by Rio Youers
“Lewd sounds good,” she said. “But maybe later.”
We watched the flat grassland of southwestern Oklahoma scroll past the window, dotted with billboards promising salvation and legal expertise and the waistline you always wanted. After a few moments, Sally’s hand crept into mine.
“All right,” she said. “Me and Lang.”
“Take your time,” I said. “There’s a long road ahead of us.”
She nodded, looking at me but not really seeing me. She was in the room deep in her mind, then in the high-security vault, pulling the chains off the box so that she could access Lang’s memories and continue sharing them with me. I couldn’t imagine how difficult this was for her, hotwiring conjunctions and reconstructing events from Lang’s life as if they were her own. She didn’t flinch, though. Not once.
“He used to fantasize about eating me,” she said. “He had my vital organs slow-roasted and arranged on silver platters. A way of ingesting my powers.”
“Whoa,” I said.
“One of his dark reveries,” she said. “He’d never have done it.”
“Still fucked up.”
“Yeah.” She settled back in her seat, adjusting her hand so that our fingers interlocked. “He obsessed over my power, but couldn’t have it. And he couldn’t eat me, obviously, so he used me. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s go back to the beginning—the beginning of me, I mean. Let me tell you about a couple of trailer-trash, alcoholic, good-for-nothing scumbags called Steven Farrow and Tatum Moore.”
The tone of her voice had changed. I detected anger, disappointment.
“Let me tell you about Mom and Dad.”
* * *
Coil In Harmony was the perfect setup. To the outside world it looked like just another support group for wasters, junkies, and bottom-feeders. On the inside, it was a way for trues to share their feelings, their stories, to get to know and understand one another. For Lang—who established the group—it was an opportunity to see what happened when you brought a group of moderately powerful trues together. Would sparks fly? Would a leader, or aggressor, emerge? Could they join forces—link their energies like batteries—to create an all-powerful super coil?
September 15, 1990. A bio-PK named Steven Farrow walked into a Coil In Harmony meeting expecting only to walk out with the honorarium he’d been promised for attending. He got more than that.
“Back up a second,” I said. “Bio-PK?”
“Biopsychokinetic,” Sally said. “Someone who can mentally affect biological systems, either their own or somebody else’s. If they’re good people, they can use their ability to heal—to drive out viruses, stop bleeding, that kind of thing. If they’re not so good, and they’re powerful enough … well, they can cause heart attacks and strokes, kill a person just by looking at them.”
“Like Lang,” I said.
“His primary power.” Sally nodded. “He was also a formidable telepath with substantial mind-control abilities. Not so much anymore; I seriously damaged his coil when I tore through his mind.”
“Five percent,” I said. “That’s what he told me—he’s like a battery running at five-percent power.”
“I should have shut him down completely,” Sally said, and gave her head a little shake. “That was a mistake. A big mistake. But anyway: Steven Farrow. Steve-O to his dumbass redneck pals. Daddy to me. Not a good person, but a decently powerful bio-PK. He could raise your heart rate or give you a stinker of a headache. His preference, though, was to constrict bone tissue until it fractured. He called himself the bonesnapper.”
The story of how Sally’s parents met was something she plucked from both their minds over the years. Not deliberately, but she caught occasional flashes, like a radio picking up bursts of interference.
“No child should have to see what their parents are thinking,” she said. “This whole psychic power thing … it’s a double-edged sword, believe me.”
Steve-O attended the inaugural Coil In Harmony meeting with no intention of “sharing.” He just wanted to pick his nose for a couple of hours and get paid. There were eight trues present. One of them was twenty-three-year-old Tatum Moore, a bottle-blond jizz magnet (plucked from Steve-O’s mind, not mine) dressed in a faded denim jacket and spray-on jeans. It wasn’t long before they started shooting eyes at each other. Steve-O sent a little bio-PK mojo her way—making her heart fairly gallop, causing certain areas of her body to flush—and Tatum reciprocated with a dose of mind control, willing Steve-O to massage his crotch through his jeans until a quietly impressive porker had formed.
