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She was a mysterious person.

Lying in the almost dark, Artie hoped she would be okay.

(He wondered what she thought of as she played.)

A few hours later, very early in the morning, a doctor showed up at the foot of his bed. The doctor was younger than Artie, and he said, “Glad to see you doing so well, Mr. Dam.”

“Yes,” Artie said. As the doctor moved toward him with his stethoscope Artie said, “Can I tell you something?”

The doctor stopped moving toward him.

“I’m wondering if you’ve ever heard of something like this. But I had a dream one week ago that I was in the water floating, and it was exactly like what actually happened to me.”

The doctor looked at him from behind dark-framed glasses. And then, to Artie’s surprise, he sat down on the bed. “Precognition,” he said. “I’m interested in that stuff.” He glanced around. “Not all my colleagues are. But tell me.”

And so Artie told the doctor of his vivid dream, and how when he was in the water he understood that this had been his dream.

The doctor regarded him carefully. “Has that ever happened to you before?”

Artie shook his head. “Never.”

The doctor sighed and said, “Well, I have no idea. But I have heard of such things, yes. Maybe you have a gift.” He stood up with his stethoscope.

—

The second night in the hospital was even better than the first, which Artie realized now he had only barely remembered. But as he began to feel more aware, more himself, he thought: Wow. And after kissing Evie good night, he looked at the television above his head for a few minutes and clicked it off and lay in the almost darkness.

What came to him then was this memory: the night he was awarded Teacher of the Year. The event had been held at a neighboring school, and at the reception beforehand, Artie had felt a growing unease while he greeted the teachers and superintendents from all over the state as he held a glass of wine from which he did not drink. Evie had enjoyed herself tremendously, he could see this in the glow of her face as she shook hands with person after person.

The dinner and the award ceremony itself had been held in the huge gymnasium of this same school. Long blue curtains had been put up on the stage part of the gymnasium and the place was packed. The dinner had seemed interminable. What helped save Artie was the fact that Flossie (with her husband) was seated at the same table. But Flossie was across from him, and the table was big. She had had too much to drink, he could see this, and he did not care. Her lipstick rimmed her wineglass, and every so often she would set her glass down and catch his eye and wave to him from across the table. “Dear Artie,” she boomed a few times, her pink polished nails wagging from her plump hand as she blew him a kiss.

—

In fact, Artie had been almost paralyzed with fear. As he sat at the table while the introduction was made for him, he was honestly not sure that he would be able to stand and walk up the stairs to the podium. But he did. His written speech was dampened with wrinkles, and he smoothed it out and began to speak, and after the first page or so something in him calmed down, and he was able to look up more at the audience, and when he spoke of his excitement at teaching the Civil War—how each year he assigned a student to research an actual soldier or nurse from Massachusetts and had that student read all the letters written home—as he relaxed into this, he glanced up and caught Flossie’s eye, and she was positively beaming at him, and then, before he looked back down at his text, his eyes moved ever so quickly to her husband, Reginald, sitting stiffly beside her, and he saw—he was always certain of this—he saw Reginald roll his eyes.

The man had rolled his eyes at Artie.

Well, it didn’t matter.

—

In the years to come Artie told no one but his wife that he had seen this. “He’s jealous,” Evie had said dismissively, and Artie said, “Jealous of what? He’s got an endowed chair of mathematics at Boston University,” and Evie said, “Yes, and how many awards has he gotten from his popularity? He may be brainy, but he’s not popular and you are.” Flossie he never mentioned this to as she would weep at their table in Spud’s Bar and Grille after Reginald died, telling Artie what an asshole her husband had been and how she missed him so much. Artie would just nod. And after a few minutes Flossie would say something that had them both laughing again.

—

As Artie lay there in the not quite darkness of the hospital room he thought about this, Reginald rolling his eyes at him, and Artie felt a real sense of sorrow for the man, to have such a poverty of spirit. These were the words that came to Artie: poverty of spirit.

And then turning slightly over—he could not turn fully because of the intravenous needle they had stuck into his arm—he thought again of his sister, Maria. A sweet girl who had only wanted sweetness in her life.

When Artie told Evie about his dream, early that second morning in the hospital, and how accurate the dream had been, she just watched him carefully. “Seriously,” Artie said. “Isn’t that strange?” Evie kept watching him. Then she said, “Really?” She said it hesitantly, as though she was not sure she believed him.

“Yeah,” said Artie. He was sitting up in bed; he was waiting for his breakfast; he could hear the trays rattling in their big rolling container outside in the hallway. “I told the doctor, and he was interested. But he said that not all his colleagues would be. But the doctor—I mean, my doctor—said he had heard of such things happening. It’s called precognition.”

“I know what precognition is,” Evie said.

“Have you ever had clients who had it?”

“No.”