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The other thing noteworthy about the T-burg trip is that the last contrails of the old mental telepathy are gone.
That was actually why I first noticed him. He was never much to look at.
But we stood side by side in that elevator my first afternoon in Seattle, and every word out of his mouth was exactly what I’d been thinking. The phenomenon intensified and persisted over 20 years.
That was why it was so hard to let go.
Reciprocal, he said.
But now when I interrupt him – and I interrupt people a lot; my natural high spirits and V8 thought processes – he makes a face and tells me, “That’s not what I was going to say.”
So freedom for me inside my own head.
The inner dialogue becomes an inner monologue.
It feels a bit strange.
Not bad.
But strange. Drafty.
Because, really, what good are thoughts if someone else isn’t thinking them too?
###
The mental telepathy thing was never on me. It was all him. And, of course, it’s something that sociopaths and con men are extremely good at. He was always a lousy con man, though. Or maybe because the spigot piped both ways, I always knew when he was trying to con me, at least with one part of my mind although the part of my mind that loved him remained in complete denial.
Once, I said to him, “Well, it doesn’t come from me. I can’t do this with other people. And I’ve seen you do it with other people. Is it always women?”
He raised his eyebrows. “No,” he said softly. “Sometimes it’s men.”
“And is it… Do you target people?”
“No,” he said. “It’s random.”
There is a certain malleability associated with it, and he disliked that malleability. As though that… tendency, talent, whatever you want to call it... was a propensity toward something destructive like alcoholism.
I saw him do the changeling enchantment thing to the awful Jayne, but I haven’t seen him do it since.
Could be that he clamped down on it after he almost died and recovered.
Still.
If you had serious bank riding on a bet about something whose outcome you knew absolutely nothing about, whose outcome nobody could predict, you’d be smart to ask him about his hunch.
###
Anyway. A Christopher Priest novel.
And speaking of Christopher Priest – the most interesting thing about Stranger Things is probably the fact that the showrunners are a pair of identical twins. Shades of The Prestige!
That was actually why I first noticed him. He was never much to look at.
But we stood side by side in that elevator my first afternoon in Seattle, and every word out of his mouth was exactly what I’d been thinking. The phenomenon intensified and persisted over 20 years.
That was why it was so hard to let go.
Reciprocal, he said.
But now when I interrupt him – and I interrupt people a lot; my natural high spirits and V8 thought processes – he makes a face and tells me, “That’s not what I was going to say.”
So freedom for me inside my own head.
The inner dialogue becomes an inner monologue.
It feels a bit strange.
Not bad.
But strange. Drafty.
Because, really, what good are thoughts if someone else isn’t thinking them too?
###
The mental telepathy thing was never on me. It was all him. And, of course, it’s something that sociopaths and con men are extremely good at. He was always a lousy con man, though. Or maybe because the spigot piped both ways, I always knew when he was trying to con me, at least with one part of my mind although the part of my mind that loved him remained in complete denial.
Once, I said to him, “Well, it doesn’t come from me. I can’t do this with other people. And I’ve seen you do it with other people. Is it always women?”
He raised his eyebrows. “No,” he said softly. “Sometimes it’s men.”
“And is it… Do you target people?”
“No,” he said. “It’s random.”
There is a certain malleability associated with it, and he disliked that malleability. As though that… tendency, talent, whatever you want to call it... was a propensity toward something destructive like alcoholism.
I saw him do the changeling enchantment thing to the awful Jayne, but I haven’t seen him do it since.
Could be that he clamped down on it after he almost died and recovered.
Still.
If you had serious bank riding on a bet about something whose outcome you knew absolutely nothing about, whose outcome nobody could predict, you’d be smart to ask him about his hunch.
###
Anyway. A Christopher Priest novel.
And speaking of Christopher Priest – the most interesting thing about Stranger Things is probably the fact that the showrunners are a pair of identical twins. Shades of The Prestige!
