by Dima Zales
“All right,” Ariel says and blitzes through the kitchen like a sultry Tasmanian devil from the cartoons. Cabinet doors slam, plates thump against the counter, and dishes rattle in the sink. I’m pretty sure I see a crack appear in the cup she’s holding as she bangs it against the kitchen faucet in an effort to get water. Before I can beg her to stop making such a clamor, she grabs a plate of eggs and a cup of coffee, and heads for the table.
“Would you sit down,” Felix says to her as she jumps up a second later to grab milk in the same frantic manner. “What, is this your tenth cup of coffee?”
Actually, Ariel is acting like she’s on amphetamines, but I don’t say it out loud because that would just upset her. My roommate takes a range of legal and, I suspect, some not-so-legal drugs to help her cope with the PTSD she denies having. Felix and I generally don’t give her a hard time about that because taking those pills seems to improve her quality of life.
“I’m just excited after having so much fun last night.” Ariel’s megawatt smile blinds my hungover eyes.
“So much ‘fun.’” I make air quotes to make sure no one misses my sarcasm. “I could use a guillotine right about now.”
“Is your hangover really that bad?” Ariel’s smile dims slightly. “I can hook you up to an IV, if you’d like. They say it helps with dehydration symptoms.”
“I think I’ll pass,” I say, sipping my tea. “But I will take enough Tylenol to cure or kill an elephant.”
Ariel jumps up and beelines for the medicine cabinet. Almost instantly, she’s back with a bottle of painkillers and a glass of water.
I gratefully shove a pile of pills into my mouth and chase them down with water. Hopefully, my liver can take it.
“You better recover soon. The Jubilee was just the first step in our celebration,” Ariel says as I resume eating.
I nearly choke on my oatmeal. “More celebration?”
“Of course.” She beams at me again. “I’m taking you to Earth Club.”
I picture loud club beats, and my left eye twitches involuntarily, the headache gleefully pulsing at the base of my noggin.
Felix looks me over. “Are you sure it’s a good idea to take her there so soon?”
“No. Not a good idea,” I say, clearing the knot in my throat. “I’d rather go to a shooting range and let someone shoot me in the head.”
“I’m not saying we go today,” Ariel says, her hyper manner undiminished. “We don’t even need to go tomorrow. We’ll go on Saturday—that’s when everyone’s going to be there, anyway.”
“What do you mean, everyone?” I massage my throbbing temples.
“The Cognizant,” Ariel says and spears a piece of egg on her fork. “Earth Club is where we hang out without having to hide our natures.”
“That does make it a little more interesting,” I say cautiously and eat half a spoon of oatmeal. “Maybe in a few years, when this headache is gone—”
“It’s located in the Otherlands.” Ariel’s smile threatens to break her face. “It’s your chance to officially go there—I know you’d want that.”
“I’ll think about this,” I say and sip my tea again. “But no alcohol at the club if I go. No alcohol for me ever.”
“Sure.” Ariel shoves her fingers through her hair in a jerky motion, still beaming like a lunatic. “They have every drug known to man—and some not known to man.”
My earlier concerns about Ariel’s sobriety return with a vengeance. I catch Felix staring at me intently—his thoughts must echo mine.
“Are you going with us?” I ask Felix. What I leave unsaid is, “Maybe you can help me keep an eye on her?”
Felix hesitates, then nods. “Yes. All right. I’ll go.”
Ariel all but jumps up and down in her chair. “This is going to be so much fun, you guys.”
In the momentary silence that follows, I hear the pitter-patter of fluffy feet. With a wave of guilt, I realize that in my hangover misery, I completely forgot to feed Fluffster—my pet chinchilla.
Fortunately, Fluffster doesn’t look particularly grumpy, so hopefully, he just woke up and didn’t realize I forgot about him. In fact, he looks extra bright eyed and bushy tailed today, his tiny nose wrinkling in the middle of majestically long whiskers and his large ears standing up like radio antenna dishes ready to receive alien transmissions.
