The Thought Pushers (Mind Dimensions Book 2) (10 page)

“What? How do you know that?” Eugene gives her a startled look.

“I Split to the Mind Dimension just now, of course,” Mira replies. “Then I walked back to the hospital and Read the people there. I had to see if I could learn something more than Darren discovered about our enemy.”

“And,” Eugene prompts impatiently.

“And I didn’t find any sign of the bastard. Only that tell-tale presence Darren described in the woman’s mind.” She looks upset as she says this.

“But how do you know it’s the same Pusher?” Eugene asks.

“I just feel it. I can’t explain it,” she says curtly, and I know exactly what she means. There was almost a tone of voice to the Pushing instructions I glimpsed in the nurse’s mind—the same tone that I heard in the Russian mobster’s head the other day.

“What did the people I Pushed think about the whole ordeal?” I ask worriedly. “Are they going to call the police? Do you think I’ll be wanted for questioning?”

“No. The resident and the visitor have amnesia, as does the nurse,” Mira says, her expression now hard to read.

“Amnesia is a known side effect of Pushing,” Eugene explains. “If you get someone to do something small, something they can justify to themselves, they can internalize the story the Pusher gives them or invent their own reasoning, creating an illusion of free will. But when it’s something big, something they can’t fathom doing by free will, the brain chooses to forget the incident altogether. It’s a type of defense mechanism, I guess. They either don’t remember what happened, or have only a vague recollection. My father thought it was akin to alcohol-induced amnesia.”

I sort of understand. The alcohol amnesia thing happened to me once. I woke up next to Jen, this woman that I couldn’t picture myself being interested in, beer goggles or not. Yet apparently we’d hooked up, and she told me a story that sounded like it happened to someone else.

“Right, so you’re off the hook,” Mira says to me. “I don’t think anyone is going to be questioning you for that.”

“Okay, good,” I say, starting to feel cautiously optimistic. “Let’s keep on driving. Start the car.”

“What if he’s still there?” Mira says, frowning. “Maybe we should go back.”

“No, that’s a terrible idea,” Eugene says firmly.

“I agree,” I say. “Being nearly killed twice in one day is plenty for me.”

“You guys are such wimps,” Mira says scornfully.

“I am not,” Eugene objects. “We’re blocks away from Brighton Beach, where the Russian mafia hangs out all the time—and the Pusher has used them in the past. He can Split, walk over, find a lackey, and make him come kill us. In fact, the hospital is so close that the Pusher can just call them on the phone. For all we know, they’re already at the hospital by now. I’m all for vengeance, but if we get killed, we won’t get any.”

“Exactly,” I say. “I’m too sick from the drugs and the head wound. I need to rest before I take another bullet for the greater good.”

“Fine.” Mira blows out an annoyed breath. “You’re probably right. So what now?”

“I’m going to stay at a hotel,” I say. “They now know my name, which means they might know where I live. I’m not taking any chances. In your case, it’s even simpler. They do know where you live, so I suggest you follow my example.”

“That’s a good idea,” Eugene says. “They are really after us, so it pays to be cautious. Needless to say, give a different name when you book your room.”

“Right. And no going to the apartment to get shit, Eugene,” Mira says, and I hear her also mumble something along the lines of ‘a couple of pussies.’

“Wait, I just realized I forgot some stuff at the hospital,” I say, patting my pockets.

“Are you looking for this?” Eugene says, getting a gun from the glove compartment.

“I was actually thinking of the Gameboys I left in that room, but that’s also mine,” I say. “Where’d you get it?”

“Mira got it out of your pants before the paramedics got to you,” he says. “I’ve been holding on to it.”

“Okay, thanks,” I say, trying not to focus on the image of Mira getting something from my pants.

We don’t talk much more on the way to the city, other than my asking Eugene to stop near a juice bar. A beet-carrot jumbo cup of juice is all I want today. I don’t think I can keep anything more substantial down.

As I drink the juice, we make plans, which are very simple. Keep our heads low for a couple of days, and then regroup. Mira suggests we don’t use credit cards for the time being, and we all stop by a bank to get cash.

I suggest a hotel that I know is halfway decent, but they refuse, preferring to stay in Brooklyn. I decide to go to that hotel anyway, having had enough of Brooklyn, and we agree to split up.

After that, I doze from the sugar high of my juice, only to be awakened later by the sudden stop of the car.

“This is you,” Eugene says.

Looking out, I see the Tribeca Grand Hotel—my destination.

