We left for New York around two in the morning. Kate had locked herself in her room for a couple of hours, the sound of her crying surfacing every once in a while, whenever she lifted her face out of the pillow. Max went out in the afternoon, saying he was ‘going hunting,’ whatever that meant-he returned twenty minutes later, talked to Tauber a minute and went right out again. When Kate finally emerged, eyes bloodshot and suspended between collapse and explosion, Tauber quietly said, “If we’re boardin’ an international flight with no suitcases, they’ll have us in the interrogation room in about half a second.” When Kate looked up, he waved a stack of fifties in her face-apparently Max had done another bank run.
She dragged us out shopping and spent the evening expertly packing suitcases in the living room, refusing to let any of us help. But when Max finally returned at 11 with Chinese and said we’d soon be ready to go, she boiled over.
“I’m totally unreliable. I’ll be a danger to you all. I don’t know what I’m doing till I’ve done it. And I won’t be any good in a fight. There are things I’m not willing to do, even to my enemies.”
“Breaking every bone in their bodies should get us through most situations,” Max answered drily and Kate surprised herself by breaking into laughter.
“That’s very reassuring,” she said.
Tauber returned from down the block with a very lived-in hearse.
“This won’t attract attention?”
“They’ll notice ya but nobody’s gonna stop ya,” he smirked.
“Here’s your passports,” Max announced, handing each of us a packet of several. “Use the American ones for now.”
“Keep no more’n one on ya at a time,” Tauber cautioned. “The rest go in yer suitcase. Invent a good backstory for yourself, a history. Nothin’ fancy, just simple so we can all remember.”
The little blue books looked very realistic-mine had several pages of dog-eared destination stamps.
“Are these for real?” Kate asked.
“The guy who made them is the CIA’s guy in Philadelphia,” Max explained. “He has the real machines.”
“So they’re real.”
“No. The serial numbers come from dead people whose passports haven’t expired and a couple of variations in the holograms make them forgeries. So they’re just wrong enough that the government can deny us.” He smiled. “Does that make me a patriot?”
“Will he remember making them once the suggestion runs out?”
“No suggestion,” Max said. “It would have worn off before the G8 ends, so not a good idea.” He held up the chain with the ID card and BMW key fob. “I told him it was L Corp business. They’re the fair-haired boys these days, so he’ll make sure he forgets.”
Halfway up the Jersey Turnpike, everybody had settled in. Tauber and Max were lights-out in the back seat, Tauber with his arms crossed over his chest like a mummy, Max rousing with tremors every few minutes, taking a drowsy look around and settling back to sleep.
Kate rocked slightly in the passenger seat, humming to herself but staring at me every once in a while. “What does he want?”
“Who?”
“Renn.” She was rolling around in the seat, giving me the girly eye. I’d taken a few peeks at her too, though the memory of her breaking the guy’s bones at the graveyard (and knowing she could read my thoughts) kept me respectful. She was pretty in a distracted tomboy sort of way, the girl who didn’t pay attention to her own looks. Which, in the real world, meant she was pretty enough not to have to-and knew it.
“I don’t know. It’s a big question,” I asked.
She ran her finger up the side window of the car-it had started to rain again; we’d been moving through showers the whole way. “Well, that’s the hard part, isn’t it? To know what you want.”
She reminded me of Tess all of a sudden, which didn’t make sense; they didn’t look at all alike. Maybe it was just the way we were talking, softly, the rain patting on the roof, like lovers after bed.
“I’ve seen how you pay attention-to everything,” she observed. “You’re a watcher. You have to know something about him.”
I was a little annoyed she wasn’t more interested in me. “I know who he is,” I said firmly and she sat up. “He’s a superhero who wants to be a person, but he’s not really cut out for either one.” She didn’t seem impressed, though I thought I was reasonably brilliant.
The overhead lights rolled across the windshield like the drum lights on a copy machine. The rain came in bursts and other cars hovered in ragged clusters every couple miles.
