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Novel Treatments / Relatively Superhuman: Chapter 4 - How to Become Clairsentient
The man’s clinging chill, plus the lady’s hectic heart rate, reminded me.
I was nine.
We were driving eastward across the south of France, from the farm in Aquitaine to the start of my favourite time of year―our annual Alpine ski holiday. I always remembered things from this point onward, never before. Back then, I must have felt that something epic was about to happen. I was right, that ‘something’ was the first ever alteration of my worldview.
We'd been winding through the final mountainous section of our approach to Chamonix for a while, navigating rock faces that towered above us as much as they plunged below, via the Viaduc des Egratz. I stared up and down in awe, as if it was my first time, filled to bursting with conflicting emotions: did I want to turn around and run back to the relative flatness and safety of Aquitaine, or did I want to pitch a tent on the precipice and stay with the Gods for the rest of my life?
That indecision didn’t last long.
Without warning, it was as if we’d driven into a vicious car wash that operated by snow instead of water. Just glaring, chaotic white through every window, no sight of other cars, mountains, or buildings. We knew it wasn’t an avalanche―the car was still―but it was the closest the sky could come to creating one.
I felt like a mere husk, as if something vital had been removed. It had. The façade of safety.
The wipers cut clean arcs that existed for a split second before swiftly disappearing, then laboriously repeated the attempt again and again, straining against the weight of the snowfall. My father leaned forward, trying to make the most of those snatches of visibility, knowing it was best to keep moving forward for the danger of being hit from behind. That was when I noticed he wasn't wearing his seatbelt.
When I woke up―or more accurately came round―I found myself facing the rear seats I should have been sitting on, my eyes almost level with the top of the back. My knees were where my feet should have been. My feet weren’t there because they were being eaten by the foot well beneath my mother’s seat. My left foot was abnormally twisted, the pain of it charging through me like lightning through a conduit to my head. And some powerful force pulled my back flat against the back of her seat.
The snow’s glare seared my eyeballs, producing the kind of headache only people who heard voices experienced. So it took some figuring out to realise that the powerful force was gravity, and that the car was rear-end up, like it had nose-dived from the sky. The word plummet came to me. My mother had ironically only taught me it a week earlier.
I turned my head one way, then the next, and almost blacked out from a pain that felt as if my scalp had been peeled back, then the bloody skull cracked open with a hammer and an ice pick. The surroundings blended like the swirl in a newly opened tub of Tutti Frutti ice-cream.
“Maman? Papa?”
Pure white still beamed through all of the windows, but I thought I'd also caught bright red at some point during the dazed meandering of my first reconnoitre. “Maman?”
I bore the blowtorch level pain on the left of my head to turn enough and see through the gap between the front seats. First there was the seat of my father’s pants. Twisting more I saw his body up to his elbows―but everywhere above that had punched a bloody hole through the windscreen.
Adrenalin unleashed like a slashed balloon full of water. I husked out again.
I couldn't see my mother, but I saw the beginning of her seatbelt up by the door. It was taut.
“Maman?” I kept on struggling to get free, making no headway at all but still trying. I heard her breathing in a strange way, and I was sure I caught the heat of her breath rising up past one side of me, like her soul.
“Lu…Lukas…” she sounded as if someone had their hand around her throat. Although she always spoke in French with me, it was no surprise that she’d said my name in her Northern Irish accent―her native tongue always fought through under stress.
I craved the sight of her, wanted so much to touch her pale, silken, cocoa buttered skin, and to hear her sing in Gaelic.
“Mam, are you okay?”
I wanted to look into those green eyes and see that everything would be alright. I just needed to free myself, but gravity, pain and exhaustion ganged up on me.
She choked. “My…my heart…”
“No. Not that! Please God…why?”
If anything, I was lodging myself further in place.
“Love you so much…son.”
I knew what the words and the tone and the pain in them meant.
“Mam! No!” I didn’t sound like myself. Rough. Guttural. Primal. “Don’t leave me!”
There wasn’t enough air in the world to satisfy my lungs, though there was plenty water in my tear ducts.
“I’m…sorry son…” Whispered.
Then, I realised, and my emotions calmed, like the moment after a bastard of tempests when you can’t believe your boat is intact and you’re still alive. There was nothing I could do about it; she was going.
“…always loved…”
I figured it was best to make use of those last few seconds, so I tried my hardest to calm down.
I was able to turn just a little, so I could put my face flat against the fabric. One arm reached over and pressed a palm flat against the back of the seat, next to my face.
“…darling boy…” Barely audible. Not helping at all.
