There’s always been a fundamental divide in military thinking. One side believes that wars are won by the army with better soldiers. The other side believes wars are decided with better weapons.
The better-weapons side has been winning the argument for the past hundred years or so. In World War I, the Germans had the best-trained soldiers in the world, the product of years of tradition and schooling, thousands of young men raised for nothing but combat. And they were wiped out, wave after wave, by machine guns and poison gas, as if they were mere mortals like anyone else. After that, World War II showed that you could erase whole cities with one bomb. Soldiers, to these people, have been reduced to the meat left on the battlefield as a way of keeping score. They believe our defense budget is best spent on cruise missiles, drone strikes, and orbital lasers.
But the better-soldiers side points to conflicts like Vietnam, where it didn’t matter how many tons of bombs and napalm we dropped on the enemy. They put their money on Special Forces, and turncoats buried deep in the enemy’s headquarters, and highly trained covert operatives. They believe that the right man in the right place can change the course of a war.
That group is the reason, more or less, that I exist. Along with a man named Wolf Messing.
Messing was a Russian psychic and showman who lived in Moscow in the 1950s. There are a lot of people who will tell you now that he was a fraud. Maybe he was. But if that’s the case, he was a fraud who managed to fool Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, the Gestapo, and most important, Josef Stalin.
Stalin, for you illiterates who can’t remember anything before Kim met Kanye, was the absolute ruler of the Soviet Union and one of the great butchers of the twentieth century. His body count has been estimated as high as ten million, and that’s not including the people who died in famines or in the massive prison system he created during his rule. People whispered his name, as if he would appear like Satan and drag them off to the gulags personally. He could not have been more terrifying if he slept on a bed of skulls and drank blood for breakfast.
And even he was scared shitless of Wolf Messing.
Messing was performing every night for the Russian elite then, and Stalin had heard stories about his psychic abilities: how he’d escaped the Nazis in Berlin by convincing his jailers to open the cell door and lock themselves inside; how, as part of his act, he walked into the state bank of Moscow and convinced the manager to hand over 100,000 rubles, no questions asked; how he knew your deepest, darkest secret the moment he met you.
Stalin decided to test Messing. A couple of men in dark suits from the KGB showed up at Messing’s theater one night and told him that the glorious leader wanted to see him at 1:00 P.M. the next day. The only catch: Messing had to get past the guards first. He was ordered to use his abilities to try to get into the Kremlin without the proper authorization. No big deal: just walk into one of the most heavily guarded buildings on the planet without papers or an escort.
To make it even more interesting, Stalin gave his men photos of Messing and ordered them to shoot any intruder on sight. If Messing failed the test, he’d be dead.
But the next day, at 1:00 P.M. sharp, Stalin looked up from his desk—and Messing was standing there. Close enough to touch Stalin—or put a bullet into him, if he wanted.
Stalin demanded to know how Messing pulled it off. Messing said he projected the words “I am Beria” into the minds of everyone who saw him. When they looked at him, walking past the guards, down the halls, they didn’t see the unassuming little Jewish man. Instead, they believed they were seeing the head of the Russian secret police, possibly the only man in Russia more frightening than Stalin.
Stalin never let Messing get that close again. But he began pouring a lot of money into psychic research. The Soviets reportedly came up with agents who could make themselves invisible, who could implant ideas into the minds of other people, who could pinpoint the positions of America’s top-secret missile silos just by looking at a map. They had one woman, Nina Kulagina, who was supposed to be able to move small objects, coins and dice, with the power of her mind alone. That doesn’t sound like much, until you think about all the tiny, vital things inside the human body—like, say, a blood vessel inside the brain, being squeezed like a balloon until it pops.