Fast forward a couple of hours and they’re slinging swill at some dive bar on the next block, and not long after that are bumping uglies—very uglies—on the backseat of Steve-O’s Grand Am.
“Everyone,” Sally said bitterly, “should be so magically conceived.”
There was more to the fairytale: how Steve-O refused to take responsibility after finding out that Tatum—as he so charmingly put it—had a trout in the well; how he’d one-eightied that decision and moved her into his trailer in West Tennessee, promising to be the best fuckin’ daddy in McNairy County; how they’d argued over just about everything, resorting to psychic brawls that left them with fat lips and broken bones; how Steve-O had kicked the booze and amphetamines for almost two weeks and come close—so fuckin’ close—to landing a job at the Chewalla Hoggery. There was so much anger and resentment, and for a while it didn’t look like Steve-O would go the distance, but in June of ’91 Tatum gave birth to a healthy baby girl and Steve-O was there. Drunk as shit but there. “Oh, Potato, we made the cutest little crumb-snatcher,” he wept, holding his daughter for the first time, and those tears were real. “She’s so fuckin’ special.” And he didn’t know the half of it.
“You know what’s crazy?” Sally said, raising her shoulders to emphasize the irony. “If Lang hadn’t set up those Coil In Harmony meetings, my parents would never have met, and I would never have been born.”
“That is crazy,” I said, looking out the window as we crossed the Texas state line. There was a mild throb behind my eyes. Tiredness probably, but I had spent the last thirty minutes trying to align the sweet, pretty girl sitting next to me with the trailer-trash assholes tumbling around in my mind. It seemed the only thing she’d inherited was their supersensory powers, exponentially amped.
“Are they still alive?” I asked.
“I think so,” Sally said. “I haven’t had any contact with them since they put me on a bus and told me to never come home. Last I heard, Mom had shacked up with an Elvis impersonator in Tinsel, Tennessee. I don’t know where Dad is.”
Our hands were sweaty but still locked and I gave her fingers a light squeeze. Her head found my shoulder again. I liked it there.
“I used to tell you they were dead, and that I couldn’t remember them, so that you didn’t ask too many questions.” Sally shrugged. “It wasn’t entirely a lie; they’re dead to me.”
We were silent for a long time, lost in our own thoughts. I closed my eyes and willed the dull ache behind them to fade, which it did; I drifted into an unexpected, pleasant doze, and snapped awake with surprised little head movements when we stopped an hour or so later in Amarillo.
Another lengthy layover. Everybody off the bus.
* * *
It was 12:30 by the time we got rolling again. We were now less than three hours from Cypress, and had both agreed that with sleeping, layovers, and conversation, it hadn’t been too shitty a journey.
“Let’s spend one night in Cypress,” Sally suggested. “Catch another bus early tomorrow. See if we can make it deep into Cali before stopping again.”
“Sounds good,” I said.
A young dude had joined the bus in Amarillo and sat close to us, manspreading across two seats, head resting on his backpack while he fucked around with his phone. Up to this point, we’d managed to keep some distance from the other passengers and our voices below the hum of the engine, so there was no chance o
f being overheard. Now, with the manspreader so close, Sally was reluctant to continue her story.
“Everyone’s a potential threat,” she whispered. “Even if they don’t mean to be.” And she made a tapping motion with her thumbs. I looked at the dude’s cell phone and imagined the Tweet: #Greyhound to Albuquerque. Overheard chick in next seat claiming she has psychic powers. This is going to be a long journey. #freakshow #helpme.
“It’s cool,” I said. “We can talk later.”
As it turned out, we didn’t need to. The manspreader pulled a set of Bose cans from his backpack, wrapped them around his head, and zoned out to his music.
“Problem solved,” I said.
Sally nodded. She continued.
* * *
The early nineties: Sally—then Miranda Farrow—grew up in a trailer on the outskirts of Ramer, Tennessee, and it was clear from the outset that she was far beyond ordinary.
