Ivo Lass averted her eyes and looked through the room’s window at the hazy sky. “Matt, before we continue, I need to know something. Is Micky Cass in some sort of danger?”
It had come flying out of left field and it took Matt a moment to piece together the implications. “What makes you think that?”
An amused expression touched her lips as her eyes crinkled at the corners. “ ‘Slag Like Me’ has failed to appear for weeks. You are a police officer pretending to be a reporter, apparently tracing Robb’s footsteps in disguising himself as a Tenctonese. I take it I’m even a suspect?”
“What makes you think I’m a cop?”
Her eyebrows went up again. “The same way I know that Robb’s columns have failed to appear. I read newspapers. I watch television. You and your partner have appeared in both several times, Detective Sikes.”
Matt held his hands to the bandages covering his face. “But you can’t see me.”
“I can hear your voice.” Her expression grew serious. “What about Cass?”
“Unofficially, he’s missing.”
“And unofficially you’re investigating?”
“Yes.”
She nodded slowly, her gaze again on the window. “Matt, I want to do everything I can to help you. During the time Micky Cass and I were together for his training, I came to admire him a great deal.”
Matt drummed his fingers on the armrests of his chair as he weighed Ivo Lass’s value as a suspect versus her value as an ally. It didn’t really matter, he concluded. If she wasn’t connected with Cass’s disappearance, her help would be indispensable, if she was responsible, nothing would prove it more quickly than having her betray him. It would be sort of like looking for a gas leak with a lit match.
“I can use all of the help I can get. About the training?”
“Yes?”
“Cass wrote that it took eleven weeks. If it takes me that long, Micky Cass’s trail will be long dead and gone before I get to it. Is there any way to speed it up?”
“There’s no need.”
“No need?”
“That’s correct.”
“What about the eleven weeks? He must have had something that needed fixing. What did Micky Cass have that I don’t?”
“Self-esteem.”
Through sheer force of will, Matt restrained himself from echoing her statement. Since that statement was all that filled his mind at that moment, however, he was left somewhat speechless. At last he said, “I don’t understand.”
She nodded her approval at his response. “Very good, Matt. Now, what don’t you understand?”
“Who’s making echoes now?” Ivo Lass laughed, but Matt persisted. “You said that Micky Cass had self-esteem and I don’t.”
“You don’t and neither do most Tenctonese or other kinds of slaves. It’s his positive feelings about himself that revealed him as a human in his first attempt at passing as a Newcomer.”
“You’re saying I don’t have positive feelings about myself? And what about my partner? He’s a Tenctonese and sometimes he can be insufferable with how confident and self-assured he is.”
“I’ve never met your partner, but perhaps he does the same thing you do—he pretends.”
“Pretends?” Matt held up his hands. “Sorry.” He lowered his hands as anger attempted to cover up his feeling of being threatened. “I don’t see how you can know any of this.”
“It’s very simple, really. In your case, I can feel it. In the case of your partner, he’s Tenctonese. A slave—any kind of slave—has to conform to survive. Whatever the prevailing mood, attitude, desire, the slave must instantly adapt if he is to survive. He must become an emotional—even political—chameleon. Particularly if one is born into it, there is little or no struggle involved. Everyone around you thinks and acts that way, and you do as you were shown.”
“Who are you talking about now? Me or my partner?”
“Both, actually.”
“We were both slaves? Is that what you’re saying?”
Ivo Lass nodded. “I don’t think I have to explain your partner’s past, do I? You’re satisfied that he was once a slave?”
“Yeah. Sure. What I don’t get is you saying that I was once a slave. You sure you don’t have your human history a little confused?”
The Hila leaned forward in her chair, rested her elbows on her knees, and looked deep into Matt’s eyes. “What was your childhood like, Matt?”
“My child—sorry.” Ignoring the pain of the new skin on his neck, he shook his head. “I guess like everybody else’s. School, peanut butter, baseball, girls.”
