Stefan exhaled, and a veil of smoke clouded my view for a moment, before the wind snatched it away. “Do you think one of these days they’ll get bored with Show and Tell and maybe play ping-pong on those tables instead?”
None of the students really did it for me today. I guess that would make it easier for me to focus on the game and act slightly psychic, but not too much. “Anything is better than one more minute in a classroom with Faun Windsong. I swear to God, she asks the most retarded questions just to hear herself talk. Blah, blah, blah. And The Nun? She just lets her keep going.”
The medium facilitator, Miss Maxwell, used to be a Catholic nun. That’s what we heard anyway. Once a nun, always a nun. Even if she was excommunicated for talking to dead people.
“Foosball.” Stefan took a long drag of his cigarette. He exhaled through his nose. “Now, that would be something. I’d show up for that completely sober.”
“There you are,” said a familiar voice from the doorway.
Stefan raised one eyebrow and smirked. He took a long, deep drag deliberately slow. I rolled my eyes. Einstein.
“They’re gonna start any minute. They’re setting up the tables.”
“We can see it from here,” I said in a monotone.
Einstein came up and peeked over my shoulder. I think his puny brain couldn’t grasp the shape of the buildings, and he’d never realized you could see the West Wing from the lounge. He stared for several drags of Stefan’s cigarette, getting his bearings. And then he laughed. “Heh-heh.”
Stefan and I both immediately imitated his laugh. In unison.
“Movie Mike says that if he gets a hot chick, he’s gonna try really hard today and send something flying across the table.”
Stefan’s lip curled. “I’ll keep my eye on him. If I’m lucky, I’ll get to see his head split open and his brains ooze out.”
“Heh-heh.”
Einstein left, because for him, the thought of being late for Show and Tell was as inconceivable as skipping a meal.
“What did Movie Mike do now?” I asked Stefan.
“The little douchebag was passing by me in the lunch room, and he told me to suck in my gut.” Stefan smiled as he said it. Which struck me as menacing.
“And then what?”
Stefan pressed his lips together in an attempt to stop smiling, but he couldn’t suppress it. He shrugged gleefully.
I prodded him with my shoulder. “Come on, man, tell me.”
Stefan put his lips against my ear. “I made him shit himself.”
I flinched. “You can do that?”
“I didn’t mean to. I was actually trying to make him vomit in front of Pretty Pretty Paula. Sending him vibes about how sick he felt, how his stomach was churning.” Stefan clapped his palm over his mouth and his whole body shook with laughter. He knuckled a tear from his eye, took a final drag from the cigarette, and flicked it out the window. “Oh, the smell….”
“Come on,” I said. Because I couldn’t figure out how to act like I thought it was funny. Mike should have known better than to get himself on Stefan’s bad side, but still. “You don’t want to miss Show and Tell.”
We acted like we were taking our time because we were both so cool, but eventually we followed Einstein downstairs. I didn’t mind Show and Tell, and I think Stefan didn’t either. Even if there wasn’t anyone new to cruise, it was the only time we ever saw each other during training. I would watch him, glancing at me over the table divider, giving me coy eyeliner looks. I dug it. Even if he did scare me a little.
The telepaths and the empaths had multiple stations dedicated to testing them. Because there were only four mediums, we got one table that we had to share. Faun was there already, handling the personal effects of some recently deceased unfortunate. It was a stupid test. The med school had never snagged anything important enough to bring a ghost along with it. I wondered what their paperwork said about any of us mediums. A bunch of blanks?
Dead Darla scowled at me from her post by a shy-looking med student who looked like he might be convinced to accessorize his black turtleneck with some silver skull jewelry. She’d dated someone briefly since my arrival, but gay or not, I’d picked Stefan over her, and she’d never forgiven me.
Einstein was talking away. He could go on and on. I wasn’t listening at the time, but now, from my strange half-here and half-there perspective, I could tune in on his words.
“And Director Sanchez is moving to Miami, and the new director will be here today. Some Polack name. Heh-heh.”
