by Gwynn White
The stairs led to a landing that looked like a waiting room or reading area. Hardwood floor, leather couch, several matching chairs and a coffee table.
Jaxon walked straight across the area and knocked on a door.
A man’s voice inquired, “Yes?”
Jaxon gave his name and said, “Our guests are here to meet you.”
The voice on the other side replied, “Come in. Please.”
Opening the door, Jaxon motioned for us to enter.
A man sat behind a massive wooden desk. At first, I thought he was old. He reminded me of a suntanned Gandalf the Grey. He had long gray hair and a flowing gray beard. His skin was rough and weathered, with deep lines reminiscent of parched gullies. His blue eyes, however, were clear and vibrant and his voice sounded no more than middle-aged.
He asked us to sit. Nat and I chose the cloth-covered couch directly in front of the desk.
He smiled, revealing perfectly straight white teeth. Introducing himself, corroborating what we’d already assumed, he said, “I’m Leader Razkazeel. I know who both of you are. When I heard you wanted to speak with me, my assistants did some research. I don’t meet with just anyone.” Looking at Jaxon who was pacing around the room, he added, “For the safety of myself and everyone else in the compound, you know. There are those who want to harm us.”
He paused and looked once again at Jaxon. Turning his attention back to us, he said, “You’ve seen the militarized police force outside?”
Nat answered, “It would be hard to miss them.”
Knitting his thick gray eyebrows into an expression of deep concern, Razkazeel looked from Nat to me and replied, “Yes. Do you know why they’re here?”
Hoping it wouldn’t enrage this leader of a bizarre cult, I ventured an honest answer. “The news is reporting that one of your members killed her two children inside this compound and the police are responding. I’m assuming they hope she’ll give herself up; but, if not, they’re prepared to force their way inside to arrest her.”
Razkazeel said, “That’s their excuse.”
Suddenly, there were footsteps behind the wall on the opposite side of the room from where we’d entered. For the first time, I noticed another door there.
Nat asked Razkazeel what he meant.
I felt unnerved that the guy we were talking to didn’t seem especially concerned about the murder.
A stabbing pain shot through my head, shearing my conscious mind from the logical progression of conversation.
A lovely woman in a long flowered dress holding a vial of poisonous liquid to the lips of a little girl. My twin. We had a deep psychological connection. We shared one psychic brain. Filling her veins with lethal contaminant, you might as well have sliced through my own corpus callosum. My father grabbing my hand and the hand of my brother. Running. Running. Me screaming for Crystal. Did I really scream for her? Had I even tried?
Again, as in the airplane, odd foreign images flooded my brain.
Babies with green skin floating in glass tanks. Large black eyes. Women lying in beds, crying.
I rubbed my forehead.
Turning to me, Razkazeel asked, “Is your head hurting?”
I tried to swim up from the depths into which I’d fallen, tried to focus my thoughts on the here and now. I managed to say, “Yes.”
Razkazeel said, “I can give you medication for that. It will get better. You have the kind of empathic ability we need.”
Medication? Ability they need…? I feared I’d be drugged and held against my will, never let out of the compound.
Running. Running. My feet were too little, my brother’s even smaller. My father picking him up. My terror that I’d be left behind.
As though he had never switched subjects to address my headache and whatever kind of ability he thought I had, Razkazeel said, “Zyrielle did murder her baby girls. Hailey and Skylar, precious three and one year olds.” His eyes filled with sorrow. “But that’s not why the police are really here. Did you see the tanks?”
Nat shook his head yes.
Razkazeel said, “Those aren’t the police. The military is here to take that which frightened Zyrielle to kill her little girls. She was only trying to protect them. She feared that which is not an actual threat.”
Vial of poison. Not to protect, but to transport Crystal into another dimension.
Razkazeel said, “I need your help. I hope I can trust you. I have to take this leap of faith.”
I felt incredibly confused. My head was pounding with pain and memories and strange intrusive images.
Never one to turn down an opportunity to delve deeper into field research, Nat said, “Of course you can trust us.”
Making eye contact with Jaxon, Razkazeel nodded his head. He had obviously said yes to something.
Jaxon walked to the door behind Razkazeel’s desk and opened it. Gazing into the open space, he remained quiet.
As he returned to the middle of Razkazeel’s office, two humanoid creatures with green skin, large black eyes and bald heads followed behind him. At first, I thought they were nude. It took me a few seconds to realize they were wearing skintight green bodysuits.
My head exploded in pain and images.
Creatures bending space-time, folding one era onto another, pods skipping from one point to the next. Earth dying over and over again. Rivers drying up. Glaciers melting. Oceans rising into monstrous waves. Tsunamis drowning us, our screams swallowed by the void of death.
I found it difficult to breathe. I drowned in images, began losing my mind, lost the boundaries I had carefully constructed about who I was.
