Cynthia stood anxiously awaiting for Sr. Mary to get off her shift at St. Patrick’s Hospital. She was impatient to know who this "Ed Bishop" was whose admittances had managed to screw up her data on the medical analysis for months . Sr. Mary would not have revealed the name of the patient over the phone had the request not come from her blood sister, Cynthia. It probably had some very practical explanation, Cynthia thought, snaking her auburn tresses around her fingers like a copperhead winding its way through the idle digits. Or, she shrugged to herself, it was just one of those interminable absurdities calling for her attention that she would have usually ignored.

These absurdities were piling up, she chided herself at her own obstinacy. This had begun with the visit she had deliberately made to that plump, Russian, con artist, psychic, Madame Selma. That had been worse than absurd and Cynthia blamed herself for it. Maybe the errant data stream was just one more idiosyncrasy she would do best to ignore? She had become so superstitious lately that even the man she bumped into on the way to the nurse’s station triggered an occasion of Deja vu. For a moment she thought he had been the mysterious man in her dreams; but that was impossible! "The Jack of Spades," that’s what Madame Selma had called him, and then there he was in her dream. Also, she was sure she had dreamed of him again the night before, however, the details fled her mind as quickly as she tried to chase them; something about a fountain and a doorway, she wasn’t sure. Of course, she had dreamed him up to try to make sense of a nonsensical situation, she told herself. Or had she? Cynthia wondered what was happening to her calm, boring, and predictable world. Cynthia’s mind struggled with the last few days’ happenings and her bizarre evening with the psychic.

Her mind traveled back to Madame Selma, on that winter-crunchy Boston night.

The psychic spread the cards in front of Cynthia in a half-moon while small-talking her way through the session. Two oversized, plain ceramic cups of coffee sat to the side of the table. Madame Selma had conducted her private session in a room barely big enough for the rectangular table in the middle of it, and the only things that stood out, were the massive coffee cups and the plain, circular clock on the wall. It was a round, schoolroom clock which had ticked off the vital minutes in dollar figures, hanging directly to the right of the medium. Cynthia looked at the clock and then back at Madame Selma. Each minute represented exactly one dollar to Cynthia; the half-hour session had cost her thirty dollars. Cynthia willed with all her might that she hadn’t wasted her money.

"Pick twenty one cards, " Madame Selma instructed her client in a coarse, Russian accent.

Cynthia complied, wondering why they were using a regular deck instead of tarot cards. And why twenty-one? Why not three, or eighteen or just turn them all over and look at them? Was it because it was a gamble that she’d discover anything this way and twenty-one was a gambling game?

"So..." Madame Selma said as she expertly picked up the twenty-one cards and began to lay them out in cross hatch patterns, "what is it you came to find out about? Just specify, career, relationship or yourself."

"Relationship," Cynthia replied knowing that this was going to be futile. If she had to answer her own questions, Cynthia mused, she might as well have gone to a psychiatrist, that way she would have expected a "What do YOU think?" attitude. Oh well, she thought, I might as well have fun. It was a new experience and Cynthia was terminally curious as a habit anyway. She remembered how she had been interested in having Madame Selma explain fortune-telling to her.

Madame Selma expertly turned over a King and stared at him. "You have one man in your life," she proclaimed. "Are you living with him?"

"Yes," Cynthia replied.

"You are arguing; there is much talk between the two of you."

"Yes." Cynthia became curious at what the medium supposedly was interpreting. She hadn’t seen the pattern, and Cynthia prided herself on seeing patterns.

As if Cynthia had spoken the question out loud, Madame Selma brought the two fours up that had landed diagonally from each other and put them in front of Cynthia’s face. "You see, " the psychic said calmly, "the fours represent talk and two fours diagonally is talk going back and forth--an argument."

For a moment, Cynthia thought she glimpsed a piece of a pattern but she dismissed the idea as frivolous.

"Tell me, " Cynthia asked, in between sips of coffee, "what do you see when you look at the cards?"

"I’ll show you, " Madame Selma said, "look here, what do you see?"

Cynthia stared at the King of Hearts and Madame Selma’s witch finger pointing to the symbol on the corner of the card. "I see a heart," Cynthia said confidently.

"No, look again." Madame Selma pointed to the heart.

