by Dima Zales
In the midst of all this, the knowledge dawns on me: I’m not alone. I’m part of something more elemental than myself. And then, I understand.
I’m not simply Darren, not anymore. I’m Caleb. And I’m Darren. Both at once. But not in the way Reading allowed me to be other people. This is a much deeper connection. During Reading, I merely see the world through someone else’s eyes. This Joint Reading experience is much more than that. I see the world through Caleb’s eyes, but he also sees the world though my eyes. It almost blows my mind when I realize I can even see through his eyes how the world looks through mine, when filtered by his perception and biases.
I can tell he’s trying not to get deep into my mind, and I try to reciprocate by focusing on not getting into his. As this is happening, the positive feelings I was experiencing thus far begin to turn dark. I sense something frightening in Caleb’s mind. And the whole universe seems to be shouting one idea in our joint mind: “We are staying out of each other’s heads. We are staying out of each other’s heads . . .”
But before either one of us can actually follow this reasonable mantra, a barrage of memories is triggered, all at once.
On some level, I’m not sure how, I know that Caleb is seeing my most embarrassing and vivid memories. I don’t know why it’s happening; it could be because they shine so brightly in my mind, or it could be because he’s curious about some of this stuff. Whatever the answer, he’s reliving the time my moms talked to me about masturbating. If it were possible to turn red right now, I’d look like a tomato at the thought of sharing that particular memory. He’s also reliving other things, like the time I first phased into the Quiet after my bike accident. The first time I had sex. The day I saw Mira in the Quiet and realized I wasn’t alone.
On some level, I’m reliving all these memories at the same time. All at once, as though in a dream.
And then I realize something else is happening. With dread, I see a mental tsunami coming at me.
It’s Caleb’s memories.
Chapter 3
Caleb, the device was found.
We read the text and are overwhelmed with relief.
“We?” a sarcastic voice in my head says. “It’s me, kid, Caleb. This is my memory.”
“‘We’ is how I experience it, Caleb,” I snap back, hoping he can hear me. “You think I want to be here?”
“So get the fuck out.”
“I would if I could.”
“Try,” Caleb thinks at me, but it’s too late. I’m immersed back in Caleb’s memory, which continues to unfold like a Reading session.
The text doesn’t change our mission, we realize.
We’re approaching the car, trying to get as close to it as possible before Splitting. It’s a fine balance, this business of attacking someone who can also enter the Mind Dimension. It’s a difficult art that we’re still developing.
Typically, it’s hard to catch someone unawares if he or she can Split. From childhood, those of us with the ability to enter the Mind Dimension learn to immediately scan the environment around us when we Split. Or at least the paranoid among us do.
The solution is very bold; few would have the balls to try it. The answer is to attack someone inside the Mind Dimension itself.
I, Darren, disassociate for a moment and think at Caleb, “Why attack someone in the Quiet? Nothing you do there has any effect in the real world.”
“What did I tell you about getting out of my head?” He sounds angry, if it’s possible to sound angry while thinking. “At the very least, stop the fucking commentary. For your information, when one of us dies in the Mind Dimension, it has an effect—a lasting effect. Trust me.”
“But still, why not do your attack in the real world?” I ask.
“Look, kid, I’m not here to teach you anything. We’re here for me, remember? But if it shuts you up, let me explain. One benefit of attacking someone in the Mind Dimension is that there’s no possibility the person will see me until I pull him or her in. It’s the ultimate stealth, and the reason for the development of this technique. Another huge advantage is that, in the Mind Dimension, a Pusher can’t use random bystanders to aid himself—something that fucker would definitely try. But before going in and attacking people in the Mind Dimension, keep in mind that this technique has drawbacks. In a regular fight, I can leverage the Mind Dimension. It’s a huge edge. I can Split and see where my frozen opponent is about to strike me. If the opponent isn’t a Reader or a Pusher, I can Read him too, which gives me valuable information about my opponent’s actions in the immediate future. Unfortunately, in this case, the opponent is a Pusher. All I can rely on is fighting prowess. This suits me just fine, since I’m confident in my abilities in that department. Still, I always strategize based on the assumption that my opponent is as good as, or better than, me—as unlikely as that is in practice.”