“Did you like school?”
“No. I hated it.” He shook his head slowly. “I didn’t get very good grades. Not much in the way of friends.”
“What about baseball? Did you like baseball?”
Matt frowned. “Yeah. I liked it. Some. I played it because my father was a fan and I wanted to impress him.” He gave a tiny shrug as he pulled his mind back from the past. “He only ever showed up to a couple of games.” He held up a hand, “And before you ask, the peanut butter seemed to be the only thing I ever got to eat at home. There was never any food in the house, and I bought my own bread and peanut butter and stashed it.”
“The girls?”
“One or two dates. They were disasters. I was the kind of kid fathers don’t want their daughters to date.”
“It’s interesting, Matt, the parallels between slavery and certain dysfunctional family systems. Liot Mrysvi, the Tenctonese family therapist, published an incredibly interesting study on it titled The Invisible Tattoo.”
“I’ve seen it in the stores. I never read it.”
“What was it in your family, Matt? Gambling, incest, eating disorders, physical abuse, drug addiction—”
“What?” Matt almost came to his feet, then dropped back into his chair. It was frightening how the Hila could see into his heart, his past. When George had gone though riana, the Tenctonese male menopause, he had gotten a little smarter. It showed as an almost two percent gain in his intelligence quotient. Tenct women had a similar experience, Cathy had informed him, and Ivo Lass was over a century and a half old. When she was born, slavery in the United States was still a going concern. She must’ve been through riana a dozen times. But, thought Matt, how smart can you get before your head explodes?
“What was your childhood home like, Matt?”
He looked down at his hands, remembering the Adult Children of Alcoholics meeting he had attended. He never could understand how those people could talk about this stuff like it wasn’t something swimming in shame. The image of his father drunk, his mother wiped on prescription drugs, the countless times he bit his tongue, closed his eyes, covered his ears. The back of his father’s hand, the long silences, the longer arguments. Moments after the one time he had opened his mouth and wished his father dead, he watched in horror as some thug shot him down. Matt moistened his lips, glanced at the Hila, and said quietly. “Alcohol. Drugs. Some physical abuse.” He looked down at her hands. “A lot of physical abuse.”
“And you survived,” said Ivo Lass. “How you survived, however, had certain effects. One of those effects was to crush your self-esteem. It is quite similar to what happens to any slave.”
“I was not a slave!”
Ivo Lass looked into Matt’s eyes, her expression something of steel wrapped with compassion. “Were you forced to do things against what you knew was right?”
Matt thought for a moment, then shrugged. There had been only a couple of hundred thousand times. Being the man of the family at the age of five because the man of the family was passed out and the woman of the family was locked in her bedroom talking to people who had died twenty years ago. Lying to friends at school because of the endless shame. So many things. “Yes. There were some things. Lots of things. That’s how it was in my family.”
“Were you punished no matter what you did?”
Matt’s mouth suddenly went dry. T
he stupid scene with the bike when he was eight flooded into his mind. He had left his bike in front of the house. His mother, citing everything from what the neighbors might think to a world filled with potential thieves, beat him with a wire chair leg for leaving the bike in front of the house. He looked at his knuckles, remembering the blood there from the wire cutting his fingers as he tried to protect himself. Once she was exhausted and went to pop a few more Valium, young Matt put the bike away in the garage. His mother beat him again for that. It seemed she had wanted his father to see what an irresponsible slug his son was, and the bike in front of the house was valuable evidence that Matt had fouled. He had been beaten again when he asked his mother if he should put the bike back in front of the house . . .
“Okay. So what?”
“Matt,” continued the Hila, “were you denied because those in authority were serving an even greater authority?”
Frowning, Matt held out his hands, grateful to be angry instead of rocketing down that well of self-pity. “What in the hell does that mean?”
“Think.”
“Think?”
Ivo Lass nodded and pointed between Matt’s eyes. “With your brain.”