Once the CIA and the army heard about Messing and the other Soviet psychics, they panicked. This was back when the Soviet Union was still something to be feared. There was only one satellite in the sky then, and it had a red star painted on its side. American kids hid under their desks during H-bomb drills, ready for atomic war to break out at any moment. The best and brightest in the government were not about to let the United States fall behind in any race with the Russians. In 1953, Allen Dulles, the head of the CIA, told a group at Princeton that “mind warfare is the great battlefield of the Cold War, and we must do whatever it takes to win.”
So, in the grand tradition of the CIA, they began throwing millions of dollars at the problem. They sent recruiters out to séances and carnivals all over America, looking for psychics who could match the ones at the Soviets’ Brain Research Institute. They started Project MK-ULTRA, which dosed unwilling subjects with LSD in an attempt to control their minds or awaken paranormal abilities. They created Project Star Gate, which was supposed to use remote viewers to pinpoint hidden Soviet military installations through ESP.
None of it worked. At least, as far as the public ever knew.
There’s a reason you hear only about the CIA’s failures. By definition, if a covert operation is successful, no one will ever know about it. But for decades, we’ve learned in painful detail all the ways the CIA has stepped on its own dick: the failed Cuban invasion at the Bay of Pigs; attempts to kill Castro with exploding cigars; smuggling cocaine to pay for weapons for anticommunist rebels in South America; “slam-dunk” intel on Iraq’s WMDs.
And things like Star Gate and Project Jedi and the First Earth Battalion. High-ranking officers were told they could walk through walls if they concentrated properly. Special Forces soldiers were told to focus their inner chi until they could kill a goat by staring at it. Others sat in a run-down building on the grounds of Fort Meade, racking their brains for visions of Russian submarines. They didn’t even have the budget for coffee; they had to bring their own.
Things like this make the CIA look like Chris Farley in an old SNL rerun, stumbling through the living room and smashing all the furniture; a bumbling, barely functional, mostly harmless clown.
Nobody sees the men and women behind the dictator who has a fatal heart attack, or the coup right before the crucial election, or the bigmouthed union leader who vanishes from his bed in the middle of the night. Nobody suspects the clown.
John Wayne Gacy used the same trick, until they found all the bodies in his basement.
There’s the cover, and then there’s the real work. In my case, Star Gate was the cover, the exploding cigar designed to make a lot of noise and smoke.
My group did the real work.
I THINK IT must have surprised them, when my test results showed up. Maybe it had been so long since they’d found someone like me through the exams that they had to get orders from higher up in the chain of command. It certainly took them long enough to come find me.
Or maybe they only went back and looked at my tests after what happened with my drill sergeant.
SERGEANT LEARY WAS a throwback, a draftee during Vietnam who opted to become a lifer. He was something prehistoric compared to the kids who’d seen the towers fall and then signed up for revenge and college tuition. There he was, quietly grinding out his time at Fort Benning, and then, suddenly, he was expected to teach a bunch of children raised on Nintendo how to fight in the real world.
I did my best to avoid him. I was arrogant, but I wasn’t completely stupid. I knew that the army wasn’t the place to test authority. It wasn’t high school anymore. So I wrapped my usual attitude tight and kept my head down. I was determined not to be noticed. I wanted a fresh start, without my talent separating me from everyone else. I wanted to be human.
It didn’t matter.
Leary made me the squad’s official scapegoat. If we had to do extra miles on a run, it was because I was dogging it. If we failed inspection, it was because I was sloppy. Or I looked at him the wrong way during lineup. That sort of thing. At first I told myself it wasn’t personal. Get a group of humans together and basic primate politics take over: someone will be the class clown, someone else will be the teacher’s pet. I got to be the designated punching bag. A big silverback gorilla like Leary would shove people into these roles if nobody took them. It’s a quick and dirty way to get a bunch of strangers to think of themselves as a unit. Even I knew that.
Then it turned into something uglier. For me, Leary tapped into a reservoir of cruelty that probably surprised even him.
