Extraordinary Powers (13 page)

We stared at each other for a moment, Rossi and I. In the long months since that instant, I’ve never been able to explain this aspect to anyone’s satisfaction, least of all mine.

I heard Charles Rossi’s voice almost as clearly, almost as distinctly, as if he’d spoken to me.

Not quite as if he’d spoken aloud. The timbre was different from the spoken voice, the way a long distance telephone connection sounds at once different from a clear, local one. A little less distinct; a little distant, a trace muffled, like a voice heard through a cheap motel room plasterboard wall.

There was an unmistakable difference between Rossi’s spoken voice and his—what else can I call it?—his “mental” voice, his thought voice.

The spoken voice was somehow crisper; the mental voice was softer, smoother, more rounded.

I was able to hear Rossi’s thoughts.

My head began to pound, a throbbing, vicious pain that localized at my right temple. Around everything in the room-Rossi, his gaping assistant, the machinery, the rubberized lab coats that hung on hooks by the door—was a shimmering rainbow of an aura. My skin began to prickle unpleasantly, flushing hot and then cold, and I could feel a wave of nausea overtake my stomach.

There have been volumes upon volumes written on the subject of extrasensory perception and psychic phenomena and “psi,” the vast majority of which is packed with nonsense—I know, I’ve probably read every bit of it—but not one theorist ever speculated that it would be like this.

I could hear his thoughts.

Not all of his thoughts, thank God, or I would surely have gone crazy long ago. Certain ones, things that entered his mind with sufficient urgency, sufficient intensity.

Or at least so I came to realize much later.

But at that moment, at that moment of realization, I had not put all of this together the way I have by now. I only knew knew that I was hearing something that Rossi had not spoken aloud, and it filled me with a bottomless dread.

I was on the edge of a precipice; it was a struggle now to keep from losing my mind entirely.

At that moment I was convinced that something in me had snapped, some thread of my sanity had broken; that the magnetic forces of the MRI machine had done something terrible to me, had somehow precipitated a nervous breakdown, that I was losing my grip on reality.

And so I responded in the only way I could: absolute denial. I wish I could claim credit for being shrewd, or clever, say I knew even then I must keep this strange and awful development to myself, but that wasn’t the first thing that came to me. My instinct was to preserve some semblance of sanity not to let on to Rossi that I was hearing things.

He spoke first, quietly. “I didn’t say anything about Mr. Traslow.” He was probing me, watching my eyes from this uncomfortably close distance.

I said slowly, “I thought you did, Charlie. Must have misheard.”

Turning to the lab table, I gathered my wallet, keys, coins, and pens, and began putting them in my pocket. As I did so, I backed slowly, casually, away from him. The headache intensified, the cold flush. It was a full-blown migraine.

“I didn’t say anything at all,” Rossi said levelly.

I smiled dismissively, nodded. Wanted to sit down somewhere, tie something around my forehead, squeeze the pain from it

He gave me another long, penetrating stare, and and I heard, a murmur: Does he have it?

With forced joviality, I said, “So if we’re all through for the day “

Rossi eyed me suspiciously. Blinked once, twice, and said, “Soon. We need to sit down and talk for a couple of minutes.” “Look,” I said. “I have a terrific headache. A migraine, I’m pretty sure.”

I was at least six feet away from him now, putting my suit jacket back on. Rossi was still watching me as if I were a boa constrictor coiling and uncoiling in the middle of his bedroom. In the silence I strained to hear another of these murmurs, these faint voices.

Nothing.

Had I imagined these last few moments? Had they been hallucinations, like the shimmering aura that surrounded all the objects in the room?

Would I come to my senses now, after this momentary departure from sanity?

“Are you prone to migraines?” Rossi asked.

“Never had one before. The test must have caused it”

“That’s impossible. It’s never happened before, not in any test of the magnetic resonance imager, ever.” “Well,” I said, “in any case, I should be heading back to the office.”

“We’re not quite done here,” Rossi said, turning back toward me.

“I’m afraid “

“We’ll be done shortly. I’ll be right back.”

