Anger gripping me by the throat. An avalanche of betrayal. The dark knot of exploitation.
I shook my head glibly. “I told you. Um, this was a mistake. Sorry.” I shrugged and attempted to rise from my chair.
“No, we’ll get this,” she said, waving her hand to make me sit again. “Let’s try again.”
I sighed; my shoulders drooped. This “trying” went on forever. Maybe an hour or more. I sat, doing nothing, the mutual distrust and dislike between the two of us growing—until finally Dr. Carrillo snapped.
“Did you do this for the money?” she asked. Her jaw moved furiously on a piece of chewing gum. “Because if so, you won’t get it. You might not even get a flight home.”
If she didn’t already know I was ridiculously rich, I wasn’t giving that information away.
“I told you. This was a mistake.” My hands kneaded my pant legs, damp from sweat. I realized I must’ve been clutching them the entire time.
Dr. Carrillo’s enthusiasm drained like water, and she flicked her hand at me. She turned around and mumbled something under her breath. I could barely make out her comment. “Stubborn. Just like Carol.”
6
Julia
Instead of running all the way back to the dorm, I slipped into a pay-phone booth upstairs in the lobby and made a collect call to Father. The phone rang several times until finally he answered and accepted the charges.
In the background, voices hummed and a violin played lilting notes of classical music.
“Father,” I pleaded. “I need to come home. Please. This is horrible. I don’t belong here. This is not at all summer camp.”
“Dear,” he said, “I can’t talk long. We have guests. Your mother’s luncheon to benefit arts in schools.”
Of course, they had guests. They always did. Here I was, stranded in the middle of this concrete laboratory in California, turned over to scientists like a piece of property. But they had guests. My heart raced. The idea of being stuck there another day felt as if a plastic bag was covering my head and starving me of oxygen and light.
“I must come home. This place is strange. I’m not like them.”
“You must stay.”
I didn’t answer.
“Your grandfather and mother think it’s best.”
“But.”
“Julia…” His tone told me it was over.
“But what do you think?” I asked, challenging him for perhaps the first time.
He hesitated. “Your aunt. You don’t want to end up like her.” His voice sounded foreign to me, twisted with fear.
I didn’t reply.
“Just stay.” He sighed. “Do your thing, and we’ll see you in two months.”
A long pause. I considered what to say next. Again, I wanted to yell, demand that he take me home. But that wasn’t what Cavanaugh kids did. Instead, I stood there with the phone to my ear, waiting for him to change his mind, waiting for him to set me free. My mouth opened, the sound of my breath shallow.
“I love you, dear. Be strong.” The next instant, without waiting for a reply, he hung up.
Blood pulsed in my cheeks, and I stood for several seconds with the phone to my ear. Grandfather had the power to sequester me in this crazy place without my permission. And now I was being asked to make a pile of equipment go haywire. If I didn’t cooperate, would I end up like Carol?
I hung up the phone slowly, but then slammed shut the glass door to the booth. I turned around and kicked it—a stupid move that fiercely stung my toe. For half a moment, I wondered if my anger in California could disrupt Mother’s luncheon back home. If I could make the plates ripple, cause all the violin strings to pop at once, make her hair catch fire.
I shook off the wicked thought. That’s what had gotten me there in the first place.
I mumbled to myself all the things I wished I could have said to Father. Bullshit charity. Don’t you care about your daughter? Do you even know how they’re using me? Do you even know what really happened to Aunt Sabrina? How could you be so selfish? How could you just ship me away? I demand to come home. Now! I demand it! I’m terrified! I’m terrified of these people. I’m terrified of what will happen here. I’m terrified of myself. The thoughts I could never express, secrets I could never reveal. I knew this, and my shoulders slumped as I limped across the lawn to the dormitory, my big toe throbbing.
Something appeared in my peripheral vision. I could have sworn that behind a tree something—or someone—moved. I made out the edges of something blue. A dress. A person with long, dark hair. That girl in the blue dress! She wasn’t a girl, really. She was a young woman. Maybe mid-twenties? I took a couple steps toward the tree—and she disappeared.
