We drove for about ten miles and nobody said a thing.
“Okay, tell me what the fuck’s going on,” I burst finally.
“You don’t need to know,” Dulles said.
“They would have arrested him too.”
“Nobody’s getting arrested.”
“What the hell-I’m just a vessel anyway.” Dulles shot me a look and swiveled in his seat, which would have flipped me out if I hadn’t already seen him drive with his eyes closed.
“You’re fortunate to be a vessel. Everything you know about us can be used to hurt you.” He turned to Tauber. “If you’re so concerned about his welfare, you tell him-am I lying?”
“No,” Tauber said, his face reddening. “That’s true.”
“If they catch us at this point, you can claim you’re a hostage. Once you know what’s going on, that excuse goes out the window.”
“Why? How would they know what you told me if I don’t tell them?”
“These people would know.”
“How?”
He threw his hand in the air. “If I answer that, I have to answer the rest. It’s no good.”
“I have to know,” I said and I meant it. I’d been stuck away in the Everglades for a year or more and what was the point of knowing anything there? But now, I was loose in the world again and all that was left of the reporter I’d once been was the hunger to know. To know what, in this case, I hadn’t a clue-hunger’s unthinking, whether for food or sex. Or knowledge. Whatever is hidden in my sight must be uncovered. I had to know.
“What about the landlady? You weren’t at any party with her. You didn’t get into her dress.”
“That was a lie,” Max said, relieved that it was.
“No, it’s a lie if you knew there was a party and pretended you were there. How did you even know there was a party?”
I turned to Tauber. “Did she wear a green dress?” He nodded. “Was there a pocket inside?” He shrugged.
I turned back to Mr. Dulles. “If he doesn’t know, how do you? Is she some kind of enemy agent?”
Tauber burst out laughing. “God help the country that employs her.” He turned to Max. “You’ve got to let him in.”
Max scowled. “You know the answer. You got most of it while I was talking to her.”
“What do you mean?”
“What were you thinking-back then, while we were talking?”
I tried to take myself back, to recover what was going on in my head at the time. “I knew you were lying.”
“Right and that’s good,” he grinned. Most people don’t get all happy when you catch them lying, but I’d gotten over expecting anything sensible out of him. “But, after that? When I told her about the party? When I mentioned the green dress?”
“I got confused then. I couldn’t figure out-”
“Don’t do that,” he jumped. “These are rationalizations you made up after the fact. What did you think right then? In the moment?”
I tried to remember. I fished back for the look on the landlady’s face right then, her confusion-and for the expectant, offering expression on his face at the same time. “I was thinking…I was thinking you were reading…what to say…”
“How?” he encouraged, like he knew what was coming.
“Like you were reading it off her face.” It felt stupid to say it. It didn’t make any sense, but it was what I’d been thinking.
“Good! Except I couldn’t read a green dress off the expression on her face, could I?” Was he making fun of me? It wouldn’t have been the first time.
“I’m not making fun,” he added a second later and I shivered even before I realized I hadn’t said it out loud. “Gregor, you did great. You got as much of it as you could. You just explained it away instead of accepting the strangeness of what you knew.” He was giving me the stare but this time, the back of my skull was just tingling, not burning. “I couldn’t read a green dress in her expression, could I?”
“No.”
“So where’s the only place I could have gotten it?” His eyes were as big as the moon over the Gulf, when it’s clipping the horizon, shimmering the size of a container ship.
“Just tell him,” Tauber interrupted.
“No! It’s crucial that he knows what he knows!” Mr. Dulles spit, suddenly fierce. “Don’t worry about making sense. Don’t worry about sounding foolish. You know the answer. Know what you know. Take ownership of what your senses are telling you, even if it flies in the face of everything you believe. Where did I get the information? Where’s the only place I could have gotten it?”
“Her head.” It burped out of me the same as the agent names, the same way I’d known where the box was in Dave’s office-autopilot, no thought behind the words, presentation before understanding.
“That’s it,” he said. “You’ve got it,” as though everything was settled.
“Got what? What have I got?”
“We read minds, son,” Tauber answered, with a weary smile. “It’s what they paid us for, for a while.”
“Oh, come on,” I moaned. It was such a comedown, after thinking they were going to explain. Tauber shrugged so I turned back to Mr. Dulles. “Okay, fine-read my mind,” I demanded.
“Jesus, give me a break, I’m not a carnival barker.” I just stared back. If he could read minds, let him do it or shut up.
“Okay, you’re thinking that I can’t read your mind, of course. You’re thinking you never trusted me, even when I hung around Dave’s because I wouldn’t play cards and I didn’t really take part in things. You’re thinking about the Burger King billboard when we got off the highway-you’re not really hungry but you want a Double Whopper with Cheese anyhow. There’s a part of your mind that’s singing ‘I Want to be Sedated’ and there’s a part that’s still in Fallujah, in a firefight. The machine guns and rockets are echoing in the background behind everything else.”
“I’m not in Fallujah,” I said but he turned back to driving without a reply. It took a few seconds to hear them-the guns, the rockets, the shouting and screaming and all the rest, everything he’d described, all there, all at once, once I listened. I realized I didn’t really listen a whole lot. Especially to the Fallujah part. I didn’t want to listen to that.
“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.”
