Mindbenders (25 page)

“Okay, it stops girls and old men,” Tauber said. “Will it stop bullets?”

“It’ll deflect some and absorb others.”

“You control it?”

“No—it responds to the vibrations of the bullet. This is the stuff that drove the commisars crazy. The people that study this stuff will tell you that electrons are electrons. The electrons in me could just as easily be in a desk, a cloud, a peanut or a nuclear warhead. And—I know this for a fact but I’m not sure it’s exactly official science—the electrons in the desk
become
part of  the peanuts and then the floor and then the cloud overhead. Matter is fluid—there’s a continual exchange process. Meanwhile, all that matter reacts to input. To put it simply, our environment—everything around us—reacts to everything else around us. And to us. So the field got thicker and grew when Kate approached it enthusiastically, and toughened up, got denser, when you decided to beat the shit out of it.”

“Ye’re saying everything’s alive?”

“That’s over my pay grade,” Max said. “But I can’t wait until scientists announce that grass has feelings.”

 “Will it stop lightning bolts?” I asked.

“What?” All eyes on me. I
hate
that.

“Volkov’s guy—Marat—he can shoot lightning bolts from his fingers. He was shooting at me when I was trying to get down the hillside.”

“How far could he shoot? What kinda’ distance?”

“At least a couple yards.”

Max, who never really stood still, was still now. “I—I don’t know,” he said. “That’s a new one to me.”

“That’s no good,” Tauber said, staring at Max like he’d been betrayed. “I thought you were the big cheese.”

“I don’t know Marat—I don’t know where he got his training.” Max looked thrown. “Anyway, I bet the shield would stop it.”

“What do you mean,
bet
?” Tauber growled. “We’re four people against an army. They’ve got training, equipment, systems and backup. The cops and government are with
them
. I don’t wanna hear
should
.” He was livid. “We need offense.
Hard
offense, something that’ll scare ‘em back to their cribs. We have to even the odds a little bit here.”

“We’re trying to prevent an assassination,” Max said. “We’re not trying to start a war.”

“We’re trying to stay
alive
.” Tauber pulled a cigarette butt out of his pocket and held it to his mouth. “Light it!” he ordered.

Max stared at him uncertainly—he held out a finger and produced a couple of sparks until the cigarette lit.

Tauber pulled a couple of times, took a decent drag and exhaled a long plume of smoke.