“Most parents are afraid their kid will drink bleach or swallow a button,” she said. “Mine were more concerned I’d turn one of them into a drooling zombie. When I was three years old, I told Mom that Dad had been ‘naked kissing’ Rhonda-Shawn Colton—I’d seen it in his mind, clear as I used to see Barney the Dinosaur on our crummy little TV—and he ran his belt across the backs of my legs for peeking where I had no business. Well, I didn’t like that very much, so I jumped into his mind again, gave it a tiny pinch, and for the next two weeks he was wearing diapers and eating through a straw.”
Meanwhile, back in Nashville, Dominic Lang had met Gene Lyon and fallen head over heels, and while Lyon was out of the country photographing dead Iraqi soldiers and the horrors of ethnic cleansing, Lang was continuing his search for threats. He held regular Coil In Harmony meetings, singling out anybody with greater than average power. He also contacted parapsychologists across the world and scoured the news for phenomena suggestive of psychic ability. Persons of interest were tracked down and tested.
“There were a lot of dead ends,” Sally said. “But every now and then he’d encounter someone with considerable power. It didn’t matter that they were on the skids, or that they were too strung out to know their own names. He shut them down, just the same.”
“Brain-popped them?” I asked.
“Yeah, but he was careful about it,” Sally said. “And too cowardly to challenge them directly. He’d follow them, learn their habits, and strike when they least expected it.”
“And nobody suspected anything?”
“There weren’t enough of them to arouse suspicion,” Sally said. “Maybe six over a four-year period. And there was nothing tying them to Lang. No prescriptions or medical records. They were guinea pigs, not patients. Also, we’re talking about down-and-outs, drug addicts, alcoholics. That they suffered heart attacks or strokes was hardly suspicious.”
We passed a sign that read TUCUMCARI 33, our last stop before Cypress. Beyond the pale strip of the interstate, the High Plains of eastern New Mexico stretched as far as the eye could see, all brittle scrub and cracked earth.
“Everything was falling into place for Lang,” Sally said. “He was in love, his clinic was prospering, and he was eliminating powerful trues. He was also moving in more influential circles: hobnobbing with Tennessee’s upper class, increasing his stock. Unfortunately, the same couldn’t be said for our dysfunctional tribe.”
The young Farrow-Moore family had been evicted from their trailer on the outskirts of Ramer and were living out of Steve-O’s ’79 Grand Am. Steve-O earned a little scratch selling marijuana, but it wasn’t enough to keep him in booze, let alone feed the kid. Tatum, for her part, tried using mind control to rob a couple of liquor stores, but was so whacked on drugs that she only managed to give herself a migraine and piss her pants. She found money in other ways, but again it wasn’t enough. Eventually, Steve-O decided to drive them to the shrink in Nashville—who was well-to-do and well connected—to see if eight-year-old Miranda had any earning potential with her ability.
“They were thinking of a TV show or stage act,” Sally said, smiling sadly. “But Lang had other ideas.”
* * *
Rose Gibb (she of the Taco Bell breath) told Lang that she had a muscle in her brain that kept flexing. Eleven years later, little Sally Starling/Miranda Farrow—wearing a Tweety Bird T-shirt, her hair in pigtails—sat in the same office, stared across the same desk into the same striking eyes, and offered a more imaginative description.
“It’s a bird,” she said. “I keep it in a cage.”
“We told her to do that,” Steve-O piped up proudly. “Shit goes tits-up when the bird gets out.”
Lang sneered in Steve-O’s direction, then turned his attention back to Sally.
“Is it like…?” He pointed at Sally’s T-shirt.
“No,” Sally said. “Tweety is a happy bird.”
“Oh, so the bird in your head isn’t happy?”
Sally shook her head.
“Does it have yellow feathers?”
“No,” Sally replied. “They’re red.”
Lang nodded calmly but that one word, red, sent flags of the same color rippling through his soul. He made a show of writing in his notepad while pulling a screen across his mind, just in case the girl decided to take a peek inside.
After a moment he asked her, “Do you know what kind of doctor I am?”
Sally nodded. “Daddy says you’re a headshrinker.”
“Well shit, I didn’t say that,” Steve-O said. “She must’ve plucked it from the ol’ noodle.”
“Yes,” Lang said, ignoring him. “Another name for it is psychiatrist. My job is to analyze people’s minds and help them. Do you know what analyze means?”
