Mindbenders (6 page)

He pointed to our left. “The man over here traveled three hundred miles to a specialist; he’s getting the results tomorrow morning. He has cancer—I can feel it in him. I can visualize the tumor, though I don’t know the name of the organ that’s hosting it.” And as he talked, it was like the wall dissolved away and I saw the guy lounging on the bed in the next room, eerie content, leafing through sales brochures like nothing was wrong in the world. “Is he thinking about cancer? No. Living a better life? No. He’s thinking:
Plasma or LCD? Plasma can burn-in
; that really concerns him. He’s dwelling on it. He won’t live long enough to pay the thing off.”

“Which isn’t a bad reason to buy one,” I said. “He’s scared.”

He turned in the other direction and that wall faded away, leaving a mousy blonde in a negligee and a real unhappy expression, close enough I felt I could reach over and touch her. “On
this
side, Ulna from Orangeburg is waiting for her brother-in-law Rick to get back from the office. She asked Rick for a loan to keep her house out of foreclosure. Rick’s doing way better than Ulna and her husband—Early, that’s the husband. Ulna and Early—you can’t make this stuff up. Rick’s always been a little too friendly and now she’s waiting for him at the motel, ready to be friendly herself. She’ll get the loan—she’s a determined girl. Another little everyday tragedy. You know what she’s thinking? Over and over?” He began to sing in a weirdly-pitched voice:

It's like you're always stuck in second gear,
Well, it hasn't been your day, your week, your month, or even your year.
But, I'll be there for you, when the rain starts to pour.
I'll be there for you…

 And then, all at once,
all
the walls dropped away. For a few moments, the whole hotel became visible, stacks of rooms full of people, arguing and ignoring one another, watching TV and fucking, eating McDonalds take-out with the kids, counting money or emptying liquor bottles in glee or misery. And all of them saying one thing and thinking another, or a couple anothers. The first second was overwhelming; after ten seconds, I thought my head would split open. I had my hands over my ears when he realized what was happening and made the voices go away. When he continued a second later, his voice was soft, like he was trying to cut me a break.

“As for the rest?
I’m getting old. This is someone else’s fault
—fill in the blank as to who.
Why is my husband/wife/boss/past such a bitch? I want to be happy but I’m afraid to change
. Sometimes you get a bundle of ambiguous regret:
I wish he was dead. Do I really want to take out a mortgage with him? But the rate is really low.
” He laughed his deep, scraping laugh. “Believe me, I’m making it sound better than it is.” He sat on the edge of the cot, which sagged like he weighed a whole lot more than he looked. “Other people’s thoughts are amazingly banal—what makes them meaningful are the feelings attached.”

“But Tauber said you feel things, like you’re inside the other person.”

“Oh, I feel
everything
,” he replied. “So what? Nobody feels one clear, simple feeling at a time. We know what we want to do and twenty reasons it won’t work, all at once. The woman’s too good for us; if only she was more like Angelina Jolie.
She loves me-she loves me not
isn’t doggerel; it’s the persistent state of the human mind.

“I spent ten minutes once, standing within three feet of one of the world’s billionaires, easy pickings, homed in on him completely. I could have stopped his heart on the spot, given him cancer, shot sparks from his fingers. His conscious mind never let up the whole time:
Build this, talk to so-and-so about that, the deadlines have to be tightened, appease the regulators, after this step, the next step is
…The entire time, without letup, just one level below, a high, sing-song voice kept chanting in his head,
You’ll die in the gutter, you’ll die screaming in the gutter
, like a schoolyard chant.

This is how
everybody
works. And from this swamp, I’m supposed to pull facts, make life-and-death decisions. So yes, I hear things but it’s a very limited gift.”

He pushed a couple of vanes apart and stared out into the light. If he could drive with his eyes closed, this had to be a symbolic move. “Meanwhile,” he breathed, deep and low, “there are people out there who mean to do us harm.”

“You feel them? Are they close?”

“No,” he said. “Not yet. But the guys this morning were part of an organization. Whatever country they’re from will be scrambling tomorrow.” He glanced at Tauber for a moment and then back to me with a look of concern on his face. “Let’s not mention the details of this morning to him, okay? Not till we know him better.” I nodded. I wasn’t sure how I’d explain sparks flying from his fingers anyhow.

