“Like . . . a premonition?”
She dips her chin. “So, in your case, you dreamt about a man and then, allegedly”—she gestures to Oliver—“met that man. Other examples are people who had nightmares about the twin towers falling in the months and weeks leading up to 9/11. Or people dreaming of earthquakes only to experience one days later. It’s even said that Lincoln dreamt of his own death, just weeks before he was assassinated.”
“What? I thought you said death was symbolic.”
“I said it’s often symbolic.”
I clench my jaw, inhaling deeply through my nose.
“Is that true?” Oliver asks. “Did people really dream about 9/11 before it happened?”
“It depends on your definition of true, I suppose,” she says. “Are these people lying? I don’t think all of them are—there are just too many stories for that to be possible. But is their perception of what’s occurred accurate?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, don’t get me wrong, I think these anecdotes are all very intriguing. But I also think coincidence and perception can play a big role. In other words, people can see what they want to see sometimes. Maybe they want to believe someone is their soul mate”—again, her hawk eyes dart back and forth between us—“and so in retrospect they think, say, that man with the gold medallion walking on the beach in their dream must be the exact same person they meet a year later with a gold medallion walking on the beach and are now falling in love with. But perhaps it’s just a strange coincidence. I mean, there are a lot of men on the East Coast that wear gold medallions—especially near Jersey.” She pauses, but doesn’t crack a grin at her own joke. “Or, in the case of 9/11, maybe the nightmare was just of an explosion in a building, but again, in retrospect, it’s very easy to think that it must have been the World Trade Center.”
Oliver leans back, jabs his fingers into his hair. But I sit still, processing what Dr. Saltz is suggesting, which is similar to what Harrison said—that I didn’t actually dream of Oliver, just someone who looked like him. And that upon seeing him, I made the connection, because I what—want it to mean something? The whole idea is preposterous and the irritation that has been building is now full-blown anger.
“This is bullshit.”
Oliver turns to me, eyes wide.
“What? It is. You know this isn’t just a weird coincidence. I dreamt of you—not someone who looked like you. It’s not my mind playing some trick on me.”
The air conditioner shuts off and a tinny silence fills the room.
The wheels of Dr. Saltz’s chair squeak as she shifts in her seat. “Look,” she says. And when I do, really look at her, her features have rearranged themselves into a softer kindness. “My grandmother used to have this friend, Harley Dean. And whenever anybody lost something, they called Ms. Harley Dean, because she would know how to find it. One time my grandmother moved houses, and lost a pair of crystal candlesticks that my grandfather had given her. She told Harley Dean—who lived two full states away—and the next day Harley Dean called her and told her to look in a cabinet underneath the stairs in the basement. Sure enough, my grandmother found a box there, and in that box were the candlesticks. Now, mind you, Harley Dean had never been to my grandmother’s new house.”
My brow wrinkles. “So how did she—”
“Said she dreamt it. That’s how she found other people’s lost things—she would dream about them. Where they were.”
I sit back, not understanding.
“What I’m trying to say is, I can’t explain that. I believe that it happened—I know my grandmother wouldn’t lie about it—but I have no explanation. I would love to sit here and tell you the how and why of it, but I deal in science. And from my research and the fifty years of research before me, the science backing up this type of predictive dreaming just isn’t there.” She holds my gaze for a beat, shifts her eyes to Oliver. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not real.” She starts moving papers around on her desk and stands up. “Now if you’ll excuse me.”
Oliver stands up and holds the door open for her. “Thank you for your time, Dr. Saltz,” he says as she passes. She grunts and then pauses.
“You know, I’m surprised you didn’t call Denise Krynchenko.”
“Who?” he asks.
“You don’t know of Professor Krynchenko? She’s Harvard. Studies all that psychic stuff. Look up her book. It’s a doozy.”
Oliver stretches away from the door, holding it open with his foot, and grabs a pen from Dr. Saltz’s desk. Scribbles the name on his palm.
“Thanks,” he repeats. And then Professor Saltz is gone and we’re alone. “C’mon,” he says to me.
“Where are we going?” I stand up, my knees a little wobbly. “To a library?”
“No. I need a drink.”
* * *
Another thing I love about big cities: You can find a bar that’s open and serving at literally any hour of the day. Back in the bright sunshine, the first restaurant we come to off campus swells with brunchers at sidewalk tables, laughing over their smoked salmon tartines and Bellinis. We pass it, as if in silent agreement that the atmosphere doesn’t quite fit our mood, and Oliver reaches for the heavy wood door pull of the next establishment—no patio, no brunchers. No brunch, apparently, as one staffer is in the middle of pulling the chairs off the tabletops in preparation for the lunch service. Our eyes adjust to the dim light, we hop up on barstools and, seeing as we’re the only patrons seated at the long, scuffed wood bar, the bartender gets our drink order right away.
“Dying?” I say to Oliver the second our cocktails (old-fashioned for him, vodka tonic, two limes, for me) are placed in front of us.
“Yeah,” he says, twisting the highball glass slowly on the bar top.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know. How do you tell somebody that?”
He has a point. He rubs his hands over his eyes and temples. “This is all so weird.”
“So—how do I die?” I mean it as a joke to lighten the mood. But it hangs in the air, heavier than I intended.
“Different ways,” Oliver says. “The two of us hiking in the woods and you willfully stepping off a cliff, your body colliding with the rocks below. Masked man eerily laughing while peppering your chest with copper-tipped bullets from his artillery of weapons. Walking across train tracks, not hearing the locomotive whistle as it barrels toward you, leaving your head bloody, neck half—”