Lies I Live By

by Lauren Sabel

  “They’re expensive,” he says. “And the government gives us less funding than the canine unit. But on the up side, we do have Mickey.”

  We have the Mickey Mouse balloon instead. Stellar security.

  Once I’m seated inside the cage on the hard metal seat, Indigo closes me in and takes a seat outside the cage.

  “I’m right here if you need me,” he says.

  “You and the ejection button.”

  We go through the same drill: Indigo shows me a sealed envelope; I pack my worries into a suitcase, drift deep into the ocean in my mind, and picture what is inside the envelope. As always, an image comes to me.

  From what I’m able to see, which isn’t much, I’m floating in darkness, hearing only the splashing of waves around me. For what could be an hour or several hours, I am floating there, just watching and listening.

  Then, after what seems like forever, the face of a child floats into my mind. He has dark skin and brown eyes, and his clothes are ragged but clean. He has this mischievous look, and something about him tugs at my heart in an almost physical way. I feel myself smile just looking at him.

  “What are you looking at?” Indigo asks over my vision.

  “A boy,” I say. “An adorable little—”

  Then I see it, something that makes me shudder through every cell of my body. In the boy’s pupils is the reflection of a giant wall of water. It must be taller than a house, and it’s about to crash over him. The boy backs up, but there’s nowhere to go. I can feel his terror, and there’s nothing I can do to help him. Then the white crest of the wave breaks, and at the same time, the boy cries such a desperate sound that it shatters across my mind. The sound jolts me out of my vision, and when I look at Indigo, there are white spots floating in front of my eyes.

  “Welcome back,” he says, and glances at his watch. “That was a long one. See anything interesting?”

  “There was this kid,” I say slowly. “And a giant wave was crashing over him. But it was too dark to see where I was.” I shift on the bench, wishing I could go in again and find out something that could help him. “Maybe just one more time—”

  “You know the rules,” Indigo reminds me.

  I still remember the speech Indigo gave me when I first got here. You don’t need someone to break into your mind for your brain to give up on you. “Rules were put into place to protect us,” he told me. “Where we go in our sessions, they’re deep places. If we live too often in that space—or if we put too much pressure on our minds when we’re in there—we might lose the ability to live in this one. Understand?”

  “I know, don’t push my mind past its breaking point,” I chant.

  “That’s right,” he says. Indigo opens the Faraday cage and gestures for me to climb out. He holds out my post-session file, and I take it from him and sit down in a chair outside the cage. As I methodically write my report, I can’t help wishing I could have done something to help the little boy. Not that anyone can stop a tidal wave, but if I know where and when it’s going to happen, maybe I can make sure he’s not there. Could he have been on an island? Maybe in the Pacific?

  Not being able to analyze what I see during a session is like someone leaving a puzzle lying around and ordering you not to put it together: you may not with your hands, but you will with your mind.

  My post-session report is usually at least five pages long, outlining everything I saw, heard, and felt during my hours of viewing. As Indigo says, nothing is unimportant, as we never know which detail could help the CIA find a potential terrorist or discover the location of a radioactive bomb. Sometimes just the fact that the boy had dark skin or the wave was facing a certain direction is enough to prevent a major disaster from happening. While I write my report, Indigo studies the notes he took on my session, pops out to go to the restroom and get a candy bar, and straightens up the room for the next viewer.

  When I’m finally done, Indigo asks me if I want to go over my report before I leave. Sometimes I do; sometimes I need to decompress after a session before I go out into the real world, even if that real world is only the recovery room down the hall. The world of the mind and the physical world are two totally different things: and sometimes it takes hours to prepare one for the other.

  But I shake my head and hand him the long, detailed report. He shuffles through the half-dozen pages, glancing up at me every now and then. “So no smells or tactile impressions?”

  “No touchy, no smelly,” I say. “And no clue when or where.”

  “Okay,” Indigo says. “Good work.” He gets up from his chair and holds out a hand to pull me up, but I stand up on my own.

  “You’re the old one,” I tease. “I should be helping you up.”

