by Rio Youers
“We’ve got time to kill,” Sally said. “Maybe we should find a bar. Grab a drink and something to eat.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“We can talk, too,” she said.
I nodded. I knew what that meant.
We were drawn to a bar two blocks south of the bus terminal, music jumping through the open doors, dirty country with a rock edge. We sat, we ate, we listened to the band. Sally bounced to her feet at one point and danced, swaying her hips, just like the girl in my memory. Her energy was infectious. I laughed and clapped my hands, and then—what the hell—I danced, too. Correction: I moved my body moronically. I can keep time on guitar, I have a fine sense of rhythm, but I turn to shit on a dance floor. Sally appreciated the effort, then took pity and swayed into my arms. I didn’t let go. She made me look better.
We returned to our table and finished eating as the band wrapped its opening set. The background music kicked in to keep everybody hopping. It was loud, but not as loud as the band, so I heard Sally perfectly when she leaned across the table and said:
“I didn’t want to hurt anybody.”
The way she said it—resentful and sad—more than the words themselves made my stomach tighten. I took a shaky breath and looked at her with what I hoped was a cool and accepting expression.
“I was manipulated,” she continued. “And scared. I might have handled it differently, but I was just a kid.”
The music faded to a distant thump. Our server came and cleared our plates. We ordered more drinks. I wanted something stronger but stuck to beer. When our server had left, Sally reached across the table and clasped my hand.
“Are you ready for this?”
“Yeah,” I replied.
“If you’re going to commit to this lifestyle, you need to know who I am.”
“Yeah.”
“And if you’re going to run away with me, you need to know what you’re running from.”
“Dominic Lang,” I said.
She gave me the same surprised expression as when I’d called her Miranda.
“I’ve done my homework,” I said.
“What do you know?”
I offered a synopsis of what I’d learned. Enough for her to know I hadn’t simply read his Wikipedia page.
“He was in here,” I finished, pressing a finger to my forehead. Pressing hard, to indicate how deep he’d gone. “He was in here, looking for you.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I call him the spider.”
Our drinks arrived. I drained half my beer in a single, dry-throated hit.
“There’s a room in my mind,” Sally said a moment later. “Deep in my mind. It’s full of other people’s memories. Terrorists. Rapists. Murderers. I don’t go there very often.”
I lost the music then. Couldn’t tell you what was playing. I lost all the other tables and everybody sitting at them. I lost the flashing TVs and fizzing neon signs. My attention was on Sally. Absolutely.
“There’s a high-security vault at the back of the room,” she continued. “It has a steel-reinforced concrete door with bolts as thick as your leg. Inside the vault is a box wrapped in chains. This is where I keep Dominic Lang’s memories. This is where I keep his power.”
A tear flashed from Sally’s left eye, leaving a thin trail. This was my first glimpse beneath the mask. I saw nothing beyond nature. Only a fragile, frightened girl. The girl I thought I’d find.
“He’s dangerous, Harvey.”
“I know.”
“Power-obsessed. And obsessed with me—with what I have inside.”
I reached across the table, used my thumb to wipe the tear track from her cheek. But there was another. And another.
“My parents took me to him when I was eight years old,” she said. “He recognized my ability, then manipulated and blackmailed me—used me to subdue his more powerful targets. For seven years I was his secret weapon.”
She clasped my hand again, hard enough to make the bones pang.
“For seven years I was his red bird.”
Seventeen
It was during his year at Oakwood Psychiatric Hospital in Connecticut that Dr. Dominic Lang wrote a paper propounding the similarities between psychic ability and mental illness. He suggested a widespread misdiagnosis of brain diseases such as schizophrenia, and through data collected over the next four years, estimated that ninety percent of “true” psychics reside in mental institutions.
“True psychics?” I asked Sally. “What does that mean?”
“Not the charlatans,” Sally said. “Not the boardwalk fortune-tellers or two-bit intuitives. True psychics are a rarer breed, many of them highly troubled, most seemingly insane.”
