Have you ever heard of Heather Ravken? The psychic? The one who told the world she could stop a train with her mind? Have you seen the video?

I knew Heather from back when we were kids, back when the sun was so large in the sky you could almost lick it like a lollipop—it gave the days that sweet taste that lingers. Back then my friends and I rode our bikes around the neighborhood, sniffing barbecue and jumping curbs. Sometimes stopped to play some other kids in basketball or kickball, sometimes hovered around some girl’s house that we liked, talking brave but never knocking. But nobody liked Heather, so we didn’t spend too much time outside her house. It looked like a normal enough house, I guess, but nothing that went on inside was normal. Both her parents were deaf and kids gave Heather a hard time about that. You can imagine the kinds of sounds they’d make in imitation. Sometimes spotted Heather sitting on her roof with her eyes closed. She wouldn’t move for the longest time. I even saw kids throw rocks at her, and still she didn’t budge. In class, she was always the first one to arrive and the last one to leave. It was like she traveled along a different timeline or something. Sometimes she raised her hand to answer a question the teacher hadn’t even finished asking. But the answers were always wrong. Well, I guess not totally wrong. They were just these long, rambling things that made no sense to me, answers that the teacher rolled her eyes to. Heather dressed like she was 40, and never laughed. Never ever laughed. Her hair was frizzy, her face round. She had a large birthmark on her neck and earlobes that dangled even without earrings. It wasn’t until my 14th year that I even spoke a word to her.

I was racing my bike down the block, this steep hill which Heather lived almost at the bottom of, in a small ranch just before the street leveled out. I was coming down pretty fast when I hit a rock and went tumbling end over end. Hitting the pavement right on my shoulder, I rolled like a log for nearly twenty feet and, when I came to a stop, Heather was standing over me. I don’t know if she was cleaning or was sick or something, but she was holding a box of tissues
and a water bottle, and she immediately started tending to my wounds right there in the middle of the street. I was cut up pretty bad, but nothing too serious. Back then, these sorts of things happened and you just had to get up and grab your bike and ride back home all aching and bleeding. Forget about wearing a helmet or pads or whatever. I knew I was going to have plenty of fresh scabs on my knees and elbows and arms for the next few weeks, but that was a constant, and I can still count the scars of my childhood today. Funny thing, though, I never see kids with scabs anymore.

Heather started cleaning me up, and I found myself strangely overwhelmed by the act. From what I could remember, my mother had never so much as kissed a boo boo in my life. And my father didn’t heal them, he just doled them out.

My first word to her was a bubble-ladened “Thanks.”

“You were always going to fall here,” she said in a sort of monotone.

I winced as she wiped at a cut that had small bits of gravel and dirt in it. I didn’t even have a chance to roll my eyes at the comment.

“And I was always going to be here to help you. We were always going to meet.”

I spoke through gritted teeth. “We’ve been in the same class a few times, Heather. We’ve already met several times over.”

“Not like this.”

I tried to get up and a fissure of pain ran through me, sending me back to the ground.

“Let’s get you to the side of the road. Your bike too.”

She helped me to the curb, then went to get my bike—she moved it like she had never touched one before, like it was some strange object. Meanwhile, it was as if her words finally reached my ears. “What do you mean, ‘always’? ‘We were always going to meet’?”

“Always, always.”

“What’s that mean?”

She paused, then sat down beside me. He presence in my periphery was that of a glitch. Something that was both there and not. “Do you know free will?”

“Like, I get to make my own choices and stuff?”

“Yes.”

I was bored already. “Yeah.”

“It doesn’t exist.”

I laughed. “So this had to happen. I had to fall. Nothing I could do about it.”

“Nope.”

I nodded. “Well, guess what? I’m going to choose right now to tell you you’re crazy. Heather, you’re crazy.”

A slight smile, almost a twitch. “You were always going to say that. Always, always. You just think you had a choice.”

“Garbanzo!” I shouted after some mild consideration. “How about that? Now that’s a choice.”

“Garbanzo, that’s funny.” Smiling wider now, Heather shook her head and continued to wipe away some blood. “Do you believe in God?” She asked this as one might ask for the ketchup to be passed.

“I guess.”

“And you believe He is all powerful?”

“Sure.”

“Omniscient?”

I stared at her blankly.

She sighed. “All-knowing.”

“Of course.”

“Well, we can’t have free will if God’s all-knowing.”

“Why not?”

“If God knows everything, he knew you were going to fall off your bike. He knew you were going to say garbanzo. And he knows that after this you’ll ride home and sit on your couch and have a snack.”

“And what if I don’t do that? What if I ride to my friend’s house instead?”

“He’ll know.”

“Okay, so what?”

“So, if God knows everything that will happen, you have no say in the matter. He already sees it. It’s already done. Your choices have already been made. To prove Him wrong would be to prove his infallibility.”

“His what?”

“You’d prove that God could be wrong.”

In fact, I did go home after that and had a snack on the couch. I didn’t know if that was because I was hungry and in pain and needed to prop my legs up and rest, or because of the power of suggestion, or because I never really had a choice. Though we didn’t talk much at school, it was that conversation that brought me back to her house the next day, and the day after that, and the day after that.

