by Dima Zales
We get in through Citibank’s back door, and our fingers dance some more around the keyboard. We do some quick mental calculations along the way. Assuming a reasonable rate of twenty percent, and the starting principal of one grand (rounding up), with compounded interest (again, rounding up), Roger owes us five grand. No, that’s not enough. We add a zero at the end for emotional damage and what not. That number turns out to be perfect, since fifty grand is about the amount he has in his account.
We decide against taking the money for ourselves. That could get us into trouble, and it’s not like we’re desperate for cash. Some more clicks of the keyboard, and we smile. How noble is it of Roger to give all his money to the Stop Bullying Now Foundation? How admirable, given how he’s about to need this money quite desperately to hire a tax attorney.
I, Darren, feel proud of my friend and decide I don’t need any more proof.
* * *
“You worked for the FBI?” I ask as soon as I’m out of the Quiet.
“I mentioned that to you—”
“Did you ever tell me about that asshole from your high school? Roger?”
He looks taken aback. “No. I’m fairly sure I haven’t. I don’t like talking about that shit...”
I proceed to tell him what I just saw through his younger self’s eyes, down to all the little details. When I recall it, I even mention the hacking techniques he used, saying terms that are foreign to me, such as ‘SQL Injection’ and ‘buffer overflow.’
As I go on, Bert’s expression becomes harder and harder to read. If I had to pinpoint what he was feeling, I’d say it was something between awe and terror.
“I never wrote any of this down,” he mumbles softly. “And I never told anyone. No one.” He shakes his head. “But you could’ve learned about him from someone who went to school with him—”
“Seriously?” I say. “Your denial is getting weak, my friend.”
He rubs his nose. “Okay, but that personal stuff can be found out... somehow. What if I think of something completely random? You’d still know?”
“Go for it.”
He grabs a book off the shelf, turns his back to me, and opens the book to a random page. I see where he’s going with this and instantly phase out.
I approach frozen Bert from the front and follow his gaze. He’s looking at the top of page 188. I memorize the line and walk back to my body.
“Page 188,” I quickly say when the noise of the airport is back. “The line reads, ‘Korum wasn’t home at all, and she wondered where he—’”
“Shit,” Bert interrupts. “I haven’t even read the whole line yet... but that’s what it says.”
“I did the time-stopping thing and looked at the page while you were frozen,” I say. “I didn’t need to actually read your mind.”
In stunned silence, Bert returns the book. His hands are shaking.
I decide to do another demo, something that should cinch the deal. I admit I’m probably showing off at this point. I phase in again and approach my friend. The Guiding only takes a moment and when I’m done, I phase back out.
As per the instructions I imbedded in his mind, Bert, eyes glazed, takes out the pen and paper and writes, “Oh yeah, Bert, buddy, I can also make you do shit. Why did I just write this? Notice how the handwriting is yours?”
Bert’s eyes return to normal, and he reads the paper. Then he looks at me. Then at the paper. “Fucking fuck,” he finally says. “You have to tell me everything.”
“Let’s walk over to Starbucks,” I say. “This might take a while.”
* * *
“Can we talk?” Bert says to Hillary when we get to the gate.
“I just told him everything, Aunty,” I say playfully. “So you guys have some catching up to do.”
Hillary gives me a seething look. It’s as if she wasn’t the one who okayed my bringing Bert up to speed. I’m guessing she’s mad that I didn’t let her talk to Bert first. Then she grabs Bert’s arm and begins dragging him away.
“Just remember I have to make this flight,” I remind them before they walk off. “With or without you guys, I’ll be on it. I can’t afford to wait till tomorrow.”
They don’t respond, already arguing as they walk. I’m sure they’ll be fine. I don’t need to get inside Bert’s mind to know Hillary can get away with pretty much anything as far as he’s concerned.
“Boarding is in twenty-five minutes,” Eugene yells at them.
“Wow,” I say. “Time flies when you’re breaking taboos.”
“Yeah,” Eugene says. “I have to say, this is really exciting. Did you tell him about my work?”
“How could I, when I don’t know much about it?”
“Well, since you bring it up—”
Eugene goes into detail about his work for about twenty minutes. Mira leaves as soon as he starts talking, giving me a ‘you deserve this’ kind of stare. She’s still clearly in a bad mood.
I won’t repeat much of what Eugene shared with me, because frankly, if he expected me to understand even half of it, he must think really highly of my background in neuroscience. However, there is one thing I do grasp when it comes up.
“You know,” I say, grabbing on to a familiar subject, “when it comes to stimulating a specific region of the brain, instead of implanting electrodes, something no sane person would let you do, you can use TMS—Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation—”
“I know what that is,” Eugene says. “The problem is that those machines are very pricey.”
“And getting someone to drill a hole in their head is cheap?”
“I was thinking of finding someone who already—”
“Listen,” I interrupt. “It just so happens that through work, I know of a company that’s about to make those things very affordable. And more importantly, better and more portable. So you know what? I’ll buy you one.”
