July 12, 2000

Fox Island, Washington

When I looked through the drum circle, her eyes had been wells of mystery, but it took me nearly three months to discover that Erin was telepathic.  I watched her get out of her car, laughing at me through the window.  Moments later, she opened my bedroom door and looked in at me.  Her expression was all scandalous with a knowing gleam of mischief.  She wagged her finger, walked across the room and lifted the rug where I had stashed a porno magazine.  After flipping to a page with the girl I had spanked it to an hour ago, she asked, “Her, really?” before breaking into laughter.  I was unsure whether it was my dumbfounded expression or the girl in the magazine which she found most amusing.   

“Are you a witch?” I asked.  Her eyes twinkled, but didn’t have any chastisement or derision in them.  

“An empath,” she answered.

So I had been caught red handed in the astral realm, and my girlfriend was magic!  Without a camera to spy on me -- which would have been the height of technology in 2000 -- there was no logical explanation other than the loose concept of female intuition.

Erin explained that if she tuned into someone, she saw a line run diagonally across her mental window -- the internal scape of imaginative space.  On one side of the line, she saw her own thoughts, but on the other, she saw thoughts of whoever’s mind she snooped about in.  Just a little concentration was all it took, but she tried not to invade people’s heads.  As she was smitten with me, her thoughts and my thoughts merged for most of her waking life.  This was something I was unaware of up until this point.

“So you can see what I’m doing at all times?  And, you kept me in the dark about this after sharing a bed for three months?” I asked.

“Well, is it a deal breaker?” she asked.

“No, but you could have told me that you can read minds.  Super powers should be disclosed, shouldn’t they?”

“Bear, most of the time people don’t think anything concrete enough for me to evaluate,” she said, and twisted a spring of her hair around an index finger.

“Evaluate?”

“How else do you want me to put it?  It’s just a bunch of fog with vague shapes.”

“Ah,” I said, “but me fantasizing about the girl in the magazine was concrete enough for you to see?  That’s fucked up, Erin.”

“I love you, bear.  Remember me telling you that I had strong empathy that freaked people out?”

“Yeah, somehow avoiding the word ‘psychic’ which is what you’re telling me now.  And then violating me -- I mean I’m not mad or anything, but just saying.  Knowing that you have, and will continue to go about penetrating my brain space--” I breathed in a hiss of air through my teeth, cocking my head to insinuate that what she had done was a breach of our mutual trust -- could be if I wanted to press the issue.  

“I’m not really psychic though.”  She glanced at her finger which had been a hindrance when she tried to wave away the word ‘psychic’ with her hand.  It was wrapped up like the wheel of a spool of thread.  She straightened her finger and let the chestnut curl of hair unwind, releasing its bind.

“How not psychic?” I asked.

“I tried to get into an ESP fair, but they said I was an empath -- not psychic.”

“They’re idiots!” I exclaimed. “You knew where I stashed the porn under the rug.  That alone is enough to freak me out, and then you pointed to the girl I masturbated to -- how is that not psychic?  You flipped to the fucking page!”

“Try not to take offense,” she said, rewinding her finger in the same locke, “but you’re pretty easy to decode.”

“You mean I am open and honest?  How could I take offense to that?”

“Well, not so much open and honest as loud in your head.” she said, pausing to think of a better way to phrase it.  “It’s like you think of something and then mull it over using words or clear phrasing.”

“Doesn’t everyone think in words?”

“No, not at all.  Most people think in pictures and emotions that are like tones.”

I raised an inquisitive eyebrow.  

“Here,” she said, tapping the foot of my futon and sitting across from me.  We sat cross legged facing one another, and she flipped off the light.  Glow in the dark stars illuminated my ceiling, but it was afternoon and filtered sunlight spilled around the drawn curtain.

“Think of something,” Erin said.

“Spooky,” I said.  “You look like you want to tell a ghost story.”

“No, I just want it dark, so I don’t have as much light behind my eyelids,” she said.

“Ah, I get it.  Like a dark movie theater.  Okay, what should I think of?  Give me a genre.”

“I don’t know, but try to think of an image.  Anything,” she said, and closed her eyes.

It took me a moment to decide on something before settling on Santa Claus.

