her finger at me and says, “You should be locked up.”
I ask her why she has to blame the victim.
The doctor, she says, “’Cause we’ve seen you in here eight times this year.”
I wish I could say I remember those eight visions, but I’m sure my mom’s got them charted out on her wall. Each of them embellished just for her. The ones I do remember were the ones I squeezed the most Buzz out of. The one with me paragliding over Detroit at night. The one with me crashing a Ferrari into the back of a semi truck. And the one with me tightrope walking over Times Square. All of them meaningless outside of the adrenaline. What’s funny is that lying in a hospital bed right now I’m kind of wondering what else I could have seen. Why only the action? It’s like a child skipping through his favorite movie. What about the other parts? Why haven’t I ever thought of this before? Where else has the guy in the mask appeared?
When my shrink show up he asks to be alone with me and my mom bows out. Sitting on the edge of my bed, Dr. Borgo asks me if I knew how bad things got.
I ask, “Worse than any other time?”
I am of course talking about the bowling alley incident. The time Borgo and I first met. My very first really really bad head injury.
It was last summer when the shit officially hit the fan and the Buzz dependence started. If I went a week without a concussion my skin would be crawling. I was sure, convinced, that if I went a month without hitting my head and riding the high, I’d die.
Mom was happy with every vision.
I pretty much walked the whole city and wore out three pairs of shoes. The whole time just looking for fights or jumping in front of cars or stealing candy from kids with big dads, big bodybuilder dads. I’m not an aggressive person, not a violent or angry guy, and most of the time I’d just throw out verbal abuse to get someone to throw a fist.
People I knew, people like Paige, all got summer jobs. They worked the cash register at the Hungry Elephant at the zoo. They were lifeguards at the JCC. Mowed lawns in Cherry Hills. Had internships they thought would get them into that one special college far away from their parents.
Not me.
Every day Paige would call or visit me at the hospital or bring cookies over to my house. Every day Paige would say, “Next time you’re going to die” or “Next time you’ll be in a coma.”
My summer job was getting my ass kicked.
Kicked from Broadway to Wazee. From Speer to I-70. There was a fight with five bums in the parking garage just off Paris on the Platte. A full-fledged melee with skaters on the Auraria campus. A hospital visit after a smackdown with gang-bangers near City Park. Fights with factory workers. With Air Force cadets. With bar backs. With strippers. With drunks. And with football players in a bowling alley.
It was last July, I’d spent the day all jacked up downtown and had taken the bus home but decided to stop at Monaco Lanes Bowling Alley for a soda. It was freakin’ hot out and I was exhausted. Maybe a little confused.
I got a Coke at the bar and sat and watched people bowl. Didn’t take long before I was itching for the Buzz again. Like really frantic. Started a fight with these football players from TJ, they kicked my ass all over the place and the fracas ended with me getting conked on the dome with a bowling ball. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t focused. Smash. Crash.
What I saw in the darkness didn’t seem far off at all. Maybe only days. I was standing in the middle of a street watching the aftermath of a car accident near my house. This guy from school, a guy I’d only recently met, Harold Vienna, was lying in front of a red car. He looked like he was asleep, only one of his legs was bent backward the wrong way, the way it shouldn’t bend. There were people getting out of their cars and covering their mouths to stop from crying or screaming or both. I couldn’t move. My heart had slowed to just this hollow thud, like when you hit the side of an empty can. Just metal in my chest.
And I woke up in the hospital.
The Buzz was pitiful.
Mom was bummed the vision wasn’t focused, wasn’t far out, but she was sympathetic. She said to me, “Isaiah 40:26: ‘Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one falleth.’” Paige didn’t quote any Bible, she cussed me out.
Dr. Borgo came to see me the second day I was there.
Still in my hospital gown, still in bed, feeling sick still from the vision. Back then Borgo had a goatee to go with his black-framed glasses. He’s a black guy and with the goatee he totally looked like Malcolm X. I told him that and he shrugged. He looked me over, asked some questions, and then leaned in and whispered, “You see anything?”
“Like what?” I asked him.
“Like things that haven’t happened yet.”
I wasn’t sure if he was for real, so I said, “Maybe.”
“Thought so. How far out can you see?”
“Mostly years. Decades.”
“But you can see sooner?”
“Yeah. Sometimes weeks. Hours one time.”
Dr. Borgo put his head on his fist, like how a shrink should look thinking, and said, “And you prefer one over the other, right? The further-out visions, right?”
I nodded. Face just blank, splotchy with bruises.
“You get a certain, well, feeling?”
“Feeling?”
“You get high from the visions, Ade?”
I nodded again. Mouth so dry.
“And the further out in time you see, the greater the high is, the stronger the high? I’m guessing that you control how far out you see by focusing. Pushing down, the ciliary body changing the shape of the lens. That’s how you do it. Just the same as normal seeing.”
I sat myself up in the hospital bed, asked, “How come you know all this, Doc?”
“I’ve seen people like you before. Only a few. It’s considered dodgy to research psychic phenomena, but there’s a group in Toronto studying it. Another in Omaha. Ten years ago I met a man who could see a couple weeks into the future if he held his breath and passed out. He was the best of the bunch, but there are others, some of them very young. Most of them can’t really see, they just get impressions, like random-”
“I see everything. Crystal clear, like in a movie.”
“I believe you.”
“What about these others, are there any here? That would be amazing to meet someone else who could do it. That would just be-”
“I don’t know. The ones I’ve met, and it’s only been a handful in a dozen years, had real problems. They weren’t what we’d normally consider well people. A lot of them go crazy. A lot wind up on the street. Ranting and raving like-”
“How come I’ve never heard of anyone else before? How come I’ve never heard of you before? I’ve been in this ER like twenty-three times.”
Like in a movie, Borgo picked my chart up, flipped through it. “Twenty-four,” he said. “Looks like almost ten this year.”
“Yeah. So?”
Dr. Borgo laughed. “I like to stay on the edges. Honestly, it’s risky for me to talk to other physicians, other researchers, about this. They assume, before I even get into the meat of it, that I’m a quack. That people like you don’t exist. I’m at peace with that. Not looking for fame.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Just knowledge, Ade. I’m fascinated. Curious.”
“Me too.”
And he told me about research that had been done in Canada in the mid-70s. About how the government had recruited people like me, people with divination skills, to lead some new armed force and how it all fell apart and