I recalled what I’d read about Lang: diagnosed with autism at five years old, didn’t speak until he was eight. Not a normal kid, by any means.
“You need a conduit,” Sally said. “You need to link your rational mind to your irrational psychic energy. Once you have a conduit, you have access. Once you have access … well, that’s when the magic can happen.”
It began with a patient named Edwin Elder, a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic who spent his days doped up on phenothiazines, and when coming down would stand in a corner and rattle his head against the walls. Elder had found a home at Oakwood after killing his parents with a shingling hatchet, then sitting their corpses on the front deck—Mom with a whiskey sour, Dad with a book—for all to see. Lang, thirty-two and fresh off his psychiatry residency at Yale, had taken an interest in Elder during his initial assessment. Elder had been restrained, his medication wearing off. It was the perfect opportunity for Lang to crawl into his mind, where he felt a familiar and suffocating presence.
“The psychic coil,” Sally said. We had left the bar by this point and were sitting in the bus terminal, huddled beneath Sally’s new jacket. “It’s what generates our power.”
I imagined an electromagnetic coil buried deep inside the brain, inducing toothaches, migraines, debilitating nausea. It put me in mind of Dad, who’d gone through a phase of protecting himself against what he called “dirty electricity.” This was when the tinfoil hat sat permanently atop his noggin, and when he’d designed plans to build a gigantic Faraday cage around the house.
“This may sound crazy,” I said. “But when you say psychic coil, I think of electromagnetic pollution.”
“Not crazy,” Sally said. “You’re actually close to the mark. The brain generates electricity, after all.”
“Enough to power a lightbulb,” I said. “Hey, I learned something in fifth grade.”
“Right. Now think on a bigger—much bigger—metaphysical level: an aggressive energy producing symptoms in line with mental disorders like schizophrenia and bipolar. And the only way to control this energy is to get on the same circuit. Connect and flow.”
“That’s why you need a conduit.”
“Which, according to Lang’s research, fewer than ten percent of true psychics have.”
Edwin Elder was not one of the 10 percent. Lang quickly determined that antipsychotic medications appeared to calm him only because they dampened his psychic energy. In no way a cure, they also hindered functionality in other areas of his brain. With or without medication, Elder was a hopeless cause.
Lang wrote: The patient has exceptional psychic ability, perhaps equal to my own. However, he is unable to connect and interact with it. He may as well be a worm, blind, wriggling in the dirt. I could step on him at any time.
Inspired by this development, Lang searched the minds of Oakwood’s demented populace and discovered an untapped psychic coil in four out of fifty-two diagnosed schizophrenics. He visited other institutions across the Northeast and collected similar data. It was the same in the South; after leaving Oakwood, Lang toured hospitals from Tallahassee to Dallas, where the results were consistent: Between 5 and 10 percent of all patients with schizophrenia-like disorders had crippling levels of psychic energy.
“What was the point of this research?�
�� I asked. “Was he gauging his power?”
“He was trying to understand it,” Sally replied. “At least to begin with. You have to bear in mind that Lang was a complex and confused individual. It was the same with his sexual orientation, up until the point he met Gene Lyon, who made that aspect of his life much clearer. Gene was an emotional and sexual center for him. An anchor. And that’s what Lang was looking for in his research: a way to become centered. Then, maybe, he’d see what he was capable of.”
I thought of Mitt Grover dropping dead during the election debate at Laurel State, his brain a handful of wet pieces, and surmised Lang already had a pretty good idea what he was capable of.
“He was bad in the womb,” I said. “I can’t believe he didn’t have wickedness on his mind.”
“Perhaps,” Sally said. “But, baby, there’s only one thing more dangerous than someone with power, and that’s someone in a position to use it.”
