Mindbenders (11 page)

“Anyway, the problem for most mindbenders is that the mental signal they receive is weak. Any sort of distraction or embedded or suggested thought will disturb it or color it and your whole purpose as a spy is to bring back useful, accurate, actionable information. So they had to desensitize us, to beat down our reliance on logic, on what we thought things
should
mean, anything that might get in the way of our reporting what we found, as we found it. Desensitizing involved a series of beatings—”

“Excuse me?”

“They beat us. They sent good decent men with big families and charitable intentions—and strong arms. They would put us in a small room and send in the strong men to hit us, with absolutely no evil intent. This started when we were around eleven or twelve, in addition to our classroom training. You would show up for geometry to find that the rest of the class had been moved elsewhere and here was Boris to rearrange your attitude—and your bones.

“They were under some sort of deep suggestion, surely, for while they were beating us, they would be thinking about taking their own children to the park or making love to their wives or some movie they saw last weekend. Either they were under suggestion or they searched the Republics for oafs who could be that disassociated from reality.”

“This was on purpose?”

“It was crucial to the process that it make no sense. No matter how we tried to rationalize, the reality would defeat us. They beat us viciously while having nothing whatever against us and, being mindreaders, we would know this for a fact. After enough of this—each person has their own definition of ‘enough’—you were expected to lay down your need for answers, your expectation that things would make any sort of sense. You were expected to accept what you found, so you could report ‘as is.’ And you were expected to obey.”

He was biting his fingernails as he spoke. He didn’t seem aware of it but, by the time he reached this point in the story, he’d worked past the white nail rim on several fingers and into the colored part. As  he bit pieces off, he placed them neatly without thinking in his shirt pocket.

“I’m not good,” he said after a pause, “at obeying. The first time a man hit me hard, I killed him. We were in a laboratory setting, so of course the place was floor to ceiling sensor arrays. They measured 5000 amps straight to the heart.” His eyes were locked onto the desk in front of him but he was rubbing his earlobe red. “It took three seconds for him to die and in that time, I saw what he saw, I felt what he felt, everything that was in him as he knew he was done—his parents, his wife and children, the first three women he made love to, the guard outside he’d made love to earlier that day, his best friends in grammar school, his grandparents…and his anger at the idiots who sent him to beat up the boy who shoots sparks out of his fingers.” He looked up at me momentarily but the eyes were blank. He’d killed this memory long before, to the extent he could.

“I continued this way until I was twenty—it took me that long to learn how to only kill intentionally. I spent years in tutoring with teachers on the other side of a glass wall and watching other children play games outside. Occasionally I was allowed outings to the home of one or another of the scientists, for a meal or sitting with the family watching television. I was told it might be dangerous for me to swim—I might electrocute somebody. Ha!

“I can’t blame them for being cautious—I killed three other men in that time. They kept trying to find some way to adapt the system or adapt me to the system. I was too valuable to waste—a mindreader who could read the enemy’s secrets and memories and then fry him with a touch! A perfect assassin, if only I could be made fit for the task.

“In the meantime, they left me to my waveform experiments, my little hobby, in the classroom by myself day after day, setting off Bunsen burners across the room or making my hand merge with the desk.”

“What?”

He looked at me quizzically and then laughed. “Oh! Yeah, it’s—” And he placed his hand onto the card table between us and closed his eyes until the hand sank into the desk, until his arm just led to the desk and stopped there. I was gaping at it when he opened his eyes. “You have any change? A dime or a quarter or something?”

I had a two-dollar bill in my pocket. I always have it there. I know they still print them but I told myself it was lucky when I got it so it is. “Something,” I answered.

“My fingers are under the table—give me what you’ve got.”

I had to look under the table. There were fingers there, wiggling down out of the surface. I couldn’t help it—I reached out and grabbed at the fingers.

“Ow!” he yelped and I jumped back. He huffed at me. “They’re real, yes. If you pull on them, it hurts.”

