James Wilson walked along a downtown Portland sidewalk. Wearing a corduroy blazer and a wool scarf, he barely felt the cold, but he took notice that for once it wasn’t raining on a February evening. As he turned a corner, he saw a teenage boy sitting on the forlorn steps of an old bank building. With his guitar case laying open before him, he played a self-composed ballad to the mostly oblivious passers-by. James stopped, opened his wallet and took out a couple of twenties. It was cold, after all. Then he crossed the street and entered a pub on the corner.
Soft jazz greeted him as he stepped inside. He sat down at the bar and took off his hat. He was just going to check his cell phone for messages when a woman tapped him on the shoulder and sat down in the adjacent seat. The bartender took their orders and then hurried off. James turned to his companion.
“Long time no see, Kat. You’ve been rather busy lately, I’m guessing? What with all your patients coming off the holiday stress?”
She adjusted her pencil skirt and set her purse under the bar. “Yeah, you know how it goes.”
“Mother-in-laws.” He smiled. “Sometimes I wonder if I’m simply training my students to be proxies for ‘the good-listener-friend’ that no one has anymore.”
“It seems that way at times.” She glanced down the bar. The bartender was just finishing.
“But you seem distracted. You acted like there was something particular you wanted to discuss. Is it Jarrod again?”
Kat cast him a short glance and then took her drink from the bartender. “No, fortunately, he’s decided to give me a respite from domestic drama.” She stirred her drink. “It’s work.” She smirked. “I know I promised to stop bothering you with advice long ago… But it seems I keep coming back to professor.”
He smiled. “It’s nice to be needed.”
“That’s a condition you know.”
“Only when someone diagnoses it.”
“Good thing I hate labels, then.” She smiled and took a drink. “It’s a girl – college-aged. She has…prescience.”
“Visions?”
“Sometimes. Sometimes just inklings.”
“Of what nature?”
“Positive results – of her actions.”
He took off his blazer and loosened the laces on his brown leather shoes. Motioning to the drinks, “Think we’re going to need more of these?”
“Definitely.” Kat took off her jacket and slipped off her heels. She took a long sip of her drink and then leaned back in her seat.
“She first came into my office about six months ago – right at the beginning of the school year. I have a contract with her university, you see.” She sighed. “One of the perks of being young and hip, I guess. Students find me an appealing therapist. Anyway, she was shy, a little reluctant at first. Fortunately, she had written “visions” in the comment box on her sheet, so I had some idea. But, you know, visions can mean anything from weird dreams to schizophrenia. So I asked her why she wrote that. She told me she didn’t know what else to call them. I asked her,
‘How do these visions come to you?’
‘Umm, sometimes pictures, sometimes scenes, and sometimes they’re not visions at all – just ideas.’
‘And what are they like?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What emotion do you feel from them?’
‘Oh. They’re always very good visions. Very happy, wonderful things.’ She smiled.
‘What else can you tell me about them?’
‘They’re visions about other people. In them, I see what will happen to others if I do something for them.’
‘How long has this been happening?’ I asked.
‘About a year – off and on. I think maybe it has been happening longer than that, only, I didn’t recognize them before.’
‘Can you explain to me a situation in which one of these visions occurs?’
‘The first time, I mean the first time I realized, was about a year ago. It was very simple. Umm. I was taking an American history class. There was this boy; he always sat in the back; he didn’t have any friends in the class. I could tell he was having some difficulty. We were preparing for a final, so we were making study groups. He didn’t have one. I thought maybe I should invite him to my group. And then it happened – the vision, I guess.’ She stopped.
‘Go on.’
‘I saw his exam – in my mind, and in big scrawling red pen, there was a 90 written at the top. It was a vision about his success.’
‘So what did you do then?’
‘I invited him to join our group, and he said no. But I gave him my phone-number and told him that if he changed his mind we were meeting in the library on Tuesday and Thursday at three. So then he came, and we studied and then we took the test. I didn’t think anything about it, until the next week when he brought me his exam and showed it to me. It was the same.’
