The News of the World by Ron Carlson

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    During my pregnancy I couldn’t see a thing. It was wonderful. My work at the hospital took on a day-to-day quality that I loved. Things got dirty, I washed them. Something would drop on the floor, I would clean it up. It was cause and effect, no thick vertigo full of sad cinema. How I loved those slow days, each separate from the other, the only continuum my stomach filling with my daughter Irene.
    The day she was born I passed out for thirty-six hours during which I saw the rest. I even saw this night, tonight. I saw it all.
    Two weeks after Irene was born, Josie, the nine-year old daughter of the couple who shared our duplex, disappeared. They searched for her for two months before I walked into the police station one day and told them to look a hundred yards below the end of Wymer’s old dirt road at the base of Brave Mountain. I’d known about it for five weeks, ever since the mother, Samantha, who everybody called Sam, and who was close as close with me while I was carrying Irene, who taught me the real simple pleasure of gossip and the small satisfaction of folding clothes, Samantha came over, not crying, and she touched my hand as I gave her the coffee and I saw the guy drop the body on the ground. I knew where he was because that was Brave Mountain right behind him. I got scared because it was all starting again, and this time it was serious. I knew what would happen if I went to the police and it did happen, you didn’t have to be psychic to see that. But I couldn’t let Norm and Samantha go on not knowing where their baby was. I thought of anonymous notes. I thought of anonymous calls, but no. Do you see? A little girl was dead, and you can’t stop it. I saw it all.
    When the police returned that afternoon it was already in the papers: PSYCHIC FINDS BODY OF MISSING GIRL. Psychic. I’ve always loved that word. One of the first movies Allen took me to was Harper, starring Paul Newman, and he has that line in the roadhouse where he says to the bartender, “You must be physic,” meaning “psychic.” I must be physic. But it was in the papers.
    The next day the press started coming round and that was pretty hard on Allen, who is a kind man and a fine doctor, to have these monkeys in our front yard with cameras and a newborn girl in the house, but the worst was the letters and phone calls. Could I come to Portland to find a man’s wife? Could I come to Baton Rouge and find the missing children. Just the letters in my hands started all the strange engines of seeing in my heart. The guys finally climbed off our lawn, but the mail kept up steady. Every other day I’d get a call, some female voice so full of electricity I’d end up sitting on the floor with the receiver in my lap. She was sure if I’d just come and sit in Terry’s room, I could find her baby.
    I stopped eating, and in a week I was this old. That was twelve years ago. Late, late at night when I was in bed with Allen, I’d get up and go out on the porch in Reno, Nevada, and just try to see the stars. Do you see? My life was over. I could see it all, and let me say it plain: that is no comfort. You want to see the future? You’re welcome to it.
    The night I left, I held Irene in my arms. I stood naked in the nursery Allen and I had fixed up together and I held her naked in my naked arms, and when I saw her and what time had in store for her, I set her down, dressed, and left. She’s okay. She’s going to be an architect. Isn’t that wonderful? And Allen’s okay. He won’t win the Nobel Peace Prize, but he’ll have three articles in The New England Journal of Medicine soon, two in one issue, and he has a fine woman who lives with him outside of Reno now, his wife, a woman with a garden.
    I drifted around Nevada for a while doing honest work, trying not to touch anyone. I went to Arizona for the horse races, but found I couldn’t pick a winner, some