Lies I Live By

by Lauren Sabel

  “Hey, Cal,” Charlie says, hugging me around the waist from behind, and then turning me around to face him. “Sorry ’bout that. I was with a customer.”

  When he says customer, his eyes fleet over to the girl. She’s putting a coin in the belly dancer machine, a machine no one but dirty old men pay for. Right. She’s here for the machines. I raise my eyebrows, and I swear Charlie blushes.

  “New in town,” Charlie says, and then, turning away, “I’ll get my stuff.”

  Charlie and I do what we always do when I meet him at work. We sit on the wall over the ocean, cracking soft-shell crabs open with our bare fingers and dipping their thick white flesh into tin cups of melted butter and garlic. I stuff a piece of crab in my mouth and lick the butter off my fingers as it dribbles down to my wrist.

  Below us, the sea lions are barking at one another on their floating piers. They are slick and shiny, like tar-covered dogs. They have these ridiculous whiskers, and they flap their webbed feet at each other as they scramble to get onto the dock. I laugh aloud as a tiny sea lion pushes a giant one into the water. He swims around, looking for a place to climb up and sun himself in the last few rays of light.

  “Freshwater pearl at sunrise,” Charlie says. He points across the pier at a wooden booth painted with cheesy ocean waves, advertising how, for $14.99, anyone can crack open an oyster and fish out a pearl. A couple of tourists are there, and a little boy is squealing in delight as he pries open an oyster.

  “Belly dancer machine,” I say, and I can tell he’s disappointed that I didn’t think of him until an hour ago. When he was flirting with that girl. I frown, tracing the girl’s silhouette against the darkening window in my mind.

  “Callie?” I feel Charlie’s warm hand on my arm, and my heart slows down its frantic beat. He rubs his thumb above the blue veins in my inner wrist, and I take a deep breath. “What’s wrong?”

  I focus on the biggest sea lion, now finding a place on the dock between two glistening black bodies. I wish I could tell Charlie about my real job before these lies eat me alive, but it’s all trapped in me, shrouded in secret, smothering me from the inside. “Who was that girl?” I ask him instead, looking at my heels bouncing inches off the sea wall with each swing of my legs.

  “Which one?” he asks. I look up at him, briefly catching his eyes before he looks away. “She’s going to Pratt next year.”

  She’s going to Pratt? With Charlie? I don’t want to look him in the eyes, so I watch two sea lions fighting for the center of the pier. Other sea lions are bailing, diving off the dock, leaving the two of them alone on the wooden slat. I picture the NYU acceptance letter in my desk, and an uncomfortable sensation grows in my chest, like I don’t quite fit into my body.

  “I asked about her New York T-shirt, and she mentioned she was going to study art at Pratt next year. I said we should hook up for coffee sometime and talk about the photography program,” Charlie says.

  Hook up for coffee? When does Charlie ever talk like that?

  “She’s from SoCal,” Charlie continues.

  The horrors of Hollywood, and deserts, and botoxed mindless blondes. “She looks like it.”

  “She’s nice,” Charlie says defensively, and I feel my skin prickle. “She said she’s coming to my photography show. Anyway, she wanted to meet you.”

  “I bet she did.” I wonder why I’m getting so jealous. I trust Charlie completely. But since I met Jasper this morning, I know what it can feel like with someone else. How my spine can tingle in a way it never has, how catching eyes, touching hands, is like a fever.

  The office is rippling with tension this morning. It’s rare to see Indigo in a bad mood, but today he’s stewing around the staff room like he’s wearing a big cartoon rain cloud above his head. In the candy machine behind him, a Kit Kat is dangling defiantly above the slot.

  Standing stiffly beside the staff table is Michael. He’s a small, pale man with a lazy, wandering eye. Michael used to be a psychic viewer here, but after his mind snapped, he’s only here occasionally, under Indigo’s supervision.

  “Hi, Callie,” Indigo says, and then he stops pacing and glares at the candy machine. Michael flicks his finger to the right, and the Kit Kat appears in Indigo’s hand.

  “Thanks, Mike,” Indigo says.

