Extraordinary Powers

by Joseph Finder

  “Are you prone to migraines?” Rossi asked.

  “Never had one before. The test must have caused it.”

  “That’s impossible. It’s never happened before, not in any test of the magnetic resonance imager, ever.”

  “Well,” I said, “in any case, I should be heading back to the office.”

  “We’re not quite done here,” Rossi said, turning back toward me.

  “I’m afraid—”

  “We’ll be done shortly. I’ll be right back.”

  He went off in the direction of the adjacent room in which the computer banks were being monitored. I watched him approach one of the computer techs and say something quick and furtive. The tech handed him a small sheaf of printouts.

  Then Rossi returned, bearing the computer images from the lie-detector test. He sat at a long, black-topped laboratory table and gestured for me to sit opposite him. I paused a moment, considered, and then sat obligingly.

  He spread out the images on the lab table. Looked them over, his head bowed, seeming to consult them. We sat perhaps three feet apart.

  I heard Rossi’s voice, muffled but astonishingly clear: I believe you have the ability.

  He said: “Here, you’ll notice, is your brain at the outset of the test.”

  He pointed to the first image, which I drew closer to inspect. “Unchanged, for the most part, throughout the test, because you’re telling the truth.”

  I heard: You must trust me. You must trust me.

  Then he indicated a final set of images, which even I could tell were colored somewhat differently—yellow and magenta along the cerebral cortex rather than the normal rust and beige. He described with a finger the areas that manifested change.

  “Here, you’re lying.” He smiled quickly and added with unnecessary politeness, “As I asked you to do.”

  “I see.”

  “I’m concerned about your headache.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said.

  “I’m concerned that this machine might have caused it.”

  “The noise,” I said. “The noise is probably what did it. I’ll be fine.”

  Rossi, head still bent, nodded.

  I heard: It will be so much easier if we trust each other. The voice seemed to fade out for a moment, and then came back:—to tell me.

  He did not reply, and so I said, “If there’s nothing further…”

  Behind you, the voice came, urgent and loud now. Coming up behind you. Loaded gun. You’ve become a threat. Pointed at your head.

  He was not speaking. He was thinking.

  I betrayed no response. I continued staring at him questioningly, yet as casually as I could.

  Now, now, now. Hope to God he can’t hear the footsteps behind him.

  He was testing me. I felt sure of it. Mustn’t respond, mustn’t show fear, that’s what he wants, he wants some little sign, some glimmering of fear in my face, wants me to whip around suddenly, flinch, show him I can hear it.

  “Then I really should be getting along,” I said calmly.

  I heard: Does he?

  “Well,” Rossi said, “we can talk next time.”

  I heard: Either he’s lying or—

  I watched his face; saw that his mouth hadn’t moved. Once again I felt that creeping dread, a tingling on my skin, and my heart began to beat much too quickly.

  Rossi looked at me, and I felt sure I saw resignation in his eyes. I had, for the time being at least, fooled him, I thought. But there was something about Charles Rossi that told me I would not fool him for long.

  THIRTEEN

  I sat, stunned, in the back of a taxicab making its way through the broad, clogged streets near Government Center toward my office. My head throbbed worse than ever, and I felt constantly on the edge of being sick to my stomach.

  It is an understatement of the highest order to tell you that I was in the early stages of some sort of deep, wild panic. My world had been turned upside down. Nothing made sense anymore. I was deeply afraid that I was on the verge of losing touch with sanity altogether.

  I was hearing voices now, voices unspoken. I was hearing, to put it plainly, the thoughts of others almost as clearly as if they had spoken them aloud.

  And I was convinced I was losing my mind.

  Even now I’m unable to put straight what I knew then and what I concluded much later. Had I really “heard” what I thought I’d heard? How was this possible? And, more directly to the point, what precisely did Rossi and his lab assistant mean by asking themselves, “Did it work?” It seemed to me there was only one possible explanation: they knew. Somehow, they—Rossi and his lab assistant—were not stunned that the MRI had done to me what it did. For there was no doubt in my mind that it was the MRI that had somehow altered my brain’s hardwiring.

