Select Few

by Marit Weisenberg

  I looked up at the security cameras. Who the hell was this woman? I suddenly felt like a dead man walking, resigned to fate, and thought I’d been lucky to come as far as I had. Who might be waiting for me? The FBI? Another branch of government?

  The next hallway was lined with windows that looked into a series of classrooms. Miriam knocked lightly on the glass. A girl with a chimp on her hip looked up. She came over to the door and unlocked it.

  “Etta, how are you?” Dr. Gottlieb said. “I wanted to introduce Julia, a prospective student.”

  “Hello.” The girl’s glasses were falling down her face, and the chimp reached up to push them back on her nose. I smiled despite myself. The chimp reached for me.

  “It’s okay, you can hold her if you like,” Etta said.

  Startled, I took the chimp in my arms and stared into her eyes. She put her hands on my face. Then she pushed away from me and reached back for Etta.

  “Aww, she wanted to see if you could talk to her.”

  “Oh, should I have said something?”

  “Oh, no. Not out loud.”

  “Silently?” I looked to Miriam, and she nodded. “You can talk to her?” I asked Etta.

  “It’s just this thing I can do.”

  Without telling them, I tried again. I held out a hand to the chimp, and she took it. We locked eyes once more. I could hear her heartbeat, and I began to sense her curiosity but nothing more. She shook my hand as if she wanted to comfort me because I couldn’t do it.

  When Etta took her back, she said, “She likes you.”

  Miriam gestured for me to follow her to another room down the hallway.

  “I don’t understand,” I said, suddenly thinking this might all be a messed-up dream—a feeling John had expressed more than once. My teeth began to chatter. Miriam didn’t answer.

  Miriam placed her phone on a ledge in the hallway and then led me into the next room. She nodded to two older-looking students who were seated at a small table across from a young man who had his eyes closed.

  “Ahmet?”

  The young man looked up at us, confused. His pencil hovered over a piece of graph paper with a meticulous, partially completed sketch of a swimming pool and an ivy-covered wall directly behind it.

  “Ahmet, this is Julia.”

  He nodded and then silently went back to his work.

  Miriam smiled and turned to me. “I shouldn’t have interrupted. Here, let me show you.” She led me back out into the hallway and the door fell closed behind us. She collected her phone, and after a moment, pulled up a video for me to see of a group of people seated next to a swimming pool with an ivy-covered wall behind it. Ahmet’s drawing was exactly what the group was looking at.

  “We’re running a remote viewing project. We have a team at this location right now. Ahmet’s not told where they are. They need to stay in one place until he’s finished, which can take up to a few hours. We use the photo of the location to compare with what Ahmet sees and draws. So far we’ve had varying results. Let’s go talk in my office.”

  As I walked with Miriam, fear ignited a strange urge to cry. “I don’t understand what this is.”

  “It’s a place to learn and to create. Students come, no strings attached, and explore their ideas. We have students from across the US, the Philippines, Malawi, India—all over. The hope is that their work will lead to achievements benefitting the common good. That’s the official line for the Institute anyway. Other universities have them as well. Einstein came up with his theory of relativity at Princeton’s. We all work to provide an environment that fosters breakthroughs and contributions to society.”

  “But how is what I just saw…?”

  Miriam opened a door to a corner office and entered after me. We were enclosed in a sun-filled room.

  “How we differ is that this institute is devoted to exploring ways of learning and creating that aren’t accepted yet. There is so much more difference out there than many people believe or want to know about. What we consider reality is only an agreed-upon reality. It’s not the whole picture. We’ll never know the whole picture, but we can keep looking for answers. Why don’t you have a seat?”

  Miriam settled behind an old-school metal-and-Formica desk that looked like it once belonged in a lab. “It’s everywhere,” she continued, “the person who does something extraordinary or masters something that’s eluded the experts. After decades of working here, it’s my belief that these talents can’t just be written off as oddities. I think they’re displays of people becoming increasingly sensitive to their environment, more empathic, more intuitive. Though the students here aren’t exactly like you and me.”

  “Excuse me?” I remained standing in the shadow cast by a large oak outside the window.

  “They aren’t descendants of a people who made an evolutionary change. See, I’m descended from the Chachapuris as well.”

  I knew my job was to pretend I had no idea what she was talking about. That’s what I’d been taught to do. But the problem was, I believed her. I’d recognized it the second she walked into Dr. Yu’s office.

  Miriam leaned into her chair and glanced at the ceiling. “I could always do the strangest things. I would go to school and bend silverware at lunch, showing off for anyone who wanted to see.” She looked back at me. I was still standing across from her. “You can imagine how long that lasted before my parents told me to stop. My grandfather always said I could do these things because we were directly descended from Puris who were captured and forced to work the mines. In the Chachapuri lore, the fate of those who escaped had always remained a mystery. In the stories, they were still out there, maybe hiding but hopefully thriving—keeping our history and culture alive and continuing to develop our unique talents.

