Mindbenders (5 page)

“Don’t be stubborn,” Mr. Dulles said. “You saw me do it with the landlady and you knew it for what it was. Your rational mind resists but your instinct knew, right then and there—
he’s reading it in her face
. That’s what you told yourself and you were 90% right. A minute ago, when I told you I wasn’t making fun of you—you hadn’t accused me out loud. I’ve done that several times before, though maybe not so openly.” He leaned in and I waited for my head to heat up but he only wanted to talk. “The most important thing is: you
knew
. You not only knew I was reading the landlady, you knew she damned her memory that she couldn’t remember me. You knew when Mark was standing at the peephole of his door. You knew he was still drunk from the night before.”

“I could hear him slurring,” I said. I shrugged, apologetic, in Tauber’s direction and he shrugged back. I’ve known other people over the years who drank from habit—after a while, their dignity gets pretty flexible.

“Some people slur all the time,” Max said. “Some people have speech impediments. You weren’t guessing—you
knew
.”

“What are you saying—I’m a mindreader?”

“I’m saying
everybody
mindreads,” he answered. “Almost everybody. They’re just primitive about it. This is scientific fact, not fact published in medical journals, but fact nonetheless, science that’s been distributed for years in manila envelopes, hand to hand in code to those with a need to know. And if it’s ever published, if the New England
Journal of Medicine
ever provides an acceptable rationale, mindreading will be routine in three years.” He tapped the steering wheel as he talked and I realized we were in a moving car, on the highway again. I’d gotten so drawn in I’d lost all sense of the world, of where we were.

“You mean we’d all be doing what you just did?”

“Hell no,” Tauber shook his head.  “That’s like sayin’ anyone could paint the Mona Lisa if you give ‘em paint and canvas. Some people’ll do it better and quicker.” He looked at Max. “He’s very quick.”

“Most of them would justify their wishful thinking and call it mindreading,” Max said. He looked over to see if I was satisfied.

I was nowhere near satisfied. This was without a doubt the most ridiculous explanation of anything I’d ever been asked to swallow. There was not one thing about it that felt slightly real—except that it did explain every weird thing that had happened since morning. Once I took the whole thing in wide-angle, I realized I had to either doubt everything that had happened since Dave was shot or this was the best explanation I could think of. It was the only explanation that didn’t force me to doubt my own sanity any more than usual.

“When you first told her about the check, she wasn’t convinced. She didn’t want to check on it. You made her.”

“Bravo,” Mr. Dulles said. “Good work. Yes, I made her.”

 “The job was readin’ minds and planting thoughts in other people’s minds,” Tauber explained. “He made her think checkin’ was
her
idea.”

Mr. Dulles grimaced. “I still think we should stop,” he said, talking to Tauber. “Beyond this, he becomes an asset—for whoever’s out there.”

“He might pick it up himself—he’s a bit of a sponge,” Tauber said, talking about me(!). He gave Mr. Dulles a moment to protest, then returned my way. “Memory’s real sensual. Once you’ve got that real good mental connection with somebody, you share whatever they’re thinkin’. Not just thinkin’ really—sights, sounds, smells—you can pull all kinds o’ stuff outta their heads. Or you can make ‘em see things that aren’t there, say things you want ‘em to say, things you want ‘em to
believe
. It gets pretty comical sometimes.”

“That’s enough,” Mr. Dulles said but Tauber’s eyes were bright.

“The thing is, once you make that connection, it’s not like you’re
in
‘em, it’s like you’re
them
. You not only know what happened, you know how it
felt
.” He was rising up in the back seat now, the power of the thing carrying him, like an addict remembering his first fix, when he felt like he was touching God—hell, when he felt like he
was
God.

“And then ya feed it back to ‘em—into their minds—with all those feelings attached and it breezes by every gut check, every guidepost the mind puts up to vet information. It feels like they’re
rememberin’
. O’course, you add in some suggestions o’ yer own to tip the balance a bit.”

He smiled again, amazed at this nasty, awful achievement. He turned to Max. “But I’ve never known anyone who could do it so damn
fast
!”