  But did Truslow know what had happened?

  And yet a minute after thinking this whole thing through lucidly, I found myself wondering, in a panic, whether I had taken a left turn into lunacy.

  As the taxi crawled through traffic, my thoughts grew increasingly suspicious. Was that “lie detector test” business merely a pretext, a way to compel me to undergo this procedure?

  Had they, in short, known what would happen to me?

  Again: had Truslow known?

  And had I fooled Rossi? Or did he know that I had this strange and terrible new ability?

  Rossi, I feared, knew. Normally, when someone says something that echoes in some way what we’ve been thinking—we’ve all had moments like that—we respond with surprise, often delight. It is no doubt pleasurable on some level to find another human being connecting with us in such a way.

  But Rossi didn’t seem surprised. He seemed—how would I describe it?—alert, alarmed, suspicious. As if he’d been waiting for such a development.

  I wondered, as I reflected on that scene with Rossi, whether I had really convinced him that there was nothing out of the ordinary in my response—that I merely seemed to be tuned in to his thoughts, that it was nothing more than coincidence.

  As the cab pulled into the financial district, I leaned forward to give the driver directions. The driver, a middle-aged black man with a sparse beard, sat back in his seat distractedly as he drove, as if in a reverie. Separating us was a scuffed Plexiglas partition. I spoke into the speaker holes, and suddenly realized something startling: I wasn’t “hearing” the driver. Now I was totally confused. Had this talent subsided, or disappeared altogether? Was it the Plexiglas, or the distance, or something else? Again: had I imagined the occurrence altogether?

  “Take a right here,” I said, “and it’ll be the large gray building on the left.”

  Nothing. The sound of the radio, an all-talk station chattering along at low volume, and the occasional burst of static from his CB, but nothing else.

  Had the MRI done something to my brain that had disappeared as quickly as it had appeared?

  Totally confused now, I paid him and entered the building lobby, which was crowded with people returning from their early lunches, noisy with their babble. Along with a sizable crowd of lunchtime returnees, I pressed my way into the elevator, pushed the button for my floor, and—I will admit it—tried to “listen” or “read” or whatever you call it, but the various loud conversations made that impossible in any case.

  My head throbbed. I felt claustrophobic, nauseated. Perspiration dripped down the back of my neck.

  Then the elevator doors shut, and the crowd fell silent, as it so often does in elevators, and it happened.

  I could hear, kaleidoscopically, snatches of words—or, as it seemed to me at that moment, smears of words and phrases, the way a record or tape sounds when you play it backward (or did in the days before digitally recorded sound, when the technology actually allowed you to do such tricks). The woman next to me—pressed up against me by the crush of people—was a serene-looking woman of around forty, plump and red-haired. Her expression was pleasant, a slight smile. But I could hear at the same time a voice—it
had to be coming from her—that came in surges, distant and then distinct, fading in and out, like voices on a party line. Stand it can’t stand it, the voice went. Do it to me he can’t do it to me he can’t. Startled by the contrast between this woman’s pleasant demeanor and the thoughts that bordered on the hysterical, I turned my head toward the man on my left, who looked like a lawyer, in a lawyerly pinstripe suit and horn-rimmed glasses, early fifties, his expression one of vague boredom. And then it came, a distant shout in a male voice: minutes late they’ve started without me the bastard …

  I was “tuning in,” without consciously doing it, the way you can listen for a familiar voice in a crowd, selecting for a certain timbre, a certain sound. In the silence of the elevator, it was simple.

  The bell sounded and the doors opened onto the reception area of Putnam & Stearns. I brushed past several of my colleagues, barely acknowledging them, and found my way to my office.

  Darlene looked up as I approached. As usual, she was wearing black, but today it was some sort of frilly high-necked thing that she probably imagined was feminine. It looked as though she’d picked it up at a Salvation Army.

