INTERVENTION (6 page)

In our early childhood, following that initial stress-provoked incident of farspeech and farsight out in the woods, we experienced other near-involuntary telepathic interchanges. Once Don scalded himself with hot soup and I, in the next room, jumped up screaming. I would have a furious argument with a cousin and Don would come running up, knowing exactly what the fight was about. We sometimes dreamed the same dreams and shared unspoken jokes. Eventually, we attained crude telepathic communication as well as a kind of shared farsight and mutual sensitivity. We experimented, "calling" to each other over greater and greater distances, and exercised our farsight with variations on games such as hide-and-seek and hide-the-thimble. Our cousins were blasé about our talents, ascribing them to the acknowledged freakishness of twins. They learned early not to play card games with us, and casually utilized our farsensing abilities to track down lost items and anticipate impending adult interference in illicit activities. We were a little weird, but we were useful. No big thing.

On one of our first days at school I was cornered by a bully and commanded to hand over my milk money, or suffer a beating. I broadcast a mental cry for help. Don came racing into the schoolyard alcove where I had been trapped, radiating coercive fury and saying not a single word. The bully, nearly twice Don's size, fled. My brother and I stood close together until the bell rang, bonded in fraternal love. This would happen often while we were young, when each of us was the other's best friend. It became rarer as we approached adolescence and ended altogether after we reached puberty.

By the time we were nine (the age, Denis later explained to me, when the brain attains its adult size and the metafunctions tend to "solidify," resisting further expansion unless painful educational techniques stimulate them artificially), Don and I had become fairly adept in what is now called farspeech on the intimate mode. We could communicate across distances of two or three kilometers, sharing a wide range of nuance and emotional content. Our farscanning ability was weaker, requiring intense concentration in the transmission of any but the simplest images. By mutual agreement, we never told anyone explicit details of our telepathic talent, and we became increasingly wary of demonstrating metapsychic tricks to our cousins. Like all children, we wanted to be thought "normal." Nevertheless there was a good deal of fun to be had using the powers, and we couldn't resist playing with them surreptitiously in spite of vague notions that such mind-games might be dangerous.

In the lower grades of grammar school we drove the good sisters crazy as we traded farspoken wisecracks and then snickered enigmatically out loud. We sometimes recited in eerie unison or antiphonally. We traded answers to test questions until we were placed in separate classrooms, and even then we still managed to cooperate in uncanny disruptive pranks. We were tagged fairly early as troublemakers and were easily bored and inattentive. To our contemporaries we were the Crazy Twins, ready to do the outrageous to attract attention—just as in our baby years we had vied to attract the notice of hard-working, hard-drinking One' Louie and kind but distracted Tante Lorraine. (But our foster parents had three additional children of their own after our arrival, for a total of nine, and we were lost in the crowd of cousins.)

As we grew older we developed a small repertoire of other metafaculties. I was the first to learn how to raise a mental wall to keep my inmost thoughts private from Don, and I was always better at weaving mind-screens than he. It provoked his anger when I retreated into my private shell, and he would exercise his coercive power in almost frantic attempts to break me down. His mental assaults on me were at first without malice; it was rather as if he were afraid to be left "alone." When I finally learned to block him out completely he sulked, then revealed that he was genuinely hurt. I had to promise that I would let him back into my mind "if he really needed me." When I promised, he seemed to forget the whole matter.

Don amused himself by attempting to coerce others, a game I instinctively abhored and rarely attempted. He had some small success, especially with persons who were distracted. Poor Tante Lorraine was an easy mark for gifts of kitchen goodies while she was cooking, for example; but it was next to impossible to coerce the redoubtable nuns who were our teachers. Both of us experimented in trying to read the minds of others. Don had little luck, except in the perception of generalized emotions. I was more skilled in probing and occasionally picked up skeins of subliminal thought, those "talking to oneself" mumblings that form the superficial layer of consciousness; but I was never able to read the deeper thoughts of any person but my twin brother, a limitation I eventually learned to thank God for.