My roommates exchange a strange look, then stare at me.
I look at them, then at Fluffster worriedly—and then I see it.
Fluffster has a tiny aura.
The glow is similar to the one both of my roommates possess—which in their case means they are under the Mandate, like me.
In other words, Cognizant.
“Felix. Ariel.” I point at the aura. “Are you also seeing the glow that’s supposed to indicate people under the Mandate? Do you know why my cute rodent has one?”
“It’s a long story.” Felix puts down a butter knife and looks at Ariel.
“Fluffster isn’t what or who you think he is,” Ariel says, her smile as bright as ever.
Fluffster scurries closer, jumps onto my knee and then onto the table. He’s never displayed this much dexterity before. He then looks very intently at Ariel with his pretty black eyes.
“No,” Ariel says, seemingly to Fluffster. “It’s better if you tell her.” Fluffster looks at Felix in that same way—as though he wants to hypnotize him.
“Don’t look at me,” Felix says. “I think it should come from the horse’s mouth. Or chinchilla’s brain. Or whatever.”
“Tell me?” The room starts to spin again, and it’s no longer because of the hangover. “Guys, please. This is the worst day for jokes.”
Fluffster stands on his haunches on the table, and it could be my imagination, but did he just gesticulate with his little hand-like paws?
“I wouldn’t know where to start.” Ariel puts down her fork with a loud clank, her smile disappearing as she full-on glares at my pet. “It’s your charade; you deal with it.”
Fluffster begins to pace the table. From time to time, he looks at Felix or Ariel, then at me.
“Okay,” Felix finally says to my pet. He then turns to me. “You ever hear of the domovoi?”
“Yes,” I say, my headache very quickly evolving into a full-on migraine. “It’s some kind of a Russian house spirit or something like that, right? Vlad and Pada called Fluffster by that word, so I looked it up.”
“Correct,” Felix says. “The domovoi feature prominently in Slavic folklore. And, according to my dad, they are a group of powerful Cognizant within their own realm of influence, and he”—Felix points at Fluffster—“is one of them.”
I gape at the little animal. “But he’s a chinchilla. A rodent native to the Andean Mountains in South America—as far from Russia as you can get. I bought him at the pet shop. This makes no sense.”
Both Felix and Ariel look at Fluffster, avoiding my gaze.
“This isn’t funny,” I say. “Are you seriously about to tell me Fluffster is a were-chinchilla? Or is he supposed to be a chinchilla who got bitten by a rabid guy from Siberia, making him a were-man—a cute furry creature who turns into a hairy Russian dude during a full moon?”
“Having grown up in the States, I don’t know that much about the way the domovoi work,” Felix says. “What I do know is based on what my dad told me. The domovoi usually stay in an insubstantial form, but sometimes, they take the shape of a passed-away pet—usually a dog or a cat…”
I stare at everyone in turn, the hair on the back of my neck standing up.
Fluffster walks over to my oatmeal bowl, stands on his haunches again, and stares directly into my face.
My eyes widen, and I blink repeatedly.
There’s always been intelligence in Fluffster’s gaze, but never this deep. Never this intense.
“I’m so sorry you had to find out this way,” says a soft voice in my head—and though it’s purely mental, it has a hint of a Russian accent.
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Sneak Peek at The Thought Readers
Description
Everyone thinks I’m a genius.
Everyone is wrong.
Sure, I finished Harvard at eighteen and now make crazy money at a hedge fund. But that’s not because I’m unusually smart or hard-working.
It’s because I cheat.
You see, I have a unique ability. I can go outside time into my own personal version of reality—the place I call “the Quiet”—where I can explore my surroundings while the rest of the world stands still.
I thought I was the only one who could do this—until I met her.
My name is Darren, and this is how I learned that I’m a Reader.
Excerpt
Sometimes I think I’m crazy. I’m sitting at a casino table in Atlantic City, and everyone around me is motionless. I call this the Quiet, as though giving it a name makes it seem more real—as though giving it a name changes the fact that all the players around me are frozen like statues, and I’m walking among them, looking at the cards they’ve been dealt.