"A heart--I said." Cynthia said wondering what the old lady had in mind.

"NO!" Madame Selma folded her arms across her chest. "I see a penis."

"A WHAT?!"

"I see the male sexual organ; and here, " she continued by pointing to the club symbol on the Queen of Clubs that was diagonally placed next to the King, "I see the female sexual organ." She gingerly outlined each petal of the club symbol, "See the curves and folds?" Then she pointed to each card diagonally opposite each other: "Here is the King and there is the Queen. You get it?"

Cynthia stared at her.

"The King is your boyfriend, the Queen is you. You get it?" Madame Selma repeated it.

Cynthia ignored her obvious insinuation. The woman had probably noticed no ring on her finger and when she had admitted to living with him, it was easy to guess why.

"Look here," Madame Selma’s slender ringed, finger drifted over to a Jack of Spades. "There is a new man about to come into your life. He is in your life now, but you do not know him yet."

Cynthia stared at the Jack, looked at the medium, and then glanced at the clock. It was five minutes over the end of her session. What had they put in the coffee? She wondered. Her vision was swimming, the room felt warm and she was beginning to have the most unusual feeling like she was in a dream. The hands on the clock were moving too slowly. She knew this feeling for what it was--the moment when her consciousness looked through the dream landscape and recognized it for what it was: a dream. She knew she had previously had this feeling only when she became lucid enough to know she was dreaming, but, she wasn’t dreaming, Cynthia was sure of it. She was awake, and she was thirty dollars poorer to prove it.

"I have to go." Cynthia didn’t want to wait any more to leave. "My boyfriend will be waiting for me."

Madame Selma smiled and said, "I gave you five more minutes because I like you." She tried to establish a rapport with a prospective client. "Pay attention to the new man--the Jack of Spades; he has some important information for you."

Those were the last words Cynthia heard about the possible "future" lover until that same night when he appeared to her in her dream. It started out as an ordinary dream commuting on the normally crowded orange line of the city’s commuter system to her new job in downtown Boston. Initially, she wondered why the train was empty until she "remembered" that it was a state holiday her company hadn’t allowed its employees. Wobbling on the nauseatingly tangerine-colored seat as the train hobbled over the rails, Cynthia had difficulty reading the poster above the seat in front of her. The image twisted and turned until she was sure the only legible items were the club symbols dancing in an outline around the border. She rubbed her eyes, making a mental note to get them checked at some point. With that adjustment to her dream environment, her mind wandered back to the prospects of her new job when the thought led her back to her old job, which she had highly favored. Now why was it that I left, Cynthia asked herself at the oddity. This last fabrication was the key. It was just too unbelievable. Cynthia loved her job and she didn’t see a reason to commute downtown to go to a different job. It made no sense. She would never do that. So, she surmised, she probably hadn’t. She didn’t take a new job--and where was everybody anyway? The station she had arrived at was deserted. Then Cynthia felt the warmth surround her as if she had just dipped her entire body into a luxurious,rose oil bath. "I’m dreaming," she realized. "Oh no--not again! Now I’m stuck here until I wake up."

Cynthia saw a man sitting on the bench in the T-station, in a gray rain coat. He looked her way, and got up to make his way towards her. He was tall, about 6’ " she judged, and slightly older than herself. The gray in his hair gave him a distinguished look but also marked him as being in his forties. The sparkling, clear green eyes settled on her as he grinned and tried to make his appearance less commanding and non-threatening.

"Lost?" He mused in a friendly fashion.

"No. I’m dreaming." Cynthia replied as she had glanced around him trying to figure what to do with this image in her dream.

"You ARE lost!" The man chuckled humorously. "Why did you call me?"

"I didn’t call you." Cynthia began to get ensnared in the dream conversation and thought better of it. She stopped herself short.

"I’m here, so you must have called me."

Cynthia decided to ignore the image.

"You should be paying attention, young lady, " the man informed her. "You don’t know what you’re doing. Here, take my card." The man reached in the raincoat pocket and extracted the business card for her. "Call me again--if you decide you want help."

Cynthia looked at the card that had landed in her hand. It was the Jack of Spades. Then she saw it fade and lighten as she prepared herself to awaken from the dream.

