The Seventh Sense
Lubrican
The Seventh Sense
by Robert Lubrican
Copyright 2020
Table of Contents
Foreword | Prologue #1| Prologue #2 | Parts: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10
11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26
Foreword
In my experience, the typical mind control story is the teenage fantasy of being able to do whatever you want, without having to endure parental (adult) strictures, or face the consequences. That's fine. It's an established and popular genre. But I'm not a teenager. I left my teen years behind me half a century ago, and in half a century I figured out there are always consequences. The other thing is that the ability to control someone else's mind should at least have a reasonable source. I'm not saying a believable source, but at least it should be reasonable, something that might be within the realm of possibility. Telekinesis isn't necessarily believable, but it is a reasonably well established claim, in terms of actually existing. So I tried to imagine mind control - sort of, kind of - based on telekinesis. It sort of blossomed from there. I hope it is as much fun for you to read as it was for me to write.
I don't think of this as a mind control story. That said, I also don't know exactly what to call it. So I'm settling for science fiction. You can weigh in after you've read it.
Finally, the format for presentation is different, maybe even odd. But there's a reason for that, so be patient until you've read several parts of the story. The more you read, the more sense it will all make.
Bob
Prologue One
The bell rang and students began flowing out of the classroom while Professor Noel Wilson gathered his papers off his desk and stuffed them into his satchel. He was eager to get to his lab. He now thought of teaching as a waste of time, but without the teaching there would be no lab, and without the lab, there would be no Nobel prize. He was convinced he'd be recognized with the Nobel for his work. But there was much work to do before the world could find out what he'd found out. Then the teaching could begin in earnest. It would mean something, then.
He was well aware that some of his colleagues thought he was ... eccentric ... to use the polite word. He didn't care. They'd learn, someday, how foolish they were. After he could go public with his discovery, they'd all gather around him and claim to have been friends with the great man.
Of course there would be recriminations, too, and possibly legal action against him. But if he was successful, all that would fall away like dandruff under the comb. It would be years before clinical testing could be arranged, and of course, he couldn't wait years to find out if his manipulations worked. So he'd used the process on his son. The boy was only five at the time, but the process needed to be done as early as possible. In utero would be best, but of course it would probably be decades before that was accepted. So a five year old was the best he could do, for now. And he was completely convinced there would be no ill side effects. He'd be there to train the boy.
That was why he was so anxious to get to his lab, in fact. He'd done the procedure on little Bobby almost six months ago, and he was sure it had worked, but the boy wasn't advanced enough, mentally, to be able to understand the questions his father asked him. Tests needed to be developed to detect and quantify the effect of the changes he'd made in his son. Such tests would have to be thought out carefully, because while he would probably be vilified for unethical testing on his son, the results would still be valid - assuming his test protocols were found to be valid.
A second, though much less important, reason he was eager to get to his lab was that his lab "roommate" would be there. Melody Robbins was a doctoral student with her own line of inquiry, associated with her doctoral thesis, but they worked together, sometimes. They had to share lab space, because the college was small, and resources were limited. The school would be put on the map when his research was published, but for now, it was a backwater part of the Catholic university system, in a sleepy little town, in a fly-over state, where life was slow and peaceful.
Melody Robbins would be happy to see Noel Wilson, too. When she'd first been assigned to what he thought of as his lab space, she'd been a mousy, twenty-four-year-old woman who hadn't been on a date in seven years. All her energy had gone into getting her masters, and now pursuing her doctorate in genetics. Since Noel taught genetics, some worker bee had assumed moving her in with him was the obvious choice.
At first she'd been disappointed with her entry into the world of doctoral studies. Noel was almost paranoid in protecting his research from the prying eyes of ... well ... of anyone. All he'd say was that he was working with the human genome. Since every researcher in the field of human genetics was working with the human genome, that was a little like a chemist saying, "I'm studying chemistry."
Once he'd rearranged his equipment (which really did only take up half the lab) and reoriented his group of oversized computer monitors so she couldn't casually observe them, he'd pretty well ignored her. Until, that is, his son had been there one day, and had become bored, and wandered over to ask Melody questions. She liked children, and Noel's little boy was a sweet thing. Her heart went out to him to begin with, because his mother had died during childbirth. So she took him to the vending machines and bought him a snack. After that, they'd been as thick as thieves.
It was because she'd become friends with his son, that she became friends with Professor Wilson. And it was because neither of them had "been on a date" for almost a decade that she become his lover. It was because she became his lover that she was able to influence him to update his will, to ensure that his son wasn't left to the whims of fate, if something happened to Noel.
And it was the updating of that will that landed Bobby Wilson in the convent when, as Professor Wilson was hurrying toward his lab on that day in late fall, the driver of a truck carrying pipe had a heart attack and died at the wheel. When it crashed into a power pole, a piece of pipe was launched like a spear, and drove completely through Noel's chest, almost like a ten foot long bullet.
Noel hadn't assumed nothing would go wrong, and, after she stopped crying, Melody followed the instructions in his will to the letter.
The mother superior of the convent was delivered a little boy, and an envelope. Inside the envelope were instructions, custody documents, and a key.
Her convent was the beneficiary of Noel's life insurance.
Mother Mary intended to follow the instructions to the letter, as well.
Prologue Two
There are twelve numbered federal circuit courts of appeal in the United States. Many (but probably not most) are aware of these powerful courts. Any appeal on a decision made by these twelve courts is heard by the supreme court.
What most people are not aware of is that there is a thirteenth court of appeals in the Federal Circuit, which has nationwide jurisdiction over certain cases based on specialized subject matter.
It was in this 13th court of appeals that the case of The United States VS John Doe quietly appeared on a balmy Monday morning in September. The purpose of the initial hearing, oddly enough, was the defense seeking a writ of habeas corpus from the court to compel the government to actually produce the defendant in court.
The counsel for the government calmly objected, saying that it would be much too dangerous for the defendant to be produced, since no one knew how to control him. The judge made reference to the movie titled "Silence of the Lambs" and suggested that, if Hannibal Lecter could be made safe, then John Doe could be made safe as well.
The chief government lawyer, with a completely straight face, reminded the judge that Hannibal Lecter had escaped.
That was the beginning of a very long, very trying day in court where, at every turn, answers like, "That's highly classified, Your Honor," and "That would be much too dangerous, Your Honor," and "The government could not guarantee public safety under those conditions, Your Honor," and finally, "This is a national security situation, Your Honor" were bandied about like a swashbuckler swinging his sword.
What ended the day was the judge asking, "How is John Doe being controlled at this very instant?"
When the government lawyers put their heads together, an argument ensued. It took a threat of holding them all in contempt of court before an answer was delivered.
"It appears that a nun controls him, Your Honor. "
"A nun."
"Yes, Your Honor."
"You mean like Sister Mary Beth, in a convent."
"Exactly, Your Honor, except this one is named Sister Olivia, as far as we can tell. None of us have ever actually met her. She has to be kept in the same secure location as the accused. And that's why the defense hasn't been able to meet with his client, which is why we are here. I can assure you, though, that he's in good health and isn't being abused in any way."
"Let me get this straight, counselor. You're telling me that this incredibly dangerous man, who cannot be produced in court, lest Armageddon commence, is held at bay by a nun with a ruler in her hand?"
"I don't know about the ruler, but otherwise, yes ... as far as we're being told," said the lawyer.
The judge sat there, mute, for all of thirty seconds. Then he ruled.
"This matter will proceed. Today is Monday. I want all parties here Wednesday morning at ten, ready to argue this petition based on clear and concise evidence. Court adjourned."
There was consternation at the government table and, in the spirit of nuns and Armageddon and all that, no little gnashing of teeth.
Editorial comment
The information presented in this book is a compilation of court documents, obtained by judicial order during legal processes, as well as interviews of the participants who would give them. The intent of this book is to reveal to the public the kind of details that would quell rumors and fake news surrounding Bobby Wilson and the controversy that currently whirls around him. The government has gone to extreme lengths to attempt to subvert his legal rights, and the public is always ready to convict in absentia any person whose name and photograph is flashed on the screen. It is also for reasons of privacy that the editor's name appears on this book in place of the author's name. The author, as referred to numerous times in the book, has been given an altered name to protect her identity. In fact, all the names have been changed, except that of Bobby Wilson.
There are redactions throughout this volume. Those are the result of what the government won in the case that followed Mr. Wilson's arrest and (unlawful) imprisonment. It was the government's position that the information being redacted was of national security importance, and therefore needed to be kept secret, to prevent foreign agents from gathering intelligence. The defense determined it wasn't worth continued adversarial efforts to fight over a few words. It is the editor's opinion that, since a number of their classified documents were ordered by the court to become de-classified, it seemed reasonable to throw the government lawyers a bone. These redactions are annoying, but do not affect the quality or import of the story this book unfolds.
