It’s kind of a strange thing, really. My superpower.

It’s a special kind of psychic power, a mind power. 
I must have been born with it, I think.

The ability? It’s more than mind-reading. It’s the power to allow anyone… to read my mind. It’s the opposite of mind-reading. Perhaps “mind-telling” is a better way of putting it.

My parents probably noticed it first. Perhaps it was the way I had, even as a baby, of setting my eyebrows in what could be perceived as a look of mild scorn or sarcasm, but which I now recognize, as of yesterday, to be merely my childish attempt to squint to focus my Third Eye, which, like my other two eyes, is myopic. They never let on that they suspected me of being an “Adept,” in this ability.

By ninth grade, my fed-up parents dispatched this prodigy to boarding school. I was placed in a special program for so-called “Gifted Kids,” (You see? Adept!) that turned out to be an 8th-Period Art Criticism class that lulled us into late-May afternoon stupors brought about by the humid mix of growing hormones and low blood sugar.

Yes, around that queer “Nappy” hour that hits every day between 2 and 3pm, that spectral mid-afternoon time when the conscious mind loses its footing a little; falters with a scrape of rocks down cliff-face, when you find yourself in that volatile twilight space between sleep and wakefulness where suggestion, autosuggestion and fancies of all sorts can make their marks, falsely or truly.

Now it comes back to me. Like when you jerk awake after a dreamt misstep.

It’s strange, this flood of memories. I suddenly remember all my training. I’ve suddenly come awake after fifty years of dreaming.

Yesterday, I professed to be a copywriter. Now, I can see that my so-called “Normal Life,” was merely a predetermined course designed to bring me here, to the rediscovery of my talent.
 My “Gift.”

Yep. It’s all coming back to me.

First of all, let me put you at ease. My reverse-telepathy is much more innocuous than, say, the infamous “Black Budget” CIA projects such as MK-ULTRA, Artichoke, Bluebird and others. You remember, the secret projects born of the Cold War which sought to create killers programmed with complete alternate personalities for specific missions whose memories and identities have been entirely washed clean, leaving no one but the dispatchers the wiser.

Like Chapman, Hinckley, Sirhan Sirhan.

That’s so not me.

But, back to my superpower. I think it began evidencing itself starting in my pre-school years, and carried on even through high school and college. Maybe.

Nothing much you could point at, but it was a sense that’s… hard to describe. A little like déjà vu, or the gentle precognition you feel when, late at night, a song comes into your head, and the next morning it’s the first song you hear on the radio, or you hear some news about the singer. A little sensation, in the peripheries of thought and vision. A trivial soothsaying, a thrill of wraiths, of shades at the edges of your field-of-view, knowledge of occasional prophetic oddities affording no real profit or advantage…

I thought nothing of it. 
Nor did I, until today, when it all came flashing back.
 I still don’t remember the actual training, mind you, but there must have been some… a lot!

But I now see clean through the semi-transparency, this tissue of a life they… implanted in me, or overwrote on me.

The one that crowded out the real me!

What hadn’t they done to me in their quest?

I can only speculate.

Trances? Hypnotism? Drug-induced comas and visionary experiences to try to trigger “Out of Body” experiences? Remote Viewing, with its tours of the Semipalatinsk testing range, or the biological testing installations along China’s northern border, outside Mukden?

When I come in is hard to say. I mean I know I was born sometime around 1963. That much is clear. That was NOT me in the baby-carriage at Dealey Plaza. Born before JFK got killed, at least.

Somehow they got to me. Early.

Whatever it was, whatever mind-control program that Hoovered me up into its many-tentacled, sudsy brainwash, they must have got me, erased my memory of my time “In Program X (or, whatever they called it),” then covered that back over with a rich tapestry of a manufactured childhood.
 Backhoed, more like it.

What is my mission, you may ask? That I don’t have the answer to, yet.

Well, let’s look back at what I have suddenly remembered. At all of these suddenly jumbled pieces of a puzzle that’s tumbled out of the closet of my mind, a dusty, cardboard-musty box from the topmost forgotten shelf, a puzzle called, “Who I Was.”

Perhaps my fond memories of summer camp counseling up in New Hampshire actually cloaked a darker secret. Of drugged, three-hour rides by bus across back roads to the outskirts of Montreal, where I was exposed to two straight months of their psychic driving techniques. Yes, the old Talking-Pillows-61-Straight-Nights-on-LSD-Lucid-Dreaming-REM-Sleep-Denial Trick, as Maxwell Smart might have phrased it. And to think my vividest memory is of the aurora borealis arcing green majestic, snapping like celestial reins… a little obvious, N’est ce pas? An ideal regime for implanting strong alternate personalities in people.

Seen in this light, my visit, the summer before my junior year in high school to what was then the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics seems highly suspect. Perhaps I was sent there for the “finishing touches.”

Can anyone say, Akademik I. P. Pavlov Institut?

