by Clara Ward
“Intelligence on the U.S. is highly variable. If they’ve sent messages about you to their foreign embassies, someone here would probably know, but I haven’t heard anything. What do you want to set up?”
“Nothing specific yet. I worked with a non-profit in the states, but most of our projects were international. I’m wondering if I could still be useful to them or if I need to start fresh.”
Tom half-smirked. “If they had any secrets, your government probably already snooped them. If you work with them openly, they’ll probably stay under surveillance. You should get a PAD if you’re going to call the U.S. a lot.”
“Oh shit.”
“What?”
“Just some business with PAD that I left dangling. Anything happen with them recently?”
“No idea. I don’t really follow the news.”
Reggie had a knee jerk reaction to people ignorant of current events, but he suppressed it. It seemed a bit hypocritical at the moment.
Tom turned to Sarah and said, “Do you still want to see Angkor Wat? I could arrange something for you.”
As Tom and Sarah talked, both leaning toward each other now, Reggie felt strange misgivings. Not that he’d ever particularly trusted Tom, but this evening he distinctly doubted the man. Was he jealous, or paranoid?
Reggie remembered his father counseling him before he left for the Peace Corps. Dad sat in his leather chair by the fire, eyes squinting into the flames. “Reggie, there are many kinds of people out there. I’ve always managed to find the honest ones. You trust your instincts, and I think you can too.”
Reggie wondered if he should call his folks. Had the government investigated them as well? While he turned over the possibilities, their server arrived with dessert.
“Should I ask him to stay?” Tom whispered, a mockery of his usual flirtatiousness. “You could sample another local dish?”
Sarah shook her head and Reggie offered a gentle, “No thanks.”
Tom smiled, clearly baiting them for fun now. When they’d finished the fruit and icy deserts he asked, “Have you worked through those Puritan ideas about teek sex?”
Sarah blushed.
Reggie figured Tom was harassing her for fun. He must know by now that she wasn’t interested.
“The problem is,” Reggie said with a melodramatic shrug, “If she pins me to the ceiling while teasing me, there’s always the risk she’ll get distracted and I’ll fall back down. It’s rather hard on the bed.”
Tom glanced at the low ceiling of the boat, “If you’re into aerial demonstrations, just close the curtains and make me a pin-up.”
Sarah mimed considering it for a moment. She leaned her head sideways, then gave it a shake and laughed.
They returned to light conversation until Tom signaled for a boat to shuttle them back to the dock.
After Sarah closed the door to their hotel room that night, she leaned against it for several moments.
Reggie removed his shoes, then sat on the bed and waited.
“We’ve never talked about the whole teek sex thing, except with Tom.”
“True,” Reggie replied, instantly warming to the topic, though unsure where Sarah was headed.
“Have you been thinking about it? That whole bit with the ceiling—”
“He was trying to embarrass you. I just tried to distract him.”
“But had you thought of it ahead of time?”
“Yes, more as an amusement than an actual desire.”
“Were there actual desires?” Sarah was not asking flirtatiously. She was still sticking to the door, looking distinctly uncomfortable. Reggie was torn between a suspicion that he could have some fantasies played out tonight and realizing that Sarah needed someone sympathetic to discuss the possibilities.
“Come over here. Let’s talk.” When she perched two feet away from him, he reached out to hold her hand. It was cold.
“I’ve used teek so much these last few days,” she said, “But I still don’t know where it comes from or how it works.”
“And it worries you?”
“It would be better to know. But I don’t think I’m going to find out, and I feel sort of, sort of robbed not using it when no one else seems to worry.”
“Does it feel wrong to use it?”
“No. Sometimes it hurts to keep it a secret, but being able to do stuff feels pretty good. That’s really conceited, isn’t it?”
“You’re one of the least conceited people I know. You can do something amazing. It’s a gift.”