  “Good point,” Indigo says, pulling open the door and gesturing for me to leave first.

  Indigo heads to his office, and I hear him drop the sealed envelope in the Completed Sessions box. Unless a target will be viewed again, Indigo puts them in the box, which he then delivers to the CIA headquarters, to the contact only he knows the identity of. Supposedly, once there, the files are destroyed to maintain secrecy, although nobody really knows.

  I walk through the recovery room and push through the swinging door to the staff room. I’m still so preoccupied by the child’s desperate wail that I almost walk straight into Jasper. He’s leaning against the table, sipping coffee.

  “That bad?” Jasper asks as I jerk to a stop in front of him. “Wanna talk about it?”

  I shake my head. I’ve been holding this stuff inside of me for so long that I don’t even know how to talk about it. It’s like explaining a dream, but it’s real.

  “It’s hard sometimes, isn’t it?” Jasper asks, putting his coffee cup down on the table over the worn-in water ring. “We just watch, and there’s nothing we can do.”

  I slump back against the candy machine, wondering if Jasper is reading my mind, or if he really feels this way, exactly the way I feel.

  “But you can influence, can’t you?” I ask.

  Jasper shakes his head. “I can bend metal,” he says, “but only within a hundred feet.”

  “Is that why you left the New York office?”

  “Nope. Issues with the boss. I’ve got a problem with authority.” Jasper’s grin reminds me of how different he looked yesterday when he was storming across the quad, and of Indigo’s angry look when I got in here.

  “No kidding,” I say.

  Jasper sits at the table and pulls out a metal chair for me. It scrapes across the tile floor, and the screeching hurts my ears. I think about sitting down and telling him all about it, but then I remember the way it felt when he touched me. It was like my whole body unconsciously leaned toward his, and even though I tried to remind myself that I’m taken, something inside of me wanted him. There was nothing logical about it, and it was like nothing I’ve ever felt before, but it was real. It made me dizzy and shaky, and I just can’t handle that right now.

  I push myself off the candy machine. “I have to get home,” I say, my words coming out in one long word: Ihavagethome.

  “Sit a while,” Jasper says. “Talk.”

  I pull the chair out farther and lower myself into it, plopping my purse down on the table in front of me.

  “What happened in there?” Jasper asks, leaning forward so his chin is balancing on one palm. “You look like you’ve been through the wringer.”

  “You could call it that.”

  “Don’t feel like talking?” he asks.

  “But I’m guessing you do,” I respond, a smile inching over my lips.

  Jasper sits back and studies me. “Watch this,” he says, and starts waving his hands around, twisting and twirling them like a maniac.

  I lift my eyebrows. “Interpretive dance?”

  “Magic,” Jasper says. “Well, it’s not magic, not in the real sense of the word; it’s more like a trick of the eye. Like if I wave my hands around a lot”—my eyes follow his flailing hands, and the way his ring twin
kles on his middle finger—“you never notice that I stole your wallet.”

  On the table, my purse is still closed, but my faux leather wallet is lying open beside it, showing my old school ID, with my full name, Calliope Sinclair. The picture was taken before I ever met Indigo, before I knew any of this, and there is some sort of innocence in my eyes that I don’t see in the mirror anymore. I’m guarded now—in my eyes, my brain, my heart. “How did you do that?”

  “I can’t tell you,” Jasper says solemnly. “I swore the Magician’s Oath.”

  “The what?”

  Jasper sighs. “You don’t know anything about magic, do you?” I shake my head. “The Magician’s Oath. ‘As a magician I promise never to reveal the secret of any illusion to a nonmagician,’” he recites. “Blah blah blah.”

  “You’re a magician? Like, pull a rabbit out of a hat?”

  “There’s more to it than that,” he says, and it sounds like a warning.

  “Like sawing women in half and putting them back together?”

  “This is serious, Callie,” Jasper says, and in his voice there’s a hardness I haven’t heard before; it’s like sitting in the bath for so long you don’t notice the water has gone ice cold. Then his face transforms into a smile, and the warmth comes back full force. Did I just imagine it? “Can I use your scarf?” Jasper asks.