He went off in the direction of the adjacent room in which the computer banks were being monitored. I watched him approach one of the computer techs and say something quick and furtive. The tech handed him a small sheaf of printouts.

Then Rossi returned, bearing the computer images from the lie-detector test. He sat at a long, black-topped laboratory table and gestured for me to sit opposite him. I paused a moment, considered, and then sat obligingly.

He spread out the images on the lab table. Looked them over, his head bowed, seeming to consult them. We sat perhaps three feet apart.

I heard Rossi’s voice, muffled but astonishingly clear: / believe you have the ability.

He said: “Here, you’ll notice, is your brain at the outset of the test.”

He pointed to the first image, which I drew closer to inspect.

“Unchanged, for the most part, throughout the test, because you’re telling the truth.”

I heard: You must trust me. You must trust me.

Then he indicated a final set of images, which even I could tell were colored somewhat differently yellow and magenta along the cerebral cortex rather than the normal rust and beige. He described with a finger the areas that manifested change.

“Here, you’re lying.” He smiled quickly and added with unnecessary politeness, “As I asked you to do.”

, “I see.”

“I’m concerned about your headache.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said.

“I’m concerned that this machine might have caused it.”

“The noise,” I said. “The noise is probably what did it. I’ll be fine.”

Rossi, head still bent, nodded.

I heard: It will be so much easier if we trust each other. The voice seemed to fade out for a moment, and then came back:—to tell me.

He did not reply, and so I said, “If there’s nothing further … “

Behind you, the voice came, urgent and loud now. Coming up behind you.

Loaded gun. You’ve become a threat. Pointed at your head.

He was not speaking. He was thinking.

I betrayed no response. I continued staring at him questioningly, yet as casually as I could.

Now, now, now. Hope to God he can’t hear the footsteps behind him.

He was testing me. I felt sure of it. Mustn’t respond, mustn’t show fear, that’s what he wants, he wants some little sign, some glimmering of fear in my face, wants me to whip around suddenly, flinch, show him I can hear it.

“Then I really should be getting along,” I said calmly.

I heard: Does he?

“Well,” Rossi said, “we can talk next time.”

I heard: Either he’s lying ori watched his face; saw that his mouth hadn’t moved. Once again I felt that creeping dread, a tingling on my skin, and my heart began to beat much too quickly.

Rossi looked at me, and I felt sure I saw resignation in his eyes. I had, for the time being at least, fooled him, I thought. But there was something about Charles Rossi that told me I would not fool him for long.

THIRTEEN.

I sat, stunned, in the back of a taxicab making its way through the broad, clogged streets near Government Center toward my office. My head throbbed worse than ever, and I felt constantly on the edge of being sick to my stomach.

It is an understatement of the highest order to tell you that I was in the early stages of some sort of deep, wild panic. My world had been turned upside down. Nothing made sense anymore. I was deeply afraid that I was on the verge of losing touch with sanity altogether.

I was hearing voices now, voices unspoken. I was hearing, to put it plainly, the thoughts of others almost as clearly as if they had spoken them aloud.

And I was convinced I was losing my mind.

Even now I’m unable to put straight what I knew then and what I concluded much later. Had I really “heard” what I thought I’d heard?

How was this possible? And, more directly to the point, what precisely did Rossi and his lab assistant mean by asking themselves, “Did it work?” It seemed to me there was only one possible explanation: they knew. Somehow, they—Rossi and his lab assistant—were not stunned that the MRI had done to me what it did. For there was no doubt in my mind that it was the MRI that had somehow altered my brain’s hardwiring.

But did Truslow know what had happened?

And yet a minute after thinking this whole thing through lucidly, I found myself wondering, in a panic, whether I had taken a left turn into lunacy.

As the taxi crawled through traffic, my thoughts grew increasingly suspicious. Was that “lie detector test” business merely a pretext, a way to compel me to undergo this procedure?

Had they, in short, known what would happen to me?

Again: had Truslow known?

And had I fooled Rossi? Or did he know that I had this strange and terrible new ability?

