by Ted Krever
Seven
“Seven.”
“Wrong.”
“Three,” I said, straining to pluck an answer out of the air, trying to imagine the far side of the card he held in front of me.
“No.”
“Nine. Two. Six Hundred and Fifteen.”
“Funny,” he said. “Okay, just stop what you’re doing. Stop imagining. Stop trying to figure things out. You can’t learn this; you just have to know it.”
“That’s stupid! How can you know something without learning it?”
He reached across the table and pinched my hand, hard. “Yeow!” I recoiled.
“There,” he said calmly. “No learning involved. You don’t make this happen. Stop trying to explain. Your conscious mind demands control; your subconscious just knows. Look at the card and say whatever comes into your head. Say it before your mind gets a chance to corrupt it.”
“Like the Force,” I said. “In Star Wars.”
“No!” he said sharply, holding up that admonishing, dangerous finger. “Don’t do that. The American mind control program fell apart from that kind of association—‘New Age’; crystals, Vulcan mind melds, the love that overcomes all obstacles. Good Vibrations. Unless you’re getting royalties from the song, there are no good vibrations. What’s good in life vanishes in a breath; pain lingers forever.”
He went through the deck, sorting the cards into two piles and then shuffling one pile. “Okay. I’ve narrowed it down—hearts, spades and diamonds, nothing else. Just tell me which. No thinking allowed. No questioning. Just say what you think as soon as you think it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He held up a card.
“Diamonds.”
“Good.” He made a mark on one side of a sheet of paper on the table.
“That was right?”
“Tell you later. This one.” He held up another.
“Diamonds again,” I said, sure I was doing it wrong.
“Very good,” he said. “Next.”
“Spades.”
“Good. Next.”
And so on. This went on for fifteen minutes. When we were done, the paper had scribbles on both sides. He tore it up immediately without looking at it and tossed it in the trash.
“How’d I do?” I asked, puzzled.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“I want to know.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Now I got upset. “What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? Why’d I do it then?”
He sighed. “I told you—what matters is that you have the feeling of knowing. Once you get that, you’ll get better.”
He could see on my face that I didn’t find this a very satisfying answer.
“I told my teacher once,” he said, “that I didn’t think I could develop the skills we were working on. He told me, ‘Don’t worry about the skills; develop your confidence.’ I said, ‘How am I supposed to have confidence when I don’t have the skill?’ His answer was, ‘Once you have the confidence, you’ll find out you already had the skill.’”
“That’s stupid,” I told him.
He shrugged. “Maybe it is,” he acknowledged. “A lot of life is stupid.” He smiled and started putting the cards back in the box. “Once you loosened up,” he said, “once you got bored and stopped trying to guess, you got around 65% correct. Way beyond mathematical probability. You have potential.” The pleasure leaked out of the smile now. “Nothing kills more people than potential,” he mused. For a moment, which was about as long as he ever mused about anything. Then he added, “Start concentrating on some really vivid moment in your life—something that really comes alive when you remember it. Probably something bad.”
“Why bad?”
“I said already—pain lingers. Happiness becomes elusive as soon as it’s over.”
“Why?”
“At some point, things are going to get intense. You’re going to have to block for yourself. If you can put your mind in some other place, into some other reality that isn’t about now, you become hard to read. It’s the simplest way to block.” If this was the simple way, there didn’t seem to be much point asking about the more complicated ones. I was totally lost. “Just try to remember something vivid,” he said. “Like I said, it’ll probably be bad and you’ll have to be able to choose it—to choose to go back into it, really get inside it, at a moment’s notice.” Why would anyone want that, I thought, but he was already announcing, “I’m taking a shower. Then we should think about food.”
I sat in the living room for a few minutes. I could have turned on the TV or caught up on my reading but I got up and opened the sliding door and went out onto the balcony instead. It felt like I’d been enclosed for months.
The view carried all the way on down the valley. The rain clouds were breaking up, the last glints of sun winking over the mountains and slinking through the streets of the town. A breeze was swirling at the base of the cliff, carrying leaves and twigs up off the rock shelves towards the house. The birds were out in packs, swirling around, twittering and making tight turns in loose formation. Together yet separate, like Max’s world, bits of matter bound together by Good Vibrations. Or Bad Vibrations maybe, if you listened to him. If you believed he meant everything he said. I didn’t believe anybody meant everything they said.