He looks as if I just handed him the world. “I don’t know what to say.” I hope he doesn’t tear up, though it looks like he’s considering it. “An assistant and a TMS machine,” he says, his voice shaking with emotion. “I’m going to leapfrog years—no, decades—in my research.”
“Glad to be of help, buddy.” I don’t remind Eugene that Bert hasn’t agreed to help him yet. Knowing Bert, he probably will. “If you don’t mind, I’ve got to swing by the restroom before we board.”
“Hurry up. We have mere minutes,” he says. “If you see my sister or the lovebirds, tell them to come back too.”
I walk briskly in the direction of the bathroom. He’s right. I need to hurry. Getting us these tickets was a feat only Bert could’ve managed, as airlines don’t usually hold five empty seats last minute. But through Bert’s computer magic, four people got bumped from this flight so we could get on. Bert kindly made sure that the family that was affected got a nice compensation from the airline. That’s Bert for you. He also made it clear that the 11:00 p.m. flight is the last one out today, which means I have to be on it, no matter what. If there’s a line in the bathroom, I’ll just have to hold it.
I’m almost ready to enter the men’s restroom when something catches my attention. Something orange. Something that makes me do a double take.
There is a bald, orange-robed figure a few feet away, heading in my general direction.
It could just be a regular Buddhist monk, I tell myself as my heartbeat skyrockets. It’s not necessarily one from the Enlightened Temple.
But then I spot another one behind the first monk I noticed. And a few feet away, I see yet another. Worse, when the nearest one sees me looking at him and his friends, he drops his leisurely pace and starts running toward me.
I’m in deep shit.
Chapter 12
I phase in, and the ambient noise of the airport disappears. Something else is missing. It takes me a moment to realize my poor bladder isn’t demanding anything from me anymore. Not until I phase back out, that is.
I walk over to Eugene and pull him into the Quiet.
“Darren,” he says. “What are you doing? I’m like right here, mere feet away—”
“We’ve got a problem,” I say. “Make that a big problem.”
“What’s going on?”
“The monks from the Temple are here. See that guy in the robe there, and the other ones?”
“Oh, shit,” Eugene says. “What do you think they want?”
“To take me back, make me and Julia do what I refused...”
“Tvari,” he says furiously, switching to Russian.
“Yeah, whatever you just said.”
“But—”
“I can’t miss my flight. Can you help me with this?”
“You insult me by even asking,” he says. “Let’s find the others.”
We find Mira at the nearby grocery stand. She’s holding an apple and is about to pay for it. I pull her in and give her the rundown.
“Let’s Read them,” she suggests. “That should tell us how many there are and whether Caleb is with them.”
“Shit, I didn’t think of him,” I say. “He could be a real problem if he’s here.”
“Right, which is all the more reason to do as Mira suggests,” Eugene says and walks toward the monks.
“I don’t think we’ll have any luck with this one,” I say. “I recognize him. He’s the very one I tried Reading before, but all I got was the white noise from his meditation.”
“It’s worth a shot,” Eugene says. “Maybe one of us will have better luck?”
Mira walks up to the monk and touches him. She looks as if she’s concentrating, and her expression becomes serene. Then she looks annoyed.
“No go,” she says. “All I get is what Darren described, a sort of emptiness.”
She then notices the piece of paper the monk is holding, grabs it from his hand, and reads it.
“Right. According to his boarding pass, he’s flying to Detroit,” she says. “And I’m the Pope.”
“Let’s try Reading those two.” I look at the other two monks standing in the distance. Decision made, I approach the younger one, saying, “I’ll try this one. You go for that one.”
This monk is also holding a boarding pass. This one is to Houston. They must’ve bought random tickets just to get through security. I wonder why airport security doesn’t flag people who say, “I’ll take a ticket to anywhere please. Oh, and random tickets to I-don’t-care-where for my brother monks.” Asking these monks what they’re up to would make a hell of a lot more sense than forcing old ladies to take off their shoes.
I put my hand on the monk’s shaved head, noticing as I do that he’s barely out of his teens. After a moment of concentration, I’m in.
* * *
We’re wondering what’s so special about the guy we’re following. The Master didn’t say. He just said the excursion might do us some good, but we think this might be the rare case when the Master is wrong. Keeping centered is incredibly hard with all these people around. The noise, the smell of junk food and perfumes—it’s all overpowering.
I, Darren, realize this monk is distracted from his unreadable state of mind by the day-to-day life of the airport. Or he’s just not as good as the others at keeping his defenses up, being younger and less experienced. Whatever the reason, it works to my advantage, and I dig deeper.
“Let’s split up,” Caleb, the outsider whom the Master seems to respect for some reason, says. “Let’s cover this whole airport. If you see him, stall him, and use this.” He hands every one of the brothers a burner phone that’s programmed to call him.
I, Darren, disassociate. Things are bad. First, the Master is the monk nearest me, and I get the impression that this monk is called ‘Master’ due to his fighting skills and not just his meditating prowess. What’s worse is that Caleb is here. And just to top it off, many more monks, all from the Temple, are surrounding the airport.
