Out of Touch (7 page)

“Is this something your family makes?”

“Not really, my mother didn’t have much time to cook.”

“Tell me about your mother and your other relatives. I’m very curious about them. I’m sure one rainy night, just after we moved here in 2003, I heard someone shouting telepathically down there. It was the loudest thought I ever heard.”

“What time of year?”

“Winter, maybe nine or ten o’clock. It was freezing cold and rainy. I was pregnant and bundled up by the fire. Jayu was working late, and I didn’t think I could fall asleep alone in the house on such a noisy night. I’d only been here for a few months, and I didn’t know anyone. Had I heard something like that later, I might have rushed down just to see if I could find the person. But I was still worried that the Chinese or American governments might be watching us.”

Sarah finished her own cookie and wiped her mouth in time to say, “What made you think that?”

“You can’t imagine what it was like in Hong Kong at the time. Everyone pretended all was well. China had promised a hands-off approach. But my brother-in-law heard rumors. He worked for a pharmaceuticals company. And suspicious requests came in from the mainland. There seemed to be research into certain mental conditions, ways of simulating them or controlling them. A strange virus appeared, and rumors said it was genetically engineered. He heard someone joking about a program to conscript telepaths for government work. There was no way to know if there was truth behind the joke. He quickly found a job in the U.S. and moved. Jayu and I did too. None of us could stand the thought of being tools of the government. Perhaps, having known such precarious freedom all our lives, we valued it even more than most Americans.

“Jayu finally went back, a few years ago. He was going to make discreet inquiries with a few of our ancestors’ families, for the sake of the children. We were beginning to doubt there were any telepaths in the U.S.. We were worried for our children’s futures. Who would they marry?”

Lisa scowled at her mother, but she said nothing Sarah could hear. Robert and Howard seemed content munching cookies.

“Then Jayu died in a plane crash between Beijing and Taipei. At first I thought the Chinese government had taken him. But then surely they would have sent someone to recruit us. So finally I accepted that he was dead.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Thank you. But, I have my children, and my nephew.” Mei Mei spared a pouting half smile for Howard, caught with powdered sugar on his nose and chin. “It’s better to be safe and free.”

“Don’t you worry, with all the genetic tests and so on, that we’ll be targeted here?”

             
“I can imagine people finding out telepathy exists. There could be trouble. But so far the U.S. has upheld people’s rights to not be tested for being gay, having mood disorders, tending toward violence. It’s reassuring. I can’t imagine the U.S. running a secret program to kidnap or conscript people like us.”

             
Sarah wasn’t so sure. She’d been watching genetics legislation and court decisions since the election, but she didn’t want to say anything too political. As for trusting her government, among her mongrel heritage was at least one Native American great-grandmother. When Sarah did a grade school project on the Trail of Tears, she took it personally.

              “But as I was saying,” Mei Mei continued, and Sarah tried to look attentive, “When I heard something that night, I didn’t know I’d never hear anything like that again. Years later, when Lisa and Robert were old enough to participate in the American Halloween holiday, I took them to trick-or-treat at your house and some others on your street. Your mother’s mind was silent also. I tried speaking to her telepathically, but she showed no sign of hearing. I thought I must be wrong or that whatever I’d heard came from a visitor, maybe a relative?”

Sarah was caught up in her own thoughts and failed to answer for a moment. If her mother had been telepathic, would she have hidden it from Mei Mei? From Sarah? Could she have been worried about government detection? Could Mei Mei be working for the government, either U.S. or Chinese? But then she wouldn’t have told that story, or would she?

Sarah pushed back a tired swell of emotions. She’d come too far to turn back now, so she trusted her gut reaction, “What did you hear the person yell that night?”

“I believe it was, ‘Shut up!’”

“My aunt and uncle.” Sarah said it without meaning to speak her thoughts aloud. But what else could she do? How else could she ever find out? “I can’t really remember; that would have been when I was four. But there were a few times my mother’s sister and her family stayed at our house. They live in the bay area, and sometimes the airports there close for bad weather and they end up in Sacramento. They sometimes stay with us until the weather clears.” Sarah realized she’d said “us” as if her mother was still alive, as if her mother could have been here to answer these questions herself. Maybe this was all just a dream and it didn’t matter what she said. “They have four kids; the older three would have been teenagers by then. If they were all telepaths—anyway, I could imagine my Aunt or one of them screaming ‘shut up,’ on a rainy night, cooped up in my house.”

Sarah’s mind began to cascade with images of her cousins: playing games with rules she couldn’t follow, biking silently in the Berkeley Hills, putting on Christmas plays where only she forgot her lines. Sarah was always the outside one, the younger one, just a cousin. But could there have been something more? Were they all teeps? She’d tried her telekinetic tricks in front of them several times, hitting a key on the piano, making mistletoe drop on someone’s head. Were none of them teeks or did they just not tell her because she couldn’t hear them? Sarah felt a childish urge to run home and bury herself under blankets until she sorted things out.

But she knew better than to eat and run. She let herself be led back to the sitting room.

“Do any of those relatives come to visit now? Maybe we could meet them and find out if they hear us.” Mei Mei spoke gently, no excitement in her voice. Where was the emotion? If they’d been looking for people like her for so long, shouldn’t they seem more excited? Then again, some people were like that. The Chens all seemed quite reserved, sitting primly on the furniture, but Howard kept shifting positions, leaning forward like the Thinker, putting his arms down, clasping and unclasping his hands. And he kept smiling and staring at her. Sarah realized she’d been rubbing her little finger against the smooth leather couch. She stopped.

