She looks at me and shakes her head. “How do you know that? That doesn’t make any sense.” She waves the knife at me. “Why would you think I’d believe you—that’ll just hurt like hell and then you’ll get the knife.”
I shake my head back at her. “I have a voice.” She looks confused. “Inside my head. It’s been talking to me. It’s been helping me, but the patch made it hard to hear. Now that my patch is off, I can hear her outside the Jungle again and she’s telling me how to take yours off.”
Corina’s shaking her head. “How the hell do you expect me to believe that?” She laughs at me. “Any of it. You’re the one who says they’re going to kill us—there’s no proof of that.” She’s not afraid of me now. She’s disgusted.
It’s written all over her face.
It’s too loud in my brain for thinking. I shake my head again, one last time to try and clear the guitars. It works a little bit. They’re down to a level that doesn’t rattle my mind.
“Please. Just try it—if it hurts, stop.” I wait for a second, but my Voice doesn’t correct me or tell me I’m an idiot. I hope that means I’m right that it won’t hurt.
“Uh-uh.”
“If it doesn’t work, then go back. Tell them I used mind control to convince you to come with me. I won’t hurt you and I won’t stop you.”
She starts to look nervous again, unsure.
“Keep talking, runaway. She’s listening.”
“The Voice is real, but I can’t prove that to you unless you try this out. Corina, I love you,” I tell her for the first time since we’ve lost our connection. It’s weird because I know it’s true, but it doesn’t feel the same. It feels like it did before the connection, but it’s half love. It’s just normal human love. I feel very alone. “Please.”
She looks down at her patch and then at the knife. I hold my breath while she considers it and then she nods. “If it hurts, that’s it. I’ll know you’re crazy and I’ll go back to the compound.”
“Yes. Absolutely.”
“Okay.” But she doesn’t make any moves toward her patch.
“Okay.”
“Okay.” She starts to move the knife. She flinches when it touches the patch, and then she turns it so the blade touches the front surface at the top.
“Top edge. It’s got to be the top edge.”
“The top edge, not the front. Not between the patch and the skin?” I add but it’s as much a question as an instruction. I don’t hear anything, so I nod. “The top edge of the patch, not between the patch and the skin.”
She turns the knife. She places the blade against the top edge and pushes against it. I can see the patch dimple, but she doesn’t stop. She pushes harder and the knife penetrates the skin of the patch.
She stops.
She looks surprised, but not like it’s hurting her. She draws the knife forward across the patch to the front edge. She moves it slowly, like she’s waiting for the pain, until she reaches the front of the patch and pulls the knife up slowly.
Nothing happens at first, but then the cut edge begins to curl in and the patch starts to change color from the dark brown of her skin to the same dull red that my pod turned when I deactivated it way back when at the compound. The change happens slowly, like the color is bleeding out of it, dripping back into Corina’s flesh.
When the patch is completely red, it falls off, leaving only a series of four circular scars where the blood vessels were in its place.
“Holy hell,” Corina whispers. “Your voice is real.”
“Yeah. My Voice is real.”
She examines her patch on the ground where it fell. She seems frozen.
“Corina?”
She shudders when I speak and then looks up at me. “They’re all really dead?”
“Who?”
“Calvin? Marcus? Everybody?” She’s shaking. I reach for her. At first she pulls away, but then falls in against me. “They’re all dead, aren’t they?”
“They might still be frozen.” It doesn’t sound very helpful.
“And that’s what’s gonna happen to Paul and the rest, too?”
Flashes of Paul. Playing guitar, laughing in the kitchen. Damon and me drinking in Vegas. Maddie. But then I’m back to Paul, unconscious on the floor of the room after I dropped him. I shake my head. “No. I’m gonna get them out. I promised Paul.”
She looks around at the alley we’re in, the patches on the ground, the blood, my vomit on the Dumpster. “Why don’t we finish rescuing us first.”
I shrug, and turn to start walking.
“Alex?” Corina asks. The guitars are in my head. I can barely hear her.
“Yeah?”
“You trust this voice of yours?”
“She’s been right so far.”
She looks at me. “She?”
“It sounds like a girl.” I shrug.
She shakes her head. “You shrug too much.”
“It’s just a voice.” Then I shrug again. My head’s too loud to do much else.
Fifty
Without Corina in my mind, I feel empty, small. Just a bag of guitars. She’s walking next to me, but she’s far away. She’s in another galaxy, another universe. Another body with a mind that I can’t feel.
I feel lost in every way I can.
We’re going to catch a Greyhound south to LA.
We buy a set of clippers at a Walmart, along with some glasses. Corina cuts my hair in the bus station bathroom. Shaves me down into a buzz cut. I try and argue with her because I like my long hair, but she says it’s the best way. Then she hands me the reading glasses—the kind old people get from the rack by the pharmacy. They’re thick and black and they make the world look like I’m staring at it through a fish-eye filter.
“I can’t wear these.”
