Extraordinary Lies

by Jennifer Alsever

  “Same time, she wants you to go on and be free.”

  My gaze finally fell on Minnie again. She looked directly at me. Long cow eyelashes. “She all spun up and worried ’bout you. All about choices.”

  I looked away, blinking back the tears.

  Minnie looked at the ceiling, as if names were markered up there. “Ruby. Danny V. and Pete Spinuzzi. The register at the diner. Uh-huh, she knows you tend to go whole hog.”

  Minnie and I locked eyes for a long moment. My heart spun in circles. My sister knew that Ruby and I smoked when I couldn’t deal with life. She knew about me and Danny and how he cheated on his girlfriend with me all the time. She knew about Pete, and how we broke into school to steal the math tests so I could graduate. She knew I stole from the diner’s register so I could get her new shoes. Of course she did.

  I couldn’t swallow. So this was how my clients felt when I pried into their lives. When I told them things that only they knew. Things they thought were private.

  “I thought this was supposed to be about her.”

  “Sweetie, she done seen way too much. She’s just a li’l girl.”

  I hated that she called me sweetie. I nodded quickly, scooted my chair back.

  “Made her grow up real fast.”

  Abruptly, I reached across the table and snatched my picture back. With trembling hands, I fumbled with the button on my purse before cramming the paper inside. My cheeks felt hot, and I could feel Henry’s curiosity and interest. Our eyes met, and I could barely breathe as a crooked, sexy smile crept across his face.

  I turned to Minnie, faking a poised, nonchalant air. “So, pretty cool, Minnie. I bet you freak a lot of people out with that little trick.”

  “It ain’t no trick. You should know,” she said, taking a drink of water and not taking her gaze off me.

  Now this entire table knew that I was a giant screwup. That I had a propensity for disaster. Great. First impressions. “Lovely,” I said under my breath, glancing at Cord.

  His eyes were warm and he faintly shook his head.

  “Now all you guys think…”

  “Naw,” he said.

  “I’m freaky-deaky,” I said.

  “We’re all that way, chica,” he said.

  “Wait, is that the girl who floated out of her body? Carol? In the lab?” Julia asked, pointing out the window.

  The whoop whoop sound of a siren interrupted the conversation. Outside the window, red and blue lights flashed. Samuel, who was closest, stood and gazed out the window.

  “Ambulance,” he said. “Right outside the dormitory.”

  4

  Charley

  Ruby was pretty ticked off when she answered the phone the next morning. “I can’t talk long,” she said.

  I knew there wouldn’t be enough time to call Cindy later, because Dr. Carrillo informed us that we were going to “get down to business” with all her experiments. I hated calling collect, and I had hoped Ruby would accept the charges. She had, although she exhaled loud and long, and it took a second for her to tell the operator to put the call through.

  I spoke fast to hurry the call. “I just wanted to make sure Cindy was alright. Did you check on her?”

  Ruby didn’t answer.

  “Ruby, you didn’t check on Cindy, did you?” My chest tightened.

  “Yeah, I did.”

  “And?”

  She paused. “Sorry, watching Jeopardy!”

  And she was probably getting the questions wrong, no doubt.

  “So…?” I asked.

  “She was fine, Chars. Popped in last night and she was just listening to records.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know, like ten.”

  “Were my parents home?”

  “No, they were at some party.”

  Of course, they were. They were probably doing coke off the tables again. You’d think Mom would be a toothpick because of the drugs, but she liked booze and pie more than coke.

  “Seriously. She’s fine. How are things in Cali?”

  “Weird.”

  “I’m sure.”

  “But at least I’m not the only weirdo.”

  “That’s a first.”

  “I’m supposed to be tested today.”

  “They don’t have to test you. It’s the real deal.”

  “No, like, they want to know how it works.” I gazed at the clock. “Speaking of which, I gotta go.”

  “Yeah, cool. See you.”

  “Ruby?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks.”

  “No prob.”

  “And don’t forget about her?” That was the thing. I knew she would.

  “Yup.”