7
Charley
My stomach growled. And as if on cue, Dr. Monson came into the hall. “We’ve provided coffee and donuts for you.” She pointed over her shoulder. “Over there. Round the corner.”
She led us to a long table with piles of sugared cake donuts.
I didn’t drink coffee—the smell reminded me of the diner. But I liked donuts.
I picked up the biggest one from the platter and took a big bite. Minnie talked with Samuel—like usual—while Katerina and Henry stayed to watch the scientists. I stood in the hallway and watched Katerina. With colorful flowy clothes and a head that always tilted, she reminded me of an exotic bird I’d never seen before.
“I’m so very impressed by the experiments. Please do tell me. What might be the ultimate phenomena you would like to see displayed?” she asked a grad student.
“Oh, I would probably say mind control would be the ultimate, for sure,” the student said. He was shaped like a triangle. “If there was a way to transmit enough energy to implant thoughts into people’s heads, well, that’d be really something.”
“I see.” She picked up pencils from a desk and stacked them in a cup.
I finished off the donut and wiped my mouth my with arm.
“Hey.”
Startled, I swiveled to see Cord standing in front of me, a donut in an outstretched hand. “Donut?” he asked.
I took it, paused. “Thanks.”
“You nervous?”
“For…”
“For the experiments,” he said.
“I dunno know. Not really. You?”
He leaned his back against the concrete wall, a gentle giant. “Yeah, my dad, he fought in World War II.”
I studied the sugar crystals on my donut before looking at him. So?
“So I think for sure I’m going to Vietnam. But they didn’t let me in.” He pointed to his chest. “Heart murmur.”
“Oh?” Was that good news or bad news to him? I couldn’t tell.
“I was kinda relieved. You seen the way them guys come back from ’Nam?”
I nodded. The war that was tattooed on our generation. It cut deep scars into so many of us.
“My friend Emilio. He came back and, man, you can’t wash that war off him.”
The donut stuck in my throat. Why was he talking about Vietnam? I’d just asked about his experiment.
“And the connection to Vietnam is…?”
He slumped against the wall and slowly slid to the floor. I sat down next to him. He told me how his dad fought in the Tenth Mountain Division, which was where they all fought on tiny little wooden skis in the middle of winter in some big mountain range in Italy. He went on and on about how his dad had to sleep in subzero temperatures. Seemed horrible. The dark basement and stale donut seemed pretty good about then.
Finally, he got to the point. “This is a big deal for me. They don’t let me serve with a gun and all. But maybe … I’m thinking I go work for the government.”
“Ewww.” Government? I’d seen those mail carriers. Boringest job ever.
“I wanna be a psychic soldier.”
“Huh.” I brushed the donut sugar off my pants. “This donut is stale.” It tasted like cardboard, really.
“What?” He swiveled his head to
look at me, as if he didn’t know we were snarfing down donuts together on the hard floor.
“Yeah. Stale.”
“I’m thinking it could work out,” he said.
“I hope they give us better donuts tomorrow,” I said, standing up.
Dr. Carrillo emerged in the hall, and I licked the last of the sugar off my fingers. “Let’s go,” she said.
Minnie followed Dr. Strong into a lab. Cord went into a room with Dr. Monson, while Katerina and Henry watched from the hall through the window and Samuel slumped onto the floor, eating donuts.
I followed Dr. Carrillo down the hallway and slowed my pace to watch Dr. Strong and Minnie through an open door inside one of the other labs. Minnie became eerily still, gazing off into the corner of the room. I stopped and watched her as Dr. Carrillo kept on walking without me.
“What’s the problem?” Dr. Strong asked.
Minnie pointed. Her eyebrows high on her forehead. “Y’all see that girl over there?”
I strained my neck to look into the room but didn’t see anyone in the corner. Dr. Strong shook his head.