  “Not a chance in hell,” I say, but I unwrap the silk material from around my neck anyway. I hand it to him, hoping he’ll be careful with it. My dad gave this to my mom before he left, or so Mom said. It’s the only thing I have left of him, and truthfully, part of me wants to lock it in a box and preserve it forever, like maybe it contains the parts of my history that I’ll never know.

  Jasper shows me his thumb, holding it out in a thumbs-up position, and then drapes my white scarf over it. He takes a pin, like one you sew with, out of his pocket. “Do you see this pin?” he asks.

  “See these?” I ask, pointing to my eyes. “Eyes. Good for seeing.”

  He nods, and then he stabs his thumb with the pin, full force. I gasp, not sure if I’m more upset about his thumb or my scarf. Jasper pulls more pins out of his pocket, and stabs through his thumb a dozen more times. When he’s done, there are pins sticking out through his thumb on all sides, like a pincushion.

  “What did you do?” I gasp. And the last remnant of my dad is gone.

  Jasper holds out his thumb, and the scarf is full of holes, just like the story Mom told me about my dad: about how he disappeared when I was a toddler, and how she looked for him for years, but it was like he had never existed. It seemed like his name, and everything else about him, had been erased, she told me on one of the rare occasions she talked about him. When Mom eventually gave up, she finally admitted to herself that the truth wasn’t that mysterious; Dad just didn’t want to be found.

  When Jasper pulls my silk scarf off his hand, his thumb is all in one piece, not injured at all. But my scarf didn’t fare so well; it is full of holes.

  I glance at my holey scarf, and sadness starts to build up in me. Why is it such a secret? Don’t I deserve to know who my father is? I look up into Jasper’s grinning face, as if he’s just done the best trick in the world, and my sadness hardens into anger.

  “Why did you do that?” I ask icily.

  But Jasper just shakes my holey scarf three times and hands it to me. It is back in one piece; the holes are gone.

  “Okay . . . so how did you do that?”

  “Magician’s Oath,” he reminds me, as Indigo swings the staff room door open.

  The top button of Indigo’s shirt is undone, and his tie is skewed across his chest at a strange angle.

  “Jasper,” Indigo says, walking into the room and plucking a carrot, dotted with pin holes, out of Jasper’s sleeve. “If you’re done with your parlor tricks, let’s get some real work done.”

  My eyes follow the carrot in Indigo’s hand, and then land back on Jasper.

  He shrugs and grins. “You didn’t think I’d pierce my thumb, did you?”

  “And the scarf?” I ask, as he stands up to follow Indigo out of the room.

  Jasper turns around and throws a ragged white napkin at me, and it lands on the ground. I can see the green linoleum floor through its holes.

  Mom is still sitting in the exact same place at the kitchen table, grading papers, as she was when I left for work this morning. It seems like that’s all she does every year in early May. Even though she has three teacher’s assistants to help her, she insists on editing her students’ final papers herself.

  “Hey, Cal,” Mom says. “Mind ordering dinner?”

  “Mission accepted,” I say. “Hand me those menus, will you?”

  Without looking up from her grading, Mom pushes the take-out menus toward me with the end of her pen. I notice her pen’s all chewed up, like a rabid dog attacked it.

  I reach over and grab the red-and-black Japanese food menu out of the stack.

  “Noodle bowls okay?” I ask, and she nods, so I hitch my backpack over my shoulder and head upstairs with the menu in my hand. I pull out my phone and dial the number, and it rings several times before a woman answers it.

  “Kon’nichiwa, Sushi House. What’s your order?”

  I walk into my bedroom and drop my backpack on the floor. “Delivery please. Two tofu noodle bowls, one vegetable tempura, and a side of cheese wontons,” I add, in case Richard gets home in time to join us. Richard loves wontons.

  “Forty-five minute,” the woman says, and the line goes dead.

  I lean out of my bedroom door and grab onto the stairwell’s wooden banister. “Forty-five minutes!” I call down to Mom. “Be down soon!”