‘The same…?’
‘As the one in the vision. Same big scrawling letters, red pen, ninety.’
‘So then what did you do?’
‘I was shocked and I tried to put it out of my mind. I thought I was just being fanciful, you know? I mean, I didn’t think that people actually have visions. So I ignored it, but then it happened again. The next time it was at work. I work at a retail store. I’m a department assistant manager, and they told me to hire a part-timer. There were three people. Two of them were very qualified and the other one – she had never had a job before. You could tell she was from a bad background. But after I interviewed them, I was thinking it over and I thought about her and about what getting this job would mean to her. I could see her with confidence – getting hope. So I hired her.’
‘Did she accept?’
‘Yes, and she succeeded. She was promoted to full-time within two months and everyone loves her. She started taking night classes this fall. I think it changed her life.’
‘That was the second time?’
‘Yeah, so then I thought, well, that was just lucky. It wasn’t really a vision. I saw no picture that time. I just had faith and she didn’t let me down. That was in January. I still didn’t think much of it. Only after that, the visions got stronger, more lucid. Lucid, right? That’s the right word?’
‘Like realistic?’
‘Yeah. Strangers. Men on the sidewalk asking for money. And it wasn’t just the visions. If it were just visions, then I would only believe that I have a lot of hope for people. But I see them come true. I’ll meet the homeless man again, with new shoes.
‘Last March, when we had that freak snowstorm – the city buses were cancelled. I was driving from work back to my dorm. And I saw a woman at the bus stop. I felt bad – she obviously didn’t know about the cancellations. And then, suddenly, I saw her meeting a man in a blue sweater, and they started laughing and later he asked her to go to dinner with him. So I picked her up. She said she was going to a friend’s birthday party at a restaurant near my school. I dropped her off at the restaurant, but as I was pulling away, I saw the group she was meeting, and then she was shaking someone’s hand, like she was being introduced.’ She stopped. She looked up at me and her eyes were almost glowing with excitement. ‘It was the same man, that I had seen before – in a blue sweater. After that, I really started to believe that – maybe I really was seeing visions – that I didn’t just have an overactive imagination because he was the same – exactly the same. He had dark curly hair, a reddish complexion, stubble.’ She shook her head in wonder.”
Kat straightened up in her chair. “I have to admit, I was a little stumped, and since we were coming to the end of our time, I asked her why she had signed up for therapy. She shrugged.
‘Well, I guess I was just kind of concerned. I mean, like I said, normal people don’t really have visions. I guess, I’m kind of worried about myself, even though, I don’t know why I should be. I’m perfectly fine. If anything, my life is more exciting and…well…joyful now.’
‘Does it help to talk about it?’
‘Yes! Yes, it does. I’ve been afraid to tell anyone about it.’
‘Well, that’s what I’m here for.’
“I told her she could sign up for a follow-up appointment and after that she started seeing me regularly. The stories were all rather similar. I found it very interesting. I never had a client like that before, and I wasn’t sure how to approach her situation, but mostly we just talked.”
James broke in, “Did she show any signs of emotional instability?”
“Well, no, that was the problem. She had no personal or family history of mental illness, and occasionally when we talked about other things, school, work, her friends, she seemed perfectly healthy.”
“Seemed?”
“Well, that was for the first three or four months. In December, I noticed a change. She had missed our last appointment and so it had been a while. When she came in, I saw immediately that there was something on her mind. She glanced around the room awkwardly and when I asked her to sit down, she just kept standing.
‘Do you remember the story I told you about the woman I picked up in the snow storm?’ she asked.
‘Yes of course.’
‘Well, I saw her again.’
‘Oh?’
‘She’s engaged. To that man. The same man. The guy with the blue sweater.’
“I stared at her a minute. For the first time since I’d known her, she looked tired.”
