Awash in Talent (4 page)

“I’ve been able to master concepts like
Belvedere
already,” she said, pointing to a black and white lithograph of a building with two levels. I only saw what was unusual about it when I kept looking. The columns originating on the floor of the first level ended up on the opposite wall in the ceiling of the upper level. In three dimensions, the building would have toppled in the barest breeze.

“Master the concept?” I asked.

“Yeah, I feel confident I could draw up the plans for that building if anyone ever decides to build it.”

I chuckled. “So, you’ve found the fourth dimension where such a building could stand up?”

“No, it only needs three dimensions. This one I’m working on now. It’s a little harder.”

The picture she was pointing to on the opposite wall had the title
Ascending and Descending
inscribed inside the frame. Another two-story building showed unappealing jesterlike people marching up and down stairs. The problem was that the stairs had no starting or ending point, but went around the four sides, ever ascending or descending. Again, the two dimensions of the medium allowed for tricks of the eye that couldn’t possibly be realized in three.

“I think you’re really going to need a fourth dimension for that one, kid,” I said in my wisest older sister tone.

“No, I can get it, I know I will,” she said, lifting heavy books off her desk. She found the right one and opened to
Waterfall
. “This is my ultimate dream.”

Here, a waterfall cascaded naturally down a similar manmade structure. But before it arrived at the falling point, the water was flowing up, against gravity.

Breathlessly, she started, “I can’t figure out how to get the water to flow upward without . . . well, to flow upward.”

I stared at her blushing cheeks. Was she implying that she could use telekinesis to supply the upward water flow for such a silly building? What was the point? Either she was recklessly smart—a multidimensional genius—or she was just a stupid thirteen-year-old who dabbled in impossible dreams after being cooped up for so long. The safest assumption seemed to be the latter. I kept a sharp eye out for the rest of the break to make sure it was the right one.

Apart from the change in our relationship—which thrilled my parents—I noticed nothing unusual in the house. No poltergeistly objects moving of their own volition, I mean.

No, things didn’t come to a head until after I had already eaten a few too many collegiate meals in the Ratty. I was bussing my tray when my parents called. Normally, I only heard updates about them through Beth, so I waved to my friends as they went to the library. I strolled under the barren branches to take the call, wearing the same sweater Carlos had brushed against nearly two months previously.

“We’re really concerned about Beth,” said my dad.

“What’s wrong?”

“We think she needs to go to a special school,” said my mother. They were on speakerphone.

“She seems smart enough to me,” I said.

“No . . .” My mother hesitated. “One of those schools where they learn to control it.”

“Control . . .” I mouthed as a question, although the floating gauze was so clear in my mind that I nearly ducked out of its way.

“Control her telekinesis,” my father said, as if saying it out loud solved the problem.

“I know her better than anyone now,” I said, my voice echoing off the flat grey surface of the John Carter Brown Library. “She isn’t telekinetic.” I would say what I had to in order to save her from Big Brother.

“We thought you might deny it,” replied my father. “Watch this. We took it a few minutes ago.”

I hadn’t even known my parents owned a phone that could shoot video, but there it was on my admittedly tiny screen, with that surreal quality you can only get from camera phones.

Beth sat in the middle of the dining room. Antique chairs, silverware, a family portrait, ghostly lace tablecloths, and thirty-five pieces of my mother’s heirloom china appeared to have lives of their own as they tumbled through the air, avoiding one another in crazy swerving loops. The only objects that weren’t crashily zooming about were the oak table and the eighth grade history book open in front of Beth. She was sobbing, but I managed to catch something about not being able to stand her school any more. My dad’s voice came in from the side of the camera, saying, “They’re teaching you things you’ll need to know.”

With that, the book in front of Beth slammed shut by itself and the chairs, portrait, plates, teacups, forks, and knives dropped to the floor with a unified thud. “Quiz me,” my sister said, clear as a bell.

There could no longer be any doubt that Beth was telekinetic. I felt chilled beyond what the weather warranted.