Three days later, a psychic, a dream man’s challenge, and a graph of data etching a club symbol had forced Cynthia’s curiosity to the extreme.

Ever since she’d gotten the doubtful honor of analyzing St. Patrick’s Hospital’s records where her sister worked, that blasted abnormality had popped up. It had been only one point, one person to be exact although probably various people at different times, that had screwed up the neatness of her graph. She’d thought of disallowing it as a valid data point. That would’ve made this type of exception appear on their report ten times in a row. It just irked her horribly to repeat the same exceptions without a reason. Everything had a pattern and she just wasn’t being smart enough to see this one. The data points seemed to mock her, "You call yourself a medical data analyst? Ha!" They laughed at her from behind their shroud of mystery. It had been this challenge that she had stubbornly accepted.

She had sat for hours methodically plotting the data first by age, then by medical test administered and finally by date. After plotting the data points as number of tests admitted vs. admittance id and connecting them the graph had unfurled the three petals of a club face. This final affront had pushed Cynthia into picking up the phone and wrangling the name that matched the admittance id from her one contact at the hospital, Bridget, otherwise known as Sr. Mary, a doctor and Catholic sister at St. Patrick's hospital. Determined to affirm to herself that nothing extraordinary was happening in her life (as Cynthia had been tempted to imagine it), she had hung up the phone and picked up her burgundy coat and marched herself right down to the St. Patrick’s hospital.

By the time Sr. Mary had gotten off her shift, Cynthia was explosive with impatience.

"Ed Bishop?" Sr. Mary was surprised at her younger sister’s interest in the man.

"Who is he?!" Cynthia demanded.

"Just a guinea pig." Sr. Mary laughed, wondering why it was important . "He’s taking part in a study of the effects of vegetarianism on blood pressure in older males. Everyone knows him here. He’s quite charismatic." At this last statement, Sr. Mary felt herself blush softly.

Cynthia was too busy figuring out the correlation of this man to her data point to notice Sr. Mary’s uncontrolled reaction. Of course, if he’d been admitted for tests several times in one day, and gone through the regular hospital admittance each time to cover the expenses, then his ID would skew the results! Cynthia’s mind swirled through this new information, relieved to have a reason for the blips in her graphs.

Sr. Mary, on the other hand, was thinking back on the many dreams she had had with Ed as her dream lover. He had fascinated her by his gentleness and intensity. Their unions had been deeply moving and almost spiritual for Sr. Mary, but they had been dreams. Even now, Sr. Mary knew they were filthy dreams, sinful dreams, that (thank God), had been expunged from her soul. However, the thought of them brought back a bit of a feeling of shame that would invariably color her cheeks. It had really been quite an indecent set of dreams, after all; because of that she made it a point to always smile at Ed Bishop when she saw him, something she rarely did, to make up for the ways her mind had used him while she slept. She would see him wandering the wards and visiting patients. She found that to be a very noble thing for him to do and had noticed that upon his visits some of the patients seemed healthier and with more vigor than before. But then, she had been praying for their healings for a quite a while, and God did answer prayer, Sr. Mary thought. He had often smiled back very warmly but had never spoken to her directly. Sr. Mary turned her mind away from her inner thoughts and back to Cynthia, her younger sister.

"So, what’s the reason for the question, Cynthia? Are you becoming interested in vegetarianism, now?" Sr. Mary kidded Cynthia.

"No. No." Cynthia shook her head, her hair striving wildly to hang on. "It’s really quite stupid. Let’s just say I’m relieved that that’s all it is: a study, I mean. Don’t laugh, sister, just that for a moment I thought he might be the 'man of my dreams.'" Cynthia paused then asked, "What did I say?"

"Nothing," Sr. Mary evaded Cynthia’s probing brown eyes, "nothing. Anyway, I doubt you’d be interested, he’s quite a bit older than you--graying hair and all that. And what’s happened to John?" Sr. Mary tried to change the discussion towards her favorite saga of the will he/won’t you get married theme between Cindy and her live-in boyfriend. Sr. Mary rarely wasted a chance to tell Cindy how sinful her situation was. However, Cynthia wouldn’t be diverted. Her mind went back to the image of the man in the subway, a forty-something gentleman with a young priest’s concern for her safety, and the devilish green coveting eyes that had looked her up and down once before leaving.

