But I knew. I knew with absolute certainty what this woman was thinking. And for some reason I found this deeply upsetting, as if I’d just become an outsider to the normal rules of human behavior.
I’m also quite aware that another man might have taken immediate advantage of the situation. And why not? I knew she was willing; I found her attractive enough. Even if she affected a lack of interest, I could see-or “hear”-through it, knowing just what to say and when to say it. The power was enormous.
Well, I’m no more virtuous than any man. It’s just that I was in love with Molly.
And it was at that point that I realized that my relationship with Molly could never be quite the same.
The Boston Public Library was not too busy at this time of the early evening, and I was able to get the pile of books I’d ordered within twenty minutes.
The literature on extrasensory perception is actually quite extensive. A number of books had (reasonably) sober-sounding titles like Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain and The Scientific Basis of Telepathy. Some, on the other hand, had such unpromising titles as Develop Your Mind Potential! or Anyone Can Have ESP; those I discarded after the briefest scan. Some of the serious-seeming ones turned out, after a few minutes of reading, to be not so serious after all-they’d dressed up a lot of speculation and the slimmest evidence in pages full of statistics and learned references. Finally I was down to three volumes that seemed to hold out hope: Psi (which turned out to be a jargon abbreviation of “psychic”), Recent Findings in Parapsychological Phenomena, and The Frontier of the Mind.
I felt a little strange looking through these books, speculative as they were. It was a bit like a migraine sufferer poring over volumes that hypothesized that there just might possibly be such a thing as a migraine headache. I wanted to shout out to the library’s hushed, cavernous interior: “It’s not goddamn theoretical! I have it!”
Instead, I plowed through the studies. Apparently, amid all the quacks and the loonies there were a number of credentialed, credible scholars who believed that certain human beings possessed the ability to read minds in one way or another. Among them were a few Nobel laureates and some prominent researchers at Duke, UCLA, Princeton, Stanford, Oxford, the University of Freiburg in Germany. They studied such subspecialties as “psychometry” and “psychokinesis.” Mostly these scientists had attained recognition in more traditional fields of research and drew little or no serious attention for their work in parapsychology, despite the occasional article in respected science journals like Britain’s Nature.
What it seemed to come down to was this: perhaps a quarter of all human beings, at one time or another, experience some form of telepathy. Most of us, however, refuse to allow ourselves to accept it. I read a number of accounts that seemed plausible. A woman is dining with friends in New York City and suddenly feels certain that her father has died. She rushes to the phone-and the father, indeed, died of heart failure in a hospital at the moment she felt it. A college student feels a sudden, unexplained urge to call home, and learns that his younger brother has been in a terrible car accident. Most often, I learned, people receive “signals” or “feelings” while asleep and/or dreaming, because it is at those times that we are least hindered by our skepticism.
But none of this really applied to what had happened to me. I wasn’t experiencing “feelings” or “signals” or “urges.” I was “hearing”-there’s no other word for it-the thoughts of others. Yet not at a distance. In fact, more than a few feet away, I could not “hear” a thing. Which meant that I was receiving some sort of transmissible signal from the human brain. Nothing in these books dealt with that.
Until I came across an intriguing chapter in The Frontier of the Mind. The author was discussing the use of psychics by various police forces throughout the United States, and by the Pentagon during a search for MIAs in Vietnam. There was a reference to the Pentagon’s use of a psychic in January 1982, in a hunt for General Dozier, who had been kidnapped by the Red Brigades in Italy.
And then I spotted a reference to a 1980 article in the U.S. Army’s house journal. Military Review, on “the new mental battlefield.” It discussed the “great potential” of “the use of telepathic hypnosis” in warfare-psychic warfare, the article called it! There was a mention of Soviet “psychotronic” weapons-the use of parapsychology to sink U.S. nuclear submarines-and of the National Security Agency’s use of a psychic to crack codes.
The book continued on to discuss a rumored “psychic task force” in the basement of the Pentagon, maintained under the highest of security and headed by an assistant chief of staff for intelligence.
And then, on the next page, I came across a reference to a top secret CIA project involving the intelligence possibilities of extrasensory perception.
The project, according to this account, was terminated in 1977 by the new Director of Central Intelligence, Admiral Stansfield Turner. At least, the author speculated, it was terminated officially. Very little was known about the project, the author said, except one name associated with it, obtained from a renegade CIA officer. It was the name of the project’s director.
The name was Charles Rossi.
Deeply anxious now and disoriented, I needed to get some exercise, to clear my head and think rationally.
For a couple of years now I have belonged to an athletic club on Boylston Street that I like mostly for its proximity both to work and to home. Its clientele is a real mix, lawyers and businessmen, salesmen and midlevel executives, real jocks, and so on; the gym facilities are top-notch. I could never prevail upon Molly to work out with me. She was of the opinion that we all have a finite number of heartbeats, and she didn’t want to waste hers on some Nautilus machine. And she called herself a physician.
I changed out of my work clothes and into a pair of shorts and a T-shirt, and worked out on the rowing machine for twenty minutes, thinking all the while about what I had read at the library.
In the strictest sense I was not reading the thoughts of others, I’d concluded. I was able to receive the low-frequency brain waves generated by one single part of the brain, the speech center in the cortex. In other words, I was hearing words and phrases as they were converted from abstract thoughts and ideas into words, as they were given form in speech, preparatory to their being uttered aloud. Apparently, if my theory was right, when certain thoughts occur to us with the right force or passion or emotion, we prearticulate them-ready them for speaking, even if we will never speak the words. And it is at those moments that the brain gives off signals perceptible to-well, to me.
If only I knew more about how the brain functioned! But I could scarcely risk consulting a neurologist at this point: no one could be trusted, really, to keep my condition a secret.
All of this was going through my mind as I got off the rowing machine, my gray T-shirt already stained dark with sweat, and got on the Stairmaster. This particular torture device requires you to pump up and down on a set of pedals while grasping on to a handlebar, all the while standing vertical, while a bright red computer display keeps track of your pain.