  I hung up and ran down the stairs, then bolted out of the building and across the lawn to the SRI building. Dr. Carrillo was waiting for all of us in the basement, and she frowned when I walked in, looking at her watch.

  “Where’s Julia?” she asked, scanning our faces.

  We all looked at each other. For a bunch of psychics, we were pretty clueless. Maybe she was sick?

  Cord, Samuel, Henry, Minnie, Katerina, and I followed Dr. Carrillo as she limped along the long tunnel of the basement. The low light, gray walls, and clip-clopping of our feet gave an eerie vibe to the place, and it felt as if we were walking deeper and deeper into a burrow in the earth.

  “There’s no way you can be fraudulent here,” Dr. Carrillo said. “We will do a fail-safe psychokinesis experiment,” she said, stopping at a door marked with yellow earthquake supports. “I’ve got some of Stanford’s best physicists on board, and one of them, Dr. Erik Musser—he runs the high-energy physics lab—is giving me access to a superconducting shielded magnetometer.”

  I heard only technical jargon, but we all murmured as if we knew exactly what she was talking about. Dr. Carrillo launched into some sort of physics lecture about how this fancy machine measured something called quarks, or subatomic particles.

  “It is a subnuclear constitute of nuclear particles, such as protons. But they’re not yet isolated outside of the nucleus.” She waved her hands enthusiastically and explained that the quark detector was a very sensitive machine that could see decay in the magnetic field.

  All of us huddled inside the small room, unsure of what would come next. The room smelled like bleach and its concrete walls were painted mint green. A few light bulbs hung overhead. Two men and two women stood around a machine that looked similar to a heart-rate monitor or a lie detector. An electric pen drew a steady line on a ream of paper.

  “That’s a chart recorder that can pick up any kind of quark, any kind of disturbance to the magnetometer, which has two layers of superconducting material. Between them sits a thin layer of non-superconducting material.”

  Dr. Carrillo pushed up her thick glasses and pointed at Samuel. “You. You’re first. You mentioned that you have had experiences…” She waved her hand in the air, inviting him to finish her sentence.

  He nodded solemnly. “Yes, that’s right.” He cleared his throat, stood up straight. “My watches stop on my wrist. Streetlights go out when I walk past them. Light bulbs burst when I touch lamps—”

  “Right. Right.” She was evidently bored with his stories. “The rest of you. Out. You can watch from the other room. Samuel. You sit.” She pointed at a stool.

  We filed out of the room. I was already irritated with Dr. Carrillo’s attitude—abrupt and cold. She treated us like we were truly lab monkeys. Cord’s raised eyebrows told me he thought the same thing. I rolled my eyes.

  Out in the hallway, we flicked the switch to hear their conversation and watched through the glass window. I was partially relieved that I wasn’t on display there. What would happen if I failed? Would she call me a fake and send me home?

  “Samuel, I want you to do whatever you do to interrupt the machine. The magnetometer.”

  He spun around the room, surely looking for this machine.

  “Where is it, then?” Samuel asked.<
br />
  “What?” Dr. Carrillo asked.

  “The magnetometer.” He put his hands on his hips.

  “It’s five feet below us—buried in concrete.” She pointed at the floor.

  “Excuse me?” Samuel looked like he was on fire. “Did you intend for me to fail?”

  Something along those lines had occurred to me too. Maybe she was weeding us out and only testing the best.

  “How could I possibly affect something I can’t even see? Let alone something set five feet below in concrete?” Samuel folded his arms over his chest. God, how I appreciated his arrogance now.

  “Give her hell, Sammy,” Minnie whispered. We giggled.

  “You’re setting me up to fail,” he said.

  “No, we want to see your capabilities.” She mirrored his irritation.

  Samuel glanced at the faces of the people standing by the recorder. Dr. Monson practically sneered at him.

  “Those are PhD students and postdocs,” Dr. Carrillo said. “They will watch.

  “And—” he said.

  “The pen on the chart recorder hasn’t been disturbed for the last four hours. We want to know the answer to the question: Can human beings affect the same physical energy as inanimate objects and machines? It would be quite the experiment, worth watching, if so. You see?”

