Sentinel Days

by Marshall Moore

It’s hard to push a dime across the table with your mind. I’ve tried. From early childhood, I was convinced I must have the ability. Exotic talents ran in the family, or so my mother insisted. Every chance she got, she reminded my sister and me that she was a powerful telepath. Her stories often concerned feats of domestic shock and awe: sensing what our father wanted for dinner, stopping at the supermarket on the way home from work, and having it ready just in time for him to walk through the door. She claimed she only got the menu wrong once. She made chipped beef on toast and when she served it to him, he told her his buddies in the Marines called it shit on a shingle. It never appeared on her table again. Still, one misfire out of a whole marriage’s worth of dinners, apart from his two tours in Vietnam: that was an excellent track record, wasn’t it? So when she said she was monitoring my thoughts and my sister’s at all times, keeping track of where we were, what we were thinking, and what we were likely to do, it made sense to believe her. It made sense to behave. And since we were the children of somebody capable of this type of surveillance, it followed that we must have those abilities too. I know this is not how sane people think. In my defense, I was seven or eight. Also, in the rural South, logic and reason matter less than a well-crocheted narrative.

Although my father had less to say about telepathy and whatnot, he prepared biorhythm charts for the family every couple of months. Biorhythms, now debunked, were popular in the seventies. In theory, your physical, emotional, and intellectual capabilities followed set rhythms of 23, 28, and 33 days respectively. Now and then he’d warn us if we had a “triple critical” day coming up, a day when all three domains converged at their lowest ebb. Since we weren’t allowed to stay home from school and hide under the covers on those days, it was never clear what we were supposed to do. We would stumble out of the house or the school bus on edge, half-expecting cracks to appear in the sky, which never happened. But it still had to be true, of course. He corroborated our mother’s stories of psychic phenomena, and he worked with computers. He’d come home with printouts of our sine waves. This made it all seem very scientific, not to be questioned or doubted. So I was always on guard, always anxious. When nothing awful happened on one of those days, it only showed I’d gotten lucky, dodged a bullet. The danger was real. It recurred.

Mind over matter, my father liked saying. If you put your mind to it, you can do anything. Even the psychic stuff. Looking back, I wonder if he thought I had a filter, if he was just pulling my leg and assumed that I knew. I didn’t. I can’t tell when people are teasing. My brain isn’t wired that way. It sometimes felt as if a brick wall existed in the front region of my mind. If I tried hard enough, if I focused my will and my intention and the frustration that even at that age I could tell was fermenting into rage, I could blast right through the obstruction. Power would issue forth, or so I imagined, and In the smoldering rubble afterward, I might finally be able to live up to the potential I kept being told that I had.

My first attempts to break through the brick wall involved telepathy. Mom made it sound natural, almost easy, like learning to ride a bike or tie your shoes. When I’d ask her to tell me what I was thinking, she’d say I was thinking I didn’t believe her. After all, we had such a close, special relationship. Didn’t I trust her? Why would she make up a thing like this? See, and now you’re feeling a little bit sad. You’ve got your frowny face on. She would then reassure me that they were looking out for us as best they could. Yes, we were different from other people. This was one of the ways. Then why can’t I do it?, I would counter, indignant at the barrier that seemed to keep me from my rightful place among the clairvoyant elite. Just keep trying, she’d say. It’ll happen someday. Like your father says, mind over matter. With that in mind, I’d sit in class listening to the teacher with one ear but trying to zero in on random classmates and hear what they were thinking. Nothing came of it. It’s possible there simply weren’t thoughts in their heads. I did consider that. But since I also couldn’t anticipate when the teacher was about to call on me, I figured this telepathy thing was a bust.

The logical next step was to try sending the cats telepathic messages, because of course it was. I thought that as a less complex species, they’d be easier to reach. I might have misjudged them. Every attempt failed. They wouldn’t even come when I whistled or called here kitty kitty kitty kitty!, like my mother did. They were outdoor cats and spent their days outdoors doing cat things. Off-key whistles and caterwauling from the human who only fed them once or twice a week were not of interest, and if any of my telepathic missives did get through, they were met with indifference. Cats are like that. I wondered if I should lower my expectations even further. I could go down to the pond and try ESPing with the wildlife there, but the fish were bony little carp you couldn’t eat, I was scared the turtles carried diseases, and the muskrat hid most of the time. There were also frogs but they were slimy, and dragonflies but they wouldn’t stay still very long. It was pointless. I gave up.

From somewhere I got a pack of Zener cards. These were designed back in the 1930s for research into parapsychology. There are 25 cards in a deck. Each bears one of five symbols: a circle, a plus sign, a square, a star, or three parallel wavy lines. As with normal playing cards, the symbol appears on only one side. The researcher holds one up and instructs the test subject to say what it is. The more often the subject is right, the more likely it is they’re clairvoyant. But like biorhythms, Zener cards would later be discredited. Cards are easy to manipulate, terrible as testing tools. Ask any gambler. But did I know that? I did not. Did I care? I also did not. Quite deaf to the thoughts of people around me and unable to find lost items by picturing them in my mind, I needed something concrete.

To keep things scientific, I went to the library and checked out all the books on ESP. Just finding them on the shelves felt like validation, although I wouldn’t have understood the word at that age. From the library books, I learned the exotic taxonomies: telepathy, clairvoyance, telekinesis, precognition, teleportation, astral projection, and all the subtle variations thereof. I learned about Ouija boards (we had one at home) and automatic writing, about dowsing and mediumship and remote viewing and retrocognition. I just had to figure out how to activate whatever gift must be stubbornly dormant, a point on which those books were a great deal less clear.