  As I neared her, I heard: “something seriously wrong with Ben.”

  She started to say something, but I waved her away. I entered my office, silently greeted the Big Baby Dolls who kept their silent vigil against one wall, and sat down at the desk. “Hold my calls,” I said, closed my office door, and sank into my chair, safe at last in the solitude. For a very long time I sat in absolute silence, staring into the middle distance, squeezing my throbbing temples, cradling my head in my hands, and listening only to the hammering of my heart.

  * * *

  A little while later I emerged to ask Darlene for my messages. She looked at me curiously, obviously wondering whether I was all right. Handing me a pile of pink message slips, she said, “Mr. Truslow called.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You feeling any better?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You got a headache, right?”

  “Yeah. A nasty migraine. ‘A headache so bad it shows.’”

  “You know, I’ve always got some Advil here,” she said, pulling open a desk drawer that revealed her stash of medications. “Take a couple. I get migraines, too, every month, and they’re like the worst.”

  “The worst,” I agreed, accepting some of the pills.

  “Oh, and Allen Hyde from Textronics wants to talk to you as soon as possible.” Mr. Hyde was the beleaguered inventor of Big Baby Dolls who was on the verge of making a settlement offer.

  I said, “Thanks,” and scanned the messages. Darlene had turned to her IBM Selectric—yes, we still use typewriters at Putnam & Stearns; in certain instances the law requires typewriters, not laser printers—and returned to her frenetic typing.

  I could not stop myself from moving close to her desk, then leaning forward and trying.

  And it came, with that same damned clarity. Looks like he’s losing it, I heard in Darlene’s voice, and then silence.

  “I’m okay,” I said quietly.

  Darlene spun around, her eyes wide. “Huh?”

  “Don’t worry about me. I had a tough meeting this morning.”

  She gave me a long, frantic look, then composed herself. “Who’s worried?” she said, turning back to the typewriter, and I heard, as if in the same conversational tone, Did I say anything? “Want me to get Truslow on the line?”

  “Not yet,” I said. “I’ve got forty-five minutes before Kornstein, which goes right into Lewin, and I need to get some fresh air or my head’s going to explode.” What I really wanted was to sit in a dark room with the blankets over my head, but I figured that a walk, painful as it might be, would do as much to alleviate the headache.

  As I turned back to my office to get my overcoat, Darlene’s phone trilled.

  “Mr. Ellison’s office,” she said. Then: “One moment, please, Mr. Truslow,” and she punched the hold button. “Are you here?”

  “I’ll take it.”

  “Ben,” Truslow said when I picked it up in my office. “I thought you’d be returning to chat.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “The test ran on longer than I anticipated. I’ve got a crazy day here. If you don’t mind, let’s reschedule.”

  A long pause.

  “Fine,” he said. “What did you make of this Rossi? He seems a bit thuggish to me, but maybe I worry too much.”

  “Didn’t have much of a chance to size him up.”

  “In any case, Ben, I understand you passed the lie detector with flying colors.”

  “I trust you’re not surprised.”

  “Of course not. But we need to talk. I need to brief you fully. The thing is, a little wrinkle has turned up.”

  There was a smile in his voice, and I knew.

  “The President has asked me to go to Camp David,” he said.

  “Congratulations.”

  “Congratulations are premature. He wants to talk things over with me, his chief-of-staff says.”

  “Sounds like you got it.”

  “Well…” Truslow said. He seemed to hesitate for a moment, but then he said, “I’ll be in touch very soon,” and he hung up the phone.

  * * *

  I walked up Milk Street to Washington Street, the pedestrian mall sometimes called Downtown Crossing. There, along Summer Street, the gulf between the two great, rival downtown department stores, Filene’s and Jordan Marsh, I wandered aimlessly among pushcart vendors selling popcorn and pretzels, Bedouin scarves, Boston tourist T-shirts, and rough-knit South American sweaters. The headache seemed to be subsiding. The street was, as usual, teeming with shoppers, street musicians, office workers. Now, though, the air was filled with sounds, a bedlam of shouts and mutterings, sighs and exclamations, whispers and screams. Thoughts.

