Mindbenders Read online

Three

  We drove for about ten miles and nobody said a thing.

  “Okay, tell me what the fuck’s going on,” I burst finally.

  “You don’t need to know,” Dulles said.

  “They would have arrested him too.”

  “Nobody’s getting arrested.”

  “What the hell—I’m just a vessel anyway.” Dulles shot me a look and swiveled in his seat, which would have flipped me out if I hadn’t already seen him drive with his eyes closed.

  “You’re fortunate to be a vessel. Everything you know about us can be used to hurt you.” He turned to Tauber. “If you’re so concerned about his welfare, you tell him—am I lying?”

  “No,” Tauber said, his face reddening. “That’s true.”

  “If they catch us at this point, you can claim you’re a hostage. Once you know what’s going on, that excuse goes out the window.”

  “Why? How would they know what you told me if I don’t tell them?”

  “These people would know.”

  “How?”

  He threw his hand in the air. “If I answer that, I have to answer the rest. It’s no good.”

  “I have to know,” I said and I meant it. I’d been stuck away in the Everglades for a year or more and what was the point of knowing anything there? But now, I was loose in the world again and all that was left of the reporter I’d once been was the hunger to know. To know what, in this case, I hadn’t a clue—hunger’s unthinking, whether for food or sex. Or knowledge. Whatever is hidden in my sight must be uncovered. I had to know.

  “What about the landlady? You weren’t at any party with her. You didn’t get into her dress.”

  “That was a lie,” Max said, relieved that it was.

  “No, it’s a lie if you knew there was a party and pretended you were there. How did you even know there was a party?”

  I turned to Tauber. “Did she wear a green dress?” He nodded. “Was there a pocket inside?” He shrugged.

  I turned back to Mr. Dulles. “If he doesn’t know, how do you? Is she some kind of enemy agent?”

  Tauber burst out laughing. “God help the country that employs her.” He turned to Max. “You’ve got to let him in.”

  Max scowled. “You know the answer. You got most of it while I was talking to her.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What were you thinking—back then, while we were talking?”

  I tried to take myself back, to recover what was going on in my head at the time. “I knew you were lying.”

  “Right and that’s good,” he grinned. Most people don’t get all happy when you catch them lying, but I’d gotten over expecting anything sensible out of him. “But, after that? When I told her about the party? When I mentioned the green dress?”

  “I got confused then. I couldn’t figure out—”

  “Don’t do that,” he jumped. “These are rationalizations you made up after the fact. What did you think right then? In the moment?”

  I tried to remember. I fished back for the look on the landlady’s face right then, her confusion—and for the expectant, offering expression on his face at the same time. “I was thinking…I was thinking you were reading…what to say…”

  “How?” he encouraged, like he knew what was coming.

  “Like you were reading it off her face.” It felt stupid to say it. It didn’t make any sense, but it was what I’d been thinking.

  “Good! Except I couldn’t read a green dress off the expression on her face, could I?” Was he making fun of me? It wouldn’t have been the first time.

  “I’m not making fun,” he added a second later and I shivered even before I realized I hadn’t said it out loud. “Gregor, you did great. You got as much of it as you could. You just explained it away instead of accepting the strangeness of what you knew.” He was giving me the stare but this time, the back of my skull was just tingling, not burning. “I couldn’t read a green dress in her expression, could I?”

  “No.”

  “So where’s the only place I could have gotten it?” His eyes were as big as the moon over the Gulf, when it’s clipping the horizon, shimmering the size of a container ship.

  “Just tell him,” Tauber interrupted.

  “No! It’s crucial that he knows what he knows!” Mr. Dulles spit, suddenly fierce. “Don’t worry about making sense. Don’t worry about sounding foolish. You know the answer. Know what you know. Take ownership of what your senses are telling you, even if it flies in the face of everything you believe. Where did I get the information? Where’s the only place I could have gotten it?”

  “Her head.” It burped out of me the same as the agent names, the same way I’d known where the box was in Dave’s office—autopilot, no thought behind the words, presentation before understanding.

  “That’s it,” he said. “You’ve got it,” as though everything was settled.

  “Got what? What have I got?”

  “We read minds, son,” Tauber answered, with a weary smile. “It’s what they paid us for, for a while.”

  “Oh, come on,” I moaned. It was such a comedown, after thinking they were going to explain. Tauber shrugged so I turned back to Mr. Dulles. “Okay, fine—read my mind,” I demanded.

  “Jesus, give me a break, I’m not a carnival barker.” I just stared back. If he could read minds, let him do it or shut up.

  “Okay, you’re thinking that I can’t read your mind, of course. You’re thinking you never trusted me, even when I hung around Dave’s because I wouldn’t play cards and I didn’t really take part in things. You’re thinking about the Burger King billboard when we got off the highway—you’re not really hungry but you want a Double Whopper with Cheese anyhow. There’s a part of your mind that’s singing ‘I Want to be Sedated’ and there’s a part that’s still in Fallujah, in a firefight. The machine guns and rockets are echoing in the background behind everything else.”

  “I’m not in Fallujah,” I said but he turned back to driving without a reply. It took a few seconds to hear them—the guns, the rockets, the shouting and screaming and all the rest, everything he’d described, all there, all at once, once I listened. I realized I didn’t really listen a whole lot. Especially to the Fallujah part. I didn’t want to listen to that.

