Works/Persistence of Vision

I remember the day I met him. I woke up with my nightshirt damp down the length of my spine and between my breasts, knotted around me from my wriggling. I sat up and thought, That must have been a bad one.

They're always rougher when they come in dreams - I suppose it's because the real world isn't around me then, so it's easier for the images to be stronger. Stronger, and harder to interpret. I remember sitting at my kitchen table with a mug of coffee, trying to work it out. There had been a bridge - no, not exactly a bridge. Outdoors in some wild place, but not wild either. A castle? No, no, not around here. Something that looked like a castle?

I gave up and got dressed. I don't recall my exact activities that morning. The usual. Shop, browse a bookstore, have a cup of coffee, all the while not paying much attention. Watching the faces go in and out. I think I must have been in a cafe or something. I do recall that I was sitting down when it came. I had a beverage; I remember it spilling on the table.

I worry that I'll get one while I'm trying to cross the street or do something that requires concentration. I gave up driving; it got so I was so nervous my hands shook on the steering wheel. I never leave Manhattan anymore anyway. I like to keep the landmarks recognizable.

I've never actually had one someplace dangerous, although I had a big one once in public and came out of it in the hospital. They'd thought I was having a seizure.

I always pay for my food and drink before I start to eat it. If I'm in a nice restaurant, I guess at the bill and put money on the table, under a glass. Polite waiters don't ask. I try to overestimate a little. Polite customers compensate for their faults.

I don't remember interpreting this one, or getting there. I don't remember what the building looked like. They all look alike anyway. I remember the woman's face as I picked up her infant daughter. I remember the whole place smelled like fish grease; the walls and ceiling of the kitchen were stained yellow from it. I remember taking the woman's hand and pulling her out of the kitchen. When I pulled her away, she wanted to turn the gas off. The roof fell in just as we reached the hall. The baby didn't start crying until then.

The walls were crumbling around us and I remember thinking, So this is how it will end, except it never ends, and then there was the next apartment and the fire escape was still attached to the back wall and we were on the ground. Fire trucks. It had taken me too long to get out. I had to get away quickly. The woman was jabbering at me and I tried to pawn her off on a paramedic and vanish. "I was just visiting a neighbor and I heard the building start to make a weird rumbling noise. Look, I'm fine, they're going to tow my car, I don't need a doctor. Let me go." I must have gotten the Light then - the paramedic let go of me and I ran.

Behind me someone said, "Wait!"

He caught up with me as I was getting onto the train. Out of breath. He was maybe thirty, short very curly brown hair and blue eyes, eyes that notice things. The doors shut. He tapped his notepad against the window. I looked the other way.

I remember. My memory is fine, really. I always remember the important things.

It seems like the next time I saw him was the next day, but now I think there had to have been a few days in between. I guess nothing happened on those days. I do sometimes have long spells where nothing happens. That's generally when I get my writing done.

I remember that I again started my day by coming out of the same dream. That's not uncommon. The big ones are usually dreams, and they usually come more than once, repeating until they happen or I can interpret them - whichever comes first. But the second time was no clearer. Definitely a castle, however unlikely. Some kind of bridge. Something involving rock - a cliff? Nothing more.

I drink about ten cups of coffee a day. The idea is to think frantically, but not about anything in particular. Wind it up and let it go. I can't count the number of times I've had them while sitting over a cup of coffee. The way I had the next one.

Times Square. Major, but not urgent. True hell is knowing about a big one but not having time to reach it. I took the subway.

The building was not what people mean when they talk about the glamour of Manhattan. I've seen some of the nice places too. This lobby hadn't seen the far side of nice in years. The old man in the creaky chair with last week's newspaper crinkled his eyebrows at me. I don't remember his face, but I remember his eyebrows. White and overgrown.

"You gotta be kidding, lady," he said.

"No, I'm not. I need you to evacuate the building. It's serious."

"Some of these people can hardly get out of the building, if you take my meaning. Peddle it somewhere else, lady." He pulled the paper back up and I reached over and yanked it back down again.

"Get them out. I mean it."

He gave me that scared look, the one that tells me I must have the Light. "Wha-what do you want me to do, anyway? Go from door to door?"