“Wow, dude, that’s way more than I ever wanted to know about the subject—and extremely arrogant, to boot,” I think at him.
“You asked, asshole.”
With no more commentary coming from Caleb, I get sucked back into his memory.
A car alarm blares in the distance. We decide that the location we’re in now should work for our purposes: far enough that the Pusher couldn’t have seen us coming, but not so far away that we can’t fight when the moment arrives.
We Split, and the car alarm, along with other ambient noise, disappears.
Now that we’re in battle mode, our need to kill the man in the car—the Pusher—is overwhelming. It overtakes our whole being. We rarely get a chance like this. A righteous, completely justified kill. No way will we face an attack of conscience over this. No, there won’t be any lost sleep, or even an ounce of remorse this time. If anyone ever deserved to die, it’s our current target.
This Pusher has been trying to damage the Readers’ gated community for weeks now. He’s responsible for the bomb that our men are disarming at this very moment.
So many Readers could have died. On our watch. This possibility is so unthinkable, we still can’t fully wrap our head around it. And it was all avoided by mere chance, by a lucky discovery. We saw the telltale signs inside the mind of that electrician. We don’t dwell on what would’ve happened if this had gone undiscovered. The only consolation is that we would’ve died along with the victims, given where the explosion was set to take place. We wouldn’t have had to live with the shame of being Head of Security and allowing such a thing to occur.
Of course, the chicken-shit Pusher did none of the work himself. No. He mentally compelled the staff at the community instead.
Rage wells within us again when we focus on how these nice, regular people got their minds fucked with, simply because they happened to be contractors, plumbers, and gardeners working at the Reader community. We seethe at the injustice of it, at how they would’ve been blown up along with the Readers, collateral damage in the Pusher’s eyes. We would never resort to such a maneuver. The idea of collateral damage is among the things that made us eventually leave Special Ops.
Our rage grows exponentially as we remember what Julia told us she gleaned while Reading Stacy, the bartender—what this slime did to her. The metaphorical rape of Stacy’s mind, making her try to hurt the people she worked for, wasn’t enough for him. The fucker took it a sick step further and made it literal. He decided to mix his unholy business with the abominable perversion of pleasure, making her do such twisted things . . .
We take a deep breath, trying to suppress our rage, which is beginning to overflow. Rage is not helpful in combat. At least not in the style of fighting we have cultivated. We need to be assessing, analyzing, and then acting. We know that historically, berserkers always died, albeit gloriously, on the battlefield. That’s not our way. In fact, we practice something that can be said to be the opposite of blind fury. We call our style Mindful Combat. It requires a degree of tranquility. We take some more deep breaths. We mean for one person to die today, and he is in that car. We need to
live on so we can hunt down and kill anyone else who’s part of this crime, this conspiracy.
We’re watching the man in the front window of his car. We’re wary. We recognize people like ourselves, former military, and this guy’s body language screams Special Ops. The way he parked away from any good sniping spot, the alert way he’s sitting. All these clues point to elite training. But this guy is not from the Special Activities Division, our own background. We’re pretty sure of that. He might’ve trained with the Recapture Tactics Team—though this asshole probably Pushed to get his way in, at least at the psych-profiling stage.
Taking a final deep breath, we shoot out the passenger window and punch the frozen Pusher in the face, knowing that the physical contact will bring him into our Mind Dimension. Killing him here is the goal. Doing it slowly, if possible, would be a bonus.
We prepare to shoot as soon as he materializes—but he doesn’t. We’re taken aback for a second. He should’ve materialized in the backseat, we think momentarily before a sharp pain in our right shoulder grabs our full attention.