“Okay,” he said, “now figure out how to do that to a
man
. At thirty feet.”

~~~~

The plane wasn’t full. They seated us in one center row but we ended up sprawled across several. Max sat shielding Tauber from the attendants and their little booze bottles until the old guy sputtered to sleep. Kate stretched out across the row behind me, covered by four little airline blankets, but I could hear her toss and turn, showing no signs of really being sleepy. I drifted in and out myself, blessedly without bad dreams but also without sustaining any sort of rest. In the middle of the night, I came to, groggy and with voices over my shoulder, whispers out of a dream. The music of the voices came first and for a long interval before the meaning of the words began to kindle.

Kate’s voice first: “…but what
kind
of life? Where do you live?”

Max: “I have places to go.”

“Are they home? Nobody waiting for you someplace?”

“I’m difficult to get along with.”

Her laughter.“If that was the criteria, no man would ever get a date.”

Renn laughed(!). And then got over it. “Our gifts make normal ties difficult.”

“Shouldn’t it be the opposite? If you know what the other person wants—?”

“The other person’s not the problem. We have an overwhelming ability to delude others—and ourselves. It’s not a wonderful gift.”

“We can’t see through it?”

A psychiatrist is someone who’s trained and gifted at recognizing
other
people’s neuroses. We’re all blind to our own.”

Pause.

“It’s not stopping you from flying to Rome,” Kate answered. “The dangers aren’t stopping you.”

“This has been a very scary week for me,” Renn whispered. “Scary and terrible and seductive. Pietr is trying to kill me. Anything—
anything
—I do in return is justified; self-defense! I have no limits. I can indulge anything in my power. I can be, as he says, everything I am. Which makes me terribly dangerous. To you, Greg and Mark. To people who believe in Aryana Singh and nuclear disarmament. If I get lost in self-importance or simply make a mistake, a real-world problem gets much worse than it already is. That’s why I’ve been so tough on you.

“Fear is a reasonable response to this world. Are you shocked when a friend is unhappy or in pain? Of course not, it’s common. A friend who’s ecstatic--or even truly content? You’d have to know their secret or start measuring them for a rubber suit. Yet, given the choice, we have to choose hope, don’t we? Avery wants to commercialize it, turn it into a commodity he can sell like everything else. He may be right, hope may just be an illusion, but that choice—which direction each person tilts, hope or fear—matters. Which is why we’ve got to keep our heads about us—we can’t let that that difference get lost. The lines get blurred so easily, you see?”

Long pause. I almost fell asleep again before Kate said, “Wouldn’t that be what real friends are for? To keep us from going off the tracks?”

“I’ve never been lonely. I’m always surrounded by other people’s thoughts.”

“What could be lonelier than that? There was a boy I wanted…a few years ago. I was mooning after him across the classroom like girls do and suddenly I was inside his head. I knew everything he thought and felt. I stayed inside him a whole day and night.”

“That must have been eye-opening.”

 “The truth? What surprised me, when he wasn’t being a sick pig, was how romantic he was—men don’t talk about that, do they?”

“It—it may not be our strong suit.”

“I realized how easy it would be, to be just what he wanted. He was playing out all the scenes in his head. So I ambushed him before the next class, dressed like the girl in his dreams, came on just like her. He couldn’t get away fast enough! As a fantasy, it was fine. In real life…scared him to death.” (laughs)

“Fantasies are frightening because we feel we don’t
deserve
them.” Max’s voice, very soft. “We all feel our lover is too good for us, don’t we? We rediscover the world through them,
everything
changes shape because of them. Whereas, we know that power isn’t inside
us
; we know
what
un
-magical creatures we are.”

Kate was still giggling. “It’s like, every boy I ever dated, once they found out what I could do, they’d get all intimidated, because I
knew what they were thinking
. Like women don’t know that anyway.”

Her musical laughter stopped abruptly. I don’t know if she read something in him or saw something on his face but I could feel the air chill as he started speaking.

“When I was 17, there was a girl I wanted terribly. She was the daughter of one of the keepers, one of the scientists in the program. Elena…a luminous spirit. I knew she was too good to even look at me. My ineptitude with women was famous in the program, a source of great satisfaction to my peers. But somehow this time, I conquered my own fears. I went after her and—amazingly—she responded. More amazingly, we were wonderful together. Instinctive, natural, all the things my life had never been. We saw the possibilities in each other and were somehow oblivious to the weaknesses. Her father opposed me with good reason—I’d recently killed a man who tried to ‘discipline’ me—but the program leaned on him. They wanted me to ‘develop’; she surely would have bad dates with someone—it might as well be me.”

At this point, I wasn’t sure I
wanted
to listen but I couldn’t help it, like waking up and hearing your parents talking downstairs at night when you’re a kid. The moon glistened through the porthole like a snowball.

“We were together for five months. I was…I don’t know how to describe it. (laughs) Happy, I suppose. Light. Free. I didn’t think too much. I knew what I wanted. I was
content
.” Dark bitter laugh. “And then I discovered I’d forced her, coerced her. I’d made her come to me. I hadn’t meant to, I’d done nothing consciously. I just wanted her so badly I made it happen.
I made my longing real
. As soon as I understood what I’d done, I released her and she felt…violated.” Long pause. “I think she did love me at one point. I am certain there was something real between us…but how real can any feeling be if it’s been compelled at first? We were very young and…sheltered. She was in pain and I was terribly guilty…” His voice trailed off.

“So what happened? How did you resolve it?”

“Resolve it? She killed herself is how we resolved it.”

“Omigod.”

“Yeah. Omigod.”

Silence. Engine noise, baby crying on the other end of the plane, headphone whoosh on the other side of me.

Max, taking deep breath: “So when I worry about us deceiving ourselves, there’s a reason. I failed my apprenticeship as a spy. I’ve spent twenty years running from anyone who would use my skills. I’ve never been put to the test. I have no reason to trust my own judgment.”

“Well, you figured out what was happening with…Elena. You did something bad but you didn’t deceive yourself about it.”

“Ah! No, I can’t take credit for that.” Pause. “Someone else figured that out.”

“What? How?”

“He was right. There was no doubt. I knew it as soon as I was told.”

“But how did he know?” A short pause and then a different tone of voice, a more matter-of-fact tone. “Another mindbender.”

“Yes. He knew her better than me, I suppose. Her lover before me. I took her from him, I suppose, not that I ever thought of it that way. I wasn’t thinking of…I just wasn’t thinking.”

“A friend?”

“A rival. Pietr Volkov, actually. He saw what I couldn’t see. He told me off and rightly, not that it did anyone any good.” Many sighs now, hard exhales. I was wide-awake. “It’s…it’s all history,” Max stammered. “It’s got nothing to do with now. There’s more at stake here.”

“Mmm,” Kate murmured. “But the lines
do
get blurry, don’t they?”

