Of course, it can’t last.
What the hell?
It’s a high, childlike voice, but there are no kids in first class. It takes me a second to place it. It’s Kelsey.
She’s folded away her MacBook and stares out the window. The song repeats over and over in her head as she looks at the clouds.
It’s completely unlike her usual internal tone. She broadcasts a sense of peace even as it gets louder. I almost hate to interrupt.
Almost.
“Could you not do that?”
My voice breaks her out of her reverie. Her full attention comes back online, along with a healthy dose of suspicion.
“Do what?”
“The singing.”
“I wasn’t—” She stops. “Oh wow. Okay. Now that’s really creepy.”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to eavesdrop.”
“I told you, you don’t have to prove anything to me.”
“And I’m not. I swear. It’s just very—distracting.”
She’s having a hard time with this.
“I wasn’t even aware I was doing it,” she says. “It’s just something that goes through my head whenever I’m in a plane—”
“Since you were a kid. I know.”
“Of course you do.”
“That part of you still sounds like a little girl.”
“You’re really not making it any less creepy now.”
Not much I can do about that. “Some things are harder to block out than others.”
“My singing is that bad? Even in my head?”
That makes me laugh. “No. It’s all music. Any kind. I find it grating.”
She blinks twice while she processes that. “You don’t like music?”
People have a hard time understanding when I admit that. It’s almost easier to convince them that I read minds. Everyone likes music, right?
No. Not everyone. So I try to explain. “I know people hear something else when they listen to it. I mean, I get that. I can see it. But I’ve never felt it. It’s just annoying to me. Just more noise. It always has been.”
She’s still not quite able to grasp it. “So what do you listen to?”
“I have enough to listen to. Believe me, it’s never quiet.”
I can see her imagining what it would be like to hear every stray thought, the way I do. She doesn’t like the idea much. “So that’s why you want the island.”
I nod. “Sloan told you about that?”
“I helped draw up the contract.” She turns in her seat to face me. “Do you mind if I ask you a question?”
Honestly, I’d rather skip this. I see what’s forming in her mind. And I know how I’ll respond, and then I’ll see her response before she can put it into words, and so on. It’s tedious.
But we’re stuck with each other for a while, and we could use the repair work. So I put down my book and try to act like a person who has conversations.
“If it’s so painful for you to be around people, why not just move away from them?” she says. “There are plenty of places where you could go off the grid. Why not just get a cabin in Montana? Why do you need a private island?”
“What’s that suit you’re wearing?”
She looks confused, but answers. “Theory.”
“Why so expensive? You’d be fine in jeans and a T-shirt, right?”
She makes a face. “That’s not the same thing.”
“Yes it is,” I say. “Just because I don’t come from money, don’t assume I don’t know what it means. Money offers its own protections. Your boss already knows this. You accumulate enough, and the world starts to bend in your direction. I could find a cabin in the woods right now, true. But it wouldn’t stop someone else from buying the spot next to me. I want more insulation than that.”
“You need a whole island’s worth of insulation between you and the rest of the world?” She says it with a little smile.
“You’ve never been poor, have you?”
Kelsey recoils physically from the question. “I’m not sure what that has to do with anything.”
“It’s got everything to do with it. It’s the same reason you want your doctor to be trained at Harvard instead of a state school. Or why you shop at Whole Foods instead of the corner grocery. If it costs more, it’s generally because it’s worth more. And every system we have is set up to protect the people who have more. You’ve never had to think about that because you’ve always been on the inside of the fence.”
“I was just asking you a question,” she says. “You don’t have to get personal about it.”
“I’m just answering your question,” I tell her. “I’ve been poor. I’ve done without. I’ve scraped by. I’m not going to do it again. If I walk away from the world, it’s going to be on my terms. And no matter where I end up, I am going to make certain I never have to eat Top Ramen or Hamburger Helper when I get there. Does that help you understand?”
“Yeah,” she says. “It does.”
I scan her for sarcasm, but I don’t find any. In her mind, it’s the flat, unvarnished truth.
She’s got one last question, and again she means it, without judgment or agenda. “So what happens if you ever need a friend?”
I answer her as honestly as I can. “Wouldn’t know,” I say. “Never had one.”
[4]
There’s not a lot I want to say about my childhood. I can’t tell you when I knew I was different. It took me a long time before even I realized what I could do.
Language is necessary before we can form consciousness. Or, to put it more simply, we’re animals until we learn how to talk. Until we begin to grasp words, we’re just little screaming, eating, diaper-filling beasts.
So it’s hard to say when I knew I was picking up things from inside other people’s minds. I had to learn how to read before I realized I could read minds. I had to learn to talk before I realized I knew the things other people wouldn’t say out loud. But I believe I always had my talent, even if I couldn’t understand it.
Before I knew any words, I saw colors. I think this was because I simply hadn’t learned the framework necessary to put my gift to work. I didn’t have language, and without it, my brain sent me messages in the most basic building-block method possible.