"Gray, you say? Just out of curiosity, what else does he look like?"

"Tall, about 6 ft, I’d say. Not wiry though. Green eyes. A very distinguished looking older gentlemen." Sr. Mary stressed the world older. "You passed him on the elevator, I’m sure. He was leaving when I saw you come in."

"That was him?!" Cynthia’s eyes stretched themselves around her pupils as she recognized the man who she had passed earlier. "Your kidding! He really is the man of my dreams, then!"

"Don’t get carried away!"

"No, I mean, not my 'dream man' but the man IN my dreams." Cynthia tried to explain excitedly.

"What are you talking about?!"

"He was there, in the subway, not a real subway of course!" Cynthia couldn’t be held back. "Then, I saw him again last night--in my dream, I mean. There was a garden and a fountain and a doorway, and Bridget..." Cynthia turned to stare at Sr. Mary full circle so surprised by her sudden full recollection of the dream that she failed to refer to Sr. Mary by her proper name, "you were there!"

Sr. Mary jumped up instantly. "Cynthia, I don’t know what you’re into now, but please don’t tell me you’ve gotten yourself involved with drugs now! Isn’t one mortal sin enough for you?" Sr. Mary gathered her habit with her clammy hands and turned to leave. She did remember a garden with a fountain in her dreams last night, but Christ had been there, not Ed Bishop. It had been a special dream because she knew she was dreaming at the time and Christ had come to test her worthiness. How could she forget a dream like that? However, the garden and the fountain were just coincidences, she decided. The idea that a dream could be shared by two people at the same time was preposterous! "Please, just leave Ed Bishop alone. He’s just a plain, ordinary citizen who spends a bit of time helping others. Don’t go off on this wild tangent. You’ll get me in trouble with the hospital and I’m sure Mr. Bishop wouldn’t like the fact that his privacy has been invaded."

Cynthia forced herself to calm down abruptly. Of course, Sr. Mary was right: No one would believe her that a dream could actually be real with real people who shared a common experience. Cynthia knew what she knew, however, and that was all she needed to find Ed Bishop and make him explain what was happening.

"You’re right, " Cynthia smiled sweetly at Sr. Mary, "it was just a couple of dreams. And I AM getting carried away. You sure you weren’t there?" She looked at Sr. Mary expectantly as she tried to laugh her earlier performance out of Sr. Mary’s memory.

"No. Why would I care to dream about a man like Ed Bishop in a garden?" Sr. Mary muttered stubbornly, her arms folded themselves across her chest.

Cynthia spread her hands up admitting defeat, but inwardly, she knew Sr. Mary was lying, whether intentionally or unintentionally. The truth was that Ed Bishop deserved more than a cursory glance, despite what Sr. Mary claimed. Cynthia’s data analyst mind seized on Ed, like the errant data points on her graph that he had managed to unwittingly produce.

"Sr. Mary," the young novitiate came to summon Sr. Mary back to the ward, "Mr. Frailmenn is going into cardiac arrest and we can’t locate his doctor."

Sr. Mary turned gratefully back towards her duties, leaving Cynthia with her thoughts. A regular blood pressure check; that was the test that had screwed up her graph, Cynthia decided. The study was very precise and predictable. All she had to do was predict when Mr. Ed Bishop would be due for the next check up and be there herself. She knew what Mr. Bishop looked like, she would just pretend she was waiting to take a test herself in the hospital’s lab. Sr. Mary wouldn’t even notice. The lab was on the second floor and she wouldn’t even see her in the sitting room. Meanwhile, Cynthia was willing to bet she would see Mr. Bishop again, much sooner than that, possibly even the very same night --in her dreams, of course. What had he said? She recaptured the memory of her dream in its details. Seven days, seven levels. Today was Monday: the first day of the week. If her dreams were true, that gave her until next Sunday night to figure out who Ed was and why he had chosen to test them. This worried Cynthia who decided a week was not long enough to analyze anything, much less a human being. Yes, she would have to do it in her dreams as well, she decided. When they met in their dreams she would find out more. She smiled at the absurdity of it. Absurd, yes, she thought smugly --unpredictable, no. It would be interesting to see if she was right.