We headed out onto the highway. The afternoon was waning—every once in a while, a little breeze actually cut through that hotbox car. I was trying to decide if I was any better off for having  the explanation.

 “How did Dave die?” Tauber asked.

“I told you—shot by three mindbenders, country unknown.”

“When did
you
get there?”

“Right after,” I said, which only deepened the lines on Tauber’s forehead.

Mr. Dulles reddened. “Dave said he’d been getting probed for a month. He told me something was up but I didn’t believe him.”

“Why not?”

 “Because
I
wasn’t getting probed.”

“What’s probed?” I asked. If they were mindreaders, why didn’t they know I had no clue what they were talking about?

“Your mind transmits. Your thoughts have a physical dimension.”

“Like molecules?”

“Particles and waves, vibrations, frequencies that can be tuned and amplified. The transmission can also, to some extent, be tracked. I know your base frequency now. If you were arrested, I could follow you from several miles away to the police station.”

“So when an agent’s nearby and ya don’t know his frequency,” Tauber said, “ya probe for it. Ya send out a signal that hits a bunch o’ frequencies and see if it gets a response.”

“And what do you do about it?”

“There are ways to combat it,” Dulles said. “You change your frequency or muffle your signal. You move around the time sequence. Or, sometimes, you catch the probe and follow it back to the originator, to locate whoever’s searching for you.”

Tauber stared at Max. “You’re saying ya still get probed?”

“A couple times a year,” Max admitted and it was clear they both felt this was significant. “There are people who…want me to work for them. Doing jobs I have no desire to do. When they get annoying, I disappear. Dave was my safe haven. But when he asked me for help, I told him there was nothing to it, because if I wasn’t getting probed, nobody was getting probed.”

