Minding Yourself
Three stops before yours, a telepathic flare-up comes on fast, like a stream-of-consciousness flash flood you can’t escape in this train car. Immediately you regret skipping your usual afternoon coffee. Without it, everything on everyone’s mind comes rushing into yours, the inner lives of other passengers now impinging on your own, making your consciousness a mess of their thoughts—mental images in rapid succession like a montage by an auteur gone mad during post-production, this deluge accompanied by emotions surging and throbbing through the chatter of overlapping quotidian monologues.
Can’t forget again. Better start the laundry when I get home.
The only way a story that weird makes sense is if it’s just an allegory about parenting.
Ugh, should have taken a cab. It’s so stuffy in here. What I get for trying to save money.
Why doesn’t she just break up with him already?
When you get off at your stop, it only gets worse. You’re awash in a roiling psychological sea, the station’s rush-hour bustle an ever-shifting tumult of countless sensations, sentiments, impressions, memories, anxieties, fantasies and song lyrics—there are always song lyrics, and now it’s a contralto crooning with a slowly-unfurling melancholy.
The geographical cure for amnesia
a placebo you swilled as your ambrosia
These vocals get your attention. Each word is oddly doubled, repeated as though by a shallow echo. And it’s not just the vocals. There’s a constant reverb to the guitar chords and piano notes. Then the song sounds normal, without any duplications.
You were never remembering,
but instead merrily confabulating
Now with a thought.
Ah, I wish I could tell who’s listening to that song. I’d love to find out if their taste in clothes is as interesting as their taste in music.
Wait–could that be another telepath? So incredible it seems impossible.
You’re picking up my thoughts about picking up another person’s thoughts!
Unmistakably, someone’s inner voice is speaking to you.
Over here, in the blue jacket!
Scanning the station, you spot a hand waving at the far end, near the information counter, the cuff of a blue sleeve below the palm, just visible above the horde of commuters.
Once you’ve maneuvered through a stream of people heading for outbound platforms, you make eye contact with the owner of the coat, and there’s a dizzying moment of her seeing you seeing her, this petite woman who’s all smiles and bright eyes.
When you reach her, she asks, “Got a few minutes?”
Her mind is a bundle of excited thoughts—among them a pressing desire to ask you a question.
“OK, but I really need some coffee,” you answer.
She nods sympathetically.
Together, you go to the little café next to the station. After settling into a corner table, you sip eagerly from a steaming mug while she snacks on a biscuit topped with strawberry jam. The caffeine might keep you up tonight, but you need the relief, which is almost instantaneous—thank goodness—swiftly focusing your attention on your own thoughts. The ambient hubbub dials down to a murmur that lets you hear yourself think. You wonder if caffeine has the same effect for her.
“Doesn’t it bother you?” you ask.
“Sometimes,” she replies. “But I try not to get swept up in it. I let the thoughts of others come and go. Similar to mindfulness meditation. That’s what my grandmother taught me, and it really helps.”
“That’s nice someone in your family could help you handle telepathic overwhelm.”
“Yeah, Granma taught me everything she knew as soon as she realized I was developing this ability.”
You wince. Ability is too generous. What can you really do with vestigial telepathy besides eavesdrop on people’s thoughts—which is more trouble than it’s worth.
“Sorry you had to learn about it from doctors,” she says.
“That wasn’t great, but a clinical explanation was better than no explanation for why my mind would suddenly become a kaleidoscope of random thoughts and feelings. And the doctors were pretty compassionate.”
Not wanting to talk about your childhood, you think of ways to change the topic and remember she had a question for you.
“So what did you want to ask me?”
“Oh, that. If you’d do me a favor.”
This piques your curiosity. What kind of favor could she want from someone who can do the same thing she can?
“I’d really appreciate it if you’d let me observe your thoughts while you’re observing my thoughts,” she says. “When we’re not around so many people.”
It’s a simple request that you have no reason to turn down, but doesn’t she already know what her own thoughts are like?
“I do,” she says quickly. “But I want to know what they’re like through someone else’s perspective.”
But her grandmother, didn’t she—. You stop your thoughts in their tracks.
“That’s OK,” she says. “You’re right. We used to observe our own thoughts in each other’s minds. That got me to better know my mind. And that’s what I’m really asking for. The chance to better know my mind now, to see how it compares to back then.”
“Well, I’ll gladly put this ancestral anachronism to use for you.”
“Thanks. Here,” she says, taking a notepad and pen from her purse. “Call me when you’re ready. No pressure though.”
