Chapter 17

I woke from a strange dream to see the morning light peeking around the window shades. In my dream someone was poking me with a cattle prod.

I opened my eyes and found Gail lying close, facing me, and poking her finger into my chest once every few seconds.

“Ah-ha!” she said, “proof of life.”

“Why are you poking me? What did I do?”

“Nothing,” she said. “It’s morning, time to get up, I need to shower, and you probably do, too.”

“What time is it?” I asked, afraid of the answer.

She told me, and I said, “Do you have some genetic abnormality that allows you to function on two hours sleep? After last night I thought you’d sleep till Sunday.”

“It was way more than two hours, and I’ve had enough sleep. What’s wrong with your genes that you need so much? C’mon, let’s hit the showers.”

I argued a bit more, but she was adamant, and still poking me. I eventually got up, and into pants and shirt, and she led me to the bathroom.

She got the shower running to warm it up, and put on a shower cap. “My hair takes so long to dry that I have to plan ahead to wash it. I’ll do it tomorrow. You ready?”

I washed her back and played with her butt with soapy hands, but as much as I might have liked to take it further, I didn’t think I could get a boner yet, as she had drained me so expertly last night.

Though I had some second thoughts when she washed my dick and balls, making sure that they were extra clean. She knew I couldn’t do anything about it, but she still teased me. Evil woman.

Cleaned and dried, she made me some tea, and found some cereal and milk for breakfast.

“I’m going to need a nap when I get back, Gail. You wore me out. Again.”

“I’ll find you some multivitamins and iron pills, Carter, since you’re obviously seriously anemic and run down. Get you fixed up in no time.”

“Thank you, doctor. Where’s Carol this weekend? I didn’t hear her come in last night.”

“Probably stayed at her boyfriend’s. She didn’t tell me, so I’m guessing.”

“Just as well. I’d have been a little embarrassed to have her hear me shouting last night.”

“She’d probably have been too drunk to know where it was coming from. What’s on your agenda for the rest of the day?”

I told her about upcoming midterms, and she commiserated, saying she had her own to worry about. We talked a few minutes more, then I found my shoes and my jacket and she walked me to the door.

She put her arms around me and hugged me for almost a minute, quiet.

“I’ve got some more thinking to do, Tom, to figure out how to process all the things that happened last night. I just want to say that I’m so relieved that that’s over. I’ve been terrified of those things for so long, and now I find that they’re manageable, controllable, not as frightening as I’d worried about. In fact, they even made me feel good. So I’m feeling pretty good about myself today, and thanks for that, for being so understanding. I appreciate it.”

“Gail, you’re a strong woman, you would have gotten a handle on it in your own time, but I’m glad I could help in some small way.”

“I do appreciate it, Carter. Now, go take your nap. Wuss.” She shooed me out the door and blew me a kiss as I left.

It had turned chilly, and the jacket was a little too light for the weather, so I walked quickly, trying to warm up. It didn’t work.

I was shivering when I opened the door, and the bed looked so tempting. I had just laid back and closed my eyes when Larry raised his head. “Another unexplained absence, Carter? That’s two demerits. So was this the same one, or somebody new?”

“Larry, I’m tired. Are you writing a gossip column? Let me sleep.”

“No, I want to talk. No, I want to brag. I finally got lucky last night. Some girl took me back to her dorm and we spent a couple of entertaining hours.”

“I’m happy for you, Larry, but why are you telling me now?”

“Because I think it’s partially your doing, Carter.”

I raised my head from the pillow and looked at him. “Huh?”

“I mean, I went to this party with the guys, and we were all hitting on the women there, like we usually do, with no luck, rejections across the board, some of them more than a bit unfriendly, too. So I was feeling sorry for myself, and I must’ve looked sad because this girl came up and asked why I was looking so down at a party.

“And instead of starting with my usual pickup lines, I said it’d been a tough week and I was feeling a little low. She looked maybe a little sympathetic, so I decided to just talk with her instead, get to know her since I obviously wasn’t going to get laid tonight.

“She turned out to be pretty interesting, and funny, too, and nice looking, and we really got along. So, one thing led to another, and, you know.”

“Larry, I’m really glad to hear it. Women are people, with brains and ideas and opinions, and they generally like guys to recognize that before they’ll think about anything further. I’m happy it worked out for you. Now, I do need to get a little sleep. Go have breakfast.”

He shrugged, having crowed about his success, got dressed and went off to eat. I managed to get a couple more hours of sleep before the noise in the halls got to be too much, so I got up and went to lunch.