We developed a modest self-redaction that enabled us to speed the healing of our smaller wounds, bruises, and blisters. Curing germ-based illness, however, even the common cold, was beyond us. We also practiced psychokinesis and learned to move small objects by mind-power alone. I remember how we looted coin telephones throughout two glorious summer weeks, squandering the money on ice cream, pop, and bootleg cigarettes. Then, because we were still good Catholic Franco-American boys at heart, we had qualms of conscience. In confession Father Racine gave us the dismal news that stealing from New England Bell (we didn't reveal our modus operandi) was just as much of a sin as stealing from real human beings. Any notions we might have had of becoming metapsychic master-thieves died aborning. Perhaps because of our upbringing, perhaps because of our lack of criminal imagination, we were never tempted along these lines again. Our fatal flaws lay in other directions.

The first indications of them came when we were ten years old.

It was late on a dreary winter day. School was over, and Don and I were fooling around in what we thought was an empty school gym, making a basketball perform impossible tricks. An older boy named O'Shaughnessy, newly come to the school from a tough neighborhood in Boston, happened to come along and spot us working our psychokinetic magic. He didn't know what he was seeing—but he decided it must be something big and sauntered out to confront us.

"You two," he said in a harsh, wheedling voice, "have got a
secret gimmick
—and I want in on it!"

"Comment? Comment? Qu'est-ce que c'est?" we babbled, backing away. I had the basketball.

"Don't gimme that Frog talk—I know you speak English!" He grabbed Don by the jersey. "I been watching and I seen you gimmick the ball, make it stop in midair and dribble all over your bodies and go into the hoop in crazy ways. Whatcha got—radio control?"

"No! Hey, leggo!" Don struggled in the big kid's grip and O'Shaughnessy struck him a savage, sharp-knuckled blow in the face that made my own nerves cringe. Both of us yelled.

"Shaddup!" hissed O'Shaughnessy. His right hand still clenched Don's shirt. The left, grubby and broken-nailed, seized Don's nose in some terrible street-fighter grip with two fingers thrust up the nostrils and the thumbnail dug into the bridge. Don sucked in a ragged agonized breath through his mouth, but before he could utter another sound the brute said:

"Not a squeak, cocksucker—and your brother better hold off if he knows what's good for the botha you!" The fingers jammed deeper into Don's nose. I experienced a hideous burst of sympathetic pain. "I push just a little harder, see, I could
pop out his eyeballs.
Hey, punk! You wanna see your brother's eyeballs rollin' on the gym floor? Where I could
step
on 'em?"

Queasily, I shook my head.

"Right." O'Shaughnessy relaxed a little. "Now you just calm down and do a repeat of that cute trick I saw you doing when I came in. The in-and-outer long bomb."

My mind cried out to my brother: "DonnieDonniewhatgonnaDO?

TricktrickDOit! DOitGodsake—

Thenhe'llKNOW—

O'Shaughnessy growled, "You stalling?" He dug in. I felt pain and nausea and the peripheral area of the gym had become a dark-red fog.

"Don't hurt him! I'll do it!"

Trembling, I held the ball between my hands and faced the basket at the opposite end of the court. It was fully sixty feet away, more than eighteen meters. I made a gentle toss. The ball soared in a great arc as though it were jet-propelled and dropped into the distant basket. When it hit the floor it bounced mightily, came up through the hoop from beneath, and neatly returned to my waiting hands.

"Jeez!" said O'Shaughnessy. "Radio control! I knew it. Thing's a gold mine!" Raw greed glared out of his eyes. "Awright, punk, hand over the ball and the gimmick."

"Gimmick?" I repeated stupidly.

"The thing!" he raged. "The thing that controls the ball! Dumb little fart-face frog! Don't you know a ball-control gimmick like that's gotta be worth a fortune? Get me outa this backwoods hole and back to Beantown and my Uncle Dan and—never mind! Hand it over."

"Let my brother go first," I pleaded.

The big kid laughed. He crooked one leg around Don's ankle and simultaneously pushed. My brother sprawled helplessly on the floor, gagging and groaning. O'Shaughnessy advanced on me with hands outstretched. Two of his fingers were bloody.

"The ball and the gimmick," he demanded, "or it's your turn, punk."

"The only gimmick's inside my head," I said. "But you can have the ball."