Because of the unusual manner in which information was compiled, the way in which it will be presented is unusual, as well. Information will be presented in parts, rather than chapters, so that it can be revealed in print in much the same way it was revealed in court and later interviews. This is how the story of Bobby Wilson and his incredible talent/powers/abilities came into public view after having been hidden away for eleven years after they were first discovered.
Part One
///CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET///
THIS DOCUMENT MAY NOT BE COPIED OR DISSEMINATED TO ANY ENTITY WITHOUT DIRECT AUTHORIZATION OF THE SECRETARY OF HOMELAND SECURITY
Exhibit three: Excerpts from Journal of John Doe, AKA Robert Michael Wilson, read into the transcript of trial, 13th Circuit Court of Appeals of the United States of America, in the case of the Government vs. John Doe:
Tuesday:
Hi. I'm Bobby Wilson, and Sister Olivia says I have to start a journal. This is me, starting my journal. I don't really know how to write a journal. She explained to me about her diary, or the diary she had when she was a girl my age. I guess she doesn't have it anymore. She didn't say what happened to it, but what good is it to write everything down if you don't keep the book it's in?
Anyway, Sister Olivia says there's no right or wrong way to do this, so I'm just going to write stuff down. She says she has to read it, to make sure that everything I told her is in it. Everything I tell her is in it. She said other people will read it some day, but she didn't say why. I think I know why. It's because I'm different. I can do stuff.
I guess I should start with Sister Olivia. She's my teacher, now. I've had lots of them before this. I've lived at the convent for as long as I can remember. I remember my dad, but not very well. He wore glasses, and had a beard that only covered his chin and was pointed. And he loved cottage cheese. I remember that. There were always tubs of cottage cheese in the fridge, and I could open one and eat out of it any time I wanted to. I remember where he worked, and the pretty lady there I liked. But that's about it, as far as my father goes.
I'm seventeen, now, so it's been eleven years since my dad died. All I know is there was some kind of accident and the pretty lady took care of me until I came to the convent. I remember her better than my dad, except I can't remember her name. She held me and cried when she said my dad couldn't come see me anymore. And she brought me to the convent at [redacted]. I've lived here ever since. I go to school here and everything. I asked once why I can't just go to the public school in town, like everybody else, but Mother Superior Mary says my dad stipulated I had to be schooled in this very convent, if something happened to him. She says she doesn't know why he picked this one. Nobody else I ever talked to knows, either.
The convent is in [redacted], which seems like a nice place to me, though Sister Olivia says it's a podunk town, halfway to bum-tick, nowhere. I always see her mind smile when she says that.
I guess that brings us to why I'm supposed to be writing a journal to begin with.
I'm seventeen, but Sister Olivia says my emotional, educational age is a lot younger. That's one of the purposes of this journal, to help me figure things out that I should already know, but don't.
The biggest reason for all this, though, is that I have what Sister Olivia is calling "The seventh sense." She made that up, but it seems like a good enough name to me. I thought everybody had it until Sister Olivia found out I had it. It's hard to describe, and Sister Olivia and I have talked about it a lot, which is why she said I should start writing it all down. She thinks that some day a bunch of scientists will want to study me. I think that's silly, but she seems convinced. I also see her brain frown when she talks about that, like she's worried.
So instead of trying to define the seventh sense, I'll just tell you the stuff it does. That's why Sister Olivia wants me to write a journal. To try to explain what I can do.
It started when I was little, right after I came to the convent. I remember there was a dog, chasing a rabbit, and I could feel that the rabbit was terrified and the dog was elated. I didn't know those words, back then, but I felt those things inside me. The rabbit ducked through some hedges and the dog couldn't follow. At that point, I felt the rabbit change from terrified to relieved, and the dog changed from elated to frustrated. Again, these are terms I learned later on, which describe what I was feeling in those animals' brains. The funny thing was that, within a minute at most, what I felt in both animals' brains was ... nothing. They were just animals again, and not sending out any signals at all.
I didn't say anything to anybody about this. That's because I thought everybody could hear animals' brains like that.
I found, as the years passed, that every once in a while I could "hear" what was going on in other brains. Sometimes it was like the rabbit and the dog, but usually it was with people. Especially if somebody was really mad, I could hear them being angry in their brain. But that was just sometimes. If I could see them, I could see what color their brain was, and I knew what some of the colors meant. Sister Olivia says it sounds creepy, but it was kind of like I could see through their skull and see a mass of color. Again, I didn't think too much about it because I thought everybody could see/feel/hear it like I did.
By the time I was ten or eleven I discovered something else I could do, and this time I knew it was unusual. I could make little things move around just by thinking about it. The first time was when I had just laid down on my pallet to read and left my cup of water on the table beside the door to my cell. I was disgusted that I'd have to get back up and go get it and I sort of "reached for it" in my mind and the cup tipped over.
Nobody was more shocked than I was, let me tell you. I mean there was nobody else there, but if there had been, I would have been more shocked than them. I say more shocked, because they wouldn't have known who did it.
But I knew it was me, so I got up and set the cup upright again and went back to my pallet and laid back down. I tried to reach for it in my mind again, but nothing happened. At first I was freaked out, because I knew I had knocked that cup over, but I couldn't do it again. Then I got mad and the cup wobbled, and that freaked me out.
I was smart enough to figure out that the first time, I'd been disgusted, and the second time I'd been angry. So it had something to do with emotion. That was why I couldn't "just do it." I could do things while I was feeling some strong emotion, but not when everything was 'normal'.
Wednesday:
Sister Olivia read what I wrote yesterday and says I have to explain things better. For example, she says regular people don't sleep on pallets or live in cells, and that when people read this in the future, they won't understand. So she says I have to explain more. Or maybe better.
Before my father died, he wrote a will. In his will he said that if I was a minor when he died, I had to be raised and educated at the St. [redacted] convent specifically, and nowhere else. I guess he had life insurance and it was to go to the church if I was a minor, to pay for my upbringing. Why he picked St. [redacted] convent wasn't explained. This convent, however, was not designed for raising children, so I had to live in the same conditions as the sisters lived. Each sister had her own room, or "cell" and because trials and tribulations are good for the soul, they don't have a lot of frills ... like what Sister Olivia says are beds with soft mattresses and things like that.
So I live like a nun. Big whoop. Since I have no idea how other people live, I guess I'm not missing much. Though a soft mattress does sound kind of interesting.
So if I use what Sister Olivia calls "institutional language" just think about nuns in a convent and I guess it will make more sense.
Speaking of "institutional," while the convent wasn't designed to raise kids, it was designed for them to live at temporarily. St. [redacted] convent operates a shelter for homeless and abused women. If a woman is hiding from a man, she and any children she's also hiding from the man can come to the shelter and stay in safety until a more permanent solution can be found. That usually only takes a month or so at the most. St. [redacted] is networked in with similar operations in other towns and other states, so a woman can be offered a lot more options than she thought she would have when she came there.
While children are here, they go to "school" so they don't get behind in their studies. Those are the same classes I'm in. The difference is that, while all those kids met "Bobby, who is living here temporarily," and then went on to live somewhere else, "Bobby, who was living there temporarily," kept living there temporarily. That's because my father's will stipulated that I had to be in the care of St. [redacted] until I was eighteen, and then had to stay there three and a half more years before I could be given the key to a safety deposit box in the People's State Bank of [redacted] on my twenty-first birthday.
I just found out about the safety deposit box. Sister Olivia just told me. Nobody knows what's in it, or at least nobody is willing to admit they know. It's all very hush-hush. So is the fact that Sister Olivia is assigned to me all the time, now and is my only teacher. Mother Superior Mary has been told everything that Sister Olivia found out about me. Sister Olivia says that the big argument now is whether to bring a priest in on things or not. On one side of the argument, my father's will specifies that my care and education will come specifically from the St. [redacted] convent, which does not have a priest on staff. The convent is associated with St. [redacted] church, of course, where there are two priests, but of course, neither of them is under the mother superior, so they're not technically convent staff. The other side of the argument says that demonic forces may be at work, in which case only a priest can do what is necessary to protect everyone from me and save my soul. I don't feel possessed, but Sister Olivia says nobody ever does.
Sister Olivia tells me she has convinced the Mother Superior that my soul is fine and that she can control me. Personally I think Mother Superior has assigned me to Sister Olivia because she's not a nun, yet, and if it all goes bad, she can blame it on a novice. (Sorry, Sister, that's just what I think.)
That's silly, though. I'm not going to hurt anybody. Why would I ever want to hurt anybody?
Thursday:
I don't know why this is being called my journal, if Sister Olivia is going to keep telling me what to write in it.
She says I shouldn't mention her at all, but that's too bad. She's too important to the story to leave out of it. You'll just have to deal with it, Sister.
