Call Me Jane

by Ryan Maitland

  I let go of her arm with a huff and started off in the direction her mind told me to go, grateful that she knew where it was and had seen it with her own eyes.

  I had to stop five times, along the way, to catch my breath, including right outside the building! By this point, I was back to starving, but now I could add dehydration to my list of physical ailments. I was dead tired, despite how much sleep I had gotten. I was also dizzy and lightheaded, but I promised myself I’d persevere. I owed it to myself and to Tommy. I was in the home-stretch and I’d be damned forever to the pits of hell if I was going to give up when I was so close to my goal!

  The building was just as the lady had remembered it! It was a single-story adobe building with red brick shingles and a small line of parking spots on a narrow, two lane street. It didn’t look like the building that would forever change my life, or so I hoped, but then what building would look like it could do that?

  I steeled my nerves, took a deep breath, and opened the door, feeling the blessed rush of cold air from what must be a considerable air-conditioner. Inside, there was a small reception desk with a lady manning it to greet visitors.

  “Hello,” I greeted her, thinking how plain everything looked, “I’m here to take the Magus foundation challenge!”

  The lady looked at me skeptically, her face showing concern over how I looked. “We only accept applications from those with a large media presence…”

  “Media presence?” I asked, confused.

  “Have you ever been on TV?” she asked, sounding weary. I guess she had to do this often…

  “Um, nooooo…” I admitted, getting worried. Had our plan failed at the last leg? Wouldn’t I even get a shot at escaping?

  “Then I’m afraid you don’t qualify…” the lady answered, sounding sympathetic.

  “No!” I shouted, slamming my hands on the counter as tears sprang to my eyes. “You can’t do this! You have to give me a chance! Please!” I pleaded with her, my voice getting more desperate with every word out of my mouth.

  “Listen dear,” the lady told me, her tone going patronizing, “you should run along home before I call the police.”

  “I can’t go home!” I nearly screamed at her. “I spent every last cent I had to get here! All I have left are these clothes! Please, if you just give me a chance, I can prove to you that I have psychic powers! Please just let me show you! You won’t regret it!”

  The lady gave a sigh that sounded like she was humoring me for the sake of trying to calm me down so I wouldn’t hurt her. “Okay, let’s start with what you can do…”

  By this point, all this emotion and shouting left me slightly out of breath. The fact that the last bit of food I had had was about a day ago probably didn’t help, nor did walking out in the sweltering heat in the blazing sun, but I gave it my best shot, knowing that if I couldn’t convince this lady to at least give me a shot, my life was basically over. I didn’t even have Tommy to fall back to!

  “If I hold an item that is significant to someone, I can see what they see, hear what they hear, and feel what they feel,” I told her, using a script Tommy and I had worked out together. “I don’t need to meet the person or know anything about them, but the object must mean something to them.”

  The lady arched a brow, considering me. I’m guessing she’s never heard this variation before.

  “So, you can read minds?” she asked.

  “Sometimes,” I told her. “Hearing thoughts is usually more difficult… but tapping into their senses is easier,” I continued, using the words Tommy did when he was describing what I was doing.

  “I see…” she said, making some notes and considering me again.

  “Please!” I begged once again. “Look, if I can’t do what I say I can, you can call the police and they can take me and lock me up and I can return to the people that consider what I can do to be the work of Satan and you’ll never have to see or hear from me ever again! Okay?”

  I think it was mentioning that the people that would be taking me back considered Satan to be a real person that finally did the trick as the lady seemed to reach a decision.

  “Okay,” she told me, her face softening a little. “We’ll make an exception this one time, but if you can’t do what you say you can do, then there’s not much I can do for you, understand?”

  “Yes!” I shouted in relief as well as in answer to her question. “I understand!” I clarified. “You won’t regret this! I promise!”

  I could feel tears coming down my cheek, but this time they were tears of relief and joy, rather than of despair. I had done it! I was getting my shot!

  “Now, then,” the lady addressed me, bringing me back to the reality at hand, “let’s start with your name.”

  “Call me Jane,” I told her, not wanting to give her my real name for fear that she would call the cops. Jack and Billi must have noticed that I was gone by now! I was sure they had issued a missing-persons report, or something. I thought that any cop that saw me would recognize me, though I didn’t know how, considering neither Jack nor Billi had ever taken a photo of me, that I knew of…

  “Okay, Jane,” she said, emphasizing my name to show me she didn’t believe it was my real name. “I’m going to make a call and some gentlemen will take you to a testing area. You just wait here, okay?”

  “Okay,” I agreed, the relief ebbing away slightly as I tried to prepare myself. I couldn’t afford to blow this!

  As promised, the lady made some calls, rehashing my explanation of my abilities and asked that they prepare a room as a special favor to her. It was not long after that that a man with small eyes behind rectangular glasses came down the hall wearing a white coat that went down to his knees. His badge said his name was… let’s call him Ted and he had a smile on his face as he held out his hand in greeting.