I drove the rubber sphere at him with all my psychokinetic strength, hitting him full in his grinning face. His nose shattered with the impact and the ball burst its bladder. I heard a gargling scream from O'Shaughnessy and a throaty noise like a Malamute snarl from somebody else.

Help me
get
him Donnie!

The torn and flattened ball like some writhing marine organism clamping itself across a horror-stricken face. Savage sounds and big hands clawing and punching at me. The brother mind poured out its own PK spontaneously to meld with mine, strength magnified manyfold, cemented with mutual loathing, fear, and creative solidarity. Somebody shrieking as the three of us struggled beneath the basket. Then a grotesque figure like a scarecrow, its head a red-smeared dented globe. Go for it Donnie man HEY togethemow togethemow allezallez SLAM-DUNK THE BASTARD...

They found O'Shaughnessy bloody-nosed and half out of his mind with terror, stuffed headfirst into the basket so that the hoop imprisoned his upper arms. The broken basketball encased his head and muffled his cries a little, but he was never in any real danger of suffocating. We had been caught, literally red-handed, trying to sneak out of the gymnasium. O'Shaughnessy blamed us, of course, and told the story pretty much as it had happened—leaving out his own extortion attempt and assault with intent to maim. He also accused us of owning a mysterious electronic device "that the FBI'd be
real
interested in hearing about."

His tale was too outlandish to be credited, even against us, the Crazy Twins. We maintained that we had found him in his weird predicament and attempted to help. Since we were obviously both too small to have boosted a hulking lout three meters above floor-level, it was evident that O'Shaughnessy had lied. His reputation was even more dubious than ours: he was a bad hat who had been shipped off to relatives in the New Hampshire boondocks in the vain hope of keeping him out of a Boston reformatory. Following the incident with us he was retransported with alacrity and never heard from again.

We, on the other hand, were clearly not telling all we knew.

Many questions were asked. Odd bits of circumstantial evidence were noted and pondered. In the midst of the uproar we remained tight as quahog clams. Our cousins who knew (or could deduce) a thing or two rallied round loyally. The family came first—especially against the Irish saloperie! After some weeks the incident was forgotten.

But Don and I didn't forget. We hashed over and over the glorious experience of metaconcert, the two-minds-working-as-one that had produced an action greater than the sum of its parts, giving us transcendent power over a hated enemy. We tried to figure out how we had done it. We knew that if we could reproduce the effect at will we would never have to be afraid of anyone again.

We thought about nothing else and our schoolwork was totally neglected; but we were never able to mesh our minds that way again, no matter how hard we tried. Some of the fault lay in our imperfect metapsychic development, but the greater failure was grounded in a mutual lack of trust. Our peril at O'Shaughnessy's hands had been sufficient to cancel our jealous individuality; but once the danger was lifted, we reverted to our deeper mind-sets—Don the driven, domineering coercer and I the one who thought too much, whose imagination even at that young age whispered where the abuse of power might lead.

Each of us blamed the other for the metaconcert failure. We ended up locking each other out in a fury of disappointment, thwarted ambition, and fear—and we barely missed flunking the fifth grade.

One' Louie called us to him on a certain spring evening and displayed the fatal report cards. Our cousins were all outside playing in the warm dusk. We heard their laughter and shrieks as they played Red Rover in a vacant lot while we stood sulkily before our uncle and faced the time of reckoning.

"Haven't I done my best to rear you properly? Aren't you as dear to me as any of my own children?" He brandished the cards and his beer-tinged breath washed over us. "A few failing grades, one could understand. But this! The sisters say that you must make up these failed subjects or repeat a year. All summer long, you must go to the public school in the morning. What a disgrace! Such a thing has never happened before in this family. You shame the Remillards!"

We mumbled something about being sorry.

"Oh, my boys," he said sorrowfully. "What would your poor parents say? Think of them, watching from heaven, so disappointed. It's not as though you were blockheads who could do no better. You have good brains, both of you! To waste them is an insult to the good God who made you."

We began to sniffle.

"You will do better?"

"Yes, One' Louie."

"Bon." He heaved a great sigh, turned away from us, and went to the sideboard where he kept the whiskey. "Now go out and play for a while before bedtime."