She was silent as he stroked her hand and then moved closer. He wondered if it was time to move on to something more intimate, and gently stroked down her side, just skimming her breast. She took a deep breath. His attraction increased. He felt an invisible hand glide from his cheekbone, down his neck, across his chest and stomach to his groin and thigh. His body responded without hesitation.
“So tell me what you’ve imagined,” Sarah said.
And he did.
Chapter 16
April 26 – May 10, 2025 – Bangkok, Thailand
Saturday found them back at the Johnson’s for tea. Sarah stood in a sitting room filled with adjustable furniture, beanbags, and swings. The different shapes, textures, and colors fit no unifying theme except that they might all be considered chairs. Sarah gazed around like a museum visitor who’d just happened into the “Sitting” Room.
Several pieces seemed the image of comfort, but Sarah did not feel comfortable. Reggie had suggested conservative clothing, not knowing what their hosts would expect. Now Sarah wriggled her shoulders against the seams of her fitted blouse and her toes inside stiff new shoes.
Mr. Johnson, Samuel as he wanted to be called, wore dark suit pants and a white button shirt, but somehow eased casually into a chair shaped like Charlie Brown’s broken kite. Reggie settled, despite his tie and jacket, into a similar canvas contraption supported asymmetrically by metal poles at the corners. Sarah would have chosen a swing seat if she’d been with people she knew, but here she wouldn’t know whether or not to swing. Fearing she’d attract attention if she didn’t choose fast, she plopped into a relatively normal but overstuffed chair. It would have been fine if she wanted to curl her feet up and take a nap, but in the current situation, she felt like she’d jumped into quicksand. Oh well, at least the trap was velvety soft. She leaned back to feel the fuzzy fabric stroke her neck.
Mrs. Johnson, or Ida, a thin Chinese woman with streaks of gray through hair wrapped back in a bun, wore a sarong and served good Thai tea as if no one’s culture was any obstacle for her. Sarah barely tasted the tea. While Samuel, Ida, and Reggie were chatting as if nothing had happened, Sarah kept glancing toward the door, expecting Emma to pounce upon her and make a scene.
“I hear you turned down a government job. Do you have something else lined up?” Samuel asked Reggie.
“I was co-founder of an NGO back in the states. Thought I’d wait and see if I could work with it from here or if I should start up something new.”
“Admirable. Of course, you could always take the government money as well. They won’t expect you to work too hard for it, and you might find civil service interesting.”
Ida touched her husband’s arm and smiled. “Samuel was a diplomat for thirty years, first for the Americans and then setting up the ‘mental differences’ legislation here. He only thinks the work was easy because he enjoyed it too much to notice.”
“And who’s to say Reggie wouldn’t feel the same?” Samuel asked with a lift of his eyebrows.
“You set that up?” Sarah asked, drawn back to the conversation.
“I did,” Samuel sighed. “The U.S. was just starting to use telepaths as agents then, mostly for their war on terrorism. Already on the diplomatic track, I was one of the first they found. There was a rumor Thailand was gathering its own force; so they sent me here to snoop. I didn’t find anyone in the government, but I met Ida. She had me hopelessly smitten before she introducing me to her friends, most
ly escapees from China, an energetic group of intellectuals, artists, and telepaths.”
Samuel gazed at his wife with an intimacy at once touching and embarrassing to Sarah. She couldn’t tell if there was telepathy in play, but Ida took over the story.
“We were a community, but we had no ties to any government until the U.S. started worrying. Then Samuel defected and quietly arranged for laws to protect us and attract others.”
“How many are here now?”
“Many,” Ida slid her eyes evasively. “Only two other teeks before you and Howard came. And of course, you’re unique.”
“You’ve also attracted the interest of our daughter and her mentor, Aliana,” Samuel said, not so casually.
Sarah cringed and went cold, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset them.”
“Upset them?” Samuel chuckled. “They’ve both been after me all week to hire you or give you a grant or somehow bring you into their little troop.”