Matt raised his eyebrows and folded his arms. “Getting just a touch testy, aren’t we?”
“Answer the question.”
The question: Had he ever been denied because those in authority were serving an even greater authority? He stared into a dark corner of the room. He had certainly been denied. There had been no childhood. No real friends; he couldn’t afford them—the shame, the lies, the endless embarrassments. All of the things he had never had because there was never enough money. Matt’s bike had been purchased with money he had earned cutting grass, raking lawns, shoveling endless mountains of garbage.
When his father had stumbled in late the night of the great bike episode, he had not been beaten again. Instead he had watched as his father took out his rage on the bicycle, reducing it to scrap in a matter of minutes. The mother and father that were never available for him except for guilt trips and beatings, and then not even for that. And what higher authorities were his mom and dad serving? Mom worshipped at the feet of Prince Valium. Dad’s god was the great deity, Al Cahol, and his consort, Mary Jane. He felt his eyes grow moist as he nodded.
“Matt, were you free to change your nightmare? Were you free to leave?”
He slowly shook his head. “No.”
“Then, you were a slave.” As she raised her brows and smiled, Ivo Lass seemed to stop herself with an effort. “I am not your enemy, Matt. It is not even my province to treat you against your will.”
“What the hell were you doing, then? Ambush counseling?”
“I was answering your question about the training. You don’t have the same obstacle to overcome as Micky Cass. You don’t have the same self-esteem.”
Matt took a deep breath and let it out in a rush of frustration. “You’re telling me that Newcomers can tell a human with too much self-esteem.”
She burst out with a laugh and shook her head. “No, Matt. Tell me something.”
“If I can.”
“When I first came into the room, when you first saw me, how did you feel?”
Matt knew that if he repeated the word feel as a question, he’d just be stalling for time. Not only would he be stalling for time, it would be an obvious stall. How had he felt? He thought back and nodded slightly. “I guess I felt a little like what I feel a lot like right now.”
“Which is what?”
“Threatened.” His eyebrows crouched into a frown. “Maybe a little envy. Maybe a lot of envy.”
“Matt, that’s how that prostitute felt when she caught sight of Micky Cass in his disguise. Tencts have come to associate the feelings with humans, but they are the same feelings felt by every emotional cripple next to someone who is healthy.”
“Come again?”
“I don’t need to prove anything to you, Matt. I don’t need you or your good opinion of me. I don’t need to justify my existence to you or to anyone else. There is absolutely nothing within me that makes me either need or want your approval. That makes me very scary to someone who feels that he constantly needs to prove his worth to others.”
“I don’t feel that way.”
“Then why tell me?”
“Tell you?” asked Matt, completely forgetting his little speech habit. “You asked.” Matt paused as he thought on the past few moments. “Didn’t you?”
“No, I didn’t.” Ivo Lass stood up and walked to the window. Her eyes studied the cityscape outside as she said, “There is an easy test of your need to justify yourself to others, Matt. I will tell you what it is and ask you to make no response. After all, I am not in a contest with you. I will tell you what it is, and you may do what you will with your conclusions. Do you understand?”
“Okay.” For some reason Matt felt more threatened than he had experienced before.
“Very well. Matt, do you have a boyfriend or a girlfriend?”
“Girl,” he said, realizing as he did so that his response involved disassociating himself from a particular life-style because Ivo Lass might judge it somehow. Already he was up to his ears attempting to prove something to the old alien. “Yes,” he said. “I have a friend.”
“Intimate friend?”
“Yes.”
“Now, this is the question the answer to which I want you to only think about, not express. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“When you’re relaxing—watching baseball on television, say—and your intimate friend walks into the room from doing dishes or balancing her checkbook, or from whatever unknown activity, how do you feel?”
The feeling? It had only happened five hundred times. Matt’s eyebrows went up in recognition of the Hila’s point. When Cathy came in when he was goofing off, that’s how he felt—like he was goofing off. He felt guilty.