“What do you remember?” she asked after ten minutes of silence.
“What?”
“That’s your problem, isn’t it? Remembering?”
“It’s one of my problems.”
“So what do you remember?”
I wanted her to be interested in me but then I went all suspicious when she was. That’s what I got for the kind of company I was keeping. But the look on her face drew me in. She had power and she was the first one in this whole crew to ask me the slightest thing about myself. She cared-I could see it, just looking at her. Max kept telling me not to worry about how I knew things anyway, right? Just know what you know — I could hear him voice pounding that line into my head. I felt like I knew Kate-and I trusted her. She could probably find out more about me in three seconds than I knew myself-if she wanted to.
“What do I remember? Lots and nothing. I remember being a kid-riding a bike, stacking hay in a field and binding it. I remember the porch and the steps and the dark green screens over the window but I can’t remember where we lived, not even what state. I remember sitting in the kitchen with my mother, singing Doobie Brothers songs along with the radio. I remember she’d cut her hair short and I remember her dress-some bright orange thing with a big swirly pattern on it-but I can’t see her face. How can I not remember my mother’s face?” The images were there always, fragments, bits and pieces that didn’t add up to anything bigger, any sort of whole. They were always there behind my eyes, behind every conscious thought. “I remember women-dates, my arm around some girl at a movie, parked in the high weeds in my car. I remember the dashboard light and the feel of some girl’s blouse, her perfume and the taste of her neck. And the crickets, so loud. But it’s flashes and feelings, nothing…complete. What do you remember?”
“Of my life?” she asked, confused.
“Of my life,” I said. “You’re the mindreader, right? You see any more than I do?”
“I’m not much of a mindreader,” she answered, “But-can I touch your forehead?”
I pulled away. “I don’t like anybody touching me,” I insisted though it wasn’t true. I was just instinctively afraid of her opening me up like Pandora’s Box. Of course, as soon as I thought it, she read it.
“I’m nothing to be scared of,” she said. “I backed into this thing.”
She smiled and it was a blushing, half-shy, real smile, not that gargoyle smile of Max’s. “I’ll look inside if you want-it’ll be as much of an adventure for me as for you.” Then she stopped and I could see her play back what she’d just said; she cackled a moment later. “I guess that does sound a bit scary,” she admitted but I was already over it.
In the highway light, she was unbearably lovely. Her green eyes just seemed to soak me up. She’d been waiting, waiting for someone-why couldn’t it be me?
“I want to help you,” she breathed in an impossibly soft voice, “but you have to let me touch you.”
If she’d told me to shoot myself in that tone of voice, I couldn’t have said no.
She put her fingers to my temples and I got an instant erection. A long blast screeched from a truck horn right alongside and I swerved back into our lane. “Sorry,” she said, reddening. “I–I didn’t…I never know when I’m going to do that to a guy.”
“You mean…that happens a lot?”
“Not always…but…with some guys, yeah, every time.”
“You must be very popular,” I said and she giggled. She reached for my temples again; ohh did I not want to resist but I had to pull away.
“I can help you,” she murmured. “I can feel it.”
“I believe it,” I said and I sure did. “But maybe while I’m driving isn’t the best time.”
She settled back into her seat and-just like that-the whole thing fell apart. She was still Kate, real pretty and interested in me but…normal pretty and interested, in a normal way. The magic was gone. I was back in the real world. Tess must have felt that way when Renn released her, though she wouldn’t have known what was happening. But Max hadn’t anything to do with this-he was still dozing in the back.
This was all Kate, feeding me what I wanted, locating my desire and offering it back. That would be part of a mindbender’s arsenal, wouldn’t it? Part of a woman’s, too. I waited for her to read that I’d caught on, waited a long moment but she just kept staring out the window and then flashed me her cute smile when she caught me watching. I was left wondering if she knew what she was doing at all.