He singled me out for every humiliation. I was the practice dummy during hand-to-hand combat for the entire squad. I ran extra miles. I did push-ups until I was facedown in the mud. I hit my bunk bruised and bleeding every night, long after lights-out, usually because I was finishing some punishment detail, and then woke before reveille to see Leary’s face as he shook me out of bed to start the cycle again.
Before long, everyone else in my unit picked up on this hostility, and they reflected it back. I didn’t blame them. Anyone who made even a small gesture of friendship in my direction found himself punished along with me.
I’d seen this sort of reaction before. There are people who respond to my talent instinctively and violently. It sets off some primitive warning system, deep down in their brain, that lets them know I’m invading their privacy just by existing. Leary wasn’t anything close to sensitive, but he’d spent time in combat, and he had a pretty well-honed sense of survival. It was like he smelled something on me. Maybe he had some kind of evolutionary defense against people like me, a built-in alarm that went off when it detected someone who could intrude into all his dark places.
Whatever the reason, he knew right away there was something different about me. And he hated it.
I tried my best to stay out of his head. I figured I could survive whatever he threw at me, then I would be out of his life after ten weeks. Getting inside his thoughts would only make things worse.
That was the plan, anyway.
Then, near the end of Blue Phase, the section right before graduation, Leary pulled me aside one night after dinner. He took me into a nearby restroom, which is what he called his conference area. This wasn’t unusual. He’d scream at me for a while and order me to clean toilets or pick up litter on the parade grounds in the dark. I could handle it. I thought the end was in sight.
This time, he was quiet. No screaming. With a grim, clipped satisfaction, he told me that my scores were inadequate for advancement. I wasn’t ready to move on to individual training. I’d have to repeat basic. With him.
My self-control crumbled. Rage shot right through me, along with disbelief and, I admit, a strong need to wail like a toddler. I wanted to know why he just kept picking on me. I let my guard down in that moment, and peered inside his head.
I saw it all clearly. He’d falsified my scores to keep me in basic. He’d do it again, and again, and again, if he had to, until I dropped dead on the parade ground. He wanted to grind me down into nothing. He wanted to break me, reduce me to a beaten animal. It had to be him, personally. And he didn’t even know why.
But I did. I blew past all of his thoughts about me, and saw the reason that he feared me, that he feared any kind of exposure.
I got only glimpses. I didn’t have the kind of control I do now. He was nineteen. A private in Vietnam. A smell of burning flesh, mingled with nuoc mam. A young woman, almost childlike, a black wing of hair over half her face, bright red blood covering the rest. Leary’s hands, shaking, spattered with the same bright red. A burst of sudden dark shame, mingled with an unhinged joy. For a brief moment, he and his friends had become animals—worse, they had become monsters.
The massacre was never officially recorded. His superiors buried the bodies, and Leary began to bury the memories. But they always lurked, in the back of his head with the real secret, the one he’d barely admit, even in his darkest moments: He felt no guilt. He liked it.
I saw that was why he had stayed in the army for life. Jesus might have required some kind of repentance to forgive him, but the army didn’t. It took his greatest sin—every horrific, vicious second of it—and embraced him for it, drawing him closer than ever. From that moment on, the army was his god.
I came back out of his head, reeling, and we locked eyes for a moment.
Until that point, I had never consciously projected into another person’s mind. I didn’t know how. There were probably times when my thoughts radiated out to anyone nearby, but it was a weak signal, like the sound of two calls overlapping on a cheap phone.
At that moment, however, I was linked with Leary. I peered right into his mind, and then I sent back all the fear and disgust and contempt at what I found there. For that split second, my thoughts washed into his, crashing into that small place he thought was his and his alone—and he knew. He knew that I’d seen.
Without another thought, he tried to kill me.
I’d been beaten before. As a kid. On the playground. By foster parents. That was amateur hour. This was the dedicated work of a professional.