“Maybe you should challenge him to a game of screwing in light bulbs.”
Einstein thought about it for a second. “Heh-heh.”
I caught Stefan’s eye. He gave me a long look, up and down. I slouched harder against the wall, and angled my hips. I dug my thumbs into the pockets of my Levi’s, and framed my package with both hands. A naughty smile flickered over his expression, quickly hidden as he guessed yet another color from a series of obscenely bright cards. He was reading the presenter, and not the cards, since he was no precog. But I guess he still got a lot of them right, once he got a feel for the person holding the deck.
On the opposite side of the room, one of the med students opened up a gigantic box of donuts. I watched Stefan look up from his test. Not that he’d heard it or smelled it or had any reason to have seen it. But I guess a room full of people give off a certain vibe when the donuts show up.
Einstein ran over to take first pick. I had a stomach full of institutional pancakes, and wasn’t ready to add more starch to my body at the moment. Faun Windsong finished up, and Dead Darla was still hovering around her med student. That left me. I sat down across from a nervous girl who looked like maybe she’d had skin problems once, and never gotten back her confidence.
She pulled out a metal box and set it on the table. There was no divider between us, not like the tables where the telepaths and empaths and precogs tried to guess colors and shapes. She probably would have been more comfortable if there were. She folded her hands in her lap and tried not to fidget.
I pulled a string of pearls from the silver box. Silver. I noticed that now, I hadn’t thought much about it then. There was nothing supernatural about the pearls. Nobody appeared when I handled them. Nobody whispered in my ear. Even so, there were certain things that were expected of us. “I think the energy is female. Maybe a mother, or a grandmother. Or…like a mother. To someone.” One of the things they expected was that we wouldn’t neglect the obvious.
Once I’d finished sorting through all the trinkets and giving the med student answers I’d pulled out of my ass, I turned to head over to the donuts. Because, of course, that’s where Stefan would be.
Only, he wasn’t.
Einstein was there, with a long john in one hand and a cruller in the other. Faun Windsong broke a bagel into a dozen small pieces, which she did to fool herself into thinking that she was eating less, and whined about the lack of low-fat cream cheese.
But no Stefan.
I felt a presence beside me, not in a psychic way. More in a something-is-blotting-out-the-sun way. A guy in blue scrubs stood beside me, over two hundred pounds of solid muscle. Some new orderly. There was a handful of regulars, but the other ones came and went; I had a hard time keeping track of them. “Are you getting a donut, or not?”
I almost said, “What’s it to you?” Except that I didn’t care for the look in his eye, and while I didn’t think I was in danger of getting punched in the head, it didn’t mean that I wanted to make an enemy among the staff. After all, people can find all kinds of ways to get back at you if they’re looking for revenge. They can “accidentally” crash a cart into your door while you’re trying to sleep. They can spit in your food. With that in mind, I just shook my head.
“Then let’s go.” He stared at me until I fell into step beside him and the two of us left the cafeteria.
I was curious, but not overly so. Heliotrope Station might be boring, but at least it wasn’t ful
l of crazy people like the CCMHC. But the closer we got to Administration, the more uneasy I felt. I wondered if maybe I wasn’t performing well enough to stay. If that were the case, would they give me some kind of warning? Or would they just kick me out and leave me on the street to fend for myself? Shit, what if I had to go get a real job?
The new orderly lead me up to Sanchez’ door. Only it wasn’t Sanchez’ anymore, not if Einstein had been up on his gossip, and he probably was. He might be stupid, but his short-term memory was okay. “Wait here.” The orderly stood beside me with his hands loose at his sides. He stared straight ahead. I wished I had taken a donut. It might be the last free meal I got in a while.
In a couple minutes, Sanchez’ door opened. Another new orderly came out, leading one of the precogs, a black kid named Big Larry who never really liked me because I never bothered to hide the fact that I checked out guys’ asses. And yet I felt a certain kind of solidarity with him, because he and I were psychics. And these other guys could have been professional wrestlers. I tried to catch Big Larry’s eye. “Hey,” I said.