I mentioned yesterday she's actually a Novice, which means she's not technically a nun, yet. She's the first one of those I ever met and she explained that the novitiate is the period of training and preparation that a prospective nun goes through prior to taking vows of obedience. They do this in order to figure out if they're being called by God to a life of such religious vows. It usually includes times of intense study, prayer, living in community, studying the vowed life, deepening one's relationship with God, and deepening one's self-awareness. It is a time of creating a new way of living in the world. I could write a book about nuns in general (and now the novitiate) because I've lived with them and watched them for the last eleven years.
If you ask a regular person, she'll say she prays, but that God doesn't answer her prayers. I hear women say that at the shelter all the time. A nun would tell you they aren't really listening, and that sometimes God takes a while to get around to answering prayers. Some would tell you it takes time to recognize that he has answered them. So they spend time listening and waiting. Since they live in a convent, they have the time.
Sister Olivia used to be in the Army, and I guess she was a hot shot or something. I don't know what they call them in the Army. I talked to some kids one time who were staying here and they told me about SEALs, who I guess found this big terrorist guy in Pakistan and killed him. They thought I was crazy because I'd never heard of this terrorist guy before, but Sister Olivia says that's only because I have never gotten to watch TV or listen to the news. There is a TV in the shelter, but I'm not allowed to just sit and watch it. The sisters always said there was nothing on there I needed to see.
Anyway, I only know about Sister Olivia being in the Army because that's how she found out what I can do. She came here a year ago and right away she felt different than the others. It's hard to describe it because I've been aware of all this my whole life, and thought it was nothing special. I thought everybody could see what I see, and do what I do.
The other sisters were sad sometimes. That was normal. Everybody I ever met gets sad at one time or another. When I pay attention, two things happen. I "see things" and "feel things." "Sad" looks like a particular color to me. It isn't a color with any other name, like orange, or black or yellow. There's nothing in the natural world that's that color. It's the same with anger and love and some other colors I haven't figured out what they mean, yet. The emotions have their own special colors, or kinds of light or something. Anyway, the women who came to the shelter had colors mixed that I learned meant sadness and fear. I have a theory about a color I think might mean "hopeless" because a lot of them have that color when they get here, but then it goes away when they leave. It's hard to tell, because the fear sometimes goes away, too. The sadness fades, but is never gone. Sadness stains the soul like tea stains a white undershirt.
Sister Olivia thinks that's what I'm seeing - the soul. She asked me if it looks like the auras around Jesus and Mary in paintings at the convent, but it's not like that. But she thinks I'm seeing people's souls. I'm not so sure about that. I don't think souls get angry or happy. At least not the kind of soul the nuns have taught me about since I got here.
Friday:
I probably shouldn't write this, because Sister Olivia's going to read it, but when she got here (to the convent) I was interested in her for another reason than because of the amount of sadness that stained her brain. She was also really pretty. I mean pretty like the women I see in some of the magazines lying around in the shelter.
Some of the kids I met said they had been to sex education class in school. I never had any kind of formal, sanctioned sex education. That didn't mean I was ignorant about sex. Actually, I probably was (am?) ignorant about sex, but I never thought about that before this. I had gleaned little tidbits from kids who stayed in the shelter with their moms. Nuns have some kind of weird power that tells them you and some kid are talking about sex, because whenever I was talking to a boy about that, a nun showed up and asked us what we were doing. It's like they have radar. I even asked Sister Olivia about it, but she says I'm imagining things. Anyway, I knew babies came from sex and that the chest area of a woman was used to feed babies. Some of the women who stayed in the shelter breastfed their babies. Of course I never actually saw them doing that, but I knew it happened because I was forbidden to "bother" a woman while she was doing it. I also knew that there was something between a woman's legs that had to do with sex, something one boy had called a 'pussy', though that didn't make any sense at all. The only pussies I knew anything about were the cats at the convent. The sisters called them "pussy, pussy, pussy" when they were offering them food.
I knew about erections, and what they meant. The erection fertilizes the woman somehow. I couldn't imagine how that happened, but I knew, on a scholastic plane that was what it was for. Sister Deliah taught a class one day where she talked about how the frog mamma lays eggs, and the frog daddy squirts his sperm on them to fertilize them. The only thing my penis squirts is pee, but I was pretty sure you didn't pee on a woman to make a baby. And I've found lots of frogs in the garden, but none of them ever had an erection. Anyway, I got educated by the nuns on erections. I was told they were bad and to talk to a priest about them. And when I saw Sister Olivia the first time, I got an erection. I still get them when I'm around her sometimes. And yes, Sister (since I know you're reading this) I do tell the priest, during confession, about the ones I get because of you.
In my own defense, the first time I confessed and told the priest I'd gotten an erection, he said, "That's all?" like he expected there to be more, somehow. A different priest asked me who I got them about, but then said, "Never mind. It's not important." My penance for those is usually to volunteer an hour in the shelter, which is something all the priests know I do anyway. So I've never really been "punished" for having an erection, even though some of the nuns have said I should be.
So I looked at Sister Olivia as often as I could, because she was just so pretty. I never spent any time with her, back then, other than to help her with some task or whatever. She did lots of the heavy work because she had more muscle than your average sister. I saw her in a T shirt one time when she was working in the garden and was a little envious of how good a shape she was in. I tended toward the skinny, not-so-buff kind of build. Her T shirt was tight and her breasts were kind of sticking out. I figured Sister Olivia would have no problem feeding babies. She had pretty big breasts.
Her arms were muscular and she just looked healthy, or something. I didn't know anything about her then, like how in the Army, she'd been on twenty-five mile hikes, carrying all this heavy equipment and stuff like that. All I knew about her was that she had been there about six months and hardly ever talked to anybody. Some of the sisters are like that. It's not exactly a vow of silence. They just want to spend as much time thinking and reflecting as possible, so they avoid getting into discussions. Her face looked like Mother Mary's, kind of hard, like she was slightly angry. She didn't smile very much. Some sisters did, and I even heard some of them laugh out loud before, though that was frowned on for some reason.
The reason that particular day is special isn't because I got an erection for her, but because her sadness color was almost overwhelming that day.
So I "hugged" her.
I'll try to explain. Everybody knows what a regular hug is, so that's the word I'm using. And everybody knows how good it feels to get a hug, whether you're sad or not. But hugs are extra good when you are sad. There were lots of hugs going on in the shelter part of the convent. The nuns hugged the women, and the kids, and the moms hugged the kids and I could see immediately that it affected the colors of the brains. The sadness colors got lighter, and the happiness colors got a little brighter. And the longer a woman stayed in the shelter, the more affected she was by the hugs. I could feel the sadness get less, too.
Of course I couldn't hug these women like the nuns did. I wanted to, and I even did a couple of times when I was little, but I got shooed away by a nun and told not to bother the woman.
So I found another way to "hug" someone who was sad. I reached to the colors, and made the sad color fade, while making the happy color get brighter. Sister Olivia calls it "painting" because of how I explained it to her, and I guess that's as good an analogy as any, but I call this kind of interaction "Hugging." I also hug people with my arms, but if I write about the mental kind I'll put quotes around it so as to be clear.
And on that day, I gave Sister Olivia a really good "hug". It was so good, in fact, that she "felt" it. I mean she stood up and looked around, and then reached one hand to her head. I didn't think too much about that. I did this kind of thing all the time. It made people happier and less sad, and that made them more fun to be around. Nobody had ever told me they could feel it happening, though.
I could do other things, too. Like one time I was talking to a girl in the shelter. Her name was Cathy and she was pretty, too. Her mom had come to the shelter the night before and was all beat up. Cathy had a brother who was older than she was - she was about my age - and while I was talking to her he came over and told me to leave her alone. I said I wasn't bothering her and he wanted to fight. A lot of the boys in the shelter want to fight for some reason, and I learned a long time ago what "aggression" looks like in a brain. What was harder was learning what color to "paint" it with. I got pushed around a lot, until I realized a lot of the older nuns had a color few other people had. It was instinct, one time, to use that color and it worked.
Since then I've decided that color is what "peaceful" means, real deep-down peacefulness, so I use that color against aggression. I used it that day to make that kid stop wanting to fight me.
I also use it when a nun is upset with me about something, or I'm being punished. Sadly, I can't use it on priests in confession. I have to be able to see someone to use my "paints" and change their color. I can hear their emotions without seeing them, sometimes, and I can guess what color their brain is, but it's much better if I can see them.
It was because I liked looking at Sister Olivia's breasts so much that I was aware of how sad she was. She was sad all the time, even after I "hugged" her. Usually, when I "hugged" someone, they felt better and stayed better, but not Sister Olivia. So later, when I saw that she was still very, very sad, I "hugged" her again and it was because I did it again that I got caught.