The shorter of the two aliens approached me.
My heart beat against my chest like a trapped bird.
As if in a nightmare, I tried to scream, but couldn’t get my throat to emit noise. It was as though I had become paralyzed. I don’t usually succumb to fear, but this was different than any terrifying situation I’d ever experienced in my entire life. These beings had taken over my brain, hacked into it and planted thoughts and images I couldn’t block. The loss of control over my own mind had stripped away my ability to function.
One of the green creatures bent down close to my face. She gazed into my eyes. I say she because her humanoid facial structure appeared feminine. Her eyes were reflective. I saw myself within the shiny black structures, looking small and petrified.
She reached a hand with long green fingers toward me. Placing her hand on the top of my head, she sang in what sounded like an ancient language.
My headache disappeared and my body relaxed. A sense of peacefulness and utter calm took over.
And then she communicated with me in the way that Crystal and I had communicated so many years before: through telepathy. She told me she was in danger of being captured and unable to ever return home. She was frightened that she would be experimented upon.
Her thoughts were clear and separate from each other, not the earlier chaotic jumble of information that had surpassed my ability to process.
I wondered if Nat was experiencing the same thing.
She communicated: “Being a twin, your mind is more open to this. You’ve had experience with this type of communication before.”
That freaked me out. I did not like her reading my mind. Crystal had been my identical twin. Our communication still held its own kind of privacy. We had split from the same egg. No one from the outside could break into our shared thoughts. Not even my mother who had born our single egg and birthed our tiny separate bodies into the world.
The creature with green skin and mesmerizing black eyes read my discomfort and backed off. She sent me information about herself instead: My name is Paloma.
I thought: Wait. Paloma? That’s an Earth name, a name used today on Earth.
Paloma communicated: Yes, I’m not from another planet. I’m from another time.
Again, I saw the bending of space-time. And this time, maps. There were complex maps and graphs…coordinates, places for crossi
ng over from one space-time location to another.
Razkazeel interrupted. He said, “If the military barge in here as they’re most likely planning to do…my guess is they’re waiting for night when many of the news reporters leave and they’ll have cover of darkness…they’re going to capture Paloma and Zander. You know they’ll experiment on them and torture them and cause them great physical pain…for research. We thought the beings we believed in would come from somewhere beyond the stars, but I opened my mind and listened to them upon their arrival. The government won’t do that. Angry, fearful crowds won’t do that. These creatures are us. They’re no different than us except in certain aspects of their physical appearance. It’s up to us to save them, to protect the future of the human race.”
Not all of this made sense, but the smell of fight or flight filled the room and seeped into my bones.
Nat asked, “What do you want us to do?”
Razkazeel said, “Take our two visitors to your van. The officers outside don’t know you’re here. Drive them to a safe place. Contact me when you get there.”
I said to Paloma and the other creature whose name I now knew was Zander, “Are you ready?”
They both nodded their heads yes.
Jaxon led the way. Opening the door through which we had entered Razkazeel’s office, he led us out through the waiting room and down the stairs. Rather than taking us through the community room, however, he took us down another flight of stairs, straight down to the basement. From there, we moved quickly through the tunnel.
Running, running, my lungs and muscles burning. Escaping those who would kill us, their twisted precaution against irrational fear.
Part II
Jade Whitaker
5
I’d just started a new job. My last one hadn’t worked out. I’d been working as a barista in a coffee shop. I’d earned my Bachelor of Psychology degree a few months before starting that, but soon discovered it was almost impossible to get a job in the field of psychology without a graduate degree. In order to support myself, I’d taken the first job I thought I could live with: coffee shop barista.
My new job was closer to the kind of work I wanted to do: Social Worker at the Archer-Knight Hoarding Center. I knew the name came from the two founders: Elizabeth Archer and James Knight, but I kept imagining that a knight and an archer presided over the place. I also pictured them secretly stockpiling arrows, devoting entire secret rooms to hoarding their own weapons.
Something had been happening to me over the years, but more recently it had become intense and problematic in work environments. I seemed to be able to read people’s minds. Not everything a person was thinking, thank God. That would have driven me insane. Rather, I had developed a keen sense of what was on a person’s mind, the thing they were most concerned about or most focused on. It spoke so loudly to me, I tended to respond to that, rather than to what they had actually shared with me. As I’d come to learn the hard way, the thing that’s uppermost in a person’s mind is often the exact thing they’ve been working hard to hide.
At the coffee shop, I felt that my ability to experience empathy had simply leveled up. Perhaps I had become a full-blown Empath. Maybe I was so bored with the job, my brain had grown an Empath section in order to keep itself entertained.
People moved through long lines to order caffeinated drinks, one after the other. Some days I served an extraordinary number of people. My interactions with them were brief. When I worked at the cash register, it was always the same combination of sentences or some close variation. I greeted them, asked what they’d like, answered questions, then gave orders to the person making the drinks. Some days, I was the person making the drinks. When we weren’t too busy, I did both.
