Mind Games (23 page)

Shelby hooks her arm through mine. “Bet him, Justine. You will make money.”

Carter says, “Do you really think Aggie will send her entire party home just from watching Simon kiss you?”

“Forget it. I’ve defiled my relationship with Cubby enough for one day.”

“Don’t be so precious,” Simon says. “It’s for the job.”

I cross my arms.

“Okay,” Simon says. “Twenty minutes, or I pay each of you five hundred dollars. But if I win, you each only pay me a hundred.”

Simon stares at me—hungry, pleading. He’d do just about anything to make this bet happen.

I smile. “Okay, I’ll take the bet,” I tell him. “For a price.”

Shelby and Carter exchange glances.

“Name it,” Simon says.

“Your technique. How you can zing targets who are repellent to you when nobody else can. How’d you get rid of your limits?”

Simon shakes his head.

“Those are my terms,” I say.

Simon stares down at his black boots, clompy and dirty against the white shag carpeting.
“No.”

I wonder if there’s something embarrassing or intensely personal in what he does. “Help me, Simon. Help me to be effective with people like the Alchemist.”

Carter grabs a champagne off a passing butler’s tray. “Justine, we all have negative reactions to certain energy dimensions. We all have our limits.”

“Not me,” Simon says.

“So tell me,” I say.

“You wouldn’t be willing to go through with it. It involves losing control, and you’ll never do that.”

“No bet then.”

Simon stares across the room at the Silver Widow, who talks excitedly with Elaine the stylist. He’s craving the bet. We all see it. And we all want to hear the technique he’s so reluctant to divulge.

“Clock ticks,” Shelby says.

Simon frowns. “You won’t appreciate it, that’s all.” He eyes each one of us, then looks back at Aggie.

We wait. I’ve always enjoyed those “downward spiral” tales of real-life corruption and dissipation you can see on cable TV—true crime stuff, rock stars gone bad. But as I stand there adding “bartering sexual favors for tips on how to be a more effective vigilante” to the list of things I now stoop to, those stories seem a whole lot less entertaining.

“Okay, okay. Deal.” Simon takes a breath. “When I reach out to somebody’s energy dimension, the second I sense something vile, for example … Wait, back up—” Thoughtful pause. “First you need a piece of understanding in place.” He turns to me. “Why is my energy dimension so vile to you, Justine?” He waits. I have no answer, so he continues. “What is an energy dimension? And can it hurt you?” He pauses, looking at each of us. His whole disposition has changed with his decision to
tell; for once he seems sincere. “An energy dimension can’t hurt you,” he says. “When you drew back in disgust from me, Justine, it wasn’t to protect yourself from what’s in me. You were protecting yourself from a vile, discarded, probably unknown part of yourself. That’s the thing you need to understand to get my technique to work. Basic psychology one-oh-one. I’m not too horrible to you; I’m too
familiar
. You wouldn’t be repulsed by me if you didn’t resonate with me. Or if some disowned part of you didn’t.”

“Are you suggesting I resonate with the Alchemist? A rapist and a murderer? Is that what you’re saying?”

Simon crosses his arms. “What happened when you touched his energy dimension?”

I think back. The feeling of a hole crawling with dark life. “I just sensed what was there and drew back. I didn’t actually touch it.”

“How very curious. You sensed what was there without even touching it.”

“I’m not like the Alchemist.”

“No, you’re not a sadistic criminal, but you have things in common with the Alchemist. How else did you know what was in him? Did you touch his energy dimension before?” Simon places a cold fingertip on my chest. “You recognized it. The same thing happened when you tried to touch my energy dimension, as I knew it would. You can’t recognize something you don’t know.”

“I believe I would recognize true love if it happened to me,” Shelby says, “but it has not happened yet.”

Carter says, “I like to think I’d recognize Bigfoot.”

“Fuck off,” Simon says. “I’m giving you my technique. My technique is valuable.” He turns to me. “Have you ever gone swimming in Lake Michigan in spring? It’s freezing. You dip a toe in, pull it out screaming. How do you get past that? Well, if you plunged in …”

“Plunge in?”