She was at prayers, and the color of her brain was all sadness, while most of the other nuns' colors were more along the lines of hopefulness, or happiness. I sensed she was feeling awful so I "hugged" her again. I was standing right behind her when I did it. The nuns never turned around at prayers, so I wasn't worried.
But Sister Olivia turned around. She stared right at me.
"What just happened?" she kind of gasped, raising a hand to her temple.
"I'm sorry," I said. I had never thought about it like this, but, instinctively, this time, I realized what I had done was somehow intrusive. Usually, I didn't feel bad about "hugging" someone, because nobody ever knew what was happening. But I could tell Sister Olivia was upset. Her sadness color had turned to worried/scared colors. I knew those colors really well. Almost every woman who came to the shelter had those colors.
"What just happened?" she asked again, her voice sounding hollow.
Other nuns were beginning to turn their heads, their concentration on prayer broken by our voices. I reached for the cuff of her robe and pulled. Thankfully, she went with me until we were ten or fifteen feet away from the others.
"I hugged you," I whispered, for lack of a better explanation.
"No you didn't. You were standing behind me. You never touched me."
"Did it feel like you got a good hug?" I asked.
She kept staring at me, but nodded slowly.
"Sort of," she whispered.
I shrugged my thin shoulders and said, "I sort of hugged you." I shrugged again. "In my mind?"
"But I felt it!" she gasped.
"I'm sorry," I said. "I won't do it again."
"Do it? I don't understand. What did you do?"
This was the first time I had an inkling that everybody else in the world might not be able to do what I could do.
"I'm not sure I can explain it," I said.
Sister Olivia missed prayers that day and we went for a long walk. We talked about a lot of things. She asked a lot of questions. I didn't go back in her mind until she started asking me to try to tell her what she was thinking. I explained that I couldn't see what somebody was thinking, only what they were feeling. That's when I found out why she was so sad all the time.
That was the first time anybody learned what I could do and "studied" me. It was also when the inkling that I was different got turned into fact. At least as far as Sister Olivia believed, nobody else could do what I could do.
I know you're supposed to respect nuns, and all your other elders, for that matter, and I know how we're all equal in God's eyes, but I've known some nuns who were a lot less forgiving than others. I will thank my lucky stars forever that it was Sister Olivia who was the first person to learn what I was capable of, and not someone else. Even if she made me start writing this journal.
Saturday (night):
I had extra penance in the garden today. Sister Olivia read my last journal entry and was not impressed. She said I shouldn't be looking at her breasts, so she made me spend all day in the garden with her, not looking at her. I could talk to her. I could ask her questions. I could explain things about my abilities. I just couldn't look at her. I think it's the hardest penance I've ever been given. I didn't even know a nun could hand out penances.
But it gave us a chance to talk about how I'd "hugged" her, which is how she figured out I was doing something, which is how she figured out what I was doing, which she says is going to change the world some day. I don't see how, but she says so.
She did feel it, that first time I "hugged" her. She felt something wash through her head and her sadness went away. It confused her, which is why she stood up and looked around. But that sadness came back. You see, when she was in the army, she was part of a group of soldiers who went on special missions and killed people, like the SEALs killed that guy in Pakistan. And I guess sometimes other people, innocent people, like kids, got killed too, by accident, and that made her sad. I mean really sad. So sad that she decided she needed to spend the rest of her life doing something to make up for it. So she decided to become a novice and see if being a nun would do what she felt she needed to do.
To me, it seems like becoming a nun is a penance she put on herself.
Now, I get that. I know killing is wrong. One of the ten commandments is not to murder. And if you're trying to kill a bad person to protect everybody else, and kill somebody innocent instead, or at the same time, then maybe that's murder. I don't know. All I know is that not all killing violates that commandment. I mean look at David. He brought a rock to a sword fight and nobody gave him any grief for killing Goliath, especially not God. And just as soon as the Israelites finally got into the promised land, they started killing people right and left, and God was all happy about that.
Sister Olivia doesn't want to talk about killing people, and I get that. I'm not crazy about talking about what I can do. Not since I found out nobody else in the whole world can do it. I'm not crazy about a bunch of scientists studying me, either, which is why I agree with Sister Olivia and Mother Superior that we have to keep my abilities secret until I turn twenty-one and can get into that safety deposit box. Mother Superior says she knew my father, and she thinks his research on genetics is in there, and that it will explain why I can do what I can do.
Wednesday, June 12, 20[redacted]:
Sister Olivia says I have to start dating these entries with more than just the day of the week. That's because I'm not writing in my journal every single day. I mean sometimes nothing happens. It doesn't make sense to me to put a date and write that nothing happened. One reason nothing happens sometimes is that, since we're keeping my abilities secret, I'm not supposed to use them anymore. So there's not much going on to write about. I spend most of my days with Sister Olivia, now. I would say that's difficult, but she's gotten over how I look at her breasts and get erections when I see her and all that. She says I'm distressingly normal, whatever that means. She acts like she's the boss of me, even though I know she's not a whole bunch older than me.
Kids I meet always ask me what it's like living with nuns all the time. Since that's all I ever did, I usually just shrug and say, "You know." Since spending so much time with Sister Olivia, I have thought about it, though. It's kind of confusing. Like one time when I was at confession (about another erection), I asked the priest if we really were made in God's image and he said we were. So then I asked, if God had erections, why was it so bad that I got them. He got mad at me and told Mother Superior my soul was in danger.
And when Sister Olivia found out what I could do, she told me not to do it, but then she kept asking me to do it and tell her what I saw. I mean, I get why she wants me to do it, but life in a convent is confusing like that. We spend a lot of time looking at the women in the shelter and talking about what I see in them, and what I feel coming from them. We also talk about the kids, which I think makes more sense. That's because after we talk about a particular woman, Sister Olivia goes and talks to her, to try to figure out if I was right about what I saw. It's a no-brainer, really. I mean what's the likelihood that I'll see sadness in a woman at a battered women's shelter and be wrong? And a lot of the women don't want to talk about what's making them sad, just like Sister Olivia doesn't want to talk about what makes her sad. But the kids are different. The sadness isn't as overwhelming with them. Yes, the colors are there, but they're not as bright or disturbing. And one kid will talk to another kid when they won't talk to an adult.
As a result, we've learned some things that will maybe, eventually help people.
For example, yesterday Sister Olivia had me "examine" a woman named Jane, who came to the shelter with her son and two daughters. The boy's name is Jimmy and he's angry all the time. I know I'm not supposed to, but he was so angry that I painted him with peacefulness. Jane was sad, but she also had the color I've learned means desperation. What she didn't have was the fear color. So I told this to Sister Olivia and while she talked to Jane, I showed the two girls around. Their names were Linda and Debby. Linda was seven and Debby was eleven. Their brother, Jimmy, didn't want to go on the tour. I say tour, but in reality it's just showing them the common area, with the couches and TV and dining tables. Their cells hadn't been assigned, yet, and anyway I'm not allowed in them unless they're empty and I'm cleaning them.
So Debby was the one showing sadness and fear, and I told her everything would be okay, but she insisted it would never be okay and she started to get so agitated that I "hugged" her really well. She calmed down but then started bawling, and she was babbling about how her father would find her and "do it again." Her mother came running over and started hugging both girls.
When I talked to Sister Olivia about all this, I explained Debby wasn't afraid for her mother. She was afraid for herself!
So Sister Olivia went and talked to Sister Eunice, who runs the shelter, and pretty soon they were both talking to Jane, and then to Debby. And the police came, which isn't really rare, but this time they talked to Debby instead of Jane, which was very different.
Sister Olivia came and talked to me while this was going on. She said I'm old enough to understand, now, and she taught me a whole passel of things about sex.
Jane's husband was sexually abusing the girls. And she says he saw his son as competition, because he was psychologically abusing Jimmy, telling him how worthless he was and things like that.
The reason this is important is because this was the first time I realized there was more evil in the world than just guys who get mad and like to beat up women.
Sister Olivia and I have a lot to talk about. She says it can't wait until I'm older, because my "talent" can do good now, instead of waiting until I'm older.
She says what I saw in Debby helped them get Jane to admit what was really going on, instead of what Jane said was the reason she came to the shelter.
So, am I supposed to use my talent or not?
That's to you, Sister Olivia, so you'll understand why I get frustrated, sometimes.
Tuesday, August 18th, 20[redacted]: (prosecution stipulation that John Doe is seventeen years old on this date)
It's Tuesday night and this morning, Sister Olivia said we had to leave the convent. She told me to pack my stuff and be ready in ten minutes. It turns out she has a car! Who knew? And we've been in that car all day, on our way to [redacted] which is one of our sister shelters in [redacted]. Sister Olivia, who says I have to call her Tiffany while we're traveling, explained during the trip why all this is happening.
