Extraordinary Lies

by Jennifer Alsever

  “A gift.” I looked up, blinking slowly. Something unfamiliar unlocked inside me, a boldness I’d never displayed at school, at home, anywhere. “Okay. If I do have a gift, then you just want to manipulate it.”

  Cord stood silent next to me and shifted his weight between his feet. I turned away from her, opened the narrow glass door and pulled the neck of a bottle from the vertical line of circular openings. I popped the lid off with the machine’s bottle opener and took a long drink of the soda. Please go away.

  She didn’t.

  “Dear, what’re you so afraid of?” She squeezed her lips into contrived concern. Fake. She, just like everyone else, wanted something from me.

  Sandra Evanston had been the first—back in third grade. When she found out I was wealthy, she started inviting herself over just so she could play in my playhouse with real plumbing. Then there were the countless friends and boyfriends who conveniently forgot their wallets when we went to dinner, to the carnival, to the theater. The friends who wanted to ride on our boat and drive Father’s car, who cozied up to me right before a trip to the Bahamas, dropping hints of how they’d never been. This time, with Dr. Carrillo, it wasn’t money. But it felt the same.

  Dr. Carrillo limped away, pushing the glass door to leave the building. The inquisition was off. Thank God.

  Henry came around the corner, flashing a quick smile to me and Cord.

  “How you doing?” Cord asked him.

  Henry slowed his pace.

  “I hear you was doing mind-blowing stuff in the Dungeon,” Cord said.

  “I’m green.” Henry tried for bashful.

  That’s not true. I’d seen in the lab how he moved objects with his mind. He was the most dangerous among us.

  “It’ll take time and practice,” Cord said.

  “Who were you talking to, Henry?” I pointed at the phone booth. “On the phone.”

  He feigned confusion. “Damn. Time. Gotta go,” he said, glancing at his watch. With a quick wave, he turned and practically sprinted out the front door.

  “Wow, that guy’s hot and cold, eh?” Cord slipped a coin into the machine. “He was all over you a few days ago. Then after Katerina’s house, bam, he’s down in the lab all the time.”

  “I guess so.” The confirmation that Henry had indeed been glued to my side made my skin crawl, and in truth, I was pretty relieved he’d found other interests. But I worried what those new interests were.

  “I try,” he said, shaking his head. “But that guy don’t sit with me right. I had a dream about him and got a bad vibe.” He pulled a soda bottle from the machine.

  I looked at him. “Really? What’d you dream about?”

  “I don’t got specifics. Just a feeling. Dark. Just dark.”

  I felt that way about Henry too, but I couldn’t identify exactly what it was.

  “Sometimes, I dream about people and I only get a feeling,” he said. “The energy… it shows…”

  “Manifests itself?” I asked.

  “Yeah, it shows up bigger, like a picture. Sometimes I even taste or hear it.”

  I nodded.

  “My seventh-grade teacher? She was the taste of sweet peach. But my neighbor—beautiful lady with hair like … anyway—she gives me the taste of moldy bread. Henry? That dream gave me the feeling like I was going down to a dark basement at night. Cold and spooky, and I didn’t know what I was gonna find.”

  If that were the case, I was extra glad that Henry had found something else to focus on. I only wished my own “gift” was a better sense of people, an ability to see inside them and see beyond their beauty or charm. Instead, I just broke things when I was mad. I wondered for a brief moment … if I did the testing, would I discover more about my abilities? Have control over my life?

  Cord followed me up the stairs, and our clanging footsteps echoed in the concrete stairwell. “Did I tell you about my test?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “I helped the cops! I find this getaway car in a bank robbery. Crazy, man.”

  He paused.

  “But I got other stuff wrong.”

  “Oh?”

  “I go tell Missus Carrillo that hostages are alive,” he said. “But a couple of them got killed in that robbery.” His pace and voice slowed, as if he had been the one to kill them. “I was dead wrong.”

  Everyone is wrong, Cord. Half the time, I don’t believe myself.

  “Oh,” I said, nonplussed.