He grabbed my ears and dented the steel mirror above the sink with my head. He punched something below my sternum and I stopped breathing. I lifted an arm to defend myself and he twisted it into a spiral, breaking it so fast I heard the snap before I felt the pain. In a moment, I was on the floor, feeling my ribs crack as he kicked me.
I cast out desperately with my mind, hoping to find someone on their way to help, or even someone on their way to take a leak. All I got from the small crowd outside the door was fear. Nobody wanted to interrupt. No one was even sure if they should. There might have been an urge, in one or two of the people listening to him beat me, to find someone of higher rank to break it up.
But by the time one of them managed to overcome his indecision, I’d be dead. Leary meant to murder me. I could feel his hatred, burning like the heat from an oven. And I felt something I’d only seen in his memory before: that same unhinged joy he felt in Vietnam, his pure unalloyed delight that he was about to kill something with his bare hands—again—and no one would be able to stop him.
I don’t know exactly what happened next. Only that I’ve never done anything remotely similar since.
The last thing I remember clearly is one of Leary’s big leather boots coming for my face, blotting out the light from the lamp. He was old-school, so he laughed at what he called our “tenny-runners,” the lightweight desert BDU footwear. He still wore steel-toed combat boots.
I fixed on that boot. If it hit me in the face, I was done. I knew it. My skull would crack, and my brain would bleed, and everything I was, or ever could be, would die right there.
It was nothing conscious. It was, I think now, the only attack I had left. My final defense.
I lashed out with everything I had inside, everything I’d ever contained, every wound I’d ever suffered in silence. The abandonment I’d felt before I could form words. The abuse at the hands of people meant to care for me. The paranoia and suspicion from the other kids forced into proximity with me. I gathered all those years of fear and rage and pain and hate from the place they burned in my mind, and unleashed them in one primal, silent scream.
The boot never connected. I heard Leary sink to the floor, like he was sitting down for a rest, but I couldn’t see him. One eye had already shut, and I couldn’t move my neck. I lay there, curled in a ball for what seemed like a long time. It was very quiet.
Someone finally opened the door to check on us. I heard a voice say, “Holy shit.”
I slid into unconsciousness.
WHEN I WOKE up in the infirmary, I was handcuffed to the railing on my bed. Not strictly necessary. My head felt like a cracked egg, with the yolk dangerously close to slopping out. One eye was still swollen shut, and I could barely move without pain lancing through every part of me.
There was someone waiting for me. A young guy, in anonymous BDUs, no name tape, no rank. He noticed I was up, and left the room without speaking to me.
I might have blacked out for a little while again. The next thing I knew, there was another man sitting next to me, older and heavier.
“You back among the living, son?” he asked.
I blinked and focused on him as best I could. He was wearing the same black BDUs as the other guy, and his hair was sloppy and slicked back. But there was no question he carried some kind of rank. It was like a soft cushion of authority all around him.
It wasn’t just hard for me to see. It was hard to read anything. The man was basically a blank to me. That was a little frightening.
It took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t just him. I couldn’t hear any of the usual mental babble from anyone.
I found out later I had a concussion from where Leary used my head to dent the mirror. The pain made it hard to think too. The medical staff had decided to ignore the doctors’ orders for painkillers. The pain and the head injury had shut my talent down. It was both amazing and terrifying. I suddenly knew what it must be like to wake up blind or deaf.
I wanted to lie back and enjoy the silence for a while, but the man in black kept staring at me, waiting for me to respond. I didn’t know what to say. Without my talent, I had to rely on the same clues as normal people. I looked him in the face. He had the kind of regular-guy good looks that instantly inspired trust. I could see him behind a desk in a bank in Iowa, telling some elderly couple not to worry about the mortgage payment. You could fool a lot of people with a face like that.
“Who are you?” I asked. Not exactly brilliant, but it seemed like a pretty safe question.
“You want to tag a ‘sir’ on the end of that question, Private?” he shot back. There was a gunslinger drawl tingeing his voice like the smell of BBQ and horse manure.
