HEAR

by Robin Epstein

  “And you never had another vision after that?”

  “No.”

  He takes the framed photo in his hands. I want to ask more questions, but he’s already a million miles away. I start twisting my signet ring. I stare down at it as he shambles out of the room and back upstairs, still clutching the photo. The etching on the onyx in the center of the ring is an image of a temple. My dad claimed it was a family heirloom, and I never bothered asking more about it; the family inheritance part didn’t really interest me. Now I can’t help but wonder if there are more inheritances from my family that I have yet to discover. Or if the temple signifies something . . .

  If there’s an answer to that question, my gut tells me there are more clues to be found on the third floor.

  For an hour and twenty minutes, I lie in wait on my water bed. If Uncle Brian suspected I was about to undertake an exploratory mission, hopefully the long delay has assuaged his concerns and he’s gone to sleep. I slide out of my shoes and stretch and flex my feet, popping the noisy cracks out of my toes. Then I reach into my backpack and feel the Zippo lighter and the mini LED flashlight I keep in the side pocket for emergencies.

  When my dad discovered the lighter shortly after I bought it, I told him I needed it for an art project. (“Project Set Off Fire Alarm,” though that detail I kept to myself.) Dad seemed skeptical, but at the time, I assumed he worried I’d become a smoker. The lighter and flashlight have proven invaluable tools on various missions in the past, so I always keep them handy. It’s only the flashlight I need tonight.

  I inhale and exhale deeply, summoning my inner ninja before sneaking back to the third floor. The door to Uncle Brian’s room is closed, and the main light is off. Whether or not he’s still awake and reading, I can’t tell, but I won’t risk going near the end of the hall to find out. Of the other two rooms on the hallway, the door to the right is open. That’s where I’ll go first—always take the easy way out (or in) if offered.

  I creep through the door and shine the flashlight across the walls. The bookshelves are filled with cans of spray starch, extra lightbulbs, a mug full of pens, and a sewing basket. To the left is an ironing board with a stack of handkerchiefs on top awaiting pressing. It’s a glorified laundry room. Pretty unglorified, actually—there isn’t even a washing machine. Nothing seems out of the ordinary on preliminary inspection; several framed paintings hang on the pale-yellow walls. I run the flashlight over the carpet edges to see if anything looks loose. I even search for hidden panels—he did work for the CIA, after all—but find nothing.

  When I swing the flashlight over the bookshelves one last time, I spot a shadow behind one of the cans of starch. The shadow is a container the size of a pill bottle made of opaque black plastic with a grey flip-top lid. I can’t imagine what kind of pills would require such secrecy, so I shake the bottle to hear if there are any left. Rather than the rattle of pills, it produces the sound of something solid.

  I uncap the container. As the rolled brown strip of plastic slides out, I realize I’m holding a film canister. I uncurl the strip and shine my flashlight at it. The tiny images are color-reversed, making the pictures impossible for me to decipher. In order to see what’s here, I need to develop the pictures and literally turn this negative into a positive.

  “ You look like ass,” Pankaj says when I walk into the lab early the next morning and find him sitting there alone.

  He’s right—I haven’t slept—so I don’t have an immediate comeback. It doesn’t help that he looks pretty good himself. Maybe even more than pretty good. Whatever.

  Since I couldn’t sleep, I considered calling my dad at 3 a.m. to vent. I wanted to tell him the big family secret was out and demand that he tell me all he knew about his abilities and mine. But I didn’t call. Something stopped me. Part of it was rage—righteous rage, if I’m allowed to call it that. I was afraid of what I would say. I also knew that if I pressed him on why he’d lied to me about this for my whole life, he would find an excuse. I never lied to you, Kass. I just never mentioned it. There’s a difference, he would say, and then he’d assure me whatever he did or didn’t tell me was to protect me and my innocence. All for my benefit.

  But this is so much more than just a sin of omission. This is deception about something very personal, something that exists inside of me, that is part of me. This goes far beyond the lies all parents tell their children: that the tooth fairy exists, that everything will be okay.

  Besides, I know there’s nothing he can do at this point. If my father was ever able to protect me before, that’s no longer the case. There’s no way he can save me—or whichever one of the five of us is supposed to die—now.

  “Apologies for the comment,” Pankaj says in the silence. “But don’t take it the wrong way, Legacy.”

  I take a seat at a different workstation and turn to face Pankaj. “How could I possibly take ‘You look like ass’ the ‘wrong’ way? There’s really only one interpretation for a statement like that.”

  Pankaj smiles. “That I’m a jerk?”

  “I’m beginning to see the downside of this mind-reading business.”

  When he laughs, I can’t help myself. I start laughing too. And I have to admit, the laughter feels good. Thankfully the others have yet to arrive, so I don’t have to be self-conscious about it. How is it that this cocky con artist—this kid who’s so dismissive of my background that he still calls me Legacy—can lift my mood in an instant?

  “I promise I wasn’t trying to be mean,” Pankaj says as he walks over to my workstation, leaning across it. “Seriously, what’s going on? How did it go with the money and your uncle last night?”

