The Journal of Parapsychology October 2004
On May 27th, I was the neighborhood FedEx courier’s first delivery of the morning. Before I had even signed for the envelope, I was opening it and speed-reading the documents contained within. The EVP expert, Dr. Macrae, confirmed that the disruptions on the recording were the result of an outside force acting on the physical surface of the tape, and, as I suspected, were not the result of sounds laid down within the recording itself. Dr. Macrae went on to explain that he had seen this type of phenomenon before, where “spirits,” as he referred to them, “left a corporeal imprint on recording (both audio and visual) materials much like the living leave footprints in mud.”
Having thoroughly examined and documented the defects in the tape, Dr. Macrae concluded that they were too deliberately positioned to be coincidence. Moreover, it was his firm belief that E (and I never suspected that she had) could not have created the defects on the tape. These, he asserted, were identical to those effects produced when massive amounts of energy exert themselves upon a magnetic field, and could not be easily duplicated by human intervention. In fact, Dr. Macrae wrote that he was “pleasantly mystified that the recording device had not broken under the strain. It is truly strange that it did not.”
The “bad news” came toward the close of the papers. Dr. Macrae had been able to isolate the presence of the “spirit’s energy” within the defects, not the particulars of his conversation or identity. He concluded that the apparition had left no trace of his voice, thoughts, or emotions. Dr. Macrae even attempted to uncover a “track” underneath the defects, where perhaps the apparition’s energy had organized itself into an urgent thought. Sadly, there was no such track.
Thus, we had our first concretized proof of supernatural activity, but it did not move us any closer toward discovering who the apparition was.
I was startled when the phone rang just as I began tucking the papers back into their envelope. After reading in depth about the apparition’s imprint, I’d been left feeling as if he were in the room with me. For a split second, I believed that when I picked up the phone, I would hear an otherworldly cacophony—the apparition attempting to tell me the rest of his story.
There was a living person on the line, however. It was my old friend Dr. Wainscott, the same man who first told me about E.
He spoke. I listened. Before he’d finished, I was grabbing my car keys from the bowl in the entryway and running out the door. Later I would find out that I’d not hung up the phone, but left it on the floor.
Very uncharacteristically, I drove eighty miles per hour the entire way to Health Services. My speed only seemed to make the rest of the world move more slowly—the lights, other drivers, time itself. When I pulled up to Health Services I was giddy with anticipation, and I distinctly remember that I did not want to take the extra half second to lock my car doors. Not to place a spiritual bent on the moment, but material concerns did feel very irrelevant.
Because it was Saturday, the building’s front door was locked and I had to ring the bell. I rang it more than once. When Vivian appeared, she was exasperated, and gave one of her suspicious looks, which produced déjà vu within me. I flashed back to the first day that I’d met her in the infirmary and, unwittingly, insulted her observational abilities. On the doorstep, I experienced the uncanny sensation that my own life was repeating itself.
I jogged to the top of the stairs with Vivian trailing behind, still perplexed by my behavior, and when the desk came into view, so did E. She had the phone to her ear and was facing in the opposite direction.
“E!” I called, and she spun around and called back, “Mark! I was just calling you!” Her finger was still in the process of entering my number and she lifted the phone to show me.
Vivian, trusting E’s judgment and ability to fend for herself, announced that she had to go finish some work in the lab.
I placed my hands on E’s shoulders, unintentionally shaking her as a result of my own raw nerves. “Listen to me,” I said, “I have big news.”
“I have huge news,” E responded.
“Please, just listen to me,” I continued. “Please. Ten minutes ago I received a call from Wainscott. Yesterday a patient was checked into RIH, E.” I heard my voice ringing inside my head. I was heating tones that I rarely utilize. “There was a patient admitted to the psych ward, and then diagnosed with tetanus. Wainscott found out this morning. E—”
I wanted her to seize this moment with me. While her face remained jovial, she did not seem to be grasping the magnitude of what I was telling her.
“E,” I said, “the patient was recently discharged. And. He is. On his way over. To the infirmary.”
“No,” E said, shaking her head.
“Yes! Yes! It’s difficult to grasp at first, isn’t it? This changes everything!”
“No,” E repeated. “He’s not on his way over. He’s here.” I remember the bottom of my stomach dropping out, and then turning around to see what or who was at my back, suddenly taken by the feeling, once again, that I was being watched. “Where?” I asked, my voice now closer to a whisper.
E motioned to the closed door of the infirmary. "In there,” she said, sharing a look of astonishment with me. We stared at the closed door, barely able to ponder the answer contained within.
“But this means—” I said after two silent minutes had passed, looking back toward E.
E finished my thought. “This means that I haven’t been reliving someone else’s past.” Her eyes grew large, locked on mine. “I’ve been seeing my own future.”
We had been looking in the wrong direction.
Earlier that morning C had departed the infirmary, and from what I could infer, the parting had not been pleasant. E would not share much about it.
Once she was alone, E told me that she looked at the beds, all made up except hers. Then she lingered on the impression of her body that remained pressed into the mattress. “I am a candlestick,” she remembered thinking, “and that’s my box I go back into.” The realization that the room was hers again hit powerfully, and she claimed to have felt ownership reverting back to her. She said that she underwent a psychological transfer, becoming cognizant of every single property of the room as if she had been away on vacation and “only just came back.”
Overwhelmed, she walked out of the infirmary to take a brief respite before she reclaimed her space.
Passing Vivian, E remembers noticing the nurse filling out a new patient’s admissions forms, and she thought to herself, “Oh. Someone else.”
E followed the main hallway down to its end, then turned the corner. At the farthest examination room, she lowered herself against the locked door and rested on the floor. She was resolved to stay there until the hallway dimmed for evening.