I used my one good eye to take a long scan over his no-name, no-rank uniform. “Why should I?”
The stern look on his face vanished as he broke into a grin. “Well. Good to see you didn’t have the shit completely beaten out of you.”
I rattled the cuff against the railing. “Am I under arrest?”
“Not at all, son.” He snapped his fingers and an MP, waiting in the hallway, came running to unlock my wrist.
“Think you’re up for taking a walk?” he asked.
It didn’t really sound like a request. And I was curious. Most of the time, I knew what was coming because I could see inside the minds of everyone who got close to me. For the first time in my life, I didn’t know where this conversation was going or where it would end. This was like being a visitor to an entirely new country. I figured I should see the sights while I could.
So I lifted myself cautiously, waiting for something to rupture or pop. There was pain everywhere, but I managed to swing my legs out of the bed and stand without falling over.
“That’s good. On your feet, soldier,” the older man said.
“Who are you?” I asked again.
“You can call me Cantrell,” he said, and offered his hand. I took it, and he hauled me the rest of the way up. “Come on. Want to show you something.”
The MP offered to accompany us, but Cantrell waved him away. I was no threat. I dragged myself along like an old man, leaning on my IV for support. Cantrell walked confidently down the halls, and I quickly got lost.
He talked the whole time. He began lecturing me, as if we were just picking up a lesson from an earlier conversation, right where we’d left off.
“You know, a lot of people think the military is where you send your subnormal sons and high school dropouts,” he said. “And sure, we got our share. Smart people don’t usually volunteer to dodge bullets on a regular basis. But the military is actually highly invested in intelligence. I mean both kinds: what you know and what you learn. Some of the greatest innovations in history have come from the military. Because any army that doesn’t think ahead is going to be nothing but a bunch of corpses in uniform before you know it. Which, unfortunately, is where we happen to be right now. See, we thought we won the only war that mattered. The commies folded up and left the table. Boy, let me tell you, we thought we had it all figured out. One world under America, with our only rival finally put down for the count. We were busy taking a victory lap. Then those Arabs”—he pronounced it Ay-rabs—“crawl out of the sand and fly a plane into the Pentagon. We didn’t expect our next big threat to be a medieval religion that promises a virgin to every dipshit willing to strap on a suicide vest. We never saw it coming.”
He paused to open a set of double doors to the intensive care unit.
“You have no idea the shit that hit the fan on September twelfth. For years, we thought we understood hijacking and terrorism. We thought there were rules, even though we called it unconventional warfare. Point is, war changes all the time, and we have to change with it.”
He stopped outside a room with a glass wall. Inside was a bed and a bunch of machinery dedicated to keeping a dead man alive. Monitors for heart rate and breathing and oxygen, all beeping and pinging softly, all hooked up to the still figure under the bedsheets.
Leary. His eyes were open, staring at nothing. Tubes ran into his mouth and nose. There wasn’t a mark on him, but he still looked like a body ready for viewing at a funeral.
Cantrell paused his speech to let me get a good, long look.
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“Now that is an excellent question,” Cantrell said. “The short answer is, nobody can tell. The doctors say there’s no trauma or injury. He doesn’t have any wounds. You didn’t land a single punch, son—which is nothing to be ashamed of, you were totally out of your league here. I read this guy’s service record. He’s been winning Advanced Combatives competitions for longer than you’ve been alive, against guys with a lot more training than you. But you’re up and walking around, and he’s the one sucking his meals through a straw.”
I kept staring. For a moment, there was only the sound of the machines.
“See that little screen over there, to the left?” Cantrell stood very close and pointed. My eyes followed his finger. I saw. It was another monitor, a green screen with a steady line scrolling past. “That’s his EEG. Measures brain activity.”
“I know what an EEG is.”