Red was pain. Green was the color of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty. Anger I associated with deep violet, which would become almost black as it shifted to rage and violence. Yellow always meant greed and hunger, which were the same things to me. Blue was love.
Most of what I remember of my birth parents is violet and green and black, with occasional highlights of red. There is one time I can remember being held in the arms of someone and feeling safe and warm and protected, surrounded by nothing but blue.
That might have been my mother. Or maybe I’m just imagining it.
Either way, they were gone before I was nine months old. I don’t say this for sympathy. It’s just a fact. It means I don’t have any reliable witnesses to fill in the blanks in my memories. I don’t know when I started acting differently from the other kids. Maybe it was there from the start, and that’s why my parents exited the picture as quickly as they did.
I can tell you that I didn’t speak until I was almost five years old—and then I began talking in complete, grammatically perfect sentences—but I don’t really remember why. I suspect it was the way I coped with all the stimuli coming into my brain. I had to sit quietly for a long time to sort it all out. Until I did, the adults in charge of my life thought I might be retarded. After that, I tested in the genius range by most measurements.
But by then, I was already deep in the system for abandoned and unwanted kids.
There are many, many p
eople who join the system because they want to do right by those kids. They want to save them, or at least make their lives a little better. And there are those who are more or less apathetic, who joined up because they needed a job and this was what came along. They’re like benign tumors—not actively harmful, but taking up space and resources anyway.
Then there are those who join the system because abandoned and unwanted children are exactly what they want. They look for kids who have been neglected, who will take any attention as a sign of love, who will not complain, and who will not be believed when they do.
A child who doesn’t speak, as it turns out, is just perfect for them.
That’s why I don’t talk about my childhood much. It took me too long to find the right words then. It seems like a waste of time to say anything about it now.
BY THE TIME I got to high school, everyone paid to care about me was pretty much done. I was marked first as a poor candidate for adoption, then a problem child, then a recurrent discipline case. All true, I have to admit. Before I got it under control, my talent made it tough to play along with even the most harmless level of social bullshit. I was the kid who said exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time. What’s worse, it was always true.
I couldn’t help it. When I was stuck in an evaluation session with social workers, their worst qualities would bleed out from behind the smiles and therapeutic language. I could see the hangovers, the frustration, the anger, the dislike, and worst of all, the indifference. I knew instinctively that many of them simply did not care what happened to me. They couldn’t afford to care after working for so long in such a broken world and seeing so many young lives abandoned and discarded. They had retreated into a protective shell of apathy. None of them wanted to be reminded that they’d given up.
There were true believers, of course, real champions who still bled for us and did their best to defend us. Those were the ones I turned to when I discovered things that I could not tolerate in one of the houses where I was dumped with the other unwanted. And they did their jobs, just like they were supposed to.
That didn’t mean there were no consequences. You expose a guy who’s diddling his kids, or a woman who’s drinking away the child-support checks, and sure, someone will apologize and move you along to the next house. But the system will remember. There will be lingering suspicion simply because you were there, in a house that had seemed perfect—or at least, adequate to fill the boxes on the government checklist—when it all fell apart. You managed to expose, even if no one knew how, a flaw that everyone else missed, or agreed to overlook. When it all blew up and people lost their jobs, you were there. Again. That makes you somehow culpable, somehow a part of the problem, because it always seems to happen with you. You become that creepy little kid who’s always in the places where things go wrong.
In other words, the system will remember that you fucked with it, that you kept it from running smoothly, no matter how good your reasons. You were not quiet, you did not behave, and you were not to be trusted in the future.
That’s why, when I was sixteen, I ended up with the Thompsons. They had a reputation for dealing with troubled kids, for meeting rebellion with impenetrable discipline.
Looking back, I can see they deserved better than me. They were decent, if rigid, people: an older, churchgoing couple who thought it was their responsibility to take in troubled youth and turn us into something more like themselves. They didn’t love all the kids they took in—they didn’t even like most of us—but their motivations were pure. They never raised a hand or even their voices to us. They had their own money and never spent the checks from the state on anything but our food and clothing.
Still, I could sense their underlying revulsion when they looked at me and the other kids in their care. It tasted like a dirty coin in my mouth. They couldn’t help seeing us through a lens of hardened pity and contempt. We were inferior specimens, carrying the sins of our failed parents in our morally weakened souls. Every time one of us screwed up, it only confirmed their judgment. They were good people; we were fallen. They’d do their best, but privately, they thought most of us were already lost.
I could see all this like it was under a halogen lamp, and it pissed me off. I didn’t think that they were any better than I was, and I didn’t want to be like them.
They tried to keep me in line using the same tough-love approach that had worked for them for a couple of decades. It didn’t take. We fought. I cheated.
