Mindbenders (14 page)

“C’mon,” Tess said, grabbing me by the hand and pulling hard, “we’re going for a
drive
.”

We didn’t drive very far, ending up behind a hardware store nearby. It looked closed for the night but she said ‘They’re bankrupt’ in a tone of voice that said
Don’t question the county registrar
and that was enough for me. We parked out near the dumpster in back and pawed each other for an hour or so. It just tore me up to have her—nothing was what I expected. We laughed and got off really nice at first and I was just gassed being there, my hands on her, my mouth on her, giving and getting pleasure. But after a while, my feelings got gummed-up, a bit more complicated. When I kissed her, I tasted other kisses; when I touched her breast, I remembered other breasts. Good feelings here and there, good moments but bad ones too, fights and jealousy and lies. It occurred to me that I was remembering the feelings without being able to remember the women and that felt kind of shameful. I’d lived a while without a memory and that was beginning to feel like a blessing. It took a big effort to try and shove those feelings back into the murk and just be with her.  I never completely succeeded at it, to tell the truth.

When we got back to the restaurant with the huge electric sign, she kissed me goodbye like she meant it and said “If you ever get back around here, I’ll be at Town Hall.” And that really shredded me—it had been a long time since anybody wanted me, much less wanted me
again
. I knew I’d never be back and if I was, it wouldn’t be the same anyway. I was pretty sure she knew that too. Which left me tingling with feeling as I got out of the car, feeling in all directions, sensitive to everything everywhere—the breeze and the damp in the air, the sound of the cars on the highway six blocks away, the smell of her on my fingers. I felt
alive
. I wanted to bottle that feeling, hold onto it as long as it would linger. It was already fading by the time she turned out of the lot.

Max was in a Subaru with the flared fenders and big tires, the turbo and the wing on the back, the whole tuner thing. I knew a guy in Iraq who had the same model. He kept buying parts for it off the Web, week by week; his brother would install them and send him the pictures and little videos of it racing in the neighborhood. They lived in Cincinnati. He came home with no arms or legs. I remembered that all at once, looking at the car. It was another thing I’d forgotten—at least, that was my first thought. But you can’t be aware of forgetting something, can you?

I got in the passenger seat and Max started driving back up into the hills, toward the house. Neither of us spoke for a while and then finally I said, “This self-awareness stuff is for shit.”

“It’s a mixed bag,” he said. “Like most things.”

“It’s for shit,” I repeated.

He waited a moment—I could almost see him biting his tongue—and then he couldn’t seem to stop himself from going on. I wondered if he had some kind of impulse control problem. “You still have a choice. I can let you off and you can go back to the life you had.”

“We have to get the guys who got Dave,” I said. That wasn’t changing.

“It only gets worse,” he warned. “There are a lot of things you’re getting by ignoring, that are going to be dragged up, that you’re going to have to deal with. And eventually, you’ll see through everyone and everything.”

“But you’re in control then, right?”

“Ha! When the girl says ‘yes,’ instead of feeling your own happiness, you feel her doubts about you—or how inflated her hopes are. When your friends say you told a funny joke, you’ll know different. You’ll know when you bore them. You’ll know when the salesperson is cheating you—you’ll know when the doctor asks for tests but knows already you’re very sick. You’ll have nothing to do but track your enemies—or just stay away from people altogether.”

“Why that? Why does that follow?”

“Look at the company you’ve been keeping these few days,” he said. “I was fine when I could fade into a swamp. I was away from people, so I was fine. Tauber stayed among the voices and chewed himself up. Our skills are only useful when we have enemies to hunt, secrets to uncover. Otherwise, life is empty, without purpose, without hope of purpose.”

“I’ve been there already,” I said. “This is better. I was locked in myself. Now I’m out.” I looked at him with some gratitude. “You’ve liberated me.”

He soaked that in and sighed. “These last couple of days have been a liberation for me, too—but an evil one. It’s a horrible wonderful temptation, needing danger to feel free, to feel useful. I need evil in the world so I can do good.”

“We’ll beat them,” I said, not understanding his point.