  So it’s not a rumor. I’ve heard Indigo say that Michael is an expert at telekinesis, which means he’s able to move things just by thinking about them. Telekinesis is not that weird, when you think about it: we use invisible energy wavelengths every day. When we use the microwave, we use invisible rays to cook our food. When we listen to the radio, we use radio waves to connect us to different types of music. So is it that strange to use invisible thought waves to push or pull an object in space?

  I wish I could do it, but few people can. I briefly wonder if Michael was offered a spot in the New York office before he lost his mind.

  “Hey Mike, thanks,” Indigo says again.

  Michael doesn’t respond; he just shifts from foot to foot, his hands loose at his sides like unused guns. He looks around, his eyes registering the lack of bars on the windows, the unpadded wall, and he sighs. Here again, I guess he’s thinking. I felt that same way this morning, after staying up late last night thinking about Charlie and the girl with the crop top. Does Charlie somehow sense he could know every part of her, and that with me, he never will?

  Indigo walks up beside me and places a hand on my shoulder, making me jump. “Real shame, that one. Used to be one of our best,” Indigo says, as if I’ve never heard him rave about Michael’s psychic powers before. Indigo spins his finger in a circle around his ear. “But when they get in here . . .”

  I shiver. “What happens? I mean, exactly?”

  “When people break into someone’s mind, the brain instinctively fights to get the intruders out. Kind of like white blood cells attacking a flu virus,” Indigo says. “This fight puts enormous stress on the brain. Eventually the brain gives out, like what happened to Michael.” He shakes his head sadly. “Anyway, I had to do what was best for him, even if he didn’t like it.”

  “Michael didn’t want to go to Shady Hills?” I ask, referring to the mental institution that is now Michael’s home.

  “No. But when someone has their mind broken into, it’s a quick downfall into madness. It’s my job to retire those people.”

  The word retire makes me think of people shooting horses with broken legs to put them out of their misery. A chill runs down my spine.

  “So what’s the crisis this time?” I ask Indigo. I wonder if Michael’s presence here has anything to do with the laser on the Russian aircraft carrier or the body I saw trapped under the red smoke of radiation.

  “That’s classified,” Indigo says, which doesn’t surprise me because Indigo only brings Michael in during emergencies. Besides all the red tape Indigo has to go through to get a clinically insane person a day pass to a classified facility, what if someone found out? The government might shut down our whole organization to avoid a news headline like, “America employs mental patients to find military secrets.” But Michael is essential sometimes. His letter- and number-reading abilities in his sessions make him very, very dangerous—or very helpful, depending on whether you’re the one hiding the classified military secrets, or trying to find them. “I’m working with Michael, so you’ll be Jasper’s monitor today,” Indigo continues. “He’s waiting for you in the viewing room.”

  “Psychic Welcoming Committee at your service,” I say, saluting Indigo.

  “Try not to overwhelm him with your . . . um . . .”

  “Attitude?” I suggest.

  He nods. “With your you.”

  “Consider my ‘you’ sealed.” I zip my mouth shut and throw away the key.

  Indigo grins at me before he turns back to Michael, and I have no choice but to grab a cup of coffee and head into the viewing room.

  Jasper is leaning back in the leather reclining chair, his eyes closed. I watch him for a mome
nt, the way his eyelashes flutter and his chest rises and falls under his red zippered hoodie. Then his eyes snap open.

  “Watching me?” he asks. He yanks the side lever, and the chair jolts to a sitting position.

  “And I would be doing that why?”

  “It’s okay,” he says. “I was watching you, too.”

  “Did you even hear me?” I ask.

  “Not much else to do around here but watch you,” Jasper says, “and play fortune-teller.” He taps his finger to his temple, his wooden beads jangling from his wrist. “You are thinking about . . .” He pauses, tapping his temple again, his face getting really serious. “Why this office always has such horrible coffee.”

  I feel a smile crack across my face. “Better in New York, was it?” I say, taking a sip of my watery coffee and grimacing.

  “Nothing’s better in New York,” he says, “this being the happiest coast and all that.”

  “And all that,” I agree.

  “You shouldn’t drink that stuff,” he says, nodding to my cup of coffee. “Stunts your growth.”

