One Weird Day

Weather Forecast - Part 4

--- 2046, March ---

Eric reaches over me, retrieves his watch from the bedside table and fastens it on his wrist. He leans back on his pillow and stares at the ceiling, then turns to me again.

"I still don't believe it," he says. "That interview of yours. That's charlatanism. There's no way you can know such things."

"Wait a week and see for yourself."

"But what if there is no flood? How will you explain it? If you want to be a charlatan, make fuzzy predictions: "On the day that the northern moon meets the southern wind, a natural disaster will hit our city..." Then wait for an appropriate disaster and tell everyone : "That's what I was talking about!"

"Impressive. Ever considered doing it for a living?"

"We would actually make a good team," he muses. "I could make up predictions for you. We could convince that journalist to take another interview. And if people start believing us, it could become quite a business..."

He darts a glance at his watch again.

"Time for you to go home?" I ask.

"No, why would I hurry?"

"To feed the goldfish?"

"It's fasting today." He lays back with his hands behind his head. "I've got plenty of time."

"Then stay the night," I suggest.

"But I've got to work tomorrow," he says, "and I have nothing here, no clean shirts, no underwear. And you know I have trouble sleeping in a new place."

"Last Thursday you fell asleep just fine."

"That's because you tired me out," he says playfully, reaching out to kiss me. "If not for the alarm clock, I would have slept whole night."

"Why set an alarm clock if nobody is waiting for you at home except for a hungry goldfish?"

"Are you hinting at something?"

"I'm not hinting, Eric. Go home to you wife. She's waiting. So is your son."

A pause hangs in the air as he looks at me appraisingly.

"All right now," he says, sitting up. "Did you spy on me or something?"

"No, I just know. I told you that I can find out anything I want to know. And many things I don't want to know as well."

"And I told you I don't believe in this bullshit."

He gets out of bed and starts to get dressed, avoiding looking at me. I pull my blanket up, keeping an eye on him. He struggles for a while to get his foot into a trouser leg.

"Eric, calm down."

"No, what does it say about you then?" he exclaims, gesticulating with one hand and trying to pull his pants on with the other. "Back on our first date, you said you weren't interested in married guys. And now it turns out that you know, one way or another, but you do. Still it doesn't bother you, does it? Don't you feel guilty about my wife? She's nice, by the way. It's just that we don't get on as well as we used to."

I don't feel bad about his wife because I know that she cheated on him too. Sometimes, when they "don't get on as well as they used to," she slips away for a couple of hours to cry on her ex-boyfriend's shoulder. Sometimes their conversations move into the bedroom. Which gives Eric a sort of moral right to pay her back in kind, he just doesn't know that himself. And now he's wounded and upset about not being able to go on playing the role of the fancy-free bachelor—and ashamed, too. Thinking that I didn't know about his wife and she didn't know about me somehow made him feel like he wasn't really cheating.

"You won't come again?"

"Why do you ask if you know everything?" He sits in an armchair to tie his laces. "Tell me, Cassandra, will I come again?"

I turn on my side and stretch.

"Yes, you will show up a few more times. But then it will get more difficult for us to meet secretly, since I will be more famous. After the flood I will give more interviews, and then I'll receive a few minutes on the local news on a daily basis. International interest in my predictions will increase. At first people will laugh, but after realizing that I never make mistakes, they will start taking me seriously. All this will snowball --"

"Wow, you have big plans."

Maybe I should make him believe, after all.

"Eric, do you want me to tell you about your biggest fear?"

He leans back on the chair, hands on knees.

"Go ahead."

"You're scared of frogs. When you were three years old, you sat on a river bank, your parents were nearby. You threw stones into the water, which startled a frog. It jumped out of the grass right onto your leg. It looked like some kind of monster to you, and you cried. It took some time for your parents to calm you down, they couldn't even figure out what had frightened you so much. You have been afraid of frogs since then. You even avoid going near rivers without realizing why."

As I speak, his expression changes. His irony dissipates. He looks puzzled, disbelieving and a little scared.

"That's one of my earliest memories," he says at last. "What color were the shorts I was wearing that day?"

"Yellow."

He goes quiet.

"So, you can answer any question?"

"I think so."

Another pause.

"Does God exist?"

Wow.

"Eric, I'm not going to answer that."

TO BE CONTINUED...