Big Larry was dark-skinned. I’ll never forget the way his eyes looked, with the whites showing all around. He didn’t say a word.
Did Big Larry have something to worry about? I’d always thought he was pretty accurate. “Go on,” said the gigantic orderly. I didn’t see any way out of it, so I took a deep breath, and I stepped into the office.
-TWENTY ONE-
What I remembered most about Sanchez’s office, not that I made a habit of hanging out in there, was that there were stacks and stacks of papers and manila files everywhere. Lots of chairs too, maybe five, and you could only sit in two of them, because all the others functioned as some sort of elaborate filing system.
Now, not only were all the teetering stacks of paper gone, but the chairs were, too. All but the single, imposing modern-day throne behind the desk. And that one wasn’t even being sat in.
Krimski stood behind Sanchez’ old desk. He wore an immaculate pinstriped gray suit, double-breasted, with a black tie that was thin enough to look modern, but wide enough to keep it from being too edgy. Now, from my vantage point in Stefan’s hypnosis couch, I saw the faintest impression of a holster on his left side. Back them, I wouldn’t have noticed unless he whipped out the gun and pummeled me with it.
“Mister Bayne, is it? I see you have the distinction of being the highest level medium.”
“I think Faun Windsong might call you on that.”
He went on as if I hadn’t said a word. “As a courtesy, I’m letting you know that certain policy changes are in effect, immediately.”
My brain scrambled. Courtesy—good. Policy changes—probably not so good.
“As outlined on page fifty-eight, paragraph four of your intake agreement, we will continue testing the psyactive and anti-psyactive properties of certain substances. Unfortunately, nicotine skews the results. Cigarette distribution will be ceased, and the smoking lounge is closed.”
Cigarettes were one of the main commodities at Heliotrope Station, just like they had been at the CCMHC. That, and maybe sexual favors—which I personally liked to save for recreational use. Though I guess some people felt that way about their smokes.
Besides that, it was just plain rude to close up the smoking lounge, whether or not we had anything to smoke once we were in there.
I opened my mouth to suggest as much, but Krimski started talking before I figured out what to say. I guess he’d had practice. Big Larry. Maybe Stefan, too.
“Your file says you’ve been having sexual relations with your fellow residents. What you do in your own time makes no difference to me. But when you’re within these walls, you’re on my time.”
My mouth worked. They put stuff like that in my file?
“Fraternization, between staff and residents, and among the residents themselves, ends now. After focus groups, residents will return to their rooms and remain there, unless they are called upon for testing.”
“You mean, like solitary confinement?”
“Hardly. The program is in danger of being shut down. The telepaths can’t see anything, the TKs can’t move anything, and the mediums don’t get anything but the vaguest impressions. Heliotrope Station isn’t a social club, Mister Bayne. It’s a training facility. And we will train you.”
I really, really didn’t want to be the star pupil in the medium department. I’d need to be sure to do even worse next time I was tested. And if I did get thrown out for underperforming, at least I’d be able to get laid without someone documenting it in my goddamn file.
“Mister Brown will show you back to your room.” I had been there nearly four months—it’s not as if I didn’t know where my room was. And I don’t think that was the point. I turned toward Brown, because I would rather walk beside him then have him start grabbing me, when some motion in the far corner of the room caught my eye.
A bunch of meaningless highlights resolved themselves into a figure, transparent, but recognizable enough. I knew Director Sanchez by his bald spot. It was shaped like an hourglass, big on the crown, wide across the forehead, and a tiny bridge of hair that tried to connect from ear to ear over the top of his head. His face was not so recognizable. It was swollen and bloated, and his eyes looked ready to pop out of his skull. A length of wire was wrapped around his neck so tightly I was worried it would act like a cheese cutter and lop the whole thing right off.
I stumbled, and I looked at my boot. But I don’t think Krimski was convinced that the carpet was what had distracted me. Sanchez had died there. And I knew it. And he knew I knew it.
