“Maybe,” I said, feeling profound, “he meant you should use the power for a good purpose.” If it had been a movie, that would have been a key line. I could see Harrison Ford saying it.
Renn sighed and then coughed up a laugh. “I have a gift,” he replied, “that has no positive use. I can root out things people want hidden and force people to do things they don’t want to do. Where does positive fit in?” He went back into the living room and slid the door closed after I followed him in.
“And so, now I’ve told you my story. I’ve led you to a dangerous place and I’m not sure what the next step is. I don’t know who these people are who are after us now; I don’t know why they killed Dave. I know they aren’t going to give up-we’ve gone a long distance away and I can still feel them probing for us every few minutes, even here. I won’t keep you against your will and I wouldn’t blame you for bailing. If you want to, I’ll drop you in town in the morning.”
“They’ll torture me to get what I know about you.”
“They wouldn’t have to torture you in any case,” he said. “But if I drop you off, you won’t know anything about me-and they will be able to read that pretty quickly.” He shrugged. “ It’s your decision. I’m not very pleasant but I’m not a jailer.”
“What about the stuff in my head? The other names that might be there? Don’t you need them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it doesn’t matter. It won’t bring Dave back, will it?”
“It does matter,” I said as a reflex and knew in that instant it was everything to me. “We’ve got to get the guys that did it and find out why.”
“Why?” he asked and I could see he was really listening, that for some reason he really needed an answer.
“Because we know they’re out there, whoever they are. And because we-you-can do something about it.”
“That simple?”
“He was my friend. And yours.” He nodded. “That’s pretty simple, I guess.” Looking at his face, I thought, He envies the fact that it’s that simple for me. And then I had another thought. “Of course,” I said, “you knew I was going to say that.”
He shrugged and laughed his grating laugh. “I don’t have a choice,” he said. “Thoughts like this don’t mean much until you say them out loud. Or, really, until you do something about them.”
“Okay,” I said. “So now what do we do?”
“Now,” he concluded, “we play cards.”
Seven
“Seven.”
“Wrong.”
“Three,” I said, straining to pluck an answer out of the air, trying to imagine the far side of the card he held in front of me.
“No.”
“Nine. Two. Six Hundred and Fifteen.”
“Funny,” he said. “Okay, just stop what you’re doing. Stop imagining. Stop trying to figure things out. You can’t learn this; you just have to know it.”
“That’s stupid! How can you know something without learning it?”
He reached across the table and pinched my hand, hard. “Yeow!” I recoiled.
“There,” he said calmly. “No learning involved. You don’t make this happen. Stop trying to explain. Your conscious mind demands control; your subconscious just knows. Look at the card and say whatever comes into your head. Say it before your mind gets a chance to corrupt it.”
“Like the Force,” I said. “In Star Wars.”
“No!” he said sharply, holding up that admonishing, dangerous finger. “Don’t do that. The American mind control program fell apart from that kind of association-‘New Age’; crystals, Vulcan mind melds, the love that overcomes all obstacles. Good Vibrations. Unless you’re getting royalties from the song, there are no good vibrations. What’s good in life vanishes in a breath; pain lingers forever.”
He went through the deck, sorting the cards into two piles and then shuffling one pile. “Okay. I’ve narrowed it down-hearts, spades and diamonds, nothing else. Just tell me which. No thinking allowed. No questioning. Just say what you think as soon as you think it. Okay?”
“Okay.”
He held up a card.
“Diamonds.”
“Good.” He made a mark on one side of a sheet of paper on the table.
“That was right?”
“Tell you later. This one.” He held up another.
“Diamonds again,” I said, sure I was doing it wrong.
“Very good,” he said. “Next.”
“Spades.”
“Good. Next.”
And so on. This went on for fifteen minutes. When we were done, the paper had scribbles on both sides. He tore it up immediately without looking at it and tossed it in the trash.
“How’d I do?” I asked, puzzled.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said.
“I want to know.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Now I got upset. “What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? Why’d I do it then?”
He sighed. “I told you-what matters is that you have the feeling of knowing. Once you get that, you’ll get better.”
He could see on my face that I didn’t find this a very satisfying answer.
“I told my teacher once,” he said, “that I didn’t think I could develop the skills we were working on. He told me, ‘Don’t worry about the skills; develop your confidence.’ I said, ‘How am I supposed to have confidence when I don’t have the skill?’ His answer was, ‘Once you have the confidence, you’ll find out you already had the skill.’”
“That’s stupid,” I told him.
He shrugged. “Maybe it is,” he acknowledged. “A lot of life is stupid.” He smiled and started putting the cards back in the box. “Once you loosened up,” he said, “once you got bored and stopped trying to guess, you got around 65 % correct. Way beyond mathematical probability. You have potential.” The pleasure leaked out of the smile now. “Nothing kills more people than potential,” he mused. For a moment, which was about as long as he ever mused about anything. Then he added, “Start concentrating on some really vivid moment in your life-something that really comes alive when you remember it. Probably something bad.”
“Why bad?”
“I said already-pain lingers. Happiness becomes elusive as soon as it’s over.”
“Why?”
“At some point, things are going to get intense. You’re going to have to block for yourself. If you can put your mind in some other place, into some other reality that isn’t about now, you become hard to read. It’s the simplest way to block.” If this was the simple way, there didn’t seem to be much point asking about the more complicated ones. I was totally lost. “Just try to remember something vivid,” he said. “Like I said, it’ll probably be bad and you’ll have to be able to choose it-to choose to go back into it, really get inside it, at a moment’s notice.” Why would anyone want that, I thought, but he was already announcing, “I’m taking a shower. Then we should think about food.”
I sat in the living room for a few minutes. I could have turned on the TV or caught up on my reading but I got up and opened the sliding door and went out onto the balcony instead. It felt like I’d been enclosed for months.
The view carried all the way on down the valley. The rain clouds were breaking up, the last glints of sun winking over the mountains and slinking through the streets of the town. A breeze was swirling at the base of the cliff, carrying leaves and twigs up off the rock shelves towards the house. The birds were out in packs, swirling around, twittering and making tight turns in loose formation. Together yet separate, like Max’s world, bits of matter bound together by Good Vibrations. Or Bad Vibrations maybe, if you listened to him. If you believed he meant everything he said. I didn’t believe anybody meant everything they said.
Dave used to take me fishing. We’d sit for hours without anything happening, line in the water, staring, barely talking. I’d get lost in the line in the water, in the little ring, the nipple that formed around the spot where the line fell into the water. I could just stare into the dark pool and drift for a long time and when I’d look up Dave would be smiling at me. We’d go for long walks along the boundaries of the marsh nearby, checking the fencing and repairing where it was breached or crooked or the wood frame was rotting. It annoyed me to be doing it; I knew nobody was paying him for the work and I didn’t see why you needed a fence around a national park but Dave wanted to and that made it okay. He would point out the joint that needed a few nails and then point it out again, even though I was already looking at it. Look at that knothole, he’d say, is that the biggest knothole you ever saw in your life? and I thought to myself, this guy’s the fucking dweeb of the world, who cares about knotholes? But it would be the same thing with the trees and the birds and even the clouds. Look how the edges change. Constantly shifting. It took me a while to realize he was doing it with a purpose-he was bringing me back into the world, on a level I could handle. My door was shut tight; there wasn’t a whole lot I was willing to let in but Dave just doggedly went at every little crack I’d left open, pushing till it opened a bit wider. I loved him like you love your dotty old aunt who doesn’t know anything about the world but would sell her house for you in two minutes if you needed it. That’s what I thought he was, dotty. But I also knew he was taking care of me and I knew I needed taking care of.