I closed my eyes, and tried to will everything into the background―the need to breathe, to cry, the adrenalin, the biting cold, the pain of my twisted ankle―and just hauled my senses in a new direction. Rather than my body reacting to environmental stimuli, I tried forcing it to react to what was important to me.
It killed my head. Being a force of nature it reeled against change, thrashing against me like a snake whose neck I squeezed beneath my heel. I found though that I wasn’t killing the animal, just taming it, retraining its force, its nature. At some point, it developed its own momentum, becoming a new type of instinct, rather than the simple sense of touch it started out as. In grew into its new form, understanding that the priority was no longer the environment―it was my mother.
And just in time too.
When she groaned with pain, I felt it striking my heart too. It spread across our ribcages, like a crack on a windscreen. I didn’t mind dying with her, and actually thought it was happening, I wasn’t breathing after all, and I knew how cold it must have been although I couldn’t feel it.
At first her pain was the most awful sensation―perhaps like black ink replacing the blood in my veins, all organs and functions shrinking back, unwilling to be contaminated.
Then, nothing.
I hoped it meant that I’d taken some of the pain away from her. She deserved that much, because she was the most fantastic mother ever.
At the hospital, Dr Levallois diagnosed me as having a concussion and performed brain scans. A gendarme with a huge moustache, Sergent-Chef Jean-Michel Bourges, came to me afterwards while I was in the recovery room staring at the cast on my left foot. He sat next to me and placed his arm around my shoulder, yet it did nothing to dissolve that immense sense of solitude, like I’d been covered in a large upside down bowl that was too heavy for me to lift off.
“Mon fils...j'ai une mauvaise nouvelle...”
Bad news.
He told me that the inertia function of my mother's seatbelt, coupled with the pull of gravity on her body in that downward position, stopped her from being able to free herself, or breathe properly. He told me that the panic the situation caused, plus the fact that the seat belt had already crushed her chest bone, was probably what triggered her heart attack. He paused and then added that, on the other hand, my father would probably have been there to give me this information himself, and to comfort me, if he had been wearing his seatbelt.
He asked me to tell him what had happened just before. I couldn't remember anything. He told me to try harder because he needed to find out if there was foul play. I cried. Doctor Levallois said that I may have had retrograde amnesia from the concussion and that he would consult specialists with my scans and let the Sergent-Chef know in a few days.
In the meantime Sergent-Chef Bourges took me into his home in nearby Bonneville where I lived for a time with his family―his wife Mirabelle, who smelled of vanilla, and their children Laurent and Marin. I was to stay there until legal matters and the funeral could be ironed out and somewhere was found for me to go.
At the beginning of my second week there Doctor Levallois phoned Bourges saying that there was no sign of physical damage, so post-traumatic amnesia could be ruled out. However, the memory might be psychologically blocked, he suggested. He recommended that I be taken to a specialist; hypnotism with a similar patient had apparently produced satisfactory results. The Sergent-Chef decided that I’d been through enough trauma, and that there was no real reason to suspect the accident was anything but that―an accident.
Although I spent the rest of my school life in the French boarding school system, the Bourges’ insisted on remaining the closest thing I had to, yet another, family. Mirabelle read tarot cards, and had as many books about spirituality and such as my mother had of the classics. One day, in candlelight, across a table neatly laid out with her colourful cards of pictures, I explained to her what I did in the car when my mother was dying. She told me it was called, clairsentience.
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I enjoyed the chapter overall, but felt beaten down by all the metaphors, similes, and analogies. Used properly, as you have many times in this and previous chapters they can bring your reader into a believable experience, used heavy-handedly they make an already confusing experience worse.
Below is a list of the not-so-great:
“a vicious car wash that operated by snow instead of water” – this metaphor is wordy, but I can see it.
“chaotic white” -I can’t visualize a chaotic lack of color.
“a mere husk” -mere is unnecessary, husk covers it concisely.
“lightning through a conduit to my head” – how does lightning go through a conduit to your head? unclear analogy.
“only people who heard voices experienced” – unclear analogy likely most of your audience doesn’t hear voices.
“skull cracked open with a hammer and an ice pick.” – “skull chiseled open” would be less wordy.
“like the swirl in a newly opened tub of Tutti Frutti ice-cream” -While I know what that looks like, I thought he was facing the rear seat and the windows were all whited out. What is creating the colored swirls?
“making no headway at all but still trying” -I’d omit “but still trying”
“pale, silken, cocoa buttered skin” -cocoa butter is silken, but not pale. I’d go with cream, milk, something silken and pale.
“perhaps like black ink replacing the blood in my veins” – why perhaps? and I can’t imagine that sensation at all.
“upside down bowl” -wordy, but understandable.
These are just to my tastes of course, there will be readers who enjoy these word combinations I’m sure.
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