I won’t bore you with school details. Midterms were challenging, but I found that the extra prep I’d done had paid off and I felt confident about my answers. I was relieved, and that was reinforced as I left the exam area afterwards and saw more than a few worried looks on people’s faces. Of course, it might turn out that my confidence had been misplaced and I should have put on a worried look myself, but I still felt pretty good about it.

With that weight off my shoulders, I went back to the library and continued my personal research, trying to understand more about ESP and mind-reading. The general term is parapsychology, so I’ll use that, but that word is a big umbrella for all the weird stuff people claim they can do with their minds, including talking to the dead. “Uncle Howard, are you there? Can you hear us? Knock once if you can hear us. Young Tom is here and wants to know how he did on his midterm exams.”

But thinking about my particular talents brought me back to my earlier ruminations about whether strongly tethered habits and beliefs can be overridden. I had previously leaned toward a definite ‘no’, that doing so might cause some internal trauma from competing and dissimilar beliefs struggling with each other, but now I was reconsidering my decision. I’d thought that Gail’s long-held convictions that she couldn’t deepthroat because she’d choke, and couldn’t do anal because it would be too painful, were too strong to be removed or at least suppressed.

That turned out not to be the case because, apparently, a more positive feeling to supplant and overpower the negative one could be effective. I wasn’t sure if this were true across the board, whether it might be possible to use it to modify public rather than private behavior, for example, or to replace some personal moral or ethical belief. I wasn’t even sure how I would test that case, but something to think about.

So I concentrated on school, and found myself getting involved in my classes. I found that a little odd, but I was comparing it to middle school and high school classes, where almost everything was taught by rote, the teachers couldn’t wait for the three o’clock bell, and you weren’t forced to think for yourself,

The teachers I had here were making an effort to push us into deeper water so that we’d have to swim. It was a challenge, and it took a lot of work, but I was surprised to find that I liked it.

A week or so after my last encounter with Gail I suddenly remembered that I had promised myself to find a name for the metaphor that caused a rush of pleasure when a dick entered her mouth, increasing as it went deeper. I couldn’t keep calling it ‘that thing that happens when she feels a dick in her mouth’.

I tried on and discarded a number of names, but eventually settled on “Boner Bliss”. Not perfect, but it described what it was supposed to do pretty well. I had decided that I wanted to keep separate the small orgasm that began when the dick pushed into her throat. So Boner Bliss and Spitshine together could be quite the pleasing cocktail. Well, I’d already proved that, several times over, but having names for them now made it easier to apply them.

I had also promised to give some thought to how to apply some of these baseline states to myself. I could send myself a named metaphor for an orgasm, like Aftershock or Roller Coaster, and they worked impressively well. I was really proud of myself for figuring out how to do that. But I’d never tried giving myself Foundation or Rowboat, since they were baselines and were meant to maintain an enhanced state of relaxation and contentment between orgasms.

That was the key, they were designed to keep women in an aroused, pleasurable state as they went from one orgasm to the next. I had to think about what it meant to give a guy -- me -- that sense when we only get the one orgasm before collapsing. Damn, more questions, always more questions.

I had gotten in the habit of calling home every week or ten days, mostly because I seldom had much new to report, nor they to me. Still, it made my mother happy to know how I was doing, that I was getting along with people and doing well in classes, so I called.

It was pretty much the same conversation this time, though I did find out -- and I had been waiting for this to happen for a long time! -- that Mindy, my sister, now had a boyfriend. All through high school, when I had expressed even a passing interest in a girl, my mother was on me like a circling hawk spying a fleeing rodent.

It wasn’t what you think. I had decided that she was trying to relive some part of her adolescence by vicariously feeding off mine, wanting to know everything about my female friends. It could have become obsessive, but Karen had suggested that I should invite her to dinner so they could meet, and Karen, within a couple of hours, had twisted my mother around her finger.

My mother had miraculously stopped her snooping and only occasionally asked about Karen. But I knew that the vicarious thrill she got from it was still there and I had predicted that when my sister got a boyfriend, my mother would be in her romantic life like flypaper.

I wasn’t entirely wrong. As she talked about it, it seemed to me that she knew entirely too much about how the two of them got along, how they felt about each other, and where the relationship was headed. I wasn’t sure how my sister felt about my mother’s involvement, and would have to ask her the next time I spoke to her.

It’s entirely possible that Mindy was a willing participant, as she was a major league gossip and loved talking about boys and who she liked with anyone who’d listen. And my mother was a good listener. I’d hear more about it the next time I went home.

And in the meantime I returned to my usual schedule of classes, homework, reading, frequent quizzes, and, when I had time, my own research into parapsychology. I still had Willing’s brief talk to the Psych Club bouncing around my head. He’d made some oblique references to research in ESP and other parapsychological phenomena, but also had suggested that the research was out of the mainstream and frowned upon by the academic establishment.

