Mind Games (4 page)

“Does it get worse every year?”

I don’t answer. Because it does.

He says, “Aren’t you curious what it would be like to feel healthy and happy for a while?”

“Healthy and happy?” I repeat his words casually, like it isn’t what I most want in the world. “Not if I have to hurt someone.”

“Fair enough. But how about a free demonstration? I’ll let you zing the fear into me. You’ll be free of it for weeks, maybe a month.”

“I don’t want to hurt you, either.”

“You won’t. Can you generate a fit of health anxiety right now?”

“Not on command.”

“Right.” He writes something on a napkin. “Then we’ll provoke an attack. Eventually you’ll learn how to ramp it up on your own.” He turns to Shelby. “Go up to the drugstore and get these.”

Shelby reads the napkin. “Oh.” She smiles and leaves.

“What is she getting?”

“You’ll see,” Packard says.

“Yeah, we’ll see.” I cross my arms. “It’s never been things that scare me.”

His cheeks harden, like he’s suppressing a smile.

I’m a bit nervous now, but I need to see if he can help me. I need to know if what I’m passing up is real. “I’m warning you, when the old ladies pass out the little squares of pizza at the supermarket, I always take one, but I never buy the pizza.”

He leans into the booth corner, raises a knee above the plane of the table, and drapes a lazy arm over it. “You’ll buy this pizza. It’s topped with wealth, health, and perfect happiness.” His confidence is captivating.

A waiter brings a bottle of clear liquid and pours us each a fat glass. It smells licoricy. Ouzo. Packard raises his glass, a toast to nothing, drinks it like a shot, and pours himself another.

“I’m no vigilante.”

“Naturally.” His lips quirk, as if he secretly finds my resistance amusing, and his eyes seem softer now, a soft green gaze under dusky red lashes. I have to look away, like if I stare at his handsomeness for too long, I’ll get lost in it. I sip my ouzo even though it’s barely afternoon.

He runs a finger around the rim of his glass. “Wealth, health, and happiness. And membership in a glorious and invincible squad.”

With this utterance, Packard moves out of the category of
handsome, slightly maniacal highcap
into the realm of
mastermind
.

“You generate such a high volume of fear. It’s a rare ability.”

“Thanks,” I mumble, blushing stupidly. Nobody ever admired me for being screwed up.

“As a disillusionist, you’ll zing that fear into criminal targets, and at the same time you’ll use your warped hypochondriac’s reasoning to draw their attention toward symptoms, diseases, and mortality. In this way, you’ll push them into an attack.” Packard goes on about how they psychologically attack people as I construct and eat a bread-and-kebab treat. They seem to view their criminal targets almost as computers, and overloading and crashing frees them to reboot without their old hurtful, antisocial behavior.

Then Shelby’s back with a brown paper bag. Packard pushes aside the plates and glasses. “Shelby, what do you have in there?”

“I have these.” Shelby pulls out a stack of fashion magazines.

I feel cold.

Shelby slaps one down in front of me. “Girl in prime of life gets cancer.” Then another. “Staph infection leads to double amputation for young mother.”

“Oh my God,” I whisper.

She puts down the next. “Degenerative corsitis attacks intestines of girl on honeymoon.”

Fashion magazine disease articles. My personal kryptonite.

Gleefully, Shelby slaps down another. “Blood clot in the leg travels to brain. She is only twenty-four. Dies.”

I inhale sharply.

Packard shoves it closer to me. “Excellent. Justine is partial to vascular maladies,”

“I can’t read that,” I whisper hoarsely.

“Vascular? Hmm.” Shelby extracts a pink-spined magazine from the bottom of the stack. “Perhaps this—‘Hofstader’s thrombus strikes down young woman out of blue.’”

I widen my eyes.
Hofstader’s
. My second-worst disease. A close cousin of vein star. Some say it’s the same syndrome.

Cheerfully Packard says, “We’ll start with that one.”

“I can’t read that. I won’t.”

Shelby helpfully opens it to the page.

“Thanks, Shelby.” Shelby leaves and Packard leans across the table. “You’re going to read it. The whole article.” He sits back. “That’ll do it for you, right?”

I grimace at the image of the woman rock climbing. There’s always a before picture where the woman is living her fun life and doesn’t know she’s sick. “Honestly, I probably shouldn’t read this because there really is a possibility I might have a vascular condition, and anxiety could heighten my blood pressure and make it worse.”