Crossing the Verrazano Bridge, Max roused and Kate immediately asked, “Why mindbenders? If they want to assassinate her, mindbenders are a nuclear reactor for boiling water. All they need is a marksman with a telescopic sight.”
“All they need,” Max replied, “is a marksman with access. This is the G8. Rome will be totally locked down. Even before all this disarmament craziness, you would have had 100,000 protesters. Now? You’ll need DNA scans to get past the first barrier.”
She sat mulling a moment. “You don’t mean disarmament is crazy.”
“What’s it matter what I think?”
“You’re serious.”
“It’s not practical,” he said. “For smaller countries, nukes are their chance to play on the big stage. If the G8 agree to disarm, the small countries will just see it as a plot to keep them down.”
“It’s not worth trying?”
“It’s actually dangerous,” he continued. “At the moment, you have nation-states hiring and paying-paying well-the best nuke-making talent in the world. They build quality-controlled arsenals with oversight and checks and balances, if only because the Presidents don’t trust the Generals and vice versa.
“Nation-states have trade on the world market. Their politicians like going to the UN, getting their picture taken smiling with the President or insulting him. All these pressures tip nation-states toward some sort of moderation.
“Take them out of the nuke business, what’s left? An international class of brilliant bomb-makers with no paycheck or, if you pay them to do nothing, a pack of creative lunatics bored to death. And who comes calling on them next? Guys who are way scarier than the ones they work for now.”
Kate took this in and shook her head. She didn’t have an answer but she didn’t like his either. Max shrugged. I drove on as the sun came up over Brooklyn.
When we reached JFK, Tauber almost fell flat on his face getting out of the car. He threw an arm out to keep himself from capsizing completely, staggered upright and nearly swooned a second time.
I grabbed him by the shoulders. He was quivering like someone had put him in a deepfreeze. “Are you okay?”
“Mostly,” he lied, watching his feet like they might start jumping around on their own. “They denied me liquid companionship at L Corp and we haven’t had a lot of…time…since then…”
“Is this a good time to go cold turkey?” Max asked him.
“The question I keep askin’s if I’m more use to ya drunk or sober.” He frowned and rubbed his forehead-his hands were trembling. “Guess we’ll find out pretty quick.”
The garage elevator was right across from the terminal. Max and Kate came to a sudden stop as soon as the doors opened.
“Jesus,” Kate whistled. Nothing seemed wrong that I could see. Then Max whispered, “They’re all over the place.”
“Where?”
“Look for the lapel pins,” Tauber said and everybody turned on him like he’d lit a spotlight. A series of tremors passed through his shoulders-he shrugged, sheepish. “I’m sorry-didn’t think of it before. Special Duty, male or female, all have lapel pins.”
“To make it easy for us to pick them out?” Max asked.
“There’s six pins in a set,” Tauber answered. “each one stands fer a frequency. It’s a security double-check. If ya have L Corp ID but no pin-or ye’re ridin’ the wrong frequency for your pin-they’ve got ya.” He smiled. “Volkov’s paranoid about his shooters goin’ off on their own. Us bein’ able to spot ‘em easy-that’s a bonus.”
“They told you this?” I asked.
“They didn’t tell me shit. But,” he pointed to the black-and-blue bulge, “I know how to keep my eye open-”
“That’s good work,” Max said and Tauber cracked a smile between tremors. “We’ll be as inconspicuous as we can, get our passes, check the luggage and disappear until boarding. Okay?”
We hustled through ticketing and dropping luggage at the bomb-detector. Then we found ourselves on a mezzanine looking down on the food court. It was a sea of lapel pins, men and women in dark-suited clusters killing time, buying magazines and beers and duty-free IPods, arguing sports and reality shows but sticking to their little groups and eyeing their watches.
“They’re not here for us,” Tauber said. “They’re not even watchful.”
“Are they all flying to Rome?” I asked Max.
“Don’t know,” he said. “They’re blocking.”
“Can’t you break it?”
“Of course,” he sniffed like I’d insulted him.