A month ago a woman came to the shelter. I just happened to be there, doing penance, and saw her come in. Her name was Rhonda, and she was more beat up and more terrified than I've ever seen a woman be. There was almost no other color in her brain, except the pain/fear color. That was really bright, too. She was sobbing and said her husband would find her, and that when he did, he'd kill her. She didn't say he might find her. She said he would find her and the colors in her brain told me she believed that with all her heart. She also believed that he'd kill her. Nothing the nuns said would calm her and even when I washed her with calm, she only calmed down a little bit. I'd never seen anything like it.
Rhonda said her husband was a maniac, which was why she couldn't swear out a complaint against him in the past. She had also avoided going to the hospital in the past when he beat her. This time, though, she felt something break inside her arm and knew she needed help. So she came to [redacted] because she'd heard somewhere we had a doctor on staff. We don't, and when they wanted to call an ambulance for what they thought was her broken arm, she lost it. That's when I "hugged" her hard, and it barely made any difference.
She'd been there almost half an hour when they called an ambulance, despite her pleas not to. She said he had a scanner, and would hear it. But the nuns either didn't believe her, or thought all their years of doing this meant they could handle things.
But he did hear the call on the scanner. And he did come to the shelter.
I was taking the trash out when I heard screams from inside the shelter and ran towards the door, where there were also sounds of things crashing and breaking. I got there just in time to see this man swing his arm and hit sister Meredith on the face with his fist. She went flying as blood spurted from her nose. A pregnant lady, named Diane, was huddled in a corner crying, with her arms sort of wrapped around her bulging stomach. Two other nuns were on the floor, one sitting, and one lying, trying to get up. The man kicked Sister Alicia on her hip, and said, "Get out of my way, bitch!" She rolled over with a gasping cry and he stomped over to Rhonda. He leaned down, grabbed a handful of her long hair, and pulled.
"You're coming with me, you worthless cunt," he growled. "I'm gonna teach you a lesson you'll never forget!"
I ran in. There was so much anger in the room that it made a kind of haze of the scene in front of me. I grabbed the guy's arm and pulled. I think I yelled for him to let go of her. He looked over his shoulder at me and jerked his elbow so that it hit me right at what Sister Olivia told me is called the celiac plexus, or solar plexus. Every bit of breath gushed out of me and I felt paralyzed as I fell to the floor.
Then he reached into his waistband and pulled out a gun.
All I had was my mind ... so that's what I used. I didn't really think about it as I did it - that would come later - but I sent my senses into his head. It was like watching TV. I could see physical things in his head. I found a nice, fat blood vessel. Then, imagining I had two tiny hands, I gripped that vessel and pulled those little hands apart. The vessel separated like a string of cooked spaghetti, and blood went everywhere.
The guy froze, let go of Rhonda's hair, dropped the gun on the floor and then reached to grab his head with both of his hands. He staggered around for maybe ten seconds before he just dropped like a sack of rocks and lay there, staring at the ceiling.
He wasn't actually staring at anything, though, because he was dead.
A kid came to the shelter one time who had this little thing that had music on it. You put these little things in your ear and you could hear music. He let me listen to some music he called "Metallica" and it was the most awful screeching I ever heard. The psychic noise in that room crescendoed like someone had started playing Metallica at top volume. I thought my head was going to explode. I managed to get to my feet and took a couple of steps toward the door. Nuns were running all over the place, screaming and shouting. Everything suddenly looked like I was staring down a really dark tunnel at a little bit of light. Then the light went out and everything got black.
I woke up in bed. I knew it was my own bed because I could see my poster of Miss Piggy on the wall. It's a picture of her and Kermit riding a big hog - motorcycle. She's dressed all in silver and has her hands on the handlebars. All you can see of Kermit are his legs, sticking out to the sides and his hands on her waist. It's one of the few things that came to the convent with me. I think it belonged to my dad when I was little.
My head hurt, but I lifted it to look around. Sister Olivia was sitting in a chair beside my pallet, reading something. She must have seen my head move because she looked up.
"Thank goodness," she said. "We were afraid you might be in a coma."
"A coma?"
"Well, that's not what the doctor said. He said you just bumped your head when you fell down. But you've been asleep for twelve hours."
"What happened?" I asked. Memories started flooding into my mind. "That guy! Where is he?"
"You lie back down," said Sister Olivia. "He's not a problem any longer."
"What happened?"
"Never mind that. Are you hungry? Thirsty? The doctor said we could give you something when you woke up, as long as you're not nauseated. Are you nauseated?"
I was starving, and said so. She got up and left my room, but didn't close the door. She disappeared and then her head popped into view in my doorway.
"You stay there. You're not allowed out of bed yet."
I had been in the process of sitting up, but I let my abs relax and plopped back down. I winced. Even the pillow hurt my head. I felt around with a hand but felt nothing special. My head felt like a muscle feels when I used it too much. It was like my whole brain was sore.
I remembered what happened. Nobody had told me, yet, but I knew the guy was dead, and that I had made him that way. I was still examining feeling around on my head, when Sister Olivia came back in with a tray. It had a PB&J on it, and a glass of milk.
I did not tell her what I remembered doing to the man.
While I ate, Sister Olivia went back to her book, a paperback. I couldn't read the title, but I saw "John Grisham" on it in big, shiny letters. I had found a copy of The Rainmaker, by John Grisham, on the roll-around library cart one time and started it, but Sister Ignacio found me reading it and took it away from me. She said I wasn't old enough to read "that trash". I think I was twelve, at the time. Apparently, Sister Olivia was old enough to read trash.
After a while, the fact that he was dead got to bothering me, and it got worse. The worse part was that I didn't feel bad about killing him, and I knew I should feel bad. But he'd been hurting people. And when I saw that gun, I got really scared. Still, I knew I had to confess it, but I didn't want to go to one of the priests who was used to hearing me moan (again!) about how I got a boner for some woman, and then, instead, tell him I'd broken commandment number six.
So I confessed it to Sister Olivia, and asked her for absolution.
She told me it didn't work that way and that she'd pushed the envelope hard enough already. She was talking about how she'd gotten an extension on her novice period because she still wasn't sure that going the nun route was what she felt called to do. Because she was so heavily involved with me, they made an exception and she didn't want to start hearing my confession and make things even stranger.
Then she said I needed to hold off talking to the priest until she could do some investigating and make sure I actually had a legitimate sin to confess to.
Of course I know now that, had I run to the priest and confessed to my sin of murder, there would have been awkward questions about how I might have accomplished such a feat, seeing as how the initial coroner's report said this guy had a stroke. And in answering those awkward questions, the priests (and presumably the bishop and Cardinal and maybe even the Pope, if this is as important as Sister Olivia says it is) would find out that Mother Superior Mary had been keeping a big secret in her little convent.
So I waited until Sister Olivia somehow got access to the final autopsy report ... which changed the manner of death from natural causes to "unnatural" causes. It was being listed as a homicide, but only because nobody could explain how two inches of a vein in a man's brain had been pulverized, and there wasn't a mark on his head anywhere. It was completely new to medical science. The report likened it to a section of the man's blood vessel as having been "microwaved until it exploded."
Sister Olivia was sure the police were going to return to the convent with ... awkward questions.
When Sister Olivia made her report to Mother Superior, Mother Superior called a friend at [redacted] and asked if they could "put up a woman and her nephew" for a week or so.
So here I was, with my "aunt", on my way to someplace where we both hoped the government wouldn't find me. That's why the writing is so shaky. We're driving fifty-five miles an hour on side roads because Sister Olivia doesn't want to use the Interstate.
Sister Olivia hasn't said anything for a while. She's just driving and staring straight ahead. I'm wondering a lot about why Mother Superior would help shelter a murderer, and why Sister Olivia didn't seem bothered by the fact that she was transporting that murderer to another state.
Maybe she'll tell me after she reads this.
Part Two
///CLASSIFIED TOP SECRET///
THIS DOCUMENT MAY NOT BE COPIED OR DISSEMINATED TO ANY ENTITY WITHOUT DIRECT AUTHORIZATION OF THE SECRETARY OF HOMELAND SECURITY
Exhibit 4, excerpts of manuscript found in cell of John Doe, AKA Robert Michael Wilson, 13th Circuit Court of Appeals of the United States of America, in the case of the Government vs. John Doe:
We got caught, and now we're inside a mountain, locked up. I'm not supposed to know that, but my "powers" as Sister Olivia calls them, have gotten a lot stronger. I think it's like a muscle. The more I use it, the stronger it gets.
I felt them coming, and was able to warn Sister Olivia before they broke down the door. She said they would take my journal, and that anyway, now that things were going to come out into the open, she was going to write a book, so she told me to try to find a way to write things down for her to use in her book. She said they'd separate us, and she might not see me again for a long time, and to write like people who didn't know us would read it some day.
