I was enjoying my mid-morning break in the Processing Lounge. That's where Michael found me, just as I finished off my yogurt. Normally, he spent little time in the lounge. The contestants, he told me, gave him the creeps.

He walked up carrying his cup of coffee and wearing that expression which he thought conveyed guileless congeniality. I hadn’t yet developed my “reading” skills to see through this facade, but of course I did not need them. Micheal was not as clever as he thought himself to be.

Ever since I arrived at work morning, I knew he’d want to grill me about the weekend. I had hoped to forestall it longer.

“I wondered where you were hiding,” he said, sitting down beside me.

He pivoted around and swung his arm across the back of the sofa. I didn’t care for his phony intimacy.

“So, camping,” he began, attempting the tone of small talk. “Really? Marshmallows on sticks over a roaring fire? Did you guys sing songs?”

“There’s really not much to tell. Sy has a cabin built on the hillside with a wooden deck. A bit of a reach to call it camping, though. Saligia did crossword puzzles in a hammock. Sy made lemonade and sandwiches."

“Oh, it’s Sy now, is it?”

“I suppose so. Anyway, if you’re hoping for something juicy, I can’t help. We read. We talked. There was some wine. The basics. What people do.”

That was all true. Just three folks spending leisure time together. I had wanted an opportunity to ask about the portals. Learn more about these "very special people," as Dr. Hetzel called them. But Sy quickly put a stop to that with his no-shop-talk policy.

I had a nice time, though.

I did my best to give Michael some details to placate him. Such as how we assembled a fruit salad. Our leisurely hike out to a charming waterfall. And the evening we played a word game Sy invented called Sounds Naughty But It’s Not.

“Well,” Michael said with a smile, though I could tell it was forced. “Clearly you have been drawn into the inner clique. But I’m going to trust that you’ll keep me in the loop.”

But poor Michael was far out of the loop. And it was tearing him up. He did his best to hide it as he stood, mentioned something about a meeting with the marketing team, and headed off.

It never occurred to me to tell Michael about the Great Expanse. He was like so many people I know, completely incurious about matters of the extraordinary. Particularly when it didn’t concern him. The existence of a huge disk of glass, flat as a still pond and the size of a city, whose surface defied the laws of physics—at least as I was taught, and I would assume, Michael as well—should at the very least be worthy of a conversation over yogurt and coffee. But I was certain if I described the journey across that expanse in Sy’s Jeep, Michael would become bored, glance at his watch, even, and quite probably make up some excuse to get up and leave. As if he found something distasteful about such matters.

I guess I, too, eventually became a bit bored with the Great Expanse.

However, things picked up once we got to that big tent. I found the experience enjoyable, but it was hardly like running away to join the circus, as Sy had suggested.

True, there had been sawdust on the floor. And amid the array of strong and unpleasant odors, I would not have been surprised to see an elephant or two, but I saw no exotic animals. Not a single trapeze hung above, nor were any clowns in whiteface and oversized shoes wandering about. And you know, I certainly wouldn’t have said no to a hot dog or a bag of popcorn. Sadly, it was just row after row of folding chairs facing a low wooden stage—though the thousands of lit candles gave the whole place an almost magical feel.

I didn’t know if Sy kept to some sort of schedule. Did they expect him every Saturday, midmorning? Or had they simply seen our slow approach across the glass surface of the Expanse? Whatever the case, the tent had been made ready—prepared for our arrival.

Saligia and I followed Sy to the stage. He positioned himself behind a podium festooned with jasmine, sunflowers, and flowering branches of huisache. Two chairs had been placed on the stage, one on each side of the podium. Saligia sighed and sat in one of them. She looked over at me, so I sat in the other.

We watched as the people silently filed into the tent, seating themselves in the rows of chairs. They all smiled, looking up at the three of us with expressions of intense benevolence. It was very unsettling. I had a moment of abject terror, wondering what might happen to us if Sy broke character, and failed to give these people whatever it was they thought they needed from him.

My money was on burnt-at-the-stake.

But Sy, that impulsive rogue, seemed to feed off of audiences. He might poke and tease and dig at those around him with the occasional subtle taunting, but when adoring eyes were on him, and a rapt audience awaited, he remained on topic and in character. And, well, that man could deliver.

It was quite the show.

He began with a deep-throated benediction, tossing in some Latin. Though for all I knew, it could have been Portuguese or made-up gibberish. He followed with a short sermon about a country road that split in a fork. There were no signs to indicate which road went where. Most of the cars took the road to right, following those in front of them as though they knew where they were going. A few would occasionally take the road to the left. The adventurous minority. But what of that one car abandoned on the roadside? The driver’s door was left agape, and far out on the boulder-strewn plain a distant figure could be seen making his or her own way. “The third way,” Sy said meaningfully.