“Red and white,” Erin said, her eyes darting around behind her lids,  “Something to do with snow -- Santa?”

“Wow, that’s creepy.  Do it again,” I said.  

“You can see why I’ve learned to keep this a secret.  The way you’re looking at me right now -- I’m just sick of being seen as different.  A freak.”

“Yeah, but if I can’t keep a secret from you -- I don’t know.  Unfair.  Anyways, let me try again, freak.”

When Erin closed her eyes I pictured a school bus, and silently sang The Wheels on the Bus.

“Spokes… rubber,” Erin stammered.  “Yellow, like cheese, um… Is that supposed to be a school bus or something?  Kind of cartoon?”

“No, it was a blue kyte,” I said, trying to sound confident.

“Bear,” she said, with a look that let me know I wasn’t fooling her.  “It might not have been a school bus, but it was definitely something yellow on wheels, or maybe cheese on olives.”

“Fine,” I said and laughed, “Got me.  I was picturing a school bus I saw in a kids book a few days ago.  Very cartoonish, yeah.”

Erin considered the sixth sense to be a curse.  At the start of her junior year, she had felt the pain of her friend from across the school.  “When I started to cry for no reason, it was really uncomfortable.  I thought I was having a mental break down.  Luckily I ran into the same bathroom where she was to get myself under control.”

“So you both were in the same bathroom, both crying, but you didn’t know why?”

“Not at first, but when she came out of a stall, and I saw her face, I knew Tray had broken it off with her.  

“Boyfriend?”

“Yeah, since middle school.  She said if it wasn’t for me, she was thinking of killing herself.  She tried before, so it was really scary to hear her say it.”

“Did you feel the suicidal sadness -- I mean, if you could feel her pain, could you feel it on that level?”

“It sucked really bad,” Erin said, her finger entwined to her shoulder in the habitual curl.

***

February 20, 2001
Pahoa Hawaii

   

Six months later, I woke up in a lava tube in Mackenzie Park, 2,600 miles away.  I was gasping for breath, the cave air stifling, and scrambled up without rolling up my sleeping bag or pad.  The nightmare had been vivid, and I knew it was more than an REM hallucination.  Something beyond mere intuition told me that Erin had cheated.  I hopped on my bike, rode to town with visions of her and another man replaying themselves on a hideous loop.  Had she sent me the dream?  I knew she was telepathic, but perhaps she could send as well as receive thoughts.   

“I saw you with him,” I said.  I was on the payphone across the street from the thrift store at the end of Pahoa. “Did you hear me, Erin?  I saw you with him.”

As I looked up, Rafael waved at me from his shop’s doorstep.  I was too upset, and it was not a good morning.  I turned away, looking at the silver buttons on the dial pad.

“I haven’t done anything with him yet,” Erin said.  “But I need to know.  I need to hear you say it.  Do you love me?”

The stirring of doubt, and confusion was integrated with a warmness.  I knew her.  But was it love?  I had stopped telling her that I loved her after three months.  When the twitterpated starry eyed bliss wore off, I looked up at her one morning and felt nothing.  That day, I had tried to get drunk on my sister’s tequila, lamenting as I pined over the loss of what I thought to be true love.  Erin tried to reassure me.  She said that she knew that I loved her, but six months later, she was giving me an ultimatum.

“So the dream, that was you?” I asked.  “I mean, you sent that, right?”

“Do you love me, bear?” she asked, ignoring my question.

I pulled on my goatee, my mind reeling.  She was psychic.  Why couldn’t she just know how I felt and be done with the needing to hear anything?

“You’re almost done with high school,” I said.  “We talk every week, and after you graduate we can travel.  I just couldn’t do another winter in Washington, but I miss you.”

“I need to hear it.  I need to hear you say it, or I can’t do this anymore.  Do you love me?”

“I--” the veins in my forehead throbbed--“don’t know.” I sighed, resolute, knowing that I had to be honest, come what may.  

“Goodbye bear,” she said, melodramatic.  “Please don’t call me again.”  Her voice was wavering as she hung up the phone.

As if a water line ruptured, I burst into tears.  A rift opened in my heart, and I tottered down the boardwalk, my body feeling weak.  The bright colors of Pahoa -- the turquoise storefront of Jo Mama’s and the red and yellow Meaner Wiener hotdog stand -- were too much.  My footing felt sloppy, the ache within me powerful.  

