Some Mind Reader

A moon-lit train compartment, breath fogging the pane, becomes the stage where Martha Mansfield’s clairvoyant socialite drifts into the nightmares of strangers: she tastes a banker’s cyanide daydream, feels a chorus girl’s noose tighten around her own throat, and hears the metallic click of a trigger that has not yet been pulled. Across from her, Johnny Dooley’s vaudeville con-artist—eyes glittering like dimes on a card-sharp’s mat—pretends to read minds while secretly filching destinies, palming wedding rings and death certificates with the same sleight. Between them, a single leather-bound diary—inked with prophecies that rewrite themselves before the page dries—becomes the rope in a tug-of-war that yanks both voyagers through velvet curtains of smoky drawing rooms, across carnival midways garish with spangled light, and finally into a courthouse whose marble corridors echo with a heartbeat that is not their own. Every time Mansfield’s character tears out a page, memory re-stitches itself: mothers forget sons, widows reclaim husbands, the moon rewinds its phases. Yet each excision births a new wound in the city’s architecture—fire escapes sprout like ivy, alleys elongate, a cemetery statue turns its face. Dooley’s hustler, desperate to sell tomorrow to the highest bidder, discovers that the diary will not let him speak a lie; when he tries, his tongue folds backward, tasting iron. In the final reel, the two minds—now fused into one omniscient ache—stand on a rooftop where neon signs spell different names depending on who looks up. They burn the diary; the smoke forms a translucent screen on which their own futures unreel in flickering monochrome. They watch themselves watching, unable to turn away, until the film itself coughs, buckles, and dissolves the lovers into white specks that drift like moths into the projector’s beam, leaving the audience alone with the certain knowledge that the next thought they think may already be copyrighted by a ghost.