Seer

Timothy

I’m going over to Natalie’s today. Since she’s always at her dad’s house on weekends, my mom has agreed to drive me over there again.

When Mom drops me off, I go up to Natalie’s room, while Mom sits down to talk with her parents. Natalie meets me halfway down the stairs. “Hi!” she tells me. “I have a new idea for an experiment to tell you about.”

“I do, too,” I tell her.

I’ve been thinking of ways to work on hearing Guardian better. I can hear him if I’m trying to open my mind, and he’s trying to talk to me. If both of those things aren’t happening at the same time, I can feel his presence when I open my mind, but nothing else. When I can hear him, I am not exactly hearing his words, more like I can almost figure out what he is trying to say.

It isn’t very clear or precise, and I’d like to improve on that. I want to be able to hear words.

We get into her room and she closes the door like always, so we can talk privately. We don’t want anybody hearing us talk to our guardians. “Tell me about your experiment,” she says when she turns around from the door. “Is it about Guardian?”

“Yes,” I say. “I keep my mind open a lot of the time, and sometimes I know what he is saying to me, but I can’t really hear words. It’s more like remembering a dream, not like something real that is happening. So I’ve been thinking of ways to practice, and hopefully learn how to hear him a lot more clearly.”

She is sitting on her desk chair, kicking her legs. “Ok,” she says, “what do we do?”

I sit down on her bed and take my notebook out of the bag I brought with me. “Can you get a notebook out too?”

“Sure,” she says, and reaches in her desk drawer and gets out a notebook. Then she sits and waits to see what we’ll do next.

“All right, here’s what I want to do. I want you to write down a word, but don’t show me. Then I’m going to try to hear Guardian tell me the word.” I look up into the air, wishing that I knew better where to look when I’m talking to my guardian. “Guardian, can you look at her word, and then try to use energy to tell it to me?”

Natalie looks over to where Angel must be, then tells me, “Yes, Guardian is going to watch what I write and then try to tell it to you. What kind of word should I write?”

“Probably best to stick with a noun,” I tell her. We’re learning about nouns in school. “It’ll be easier if the word is an object, not just a description or a feeling or something.”

She thinks for a second, then writes something down, using her other hand to shield the page from my eyes. Then she looks up at me and waits to see what will happen next.

I close my eyes, and open my mind. It’s a weird feeling, but I’m getting used to it. I don’t think I could ever explain it to someone else. It feels like I am actually doing something in my brain, like making my mind open up like a cupboard door. I feel Guardian there inside my mind, and wait to see if I can hear anything.

After a couple of minutes I am feeling like I’m getting something, but I can’t tell what exact word it is. It’s like I’m getting the idea of something, though, sort of like a dream. What is it? Something big. Like, an animal maybe? I can’t tell, so I write down “animal” in my notebook.

“Ok, Natalie, show me what your word was.” She holds up her notebook, and I see that she had written “elephant.” I hold up my notebook so she can see that I wrote “animal.”

“That’s really good!” she says. “Wow! I think you’re getting much better at this! It was an animal, so that counts, right?”

I’m not satisfied. “I didn’t hear it though. More like I felt it, and it wasn’t precise enough to know exactly what you wrote.” I sigh. “Can we try again? Is that ok with Guardian?”

After a couple of seconds, Natalie tells me, “Angel says Guardian will always be willing to try whatever you like.” She thinks for a moment, then says, “Timothy, I don’t think you ever need to be worried that Guardian would get tired of trying your experiments. Angel is always completely patient with every single thing I ever want to do. I don’t think guardians can ever get bored or anything like that.” She looks over to where Angel is, then smiles. “Angel says I am precisely correct.”

Hmmm. Well, that’s good to know. “Ok, then, let’s try again. Please write another word on the next line.”

We try it over and over, but the same thing keeps happening. I get a sort of impression of something, and write down a word, but it’s never exactly the same word. Like, when Natalie writes “airplane”, I write “machine.” When Natalie writes “house”, I write “box”. It’s never quite right.

After a lot of tries, maybe Guardian wouldn’t ever get tired of it, but I’ll bet Natalie is. “I tell you what,” I tell her, “let’s try this experiment a different way. We don’t really need to be together to do this. We can do it at night after I go home. How about every night before bedtime, say at 8:00, you write down a word, and tell it to Angel. He can tell Guardian. I’ll listen at 8:00 and write down what I think the word is, then we can compare notes at school in the morning. That way we aren’t just doing the same thing over and over in one day. Maybe practicing a little bit every day is more likely to work.”