“Get going,” he says. When I protest, he slaps the magazine. “Read.”

“I told you—I’m not sure if I want to do this anymore. It’s not like I’m going to join.”

“You want to leave? Then leave.”

There’s this silence where I imagine leaving.

He sits back. “You’re not joining. Fine, but let’s not waste time acting like you don’t want a peek behind the curtain. It’s human nature.”

“Are you always such a know-it-all?”

He fixes me with an intense stare, which I take as a yes.

I stare straight back at him. He
is
right, and I’m not the kind of person to pretend otherwise. “Okay, let’s see what you got, mister.” And then there’s this awkward moment because that sounded sort of sexual.

Coolly I focus on the page. First-person disease articles start in the hospital and flash back to the diagnosis, or else they start with the happy life, like this one, and narrate the course of the disease. This woman made up excuses for the scalp tingles and pinpoint pain. Bad idea. A few weeks later, she cancels a doctor appointment. Precious time is lost. Very common.

Packard sighs impatiently. “How long is this going to take?”

“I don’t know.” I read another paragraph. Hospital elevator. Heading up to surgery. “Can you please not watch?”

Packard pours himself another drink.

The article talks about the woman’s career as an aerobics instructor before the disease struck, something I hate to see. It’s always better if they sat on their couch eating junk food all day. I read and read. Nothing’s happening. I’ve never tried to force an attack before.

“What’s the problem?” he demands.

“I don’t know. I guess it has to come up naturally.”

“That’s why I got you these magazines to look at.”

“It’s a lot of pressure, okay?”

He sighs and tops off my glass. “Maybe this’ll relax you.”

“It’ll just dull things. Maybe you could give me a little privacy?”

“How will I know when you’re ready?”

“I don’t know, but I can’t concentrate with you hawking over me.”

“I’m hardly hawking.”

I snort and get back to the article, but my concentration’s shot.

“Idea. How about reading
with
comprehension?”

I frown at him like he’s being a jerk, which he sort of is, but I’m feeling far more hopeless than angry. I wanted to know something in the world could help me, even if I wasn’t planning on choosing it. I turn away from him and the magazine, hating everything, and I just sort of glare at the horse painting on the wall above our booth. Underneath the horse is Korean writing; you can tell from all the circles. So what’s it doing in a Mongolian restaurant? And the elephant salt-and-pepper set is from India. Everything about Mongolian Delites is wrong.

“You’re not even reading,” he says.

I give him a level look. “What’s up with the decor here? All the random ethnic bric-a-brac.”

He narrows his eyes, cheeks gone rosy with heat. Slowly he rises up out of the booth and comes around to my side. He plunks his boot on the seat next to my thigh and slaps the magazine. I jump. “I’m coming back in five minutes,” he growls. “If you’re not good to go, we’re not doing it.”

“Yikes!” I say as he storms off. But the jolt got my heart pounding like crazy. Fear. This is what I needed. I glue my gaze to the magazine. The picture of the happy girl. “I thought I’d leave the clinic that day with a prescription and some free time to shop. Instead I spent the afternoon getting my head shaved for surgery.” And then I come to this sentence: “Emerging research
suggests heredity may play a small part in vascular conditions. …”

Heredity?

I can feel myself actually breaking into a sweat. I check the cover—last month, May. So they’ve discovered that vein star syndrome and Hofstader’s are
hereditary?
The word swims before my eyes, and I touch my scalp. Were those tingles? This extreme level of anxiety alone could bring on a vein star expansion and leakage. This is bad.

I hardly notice or care when Packard returns and sits across from me. I can literally feel a vein expanding inside my cranium, bulging out in the telltale star shape that distinguishes the disease. Learning this news in an already-tense situation was a dangerous combination. And what if I collapse? What do I really know about these people?

“Ready?”

I look at him like he’s crazy. “I don’t know what I was thinking. This isn’t a fear thing; it’s a medical thing.”

“You just believe that because you’re inside it now.”

“I wish.” I’m thinking ER, but they have to catch it preleak to do any good.

“Hey,” he says. “Look at me.”

I don’t bother; I have to concentrate on not panicking. Because if it’s hereditary, I probably really do have it.