Dave used to take me fishing. We’d sit for hours without anything happening, line in the water, staring, barely talking. I’d get lost in the line in the water, in the little ring, the nipple that formed around the spot where the line fell into the water. I could just stare into the dark pool and drift for a long time and when I’d look up Dave would be smiling at me. We’d go for long walks along the boundaries of the marsh nearby, checking the fencing and repairing where it was breached or crooked or the wood frame was rotting. It annoyed me to be doing it; I knew nobody was paying him for the work and I didn’t see why you needed a fence around a national park but Dave wanted to and that made it okay. He would point out the joint that needed a few nails and then point it out again, even though I was already looking at it. Look at that knothole, he’d say, is that the biggest knothole you ever saw in your life? and I thought to myself, this guy’s the fucking dweeb of the world, who cares about knotholes? But it would be the same thing with the trees and the birds and even the clouds. Look how the edges change. Constantly shifting. It took me a while to realize he was doing it with a purpose—he was bringing me back into the world, on a level I could handle. My door was shut tight; there wasn’t a whole lot I was willing to let in but Dave just doggedly went at every little crack I’d left open, pushing till it opened a bit wider. I loved him like you love your dotty old aunt who doesn’t know anything about the world but would sell her house for you in two minutes if you needed it. That’s what I thought he was, dotty. But I also knew he was taking care of me and I knew I needed taking care of.
He convinced Mr. Dulles—Renn—Max—shit, how’d he keep all the names straight?—to come fishing with us once. There was never a man who couldn’t fish like Max. He stared at the rod like it was a snake or something and he wouldn’t drink beer even, which didn’t put a damper on anybody but him. But they started arguing one time about something—something I didn’t really get—and I told him to be more respectful of Dave. I yelled, I guess. It was probably about the first words I’d said in months around him or anybody at that point. And the back of my head went hot and I yelped and it stopped right away. And I can remember their faces when it happened—Renn looking sheepish and Dave intrigued.
I looked over the balcony at the birds darting and flickering in their dance and realized that was why I was with Renn, with Max. Dave didn’t put me here for the protection of the program. He placed me here for my sake, because somehow being around Max was opening me up, helping to bring me back. I couldn’t really be grateful to Max for this—it wasn’t his plan; I wasn’t at all sure he was even aware of it. And it really didn’t make me any more grateful to Dave either—I couldn’t be any
more grateful to Dave than I already was. But it made everything feel a little more sensible, made it fit together. There was a flow to it. A harmonic. A good, positive vibration, haha.
A moment later, I heard his voice and turned to see him coming back into the living room, hair still damp, staring at his wristwatch and talking on a cellphone I hadn’t seen before.
“…well, I’m glad I could amuse you. It isn’t funny, Nick. Dave didn’t just die; he was shot dead in the bathtub. If you guys aren’t interested, somebody is. Alan Hammond was a visionary. He just hasn’t been dead long enough to be proved right yet.” He clicked off the phone. “Remember I told you I didn’t work for America?”
“Let me guess—you lied.”
“I didn’t lie—to me, it just feels like it never happened. The job only lasted about three months, just a few months before 9/11. A friend, an acquaintance really, put me in contact with Alan Hammond, the Senator. He wanted me to work with the Senate Intelligence Committee, to keep an eye on American spooks, keep them in line. That was back when this country still wanted to keep their own spooks in line. Of course, as soon as they debriefed me and convinced themselves I was on the level, they started pushing me to do other things for them, the kind of things I wouldn’t have done for the Soviet either. Things that sent me running to the Everglades.”
“Dave knew you’d run?”
“Dave was one of the guys who debriefed me. There was Dave, Scott Cornwell and Alan Hammond’s aide Jim Avery. Cornwell was my runner and it turns out he still has the same phone number. I just called and asked him if they’d restarted the old program—or anything like it.”
That’s where I stopped him, as you’d imagine. You probably wonder what took me that long but, for a moment, I’d thought he had to be kidding.
“Jim Avery?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said, giving me the eye again but my head didn’t burn. “Cornwell laughed when I asked where Avery was. He said he’s got his own business.”
I laughed—I didn’t want to make him feel dumb but I couldn’t help myself. “No kidding,” I said. “You don’t watch TV?”
“Avery’s on TV?”
“Jim Avery? This is Your World?” He stared at me like I was talking riddles. “He’s on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. He’s got his own channel!” Renn went wide-eyed. My pilot light was on dim the whole time at Dave’s but you had to be completely off to miss Jim Avery.