Strangely, the Pusher seems to have materialized outside the car. We don’t recall anyone ever becoming corporeal in the Mind Dimension this way. There’s no time to wonder how it happened, or where he got the knife that’s now lodged in our shoulder. With this injury, our whole world becomes focused on one thing only: survival.
The burn in our shoulder is excruciating, and just holding the gun in our right hand feels like torture. Doing our best to ignore the pain, we turn around and try to fire at the attacker. He anticipates the move, and with a twist, manages to get free. If not for our injury, there would be no way he’d get away with this, but as it is, a moment later our weapon clinks as it falls to the ground. His other hand reaches into his coat pocket.
It’s time for a desperate maneuver.
We head-butt him—a move so dangerous that we normally discourage our people from using it.
The blow brings stars to our eyes, and a sense of disorientation, but it seems that the risk was worth it. The Pusher clutches his now-hopefully-broken nose. This is our moment.
Using our good left hand, we punch him in the nose—which he’s clutching with his hands—and with the injured arm, we reach into his coat pocket.
We grab his gun, lift our right hand, and let it come down. Using the injured hand this way, with the gun as a makeshift club, hurts us less than a punch would have. The heavy gun handle lands on the same weak spot on the Pusher’s nose.
He doesn’t pull his hands away. The damage to his nose must be severe.
He tries to go for a low kick, hoping to hit our legs. We move out of the way of the attack, take the gun into our left hand, and take it off safety.
We shoot his left upper arm first. He makes a strange gargling sound.
We shoot his upper right arm next. This time, he screams.
We savor the fact that his pain must be excruciating.
A shot to each leg follows, and he falls to the ground, trying to get into some semblance of a defensive position.
Now the Mindful Combat part is over, and we can let the rage back in.
Still, we don’t let the rage make us go too quickly. We kick and take a breath. Then kick again and again.
We’re moving in a fog. Time seems to slow.
When our legs ache and we’re satisfied with the amount of bone-crunching noises, we finally get tired of this game. After all, unless the Pusher dies of these injuries, he’ll be good as new when he gets out. But that’s not going to happen. We aim the gun at our opponent’s head.
It’s time to get to the point. It’s time to begin killing this Pusher . . .
* * *
I, Darren, have to remind myself that this whole experience was just Caleb’s horrific memory. I feel sick. But at the same time, I also feel surprisingly at ease with the memory. It’s a very strange, contradictory combo.
“No shit,” Caleb’s voice intrudes. “We’re part of the same mind for now, and my half of it is fine with it. How your half, the weak half feels, is irrelevant. You don’t like it? Then get the fuck out.”
I try, but I can’t control it. Unbidden, another memory of Caleb’s overtakes me.
* * *
We hear a loud noise and wake up. The alarm clock next to our bed is showing three a.m., meaning it’s only been an hour since we went to bed. That’s a single hour of sleep after hundreds of miles of running in the span of four days.
We’re being dragged somewhere. The weariness dulls the panic a bit, but we know something bad is coming. And that’s when the first punch lands. Then the second. Someone pushes us, and we slip on someone’s blood and fall to the ground. After all that, they decide to beat the shit out of us?
We try to ignore the pain, making a valiant effort not to Split into the Mind Dimension. Such a reprieve would be cheating, and we want to feel like we earned our place here.
“Don’t you want to quit?” a voice keeps saying, and we hear someone agree. That person’s beating stops, but of course, he’s out of the program. To us, there is no such option. We would give anything to stay in—lose anything, endure anything. We never quit. Ever.
Instead, we slowly begin to get up. A kick lands to our kidney, another to the small of our back, but rather than keeping us down, they have the reverse effect: they spur us into action. It feels like the world is pushing us down. We fight for every inch, every microsecond of progress we make, and we find ourselves standing on two feet once again.
The blows raining down on us from all around stop abruptly.
A large man steps forward.
“This one isn’t just surviving—the bastard wants to fight. Look at his posture,” he says, surprise mixed with approval in his voice.
We don’t have the strength to answer. Instead, we strike at him with our right arm, instantly blocking his countermove.
