Mario Savio is dead at the age of fifty-three. Winded while moving his furniture into his new home in San Francisco, he sat down at the kitchen table and had a massive coronary.

His wife told us at the funeral that he had seemed embarrassed by his weakness as he watched his colleagues and friends carry his bed, desk, and bookcases up a flight of stairs and into the two bedroom apartment. He was embarrassed, winded, and then he was dead.

I have relied on my psychic power for more than forty years, but Mario's death caught me off guard. I didn't see it coming.

I can see the future. I predicted the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion, the Reagan era, and so on.

Listen:

I can read the present like a text, deconstruct each moment for clues about the future. It's a trick any soothsayer might use, like reading entrails or palms. I can strip away the surface meaning of a billboard or a telephone conversation and see the implied promise underneath. Birds flying in strange formations and cracks in a sidewalk are the outlines of photographs for tomorrow's newspapers.

This power of mine often feels like a curse. My world is constantly coming apart at the seams. Visions come on like anxiety attacks: my heart pounds in my chest, sweat breaks out across my scalp. My arms and legs become light, almost hollow, and everything I touch feels like paper.

The worst part is that these vision don't help me do anything. I can't win the lottery, or at least I'm no more likely to win the lottery than anyone else. I can't read minds, bend spoons, read tarot cards, or help you with your love life.

I can see the future, but I can't control it. I know what's going to happen next, but I can't change a thing. The information I get is useless.

For instance, I know how the world will end.

Justine called me last week.

"How did they get him?" I asked her when she told me Mario was dead.

"They didn't get him, Noah. He had a heart attack. Nobody got him."

I was in the darkroom, developing pictures of the Rose Festival for the "Living" section of The Portland Oregonian. I looked down into the tub of chemicals, watched an image of a Ferris Wheel appear.

"I want you to come out for the funeral," she said. Her voice was cold, her breathing even. "We need to see you."

"Who's we?"

"Us, we, the FSM."

The FSM. The Free Speech Movement.

In 1964, on the University of California's Berkeley campus, Mario Savio had been a student dissident. He was our leader. Mario Savio helped fight for free speech, for the right to teach civil disobedience and to set up tables for civil rights groups. He was responsible, along with Jack Weinberg, Michael Rossman, Justine Favors, and about 6,000 others, for starting what is now known as the '60s.

I looked down into the tub of chemicals. This time a fun house appeared. The fun house was old, vandalized, falling apart. It was called "America Rocks." Cartoon caricatures of Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix adorned the entrance. Their images had faded, and someone had blacked out most of their teeth.

"The FSM is ancient history. That's all over."

"Maybe you're right," Justine said. "The FSM is dead…this time it really is. But come anyway. Please?"

"I'll be there," I told her.