He held his other hand up in the air, pointed at me. “Remember what I do to people that hurt me, okay?” He looked serious for a split-second and then flashed the best smile he could. “Just kidding—I don’t do that anymore. Okay?” He looked at my hand—I had the two dollar bill scrunched down inside it. “So give me the change—I’ll give it back.”

I put my hand under the table and held the bill up against his fingers. He grabbed it away from me and slowly pulled the hand back up out of the glossy wood, the bill in his fingers. The corner was torn-off, just like it was when I first got it.

“Pretty good, eh?” he gloated and suddenly I could see that twelve-year-old boy alone in the lab who’d figured out a nifty magic trick to show off with. Except that, seeing that boy in his face, I knew finally that it wasn’t a trick, that he did no tricks, that he could do what he said he could do, that he was what he said he was. The trick made him happy.

All the powers I’d seen—the things a greedy, ambitious man would have coveted—those didn’t do anything for him. They seemed to depress him. Putting his hand through a desk and pulling out my two-dollar bill, that made him happy. It was a stupid, real moment. It was what I needed to know about him. I felt something inside me relax.

“It’s amazing,” I said.”What good is it?”

He laughed again—a sharp crack of a laugh, an exclamation, the laugh of someone who never expects to laugh.”Good? Nothing. If I lock my keys in the car, I don’t have to worry. Otherwise, it’s just a party trick.”

“So you finished your training,” I returned to the subject. “You were only twenty. What happened?”

“I was only twenty but I’m not history. History has its own timetable. By the time I learned to control myself, I was the dregs of a dying program in a dying country. The other experiments were long gone to embassies or assignments abroad—or asylums, if they didn’t handle the training. The funding dried up, our handlers were bringing the remaining two or three of us meals from their own kitchens.

“Understand,” he said, holding up his ring finger—it had a high school graduation ring on it, one of those silly rings nobody wears anymore, “I was raised to be an American. Maybe it was the Russian idea of America but generally, KGB was pretty good at it. Inside the facility, we watched Sesame Street and Beverly Hills 90210. I listened to the Police and Springsteen and Talking Heads—one of my teachers was big on Talking Heads. I read Thomas Paine and Jefferson, Twain and Bellow and Hunter Thompson. Like most immigrants, I know far more about America than most Americans.

“Of course, we were also taught about dialectical materialism and the inevitable march toward a communitarian world. But the training misfired in me. I was excited by the chaos of America, not the super-efficient Soviet state they told me about. If they’d let me out onto the street once in a while, maybe I wouldn’t have looked so far away for my chaos.

“But I fell in love with the idea of America, the crazy quilt of too many races and too many ideas all fighting for breath. Communism was an ideology—it had the right answer for every question and I didn’t believe in that. America sounded like Indiana Jones: ‘I’m making this up as I go.’ For a rebellious teenager, what could be better?

“So when they came—my babysitters—when they came one day and said ‘It’s time for you to go’, I said ‘Where? To do what?’ I’d gotten a little training and I was no longer a danger to anyone, but it was clear to me and to most of the handlers that I was just no use as a spy.” He laughed. “I’m just not the type. So I said ‘What’s my mission?’ and they said, ‘There’s no mission. There’s no one to spy for. The Soviet Union is over.’

 “Viktor, the head man, gave me a winter coat—I think it was his, it was about three sizes too big for me—and ten thousand rubles, whose value was precisely nothing and less than nothing the next day. And set me out onto the street all alone. I’d never wandered anywhere on my own before, not once in my whole life.

“Novosibirsk was a city—not Miami, not New York, but a big city, big enough for me to see what was happening. The money wasn’t worth anything. People continued to show up for work out of habit. There wasn’t even food on the black market. The police were up for hire—if you could pay them, in hard currency, they would protect you. Everything was for sale—everything. The fear and the despair in everyone’s heads—it was real ice-water for me, a cold shower, that this was the first real world I was let loose in.” He stopped, awkwardly. It was like he’d never really talked about this before.