Natalie says, “Angel, will you remind me every night at eight that it’s time to write down a word?” She listens for a second and then nods at me. “Ok, we’ll do it.”

Natalie

After Timothy’s experiment with Guardian, I think he might want to take a break and do something else. But he remembers that I had told him I had an experiment too, and asks me, “Ok, what was your experiment idea?”

I’ve been a little worried about telling him about this, since Jonathan is his least favorite person. But what he just said about practicing a little bit every day gives me an idea.

“You know how I’ve been reading the bible, trying to understand religion so that I can figure out a way to help people stop hurting each other over it?”

“Yes,” he says.

“Well, I’m thinking that maybe I should try to do something smaller. Like what you said, about doing your word experiment with Guardian a little bit at a time, rather than all at once. Maybe doing a piece at a time will make it easier.”

“Ok,” he says, “so what is it you want to start with?”

I take the notebook where I had been writing down all the words for his experiment, turn it back to the first page, and hand it to him.

He takes the notebook, reads “The Jonathan Project” at the top, and his forehead wrinkles. He looks up at me like he’s about to say something, but instead he looks back down and reads the notes that I wrote last night after phase one of my experiment.

When he’s finished reading, he doesn’t look very happy.

“Sooooo,” he says slowly, “you are going to spend more time with Jonathan?”

“Yes,” I tell him, “so that I can get to know him well enough to understand how to help him change to be a nicer person.”

He’s frowning. “I don’t think he will ever be a nicer person.”

“Well,” I say, “we can’t know that for sure. And I think this is a really good place for me to start experimenting, to see whether I can help people behave better. Don’t you think? That I should try to figure out how to help just one person?”

He huffs out a big sigh. I can tell he’s trying to find a polite way to say what he thinks. Then he just throws up his hands and says, “But he’s so awful! He’s always so mean! What if he hurts you?”

“I don’t think he will. I’m always checking with Angel to make sure that I know what he’s thinking. So I can just change what I’m doing if I think the experiment is going the wrong way. I think it can work.”

Timothy looks really doubtful. “Does Angel think it can work?”

“Well, not really. Angel thinks that Jonathan isn’t very likely to change. But I want to give it a try.”

Angel is watching us discuss this. Timothy doesn’t seem to be any happier about this. In fact he is starting to look sad, not just like he thinks I’m going to be wasting my time, but like he thinks something even worse will happen. He shuts his mouth tight and looks like he isn’t going to talk at all any more. I’ve seen that look on his face before, when he gets too emotional to speak. I look over at Angel to find out what Timothy is thinking, since apparently Timothy isn’t going to tell me. Angel says, “Timothy is concerned that he is also going to have to spend more time with Jonathan, and he knows that it would be unlikely to end well for him.”

Oh.

“You don’t have to worry, Timothy, I won’t spend extra time with Jonathan while you are here. You won’t have to be around him.”

But this doesn’t seem to make Timothy any happier. “What is it, Timmy?” I use his old name, that I used to call him when we were younger. “Why do you look so sad?” I never want Timothy to be sad.

“I don’t know,” he mumbles.

“Come on, please tell me,” I say. “I want to know what you’re thinking.” I can ask Angel again but I wish Timothy would just share it with me.

“Ok, fine,” he says, wiping his nose with his sleeve. “I guess if you are going to be spending all your time experimenting on Jonathan, I won’t get to see you as much.”

“Oh!” I have to admit I hadn’t thought of it that way. “Um, maybe. But I’ll still be in class with you, and whenever we’re over at my Mom’s house I’ll see you there. I’ll make sure that we’ll still spend lots of time together.”

He still looks very glum. “All right,” he says sadly. “I guess it’s a good experiment. But I’m going to miss you if you end up spending a lot more time with him instead of me.”

Now I feel terrible. I really want to help Jonathan change, but I don’t want Timothy to end up feeling lonely because of my experiment. I try to think of a solution.

“Well, maybe once Jonathan starts being nicer, you can hang around with us too?”

Timothy just looks at me like I’m insane. Ok, maybe not.

“All right,” I say, “how about we work extra hard on your experiment to be able to hear Guardian better? If you can start really understanding what he’s saying, I can talk to you all the time through Angel and Guardian. It’ll be like we’re always together!”

“Yeah, ok,” he says, but he doesn’t sound convinced. He gives a heavy sigh. “Well, tell me more about your plans for the Jonathan Project.” I guess he figures he might as well help me plan out the experiment.

That’s good. He’ll be ok. And I’m going to help Jonathan be ok too. Everything will be fine.

I look over at Angel, who just shrugs.

Fine. Nobody else is convinced, but I’m going to do this. I’ll make it work.