Chapter 1: Accident And Aftermath

I’ve thought for a long time about chronicling this, and have always given up the idea because no one would believe it. Sometimes I don’t believe it myself. I’ve done some quiet research on the Internet and have never seen a reference to anyone else having anything remotely related to what I’ve got, but maybe they’re trying hard not to publicize it, just like I am.

Anyway, I finally decided to write down what I remembered, if only to try to put it in some order so that I might better understand it. It may be that no one will ever see this.

I think I will do this chronologically and perhaps that will lend some clarity. My name is ... well, let’s call me Tom Carter. Obviously, that’s not my real name; I have nightmares of DARPA or some darker government organization knocking on my door one evening and inviting me for a long vacation at an unnamed location surrounded by barbed wire and armed guards (“for your protection”) where we would discuss how I came by these gifts and how we might best use them to advance our common patriotic interests. So Tom Carter.

And I live in Cleveland ... not. In fact, every datum in this document has been changed or obfuscated so as to prevent anyone from even identifying the state in which I live. Call me paranoid.

You will forgive me if I skip over large chunks of time in this history. My point here is to detail how I came to discover this talent, and how I progressively learned about it by trial and error, and how I learned to fine-tune it. I don’t need to detail every day of the progression, just the important parts.

And before you say anything, yes, I know this is not a scientific treatise in the sense that I state my hypothesis, lay out my testing criteria, collect and interpret data, and eventually list the results using informative color-coded charts which support my conclusion. Had I been older and better trained in scientific method, I would have done that.

Had I been a credentialed researcher in psychology or sociology or any of the mind sciences, I would have kept detailed logs of interviews and events with experimental conditions and the collected raw data and my conclusions and all the trappings of modern experimental science.

But I was just fifteen years old when this thing happened to me. For obvious reasons I could not, would not tell an adult about it. I would have been committed, or in the case of DARPA et al, confined.

Also, remember that teenage boys are essentially a bag of hormones attached to a penis, so it’s not surprising that my data collection involved girls. That’s all we thought about at that age.

So I report these interactions in some detail, trying to recount the nuances of location and weather and dialog and impressions, all the subtle distinctions I could recall, because therein is contained the essential raw data by which I came to progressively understand my talent. Deal with it how you will.

In full disclosure, I also don’t relate every interaction I had with people, sexual or otherwise, in which I used my talents, just the incidents that helped to explain it or show how I learned about it or how to manipulate it. And now the background.

I’ve got two parents -- surprise! -- and one sister, grandparents, cousins, and so on. We’re not rich. I suppose we’d be classified as lower middle class, comfortable, but not a lot of money to spare. I’m bright, always have been, but not a straight-A student, at least not at the start of this chronicle.

I don’t have much intellectual self-discipline, so I skip over stuff that bores me, and immerse myself in the things that I find interesting. I’m not much into sports, because I don’t have much in the way of muscles or athletic ability, but I do like the sciences and math, so I’m a bit of a nerd.

I’m articulate, and well-read, and perhaps a little glib, which sometimes gets me into trouble. I’m kind of average all around, not bad looking, I’m told, but no heart-throb either.

I like people and learning about them and understanding them. The other thing is that I look and act older than I am, by several years, and I have a kind of confidence about me, like I know who I am and why I am here. (That’s what people think they see underlying my confidence, but the truth is that I just don’t give a damn about what people think of me.) Both of these things will become important later on.

The “no athletic ability” part is how this all started. Just after I turned fifteen, my friends and I decided to go skating one winter day at Parker’s Pond, which was the nearest local swimming place in the summer, and in the winter it was the place for general skating and pickup hockey games. It had started to get a little run down in recent years, and parts of the shoreline were being used as a kind of convenient but illegal dump; however, the rest of it was still pretty nice.

I didn’t have much interest in skating, but my friends said that there’d be girls, and we were just starting to develop a serious interest, though we had no idea how to go about approaching them and getting to know them. Fifteen year old girls always seem so much more grown up than fifteen year old boys, and for the most part they considered themselves much more sophisticated than us.

So, despite the fact that I could hardly stand up on skates, off we all went. We sat on a fallen tree and pulled on our skates and set off onto the ice. And yes! there were girls, as promised, in twos and threes, and sometimes in wolf packs of a dozen, for protection against just such predators as us. So we skated around, being boisterous and trying to get their attention without actually going up and talking to them. Like I said, we were new at this.

Someone in our group came up with the idea of ice-basketball, where we’d try to get the “ball” (a discarded goalie’s glove) into the “net” (an empty barrel laying on its side at the edge of the shore). With a lot of crashing into each other we would throw the mitt from one player to another, accompanied by much shouting which, we were sure, would attract the girls as spectators.