“ I hope so,” he answered. “But then what will we do?”

~~~~

Eight

There are kids squirreling around the shed, maybe eight, nine years old. They might be stealing something—that would be okay. But they might not. They hide bomb material in sheds like that sometimes—they could be using the kids to get it or set the fuses. They use them like that sometimes too. We met a guy who was stationed in Najaf who said that happened to his outfit last week. Maybe there’s another reason—maybe they’re just playing—but we don’t know. And what you don’t know can hurt you. So our fingers are on triggers, everybody’s fingers, waiting, tense, clenched twitching. Eventually Marshall’s finger twitches and we have screaming kids with a bullet through the jaw or a broken collarbone or something. Maybe there was a reason. Maybe there wasn’t.

We’re convoying. We’re always convoying. Low stretches of stores and houses, business signs in Arabic, French and English, laundry hanging from windows and long corridors of smooth wide highway—Saddam built great roads, gotta give him that. We pass a market and everybody in the stand waves. We wave back—this is the first couple weeks, where people are still waving. I hear a noise and look the other way for just a second—when I look back, the woman behind the stand is leveling a Kalishnikov at us. The first time it was a woman, we hesitated. Hendricks took a round in the neck that time, just above the armor. Now, nobody hesitates—she takes about twenty rounds in three seconds, the blood seeping into the sand as fast as it comes out of her and then her body seeping into the ground, swallowed up like quicksand or vanishing powder. 

We drive as fast as we can go. Anything, just
anything
, could be a bomb—garbage cans, maildrops, cardboard boxes along the road. They trigger  them with alarm clocks, cell phones, garage door openers, VCR remotes. Clever shit people here, dammit. The first time we take a direct hit, we start cursing a blue streak and laughing, laughing from relief.
Shit, that was big
.
Good baby, good baby, this Hummer is good
. What nobody says but everybody thinks is
We made it
. But sometimes, it isn’t bombs—it’s just bullets, stray bullets, aimed bullets, who knows? This time, the big diesel rig in front of us takes five bullets in the engine and loses power and we leave him behind with a Hummer to take on personnel. We keep moving—we’ve got three more trucks to get to destination.
Watch that bottle there—move that fucking VW, make him move.
It’s boring and endless; beyond all the rest, the
tension
can kill you.

And two minutes later, the horizon erupts, end to end—the earth jumps up and down like it’s a trampoline and the world ahead is billowing smoke. The KBR truck in front took an IED and there’s a hole the size of a house in the middle of the highway. So now we’ve got to stop, stop completely, try to establish a perimeter and bag everything—all the pieces, shards of bone and bits of flesh, any speck that might have once been part of a person.
Is this something?
Take it.
Inspecting every sliver, every fiber on the ground, carefully, thoroughly, always aware we’re stopped, stopped dead, completely in the open. They’ll shoot us, shoot at us. That’s what they do. They do it when we’re hauling sixty around the perimeter so what are they going to do now that we’re hauling zero  in the middle of town, on our knees picking up the pieces? They’ll be shooting and soon. Ignore it. Keep looking. Miss nothing. Take everything that’s human, every mote that might be, anything that might once have breathed. Don’t miss one…anything. Because there’s folks at home who don’t want to be watching TV one night and see part of their kid being waved around, beaten on, burned up one last little bit more by some raghead geek on a bridge. Don’t miss a speck.

And then I was awake—breathing hard in total darkness and, after flicking the light on, in an illuminated room that meant nothing to me, that could have been anywhere in the world—anywhere other than where I’d been a second earlier. And knowing that anywhere other than that was a better place to be.

The sheets looked almost new, unused, unwrinkled, like I’d spent the night paralyzed—but they were drenched as well. I pulled the shades open and cut my fingers on the vanes as they whipped upward. Dropping below were the cliffs, rock ledges and trees pointing toward town, the town where we’d been earlier last night, where life was.

It’s the master bedroom
, is what came to me slowly, the world returning to me or me to it, whatever.
Max gave me the master bedroom since he wasn’t a sleeper