Then we waited. She told me not to do anything to them, not to hurt them or resist, so I didn't.
Then they crashed in the door and put handcuffs on us. She was right. They found my journal and took it with them when they moved us to this mountain.
I'm writing in two forms, because after I asked for a pen and paper, the first day I wrote stuff, they took the paper and wouldn't give it back. So now I write stuff for them to find and seize, and I write other stuff for Sister Olivia, like what I'm writing right now. I don't get to go anywhere so I have plenty of time to do both. I wrote about some of this in my journal, but that's gone, now, so I'll have to repeat some stuff.
The first question might be, 'How does one hide one group of writings and let them find another?'
That's easy. To put it in Sister Olivia's words, I "use the force", like in Star Wars. She was joking about it the first time she said it, but she rented that movie so I could watch it. It was the first movie I ever saw and it amazed me. It gave us a frame of reference to talk about what I could - and could not - do.
What I could not do was read someone's mind. I couldn't tell what someone was thinking about by "listening in" to their actual thoughts. On the other hand, body language speaks louder than words, and the colors of the mind say a lot to me, too, so it's not too hard to guess what's going on inside someone's mind. Even if they know how I do it, like Sister Olivia does, they can't control what they're feeling. It's a little like a lie detector machine. It measures things that, supposedly, humans cannot control.
So when I hear a mind coming to my cell, I put the stuff I want them to find on the little steel shelf on the wall next to the sink, and put this record under my T shirts. While they are searching my cell (which they almost always do) I paint their minds with a color I discovered accidentally when Sister Olivia found bed bugs on the mattress of a motel we stayed in. I call it the color of "Ewww" because that's what she said when it bloomed in her brain.
When they get to my T shirts, I paint them with "Ewwww" and they jump right over my hiding place.
Okay, so we left the St [redacted] convent and went on the run. Sister Olivia had a bag with a bunch of cash in it. We were only on the road for three days.
Those three days changed my life forever, though.
First off, we talked a lot. I know that sounds pretty anticlimactic, but you have to remember that, while I had lived with women my whole life, most of them had been very closed-mouthed women, who had nothing much to say to a little boy, other than the verbiage associated with ordering him around and disciplining him. So I'd never really had the opportunity to talk to a grown woman for more than a minute or two. I had talked to girls in the shelter, but even then it was usually only for five or ten minutes at most. The women (and kids) who came to the shelter did not, as a rule, trust men very much. I should have said they didn't trust 'males' very much. A lot of moms, when they saw their daughters talking to me, called them away and told them not to talk to me in the future. Another boy might have taken it personally, but I could see the colors of fear, mistrust and worry.
So having Sister Olivia to talk to for literally hours on end was indescribably important to me.
Had it been a different nun, I'm sure things would have gone a different direction, but Sister Olivia had all kinds of cool stories to tell, and she didn't mind if I asked questions. I asked a lot of questions.
She did most of the talking, of course. I mean she already knew everything about me except how I got my talent and exactly what I could do with it. But I didn't know everything I could do with it, either, so we were both ignorant about that. What I learned about her might be compared to looking at a person's skin and then being given a course on the whole body. Our skin, while it is the largest organ of a human body, covers up tons of more interesting stuff. Because we were together so much, I got to see some of what was under her skin.
I heard about where she grew up, and how her own father was abusive to her mother. That was one reason she asked to do her novice period at St. [redacted]. She knew how the kids at the shelter felt. It was also why she joined the army just as soon as she didn't have to have parental consent to do it. She didn't take any shit from the men, either, which is one reason she ended up in Delta Force. She wouldn't tell me a lot about the missions she went on, except for the humanitarian aspects.
It was pretty much a one way street, though. I didn't have all that much to tell Sister Olivia about why I could move things with my mind, or tell what people were feeling. I could usually tell when someone was lying. And, of course, I could reach into a man's brain and kill him. But I couldn't tell her how or why I could do these things. And, while she wanted to investigate my abilities there weren't really any exercises we could do driving down the road. My control over inanimate objects was very basic in those days, and unreliable, in terms of "proving" I could use telekinesis. In the time they've had me locked up, I've gotten a lot stronger, probably because I had so much time to practice. I did tell her what colors I saw in the people's brains who passed us, but there weren't all that many of them. I did the same thing at restaurants, when we stopped, but we couldn't really talk about it because of the people around us.
It wasn't until we stopped the first night that my thoughts ... and the questions I had then ... became more personal.
She told me about how to be "on the lam" as she put it, and part of that was choosing a fleabag (again her word) motel to stay in. She wanted something as close to being off the grid as possible, with the understanding that one hazard that went with off the grid, fleabag motels, was usually off the grid, fleabag police forces, as well. She said that sometimes small town cops have nothing better to do than be curious about who's staying at the motel for the night. She says they can get nosy, and they have the time to get seriously nosy.
She had left her phone at the convent (yes, nuns have phones, too,) so we didn't have access to the internet, or GPS or any of that, so the first thing we did was take side roads, instead of interstates. Around seven P.M. she started slowing down as we went through towns. She chose the Flamingo Motor Inn because it was an old timey kind (according to her) and it had about a hundred plastic fake flamingos stuck in the ground all over the place.
"This place will be run by an old couple," she predicted.
The woman who was sitting behind the counter, knitting and watching a tiny little TV had white hair, a beautiful smile, and must have been a hundred. Her husband waited in front of the door to our room as she moved the car, and unlocked the door for us. Sister Olivia hadn't told them anything about who I was.
"You and your brother have a nice night," he said, smiling. "If you get peckish, there are some vending machines by the ice machine in the laundry room. The café closes at eight."
"Sharp guy," she said, as she closed the door.
"What do you mean?"
"He got a look at the car without making it obvious."
"Who cares?" I asked.
"He was making sure we didn't have other people in the car, who we didn't pay for," she said. "Plus I bet his memory is sharper than you think. If there's a problem, he'll remember what the car looks like. He might even have verified the license plate."
"Anybody can see the license plate," I pointed out.
"Yes, but most people don't actually look," she said. "A license plate will tell you a lot if you have access to police records. I served with a guy who got out and became a cop in Atlanta. He said if things were slow, he'd just cruise motel parking lots running tags. He found stolen cars routinely, as well as identifying people who had warrants for their arrest."
"Come on," I scoffed. "Who parks a stolen car in front of their motel room?"
"People who steal cars have to sleep, too," she said.
"And how could he know the person driving the car had a warrant on them?"
"He didn't, but if the owner information on the car got a hit on a warrant, he could go inside and ask who had rented the room."
"I didn't think of that," I said. "What if somebody does that here?" I asked, suddenly worried.
"Not to worry, little man," she said. "It's Sister Elizabeth's car, and I have the registration, as well as a note from her that she loaned me the car. And, if we get stopped and they run my name, there are no warrants for my arrest anywhere." She frowned. "Well, not in this country, anyway."
"Somebody overseas wants to arrest you?" I asked, eager to hear another story.
"Let's just say I ruined a lot of people's weekends, and some of them might want to ruin a few of mine," she said.
"You're never going to tell me about killing people, are you?" I asked.
She stared at me. I had never been quite so bold before. But her colors had been a lot better since we started on this trip, and she was smiling more.
"I hope you never have to find out what that's like, Bobby. One thing I learned in my military career is that it's better if you can make love, not war."
"I already know what killing is like," I said.
She turned and stared at me. I saw sorrow colors flash over her brain, and then a mix of others.
"What you did isn't like what I did."
She'd been taking things out of her suitcase, and she happened to be holding a pair of nun panties when she said this. The nuns all wore linen panties that were kind of shapeless. I knew because I worked in the laundry sometimes, usually when I was being punished for some infraction. Their bras were made of cotton and thick and very durable, with wide straps on both the shoulders and back. Nuns might be willing to go through privation, but they wanted to be comfortable doing it. The laundry room was available to the patrons, too, though, and while I was in there I saw what 'normal' panties and bras looked like.
"Stop staring at my underwear," she said.
I jerked. I'd been thinking that those panties might give us away as her being a nun, if somebody searched our belongings. It had been an admittedly wild flight of fancy, as my imagination squirted out a scenario in which a detective (who looked like Columbo) held up a pair of linen panties and said, "Aha! These belong to a nun and we're chasing a nun!"
"What if somebody searches our stuff?" I asked.
"What?" She was staring at me, now.
"What if the police find those and know you're a nun?" I asked. "You don't want anybody to know you're a nun ... right?"
She didn't correct my misrepresentation of her status in the superfluity. That's what a group of nuns is called. I learned that in my religion class. I've never actually heard anyone use it before, though. It's a cool word. People should use it more.