Rossi, I feared, knew. Normally, when someone says something that echoes in some way what we’ve been thinking we’ve all had moments like that we respond with surprise, often delight. It is no doubt pleasurable on some level to find another human being connecting with us in such a way.

But Rossi didn’t seem surprised. He seemed how would I describe it?

alert, alarmed, suspicious. As if he’d been waiting for such a development.

I wondered, as I reflected on that scene with Rossi, whether I had really convinced him that there was nothing out of the ordinary in my response that I merely seemed to be tuned in to his thoughts, that it was nothing more than coincidence.

As the cab pulled into the financial district, I leaned forward to give the driver directions. The driver, a middle-aged black man with a sparse beard, sat back in his seat distractedly as he drove, as if in a reverie. Separating us was a scuffed Plexiglas partition. I spoke into the speaker holes, and suddenly realized something startling: I wasn’t “hearing” the driver. Now I was totally confused. Had this talent subsided, or disappeared altogether? Was it the Plexiglas, or the distance, or something else? Again: had I imagined the occurrence altogether?

“Take a right here,” I said, “and it’ll be the large gray building on the left.”

Nothing. The sound of the radio, an all-talk station chattering along at low volume, and the occasional burst of static from his CB, but nothing else.

Had the MRI done something to my brain that had disappeared as quickly as it had appeared?

Totally confused now, I paid him and entered the building lobby, which was crowded with people returning from their early lunches, noisy with their babble. Along with a sizable crowd of lunchtime returnees, I pressed my way into the elevator, pushed the button for my floor, and I will admit it tried to “listen” or “read” or whatever you call it, but the various loud conversations made that impossible in any case.

My head throbbed. I felt claustrophobic, nauseated. Perspiration dripped down the back of my neck.

Then the elevator doors shut, and the crowd fell silent, as it so often does in elevators, and it happened.

I could hear, kaleidoscopic ally snatches of words—or, as it seemed to me at that moment, smears of words and phrases, the way a record or tape sounds when you play it backward (or did in the days before digitally recorded sound, when the technology actually allowed you to do such tricks). The woman next to me—pressed up against me by the crush of people-was a serene-looking woman of around forty, plump and red haired.

Her expression was pleasant, a slight smile. But I could hear at the same time a voice—it had to be coming from her-that came in surges, distant and then distinct, fading in and out, like voices on a party line. Stand it can’t stand it, the voice went. Do it to me he can’t do it to me he can’t. Startled by the contrast between this woman’s pleasant demeanor and the thoughts that bordered on the hysterical, I turned my head toward the man on my left, who looked like a lawyer, in a lawyerly pinstripe suit and horned-rimmed glasses, early fifties, his expression one of vague boredom. And then it came, a distant shout in a male voice: minutes late they’ve stoned without me the bastard … I was “tuning in,” without consciously doing it, the way you can listen for a familiar voice in a crowd, selecting for a certain timbre, a certain sound. In the silence of the elevator, it was simple.

The bell sounded and the doors opened onto the reception area of Putnam & Steams. I brushed past several of my colleagues, barely acknowledging them, and found my way to my office.

Darlene looked up as I approached. As usual, she was wearing black, but today it was some sort of frilly high-necked thing that she probably imagined was feminine. It looked as though she’d picked it up at a Salvation Army.

As I neared her, I heard: “something seriously wrong with Ben.”

She started to say something, but I waved her away. I entered my office, silently greeted the Big Baby Dolls who kept their silent vigil against one wall, and sat down at the desk. “Hold my calls,” I said, closed my office door, and sank into my chair, safe at last in the solitude. For a very long time I sat in absolute silence, staring into the middle distance, squeezing my throbbing temples, cradling my head in my hands, and listening only to the hammering of my heart.

A little while later I emerged to ask Darlene for my messages, She looked at me curiously, obviously wondering whether I was all right.

Handing me a pile of pink message slips, she said, “Mr. Truslow called.”

“Thanks.”

“You feeling any better?”

“What do you mean?”

“You got a headache, right?”

“Yeah. A nasty migraine. “A headache so bad it shows.”