I know I should get out of the monk’s head and figure a way out of this mess, but curiosity overtakes me. Inside this young monk’s mind is something useful.
These monks’ fighting style.
I try to feel lighter, enough to go back just a few days.
We’re sparring with our more experienced sister. We much prefer no-contact practice, but the Master frowns upon it. He calls no-contact ‘flowery fists and embroidery kicks.’ The Master says that no matter how pleasing it is to the eye of the spectator monks, or cleansing for the mind of the monk performing the movements, no-contact practice can never take the place of sparring.
The sister we’re fighting is amazing. Being a woman of small frame, she’s supposed to be weaker than us, but we can barely keep up with her. We know small bruises will appear tomorrow where her punches land. And what impresses us the most is that we know she’s holding back the intensity of those punches.
I, Darren, eventually disassociate from the training, but not before I get a compressed month’s worth of sparring sessions, and triple that of the stylistic, dance-like solo training. I don’t bother remembering the fancy names for the stances, though I guess it would have been cool to show Bert a move and say, “Yup, that was the ‘Fierce Tiger Descending from Mountain.’” My goal was to learn the strengths and weaknesses of the style in case I need to fight the Master, who’s frozen in the process of running toward me.
Fighting lessons out of the way, I allow myself an indulgence. I try to zoom in on a very specific memory—that of the Reading-resistant meditative technique these monks possess. The young monk was thinking about it while sparring and practiced a version of it during his solo training, but I wasn’t focused on it enough to really understand how it works.
I jump around in his head and come up empty. I don’t see anything specifically relating to this mysterious technique. All the monks ever taught my host was a type of meditation, which I doubt is special in any way. None of the meditation techniques are qualitatively different from the focused concentration we all think of as meditation. No secret sauce that I could glimpse. These monks simply meditate a lot. Either this monk wasn’t entrusted with the special technique, or blocking someone from entering your mind doesn’t involve some kind of special trick.
Could it be that regular, vanilla meditation—with enough practice—can make you resistant to Reading and Guiding? Or is it more likely that these monks have special genetics? Like a breed of people who are naturally capable of resisting us? This last theory is flawed. It doesn’t explain how I can Read this monk, which suggests blocking people like me is a skill he hasn’t yet mastered. Or maybe there’s another alternative that I’m not considering.
I file this away as something I can talk to Eugene about someday. I also make a mental note to Read the next ‘regular’ Buddhist monk I come across, which could prove or disprove my vanilla meditation theory. Not sure where I’d find such a monk, but one time, I did see the Dalai Lama near the United Nations Headquarters. He’s a Buddhist.
Damn, I wish I’d known about Reading then. Reading the Dalai Lama would’ve been cool, but it could’ve ended with him joining me in the Quiet. How do I know he’s not one of us?
Realizing I’m getting sidetracked, I mentally smack myself into focus and exit the young monk’s head.
* * *
“It’s amazing,” Eugene says as soon as I’m out. “I can’t Read him. I wonder how—”
“Zhenya, focus,” Mira interrupts. “Now’s really not the time for your science.”
“I had better luck Reading than the two of you, but the information I gleaned doesn’t give me much hope,” I say, preventing Eugene from arguing with his sister. “Caleb is here, as well as more of these monks.”
“Damn it,” Mira says. “Let’s go find the tiny one and figure things out from there.”
Finding Hillary is a great idea, so I lead the charge.
She and Bert are in the Starbucks where I told him our secrets. I can’t help but smile when I see my friend holding another cup of coffee. He had two while we were chatting less than an hour ago, but he has an ex
tremely high tolerance for caffeine. I think he can drink coffee all day long without getting even a little jittery. Or maybe it’s hard to tell the difference between normal Bert and jittery Bert, given how keyed-up this kid normally is.
I pull Hillary in, and a moment later, she’s looking up at me with concern written on her small face. Her eyebrows furrow even deeper as I explain the situation.
“Give me a second,” she says.
She walks over to Bert and does that kissing thing to him again. Mira and Eugene look away while I just look off to the side, unsure what etiquette says to do in situations such as these.
“Ready,” Hillary says when she’s done with whatever it is she was doing to Bert.
“You Pushed him?” Mira asks.
“I Guided him to go straight to the plane and not look back or start any trouble,” Hillary says.
“Good call,” I say. “One less variable for us to worry about.”
“My thoughts exactly. Now follow me,” Hillary says and walks away. Mira and Eugene exchange questioning glances, then look at me. I shrug. I have no idea what my aunt has in mind, but since she looks as though she knows what she’s doing, I decide to follow her for now.
She approaches a man in uniform. He appears to be a TSA agent. Without hesitation, Hillary frisks the guy.
“No weapons,” she says with obvious disappointment.
“I don’t think TSA agents carry,” Eugene says. “They’re not cops.”
“I think I see where you’re going with this,” Mira says, looking at Hillary approvingly. “Let me have a look.”