The Firebird

He didn’t own a watch. He used his mobile to tell the time with when he thought of it, and since he rarely thought of it he usually was late. He was late now – that was why I’d come in here to kill some time while I was waiting. In the weeks that I’d been seeing Rob, I’d learnt there was no need to wait in full view on the pavement. He would find me when he did arrive, and I would know the moment that he did. I’d feel that sudden tingle of awareness, as I felt it now.

I turned, and thought again that I would never tire of watching him approach like this: his easy stride, his boyish smile, his blue eyes warm and seeming to see only me. His voice as well, that deep Scots lilt, was something that I’d happily have listened to all day. He said, ‘I’m sorry to be late.’

‘What was it this time?’

‘Inattention. I was reading.’

‘Well, there,’ I said, and handed him the newly purchased watch. ‘Now you have no excuse. It has an alarm you can set, see the button?’

He laughed as he took it and put it on, buckling the cheap plastic strap with one hand. ‘Thanks. That may be the best gift a girl’s ever given me.’

‘Get them a lot do you, presents from girls?’

With a serious face he assured me, ‘Oh aye. It’s continual.’ But those incredible eyes told me differently. He glanced at the items I held in my hands. ‘D’ye have everything you need, then?’

I had everything I needed in the fullest sense, but all I did was nod and Rob said, ‘Right, we should be on our way. We don’t want to keep Dr Fulton-Wallace waiting.’

I rolled my eyes at him. ‘So it’s all right to keep me waiting, is it, but not her?’

‘I’ve no idea what you’re on about.’ He raised his wrist and turned it so that I could read the digital display. ‘Can you not see the time?’

I called him something rude, then, and he grinned and caught my hand in his and out we went together to the street where the day’s rain had finally dwindled to a windblown spray that made the pavement gleam beneath the lights just coming on against the gloom of a mid-January evening.

My hand in Rob’s felt warm. I’d been so hesitant at first to let him touch me. I’d been nervous, given how intensely we’d connected without any touch at all the first time we’d been thrown together; without even being in the same room, for all that.

I’d been nervous then, as well. My very first week in the study at the Emerson Institute, and I’d been sitting in a soundproof room, reclining in a soft upholstered chair while Dr Fulton-Wallace gently taped halved ping-pong balls across my open eyes to mask my normal sense of sight.

The test, she’d reassured me, was a simple one. The ‘ganzfeld’, she had called it, was a traditional procedure meant to test whether my mind could ‘see’ an image sent to me remotely by a person in another room. That person, whom I’d never met, was sitting somewhere else within the Institute and similarly soundproofed, though with eyes and ears left open and aware.

The test’s design was basic. In that other room, the isolated ‘sender’ would be shown a video clip that a computer had chosen at random, and for half an hour he or she would sit and concentrate on watching that, while in my own room I remained immersed in my state of partial sensory deprivation, with headphones playing me filtered white noise – known as pink noise – and a red light shining down at my face to produce an unvarying glow through the translucent ping-pong balls. All that I needed to do, in that time, was to talk – make a running report of whatever I felt, and whatever I saw. At the end, I’d be given four video clips to watch, and I’d be asked to rate and rank each on how closely it matched what I’d ‘seen’ in the ganzfeld procedure.

Dr Fulton-Wallace, ready with my headphones, had said, ‘There’s no need to worry. You’ll do fine. We’re not testing you, really. This study is meant to explore what the sender does. There’s been a lot of debate and discussion within the field about the role of the sender, and whether a sender is needed at all, so we’re hoping our study will add something useful to that. Are you comfortable?’

Surprisingly, I was, despite the nervousness.

‘All right, then,’ she had told me. ‘I’ll leave you to it. You’ll hear some taped suggestions on the headphones first, to help you to relax, and then the pink noise will begin. Just try to verbalise whatever you’re experiencing.’

My grandfather’s warnings had swirled in my thoughts only briefly before I had pushed them aside as I’d settled myself in the chair and deliberately opened my mind to whatever might come.

The image had, in the end, risen as clear as a painting: a view of a bench by a pond in a park, with a pair of swans sailing serenely along in the shallows beneath a great willow whose branches wept down in a gentle cascade of pale green.

I did as instructed, and talked about what I was seeing, describing the park and the swans. When a young boy appeared with a toy boat in hand, I described him as well, and said what he was doing.

This went on for some time. The boy was just setting his sailing boat adrift on the pond when a curious thing began happening all round the image’s edges. They started to shrink inward, as though I’d taken a step back, and they went on shrinking until I saw not just the image, but the screen it was appearing on, and behind that a wall much like the wall of the room I was now in myself. As my view tilted slightly a few strands of hair blocked the edge of my eye and a hand that was not my own hand brushed them back and a voice – a male voice that I’d never heard – greeted me.