It took a little while to find the channel on the set in the living room—it was channel 152 or something—but then we basked in the glow of Jim Avery’s greatest hits: Be Everything You Are and Why Settle for Less than your Whole Self? and the inevitable It’s Your World, chanted by Avery and huge crowds in LA, New York, Seoul, London, Rome, Frankfurt, New Delhi, Hong Kong, Moscow, Vancouver and Prague, among others. They had ads for Your World vacations and 24-hour video-on-demand.
“Wow,” Max said and I had to nod.
“You should ask him for a job,” I said. “He’s the biggest thing going.”
Max kept staring at the tube. “It’s him,” he said haltingly. “But that’s not his hair—it has to be a toup, or implants maybe.” He started pacing around the room, looking deflated. “I see why they laughed at me—whatever became of poor Jim Avery. Wow!”
“What did Cornwell say about the program?”
“There’s no program—hasn’t been in years. He said the only reason he could answer me at all was that there was nothing to it.”
“You believe him?”
“I’m not big on belief. I listened to the sound of his voice more than what he was saying, listened to the vibrations like a stress detector. If he was lying, I would know. And,” he added, “he was one of the people who debriefed me several years ago. So he knew I would know, which means there’s no point lying.” He tapped a finger on the table—the first two times it tapped; the next two it went right into the wood, disappeared right through. He was apparently doing it without being aware of it. This would get real confusing if somebody unaware saw him. Did he do it all time without being noticed? That was a scary thought all on its own.
“I asked him about L Corp,” he continued. “He said security was a sideline, they were mostly political consulting and lobbying, media management and such.” He shook his head. “Not the place you’d expect a Miriam Fine. Or platoons of thugs with feeble mindbender power.” He came back to the couch now. “We can research it later. First, I think we should go out to dinner.”
“Out? Isn’t that dangerous?”
He shrugged again. “Everything’s dangerous—it’s just a question of more or less. I don’t think they’ve found us yet.”
That sure didn’t sound very conclusive. I was hoping for something a whole lot stronger, but he didn’t seem to be offering. “Could they have traced the phone call?” I asked.
“I doubt it,” he said casually. “Fischel’s just a committee staffer—he’s not high on the food chain. If they were tapping him for some reason, it would take a minute to recognize this conversation as worth tracing. I bounced the call off two Soviet satellites that are still up there and I timed it—believe me, they’re not as fast as the movies.”
“That’s it? That’s all the reassurance the world’s best mindbender can offer?”
“If I wait for better than that,” he shrugged, “I never get to go out to dinner.”
The town downvalley was bigger than it looked—it had the remnants of a low-rent amusement park along with a reptile zoo, several hotels and restaurants clustered along the main roads leading out to the highway—there was also a Your World Center, which I gleefully pointed out to Max as we passed. We ended up in a shed-like place off the beaten track, with an electric sign bigger than the restaurant and a round dance floor in the middle of a raised circle of dinner tables. The signs hanging by the side of the door promised Kansas steak, local lake trout and 800 different beers from around the World. They had internet access—you could order dinner from Singapore, though it didn’t mention delivery. There were a crowd of customers, but mostly at the bar and dance floor. Max shook the maitre d’s hand and he stiffened and led us immediately to a table with a clear view of the entrance and easy access to the emergency exit.
The bar was filled with several clusters, milling and circulating and laughing a little too loudly, the general crowd trying a little too hard to have a good time, as opposed to the hard-core drunks at the small tables near the far end of the bar.
It’s funny how you can find the person you’re looking for in a crowd, even if you didn’t know you were looking. A bright-eyed dark-haired girl standing with her blonde friend right at the center of everything, for example, watching faces and sharing confidences and trying to look carefree. At first I thought, maybe they’re more than friends—they were hanging close and you can’t tell these days. But when she turned around, her eyes said she was looking and not finding. And it just hit me hard, as soon as I saw those eyes full-on: I just knew who she was. I knew what she was feeling all too well. It wasn’t a memory, it was like I was inside that feeling, inside her, the hope and bitterness flashing through me all at once. There are other feelings I’d have chosen to revisit before that one.
Max nudged me. “Ask her to dance,” he said. “Go on.”
“Go away,” I said. “We’re incognito.”
“You’re a man out for dinner with his business partner. We’re on a business trip—we leave in the morning. A convenient cover story. Get used to having one.” He leaned into my ear. “She’ll like you,” he said.