"Why would the police think these belong to a nun?" she asked, holding up the shiny, cream-colored garment.
"Because they're nun panties," I said, using circular logic. "Nobody else wears those."
"And how do you know this?"
Her voice took on that edge that made the hackles on the back of my neck stand up. That's the quality in a nun's voice that says you better tread lightly, lest you run afoul of God's displeasure. That's why you get punished. It isn't because the nun is unhappy. It's always because God is disappointed, and is apparently too busy to punish me himself. Nuns are his proxy for that kind of thing.
"I work in the laundry sometimes," I said. "You know that."
She blinked.
"Oh. I suppose you do." She stared at me a little longer. "And you are almost a man, so I suppose it's normal for you to be interested in ... girls' underwear."
I was shocked! It must have showed, because she grinned at me.
"I think I'm safe a while longer," she said. "You're cute, but you're too young for me."
I thought about this actor I saw on TV where some silly thing that happened on the show and his reaction was to grab his chest with both hands and say, "It's the big one. Call an ambulance!" Well, that's how I felt when she said all that. Me? Cute? Too young for her? Meaning, of course that there was some guy who wasn't too young for her? I wasn't stupid. I knew she was talking about sex. I didn't know much about sex, but I knew that's what she was referring to.
It was like the whole world sort of sighed and rolled on its side. Up to that point in my life, there were two kinds of women: normal ... and nuns. Normal women knew about sex and all that stuff. They had husbands and babies and did all the things women do with husbands to make babies. But nuns were different! Nuns didn't do any of that stuff! Nuns didn't even know about that stuff ... right?
Well, obviously they did know about it. And just as obviously, they thought about it, too.
It should have been obvious, but it wasn't. Not to me. And the epiphany I had then changed my world.
I've always been able to adapt to changing circumstances. I credit that to having thirty mothers, instead of just one. I was like a chameleon, sometimes. So as she puttered around putting her toiletries in the bathroom and turning on the TV to find the weather channel, I did a lot of thinking. I did even more as she left to go try to get some takeout food from the café before it closed. She didn't want to eat inside restaurants unless it was necessary. Driving down the highway you're pretty inconspicuous, but in restaurants, people tend to study the other patrons. While she was gone I came up with some new questions for Sister Olivia.
She brought back burgers and fries, something we never had at the convent, and something I had learned to love already on that first day of my life in the 'normal' world.
"How many boyfriends did you have before you came to St. [redacted]?" I asked after taking a huge bite of my burger.
"Don't talk with your mouth full," she corrected. "And none of your business."
"Why is it none of my business?" I asked. "Were they all secret boyfriends, like some of the women in the shelter have?"
She stared at me.
"What do you know about boyfriends?" she asked. She blinked. "Or I should ask how do you know about boyfriends?"
"I'm not a nun," I said. It was an instinctive answer. I didn't actually think before I spoke. In my defense, I hadn't been taught anything about romantic relationships by a nun.
I didn't know what to expect, but what I didn't expect was for her to laugh.
"No, you're not," she said after she stopped laughing.
After we ate it was only eight-thirty. We didn't plan on going out anywhere, of course, and Sister Olivia said she was going to take a shower. She went into the bathroom and I picked up the remote she'd used before, when she looked what the weather was going to be like ahead of us. I'd never been able to choose what to watch and I was fascinated as I started flipping through channels. They had a lot more of them on this TV than the one at the shelter. A lot of them seemed to be about cooking. They were selling jewelry on one of them. I didn't recognize any of the shows I'd seen before, at the shelter.
I stopped on one where a woman with lots of makeup on was saying something about her friends waiting to show me a good time. It said "$4.99 per hour". The woman said, "Here's a preview of what you'll see," and the scene changed to a woman kissing a man. They both had pants on, but that was all. The woman's breasts were pressed to the man's chest, so I couldn't see what they looked like, except they bulged out a lot. I'd never seen anybody kiss like that, either. It was like they were trying to eat each other's lips or something. The scene changed to a man lying on a bed, and a woman was sitting on top of him. They were both naked and his hands were covering her breasts and she was jerking forwards and backwards, moaning like she was in a lot of pain.
I was watching a woman who was on all fours, like a baby crawling, and a guy was kneeling behind her, bumping her butt for some reason when Sister Olivia came out of the bathroom, rubbing her hair with a towel. These people were naked too, but the camera was positioned such that I couldn't see any private parts, but this woman sounded in pain, too. I was confused, because the colors on all the men I'd seen were excited, but the colors on all the women were bored.
Sister Olivia had on running shorts and a T shirt and she stopped as she heard the woman who was in pain. There were maybe five seconds where she just stared at the TV and then she rushed across the room and grabbed the remote out of my hand.
"Oh no you don't, Buster," she growled. She punched a button and the TV went dark. "No porn for you," she snarled.
"What's porn?" I asked. "Is that what they were doing? How come you have to pay $4.99 to watch it? I thought TV was free."
She looked at me.
"Please tell me you didn't push the pay button," she said.
"I didn't push the pay button," I said, dutifully. "I didn't even know there was a pay button. Where is it?" I peered at the remote in her hand.
"You don't need to see that stuff," she said. "That's one reason we discourage you from watching TV at the convent."
"I never saw anything like that on the TV at the convent," I said.
"We don't have that channel," she said. "Now. You go take your shower. We're getting an early start tomorrow."
I went in the bathroom and started the water running while I took off my clothes. I was thinking about what I'd seen. Was that man who had his hands on the woman's breasts hurting her? Was that why she didn't want me to watch it? The nuns always turned the channel to something else if there was violence on the TV. Except part of the noises she was making included her saying, "Oh yes!" I was really confused, because her voice said she was all for this, but her colors said she wasn't happy at all. Still, it had been exciting to see those people naked, though the kissing part looked kind of icky. I mean they were licking each other on the mouth!
I knew not to waste water, so I hurried up. When I washed my penis, it started getting big, like it did sometimes. I never thought much about that. It just happened sometimes, like when I saw Sister Olivia in regular clothes. I didn't actually go see the priest every single time I got an erection anymore. I sort of batched them together. The priest said that was fine. And anyway, erections didn't last. I mean they eventually got soft again.
For some reason it felt good to wash it on this night, so I rubbed my hand up and down it a few times. I had an erection, but I didn't think of it as an erection. I mean I wasn't looking at anybody. The nuns had said I had to confess getting erections, but getting stiff in the shower didn't feel like a regular erection. It felt better than it ever had, before, so I just kept washing it. I could feel my heart going faster and it started feeling really good. This had never happened before but because it felt so good, I just kept going.
Then, suddenly, there was this pain, a really awful pain in my penis, except right after that something soothing rushed through my penis and white stuff started shooting out of it. It wasn't pee, and I was afraid I'd broken something, because that pain had been really bad, except then it felt really good, and even though it felt bad, I couldn't stop washing my penis.
The door burst open and Sister Olivia came rushing in. She pulled the shower curtain to one side and looked at me.
"What's wrong!?" she yelled.
My hand slowed way down and I stared at her. I was kind of hunched over and some of the white stuff was running down the shower curtain beside her knee. I guess I stared at it, because pretty soon she looked where I was looking.
"Shit!" she said. Just like that. She cussed and it sounded almost normal. I couldn't believe it. Then she turned around. "I'm sorry," she said. "I thought you'd hurt yourself."
"I think I did hurt myself," I said. "Something came out of my penis and it wasn't pee, and there was this pain. I think I might have broken my penis."
She turned sideways and pulled the shower curtain almost closed.
"You didn't break anything," she said. "Bobby? Is this the first time you did that?"
"What did I do?" I asked.
"You jerked off, Bobby."
"I didn't jerk anything," I said. "I was just washing my penis and it felt good, so I kept washing and then it hurt really bad and the stuff came out of it."
It was silent.
"We're idiots," she said.
"We are? Why?" I asked.
"No, not you. Us. The sisters. We should have known this would happen."
"What did happen?" I asked.
"Finish your shower and we'll talk about it when you're dried off."
"So I didn't break anything?"
"No, Baby. You didn't break anything."
"Good," I sighed. "I was worried."
"We'll talk when you get ready for bed," she said.
My penis felt great by the time I left the bathroom. It felt different, kind of tired, but great. Sister Olivia was lying on her bed, reading a book. I was kind of shocked, because I'd never really seen her dressed like she was. I could see all of her legs, and her T shirt was hugging her boobs. I'd seen her in a T shirt before, in the garden, but she'd had on long pants, then and usually she wore what all the nuns wore, which was a robe. The robes sort of smoothed everything out, and de-accented the fact that the nun had female curves. Looking at Sister Olivia, there on the bed, she looked more like one of the women from the shelter. Except her brain, at that moment, was the color of contentment.