  I shrug, and because we’re still alone, I consider telling him what I learned about my dad. But for once, I’m able to stop myself. Before confessing anything to anyone, I need to learn more about his abilities myself. “It’s all related to family drama, I guess.”

  “Ah, family drama,” he repeats. “I know it well. As I may have mentioned, my family is award-winningly dysfunctional. My sister, Nisha, is perpetually up for ‘worst performance’ in social situations. She has a particular skill for making people uncomfortable and scared. I spent my childhood sleeping with one eye open. So, yeah, I get that worrying about family stuff can suck the life force right out of you.” His voice softens. “I’m being serious, Kass. You can talk to me.”

  “There is so much about all this that I can’t even begin to understand.” I wave my arms around the lab. “I mean, why would you close a lab that’s doing research on ESP? If we can find a reliable way to predict events in the future, we can stop things like disease, conflict, and disasters . . . just to name a few.”

  Pankaj lets out a whistle. “Wow,” he says.

  “Wow?”

  “ You don’t seem to get how dangerous this is.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Kass, scientific advances almost always come with moral ambiguities.” He pauses but I wait for him to continue. “Okay, ever heard of J. Robert Oppenheimer?”

  I knit my eyebrows, not sure where he’s going with this. “Father of the atomic bomb. Manhattan Project guy, right?”

  “Right, the guy whose creation, the nuclear weapon, killed or injured somewhere around two hundred thousand people in Japan. Oppenheimer said that in the moments following the first successful test of his bomb, he realized the dark consequences of his work: the world would not be the same; his invention could end life on a massive scale. He said he thought of the words from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita: ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’”

  “ Yikes. How do you know all this?”

  “I’m smarter than I’m given credit for,” Pankaj says. “Maybe I’m a lot smarter than I’m given credit for.”

  “ You hide it really well.”

  He laughs. But as I picture the famous photo of the mushroom c
loud over Hiroshima, he looks down and his expression grows serious.

  “Look,” he says, “I mention this because advances in science come with all kinds of consequences, good and bad. And your uncle, he’s . . . troubling.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “Kass—”

  “He’s the J. J. Dyckman Distinguished Professor of Applied Engineering at Henley University,” I interrupt. “He got you out of jail. What’s troubling about that?”

  Pankaj sighs and brushes his hair away from his eyes. “Nothing about him has been ringing any alarm bells for you?”

  I hesitate. Lots about my uncle rings alarm bells. But for some reason I feel defensive; this is my family, after all. “No,” I lie.

  “I guess that’s your blind spot,” Pankaj says with a shrug. “ You can’t see him, not really.”

  I snort. “ You’re making it sound like he’s a serial killer or something!”

  “Not a serial killer . . .” he says, but not in a “that’s completely out of the question” tone of voice. “I am saying that his motives in testing ESP and our minds are in no way as pure as he claims. Especially not for someone with his background.”

  I get a tingling at the back of my spine. “How much do you know about his background?”

  Pankaj takes my left arm and turns it to glance at my Rolex, the one he won for me. It hasn’t left my wrist; I feel protected wearing it somehow, like it’s one of Wonder Woman’s cuffs. It’s 8:50. We have ten minutes until the others arrive.

  “Follow me.” He hurries out of the lab before I can protest, so I trail him down the hallway to the stairs. He opens the door and descends two flights before exiting on a basement level and strides quickly to the end of a bare cinder-block hallway lit with harsh fluorescent bulbs. He stops in front of an unmarked door. After glancing around to make sure we’re completely alone, he leans close and starts to whisper.

  “Kass, I want to tell you something. I waited until now because I wasn’t sure you were ready to hear it. But as soon as I landed on campus a few weeks ago and shook hands with the professor, I knew something was off. I started digging right away. When you all went to dinner that first night you were here, I was in the library doing research on him. It actually felt like I was getting somewhere when Dan found me and forced me to come out with you guys.”

  So that’s why he was so pissed off that night. He flashes a rueful grin, as if reading my thoughts, which for all I know, he is. I sigh. “What did you find?”

  “One roll of microfilm had images copied from your uncle’s old lab notebook. For whatever reason, someone had taken pictures of every page in that notebook to make the film. But I couldn’t make heads or tails of most of it because it seemed to be about drug development and testing.”

  “Something to magnify the brain’s response to ESP?”

  “Exactly. I found lots of notes that were case histories of some sort. They all included a photo of the subject then listed bizarre details about their love lives, like S, twenty years old. Not interested in food. Hears conversations in rooms where she’s not present. In love for sixteen days.”

  “That’s . . . weird.”

  He leans closer to me now; his amber eyes seem to take up my entire field of vision. “No kidding. They were all like that. K, seventeen years old. Increased heart rate. Sweaty palms. Correctly predicted path of tornado. Told girlfriend of six weeks he loved her.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that my great-uncle is studying love? That love somehow magnifies ESP?”

  Pankaj’s eyes are searching now; he knows how ridiculous it sounds. “Like I said, I needed more time, but one of the things in your uncle’s file was an article by Freud. It’s about how the brain works differently when it experiences obsessive feelings of love. That was followed by a sheet of paper with only three words, in your uncle’s handwriting: Blinded by love. And when I started thinking about it, there was a certain logic to it. When people are blind, their other senses sharpen and become more acute, like their hearing and sense of smell, right?”