  On a few stairs above me, Cord paused with his hand on the railing. He looked at me intently, more closely than anyone there had yet. He paused and then stammered, “Not to be mean, but I don’t get you.”

  I stopped and looked at him. After a long pause that I hoped telegraphed my irritation, I took the last few steps, ready to ignore him the rest of the way to my room.

  “Why ain’t you doing the experiments?” he asked, huffing as he came to the last tread of steps. “You got all the way here, right? What’s the problem?”

  My skin felt prickly, like a defensive shield. “They’re just using you.” I stopped at the door to our hall and turned to him. “Why are you doing the experiments?”

  “Cash. Ain’t that why we’re all here? My parents. My family. Plus, I’m shooting for a job as psychic soldier,” he said.

  “I don’t care about the money,” I said softly, squeezing past him and opening the door for myself.

  “But you could help science.” His voice trailed behind me as I moved down the hallway to my room.

  This has nothing to do with science, and everything to do with survival. A memory of Aunt Sabrina surfaced in my mind: she was blowing bubbles for us kids by the pond, giggling and pointing at the iridescent balls floating through the air. “Get them!” she had said. We’d chase them everywhere, clapping to smash them. I remembered how I had always wanted to touch her skin, so smooth and tight over her cheekbones, so much prettier than anyone else in the family. I had felt like I’d swallowed stones when Father explained that Aunt Sabrina was never coming home. Later I heard Mother playing bridge with her Junior League friends, gossiping about how her sister had been locked up because she had “the Devil’s touch.”

  I kept walking down the hall as I answered Cord behind me. “I don’t have abilities,” I said. “I’m going home soon. Any day now.”

  “America needs us.” He jogged to catch up to me. “You got skills. You know it. I feel it.”

  He paused and after a few more quiet strides, he continued. “You got a duty to help the country.”

  I frowned and mumbled. “Duty?”

  “Yeah. There’s money from the CIA. For us. To study us.”

  “Why do you keep saying that?” I stood at my door and put a hand on my hip.

  “’Cuz they say stuff. I bet they’re gonna train us to do things. To mess up ballistic missile equipment. Mind control. Look at secret documents from the enemy. Rescue prisoners of war. Find Vietcong tunnels. That kind of stuff.”

  It dawned on me then: I had no idea what we were doing there. Dr. Strong said it was for academic study, and I couldn’t imagine real generals relying on a bunch of faraway psychic teenagers to make military decisions. I rolled my eyes and looked at the floor. “Yeah, right. Like Vietnam needs any more controversy.”

  “It ain’t just ’Nam. It’s all bigger than that,” Cord said.

  The lock on my door unlatched, and I prepared to enter my tomb of a room. I wanted to bury myself in books.

  “The Commies. The Soviets wanna blow us up.”

  He was so paranoid. I studied his lump of dark hair, wondering how his mind worked behind his skull.

  “It’s true. I got a premonition. A dream about this book that’s supposed to be out in a couple years. Watched the guy write it in my dream.”

  “Great.” There was no way to fact-check him on this. I couldn’t wait two years to find out he was right. Plus, I had no idea what he was talking about.

  “It’s gonna be called The Gulag Archipelago. Written
by a guy, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and it shows all the bad stuff the Russians are doing over there.”

  The door knob felt smooth in my hand, and I so badly wanted to twist it and leave him.

  “You know they send people to this prison for no reason in Russia? Military guys just come in the middle of the night, and bam, take them away. The government. Put them on this train and take them to this place. An archipelago?”

  I noticed the tiny bits of crumbs tucked along the carpet and floorboard. Gross.

  Cord kept talking. “Yeah, that’s what it was. In the middle of the north pole. It’s some prison for maltidos. People stay there half their lives, if not more! The Russians listen to everything—you say something nobody likes and bam, you’re arrested.”

  “That’s in a book.”

  “Yep.”

  “You just … predicted that.”

  “I know it’s true. We don’t know how lucky we got it. People don’t know the KGB gets into all these governments. Africa and South America. Lots.”

  “The KGB?”

  “Yeah. They’re the Soviet’s secret spy group.”