He pointed to our left. “The man over here traveled three hundred miles to a specialist; he’s getting the results tomorrow morning. He has cancer-I can feel it in him. I can visualize the tumor, though I don’t know the name of the organ that’s hosting it.” And as he talked, it was like the wall dissolved away and I saw the guy lounging on the bed in the next room, eerie content, leafing through sales brochures like nothing was wrong in the world. “Is he thinking about cancer? No. Living a better life? No. He’s thinking: Plasma or LCD? Plasma can burn-in; that really concerns him. He’s dwelling on it. He won’t live long enough to pay the thing off.”
“Which isn’t a bad reason to buy one,” I said. “He’s scared.”
He turned in the other direction and that wall faded away, leaving a mousy blonde in a negligee and a real unhappy expression, close enough I felt I could reach over and touch her. “On this side, Ulna from Orangeburg is waiting for her brother-in-law Rick to get back from the office. She asked Rick for a loan to keep her house out of foreclosure. Rick’s doing way better than Ulna and her husband-Early, that’s the husband. Ulna and Early-you can’t make this stuff up. Rick’s always been a little too friendly and now she’s waiting for him at the motel, ready to be friendly herself. She’ll get the loan-she’s a determined girl. Another little everyday tragedy. You know what she’s thinking? Over and over?” He began to sing in a weirdly-pitched voice:
It's like you're always stuck in second gear,
Well, it hasn't been your day, your week, your month, or even your year.
But, I'll be there for you, when the rain starts to pour.
I'll be there for you…
And then, all at once, all the walls dropped away. For a few moments, the whole hotel became visible, stacks of rooms full of people, arguing and ignoring one another, watching TV and fucking, eating McDonalds take-out with the kids, counting money or emptying liquor bottles in glee or misery. And all of them saying one thing and thinking another, or a couple anothers. The first second was overwhelming; after ten seconds, I thought my head would split open. I had my hands over my ears when he realized what was happening and made the voices go away. When he continued a second later, his voice was soft, like he was trying to cut me a break.
“As for the rest? I’m getting old. This is someone else’s fault — fill in the blank as to who. Why is my husband/wife/boss/past such a bitch? I want to be happy but I’m afraid to change. Sometimes you get a bundle of ambiguous regret: I wish he was dead. Do I really want to take out a mortgage with him? But the rate is really low. ” He laughed his deep, scraping laugh. “Believe me, I’m making it sound better than it is.” He sat on the edge of the cot, which sagged like he weighed a whole lot more than he looked. “Other people’s thoughts are amazingly banal-what makes them meaningful are the feelings attached.”
“But Tauber said you feel things, like you’re inside the other person.”
“Oh, I feel everything,” he replied. “So what? Nobody feels one clear, simple feeling at a time. We know what we want to do and twenty reasons it won’t work, all at once. The woman’s too good for us; if only she was more like Angelina Jolie. She loves me-she loves me not isn’t doggerel; it’s the persistent state of the human mind.
“I spent ten minutes once, standing within three feet of one of the world’s billionaires, easy pickings, homed in on him completely. I could have stopped his heart on the spot, given him cancer, shot sparks from his fingers. His conscious mind never let up the whole time: Build this, talk to so-and-so about that, the deadlines have to be tightened, appease the regulators, after this step, the next step is…The entire time, without letup, just one level below, a high, sing-song voice kept chanting in his head, You’ll die in the gutter, you’ll die screaming in the gutter, like a schoolyard chant.
This is how everybody works. And from this swamp, I’m supposed to pull facts, make life-and-death decisions. So yes, I hear things but it’s a very limited gift.”
He pushed a couple of vanes apart and stared out into the light. If he could drive with his eyes closed, this had to be a symbolic move. “Meanwhile,” he breathed, deep and low, “there are people out there who mean to do us harm.”
“You feel them? Are they close?”
“No,” he said. “Not yet. But the guys this morning were part of an organization. Whatever country they’re from will be scrambling tomorrow.” He glanced at Tauber for a moment and then back to me with a look of concern on his face. “Let’s not mention the details of this morning to him, okay? Not till we know him better.” I nodded. I wasn’t sure how I’d explain sparks flying from his fingers anyhow.
He held his hands in front of him, about eight inches apart. “Have you ever meditated?” he asked, sitting on the floor again, his hands about eight inches apart in front of him, palms raised.
“Dave used to ask me to,” I admitted. “I wasn’t much good at it.”
“I need you to practice-it’s the first step toward protecting yourself,” he counseled. He gestured and I set my hands up in front of me like his. “Okay, just let yourself feel it-good, you’re there quickly, that’s helpful. You feel the vibration? Right now, it’s very limited-you haven’t taken control of it. But it’s a harmonic, a frequency. Harmonics bind matter together-all matter. If you can learn to feel the frequencies, to distinguish one from another, eventually you’ll be able to adjust them. And once you can do that, you’ll be able to affect everything around you.”
“ Me?” I screeched. I screech when I’m nervous-it’s a bad old habit.
“Better you than someone else,” he warned.
“I’m not a mindreader.”
“You couldn’t explain what was happening and you don’t like that feeling,” he said. “But you knew anyway.” He smiled his gargoyle smile. “You have had the privilege, thus far, of not knowing what you know. My job will be to deprive you of this privilege.”