Simon smiles. “Instead of just touching it, you plunge in, hand first. When I sense a repellent energy dimension, I accept that it is only me that I feel, and that I have been to that place before. It’s a mode of surrender. Throw down the walls. Let the monsters in, let the monsters out. I just surrender and plunge, with an attitude of total acceptance”—Simon places his hand upon his chest—“here.” He screws up his lips and gets this distant look.
He’s serious
, I think.
He’s really done it
. “I love and accept it as part of me. I accept that every repellent target is me, and every vile energy dimension is my energy dimension, and I plunge. And you know when you do it right, because there’s this—” He pauses, royal blue gaze into nothing. When he continues, it’s in a whisper. “The otherness falls away. And you’re deep inside. It’s amazing.”

Shelby regards him with horror.

“Spelunking, I like to call it,” Simon says. “And then you burn the hole deep inside instead of on the surface. And zing the fuck out of them.”

I’m stunned. “What if you can’t pull out? Packard says if you go all the way inside you might not get out.”

“And I’m here to tell you it’s fine.”

Carter squints. “You don’t really go in.”

“Yes, I do,” Simon snaps. “I knew you wouldn’t be up to it.”

“That is a huge risk to take,” I say.

Simon smiles. “Yes, it is.”

My mouth hangs open. I’ve never met somebody who cares so little for his own well-being. It’s here I realize that Simon probably won’t live much longer. It makes me sad.

“Well?” Simon says. “You got your answer.”

“Thank you, Simon. Thank you for telling.”

He smiles. “And now for the entertainment portion of the evening.”

I’m not eager to kiss him, but a disillusionist is good for her word. “Start the clock, Carter.”

Simon looks into my eyes. “Where’s Aggie?”

“Across the room,” I say. “Behind you.”

“Is she still watching us?”

“Yes.”

He walks around and stands behind me so that we can both see the Silver Widow. He puts his hands on my shoulders and whispers into my ear. “Close your eyes, and don’t open them until I tell you.” I sigh and comply, and he wraps his arms around me from behind, around my stomach. “Smile, but not like you think any-thing’s funny.”

I smile, lips closed, and he kisses my cheek, just once, very lightly. “Now I’m whispering in your ear,” he whispers in my ear. “Keep doing exactly what you’re doing. She’s watching, wondering what I could be saying to you. What could it be?”

“That
was the big kiss?”

“I know you were probably hoping for something more involved.”

“I’m just surprised,” I whisper, eyes still closed.

“You’ve been spending too much time with Packard.”

“Don’t push it.”

“Don’t worry, baby, you’re far too goody-goody to be my type,” he says. “Now I’m looking up at the stairs. And now I’m looking at her. It’s a good thing you can’t see the way I’m looking at her. Oooh.”

“You better not be too hard on her, Simon.”

“Or what, ants’ll eat my brain?”

“Maybe.”

I hear Carter’s voice, a whisper. “No, no, people. Sit back down.”

My eyes are still closed. “What’s happening?”

“Every single person on the couch by Aggie just stood up,” Simon says. “Yes sir. Jacket going on …” I can
feel his cheek press against my cheek, the puff of his smile.

   About forty-five minutes later Carter, Shelby, and I are speeding back to town. All I want is to get home and climb into bed with my book; sometimes that takes my mind off my health enough to let me sleep. I’m determined to ride out this hypochondria episode the old-fashioned way until I zing Connor, and I most certainly will not be crawling to Packard to beg him to let me zing him in the meantime. No doubt he’d enjoy that. I surely wouldn’t. I can hold out for a few more days—I’m not in the Jarvis danger zone yet.

Shelby hangs over the seat, smiling at me in the back. We all have IOUs from Simon. “Something to always remember,” she says. “When Simon offers to bet, always say yes. Always yes.”

“He came pretty close to winning,” I say. “People were upset about the mayor—a lot of them were looking for an excuse to leave.”