  “That’s what happened.”

  Jasper picks up his coffee cup and takes a sip, making a pained face. “You ready?”

  It’s always nerve-racking to work with another psychic for the first time; how will I know he won’t judge me when I lay my heart out pulsing on the page, or spit incomprehensible words in the air? It may be selfish, but I’m glad he has to go first.

  “Always.” I press Record on the remote control, and the red light on top of the video camera flips on. Click.

  Jasper shuts his eyes, purses his lips, and then he’s gone. With each minute that passes, I feel him pulling farther away from me, withdrawing to a deeper place, on the other side of the universe that I can’t see. As he goes in deeper, I wonder what his method is for getting into his psychic zone. Does he put on scuba gear and release himself slowly into the ocean, or imagine a spinning golden orb, like Indigo does? Jasper’s hand starts up first, moving across the paper, drawing something in exquisite detail.

  “I’m outside,” he says slowly. His hand is sketching faster, his voice sounding thicker now. “It’s nighttime . . .”

  As he trails off, I can tell it’s getting painful for him because tears start to well up in his eyes. That’s the tricky thing about viewing coordinates. You imagine the coordinates in the envelope, like N39º54.16W68º72.5, and at first, it means nothing. Then you start to see images, to lower yourself into a world flooded with sound, shapes emerging from shadows. Small solid shapes like ball and tower, objects you can feel with both hands. The feelings come next. It takes a while to get to emotions and physical sensations, but when they come, you can’t flinch or look away. You have to take it all, be the receptacle. Right now, I can tell that he wants out. But you have to take that too.

  “I’m not alone,” Jasper says. “There’s someone else out here, and he’s injured.” His eyes are now open, and filled with tears.

  I’m surprised by his tears. He seems so tough on the surface, but underneath, is he just as scared and vulnerable as I am?

  “There’s glass all around me,” he continues. “It looks like a broken window or something.”

  The comparison to a broken window is the problem, and at this point I have to say AOL, which stands for Analytic Overlay. That’s our code word for scratch the session, because the analytical mind has moved in. When we psychically view, we only use the primitive mind, but once we start making relationships between something we know and something we don’t, the analytical mind has stepped in. It’s not reliable, because what if you say it looks like a nuclear weapons facility, but it’s a just a steel factory, and we attack based on that info?

  “AOL,” I announce, louder than I need to. Having an AOL is always embarrassing because it means you’ve wasted the monitor’s time; you’ve let your humanity get the best of you.

  Jasper seems as surprised as I am that he’s crying. “I’ve never done that before,” he says, all traces of his cockiness gone. He wipes the tears off. “I really screwed that up, didn’t I?”

  This Jasper is even more likable, I want to say. I hope he sticks around. “You did,” I say, “but this stuff still counts, off the record.”

  I nod at the small stack of papers in his hands, the ones he sketched while he was viewing. He shrugs and hands them to me, and I can tell from his flushed face that he’s still a bit embarrassed. How cute.

  I open a file folder and start to put the papers in, but as I turn them over so that they are right side up, I do a double take. It’s a drawing of person lying face down in a pile of glass shards. He’s wearing a hoodie with the hood pulled over his head, and one of his arms is flung out beside him. On the back of his hand is a large tattoo of a star.

  There’s something about the figure on the ground that’s familiar, I just can’t quite put my finger on what. It’s not your job to analyze, Callie, I remind myself. Still, as I pack up and head home, I can’t shake the feeling that I know that person. That person who is bleeding and possibly dying and who I can’t help at all.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The house smells like fried food when I get home that evening. I follow the smell into the kitchen, where Mom is sitting at the table, a smattering of Chinese food boxes around her. “Hungry?” she asks.

  I drop my backpack onto the floor. “Not really.”

  “Try a bite,” she says. She pushes a box toward me. “Chow young with fried wheat gluten.”

  “Ooooh, worms,” I say, grabbing the box and taking a bite anyway. The slimy gray noodles taste even worse than they look. “It’s good,” I lie.

  “How was nannying?” Mom asks.

