He took a desk a little behind the girl in the olive dress so he could watch her. He assumed she was here because of the same newspaper advertisement that had drawn him to campus:
RESEARCH SUBJECTS NEEDED FOR STUDY OF PSYCHIC PHENOMENA
Then in smaller type:
$5 HONORARIUM FOR INTAKE SURVEY, $20 PER DAY FOR THOSE CHOSEN FOR LONG-TERM STUDY. CENTER FOR ADVANCED COGNITIVE SCIENCE, UNIV. OF CHICAGO.
He figured the study was the usual academic foolishness, preying on the two types of people who’d answer such an ad: the desperate and the deluded. Those four yahoos in shirtsleeves and dungarees, laughing as they hunched over their desks, egging each other on? Desperate for the dough. That mole-faced student in the cheap suit, knee bouncing, all greasy hair and thick glasses: deluded into thinking he was special. The black kid in the shirt, tie, and Sunday shoes: desperate. And the old married couple helping each other fill out the paperwork? Both.
Teddy was here for the cash. But what about the girl? What was her story?
Teddy kept checking on her while he filled out his paperwork. The first few forms asked for demographic information, some of which he made up. It only got interesting a few pages in, when they started asking true-false questions like “I sometimes know what people are going to say before they say it.” And “Watches and electrical devices sometimes stop working in my presence,” which was followed twenty items later by “Watches and electrical devices that were broken sometimes start working in my presence.” Pure silliness. He finished quickly, then carried his clipboard to the front of the room and handed it to the red-wigged secretary.
“Is that it?” he asked.
“The five-dollar check will be mailed to the address you put on the form,” she said.
“No, I mean, the rest of the study? What happens after this?”
“Oh, you’ll be contacted if you’re one of the ones chosen.”
He smiled. “Oh, I think they’re going to want to talk to me.”
“That’s up to Dr. Eldon.”
“Who’s he?”
She seemed a little put out by this. “This is his project.”
“Oh! Wait, is he a big guy, kinda heavy, with Einstein hair and big square glasses?”
A hit. A palpable hit. “Have you already met with the doctor?” she asked.
“No, no. It’s just…well, when I was filling out the forms I kept getting this image. Somebody who was really interested in what was happening here today. It kept popping up, so I started doodling. May I?” He held out his hand for the clipboard he’d just given her. He flipped back a few pages. “Is that him?”
Teddy was no artist, but he could cartoon well enough for his purposes. In fact, it helped if you weren’t too good, too accurate. What he’d drawn was little more than a circle to suggest a fat face, a couple of squares for the glasses, and a wild scribble of hair above.
The receptionist gave him the look he liked to get, confusion taking the slow elevator to amazement.
He lowered his voice. “And the weird thing is? I kept picturing me in a meeting with him. Him, me, and that girl—” He nodded toward the girl in the olive dress with the black hair and the blue eyes. “All of us sitting around a table, smiling.”
“Oh,” the receptionist said.
“This is why I need to be in this study,” he said earnestly. “This kinda thing happens to me all the time.”
He didn’t mention that this kind of thing happened usually in bars, when there were a few bucks on the line. Fleecing fivers out of drunks was easy, but no way to earn a living. It was time to upgrade his act.
When he saw that ad in the Sun-Times, he realized that his first step should be to get certified as the real thing by real scientists. He made sure to do his homework before he showed up: a visit to the U of C library; a few questions about the Center for Advanced Cognitive Science; a quick flip through the faculty directory to see a picture of Dr. Horace Eldon; and voilà. One soon-to-be psychic flash, complete with doodle. The last bit, adding the girl into his precognitive vision, was a late improvisation.
He left the classroom without saying another word to the girl. Yet he knew, with an unexplainable certainty, that they’d meet again.
Graciella was a woman ready to talk. While their coffees steamed in front of them he asked many questions, and she answered at length, which seemed to surprise her; he got the impression of a tightly wound woman, normally guarded, who was playing hooky from her internal truant officer.
She was, as he’d guessed, a stay-at-home mom—or, given the size of some of the homes in Oak Brook, the suburb where she lived, a stay-at-mansion mom—whose primary duty was to arrange the lives of three school-age sons, including the problematic Julian. Her days were entirely set by their needs: travel soccer, math tutoring, tae kwon do.
“Sounds stressful,” he said. “To do that alone.”
“You get used to it,” she said, ignoring the obvious question. “I’m the rock.” She still had not mentioned her husband. “But why am I telling you all this? I must be boring you.”
“I assure you, you’re the furthest thing from boring in months.”
“Tell me about you,” she said decisively. “Where do you come from, Teddy? Do you live near here?”
“Just up the road, my dear. In Elmhurst.”
She asked him about his family, and he told her of his grown children, without mentioning grandchildren. “Only three, two boys and a girl. My wife was Irish Catholic. If she’d lived, we’d probably have had a dozen, easy.”
“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,” Graciella said.
“She was the love of my life. She passed when the kids were young, and I raised ’em on my own.”
“That was probably unusual at the time,” she said.
She made it sound like it was so long ago. And he supposed it was, though he didn’t want her to dwell on their age gap; where was the fun in that? “Difficult, sure, very difficult,” he said. “But you do what you have to do.”
She nodded thoughtfully. He’d learned not to rush to fill the silence. He saw her notice the Rolex on his wrist, but instead of commenting on that, she said, “I like your hat.”
He’d set it on the edge of the table. He’d been absentmindedly stroking the crown as they spoke. “It’s a Borsalino,” he said. “The finest maker of—”
“Oh, I know Borsalino.”
“Of course you do,” he said, with pleasure. “Of course you do.”
“So,” she said. Finally getting to it. “Do something psychic.”
“It’s not something that you can flip on like a switch,” he said. “Some days it comes easily for me, easy as pie. Other days…”
She raised her eyebrow, egging him on again. She could do a lot with an eyebrow.
He pursed his lips, then nodded as if coming to a decision. He plucked a napkin from the dispenser on the table and tore it into three pieces.
“I want you to write three things you want for your family.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just two words, two words on each piece, something like ‘more money.’ Call them wishes.” He doubted she’d wish for money. That was clearly not her problem. She opened her purse to look for a pen and he handed her the one he kept in his jacket pocket. “Take your time, take your time. Write forcefully, in all caps—put some emotion into it. This is important.”
Graciella bit her lip and stared at the first slip. He liked that she was taking it seriously. Taking him seriously. When she began to write, he turned in his seat and looked out across the empty plastic booths. It was afternoon, the dead zone.