The problem with the theory of my being crazy is that when I ‘unfreeze’ the world, as I just have, the cards the players turn over are the same ones I just saw in the Quiet. If I were crazy, wouldn’t these cards be different? Unless I’m so far gone that I’m imagining the cards on the table, too.
But then I also win. If that’s a delusion—if the pile of chips on my side of the table is a delusion—then I might as well question everything. Maybe my name isn’t even Darren.
No. I can’t think that way. If I’m really that confused, I don’t want to snap out of it—because if I do, I’ll probably wake up in a mental hospital.
Besides, I love my life, crazy and all.
My shrink thinks the Quiet is an inventive way I describe the ‘inner workings of my genius.’ Now that sounds crazy to me. She also might want me, but that’s beside the point. Suffice it to say, she’s as far as it gets from my datable age range, which is currently right around twenty-four. Still young, still hot, but done with school and pretty much beyond the clubbing phase. I hate clubbing, almost as much as I hated studying. In any case, my shrink’s explanation doesn’t work, as it doesn’t account for the way I know things even a genius wouldn’t know—like the exact value and suit of the other players’ cards.
I watch as the dealer begins a new round. Besides me, there are three players at the table: Grandma, the Cowboy, and the Professional, as I call them. I feel that now almost imperceptible fear that accompanies the phasing. That’s what I call the process: phasing into the Quiet. Worrying about my sanity has always facilitated phasing; fear seems helpful in this process.
I phase in, and everything gets quiet. Hence the name for this state.
It’s eerie to me, even now. Outside the Quiet, this casino is very loud: drunk people talking, slot machines, ringing of wins, music—the only place louder is a club or a concert. And yet, right at this moment, I could probably hear a pin drop. It’s like I’ve gone deaf to the chaos that surrounds me.
Having so many frozen people around adds to the strangeness of it all. Here is a waitress stopped mid-step, carrying a tray with drinks. There is a woman about to pull a slot machine lever. At my own table, the dealer’s hand is raised, the last card he dealt hanging unnaturally in midair. I walk up to him from the side of the table and reach for it. It’s a king, meant for the Professional. Once I let the card go, it falls on the table rather than continuing to float as before—but I know full well that it will be back in the air, in the exact position it was when I grabbed it, when I phase out.
The Professional looks like someone who makes money playing poker, or at least the way I always imagined someone like that might look. Scruffy, shades on, a little sketchy-looking. He’s been doing an excellent job with the poker face—basically not twitching a single muscle throughout the game. His face is so expressionless that I wonder if he might’ve gotten Botox to help maintain such a stony countenance. His hand is on the table, protectively covering the cards dealt to him.
I move his limp hand away. It feels normal. Well, in a manner of speaking. The hand is sweaty and hairy, so moving it aside is unpleasant and is admittedly an abnormal thing to do. The normal part is that the hand is warm, rather than cold. When I was a kid, I expected people to feel cold in the Quiet, like stone statues.
With the Professional’s hand moved away, I pick up his cards. Combined with the king that was hanging in the air, he has a nice high pair. Good to know.
I walk over to Grandma. She’s already holding her cards, and she has fanned them nicely for me. I’m able to avoid touching her wrinkled, spotted hands. This is a relief, as I’ve recently become conflicted about touching people—or, more specifically, women—in the Quiet. If I had to, I would rationalize touching Grandma’s hand as harmless, or at least not creepy, but it’s better to avoid it if possible.
In any case, she has a low pair. I feel bad for her. She’s been losing a lot tonight. Her chips are dwindling. Her losses are due, at least partially, to the fact that she has a terrible poker face. Even before looking at her cards, I knew they wouldn’t be good because I could tell she was disappointed as soon as her hand was dealt. I also caught a gleeful gleam in her eyes a few rounds ago when she had a winning three of a kind.