  On Devonshire Street I entered an electronics shop, blankly examined a display of twenty-inch color television sets, fended off the salesman. Several of the sets were tuned to soap operas, one to CNN, one to a Nickelodeon rerun of a black and white TV show from the fifties that may have been The Donna Reed Show. On CNN the blond anchorwoman was saying something about a United States senator who had died. I recognized the face flashed on the screen: Senator Mark Sutton of Colorado, who had been found shot to death at his home in Washington. The police in Washington believed the slaying was probably not politically motivated, but instead committed during an armed robbery.

  The salesman approached again, saying, “All the Mitsubishis are on sale this week, you know.”

  I smiled pleasantly, said no thanks, and went out to the street. My head throbbed. I found myself standing close to passersby at stoplights and crossings, listening. One attractive young woman with short blond hair, in a pale pink suit and running shoes, stood next to me while the Don’t Walk sign flashed at Tremont Street. In normal circumstances we all keep a certain social distance from strangers; she was standing a few feet away, immersed in her own thoughts. I bent my head toward her in an attempt to share some of those thoughts, but she scowled at me as if I were a pervert, and moved quite a distance away.

  People were bustling past too quickly for my feeble, novice efforts. I would stand, craning my neck this way and that as unobtrusively as I could, but nothing.

  Had the talent disappeared? Had I simply imagined the whole thing?

  Nothing.

  Had the power merely faded?

  Back on Washington Street, I spotted a newsstand, where a clot of people were buying their Globes and Wall Street Journals and New York Times, and when the Walk sign flashed, I crossed over to it. A young guy was looking at the front page of the Boston Herald—MOB HIT MAN NABBED it said, with a picture of some minor Mafia figure who’d been arrested in Providence. I moved in close, as if contemplating the pile of Heralds in front of him. Nothing. A woman, thirtyish and lawyerly, was scanning the piles of papers, looking for something. I moved in as close as I could without alarming her. Nothing there either.

>   Was it gone?

  Or, I wondered, was it that none of these people was upset enough, angry enough, scared enough, to be emitting brain waves—is that how it worked?—of a frequency I could detect?

  Finally, I saw a man in his early forties, dressed in the natty apparel of an investment banker, standing near the piles of Women’s Wear Daily, blankly staring at the rows of glossy magazines. Something in his eyes told me he was deeply upset about something.

  I moved in closer, pretending to be inspecting the cover of the latest issue of The Atlantic, and tried.

  —to fire her she’s going to bring up that whole fucking business about the affair God knows how she’ll react she’s a fucking loose cannon would she call Gloria and tell her ah Jesus what am I going to do I don’t have any choice so goddamned stupid to fuck your secretary—

  I stole a furtive glance at the banker, and his dour face had not moved.

  By this time I had formulated a number of what I guess you could call understandings, or perhaps theories, about what had happened, and what I should do.

  One: The powerful magnetic resonance imager had affected my brain in such a way that I was now able to “hear” the thoughts of others. Not all people; perhaps not most, but at least some.

  Two: I was able to “hear” not all thoughts but only those that were “expressed” with a fair degree of emphasis. In other words, I only “heard” things that were thought with great vehemence, fear, anger. Also, I could “hear” things only at close physical proximity—two or three feet away from a person, maximum.

  Three: Charles Rossi and his lab assistant were not only not surprised at this manifestation, but were actually expecting it. That meant they had been using the MRI for this express purpose, even before I came on the scene.

  Four: The uncertainty they felt indicated that either it had not worked in the proper way before, or it had rarely done so.

  Five: Rossi did not know for certain that this experiment had succeeded on me. Therefore, I was safe only as long as I did not let on that I had this ability.

  Six: Therefore, it was only a matter of time before they caught up with me, for whatever purposes they intended.