“You know that for a fact?” I asked but he just sat back, staring at the ceiling, all innocent eyes. When the waiter brought us our two out of the 800 beers of the World, I asked him to bring her and her friend whatever they were drinking. Max said, “No—ask her to dance,” but this was how I knew to do it. And, as soon as they got the drinks, she smiled at me and I smiled back and three seconds later, the two of them were sitting down in the booth next to us.
“I’m Tess,” she said, holding out her hand. “This is Cindy. Thanks for the drinks.”
“I’m Greg,” I said “and this is Max.” I hadn’t thought twice about it but when I looked over at him now, he looked petrified, frozen in place. He sat straight as a ramrod with his eyes flashing, sharp, like he was surrounded by a vile of snakes. The girls somehow didn’t seem to notice, which was kind of amazing.
Cindy offered her hand. Max shook it, jerky, out-of-synch. She didn’t seem to notice this either. Tess, meanwhile, was staring at me with eyes the size of flying saucers.
“You guys aren’t from around here,” she said.
“You know everybody around here?” I said and they both laughed, which was charitable—it wasn’t much of a joke.
“Actually, I do,” she answered. “I’m the county registrar. If you have a last name, I can tell you what you paid in taxes last year.” She nestled up next to me, our arms and legs touching—her skin was warm, nice muscle tone. She was actually pretty buff. “Assuming you filed.”
“Don’t tell her anything,” Cindy said and we laughed some more.
“We pay no taxes in this area,” Max said, forcing himself to speak. “We’re just here overnight—our businesses are upriver. We have inspections to do tomorrow.” I kicked him under the table—lighten up, dude. He was treating them like the Board of Directors.
“I didn’t think there was anyplace around here people wanted to go,” Cindy said; I laughed at this too before realizing she was serious.
Every time I looked at Tess, the world calmed down. I didn’t feel like I had to do anything in particular to get her to like me. At the same time, Cindy was listening to Max go over the details of our profit projections, all moon-eyes, like it was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to her. Max kept smiling really hard, which only made his face more frightening-looking.
“What do you do?” I asked Cindy, trying to keep the train from going completely off the tracks.
“I’m a trainer,” she said, with a little hesitation.
“Cindy’s a Worldie,” Tess said in a vague combination of envy and disdain.
“I’m a third-level,” Cindy burst now, with the zest of the true believer. “I train graduates and other trainers. We’ve got people who come back ten and fifteen times, to make sure they get it, to keep their hope level up. We’ve only been open a year here but we’ve already got a base of almost 200 just in this area.”
“If she keeps doing what she’d doing,” Tess added, “she’ll move up to state level.”
“It’s so spiritual!” Cindy exhaled. I saw Max shrinking into the corner of the booth but it was too late to stop myself—the words were already halfway out of my mouth.
“Your World? Y’know, Max actually used to know Jim Avery.”
If a look could strangle you across a table, I’d have been dead in a dumpster one second later.
“Omigod, you know him?” Cindy turned with a beatific look. “He changed my life—he taught me to believe in my dreams. Isn’t it—?”
“Knew him,” Max interrupted roughly. “Knew. Years ago. For a very short period of time.”
“When? What was he like?” Cindy sputtered. “What happened? Have you kept in contact? Would he know you if he saw you again?”
“You want to dance?” I asked Tess and we both jumped out of the booth. I felt the back of my head burning hot but I’d seen that one coming and just kept putting one foot in front of the other.
It was a slow song and I got to hold her pretty much beginning to end. I hadn’t held a woman in a long time. It was terrifyingly wonderful, though I don’t know why terrifying. I’d had women in my arms before. We talked all the way through the song but the words got less and less important as we went on.
‘You really aren’t staying around?” she said.
“Business,” I shrugged, genuinely unhappy about my fictional life, whose consequences were the same as my real one. Which is the merger, I guess, that makes a good cover story work.
“I never thought I’d meet someone like you in a place like this,” she said and that turned me around all of a sudden. We’d had one dance and I was a little light-headed too but I couldn’t get three words out of my mouth two or three days earlier, so I had an excuse. What was hers? Then she said, “You want to go to the car and fool around a little?” which put me over the limit. I dragged her off the floor and back to the table.
Renn was wedged into a corner of the booth, bending spoons without touching them while Cindy explained the world according to Jim Avery to him. He wasn’t even trying to hide his discomfort. Was he gay? I wondered and then rejected the thought. If he was gay, they’d be best friends and discussing window treatments. Maybe he was in the closet? Whatever the reason, he was ignoring her and she just kept yammering, oblivious, like she was getting paid by the word.
