But hallucinations could also be caused by alcohol psychosis and drug abuse—the often cited, but rarely seen, LSD flashback, for example—and there were all kinds of toxic drug interactions. Lindsey was about the right age to have dabbled in LSD, and it was a well-known fact that prisons were rampant with drugs; Suki had once had a patient who kept getting arrested so he could return to prison and its easy access to high-quality heroin. Who knew what Lindsey might be taking to keep herself occupied? She might even be high right now. Suki looked into Lindsey’s eyes, which were clear and not the least bit dilated.
Lindsey smiled. “I heard Wendy became a drug abuse counselor,” she said with a wink.
“Do you ever get these memories any other way beside seeing them?” Suki asked. Visual hallucinations were actually quite unusual; auditory were the most common.
“Sometimes I smell them.”
Suki looked down at her form. Olfactory hallucinations were reported even less, and often indicated a diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy. But they could also signal a brain tumor. Or Lindsey’s symptoms could be metabolic, an abnormality of her limbic system or a pituitary imbalance. Migraines, and even severe sexual abuse, had been known to cause hallucinations.
It occurred to Suki that this evaluation might take longer than she had initially estimated. But instead of probing for Lindsey’s medical, psychiatric, or drug history, she asked, “So you didn’t think it was weird when it happened? When your predictions came true?”
“Well,” Lindsey said, “most of them didn’t come true. And the others, I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I guess I just assumed they were coincidences. There didn’t seem to be any other explanation.”
Suki put down her pen along with all pretense of filling out the form. “So what was it that made you decide they were more than just coincidence?”
“Isabel.”
“But aren’t they different things? Predicting the future and believing in ghosts?”
“Yes,” Lindsey said, giving Suki an appreciative nod. “And no. It’s actually a big controversy in the field—purists say that ghosts have no place in parapsychology, that ghosts and poltergeists are the realm of fairy tale and religion. The conservative wing thinks only actual psychic ability—clairvoyance, telepathy, psychokinesis, things like that—are worthy of scientific study.”
Despite Lindsey’s oxymoronic pairing of conservative and parapsychologist, Suki was fascinated. “But you don’t agree?”
“I think it’s all part of a bigger issue. Like I told you last week, this is about opening up your mind so you can see more, understand more. It’s not about closing it to only what’s convenient to study.” Lindsey grabbed Suki’s pen from the table. “I’ll show you what I mean.” She turned the evaluation form over and made a dot on the back. “My friend Babs does this with an apple, but this’ll have to do.” She licked the top of the pen and pressed it to the paper, leaving a small damp circle in the corner. Then she put the pen down. “What do this dot, this spot of spit, and this pen, all have in common?”
“They’re all ways for you to avoid answering my questions?”
“They are that,” Lindsey acknowledged. “But they’re also something more—and something less.” When Suki didn’t answer, Lindsey smiled broadly. “They’re all the pen.”
Suki raised an eyebrow. “How do you mean?”
“A pen in one dimension is a dot, in two dimensions it’s a circle, and in three dimensions, it’s a pen!” Lindsey handed it back to Suki. “When you limit what you let yourself see,” she explained, “you limit what you let yourself understand.”
Suki turned the pen between her fingers, watching it as if it held all the answers within its shiny black surface. Life was already so chaotic, did she really need to see any more? She flipped the evaluation form face-up. “Were there many drugs
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