Mind Games (14 page)

I struggle to keep my expression neutral as the fear surges out my hand, finding and animating her fear, filling her. It flows and flows, and just as I’m thinking it might never end, it does, and there’s wind in my fingers, and peace in my heart.

“God, do you think it’s something serious?” She bolts up off the bed. “I knew it was serious!”

I sit there replaying the surge in my mind, the madly satisfying rush of my fear into a perfectly analogous vessel. The cool calm it left behind. It’s like nothing I’ve ever experienced, even with Packard.

She scratches her leg. “Well? What do you think?”

“I can’t say,” I whisper.

Aggie rips off her cover-up and inspects her skin in the mirror. “I’m totally freaked out now! I knew I shouldn’t’ve gone to stupid Atlanta! Is it contagious?”

“Infectious,” I say, thoroughly exhilarated and even a bit debauched. I have to concentrate. I have to get her rolling.

“Shit! I touched things in that airport. On the plane.
Interacted with the workers. No offense. What if I have it? Look at it—use your nursing skills.”

“Come here.”

She obeys. Now that my fear is in her, I have this crazy sense that she’s mine. I take her arm and pretend to inspect it more, dizzy with pleasure. Her skin is as soft as it looks. I take a centering breath and do a Packard number exercise: 11 × 39 = 429. “If you’re lucky, it’ll stay dormant,” I say. “Stress aggravates it. You don’t want that.”

“What? What are you seeing?”

“There are sometimes tiny filaments involved around the lesions. And that’s what I’m looking for, but I don’t have any equipment.”

“Shit.”

I stand, keenly attuned to my surroundings, to Aggie. The skin fixation, the method of killing she used—it all links up in my mind. He had an affair, and the death was cleansing: a brain picked clean. Her white decor is cleansing, purifying for her.

“The truth is, they barely know anything about Osiris virus. Most doctors are reluctant to diagnose it. A lot of them will say it’s a pimple, or psychosomatic.”

“You really think I have it?”

“I’m sorry; I’m just not qualified to make a diagnosis.” To a hypochondriac, this answer is worse than a yes. It’s like saying,
Yes, but it’s so horrible that I’m hedging
. “Do you have a computer?”

Aggie gets this haunted look in her eyes. She does not want to go online. She knows what will happen there. She swallows, and I have this strange urge to touch her throat, trace the path of her swallow to the nook of her neck, like I’ll touch my own fear there.

I say, “We could get the latest research and see the photos for better comparison.”

She is still. She does not want to go. But she will.

Soon we’re sitting together in her office, embarking on the most dangerous voyage a hypochondriac can take: the online odyssey to rule out a condition, which is like trying to rule out the probability of getting sucked into quicksand by standing in it. She scratches her arm now and then. Osiris virus patients often become so focused on the sensations of their skin that they create their own lesions. Most get diagnosed with delusional parisitosis. I watch and wait, breathing in her floral perfume.

A voice from downstairs. “Hello?”

“I can’t deal with Carter now,” Aggie says, fixated on a pimple photo. “Tell him to reclean the pool. I’ll pay him double or whatever. You have to stay and help me with this.” This is the binding that Packard talked about, I think. She feels attached to me, thanks to the zing.

I rush down the stairs and through the carpeted world of white and find Carter in the conservatory. He raises his eyebrows, as though he’s surprised to see me.

“Champagne brunch is cancelled, Carter. We need more time.”

He draws near with a crooked smile. “What’s going on up there?”

“I zinged her. And we’re kind of in the thick of it.” Carter smells like newly mown grass and sweat. I have this weird urge to taste his skin. Glory hour.

“Why’d you take her clothes?”

I snort. “Please, these are duplicates. Look, Aggie wants you to clean the pool again. She won’t be watching.”

“Nice going.”