He held his hands in front of him, about eight inches apart. “Have you ever meditated?” he asked, sitting on the floor again, his hands about eight inches apart in front of him, palms raised.

“Dave used to ask me to,” I admitted. “I wasn’t much good at it.”

“I need you to practice—it’s the first step toward protecting yourself,” he counseled. He gestured and I set my hands up in front of me like his. “Okay, just let yourself feel it—good, you’re there quickly, that’s helpful. You feel the vibration? Right now, it’s very limited—you haven’t taken control of it. But it’s a harmonic, a frequency. Harmonics bind matter together—all matter. If you can learn to feel the frequencies, to distinguish one from another, eventually you’ll be able to adjust them. And once you can do that, you’ll be able to affect everything around you.”

“
Me
?” I screeched. I screech when I’m nervous—it’s a bad old habit.

“Better you than someone else,” he warned.

“I’m not a mindreader.”

 “You couldn’t
explain
what was happening and you don’t like that feeling,” he said. “But you
knew
anyway.” He smiled his gargoyle smile. “You have had the privilege, thus far, of not knowing what you know. My job will be to deprive you of this privilege.”

~~~~

Four

I hear the crackle in the middle of my head.
Tango Seven—multiple events in your vector, last five minutes. Exercise caution.
Sound is a vibration. This vibration grows, echoes, deeper, shimmying through me. We’ve been waiting for action since we started staging. We’re soldiers, we joined up, no one made us. We want to fight. We want to prove ourselves, to find out who we are when the air bends and the fire fills us. We crossed the border two days ago and we’ve spent two days driving, swallowing pills, driving some more and sitting out a sandstorm that lasted six hours where nobody could sleep cause we kept saying to each other,
They know this stuff and we don’t—when it stops, they’ll be on us in a minute
but they weren’t and then driving driving some more, past blown-out buildings and blown-out tanks and my headphones screaming.

The waiting is killing. No more waiting. Fight. Fight now. That’s what I want because I don’t know what else to want. And then, without transition, we’re fighting. I hear the CRACK!! over the music and the Humvee right in front of  us bounces into the air like a milk carton somebody kicked and we’re almost on top of it by the time we stop. It’s in the narrowest place, of course, wedged between two cinder block walls set close together, between two neighborhoods that hate each other and both hate us and we’re bogged down, nowhere to go, can’t get around it.

Man Down! Man Down
! Monroe is shrieking into the headset and we see the Vee behind us drive right up and Shumwalt the medic jump out to help but he isn’t there more than ten seconds before he’s rushing back to his mount, shaking his head like it’s detached.

The wait, the wait, the wait, the wait
.

I shut off the music, not that it matters much—the gunfire is louder than the headphones all the way up, loud enough to wake the dead. In which case, start with the medic—his head is severed by rounds from three different directions and then blown sky high by a rocket that takes out his Humvee, throwing it six or seven feet in the air and crushing it against one of the cinder block walls. Some guys scramble out—how are they alive?—they get five or six steps before being cut down. There’s too much fire from all over. These guys have guns and lots of them.

Half a second later, we’re in the crosshairs. The door and windows of our truck are pounded with bullets. It’s built for that, we’ve been told a hundred times but so many are coming at once that I watch the panel buckling right in front of me, puffing like the wrapper around the popcorn in the microwave. I’m embedded, the writer, the carry-along, an extra, an amusement most times, a burden at the moment. I have a gun in my belt but it might as well be a cap pistol.

We’ve got to move—Ram it!
Monroe tells Gunner, the driver. If his name is Gunner, why isn’t he the fucking gunner, dammit? Nonetheless, Monroe says
Ram it
so Gunner puts the thing in gear but then all at once, there’s a different banging on the doors, banging and screaming—two of the guys from the medic Vee want in.
Get us out of here!
I hear someone screaming and Philips opens his door at the same time Grover opens his. Just in time for the poor son-of-a-bitch on Philips side to get riddled six or seven times in his vest—not dead but knocked over and that saves him and us.

For just a second, everything slows down as the guys on the end lean out to pull the two grunts into the Vee. I’m sitting, staring out the windshield, a dazed drugged-up sedation case and my eyes widen as up the road on the other side of the burning Humvee crawls a
bus
. The local town bus, the rattle-trap skinny-tire flaking-paint Fallujah regular city bus, low-cost rapid transit fucking bus on its rounds, following its route, the driver doing his usual civil service job of looking exactly ten yards ahead of him and no more. And now he’s opening his doors at the bus stop—which just happens to be in the middle of a firefight. And as the doors are open on both sides of our Humvee and a thousand rounds are flying at us and Gunner is about to drive right over the flaming fucking Vee in front of us to get out of here, I see a procession of
soldiers in uniform filing neatly off the bus
. Like they paid their fare downtown and waited politely with their guns for twenty stops from there to the war. And now they’re lined up, joining the rest of the warring neighborhood factions, shooting at us while the last two start setting up a rocket launcher and aiming it right at
me
.

“Gunner GO!!!” I yell and Gunner puts the thing in gear as they haul the last soldier in through Grover’s door. Right then, Philips takes a round right in the neck that spurts all over the cab and he slumps to the floor. The rest of us all lean over to grab him and pull him up. At that instant, I hear a sharp hiss and raise my head a fraction, a millimeter, a milli-millimeter or whatever’s smaller than anything—and see a rocket, the one launched by the bus soldiers, hovering right in front of my nose, passing so slow, so slow I can read the serial number on the side, right through the cab of our Humvee, screaming in one door, across the aisle between front seat and back and then out the other door without touching a thing, a person, anyone or anything. It explodes against the cinder block wall, happily about five yards behind us as we jump the other Hummer. My nose is singed black for a week. It’s three days before I can hear much of anything, even Metallica. But Gunner hit the pedal at the right time and we will live, at least a little longer.

