Mindbenders (12 page)

“They wouldn’t have to torture you in any case,” he said. “But if I drop you off, you won’t know anything about me—and they will be able to read that pretty quickly.” He shrugged. “ It’s your decision. I’m not very pleasant but I’m not a jailer.”

“What about the stuff in my head? The other names that might be there? Don’t you need them?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter. It won’t bring Dave back, will it?”

“It
does
matter,” I said as a reflex and knew in that instant it was everything to me. “We’ve got to get the guys that did it and find out why.”

“Why?” he asked and I could see he was really listening, that for some reason he really needed an answer.

“Because we know they’re out there, whoever they are. And because we—you—can do something about it.”

“That simple?”

“He was my friend. And yours.” He nodded. “That’s pretty simple, I guess.” Looking at his face, I thought,
He envies the fact that it’s that simple for me
. And then I had another thought. “Of course,” I said, “you knew I was going to say that.”

He shrugged and laughed his grating laugh. “I don’t have a choice,” he said. “Thoughts like this don’t mean much until you say them out loud. Or, really, until you
do
something about them.”

“Okay,” I said. “So now what do we do?”

“Now,” he concluded, “we play cards.”

~~~~

Seven

“Seven.”

“Wrong.”

“Three,” I said, straining to pluck an answer out of the air, trying to imagine the far side of the card he held in front of me.

“No.”

“Nine. Two. Six Hundred and Fifteen.”

“Funny,” he said. “Okay, just stop what you’re doing. Stop imagining. Stop trying to figure things out. You can’t
learn
this; you just have to know it.”

“That’s stupid! How can you know something without learning it?”

He reached across the table and pinched my hand, hard. “Yeow!” I recoiled.

“There,” he said calmly. “No learning involved. You don’t
make
this happen. Stop trying to explain. Your conscious mind demands control; your subconscious just
knows
. Look at the card and say whatever comes into your head. Say it
before your mind gets a chance to corrupt it.”

“Like the Force,” I said. “In Star Wars.”

“No!” he said sharply, holding up that admonishing, dangerous finger. “Don’t do that. The American mind control program fell apart from that kind of association—‘New Age’; crystals, Vulcan mind melds, the love that overcomes all obstacles.
Good Vibrations
. Unless you’re getting royalties from the song, there are no good vibrations. What’s good in life vanishes in a breath; pain lingers forever.”

He went through the deck, sorting the cards into two piles and then shuffling one pile. “Okay. I’ve narrowed it down—hearts, spades and diamonds, nothing else. Just tell me which. No thinking allowed. No questioning. Just say what you think as soon as you think it. Okay?”

“Okay.”

He held up a card.

“Diamonds.”

“Good.” He made a mark on one side of a sheet of paper on the table.

“That was right?”

“Tell you later. This one.” He held up another.

“Diamonds again,” I said, sure I was doing it wrong.

“Very good,” he said. “Next.”

“Spades.”

“Good. Next.”

And so on. This went on for fifteen minutes. When we were done, the paper had scribbles on both sides. He tore it up immediately without looking at it and tossed it in the trash.

“How’d I do?” I asked, puzzled.

“Don’t worry about it,” he said.

“I want to know.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

Now I got upset. “What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? Why’d I do it then?”

He sighed. “I told you—what matters is that you have the feeling of knowing. Once you get that, you’ll get better.”

He could see on my face that I didn’t find this a very satisfying answer.

“I told my teacher once,” he said, “that I didn’t think I could develop the skills we were working on. He told me, ‘Don’t worry about the skills; develop your confidence.’ I said, ‘How am I supposed to have confidence when I don’t have the skill?’ His answer was, ‘Once you have the confidence, you’ll find out you already had the skill.’”

“That’s stupid,” I told him.

He shrugged. “Maybe it is,” he acknowledged. “A lot of life is stupid.” He smiled and started putting the cards back in the box. “Once you loosened up,” he said, “once you got bored and stopped trying to guess, you got around 65% correct. Way beyond mathematical probability. You have potential.” The pleasure leaked out of the smile now. “Nothing kills more people than potential,” he mused. For a moment, which was about as long as he ever mused about anything. Then he added, “Start concentrating on some really vivid moment in your life—something that really comes alive when you remember it. Probably something bad.”

