Out of Touch (43 page)

“Here, have some water first. To do this, you know, I think I have to set the words out of my mind. To be honest and try to understand, together, well . . .”

“It’s all right. I think I know.”

After they each drank some water, Sarah removed Aliana’s shoes and her own, trying to let the words slip from her mind. Her fingers hovered over the strap marks left by Aliana’s sandals. The cold from Aliana’s foot seemed to pull the warmth from Sarah’s hand. She took some lotion and began to stroke in curves, following the lines of Aliana’s feet, extending to toes, cuticles and nails. Giving touch, she felt the return pressure from flesh and bone and skin. Warmth flowed from her to cooler parts of Aliana but returned from warmer places. Sarah moved so their bodies touched along one side, and then she reached out with her mind, feeling touch as a pattern of pressure and warmth, but also as something more, something beyond words.

As Aliana reached out to her, Sarah’s senses opened to every nuance of Aliana’s touch, including the indirect sensations replaced and reinforced, along tiny hairs on face and neck.

For Sarah, the use of her physical body wove seamlessly with the invisible touch from her mind. The smoothness and warmth of Aliana’s skin, the response of muscles beneath, and the reactions shown in sighs, caught breath, and pulse—those became all of Sarah’s awareness. She let go of time, the world outside, ideas, and worries. She held herself firmly in contact only with the moment and with Aliana, who seemed almost a part of herself. She let herself feel everything.

When words finally returned to her, the glade was growing dark. Sarah’s head rested on Aliana’s stomach. Aliana’s hand was threaded through her hair.

The part of Sarah that valued discretion considered their present appearance, whether anything that might upset them afterward had happened, and whether anyone might have seen. It was like gazing back on a dream. Their clothes were still basically in place, though Sarah could remember the feel of Aliana’s skin beneath the palm of her hand while the gauzy smooth blouse slid across her knuckles. Her skin was a memory of touch layered on previous touches, and so in some way was her other sense of touch, the part she used for telekinesis. Nothing overtly sexual or painful had happened, but some of it wasn’t what she’d expected, wasn’t what she’d known of herself before. Sarah realized that anything the two of them chose to do together would have been all right, because they’d both been communicating more precisely than they ever had before. Whether anyone from the household might have noticed them was beyond what Sarah’s myopic memories could answer. Defiantly, she told herself that shouldn’t matter either.

It was at this point that the music coming from the house registered on her increasingly verbal thoughts. Aliana must have been aware too, because for the first time in hours she spoke.

“There’s something more I don’t understand. If you can feel this, create this with touch, why do you hardly ever touch anyone?”

“I think, since childhood, I’ve been on the edge of this every single day. And until now, there was no one else to feel it with me.”

There was a longer pause than usual between spoken messages. Then Aliana asked, “Do you want to go in for dinner?”

“Not really.”

Aliana curled around Sarah and pulled the sleeping bag over to keep them warm.

The next evening Sarah was almost late for dinner. She’d been exploring the beach and felt sticky all over from the salty spray. Usually, she tried to be early, so she could sit at an empty table and let others chose to sit with her or not. Tonight everyone had turned up for dinner and there was only one space left. So Sarah found herself at a table where all the rest fancied themselves writers. She wasn’t sure if they were all mind readers other than her, but they were polite enough to speak aloud during the meal.

Nonetheless, Sarah’s mind drifted. She noted the tables in the room where no one spoke aloud, and tried to remember who sat there so she wouldn’t intrude on them in the future. She tried to memorize names and talents. Someone across the room said “full moon tonight” and “renew the energy again.” Sarah tried to hear more of that conversation, but couldn’t piece together the half-heard words through the mumbling accent.

Then she made the mistake of finishing her stew and biscuits before the more talkative members of her table, and probably meaning to be polite, one of them tried to involve her in their topic. “Have you done any writing?”

“Not fiction,” she answered, “I never think up stories. Guess I’m not creative that way.” She thought of Reggie and how he was always dragging her into some fiction of his own.

“Of course you’re creative. All our kind are creative. Where does your mind take you that other people’s don’t?”

Sarah wished she’d made her previous answer shorter. All she could think of was the night before with Aliana, the complete lack of words, which she certainly wasn’t able to talk about. “In college, they said I was good at spotting researcher’s misassumptions. But I was studying anthropology, and while the profs and students all assumed I was like them, I never believed any of them were like me.”

“Well, that’s probably a form of creativity.” The questioner gave a cut off chuckle and a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, then let the conversation drift away.

After dinner, Sarah helped clear tables, fold down leaves, and move things to their non-mealtime places. She was about to slip off for a shower to remove the ocean grit when Doug, the one who always wore white, entered in a long, flowing, and of course, white robe. It looked like something a monk would wear, though his long brown hair and multiple braids gave him a sort of new age ambiance.

The room was suddenly quiet. Doug opened the door and walked out. Everyone else fell in line behind him. Sarah was just wondering whether she was meant to go along when Oliver jerked his head to motion her toward him, and by the time she reached him, there was little choice but to follow out the door.

In the moonlit darkness outside, with the noise of wind and waves, the human silence seemed less oppressive. Oliver whispered, “Movers always go first, after the Druid,” and Sarah noticed that the people ahead of them were the ones she’d mostly known were movers. And Doug must be “the Druid.” Once again she was glad her thoughts could not be heard, because her knee-jerk reaction to the term was not entirely tolerant. Still, his white robe made him easy to follow across the dark field.

Once in the woods, they formed a tight circle nearly shoulder to shoulder, just a few yards from where she and Aliana lay the day before. But now there was a rectangular pit, a shallow grave surrounded by four tidy piles of dirt. Running down a tree, across the ground, and into the pit was a metal reinforced plastic tube. From the work she’d done on her mother’s house, Sarah identified it as conduit. But there were no wires inside this tube, just an empty hole.