He slumped a bit in his seat. “I’ll take you to this Miriam Fine,” he continued, “and you can figure out what to do from there.”

~~~~

We drove quiet for a long time. We’d had an outburst of talking and now we were
done
spent—yeah, we were
spent
. I liked the sound of that—it’s a better word. Words were beginning to come back to me, at least that one did. After the year I’d had, a trickle felt like a downpour.

A moment later the trickle started, like I had triggered the reality by thinking the word. Raindrops appeared on the windshield. A few moments later, the downpour was pounding the roof, slithering in the slipstream across the windows, a mad river curdling the pebbly ground along the road, a full-fledged sky-dump.
Words have power
—who said that?

It quickly got too much for driving.  “We have to stop,” Max said and pulled off at the next exit. It was a strip mall of motels—you could see the chain signs buzzing over the treetops miles away. Five sprawling motels in an overlit shiny row, room rates a dollar apart, separated by gas stations with prices varying by three cents a gallon. We pulled into the furthest parking lot, the one with deep woods behind it and took a double room with a cot for the third man. As soon as we’d dropped our stuff inside, Tauber told Max, “Lend me ten bucks out of the stash—I’ve got some personal maintenance issues.”

“Lend?” Max asked.

“Tomorrow, you set me loose with a shopping cart and other people’s garbage; you’ll see how much money I can make. At the moment, I’m without the tools of the trade.” Max gave him some money and he was back in a few minutes with a bottle of cheap bourbon. I hadn’t even seen a liquor store but I guess he had radar.

“You could buy
decent
booze,” Max said. “We’re not broke.”

“I don’t
want
decent booze,” Tauber replied. “Ye’ll spoil me.”

“So who gets the cot?” I asked. “Should we draw cards?”

“You’d get rooked, son,” Tauber laughed. “Reading cards is how they check if you’ve got the power.”

“I don’t sleep much anyway,” Max said. “I’ll take the cot.”

Tauber had the bottle drained in fifteen minutes. He started singing after that—not loud but not good either and Max flipped on the TV in self-defense. A few minutes later, Tauber was dead asleep. Max went to wash up. I settled onto the other bed and stared at the tube. I would have stared at anything that moved at that point.

The news stations were running tributes to the Indian Premier, or they would have been tributes if anybody had anything nice to say about him. The people interviewed were stepping carefully, trying to be respectful without outright lying. And then there was the daughter, Aryana Singh, serene and focused, Western makeup and a very stylish white head covering.

“I have been thrust into a situation I could never have foreseen. As head of my father’s party, I will be Premier of India until elections are held. In the interim, I am beholden to nothing but my own conscience and my father’s memory.”

Usually, that was about as much politician as I could stand, but, this time, I kept listening. There was something in her voice, the ring of a real person struggling to handle the curves, the way we all have to. I felt sorry for her, tell the truth. Politician is a bad job if you have any instinct for being real.

“In today’s world, danger comes not simply from rival states but from all sorts of enemies in the shadows, organizations that seize power without accepting the responsibility that comes with it. Organizations that use fear to corrupt.

“To break the cycle, we must first stop measuring power by the damage we can visit on others. I have ordered the High Command to prepare to dismantle all of India’s nuclear warheads. My father was invited to the G8 Conference on Monday; I shall go in his place and propose that all countries holding nuclear weapons agree to dismantle theirs as well. India will be first if the others agree to follow.”

Max came out of the bathroom in time to hear the back end of her statement. “Is this a mindbender thing?” I asked. “It’s pretty freaky.”

He shook his head immediately. “This gives people hope,” he answered. “Governments don’t pay for hope.” He stared at the TV for a moment. “It
is
odd,” he admitted, heading back to the bathroom.

The head of the opposition party called for Singh’s immediate resignation, followed by the Russians, English and US State Department spokespersons rejecting her offer and the Pakistanis calling it ‘a foul trick’, followed by a commercial for leaky bowel syndrome.

Max finished brushing his teeth, pulled down the window shades and placed a glass of water on the floor. Then he sat down lotus-style next to it. “I have a ritual to try to get to sleep. Do you disturb easily?” he asked.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

Of course, he didn’t say he was going to hum. Hum to the point that you could feel it in the walls and floor, hum to where the vibration through the mattress felt like one of those magic fingers things. At one point he started humming two notes at the same time, humming harmony with himself. Just as I was about to say something, he opened his eyes again, fixed on the TV.

“—Illinois officials are scrambling to explain how they executed the wrong man in a state prison on Friday. Marco Velez, serving five years for tax evasion, was executed despite what one guard called his ‘hysterical’ claims of mistaken identity. Prison officials could not explain how guards removed Velez from the wrong cell after checking his fingerprints, which didn’t match the execution order. The attorney general’s office is trying to figure out whether executing Jack Slayton, the actual condemned man, would now constitute double jeopardy.”

“That’s one, isn’t it?” I asked.

“They saw fingerprints that weren’t on the page,” Max nodded. “They saw a different cellblock number.” And he closed his eyes and resumed his freaking Ommmm harmonies.

I’d known the man almost a year off and on and this was the first time I knew his name was Max. It wasn’t like he was holding out on me—this was just the first time I’d ever relied on him for anything. After about fifteen minutes, he opened his eyes and unfolded himself. He started pacing slowly back and forth in front of the window,  like he was looking out even though the shades were down.

“Aren’t you tired?” I asked.
I
certainly was—I just couldn’t go to sleep while he was pacing like that.

“I’m
always
tired,” he said and, all at once, it came to me: this isn’t a man who can’t sleep
tonight
; this is a man who
never
sleeps. With the greenish light leaking through the blades across the window, he looked like hell. Worn out, dried out, dragged to pieces. His hair was a mess, dark and spiky and sticking out in all directions. His eyes were bloodshot, sunken into deep caves and they didn’t shine like eyes should shine. “Too many voices in my head,” he muttered, staring out the closed window.

“Ooh I forgot,” I needled. “All those hotel rooms. All those tourists
thinking
.”

“It’s not funny,” he muttered limply, like he had zero hope I could ever understand. Which, of course, made me want to.

“What’s it like?”

“What?”

“To know
everything
.”

“Ha!” he spit. “I have a universe of information and a flyspeck of knowledge. I hear everything they’re thinking, everyone around us, all the time. But that’s not knowledge. It’s excuses and resentment and the lies they tell themselves to avoid whatever they’re afraid to think about.”