We became close, chatting until the sun went down, sometimes later—not that my parents cared where I was—and the more I got to know her, the more sense her ramblings and comments made. It seemed like I just had never been listening. She told me all sorts of weird things, things that never even crossed my mind—time travel paradoxes, alien hand syndrome, owls at UFO sightings, the Roman dodecahedrons, time slips, Alpha the robot; all kinds of high strangeness. She was my internet before the internet even existed. “Point Nemo is the point in the ocean that’s the farthest from land,” she told me, adjusting her dress—she always wore dresses. Always, always. “If you were in the South Pacific, in that very spot, you’d be as far from society as you could possibly be on Earth.”

“How could I be alone if the ocean waves?”

She chuckled at this, delighting in my proclivity for dad jokes. But she immediately stifled the laughter, as if she weren’t supposed to show that side. I looked at her, the uncomfortable way she sat—in a kind of half kneel, half crouch—the way her head always tilted as if it were too big and heavy; it seemed like she was trying to figure out how to be human. Or just how to be. But the world wouldn’t let her. It felt like it was growing all around her, moving away and never letting her close. To me, it seemed like Point Nemo might actually be wherever Heather was standing.

One day she put a Rubik’s Cube under a piece of glass and told me she was going to move it with her mind. “Do it,” I said, arms folded.

She closed her dark brown eyes and concentrated real hard. Things were uncomfortably silent—for me; Heather, on the other hand, was completely fine with lingering silences. Eventually her breathing became a little strange, like small, quiet hiccups, and her face got really flush and started quaking, though nothing happened to the cube. After several minutes of this, I was about to tell her to stop messing around, when suddenly it rattled. Not a lot. Just enough for you to notice. A game of millimeters.

Heather opened her eyes and sat back, exhausted, the color slowly draining from her face. With one eye always on her, I lifted the glass and inspected the cube, the table underneath, everything. I was sure it was a trick. She just wasn’t going to tell me what it was. She was like that. I’d either have to figure it out for myself or I wasn’t ever going to know. And that’s how things were.

It was a few weeks later when her mother died that we first kissed. I didn’t know her mom well, really just in passing, but from what I could tell she was a lot nicer than my mom. She clearly loved her daughter.

After the funeral, Heather and I were sitting on her roof like she always enjoyed. She called it The Tower, though there was really nothing towering about it.

“In my head, my mom has a voice,” she said. “I can hear it when she signs.”

I scooted closer so that our legs touched. About the most thrilling experience a kid can enjoy is the subtle touch of someone they like. The world could be powered off such moments.

“What’s it sound like?” I asked.

“The universe. Like the sounds of twinkling stars reaching only my ears. These extra special notes coming from so far away. Just for me.”

I looked up to the sky, settled on a star, and watched it blink. “Tell her I said hi.” Heather turned to me, her eyes blurry with tears. Then she leaned in and kissed me. And the world changed.

In the days that followed she started showing me even more things she could do. “I can plant my voice inside your head.”

I laughed. “Right. Sure.” Though I put nothing past her anymore.

“I can.”

“Go ahead then.”

“Okay,” she told me. “Lay down, Garbanzo.” She had taken to calling me this.

I lied down on the grass.

“Close your eyes.”

I closed my eyes.

“Now, wait for it.”

I waited. And I waited, and I waited. Nothing was happening. Time fell out of place. I dreamed of home. A real home. A different life. Maybe one with her. And I was practically asleep when I heard the words, “I love you.”

My eyes shot open, and I gasped as if I had been deprived oxygen. Looking around, I expected to see Heather sitting beside me, her lips near my ear. But she was nowhere to be seen. I thought maybe I’d fallen asleep. Maybe I’d dreamt it. “Heather?”

She didn’t answer.

“Heather?”

I looked all around the house, I knocked on her door, checked the roof. She was nowhere. I felt abandoned. She never even heard me say I love you too.

After that, something changed in Heather. At school, she was more talkative. Her hair was straightened, she dressed better, or at least tried to. She started making friends, though I wasn’t sure if the kids were laughing with her or at her. It was like we had switched places and suddenly I was all alone.

One day at lunch, she captured a frog and put it under glass. A few kids gathered round, waiting to see what the freaky girl would do.

“I can make it’s heart explode,” Heather said in that calm way of hers.

I couldn’t even get close. I had to stand on top of an adjacent picnic table to get a half-way decent view. Beneath the glass I could see the frog looking confused at all the staring faces. And the longer Heather concentrated, the more uncomfortable it became. Soon, it seemed like her breathing was paired with the frog’s. Both of their breaths became hyper, frantic. The frog’s eyes were bulging. Heather was trembling, this time her whole body seeming like it would explode, not just her face. There was an energy in the air like lightning had just struck.

Then, just like that, the frog fell over, dead.

The kids erupted in shock and awe. Meanwhile, in my head, I thought, It ran out of air. It probably ran out of air. She didn’t kill it. She would never. It ran out of air.