The man’s eyebrows go up. He didn’t expect this much resistance.
Once in fight mode, muscle memory takes over, and we start the deadly dance of our personal fighting style. Even through our exhaustion, we feel a twinge of pride as a low snap kick penetrates the man’s defenses. His right knee buckles at the impact; he falters, if only for an instant.
We become a flurry of fists, head, knees, and elbows.
The guy is already bleeding when someone yells, “Stop!”
We don’t. More people enter the fight. The style we’ve developed can usually deal with multiple opponents, but not people of this caliber, and not when nearly dead from exhaustion. We contemplate the idea of Splitting to cope, but decide against it.
Fatalistically, we block the deadly barrage of their attacks, but eventually an opponent lands a perfectly executed round kick to the left side of our head, and the world goes dark.
* * *
I, Darren, get my bearings back.
“What the fuck was that?” I try to scream. Of course, I don’t have a body, so the scream just goes into the ether that is our joint mind.
“Just some training,” Caleb’s thought comes to me in response. “You seriously need to focus. You’re on the right track, seeking out the violence, but you’re still in the wrong person’s head: mine. Get back to Haim. Remember what we came here to do.”
I try to remember. It feels like years ago when we came to Brooklyn Heights to Read this Israeli guy. And as I recall this, I realize that I’m still there with Haim and Caleb, still conversing with Haim’s/Caleb’s/my sister Orit. The shock of becoming a double—no, triple—mind is still with me, but at least I can think on my own again.
“Hurry,” Caleb hastens me. “We’re about to fall into each other’s memories again.”
I don’t want that, so I make a herculean effort to properly get back into Haim’s head. I try the trick of feeling light. I picture myself as vapor in a fog, as weightless as a dandelion floret floating in a light morning breeze, and it seems to work.
As I get that now-familiar feeling of going deep into someone’s min
d, I try to zero in on and recall just a fraction of what I saw in Caleb’s mind.
It seems to do the trick . . .
Chapter 4
The attacker in front of us leaves his midsection exposed for a moment; it’s the last thing he’ll do in this fight, we think as we unleash the burst.
“You did it, kid,” Caleb’s thought intrudes. “Finally, we’re both in Haim’s head.”
“I got as much. You don’t exactly think in Hebrew, do you?”
“Right. Now shut the fuck up and let me see this.”
The ‘burst’ is what we mentally call this quick succession of punches to our opponent’s solar plexus. We walk into our opponent as we strike, making the force of our punches that much more potent. We count twenty hits before he tries to block and stage a simultaneous counterattack.
Fleetingly impressed with his economy of movement, we grab his arm and use his own momentum to throw him off balance. He hits the ground, hard. Before he tries to pull us down with him, we kick his jaw—and feel the crunch of bone as the outer edge of our bare foot connects with his mandible. He stops moving.
He’ll probably be fine. A couple of rib fractures and a broken jaw are a small price to pay for the opportunity to fight against us. Anyone who tried this outside our training module wouldn’t learn a thing. They would die instead.
The training module is our response to the immense pressure from our friends at the Shayetet to teach our unique fighting style to their people. They know we’ve left Krav Maga, the martial art style of Israel, far behind. What we’ve developed transcends Krav Maga, transcends every fighting style we’ve ever encountered.
Fighting in these modules is a compromise. No death strikes, no aggressive groin assaults; no one dies in the training module. Such a compromise defeats much of the original intent, of course. This style was designed with a single purpose in mind: killing your opponent. Now much of our energy is wasted trying not to use the style as it was designed. Not killing our opponent feels unnatural, counter to everything we’ve spent our life working toward. A hollow imitation of what we envisioned. Much to our dismay, no one else seems to care about these nuances. They clamor for a school where civilians will learn this for their own amusement, refusing to understand that it’s impossible to tame this training. This is not a sport for civilians; this is life or death. Anything less dishonors the work we have done, the lives taken in the evolution of our unique fighting style.