So I wasn’t sure that there would be much accessible research in the field, if scientists in academia were hiding their interest. On the other hand, there could be other, more conventional ways of framing that kind of research. For example, a statistician might look at cases of people who guess lottery numbers or win at roulette more often than probability would suggest. That could be indicative that there were other processes at work. That might include either precognition or cheating.

On a whim, I booted my PC, now connected to the school LAN, and looked at the school’s website. This, in itself, was very forward-looking of the school and intended, I am sure, to show everyone on the outside that we were very technologically advanced. The construction of websites was still so arcane that they had brought in outside consultants to build it for them.

Very few people had an internet connection, but still used dial-up modems to phone into bulletin board systems or, for the tech-savvy, America On-Line. So when I got my LAN hookup, which linked me to the interconnected world, I had had to download a copy of the Netscape web browser and install it on my PC. I hadn’t used it much, because there weren’t that many websites yet. There were a few commercial ones, mostly large companies, and a good portion of academia had one.

On the school’s website, there were links to the various departments -- the usual stuff about how cutting-edge the department’s research was, how committed the students, and so on. The Psychology Department had, in addition, links to a home page for each full-time faculty member, and adjunct faculty, too. I found Willing’s entry and clicked on it.

His gave his academic background, where he’d taught before, his research interests -- it cleverly evaded calling his parapsychological research by its name -- and a list of his published papers. I made notes of the ones that might have a bearing on my interests.

I called up a search engine, AltaVista, -- Google wouldn’t even exist for a couple more years -- and ran a query for ‘ESP research’ and got relatively little back, and most of that seemed to be from websites belonging to the tin-foil hat crowd.

I tried again with ‘parapsychology research’ and got a few academic hits and looked at those. Again, they were mostly summaries of published papers, and those seemed to be confined to a few esoteric specialist journals that I doubted would be in our library, but I’d look. I logged off and shut down the PC.

I lay back on my bed and put my hands behind my head while I thought. I had no idea how the mechanism of this thing I’d developed actually functioned. There were some obscure clues that might rule out a few things. For example, it was a one-to-one connection, and the target had to be visible, in my line of sight. That allowed me to do certain things.

For other things, I had to have their focus -- and I’d need to define that more precisely -- before I could look into the epicenter, for example, or piggyback on how they formed a foreign (to me) language.

That seemed to be true, also, for that extraordinary binding of minds that happened between me and Karen, and with a few others, as well. I had no idea why that worked sometimes and not others in what I assumed were the same circumstances, like when we both came simultaneously.

And if I had these quite specific skills, why didn’t I also have the ability to read minds in general? Or predict the future? Or move things with my mind? Aren’t those things linked in some way?

Hell, I don’t know. What I know about this you could write on the back of an envelope. One side only.

And that led me to contemplate why it was I had developed this in the first place. Was it just the bump on the head? Unlikely, since people got hit on the head all the time, sometimes even going into comas, but they mostly didn’t wake up with the ability to implant suggestions or other things.

So maybe there was something special about me, some brain abnormality or genetic oddity which switched on these abilities. I doubted that it was genetic, as I’d never heard any family stories about weird old Aunt Agnes and her ‘visions’, so perhaps a genetic mutation, a one-off, that affected only me. I had no way to rule it out yet.

However, the most likely scenario, I thought, was a combination of causes: The collision with the stump that sent me into the coma, and whatever it was that had been in those discarded cans next to the stump, which had gotten into the open head wound.

And those cans had been cleaned up as part of a ‘green-up’ effort around Parker’s Pond some time after my accident. I didn’t know where they had come from and who had dumped them, so couldn’t know what had been in them.

Parapsychology had a pretty standard list of things that fell under its umbrella -- telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, telekinesis, and psychometry -- collectively referred to as psi abilities. The various abilities were either cognitive, like telepathy and precognition, or manipulative, like telekinesis.

What I had seemed to be cognitive, a kind of subset of telepathy and clairvoyance. I made a mental note to try to define the known variants of parapsychology, determine which I possessed, and perhaps to experiment with the others to see if there were any nascent abilities in those areas.

Telekinesis could be fun. But precognition might be really useful. Knowing who was going to win the World Series or the Superbowl next year, a few quiet, well-placed bets, well ... Or the stock market! What are the hot stocks going to be in two years?

I was getting carried away. I’d had no hints, none, that I had any of those other abilities, so there was no reason to believe that they were buried somewhere deep inside, dormant, waiting to be awakened. Still, it couldn’t hurt to be thorough, so I’d look.