by Ted Krever
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The plane wasn’t full. They seated us in one center row but we ended up sprawled across several. Max sat shielding Tauber from the attendants and their little booze bottles until the old guy sputtered to sleep. Kate stretched out across the row behind me, covered by four little airline blankets, but I could hear her toss and turn, showing no signs of really being sleepy. I drifted in and out myself, blessedly without bad dreams but also without sustaining any sort of rest. In the middle of the night, I came to, groggy and with voices over my shoulder, whispers out of a dream. The music of the voices came first and for a long interval before the meaning of the words began to kindle.
Kate’s voice first: “…but what kind of life? Where do you live?”
Max: “I have places to go.”
“Are they home? Nobody waiting for you someplace?”
“I’m difficult to get along with.”
Her laughter.“If that was the criteria, no man would ever get a date.”
Renn laughed(!). And then got over it. “Our gifts make normal ties difficult.”
“Shouldn’t it be the opposite? If you know what the other person wants—?”
“The other person’s not the problem. We have an overwhelming ability to delude others—and ourselves. It’s not a wonderful gift.”
“We can’t see through it?”
A psychiatrist is someone who’s trained and gifted at recognizing other people’s neuroses. We’re all blind to our own.”
Pause.
“It’s not stopping you from flying to Rome,” Kate answered. “The dangers aren’t stopping you.”
“This has been a very scary week for me,” Renn whispered. “Scary and terrible and seductive. Pietr is trying to kill me. Anything—anything—I do in return is justified; self-defense! I have no limits. I can indulge anything in my power. I can be, as he says, everything I am. Which makes me terribly dangerous. To you, Greg and Mark. To people who believe in Aryana Singh and nuclear disarmament. If I get lost in self-importance or simply make a mistake, a real-world problem gets much worse than it already is. That’s why I’ve been so tough on you.
“Fear is a reasonable response to this world. Are you shocked when a friend is unhappy or in pain? Of course not, it’s common. A friend who’s ecstatic--or even truly content? You’d have to know their secret or start measuring them for a rubber suit. Yet, given the choice, we have to choose hope, don’t we? Avery wants to commercialize it, turn it into a commodity he can sell like everything else. He may be right, hope may just be an illusion, but that choice—which direction each person tilts, hope or fear—matters. Which is why we’ve got to keep our heads about us—we can’t let that that difference get lost. The lines get blurred so easily, you see?”
Long pause. I almost fell asleep again before Kate said, “Wouldn’t that be what real friends are for? To keep us from going off the tracks?”
“I’ve never been lonely. I’m always surrounded by other people’s thoughts.”
“What could be lonelier than that? There was a boy I wanted…a few years ago. I was mooning after him across the classroom like girls do and suddenly I was inside his head. I knew everything he thought and felt. I stayed inside him a whole day and night.”
“That must have been eye-opening.”
“The truth? What surprised me, when he wasn’t being a sick pig, was how romantic he was—men don’t talk about that, do they?”
“It—it may not be our strong suit.”
“I realized how easy it would be, to be just what he wanted. He was playing out all the scenes in his head. So I ambushed him before the next class, dressed like the girl in his dreams, came on just like her. He couldn’t get away fast enough! As a fantasy, it was fine. In real life…scared him to death.” (laughs)
“Fantasies are frightening because we feel we don’t deserve them.” Max’s voice, very soft. “We all feel our lover is too good for us, don’t we? We rediscover the world through them, everything changes shape because of them. Whereas, we know that power isn’t inside us; we know what un-magical creatures we are.”
Kate was still giggling. “It’s like, every boy I ever dated, once they found out what I could do, they’d get all intimidated, because I knew what they were thinking. Like women don’t know that anyway.”
Her musical laughter stopped abruptly. I don’t know if she read something in him or saw something on his face but I could feel the air chill as he started speaking.
“When I was 17, there was a girl I wanted terribly. She was the daughter of one of the keepers, one of the scientists in the program. Elena…a luminous spirit. I knew she was too good to even look at me. My ineptitude with women was famous in the program, a source of great satisfaction to my peers. But somehow this time, I conquered my own fears. I went after her and—amazingly—she responded. More amazingly, we were wonderful together. Instinctive, natural, all the things my life had never been. We saw the possibilities in each other and were somehow oblivious to the weaknesses. Her father opposed me with good reason—I’d recently killed a man who tried to ‘discipline’ me—but the program leaned on him. They wanted me to ‘develop’; she surely would have bad dates with someone—it might as well be me.”
At this point, I wasn’t sure I wanted to listen but I couldn’t help it, like waking up and hearing your parents talking downstairs at night when you’re a kid. The moon glistened through the porthole like a snowball.
“We were together for five months. I was…I don’t know how to describe it. (laughs) Happy, I suppose. Light. Free. I didn’t think too much. I knew what I wanted. I was content.” Dark bitter laugh. “And then I discovered I’d forced her, coerced her. I’d made her come to me. I hadn’t meant to, I’d done nothing consciously. I just wanted her so badly I made it happen. I made my longing real. As soon as I understood what I’d done, I released her and she felt…violated.” Long pause. “I think she did love me at one point. I am certain there was something real between us…but how real can any feeling be if it’s been compelled at first? We were very young and…sheltered. She was in pain and I was terribly guilty…” His voice trailed off.
“So what happened? How did you resolve it?”
“Resolve it? She killed herself is how we resolved it.”
“Omigod.”
“Yeah. Omigod.”
Silence. Engine noise, baby crying on the other end of the plane, headphone whoosh on the other side of me.
Max, taking deep breath: “So when I worry about us deceiving ourselves, there’s a reason. I failed my apprenticeship as a spy. I’ve spent twenty years running from anyone who would use my skills. I’ve never been put to the test. I have no reason to trust my own judgment.”
“Well, you figured out what was happening with…Elena. You did something bad but you didn’t deceive yourself about it.”
“Ah! No, I can’t take credit for that.” Pause. “Someone else figured that out.”
“What? How?”
“He was right. There was no doubt. I knew it as soon as I was told.”
“But how did he know?” A short pause and then a different tone of voice, a more matter-of-fact tone. “Another mindbender.”
“Yes. He knew her better than me, I suppose. Her lover before me. I took her from him, I suppose, not that I ever thought of it that way. I wasn’t thinking of…I just wasn’t thinking.”
“A friend?”
“A rival. Pietr Volkov, actually. He saw what I couldn’t see. He told me off and rightly, not that it did anyone any good.” Many sighs now, hard exhales. I was wide-awake. “It’s…it’s all history,” Max stammered. “It’s got nothing to do with now. There’s more at stake here.”
“Mmm,” Kate murmured. “But the lines do get blurry, don’t they?”
~~~~