  I considered that hand for a long moment. Thanks to Tommy, I had seen TV shows that informed me that handshakes were a traditional greeting, but I knew that shaking his hand would give me an open door into his head. On the one hand, getting as much information as I could would better prepare me, but on the other hand, going into someone’s head was a little tiring. I thought I was already pushing my luck a little after the incident with the lady on the street that gave me directions here. I was starving and running on empty. I decided I couldn’t risk it until after the testing was done, so I waved to him instead, explaining quickly, “Sorry! It’s just that… shaking your hand means getting into your head…”

  The man’s smile turned into a slight smirk as he waved me off. “Sure, I understand,” he told me, obviously humoring me. I caught him rolling his eyes at the lady at the desk before he turned around and motioned for me to follow him. He led me down a hall and opened a door near the end of it, motioning me inside. Inside, the room was small and plain, with just a table with some knickknacks on it, a chair in front of the items, and a camera on a tripod in front of the table. The floors were tile and the walls were white and unadorned. The knickknacks on the table consisted of some worn playing cards, a gold ring, a smartphone (learned about these from Tommy), a… rubber or plastic doll of some kind with a clown face on it, and a baseball cap. On the other side of the table, right in front of the camera, was a clipboard with a sheet of paper already loaded.

  “If you’ll please have a seat,” Ted said, motioning to the plastic seat. After I sat down, feeling nervous, he continued, “I’m going to turn the camera on and record this session. Is that okay?”

  “Sure, fine, whatever you need,” I answered, my nervousness ratcheting up even higher. This had gone from an abstract plan to something that was now real and meant either a life of torture or escape, depending on how it went.

  The man fiddled with the camera, adjusting this or that as a red light came on the front of the camera. Once he was satisfied, he picked up the clipboard and explained, “You have five items before you of varying ‘emotional significance’ that we would like you to select for testing. I will warn you that I have n
o idea of how much, if any, emotional significance each item holds.”

  His tone told me that he was simply humoring me, not believing that this would work. Maybe he thought that I would come up with some kind of excuse for why it wasn’t working. I tried not to let it bother me. After all, I could humor him as well as he could humor me.

  I picked up each item, in turn, and tested their connection, trying to feel the mind behind the object. I started with the ring, figuring it was a wedding ring of some sort and was worn all the time. It should have given me a strong signal, but it fell flat. All I got were hazy feelings of disappointment, confusion, and anger, but there was no mind on the other end. The cards were all static, with too many minds associated with them, like they had been handled so much, by so many different people, that the connection had turned to white noise. I got absolutely nothing from the hat and phone and suspected they might have been brand new.

  It wasn’t until I picked up the little orange plastic doll, whose blue eyes, red ears and mouth all bulged out when you squeezed it, that I got a decent signal. I was looking through the eyes of a person in a room identical to the one I was in, except on his table were a pack of cards with a blue and gold back.

  “This one,” I told Ted, giving the doll a few squeezes. “I’m getting the strongest signal from this one. The person this belongs to is sitting in a room just like this one, only…” I trailed off, feeling a little odd, like something was off about the situation. “I think he’s a bit taller than me,” I continued finally realizing what was different. The perspective had changed ever so slightly. “There’s also a woman with a clipboard and a white coat standing where you are now. She’s brunette, but she has blue eyes and really red lips.”

  “When you’re ready,” Ted told me, sounding like he was far away, “the tester will…”

  “Don’t tell me what the tester will do,” I interrupted Ted. “It would be better if I just describe to you what the tester sees and hears. That will make this more believable, right?” I asked.

  “If that’s what you prefer,” Ted said, sounding a little startled. I’m guessing the other occupants of this chair wanted as much information as possible to try to fool them out of their money, whereas I wanted to convince them that what I did was completely real and unexplainable by them.

  “I do,” I told him, only half-listening to him while maintaining the connection to whoever this tester was.

  I heard Ted pull something out of his pocket and speak quietly, but I don’t think it was aimed at me. I think it was aimed at the lady in the other room who pulled out what TV has taught me is a walkie-talkie.

  “The tester is picking up a pack of cards,” I told Ted. “He’s dividing the deck in two and shuffling them,” I continued.

  From there, I told Ted about what the cards were showing, circles, squares, triangles, plus signs, and squiggly lines. I told him the order that the tester saw them in and where they were placed on the table. By the time I was done, I was panting heavily, grateful I had not taken Ted’s offered hand when he introduced himself. This was more tiring than my time spent talking to Tommy. With Tommy’s car, the connection was effortless, whereas this took work to maintain the link between my mind and this mysterious, taller, tester. It didn’t help that I was badly dehydrated and still starving…

  When I was done, I set the little doll aside and laid my head in my arms, still panting. Ted made a few more notes and told me, “Now we’ll compare notes. If they don’t match, then we’re done!”

  He sounded entirely too cheery at the thought of the notes not matching, which would be the end of me… He left me alone in the room, taking the knickknacks, but leaving the camera running. He shut the door behind him with a loud click as the latch engaged. I waited, head in arms, for his return, catching my breath and trying desperately to stay awake. He seemed to be gone a long time but when he finally came back, his face showed utter disbelief.