“Go-devil,” Minnie said, her voice low and barely above a whisper. She blinked quickly, and Dr. Strong glared at her.
“Wha—” he started.
“Ghost,” she said quickly.
“Nonsense,” he said, looking at his clipboard. “I have some handwriting I want you to review. From a Lieutenant Colonel Russell Gart.”
She saw a ghost? I felt cold, as if I just walked into the diner’s walk-in cooler.
Minnie gazed at the invisible person in the corner. “She said to continue. Carol said to continue.” Slowly, without taking her eyes off that corner, she sat down in a chair.
Carol?
8
Charley
A few minutes later, Dr. Carrillo approached me in her teeter-totter way. “I’ll take you now, Charley.”
She brought me into a lab where an old man sat at a table, wearing a fedora and a long trench coat.
“You’re going to read this man’s hands,” Dr. Carrillo said. “He’s already written down details of his life. Plus, we have formal documentation to back it up.”
“No problem,” I said, slowly sitting down at the table across from him. This would be just like at home. No stuffy closet in the diner. Instead I’d be in a stuffy concrete room with a scientist analyzing my facial expressions and every move. What happens if I’m wrong? My chest tightened with the thought. Of course, I’d gotten things wrong before. Sometimes. Well, really, maybe only a couple times. I wasn’t Jesus. I was just a girl who saw stuff.
The man placed his hands out to me, palms up. I considered him. He had the face of a criminal, the kind I’d see in the diner after they were released from prison. Plump and doughy but would turn on you in an instant—if you didn’t keep their secrets. His hands were smooth.
“This nice man wants to know what his wife wants for Christmas. She wrote it down on a piece of paper earlier today,” Dr. Carrillo said. Her voice sounded syrupy. Not like her.
I took his hand in mine and the jolt came, tingly and dizzying. The feel of his rage made me shudder. His face looked soft like wax, eyelids half-mast. But beneath it all, he was a mean son of a bitch.
The slideshow began, unfolding fast and furious before me. An abusive mother who had locked him in a closet for days on end. Tears that stopped at age ten. Then, a furious beating. A baseball bat, bloody. The heavy thumping on her body.
I let go, breathless. He gazed at me, calm and still.
“Well?” Dr. Carrillo asked.
“I …”
“You?”
“I … I can’t do this.”
I couldn’t look at him. My stomach curdled, and I wanted to puke. I stood up, pushing the chair away from me. He’d beaten his mother to death. And there were more. Others. Does Dr. Carrillo know this? Did she just bring this man off the street? Why did she make me go there?
I couldn’t say what I saw. If no one knew about his past and I told … I’d be next. The thought hit me like a sack of flour. “I need to lie down,” I said. “I just … need to go.”
I marched to the door, head down. No way in hell was I saying anything. I snatched a breath—and then another.
At the door, Dr. Carrillo called out to me. “Charley, this man has served time in the penitentiary.”
I stopped.
“We know.”
I turned around slowly. “You said he was a nice man. That he wanted to know what his wife…”
“We wanted to know what you would see,” Dr. Carrillo. “What’d you see?”
Then I spotted two cops outside the window, watching us like fish in a bowl. This man was a snake. He’d attack any second, and they put me right there with him.
I walked through the door, stood next to the cops.
Dr. Carrillo limped to follow me. The man in the room didn’t move. A mannequin.
“Charley. Please.”
“He murdered his mother. As a child. With a baseball bat. And then he never stopped.” I looked back to him. Stock still. His face placid. Moonless eyes. An eel hiding beneath the rocks.
“Good job,” she said nodding quickly. She addressed the officers. “You can take him back to the prison.”
“Why’d you do that?”
“We want to know if you can spot liars and see the real truth behind seemingly benign people.”
“That’s not an experiment!”
She pursed her lips.
“That’s just messed up!” I said.
I flew down the hallway. Dr. Carrillo’s voice hung in the air behind me like smoke. “She saw it all. That’s perhaps the closest thing to magic I’ve ever seen in this lab.”