“Thank you,” I say. “Thanks for the ride. And thank you, Mira, for looking out for me at the hospital. I really appreciate it.”

She leans over her seat and gives me a peck on the lips.

I get out, my brain too overwhelmed with near-death experiences to puzzle out the meaning of Mira’s little kiss.

Operating on autopilot, I get inside the hotel. It’s nice, but its grandioseness is presently lost on me. I buy some Tylenol and water at the hotel kiosk, take four pills, and hope my liver doesn’t fail. Then I request the biggest room they have available.

As they’re setting everything up, I text Bert the names of my biological parents and the phone number of Arkady.

On the way to my room, I get some ice for my head. Then I get in, plop on the bed, order some Pay-Per-View, and mindlessly watch TV.

The Tylenol and the ice make the throbbing in my head subside a bit, and the exhaustion really hits me. It’s still early, but I don’t care. I’m going to go to sleep early yet again. If I keep this up, I might become one of those early-bird people.

As I get in bed, I set the alarm for eleven a.m. I know I’m being overly cautious, given the current time, but I do it anyway. My shrink appointment is during my lunch hour, and this time around, I’m determined to make it.

I become aware of some annoying noise. It’s my phone alarm.
Why did I set it?
I wonder lazily, opening an eyelid.

Then I remember. I wanted to make it to my appointment. All of a sudden, the whole thing seems like a drag, and I try to go back to sleep. I rarely, if ever, keep my appointments with my shrink, so why rock the boat? It’s not like I need to express my feelings and get in touch with my emotions. What possessed me to even think about going?

But as some of the ideas why I
should
see her begin buzzing in my head, sleep eludes me. After a few minutes of just lying there, I grudgingly get up.

I order room service and check my phone. I have five missed calls from Sara and one from Lucy, so I call both of them back.

Yes, I’m doing better. No, it doesn’t hurt anymore—at least not much. Yes, Mira is a nice girl.

Done with my moms, I see an email from Bert.

I’m using an app Bert personally put on my phone. Allegedly, the email sent through this app is seriously encrypted, to the point where even the NSA might not be reading Bert’s correspondence. He’s paranoid like that. If you ask me, hiding so much might actually make the NSA more curious about you, but there is no way I can convince Bert of this. In any case, as I read, I see that this specific email is among those that I do need to stay private:

Dude,

The guy whose phone number you got is named Arkady Bogomolov. He’s extremely dangerous. Not worth fucking with, trust me, even for someone as hot as Mira.

As for your parents, I’m surprised. I’m not finding much. Lucy has a case file on the murder, but don’t tell her I know this. Glancing through it, I have to say, it seems very shady how they died. No clues as to who did it. Lucy clocked an unbelievable number of hours on that case without any luck, though you probably already know this. Anyway, I can get that case file for you if you swear to never talk to her about it. There was this OB-GYN, Dr. Greenspan, that your mom was going to, but his digital records don’t go that far. I tried my phone con on them, but, get this, the physical records were stolen recently. Weird coincidence. I will keep digging, but don’t expect too much. Sorry.

Bert.

I write my response:

Can you find out more about this Arkady character? Particularly, I want to know where he can be found in the near future. I just want to look at him from a distance, so don’t get your panties in a bunch.

Yeah, and get me those files if you can. I don’t want to ask Lucy for them. I won’t tell her about the files, obviously, since I realize that you’re much too pretty to go to jail.

When room service brings in my breakfast, I order a cab. The breakfast order turns out to be too small. I wolf everything down and still feel a bit hungry. I guess not eating much and throwing up the prior day is good for the appetite. I wouldn’t be surprised if I lost a few pounds. There’s no time to get more food, though, so I guess I’ll have to make do. The shrink always has doughnuts at her office.

As I get dressed, I realize the biggest problem with staying in a hotel. All I have is my prior day’s clothes, which have been through a lot. Thankfully, they’re dark, so no blood or dirt shows. I will have to go shopping, but that can wait until after the appointment.

Leaving my room, I grab a cab and make my way to Midtown.

* * *

“Darren,” the shrink says when I sit down on her comfy office chair. “I’m glad to finally see you here.”

“It’s good to see you too, Liz,” I say, smiling. “Sorry it’s been so long. Things have been hectic.”

Her perfectly plucked eyebrows rise in surprise, and I can’t blame her. I don’t normally apologize for missing sessions—nor do I normally call her
Liz
. She asked me to call her that a while ago. Just Liz. Not Dr. Jackson or Miss Jackson. Not just Doctor. Not Ma’am or Madam. Not Mrs. Jackson or Mrs. or even Elizabeth. But, of course, I very rarely obliged in the past, so I can see how she might find it surprising that I didn’t do the usual—which is to invent a new way to address her that she most likely would prefer I not use. Like Mrs. J, for instance.

