>Inverting the argument until the truth falls out of its pockets. That’s what a reporter is supposed to do. Which is exactly what I found myself doing the other day, rather informally, when my brother reported that he chatted with an Irish youngster who claimed he could read people’s minds.
I didn’t believe it at first. But when my brother gave me instances of how the Irishman uncannily predicted everything that my brother was and wasn’t, I decided to check on Mr Know-All and see if there was a story in it after all.
I logged on and added him as my friend.
The next day, he was online, and we got talking. I didn’t hint at his mind-reading skills. But he knew who I was, and he said it in so many words.
“You aren’t American, are you?” he asks. I had used an American name as my chat id. “And your name starts with Z—— and you are a journalist for a tabloid in Asia.“
Suspicion had flown out the window, but what came next chilled me to the marrow. “You know, I am a professional assassin. I have killed a dozen people till now. But I don’t hate anybody like terrorists do. I just do it for the money. Would you still like to be my friend?”
”Sure, life is a game, lets play it,” I say and continue: “So how much money do you have?”
“About 500 thousand pounds in the bank and about 300 million in my hotel room.”
He doesn’t stop at that. He tells me how he killed a guy who was making out with his girl friend, and how he read his mind, and killed him.
“Dead men can’t talk, and I am a free man,” he says.
When probed on how he mastered the art of mind-reading and whether the way I answered his questions, had anything to do with it, he says, “I can hear things, like people talking to me… I don’t know who… it’s like your conscience.”
“What are the voices telling you right now?” I ask.
“That you are a good guy, hard working, and always in a bit of a hurry.”
“Do the voices say that you and I will be friends for a long time?”
“We will never meet,” he says, “our roads don’t cross. We will be Internet buddies.”
Then I ask him if he would know when I would die or better still, when he would die.
“I will be dead when I am 25 in a police shootout,” he says, point-blank, “I still have two years.”
I was stunned. The silence was eerie, with just the sound of my fingers stabbing the keyboard.
“But if you can read minds then surely you know how to avoid it,” I say. “If you know the police will kill you that day, you can escape.”
“I don’t know which day or where.”
Inverting the argument until the truth falls out of its pockets is all fine. But I don’t know if this Mr Know-All can qualify for Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. For all you know, he could be adept at reading people’s minds, but might be a social isolate playing out his real-life fantasies online. Or even worse, he could be a genuine professional assassin.