I’d done research on the kinds of schools they have for controlling such Talents, and it hadn’t been encouraging. Their mission statements took smug pride in squelching creativity and natural talents as well as the “unnatural” ones. They made the kids wear grey uniforms and eat unflavored gruel in starvation rations, and they certainly wouldn’t have allowed Beth to have M. C. Escher pictures, much less to make architectural models based on them.

When my father came back on the phone, I said, “You can’t send her to one of those control places. Please.”

“We don’t know what else to do,” said my mother. “We don’t have what she needs.”

“It’s probably not too late to apply to Brown for next year,” I said. “She can come live with me. The university loves special cases like hers.”

I heard Beth on the other end give a little yip. “Yes, I want to go to Providence. But could I apply to the Rhode Island School of Design?”

“That’s a great idea,” I said. “Mom, Dad, if you don’t make her waste her time at that stupid school, she can put together a portfolio quickly enough to get in for the fall. She can still live with me and RISD is the best art school, period.”

“It sounds kind of radical,” my dad said.

“What does she need with high school, anyway?” I said helpfully. “A GED, a good essay, and a recommendation will get her wherever she wants to go.”

“Can you promise never to let your powers get out of control again?” my mother said, muffled. I could picture her turned away from the phone, holding Beth’s face in her hands.

Beth must have nodded as much as possible in that position, because that quickly became the new plan. Beth’s arrival was made certain by a special dispensation and joint enrollment program that both schools interviewed me extensively for over the course of the spring semester. I signed a year-long lease for one side of the first floor of a turn-of-the-century three-story on Hope Street. I never put a single aluminum can in the ancient, groaning fridge, and Beth joined me as soon as our parents could bear to see her go. She taught me to cook with parchment and wax paper in the absence of foil. I showed her around the East Side and took her to eat on Federal Hill and to Thayer Street and the mall countless times.

Near the end of August, the entire East Side was futons and moving vans blocking the sidewalk. I had already leafed through my textbooks for the coming semester and was absorbed in reading
Seven Noble Knights
in the living room when we heard the door to the other side of the first floor opening and closing at interludes with the deep thunks and crisp thwacks that signified the transit of furniture. My body tensed. I looked at Beth, who was engrossed in one of her new books for her RISD courses. She looked back at me with a blissed-out expression that had been building all summer. Just when I thought I was safe, the peal of a hungry, frightened, or tired baby radiated through the shared wall.

Beth looked up. “You know, Stephen Hawking says there’s no heaven.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Imagine all the people living for today.” I thought that was pretty clever, but she stayed with her own train of thought.

“So I guess that would mean we all reincarnate.”

“Maybe my soul started out in the body of an
Ardepithecus ramidus
,” I declared, happy to distract her.

“Sure. But with so many new people, there aren’t enough souls to go around. I think ever since the human population reached seven billion, there might be more than a few walking around without souls.” She nodded in the direction of the shrill baby sound, and I, complacent and sleepy, pictured a planet crawling with zombie babies.

For the next few days I was vigilant and only let Beth out of the house when I’d heard the other apartment’s residents leave in their car. Because my choice of rental house for the year hadn’t exactly been an accident. Across the narrow hallway from us, a wife, a toddler, a new baby, and Carlos had moved in.

No one had any reason to reproach me. I’ve already described the most erotic moment of my life with Carlos, and you’ll agree, it’s not exactly porn material. The stuff that went on in my head when I saw him, stayed in my head, firmly contained. But I knew Beth would suspect something when she figured out who our neighbor was.

The wait was over three evenings after the zombie babies. We were watching reruns when the child next door began to complain, bitterly. I reached for the remote control to turn the TV volume up, but Beth extracted herself from her overstuffed chair and said, “It’s funny we’ve never met them, and yet we can tell whether that baby is hungry or just tired.”

I sank deeper into my chair and hid my face after I witnessed her stride out the door. Where a fourteen-year-old gets that kind of confidence is beyond me. I put the TV on mute, but oddly, the noises coming from the hallway, even with our door slightly ajar, were far more muffled than the baby’s lamentations on the other side of the wall. I heard Beth’s gasp when she recognized who the paterfamilias of the house was. A stifling silence. A strangely syncopated series of sharp poundings on the shared wall.

