Chapter 20: The Lottery and the Particles

Mrs Hoakes then continued: 'It all started Friday evening after I'd returned from work. I told you we don't have a TV set or a computer in our house, no electronics-in fact, apart from a tiny radio I have since I was a kid. And there is only one program I like listening to, which is about floral arrangements you can display in and around the house. Anyway, when the program ended, I wanted to turn it off which is what I normally do, but my younger boy started crying so I went straight to him and left the radio on. Anyway, they were announcing the winning numbers in the national lottery for three separate draws, and Melinda was guessing each and every one of them before they'd read them out. Initially, I thought it was maybe a recording I wasn't aware of, but it was all live and it went on for the first the second and then the third draw. I asked Melinda how she could know all this and she told me she could see the numbers in front of her eyes before they'd announced them. We then bought lottery tickets for yesterday's draw but she wasn't able to see anything anymore and she didn't get a single number right.'

In a way, and to a certain extent, this can be explained by science. It hasn't been proven or anything, but I have my own theory how this actually works. What happens is that you can sometimes feel the vibrations of a particle just before they occur, which may have made it that Melinda knew the right numbers on Friday but not on Sunday. By anticipating and building towards the moment, the Hoakes ruined it, because the vibrations in particles change all the time, meaning that, the moment an observer comes into play, you are already influencing the end result, and so the lottery numbers will not be the ones you initially saw. You're not predicting the future; you're shaping it. Nevertheless, what Melinda saw in the first phase, was truly extraordinary. That is, if Mrs Hoakes was telling the truth. The flashing moments of being connected to a certain vibration is somewhere in the neighborhood of milliseconds, however, and definitely not in the range of seconds or minutes, as Melinda experienced. We all experience it, as I had earlier with the three crumbs, when you know something feels just right, like being in the sweet spot. But again, this is so fleeting.

'Did she say why she couldn't see the numbers?'

'She said I had ruined it.' There you go, just what I thought. However, this revelation crept under my skin because it meant Mrs Hoakes was telling the truth.

'There are some principles in physics that could somehow explain all this', I continued. 'It's not proven or anything, but there have been occurrences like this before.' I wasn't actually telling the truth. Just trying to make her feel better.'

'Mr Sarpaulis, is she like a whizzkid in Math?'

'I don't know. It's too soon to tell. Is that all she's done?'

Her lips let slip a long sigh, which felt overplayed. 'No. There's something else. Can I show it to you?'

'Yeah.' And my mouth spoke before my mind.

'Come with me, please.'

I followed her again through a couple of corridors that spilled into three other separate rooms, and they all betrayed a modest household, marked by a heavy atmosphere of decor and furniture that seemed to have been inherited from grandparents, rather than bought. What's more, all the rooms were on this ground floor, and every end of corridor or corner of the house was stacked with construction material in the form of planks of wood, grinders, polishers and groove cutters. One corner, in particular, covered in dust and cobwebs, showed the signs of abandoned extension plans for the house, and I couldn't help thinking that this all had something to do with Mr Hoakes' occasional stays in the hospital. She eventually opened one more door and invited me inside a dark bedroom, with one window opening to an old chestnut tree that grew a few inches away from the house. Two rag dolls were holding hands against the side bed rails. There was a smell of fresh paint or some water-based colorant in the air and, considering how small the window was, I wouldn't have been surprised if they had painted the walls months, not days before. School books and stationary were spread on top of a heavy desk, with two mini-lamps and an old clock. But the most incredible feature was the paintings or drawings on the walls. Mrs Hoakes pulled the curtains even wider and I could see it was paint. What I had in front of my eyes could only be described as an ancient replica of a constellation map which featured vertical scribblings at the extremities of the front wall opposite the window and a drawing of a mountain top to its far left top corner. It was unlike anything I'd seen before. What was even more strange was that all this had been painted over a collection of flowers - daisies with each petal colored differently; some small, some big - which was more appropriate in tone with a child's bedroom.

'Saturday night, when I put Melinda to sleep, there were only flowers on the wall. The following morning, when I woke up, I found this.' The scribblings, as well as all the shiny dots and the lines connecting them, covered all four sides of the bedroom, including the side with the window. Everything fitted inside a giant mathematical grid, only that this one seemed to have not two or three but twenty three coordinates. To have a graphic representation within twenty-three planes was something I had never seen.

'Do you mind if I take picture of it?' I dared ask.

'No. Is it ok if you don't send it to the press or make it public just yet?'

'This? No. It's just for me. I wanna find out more about it.'

I took a few pictures of it with my phone and they all looked terrible because of the lack of light.

'What did she use to make all this? I continued.

'These', and she lifted a white plastic bag off the floor in which empty tubes of aquarelle had been thrown. That explains why some of the lines appeared red, while others were in blue or yellow.

'What did she say when you asked her about it?'

'She couldn't remember a thing', the mother answered. 'She told me she had dreamed she had gone with her father to the Moon.'

'To the Moon?'

'That's what she said. Although she described flowers and sunshine and clouds hovering above fields of grass. And she wasn't walking but rather jumping through all of it. There are only four people living in this house. My one year old couldn't have done it, I didn't do it and my husband didn't do it.'

'What do you think is happening then?'

'Maybe it has something to do with the drugs they gave her for her back.'

'How long has she had back problems?'

'Ever since she was little. The doctors said it had something to do with undeveloped muscles. She's been on medication on and off ever since.' She then paused and took a deep look all around the room as if the answer had been there all the time and maybe she'd missed it. 'Do you have any idea what this is?'

'No', and I had decided I wouldn't throw my constellation card just yet. 'It looks like a grid, maybe a map, but to what? This mountain. Do you recognize it?'

'No.'

'I wouldn't read too much into it'. She looked scared and I decided it was better to be on her side this time. 'Kids have great imagination'. There is nothing here a ten year old girl can't do. Maybe she'd seen this picture somewhere, or maybe she dreamt it. But it's not that unusual.'

Lady Hoakes was nodding. 'Maybe medication has something to do with it'. I continued. 'You say yourself she loves creating stuff.' It was then my turn to pause. 'Do you mind if I asked what you do for a living, Mrs Hoakes?'

'I'm a therapist', she replied, and, strangely enough it didn't surprise me. She was the worst kind of therapist: the one who didn't listen. It's the one I have encountered most often. I felt instant pity for both Mrs Hoakes and her patients. I'm sure the destiny of a troubled youth made it that she was drawn to solving problems while being totally unable to do it or find the right comfort and patience around her to allow her to do it. Living in the same house with a schizophrenic and a daughter who had inherited her father's traits had pushed her to a life of constant murmur and fidgeting, one that blocks all the sensors responsible for lifting the veil of worry and anxiety from the destitute who ask for help. It made her act like a bull in a China shop, like a train whose brakes have stopped functioning long ago and knows it's headed for derailment because of an unfortunate series of bad decisions. 'I have a small practice behind Jeremy Price's garage.'

'What kind of therapy?'

'I treat insomnia, post traumatic stress disorder, any problem related to the mind' and there was the 'loneliness' of a corporation talking now, not a human being.

'It's a beautiful job.'

'Beautiful but hard. It takes its toll at the end of the day. You don't want to hear anything about pain anymore when you come home.' She told me that with the gloomy despondency that comes with raw honesty.