  “Don’t be stubborn,” Mr. Dulles said. “You saw me do it with the landlady and you knew it for what it was. Your rational mind resists but your instinct knew, right then and there—he’s reading it in her face. That’s what you told yourself and you were 90% right. A minute ago, when I told you I wasn’t making fun of you—you hadn’t accused me out loud. I’ve done that several times before, though maybe not so openly.” He leaned in and I waited for my head to heat up but he only wanted to talk. “The most important thing is: you knew. You not only knew I was reading the landlady, you knew she damned her memory that she couldn’t remember me. You knew when Mark was standing at the peephole of his door. You knew he was still drunk from the night before.”

  “I could hear him slurring,” I said. I shrugged, apologetic, in Tauber’s direction and he shrugged back. I’ve known other people over the years who drank from habit—after a while, their dignity gets pretty flexible.

  “Some people slur all the time,” Max said. “Some people have speech impediments. You weren’t guessing—you knew.”

  “What are you saying—I’m a mindreader?”

  “I’m saying everybody mindreads,” he answered. “Almost everybody. They’re just primitive about it. This is scientific fact, not fact published in medical journals, but fact nonetheless, science that’s been distributed for years in manila envelopes, hand to hand in code to those with a need to know. And if it’s ever published, if the New England Journal of Medicine ever provides an acceptable rationale, mindreading will be routine in three years.” He tapped the steering wheel as he talked and I realized we were in a moving car, on the highway again. I’d gotten so drawn in I’d lost all sense of the world, of where we were.

/>   “You mean we’d all be doing what you just did?”

  “Hell no,” Tauber shook his head. “That’s like sayin’ anyone could paint the Mona Lisa if you give ‘em paint and canvas. Some people’ll do it better and quicker.” He looked at Max. “He’s very quick.”

  “Most of them would justify their wishful thinking and call it mindreading,” Max said. He looked over to see if I was satisfied.

  I was nowhere near satisfied. This was without a doubt the most ridiculous explanation of anything I’d ever been asked to swallow. There was not one thing about it that felt slightly real—except that it did explain every weird thing that had happened since morning. Once I took the whole thing in wide-angle, I realized I had to either doubt everything that had happened since Dave was shot or this was the best explanation I could think of. It was the only explanation that didn’t force me to doubt my own sanity any more than usual.

  “When you first told her about the check, she wasn’t convinced. She didn’t want to check on it. You made her.”

  “Bravo,” Mr. Dulles said. “Good work. Yes, I made her.”

  “The job was readin’ minds and planting thoughts in other people’s minds,” Tauber explained. “He made her think checkin’ was her idea.”

  Mr. Dulles grimaced. “I still think we should stop,” he said, talking to Tauber. “Beyond this, he becomes an asset—for whoever’s out there.”

  “He might pick it up himself—he’s a bit of a sponge,” Tauber said, talking about me(!). He gave Mr. Dulles a moment to protest, then returned my way. “Memory’s real sensual. Once you’ve got that real good mental connection with somebody, you share whatever they’re thinkin’. Not just thinkin’ really—sights, sounds, smells—you can pull all kinds o’ stuff outta their heads. Or you can make ‘em see things that aren’t there, say things you want ‘em to say, things you want ‘em to believe. It gets pretty comical sometimes.”

  “That’s enough,” Mr. Dulles said but Tauber’s eyes were bright.

  “The thing is, once you make that connection, it’s not like you’re in ‘em, it’s like you’re them. You not only know what happened, you know how it felt.” He was rising up in the back seat now, the power of the thing carrying him, like an addict remembering his first fix, when he felt like he was touching God—hell, when he felt like he was God.

  “And then ya feed it back to ‘em—into their minds—with all those feelings attached and it breezes by every gut check, every guidepost the mind puts up to vet information. It feels like they’re rememberin’. O’course, you add in some suggestions o’ yer own to tip the balance a bit.”

  He smiled again, amazed at this nasty, awful achievement. He turned to Max. “But I’ve never known anyone who could do it so damn fast!”

  We headed out onto the highway. The afternoon was waning—every once in a while, a little breeze actually cut through that hotbox car. I was trying to decide if I was any better off for having the explanation.

  “How did Dave die?” Tauber asked.

  “I told you—shot by three mindbenders, country unknown.”

  “When did you get there?”

  “Right after,” I said, which only deepened the lines on Tauber’s forehead.

  Mr. Dulles reddened. “Dave said he’d been getting probed for a month. He told me something was up but I didn’t believe him.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I wasn’t getting probed.”

  “What’s probed?” I asked. If they were mindreaders, why didn’t they know I had no clue what they were talking about?

  “Your mind transmits. Your thoughts have a physical dimension.”

  “Like molecules?”

  “Particles and waves, vibrations, frequencies that can be tuned and amplified. The transmission can also, to some extent, be tracked. I know your base frequency now. If you were arrested, I could follow you from several miles away to the police station.”

  “So when an agent’s nearby and ya don’t know his frequency,” Tauber said, “ya probe for it. Ya send out a signal that hits a bunch o’ frequencies and see if it gets a response.”

  “And what do you do about it?”

  “There are ways to combat it,” Dulles said. “You change your frequency or muffle your signal. You move around the time sequence. Or, sometimes, you catch the probe and follow it back to the originator, to locate whoever’s searching for you.”

  Tauber stared at Max. “You’re saying ya still get probed?”

  “A couple times a year,” Max admitted and it was clear they both felt this was significant. “There are people who…want me to work for them. Doing jobs I have no desire to do. When they get annoying, I disappear. Dave was my safe haven. But when he asked me for help, I told him there was nothing to it, because if I wasn’t getting probed, nobody was getting probed.”

  He slumped a bit in his seat. “I’ll take you to this Miriam Fine,” he continued, “and you can figure out what to do from there.”