I couldn’t help but burst into laughter. Daniel laughed along with me.
“He said you’re… depleted?”
I nodded.
Daniel scratched his head. “What does that even mean? I didn’t know you had a limited reserve or anything like that.”
“It’s not exactly a reserve.” I tried recalling an explanation I once heard. “Sorcery is actually produced from the awareness – the wisdom really – of normal people. We have a kind of magnet that pulls that wisdom in, and then we’re able to navigate it to influence things. To steer it. But we need a minimum amount of sorcery within us already to draw in more powers. If we use up everything in us, we can’t create any more sorcery. We get depleted. That’s what happened to me.” And when we’re depleted, the magnet becomes so strong that we could drain whoever happens to be around us and cause some serious damage to normies. But I couldn’t bring myself to say that out loud.
Daniel fished a piece of candy from the heaping bowl next to his bed. “So you’re actually taking away my sorcery?”
“Sort of. But you don’t use it anyway.” I leaned against the side of his bed.
“I’ll let you as long as you use it for good. By which I mean – learn to make latte art.”
The two of us were doubled over with laughter when his parents walked in.
Daniel introduced me. Despite their smiles, their disdain read loud and clear. Only Daniel didn’t notice it. The sting was sharp and sudden. For some reason I was sure that if Daniel was able to accept me for who I was, his parents would too. They merely nodded, leaving my outstretched hand unshaken.
“Nice to meet you,” Daniel’s mother said.
“Good to finally meet one of Daniel’s colleagues,” his father added and shifted his gaze to the door. “I thought they were only allowing family visits for now.”
I managed to smile and say, “I just popped in to say hi.” I turned to Daniel, “Thanks for the company.”
He protested, but I shuffled back to my ward.
There was no one in my room. The deck of playing cards was resting on top of the dresser. I crawled into bed. Lee had left me a proof copy he had nearly finished editing. I picked it up. It was a story about two boys who find themselves caught in a battle between two powerful sorcerers.
I started reading, pushing the faces of Daniel’s parents to the back of my mind. What did I care what other people thought, I said to myself, repeating the mantra while flipping through the pages. Who cares what two strangers, who simply happen to be genetically related to my friend, think of me.
My phone rang just when the boys had learned of the existence of a magical diamond that could transport them back home.
“Hey, Gaia here,” the voice on the other end of the line said.
“Reed here,” I replied.
She laughed, then stopped abruptly and said, “I heard what you did.”
I reclined on the bed and stared at the ceiling. “On the news?”
“No. The news was just your ordinary bullshit. Blah blah blah, evil sorcerers disrupting public order, blah blah blah.” I could imagine her exact expression when she uttered those words.
“But my friend was at the Beer Belly and said you maneuvered the entire crowd by yourself, and I told her there’s no way, because we don’t maneuver without consent, and that there are consequences, but she said she was sure of it, and that it was an emergency so it was OK that it was without consent.”
“Is your friend a moody?” I couldn’t help but ask.
“God no. I don’t have those kinds of friends.”
Those kinds. Even she had internalized society’s rejection of our kind.
“She’s an ariel,” Gaia continued without paying attention to my thoughts.
“An ariel?”
She tsked in annoyance, and I waited for her to call me an old geezer. “Come on, The Little Mermaid? The movie? Motion pictures? You are aware of that invention, right?”
She managed to get a smile out of me, despite the pain and loneliness. “Yup, I’ve heard of it. I understand it requires that other new invention the young’uns came up with – electricity.”
She giggled. “That’s right.”
“So your friend, the splasher–”
“The ariel,” she corrected me. I wasn’t even going to try to remember the new slang. “She said it was awful,” Gaia continued with a quieter voice. “She said people were bursting into flames right in front of her. And that there was some woman who was barking orders at them, but it just made everyone freak out even more, and that then she suddenly felt better. Just like that. Said she felt calm and in control, and really focused, and that she was suddenly able to follow that woman’s orders. Not that it helped much, since she was on neutral.”
“On neutral?” I asked, once again lost in the maze of her chatter.
“You know, she hadn’t exactly expected to find herself on the battlefield. But that’s not what I wanted to say. What I wanted to say is that after it was on the news, I asked Aurora, and she said it really was you, and she also said she’d let you know I asked about you, and then I told her not to, but then I changed my mind, so she said she’d give you the message, and that’s it. So I called.”
“Thanks for calling,” I said, in what I hoped was a calm, mature yet non-geezerish voice.
“Thanks for…” she began, and immediately paused.
“For not dying?”
“Something like that.”
“You’re welcome,” I said and smiled.
“You’re the coolest geezer I know,” she blurted out.
“Cool? You still use that word?”
Gaia burst into laughter. “I just wanted to make sure you could understand what I’m saying.”
“I understand, it’s just that my hearing aid has been acting up.”
She laughed again, and I asked her about school, and she immediately broke into another animated ramble about taking her matriculation exams earlier so she could start pursuing her bachelor’s degree.
I whistled. “I wasn’t half as ambitious when I was your age. I just wanted to survive high school.”
“I’m short on time,” she said.