Word spread pretty fast. Soon, Heather went from doing performances for friendship to doing them for money. It was all rather impressive—she became quite the showman—and the more impressive it became, the more impressive her clients became, and the more impressive money she was making.

After high school she became quite the sensation and we started talking less and less. She seemed confused by all the attention. Caught up, but also increasingly uncomfortable. Eventually I receded into books and my own head, and she moved to some small apartment somewhere in the middle of the country. I would hear about her appearances, all the crazy things she was doing—readings, talking to spirits, telekinesis, telepathy. She got on some local news shows and people would try to prove she was a charlatan, a crackpot. It was never clear.

Years went by. My father died, my mother remarried, and I never found the substance to fill the parts of me that had been hollowed out with our separation. It wasn’t until months after I returned home from a failed attempt at college that I saw her again. I walked out of my house and she was just standing there at the end of my driveway. She looked much older than she was. Tired and haggard. But still in a dress, and still like a presence both here and not.

“Hi, Garbanzo.”

We went for a walk and she told me all about the things she had been doing. It didn’t sound like much fun, but who was I to talk? I had no job, no real future, no friends. At one point we stopped and looked up at the stars like we used to.

“We’re like that,” she said, nodding up. “All of us. There’s all this space inside our bodies. We’re not whole, Garbanzo. Not even close. Just all this matter, all these cells with all this space in between. We’re not solid. We just appear that way. And… and sometimes I wish I could melt. Just melt away. Just become space, like we were meant to be.”

I couldn’t look up anymore; my eyes couldn’t take it. “I know you think this is all pre-destined,” I told her. “That it’s all laid out already, the past, the present, the future. But, if what I think is in store for me, the path I’m on, if that’s locked in, if that’s all I get, then what’s it all mean?”

She was quiet for some time. “I don’t know.” And she sounded so heartbreakingly sad. “But I know why we met.”

“Why?”

“To share a taste of happiness in a place with so little.”

I reached out and took her hand. “Why can’t we have more?”

“We’re not going to see each other ever again, Garbanzo. Not in person anyway. You’re going to see me on TV. I’m going to stop a train with my mind.”

“Heather…”

“What. You don’t think I can?”

“I don’t know what to think.”

“When it happens, you’re going to hear my voice inside your head. I will say something to you. Something I need to say.”

“Why can’t you tell me now? Why can’t you tell it to me when I’m in front of you? Your lips, my ears.”

“Because as humans we can speak in all kinds of ways. It doesn’t have to be so simple. So direct. And I prefer that.”

“Why won’t you come back? Why does this have to be the end?”

“You know I have no choice in the matter. And neither do you. We should just be happy that we have this, right now.”

And she leaned in and kissed me for the second time.

“That kiss is now in the world. And once it’s in the world it never leaves. It’s an infinite kiss, caught in a time that refuses to end, but rather circles back around, again—” she kissed me again—“and again—” she kissed me again—“and again. Forever.”

A year later I saw the video. It was hard to find back then, though now there’s plenty of footage if you scour the internet. The quality’s not great, but you can clearly see her standing there on the train tracks, her eyes closed, her hands at her temples. You can hear the train’s whistle far off, but getting closer. Closer. Closer. There’s a few people there watching. Some are laughing. Some are chanting, “die, die, die.” Some are whistling like the train.

Watching it that first time, I saw Heather on the tracks and my heart shrank. She didn’t have to do this. She didn’t have to do any of it. She could’ve just been with me.

Minutes in, the train was close now. The people watching started to get scared. They were yelling at her to get off the tracks. The camera panned to show just how close the train actually was. It was coming in fast, whistle shrieking. Heather hadn’t moved in all this time, not an inch. Her eyes were still closed.

The screams were louder now. Panic had set in. The joke had gone too far.

And then it happened.

A loud screech and the train was off the rails. It barreled forward, one car after another. There was chaos. Crashes and screams. The camera swerved. Sky, trees, grass, sky, stars, tracks. And the train, the train had finally come to a stop. While Heather… Heather was gone.

In the aftermath there was plenty of speculation. Some people said Heather had planted something on the tracks to make the train derail. Some people said it was all planned out well ahead of time, that’s why it wasn’t a passenger train, just freight. Some said an explosive was planted. And some people actually believed Heather caused it to happen with her mind, just as she said she would.

Not that anybody could question her. Nobody ever saw Heather again, and her body was never found. Some say she was pulverized by the derailed locomotive. Some say it was an illusion and she wasn’t even there in the first place. Some say she could teleport. Some say it was Hollywood, some say the government. Some say she is alive and living a small life.

But I go back to that last conversation we had. About all the space inside us. About how we’re all just loose cells bouncing around. And I think she found a way to make that space bigger. I think she found the hole inside herself, that hole that was bigger than all the others, and she just spread it as wide as the train itself and vanished.

She didn’t die. I know she didn’t. Because, even though I only saw the video a year later, one night I was awakened by a voice. It was her voice, and I know it was the exact moment showed in that video. And that voice said, You’re not alone. You’re never alone. I’m with you now. I was with you then. And I’ll be with you in the future. I’m with you, always. Always, always.