* * *
Dominic Lang inherited a comfortable sum of money after his father died in February of ’87. He invested most of it, but allocated a generous chunk to two things: to opening his own psychiatric clinic in downtown Nashville and to supporting his research. Regarding the latter, he used his contacts at Yale to put out a call for anyone with “paranormal, extrasensory, or nonrational sensitivities” to step forward for paid, noninvasive experiments.
It was frustrating work. Most of the people he saw were frauds: carnival chiselers and third-rate mediums, all unable to demonstrate a single psychic act on demand. They’d complain that the conditions were not right or that their pathway to the spirit world was in some way hindered. Lang didn’t need to crawl into their minds to know their psychic coil had no rumble, no flash.
Occasionally, though, a true would show up with a vibrant coil and a passable conduit. The first through his door was an eighteen-year-old girl with greasy hair, Taco Bell breath, and self-harm scars on her forearms. Lang touched her mind, felt the coil. A low, buzzing energy.
“Tell me about the marks on your arms,” he said.
“You know what they are,” the girl—her name was Rose Gibb—said. “Sometimes I cut myself.”
“Why?”
“It distracts me.”
“From?”
“There’s a muscle in my brain,” Rose said. “It keeps flexing.”
Lang took Rose to a room in the basement larger than his office, white concrete walls and floor, whispering fluorescent lights. It was set up with various stations, each with their own props: mirrors and sheets of glass, dollar-store vases, a pyramid of empty soda cans, a pile of knotted rags. It was ugly, unscientific, utilitarian.
“The flexing in your brain,” he said to Rose. “It’s not a muscle. It’s energy. A kind of electricity. We call it the psychic coil.”
Rose started to pick her cuticles, already agitated.
“Every living person has a psychic coil,” Lang continued, trying to soothe her with a smile. “For most people it’s buried deep. They don’t even know it’s there. Other people—the truly unlucky ones—know it’s there but have no access to it.”
Rose looked at her tattered sneakers and shuddered.
“And then there are people like you,” Lang said. “The rarest of the rare, an infinitesimal percentage of the population, who are aware of the coil”—Lang made a flexing gesture with his hand—“and can interact with it.”
“No,” Rose said. “It’s not … I don’t—”
“The fact that you haven’t been institutionalized tells me you can access it.”
Rose shook her head.
“Can you read or influence my mind?” Lang asked.
“No.”
“Can you predict the future?”
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.” Lang nodded, then gestured at the stations around him. “So why don’t you show me what you can do.”
Rose mumbled something and shrugged.
“You say you harm yourself as a distraction, but truthfully, it’s so that you don’t harm others.” Lang raised his eyebrows, hands spread. “I admire that. It shows you have a good heart, despite everything. But it’s okay to blow off some steam here. There’s nothing in this room that can’t be replaced.”
“It hurts when I do it,” Rose said, head low.
“I know.”
“I get headaches … nosebleeds.”
“I know.”
Rose looked toward the mirrors and something flashed behind her eyes, then it was gone. She looked at her sneakers again.
“Your father abuses you,” Lang said, sharing what he’d seen when looking for her coil. “When you were nine years old he got you drunk, and you woke up to find him snacking between your legs. He once masturbated into your hair and made you wear it to school, stiff and unwashed. Then there was the time—”
“STOP!” Rose screamed. Tears sprang from her eyes. She reeled toward the mirrors and Lang followed. He watched as she focused, zany-eyed and drooling—as a crack appeared in the center of the largest mirror and splintered to the edge. She twisted her hands, as if wringing water from an invisible cloth, and with a final effort the corner of the mirror broke away and shattered on the floor.
“Yes,” Lang said. He wiped his mouth. “Good girl.”
“No more,” she whimpered. Blood spurted from her left nostril. The crotch of her jeans darkened with urine and she collapsed to the floor. Lang left her there while he wrote in her file: Minimal psychokinetic ability. Moderate physical reaction inc. bleeding (nose) and voiding (bladder). It appears that a conduit doesn’t necessarily translate to power. V. interesting.