I felt like a robot. Hello! What would you like today?...Hello! What would you like today? How many times could you repeat that same question and still be happy to wait on the next person?
I started paying attention to subtle clues about customers: a furrowed brow, facial lines, agitation, expressions of specific emotions like happiness or sadness. Also, things they said. For instance, if they said, “What’s good about it?” after I’d said, “Have a good day!”
Somewhere along the way, I’d moved beyond that. A person’s thoughts simply spoke to me. I didn’t need to analyze anything at all about their physical appearance.
Thinking I’d cheer them up when it was my turn to make the drinks, I started creating personalized designs in the creamy froth on top. A picture of a cat with the words: Never as bad as you think. A picture of a steam train with the words: Keep moving forward. A sun and the message: Today will be better.
Lots of people liked these. They’d peer at the designs and say how cool they were. Then they’d slurp down their coffees, my frothy messages coating their lips and fortifying them for the rest of the day.
But then I went too far.
My mother had died of ovarian cancer the year before. I was devastated and lonely and depressed. I focused on other people’s problems in order to forget about my own, even if only for brief moments at a time.
A woman in her early twenties came into the coffee shop. She had dark lines under her eyes and an expression of deep and abiding sadness. She was dressed all in black, and wearing dark purple eye shadow and matching nail polish.
I carefully crafted a picture of a tree with birds flying out from the branches. I wrote: On wings of hope.
She had ordered a mocha latte. Before leaving the shop, she carried her cup over to the counter near the back door with the sugars and pitchers of cream and took off the lid. I assumed she’d decided to add extra sweetener. Her eyes grew larger as she studied the message I’d created for her. Storming up to the counter, she demanded to know if all the coffees came with the same design.
I told my co-worker at the register, “I’ll handle this.”
Pushing open the swinging door that led to the main shop, I called the woman over. I already knew her name from needing to write it on the outside of the cup.
I raised my hand and called, “Elise!” over the noise of conversation in the coffee shop. I was trying to bring her over to a private spot to ask about her concerns.
She marched over and let me have it. All of it. She threw her latte at me, then tossed the cup on the floor, splashing my shoes with the remaining liquid. I thanked my lucky stars the coffee had started to cool and I was wearing a thick canvas apron. Her face screwed up in rage, Elise shouted, On wings of hope? On wings of hope? That was the name of my boyfriend’s band! This is what I get for coming to an elitist coffee shop! People who think they’re so cool, they can taunt the more lowly among us! It’s all over the newspapers that my boyfriend died of a heroin overdose last week! I know I’m a suspect! Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!
On her way out the back door, she took her arm and swept all the metal pitchers and containers off the cream-and-sweeteners counter. They went bouncing off the glass wall and floor tiles, splashing cream and packets over customers’ feet and the side of a bin filled with coffee bags. Screams and gasps filled the shop, followed by silence. After the whoooosh sound of the door closing behind her, discussion erupted from the crowd like the buzzing of bees.
A few people left through the back door, several more through the front.
My boss was off that day, but of course he was informed about the incident. I was fired immediately. No questions asked, no being called into his office, no chance to explain. Just an email saying I was fired.
Maybe it was better that way. Perhaps Empaths didn’t belong behind coffee shop counters.
It was hard to get by financially without a job. After college, I’d returned home to live at my parents’ house. I kept referring to it that way: as “home” and “my parents’ house.” It really wasn’t anymore. My mother had died earlier that year. It was my father’s house now. He shared it with the ghost of my mother, and it no longer felt entirely like home.
I was devastated the day I lost my job. I dec
ided not to fight back because I’d come to the conclusion I’d never fit in there anyway, better for me to go find something else.
I came home before my father got off work. I felt relieved because he’d never listen to me anyway. He’d just say things like, “Keep your chin up, little girl,” before escaping into the fog he’d created around him since my mother’s death. It was impenetrable. I desperately wanted to talk to him about our loss, but it was a subject he did everything to avoid. He’d say things like, “She was so brave at the end. It’s a lesson for all of us.” He wanted me to be brave, not incapacitated by grief. He didn’t realize that his refusal to talk about it kept grief growing inside me, like a malignant beast.
By the time I started painting messages on the frothy tops of coffee concoctions, I’d been experiencing intermittent stabbing pain on the right lower side of my abdomen for quite some time. I waffled back and forth from worrying it was a tumor to treating it like a new friend. I started imagining it was a benign tumor and the source of my blossoming empathy skills. I pictured it flooding my body with new hormones that eventually bathed my brain in the potential for new abilities.
Whether or not this was true didn’t matter. Our family’s health insurance didn’t cover much and I couldn’t afford specialists. I figured I’d ask my dad to pay for a checkup if the pain became too severe.