Anyway, my dad is telling my mom about the Bible study and how so-and-so said this and so-and-so said that and, in the brief respite between milk spills, my mind wanders back to Zenn and the vision. That’s the thing about fractals; they are pretty hard to forget.
That jacket was a doozy. Some things, like grocery carts or doorknobs or even car keys, just aren’t held long enough by one person to develop any kind of attachment. They’re sort of neutral. Things that are held only while performing certain tasks, like calculators, seem to soak up only algos associated with that task. Tools or kitchen utensils or sports equipment, stuff like that. I hold my dad’s softball bat and all I get is his frustration that his home-run days are over. But the other stuff? Cell phones and jewelry and jackets, things that never leave a person’s side: those are the things I avoid. Those things are witnesses to an excruciating array of human trauma. I avoid them like I avoid mushrooms and olives.
The algos I get from people’s calculators are generally calm, neat, orderly. Tidy formulas in organized rows, like a set of instructions to follow. But fractals are chaotic, overwhelming, heavy. Sometimes scary and intricate, like competing whirlpools trying to swallow chunks of jagged metal.
I remember the first time I tried to do something about a fractal. In fifth grade my friend Lauren and I were on the school playground. We’d been best friends since the beginning of the year, and that day we were dangling upside down from the monkey bars, swinging by our knees until we could build up enough momentum to fly off the bar and land on our feet.
We counted together as we prepared for launch:
“One …”
“Two …” Lots of giggling and holding our shirts down so they wouldn’t show our sad little training bras.
“THREE!”
Off we flew, but instead of landing gracefully like the gymnasts we thought we were, we landed in a pile on top of each other, giggling at our own clumsiness. I stood up and brushed the dirt off my skinny jeans, and then reached out to help her up.
When she put her hand in mine, fear and uncertainty flowed from her body in waves of orange and neon blue like an electric current. I didn’t understand what it was trying to tell me, but it was as real and as solid as the metal bar I reached for to steady myself.
I was used to getting visions from adults. I hadn’t named them at that point, but I knew what they were, and I had learned to avoid touching grown-ups because of them. But I had never gotten one from a kid, and certainly never from one of my friends. At first I thought it was from our fall — that maybe she was embarrassed or hurt and that was what I was sensing.
“Are you okay?” I asked her.
She laughed and stood up. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
There must have been something in my voice, something different and more serious than usual, because she looked at me and her face grew stony, hard to read.
“Yeah.” But her eyes didn’t quite meet mine.
I reached out and touched her arm and the fractal struck again, just as strong as the first time. It made me sad in a way I couldn’t explain, gave me a sense of unease in the pit of my stomach. She looked at me funny.
“What’re you doing?” She pulled her arm away, wary.
“It’s just …” I searched for a way to describe it, but couldn’t. I had never told her about my visions. I had never told anyone other than my parents and various doctors. How could I tell her that I knew something was wrong even though she hadn’t told me a thing?
“Stop being a weirdo. What, are you gay or something?”
We had just learned what the word gay meant, and by the tone of her voice I didn’t think she meant it as a compliment.
I wanted to touch her arm again because the puzzle was starting to come together. Something about her parents. About their house and maybe about money. But I knew not to touch her again. I knew I was being weird. She was already backing away from me, but not because she really thought I was gay. I could see in her eyes that it was because she sensed that I already knew whatever it was she wasn’t telling me.
I just didn’t know what to do about it. A couple of days later our teacher asked me to help the kid who sat next to Lauren with his math. Even back then, I was always helping people with math. Lauren and I switched desks for the hour, which wasn’t unusual, but this time I found when I placed my hands on the desktop, when I lifted the hinged lid, the fractal was there, too.
I told my mom about it and she gave me a sad look. She was familiar enough with my visions to know they were real, no matter how much she wished they weren’t.
She’d been dealing with them since I was a toddler, when I cried whenever someone held my hand or when I touched pretty much anything besides other children or my toys. My mom thought I had some kind of arthritis or skin sensitivity or rare pediatric joint issues. She had me wear gloves, spent hours massaging my fingers (which only made it worse), took me to specialists who, after skin tests and X-rays and MRIs, never could find anything wrong.
When I was older I tried to explain it to her, but I must have sounded like a possessed devil child because she immediately started having the whole church pray for me. When that didn’t seem to work, she took me to a psychiatrist. No luck there either. So by the time I was six or seven, I learned to just limit my contact with grown-ups and keep my mouth shut. But my mom knew it was still there: her daughter’s psychic weirdness. She saw how I avoided handshakes, how I’d pretend not to notice when someone dropped something so I didn’t have to pick it up. She knew.
She knew that whatever I had sensed from Lauren was real. And she already knew what the problem was.
“Lauren’s parents are getting divorced, honey,” she told me gently. “I’m sure Lauren is upset about that.”
After that I tried to be an even better friend to Lauren, but a couple of weeks later she wasn’t in school for a few days in a row, and then one day her desk was cleaned out and rumor had it that she had moved away.
I wonder what happened to her sometimes. I’m not sure what I could have done to help, but that’s the problem with fractals: you have these secrets, this information that you are not intended to have, and no matter what you do with it, it’s not enough.
So instead I’ve learned to just avoid them because it’s like opening a can of worms. Once you know something about someone, you can’t unknow it again.