I recoiled. Her boyfriend was a damus. Maybe he had given her a vision in which she died? I didn’t even know how to begin to ask.
“My mom did her PhD when she was thirty. I have to beat her. And a PhD takes four years, so if I get accepted into an accelerated program, I can get everything done from my bachelor’s to the PhD in six years, but I’m still not completely sure I want to do it in neuropsychology. Maybe a different field? So I have to leave enough time for a potential change of heart, get it? I have to start preparing, like, now. You know?”
“No. I think you lost me at neuro-something.”
She laughed again, and called me a geezer again. “You didn’t have any plans at my age?”
I tried thinking that far back. There was that bucket list I had made in high school, all the things I wanted to do before I died. “Some plans were made. They just didn’t go with what the world has turned into since I graduated high school.”
“But you do have a degree, right? Aurora told me.”
“Yes, but in art. I don’t really know anything about neurons and science.”
“I’ll explain it to you,” she said, her voice softer. “I’ll explain to you everything about neurons, and you’ll explain to me again how to focus what I send out. Although I’m really good at it now, I’ve been practicing like crazy.”
“I’m sure.” I closed my eyes. “In the next Yoyo meeting you’ll teach me about neurons, and I’ll see just how good you’ve become.”
“I don’t believe it,” she said, her tone scolding again. “You call the organization Yoyo?! You’re such an old fart!”
I couldn’t stop laughing.
After she hung up, I sent Aurora a text saying, “You won. I’ll take on a group.”
18
After the doctors made sure I was
no longer depleted or posed a “threat to the normal population”, as stated on my release forms, I was discharged from the hospital. Matthew took me home. Our parents were waiting in my and Daphne’s apartment; the smell of cooking wafted through the air. I felt both my parents’ anxiety from the other side of the door.
“Everything OK?”
I wondered whether I was still pale or just looked miserable. “Mom’s literally trying to cook away her sorrow,” I said.
“You don’t need an empath to know that,” he said, standing close to me. “All they know is that there was a riot, none of the specifics. We haven’t told them about Daphne’s vision. I want us first to have more details from Sherry’s investigation and maybe from what Daphne sees. It wouldn’t have been fair to them.”
“Thanks,” I said, putting my hand on his.
Matthew opened the door.
The smell of frying hit me first, followed by the aroma of soup. There was also something in the oven. Standing in the kitchen, Mom turned around to us, clutching a wooden spoon. She rushed over to me, her face beaming.
“Reedy,” she exclaimed, held her arms out and hugged me.
Even though more than fifteen years had passed since I had shot up past her eye level, being taller than her never ceased to amaze me. I hugged her back. Her worry was genuine and fierce, drowning out any other emotion. She didn’t cry. She never cried. She wouldn’t release me from her embrace. Dad waited patiently behind her. I felt his tension. Instead of showing it, he pulled that funny face of his, the one that used to make me laugh when I was a kid and said, “Enough, Sharon, you’re smothering the kid.” I saw her wiping her eyes when she finally let go of me.
“There’s mashed potatoes,” she said, pointing at the kitchen with her wooden spoon, “and corn schnitzel, and I also made pea soup…”
“Help!” Daphne yelled, darting out of the living room and jumping on me, pushing my father aside. “Your mom’s force feeding me!”
I hugged her.
“Well, look at you,” Mom said to her, waving her spoon, “all skin and bones.”
Dad patted Daphne’s back and said, “You look wonderful, don’t listen to her.”
Daphne finally released me, letting me hug my dad. I felt the fear in his embrace. They were constantly scared. Because of me.
I broke away from him. Still smiling, we patted each other on the back, and I told them silly stories from my hospitalization, like how the doctors kept insisting I was thirty and I had to correct them over and over that I was twenty-eight. Daphne spoke about Matthew’s mysterious date, and our mom’s attempts at a subtle interrogation were so ridiculously obvious that he finally broke down and said he had merely popped by the police station to check whether there was any progress in the investigation, and that Sherry just happened to be there.
“Sherry,” Mom said in an incredibly flat tone. “That’s a nice name. Similar to Sharon.”
“Sharon, don’t start,” my dad muttered under his breath.
I leaned back in my chair with a stomach full of home cooked grub, happy that everyone’s anxiety and fear were channeled into this invasion of Matthew’s privacy.
Dad’s phone beeped on the table with an incoming message. I quickly peeked at it. A third arson attack.
I looked up and blurted, “Third?”
Matthew and our parents exchanged glances. Daphne was playing with her spoon and wouldn’t meet my gaze.
Dad finally sighed and said, “There were a few incidents in businesses that employ… uh… people like you.”
“How many businesses were hit?”
Putting down her spoon, Daphne said, “The police identified at least five. There were seven.”
“Is it organized?”
Daphne shook her head. “I asked Oleander as well, he doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary.”
“Sherry doesn’t think it’s organized either,” Matthew added, and clammed up when I looked at him. He shrugged, suddenly resembling an overgrown child. “They think they are isolated events. Vigilantes. Maybe spurred on by what happened a few days ago.”
Obviously neither he nor Daphne would say anything worrisome around our parents.
My mother and father’s fear was mixed with anger – their self-righteous liberal rage.