Then, all I heard was, “I didn’t mean to! I didn’t mean to!” The sentence came through the other apartment’s door into the hallway, then it was there at full volume in our entryway. Beth’s face was dripping wet with tears, so I shot out of my chair, grabbed her hand, and ran through both open doors.

Their apartment was set up as a backward version of ours. Perhaps when the house was originally built, our place would have been the library and Carlos’s the billiards room. It was apparent that he had been hanging pictures on the wall and that when Beth saw Carlos, her special abilities had gotten the best of her. Both the baby and the toddler were now bawling, and the wife (I assumed—I’d never seen her before) was on her ancient phone with 911. Shattered glass from the picture frames was scattered all over the room and stuck into walls and furniture at weird angles, snapping disconcertingly under my paper-thin sandal soles. Carlos, my handsome, hardworking Carlos, lay in a crooked heap with glass shards embedded helter-skelter all over his torso. His left palm was nailed to the wall while his right had been awkwardly secured to the floor. I couldn’t tell if his legs were injured, but they struggled, then shuddered to stillness.

To avoid looking at the unreal amounts of hot, glistening blood coming from the wounds, I stared into his weary eyes. He looked back and moaned, low and slow, before he apparently lost consciousness. His wife cupped one of his abdominal wounds, delicately skirting the glass, while she stayed on the phone with 911.

I looked at Beth. She shook her head vigorously. “I didn’t mean to,” she said. In a very low tone, so that the wife wouldn’t hear, she continued, “I thought we were building a life together and it turns out you only chose this place because
he
lives here. But I still don’t understand why you chase after him all the time. He’s really and truly not that special. And he’s taken! But you make love with him every night in your dreams.” She blushed at the words coming out of her mouth. I imagined she meant that she had heard me talking in my sleep—an unintended result of living together.

“But only in my dreams, Beth. I never act on my desires.”

“Never? I could swear you kissed him last winter,” she said.

“No, no, the most that ever happened was that he leaned across me to get a flash drive off a desk.” I felt a flush of electricity thinking about that day. “You’ve clearly never been in love.”

“Are you sure nothing’s happened?” she said, maddeningly.

“Of course. How could I not be?”

Her face flushed even more red. “Emily, I was looking for a stapler and I saw inside your top desk drawer.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t make me say it,” she said, but I resisted. “DVDs of every lecture he’s ever given? Snapshots from every angle all over the campus and in places I don’t recognize? Every last one of the articles he’s ever had published, with red hearts drawn over his name?”

Hot rage pushed out of my body against the chaos around me. I looked at my sister, so small, and I hated her in that moment, hated her so much for being so out of control, invading my privacy, and judging my love. That love had outlasted Egyptology and was set to endure far longer than even
Homo sapiens
. “I need those DVDs to study,” I yelled. And to examine for signs of requital.

The wife was contemplating us from her crouching position, wearing an expression somewhere between puzzled and incensed, unable to respond to her screaming children. But then we heard the sirens of the emergency response vehicles and saw their lights strobing through the front window. The wife said, “They’re here. Thank you,” and closed the phone with admirable calm. The police came through first, so unfortunately I didn’t get to watch the EMTs free Carlos and staunch his bleeding. The wife pointed and said, “She did this,” and one officer looked a long way downward at Beth with a quizzical expression even as he clapped the handcuffs closed.

Beth whimpered. She appeared as a grainy black and white photo on the other end of my hatred. “Those aren’t going to be much use,” I told the officer. “She’s telekinetic.”

“An unregistered telekinetic?” he gasped. “That’s even more serious.” He grasped her hand and started toward the car.

Trying to avoid incriminating my parents, I said, “She’s not just any telekinetic. She’s part of a rare group of only one hundred in the world whose only common trait is their healing ability. We didn’t think it was appropriate to register her.”