“Why bad?”

“I said already—pain lingers. Happiness becomes elusive as soon as it’s over.”

 “Why?”

“At some point, things are going to get intense. You’re going to have to block for yourself. If you can put your mind in some other place, into some other reality that isn’t about
now
, you become hard to read. It’s the simplest way to block.” If this was the simple way, there didn’t seem to be much point asking about the more complicated ones. I was totally lost.  “Just try to remember something vivid,” he said. “Like I said, it’ll probably be bad and you’ll have to be able to choose it—to choose to go back into it, really get inside it, at a moment’s notice.” Why would anyone want that, I thought, but he was already announcing, “I’m taking a shower. Then we should think about food.”

I sat in the living room for a few minutes. I could have turned on the TV or caught up on my reading but I got up and opened the sliding door and went out onto the balcony instead. It felt like I’d been enclosed for months.

The view carried all the way on down the valley. The rain clouds were breaking up, the last glints of sun winking over the mountains and slinking through the streets of the town. A breeze was swirling at the base of the cliff, carrying leaves and twigs up off the rock shelves towards the house. The birds were out in packs, swirling around, twittering and making tight turns in loose formation. Together yet separate, like Max’s world, bits of matter bound together by Good Vibrations. Or Bad Vibrations maybe, if you listened to him. If you believed he meant everything he said. I didn’t believe
anybody
meant everything they said.

Dave used to take me fishing. We’d sit for hours without anything happening, line in the water, staring, barely talking. I’d get lost in the line in the water, in the little ring, the nipple that formed around the spot where the line fell into the water. I could just stare into the dark pool and drift for a long time and when I’d look up Dave would be smiling at me. We’d go for long walks along the boundaries of the marsh nearby, checking the fencing and repairing where it was breached or crooked or the wood frame was rotting. It annoyed me to be doing it; I knew nobody was paying him for the work and I didn’t see why you needed a fence around a national park but Dave wanted to and that made it okay. He would point out the joint that needed a few nails and then point it out again, even though I was already looking at it.
Look at that knothole
, he’d say,
is that the biggest knothole you ever saw in your life?
and I thought to myself, this guy’s the fucking dweeb of the world, who cares about knotholes? But it would be the same thing with the trees and the birds and even the clouds.
Look how the edges change. Constantly shifting.
It took me a while to realize he was doing it with a purpose—he was bringing me back into the world, on a level I could handle. My door was shut tight; there wasn’t a whole lot I was willing to let in but Dave just doggedly went at every little crack I’d left open, pushing till it opened a bit wider. I loved him like you love your dotty old aunt who doesn’t know anything about the world but would sell her house for you in two minutes if you needed it. That’s what I thought he was, dotty. But I also knew he was taking care of me and I knew I needed taking care of.

He convinced Mr. Dulles—Renn—Max—shit, how’d he keep all the names straight?—to come fishing with us once. There was never a man who couldn’t fish like Max. He stared at the rod like it was a snake or something and he wouldn’t drink beer even, which didn’t put a damper on anybody but him. But they started arguing one time about something—something I didn’t really get—and I told him to be more respectful of Dave. I yelled, I guess. It was probably about the first words I’d said in months around him or anybody at that point. And the back of my head went hot and I yelped and it stopped right away. And I can remember their faces when it happened—Renn looking sheepish and Dave intrigued.

I looked over the balcony at the birds darting and flickering in their dance and realized that was why I was with Renn, with Max. Dave didn’t put me here for the protection of the program. He placed me here for
my