She now knows things are different today. More serious.

“It’s fine, Darren. I knew you would come visit me when you were ready for it—when you felt like you needed it. And as usual, this is a safe place, so please don’t hesitate to share whatever is on your mind—whatever brought you here again.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I don’t actually know where to begin.”

“You’re hurt,” she observes, looking at the bandage on my head. “That might be a good place to start.”

“Yeah, I got shot, actually. Came face to face with my mortality and all that. It was bad, but it’s not exactly what I wanted to talk about today. At least not at first,” I say as I shift in the chair. “If you don’t mind.”

This gets me another barely detectable expression of surprise. Her face is hard to read. I suspect she’s had something done that interferes with showing emotion. Botox or something like that. Or she just developed that unreadable expression as part of her job. It’s hard to say for sure.

“Of course, Darren. We can talk about whatever you want.” She crosses her long, black-stocking-clad legs. “Start where you want to start.”

I look her over while thinking of what to say next. She looks like the epitome of a MILF mixed with a bit of sexy librarian. The latter is due to the stylish spectacles she’s wearing. She’s slender, but with noticeable muscle definition on her exposed arms, particularly around her shoulders. She must be hitting the gym regularly, and it shows. Her long hair looks like it belongs to a woman in her twenties or teens. She always dresses in outfits that border on hot, but still pass for professional. I have no idea how old she is; it’s not a gentlemanly thing to ask. All I know is that she already looked this way—awesome and middle-aged—when we first met almost a decade ago. She hasn’t visibly aged since then.

As you’d expect, I used to have inappropriate thoughts about her in my early teens, but it was just a phase. Nowadays, I sometimes suspect that the tables might’ve turned, and it’s not just because of the cougar-like vibes she gives off. It goes deeper. There are little things. Like, for example, when I talk, she seems to genuinely care about what I have to say. True, it could be just her doing her job. In fact, a good therapist
should
behave that way. But I find it hard to believe that the amount of attention and the heartfelt advice she gives me is merely her doing her professional duty. Her attention to me changed as I got older—or maybe I just started noticing it at that point. Then again, it could, of course, be wishful thinking and conceit on my part; it’s beyond flattering to think a woman of this caliber wants me.

Oh, and besides the way she listens to me, there’s also the fact that I think she’s available. At least I’ve never heard her mention any family, and her desk lacks any pictures of children or a husband. Then again, these sessions are to talk about me, not her, so it’s possible I just don’t know about her personal life.

“Have you stopped time recently?” she asks, pulling me out of my jumbled thoughts. “You haven’t talked about that for a long time, something I consider to be a good sign.”

“Surprising you should mention that,” I say, considering my next words carefully. She just opened the door to the issue of covering up my blabbing about the Quiet. “I think I made a huge breakthrough when it comes to that. Sorry it hasn’t come up before in our sessions, but yeah, I don’t believe that stuff anymore.”

“Interesting,” she says, but the expression on her face is anything but curiosity. She looks almost upset. Or, more specifically, she looks disappointed and perhaps a tiny bit worried. It’s hard to tell with the Botox or whatever. “What brought this on so suddenly?” she asks, gazing at me.

“Not suddenly. It’s been a while now. I guess I grew out of it. Isn’t that the way of these things? Don’t your other patients go into remission? Get cured? Shouldn’t you pat yourself on the back?”

I find her reaction odd. She’s acting like she doesn’t believe me. Or doesn’t want to believe me. Is it because she’s afraid I’ll stop visiting? After all, that was the reason for my getting into therapy when I was growing up—my so-called delusions. But doesn’t she realize that that’s not why I’ve been seeing her since I moved out of my moms’ house? Then again, how would she know that? I don’t even know why I’m still visiting her, or why I have this standing appointment that I so seldom keep, but pay for. My shrink tax, as I always jokingly think of it.

She gives me a penetrating stare. “I think something else is going on with you. Something like denial, perhaps? Maybe you met a young woman and want to seem sane for her? Whatever it is, I’m very curious to learn more about it. Some people think mental illness is like an infection: take the right antibiotic, and you can be cured. The truth is that there’s no such thing as mental illness to begin with. Just different people with quirks and traits, some of them maladaptive. When it comes to these problematic features of the psyche, we usually have to treat them on an ongoing basis. There are few silver bullets in my profession. Catharsis is a myth of fiction. But then again, yours was always a special case. My biggest question is: if you’re cured, what are you doing here?”