This whole game of poker is, to a large degree, an exercise in reading people—something I really want to get better at. At my job, I’ve been told I’m great at reading people. I’m not, though; I’m just good at using the Quiet to make it seem like I am. I do want to learn how to read people for real, though. It would be nice to know what everyone is thinking.
What I don’t care that much about in this poker game is money. I do well enough financially to not have to depend on hitting it big gambling. I don’t care if I win or lose, though quintupling my money back at the blackjack table was fun. This whole trip has been more about going gambling because I finally can, being twenty-one and all. I was never into fake IDs, so this is an actual milestone for me.
Leaving Grandma alone, I move on to the next player—the Cowboy. I can’t resist taking off his straw hat and trying it on. I wonder if it’s possible for me to get lice this way. Since I’ve never been able to bring back any inanimate objects from the Quiet, nor otherwise affect the real world in any lasting way, I figure I won’t be able to get any living critters to come back with me, either.
Dropping the hat, I look at his cards. He has a pair of aces—a better hand than the Professional. Maybe the Cowboy is a professional, too. He has a good poker face, as far as I can tell. It’ll be interesting to watch those two in this round.
Next, I walk up to the deck and look at the top cards, memorizing them. I’m not leaving anything to chance.
When my task in the Quiet is complete, I walk back to myself. Oh, yes, did I mention that I see myself sitting there, frozen like the rest of them? That’s the weirdest part. It’s like having an out-of-body experience.
Approaching my frozen self, I look at him. I usually avoid doing this, as it’s too unsettling. No amount of looking in the mirror—or seeing videos of yourself on YouTube—can prepare you for viewing your own three-dimensional body up close. It’s not something anyone is meant to experience. Well, aside from identical twins, I guess.
It’s hard to believe that this person is me. He looks more like some random guy. Well, maybe a bit better than that. I do find this guy interesting. He looks cool. He looks smart. I think women would probably consider him good-looking, though I know that’s not a modest thing to think.
It’s not like I’m an expert at gauging how attractive a guy is, but some things are common sense. I can tell when a dude is ugly, and this frozen me is not. I also know that generally, being good-looking requires a symmetrical face, and the statue of me has that. A strong jaw doesn’t hurt, either. Check. Having broad shoulders is a positive, and being tall really helps. All covered. I have blue
eyes—that seems to be a plus. Girls have told me they like my eyes, though right now, on the frozen me, the eyes look creepy—glassy. They look like the eyes of a lifeless wax figure.
Realizing that I’m dwelling on this subject way too long, I shake my head. I can just picture my shrink analyzing this moment. Who would imagine admiring themselves like this as part of their mental illness? I can just picture her scribbling down Narcissist, underlining it for emphasis.
Enough. I need to leave the Quiet. Raising my hand, I touch my frozen self on the forehead, and I hear noise again as I phase out.
Everything is back to normal.
The card that I looked at a moment before—the king that I left on the table—is in the air again, and from there it follows the trajectory it was always meant to, landing near the Professional’s hands. Grandma is still eyeing her fanned cards in disappointment, and the Cowboy has his hat on again, though I took it off him in the Quiet. Everything is exactly as it was.
On some level, my brain never ceases to be surprised at the discontinuity of the experience in the Quiet and outside it. As humans, we’re hardwired to question reality when such things happen. When I was trying to outwit my shrink early on in my therapy, I once read an entire psychology textbook during our session. She, of course, didn’t notice it, as I did it in the Quiet. The book talked about how babies as young as two months old are surprised if they see something out of the ordinary, like gravity appearing to work backwards. It’s no wonder my brain has trouble adapting. Until I was ten, the world behaved normally, but everything has been weird since then, to put it mildly.
Glancing down, I realize I’m holding three of a kind. Next time, I’ll look at my cards before phasing. If I have something this strong, I might take my chances and play fair.
The game unfolds predictably because I know everybody’s cards. At the end, Grandma gets up. She’s clearly lost enough money.