  “What’s the verdict?” I asked, using a line from a TV show Tommy liked.

  “You uh…” he stalled. “We uh… need to do some more testing…” he finally spluttered out.

  I confess that I enjoyed seeing him splutter more than I rightfully should have. Maybe I do have a little devil in me…

  “I take it I passed?” I asked.

  “We’re, uh, not sure,” Ted hedged. “We’re sure there’s a gimmick, but we’re not sure what it is.” He motioned to someone at the door and waved them inside. This was the lady that was in the other room!

  “You’re the lady in the other room!” I laughed, pointing at her. “The one with the clipboard!”

  The lady actually jumped a little! Her eyes went wide and she regarded me a little apprehensively! She looked downright scared of me!

  “I’m not going to hurt you!” I explained quickly. “I didn’t mean to scare you! Honest!”

  “No, it’s okay, really…” she told me, sounding unconvinced. She was holding something that looked like a small plastic paddle and my mind started reeling with what she was going to do with it. My eyes might have bugged out as I stared at it.

  “This is a metal detector,” she explained, maybe seeing my panic. “I’m going to pass it over you to see if there is anything metallic on your person. We want to be sure there aren’t any devices you’re using to try to trick us.”

  “Oh, okay,” I answered her, a little relieved that she wasn’t about to hit me.

  She waved the device over and around all parts of my body, but it remained silent. She conferred with Ted afterwards and they started speaking in hushed tones. I couldn’t make out everything they said, but a few of the words included ‘impossible’ and ‘inside man.’

  “I don’t know anyone here,” I told them, trying to help. “I don’t think anyone outside my immediate family has even seen me before I got on the bus for this cross-country trek.”

  The two of them looked at me, then Ted hastily explained, “We’d like to run a few more tests to be sure of what we’re seeing, okay?”

  I sighed heavily, but relented. If this was the price of freedom, who was I to argue? “Whatever you want,” I answered.

  They left the room, but came back a few minutes later, wheeling a strange device that looked like it was part printer.

  “This is an EEG,” the woman explained, wheeling the machine behind me. “It measures brain waves. We’ll do the same test as before, but we’ll be measuring the brain waves of you and the tester to see if we can find a pattern.”

  “Whatever you want,” I repeated. The lady put weird, sticky, pads on my head that I guess helped them measure my brain. I had no clue what it revealed, but if it helped me win this challenge, then so be it.

  The lady pulled out five of the same kind of dolls I had held before. There were numbers on yellow pads on each of them, written in the same hand. All of the dolls looked identical, as far as I could tell and I figured this was another test. I waited for the lady to check the camera and motioned for me to pick a doll. Doll number two was the one with the best connection. It felt like it connected to the same person as before, at least based on the perspective.

  Just as before, I described what the tester was seeing, only I don’t think I quite finished… By this time, I was worn out and exhausted, not to mention starving and badly dehydrated.

  Had I known then what I know now, I would have asked for some water or a sandwich or something, but I was afraid that they would see it as a homeless girl trying to get an easy meal and brush me off…

  I don’t really remember this test very well once I got started… I’ve seen the tape of it since then and I’m amazed I lasted as long as I did! Hell and blast! I looked like a walking skeleton or a model of anorexia! Partway through the test, I passed out and woke up in the hospital!

  That’s when I learned that, as weird as my mind seemed to be, my blood was even weirder!

  Chapter 10

  Omicron

  I think it was the smell of antiseptic that woke me up. As best
as I can recall, I had never been to a hospital before this, so the smell of the antiseptic and the beep of the monitors were completely alien to me.

  The lighting in the room was subdued, but even so, it was painful to my dark-adapted eyes. I opened them slowly as I became more and more alert to the new sensations, such as the tubes pinching the underside of my nose that were delivering cold, crisp, air, or the slight pings of pain in my arm every time I tried to move it. There also seemed to be something pinching one of my fingers, but it wasn’t painful, just slightly uncomfortable. I could hear people walking and talking outside, but it was muffled, coming from the other side of a heavy door.

  The bed was softer and warmer than my old bed, which didn’t even have so much as sheets. This bed also reclined, elevating my upper half in a way that was supremely comfortable to me. Part of me considered going back to sleep and luxuriating in this heavenly bed, at least for a little while longer, but anxiety reminded me that I was in a strange place and had no idea what was going on, so it was best to be alert to the dangers all of this posed to me.

  Once my eyes had adjusted to the higher light levels, I looked at my new surroundings. I seemed to be on a metal bed in a private room of some kind. The room had linoleum floors and looked pristinely clean. There was a comfortable-looking chair in a corner off to my left, occupied by a drowsing woman that I recognized as the clipboard lady from the foundation. To my immediate left was the machine that seemed to be making the beeping sounds. From Tommy’s TV shows, I guessed this machine was measuring, and displaying, my pulse.

  I took a deep breath of the lovely air being piped in through my nose and managed to croak out “Where am I?” in a dry whisper.

  “Jane?” the woman jerked awake, startled by the new sound.