by Clara Ward
The group was strangely silent as she approached. They moved normally, Lisa standing straight, Robert looking down as if his eyes might spy injuries he couldn’t feel, but there were no words. For a moment, Lisa and Robert looked exactly like Wednesday and Pugsly Addams, had the retro-TV kids been older and Chinese-American. For once, Sarah related to the normal people entering the Addams’ house, and felt the alienation from the other side.
Then Howard lay a hand on Robert’s shoulder and gave him a friendly shake, still without words. Sarah slowed a little in her charge down the hill. She glanced back to see Mei Mei walking calmly behind her, careful in high-heeled shoes. Sarah faced forward again just in time to see Howard shake his head at Mei Mei.
Did she imagine Mei Mei’s stare on her back? She felt the urge to flee like a cold spike inside her, but leaving would be suspicious. Instead, she stood silently with the rest of them, not letting anyone catch her eye. Then she forced herself to look at Robert and ask, “Are you okay? That was quite a fall.”
He looked back at her with his mouth slightly open, as if he didn’t understand what she was saying. His mouth closed and his chin took on the hard set that meant a guy was either going to get angry or sulk. Sarah felt herself cringe just a little in anticipation, but then Howard spoke, offering her a way out.
“Wait. Sarah, come up to the house with me, to find some ice?”
He started walking, touching a hand to her back to get her moving. It was a very familiar gesture for someone she’d never met. What had Mei Mei told him about their previous encounter? It could just be a cultural difference, but it didn’t seem Chinese. She knew nothing about this “nephew.” Clearly he knew her name and felt comfortable using it and spiriting her away from a strangely charged social situation. Maybe he was with one of those touchy-feely groups, you could never tell, especially in California. Anyway, she was grateful to him and let herself be led up the hill.
At the back door, Sarah wiped her bare feet fastidiously on the mat. In her hurry, she’d run without shoes. Usually she loved the moist, prickly feel of grass on her feet, but this time she’d been too preoccupied to notice. Now she felt the dampness and smooth specks of soil trying to ride her feet into the immaculate house.
Striding in ahead of her, Howard didn’t rush for the freezer. Instead, he moved through the sitting area to one of the small mahogany end tables. He pulled out a neatly folded page of newspaper and handed it to Sarah. A glance showed her it was an old story about her car rescue.
She didn’t want to deal with this. It was too rapid of a change after her awkwardness with Lisa, her babbling on about Tabitha, rescuing Robert, the strange look from Mei Mei, silence on the hill. She needed time to regroup, not another round of questions. And why was a stranger bringing this up now?
Howard waited silently, head tilted a bit, and one eyebrow raised.
“What?” asked Sarah.
The newspaper floated out of her hands and into his. Sarah stopped mid-breath. She’d given up on finding someone like her. Now all the childish hopes resurfaced, along with all the fear of being discovered or exposed.
“I was there to break Rob’s fall if you didn’t,” Howard said. It had been a set up, but she froze instead of running, not knowing where to hide. Would it do any good to deny it?
She looked him over again. His warrior posture and concentration from beneath the ladder were gone. He looked vulnerable, but he met her eyes. She could see his shoulder muscles tense beneath his shirt.
“Are you really Mei Mei’s nephew?”
“Yeah, but they’re not teeks, only teeps.”
The words were from books and movies, books and movies she’d wanted to escape into. But she’d given up on saying them or hearing them with real people. Or had she? How could she be what she was and truly expect to never use such words? She took a deep breath. Her hand and thigh braced against the side of a couch. Her voice sounded surprisingly calm in her own ears.
“Telepaths? What else exists? Do you know?”
“You really can’t hear us? They’re all too paranoid to deal with you now, but I saw how that ladder fell.”
Sarah gently flew the news clipping back to the end table. Howard smiled like they shared a joke.
“We thought all teeks were teeps,” he said. “My aunt thought she heard something from your house once. You would have been too young, but was your mother –“
Sarah shook her head. The initial shock had left behind a hollow space against her lower ribs. Her mind tangled with every question she’d ever wanted to ask and every thought she’d kept completely secret.
“Sit down,” Howard said, touching her arm lightly. “Should I call the others in?”
“Are you talking to them now? Can they hear our conversation? Can you hear my thoughts?”
“Shoot, I never thought I’d talk about this to someone who couldn’t do it.” After nudging her onto a sofa, he plopped down across from her, knees wide, back curved, hands in his hair, completely unlike Lisa who had sat there before. “No we can’t hear your thoughts at all. That’s part of why we thought you were a teep. Very few normal minds are completely silent, maybe one in a hundred. And Aunt Mei Mei thought she’d heard clear telepathy from your house that one time. Then she saw the newspaper article, just after you came by. She thought you were refusing to answer her telepathically –“
“She tried when I came about the cat? Does she try everyone whose mind is silent?”
“We all do.”
“How many have you found that way?”
“None.”
“Oh.” Like a roller coaster suddenly stopped, Sarah looked at Howard, leaning back across from her, hands tangled in his hair. But it felt like he was leaning toward her, like they were twins, separated at birth, but that was too tabloid. This was weirder than tabloids. Maybe she’d always wondered, but these people had been actively looking and found no one.