By then, I’d learned to hide what I could do, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t use it. Teenagers are borderline psychopaths under the best of circumstances, and I was not raised in anything like the best of circumstances. So I used whatever advantage I had.
If I was in trouble, I’d reveal my foster siblings’ secrets to deflect attention away from myself. Or I’d play on my foster parents’ fears and vulnerabilities and set them arguing about the mortgage or the electric bill.
Within a month, everyone had learned, at least on a subliminal level, that as long as nobody bothered me, life ran smoothly. But any attempt to get me to follow the rules or to punish me for any infractions, and a black cloud would descend on the house. Vicious arguments broke out, everyone at each other’s throat, suspicion curdling over every stray word or look.
Eventually, they all kept their distance from me, and I did the same with them. I would glide into a room just as other people were leaving, and make my escape the instant I felt someone get within range. As much as possible, I was in the house only to sleep or change clothes. I coasted through school when I bothered to show up, reading the answers straight out of teachers’ heads. I’d figured out how to use my talent to scam money and whatever else I wanted. I spent the rest of my free time peeling the underwear off lonely girls who couldn’t see through my cheap tricks. (Ever think it would be great to have a boyfriend who would just know what you were thinking? It’s not.)
I wore a lot of black, in case you haven’t guessed already.
As graduation and legal adulthood came barreling toward me, I knew that, very soon, I would be on my own. I signed up for the army for the same reason a lot of kids that age did: I didn’t know what else to do, and there was a war on. They were taking almost anyone then.
Mr. Thompson signed the early-enlistment consent form with something like a stadium cheer going off in his head. He did his best to keep from smiling while he drove me to the bus station. His wife found a corner of sympathy somewhere in her heart for me, and gave me a bag filled with sandwiches and cookies before I got on the bus.
I headed off to basic training, clutching a duffel with everything I owned and that paper sack. For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to eat any of the food inside. I just held on to the bag until the end of the ride. Then, feeling like an idiot, I stuffed it into the first trash can I found.
I TESTED HIGH enough for One Station Unit Training, which is the gateway to Special Forces. I’d heard—wrongly—that Special Forces got better pay and better food. And, idiot that I was, I also wanted to get into the fight as quickly as possible.
As it turned out, that wasn’t all I was tested for. I just didn’t know it at the time. Millions of high school students in America take the ASVAB, the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery. It’s designed to discover your talents, to figure out where you’d best fit in the military—whether you’d be a good mechanic or cook or medic.
It’s also got a few trip wires hidden, searching for people with certain tendencies. Some of the questions measured the moral flexibility of a new recruit, looking for responses that might be called sociopathic by some psychologists. Those guys were taken aside relatively quickly, and put on a different career path from the rest of us.
But there were also questions designed to find people like me: people with inexplicable ability, people who know stuff they shouldn’t be able to know. They’d been added to the tests way back in the 1970s. Almost nobody answered those questions right.
I hit all o
f them.
[5]
Kelsey and I go through the usual indignities of renting a car and checking into our business-class hotel. She handles everything so I don’t have to deal with the mouth-breathers behind the counters. (Customer service: where a blank stare is your umbrella.)
We drop off our suitcases and change. I’m in jeans and my old army boots. Kelsey meets me in the lobby wearing a soft-shell jacket over spandex gym gear. Hopefully that will do for serious play.
We head toward the rental car. I open the passenger side and pop another Vicodin. “You can drive,” I tell her. I’ve been through two airports today and I haven’t shot or disabled anyone, and I’m about to go to work. I need to be unconscious for a while to reboot my brain.
“And they say chivalry is dead,” Kelsey says as she gets behind the wheel.
“It’s not dead,” I say. “It’s just taking a nap.”
The drive to the preserve takes a little more than an hour. Somewhere along the way, the Vicodin and the whiskey catch up to me, and I drop off to sleep. The last thing I feel is a sense of relief from Kelsey. I don’t blame her. It’s enough work watching what you say to other people. Watching what you think is a much bigger chore.
I wake up to the sound of Kelsey shutting her car door. We’ve arrived at the game preserve.
I grew up in the Midwest, so I got all my ideas about the East Coast from Marvel Comics and sitcoms. I thought it was nothing but concrete and high-rises. Then I finally got to see it in real life. Get outside the city limits and you’ll find lots of forests and open ground.
The game preserve is in the middle of one of those chunks of wilderness on state land. There’s a big dirt parking lot right off the highway, filled with luxury buses and a few other rental cars, with a small bridge going over a stream, leading to the main lodge.
Before we can cross over to the lodge, OmniVore has set up a check-in station. A dozen tech geeks are in line, waiting to go through.
The OmniVore employees look as if they had as much trouble deciphering the invite’s dress code as we did. They’re in the standard geek uniform, novelty T-shirts on top of jeans or shorts or sweatpants. On their feet, they’ve got sneakers and flip-flops. Which is probably what they wear to the office too.
Killfile Page 5