Theater of the Mind

He wasn’t so sure that he had a grip anymore. It wasn’t like he was going insane. His visions were true. It was the fact that to have visions in the twenty first century was considered by the larger population a bit off, to put it best.

What he saw didn’t frighten him, but it didn’t put him at ease either. He was aware that anything to do with the future was speculation. But all of his visions had come true thus far. He felt confident that what he was seeing would soon be.

He was ruminating on that unavoidable future.

“Do the math.” He said to himself. Talking to himself was a habit since he was a child. His parents knew something was different in him, but there was no changing it. They just lived with it.

“Do the math. It will pan out.” He was pacing wall to wall in his study. There were books strewn on his table, and shelves filled with them.

“What if it doesn’t?” He asked. “That would mean you are a fraud. A fake.”

He replied. “The math always works out.”

With that, he stopped pacing and picked up a pen. He wrote down the future he saw, and time stamped it by taking a photo of his notes with the time and date scribbled on the top of the page.

He never knew when the future would come, but it always did.

His parents are dead now. They had been for some time. Only they were aware of his divinations. That is why he took notes as proof of what he was going through.

He didn’t ask for the visions. They were mostly useless.

He knew this one was different.

“It will happen.” He said. “It will.”

He started to pace again. He did that often. Pacing. Back and forth, back and forth. He wore holes in his right shoes from the turns. He was always wearing down that shoe sooner than the other. It was a shame one could not buy a single shoe, he thought. He had extra left shoes that were still good. He collected them in case he might start turning with his left foot. They filled the closet in his office.

“It will happen. I know it.”

Part of his divining seemed to be willing the future to be as he saw. It went from vision, to concentrated belief, to reality. He wasn’t sure if the concentrated belief made a difference. He had never not ruminated on a vision until it became real.

He was determined to see it become real.

Sleep came much like waking. Instead of physically pacing, he mentally paced between visions. All that had become, to all those yet to be. Back and forth, back and forth. It was this way that he fell asleep every night.

When he woke, he made coffee. He never drank the first cup. It sort of just went cold as his mind started churning. He would pour out that cup. He knew that to be the start of his day.

His second cup of coffee was consumed without ceremony. The steam coming off of it was not noticed. The bitter aroma cast aside. The reflections waving off its surface were not noted.

His mind was elsewhere. His mind was building out new predictions like a supercomputer. He knew when one was done, because he would hear a chime, like the pop of a toaster. He took time to analyze the thing in its entirety. Then he started a cycle of ruminations.

“It will happen. I know it.” He’d say. “It will.”

He turned on the TV.

It was showing the news. He had all the news channels memorized. He plugged in a new channel and hit enter. He watched for a minute. He plugged in a new channel and hit enter. He watched for a minute.

The rest of his morning went like this. Surfing the news channels for his predictions.

“…the war is over…”

“See. There. It happened.” He turned the TV off. He started to pace. He turned. He paced.

That night, he printed the picture of the prediction, and filed it in the cabinet beneath his desk. He lay down to rest and ruminate on unfulfilled and fulfilled predictions. His mind was never quiet. Only for those moments after a prediction came to fruition did he know peace, albeit brief.