That night I picked a hole the size of a La-Z-Boy in the plaster of the wall in my room, not that I thought I could escape through it or anything, but just because I was bored, and antsy, and of course second-guessing my decision to hop ship from the CCMHC to come to Heliotrope Station at all.
Because logically, once I’d tested as a Psych, couldn’t the medical center have just let me out?
I hadn’t wasted much time thinking it through. Heliotrope Station promised a cutting-edge career in Psych work. I was twenty-three, and I’d only made it halfway through the tenth grade. Heliotrope seemed like a logical choice, especially since it was residential, and I wouldn’t have to worry about finding somewhere to live and coming up with rent month after month.
I slept, eventually, but it couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours. “Wake up.” I opened my eyes to an orderly shouting in my face. Not Mister Brown. But another new guy. As if all the orderlies we knew (and loved to make fun of) had been replaced by a soulless bunch of thugs.
I was escorted to the medical wing. “I’ll be late for class,” I told the dried-up guy in the nurse’s office. He wasn’t the nurse. He looked vaguely like a monkey. If Stefan were there, he’d crack a joke. But Stefan wasn’t there.
“You won’t be attending focus group today,” said monkey man—the man with the rainbow of pills and the pointy syringes. “Today, we’ll be testing the effect of a new medication on mediums.”
“Breathe deeply, and focus on my voice.” I’d know Stefan’s voice anywhere. But he wasn’t there. Hadn’t been there. Shit. My sense of time was all screwy.
“You’re centered, you’re relaxed. As I count down to one, you find yourself becoming more and more alert. Ten. Nine. Safe and relaxed. Eight.”
Hypnosis couch, right. My breathing was fast, like it could tip into hyperventilation at any second. The back of my shirt was soaked with sweat.
“Four. Feel your hands resting on your thighs. Feel the soles of your feet on the floor. Three.”
What if I opened my eyes, and I was still in the nurse’s office? The last fourteen years would turn out to be a big, drug-induced nightmare. Seriously, what if? Would I do anything different? God, I’d like to think so.
“One. Open your eyes, feeling completely refreshed.”
“If this is what refreshed feels like, I’d hate to get a taste of the exhaustion around he
re.”
“You were talking about Einstein.”
“Richie. Yeah. I saw him. He’s doing okay.”
“And Krimski. You said he was in Sanchez’ office.”
“I did? What do I say during these regression things, anyway? Do you record them?”
“Of course not,” he snapped. “I would’ve told you if I was recording them.”
“Okay, okay, I just wondered what I said.” Because it would’ve been really awkward if I just came out and said that I used to pose for him with my crotch sticking out. I suspected he knew, given his empathic ability. But putting actual words on it made it sound so pathetic.
“You don’t say very much, which is pretty typical of my patients with PTSD. You’ll tell me where you are, who you’re with, maybe what you’re doing. And only if I ask you. All the sights, the sounds, the subtle nuance, that’s something that you keep to yourself.”
So, the crotch thing. I’m guessing I didn’t say that.
“The big talkers are the suburban ladies with way too much money and way too much time on their hands. They go on and on—they’re narcissistic that way.”
“But you can imagine all this stuff, can’t you? You were there.”
“Yes. I was. That’s probably the only reason I get half of the things you’re talking about.”
“When you reminded me about Krimski, I slipped back into one of the memories from before, from the first regression we did. When they tested Neurozamine on me.”
“It’s not uncommon to revisit a traumatic event at various points. It’s your way of trying to make sense of things.”
Various snappy comebacks occurred to me, but none of them seemed worth saying. “So, when did we start sneaking into the kitchen? Before Krimski, or after?”
“Before. Don’t you remember that lock? I could pop it with a sharpened comb. The cafeteria was more like an all-you-can-eat buffet back then, until he got that lock fixed and hired all those disgustingly muscular orderlies.” Stefan stroked the soul patch under his lower lip. “When you think about it, Heliotrope Station was more like a cheap vacation package back then. Especially the classes. Those were like sitting through timeshare presentations.”
PsyCop 5: Camp Hell Page 17