“In the lab, I heard people’s thoughts but it was a controlled environment. We all had work to do. I knew from traces I’d picked up that things were getting difficult outside—everyone brings home to work and vice versa. But this was the first time I’d heard all those voices all at once and everyone in panic. It was…it was like being a child again, scared and alone and not really understanding anything that was happening. I wasn’t ready for real life, for how ugly it could be.”

He got up now and opened one of the sliding doors, hurriedly, like he had to get outside. A balcony stood under a retractable awning, hanging out over the edge of the cliff, a table with a few chairs standing against it and two potted plants going brown. The rain had let up and the streetlights were winking through the settling fog, showing off the contours of the canyon below. The hillside seemed to drop in tiers, first a shelf with trees, then a drop to another shelf, on and on unto infinity or at least unto town.

“I was out on the street overnight. That was all I could take. I have a little shame now for what I did—I could have stayed and tried to help my homeland—but I really doubt I could have done any good there. In truth, it didn’t feel like home. They brought me up to be an American. Freedom of speech, press, religion, the sexual revolution, mind-expanding drugs, Pearl Jam, Harrison Ford and Gwyneth Paltrow.

“I found a woman who would take me in that first night. The next morning, I broke back into the program. No one resisted—no one cared. If I’d asked politely, they probably would have given me what I took—my birthrights as a spy; several passports, social security numbers, drivers licenses, the records for my bank accounts at Chase Manhattan, the ones containing dollars that had been set up for me years earlier. The Soviet Union had collapsed and I felt like an American—where should I go?”

He sat back, waiting for me to supply a judgment, a conclusion.

“So now you’re an American,” I said.

“For almost twenty years,” he replied.

“Loyal to America,” I said but it was a question. “It’s what you were hoping it would be?”

“Hoping? This country? Hell, no. Who reads Jefferson—or Twain—here? Who
reads
in this country anymore? Russians read and debate all the time—they have fanatical debates about philosophical nothing. What is the price of a soul? Ask that on a street corner in Russia and take a seat for four hours—all you do is listen. Here, everything’s about money and celebrity, for its own sake, shallowness for shallowness sake, to no purpose. Real estate goes up and up and up even though everyone knows it’s overvalued—here, take a mortgage, no money down, no credit, no problem—and eventually it’ll crash, down and down even though everyone knows it’s land, it will never be worthless. The speculators make loads of money both ways and everyone else is miserable. It’s a gold rush—what could be more American?

“ No, this country is nothing like I hoped but I’m a true American now. I love what we stand for and hate what we do. I don’t file my taxes, I’m hung up on sex but I never get any and I don’t think much about freedom of speech, press or religion. And Harrison Ford hasn’t made a decent movie in years.” He looked down into the narrow infinity below and laughed.

“I’m not answering your question,” he said quietly. “This is a beautiful country but there’s lots of beautiful countries. There are good people and scumbags everywhere. Generally speaking, governments stink and religions stink and anything that tries to organize people into obedient groups stinks.

“My loyalty now is to Dave. He was a radical—he argued that this time, for the first time in history, human beings should
not
use a power they were given. That was a provocative thought but not one someone should die for. If America stands for anything good, it’s that guys like Dave can be their benign crackpot selves without being punished for it.”

“Maybe,” I said, feeling profound, “he meant you should use the power for a good purpose.” If it had been a movie, that would have been a key line. I could see Harrison Ford saying it.

Renn sighed and then coughed up a laugh. “I have a gift,” he replied, “that has no positive use. I can root out things people want hidden and force people to do things they don’t want to do. Where does positive fit in?” He went back into the living room and slid the door closed after I followed him in.

“And so, now I’ve told you my story. I’ve led you to a dangerous place and I’m not sure what the next step is. I don’t know who these people are who are after us now; I don’t know why they killed Dave. I know they aren’t going to give up—we’ve gone a long distance away and I can still feel them probing for us every few minutes, even here. I won’t keep you against your will and I wouldn’t blame you for bailing. If you want to, I’ll drop you in town in the morning.”

“They’ll torture me to get what I know about you.”