  Miriam leaned forward again and folded her hands on her desk. “Apparently, I didn’t do such a good job at hiding my quirks because the CIA recruited me when I went to college. They were looking for so-called psychics during the Cold War to interact with Soviet targets. The program was disbanded, but it landed me here as a teacher where these people from all different walks of life who had these odd but undeniable gifts surrounded me. We developed this independent institute for exploration, to see if any of our abilities could add up to anything that could be useful.”

  “Not even one is like you?”

  “No. We search for them all over the world. They’re unique, but they aren’t altogether different the way you and I are. The students who are invited usually need help; they’re struggling to make sense of their gifts and, for the most part, have learned to hide the extent of them. We’ve found that they can cultivate these abilities while their brains are still growing. Some people aren’t ready, and we back off immediately. I think there are more people than we know who suppress these traits.

  “I do think there are more of us out there. I have hope; I like to think Chachapuris find one another. As of today, I’ve met two in my lifetime.”

  She reached into her top drawer and then handed me a photo. I automatically took it and turned it over. I didn’t say anything as I studied it. In the photo my mother looked so young, standing with a lanky man with black hair.

  I looked up at Miriam. “Are you saying she’s a descendant like you?”

  “No, I think she is brilliant and an aberration, someone who was well on her way to exploring her gifts until she stopped. Your father is the other Chachapuri I’ve met.”

  I dropped the photo on the desk and had to pick it up again. The only thing that looked at all similar was his build. But from his stance in the photo, I knew it was Novak. Both he and Elizabeth seemed unaware that the photo was being taken. Looking at it more closely, I saw now that she was slightly leaning back against him, staring at something in the distance.

  I was speechless. I looked up at Miriam.

  “I didn’t mean to shock you.”
<
br />   I noticed the framed family photos on a bookshelf behind her, including one of Miriam and kids who were probably her grandchildren.

  “I brought Elizabeth into my program, and right away, she calmed down. She was still flashy and confident but she quit scaring other students. She stayed on as a graduate student in biology, but she mostly worked with me here, and at that point we were still government-funded. The FBI heard about some strange activity at the tech company Oracle regarding this incredible young man. The agency called me, as it still does when news of a questionable event makes its way up the food chain. I asked Elizabeth to investigate.”

  I remembered what Lati told me, the one time he’d ever spoken to me about my mother. “She worked there. You had her take a job? Like a spy?”

  Miriam didn’t look at me, and if she thought she’d done the wrong thing, she didn’t admit it. “Elizabeth walked into something that blindsided us. We had no idea there was an actual group of people with similar talents. It was exciting because they were the only living example of a people who had made some sort of genetic change together as a group. At least the only one we know about.”

  “He told her this?”

  “He opened up to her. About the group’s identity and their semi-nomadic lives. When Elizabeth told me about the tribe I finally had proof my grandfather’s stories were true. Your father told her about Relocation and how they were worried about sustaining their numbers. From the beginning, we knew they were planning to make a move soon.”

  Miriam tensed, which told me she was getting to an uncomfortable part of the story.

  “Elizabeth kept getting in deeper. I think from the start, she knew she would follow him anywhere. She claimed just being around him seemed to enhance what she could do, that she was getting sharper and quicker at everything. At that point Elizabeth lied to me and said she’d already told him who she really was. That he was thinking about coming in to speak with us. She stopped checking in, but I kept dropping in on her. And then she couldn’t hide that she was pregnant.” Miriam stopped suddenly. “She would never tell me what happened between them at the end. If he left suddenly. If they made an agreement of some sort.”

  Elizabeth would never tell me either. “Did you ever meet him?”

  “One time. The FBI was losing patience with the way we were running things. I was worried about your mother and that your father’s group would disappear. I went to his office to see him. He played nice, never revealing a thing about himself or that he was surprised to find out who Elizabeth really was. If he felt betrayed, he hid it for months. Now I realize he was just waiting for you to be born. I don’t know if he ever thought about my proposition to him and the Puris to come into the Institute…or maybe he got scared, told someone, and they convinced him otherwise.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have interfered and she could have gone with him for Relocation.”

  “They never would have taken her.”

  “But Novak took me.”

  “Perhaps they didn’t want to leave a trace of themselves behind or give Novak any reason to come back. I am so sorry, Julia. I should have known there was a possibility that we could lose you.”

  I quickly ran my fingertips under my eyes.

  Miriam said gently, “I’m sure you were a way forward for them.”

  “No, they want to stay the same.”

  “You are special. You’re the bridge between cultures. You’re both. Once Novak and Elizabeth got together, they opened a door to take your group in a different direction. The fact that you’re here in front of me is extraordinary.”

  “You want to study me.”

  “I want to offer you an opportunity to reach your full potential.”

  We looked at each other for a beat.

  “Your group has eluded us for the past twenty years, and they are smart enough to probably continue to do so. But their numbers must be dwindling, and they must be making decisions from a place of insecurity.”

  “They don’t feel insecurity.”