I’m impatient-I know that. Maybe it’s my addled state-if I don’t find something out right away, I forget I wanted to know it. “So probe,” I suggested.
“That’s what I’m not doing. They’re are all on headset. One probe’ll set off alarm bells all over the place.” Max’s look swept from one end of the floor to the other. “Hang out here,” he said. “I’ll do a survey and be right back.”
He went down the steps and through the crowd, staggering slightly like he’d just left Happy Hour. He threaded a route that allowed him to bump into at least one member of each lapel-pin cluster, hitting them from angles that prevented their getting much of a look at him. Then he wandered up the stairs at the far end and returned to us.
“You’re right,” he told Tauber. “They’re not here for us. And you’re right too,” aimed at me, “they’re all going to Rome. There’s thirty of them on several flights-not ours, thankfully-and that’s just New York. The Washington crowd is going through Dulles and more are coming from North Carolina-Miriam Fine’s pupils-and Boston. They got the call two days ago; no plans, no details. Just show up with a suitcase for purposes unknown.” He looked down and shook his head. “The weakest minds in the bunch.”
“They’re plenty effective when they work together,” Tauber shivered. “They made me…feel things…at the headquarters. Like I was going to die, like I was suffocating.” He cleared his throat loudly. “And worse than that. They’re a weapon. If they’re sending that many, there’s a plan.”
“There’s a staircase at the other end of the mezzanine,” Max said, “We go to the bottom and keep our distance until they call our flight.” He turned to Kate. “Don’t focus on anybody as we pass, okay?”
“Meaning what?” She sounded offended. “You don’t want me to probe them?”
“I don’t want you to set them on fire, okay?” He set off smirking-she smacked him on the shoulder as he passed.
The stairwell dropped two stories into a hallway to nowhere. Surely there was a way out from here but it wasn’t apparent. Tauber walked away from us immediately-you could see the tremors taking him. We all watched, concerned, while he fought it off. Max was next to him when he turned to face us again. He handed Tauber some money.
“Here-take this.”
“For what?”
“Maybe it would be smarter if you went home.”
“Which home is that, exactly?” Tauber said. “We kinda put paid to my apartment.”
“I’m just trying to be sensible. It’s your safety.”
“And yours. I get it. I can’t hack it.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Then don’t. I’m an old gnarly son-of-a-bitch. I’m an alcoholic walkin’ disaster. But I’m one thing none o’ you is.”
“What’s that?”
“A spy. A spy who knows how it’s done. A spy who can get what he needs without gettin’ himself killed.”
“We could all die here,” Max said, pressing the money at him but Tauber pushed it back.
“Nothin’ wrong with dyin’,” he said firmly. “Livin’ without a reason, that’s the bad thing. Put your money away-I’m goin’. You’ll need me yet.”
They exchanged heavy stares for a couple long seconds- Tauber won. Max turned back to us with a kind of fake cheer on his face. “We’ve got a few hours,” he said. “Let’s work on defense.”
“Such as?”
Max held his hands a few inches apart for several seconds, letting them waver in and out a few inches at a time, as though measuring some invisible distance only he could judge.
“Okay,” he said finally, “touch the space between my hands.”
“Touch what?” Kate said.
“Between my hands. Touch it.”
Kate looked like she’d just swallowed a lemon drop and you couldn’t blame her. There was nothing there. But she held her finger out and pushed and the finger buckled.
“Whoa!” she exclaimed, eyes wide. She poked again, having the range now, and her finger stopped at the same spot. That was all it took-her face lit up and she started running her hands over the invisible object, her palms defining the top and sides and pressing a bit at the edges, her eyes bright and smile growing. As she measured, I was able to make out a faint shimmer in the air, a bending of the light filling that space.
“What is it?” she said.
Tauber stuck his hand forward much harder than Kate had and seemed almost to bounce off. “That’s not mindbending,” he gaped.
Max shrugged. “It’s what I did in Novosibirsk when I was supposed to be studying.”