“Are you sure? At the party, Emma seemed rather annoyed with me.” Sarah struggled to sit forward in the overly comfy chair, even as she struggled to reconcile her memory of Emma with what her father was saying now.
“Oh, was she? Well, she’s young and emotional.” Ida nodded toward Sarah as if she were hardly any older than Emma and might not fully understand. “We’d been told ahead that you were a teek and not a teep, but Emma knew nothing other than that your mind was closed and she’d first seen you talking to James. She may have jumped to conclusions.”
Sarah wondered what etiquette she should have followed then or now, but she didn’t want to ask. So she waited, soothing herself with small shifts back into the velvet quicksand.
“Anyway, we don’t really have a job to offer you. But if you’re still looking for accommodations, we have a guest cottage you could take for the summer, and maybe that would allow you to volunteer with the dance troop and teach Emma gymnastics or whatever she and Aliana are so enthused about.”
“Well, thank you. That’s a very generous offer. We’d need a little time to think it over, and I’d like to speak with Emma –“
Samuel pulled a phone from his pocket, hit a key and spoke into it. “Emma, would you like to show Sarah and Reggie the guesthouse?” There was a pause, “Yes, they’re here now, in the sitting room.” A moment, and then he hung up. “She’s out on her scooter somewhere, but she said she’d be back in two minutes.”
The guesthouse turned out to be the terrarium room over the dance studio. Sarah paused on the deck with Emma, hoping for a private conversation. The deck looked like a mosaic of colorful rocks, a larger version of what covered the bottom of every kid’s fish tank. But the rocks were molded from thick insulating rubber, which felt surprisingly cool and springy through the cheap soles of Sarah’s new shoes. Sarah wanted to squat down and touch the rubber rocks, but residual burns from her last encounter with Emma kept her focused.
“Forgive me, Emma, but I’m a bit confused—“
“Sure. I was dumb last time. But no one tells me anything. And Aliana, I guess you can’t hear her, but she has the most beautiful mind. She –“
Emma broke off and her eyes searched Sarah with an intensity that would have made Sarah suspect telepathy back when she didn’t know it existed.
“I’m not sure how to talk to you,” Emma said, seeming much older than she had last weekend. “I’ve only been telepathic for a little while. Even before that, I knew Aliana was special. She was the one person who seemed to love dance the way I did. But now, I know how she affects telepaths, like father and those in the troop. She doesn’t just love dance; she loves lots of things. She passes from complete obsession with dance, to some slurpy, childish joy while eating an orange, and on to the most pure concern for someone telling her a personal story. It’s overwhelming. Her mind is this intense, swooping ride.”
Sarah was mesmerized by Emma’s words. No adult had ever explained telepathy this way to her. Was it adolescent interpretation? Perhaps even a bit of puppy love for an older woman? Or was Aliana really that unusual?
Emma looked down now, kicking at the deck with her foot. It gave a bit under each kick. “She was obsessed with you at that moment when I came in. I-- I assumed you were a teep and were sort of riding the thrill of it. It seemed unfair to her, like an invasion. Then you didn’t answer me, and I wasn’t sure if you were a teep or on some errand for that scientist. I don’t know. I was confused and Aliana’s thoughts were so loud! I lost my temper.”
Sarah tried to reconcile her image of Emma as an out-of-control, spoiled brat with the vulnerable, sincere girl fidgeting in front of her. It would be stupid to move in here and get tangled in this, but it would also be interesting. Sarah missed the girls she had coached back home. She needed a place to work out and keep her body strong. And even without telepathy, her experience with Aliana . . . Of course she’d have to think and talk to Reggie. But on an honest level, Sarah knew she was hooked.