Lacking instructions, I figured I’d wing it. I convinced my sister to have a practice session with me. Even if telepathy no longer seemed easy, it made sense as a second-chance starting point. The idea was to take turns transmitting messages and images. Since I was the kind of kid you would hit or push away as soon as look at, this felt important. I was tired of off-key whistles and caterwauling from the subhumans on the bus when it passed me as I biked to school. I was tired of wiping off the spit. She seemed to get attacked less, but wouldn’t it be handy to fry an assailant’s brain via the power of her mind, whether she needed to or was just bored? We sat opposite each other on my bed with fearsome scowls of concentration. Several minutes into this psychic combat, she sat bolt upright and screamed, I SEE A COFFIN COMING STRAIGHT TOWARD ME, IT’S A COFFIN, OH MY GOD IT’S OPENING!, then collapsed into giggles and went back to her room to listen to hair metal. For the record, I was not transmitting images of coffins. I didn’t think they were scary enough.

No one ever explicitly said not to tell people. There’s a tolerance in the South for the off-kilter, even an embrace. If Granny always knows who’s calling when the phone rings, that’s acceptable. It’s eccentric. In stories, you mitigate the doubt with deflection and distance: Aunt Lucinda used to swear she saw a ghost in that graveyard once; Uncle Joseph always won at cards because he could read minds. It was always long ago and far away; it always happened to somebody else. But you don’t tell people you keep a secret notebook of predictions so you’ll have a record of which ones come true. Nor do you tell them about trying to project your consciousness out of your body to go spy on people at night. That would be like telling them about how the trash always clanks with empty bottles when you take it out or how your mother sometimes sighs and stares out into space for so long you get a little scared or how you wish you were big enough not to get belted anymore.

I didn’t outgrow my experiments. The conviction beneath them remained, even if I’d ruled out telepathy and clairvoyance. For one thing, not all of them failed—not completely. Now and then there seemed to be glimmers of precognition: a hunch that paid off, a foreboding I’d later be glad that I’d heeded. They happened often enough to notice, often enough not to dismiss as coincidence, but not so often as to knock the world off its axis. They were the salt, not the meal. But I wanted something useful—something that worked on command. Thinking ahead to the future and ever the pragmatist, I learned to play poker. Discovered I sucked at it. Clairvoyance or no, it didn’t take long to realize I lacked the composure you need. If your baseline is a struggle to read faces and the cards remain opaque, occasional flashes of insight won’t help. So I moved on to telekinesis.

My first attempts were methodical. I’d wait till I had the house to myself and try willing small change to move across the table. Even an inch or two would have been fine. This never worked, though. A renegade streak of logic reasoned that coins were too heavy and I should try something lighter. So I tracked down everything I might have better luck with than pennies and dimes. I made paper dots with a hole puncher. These would move—if I sneezed or just sighed in annoyance. That was it. I couldn’t get little buttons to wobble, much less skate away from me. My powers of repulsion worked better with people. I fared no better with BBs: every time I lined some up, they’d roll away. Some got lost in the carpet. Although my mother was clairvoyant enough to sense what groceries to pick up at Kroger’s without being asked, her powers let her down when there was something rattling around inside the vacuum cleaner. She’d demand to know what it was; I’d just shrug and blame my sister.

As I got older and read more, books and comics expanded my views on what was possible. I hadn’t heard of pyrokinesis until I read Stephen King’s novel Firestarter. If I couldn’t flip the lights on from across the room or burst some little shithead’s liver when he called me a fag, it seemed unlikely I could ignite anything by force of will. It was the one time in my life I’ve ever wanted to be flaming. But no, the piles of dry kindling wouldn’t play nice and combust. I had better luck with a can of Raid and a lighter. In the novel, the main character’s father has the power of mental dominance: he could give a small psychic nudge and make people obey him. I tried this once or twice at home and got glared at, not obeyed. I crossed that one off the list. The X-Men comics (and later, the films) taught me volumes about preternatural uselessness. I’d have been pleased with Professor Xavier’s telepathy, Jean Gray’s telekinesis, or Wolverine’s abilities to heal. But why would anyone want to freeze things, phase through a wall, be covered with blue scales, or shoot lasers out of their eyes? Well, I could think of applications, but those abilities seemed too high-maintenance and weirdly specific. I didn’t want to live my life always in the service of a power like that. It needed to be the other way around.

If I’m honest, the desperation faded but not the belief—not completely. There would be a brief flirtation with the Ouija board, for a time. I could sometimes get it to work. Then it scared the hell out of me once. I put it away for good, a decision both parents agreed with. Somewhere along the way, they stopped bringing up the psychic stuff as well. Perhaps middle-aged life changes like divorces, new marriages, and house sales and purchases put them off exotic mental weirdness. The mundane demanded their attention just as careers and general adulting demanded ours. As I began to walk through the world less terrified of getting ambushed or touched in creepy ways or maybe shot by mistake or on purpose, I cared less about mental death rays and more about mental health days. I now regard psychic phenomena as a Schrödinger’s cat that needs the litter box scooped. They simultaneously exist and don’t. There’s also shit in the next room that might need my attention. This isn’t to say I don’t try to fold space if I’m running late for work or a plane, because I absolutely do. It hasn’t worked yet as far as I know. Or maybe it has. I’m less on edge now, and any cracks that may appear in the sky are more to do with the ozone layer than my biorhythms. But with one part of my mind, a region off to the side somewhere, I’m still watching and waiting and listening, because you never know. The dime might eventually slide.