Sally shook her head. Her pigtails swayed.
“It means to look at something very carefully.” Lang flipped to a clean page in his notepad and drew two basic pictures. The first was of a frowning face with a question mark over its head. The second was of a smiley face. He linked the two sketches with a looping arrow. “I help people go from this”—he tapped the frowning face—“to this.” Then the smiley face.
“Got it,” Sally said brightly.
“You’re an intelligent young lady.” Lang displayed a smiley face of his own, entirely false. “I wonder … could I take a look at your mind? Just a peek.”
“You mean…”
“Go inside,” Lang said, and again, “A peek, I swear.”
Sally stiffened in her chair. Her eyes flashed unsurely. Tatum stepped forward and placed her hand on her daughter’s shoulder.
“You sure about this, Doc?”
“It’ll be fine,” Lang assured her. “Won’t it, Miranda?”
“I … I guess.”
“Just be careful,” Tatum said. “And don’t poke the cage.”
The smile dropped from Lang’s face. His eyebrows took wing and he crept into Sally’s mind. Normally, when reading trues, he followed the thrum, the pressure, and was able to estimate the power in their coils. With Sally, he was immediately blinded: a shimmering red mist, as if a flare had been dropped at the back of her mind. There was something else—something beyond the mist: a bristling, vibrant energy. He imagined an exotic bird with cocked, special feathers, poised inside its cage with its red eyes narrowed. Helpless, enthralled, Lang crawled toward it, reaching out—
He was kicked back so forcefully that his chair rolled across the room, struck the far wall, and spilled him to the floor. His scalp sizzled. Blood leaked from his ears.
Jesus Christ, what the fuck was THAT?
Steve-O hooted and clapped his hands. “She’s a little shotgun, ain’t she?”
Christ FUCK.
“I bet someone in TV land would pay a lot of cabbage for her talents.”
“You put this girl anywhere near a TV camera,” Lang hissed, looking at Sally with wide, bewildered eyes, “and she’ll be burned at the stake within a week.”
He tried getting up but his legs weren’t there. He thumped against the wall, slid sideways, a
nd dropped to his knees.
“Shit,” he said.
Tatum cracked a smile—couldn’t help herself—then wiped it from her face, stepped toward Lang, and held out her hand.
“Told you not to poke the damn cage,” she said.
* * *
Lang had written: She is remarkable. Terrifying. Short of dosing her up with antipsychotics—suppressing her coil over a matter of weeks (months?)—I see no way of weakening her.
“He wanted you dead?” I asked. “An eight-year-old girl?”
“He could’ve wiped me out at any time,” Sally said. “Not with psychic power, but a bullet would do it. A contract kill.”
“What stopped him?”
“The fact that he could use me,” Sally said. “Why bury a weapon when you can strap it to your shoulder?”
“Why need a weapon at all?” I countered. “Dude was powerful enough to do his own dirty work.”
“He was also a damn coward,” Sally said. “Sure, he could take out the deadbeats—and only when their backs were turned—but there were bigger fish out there.”
Lang, in his increasing obsession and paranoia, had begun to suspect the greatest threats were already in positions of power, either in government or pulling the strings through secret societies. These individuals could not be enticed with a paltry honorarium. They were wealthy, powerful, and hidden. An unknown quantity. It terrified him.
“How do you begin to track them down?” Sally said. “They were phantoms. The secrets within a secret society. It played on Lang’s every fear, kept him awake at night. Eventually, he realized they would come to him if he made enough noise. And when they did, he’d be ready.”
I thought of the feather in my pocket. For Lang, it was an expression of power, control, and fear.
“Red bird,” I said.
“He had me right where he wanted me,” Sally said.
* * *
Tucumcari in the rearview. Cypress dead ahead. One more hour and we could breathe the desert air and eat food that didn’t come from a packet, at least until tomorrow when we’d board bus number two and do it all again. But it didn’t matter, because every little click of the odometer took us closer to our final destination: Ryder, California, where I’d live a different life with a different name, where I’d shoulder Sally’s past—her darkness—and carry it as if it were my own.