Mindbenders Read online

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  We drove quiet for a long time. We’d had an outburst of talking and now we were done spent—yeah, we were spent. I liked the sound of that—it’s a better word. Words were beginning to come back to me, at least that one did. After the year I’d had, a trickle felt like a downpour.

  A moment later the trickle started, like I had triggered the reality by thinking the word. Raindrops appeared on the windshield. A few moments later, the downpour was pounding the roof, slithering in the slipstream across the windows, a mad river curdling the pebbly ground along the road, a full-fledged sky-dump. Words have power—who said that?

  It quickly got too much for driving. “We have to stop,” Max said and pulled off at the next exit. It was a strip mall of motels—you could see the chain signs buzzing over the treetops miles away. Five sprawling motels in an overlit shiny row, room rates a dollar apart, separated by gas stations with prices varying by three cents a gallon. We pulled into the furthest parking lot, the one with deep woods behind it and took a double room with a cot for the third man. As soon as we’d dropped our stuff inside, Tauber told Max, “Lend me ten bucks out of the stash—I’ve got some personal maintenance issues.”

  “Lend?” Max asked.

  “Tomorrow, you set me loose with a shopping cart and other people’s garbage; you’ll see how much money I can make. At the moment, I’m without the tools of the trade.” Max gave him some money and he was back in a few minutes with a bottle of cheap bourbon. I hadn’t even seen a liquor store but I guess he had radar.

  “You could buy decent booze,” Max said. “We’re not broke.”

  “I don’t want decent booze,” Tauber replied. “Ye’ll spoil me.”

  “So who gets the cot?” I asked. “Should we draw cards?”

  “You’d get rooked, son,” Tauber laughed. “Reading cards is how they check if you’ve got the power.”

  “I don’t sleep much anyway,” Max said. “I’ll take the cot.”

  Tauber had the bottle drained in fifteen minutes. He started singing after that—not loud but not good either and Max flipped on the TV in self-defense. A few minutes later, Tauber was dead asleep. Max went to wash up. I settled onto the other bed and stared at the tube. I would have stared at anything that moved at that point.

  The news stations were running tributes to the Indian Premier, or they would have been tributes if anybody had anything nice to say about him. The people interviewed were stepping carefully, trying to be respectful without outright lying. And then there was the daughter, Aryana Singh, serene and focused, Western makeup and a very stylish white head covering.

  “I have been thrust into a situation I could never have foreseen. As head of my father’s party, I will be Premier of India until elections are held. In the interim, I am beholden to nothing but my own conscience and my father’s memory.”

  Usually, that was about as much politician as I could stand, but, this time, I kept listening. There was something in her voice, the ring of a real person struggling to handle the curves, the way we all have to. I felt sorry for her, tell the truth. Politician is a bad job if you have any instinct for being real.

  “In today’s world, danger comes not simply from rival states but from all sorts of enemies in the shadows, organizations that seize power without accepting the responsibility that comes with it. Organizations that use fear to corrupt.

  “To break the cycle, we must first stop measuring power by the damage we can visit on others. I have ordered the High Command to prepare to dismantle all of India’s nuclear warheads. My father was invited to the G8 Conference on Monday; I shall go in his place and propose that all countries holding nuclear weapons agree to dismantle theirs as well. India will be first if the others agree to follow.”

  Max came out of the bathroom in time to hear the back end of her statement. “Is this a mindbender thing?” I asked. “It’s pretty freaky.”

  He shook his head immediately. “This gives people hope,” he answered. “Governments don’t pay for hope.” He stared at the TV for a moment. “It is odd,” he admitted, heading back to the bathroom.

  The head of the opposition party called for Singh’s immediate resignation, followed by the Russians, English and US State Department spokespersons rejecting her offer and the Pakistanis calling it ‘a foul trick’, followed by a commercial for leaky bowel syndrome.

  Max finished brushing his teeth, pulled down the window shades and placed a glass of water on the floor. Then he sat down lotus-style next to it. “I have a ritual to try to get to sleep. Do you disturb easily?” he asked.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  Of course, he didn’t say he was going to hum. Hum to the point that you could feel it in the walls and floor, hum to where the vibration through the mattress felt like one of those magic fingers things. At one point he started humming two notes at the same time, humming harmony with himself. Just as I was about to say something, he opened his eyes again, fixed on the TV.

  “—Illinois officials are scrambling to explain how they executed the wrong man in a state prison on Friday. Marco Velez, serving five years for tax evasion, was executed despite what one guard called his ‘hysterical’ claims of mistaken identity. Prison officials could not explain how guards removed Velez from the wrong cell after checking his fingerprints, which didn’t match the execution order. The attorney general’s office is trying to figure out whether executing Jack Slayton, the actual condemned man, would now constitute double jeopardy.”

  “That’s one, isn’t it?” I asked.

  “They saw fingerprints that weren’t on the page,” Max nodded. “They saw a different cellblock number.” And he closed his eyes and resumed his freaking Ommmm harmonies.

  I’d known the man almost a year off and on and this was the first time I knew his name was Max. It wasn’t like he was holding out on me—this was just the first time I’d ever relied on him for anything. After about fifteen minutes, he opened his eyes and unfolded himself. He started pacing slowly back and forth in front of the window, like he was looking out even though the shades were down.

  “Aren’t you tired?” I asked. I certainly was—I just couldn’t go to sleep while he was pacing like that.

  “I’m always tired,” he said and, all at once, it came to me: this isn’t a man who can’t sleep tonight; this is a man who never sleeps. With the greenish light leaking through the blades across the window, he looked like hell. Worn out, dried out, dragged to pieces. His hair was a mess, dark and spiky and sticking out in all directions. His eyes were bloodshot, sunken into deep caves and they didn’t shine like eyes should shine. “Too many voices in my head,” he muttered, staring out the closed window.

  “Ooh I forgot,” I needled. “All those hotel rooms. All those tourists thinking.”

  “It’s not funny,” he muttered limply, like he had zero hope I could ever understand. Which, of course, made me want to.

  “What’s it like?”

  “What?”

  “To know everything.”

  “Ha!” he spit. “I have a universe of information and a flyspeck of knowledge. I hear everything they’re thinking, everyone around us, all the time. But that’s not knowledge. It’s excuses and resentment and the lies they tell themselves to avoid whatever they’re afraid to think about.”

  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 o
ne,” 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:

  I want a girl

  Just like the girl

  That married dear old Dad…

  “That’s all she knows,” he said.

  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.”

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