Someone Finally Believes in My Powers

I finally get someone else to be very impressed with my telekinetic powers. I’m with Laura Tucker, Daniel Englert, and Linda, walking in some European town, through a big school cafeteria, on one of the great old university campuses of the world, through a long underground area like the mall under the World Trade Center, but filled with European peasants—and at one of these places I show Daniel my powers.

That paper cup standing on a table in the food court over there? I make it blow away. That fork? I tell it to stand on end, and it does. Laura has seen be do these things many times before, but she never believed I was really doing them. She thought it was just some strange lie I liked to tell. But Daniel believes me, and because of that, Laura starts to pay attention, too.

We are in an outdoor area, now, and Laura actually asks me to show my powers again. I say, “Pick something for me to do. Anything within reason.” She says make that plant wave. I do it. She says bring that rock here, to the ground in front of me, and I do it. The rock scoots across the ground, plowing a little trail in the dirt, stopping at her feet. She says this is amazing, that I can do things to change the world. I say yes, I can, but no one has ever believed it before.

Excited, we continue our journey, and she has me do small things with my powers, her intuition or intelligence telling her to be wary of big exertions of a power like this.

Then she asks me to show her how to do it, too. And I do.

Soon, she is moving small objects with her mind as we walk up a hill to a place where excavation is being done, a sort of Holiday Ranch Lakes subdivision in the midst of being created, by Europeans, with peasants trudging through in their endless trod. I tell her I can make it rain, but she says not to do that. I agree. I say, “I don’t want to change history. The consequences of a big act of magic are incalculable. But what little thing can I do here to make these people’s lives better?”

And then Laura and I are peasants ourselves. We have become a living parable. We are a young peasant couple, fleeing up a rising, manmade tunnel, a series of stairways and ramps. We go as far as we can, running hand in hand, until the tunnel is too small for us to go any further. We are going to be married soon in order to have our peasant life together, but right now we are as far as we can go in this direction and need to rest. We are happy to be together on any adventure, even a small one like this. As we are resting, we see there is an injured mouse. Do we kill it, and put it out of its misery, or do we heal it and risk altering the course of history?

“Heal it,” says Laura. “It’s a big enough thing that we should do it, and small enough that we dare do it.”

She has a natural wisdom, this girl of mine. Integrity is her supernatural power, like mine is telekinesis and magic. So I use my powers to heal the mouse’s injuries and levitate it, on hands of air, into the shrinking passageway ahead of us. Laura kisses me for my powers and my gentleness.

Then we are Tom and Laura agains, and Laura has written a book about our travels, in a simple and direct style, with its central point being the parable of the injured mouse. She has sent it off to a publisher, and only a few days later the publisher has scheduled a meeting. Her book is remarkable and has been noticed among the thousands of books that are submitted every month to publishers. She is frightened, almost petrified with anxiety. It is 8:30 in the morning, time for us both to be going to our college classes. We are not married, but she is my girlfriend. I take her hand and assure her that her book is going to be printed. “One thing I have good taste for is books,” I tell her. “I’m always looking at books, old ones and new ones, looking for something special, and special is rare. Yours is rare.”

A little time passes, and Laura is recounting to a friend our experience with the mouse. She is behaving like Laura Craig, making a sort of Borscht Belt joke out of it. She says, “I told him to kill that mouse, and he did.” I say, “No, Laura, that’s not what we did. We saved the mouse. We did a gracious, careful thing for the world. You know we did. It’s in your book.”

I’m sad that my beloved is forgetting or changing the beautiful thing we did together.