The Karma Booth

It was quiet in the hall.

He knocked softly on the door to the girl’s room, and the light voice that answered adopted a formal tone: “Yes?” No grown-up child that’s come home ever answers Yes to a knock at the door like that. You call out Mom or Dad or say Come in or say Hey. Maybe Mary Ash had heard the doorbell about half an hour ago or was getting used to the parade of visitors.

When he pushed the door open, he found her sitting on her bed with a large charcoal sketchpad. The pad was propped up against the improvised drafting table of her knees. She smiled at him pleasantly but with no effort to rise or to interrupt her drawing. It was the smile of a self-absorbed toddler greeting a polite friend of her daddy’s. A pleasant enough smile. The eyes, however, weren’t young. They were a wise and vivid green, so striking that he almost took them for another color, one that belonged on a flower from the family garden or on a bright, newly born grasshopper chewing its leaves, knowing what its singular purpose and arrival was for.

“Mary, my name is Tim Cale.”

She nodded and smiled again expectantly, reaching out her hand to shake his without a word.

The hand with the re-grown fingers.

Her touch was cool, with a limpness thanks to a tutored grace. And then her eyes were down, back to the drawing.

The room itself told him very little, relentlessly neat and clean like the lounge below. Whatever she was now, Mary Ash had once favored pastel colors, and the acrylic paintings on the wall owed a lot to the European Fauvists. There was a framed computer store ad on the wall—obviously one of her first compositions as a professional graphic artist.

With the high angle she had for the sketchpad on her knees, he couldn’t see what her composition was. Not yet.

“Mary,” he tried again. “Mary, I know you’ve had a lot of visitors, and I’ll probably have the same questions…”

Her eyes flicked up from the sketchpad and down again as she let out a soft giggle. “I doubt it.”

“You do?”

She hadn’t invited him to sit, but he sat down anyway in the white wicker chair, making it crunch. I doubt it. He could infer a lot from those three little words, and he was instinctively certain he didn’t have to explain what his job was or why he was here.

Okay, he thought. If she expects you to ask different questions, go ahead and ask them. You planned to anyway.

He wouldn’t ask her what she remembered of Nickelbaum’s attack. He wouldn’t ask if she had any consciousness of the… transition to wherever she went. He wouldn’t ask where she had been all this time before her return. Others had inquired, and the girl had shaken her head dully or told them she couldn’t remember. She was just… back.

“Mary, what are you going to do now? I mean, after you’ve rested. Will you go back to your old job? The design firm will probably be glad to have you.”

Her eyes lifted off the paper with new interest.

“What did you feel like doing after Paris?” she asked.

After Paris…?

Don’t show it, he thought. Don’t show surprise. Don’t show you’ve been rattled. It was possible someone had filled in the girl about details of his career.

Her voice remained soft, almost ethereal. The charcoal pencil scratched the page.

“Well, it’s not like I was ever murdered and brought back from the dead,” he answered reasonably.

“No. But you felt like Europe was ruined for you after she died, and you needed to get away for a while.”

Thérèse. The girl was talking about Thérèse. Again, he resisted the urge to ask how she could know anything of his life. Instead he shrugged and replied, “That happened a long time ago.”

“Nooooo, it didn’t,” she said, her voice rising in a singsong. “Not really. Eight years ago, August twenty-fifth, you formally requested a transfer to Asia. It was after you knew you couldn’t help her. You blamed yourself for the breakup, and maybe if it hadn’t happened, she wouldn’t have gone out with the man who worked at the consulate in Lyon. He raped her after he lured her up to the embassy’s corporate hotel room off Rivoli, and he beat her, detaching her retina. She tested positive for HIV. It’s why you delayed visiting me. It’s why you feel conflicted about the Booth. You want punishment, but you also know terrible things change people forever. And you felt there was no pattern to life after Thérèse died in a car accident in Hamburg—”

“I think you’ve made your point,” he whispered.

Don’t ask how, he ordered himself, his mind racing. The how doesn’t matter right now because she obviously picked up this trick from wherever she went.

He forced himself to consider the why of her spouting the details of his life. She hadn’t done it with the others who’d come with their clipboards full of questions.

That meant she had singled him out for this mind game. It also meant he had an advantage, leverage. If only he could figure out what it was and how to use it.

He sat very still, hoping his breathing wasn’t fast. He couldn’t hear it. He was only conscious of Mary Ash, still drawing but not looking at the paper.

“I suppose you can tell me where I was August twenty-fifth last year,” he suggested, playing for time.

“Not an interesting day. You got your teeth cleaned at the dentist’s in the morning. You were upset with a foreign exchange student in the afternoon lecture, a Chilean who thought the CIA was right to topple Allende.”

“February sixteenth, 1985.”

The pale green eyes blinked then held him steady as she recited, “You were twelve and still living in Chicago. It was cold. There was snow on the ground, and you kissed Heather Dershowitz in your family’s basement rec-room while working on a history project together about World War One. You were embarrassed because your erection pushed out your jeans. She was eleven and scared she might get pregnant, and you had to show her books that proved it was impossible.”

She turned to look out her window briefly and added, “They call it hyperthymesia: the ability to recall vivid autobiographical detail according to dates. I don’t think it’s very impressive to remember stuff about yourself.”

“So you remember it about others.”

Her eyes fell gently on him again as she offered another fleeting smile. “Yes. You don’t have to worry, Mr. Cale. I’m not reading your mind, and the effect doesn’t last. And no, it has nothing to do with the physical contact when we shook hands either.”

“You just meet a person and…?”

“You know that quantum physics is responsible for how a television works, but you don’t know how. You still go on watching television, don’t you? Because you can.”

“Do you know about quantum physics?”

“Of course not!” she laughed.

With a flash of insight, he leaned in as he asked in a murmur, “You grew your fingers back, didn’t you?”

She lifted the charcoal pencil as she answered pleasantly, “Well, I do need my fingers, Mr. Cale.”

He nodded without saying a word, taking it in.

“I need to take a nap now, if you don’t mind,” she said.

“All right. Thank you for talking to me, Mary.”

“Not at all, you’re a very intelligent and interesting man,” she said as he rose to go. “You’ve been fortunate to see special things. You’ll get to see others.”

“What other things?”

She shrugged, just like a young woman trading casual gossip in the street, having run into an acquaintance. “I don’t know. I just know you’ll be near the center of it. You’ll feel better when you remember something.”

“What’s that?”