“Excuse us a second,” I interrupted and grabbed Renn by the shoulder. I might have pulled him out of his chair; I was kind of running on instinct. I’m not sure if he was shocked or relieved but he let me drag him a few feet away.
“What are you mad about?” he protested, shouting over the music.
“You’re making us wonderful,” I said, shouting back. “You’re forcing them to like us.”
“You’re getting lucky and I’m learning how believing in myself—and paying Jim Avery a monthly stipend—will make all my problems seem insignificant. I’m six minutes into a fifteen minute monologue, all of which I’ve already heard her rehearse twice in her head—so, again, what are you mad about?”
“Hey, most people pay $450 for the 2-hour Your World evening session. You’re getting it for free.”
“Free is too expensive,” he said. “Anyway, I’m not forcing them. I’m just making them receptive.”
I could feel my eyes narrow. “And the difference is—?”
“The difference is, I have some scruples. If she doesn’t like you, she doesn’t. If she sees something she likes in you, she doesn’t fight it.”
“That’s scruples? You’re still coercing her.”
“It’s easy to be black-and-white,” he shrugged, “when you have no power. I could easily force her to sleep with you and everyone in the room. The fact that I don’t doesn’t make me pure, but it is a form of scruples.”
“Well, knock it off,” I said. “Let me get there on my own.”
He sighed okay. We returned to the table, where the ladies were waiting, and I could see immediately that the light in their faces had faded. We weren’t so fascinating anymore. Now they seemed to be sizing us up a bit, checking to see if we were worth the effort. More like what I was used to.
“We’re working on this new thing—paraskiing,” Max stammered, taking furtive, nervous looks at both women. He’d been nervous when he had them firmly under control. Now he was a wreck. “You ski down a hill wearing a parasail…no…I mean, you ski down the hill and…deploy…the sail just after you go…over the edge—there has to be a cliff, of course…and you drift down…to wherever you land. Of course, you need a lot of cleared space down there…down below…for landing…because the sail tends to drift and…you don’t…want to come down in the trees. You could break something.”
He was dissolving quickly, like a standup comic who knows he’s bombing. I realized what must have happened—he’d searched (the room? The state?) for a mind with an edgy entrepreneurial idea and he’d found one—a really stupid idea, dangerous on every count. “But you wouldn’t believe the numbers,” he continued now, trying to cover himself, throwing good money after bad. “Parasails really don’t cost much and…the people who pay to take risks pay big money for it. In fact, if you don’t charge them enough, they get—” I grabbed him, held a hand up in front of the girls and dragged him away again.
“What the hell is this about?” I demanded.
“I’m no good at this,” he answered. He was sweating like a pig.
“How good do you have to
be? Idiots manage it every day.”
“Idiots have instinct,” he said without self-pity, as though this was something I should have known about him. “All I know is what’s in their minds. They want a man who does something extreme-ish though not too much and Cindy likes money, too.”
“That doesn’t mean you just start babbling every detail, dammit.”
“Well, how else is she going to know?”
“Let her figure it out! It’s a mystery—you’re a mystery. She’d rather guess you have money than be sure.” I couldn’t believe it. “You’re naturally mysterious when you’re not trying.”
“I’m—she’s pretty,” he stammered. “When the girl’s pretty, I’m just not natural,” he said unnecessarily and we retreated back to the table.
Tess was flashing looks at me now, with a sort of desperate hope in her eyes. Cindy was eyeing both entrances with an equally desperate hunger. I suddenly remembered what dating was like and understood how alluring it would be to just be able to control things.
“We have several businesses,” Renn segued, trying to get himself under control. “Rafting, skydiving, extreme skiing, gliders—Greg’s big on gliders.”
All eyes were suddenly on me and I realized—shockingly—that I actually knew something about gliders. “Gliders are amazing,” I started and suddenly there were pictures in my head and a tingle in my voice because the memories were coming back to me in waves. “They tow you down the runway and it doesn’t feel fast enough and then the plane in front of you starts to lift off and you realize you’re already floating behind it and you didn’t even feel the takeoff. And they pull you higher and higher and it’s noisy and buffety and then they release the cable and, all of a sudden, you’re just there, all alone, rock steady over everything. There’s this amazing moment when you realize it really is going to work, you’re not just going to plummet to the ground. You’re just a hiss through the air and everything gets slow and easy, like you’re suspended in time and space. You’re not going anywhere and you have all the time in the world to do it. And then you’re on the ground again, way too soon.”