I brushed past Cord and Katerina, head down, trembling. “Hey, Charley!” Cord called, but I didn’t answer.
The labyrinth of dim hallways unspooled before me until I found the stairwell. My legs throbbed as I ran so hard, chasing that sliver of light above. Anything that signaled to me that I’d reached the real world.
Back in my dorm room, the setting sun cast a shadow across the room. My fingers swam inside my purse and I clamped down on a joint. Questions ran across my mind: Why did this kind of messed up violence always seem to find me? Would this psychic ability be a curse forever?
I heaved open the window and sat on the windowsill. The joint took a second to light, and I took a long, shaky drag. The sounds of heavy bass and a drum beat, of laughter and conversation drifted in from outside. A party somewhere. On the grass below, two girls in long tie-dye dresses spun in circles with arms outspread and heads turned to the sky. Did they attract violence like me?
SRI was clearly investigating paranormal stuff, clearly focused on uncovering the physics in all of us. But it was also using me. So obvious. I took another hit, and the velvet buzz swallowed my head. The girls spun like colorful merry-go-rounds and the distant party hummed.
I was going to use this time to experience California, I decided. Live a little. I didn’t know what that would mean, but it meant escaping the God awful feeling I got from SRI.
9
Charley
Cord showed up at my door a couple nights later, announcing that we were invited to Katerina’s place in the city. We rounded up everyone—including Julia, who practically clung to her room—and finally, after enough of Cord’s prodding, she came with us.
We walked to the bus stop, Julia biting her fingernail, Cord talking nonstop about Katerina’s last experiment.
“Dr. Strong comes in with this box, okay? Says he sealed it up real tight before everything gets started.” Cord looked only at me when he talked. It was as if Minnie, Julia, Samuel, and Henry weren’t even there.
“Where’s the bus stop?” I asked. Cars zoomed past us and I took a gulp of the exhaust.
“Over yonder,” Minnie pointed to a blocky grey building a hundred yards ahead.
“She sits there all bored-looking. Just staring, and then finally she says she m
akes out the shape of something,” Cord said.
“Uh-huh,” Minnie said.
“First, she thinks it’s all a shadow. Then, she seen it moving.” Cord stretched out the last word.
I nodded, interested. The bus door opened with an exhale.
“Lifts up the lid to the box. It was a moth. A moth! Can you believe it?”
“Neat,” I said. It was. Kind of.
“A live moth in the box, and Katerina, she seen it.” Cord’s fingers splayed out.
We paid our fares and filed onto the bus, which was pretty crowded with students and, I was guessing, a bunch of college professors. Basically, old men with briefcases and ties and ladies with poofy hair and cat-eye glasses.
“Yeah. That’s what we do, Cord. We do stuff like that.” I glanced over my shoulder at him as he lumbered down the aisle behind me. A swirl of perfume, the scent of stinky feet, and the bite of gasoline wrapped around my head.
Minnie turned around to look at him. “Sure, sweetie, but how’d she know that? Ain’t that the whole point? Using science to get that understandin’?”
Cord shrugged and plopped down on a seat. “It was crazy.”
“It’s grotesquely hot in here,” Samuel said. “Scorching.”
“A moth.” Cord’s eyes disappeared into happy slits and he laughed with a small high-pitched sound. His shoulders bounced up and down.
We found spots close to him. Henry squeezed next to Julia. God, why is he so into her? Samuel sat in front of me, and Minnie crowded in next to Cord. When I sat down, the man next to me glanced up, uncrossing his leg, taking up more space. He was all shiny shoes. Loud crinkling of his open newspaper. The bleach smell of his stiff work shirt.
We pulled away from the bus stop, and I wanted to let out a big hoot of excitement.
“Did you hear about Carol?” Julia asked. “From what I understand, she went to her room and collapsed when we were all at dinner.”
Extraordinary Lies Page 7