  Miriam sized me up for a second, seeing more of me than I wanted her to. She lowered her voice, as if she didn’t want to offend me. “I don’t know how you were raised, but I can guess that you felt a degree of shame about your difference. You’re an outsider no matter where you go. That will never leave you. Every human being feels that: shame, self-doubt. But instead of being on your own and hiding your skills, here you can be fully integrated into a community. We can teach you how to coexist with others. You can safely explore and fail—just like the Puris were able to cultivate their gifts hundreds of years ago. One day you may want to teach or work with me to find other young people to bring into the Institute who think they need to hide their gifts to get by.”

  I hovered near the door.

  Miriam continued, “Kids come here, and at first, we give them all the tools they need to master their skills. They build their confidence. But at the end of the day, those are just excellent tricks. Once our students learn the extent of their capabilities, we invite them to find a larger purpose. I know how lucky I am. If I hadn’t found that, I would be hiding my gifts and battling the feeling that I’m not quite there yet, that there has to be something more. Something beyond just myself.”

  “Like what?” I asked flatly. The longer I stayed to listen, the more exposed and cornered I felt. I wanted to know I could in fact exit the building as Miriam had promised.

  “For you, I think it’s written in all stories about the Chachapuris. Their incredible empathy and their natural capacity to help. From what I saw with your father and what I feel now with you sitting before me, you have a physical effect on people. At best, I’ve seen it enhance the consciousness of those around them, inspire a feeling of interconnectedness. At its worst, it’s used to take advantage of others’ trust the way I suspect your father did later in life.”

  Miriam reluctantly stood, knowing she didn’t have me for much longer. “We’re at a crossroads. We’ve come so far, and now it seems as if we’re going backward. Humans have an undeniable instinct toward self-destruction. Just a few greedy people can cause so much suffering. Here at the Institute we want to tip the scales on the side of progress. You are full of light and goodness; it’s easy to tell. So was your father. But unlike him, you’re just choosing your path.”

  My hand stilled on the door handle.

  “Your other choice is to sit back and watch. Regardless, I need to warn you. If you remain on your own, you have to conceal your abilities. We’d love to talk to your friend too, eventually. It didn’t take long to hear about what you and he did in Colorado. If you continue, unfortunately someone will end up stopping you.”

  She let that sink in. “We want to know about the Chachapuris before they’re lost. I know it’s a lot to think about. To come in and talk about your culture, expose who you really are.”

  I’d never dreamed I’d find a meaningful outlet for my abilities outside of my family. But this felt dangerous and like a betrayal.

  “You having a life is not a betrayal.”

  Now I understood how upsetting it must have been to John when I read his mind without permission.

  “Uncertainty is dangerous. But that’s the case with every beginning. I’ll back off now. We’ll hold a spot until the start of school. If we don’t meet again, best of luck, Julia.”

  I left, blown away, never bothering with Dr. Yu’s office or her Letter of Intent.

  Late AUGUST

  JOHN

  I thought I was getting better. I went from comatose to just feeling kind of dead inside. But it was a manageable dead. At least I was eating again.

  I began to get a lot of attention at Kalamazoo, and I started having serious thoughts that it would make sense to go pro. I had fantasies about what it would be like to be a star. Have tons of money. Pay my parents back. I wanted you to read about me in the news.

  It was
a low point, for sure. I was pretty out of my mind. Winning was the only thing that felt good.

  You gave me a card last year when we first started dating. You tucked it in the pocket of my tennis bag for me to find, and I left it there so that sometimes I could look at it before matches. You painted it yourself—a landscape of Lady Bird Lake and downtown Austin in the background. Remember? It must have taken you hours, or for you, maybe not hours, but you gave it time and care. It was so good. When I first saw it, I thought you’d bought it. Later you told me you liked to paint and how it was okay but not your best work.

  Inside, you wrote stuff like: good luck, have fun on your trip, I’ll see you when you get back.

  I was so surprised that you’d made me something. At the time, we were barely dating. When you gave it to me, I realized you were into me. I was never going to throw it away.

  In Kalamazoo, a water bottle leaked in my tennis bag. The card was ruined, all the watercolors blurred together. I tossed it right in the trash.

  When that was gone, I was all out of proof that we’d ever been together.

  AUGUST

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  My one bag was packed. The room had been cleaned while I’d been at the interview. I could slip out today—now—and leave without checking out and no one would know for at least a day or so. I could take cash and go to the San Jose airport in a taxi, buy a ticket to Los Angeles, and get picked up by Angus. From there, I could fall off the map for another two weeks, at which point my family would be gone for good. Angus’s family would presumably help me procure new identification.

  So why wasn’t I leaving?

  Housekeeping had placed some of my overlooked items on the glass-topped bedside table. A hairbrush, a book. And that manila envelope Emmanuel had given me.

  Don’t. You’ve made your decision.

  I wheeled the bag behind me. Whether it was fate or just the breeze, when I opened the door, the envelope slid with a whisper onto the carpeting.