Near + Far

by Cat Rambo

  She knew all that. He'd explained it to her several times. But she nodded, smiled and waved goodbye to him as he passed through the hallway. He never looked back at her. She stood there with her glassy smile, watching him go until he was gone. She settled into the orchid-scented waiting room with her paperback.

  Trying to read was a futile enterprise, though. The words crawled and slithered along the page like recalcitrant insects, persistently worming outside of meaning. She looked at the page. Three chapters in and she still had no idea what was happening. She didn't want to read any further. A traditional love story might make her cry. She did that a lot nowadays.

  To pass the time, she walked the corridors, sniffing the changes in the air. A redolence of diapers rode the nursery floor, while a lounge on the seventh floor smelled of talcum and old age, elderly people enjoying the sunlight that streamed in through the plate glass windows framing Mount Rainier.

  Several times nurses or interns asked if they could help her, but each time she shook her head and moved on, trying to look as though she knew where she was going.

  When she stepped into the operating room theater where a cluster of medical students sat, she paused, trying to see if the body lying on the table was Emilio. She couldn't tell. Several figures blocked her sight of what might or might not be her husband. She settled into a stiff-backed chair, careful not to sit too close to anyone who might ask why she was there.

  The students ignored her, though. They chattered among themselves, gossip about Susan pursuing Lee, whose gender was unspecified. Someone said something about paying attention, and a dark-haired girl scoffed.

  "Like we haven't already seen this in first year!" she said. "This may be the only West Coast hospital installing psychic shunts, but that only gets tired after a while. It's a simple process, one that any of us could do in our sleep."

  Jamie hoped that her husband's doctor wasn't asleep. Or maybe he or she would be, and they'd make a mistake, fail to install the shunt correctly.

  Across the way, someone raised their head, looked directly at her. They wore an operating mask, but underneath that was a PsyKorps uniform. Someone watching to make sure that nothing went wrong. Someone who could read her mind already. Terror seized her. They'd tell him. They'd tell him all her doubts and fears and despairs, and he'd know she'd been lying the last few months, pretending to be happy for him.

  But they lowered their head and went back to watching what was happening. Emilio lay on the table. She could see the hawkish curve of his nose. His face looked vulnerable but serene, surrounded by white draping.

  Afterwards, he came out in a wheel chair (standard procedure, he said) pushed by a candy striper. She helped him into the passenger side of the car and drove him home.

  She couldn't help but ask, "How do you feel?"

  He was silent for a moment, his gaze turned inward, as though he was assessing each cranny and crook of his mind, to see what slithered or shone there. "I feel all right," he said finally. "My head's a little sore, but there's not as much pain as you would expect."

  "Not sensing thoughts yet?"

  "That won't happen until at least tomorrow. There's a self-dissolving seal over it, to let me come into it slowly." He frowned as though already reading her mind. "Are you okay? I know this is hard on you. You've never liked hospitals."

  How like him, to take her pain and make it something habitual and thoughtless and reflexive. "You've never liked hospitals." I've never liked things that took you away from me, she thought, you turd. Remember that woman at work that had the crush on you? You thought it was funny, but I was ready to go down and punch her out. You never understood that, never understood how much it hurt that you'd been flirting with her. Leading her on. Encouraging her. Were you secretly hoping she'd make a pass, flatter you, make you feel desirable in a way that apparently I can't? You are desired, she thought. But I want you in a way that you can't give me.

  That evening, sitting out on the deck, he said, "I need you to help me practice."

  Nice to hear you say you need me. She flinched internally. What would it be like when he could hear those thoughts? It would be a disaster. But she said, "What do you want me to do?"

  "I need to practice receiving," he said. "What I want you to do is focus your thoughts at me, make them easier to hear. Imagine it's a word, an object in the shape of a word—don't tell me what it is. Think of yourself throwing it at me."

  She thrust the word hello at him, imagined herself clubbing him over the head with it. She thought he jumped a little in his seat, but he smiled. "Hello!" he said. "That was your word, wasn't it? I heard it in my head."