To Moscow. To Moscow. To Moscow. Clearer and clearer.

And now, for some reason, I have just awakened from that alternative person. Like chrysalis yielding to butterfly.
 Like chrysalis awakening to the imago. Yes, “Imago.” Behold the power! All my power intact!

I must exercise caution in its usage.

Whatever name it went by–and I think my program had several code names in various tongues, including, projects PANDOR, Zerkalo or Wetterkopf–it left me with a superpower. As I’ve mentioned. Imprinted it in me.

A power that came back to me, full-strength, today!

I have been re-activated. And my latent power, Atelepathy, unleashed. It’s good to be back. To remember who I was meant to be.

Mind you, I have not been “reactivated” in the same sense that Donald Pleasance activated the Soviet moles to destroy America in the Charles Bronson classic, Telefon. In fact, I am still trying to identify the actual stimulus that reawakened my power.

Yes! The power to let people know, with perfect clarity, exactly what I am thinking!It’s the opposite of being able to read minds. Anyone can peer straight into me! Even people who aren’t psychic, they can sense or, “hear” my thoughts.

It can be awkward. Today, for example, I arrived for an audition at a crowded space on Madison Avenue (I am, you see, an unknown voiceover artist as well as an unknown copywriter).

As I was saying, there were two separate auditions in progress, one for an on-camera commercial, and one for a voiceover, which was mine.

An adorable tall brunette of perhaps 24 blossoming summers, clad in a short, form-fitting, dress of coral hue, negotiated the narrow passage between waiting thespians and innocently sat across from me, where I was studying my lines for a famous motor oil. Her equine legs were crossed in that wonderful G-clef way some girls can pull off as she studied the storyboard for her on-camera audition. My eyes were led instinctually to these long expanses.

I looked up quickly. She had atelepathically detected my thoughts, my eye movements! Plain as if I had stated them!

I looked away, somewhat shamefacedly.

Then I surreptitiously looked again, for she was stunning. She was watching me with a tired-stern face, bordering on disgust, her legs firmly crossed. 
She gave me a penetrating, accusing look three times that age. Which is (approximately) 2/3 mine.

I celebrated the rediscovery of my superpower (which I was keeping a secret, of course) with my buddies, some drinks, and, as it turned out some poker.

The poker game went as you might expect, considering the effects of my superpower. I lost $185, which was bad, considering that’s about all I had, and, I would discover, likely have, for some time.

It was quite bad for two more reasons, in ascending importance.

Bad because I showed up late to work the next day with a hangover. When my boss suggested that, [I] “might want to ease up on the cologne, a little,” well, he must have read the first thing on my mind, the initial reaction that was stilled on my lips, but blazed contumaciously like a movie marquee of insults, movies with titles like, Back-Stabber XXIV, Bisexual Boss, The Underminer, Fun with Underlings, Two-Timer, Daily Douchebag… 

Despite the camouflaging, pacifying smile pinned ear-to-ear on my face, he could plainly read my unmasked thoughts. The records of his various infamies, categorized neatly, for all to view, in my mind! Seven years of commerce with him had lined up my grievances in a gunbelt-like queue: that his face reminded me of a reviled Vice President of the United States, for example. His rumored predations upon junior staffers of either sex. His vanity and love of bullying, especially women. His stupid, pointy shoes. The desirability of lifting him bodily, with a thrown forearm up and under his chin, complete with a mandibular “CLACK”.

These private thoughts must have sublimated from me. These visions, along with the fumes metabolizing from the previous evening’s indigestion of cigars, beers, scotch and volatile oils from the six or seven pieces of pepperoni-onion pizza pie I’d gulped. The latter mass, lay stalled in my guts, a goat to my digestive boa constrictor, offered a secondary aromatic context to my unspoken thoughts.

His nostrils quickened, his face whitened. His eyes widened, shining with honest terror, then tightened in his habitual squint of deceit. Then he slowly reddened.

Somehow, I had psychically expressed everything his… Dapper, Candy Ass meant to me. My telepathological message must have been made clearer and more meaningful by the bagpipe call from my chafing digestive system, and the white-knuckled fists that kept forming at my sides.

Bossy-Boy, here, knew instantly that I was unfit for work, and that my outward calm and inexplicable cheer masked the possibility of real menace, or at the very least, the possibility of a scornful point-of-view. He read my mind like it was printing in a crawler underneath my head. All without a word!

My third eye must have been staring ironically. Again, he suggested,

“Maybe you should ease up on the cologne, a bit.”

I wondered in response what kind of drugs he was on, and whether he had any to share.

He didn’t like that line of thought.

Which brought me to HR for a quick exit interview.

There, I never breathed a word to Darlene (I’ve changed her name. The initial “D” is silent) of my true feelings about the vocation of “Human Resources.” Nope. Tight-lipped was I about my view of the Guild of HR as a tale-bearing, busybodied, tattletale band of goodie-goodie goose-steppers of a manifestly Stalinist ilk.