“My aunt and uncle drove out when my mom died and when we scattered the ashes, but I doubt they’ll visit again. Only one of my cousins still lives in California, and she has some problems of her own. So she doesn’t travel much.” Cousin Ashley was supposedly schizophrenic, but Sarah distrusted that label, since Ashley had always been her favorite cousin.

She remembered her last real discussion with Ashley, almost ten years before. They’d walked along the Sacramento River and tried to skip rocks. Sarah had been sixteen, confused, depressed. They’d talked about alienation, about not feeling part of the world at large. Sarah had been speaking obliquely about her telekinesis. What if Ashley had been talking around telepathy? She’d felt so close to Ashley that day but never suspected anything. She hadn’t even tried moving the rocks without a touch, having given up such tests by then.

Sarah could barely pay attention to the present. Her eyelids felt greasy, and her social skills had been pushed to the limit. Her mind was exploding with ideas and memories she needed to sort out. Much as she wanted to know everything about the Chens and to not seem rude by leaving, she had to have time alone.

After many minutes of polite good-byes and promises to talk again soon, Sarah made it to the familiar ground of her shoes. But even as she escaped out the door, Howard managed to assign himself to walk her home.

“Let me walk with you. I’ve been inside too long.”

“Oh, you don’t need to—“

“I want to.”

There was an uneasy silence for a few moments as they headed down the street.

“Sarah, I was wondering if you’d like to go out sometime, with just me? I’m mostly down at UCLA now, but maybe the next time I’m up?”

Sarah suspected Howard was asking as a guy and not just as the only teek she’d ever met. But it was tempting. “I dunno. My boyfriend, Reggie, might not understand, and well, I couldn’t really explain—“

“I didn’t mean, uh, how long have you been going out?”

“Three years.”

“And he doesn’t know?”

“How could he? I’ve never told anyone.”

“And you never . . .”

“Never what?”

“Well, you know. You never used what you could do to make things a little more interesting?”

Sarah noticed Howard’s voice was a little higher and he’d pushed his hands into his pockets.

“I told you, I didn’t know where the power came from or if it could be traced. I don’t use it casually.”

“You still feel that way?” They’d reached Sarah’s house.

“I think so.” Sarah made no move to invite him in.

“Well, many things may change now that we’ve found each other. Let’s wait and see.” Howard smiled and touched her shoulder, then
headed back to his Aunt’s house.

Sarah locked the door, closed all the remaining curtains, and hid under a pile of covers on the only bed left in the house.

“B on 2306 ordered by D for political reasons.”

When James found the note, it was folded in half and lying a few inches inside his hotel room door. His mind was busy restructuring his assumptions about the immune system to incorporate some Polish results supporting a cheaper pseudomonas retrovirus fix for those still living with cystic fibrosis. He was sure the gamma globulin problem they’d encountered could be used intentionally, to advantage, in other gene therapies if the relevant portion of the pseudomonas genome could be spliced into a safe carrier.

James tried to interpret the note as a scientist, to connect it to something at this conference on genetics and chronic disease. Instead, it distracted him, like a ring and post puzzle that looked easy but was not.

On hands and knees James put his head to the industrial carpet where the note had been. He couldn’t see a crack under the door. He stood up, closed the heavy hotel curtains, and turned off the light. He knelt exactly opposite where he’d been before and put his head down in the same spot, again facing the door. A clear gap showed light. It would have been easy enough to slide a note through. Security cameras in the hall must have recorded someone doing it. But EU privacy laws would protect those recordings from anything short of a criminal investigation. And even if he could somehow access the recordings, solving the conundrum that way would seem like cheating.

James stood and began to pace. He smoothed his hair with one hand to make sure the cowlick in back wasn’t sticking up. He paused, on the verge of turning, and stared at the note. He remained frozen like that for half a minute in the frigid hotel room. Then his mind connected “B on 2306” to the fact that Joseph Brandenburg, from his father’s old lab, had died on June 23rd.

His mouth opened in shock, then his jaw clenched in doubt, but his thoughts raced ahead, trying to solve the puzzle using Brandenburg’s death as the first piece. The controversial “D” in the news right now was Darrel Davies, a podium-thumping American presidential candidate. Globally, there were many possible “D’s” in politics, but Brandenburg had lived and died in the U.S. Could Davies know about the family business? Or was D someone closer to the lab that his father, and then Brandenburg, had run?

              James studied the note. The words were printed in Arial by some generic printer on standard weight white paper. He could have printed it himself with a cheap attachment for his outmoded pilot. The hotel might even have a message delivery system with printouts like this, and surely no one would have left useful fingerprints or DNA on such a note. Nevertheless, he placed it in a ziploc bag.

Who would send him this? Surely a professional spy would use something more subtle. Was it someone who’d known him when he still worked with his father? A wave of resentment washed through James, thoughts of the work he might have done if not entangled by his father’s petty genetic conspiracy. He let it go, there was no one from that time who would contact him now. Brandenburg had been the only employee who knew what was really going on. Brandenburg was the only one who stayed with them in 2007 when the U.S. government took over.

He would have been in his eighties now. James pictured him still with a mustache and a full head of hair, though he hadn’t seen him since leaving the U.S. fifteen years ago. The man had been competent, likable, not someone to insist on his own way or trample others to reach the top. James had read the notice of his death in a newsletter and assumed it was from natural causes. He remembered Brandenburg patting his shoulder when his father passed away and saying what a pity it was he died so young. James hadn’t been sure he agreed.

Now he strode into the hallway, down to a bank of elevators, and pressed the lower button with his knuckle. He slid the bag with the note into his jacket pocket but was unwilling to let his hand lose contact. He
used only his free hand to straighten his pressed blue shirt, first on one side, then the other, and watched the elevator light rise and pause on the fifth floor.