She writes down her phone number, then tears out the page and hands it to you.
On Friday morning, you’re waiting for her in the oak grove on the ridge of Wildcat Canyon. The landscape is alive with sunlight, bird song, fluttering leaves on swaying boughs and poppies in full bloom. As expected, there’s no one else around—precisely the reason you come here so often, why you want to retire to a place like this, why you chose to meet her here.
Your mind is abuzz with the questions you have for her. Has she met anyone else with vestigial telepathy? Did her classmates know she could pick up their thoughts? How do her friends feel about her “ability”? Or do people stop being friends once she tells them about it?
But when you see her coming up the path, another question comes to mind, thanks to a hawk gliding high above her.
“Did anyone ever tell you why we don’t pick up the thoughts of animals?” you ask once she’s a few steps away.
“Granma said it’s because their minds are too different from ours.”
“That makes sense.”
“Yeah, though somehow that explanation has never satisfied me.”
You wait for her to tell you more, but she just says, “We can start whenever you’re ready.”
“Now’s fine with me.”
“Then let’s see what’s on my mind,” she says.
You relax the concentration you’re so used to exerting. Your attention expands, allowing your awareness to encompass her thoughts, as though your consciousness is merging with hers.
The lobed leaves on the low branch just ahead. A childhood memory of a walk in the woods and a longing for that simpler time. The swallow flapping across the swath of clear sky above the distant tree line. A desire to know what that beating of wings in midair feels like.
Her mind is surprisingly serene, moving from one thought to the next with fluid ease—at a pace that’s manageable, almost leisurely, allowing for reflection and wonder. No doubt this idyllic environment helps, but still, her thoughts are nothing like the ones you absorb from people. Nothing like your own either. Hers is a mind you’d gladly have telepathic insight into.
“Grooming is easier when you have a mirror,” she says. “Especially when you start young.”
Of course. She’s had years of observing her thoughts with the looking glass of her grandmother’s mind. But doesn’t the calm of her thoughts make the chaotic thoughts of others unpleasant?
Sometimes. But when you’re composed, it’s easier to handle the frenzy around you.
“Here, you try it now,” she says.
You turn your attention to her awareness of your thoughts.
The landscape here is always so refreshing, but I should leave for work soon. Do I need to ask about switching the project to a sparse ontology during the meeting at 10am? Maybe I can go to that popular sandwich place afterwards, before the line is out the door like it’s been the last couple times. I’d love to get the grilled aubergine again—or try the curried cauliflower.
Focus on just one thing first, whispers her inner voice.
So you look past her, up at the lone cloud in the sky. The sight of it is all that occupies her awareness. Now you see how this works. The longer a thought lasts, the more time you have to observe it in her mind, and it’s like you’re encountering your own mind the way you would someone else’s.
Now move on to another thing. Whatever comes to mind.
The breeze. It’s almost uncomfortably crisp, but with all this sunlight, the gentle movement of air is like a cool caress.
Yes, yes, that’s it.
That tenuous yellow tinge in the morning light over the grassy slopes, it’s like the sheen of summer’s midday glow on the meadow outside the motel that one family vacation, half a continent away and seemingly another lifetime ago. Now, what to do with this resemblance, this link drawn between past and present? Just follow it? OK then, a memory of enjoying ice cream on a beach during that vacation. Pistachio or mint? Something green. The thoughts of sunbathers lying on towels and children playing in the waves, all far off, as though held at bay by the static crash of the surf.
I wish I could have done this earlier.
There’s still time. Better late than never.
Your gaze meets hers, and you let yourself tumble into a vertiginous spiral of self-perception—like a tandem skydiver hurtling through the air, trusting their partner to break free fall.
Editor’s Note
As an editor, I am usually skeptical of second-person POV. It’s hard to pull off without sounding aggressive and prescriptive. But Soramimi Hanarejima makes it work in “Minding Yourself.” Something about the immediacy of the intrusive thoughts, about how we are dropped into the chaos along with the narrator. As we read, the urgency overtakes us until we become the tandem skydiver of the story’s beautiful last line.
-Josh Boldt, Editor
Story Track
The ethereal nature of Hanarejima’s prose combined with the concept of vestigial telepathy brought to my mind the music of Sigur Rós. The track “Samskeyti” employs the band’s signature sound: sequences of gradually-layering, syncing patterns, similar to the thoughts of the story’s narrator. The song’s Icelandic title roughly translates to “seam,” as in connecting or joining seams–kind of like the mental connection between the two telepathic characters.