I sighed and went to the fire alarm. "Does this work?"

"It had better," he said. "We pay a bundle for them to come check it once a month. Hey!" he shouted as it went off in his ear.

"Now go make sure they're listening," I said, and I knew my blood was running high enough that he would.

Some years ago I evacuated a church. I told the preacher to call them out and he did it. No questions. In a fit of curiosity, watching the flames shooting out the top of the steeple like a refinery stack, I asked him why he'd listened to me, a complete stranger. It had happened so many times and I wondered what other people saw. He said, "You had the Light of God in your eyes."

His interpretation, of course. I know God isn't involved. I hope not.

The Light only works when my heart is pounding, and only with one person at a time. When I was young and stupid, I tried to move a whole crowd. It was a disaster. These days I'd find the one person they'll all listen to - the super, the announcer, the boss. I've bullied the Mayor three times. But he doesn't remember it.

I remember standing out in the street, with senior citizens in their baggy Bermuda shorts and their bathrobes and slippers and hair nets, thinking, I hope I've timed it right, or they'll start to go back in.

Across the street, the scaffolding for the construction elevator broke free from the exposed beams of the highrise in progress. Like smashing a pumpkin with a steel bar, it pivoted down directly into the roof of our building. Straight through the top three stories, collapsing ceilings and walls beneath it, before it stopped. Still attached to the beams across the street, it looked like a gigantic catwalk above us. Rubble everywhere. Concussions. Debris. People screaming. Time to go.

The old man from the lobby grabbed my arm. "How did you know?"

"I can't say," I said.

I had turned the corner and was almost to the subway. Then I stopped and went back. I found my old man and said to him, "Get them out from under that scaffold. It's going to collapse into the street. Nothing in this block is safe right now."

In that delay, not five minutes long, he had had enough time to show up again. He was there before the fire trucks - although I heard them on their way. Same hair. Same blue eyes. Where had he come from? If the reporters are so prompt, I remember thinking, how come the newspaper isn't better?

I ducked around the other corner but I knew, even then, that he had seen me. Those eyes missed nothing.

I read the paper the next morning. I seldom do that; I don't need to see bad news, even the parts I had nothing to do with. One old woman hadn't been able to make it out of her apartment in time. I told myself I wouldn't think about that. "An unidentified informant." Good.

The third time I woke from the same dream - castle, bridge, cold sweat - I had a new dread. Not the usual dread, that I wouldn't be able to figure it out in time. The idea had taken me that it meant I was going to see him again that day. You learn to look for patterns as quickly as possible.

I waited the whole day for it to come - whatever it was that would lead me somewhere where he'd show up. It never came. I went home, wrote a little, ate a little, showered, lay in bed sleepless, idle - and it hit me. I nearly hurt myself getting out of bed in a hurry.

Always dress. Never go in your nightshirt. Always bring emergency money. You may need a way home.

I wished once again for a faster way; my own personal ambulance with a driver and a siren. By the time I made it down to Chelsea I had missed it. The special of the day was rat poison. Always label your containers carefully and don't count on your system; your kitchen help have a tendency to move things around when you aren't looking.

I walked among the tables, between people slumped across them, face down in their food. A couple out for an intimate late supper. Maybe they had been to a show and wandered downstream. Maybe they'd been looking forward to tonight for months. Or they could just be jaded socialites looking for that next soon-to-be-trendy spot.

I counted twenty-five dead. Twenty-five is how old I was the last time I cried, the day I decided I couldn't quit after all. I cry in my sleep a lot now. No one noticed me walking around. Often people assume I Belong. It's useful.

They wouldn't let him past the police line at the door. I saw him, went back in, and left through the kitchen. He had walked around the block and was waiting for me. His eyes were really very striking.

"Do you come to every nasty event in the city?" I asked, pushing past. He grabbed my shoulder, not roughly.

"I have the ambulance-chasing beat," he said. "What's your excuse?"

"Let go of me or I scream."

He removed his hand, but still stood in my way. "You owe me an explanation."

"I'm not your next feature story. Go away and leave me alone."

"Do you want to be arrested? Are you a criminal or just some kind of disaster groupie?"

"Think whatever you like," I said, shoving past. "But don't print it unless you can find proof."