  "What does that mean, that you heard it rather than saw it?" she asked, curious.

  "There are three main sensory modes," he said. "Well, two important ones and a lesser one that they haven't explored more. People tend to think in terms of what they can see or hear or feel."

  "Feel? How would that work?"

  "I'm not really sure," he said. "But when I'm thinking I hear it as a voice in my head, so it makes sense that I'd perceive your thought that way as well. Let's try again!"

  Each time she imagined herself pushing the word towards him, while shouting it somehow into the void. She tried simple words, then harder ones, fortitude and visceral. He perceived them all.

  The shunt worked.

  "What's the next step?" she asked. Despite herself, she had gotten caught up in his excitement.

  "Later, we'll try some sentences," he said. The effort was telling on him. His face was drawn and gray as a migraine sufferer's. "Let me rest a little, then we'll go out to dinner and celebrate."

  At the seafood restaurant, they ran into their friends Betta and Tim. Would Emilio tell them, she wondered. They were staunch liberals, and she'd never heard them refer to the PsyKorps with anything but disdain.

  He said nothing about it as they exchanged small talk. Finally Jamie said, "Tell them your big news, Emilio." She felt a mean thrill at the frown that crossed his face.

  "Finally found employment," he said.

  "That's great," Betta said. She had worked with him at a start-up that had gone under years before, but they'd maintained the friendship. "Where at?"

  "PsyKorps," he said.

  Betta didn't even flinch. "What, working with their IT staff? Bleeding edge tech over there."

  "In more ways than one, eh?" Tim said. "I hope they're paying well."

  "I'm becoming an agent," Emilio said. His tone was polite and distant. Jamie could see the danger signals in the crinkling of his eyes. He was furious, and growing stiffer and more polite the angrier he got.

  There was a pause as the other couple processed this.

  "Oh," Betta said. "Well, that should be interesting, shouldn't it?" She stepped a pace away from the table. "Tim, we really need to get going. Call me sometime, Jamie!" She fluttered her fingers in farewell and dismissal. Jamie suspected Betta wouldn't be returning the call.

  Emilio waited until their meal had appeared and the waiter had checked to make sure they didn't need anything else.

  "Why did you do that?" he asked.

  She bit the tip off a breadstick, contemplating him. "It didn't cross my mind that you'd try to hide it," she lied. "What's the point of that? People will find out, and if it's after you've kept it from them, they'll feel angry. Betrayed."

  "We're supposed to keep a low profile," he said. "Not draw attention to ourselves."

  "So no one will know mindreaders are walking among them," she said.

  "Is that how you feel about the Korps? Snoops and spies?"

  "It's how you used to talk about them too," she said.

  He crumpled the napkin in his hand, clutching it as though it held the temper he was struggling to contain. "Can't you just support me in this?"

  "I could have," she said. "You never offered me the chance to."

  "Do you want a divorce?"

  The answer was too complicated for her to express. No, she wanted things to g
o back to the way they had been. She didn't want this world where he could hear what she was thinking. She took all her rage and fury, hurled it at him, and was rewarded to see him pull back as though she'd punched him in the gut.

  "How did that sound?" she said with a nasty sneer. She pushed her plate towards the table's center and stood, taking up her coat and purse.

  "We have to talk about this," he said. "It can't just live in silence any more. What it means for you."

  "Talk about it?" she said. She laughed. "That's two-way communication. Wait another week and you'll be able to pull it from my mind."

  "Is that what this is all about?" he said. How could he look so stupid and bewildered? "Is there something you don't want me to know? Have you been keeping some secret from me?" She could see him chewing over the possibilities: adultery, alcoholism, some mental illness hiding in her ancestral closet.

  "Nothing like that," she said.

  "Then what?"

  She couldn't answer through the tears choking her.

