumstances, had a patient suggested having a private meeting in my living room, I would have refused. But E was the one who made the request, and because this signified a further display of trust on her part, I accepted her suggestion.

I pulled my car as close to the ambulance entrance as the hospital would allow, then wheeled E to the passenger door. It had begun to snow, so I placed my coat over her head. On the way to my house, I told E that it was crucial that we keep this entry into my private life quiet. I emphasized that this wasn't because our session at my house would be any different from our sessions at Health Services, but because the university was very nervous about this type of cloistered interaction between student and professor.

“Okay. Neither of us will say anything about this to anyone else,” E said. “Do you want to cross our hearts?”

I looked over to gauge her seriousness, and I was surprised to see her silently laughing at me.

When I opened the door to my house and ushered E in, I couldn't help but feel like I was bringing a date home for the first time. I was expectant and nervous, although not romantically. E flipped on the lights in the front hallway, as if she'd been there before, and proceeded into my living room, steadying herself by keeping a hand always pressed against the wall.

“Why all the orange and red?” E questioned.

My house is furnished and decorated mostly in shades of these colors.

“I asked the interior decorator to do the house in warm tones. I requested the feeling of ‘home.'”

“Oh,” E said. I wondered what she was thinking.

“Do you want anything to eat? To drink?”

E sat down on my couch, which, to give readers a mental image, is in the burnt orange family. “I'm really tired,” she told me, “so let's get started.”

In my notebook, I wrote: “This is how E is—one moment you feel as if you've finally encouraged her to crawl into your palm, and the next you're worried that she's in danger of slipping out.” I sat down in the club chair opposite the couch, placed the recorder on the coffee table, and asked E to tell me her family history.

Collapsing back against my pillows, she started with how her mother and father met.

Her mother, A, was an associate's guest at E's father's company Christmas party. She sat down next to E's father and told him that the peanut M&M he was about to eat was missing a peanut, and, when he bit into the candy and the shell caved in, he discovered that this was true.

I wanted to stop E right there, so I could verify she was one hundred percent serious about what I was hearing—that it was a prediction about an M&M that eventually led to her conception. However, I didn't stop her; there was always the fear that if I showed any signs of doubt, she would stop altogether.

“I have feelings about things” is what A told S, E's father.

A discussion followed, in which A revealed to S that she believed she had psychic and supernatural powers, and that this ability was carried through every generation of the women in the family. She also claimed that she was sure her first child was going to be a girl.

Then S apparently delivered the line that became famous in E's household throughout her adolescence. “I can't wait to leave my girlfriend that I feel nothing for and start dating you,” he told A.

“Do you know if your father experienced depression during that part of his life?” I asked E.

“Why?” she asked.

“I'm just wondering.”

She paused and then said, “Who are we to say?”

I didn't respond. After a few seconds, E told me more about her father's worldview. “No, I don't think it's depression, whatever depression is. I think it's that my mom is my dad's religion,” she said.

S, before meeting A, had been living with another woman, who was, from what he told E, someone who only thought about what was “placed in front of her.” He worked (and stills works) for a long-distance phone company where he devises new calling plans, and E suspected that he was almost desperate for some kind of momentous event in his life. His meeting with A appeared to have satisfied this need. He proposed to her within months.

I asked E to tell me some stories about the interactions between her parents, so I could better understand their dynamic. She said she had been especially affected by a version of a story that her father had told her in confidence, away from her mother.

One afternoon A had visited S at his office. She entered, out of breath, telling him, “I'm almost sure I saw the heel of a loafer go into the elevator as I turned the corner, but when I got inside it was empty. Guess there was a dead man in there with me.”

S shut the door to his office, concerned that his coworkers would overhear this.

S told E that he'd become slightly scared for A because the M&M-type visions had been coming less frequently. A would predict rain when the forecast was for sunshine, and the couple would wake up at sunrise to wait for the storm that “never came,” according to E. No worms were found in the apples that A thought would house them. E told me that her favorite failed prediction was the time that A thought that the new neighbors would be black, “and they weren't.”

Among these failed predictions were frequent false pregnancies. E knew of two signs that A had brought to S. Once, there had been a squashed baby sparrow on the couple's driveway; later, A had noticed that a worker was always replenishing the nonfat milk cartons when she happened to come down the dairy aisle at the market. Despite these harbingers, A continued to menstruate.