  “I suppose.” Samuel sat on the stool with knees together, hands on his thighs.

  “Come on now, you can do it,” Minnie whispered. She turned to me. She smelled good, like baby powder. “That Dr. Carrillo could even piss off the pope.”

  “Do your thing now.” Dr. Carrillo swirled her hand in the air and backed away to stand by the students and the recorder.

  He shrugged and gazed at the concrete floor. “I’ll try.”

  His shoulders tensed for a moment, and I felt his anxiety. Dr. Carrillo was a tiger. Her whole career rested on us, really. She was a real scientist, a laser physicist, and she had told us she planned to publish in all these legit publications that had really long names. She had told us the day before on our tour that she didn’t want her colleagues to think she’d gone off the deep end studying parapsychology. She was studying physics. Trying to understand us.

  Dr. Carrillo twisted her lips and looked at her watch.

  “Just listen to your heart,” Minnie said.

  “A box.” Samuel sat up straight. “I understand there is a metal box with wires extending from it. Is there something on it called a Josephson junction?”

  Dr. Carrillo looked at him warily, turning her head sideways. The answer spun slowly from her mouth. “Yes.”

  Samuel closed his eyes and wiggled his shoulders in a swaying dance. “I see it in my mind’s eye. It feels much like waking up and remembering a vague dream.” Amazing! Confidence seemed to lift his spine a couple inches.

  “Jesus Christ!” A tall scientist with the twisty mustache threw his arms in the air.

  The students hovered over the recorder, and surprise swelled on their faces.

  They spoke hurriedly among themselves.

  “Is that an effect?” the frizzy-haired Dr. Monson asked.

  “How the—” said one student.

  “Would you do that again?” Dr. Carrillo asked, looking up at Samuel.

  “Do what? What happened?” he asked.

  “The pen moved.”

  We breathed again as one in the hallway, cheering and grinning. I let out a whoop and turned around to salute Henry. He looked right through me.

  I turned back around to watch again.

  Inside the lab, Dr. Carrillo tore off the paper from the machine and brought it to Samuel. “Before you came in here, the chart recorder had no interruptions. None. Just oscillating wavy lines. Now, look.” She held up the paper, which showed a gap in the pen-lines and then a sharp spike before going back to normal.

  “Whoa,” I whispered, still slightly bothered by Henry’s lack of enthusiasm.

  “This is huge. He could for sure…” one of the students muttered.

  “Disrupt any kind of machine,” another said.

  Dr. Carrillo radiated warmth. “You, my dear boy, are my miracle.”

  5

  Julia

  The heavy knock rattled the door. I opened it to find Dr. Carrillo standing outside in the hallway, hands on hips. “You’re late. You were due to arrive at the lab at eight o’clock. It’s ten.”

  I put on an outfit Mother bought for me in Chicago a couple weeks earlier and followed Dr. Carrillo to SRI, across the campus. It took a long time, and my face felt damp with sweat.

  Downstairs, I stood in the hallway watching Henry inside a nearby lab, while Dr. Carrillo set up my experiment.

  On the table in front of Henry sat a series of test tubes standing upright in a plastic holder, a jar with a green insect, a pile of paperclips, and pieces of torn up paper. I pressed the button in the window to hear Dr. Monson talk to him. “You’re to place these small pieces of paper, this grasshopper, and these paperclips into these sealed test tubes without touching them.”

  Henry leaned back in his chair and gave a smoldering nod that made Dr. Monson respond with nervous, flirtatious laughter. Gross. This guy was not an amateur. He reminded me of Kaa the Snake from the Jungle Book movie.

  He gazed at the table, relaxed as if he were reading a novel, and never moved his hands. Over the next couple minutes, I watched objects flicker on the table as if they were holograms, and then, one by one, they disintegrated and reappeared inside each of the test tubes. My breath caught in my chest. He might be the most powerful of us all.

  “Julia. It’s time.” Dr. Carrillo stood just a couple inches away, reeking of coffee breath. I followed her to the lab.