I had no idea if this was a memory or a dream. But it felt real inside me. At some point, I’d had a moment of nutty daring and taken that risk, for no reason at all.
The girls were staring at me, eyes wide and bright. I’d put it over. I looked at Max and he was smiling and the look on his face said You did it on your own, pal. Except I hadn’t—he’d found my best memory to spark, for me to build on.
“C’mon,” Tess said, grabbing me by the hand and pulling hard, “we’re going for a drive.”
We didn’t drive very far, ending up behind a hardware store nearby. It looked closed for the night but she said ‘They’re bankrupt’ in a tone of voice that said Don’t question the county registrar and that was enough for me. We parked out near the dumpster in back and pawed each other for an hour or so. It just tore me up to have her—nothing was what I expected. We laughed and got off really nice at first and I was just gassed being there, my hands on her, my mouth on her, giving and getting pleasure. But after a while, my feelings got gummed-up, a bit more complicated. When I kissed her, I tasted other kisses; when I touched her breast, I remembered other breasts. Good feelings here and there, good moments but bad ones too, fights and jealousy and lies. It occurred to me that I was remembering the feelings without being able to remember the women and that felt kind of shameful. I’d lived a while without a memory and that was beginning to feel like a blessing. It took a big effort to try and shove those feelings back into the murk and just be with her. I never completely succeeded at it, to tell the truth.
When we got back to the restaurant with the huge electric sign, she kissed me goodbye like she meant it and said “If you ever get back around here, I’ll be at Town Hall.” And that really shredded me—it had been a long time since anybody wanted me, much less wanted me again. I knew I’d never be back and if I was, it wouldn’t be the same anyway. I was pretty sure she knew that too. Which left me tingling with feeling as I got out of the car, feeling in all directions, sensitive to everything everywhere—the breeze and the damp in the air, the sound of the cars on the highway six blocks away, the smell of her on my fingers. I felt alive. I wanted to bottle that feeling, hold onto it as long as it would linger. It was already fading by the time she turned out of the lot.
Max was in a Subaru with the flared fenders and big tires, the turbo and the wing on the back, the whole tuner thing. I knew a guy in Iraq who had the same model. He kept buying parts for it off the Web, week by week; his brother would install them and send him the pictures and little videos of it racing in the neighborhood. They lived in Cincinnati. He came home with no arms or legs. I remembered that all at once, looking at the car. It was another thing I’d forgotten—at least, that was my first thought. But you can’t be aware of forgetting something, can you?
I got in the passenger seat and Max started driving back up into the hills, toward the house. Neither of us spoke for a while and then finally I said, “This self-awareness stuff is for shit.”
“It’s a mixed bag,” he said. “Like most things.”
“It’s for shit,” I repeated.
He waited a moment—I could almost see him biting his tongue—and then he couldn’t seem to stop himself from going on. I wondered if he had some kind of impulse control problem. “You still have a choice. I can let you off and you can go back to the life you had.”
“We have to get the guys who got Dave,” I said. That wasn’t changing.
“It only gets worse,” he warned. “There are a lot of things you’re getting by ignoring, that are going to be dragged up, that you’re going to have to deal with. And eventually, you’ll see through everyone and everything.”
“But you’re in control then, right?”
“Ha! When the girl says ‘yes,’ instead of feeling your own happiness, you feel her doubts about you—or how inflated her hopes are. When your friends say you told a funny joke, you’ll know different. You’ll know when you bore them. You’ll know when the salesperson is cheating you—you’ll know when the doctor asks for tests but knows already you’re very sick. You’ll have nothing to do but track your enemies—or just stay away from people altogether.”
“Why that? Why does that follow?”
“Look at the company you’ve been keeping these few days,” he said. “I was fine when I could fade into a swamp. I was away from people, so I was fine. Tauber stayed among the voices and chewed himself up. Our skills are only useful when we have enemies to hunt, secrets to uncover. Otherwise, life is empty, without purpose, without hope of purpose.”
“I’ve been there already,” I said. “This is better. I was locked in myself. Now I’m out.” I looked at him with some gratitude. “You’ve liberated me.”
He soaked that in and sighed. “These last couple of days have been a liberation for me, too—but an evil one. It’s a horrible wonderful temptation, needing danger to feel free, to feel useful. I need evil in the world so I can do good.”
“We’ll beat them,” I said, not understanding his point.
“ I hope so,” he answered. “But then what will we do?”
~~~~