Travels (31 page)

So where had she gotten the information?

I could think of two possibilities. One was that she had been informed. I had made my appointment by phone under a different name, but when I walked in the building, I might conceivably have been recognized by someone at the desk, and this person might have somehow told the woman who I was, that I had something to do with movies. There wasn’t any phone in the psychic’s room that I could see, but you never knew. Being informed would explain everything.

The other possibility was that she was psychic, and the phenomenon was real.

I returned to the Spiritualist Association a couple of days later. This time I saw a small, precise man with a snippy manner. He held out his hand, snapped his fingers, and said, “Well? Give me something.”

“Like what?”

“Your watch will do.”

I gave him my watch.

“Don’t worry, I’ll give it back. Sit down over there.”

He held the watch in his hand, rubbed it between his fingers, toyed with it. He sat in a rocking chair. I was starting to get a headache. I didn’t like being around him.

“Do you believe in spiritualism?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“Was your grandfather a soldier?”

“I don’t know.”

“I see, you’re one of those who say the same thing all the time, are you? Don’t want to give me any help, is that it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. I was following my plan, but it seemed stupid.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Please yourself. I see your grandfather riding on a horse; he looks like a soldier. I see your grandfather working with stone. I see chips of stone on the ground; he works with stone.”

My grandfather died in the army, in the influenza epidemic of 1919, before my father was born. My grandfather had worked as a gravestone cutter. I had seen photographs.

“Your father is dead,” the psychic said. “Recently passed over?”

My father had died eight months before. “Yes,” I said.

“He’s all right. Your mother is grieving too much. You should tell her that your father is all right and he wants her to stop grieving so much. Will you tell your mother that?”

“Yes.” Thinking, Oh brother, sure. I’m going to call my mother up and say, Some obnoxious little creep held my watch and said that Dad is on the Other Side and everything is fine, Mom. Sure I am.

And also thinking this was a stock situation. Once this guy had guessed that my father had recently died, then he could say, without much fear of contradiction, that my mother was grieving too much and that I should tell her Dad was okay. It was a stock situation and it didn’t mean anything.

The man rubbed the watch in his hands.

“Your father did some good things and some bad things.”

Another stock comment. Applicable to any dead person. I was unimpressed.

“Your father feels bad about what he did to you.”

I said nothing.

“Your father did the best he could with you, but you see, he had no father of his own to teach him.”

That was true. And not easy to guess.

“Your father didn’t know how to behave around you, and you of
course intimidated him. So you and he had difficulties. But he knows he injured you, and now he feels bad about it. He wants you to know that. He wants to help you now.”

I said nothing.

“Often at night you walk in the city. At those times your father is close to you, and he wishes to help you.”

In London, I had been seeing a woman who lived near my hotel. I would often walk home at night, enjoying the cool air and the light London fog, and during those times I would think of my father.

“I get that your sister is a lawyer,” he said suddenly. “But she is American. Why is she in England?”

My sister and her husband were at that moment on vacation in England. Somewhere—I hadn’t seen them yet, and wouldn’t until they arrived in London at the end of the month.

And so it went, for the rest of the hour. The little man might be annoying, but he was pretty accurate.

I was back a couple of days later. I saw a middle-aged woman who wore a Scottish tweed suit and who looked like a tall version of Miss Marple. In tones of great authority, she informed me that I was from Malta, that I was an only child, and that I was in a business that had to do with food or restaurants and I had better watch out, because I was being cheated.

I left stunned. This woman had been entirely wrong. It had seemed that by chance alone she would stumble onto something about me that was true. But this reading had been wrong in every detail.

Because I was directing a movie, I had a car and a driver. My driver, John King, became interested in why I was going so often to this association.

“What is it they do there exactly, Michael?”

“Well, they have people who do readings, psychic readings.”

“They tell you the future?”

“Sometimes. Or sometimes they just tell about you, what kind of person you are.”

“You don’t already know what kind of person you are?” John had this practical side.

“Well, it’s interesting if someone who doesn’t know you tells you.”

“And they’re right?”

“Usually, yes.”

John was silent for a while. Then he said, “You believe a person can tell the future?”

“I think something is happening here,” I said.

That was as far as I had gotten at that point. It would have been absurd to insist that all of my readings could be explained in some ordinary way. One psychic had told me the names of my friends in California. Another had described my house and the modifications I had made to it. A third had recalled a traumatic incident in the third grade when I had released Miss Fromkin’s pet canary and the bird had flown into the ceiling air vent and hadn’t come back for an hour.

A network of the most diligent informants couldn’t explain that one. Nor had I inadvertently conveyed the information to the psychic by any normal channel. I couldn’t have “leaked” anything about Miss Fromkin’s canary. I hadn’t even remembered the incident until I was reminded of it.

I was quite clear about all that. I was clear about what
hadn’t
happened.

But I was less clear about what
had
happened, and what it all meant. In particular, I was reluctant to jump from accepting these accurate depictions of my past to the idea that somebody could see the future. Seeing the future appeared quite a different proposition from seeing the past.

For one thing, we can all communicate the past. I can tell you about my life and you will know something about it. There’s nothing mysterious about this. The ability of somebody to do the same thing without speaking, the ability to “read my mind” without words, could be seen as merely a refinement of a pre-existing skill, just as a jet plane is a refinement of a biplane. I didn’t have any real problem with it, even though I didn’t understand how it was done.

On the other hand, I felt there were theoretical objections to seeing the future. Similar to the theoretical objections to traveling faster than the speed of light. I couldn’t really understand how it
might
be done, and that interfered with my ability to consider whether it was being done. After all, the past existed, in the sense that the past was a prior present, now retired. But the future did not yet exist. So how could it be perceived?