I had forgotten to take clean clothes into the bathroom. I got into the drawer she'd put my clothes in and got a clean pair of underwear and started to put them on.
"What are you doing?" she asked. Her voice had that tone that nuns had when they knew what you were doing and didn't approve. I was confused, because I wasn't really "doing" anything.
"What?"
"Why are you naked? You can't just walk around naked in front of a woman, Bobby. It's rude."
"Why?" I asked. This had never come up before. At the convent, I had my own bathroom. Actually it wasn't really "mine". Anybody could use it. But the nuns didn't go in there very often. Usually if they did, it was just to check on whether or not I'd cleaned it appropriately. It didn't have a shower in it, and I usually took baths. My room was only ten feet away, across the hall. I had a robe, too, except it was different than the sisters' robes. Mine was just to keep me warm. They didn't spend a lot of money on heat. Anyway, I guess there was never anybody else around when I was changing clothes, so nobody had told me changing clothes in front of anybody else could be rude.
"You're a man, Bobby," she said, patiently. I think she'd learned, on our first day, that there were lots of things I hadn't been taught, so she was patient. "A man should not reveal his sexual parts to a woman."
"Oh," I said. "Wait. On the TV they were naked. If it's rude, why were they doing that on TV?"
Her face got redder, kind of like when someone's brain is showing anger, but she didn't act angry and her brain was a different color, one I couldn't remember seeing before.
"Have you ever heard of the birds and the bees?" she asked.
"Sure," I said. "What about them? What do birds and bees have to do with being rude?"
She sighed, and closed her book. She sat up in that way athletic people have of making it look easy, and swung her legs to the side of the bed.
"This is unacceptable," she said.
"I'm sorry!" I moaned. "Really. I didn't know I was being rude, but I'll never do it again. I promise!"
She waved a hand at me.
"That's not what I was talking about. You don't have to apologize. What I meant was that it's unacceptable that your education has been ignored."
"I pass all my tests," I pointed out.
"Your sexual education," she snapped.
"Oh." That's all I had. Just, "Oh." I hadn't even been aware I was supposed to be "sexually educated".
"I should not have to teach you this," she groused.
"Then don't," I suggested. She was acting weird, and her brain was the flaming color of embarrassment, which was goofy because I couldn't see any reason for her to be embarrassed. "You told me how I was being rude, and I know not to do that anymore."
"No, Bobby," she sighed. "You need to know more, or you're going to get into trouble. We should have paid attention to this. I understand why nobody was eager to approach this subject with you, but it's still unacceptable that they've just hidden their heads in the sand."
I stood there. She looked at me.
"Did you bring pajamas?" she asked.
"What are pajamas?" I asked.
"What you wear when you're sleeping?"
I looked down at my underwear.
"I sleep like this," I said.
"Of course you do," she said. "I keep forgetting you're normal. Your education has been abnormal, but you're just as normal as the day is long."
"Okay," I said. "I'm willing to learn, but you have to stop saying stuff like that, because I don't know what it means and it sounds like there's something wrong with me."
"What's wrong with you is that you're completely innocent," she said. "The sad part is that you're how everybody should be. Being innocent shouldn't be wrong. You're still living in the garden, and we should celebrate that, instead of reviling it."
"Garden? What garden? I live in a room, like everybody else," I said.
"The Garden of Eden," she said, patiently. "You have not eaten of the fruit of the tree of knowledge."
"Okay, now you're just being weird," I said.
She held up a hand to stop me before I could remind her that there was no Garden of Eden anymore, at least not one where people could find it.
"I know," she said, as if she could read my mind. "I'm using an analogy, but it's a little spooky how close to reality that analogy is. You're a very unique person, Bobby Wilson. More unique than most people."
I smiled. Here, at least, was something I could respond to.
"Sister Pauline told me one time that I was unique, exactly like everybody else. Then she laughed. She had to explain it to me. That's when I learned what irony means."
"Sister Pauline has a delightful sense of humor," said Sister Olivia. "I wish she was here to help me teach you."
"How hard could it be?" I asked. I was thinking of subjects like math, or science, where a concept was taught and gone over until I knew it forwards and backwards. Then we moved on to another concept.
"Sex is complicated," she said. "Let's start with what you do know. Tell me what you know about sex, Bobby."
"Um, I know sex is to make babies, and that nuns don't have sex," I said. "Nobody told me why, though, except they say they marry Jesus and since he's up in Heaven it would be hard for him to make babies with the nuns."
"That's complicated, too," she said. "Maybe we'll get to that, later. What else do you know?"
"I know I'm not supposed to look at a woman's breasts. Like when I look at yours, you tell me to stop."
Her face got pink, but then turned regular again. I went on.
"I know there's something called a pussy between a woman's legs, except that doesn't make sense. A boy named Roger said that when he grew up he was going to get a piece of pussy, which also didn't make sense. He's a boy, not a girl. I know I have to confess to a priest when I get an erection, but I don't know why it's a sin to have one." I bit my lip and thought hard. "I guess that's about it."
She stared at me and breathed, "Criminal" under her breath. Then she gave me a kind of crooked smile and said, "Well, why it has fallen to me I don't understand, but we may as well get started," she said.
Basically, what she told me that night was that God created man and woman different, and that the difference between them was so they could make babies. I found out what an erection was actually intended to do. My episode in the shower was her example of how a penis worked, during sex. I was a little freaked out that I had engaged in having sex with my own hand (without knowing it at the time), especially after she talked for half an hour about masturbation and how the church says it's a sin because it wastes the semen, which God gave man so he could make babies. She told me the story of a man named Onan who was in the Bible and who took his penis out of his sister-in-law when it squirted so that she wouldn't have his baby, and how that wasted his semen, too. God killed him for that, which is how the Catholic Church knows that birth control is a sin. I got really freaked out then, worried that God was going to kill me, and she said it was okay, and that he wouldn't, because of The Good News, in the New Testament, which I already knew about.
I felt better then, when she said all I had to do was confess to a priest whenever I masturbated, and try not to do it. I thought about all those erections I'd already confessed to, and how, if I'd known about it, I could have gotten that really good pain she said was called an orgasm. I was pretty sure that if my penis got hard again, I was going to be tempted to wash it and get another orgasm because for sure it's the best pain I ever felt. She talked about how sex was supposed to be saved for the sanctity of marriage, and about how all babies should be born into a family with a mom and a dad to raise them.
I took it all in. I didn't ask a lot of questions. The more she talked, the more I understood things I'd seen and heard before, but which, before this, I didn't understand the significance of.
Of course I had questions. Like the way she talked about how sex (she called it making love) between a husband and wife is the best feeling in the world, and the most precious thing people can share. Except from what I'd seen, people didn't really make any love, because the husband still wanted to beat his wife up a lot.
Slowly, I began to understand what she meant when she said it was complicated.
As I lay there in the dark, thinking about what she'd said, I realized that the erections I'd gotten actually meant something! Like the ones I routinely got for Sister Olivia.
They meant that ... somehow ... I wanted to have sex with her.
We got up at 5:30 the next morning and drove until nine before stopping to eat breakfast. I slept most of that time. Sister Olivia listened to the radio and I heard a lot of music I'd never heard before. I liked what she called classic rock the best.
We ate at a truck stop and my eyes saw things differently than they had in the past. Like when Sister Olivia went to the bathroom, and on her way back, a man talked to her. His color was kind of a muddy mix of bored and hopeful. Her color was of irritation. I knew that color well. A lot of nuns get irritated. When she got back to our booth I asked her about it.
"He propositioned me," she said.
"I don't understand."
She stared at me.
"Remember what we talked about last night? He said he wanted to have sex with me and asked if I was interested."
"Oh," I said. I didn't speak out loud about the part where they weren't married. She knew that. "This is part of the complicated part about sex, right?"
"Right," she said.
Back in the car, now that I was awake, it seemed like this might be a good time to pose some of my questions.
"So people who aren't married still have sex sometimes, right?" I said.
"That's fornication. It's a sin, but yes," she responded.
"Did you ever have sex?"
She stared straight ahead.
"My life before I came to the convent was very secular," she said. "Secular people don't pay a lot of attention to religious rules and sanctions."
"You mean they don't care if something is a sin. They might do it anyway."
"Yes."
We went on for a while.
"You never actually answered my question," I reminded her.
"That's personal. It's rude to ask questions like that," she said.
"I understand about how being nosy is bad, but you said I could ask questions. I'm learning about all this new stuff, and if I can't ask questions, how am I supposed to pass the test?"
"There won't be a test on this," she said.
"There will be if I meet a woman some day and want to get married to her. I don't want to be stupid if that happens."
She glanced at me.
"Now I understand why my mother said I'd know what to do when the time came."
"Huh?"
"Nothing. That's what a lot of parents tell their kids. They don't explain things to them. They duck out of it by saying things like that."