  I hear a mumble in return from Mom, so I know she’s deep into her papers.

  I unlock the window, open it all the way, and edge my way out onto the fire escape. When the cool night air hits me, I automatically relax, barely even noticing the cars speeding down Fell Street below me. I gently close the window behind me and lean back against the glass. Above me, the sky is darkening, and I can only see a tiny sliver of moon in the sky. Perfect. Seven o’clock on the dot.

  Across the alley to the right, a television plays the evening news out my neighbor’s open window, spitting blue light into the dark sky. “It launched from Cape Canaveral at six this morning to a small but eager crowd,” the reporter says. I lean forward and peer through the window into my neighbor’s kitchen, at the TV sitting on the counter top. The screen shows a picture of a tiny puff of white high up in the sky. “The weather was perfect for launching—”

  I hear the creak of a wooden shingle. I get to my feet, wrap my hands tightly around the fire escape, and climb the few remaining steps up to the roof. On the other side, Richard is carefully sitting down on the steeper part of the roof. I duck down and watch him get a good grip on the shingles, trying to figure out what he’s doing out here.

  When Richard looks like he’s not going to plunge to his death, I call out, “What are you watching?”

  Richard looks over and grins at me shyly. He points toward the house to the left of ours, where there’s a TV playing a baseball game in an empty family room. “My ballgame,” he says. “You?”

  “The news.”

  Richard grimaces. “Depressing.”

  “You’re supposed to say ‘educational.’”

  Richard laughs. “Seventh inning,” he nods to the screen. “What’s happening over there?”

  “Murder, airplane crashes, shark attacks,” I count off on my fingers. The news is the same every day; I don’t have to watch it anymore to know what happens. “And today, some celebrity probably entered rehab. Shocker.”

  “Almost as predictable as baseball,” he says.

  “Nothing’s as predictable as a bunch of boys playing with a ball,” I say, now standing on the last step of the fire escape to see him better. In the near-dark, he’s a silhouette of a man with a fading orange sky behind him. “What are you doing out here?”

  “Same
thing you’re doing,” he says. “Rotting my brain.”

  I turn back to the TV. The news has moved on to a story that Colin would love, about telescopes and other important scientific discoveries. “The objective in a refracting telescope is to bend light, which causes parallel light rays to converge at a focal point,” the reporter says. My neighbor walks into her kitchen and starts chopping onions on the counter, briefly blocking my view of the TV.

  “Wanna watch with me?” Richard asks. “Close game.”

  I shake my head. I prefer almost anything to sports. “I think I’ll stick with death and destruction.”

  “Suit yourself,” he replies.

  My neighbor moves over to the sink, and I can see the TV again. “Finnegan Bishop, known in the hacking community as Bishop Finn, pleaded guilty today after breaking into NASA’s databank to name a star after his mother.” A picture of a guy with a red beard and large circular glasses appears on the screen. “The situation has weakened NASA’s online security system even more, much to the concern of—” The TV goes black, and my neighbor walks out of the kitchen.

  “Hey, Richard—” I say, but when I turn, I see that no one’s up here with me anymore. I climb to my feet and cross the roof on shaky legs to peer over the edge. From my neighbor’s TV, I hear the song “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” I watch the people singing along on the screen, mostly dads and their kids, and I realize that maybe that’s what baseball is all about. Is that what Richard was trying to say to me when he asked me to watch baseball with him? The same thing he’s been quietly saying with all the magazines he’s brought me from the station: that he loves me? Even if it means watching sports, maybe next time I’ll accept.

  CHAPTER NINE

  As Indigo counts down from ten, my eyes keep drifting closed, and I have to pinch my arm again to wake myself up. I know that I shouldn’t have stayed up talking to Charlie on the phone past midnight—especially on a Monday—but time flew by with neither of us noticing it. With as long as we’ve been together, you’d think we have nothing left to say, and sometimes that’s true. But usually, we can talk all night without ever getting bored, or in my case, without ever telling the truth.