Anyway, I wasn’t sure how much future information I was actually getting. As far as I could tell, I was being told accurate information about the past and the present. Not much about the future.

These thoughts made me hesitant as I talked to John.

“What do you like about it,” John asked, “going to see these people?”

“Just … I don’t know. I’m interested.” That was the best explanation I could give. In a way, it still is.

Then, because he still looked puzzled, I said, “Tell you what. The next time I go, I’ll make an appointment for you, too.”

I came out from my next session to find him already in the car. He was pale and frightened.

“Cor, that bloke. Know what he said to me?”

“No. What?”

But John didn’t say. “How do they know those things, then?”

“What things?”

“Oh, I couldn’t believe it, how he knew those things. Gives me shivers up and down me spine.”

“What did he say, John?”

“Oh. Well. I don’t mind telling you, I didn’t care for that. Never going back there, I don’t mind telling you.”

He would only talk about his responses to the experience, not the experience itself.

“I don’t know why you like it,” he said later. “I don’t know why you like going there.”

“I don’t know why you don’t,” I said.

I couldn’t work out his reaction. I could understand skepticism, or indifference. But fear?

Days later he gave me a clue. We were driving out to the studio and he said, “To tell the truth, I don’t want to know that much about myself. And I don’t want somebody
else
knowing.”

So that was the fear. A fear of exposure. A fear of invasion of privacy. A fear of secrets or weaknesses that will be discovered. A fear of what the future holds.

I could understand that. I remembered the first time I had ever seen an actual psychiatrist. He was the father of a girl I knew in college, and I was seated next to him at dinner. I didn’t want to open my mouth all night, because I thought, If I say
anything at all
he will see through me, and he will realize I am a shallow, sex-crazed, deeply disturbed fraud of a young man. So I kept my mouth shut.

After a while this psychiatrist said to me, “You’re very quiet.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

He asked me some questions about what I was studying in college, to draw me out. I answered tersely; I wouldn’t be drawn out.

Finally he said, “Do I make you nervous?”

“A little,” I said. And then I told him my fear, that he would be able to analyze me from my chance comments.

He laughed. “I’m off duty,” he said. “You learn to turn it off.”

But that wasn’t really satisfying. I guess he knew it, because he said, “You know, psychiatry isn’t all that powerful. If you don’t want me to know something, I doubt I’ll find out over a dinner conversation.”

That was more like it. I relaxed a little. And eventually we had a pleasant conversation.

But I still remembered the unreasoning fear of another person’s power, and the terrifying feeling of the unexplored psyche. Who knows what was in there? Better not look. Better not let anyone else look, either. You could be in for a nasty shock.

Fear wasn’t a problem for me any more, and in London I pursued my psychics enthusiastically. As time went on, I began to notice patterns in the way the psychics behaved.

For example, the psychics tended to circle around things. They were like blind people touching a statue on all sides, trying to figure out what it represented. They got bits and pieces of the whole. And they tended to repeat themselves. Just as if they were going around and around something, trying to feel it, to give their impressions.

I also noticed that they tended to speak as if they were translating. Trying to shift from one language, or one system of representation, to another. Sometimes this led them to speak very vaguely. A movie producer was “a person who is responsible for other people.” A film editor was “a person who is given things previously made that he assembles into a new whole.” A sabotaging secretary was “a person who thinks she is doing the right thing but who is angry and makes errors she is not aware she makes.”

At other times they seemed overconcrete. They wouldn’t say I was a writer; they’d say, “I see you surrounded by books.” They wouldn’t say I had a modern house; they’d say, “Your house is very open, with lots of glass and green trees outside.” And so on.

I also noticed there seemed to be a groove or a track they followed. They would be on the track for a while, and then they’d go off the track—abruptly becoming irrelevant, or just plain wrong. Once they started to make incorrect statements, I learned that they might remain incorrect for a while, until they got back on the track.

I tried to notice what was associated with their going off and coming back. It seemed that they went off whenever they paid too much attention to me. If they really looked at me, they might make some ordinary observation such as “You look very young” or “You’re very tall” or “You’re
not English, are you?” And then they would go off the track. So it seemed as if they had to ignore me to do a good reading. When they were most accurate, it was as if they were talking to themselves, behaving as if I weren’t even in the room. In this sense, what they were doing was the opposite of cold-reading techniques that required close scrutiny of the person before you. Here it seemed that close scrutiny caused errors.

Also, I noticed that psychic information was disorderly, an odd and sometimes irritating mixture of the significant and the trivial, as if everything counted the same. It was as if our usual procedures for weighting information were bypassed in psychic readings.

Finally, I noticed psychics seemed to have specific, reproducible areas of confusion. One had to do with similarities. They would confuse Colorado with Switzerland, or a beach with a desert, or medical books with law books. They were likely to confuse time—they were much more likely to get the season of the year correct than the year itself. They often got the order of things and the amounts of things wrong. It seemed that you couldn’t really expect psychics to be accurate about quantities and timing; they simply couldn’t do it.

The psychics I saw all appeared to be distinct personalities. They had little in common as people. But in the way they obtained and handled information, they seemed more alike.

This increased my conviction that there was indeed something going on, that these people had access to some information source that ordinary people did not. I didn’t know why they had access and the rest of us did not, but there didn’t seem to be any hocus-pocus about it. On the contrary, they seemed as a group to be remarkably straightforward. No séances. No phosphorescent ectoplasm. Just sit there while I give you my impressions.

Two of the psychics said that I was psychic. One said that I would be writing about the psychic world. I thought, Sure, sure.