Sleep like it’s your job, every day, and when you wake up (never before noon) sit in your easy chair and type by the light of a 99¢ reading lamp and the glow of a space heater.
Someone should have given me that advice, so I could call out that person now for thanks, for props, for accolades and salutations.
I remember an upstairs psychic rattling off mundane predictions: “You’ll get a good job, you’ll have money, you’ll get married,” and so on. Today I imagine that psychic surprising herself and me with “I see you in 15 years in an easy chair typing by the light of a cheap book lamp and warming yourself with a 15-year-old space heater.”
The psychic, a 10-year-old girl I saw in Philadelphia in 1990, said all the mundane things, delivering her words in rapid fire boredom that comes from repeating the same bullshit hundreds of times at $8 a pop. But after the mundane scripted predictions ended she just smiled, and I left, feeling had but at least entertained.
If I was a child feigning psychic prodigy I would have made stuff up, and I would probably be in trouble for it to this day, in trouble for lying to middle aged women about their numerous miscarriages, for promising fabulous riches and fame to failing college students, for describing elaborate and detailed scenarios in which every one of my customers would be promised a period of their life in which they sit in an easy chair, typing in the darkness.
A police car passes by, its siren wailing, reminding me of the other fanciful prodigy I wish existed. A prodigy of sirens. A 10 year old boy with an astonishing knowledge of different types of sirens, he could identify a Berlin police siren from 1932 as easily as a Tunisian ambulance from 1977. Like a circus freak the boy would be placed in a room, blindfolded, as siren sounds are played and he quickly identifies every one. Nothing challenges him, and to make the chore interesting for himself he follows an identification of a Cuban air raid siren with details of the American companies which manufactured the device, the decibel ratings at which the sirens were typically blasted, and the other work of the sound engineers who developed this siren sound. The prodigy is not showing off, he is simply relieving his boredom by finding more information — miraculously, it seems, as no resource of information about these sirens is known to exist or to have been made available to the child.
One day, though, during one of these siren circus acts, a mistake is made. An honest mistake which alters the boy’s perceptions of sirens: 2 sirens sounds were played at once. It might have been an Appalachian police siren played over a Swedish car alarm; or it might have been a Toronto jewelry store burglar alarm mixed with a Japanese ambulance. No one knows, but whatever they were the boy was exposed to two siren sounds at once and his abilities took a different direction. When he heard an ambulance siren he delivered his usual rapid-fire account of “It’s a Hungarian ambulance, Soviet-era manufacturer, ” etc., but his accounts included more. “There’s a woman inside, she wants this baby but she will die for it, they are trying to save her and the child, she’s poor and the child will live but will also be poor, the medics are barely paying attention to the woman’s vital signs, she is thinking of the man who impregnated her, that man is unaware of the situation…”
The prodigy handily identifies another siren as “Syrian police, siren of Egyptian origin, they are racing to a crime scene, a robbery, 3 young men robbing a bakery — a bakery? — they will be tried and serve a light sentence but 2 of them will go on and rob other places.”
The prodigy’s reading of the sirens goes beyond the circus act of identifying the type and location and stretches into the seemingly impossible. He claims the story of the incident is told through the nuances of the siren sounds, and that he can see the vehicles in a psychedelic way, the siren sounds an extension of a colored heat cloud that only he can see, and that surrounds all sounds.
He begins his rapid ascent to an insanity in which all sounds tell complex stories, all noises explain themselves, the details of their long journey to his ears fully contained in what others hear as random noise but which the prodigy hears as complex interweavings of experience.
After a brief flourish of fascination the public claims fraud. No one believes him, and why would they? The boy is lying, though his youthful directionlessness of his intentions are not pernicious. He lost the focus of his gifts, and now when he hears any ambulance or police siren he swears it is coming for him, and one day it will be true.
