out of the casino and to their car just to make sure they left.
By Spring time his friends would jokingly say it was Eric’s thirty-minute guarantee and Eric couldn’t argue with that description. What he saw was guaranteed to happen. He couldn’t tell you what would happen tomorrow or the day after, or even an hour from now. But as soon as it hit the thirty-minute mark, he knew. He wished they wouldn’t tell everyone which of course they did and they took full advantage of his gift making ridiculous bar bets and try to pick up women, never thinking of the consequences of what they were doing.
Eric’s visions increased in frequency and intensity over time. The warm heat running over his brain had changed to more of a fiery burn and the visions that he saw would last for minutes instead of seconds. He could feel a pressure behind his eyes similar to the one he felt on that wintry night with the old man as he watched the future, projected over what he was seeing live and they would water when he tried to focus on either the now or the then. Not just one tear rolling down his face but a full on cry. There was no emotion in the tears, only discomfort. No matter how much he tried to stop them the tears kept coming.
By the time summer had come back around word had spread around town of the guy that could tell the future, and some people had managed to get his address. People from town he had never even met started knocking on his door asking him to use his gift for them. They wanted him to tell them what the lottery numbers would be or what horses would win at the track.
Word had even started to spread outside of Lancaster. People were coming from all over the place to ask him what he could see in their future. The sick would ask if they were going to live. The healthy would ask when they were going to die. The Poor wanted to be rich and the rich wanted to be richer. Every time he tried to explain that his ability was limited to only thirty minutes from now the people that wanted to use him would say things like “hack”, “fraud”, and “useless”, and those names were almost always prefaced with the word “fucking”. It wasn’t just the greedy that would curse him, it was everyone. He had an old lady come up to him at the grocery store while he was picking up a pack of toilet paper ask him if he could get a message to her husband who had been dead for fifteen years.
“I’m sorry ma’am, but that’s not what I can do.” He said forcing a pleasant enough smile considering that this woman was the twelfth person that day to ask him to use his gift. “I can’t speak to the dead. I can see what’s going to happen about thirty minutes from now.”
The old woman straightened up and frowned, “Well what good is that?” The old lady turned away from him and muttered, “fucking pathetic.”
That the first of many that Eric stayed home, away from the general public because he was tired of the ridicule. The world seemed to have turned on him. He used to think it was mostly good, that the mean and self-centered were fewer than the ones that were kind and caring. But now he felt the world was greedy and selfish. Everyone wanting something only for themselves, not caring what happened to others. He no longer wanted to be a part of it.
When October came he received phone calls from the Lancaster Town Supervisor asking to know how the Town Board would vote on the proposed budget for the next year. A half hour before the vote he looked into the future, the burning now more of a fire and the pressure that pushed against the back of his eyes more intense than ever and the tears had been replaced with blood. He struggled through the pain as he always did with a hope that the out come would be good. The police would look to him to help solve crimes or prevent them all together. He helped in anyway he could, thinking he could use his ability to help save lives. Every time the film played in his vision the pain increased, his body became week. His face was becoming worn and pail. He was only twenty-four but he looked like he had aged ten years over the past several months.
It had gotten to the point that he couldn’t leave his apartment at all. Not only because of all the questions he would be bombarded with but also the sheer number of people camped outside his building. People from all over the state had started coming to him looking for answers to questions he could not answer. At least not yet. Some of the people would be patient and wait, going as far as camping out in front of the door to his apartment building. The landlord was considering evicting him because of the nuisance these people were causing for the other tenants.
The last time his friends asked him if he wanted to go out was on his twenty-fifth birthday. They tried to throw him a surprise party thinking they could outsmart his ability. They were wrong. Eric tried to act surprised when he got to the bar but everyone could tell that he knew they were throwing him a party well before he arrived with a group of people that had been camping outside his house in tow. Even Chad and Bill refused to talk to him that night.
Around the same time his friends abandoned him his family started pulling away as well. His parents called to see how he was doing less frequently. In the few conversations he did have with his parents they were talking about how people near them were starting to talk about a man that lived up north that could see into the future. Some of the people heard rumors of his name and would ask his parents if they were any relation. They tried to avoid the subject as much as possible and had even flat out lied to their friends at times, saying that they did not know who they were talking about. His sister had been getting picked on and bullied in school because she had the same last name so she stopped talking to him all together, going so far as to send him a text message telling him to lose her number, she no longer had a brother. That message destroyed him, sending him into a deep depression. They were close when they were younger, always spending time together. He tried on several occasions to get her to talk to him again. He would call and send her text messages but she would just ignore him. He always got her voicemail when he called. The phone would only ring once or twice before he heard her soft voice say that she couldn’t answer the phone right now so please leave a message which meant she was pressing the ignore button when he called. He wondered how the people he loved could cut him out of their lives with such ease and recklessness, without any second thoughts just because he was different than them. He didn’t ask for this, it just happened. He tried to explain that to them, to ask for help. But no one wanted anything to do with him. He was left alone to figure out how to live with his situation.
Weeks of loneliness had gone by before he started getting requests for interviews, first from the local newspapers and magazines then the local television networks started calling. He did these interviews with the hope that he would be able to clarify for people the limitations to his ability and that he would like to be able to have some privacy back in his life. Unfortunately for him, that didn’t happen.
After doing the interviews on the local level his story spread even further and faster. He received more requests for interviews, now from the national media, which he tried to avoid as much as possible. Then came the calls from the science community wanting to study him, to pick his brain, literally. One scientist actually wanted to cut open his head and poke around inside with no guarantee he would survive. Eric almost let him.
The visions and the pain were nearly constant and becoming unbearable. His eyes nearly always bled and his head throbbed. His complexion became more and more pail and his skin began to sag. He was twenty-five years old but looked like he was a sickly forty-five year old man. Looking in the mirror one day he realized what was happening. The more he looked into the future the faster his body aged. He tried to turn it off. To stop seeing the future but couldn’t.
Even in his dreams the future played. He saw everything that would happen in a half hour. He no longer just saw one out come. He saw all out comes of every decision overlapping over each other. He could focus on just one outcome for a moment but that was when the pain intensified from the constant warmth and dull pressure to blinding him with the fire in his head and blood from his eyes.
Eric had stopped going out, stopped answering the phone and the door.
He hadn’t left his apartment in weeks, except to run to the store to pick up groceries. Even then he had to fight his way out of his building, trying to be polite to the people camped outside the door. He would apologize and say that he couldn’t help them right now. They looked at him with either disgust or despair. They never cursed him, but they did let him know that they thought it was his job to tell them what they wanted to know. The last time he went shopping he spent all the money he could to buy as much as he could so he wouldn’t have to face them again for a while. He silently hoped that the crowd would either shrink or disperse all together if they didn’t see him for an extended period of time.
He felt like cabin fever would begin to set in soon if he didn’t get out so he focused on his own future to see what would happen if he left for a little while. His vision doubled with his future, the fire flared in his head and his eyes bled. He was surprised to see that none of the people camped outside the building would follow him even though the crowd had grown instead of shrunk while he had confined himself to his apartment.