  “Ahh,” I said, nodding and gazing at my door longingly.

  “I mean, really, that was prolly why I came here. Protecting freedom. The Russians—they’re bad news.”

  Charley bounded out of her room. “I want a sandwich.”

  “Food? You don’t think about nothing else?” Cord asked.

  She shrugged. “My parents own a diner.”

  “See you guys later,” I mumbled, hiding in my hair. If Aunt Sabrina had really been taken someplace like SRI, and everyone said she went crazy, then maybe this was a place for unstable people. Maybe I had simply imagined what happened with Steve and Kristi. Maybe we weren’t being tested, but contained, treated. I glanced at Cord and Charley. Do crazy people question their sanity?

  “I gotta eat,” Charley said.

  “Wait a sec,” Cord said. “We got no rules. How ’bout we get on the bus again and get outta here. Get some grub?”

  Charley slung an arm over his shoulder. “I like you better by the minute, Cord.” He beamed and the compliment took root inside him, spreading across his lips and lifting his shoulders.

  I paused for a moment. “I’m in.”

  15

  Julia

  I spotted the door to a little restaurant up a narrow stairwell. I remember Aunt Sabrina’s advice: The sign of good Chinese food is actually eating where the Chinese eat, not the tourists.

  Inside, the pungent scent of garlic and soy sauce welcomed us. Ornate golden dragons and woven vines and flowers covered the walls and a Chinese man clad in a suit and tie bent his head deeply to us at the entrance. At a corner table, a couple argued loudly about politics.

  “Thelma.” A man with a handlebar mustache leaned across the table while his friend raised her voice over his.

  “It’s the domino theory,” she said.

  “That’s malarkey.”

  “—if one more country falls to Communism, then we’re all at risk! We lose to the Russians.”

  “That’s a crutch!” He wiped his mouth.

  “No, no, no. No, it isn’t!”

  “We’re just supporting a corrupt dictatorship in Saigon,” he said.

  When the waitress asked them to quiet down, relief set in. I swore confrontation made me break out in hives.

  From our table, we could see people on the street below moving in herds through the rain and ducking beneath green and red awnings with Chinese lettering. Charley’s hair, like mine, was wet from the rain, and a few strands stuck to her cheek. She put her chin on her hand and peered out the window. She had no idea how beautiful she was. I watched Cord pause to admire her, a softness to his face. Is he a liar like Steve? If I’m psychic, why am I such a poor judge of character?

  Amid the clinking of dishes and the loud argument behind us, Cord told us stories about Red Cliff and his big family and home-made la torta tres leches. How he never locked his house. How his mom was just a girl, eighteen, when he was born. How every child in town knew they’d grow old enough to join the row of dirty miners who trudged down the dusty red road at the end of each weekday.

  I watched him, the way he squinted his eyes and nodded with his whole body when he talked, the way his face lit up when he talked about his large, tight-knit family and that tiny, mountain community.

  I only knew of people like myself. Of school uniforms with tall knee socks, of European birthday trips and piano lessons where you were forced to sit up tall and of teachers who smacked your knuckles with rulers. Of mothers who wore heels all day, reeked of expensive perfume, and bragged about the menus of charity dinners. Of fathers who sat in big leather chairs in smoke-filled rooms after dinner. I knew only of houses with wide, endless staircases and so many empty rooms they weren’t even real homes. Just houses. Structures. They were cold vaults filled with secrets and shrouded in forced silence. My own reality suddenly felt so much hollower than I’d ever before recognized.

  Cord kept talking, telling us stories of how the winter snow in the mountains would nearly cover his entire bedroom window and how he and his friend Sweater once ran naked on the highway. I surprised myself by sharing about Victoria’s nude gallop across our grass—but left out that it was a compound that probably matched Red Cliff in size.

  After a while, Charley leaned her chest against the table and sucked the straw in her water glass. “I didn’t tell you. They want us to do something called remote viewing.”

  She explained how we would be trained to get inside a metal cage to go someplace with our minds. “They say it’s an out-of-body experience,” she said.