James shifted in his seat. “What happened after that?”
“I tried to talk to her like normal, but she wasn’t listening to me. And then, she didn’t come back for over a month. She kept making appointments and then cancelling at the last minute. Finally, last week, she kept her appointment. She looked so different, it was distracting. She wore a baggy sweatshirt didn’t have any makeup on. She looked as though, at any moment, she would burst into tears. She just sat before me, wringing her hands and looking back and forth between her lap and her feet. Finally, she stood up,
‘I can’t keep going on like this.’ She burst out. ‘I did it again! Just today! Again, I denied someone. They needed my help and I refused.’
‘Please sit down,’ I said. She did so. ‘Now tell me what happened.’
‘There was an old man ahead of me in the checkout at the grocery store. When his total came up, he looked in his wallet and he didn’t have enough money. I think he had only five dollars. He looked rather disheveled, his pants were old and his sweater had moth-holes in it. I saw a picture of him going home to a tiny little apartment and making dinner for a little woman in a wheelchair. They were happy together.’ She started crying. ‘But I only have fifty dollars left till my next payday, and his bill was nearly thirty. So I—’ her voice dropped to a whisper, ‘did – nothing.’
‘Then what happened?’
“She looked up at me, her eyes full, ‘He picked a couple of small things out of all his groceries and bought those only. The teller put the rest in a basket and slipped it under the counter.’ She wiped her eyes but the tears kept flowing. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I’m so selfish. I could have gotten along with only twenty-five dollars. I have a meal plan and the school covers my medical. But I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to pay for his groceries. I shouldn’t have to help everyone I meet. And now I feel like – the most horrible person. I feel miserable.’
‘Has this happened before?’
She sighed. ‘Yes. In December. That’s when I stopped feeling happy about the visions. That’s when I realized they weren’t always good, because…I’m not always good.’”
Kat took a sip of her drink and leaned her head on her hand.
“Was that the end?”
“Pretty much. I tried talking to her about personal responsibility, about taking control of your own life. But she would have none of it. She told me she couldn’t forgive herself for having the power to help others and refusing to use it.”
James stared at her for a minute. “Kat, she has a condition.”
“Oh undoubtedly. Though I have no idea what, yet.”
“Well, it’s only the beginning.”
“True.” She slowly swirled the ice in her empty glass.
“Kat why do I get the feeling that there’s something else that you’re not telling me?”
She glanced at him and bit her lip. “It is interesting, isn’t it? I mean, James, can you imagine what it would be like to live in that head?”
“That’s probably the one thing you shouldn’t do.” He motioned to the bartender for refills.
She turned her gaze away and stared at the glittering bottles before her. “Yeah, I guess so. It’s philosophical though.”
“So are schizophrenics.”
She nodded.
“They – they think too much,” he continued. “They think about the things that would make normal people go crazy. You don’t actually believe that she has visions, do you?”
She turned back to him. “No,” she said. “No, I don’t.”
He sighed. “It sounds like guilt, but honestly, it could be anything.” He watched her for a moment and then reached over and touched her arm. “Are you okay?”
She hesitated. His grip on her arm tightened slightly. “Yeah,” she shook her head. “Yeah, I’m fine. I guess it’s just a difficult case during a difficult time. You know everyone else, is, like you said, bickering about their in-laws and relating long histories of past Christmas tragedies, and this girl seems so…transcendent in comparison. Truthfully, she makes me uncomfortable.”
“Do what you know how to do, and she’ll get better. You’re a good therapist. You can help her.”
She nodded.
He looked at his watch. “Well, I have to get going. Class prep: it never ends.” He smiled. “Let’s catch up more often.”
She stood and shook his hand. “Let’s. I’ll see you.”
He picked his hat off the bar, took his wallet out and put a few bills down, and waved goodbye.
Kat sat at the bar for another few minutes. Then she finished her drink, gathered her things, and walked out.