He moved towards her, his hands extended in front of him and the empty space somehow pushed her backward. After several shoves, Kate returned the favor, pushing back hard and Max fell backwards onto the floor.
“It’s ionized air,” he laughed, getting up and brushing himself off. “Molecules with an electrical charge. They pull together like a gas, a connected mass instead of individual particles, but with a strength like a solid object. I generate enough electricity to charge the air around me. And I’ve learned how to manipulate it.”
He turned to Kate. “Hold your hands apart, open to each other. Do you feel a pull-a magnetism-between them?” I tried with mine but didn’t feel a thing. Kate looked doubtful too. “It’s not going to jump out and kiss you on the lips,” Max told her firmly. “You have to know what you know. Either you feel something or you don’t.”
“I feel something,” she said uncertainly. “But I don’t generate electricity-do I?”
“Enough, I’ll bet,” he answered. “They’re subatomic particles so it doesn’t take much. Just follow the hum between your hands, follow it like the thoughts of the guy in the van across the street. The longer you hold the feeling, the more fluid you’ll get with it.”
She worked her hands back and forth for a long moment, the fascination on her face competing with embarrassment-this was a typical combination when you were dealing with Max. All at once, he flicked his index finger out close to hers-a spark jumped, bright and sharp, from his fingertip to hers.
“You’ve got juice,” he smiled, an uncoiled smile for a change. She returned the smile and I immediately felt a bit queasy, like I was intruding or something.
“Opposites attract-you’ve heard that, of course.”
Her eyes widened, her breath quickened. “I’ve heard,” she answered. This was pretty juvenile banter as far as I was concerned but no one was asking my opinion.
“Positive attracts negative,” he said and if he’d held out his finger at that moment, they might have electrocuted each other. “Particles that have to join together to accomplish anything.”
“How do I know which I am?” she asked.
He laughed. “You’re both, depending on the moment. You don’t have to worry about it-you’ll automatically attract the opposite. There’s always power around you, once you know what to do with it.” Kate had her hands wide apart as she eagerly worked up a field, a charge, whatever the hell it was.
“It takes a while,” Max advised, close behind her shoulder, “to build and then all at once-you’ll feel it-it takes on a shape and consistency of its own, a wholeness. You’ve got to keep track of that; it’s the one tricky bit. When it actually takes shape, you have to hold your breath-the rest of us, too if we’re close by-because it sucks all the oxygen out of the air for about five seconds and all that’s left is ozone, which is poisonous. So stay sharp.”
He bent over and swept his hand out in front of him. You could see a kind of dusty glimmer forming ahead of him. “It works horizontally, too,” he said, reaching into his pocket for a handful of coins and tossing them out. The pile scattered, clinking and bouncing, two inches over the floor. Max grabbed Kate’s hand and she stepped up, eyes wide, onto the surface of the thing. He steadied her as she wobbled around, slipping back and forth like it was wet marble, grinning like a five-year-old on an ice rink. And then the glimmer vanished, the shell disappeared and Kate landed awkwardly, both feet firmly on the floor.
“Okay, it’s loads o’fun,” Tauber griped. “What good is it?” He was tightly-wrapped, like forty minutes before Happy Hour.
“Ever want to hit me?” Max asked.
“Right now, I’d box Jesus.”
“Go ahead.” He swiped the air between them. “Not too hard, okay?”
“I won’t hurt ya,” Tauber snarled, throwing a punch at Max’s midsection. It snapped through the air and stopped dead, muffled by a thick curtain about three inches deep. Tauber paused for just a second and slapped out another blow, this time at Max’s shoulder. The fist stopped fast this time and he almost fell from the deceleration.
“It’s an illusion,” Tauber protested. “You’ve put me under.”
“Try my knees-but lightly,” Max said. Tauber slid his own knee forward and hit Max’s-the two of them teetered away from each other. “I didn’t charge the air down there.”
“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?”