“Do or don’t, but with them you look like a somewhat hot schoolboy.” She takes them off my face and twists her lips. “Without them you look suspiciously like . . . you.” I can hardly hear what she says over the guitars.
I put the glasses back on.
Corina takes the rest of our money to buy the tickets because I can’t even hear the cashier. We only have enough to get us as far south as San Francisco.
The bus is in the station already, so we get on and take seats in the front.
“What’s wrong with you?” Corina asks when we sit down.
I shake my head. I don’t know what she’s talking about.
“You’ve been all up in your head—what’re you thinking about?” She’s just asking, but it feels like she’s pressing and the guitars are so loud it’s hard not to get angry.
“Nothing.” I say it low, below what I can hear, because if I say it over the guitars, I’ll shout it. “It’s just loud.”
She squints at me. “Loud? The bus is stopped. Nobody’s talking.”
I sigh. I want to yell, to tell her about what she doesn’t know, but instead I lift my hand and point at my skull. “In here.” Then: “Guitars.”
“You can’t tune them out?”
I try to think of something to say that isn’t no, something to do that isn’t just another shrug, but I can’t. “No.”
Corina takes my hand, squeezes it. She leans against me and I shift so we can be closer. “If you aren’t going to be much at talking, you’re gonna have to make up for it by being my pillow.”
I smile. I’m all guitars in my mind, but my heart feels better.
I look down at Corina’s face. In all our time together I’ve only touched her like this once, in her room, when we first kissed. I’ve barely been able to look at her without worrying that people would know.
From here I can see her hair up close—the way it curls right at the roots, dense, soft.
She still smells like vanilla.
As the bus starts moving, I clos
e my eyes, try to tune out the guitars by focusing on the feel of Corina against my side, her hand on my arm, her breath on my sleeve, but it’s not enough. My mind is a mosh pit of noise intermixed with flashes of life from this morning when I ate breakfast and everything was fine.
Paul on the floor again. The Live-Tech torture, Bishop.
YOU THERE? I call out for her.
She is. I can feel her, but I can’t hear her very well. The guitars are so much louder now than they were before the patch. It’s like ripping it off tore the rest of the cover off the drain in my brain and the Jungle flooded in unchecked.
HOW DO I GET IT TO QUIET DOWN?
If there’s an answer, I don’t hear it.
I reach for my backpack, pull out my notebook. Corina doesn’t stir when I lay it open on her lap, secured in place by her arm.
I close my eyes, ready to drown in my sea of noise, hoping to be deep under when she wakes up and reads. It’s still a scary thought, but not nearly as scary as having her not know me.
Fifty-One
No sleep. Time drags. The scenery changes from flat to mountains. The stops get farther apart. The guitars don’t stop but they lessen, not quieter—just fewer. Corina moves to readjust next to me. I cover her with my hoodie because she seems cold.
My eyes are closed. My Voice and I are trying to hear each other through the noise. When the bus pulls out of Ashland it heads up a steep long hill into the mountains, leaving the sounds of people behind, and I’m left with just us, the people on the bus.
My heart is like a kick drum against the songs in my mind, but it’s quiet enough for us to talk.
She tells me what to do.
It’s not easy and it doesn’t work at first, but then it does and my head is nearly quiet, the low grumble of guitars only barely audible in their new form.
Fifty-Two
In the morning, we’re in California. Corina’s looking at me when I open my eyes. I smile up at her. “Hey.”
“How’s your head?” She puts her finger against my temple.
I blink, sit all the way up. “Fine.” My notebook’s not on her lap anymore. I look down and see it in my backpack. I look up at her. “You read it?”
She nods, pulls me to her. I come in under her arms as she holds me. “Thank you.” When she lets me go, she furrows her brow, looks concerned. “You can hear me?”
I nod. “Yeah. I’m okay now.”
“How’d you get them quiet?”
“It was like a visualization thing my Voice showed me.” I think back about how it all happened. “When we got into the mountains, my head got quiet enough for my Voice to tell me what to do. She told me to reenvision the music like it’s written down, like it’s sheet music, and then she had me build cabinets to keep it in. Just like I reimagined my glide-path.”
“And that worked?”
“Yeah. It did.”
She sits up. “Wait, so you can read and write music? Not just in your head but in real life?”
I start to shrug, but I turn it into a nod when I realize she’s impressed. “Yeah. I taught myself. When I was a kid.”
We stay looking at each other for a moment and then she pulls me closer. When she lets me go, she asks me about the sheet music. “So you got the Jungle tamed with the sheet music—does that mean you can, like, read the shit?”
I think about it. “Maybe.” Then: “Just a sec.”
I close my eyes and find the drawer with the music in it. There aren’t that many sheets right now. I pick up the stack and listen. There’s a lot of quiet music, probably small animals and such, but most of the interesting music I hear nearby are sheets filled with complex notations—probably the other people on the bus.
I focus on them—they’re hard to understand. They may be sheet music, but they’re for the most difficult music in the world. Each page starts off with notations that look nearly familiar, like déjà vu. Those notes don’t change; they’re frozen music that must be the past, where things have already happened.