It came as some surprise to me that the “ball” came flying in my direction and that the way to the “net” was clear. So I grabbed the glove out of the air and set off for the shore as fast as I could go. I would have made it, too, but it wasn’t actually smooth ice, and I hit an ice ridge a few feet from shore and went flying head-first into the edge of a stump and some trash by its side, what looked like old paint cans but with no labels. And that’s the last thing I remember, the flying effortlessly through the air, watching the tree stump approach in slow motion, then nothing.

I found out about all the stuff that happened during the time I was unconscious in the hospital later, in bits and pieces from family and friends, because I have absolutely no memory of it at all.

Apparently when I went down and wasn’t moving, everyone started to panic, sure that I had killed myself, but some cooler head saw that I was still breathing despite all the blood from the head wound, and the dirt and other matter that had been ground into the wound. So somebody was sent off as fast as they could to call for an ambulance and in a relatively short time I was hospital bound, still unconscious.

My parents were located and rushed to the hospital where the medical consensus seemed to be concussion and some kind of bruise on the brain from the collision with the stump. They cleaned up the blood and foreign matter, sewed up the cuts, and decided to put me into a medically induced coma to let my head heal before they would assess any lasting effects of the collision.

So the following week was pretty uninteresting, me being unconscious and all, but much more traumatic for my parents who did not know what to expect. This was compounded by the fact that my temperature suddenly went sky-high, which puzzled the gathered medical sages, since this is not normally a side-effect of concussion.

They decided to call it a “blood-infection” and, while they cooled my body with ice packs, they threw massive amounts of antibiotics at the “infection” which seemed to have little or no effect. Now everyone was getting worried. The doctors, who always wear the cloak of omniscience, even when they don’t know what’s going on, were now starting to whisper amongst themselves with concerned looks which they tried to keep from my parents.

And then, as quickly as it had risen, after a week or so my temperature dropped back to normal. The doctors nodded knowingly, and said, “Yes, blood infection, as I thought, antibiotics always work.” Shortly afterwards, being that my other vital signs were normal, they brought me out of the coma. The first thing I remember is a feeling that I was floating, like I was a few inches above the bed, and seeing the relieved look on the faces of my parents. I wasn’t able to speak for another day, but they took care of the bulk of the talking.

The doctors didn’t want to let me out yet, because they still had to measure any aftereffects of the injury, but at least my parents could go home to get some sleep, knowing that at minimum I was alive. I could talk slowly, if I had to respond to a question, but I found that my mind was focused inward in rather an odd way, like I was observing my thought processes rather than focusing on the input from external sensory organs -- sight, smell taste.

I didn’t seem to think about or even care about the things that used to occupy my mind previously -- friends, games, school, movies. I ignored them, much as you might ignore the things that had fascinated you at age five. They now seemed trivial and unimportant. I was inwardly focused, though I couldn’t seem to identify what I was focused on.

Thus I was having a hard time with things like television and reading, which was a little disturbing since I’d always liked these things. Without those things to occupy my mind I was spending a lot of time quietly watching people and observing their mannerisms.

I started looking at the staff -- doctors, orderlies, nurses, visitors -- just to have something to do. I was trying to figure them out, learn their behaviors, just to occupy my mind. Mostly they were pleasant, hard-working people, trying to do their jobs to the best of their abilities. Mostly. There were a few who seemed to go out of their way to be unpleasant, to each other and to the patients.

One of the doctors, we’ll call him Dr. Francis, seemed to believe that everyone on staff other than him was incompetent, and that the patients were malingering. Unfortunately, he was the doctor assigned to my care. He took the fact that I was still recovering as an affront to his accumulated medical expertise. I should be cured by now, in his estimation, and the fact that I was still there must make it my fault that I wasn’t. He had the bedside manner of a rabid St. Bernard.

And Nurse DiNardo. Too mean to retire, because she was sure that the place would fall apart without her gentle guiding hand. Nobody could do anything right while she was around. I wondered how the other nurses put up with her constant criticism and borderline verbal abuse.

If not for the difference in their ages, I decided that she and Dr. Francis should have been a couple. It would be the perfect revenge, and they probably would have wound up killing each other, to everyone’s relief.

I was still having this odd inward focus, when Dr. Francis arrived one morning to make his rounds. He started on the other side of the ward, with his usual charm and bonhomie, snarling at the elderly man in the first bed who had had a spleen removed that he would be better off recuperating at home and that the pain was just him being oversensitive.