“Good for you. See how flat it is? All those other screens have squiggly lines, going up and down. But that one ain’t moving. Doctors say his brain activity has ceased, except for the basic functions—breathing, pissing, and shitting. Other than that, nothing. He can’t even remember how to swallow. He’s a vegetable. They don’t know if he’s ever going to recover. They don’t know what caused it.”
Cantrell paused to let that sink in. He remained right next to me, speaking practically into my ear.
“But I think you and I both have a pretty good guess,” he said.
I was too shocked by what I saw to wonder how Cantrell knew what I’d done. I looked at Leary’s dead eyes and knew he was gone. That somehow I’d extinguished everything in him, every thought, every idea, every memory. Like bricking an iPhone. Erasing a hard drive.
Only this was a human being, and I’d simply wiped his mind clean.
“I didn’t mean to do it.”
“Oh hell, I know that,” Cantrell said. “You think I’m angry at you? You think anyone blames you for this? I could give a damn if he spends the rest of his life shitting into a diaper.”
I was tired and in pain. I couldn’t read Cantrell’s actual intentions. I was stumbling around in a dark room, hitting my shins on chairs and tables. It was unsettling and irritating. So I just asked him straight-out. “Then what do you want?”
Cantrell grinned like this whole world was a joke and only he knew the punch line. “I want to know if you can do it again.”
HE TOOK ME to the hospital’s cafeteria. It was empty. One guy in scrubs came inside while we got coffee. He saw Cantrell’s black uniform and immediately turned around and left. Didn’t even break stride, just spun completely on one heel and back out the door before it closed.
We sat down at a table. “Something not a lot of people know about 9/11,” Cantrell said, picking up where he’d left off. “We knew who the hijackers were.”
That was still news at the time. “You’re kidding me.”
Cantrell shrugged. “Classified right now, but you’ll start hearing it in the press soon. We knew their names. Where they were. We had the plane tickets. We had reports of these guys at al-Qaeda training camps. Hell, we even had reports from the flight schools that they attended. They didn’t want to learn any of the parts about landing.”
“Why didn’t anyone stop them?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Intelligence is the kind of stuff that only looks obvious in hindsight. Our last war was H-bombs and stealth bombers and spy satellites, and then these camel jockeys come along with box cutters and turn three planes into guided missiles. We never saw it coming, because we don’t think like they do. We can’t, because we live in the twenty-first century, and they’re still stoning people to death. We can look right at what they’re doing and not see the patterns. We had the data. We had reams of it. But nobody saw the future the way these boys did, because nobody could get inside their heads.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
He scowled at me. “I’m going to write that off to the concussion. Your whole life, you’ve known what people are thinking. You’ve been able to figure out what they’re going to do before they do it. You’ve always known when someone is lying to you. You’ve always known if someone was going to try to hurt you. And you’ve always known just where somebody else will hurt the most too.”
“How do you know all this about me?”
“Like I said. Facts are easy, once we find you. Besides. You’re not the first one I’ve seen.”
“First what?”
“A reader. Someone who can flip through other people’s thoughts like a book. This is why we need you. We can listen in on every phone call made in the United States. We can track money from the Swiss bank accounts of every terrorist organization in the world. Our satellites can look at the exact spot where Osama was hiding two weeks ago. Hell, I can tell you what Saddam Hussein had for breakfast. And it still don’t mean shit. Because all that data is nothing without context. Without human emotion or motives or thought, all you have is facts. We don’t need to know what people are doing anymore. We have machines for that. We need to know what they’re thinking. That’s where you come in.”
That was the first time I’d heard a name for what I was. Or that there might be more people like me outside of comics and movies. Still. It was a lot to take in. I was nothing but tired. My head throbbed.
“I’m not sure I can do what you want,” I said.
“Oh, I think you can do more than you know. Sergeant Leary up there is the proof.”
I thought about Leary’s dead stare and immediately shoved it away.
“Let me ask you something,” Cantrell said. “You ever tried making someone do something? Just by thinking about it?”