"What should I be scared of?" he shouted after me. "You have to come out of hiding to sue me."

I had the dream again that night, still couldn't interpret it, and decided in frustration that I wasn't going to leave the house that day. If I write all day, spend all my time concentrating on other things, I can stop - for as long as my focus holds out. I stopped for a month once. I was twenty-five.

He called my home.

"You followed me. I'm reporting you to the police," I said.

"I'm not a stalker," he replied. "Look, I'm not going to write about you without your permission, and I don't expect to get it."

"Then why are you calling me?" I asked, choking down my anger.

"I'd like you to have dinner with me."

I hung up on him.

That afternoon I went out and got the day's paper. I wasn't mentioned.

I probably would have had the dream that night if I'd slept.

The next day I called the newspaper and asked for the name on the byline. They connected me to him. "This is the disaster groupie," I said. "What are you doing for lunch?"

I don't know why I did it. As we talked through lunch - talked about everything but subject A - I realized I was having a lovely time, but I had no idea why I was even there. He did not press the issue.

The next day I prevented an office fire on Wall Street and found a phone message from him when I got home.

The day after that was rough; I saved a little boy from a fall onto subway tracks, spraining my leg. Small ones like that are hard to interpret; it could be any little boy on any platform at any hour. But it had come with uncharacteristic clarity; I saw a clock and a street number. Then, in the afternoon, I entered the back of a Chinese restaurant and extinguished a fire in a supply closet, but not before slipping and bruising my head against a doorframe. No one saw me enter or leave. Sometimes I wonder. I got home and accepted an invitation to dinner.

He saw me limp into the restaurant foyer, forehead half-purple, and began to exclaim something - then stopped himself. He said nothing pertinent until dessert.

"Look," he said, "you told me that you don't really work. No offense."

"No, that's right. I sell a little freelance writing," I said, "but I inherited the house and enough money to keep it. I don't deal well with deadlines. Too much else on my mind."

"Maybe you should tell me about what you actually do," he said carefully. "The part with the sprained legs and bruised foreheads. I've already promised to keep it to myself."

"Why are you having dinner with me?" I asked.

"Well -"

"If you're doing this because you figure that sooner or later you'll coax a story out of me, forget it. I'll leave right now. I'll get my phone number changed and this time it will be unlisted. You hear?"

"Wait, wait, wait. Is it just me, or do you do this with everybody?"

I sighed and took a long sip of my coffee. "All right," I said finally. "I see bad things in the future. Never good things. Sometimes they're days away; sometimes they're ten minutes from now and I can't get there in time to stop people from getting rat poison in their dinner. Sometimes I get there and can't do anything about it. Sometimes I can."

He stared at me, looking through me with those eyes.

"Wondering whether to believe me or not?" I asked. "It doesn't really matter."

He shook his head. "I'm wondering why you didn't just call 911 and tell them about the rat poison. Or the restaurant."

"They let you be a reporter and you're still that innocent?" I asked.

He glared at me over his fork. "You do do this with everybody. I can tell. Why are you having dinner with me?"

"You remembered me," I said. "When you saw me the second time, you remembered me. People don't usually do that."

"I wondered about that. Talking to the people in Times Square."

"And you have really interesting eyes," I said.

He digested that for a moment.

"I know this sounds horrible," he eventually said, "but why bother? I mean, you don't look like you enjoy your work much. You walk around with this look like you've been at the world's longest funeral - tired and shocked and hurt. I had to know what makes someone look like that. And see if I couldn't get you to laugh a little. Just once."

"I laughed when we had lunch."

"You did. And we didn't say anything about seeing the future, or buildings collapsing. When do you get to have a life?"

"I quit once a few years ago," I said, staring into space. "It was making me crazy. After a month I realized it was making me crazier not to. I couldn't stop thinking about all the deaths I might have been able to prevent."

"So you feel guilty because you can't protect everyone in Manhattan from disaster? Did you volunteer for the job?"

I stood up. "Thank you for a lovely dinner," I said stiffly. I limped out.

Of course he called again. "Look," I said to him on the phone the next day, "I said I wasn't your feature story. I'm also not your poster child. You don't have to save me. I guess I'm flattered, but you can't and you shouldn't try. There are things you don't know."