Aggie and I spend the next half hour examining images of seminal urticarias, which resemble pimples. Then we arrange to meet the day after tomorrow, and
we exchange numbers like it’s the most natural thing in the world. I leave her at an Osiris virus site full of first-person accounts. She’ll be there for hours. Tomorrow she’ll see a doctor, but no matter the diagnosis, she’ll think she has Osiris virus. That’s how it works. I grab my fanny pack and leave.

Soon I’m outside on the sunny veranda, breathing in the fragrance of the flowering trees; Carter is nowhere to be seen. A breeze blows cool, soft kisses on my bare arms and legs as I stroll to the edge of sparkly sapphire water, consumed with the desire to swim. I throw down my fanny pack, pull off my cover-up, and slip in. I dive deep under and skim along the bottom, water like cold silk on my skin. Then I come up and float on my back, eyes shut tight to the sun. A cardinal chirps, and a lawn-mower hums in the distance. I no longer know which direction the house is in, or which direction Midcity is in. I just float, sunshine shapes swirling on the insides of my eyelids. I float like a compass needle with no poles to point to.

A soft splash. I open my eyes and there’s Carter in the pool.

“Hey!”

“Shh!” Carter swims on his side, hair like bright metal. “You sure she’s
ocupado?”

“Definitely,” I say, watching the bright water stream off his smooth shoulders.

“What a nice, clean pool,” he says. “We did a fine job on it.”

We splash and swim around and it’s all wholesome fun until I start thinking about sliding my hands around the wet contours of his glistening muscles and maybe wrapping my legs around his waist. “We should get out of here,” I say.

He smiles. “Beware the glory hour.”

“Oh, you think you’re a bug on my windshield now?”

“I think I might be.”

“Right.” We hoist ourselves out, and Carter throws me a towel. I dry off, watching the small, bright ripples on the surface of the pool bounce from side to side, distorting the pattern of tiles deep below.

          Eleven

W
E SPEED DOWN
the Falconbridge highway, pastures and cornfields behind us, strip malls and developments increasing in density. I’m sitting on my towel, still in my wet suit because I forgot to grab my old clothes from Aggie’s master closet. No way was I going back in that house.

“That was fun,” Carter says, “but don’t tell Packard we swam like that. He’d be angry that we risked our credibility.”

“I’ll never tell,” I say, happy to be a trusted member of the squad. Doing work that means something.

We pass a sprawling suburban hospital. You can see a few people in the windows, and I even spot an IV bag on a pole—a sight that once filled me with dread. Not anymore. I sigh a happy sigh and tell Carter about Aggie and me in her closet.

“She is so smart,” Carter says. “You used to manage a dress shop, right?”

“Yeah.”

“She was seducing you with clothes. She sensed that was a way to get to you. God, she is so dangerous. But you did great. It’s great you joined us.”

I smile. My squad depended on me and I came through.

“It’ll be easier from here on in,” he adds. “Eventually
she’ll roll on her own, without your help, maybe after a few more visits.”

I go back to the zing, replaying it in my mind: touching her, making the hole, the glorious surge.

Later, we discuss Packard’s imprisonment. “I didn’t even know he was trapped until last week. It’s unthinkable. It just shouldn’t be.”

Carter is silent for a long while. If it weren’t for the hit of rage I get off him, I’d think he didn’t hear the question. “If I knew who that nemesis was,” he finally says, “well, I would want to kill him, but that would just cement Packard’s imprisonment. Or else maybe I would just destroy his face and break his fingers and …” He’s looking pale and somewhat overcome. “It’s probably good I don’t know who or where he is, because I would definitely kill him.”

“So the nemesis is male?”

“I don’t know. Seems likely.”

“That anyone would trap Packard like that … it’s all so farfetched.”

“You’re not a highcap, Justine, but this afternoon you drew energy off your dark side and attacked a woman with it. A lot of people would consider that farfetched. And you can touch energy dimensions. You’re living in a world now where that sort of stuff happens.”

“I don’t know about
living
in it. I consider myself more of a visitor. Between you and me, Carter, this whole thing is just a temporary gig.”

He turns his wide freckled face to me, incredulous. “Temporary?”

