I sat.
“Where are you from?”
“I was born a citizen of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I was born in Leningr…uh, St. Petersburg, excuse me, and grew up in a city called Novosibirsk, in Siberia.”
“What is your real name?”
“I have no ‘real’ name, like most people do,” he said. “I have no family identity. I was a child of the state.”
“You’re an orphan?”
“I’m the product of a genetic experiment. The Soviet government began experimenting with mind control in the ‘20’s. Once Stalin pushed out Trotsky, the program began forcibly mating individuals with strong powers. The program was never really successful-there were some physical and genetic problems. Early mortality and a high rate of suicide, for example.”
He laughed here a little, his dark laughter. I didn’t remember knowing many Russians but this struck me nonetheless as a very Russian type of humor. “They continued to breed the few remaining specimens until the 70’s. I am the end result of four generations of ‘psychics’ bred like farm animals for their desirable characteristics, without love or choice.”
“That’s why Fine said you were the greatest of them all-most powerful, cream of the crop.”
“I was a misfit, a disaster. When I was a child, there were ten of us, mixed into a population of forty or fifty others who showed promise but came from normal families. Most of us died off before completing training and the Soviet became disenchanted with the program as time went on, so the numbers dwindled.”
“They got disenchanted…they didn’t get results?”
He laughed again. “Oh no, they got results- everyone got results, though ours were better than the Americans. But there were problems-political problems.”
“Political problems? With spies?”
“With bureaucrats,” he answered. “Ideological problems, I should say. Communism likes-liked-to think of itself as a scientific approach to history and the world. The problem that no one likes to face is that science is a moving target. What we know now is not all we will know someday. The idea of thoughts being part of an accessible stream that can be tapped and affected at a distance, the idea that the mind-as opposed to the brain-can be separate from the body, can travel and take action on its own, this struck the ideologues as metaphysics. It strongly suggested the possibility of a soul, separate from the physical body, some remnant that has its own life beyond a single physical identity. To them, this smacked of magic. It was not explainable and repeatable-it was not scientific. This didn’t play well at the Politburo oversight committee.
“And Renn,” he continued, “ was the biggest risk of all. I was dangerous, out of control. I responded badly to training. Our training was designed for the average person with some psychotronic ability.”
“Psychotronic? Is that like psychic?”
“I don’t like that term, psychic. It puts me in a lineup with Nostradamus and Madame Marie the fortuneteller.” He shrugged. “Although, otherwise, the words probably mean the same thing.
“Anyway, the problem for most mindbenders is that the mental signal they receive is weak. Any sort of distraction or embedded or suggested thought will disturb it or color it and your whole purpose as a spy is to bring back useful, accurate, actionable information. So they had to desensitize us, to beat down our reliance on logic, on what we thought things should mean, anything that might get in the way of our reporting what we found, as we found it. Desensitizing involved a series of beatings-”
“Excuse me?”
“They beat us. They sent good decent men with big families and charitable intentions-and strong arms. They would put us in a small room and send in the strong men to hit us, with absolutely no evil intent. This started when we were around eleven or twelve, in addition to our classroom training. You would show up for geometry to find that the rest of the class had been moved elsewhere and here was Boris to rearrange your attitude-and your bones.
“They were under some sort of deep suggestion, surely, for while they were beating us, they would be thinking about taking their own children to the park or making love to their wives or some movie they saw last weekend. Either they were under suggestion or they searched the Republics for oafs who could be that disassociated from reality.”
“This was on purpose?”
“It was crucial to the process that it make no sense. No matter how we tried to rationalize, the reality would defeat us. They beat us viciously while having nothing whatever against us and, being mindreaders, we would know this for a fact. After enough of this-each person has their own definition of ‘enough’-you were expected to lay down your need for answers, your expectation that things would make any sort of sense. You were expected to accept what you found, so you could report ‘as is.’ And you were expected to obey.”
He was biting his fingernails as he spoke. He didn’t seem aware of it but, by the time he reached this point in the story, he’d worked past the white nail rim on several fingers and into the colored part. As he bit pieces off, he placed them neatly without thinking in his shirt pocket.
“I’m not good,” he said after a pause, “at obeying. The first time a man hit me hard, I killed him. We were in a laboratory setting, so of course the place was floor to ceiling sensor arrays. They measured 5000 amps straight to the heart.” His eyes were locked onto the desk in front of him but he was rubbing his earlobe red. “It took three seconds for him to die and in that time, I saw what he saw, I felt what he felt, everything that was in him as he knew he was done-his parents, his wife and children, the first three women he made love to, the guard outside he’d made love to earlier that day, his best friends in grammar school, his grandparents…and his anger at the idiots who sent him to beat up the boy who shoots sparks out of his fingers.” He looked up at me momentarily but the eyes were blank. He’d killed this memory long before, to the extent he could.
“I continued this way until I was twenty-it took me that long to learn how to only kill intentionally. I spent years in tutoring with teachers on the other side of a glass wall and watching other children play games outside. Occasionally I was allowed outings to the home of one or another of the scientists, for a meal or sitting with the family watching television. I was told it might be dangerous for me to swim-I might electrocute somebody. Ha!
“I can’t blame them for being cautious-I killed three other men in that time. They kept trying to find some way to adapt the system or adapt me to the system. I was too valuable to waste-a mindreader who could read the enemy’s secrets and memories and then fry him with a touch! A perfect assassin, if only I could be made fit for the task.
“In the meantime, they left me to my waveform experiments, my little hobby, in the classroom by myself day after day, setting off Bunsen burners across the room or making my hand merge with the desk.”
“What?”
He looked at me quizzically and then laughed. “Oh! Yeah, it’s-” And he placed his hand onto the card table between us and closed his eyes until the hand sank into the desk, until his arm just led to the desk and stopped there. I was gaping at it when he opened his eyes. “You have any change? A dime or a quarter or something?”
I had a two-dollar bill in my pocket. I always have it there. I know they still print them but I told myself it was lucky when I got it so it is. “Something,” I answered.
“My fingers are under the table-give me what you’ve got.”
I had to look under the table. There were fingers there, wiggling down out of the surface. I couldn’t help it-I reached out and grabbed at the fingers.
“Ow!” he yelped and I jumped back. He huffed at me. “They’re real, yes. If you pull on them, it hurts.”
He held his other hand up in the air, pointed at me. “Remember what I do to people that hurt me, okay?” He looked serious for a split-second and then flashed the best smile he could. “Just kidding-I don’t do that anymore. Okay?” He looked at my hand-I had the two dollar bill scrunched down inside it. “So give me the change-I’ll give it back.”