The Liminal People (7 page)

I chose my powers. I chose my life, the grime and grit of it. I chose to go where people hurt the most, in order to find the best ways to heal. It was in that choosing that I found Nordeen, and he's shown me the shadows of the real rulers of the planet. Not politicians and businessmen but gods and powers most people don't have the concepts, let alone the names, to explain. I can't remember when I stopped thinking about money as evidence of my self-worth, but it was long before I met the boss. I've been removed from the common psychology of men for longer than I can recall. I may be a freak, but unlike you, Yasmine, I embraced my freakiness. And in doing so, in knowing what it meant to be a freak, I've turned myself into an invaluable resource to men and demigods alike. You chose a man who hopes to do once what I perform regularly. You rejected your fire only to now call on mine. And I came. Not because it's the right thing to do. But to prove you wrong. To show you the value of a freak. To prove to you I was right.

But this is only what I think. I couldn't ever say such things to her.

“I'm not a private investigator,” I say slowly so she'll understand it's not an attack.

“But you cut a healing swathe through some of the most diseased and forlorn parts of Africa.”

“You heard about that?”

“I'm an international reporter of human-rights cases, Tag. How is some random man walking through Africa ignoring tribal, political, and territorial lines healing the sick not going to come across my radar? People hailed you as a messiah.” She pauses, and I know she's got more. “Did you know you cured one woman of AIDS?”

“Yes.” She's not Nordeen, so I enjoy my ability to lie. I didn't know. It doesn't matter. There's awe in her voice. Eat your heart out, Fish'n'Chips.

“It's the only documented case of faith healing of HIV on the books. There's a two-million-euro live bounty out for your head based on her description alone. . . .”

“What does this have to do with your daughter?”

“She's . . .” Her voice is lower than it's ever been. Not just since the gym, but since I've known her. I don't know if she's talking to herself or to me. “She's like you.”

“She's a healer?” Why am I so excited?

“No. She can move things . . . with her mind.”

“Telekinetic?”

“Yes. But she also can hear thoughts . . . telepathic. That's what it is.”

I'm angry and don't bother hiding it.

“What?” she barks at me from too far of an emotional distance to expect to be heard. “What did I say? What did I do?”

“Call on a freak to catch a freak?” She slaps me hard enough to break one of her fingers. Other customers react. I don't.

“My daughter is not a freak!”

“But I am?” She has no words for me. Instead she drops a twenty-pound note on the table and walks out the door. I take a second to survey the restaurant, to see if anyone follows her. When no one else does, I do. She's at a railing overlooking the Thames. After a minute, I join her.

“This was a mistake,” she says, holding her hands tight below her chin, praying.

“No. You made the right call. Just to the wrong man. Bigger man, better man, would be able to put the past aside for the sake of an innocent and all that valiant shit. Me? I'm still more like this face than I'd care to admit. A child playing grown-up games.”

“I need you to be that man now,” she says softly like we've never passed a harsh word between us. “You're the only one I know like her. . . .”

“Like you.” I'm reminding her.

“Like me,” she concedes begrudgingly. “Tamara had just come to her . . . skills, power, whatever you call it. She told me about it.”

“Did you tell her about me and—”

“I told her that I had something similar.” She truly loved her daughter. Once we moved to London, Yasmine stopped experimenting with her fire totally. Not even to light a candle. Whenever I pushed her on it, we had fights that would wake neighbors. I asked her one time what it felt like to start fires. I wanted to know if it was in the realm of possibilities for me to cauterize a wound instead of making the blood vessels just atrophy. She said starting fires was like dropping acid into her worldview. Now I would see that as a sign of problems to come, but then I was too inexperienced in love, too needy to see it as an indication of anything other than my need to compromise more. “It made her feel . . . better.”

“Just because she's like us”—I wait to hear protestations against any type of union involving the two of us, and smile when they don't come—“that doesn't mean she'd be able to fight off whatever came her way. They could have drugged her. If she's not very experienced. . . .”

“That's not why I think it has to do with the . . .” She stops and looks at me. “Can I just see your face? This is so disconcerting. Can you show me what you look like now?” I relax into my own height, skin tone, weight, and facial features, all of it. It takes less than a minute. Any gawking commuters would get a shock, but they'd have to watch for that full minute. People in cities generally don't look at each other for over a few seconds.

The transition makes Yasmine sick. I can feel the bile rising in her throat. She wants to throw up. She just stares at me in fascination. “Thank you.”

“It's just practice and precaution.”

“I understand. Before she left, Tamara began acting secretive. . . .”

“You said the two of you were tight?”

“Not with me. With her father. She said things were going on. Things only I would understand, that might hurt him politically if she got involved. I didn't ask. She's getting older. I figured she had a right to a certain level of privacy. It's hard to always be in the public light. If I had known . . .”

“And so that's why you think it has to do with what we do?”

“What we can do, yes. She never displayed her . . . gifts. She was quiet about them. Once I had to chastise her for reading her teacher's mind during an exam. But she already felt so bad about it. In part because the things in a high school teacher's mind regarding his students are so depraved. . . .”

“I can't promise anything,” I say, stretching my actual body, realizing the clothes I bought fit better on it.

“I'm not expecting promises. I don't think this is what you want, but I can give you—”

“I don't want your money, Yasmine.” I'm trying not to sound hurt by the offer.

“What do you want?” The question takes me by surprise. “I've told you what I can't give you. You don't want what I can give. I know why I called you, Taggert. What I don't know is why you answered.”