Or were they lying? Whatever she’d been feeling for Howard suddenly cut off, and she was scared by the connection she’d felt.
“Can they hear all this? Are they going to join us?”
“I only had time to tell them the highlights. I mostly told them to shut up. It’s like having someone on the telephone while trying to carry on a normal conversation. Confusing.”
His experience had been completely different than hers, whether or not he was telling the truth.
“Is everyone in your family both teek and teep?”
“My mom and dad were both teeps, but my paternal grandpa was both. The Chens are my only living relatives, and none of them are teeks.”
“What happened to your mom and dad?”
“You remember that airborne Ebola outbreak in New Zealand two years ago? My parents chose a lousy time for a vacation.”
“I’m sorry.”
The rear door opened loudly as the others came in. Howard’s back straightened and his eyes flashed across the room. Evidently eye contact was still the norm even when talking telepathically. Sarah also stiffened, feeling herself more on guard than she’d been before. Why did the only teek she’d found have to come from a family of telepaths?
Mei Mei came in and sat beside Sarah, turned toward her, knees almost touching. Sarah forced herself to meet the other woman’s probing gaze. “You really can’t hear anything? I’m sorry. We didn’t mean to be rude. You’re the first person at all like us that we’ve found in this country. My husband and I met in Hong Kong. It was still a few years before their National Health Index was started, but my brother heard rumors that the government was looking for certain ‘superior’ genetics. He and his wife decided to move to America. Business being what it was, we decided to follow them. That was before any of us had children. I hadn’t thought how hard it would be to find someone for them to marry.”
“Mother, please,” Lisa smiled behind clenched teeth. She hadn’t sat down, but stood just in front of her brother, just inside the room. “We invited her for lunch. Why don’t we set something
out?”
The silence that followed seemed a little too long to Sarah. But soon they all went to the dining room and made small talk out loud as Mei Mei served cream of asparagus soup in real china bowls. Sarah’s mind had shut down. She enjoyed the warmth of the soup and the graininess of the bread. Her eyes had settled peacefully on a vase of crimson orchids in the middle of the table. She imagined buying orchids just to sit on her table in March. Then they started moving, as if invisible hands were fussing with them. She looked up to see Howard smirking at her from across the table.
“Should we talk teek or wait ‘til after lunch?” he asked.
“Do you always use it that casually?”
“Don’t you?”
“I thought, maybe, if the power source was limited or caused some side effect-- But do you know what makes it work? There must be a price.”
He shook his head, “It’s a gift. You never use it for fun?”
Sarah’s eyes tightened. Part of her scorned his recklessness; part felt needlessly deprived. “I did a few experiments at first. I’ve made some small tests around my relatives and friends to see if anyone would notice and admit they could do it too. But mostly I’ve saved it for when I was sure it was right.”
“Like with the car crash?”
Four pairs of eyes seemed to watch how she’d answer, and her own eyes studied the delicate soup bowl. In all the times Sarah had imagined telling someone about herself, she’d never envisioned herself as the guest at a family luncheon with fine china and asparagus soup. The dancing orchids weren’t far off the mark though.
“Well, by the time I saw the car was going to crash, it was too late to stop it. Earlier I might have been able to nudge a tire or something. But I couldn’t possibly stop a moving car. Could you?”
“Dunno. I turned a parked Bug once,” Howard shrugged. Sarah gaped, but he said, “Go on.”
“Anyway, the car landed upside down in a ditch. The driver was unconscious, suspended by his seatbelt. I knew the rescue team would have trouble getting him out gently, and there wasn’t anyone around yet. So I wrapped him in constant pressure and floated him up to the road. I kept my hands under him; so if someone happened to see, they could convince themselves it wasn’t completely impossible.”
“What do you mean ‘constant pressure’?” Howard asked, leaning forward.
Sarah glanced at Lisa, wondering if the term was specific to her pre-med background, but Lisa only looked away. Robert and Mei Mei weren’t looking at her either.
“Well, you wrap a wound tight to stop bleeding, or hold a child tight to keep them calm. When I was just a kid I learned to use -- telekinesis -- to wrap myself up, like a caterpillar in a cocoon, so I could feel something pushing in all over me. I liked it, and I guess it became my model for how to move something carefully.”
“How old were you?” Mei Mei asked.
“Maybe ten.”
“Did you, um, had you become a woman then?”
Sarah felt herself blush, was embarrassed about blushing, and blushed more. “Well, a few months later, by the most obvious measure. Are they linked?”
“Yes, especially with girls. But I didn’t mean to interrupt. Why did you want to wrap yourself up?”
Mei Mei asked so innocently, like a perfectly nice person who had always lived a perfectly nice life. Sarah remembered how often she’d been terrified as a child and didn’t know how to explain.
“Howard, did you ever notice yourself being over-sensitive to stuff, especially touch? Like having to cut the tags out of t-shirts or being annoyed when your fingernails were rough?”
He shook his head but still leaned onto the table, giving her his full attention.