  She walked out of the restaurant with Emilio scrambling to pay the bill and catch up. She didn't want to strand him, so she walked a block over to the bus stop, and left him with the car.

  If he had come after her, she had resolved that she would not go with him. He wanted to be independent of her? Well, that cut both ways.

  She rode the bus home, staring out the window and contemplating her solitary reflection. When she came in, he was sitting in the living room in the dark. The window let the moonlight in, making his face a gleaming mask, tilted slightly down as he stared at his clasped hands.

  She paused, wondering if he would call to her. He didn't. She took a shower and went to bed. An hour or two later, he crawled in beside her. She moved over, let him share the warmth of the flannel sheets. He pulled her close, cuddled her into him, let their warmth seep together.

  He rested his chin on her hair, not speaking, just brushing his fingers back and forth along her arm. It was one of his signals that he'd like sex, and she hesitated, not sure whether or not to give in. Would it solve anything? Would it make things worse?

  In the end she reached back, let her fingers stray over the curve of his side as well.

  When she came, he was staring into her eyes. She shuddered and laughed and gasped. "What?" she said.

  It struck her. He was trying to sense her emotions, trying to feel what she had felt at the moment of orgasm. An experiment, to see how much he could perceive. Indignation filled her in a flash and she pulled away.

  "What did I do?" he asked.

  She thought-screamed at him. Snoop! Spy!

  He didn't deny it, just flushed a little.

  "I want you to be happy," he said. "Now I can tell when you really are."

  She thought about pills. And booze. She bought a couple of joints and smoked them, sitting out on the deck watching the shadows among the blackberry vines. A warm haze suffused her and she let herself slip away into that fog. But when Emilio came home and found her there, all her anxieties reasserted themselves and the comfortable stupor yanked away as though she had been doused with cold water.

  He didn't say anything, just took the roach and inhaled the last smoke from it. She wondered what the PsyKorps thought of drugs, even legal ones such as booze and weed. It didn't seem as though they would help you much in envisioning a clear pool.

  Emilio stood. She could feel how much he wanted and dreaded talking to her.

  "They want me to stay there for training next week," he said.

  "Stay there? As in overnight?"

  "Yes. They want us getting to know each other and doing some team exercises."

  "Well, that should be interesting," she said.

  "Will you be all right if I go? You seem so fragile lately."

  Fragile, she thought. Smashable. But already smashed. Maybe the only way to make something non-breakable was to break it. A very Zen approach.

  "I'm not fragile," she said. If he thought her fragile, wouldn't he be in even more of a hurry to get rid of her? She'd read an article the day before that had said when people developed cancer, women had a much higher chance of their partners leaving. She'd thought another of those uncontrollable thoughts, yep, he'd be out the door like a shot.

  Could she blame him for it, really? You go through childhood thinking they're promising you your soul mate will come along eventually. And then you find yourself, after a lot of trouble and discouragement, with someone who you think might fit the bill, only to discover that they're as broken as you are. Marriages were work, but no one ever told you all that.

  She was trying to figure out where she fit into his new life, and the fear was that there was no niche for her. And he didn't care about that, or if he did, he'd factored it in and it didn't outweigh the other considerations. Nor did any of her good intentions.

  No, she couldn't stand it. And he knew that no marriage had survived this, and he'd accepted that. It wasn't that he was stupid, or overly optimistic. It was that the dissolution of the marriage, the strong and almost certain possibility that it would be destroyed, didn't matter enough to make him reconsider.

  Could he even go back, at this point? He'd signed papers. They'd given him training and installed a very expensive piece of equipment in his head. He was committed.

  The Korps hadn't even bothered to talk to her about the transition, she realized. They'd written her off without even thinking about it. She wondered if that was one of the things Emilio and the other new agents would bond with during their training, commiserating with each other about their ambitions and the partners who had tried to drag them away from it.

  He stood watching her, and she wondered how much of her inner turmoil he could perceive. Either more than either of them thought, or more probably the question showed in her eyes, because he said impatiently, "It's not like that, Jamie. It takes effort to read someone. I will never read you unless you ask me to."