"Let's leave that out of it for a second," he said. "Are you interested in me? I mean, other considerations aside. I think you enjoy my company when you're not obsessing over my motivations. I think I like yours, though the dark cloud over your head makes it hard to tell -"

"I should go," I said.

"Can we at least meet and talk about it?"

"I'm busy this evening," I said. Which was a lie.

"Tomorrow, then. Take a morning off from saving the world and come walk in the park with me. Really - just one more time, that's all I ask. If you're still determined, then I'll leave you alone. I promise."

It turned out I was busy that evening after all, busy watching a fire at the docks. The blaze reflected and broke apart on the surface of the water. I had only barely gotten there in time, and had nearly been trapped in the warehouse after getting everyone else out. They'd come in with fire axes. I'd had to make up an elaborate explanation.

I leaned against a railing, shivering and coughing now and then from smoke inhalation. Who would want to be involved with this?

I woke up the next morning. The dream again. I tried hard not to think about it, but it was much stronger. Very near. He arrived in a car. "I thought maybe we should go someplace with fewer people," he said.

"Where are we going?"

"Ever been to the Cloisters?" He drove along the Hudson, north, and turned onto a road up a hill. I felt odd. We parked at the foot of an old stone abbey - I supposed those were the cloisters in question - and strolled along one of the many twisting footpaths on the property. My stomach was churning.

"I think I'm infatuated with you," he said.

"You've only just met me."

"And I'd like to know as much about you as I can. Isn't that infatuation?"

"I can't stop doing what I do," I said.

"And you won't let anyone else around you because of that? Why not?"

"Where the hell ARE we?" I shouted. He practically jumped away from me. I spun, trying to get a good view in all directions. "Oh, my God. We've got to get out of here. Right now. We've got to get everyone out of here. Why did you bring me to this place?" I screamed at him. "What have you done?"

I was far enough away to see it clearly now; it sat at the highest point on the clifftop. We had been walking around it. The abbey was my castle. We stood at a railing above a sheer cliff, looking down hundreds of feet at the the winding parkway below and the beautiful Hudson beyond that.

When we had turned off the parkway and gone uphill ... I saw what I couldn't have seen from inside the car. The road wound up to the park between two cliffs. Joining those cliffs, high over the road, was an arch of rock. A natural bridge.

The ground started to slide away beneath me. Everything shook. I ran.

You can't run in an earthquake. Just when you get to speed, the ground comes up and trips you. I fell a few times, and heard two sounds, clearer than I should have heard them: The sound of screaming far below, and the sound of one voice calling my name.

I went back to him, back to him where he was dangling from the partially collapsed cliff face, hanging by what was left of the railing. I went back to him, and pulled him up, and as he embraced me, gasping for breath, the earth stopped moving.

I pushed him away.

I walked down the road, winding my way down the hill, my eyes feeling itchy as if I were about to cry. But I never cry any more. The natural bridge had collapsed. A few pieces of metal debris jutting from the pile of fallen rock. I had no idea how many people had been in the car. I had no idea who else had been hurt.

If I had gone down the hill instead ... waved them to a halt .... Even closer timing than the little boy in the subway.

He put a hand on my shoulder from behind, and I cast it off. "When they count the bodies, you'll know what your life is worth," I said. I took a step forward, not turning to him, willing myself to walk away.

"You saved my life," he said. "Am I supposed to hate you because of that?"

"I don't know," I said. My feet still wouldn't move fast enough. "Are the people in that car supposed to forgive me?"

"You can't save everyone!" he said. "If you see a disaster coming and you save one person, you've done better than if you hadn't been there! Stop counting only the losses! You are not responsible for this!"

I turned around finally. His eyes were almost blinding. Would I have saved him if he'd had dark murky eyes? Would he even have been there?

"How do you know?" I said. "How can you be sure that I only predict these things? When was the last time there was an earthquake around here? I don't remember ever having been in one. Do you?"

He put his hand to his mouth and said nothing.

"I told you not to try to save me," I said, and my feet finally listened, and I walked, and then I began to run.

Copyright © January 1999. Do not distribute or reproduce.