The sun was bright as a face-on camera flash that Tuesday when Sarah and Reggie moved into the fishtank. Reggie had discovered some handmade, fused glass turtles, which he’d brought along to personalize their new home. He suspended one next to a primordial fern that hung from the ceiling, adding to the underwater illusion. Then there were the window snails, a recent development in the Roomba household helpers line. These opalescent thumbnail-size robots hid window-cleaning equipment under their shells. Reggie affixed one to each window and let it begin its random walk, keeping the glass clean, just like old, biological snails that tidied up fish-sized aquariums. Sarah thought it would take a hundred years of window cleaning to justify the cost of the pseudo-snails, but Reggie had been in techno-withdrawal and couldn’t resist this innovation that fit so well with their décor.
Other than the turtles and snails, they had almost nothing to unpack, so Reggie was soon busy with his other electronic indulgence. After dozens of trips to internet cafes and struggling to find a clock because he didn’t have his cell phone, Reggie had bought a PAD. He insisted on showing Sarah how to insert the SIM card from a regular GSM phone. While the SIM card was supposed to identify a caller to the network at large, Reggie explained, in the PAD system a second microprocessor acted as a false SIM, allowing PAD to constantly change the data given out, with a system only their company could track. The lower section of the phone allowed it to use satellites when wireless and cell services were unavailable or uncooperative.
One of Reggie’s first twenty phone calls that afternoon was to some storage place in the states. He seemed to think he could have their old belonging sent by boat in a few weeks, though he mumbled about the risk of loss in container shipping. Sarah, who’d been afraid to contact anyone, in case the American government was still upset, wondered if their stuff would be allowed out and if it would be searched or bugged on the way. Still, it was being sent to a dock, not an address. Since she’d expected to never retrieve anything from home, there was little to lose.
Her stomach growled like an empty garbage disposal. Reggie was still on the phone so she grabbed a canvas bag and headed out to buy groceries. At the archway, she almost collided with Howard, who was just entering the Johnson’s courtyard.
“Hey Howard, what brings you this way?”
“Came to help you move in.”
“We don’t have any stuff.”
“Easy work then.”
Sarah rolled the braided handle of her shopping bag between her fingers. Howard smiled at her like the meeting was chance and he just happened to be free all day. “I was about to go grocery shopping. Want to come?”
“Sure. Where’s Reggie?”
“On his new PAD. He’s decided it’s safe to call business contacts back home, and everywhere.”
“You don’t think so?”
“Dunno. I’d worry about spreading trouble to others, but Reggie’s friends—well, I think some of them like trouble.”
“I see. I haven’t called anyone. Other than my cousins, who came with me, I don’t
think I had any close friends.”
“Really?”
“No one I’d bother to explain to. What would I say?”
“Yeah, I feel really bad for the kids I used to work with. They must think I ran out on them, but what could I say that would help? I haven’t even called the executor for my Mom’s estate. She’s the type who worries too, but she’d see through my excuses. I guess I’ve been hiding all my life, but now, I’ve gone beyond explanation, like some kind of monster.”
Howard looked at her sideways as they walked. “It’s a gift.” He touched his hand to her shoulder, and Sarah remembered how awkward she’d felt with him that first day. They hadn’t developed any new understanding, but the high drama of the last few weeks made him seem like an old friend. Also, there weren’t any doubt in his eyes the way there were with Reggie. Howard had always known what she was.
“So have you settled in? Found a job?” Sarah asked.
“My aunt’s brokered her way into the Chinese teep community. That woman makes connections the way other people make dinner plans. Someone found her a place in this apartment complex that’s almost all Chinese teeps. She gave me a room and made it clear that I need to stay near them. But at least she doesn’t arrange my social life the way she schedules her own kids.”
“Do they mind?”
“Naw, they’re used to it. Rob would probably forget to eat if no one planned meals for him. And I think Lisa’s studying to fill her Mom’s shoes. She set up government fellowships for herself, Rob, and me; so we’re studying at Bangkok University. No specific strings attached, but we’ll see. Can’t be worse than the U.S. arrangement.”
“Good to hear. So no one regrets coming along?”
Howard laughed through his nose. “That’s an understatement. My relations are very proud people. The U.S. said outright that they’d control us. The Thais may or may not have better intentions, but they understand about saving face.”