  "You can control it that well?" she said.

  "Why do you think they give us all this training? They don't want rogue psis running all over the place giving them a bad name, you know that as well as I do. They had to struggle hard enough just to get the airport screening process in place. Everyone screamed about privacy laws. Remember that show, I can't remember the name, about the PsyKorps hunting down rogues? Lasted a season, but it showcased all the anxieties pretty well."

  He leaned back on the railing, regarding her. "Believe me, I understand," he said. "But we can get through this, Jamie."

  "When no one else has?"

  He caught her hand. "No one else is us. No one else loves each other the way we do."

  Despite the wariness that barb-wired her, she could not help but be warmed by the emotion in his voice.

  But was it real?

  She kept watching him, waiting for the moment he would get inside her head. Early in their marriage, he had asked, "What are you thinking?" so many times, checking her state, his state. He wouldn't be able to avoid it. Curiosity would force his hand.

  But he didn't seem to notice. He practiced every day, asked her to help him, and she did, thinking word after word, then phrase after phrase. He drove himself hard, would not stop until he was shaking with weariness.

  He gave her some of the money from the Korps for household expenses, and she put it away. She wondered what he was doing with the rest of it. Building himself an escape fund, money so he could leave when he was ready?

  She had thought it would be a revelation when he gave himself away, but it was nothing more than her thinking that she needed salt and looking up to find him handing her the shaker.

  He paled. "I'm sorry, you were thinking loudly," he said.

  "You couldn't help yourself, could you?" she asked, her voice and heart cold. "Must have been asking for it, on some subconscious level I don't have access to."

  "You don't need to worry," he said. "Listen, Jamie, we're all broken inside. We've all got bits that we want to keep hidden. Look, every time I find something
out, I'll tell you something in exchange. I picked my nose when I was little, did I tell you that? A nun at school shamed me out of it."

  But she had stood, was walking out of the room. He followed her, proffering more secrets: the roommate he'd been attracted to in college, his hatred of his mother's pressures to succeed, the time he'd taken money from the store he worked in.

  "It's not that," she said, packing her bags. "Or maybe it is, I don't know." She looked tired and broken to him, and he felt a wash of guilt and shame over how he'd treated her, but he couldn't make her perceive it, no matter what he said or did.

  Emilio watched from the doorway as Jamie marched away, suitcase in hand. A fine mist filled the air, glistened like a greasy sheen on the back of her unhatted head. She'd said she'd get the rest of her belongings later.

  He stood there with his fists braced against the doorway, watching till she was gone, broadcasting guilt and shame and sorrow, but there was no one around to hear him at all.

  Afternotes

  Writers mine our own lives for material and this story is one of those. I don't think any married person escapes marital stress. This story, as with a number of others in Near + Far, came out of a rough patch in my own.

  It owes its title to the eminently quotable Stevie Smith poem by the same name, and the lines "I was much further out than you thought/ And not waving but drowning." The lines sum up a certain interior desperation that I strongly identified with at the time.

  This story originally appeared in Redstone Science Fiction and was selected by editor Michael Ray.

  VOCOBOX™

  Ever since my husband installed a Vocobox (TM) in our cat in a failed experiment, he (the cat, not my husband) stands outside the closed bedroom door in the mornings, calling. The intelligence update was partially successful, but the only word the cat has learned is its own name, Raven, which he uses to convey everything. I hear him when I wake up, the sound muted by the wooden door between us.

  "Raven. Raven. Raven." Beside me, Lloyd murmurs something and turns over, tugging the sheet away, the cold whispering me further awake. When I go out to feed the cat, his voice lowers as he twines around my ankles, words lapsing into purrs. He butts against my legs with an insistent anxiety, waiting for the dish to be filled. "Raven. Raven." Kibble poured, I move to make our own breakfast, turning on the coffee maker and listening to its preparatory burble.