“Because I said I would.”

I've met about twenty people like me. Three before I ran into Nordeen. My brother, Yasmine, and the kid from the Mog. Including Nordeen, that's sixteen or so I've met in the six years I've worked with the old man. Some of them have been old but young in their powers, others babies with the ability to dominate the world. Nordeen's approach to them is as enigmatic as it is decisive, and in most cases I am his messenger. So when Yasmine says she thinks this whole mess involves people like us, I gain more confidence than I've had since I left Morocco. If it's powers, I've probably got some experience with it.

When the boss figured out that I could hurt people, he began to use me as a smart gun. With a little practice I realized I didn't have to touch people to affect their bodies. All I needed was to be in range, to feel their heartbeats. My first kill using my power was in Agadir, a small costal city in Morocco. A supplier was threatening to break the distribution line. Nordeen sent me in first, to drink tea in the man's café. When he was assured I was there, Nordeen made the call. The dealer made the mistake of underestimating the boss. I squeezed his heart with my mind until it collapsed into a bloodied clump of muscle and vein. When I felt no remorse, I knew a line had been crossed. So did the boss when I returned.

“Now you are ready for the serious work.”

“You're saying what I just did wasn't serious?”

“Killing one of them is as easy as swatting a fly. Taking out one of ours requires a steel of will and skill that I'm beginning to suspect you might have.”

He sent me to India, just outside of Bangalore. He told me to find the most powerful one like us there, and to kill them. It turned out to be a six-year-old Jain boy who spoke to the dead and animated their bones for limited amounts of time. His power had made him insane, and his sole desire was to turn the entire town into a necropolis so he'd always have people in his mind to talk to.

“I can't do it,” I told Nordeen over a cell phone.

“And why not? Is the death dealer too much for you?”

“He's six years old.”

“Would you rather face him or me?”

I compromised and gave the kid an aneurysm. He couldn't speak, couldn't move, couldn't utilize his power, but he was still alive. It was the same thing I did to my brother, but with far more subtlety. Nordeen greeted me upon my return with a reluctant welcome. He knew the boy wasn't dead but accepted my compromise despite the potential threat against his will. I was banished from his sight for three months.

He sent me throughout the world to meet other people like us. Sometimes he'd just have me identify the person. Other times he'd tell me to bring gifts, books that held the smell of antiquity, or fruits I couldn't identify. All the ones who I met and spoke with knew of Nordeen. Some spoke of him in hushed tones, others dismissed me and gave dire warnings for “my master.” From dropped sentences and silenced thoughts, I got that I was not the first of Nordeen's emissaries. After a while I realized that the whole hash-dealing business was just a cover, a way of financing his true passion. Us.

After my exile, Nordeen took a trip with me. Johannesburg. An old woman whose skin looked like it was petrified and who kept roots and barks in multicolored glass jars suspended in the air had sent him an invitation in a dream. On the private plane ride down, I somehow felt that Nordeen had been injured and healed . . . by someone else. I kept that knowledge to myself, as he seemed anxious for the first time in my experience.

The elder woman laughed when she saw me. “Old man, do you carry your healer with you everywhere these days?” Her voice broke the night sky above the tarmac, and small bits of fire jumped from her lips.

“I bring him as a courtesy to you, should I lose my temper and break off a part of you that even I can't fix,” he replied with a honeyed voice. “Keep your sparks to yourself woman and guide me to our master.” In an old cargo container, on an ancient rusting freighter, the two powers made ablutions for each other and walked into a darkness that no light would penetrate. Even the sparks from the old woman's tongue didn't emanate outward. I waited for twenty-four hours in a car on the dock wondering what power in the world existed that could cow my boss so. At the beginning of that second night, Nordeen emerged alone. He seemed revitalized physically, standing taller, his cane for ornamentation alone. His eyes shone brightly. And when he spoke, small sparks of fire came from his mouth.

“Never forget, little healer. There are powers stronger than ours in this world. And they do not always favor us.”

Those words are on my mind as I think about how to hunt down this girl, this Tamara. The really powerful ones of our type attract others. Those others are so far above us they make us seem like the normals. If one of those others is involved in this, I'm screwed. But if not, I can do this.

The moderately powerful ones like us alienate our families. As my brother did. As I did. But the most powerful of us are always alone. So she can't be that powerful. Plus, she had to make a choice to read her teacher's mind. That means she either doesn't have the power to do it casually or she has that much control. Doesn't matter. Point is she's living a normal life. A normal life means normal boundaries, normal friends, normal schooling. And our kind of power among the norms always leaves trails.

I leave Yasmine and hit a hospital. Scrubs are easy enough to find, and I need the right costume for what I'm about to try. I change clothes in the attending doctor's bathroom. Then I change physically.

It's difficult, but when I focus I can change the melanin count in my skin. It's the hardest transformation for me. Nordeen says it's because my self-image is rooted in being black. I say it's because melanin is a hard substance to transmute. But I need to be less black to pull this off, so I focus until I can tell that I probably look mulatto. I close off my hair follicles and pull the thick mats that I have out and flush them down the toilet. Then I focus on slick black hair, coated in oil. I let it grow until I can fix a small rubber band at the base of my neck. Since I'm at a toilet I vomit up sixty-five pounds, making sure to check my discharge for too much stomach acids. I just need to lose the pounds, not my voice. When I step out I look like a sexy young intern that works too hard. I look at my watch. It's eleven. Almost time for lunch.