I looked at Daphne. “Does it have anything to do with what you saw a few days ago?”
She shook her head again. “I can’t see,” she replied, her voice slightly stifled. Matthew buried his head in his plate.
“What did you see a few days ago?” my mother intervened, leaning in across the table.
Before Daphne could answer, Matthew said, “Reed’s hospitalization.” He looked at me, and I quickly nodded.
My mother shifted her gaze between me and Daphne. Instead of following up on Matthew’s answer, she looked at my dad and said, “I think it’s time for dessert.”
My parents got up, and my mom put her hand on Daphne’s. “When you want to tell us, we’ll listen.”
We had dessert, and before they left my mom hugged me a little tighter than usual, and my dad held my arm for several moments before letting go. And that was it.
19
The moaning woke me up from a troubled sleep. I couldn’t remember the dream, only that it was heavy with passion, and when I was completely awake I managed to distinguish between the internal and external components. Daphne had company. She was barely making a sound, but he was very loud. Oleander no doubt. I stared at the ceiling and cursed the day I didn’t kick him out of the apartment. We had a very clear agreement. Neither of us would do anything in the apartment without giving the other a heads up. Plain survival. I didn’t want to experience what she felt towards other men, and she didn’t want to see what I did. I blocked everything out as best I could and took a deep breath, cleansing my thoughts from the foreign desire. When I was feeling more like myself again, I got dressed and ventured out of my room.
There was a pile of dirty dishes in the sink – Daphne’s way of hinting that I had skipped too many turns doing the washing up. I turned on the kitchen radio to drown out the noises from Daphne’s room and immersed myself in soaping and rinsing.
When the song ended, the newscaster said, “You’re listening to Eppur si Mauve! with Mauve Ben-Yitzhak. Following the recent riots, we’ve invited to our studio Professor Yeshurun, spokesperson for the Hands Across Israel association, to shed some light on the situation.”
“Good morning,” Yeshurun said. “I’d like to start by mentioning that we at Hands Across Israel work to reduce the divisiveness and polarization in our society. Extremists are trying to pit us against each other, and we must remember that what we share is greater than what divides us. I am, of course, under no circumstances justifying violence against my brothers and sisters. However, we cannot ignore that to a certain extent, we did bring this on ourselves.”
The plate I was rinsing almost slipped from my hand. I caught it before it crashed into the sink.
“By which you mean?”
“Well,” I could hear his smug smile. “We demand equal rights, but few of us actually abide by the rules we ourselves have set.
We see people exploiting their powers to move up the social ladder. While I make no excuses for the measures taken by the Sons of Simeon, one can understand that they are motivated by trepidation. The fear that sorcerers will join forces in an attempt to usurp the place of government.”
“But for that we have the police special task force,” Mauve said, “and the Tobianski Act.”
“He was exonerated posthumously, and that law is barely enforced,” I blurted angrily at the plate. There was still pasta glued to it.
“I’ll just remind our listeners that the Tobianski Act allows for the immediate execution of any sorcerer suspected of major criminal activity,” Mauve continued. “Although it is rarely applied. If I’m not mistaken, the last time it was enforced was in the case of the Cash Splasher, a water sorcerer who attempted to rob a Brinks armore
d truck by drowning it, and was shot during his arrest.”
“That’s right,” Yeshurun said, and it sounded like he was going to add something, but Mauve interrupted him.
“I’d like us to talk about the new announcement released by the Sons of Simeon,” she said. ‘From the center of sin city to the farthest corners of the land, we shall not rest until this country is purged of the depravity impeding salvation. We shall no longer stand for the tyranny of the foretellers of the end times.’ The announcement is signed by their leader, Linden.”
The string of pasta finally detached from the plate and sank to the bottom of the sink.
“Yes–” Yeshurun began to reply.
“We can assume from this announcement that he intends to off all the seers.” The silence in the studio was palpable. “Right? The foretellers of end times are seers. Like in the verse, ‘Blasted be the bones of those who foretell the end times.’”
“Indeed, from the Talmud,” Yeshurun said and cleared his throat. “As such, it’s also important to clarify that seers are not, in fact, sorcerers. They are simply people afflicted by the misfortune of remembering their lives from their moment of death backwards. They do not manipulate the elements, or even neutralize other people’s defenses, like real sorcerers do. Some call them ‘timeline operators,’ or even ‘time-impaired.’” He sounded like my university lecturer in Elements and Psyche 101. It was the one course Aurora had regularly skipped, leaving me to take notes for both of us.
Yeshurun continued. “In the past, people feared that all the seers would join forces to shift the world into a timeline in which they have the upper hand. Excuse me, ‘timeline’ means–”
“They wouldn’t do that!” I told the radio. Ridiculous. Seers have to go to work and pay rent just like everyone else. It’s not even feasible. I still remembered Daphne’s explanation about how even if all the damuses in the world entered the strongest fountain of sorcery together, they still wouldn’t be able to move us into a present so distant from reality. Daphne hated the whole ‘united seers’ conspiracy almost as much as I hated the ‘every war in history broke out because of the empaths’ conspiracy.
The Heart of the Circle Page 13