Rose woke a few hours later. Lang gave her Advil for her headache, a Kleenex for her nose, then handed her a hundred dollars in cash and sent her on her way.
He never saw her again, but he did see her father.
Sally did, too.
* * *
“More trues appeared over the next few years,” Sally said. “Slowly to begin with, then in a steady trickle. Lang ran his tests and discovered varying levels of power depending on a number of factors, from age and personality to their relationship with the coil. Some could shatter the mirrors without blinking. Others could set fire to the pile of knotted rags or pluck surface thoughts from Lang’s mind. Then there were trues—those with less effective conduits—who could barely topple the soda cans. It seemed no two were quite the same, although they all had one thing in common.”
“And that was?”
“They were troubled,” Sally said. “Depressed, addicted, suicidal.”
“Because they were outcasts?”
“Maybe, but more likely because the coil is oppressive, and they turned to drugs or self-harm to help cope with it. There’s also a theory that psychic ability is triggered through stress. Like Rose, a lot of these people were born into ugly lives. They didn’t stand a chance from day one, so it’s possible their coils were activated in infancy and strengthened during the course of their lives.”
“That might explain Lang’s power,” I suggested. “A different kind of stress, though; he spent six weeks in the womb with a corpse, and the first hours of his life were touch and go. His heart actually stopped beating at one point.”
Sally nodded. “Near-death experiences are also linked to increased psychic sensitivity. Lang was half a day old when he had his. His baby brain—like all babies’—was a sponge. If there’s any hoodoo between here and the other side, he took a massive shot and absorbed it all.”
I imagined Lang at thirty-four weeks, kitten-sized, his head swollen to accommodate not a brain but an electromagnetic coil. Blue light pulsed through the gaps of his unformed skull. He had electricity for eyes.
“Lang continued his research,” Sally said, snuggling closer to me beneath the jacket. “He recorded data and got answers to some of his questions, but it didn’t help that—of the trues he’d met—not one of them had his level of power.”
“Because he had nothing to compare against.”
“Right, and that was when things got sinister. He’d always planned on using his ability to attain wealth and power, but was wary of other trues. So his research switched gears. He stopped looking for understanding, and started looking for threats.”
A metallic voice overhead announced our bus was boarding. Sally lifted her head from my chest. It was after 3 a.m. and her eyes were tiny weights. Mine, too. I had a feeling we’d sleep until we were halfway across Texas.
“Did he find them?” I asked.
“He found what he considered to be potential threats. And he subdued them.”
Once again, I thought of Mitt Grover lying dead on the stage, and knew exactly what Sally meant by subdued.
“After a lifetime of confusion and anger,” she continued. “Of feeling sexually and energetically suppressed, Lang was determined to become one of the most powerful men on the planet, and God help anybody who got in his way.”
“Jesus Christ,” I said.
“Right,” Sally said. “And then he met me.”
* * *
The first four hours of our bus ride to Cypress were spent sleeping. Not deeply, but enough to take the edge off the tiredness. I woke with Sally’s head on my shoulder and a crick in my neck. I judged from the road signs and license plates that we were still in Oklahoma. Behind us, the horizon was a simmering red line.
We rolled into Elk City’s Greyhound terminal, which was also a Hutch’s convenience store, a short time later. There was a thirty-minute layover, which gave us a chance to stretch our legs, freshen up in the restrooms, and grab a quick breakfast. We were still seven hours from Cypress, but we got back on the bus feeling somewhat refreshed.
“I bought this,” I said, holding up a jumbo book of literature-themed crosswords. “Page eighteen is dedicated to Pride and Prejudice. Word of warning: Austen is spelled with an E.”
“You’re an idiot,” Sally said, but she was smiling.
“Or,” I said, “you can carry on with your story. Tell me about you and Lang.”
“Are those my choices?”
“Not all of them. We could always make out like teenagers.” I curled my tongue, flicked the tip. “Gross everybody out. Get tossed off the bus for lewd behavior.”