“Oh well. I thought it might be related to the other. As a kid I was oversensitive to touch. For a while I had to sleep with even my face under the covers because air currents in the room could wake me up.” No need to mention that despite years of trying to desensitize herself, she was still mostly that way. No need to mention the emotional part of her need to hide, either. No need to be telling these people anything really. What if it was all a trap, and she was showing them weaknesses to use against her? But for the first time she wasn’t a freak, or at least she wasn’t a freak alone. Beneath years of lying and hiding, she found a craving to be known.
“Sometimes, when I was sad or distressed, I’d curl up in a very tight ball, in the corner of a couch with a blanket over me. Something about being enclosed was comforting. So naturally, once I learned to touch things with my mind, I learned how to press a second skin around myself. I stopped doing that when I started to worry about where the energy came from or about someone tracking where it was used. But later, as a pre-med, I realized it could be a useful way to apply pressure to a wound, and the guy in the car was bleeding, and I didn’t want to hurt him any when I moved him. So I wrapped him up.”
When Sarah stopped, everyone started to speak at once, but Howard was the only one to finish his question.
“You can just wrap a second skin over someone else? How?”
Sarah opened her mouth, and then shrugged. “I could show you. Want me to wrap your hand?”
Howard started to hold his right hand forward, then switched to his left. Not quite so trusting, but that was fine. Sarah nodded and wrapped his hand with a gentle pressure. Howard bent and flexed the fingers experimentally.
“It moves with my hand. Do you have to think to move it?”
“I just think it onto your skin. It moves with the skin.”
“What else can you do?”
Sarah let Howard’s hand free. “I haven’t tried much. I can thread a needle, play percussion but not wind instruments, move things up to a couple hundred pounds. You?”
“I don’t think I can thread a needle, but I can lift a lot more. I can’t do what you just did to my hand, even now that I know what it feels like, but I can do drums and piano, even a hundred feet from the house if I know exactly where they are.”
A slight grimace from Robert implied he hadn’t enjoyed Howard’s experiments.
Lisa said, “Is everyone finished with their soup? I’ll bring in the tornadoes.”
Sarah was wondering if she’d heard correctly and what a tornado was when Robert asked, “So you were pre-med? Where?”
He asked without raising his eyes from the table, and Sarah realized they’d skipped any introductions before. She’d caught him when he fell off a ladder, and now he seemed unaccountably familiar, like a dog-walking neighbor she’d seen pass many times but never met. He did not seem to feel the same toward her. He’d stood behind his sister before, then stayed silent as the others talked. Now he focused somewhere over her shoulder while waiting for her answer.
“UC Santa Cruz. But I switched to anthropology after one year.”
“Were you hoping to learn something about your telekinesis? I’m studying bioinformatics at Stanford, myself.”
“Has it given you any insights?”
“No, maybe when I have my own lab and the field has developed more. But tell me, do any of your relatives share your ability?” He still hadn’t looked at her, but when she glanced at Howard he was watching her and smiled.
“They never reacted to bits of telekinesis I tried out around them. But maybe . . . How does it work in your family?”
Rob started to answer as Lisa and Mei Mei brought in some sort of wrapped up pastry. Sarah ate when the others did, wondering if they always had lunches like this.
“The telepathy could be explained by a simple recessive. So far, if both parents are teeps, all the kids are. If one parent’s a teep and the other comes from a family of teeps, some of the kids are, presumably the others are carriers. The teeks may not be so simple. All we know about is Howard and one of his grandparents. It could still be a recessive. There are all sorts of rumors in our lineage if you go back a couple generations, but until Howard it seemed more like a myth.”
“Were there rumors about any other powers, maybe teleportation or py
rokinesis?”
“No, nothing like that. You’ve been searching fiction?”
“Since I was ten. I scoured the SciFi channel and the SF section at the library. I once visited a science fiction convention just so I could try tiny bits of telekinesis in front of authors who wrote about it. I thought someone must be writing from experience, but none of them even noticed.”
“We should try that with telepathy.”
“How does it work?”
Mei Mei chose that moment to pat her mouth with a napkin, and Lisa was staring at Howard as if some silent discussion were taking place. Sarah felt like a child who’d asked for too much sugar in her lemonade, but with everything she learned, she wanted to know more.
“Fair enough,” Robert shrugged and only wrinkled his forehead a little bit. “From most people we pick up random surface thoughts. Some people leak less than others do. A few are completely silent. I’ve gotten to know some of those, checking to see if they might be like us, but none of them acknowledged hearing me. Guess we could have had Howard check for telekinesis separately, but we didn’t know it happened alone. You’re sure you never heard anyone’s thoughts and just repressed it or something?”
Robert still wasn’t looking at her as he spoke, and Sarah could feel herself tensing in reply. She did not feel like commenting on what she knew of repressed thoughts or what in her life might have made her do such a thing. She shook her head and trawled for more information. “Is telepathy like talking? Is it language specific?”
“It’s mostly words. With my sister I have some shared understandings, sort of implied words. But Howard hears them as gibberish when he’s in the conversation. And if he uses Mandarin I hear the sounds, but I’m limited by my own vocabulary. Thoughts carry about as far as natural voice, but we can choose to only be heard by certain people in the room. That’s sort of rude though, like whispering.”