  I nod. My heart is pounding, and I’m not sure why. “Right.”

  “So if you’re in love and your brain is being flooded by all these different chemicals and neurotransmitters, you may have a certain tunnel vision, but it may well give you extra sensory perception too.”

  What he’s saying also aligns with Mara’s contention that when she’s most emotionally engaged, her “vision and her visions” are stronger. And then, of course, my uncle’s own words echo back to me: But when I was with Ellen, those largely latent talents became activated, practically supercharged. I did have a gift like yours. And when Ellen died, that part of me died with her.

  But on the other hand, my own experience with Pete Lewis doesn’t fit the pattern. He broke my heart, and then I completely missed the looming disaster. I don’t necessarily want to bring Pete up, but I need to understand this.

  “What are you thinking?” Pankaj asks, perhaps out of politeness. I can’t help but wonder if he already knows. I glance at my fancy Rolex. It’s 8:58, two minutes before we need to be upstairs and pretend nothing’s going on.

  “Okay. So right before I got busted by the cops, I was hanging out with the guy I’d been obsessed with.”

  “Oh,” he says evenly. “And?”

  “And being with him not only didn’t tip me off that something bad was about to go down; it pushed me to do the very thing that got me caught.”

  Pankaj shrugs. “I guess that’s not so surprising either, is it? People who are in love do crazy stuff all the time. They’re more ‘suggestible’ when they’re in that state.” He looks down. “And there are always stories about the stupid things people do because they’ve been spurned by their lovers.”

  I swallow hard, embarrassed. “So it’s a double-edged sword,” I say out loud. All that chemical stimulation can make you hypersensitive, but it can also make you reckless.

  Pankaj heads toward the stairwell. “We should head back to the lab. But later this afternoon I’m going to go back to the library and check out more of his files on the microfilm.”

  The word reminds me of the little canister of negatives burning a hole in my pocket. “Hey, do you know any places around here where I could get film developed?”

  He smiles. “ You use a camera that’s not part of your phone? Do you do Civil War reenactments too?”

  “No . . . I just have some old negatives I want to get processed. No big deal.”

  “What’s on them?” Pankaj scans my face.

  I know he immediately understands that I’ve stolen the film from my uncle. He also understands that the research project that he’d gotten started when I first arrived is about to become even more intense.

  “Go now,” he says. “I’ll hang back here for another minute so we aren’t seen walking into the lab together. At the end of the day, we also leave separately. But you’ll meet me in town at five p.m. in front of that CVS on Horner Street. Got me?”

  I nod. “I got you,” I say over my shoulder, and finally start to feel somewhat better.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  At 5:01 that afternoon, Pankaj and I are stepping through the sliding glass doors of the CVS. I pause, breathing in carpet freshener and recycled air-conditioned air.

  “I don’t want to sound too paranoid, but I’m wondering whose eyeballs will see the pictures before we do,” I whisper to him.

  Pankaj shrugs. “I did some Googling at lunch, and aside from the Henley photo lab, which we definitely don’t want to use, this is the only place near here that develops thirty-five millimeter film. I think it’s our only option.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” I reply, trying to force myself to believe it.

  A pale guy with unnaturally black slicked-back hair mans the register in the photo center. Though he’s wearing the regulation red polo and khakis,
his sideburns and tats (red dice, a vintage camera, 1940s pinup model) betray his rockabilly style. His name tag reads zander. We stand there for a moment waiting to get the guy’s attention, but his eyes are cast down as he looks at something just below the counter.

  “Uh . . . Zander? ” I finally say.

  He looks up, dazed. “Dude, sorry about that.” He waves his phone at us. “Just watching the latest news update on that shooting.” He gives a “world’s gone crazy” eye roll. “Anyways. How can I help you?”

  Interest piqued, Pankaj holds up his index finger. “What did the news say? Did they find the shooter?”

  Zander shakes his head. “No. Turned out to be a fluffy feel-good piece about a victim getting released from the hospital. No mention of the loose gun nut.” He leans over the counter, closer to us. “I think it’s ’cause they’ve run out of leads and just want the public to relax.”

  Pankaj and I nod back.

  “So, I have some negatives for processing?” I put the roll of film on the counter, continuing to hold it for a moment as I try to make up my mind about the guy.

  “Old school,” he says, taking the roll from my hands. “Okay, no problem.” He takes a pen and starts filling out an order form. “How many copies of each do you want? And do you want glossy or matte?”

  “Just one set. Glossy’s good.”

  “When will they be ready?” Pankaj asks.

  “Like, two to three weeks.”

  “Weeks?” Pankaj replies. “How is that even possible?”

  “I know, right?” Zander flips his hands out, exposing the tattoo on his inner arm: a boxy black camera with leica emblazoned on the lens cap. He gives a sympathetic look. “It’s like they send them to China for processing. Actually, that would probably be faster. But they have to go to a lab in Georgia.”