~~~~

And then I woke in a sweat and Tauber was creaking back and forth with a cup of evil-smelling coffee, singing some classic rock song I knew I’d heard but didn’t really recognize. And Max was seated on the edge of my bed, worried face taking me in. And I knew he’d shaken me awake. He was dressed pretty neatly and had even brushed his hair, for all the good it did.

“You’ll want a shower after the day you had,” he said. “And the night.” My dreams were already fading. He probably remembered a whole lot more of them than I did. “You should start getting ready,” he urged softly.

When I came out of the shower, they were both staring at the TV, rapt. “…Matthews, the chairman of Mainline Technologies, a security contractor—”

“I know Mainline,” I said. “They were everywhere in Iraq,” and  all at once they were both staring at me like I had pox.

“—had just walked out of  merger negotiations with the L Corporation of  Herndon, Virginia—”

“Also spooks, I’ll bet,” Tauber said. “It’s the right neighborhood,” and Max nodded.

“Authorities at the two companies were unable to explain why the helicopter pilot turned into a water tower instead of following his flight plan.”

Video flickered on the screen. “It’s bullshit,” Max said immediately. “Look at his face,” he said. “He’s looking where he’s going. He went on purpose.”

“Which doesn’t mean he meant to,” Tauber said drily.

Max nodded. “He was ‘persuaded’.”

“By who?” I asked.

“Let’s see,” Tauber considered, “what country would want to knock off our security contractors? Name the top six.”

“No,” Max shook his head. “The question is, who’d be interested in knocking off the head of Mainline, sabotaging the Mayor of Copenhagen and a nuclear powerplant in New York State? When you’ve figured
that
out, then you’ve got something.”

“Controversy grew today over the proposal for nuclear disarmament raised by Aryana Singh, the new Indian Premier. An attempted no-confidence vote in the Indian Parliament was disrupted by several dozen demonstrators inside the chambers and an estimated group of more than 10,000 outside. Sizeable demonstrations took place in London, Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris and Tokyo.”

“What did Mainline do in Iraq?” Max asked.

“Everything,” I answered. “Bodyguards for the VIP’s, they ran the food concessions at the bases, they brought fuel in from Kuwait.”