  “Fine.” I say, but as always, lying to Mom gives me a sick feeling in my stomach. I’m lying to protect her, I remind myself.

  “Eat,” she urges.

  I take another bite, just to make Mom happy, though now that I’ve started, I realize that I’m starving.

  “Did you eat today?” Mom is always worried about whether I ate or not. Like I’m going to starve to death in the wilds of San Francisco. The funny thing is that Mom rarely eats. In all the pictures I’ve seen of her from before Dad left, when I was just a toddler, her face was round and smiling, but now she usually looks thin and stressed. At least she did, until she met Richard.

  “Yes,” I lie, “I went to lunch with a new friend.”

  “Oh good. What’s her name?”

  “His name is Jasper.”

  Her eyebrows lift, and her face says, What about Charlie? But her voice says, “What’s Jasper like?”

  “He’s um . . . different.”

  “Different good or bad?”

  “Good different,” I say, and I almost add, like me.

  “Is he a friend of the Bernsteins’?” Mom asks.

  Ah, the Bernsteins—a dentist and psychiatrist, parents of Emma, cutest child in the world. Big house, garage with twin BMWs, all the trimmings a fictional family can get.

  “Yes,” I say. “He’s their . . .” I almost say son, but that’s too much. Always maintain enough of a separation to make it believable, Indigo says. “Their nephew,” I finish. “He’s home from his first semester of college. They wanted him to meet someone around his own age.”

  “The Bernsteins have been so nice to you,” Mom says. “Why don’t you invite him over for dinner sometime?”

  “Mom!” I protest. “We don’t owe the Bernsteins anything. Besides, I’ve only had lunch with the guy. And you don’t cook.”

  “So?” Mom lifts her chopsticks out of the box of gray noodles. “We could feed him this.”

  I grin at her, imagining Jasper sitting at our dinner table between Mom and me. “He’s not the worm-eating type.”

  Mom smiles back, and then asks, “Are you going to see him often?”

  Every day, I think. My mind races back to when I met Jasper: the sound of my name on his tongue, his magnetic blue eyes drinking me in, the searing heat racing up my arm when
he touched me. How am I going to work with him?

  “Where’s Richard tonight?” I need to change the subject before I start blushing.

  “You know him. Probably saving lives or something equally heroic.” Richard is Mom’s firefighter boyfriend, who has recently moved in with us. What she’ll never know is that she met Richard because of me. That night I bent a spoon and set the fire alarm off, Richard showed up in his full fireman gear. Mom was temporarily rendered speechless—which is hard to do—and they were so caught up in each other, if there had been a fire, neither of them would have noticed.

  “Definitely heroic,” a voice says from the living room.

  “Richard!” Mom squeals, jumping to her feet and dashing into the living room. “You’re here!”

  “Nowhere I’d rather be,” I hear Richard say, and then I hear Mom squeal again.

  “Put me down!”

  Richard carries her into the kitchen in his arms. Compared to my petite mom, Richard looks like a giant. He smiles down at her, and she strokes the tidy gray mustache in his friendly, rounded face. “Made for laughing,” he always tells me.

  “Hey Cal,” Richard says, placing Mom gently back in her chair.

  “Save any lives today?” I ask.

  “We got everyone out okay,” he says gratefully. “Got another one for you,” he adds, pulling a magazine out of his back pocket and tossing it to me.

  I’m not what I think of as a collecting type of person, but ever since Richard found out that I love National Geographic magazines, he’s brought them home from the fire station every month. The pictures are so beautiful that I can’t bear to throw them out.

  I study the cover. It’s a picture of a black night sky full of stars, and right in the center, an old water ring is etched into the cover. Along the spine it says: The Space Race Continues.

  “Heroic, just like I said,” Mom says. She pushes a take-out box toward him with her chopstick. “Join us for dinner?”

  Richard tips it over with one finger and peers inside. “Had dinner at the station.”

  “Lucky you,” I say.

  Richard pulls out a chair and sits in it, looking way too large for Mom’s IKEA furniture. By the way he shifts subtly in his seat, I can always tell that he’s uncomfortable too, although he’ll never say so. “Getting excited for fall?” he asks me.