There was that stupid joke he’d heard after mass as a kid. In the Vatican, the pontiff’s secretary comes running in and screams, “Your Holiness, He’s out there! He’s out there and He’s going to be in here in a few minutes!” The pope asks, “Who are you talking about, Father? Who’s out there?” The secretary pulls at his hair and wails, “It’s Jesus, Your Holiness! The son of God! He’s out there and He’ll be in here in just a minute! What’ll we do? What’ll we do?” The pope frowns, picks up some papers, and says, “Look busy.”
That was how it was when someone, anyone, interrupted him while he was taking a break or relaxing. He felt guilty; as if he should “look busy.”
Then he did feel as though he constantly had to prove himself to everyone, to justify his existence. He turned in his chair and faced the Hila. “I have one question, Ivo Lass. If slaves have no self-esteem, and that’s how Tencts identify Tencts, how come it’s just the opposite with us?”
“How you look at things, Matt, including yourself, is something that can be changed. Many—most—Tenctonese are still slaves in their minds. I’ve done the necessary work and am no longer a slave in mine. What you are to your own mind is something you can change, although you don’t want to change it right away. After all, it’s an important part of your disguise. When you are ready to change it, though, there are all kinds of help available. Micky Cass is a good example. He, too, came from an addictive home—drugs, gambling, food addiction, and so on. He had become so healthy, however, it took eleven weeks of training to make him sick enough in his view of himself to impersonate a Tenct.”
Matt stood up, his hands at his sides, a strange feeling of panic and longing in his heart. “Will I be seeing you again?”
She turned from the window, her eyebrows up again. “I’m a suspect, aren’t I? We’ll be seeing each other again.”
C H A P T E R 1 5
IT WAS NOT long after Sikes’s session with the Hila that the FBI’s unofficial investigation became officially official. The pulley of time strained against the belt of reality, the great shaft creaked
on its rusty bearings, and the necessary prerequisites popped up in their respective pigeonholes. The unofficial bureau assistance became an official FBI investigation and, in a rare display of cooperation with local authorities, the bureau continued to operate through the Robb investigation command center in the LAPD, making it the core of the federal task force. In other words, nothing changed except Captain Grazer became second in command under Special Agent Stillson Landry.
Landry was a human with an overly polished manner who only insisted upon two things: (1) he and Captain Grazer were co-commanders of the joint task force, and (2) Stillson Landry was in charge. It was an accounting thing to enable some FBI number cruncher in Washington to defend his organization before some congressional committee bent on saving thirty-five cents worth of paper clips while stuffing billions into personal pork barrels.
There was one other change that occurred by making the investigation official. It then became part of the public record. George expected any moment to see Amanda Reckonwith, the self-proclaimed queen of the Slagtown news beat, come bursting through the door and start sticking her damned microphone in everyone’s faces. That also meant increased pressure from the chief’s office. The task force was a truck with a powerful engine, a heavy foot on the pedal, and no gas.
In the task force’s command center, as Landry put on a primo performance of “Stuff Everybody Already Knows,” George Francisco watched Captain Grazer twiddle his thumbs while the police officers and agents assigned to the task force doodled on notepads, whispered among themselves, stared blankly out of the windows or, in at least two cases, dozed. One officer, Burke from crisis control, was playing a hand-held video game.
Why not? thought George. Some writer with more poison in his pen than sense in his head trashes the police department, throws gasoline on the coals of anti-Tenct racism, and jumps into the middle of a crowd of killers just to make a big publicity splash, then vanishes and expects the aforesaid police officers to pull his cookies out of the fire? As far as George was concerned, the only interest he had in the investigation was twofold. First, Matt was going undercover in a bizarre masquerade and might be killed for his efforts. Second, what was it that Paul Iniko had found that was so secret he wouldn’t—couldn’t—share it with his fellow investigator?
Alien Nation #5 - Slag Like Me Page 12