Wanting to get away from prying eyes, I lumbered up the flight of stairs to the baseball field above town.  The dugouts were empty, and so I sat down on a bench and retrieved my journal.  Processing what had happened with a pen would help me, or so I thought when a burbling sound of water filled my ears.  In my mind, I first saw what appeared to be a river, and then an ocean wave crashed down with violence.  But it wasn’t me in the vision.  Someone else was drowning.

A dark blue ink groove formed as the pen traveled down the blank page of my journal.  It felt like the eye of a Ouija Board, guided by something other than me, some invisible entity.  As the wave receded from my mind, the pen felt strangely heavy in my hand.  I tucked the journal in my pack and decided to let the strangeness get stranger.

Anything of intrigue -- no matter how unworldly -- was a welcome distraction from the bitterness.  The breakup was agony, and I was still fighting back tears, her name repeating in my mind, flaying my heart like a whip.  

I stood up, my right arm outstretched with the pen in my fingertips.  It was pointing, pulling me toward the stairs.  It felt as if it were being led along by a magnetic leash.  If I let go, would it float forward without me?  It almost seemed to be the case, but I held on.  I jogged down the steps, and passed under Pahoa’s community center, tugged forward as if a hook had snagged the pen, reeling me out of town.

When I made it to the guardrail on highway 132, the pen ceased its irrational behavior.  It was an ordinary Bic pen again.  I stared at it blankly.

The immediacy of the alien force receded to the background of my mind as a fresh wave of heartache washed over me.  Why had I been reluctant, so indecisive when it came to pledging my love?  Erin’s face, a floating apparition of beauty, robbed me of any chance at peace.  

But it was Sunday, and crying on the side of the road was no way to get a ride to the beach.  I needed to pull it together, but now I could see that I must have loved her.  I laughed, wiping a bit of snot from my nose with the back of my wrist.  Whatever was being rooted out had tapped in deep.  If it weren’t for the pain I felt, I could have said that whatever relationship we forged had been too shallow to consider love.  I thought of Shakespeare, and didn’t see how the depth of a loss like this could be viewed as a boon in life.  

The pen.  I looked at it in my hand.  Sure, it had behaved strangely, but automatic writing produced many extraordinary sensations.  I had worked myself into a serious state of distress.  A chemical imbalance in my brain could account for the palpable hallucination.  Or maybe the watery vision had been a metaphor for Erin’s pain, drowning in a sea of tears.  I tucked the pen in my pack next to my journal.

Although I managed to buck up, every inhalation stuttered with post-sob heaving.  My eyebrows wanted to press upward in woe, but I denied the melancholy hopelessness, forcing a complacent expression on as I stuck out my thumb.  

Had the alien encounter really happened?  What had the drowning blurble been about if not a metaphor for what Erin was now feeling?  My thoughts skipped between my lost love and what had felt like a poltergeist.  

An early 80s model Buick pulled to the side of the road.  It was filled with plants on the front bench seat.  The thin driver had white hair and a wizard beard which fit his weathered face.  I recognized him from the beach, always looking out to sea with a wrinkled brow over his eyes.  After I climbed in the back seat, he passed me a joint.

“Kehena?” I asked, meeting his distant gaze in the rearview mirror.  He gave me one slow nod and slipped the lever into drive.  Floating silently onto the highway, the old vehicle was reluctant to gain momentum.  

The joint seemed to accentuate everything.  Every color was bright, the roadside foliage exuberant in the sun.  My heart seemed to lighten up as we passed Black Sands, but then the strange magnetic pulling sensation returned.  This time it wasn’t the pen, but my arms felt increasingly lighter, and then began to rise.  As if the laws of gravity were reversing they lifted from my sides.  My left wrist hit the door.  Alarmed, I pulled both hands to my lap and gripped the hem of my boardshorts.  Nothing like this had ever happened, but the feeling was similar to when the pen had been possessed.  But I couldn’t float up -- let my arms float up.  The wizard in the driver’s seat would see.  As I tried to fathom the unearthly mechanics of the antigravity, the notion that I was hallucinating had to be cast aside.  Some sort of alien or ghost was fucking with me.