I probably just looked stupidly at him. Up to that point, I’d only read other people. Or at least, that’s what I thought at the time.
“Give it a try. See what happens.”
“You think I can control people’s minds? That’s insane.”
“I admit, it sounds that way. But if anyone could do that, we wouldn’t have wars anymore. So you can understand why I’d be interested.”
“Aren’t you afraid that would put you out of business?”
He smiled. “Everything I do is to keep people from dying. Everything. If there was a way to stop wars altogether, then I’d happily find another line of work. You join up with us, and you’ll see that for yourself. That’s what I’m offering. We’ll train you. Put your talent to use. Save some lives and keep another 9/11 from ever happening.”
I have to give Cantrell credit. He was a hell of a salesman. He was offering a chance to work for the good guys. To finally understand a little bit more about the weird echoes I’d always had in my head. To be valuable. To be needed.
And there was the stick too, just in case I wasn’t smart enough to see it on my own.
“What happens if I say no?”
Cantrell yawned and stretched, as if that was the least interesting question he’d ever heard. “You can always go back and finish your time in the regular army,” he said. “’Course, I’m not sure how much of a future there is for a guy who crippled his drill sergeant.”
I hesitated. Cantrell knew when to back off. “You still got some healing to do,” he said, pushing his chair from the table. “Sleep on it. I’ll be back in the morning.”
I WANTED TO sleep that night. I wanted to rest. But once I was awake, the pain wouldn’t let me.
I hit the buzzer for the nurse once, then waited. Nothing. Hit it again. Still nothing. After a while, I just kept my thumb down on the button.
The nurse came in, looking pissed. “What is it?” she said. “We’re busy with other patients.”
“Hey,” I said. “I could use something for the pain.”
She gave me a cold look. “Sorry,” she said. “You already had your shot.”
<Boo-hoo, you bastard> she thought. <feeling some pain> <tough shit> <exactly what you deserve>
That’s when I realized my talent was functional again. I could read her. And I saw clearly what was going on.
The medical staff didn’t know why I was there. They’d seen the handcuffs and the MP, and they’d seen Leary brought in at the same time. Nobody could figure out what had happened to him. Rumors started, and I became the villain in all of them. I’d been beaten bloody, but I could still talk and walk and wipe myself. Leary was simply gone, AWOL from his own body, and that was deeply frightening to all of them.
Just like Cantrell said, they decided I’d permanently damaged a superior officer, and they took it out on me in the only way they could. They wouldn’t compromise my actual medical care, since they took pride in their work. But they were happy to skip any extras that might make me comfortable. That included withholding my pain meds.
I wondered if Cantrell was right. If I might be able to change that.
The nurse turned to leave the room. “Hey,” I said sharply. “Give me my painkillers,” I told her.
And as Cantrell had suggested, I pushed. For the first time, I tried transmitting instead of just receiving. It felt like moving through syrup rather than air. But I felt something. I got something back, instead of an echo.
She wavered. There was a little resistance, a nagging thought somewhere in her head that told her this might be a bad idea. Even though I was pushing as hard as I could, she still had to make the final decision.
What the hell, I figured. Might as well be polite. “Please,” I added.
That did it.
She turned and opened a drawer, moving automatically, just like she did for every other patient. She took a syringe and injected a clear liquid into my IV.
Then she went through the ordinary steps of disposing of the syringe and marking the shot and the time on my chart. The warmth of the military-grade morphine was already making the pain a distant memory.
It wasn’t a huge victory. I’d really only convinced her to be a nurse, to do her job.
Still, that was how I learned I could push people. Not into doing something they didn’t want to do, but into doing the things they would ordinarily do. I could nudge them into following their regular habits, the tasks they’d done so often they were almost unconscious. To break someone out of that kind of habit, to actively fight them, that woke up all kinds of defenses, convinced them to dig in and get stubborn.
But there are a lot of things people will do without thinking.