“I love being part of a gang—don’t get me wrong, I really do. Everybody’s been great, and my whole health anxiety problem is under control for the first time in … well, ever. But I’m not completely sure how I feel about what we’re doing, and this whole double life and keeping secrets from my boyfriend? Ultimately, I
plan to figure something else out. Possibly sooner than later.”

He stares. “You’re planning on leaving.”

“Not right away. And it’s not that I don’t like everybody so much—”

“Does Packard know—” He pauses here, rephrases with care, it seems. “Does he know you see this as temporary?”

“He never asked me for a specific commitment and I never gave one.”

Silence.

“What?”

“You two never discussed the whole long-term aspect. …”

Carter’s nervousness scares me. I finger the gem on my cover-up zipper. “What about it?”

The van wheels hum as we cross over a bridge, metal angles and rivets whipping by. “Justine, this should be a happy time for you. Sheesh, you’ve successfully zinged your first target. Why would you ever want to leave?”

“What are you getting at, Carter?”

“Just tell me, what could possibly be better?”

I don’t answer. I’m waiting.

“Shit,” he says. “You should talk to Packard about this, not me.”

“Carter, are you suggesting I won’t or can’t leave?”

He looks at me warily.

“Are you?” My glory-hour feelings are definitely starting to fade.

“I can’t believe Packard didn’t …”

“What?” I demand.

Carter purses his lips, as if this will keep him from telling me. And then he says, “You can’t leave. Basically.”

“What do you mean? Maybe Packard just plans on letting me be a temporary person.”

“That’s not how it works. You’ve been zinging for what? Maybe a month or two? Do you have any idea what would happen to you if you stopped at this point?”

“I’d go back to the way I was. Right? I mean …”

His silence scares me.

“Right?”

“No,” he says eventually. “You can never go back. Zinging rearranges things inside your brain. If you stopped now, you’d be worse than you can imagine. At this point, if you go four, five weeks without a zing you’d be looking at irreversible brain damage. Basically.”

I feel ill. “No.”

“You can never go back. You can never stop.”

“No, that can’t be. After that first zing, I know I came back a month later, but I think I would’ve gotten through it.”

“After one zing, sure, maybe. But if you stopped now, you’d be a million times worse.”

Panic clenches my gut. Even the van’s hum sounds different now. More strident.

“You’ve zinged Packard probably dozens of times,” Carter continues. “And now you’ve zinged a target. I don’t need to tell you how powerful that is. You can’t stop now. The neural pathways are in place and you’re addicted to zinging. You can’t live without it. If you stop, you’d be a vegetable. Christ, I just assumed you knew going in.” He turns to me, gaze full of concern. “You’re in a permanent relationship now. You are a minion of Packard, Justine.”

I stare back, openmouthed, sensing the truth of his words.

“Maybe I shouldn’t’ve said ‘minion.’ It’s like a symbiotic relationship. He scratches your back and you scratch his.” Carter winces. “It’s not that bad. You need
him to identify safe people to zing, and he needs you to zing them.”

“You call that symbiotic? When he has power over whether we’re vegetables, and we can never be without him? That’s not symbiotic. That’s complete dependence.” I feel hollow. “Screw that. I quit. Right now.”

He eyes me nervously.

“If it gets bad, maybe I’ll find my own people to zing.”

“And risk the blowback? That’s even worse. You may as well shove an ice pick through your eye.”

“I don’t care. I’m not a goddamn minion. I won’t live in servile dependence. If I’d known that …”

“You would’ve never joined,” he observes. “And you would’ve died.”

“Says Packard.”

“Don’t leave, Justine. We’re doing important work that transforms bad people. You would’ve probably ended up staying anyhow, but now that you know you can’t leave, that’s the only reason you want to.”

“It’s as good a reason as any.”

Mysteriously, Carter chooses this moment to pull out his phone and make a call. “He up for visitors?” Apparently, the answer is yes, because the next thing I know, he’s doing a U-turn. “Packard’s going to kill me for this.”