HEAR

by Robin Epstein

  “I was diagnosed autistic as a kid.”

  Ah. So I was on the right track in my assumptions, but I’m not sure how to respond. I swallow and look down at my own bagel. “Oh.”

  “I’m not anymore. If you’re on the spectrum, you’ll probably never be completely ‘normal’—whatever that means—but you can get better. It requires intense therapy when you’re young. Mom quit her job and worked with me every day to give me the best chance.”

  Again, I’m at a loss. “That was really amazing of her,” I offer.

  “ Yeah. She felt guilty.”

  I’m midbite when Dan says this, so I have to gnaw through the rest of the chewy dough before I can speak. “Why would she feel guilty? Because she felt responsible for ‘making you autistic’?” I say this sarcastically, knowing how silly it would be for someone to feel this way.

  But he nods. “Also because my dad was a complete dick.” Dan takes a big bite out of his bagel. “He’s dead now.”

  His tone is so matter-of-fact. “Oh my God, Dan, I’m so sorry to hear that.” I reach my hand out to put it on his before realizing that might weird him out, so I quickly pull back. “How did it happen?”

  “Train derailment. Two years ago.” His tone remains flat. “He abused my mom and used to beat me, so I’m not really torn up about it.” He pulls his bagel apart and drags his index finger through the cream cheese. “She stayed with him because she didn’t have the money to do therapy with me if she left.” He licks the white glop off his finger. “I knew the train was going to derail,” he finishes. His face, with its chiseled features, is absolutely expressionless.

  I must be misunderstanding him in some way. I think he just told me he knew his father would die in a train crash. “Wait, what?”

  “My mom and I drove him to the station, which is about an hour away from our house. Anyway, after we drop him off and start driving back home, I wait until we’re about forty-five minutes from the train station until I tell my mom.”

  I stare at Dan. “Until you tell her . . . ?”

  “That the train is going to crash.”

  “How did you know that?” This cannot be true. Yet I don’t think he’s lying. Whatever I believe, he believes what he’s telling me. I’m starting to feel a little nauseated.

  “I kept having dreams about it.”

  I’m about to speak, but he holds up a finger. “ You’re going to say, ‘Isn’t it possible that because he was abusive you had a general wish for him to die?’”

  I nod; that is exactly what the picnic-table psychologist in me was going to say.

  “The answer is yes,” he confirms. “But the dreams started giving way to a daytime vision. And in that I saw the specifics.”

  “So . . . you told this to your mom? What did she do?”

  “First, she got very mad. She even said, ‘Dan, I think this is a revenge fantasy.’ But part of her also suspected I was telling the truth. So she pulled off the road and stopped the car. I can still see that whole thing so clearly.” He pauses for a moment, staring at his half-eaten bagel. “She took out her cell phone and called Amtrak. It took her forever to get a real person on the line, and by the time someone finally did speak to her, my mom sounded like a lunatic. She starts telling the reservationist that she needs to stop the train, says she has information that the train is going to crash.”

  “No!”

  “That’s what I was thinking: How dumb, right? I said, ‘Great, now they’re going to think you’re a terrorist, Mom.’ The reservations lady said she needed to get her supervisor on the line; she also connected the call to the police. Mom just keeps repeating, ‘Don’t let the train leave. Keep it at the platform.’ But when the supervisor got on the phone, he said, ‘Ma’am, I need to inform you that the train has already departed.’”

  I shake my head.

  Dan nods. “Mom screamed. Then she hung up,” he says matter-of-factly. “She looked at me and said, ‘You waited.’ Said it just like that, scared but calm, and I said, ‘Yeah, I did.’” He finishes the rest of his bagel, wipes his mouth off with the edges of the paper bag, then crumples it into a ball. “ You have some cream cheese on your cheek.”

  My head spins. I can’t believe what I’m hearing, and yet it’s become increasingly difficult to deny. “Dan,” I say, wiping my hand across my face, “the shooting in the mall?”

  “ Yeah, I bet that’s what Alex was talking about. He saw it before it went down.”

