Skeptical? Try flummoxed. At sea in a dinghy without oars and no land in sight.
Flowers glances from one to the other of us, shrugs, and leans back in the arm chair, putting his hands behind his head. Phoebe goes to her desk, and I lean against the edge. I feel the corner poke into the flesh of my left buttock, but don’t change position. It’s a counterpart to the pain in my head. My arms cross my chest, and I feel the hard lump of my weapon.
Phoebe hands me a glass of water. “Do you want a chair, Audrey?”
“I’m good.” Standing, I can get a running start if I need to leave the room. “So. What is this?”
The man’s voice is pleasantly rumbly. “It’s difficult to know where to start. I’ll just blather, and you can jump in with questions, okay? I don’t claim to have any psychic powers myself, but I have worked with various members of the sensitive community who are struggling to integrate their abilities, so I know something about it.” He pauses for thought.
Shut up. A psychotherapist named Flowers? The ‘sensitive community?’ What the fuck?
What Zoe said. My confidence in Phoebe takes a deep dive.
Bernie clears his throat. “Most people have a mistaken idea of what psychics do and are. The ones I know are very low key. No one is sitting behind a crystal ball with big earrings and a pointy hat.” He rubs his jaw, glances at Phoebe, and adjusts the neck of his sweater. “So. There’s different kinds of ESP — extrasensory perception. It’s literally perception of things beyond our normal five senses, although what psychics ‘feel’ is translated through those sensory templates that we are familiar with. Clairvoyance, for instance, is visual in nature, images seen with the ‘inner eye’. Clairaudience is auditory, sounds perceived with the ‘inner ear.’ Am I making sense so far?”
Ye gods. “Well — I guess — I don’t really know.” My head is killing me, and I squirm against the edge of the desk. “Truthfully, I don’t believe in this stuff. No offense.” Except, what did I think the vision was, a complimentary movie from the gods? Like that was any more credible. The truth is, I simply hadn’t wanted to think about it.
The queen of denial.
I look over to Phoebe, raising my eyebrows in appeal. She shrugs and inclines her head toward Flowers.
He laughs and says, “You’re not offending me. It’s not an easy thing to assimilate. Like explaining color to someone who was born blind. Really, ESP is just a different way of perceiving the environment. For instance, I know a woman who can pick up information about another person by touching an object they have owned.”
Struggling to be polite. “I frankly don’t see how that’s possible.”
“Phoebe says you used to be a detective. Think of how a forensic scientist can utilize DNA from clothing or jewelry, and the information that can be gleaned from those traces. How is that so different from what you might call psychic residue?”
“Because it’s physical — tiny bits and pieces. It’s really there, even if you can’t see it with the naked eye.”
“Okay, think about sound then. Purely an energetic phenomena that we pick up with our ears. Vibrational disturbances that our brains translate as music, noise, or speech. Why shouldn’t there be other kinds of energetic information patterns? Echoes of personality, of events?”
“If that’s true, why can’t we all see or hear these things?”
“Why can’t we hear radio broadcasts without a radio? Or see colors beyond the rainbow spectrum? It doesn’t mean those things don’t exist, just that we need specialized equipment to ‘tune in,’ so to speak. Many creatures have more acute senses than we — just because a dog can hear a noise that we can’t, we don’t discount the existence of the noise. We accept that a dog can hear better than a human. Well, some humans have more acute perception than others.”
“But.” I struggle to justify my unbelief. “A dog is hearing a noise that is happening right now. How can a person, no matter how acute their senses, be seeing something that has already happened? Days or weeks or years ago?”
Bernie glances at Phoebe and steeples his fingers. “I don’t know the actual mechanics, but think of an echo. If I shout in a canyon, the echo bounces back and back, and can be heard even after I have stopped shouting. The sound goes on and on. An animal may hear reverberations of an echo for a much longer time than a human might. In some way, perhaps an event gets imprinted on an object, or the environment. Maybe because of intensity. Maybe the greater the emotional energy, the stronger the imprint — the psychic ‘echo,’ if you will.”
“Are you saying the environment — the world — remembers the things that happen on it?” I can’t keep the incredulity out of my voice. And yet, a part of me wants to believe, to latch on to this explanation of what is happening to me, as an alternative to mental illness.
“Not in the sense that you and I remember, but maybe in the sense a computer remembers. It’s just information, stored in a matrix that can be accessed by a particular type of antenna. Metaphorically speaking, of course.” He crosses his legs. “Haven’t you ever been in a place with an atmosphere? A place that seems eerie, or forbidding, or even evil?”
I think of the Baxter Building, the miasma of human pain and misery that seemed layered into the walls along with the paint. I think of jail cells; interrogation rooms; the back alleys of Denver where unspeakable crimes were committed.
Yeah. Atmosphere. Vibe.
Bernie speaks again. “You have, haven’t you? I have too. I don’t know if Phoebe told you, but I’m also an antiquarian. I own From