“Trust me. Just for a moment.” He takes my hand, and I nearly go into arrest. But when I look up at him, that confident fire of his warms me a little. Wildly, I think,
Why not?
Why not try this?

I take a breath. “A moment.” I can’t believe I’m consenting to this.

Gently, he arranges my hand to splay flat against the table, palm down. “I want you to feel where the skin on your hand ends. Right where the surface of your skin meets air.”

I take another breath. “Okay.”

“Now, feel up off the surface of your skin—half an inch or so.” He says it so simply that I find myself doing it. It’s easy, and I have the funny sense that I’ve always felt this space.

“That’s your energy dimension. It’s inside you, and it also surrounds you. It’s where your emotions live. When you push out with your awareness, you can feel it and control it.”

I stare at my hand against the brown wood grain of the table, pulse loud in my ears, praying that this isn’t a long process.

“Can you locate your fear? Where is it?”

“I don’t know. In my energy dimension?”

“Where
in your energy dimension?”

“Can we get to the part where I’m feeling better?” My voice sounds unnaturally high.

“You have so much fear and you’re so obsessed with it, yet you don’t know where in your energy dimension it lives?”

The answer comes instantly when I focus. “My stomach. A little bit in my throat.”

“Right. Keep your awareness pushed out all around you, and around your hand.” He slides his hand across the table toward mine, and stops when there’s just a small space between our pointer fingers. “You feel that?”

“Yes,” I whisper. It’s a kind of aliveness around my fingertip. It’s the strangest thing.

“You’re touching my energy dimension with yours. Actually, I’m doing it for you, but with practice you can learn to feel other people’s energy dimensions as clearly as you’d feel an animal’s fur.” He slides closer, takes my hand, and I stifle a gasp. Sensation overload. He says, “Do you know what would happen if I made a little hole between our two energy dimensions?”

My mouth goes dry. It sounds scary and erotic at the same time. Is this his plan for pulling me out of an attack? “Can you see people’s emotions?” I ask.

“No, not in real time. What I see is structural. Don’t worry about me—keep your awareness pushed out.” He holds my fingers lightly with his, eyes burning into mine. “You’ve stoked up so much fear, your energy dimension is overloaded with emotion, especially compared to mine. Compared to anybody’s. If I made a hole between us, all your fear and other negative emotions would rush into me. Dark emotions rush from the high-emotion body to the low-emotion body. A law of physics, just like siphoning gas. Once the flow starts, they all rush out.”

“
All
the negative emotions?”

“Yes.”

“What about the positive ones?”

“Negative only. Positive behaves differently.” He seems to be waiting for my permission.

“I don’t much fancy having a hole in my energy dimension.”

“Don’t worry; it knits right back up,” he says. “Ready?”

“What if it knits back wrong?”

“It won’t.”

“Wait—will it hurt?”

Packard watches my eyes, and I have this sense of something shifting and lifting in me.

“Wait.” I try to pull my hand away.

He holds tight. “You’re fine.”

“No, something’s wrong. And my hand’s hot. Why’s my hand hot?” I look from my hand to Packard and back to my hand. It’s like something hot’s rushing out through my hand, and it’s making my whole body feel different, like I’m losing ballast, lightening. “What’s happening?” He doesn’t answer. “My hand …” I never finish the sentence, because in a flash, my hand goes
from hot to cool, like there’s wind in my fingers, and I’m all loose and light. I sit up. “Whoa. What the hell?”

Packard releases my hand. “You’ll have to learn to act less surprised when you actually zing your fear into a target.”

I move my shoulders, shake my head. I’ve never felt so breezy and light.

Packard looks on with a kind of arrogant pleasure. “Better?” He resumes his sideways position without waiting for an answer.

“I don’t understand.”

“What’s there to not understand? How do you feel?”

I feel nothing, but it’s a wonderful nothing. Nothing’s wrong with me. Nothing to be terrified about, or worried about. Or even mildly concerned about. “It’s … it’s …”

“It’s called peace.”

I laugh. I’ve never felt so light. It’s exhilarating. “Wow.” I blink a few times.

“Peace and serenity isn’t about adding something,” he says. “It’s about getting rid of something. You just zinged out all your negative emotions, most notably an enormous amount of fear. You’ll still think about diseases, but they’ll matter as much as who plants their flag on Mars. Few people get to feel this way.”