The Seeing

Chapter Ten

Two days later, Dr. Homewood parked his two-seater sports car in the area reserved for staff near the quad at Trinity College. It was a brisk, spring morning. Sunlight brightened the immense cobblestone quadrangle surrounded by gray buildings and crowded now with students in duffle coats and boots hurrying toward classes, bookbags looped over their shoulders.

Mingling easily with these undergraduates in his jeans and loose tweed jacket, Dr. Julian went to his office on the fourth floor of the science building. He dropped his briefcase on a chair stacked with books and pulled up the window shades which gave him a view of college halls and the bulk of a steepled church, its dark stone walls scored with scaffoldings.

Then he opened Jessica’s files. He started in chronological order with their first meeting on the tenth of April, several years ago. Her blood pressure had been normal, her height forty-two inches, her weight fifty-one pounds. She had started a poem for him that first day, handing it to him without embarrassment after Andrew Dalworth had left them alone in the doctor’s office.

“I can’t finish it till I know you better,” she had said, seated in the chair opposite him, her shoes swinging free above the floor.

There was a copy of the poem in her files.

Dr. Julian sorted through the results of examinations he had given Jessica over the years, noting again her records and reactions to the Berenreuther Personality Inventory, Rorschach and Thematic Aperception Tests, the Stanford-Binet and the Pinter-Patterson Performance Scales.

During this period, Jessica had participated in most of the laboratory and field tests available to modern psychic researchers. Identification of numbers written on concealed blackboards, blindfolded guessing of playing cards, identification of persons and objects in sealed rooms, with therapeutic breaks to eliminate the decline effect (or plain boredom) associated with repetitious lab experiments.

Other tests included a reading of Jessica’s attempts to physically affect a supersensitive magnetic compass needle, which registered to one-millionth of the earth’s field. Jessica’s performance had been inconclusive; the change in the output recording was insignificant, the frequency of the oscillation increasing only 1.2 percent for perhaps fifteen seconds.

Dr. Julian studied the results of a test which had particularly interested him at the time, a Global Targeting Examination on a run of ten. Jessica had scored six H’s (Hits), three N’s(Neutrals) and one M (Miss), identifying salient characteristics of areas known only to her through their grid coordinates, latitude and longitude, in degrees, minutes and seconds. Her degree of success had been gratifying. She had, in fact, looked at numbers written on a notepad in an office in Trinity College, Dublin, and had related them — six times out of ten — to the geographical areas they represented, places in the world she had never been — the Ripon Falls, Africa, Lopez Bay, the Philippines, an island in the Celebes Sea near Borneo, stretches of ocean off the Cornish coast. Her one Miss and three Neutrals (too ambiguous to fit into an equation) scarcely detracted from her performance, particularly since it had been conducted under strict laboratory control of defense against unconscious iedetic assistance (after all, Jessica might have at some time seen and memorized maps of those areas). Also, Dr. Julian understood that the object under scrutiny (Jessica) could be affected by the analysis of the witness (himself) — in some cases by his mere physical presence.

At first, Dalworth, the executive accustomed to computerized, corporate decisions at the highest level, had demanded answers, decisions, results — God, how he had demanded them, Dr. Julian thought.

“I want to know why, Dr. Homewood, why Jessica sees these things we don’t, sees things beyond our senses and perceptions. My experience tells me there are always explanations if you dig deep enough and hard enough.”

They had been sitting in a pub on the Liffey at the time and Julian remembered his exasperation with the older man. “Then dig deep and hard into this, Mr. Dalworth,” he had said, giving him a poem that Jessica had presented to him that same day, four stanzas of free verse which she called Pussywillows.

Dalworth read the poem twice, massaging the bridge of his broken nose with a thumb and forefinger.

“Well, you’re the expert, Homewood. What do you think it means?”

“I don’t know,” Dr. Julian said and sipped his ale. “I mean that in the most literal sense we can conceive. I simply do not know. There is a breadth and depth to Jessica’s perceptions and precognitions — call them what you will — that brush against the parameters we’ve established so far. Her intimacy with the strange side of nature, the warnings she sees from colors, the oblique alarms running through her poetry — much of that is beyond my experience with run-of-the-mill psychics and clairvoyants, Andrew. And beyond that of my colleagues for that matter.”

Dalworth had looked at him thoughtfully. “All right, I can accept that. Jessica is different. She’s unpredictable. Is there a danger in that for her? Or — for others?”

“I’ve already given you my answer to that, Andrew. I simply don’t know...”

When Andrew Dalworth dropped Jessica off at the north entrance to the Trinity quad at ten o’clock, she and Dr. Julian then drove in an open sports car down the coast to Dun Laoghaire, a seaside resort town a dozen miles south of Dublin. A pier jutted from the shore almost a mile out into the Irish Sea. Some of the sails on the boats were bright red, others striped blue and yellow, and still others white against the gray waters, gulls sweeping and crying everywhere. The great white wooden hotels were not yet open for the season, their shuttered windows looking down blindfolded from perches on the gray cliffs.