. A family bedroom—makeup and perfume bottles on the dresser, an analog and a digital clock atop one night table and a pile of romance novels on the other, several pairs of slippers in the corner by the closet, grandchildren photos, the progression of growing up, sweeping across the wall opposite—all the tokens of intimacy, of a long life of deep ties. It was strange, eerie, more alien to me than the landscape in my nightmares. I stared out the window again, at the tiered hillside, at the third ridge down, where Max had left the Subaru just a few yards off the road—“we don’t need anybody seeing a strange car in the driveway,” he’d said–just seeking landmarks, markers, boundaries. Nothing seemed familiar. It was the real world. I was an alien everywhere.

I banged my elbow on the way out of the room, stumbling into the dresser. Five steps later, I ran right into the crawlspace door. I was sure I’d closed it the night before—it was hanging open when we came in. Damn, that hurt! The whole place was out to attack me.

“L Corp was founded six years ago, right after September 11
^th
,” Max said, looking up from the computer as I hobbled into the living room. “The restaurant last night has more real information on their site than L Corp does.”

“Maybe they’re just from the old school,” I offered.

“I don’t think so,” he replied. “The most interesting part is the blurb on ‘security solutions’—it’s buried three pages deep in the ‘Products’ section. ‘Innovative security solutions that go far beyond intelligence gathering, threat scenarios and routine digital imaging. L Corp has a track record of identifying impending threats to both physical and information assets and responding before they can become active.’”

“Sounds impressive. What’s it mean?”

“It’s jargon for ‘We figure out what’s going to happen and stop it before it does.’”

“Mmm. Mindbenders would be good at that.”

“That occurred to me,” he said coolly. He stood up. “Do me a favor, would you? I’m getting a headache trying to find an address for the security headquarters. You think you can find it?”

“I’ll do better after breakfast.”

“There’s English muffins and eggs on the table—I just finished mine.” He arched an eyebrow again. “Eat quickly.”

“Why?”

“We’re being probed again and much closer than last night. I just sent them on a wild goose chase. So I think we have about two hours grace.”

“I’ll be ready in ten minutes,” I told him.

“Good. But I have something to do that’ll take fifteen, maybe twenty.”

“What?”

“Visiting L Corp headquarters.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know. That’s why I want you to get me the address.”

“What if it’s a thousand miles from here?” I asked. This made no sense, though that no longer threw me in Max’s company. “How’re you going to get there in fifteen minutes?”

“You just get me the address—actually longitude and latitude would be better. Let me worry about getting there.”

“—and back.”

“And back,” he said, attempting to reassure me, which he wasn’t much good at.

He proceeded to the center of the room, sat cross-legged on the floor and began his Ommm thing again. I wandered into the kitchen, put together my muffin and eggs and started searching the web site. Nothing came easy—eventually, I drilled down below ‘Join Us’ to where five security jobs hid beneath ‘subcontractor tasking’. All five were based in Herndon, Virginia though I couldn’t find any company telephone listing there.

“All I can get you is the town,” I told him and he held a hand up for a moment, to shush me long enough for his coma to pass.

“I’ll make do,” he said. “Just write the coordinates on a piece of paper. I’ll be gone for maybe fifteen, twenty minutes, tops. My body will be here but I won’t. If the house burns down or the IRS shows up to confiscate the place, I’ll be dead weight unless you wake me. If you have to kick or punch me a bit, that’s okay—just make sure it’s necessary, okay?”

“Whoah,” I said. “Replay that one for me. The body’ll be here but you won’t?”

“It’s called remote viewing. I’ll be at L Corp, hovering and eavesdropping, just getting the lay of the land.”

“Isn’t it dangerous to float around without a body? Can they see you?”

“They’d have to know how and they’d have to be looking for me. They’re not the KGB,” he said roughly. “Contractors talk big but their own security stinks, generally. They get complacent. I don’t know if they have anything we want but Fine works there so it seems like the next move.”

“Without a body, can you see through walls? Read the files in the vault?” It was weird even asking the question but, following everything else I’d seen, this was just another step.

“If the VP has something interesting on his desk,” he said, “I can read the top page—as long as it’s not numbers. If I want to see more, I have to convince him to turn the page. Which, strangely enough, isn’t so easy when my body’s at a distance.”