  When Dan and I get back to the lab, the others have already returned.

  “Where’s the professor?” Dan asks.

  Pankaj points to the dry-erase board bearing a note from Uncle Brian: Back ASAP.

  “Do you think it had to do with the shooting?” I ask. But from the looks in their eyes, it’s clear they haven’t yet heard the news.

  “Mall shooting,” Dan says. “It’s all over TV.”

  “Oh no,” Alex says softly, flopping onto one of the stools and closing his eyes. “Was a Henley professor killed?”

  I flinch, glancing at Dan. Nobody mentioned that on the news.

  Dan shakes his head. “They confirmed one fatality, but didn’t identify—”

  “It was a Henley professor. He was the fatality,” Alex says. “When I saw the aftermath of the shooting earlier this morning, I didn’t want to say it. Too scary, too . . .”

  We wait for him to say more—but he just stands and shakes his head, then gathers his bag. He starts walking out.

  Mara’s face has turned ashen. “Do you want any company?” she calls after him.

  “No, I’m gonna . . . I just have to, uh . . .” He trails off and shuts the door behind him.

  “Told ya,” Dan says, looking me directly in the eye.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  “Einstein got it wrong,” Uncle Brian tells us. “Even geniuses get things wrong. Remember that. Einstein believed the universe was deterministic—meaning the past has already dictated the way things will turn out, that nothing happens randomly or in ways that can’t be predicted. He even famously said—and I’m paraphrasing—‘That God plays dice and uses “telepathic” methods is something I cannot believe for a single moment.’ Yet on the contrary, any physicist will tell you that this was Einstein’s biggest blunder. Not only does God play dice; it would appear he quite enjoys the game.”

  I can’t help but wonder if this is the lecture Uncle Brian had planned to give us today or if the subject of randomness was inspired by the senselessness of yesterday’s shooting.

  When he finally returned to the lab after the midmorning break had stretched to two hours, Brian was pale and visibly trembling. An elderly colleague with longish white hair à la Andrew Jackson accompanied him. Brian didn’t bother to introduce the man at his side. Instead he said he’d just been informed his “dear friend and colleague,” Professor Graham Pinberg, had been shot and killed at the Bridgestone Mall. He told us to take the rest of the day off. “But please be careful out there,” he said as we gathered our things. “The gunman is still at large, and if this animal will shoot someone as decent and good as Graham, no one is safe. We all may as well have targets on our backs.”

  I didn’t hear Uncle Brian come home last night, but this morning I found him drinking his coffee in the kitchen. He stood behind the kitchen curtains, staring out the window. His eyes were a little bleary—they still are—but he seemed determined to forge ahead with the day as planned, in spite of the tragedy. I wasn’t sure how much he’d want to talk about his friend, so I just asked if the university would hold a memorial service. Brian exhaled heavily, mumbled that there’d be a tribute of some kind, but that it was important to keep on with the work in front of us. “Graham was a man whose life was dedicated to the pursuit of discovery, and getting on with it honors him best.”

  As we drove to school this morning, we saw flags lowered to half-staff throughout
the town. We also discovered that a large number of security guards had suddenly materialized on campus. With the “armed and extremely dangerous” gunman still presumed to be in the immediate vicinity, their presence had ironically only made me feel more vulnerable.

  “Einstein believed in entanglement, though, didn’t he?” Dan now asks Brian.

  “ Yes, that he did,” Brian responds.

  “Entanglement?” Pankaj repeats.

  Brian nods. “That’s when two particles that are separated by any distance—even light-years—instantaneously affect each other, as if they were part of the same unified system.”

  I shift in my seat, barely paying attention to what’s being discussed. This whole incomprehensible conversation began when Mara started talking about her tarot cards. She was on edge when she came into the lab—we all were—but then she started babbling about the “challenging read” she’d picked from the deck upon waking up. That set Dan off on some long tangent about the relationship between tarot cards and quantum mechanics. And that’s when I started to tune out.