She estimated that almost forty-five minutes later, the apparition came around the corner. Upon seeing her, he stopped and said, “Hey.”
“Come on,” she said, shaking her head. She felt her eyes brimming with tears.
“You? Right now?” she accused.
“Give me a break,” she begged.
It was this last sentence that struck E with recognition. She froze. They were repeating themselves.
“What’s wrong with me?” asked the “apparition.”
As E studied him, it became clear to her that he was no longer in ghostly form. As E put it, “It dawned on me that his head was blocking the wall behind him. It was a solid head.” E understood that she was face to face with a living, breathing human being.
For the past seven months, E had been communing with a character in her imminent life who had been waiting for her to catch up. This option had not even occurred to either of us, since we had been convinced that the young man was dead.
Why hadn’t we considered the option? After all, at E’s birth, A had proclaimed that she would possess foresight because of her caul. I can only hazard the guess that E, fearing the development of this ability, did her best to discount it, and I subconsciously followed her lead. Although she had never been happy about the prospect of being able to see ghosts, I believe having access to the past was a less threatening alternative for her. While she might be inconvenienced by the presence (and requests) of the dead, she could still take comfort in the slight separation between their lives. To put it most simply, the relationship would be of a therapeutic nature. E would have license, just as a professional therapist does, to separate the problems of the deceased from her own.
Second sight, however, brought with it not only greater responsibility, but greater confinement. I believe that, for E, the gift of the prophecy would mean a tight cocoon of repetition, in which she would be forced to know everything before it reached her. She would be, so to speak, a ghost inside her own future.
Once, A had told E that if she should ever come into her abilities, she would fall in love with how many mysteries there were in the world. However, what E had dreaded was the opposite. She feared that when she began to see what others couldn’t, there would be no mysteries left.
When she realized that the apparition was flesh and blood before her, E later reported, she had thought to herself, “My life is over.” She felt instantly devastated by a locked conception of the future and confessed that the idea of suicide had flashed through her mind.
But, just as E began to feel herself in total service to inevitability, there was one detail that snapped her back to the present.
She realized she had yet to answer the new patient.
E knew that during their last meeting, she had accused him of being dead and questioned him about how he had gotten that way. Now, however, the patient was clearly very much alive, which meant that her former comments no longer made sense. The context had altered.
With this discovery, E described herself as feeling adrift. This feeling is what suddenly filled her with, in her own words, “immense gratitude.” It occurred to E that no matter what she foresaw, she would never understand what her role was to be until the actual moment arrived.
Her abilities had left her a loophole: she was excised from her own visions. Within the next few months, E would confirm that this was true.
At the hallway desk, E held out her tape recorder and instructed me to listen.
I heard the patient ask, “What’s wrong with me?” I felt chills hearing his voice for the first time.
Then E responded. “Nothing’s wrong with you. Well, something’s wrong with you because you’re here in the infirmary. But here’s what’s wrong with me. I’m in the midst of a very bad time. My first love just left me this morning. It’s become obvious that I’m not leaving here anytime soon. Painfully obvious, meaning that I have much literal pain. It’s almost transfusion day again. Also, I’m under the inescapable impression that I have supernatural powers, can see the future, and knew you were coming.
“But beyond that, I don’t have much to say right now. So you talk. Even if you think I’m psychotic, please talk. I think I’ll be fine in awhile.”
E told me that the patient appeared completely unfazed by her speech, and he walked toward her, just as he had before. Once again, he paused about two feet from where she was and slumped down, his knees bent. He hung his long arms over them.
As he stared at her and she stared back at him, E noticed the subtleties in his expression. She saw an unusual acceptance of what she had just said. She saw amusement, but not “the negative kind.” She thought also that she could see a certain measure of patience.
“Please tell me a story,” E said. “Tell me why you’re in this hallway.” She wanted to hear it all again, wanted to experience it anew.
“The reason I’m here is probably supposed to be embarrassing,” the patient said, “but I don’t feel embarrassed about it. Are you easily offended?”
“No.”
E clicked off the recorder and looked up at me with the face of a child. “Can you believe it?” she asked. I told her no, and then I told her yes.
“He’s supposed to be testing in the dark because of his tetanus, so I finally got him to do that.” E and I walked toward the infirmary door. I felt boyish again, but I suppose that all personal breakthroughs hurtle us back toward our youths, to a time when we were just beginning to figure out the nature of things. Quietly, E placed her hand on the knob and turned.
From over her shoulder I peered into the dimmed infirmary. The shades were drawn, the room shapeless. When my eyes began to adjust to the dark, I could make out a figure lying in the third bed from the left. His features became more and more defined as more seconds passed, and soon I was looking at a face that I already knew from the artist’s rendering. My breath caught in my chest and felt too powerful for the cavity to hold it.
“I told him as much as I could,” E said about the new patient. He turned his head toward her, now aware that we’d entered the room. I was aware of the crackling of the pillowcase—of, as E had said, “a solid head.”
“Hey,” the patient said, smiling in the endearing manner that E had often described.
“It is remarkable to meet you,” I responded, letting the door go. I will confess my feeling upon entering that room. I am not proud of it, but it was jealousy. It was not romantic jealousy, as E and I were doctor and patient, nothing more. While I suspected that she and the patient were at the beginning of an intimate friendship, this was not what disturbed me. Instead, it was the jealousy that occurs when a secret, something shared, expands its borders to another person. E and I had been bound together under the same secret for such a long time that I could not help but feel a sense of loss when the source of that secret became independent, touchable, real outside of me.
Nonetheless, I battled my feeling and took a seat. That day, we occupied the first three beds, and we spoke until the darkness was so heavy that we could not make each other out anymore.