While E related these details to me, I bit the inside of my mouth to keep from making distracting expressions. She relayed all this information without emotion, as if she were speaking about the weather. The only time E revealed a deeper feeling about her mother's predictions was when she told me about the dairy aisle and began to roll her eyes. They flicked up toward her eyelids, but did not come back down for five seconds. Thus, she appeared as if she had only intended to stare at the ceiling.

I had to ask E, “Were you about to roll your eyes?”

“I was about to, but then I stopped.”

“Guilt?” I asked, trying to relate to her on a more sympathetic level.

“No,” E said. “I stopped because I've heard that if you do that with your eyes enough, they'll stay that way. And I know that's just an old wives' tale. But I've had so many things happen to me that weren't ever supposed to that I've decided to play it safe.”

I took this admission to heart, since it lay bare how fearful E had become of her own body's deviations, no matter how casually she tended to regard them.

We returned to that day at the office. S told E that he'd become worried for A, since every time her predictions failed her, she tried even harder to make bigger predictions with bigger payoffs. E felt that “he must have been worried, too, because I believe that he needed my mom to be right.”

At S's office, E's parents discussed the “ghost” heel that A had seen in the elevator, and, from what E could deduce, S had ended up believing her. Then A had announced, “But we can figure out why he's haunting the elevator later, because the reason I'm here is that I'm pregnant.”

“What did you see? What told you this?” S asked.

According to E, A's answer is also legendary: “A doctor.”

They could all laugh about it now, E said, but at the time, it was a significant and humbling admission for her mother.

E had been told the details of the day of her birth, when her parents had encountered a skeptical midwife. A had decided to have a home birth in an inflatable pool, which E described as having “clear walls with plastic fish in them.” She added that the family “still has the pool in the garage, which I think is nasty.”

The family lives in Arizona, where E was born. E describes the house as a low, sprawling one-story that attempts to marry the “indoors with the outdoors.”

E was told that the day of her birth was exceptionally hot, and while S and the midwife were in the kitchen getting ice cubes and cold water for A, the two had a quick discussion.

The midwife alluded to A as being “spaced out,” and S assumed that she was talking about A's state during the birthing process. When he suggested to the midwife that he believed this was to be expected, the midwife told S that she meant that A seemed “spaced out in general.”

The story in the family is that S almost fired her on the spot, except he did not want to leave A without medical assistance.

Soon after, A went into advanced labor, and E was born within the next hour. She came out head first, but her facial features were indistinct even after she was pulled out of the water.

When E told me that at first it appeared as if she'd been born without a face, I must admit I experienced a quick rush of exhilaration. Here was the real beginning, I felt, of everything that I needed to know about her. Here was the very first instance of abnormality, marking her the moment that she entered the world, pointing toward her later difficulties. “Your features were indistinguishable?” I echoed.

“I was born with a caul.”

A caul, for those unfamiliar with the term, is one of the two membranes that protects the fetus in the womb. It is also known as the amnion. Most infants rupture and lose their amnion during the delivery process, but a rare few are born with the veil of skin still covering their faces. There is much superstition surrounding children born with intact amnion, as the uncommonness of this occurrence paves the way for those with magical minds to believe that these children are superior and destined for greatness.

Parents who first see their infants with the caul often believe they have produced a deformed child. I asked E if she knew how her parents had reacted to their first sight of her.

“Yes, I know. They've each told me.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “We need to get this down for the study.”

S had told E that when he first saw her, he tried to convince himself that while it would be difficult to adjust to a daughter missing her eyes, nostrils, and mouth, he could do it. “When I was in sixth grade, he told me,” E said, “that when I came out, he began thinking he would just have to alter his perception. He said that he decided when he saw me that slugs and dishtowels had suddenly become the most beautiful things in the world. Because that's what I looked like.”

I asked E to describe her mother's reaction.

Apparently, A was thrilled not only about the caul, but also that she had given birth to a girl, as she had always believed she would. A is one of those magical thinkers I've referred to above, and she knew the implications of a child being born with an intact amnion. There had been other female relatives born with the caul, and A regarded her infant as the inheritor of a familial legacy.

The midwife made a comment about how children born with the caul are supposed never to drown and how she thought this was an amusing notion, considering that E was born in a wading pool. A corrected the midwife, alerting her to the more powerful connotation of the caul: this being that the infant was supposed to acquire the gift of second sight.