“That’s unusually insightful,” I say, impressed. “Almost creepy. I
have
met a woman that I’m interested in, but that’s not why I say I’m cured. As to your last question, I’m not even sure why I’m here. I guess I have some new issues on my mind, and I feel most comfortable discussing them with you for some reason.”

As I say it, I realize it’s the truth. The irony of this doesn’t escape me. I’m someone who has always been a huge skeptic about psychology as a treatment for anything. In fact, I always doubted it on a deeper level, going as far as to call it pseudo-science, though never to Liz’s face. Of course, the fact that I came for therapy today doesn’t prove the earlier me wrong. I just think I’m here more to talk to someone who’s known me for a long time and who’s acted like she cares about me. Here I can talk about things that I don’t think my friends and family are equipped to help me with.

“I’m flattered that you feel like you can discuss things with me. Maybe a big change has occurred within you after all. And I’m very excited to hear about your relationship,” she says, sounding sincere. If my meeting a girl makes her jealous on any level, she’s extremely good at acting happy for me instead. So good that I concede that perhaps I was wrong about that whole business of her wanting to sleep with me. Then again, wanting to sleep with someone is not mutually exclusive with wishing him a happy love life. There are lots of Victoria’s Secret models I wish I could sleep with, but if I learned that they had a great guy in their life, I would wish them luck. I think I would, anyway.

“Yes, the girl thing is interesting, but that’s not exactly what I wanted to talk about either,” I say. “At least not at first. It’s this other thing. I did something to a man to save her when she was in big trouble. Mind you, I was morally justified, but the thing that happened to the man as a result was very bad, and now I’m feeling guilty.”

Therapy has this effect on me. I say things there that magically put me in touch with my true feelings as soon as I say them, even if I didn’t fully register those feelings until that moment. The skeptic in me would, of course, say that this doesn’t justify the institution of psychotherapy. He would point out that I could’ve probably used a pet parrot instead of Liz to bounce words off of in this capacity. Regardless, it feels good to talk to her like that.

“Okay. If that’s what you want to talk about.” I notice she stops writing in her notebook and is looking at me with an unusual intensity. I rarely express feelings this way, and something about what I said must’ve resonated with her.

“I don’t know if it is,” I say. “There are other things that happened. I witnessed something terrible, and my life was in danger a few times. It’s all difficult to deal with, especially when I can’t discuss it with my family.”

“I see.” She gives me an encouraging look. “I can tell you have a lot going on. Just start at the beginning and tell me whatever you feel comfortable talking about. Start with this man you mentioned. What exactly did you do to him?”

“I sort of
persuaded
him to do something that ended up causing him great harm,” I say. This is the closest approximation of the truth I’m able to come up with at this time. Even this, once I say it, I regret. It’s risky. What if the Readers decide to Read my family and/or therapist for some reason? They might understand what sort of persuasion I’m talking about.

“You
guided
someone to hurt himself?” Liz says in a strange tone. She sounds almost excited. It’s not the reaction I would’ve expected at all. “This is very important, Darren. Can you tell me as much as you can about this event?”

Something is off. My heart starts pounding in my chest, and I phase into the Quiet to give myself a moment to think. Liz’s reaction is really odd. Now that she’s frozen in that moment, I see her eyes gleaming with very non-shrink-like excitement. I’ve never seen her react this way, and I’ve told her some crazy shit over the years.

Is this some weird thing for her? Does she get off on stories of patients doing something shady? That doesn’t make sense at all. Doesn’t seem like her. However, there is something I can do to figure this out. I haven’t done Reading for a while, and now is as good a time as any.

In fact, there is some poetic justice in getting inside the head of your therapist. It could be a lot of fun feeding her insights about herself that I glean from her mind. But most importantly, I can find out what’s behind this strange reaction—as well as maybe settle the whole ‘does she want me’ debate once and for all.

I approach Liz and look for a place to touch her. Though I have phased into the Quiet in her presence many times before, I’ve never used the opportunity to do anything inappropriate, like touching her very temping cleavage area—and yes, I was tempted. I’ve never tried to analyze why I exercised this restraint. It just didn’t feel right to do something like that. Not with a person whom I told about myself doing exactly this to girls at school back in the day—actions she told me not to worry about because they were just mild delusions, a slightly exaggerated version of a normal pubescent boy’s fantasy.