  Truthfully, though, I’m much more concerned about Alex—or rather, the absence of Alex. He’s been AWOL ever since he fled the lab yesterday. No one saw him in the dorm, and no one knows what time he got home last night. Or if he got home last night. Yet I seem to be the only one freaked out that Alex is missing and the shooter’s still at large. It’s not only distressing; it’s weird . . .

  By 10:10, I can no longer sit still. I feel like I’m going to lose it. But right at the moment that I’m about to blow—as if on cue—Alex bursts through the door.

  “Hey, all,” he says, his hair wet from the shower, sunglasses hanging from a button of his stylish plaid shirt. “Sorry I’m late.”

  My jaw hangs open. That’s it?

  Brian raises his eyebrows. “Care to explain?”

  “I need space after these things happen, so I tend to vanish for a while,” Alex answers quietly, matter-of-factly. He doesn’t look at any of us when he speaks; he just sits on his stool. “It’s really hard when you know about this stuff before it goes down but you’re powerless to stop it, you know?” Mara and Dan nod to themselves. “It was a whole tidal wave of emotion. For a while I was even feeling happy because it was your colleague and not you, Professor. Then I felt guilty for feeling happy because it’s so wrong. Someone was gunned down in cold blood. But my mind kept racing.” Alex takes a breath and finds Brian’s eyes. “I mean, what if it had been you? ” He shakes his head.

  Brian continues to study Alex for a moment, and we all wait for his response. But instead of offering comforting words or reading Alex the riot act for having disappeared for nearly eighteen hours, Brian picks up a yellow legal pad, flips through several pages, and scrawls some notes.

  “Okay, so moving on,” Brian says, eventually looking back up at us.

  I try to process the weirdness I’ve just witnessed, but I can’t. Maybe Uncle Brian is trying to deflect his own grief by cataloging Alex’s response?

  “For the tests we’ll be doing later in the day,” Brian says, “we’ll be studying anomalies that arise from human-machine interactions. I want to see if you can bias a machine.”

  “Bias a machine?” Pankaj asks with a grin. “Easy. Just tell it its job has been outsourced to cheaper machines in a foreign country.”

  Brian breaks into a grin, and I laugh, but then quickly put my hand over my mouth. Laughter hardly seems appropriate on a day like today. Then again, with this group, I have no idea what’s considered “appropriate.”

  “Bias in the sense of influencing a machine with your mind alone,” Brian clarifies.

  Collecting myself, I straighten on my stool. “ You want us to make a machine do something without touching it?” When my uncle nods, I continue: “Okay, that’s just impossible. No way can that happen.”

  Brian shakes his head, but his grin hasn’t entirely faded. “Let’s not forget the lesson of our man Einstein, Kass. Even geniuses get things wrong.”

  I head to the bathroom at the end of another ridiculous day. No one appeared to influence anything, but Uncle Brian watched us all afternoon and took copious notes. I’m looking at my hands as I wash them in the sink when I feel something slide down the back of my hair. I’m momentarily seized with terror, and my head jerks up. I see Mara’s reflection in the mirror. She’s standing right behind me.

  “ Your hair is so pretty, Kass,” she says.

  I try not to shudder. Who sneaks up behind someone and starts petting her hair? It’d be alarming even without a lunatic on the loose. Mara runs her hand through her own silky black hair and tousles it; she has one of those silent movie–star hairdos you need the perfect heart-shaped face to carry off. Mara’s face is so delicate it seems like the haircut was created solely for her. And her wide-set eyes, framed by long, false lashes, make her look like a manga heroine. “Thanks,” I manage to reply.

  I want to leave, but she stands between me and the door.

  “I used to have great hair too,” she says, the words tumbling out quickly, “but in a fit of I don’t know what, I chopped it all off a few months ago—actually, I do know what.” She leans in a little closer behind me and lowers her voice. “I was getting too much attention from the male population of Oklahoma, and it got to be disturbing.”

  Having tried to remain inconspicuous myself for the past two years, I can actually relate. But I’m not buying it. She’s up to something.