sake, because somehow being around Max was opening me up, helping to bring me back. I couldn’t really be grateful to Max for this—it wasn’t his plan; I wasn’t at all sure he was even aware of it. And it really didn’t make me any more grateful to Dave either—I couldn’t be any more grateful to Dave than I already was. But it made everything feel a little more sensible, made it fit together. There was a flow to it. A harmonic. A good, positive vibration, haha.

A moment later, I heard his voice and turned to see him coming back into the living room, hair still damp, staring at his wristwatch and talking on a cellphone I hadn’t seen before.

“…well, I’m glad I could amuse you. It isn’t funny, Nick. Dave didn’t just die; he was shot dead in the bathtub. If you guys aren’t interested,
somebody
is. Alan Hammond was a visionary. He just hasn’t been dead long enough to be proved right yet.” He clicked off the phone. “Remember I told you I didn’t work for America?”

“Let me guess—you lied.”

“I didn’t lie—to me, it just feels like it never happened. The job only lasted about three months, just a few months before 9/11. A friend, an acquaintance really, put me in contact with Alan Hammond, the Senator. He wanted me to work with the Senate Intelligence Committee, to keep an eye on American spooks, keep them in line. That was back when this country still
wanted
to keep their own spooks in line. Of course, as soon as they debriefed me and convinced themselves I was on the level, they started pushing me to do other things for them, the kind of things I wouldn’t have done for the Soviet either. Things that sent me running to the Everglades.”

“Dave knew you’d run?”

“Dave was one of the guys who debriefed me. There was Dave, Scott Cornwell and Alan Hammond’s aide Jim Avery. Cornwell was my runner and it turns out he still has the same phone number.  I just called and asked him if they’d restarted the old program—or anything like it.”

That’s where I stopped him, as you’d imagine. You probably wonder what took me
that
long but, for a moment, I’d thought he had to be kidding.

“Jim
Avery
?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, giving me the eye again but my head didn’t burn. “Cornwell laughed when I asked where Avery was. He said he’s got his own business.”

I laughed—I didn’t want to make him feel dumb but I couldn’t help myself. “No kidding,” I said. “You don’t watch TV?”

“Avery’s on TV?”

“
Jim
Avery? This is
Your World
?” He stared at me like I was talking riddles. “He’s on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He’s got his own
channel
!” Renn went wide-eyed. My pilot light was on dim the whole time at Dave’s but you had to be completely off to miss Jim Avery.

It took a little while to find the channel on the set in the living room—it was channel 152 or something—but then we basked in the glow of Jim Avery’s greatest hits:
Be Everything You Are
and
Why Settle for Less than your Whole Self?
and the inevitable
It’s Your World
, chanted by Avery and huge crowds in LA, New York, Seoul, London, Rome, Frankfurt, New Delhi, Hong Kong, Moscow, Vancouver and Prague, among others. They had ads for
Your World
vacations and 24-hour video-on-demand.

“Wow,” Max said and I had to nod.

“You should ask
him
for a job,” I said. “He’s the biggest thing going.”

Max kept staring at the tube. “It’s him,” he said haltingly. “But that’s not his hair—it has to be a toup, or implants maybe.” He started pacing around the room, looking deflated. “I see why they laughed at me—whatever became of poor Jim Avery. Wow!”

“What did Cornwell say about the program?”

“There’s no program—hasn’t been in years. He said the only reason he could answer me at all was that there was nothing to it.”

“You believe him?”

“I’m not big on belief. I listened to the
sound
of his voice more than what he was saying, listened to the vibrations like a stress detector. If he was lying, I would know. And,” he added, “he was one of the people who debriefed me several years ago. So he knew I would know, which means  there’s no point lying.” He tapped a finger on the table—the first two times it tapped; the next two it went right into the wood, disappeared right through. He was apparently doing it without being aware of it. This would get real confusing if somebody unaware saw him. Did he do it all time without being noticed? That was a scary thought all on its own.

“I asked him about L Corp,” he continued. “He said security was a sideline, they were mostly political consulting and lobbying, media management and such.” He shook his head. “Not the place you’d expect a Miriam Fine. Or platoons of thugs with feeble mindbender power.” He came back to the couch now. “We can research it later. First, I think we should go out to dinner.”