~~~~

Thirteen

Rome.

As the plane skimmed down through the clouds, the squat red and tan hills came into sight and I started smiling. The Umbrian hills are umber—the culture is so old, they named the color of the
land
after themselves. I found myself misting up. Not only was it a lovely scene, it was one I actually remembered, a little piece of my life come back to me. Just a hint of a remembered past was enough to fill me with a strange gratitude.

We were on a low-budget carrier connecting from Dublin, the long route that, presumably, Volkov wouldn’t be watching. The low-budget airline did without the telescoping offramp the big boys use; we descended a shiny metal staircase like the Beatles at Idlewild and boarded a shuttle bus to the terminal. Guards ringed the perimeter of the building, rifles at the ready. Nonetheless, this was Rome—even the low-rent terminal was clad in mottled dark marble gleaming in the sharp sunlight.

The line for Customs was ridiculous. “We should have used EU passports,” Max said. There were two lines for EU citizens versus one (much longer) line for the rest of the world—and our scrutiny was far more exacting. “Could’ve told you,” Tauber grumbled without explaining why he didn’t.

I guess I heard the voice behind me say “Greg?” but I didn’t even think to look. After all the months I’d spent unable to remember a single soul, a single memory, the thought of someone remembering
me
was from Mars. But Max was staring so I turned and there was Bill Szymzck towering over me and if I could remember how to spell his name, how could I not be sure who he was? He threw his arms around me and I melted—my brain didn’t register but my arms knew this overgrown bear of a man. It was miraculous to know someone, even if all I knew was that I knew him.

“Great to see you!” he shouted like he really meant it. He was huffing like he’d been running laps. Alongside him, a photographer in full battle gear—three cameras round his neck, flak jacket stuffed with lenses, batteries and memory cards—waited impatiently, legs twitching. “Are you covering this show?” Bill demanded. “Back in the game?”

“Yeah—sure,” I stammered and Billy thrust a card into my hand.

“My number’s there,” he said. “Call me—have to run.” He waved a finger at the photographer and they both took off, part of an army of ink-stained wretches pouring down the tunnel in the opposite direction.

I stuck the card in my pocket and shrugged at Max and the others. “I—I know him,” I smirked though it was all still a blank.

As soon as we stepped outside, the crowd noise swallowed us. The courtyard was packed, crowds swarming against barricades manned by lines of carabinieri in their silly black hats. A few buses and scooters puttered through the middle of the crowd like coffee through a spout. Signs bobbed in the thick air, French, German, English and some Cyrillic lettering joining the Italian. As we squeezed into the crowd, heads began to swivel upward, tracking an Air India jet making its approach. Murmurs and applause filtered in from all angles, until they filled the square.

“Singh,” Max said and his face went dark. He swept the crowd and then retraced the scan. “This way!” he said and the urgency in his voice was obvious. We pushed through the crowd, clearing people roughly out of our way, pushing hard for the center of the square. Max’s head was swiveling, searching, tracking something ahead of us. And then I saw him start, as though a shock had passed through him.

A moment later, a face appeared in the sky—no, in my head, it was in my head, but the way it looked was like it was floating translucent in the air above the courtyard. I could see through it or past it, but when I looked right at it, it had texture and shadows and substance. A youngish man, moving through the crowd, moving swiftly, purposefully, away from us. I knew this without knowing how I knew it. A moment later, I realized it had to be Max’s vision—the thought came to me before the image had ceased to be startling.