  Out-of-body experience? Like Carol? No thank you. Like a radar, I surveyed the sparse restaurant for people listening to us. Until now, I never spoke about this kind of stuff, especially in public. But of course, this wasn’t Lake Forest. I was practically invisible in Chinatown, amid a flood of people—another body passing through these streets. The idea of anonymity was terrifying and invigorating all the same.

  Charley told us about her last experiment with that cage, in which Dr. Carrillo had her touch a picture and find out information.

  “You work on getting the bank robbers?” Cord asked.

  “No,” she said. “It was a picture of a cabin in the mountains, but after touching it, I got all this weird shit about a creepy underground military base. It must’ve been below the cabin or near it.”

  “Military?” I asked, recalling Cord’s assertion about the CIA's involvement in the study.

  “Yeah,” Charley said. Something rippled through her, a shudder almost.

  She paused for a moment and looked at the drizzle running down the window like hundreds of silver worms.

  “Dr. Carrillo didn’t even know where I was—until she opened an envelope at the end of the session. It was just a test.” She looked out the window, and her face shifted. Lips pinched together. There was something she wasn’t telling us. Something important. I knew this. Cord knew this. For God’s sake, we had some sort of psychic sense.

  After a minute, Cord spoke up. “You hear that Missus Monson lives in the dorms?”

  “I figured she lived in the Dungeon.” Charley chuckled. “She’s probably never even seen daylight.”

  “Waxy skin,” I said with a smile.

  “Her hair kind of looks like that stuff we clean with… Steel wool!” Cord said.

  We laughed. The waitress arrived and placed a plate in front of me. I leaned back and took in the sweet scent of the mound of noodles and chunks of chicken, but waited to take a bite until we were all served.

  Charley held up her chopsticks, perplexed. “What do we do with these things?”

  I coached her on how to use the sticks, the two of us giggling as she dropped most of her food on her lap. Cord watched, amused, and then ate with a fork.

  Charley talked about how she used to be shy when she was little. I almost laughed at this. Her description of hiding under
the table at the diner didn’t fit what I knew to be true about being shy.

  Shy was when kids screamed and raced and played around you, riding bikes and playing tag, but you felt as if your feet had roots and you couldn’t move. Shy was when you were being interviewed for a private school, and your answers swam between your ears but the only word that came out of your mouth was, Yes, sure. Shy was when a group of girls came to your house to pet your silken bedspread and try on your designer dresses, but you couldn’t get the words out to tell them no. The word became jagged and painful, wedged in your throat, and you watched them with tears in your eyes, as they left with your treasures in hand, “just borrowing” them for a few days.

  Or maybe that was just being weak. Spineless.

  I could be different in San Francisco with these people, I decided. I felt different in this restaurant with these two.

  After a couple successful bites with the sticks, Charley pointed a chopstick at me. “Forget about what happened to me with that cabin photo, Julia. You gotta do the testing. You’re gonna do it too, right?”

  I looked at my bowl of noodles. If only she knew agreeing to the testing would mean stepping onto a trap door. And I had no idea what was beneath it.

  After dinner, we toured Chinatown’s colorful and crowded streets, ducking out of the drizzle and into shops, where we browsed wooden flutes and decorative fans and stone carvings and straw hats.

  While Cord blazed ahead, Charley and I talked about where we were from. We talked about the cityscapes of Chicago and Indianapolis, and the sound of cicadas in the summer and catching fireflies. Saturday morning cartoons and drinking Tang—Charley's in cartoon glassware. We discovered we both loved orange Creamsicles and the Rolling Stones. We’d found some mutual connection, a bridge with a common view. It was so strange, because clearly, we were from such different worlds.

  Inside one store, Charley tried on a beautiful red qipao dress like those worn centuries ago in China. I had seen something similar when my family toured the country when I was seven.

  I held up a silk fan with pink flowers, admiring the way the fan spread like delicate wings, while Charley struck up a quiet conversation with the shop owner. I noticed how she touched the woman’s hand and, at one point, whispered in her ear. The woman’s face gaped with surprise and a trace of worry flashed across her creamy complexion.