“Sure, maybe it looked bad for a while,” Carter says, “but I knew somebody would try to stay behind. I wasn’t worried, and I’ll tell you why—Simon always loses. And that spelunking technique? You’d have to be insane to do that.”

“What does it mean? Spelunking?” Shelby asks.

Carter says, “It’s where you drop down in caves and explore.”

“And sometimes you don’t come back up,” I say.

“Just a matter of time before it happens to Simon,” Carter says. “Or worse. He thrives on loss and ruin. He’s the ultimate loser.”

We stop at a tollbooth; Carter hands the woman a ten and she gives him change. Just as he’s pulling out, I notice a face in the sooty concrete above the little window—it’s hard to tell for sure, but it looked like
the face
—the sign
of Henji. “Shit,” I say, staring back as the booth recedes into the distance.

“What?” Shelby asks.

I turn and give her a strong look. “I thought I saw a familiar face.”

She raises her eyebrows. I nod minutely.

“See somebody you know?” Carter asks. “Need me to catch up to one of these cars?”

I shrug. “He’s not the kind of guy we’d want to wave hello to,” I say.

          Twenty

T
HE WEIRD FEELING
in my temple is still there on Tuesday, and it’s a struggle not to get it checked out. Having the power to zing out my fear doesn’t mean I’m cured; it just means I have the unnatural ability to erase my fear, and fear is an essential part of survival. Fear is what causes people to take measures to protect and save themselves. From that point of view, I could be in more medical danger than ever before. What’s more, not only are there intermittent tingles, but I’ve had a dull headache since Sunday, except for about fifteen minutes when I woke up this morning. That could be a really good sign or a really bad sign, depending on which medical explanation you want to go with. I keep thinking it’s a bad sign.
Get through the next hour
, I keep telling myself. And then the next and the next, until tomorrow’s card game where I’ll zing the Alchemist.

Of course my failure to zing him at the last card game also continues to haunt me. He’s dangerous and he needs to be stopped. I have to find a way to zing him. And not Simon’s insane way, either.

My focus on zinging the Alchemist is so intense, it’s been making me think I see him everywhere; I even think I see him disappearing around the end of the freezer aisle as I stand at the cheese counter, waiting for the cheese monger to slice me a tidbit of honey goat cheese.

“Here you go.”

I take the little chunk and pop it into my mouth; it nearly melts on my tongue, all sweet and goaty. “Delicious!” It’s also as expensive as gold, but what do I care? I’m a rich disillusionist. Richer than ever thanks to winning the bet with Simon the other night. I toss the cheese in my basket.

Shelby has been too busy the past few days to go back and inspect the face in the tollbooth—it’s a ways out of town—but I’m eighty percent sure it was the sign of Henji. She was free today, but I’m busy helping Cubby throw the perfect dinner party. In fact, as I cheerfully informed him, I’ll be handling the entire dinner aspect of it, plus cleanup. It’s my way of making up for forgetting our date on Friday. He’s been less talkative on the phone the past few days—a bad sign. I cannot lose him. I won’t.

This dinner is a sort of “welcome to the condo” dinner for his mysterious new upstairs neighbor, possibly her boyfriend, and the couple from across the hall. I told Cubby I’d head to his place before he gets home from work to start the cooking. He loves to come home to cooking.

I rub my temple gently, just enough to relax the surrounding musculature, as I deliberate over olives at the olive bar. Eventually I settle on some briny olives as a counterpoint to the sweet cheese and crackers. For the main course I’m doing a seafood orzo with a sesame asparagus side, Moroccan salad, and several expensive bottles of Shiraz. Cubby doesn’t need to know how much all this costs or how much work it will be; he just needs to enjoy the sumptuous deliciousness of it. The dress I’m planning to wear is less formal but just as sexy as the one I wore to the Silver Widow’s cocktail party. I grab a tube of double chocolate chunk cookie dough—dessert, or maybe a tiny treat while I’m making the
meal—and take my place in one of the annoyingly long checkout lines.

A voice behind me. “Justine?”

I spin around and nearly jump out of my shoes. The Alchemist. Standing right behind me, bright eyes and bushy pubic-hair soul patch.