The lower end of the conduit rested on top of a sleeping bag, a rather light-weight mummy bag made of blue nylon. It was lying on the bottom of the pit, about three feet below ground level. As Doug pulled forward the hood of his cloak and began to chant in some language Sarah couldn’t place at all, the last mind readers from the colony arrived, making the circle complete. Sarah glanced furtively around, trying to think like an anthropologist and not laugh at Druidic rites involving conduit and camping gear.

Expressions ranged from expectant to bored. Doug was the only one with the relaxed expression she associated with religion or meditation. It disappeared the moment he finished chanting. He set his jaw in a matter of fact smile, reached behind him for a tan linen bag, and pulled out something that looked remarkable like a mouth-to-mouth resuscitation mask. He handed it to the woman next to him, the first mover in line. She crossed to a corner of the pit, between two piles of dirt, and jumped onto the foot of the sleeping bag. Then she shimmied into the bag and attached her little plastic breather mask to the long tube of conduit. She lay back, put the mask on her face so she could breath through the tube with the plastic cup covering her mouth, and pulled a drawstring to bring the sleeping bag in tight around the tube, completely hiding her from view.

Suddenly, dirt from all four piles flowed into the pit. A wooden board from under the dirt now flopped on top of the loose packing. The four nearest people stepped forward onto the board and then off again, and the board flopped back as the four piles of dirt neatly dug themselves up out of the hole, leaving the mummy bag almost completely clean.

Sarah realized her mouth was open and closed it. Her heart was racing with surprise, though she knew she should have expected it. They were applying pressure to keep their powers working, just as she had done twice for Aliana. Who knew it could be done with dirt? But why bother with this ritual when they had movers standing by doing the work anyway? Or was the dirt just misdirection and the movers were what really made the difference?

As other movers took their turns in the pit, Sarah’s mind split off into anthropological suppositions about how this ritual had begun. How long ago? Was there a blanket and a reed tube before the modern gear came into play? Had this been a real Druidic ritual back before the Catholics came to Ireland? And if so, had people kept it going all those years or lost it and rediscovered its usefulness?

Sarah only cut loose from her web of thoughts as Doug handed her a clean breathing mask and motioned her toward the pit. She did her best to place herself just as the others had. She felt sticky and ridiculous as she scooted down into the sleeping bag. Pulling the drawstring reminded her of how she’d tried to wrap herself up, even before she’d discovered telekinesis and learned to do this mentally.

The pressure of the dirt and of people stepping on the board felt amusingly familiar. There was a sense of cold, either from the earth or from the dampness of her own sweat. And the pressure was a bit greater than what Sarah applied herself. There was a moment of tense fear as Sarah realized she couldn’t move and this wasn’t something she’d done to herself. But she instantly knew she could teek her way out even from this bound position, and she pitied the non-teeks who had to endure such vulnerability. Then the dirt was off of her and she removed herself from the sleeping bag and was given a hand up from the pit. The teek who had gone first, held out a bag for her to drop the used breathing mask in. Overall, it was a well-run operation, and she hadn’t even gotten dirty. 

Sarah looked up just in time to see Oliver ostentatiously connect his breathing apparatus and pull the string on the sleeping bag completely by telekinesis. Well, he was only sixteen and a tad bit proud after all. Sarah helped push the dirt in and out, realizing that was probably why all the teeks were up front together. By the end of the night, it would add up to a lot of work. So she did her part as they passed around the circle, with Doug taking his turn last. The Druid brought the sleeping bag out with him and pulled up the conduit. Sarah thought he looked sweetly absurd and anachronistic. Then the movers pressed the dirt back into the pit and the group wandered quietly, but casually, toward the house.

Once inside, everyone stayed in the main room. A fiddler who often played before dinner picked a tune they could have danced to, but no one danced. Instead people sat down together, leaning up against one another, lacing arms around shoulders or waists. The two couches in the room, over by the fire, filled first. But people pulled chairs together or sat on the floor such that they could be close while listening to the music.

Sarah thought of Aliana, and how she described her sense of touch as strongest shortly after Sarah created her cocoon. Were all these people feeling that? People here were always quite familiar with each other. There was a fair amount of casual touching all day, as one might see in some families. But while Sarah had gathered there was general tolerance for anyone’s intimate choices or degree of promiscuity, she’d rarely seen people leaning against each other or cuddling in public.

Looking around the room now, some couples or groups were definitely employing their heightened sense of touch. Perhaps, these people were now more like her than any group she’d ever known. Yet she felt completely alienated, her sensitivity no different than it usually was, her beliefs about touch still deeply her own. And she barely knew most of these people. The days of silence and embarrassment a week ago still stung of violation.

Aliana touched her knee, and Sarah actually jumped. The fiddler had given way to someone with a guitar who was singing folk songs from before any of them were born. Sarah tried to relax her muscles and couldn’t.

“Easy,” Aliana whispered. “Do you want me not to touch you?”

Sarah said, “No,” when what she really meant was, “Not here with all these strangers around.” But Aliana’s brow wrinkled and Sarah knew she’d hurt her feelings.

“Do you want me to stay with you tonight?” Aliana asked.

“Do what you want. You don’t need to worry about me.”

Aliana remained beside her for a while, but Sarah mostly ignored her as she watched the rest of the room and wondered if she could ever really belong with these people. She barely even noticed that some woman had come to sit beside Aliana and was gradually becoming more and more familiar.

“You don’t care if I go?” Aliana asked, quite a while later when Doug was taking a turn making music on some smaller cousin of a bagpipe.