  Various kinds of equipment filled the room. White machines the size of the expensive, newfangled microwave ovens in all of the Cavanaugh kitchens. On a tall table sat a machine with a circular fan that had red, yellow, and blue wires extending from it. Pipes led to a yellow pole and a black box with knobs like a radio.

  Chills reached across my skin, gently tickling my neck, crawling and circling and giving me goosebumps. Did they have to make us feel like science experiments?

  “What happened last night? With the emergency vehicles that were here?” I asked.

  Dr. Carrillo looked like someone had just hit her in the face with a fly swatter. She blinked quickly a couple times before answering. “That was Carol. She had a heart attack.”

  My feet slowed and I put my hand over my chest, as if I could feel my own blood stutter in my veins. “A heart attack?” She’s only a teenager.

  She sped up her pace again, nodding quickly, but her face looked strained and shaken. “Yes.”

  “Is she okay?” I asked.

  “For now.”

  I tried to swallow while Dr. Carrillo hobbled around the room like a clunky hummingbird.

  She pointed to a chair in the middle of the room. “I understand you can disrupt objects. We want to know if this is true of electronics. It’s called technopathy, or energy manipulation.”

  “What’s this equipment?”

  Dr. Carrillo didn’t respond. Instead she turned on dials and switches, and the electronics belched, exhaled, and coughed.

  “Um… Dr. Carrillo? What’s this…”

  “We are testing high-penetrating, nonionizing electromagnetic emissions from humans. It’s physics. Things you wouldn’t understand.”

  Dr. Carrillo’s jaw clenched, and she cleared her throat. Which other rights did they sign away? Answers? Respect?

  I didn't intend on showing her I was psychic; I would show her I didn’t belong here. Yet still, the thought of resisting her authority made my throat tighten.

  “Oh. You mean like quantum entanglement?”

  “Yes!” Dr. Carrillo lit up, and she looked at me in an entirely different way. Her eyes twinkled and it was as if I were suddenly elevated to human status. It unlocked a tiny part of me that wanted to please her.

  But really, I couldn’t go much furthe
r than that. I just remembered that word from physics class and recalled that Einstein called quantum entanglement spooky action at a distance. That’s why it made sense to me.

  She went on about quantum entanglement, and I only half heard her talking.

  “—pairs or groups of particles interact or are shared.”

  Then, “The quantum state of each particle can’t be described independently of the state of others.”

  Instead of interacting, I gazed at a machine that looked like an AM/FM radio about the size of a loaf of bread. A series of clear tubes extended from the back side. What in the heck is that for?

  “Sit.” Dr. Carrillo pointed, jabbing her finger down at a wooden chair. I sat slowly, clenching the sides of my polyester pants with my fists. “Please,” she added hastily. “I would like you to disrupt the electromagnetic waves of this equipment.”

  Dr. Carrillo took three steps toward me and brushed my hands with what looked like a wet paintbrush. It stung and smelled like alcohol—and made my skin crawl. “What’s this for?”

  She left me alone in the loud whirring room, and my heart thumped on my breastbone. I had the urge to let down my hair and cover my face with it. I wanted to run.

  Instead I sat quietly, waiting. After a moment, Dr. Carrillo appeared in a small window— much like the one that opened up into the other laboratory where we watched Carol the previous day. She gave a thumbs-up and a smile that made her look like a horse.

  I stared at her. I was not a fighter or a screamer. But the one thing I could do was nothing. I simply wasn’t going to make any machine go berserk. In fact, there was no way at all I would do anything. I would sit calmly, watch Dr. Carrillo lose it, and eventually she’d send me back to campus to my room. Then she’d send me home. She had to. I’d prove that I was of no use to her research. Grandfather and Mother would lose.

  I craned my head back to look up at the small dots on the ceiling. I made strained faces. Oh oh, I was trying so hard.

  After a couple of minutes Dr. Carrillo came back into the room, clearly disappointed. “Now, Julia. What is it that causes you to have these episodes?”