  “Boys don’t like the short hair,” she goes on. “Or at least not on me, so my plan seems to have worked. Almost too well.” She hesitates, and then looks me in the eye. “Let’s get out of here. Come on, there’s someplace I want to show you.”

  I have to admit, even though I’m a little creeped out, I’m intrigued by the invitation. Maybe we can be friends after all? Doubtful. But maybe.

  “Where?”

  “Follow me.” She flashes a mischievous smile.

  Mara runs—backward—the whole way from the building, yelling that I need to move faster, faster, faster! I don’t know where we’re headed, but for some reason I don’t think her urgency has anything to do with her fear of the gunman. It feels more like she’s rushing me someplace that has a limited-quantity giveaway or a unicorn. Finally she stops in front of the enormous sculpture on the art museum’s front lawn.

  “Look at this!”

  I pause to catch my breath. “ Yeah,” I gasp. “ Yeah, it’s nice.” I wonder if I’m missing something. I mean it’s fine, but it’s no unicorn.

  “They have the most amazing American art here!” As Mara throws open the museum’s doors, I’m tempted to ask her how many energy drinks she’s had today; she seems to be operating at three times her normal speed.

  A guard asks for our IDs, and as I fish mine out of my bag, Mara pulls hers from the top of her T-shirt. “Voilà,” she says to the guard, who, it must be said, seems to have enjoyed the trick. Maybe Mara’s overcompensating for the gloom that’s fallen over the campus. Maybe she doesn’t notice or care. But there’s something unhinged in those huge eyes.

  I follow her, warily, as she flits through the galleries. After a few minutes, she stands still in front of a black-and-white painting . . . of nothing. Seriously. To me it just looks like black and white paint, possibly the outline of a chair.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  “I find this mesmerizing. Look.” She points to a segment where the black paint seems to be peeking out from under the white paint. “ You assume the artist, Franz Kline, was using black paint on a white canvas, right? I mean, that’s the way things usually go. But here you can’t tell what’s the background and what’s the foreground. The eye is fooled because he applies paint in layers.”

  Where is she going with this? There’s no way Mara dragged me here to discuss modern art. But I play along. “Uh-huh.”

  “We come to a painting
believing we understand the rules in advance, right?” Mara turns to me, her brown eyes glittering beneath the fringe of lashes. “The canvas is white; the black goes on top. But in this work it’s completely unclear which came first. Maybe it’s white paint on a black canvas. We can’t know. And that’s the point. With abstract expressionism, the artist is telling us to expect the unexpected.” She takes a step toward me and lowers her voice. “It’s kind of like the feeling of falling in love; you know what I mean?”

  “Uh-huh,” I say again. I have absolutely no idea what she means. This would be a problem if we were going to be friends. But since I can’t follow her leap from paint thrown on canvas to falling in love, I feel pretty confident the friendship thing ain’t happening. “I guess.”

  “Come on, Kass. You’ve fallen in love, haven’t you?” She says this like a taunt. As if she knows my secret.

  “ Yeah,” I reply noncommittally. The problem is, I’m not actually sure of the answer to that question: Is it love if it’s only one-sided? Or did the feelings I had for Pete Lewis count as something else? Obsession maybe? I haven’t thought of him since I’ve been at Henley—which must be some kind of record for me given that I used to think of him every few seconds. But he was my infinity crush, the boy I’d been dreaming about since I first laid eyes on him in eighth-grade math class. He was the boy whose smile sent me spinning. The boy whose betrayal felt like a death.

  “When I’m in love, colors are brighter,” Mara says in the silence. “Smells are sharper; my skin is more sensitive; my visions stronger. It’s like the emotion pumps pure adrenaline through my body!” She spins around several times, and when she stops, she lets out a “Woo!” She grabs my arm to brace herself. A couple of the security guards frown in our direction. I don’t blame them. Even if there weren’t a killer on the loose, even if a member of the Henley community hadn’t been killed, her behavior wouldn’t exactly be museum appropriate.

  “Hey, Mara, let me ask you something. You seem a little—”

  “Alive?”