It was a favorite spot of theirs. Instead of in his office or a laboratory, Dr. Julian had discovered that Jessica — with her love of the sea and the outdoors — was much more relaxed out here in the open, feeding the birds and hiking along the breakwater, the spray hanging above them in the occasional sunlight like dozens of tiny rainbows.

“Are you going to be warm enough, Jessica?”

She looked down at her slim flannel slacks and then at the backs of her leather-and-knit gloves. She fastened the top button of her mulberry-red jacket and said, “Yes, of course I am.”

“Fine. You want to race me to the end of the pier?”

“No, let’s walk, Dr. Julian.”

He looked down at her and saw a certain mournful delicacy in the set of her expression, something wistful in her eyes as she looked at the circling birds, their orange beaks garish against their white plumage.

“Come on, Jess. I’ll give you a head start.”

“I don’t need a head start. Your pipe’s out, Julian.”

“It’s very difficult to keep it lighted in an open car. Which is beside the point, isn’t it? So let’s walk, and you can tell me what’s bothering you.”

They sat talking on a stone ledge at the far end of the breakwater, discussing what had happened to the dog Holly and the other things Jessica had seen in her luminous visions. They didn’t realize how cold they were until a tea-vendor came their way, an old man bent against the winds, pushing his wares in a three-wheeled aluminum cart.

Julian bought cylinders of hot tea and a pair of pigs-in-the-blankets — steaming sausages wrapped in brown pie-crust and laid on a paper napkin.

Jessica sipped her tea and threw the last bite of her sausage to a gull circling only six feet above them.

“Did you say a prayer for Holly?”

“Please, Julian, I’m tired of it.”

“Then we might as well drive back.”

“Oh, all right. I’m not sure, I don’t think so.” Shaking her dark hair back with a feminine swing, she smoothed it down to her shoulders with her gloved hands and tilted her head to Stare out across the gray waters.

She would be a beautiful woman, he thought, watching her in profile. It was there in the child — the fluid movements of her slim body, the high candor in her eyes and expression, the whiteness of her forehead beneath the dark spray of hair tumbled now by the salty winds.

“We buried Holly in the orchard where you can see the grave from my room,” she said. “Mr. Brown made a cross from the branches of an oak that fell last week. Everyone was there — Lily and Rose, Mrs. Kiernan and Mr. Flynn. And Charity Bostwick brought Father Malachy up. He said some prayers in Latin.”

Jessica looked directly at Dr. Julian. After a moment, she nodded and said, “Yes, I said a prayer, Julian.”

“For Holly?” he asked her quietly.

“No, Julian, it wasn’t for anyone.” She turned away from him and stared again at the rolling seas. “It was against something. I’ve told you—” She shrugged helplessly and smoothed her hair down again, the ends curling softly around her gloved fingers. “I didn’t feel responsible for Holly. It always helps, Julian, to remember what you told me about the view from the hill...”

“I’m glad you remember, Jessica. It’s only a metaphor, but sometimes that’s the only way we can get a glimpse of things that we can’t weigh or measure but still perceive in ways we’re at a loss to define or understand.”

When she was young — Jessica sighed at her thought; she’d been seven — Dr. Julian had likened her perception of coming events to that of a person standing on a high hill with a view of a river sweeping about its base.

“Imagine that you can see a boat coming down the stream. Think of that as the past,” he had said. “As it comes abreast of you, that, in our figure of speech, is the present. Now imagine you can see farther downstream to a waterfall, its spray leaping high in the air but still not visible to the people on the boat. From your view, you know what might happen. The boat may turn a bend in the forked river and be drawn into the currents of the waterfall. But the people on the boat can change course, drop anchor or find a safe cove. They have choices. You aren’t responsible for what they do or the possible consequence of what you see.”

Dr. Julian wadded up their napkins and poked them into the aluminum tea cylinders.

“We’re good friends, aren’t we, Jessica?”

“Of course, we’re good friends,” Jessica said. “I think we always will be.”

“Then answer me this: Is there any reason you won’t tell me what you’re afraid of?”

She shook her head slowly. “I’ve tried to understand it. I didn’t feel responsible for Holly — just sad and lonely. But the other thing is different. Cold brightness in the future, and it frightens me. Someone who had a small blue car and a pet — a black cat, I think. It was when I was very young, and mostly before Andrew.” She shook her head with a sudden stubbornness. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore, Julian. Please. Let’s go back now.”

“All right, Jessica,” Julian said, and put an arm around the girl, holding her against the winds that hurried them along the breakwater toward the blank eyes of the hotels above the resort town.