But each sheet also has a place where the solid notations stop, giving way to a spray of possibilities—colorful dots and squiggles that swirl. Colors come in confusing waves that crest and recede.
I listen to the songs playing nearby. My song. Corina’s song. I hear myself playing. I look for the sheet that matches it. I can see the music in front of me.
Read my music.
I look down. The squiggles on the current moment in my staff are full of movement. They change in time with my sound. I listen. I watch. I think. I feel.
I begin to understand.
I look farther up the staff to where it begins to dissolve into the mass of music all around us.
I open my eyes. I am looking at Corina. She’s looking the other way, out the window on the other side of the aisle.
“Corina,” I say.
She turns. “You got it figured?” she asks.
“Yeah,” I say. “I’m a Time Zombie right now. I already collapsed this just now when I was under.”
“You sure?”
I nod. A little girl and her mother make their way slowly past us toward the back of the bus. The girl looks at me. I smile.
So does she.
I look back at Corina. “I know how to read the music.”
I put the music back in the drawer and I open my eyes.
My mind is silent. There is nothing. I see what I saw. I hear myself talking.
Time Zombie.
I try and do something, anything, different from what I saw. I try to clench a fist. I try to bite my tongue.
Nothing. I’m watching the world from a formfitting glass prison until suddenly the music comes rushing back, the glass breaks, and I’m part of the world again. “The hard part is singling out the sheet music. Once I do that, I can read it.”
I try and explain it all, but she shakes her head. “I’ll just trust you.”
She reaches out for my hand, grabs it. “Do you think that you might be able to . . . ?” She moves her head side to side and then points from me to her with her other hand. “To connect us again?” she asks finally.
My heart lifts when she asks me. I smile. “I hope so.” But even as I say it, I don’t think it’ll happen. Things are too different now.
Fifty-Three
“It’s too bad I can’t push them like I used to,” I mention as we walk across the Golden Gate Bridge on our way into San Francisco. We’ve been camped out in a park near the water on the far side for a couple days, trying to spare-change enough money to get the rest of the way to LA.
“Push who?”
“My targets—I used to be able to get them to do things.”
Corina stops, leans against the rail to look at me. The bridge shakes beneath us as the traffic passes. “That’s not possible.”
“It was for me. I just went to the Jungle from my perch and found their strand.”
“Don’t joke.” She shakes her head, but she’s smiling. “You’re saying you have mind-control powers?”
I nod. “I did. I don’t now.”
“Did you ever make me do anything?”
I shake my head. “Nuh-uh.”
“How do I know my kissing you that day wasn’t some Jungle mumbo-jumbo mind control?”
She’s not smiling anymore. She looks upset. Her music is off. “I didn’t—” I reach for her. “I didn’t ever do that, Corina.” I’m starting to sweat.
She’s still for a moment, then nods. “Alright, then.”
I don’t know if it’s the bridge shaking or if I’m just dizzy with relief because she believes me.
She pushes herself off the rail and starts to walk again. We’ve gone five steps when she stops. “Back there, at the compound? How did you do it?”
I think back on it. “I just sort looked for the places where there weren�
�t solid notes in place—places where they were having doubts or were afraid of something.” I stop to try and come up with a way to explain what I did. “When I found one, all I had to do was sort of ‘connect’ to it and fill it with my thought for what should happen.”
She raises her eyebrows. Skeptical. “And that worked?”
“Yeah. It did.”
“Why can’t you do it now?”
“I . . .” I don’t finish. I start picturing the sheet music I have in my head. “Maybe I can.”
Fifty-Four
We’re on Market Street near the big park next to City Hall. Corina’s in front of me with a basket saying “Help us out” to people. I’m lying behind her, searching for good targets. It took me all morning to learn how to sort sheets and find the right ones quickly, but once I developed a method for it, it was easy.
For the last hour I’ve been focused on learning how to change people. It turns out it’s not that different from before. When I was seeing them as strands in the Jungle, I just had to find the dark spots—the places where there was doubt and fear and there wasn’t a note playing.
It took me a little time to see it—fear and doubt don’t show up as blank spots on the sheet music, just as notes that are written with less force. The deeper the uncertainty, the more faintly written the note. The more faintly written the note, the easier it is for me to overwrite it, change it. Rearrange the song.
Even so, I’m finding that some people are hard to change. It’s like everybody’s got their own key. I can add some notes, change some others around, but I can’t write things that don’t fit with their overall music.
I lay behind Corina with my eyes closed while she rattles the bucket. I’m listening for people who are already keyed to give. I just write me and Corina into their generosity.
Once I figure it out, we pull in nearly three hundred dollars in the space of twenty-five minutes before a couple of cops take an interest in us. They’re focused and I can’t get them to go away. They’re intent on harassing us. “We gotta go,” I tell Corina.
“We’re making good money.”
Strange Days Page 26