No words crossed the barrier of my tightlipped disgust for anyone would choose this kind of job, or worse, make a career, out of this moral refuse-collection.

This mopping of slop, of the effluences of career birth and death.

Nary a peep that theirs is an unasked-for intimacy, an un-privacy they seem to exult in, or, worse, crave, like a careerist blackshirt of the Geheime Staatspolizei, making discoveries by using the subject’s balls as a telescope.

Nor a syllable out of me about how her staff’s ill-starred midwifery of new hires, clumsy workplace foistings, interventions, and managing of the ceremonies and cerements of job inception and termination set squirrels of revulsion loose inside my already straining guts.

Mum, zippered, even, was I about my disrespect for this process of human belt-sanding, this methodic abrasion upon the lives and souls and families of those “managed” to fit more closely with the fast-rising curve of organizational needs.

Of the repellency of such a term as “Human Resources.” As though people were some kind of inanimate “resource” like oil or aluminum, or even sandpaper, I kept myself silent.

And never, never! did I share my observation that the people of HR, like New World Colonists, trade trouble and woe like diseased blankets, wherever they alight.

Well, something of the gist of my thoughts, must have registered with Darlene.

She looked truly hurt, and rather pale (was something going around?) as our brief conversation abruptly terminated. Two burly Hispanic lads borrowed from IT (had Darlene pressed a Panic Button?) showed me the door, promising me that everything, including my coat and travel valise would be delivered to my address, post-haste, if only I would leave peaceably.

I found that scenario agreeable, as far as my situation went, except for the “Address” part. That was a bit up in the air…

“By the way,” offered Julio, “The boss has a nasty porn habit.” 
My superpower, working! thinks I. Unasked, Julio had brought me my desire: Dirt on the Boss!

This was the first inkling that there might be a positive side, a use beneficial of my “Opened” mind, if you will.
 But that still left “open” the question of where my personal office effects would be delivered.

You see, the far worse consequence of rediscovering my power concerned what had occurred the night before between me and my wife, May-June (I changed her name, too. All the letters are silent).

To begin with, she wasn’t too pleased to see me come through the door inebriate, insolvent and, to a great degree, incoherent. And at such a late hour. Bad, very bad.

So, despite my honest efforts to try to lend a caring ear to her fears and admonitions, to take her honest plaints to heart… well, I guess I must have fallen asleep. Or passed out, more like it.

While I slept that sleep of gasps and snorts that comes of apnea and alcohol, she must have fallen upon the undefended offices of my mind.

She’d tossed the unoccupied, secret departments of my deceitful conscience with the expertise of a Detective Lieutenant!

Evidently, she’d discovered all she needed and everything she didn’t want to know of my unworthiness for her. She was beginning to piece together the my horrid insect-like status before the purity of her noble, jeweled soul… For I truly love her.

Yes, she’d crime-scened my mind and behind the yellow tape found there the evidence, hard, condemnatory, mean and bleak, a contagious bleakness she herself must felt, had been dimly aware of in her own prospects and soul, but now blared, a dissonant dark orchestra of darkened instruments playing Messiaen, a darkness she had tried to distract herself from with Me… whom she now understood to be a grim, nasty, deceitful, sinful man. But a man she trusted with her love.

A woman I loved. And love.

My bleakness, redoubled, must have descended upon her, voiding the ticket of her life with me, sending her all the way back, confused, humiliated, eyes stinging, to our beginning.

She found all that in the unguarded archives of my mind! While I slept! Damn this power!

Yes. She had loved me. And likely, still did, the poor, sweet girl. My love!

The next morning, the evidence of her love-memory, illuminated dimly on the floor near the door of the bedroom, was my favorite travel bag, looking very well packed and ready-to-go. My keychain lay atop it.

I arose. The house key was gone. She was gone. Which left me the SUV.

Which brings us back to me standing outside on the sidewalk, outside of work. Out of work.
 It’s amazing, like people can hear what I’m thinking.

Even cops.

Even big fucking bully-boy Blue, never necessarily the brightest of our species (a species which does, after all, shares so much, genetically, with Sus scrofa domesticus, the domesticated pig).

Yep. Even uniformed pricks with a gun and a stick…

And, fuck! a Taser…

They seemed to sense my disapproval of their omnipresent, malign scrutiny and their readiness to employ strong-arm tactics, or worse. They struggle with these observations. And me.

Never said a word.

Yet here I am, on a disorderly conduct charge, allegedly for breaking a cop’s finger.
 He broke it hitting me, I assure you.

But, back to your original question, what do I think of the “practice” of the “science” of psychiatry?

Really?

…

Don’t act so offended, “Doctor”, it’s not like I actually said anything.

By the way, do you think this has anything to do with my prescription sleeping aid?