Had he prepared it? Or was he improvising? And did it matter? It didn’t seem too heavy with meaning to me, but the way Sy delivered it (one moment grand, the next, grave), and the manner in which the people in those folding chairs received it, I felt I must have missed something.

Even overly abstract and meaningless to my ears, that silly sermonette had my scalp tingling.

Next, he performed a short wedding ceremony for a young couple. Then he blessed a couple of babies. And when, at the very end, people lined up for the laying on of hands, so that Sy might heal their ailments, Saligia grabbed my arm and dragged me outside where we waited in the Jeep.

She grumbled that Sy should either fund a clinic for these people or just let them be. For someone so comfortable in the role of mindreader, Saligia Jones had little patience for faith-healing.

When Sy eventually emerged, clutching his hands to his breast as one caught up in an unctuous rapture, Saligia impatiently beeped the horn to pull him back to reality. As we drove off, I still wasn’t sure what those people thought about Sy. Was he prophet or preacher? Maybe this was just the logical response people had when meeting a TV celebrity in post-Changes rural America.

The smiles we received when we arrived and the sad yet grateful tears that accompanied our departure still lingered disturbingly in my mind on Monday morning.

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

Now all of that Michael would certainly have found worthy of his attention. How Sy gleefully allowed those people to fawn all over him. How Saligia found the entire experience distasteful. People like Michael are constantly collecting those sorts of things that gave them insight into others. They will pounce on any of the personal stuff usually tucked behind their coworkers’ public facades—insights and behaviors that they might one day use to their own advantage.

All that information about both Sy and Saligia would have brightened Michael's Monday.

Not that he would ever hear any of it from me.

However, per my agreement with Fran, I should have reported all of that stuff to him. I guess Michael wasn’t the only one I was avoiding. I should have at least told Fran I’d not be able to make yesterday’s weekly debriefing meeting because I’d be out of town. But I didn’t. And now, it just felt too weird. I mean, he would love to hear all about the Great Expanse, the crowd in the tent, the weekend at the cabin. But, they were my friends now. Sy and Saligia. They trusted me.

I knew that I had to suck it up and explain to Fran why I couldn’t keep feeding him insider information. Certainly not in the way I had been doing before.

###

The daily training sessions with Dr. Hetzel and Saligia continued. I was glad. The whole Reading thing remained elusive, beyond my reach. Well, when Saligia wasn’t there to help me. And, really, it seemed that she was doing most if not all of the work.

Of course, no one had said I would be able to go about my day—far removed from Saligia—and jump from mind to mind of people around me. But, I hadn’t been told otherwise. It certainly had an appeal. Mostly the training was to satisfy Dr. Hetzel that I wouldn’t become overwhelmed by the extreme emotions that had damaged Bianca.

This afternoon when I walked into the darkened room behind the mirror, I saw Sy sitting with Dr. Hetzel. I paused, thinking I might have arrived too early, but Dr. Hetzel waved me in. The two of them were talking intently. Sy wore a white lab coat and a pair of red flocked velvet capri pants.

Saligia was in her chair off to the side, working on her knitting. As usual, she was dressed in black and, in the low light, almost vanished against the dark wall.

I went ahead and sat down in the special chair reserved for Reader training.

“Don’t worry, Rose,” Saligia said without looking up. “They’re not talking about you.” Sy and Dr. Hetzel were looking at something over my shoulder. “They are talking about him,” she added.

I turned to look into the bright classroom on the other side of the glass.

It was August. He sat in there, on the special chair, all alone.

“Poor guy,” I said. “I was just talking with him. He just wants answers, but no one will give him any." I knew exactly how he felt.

"Don't be so free with you pity, Rose," Saligia told me.

“Oh, but Sal,” Sy said, “it’s all part of Rose’s charm.” He smiled at me. "Lydia here worries about that fellow, August. That why she asked me down. I’ve come here for, what was it, Lydia?” He turned to Dr. Hetzel. “Consultation? Something like that?” Sy looked back at me. “And I was deep in a personal project when I was summoned.”

"Perfecting his egg salad," Saligia said in a way that made me think she didn't much care for the dish.

“Sugar is the key,” Sy said, raising a finger to his temple. “But too much and it fights with the dill weed.”

“This guest of ours, August,” said Dr. Hetzel ignoring Sy’s aside, “he’s an anomaly.” The doctor looked over at me. “And the one thing we don’t need in our REINCORs is something out of the ordinary.”

“You want your extraordinary guests to be ordinarily extraordinary?” I asked.

“That needs to be your new tongue twister, Sal,” Sy said over his shoulder.

“Consistency is key,” Dr. Hetzel told me. “We have these people come to us in a wide range of mental function. Some are like sleepwalkers. Others, just as lucid as anyone you might meet in the street. But they all are generally well-adjusted.” She leaned forward looking at me. “What I mean is that each of them has found a manner to incorporate his or her sense of self into the experiences each encounters from the moment of appearing in the arrival pods to that eventual time when one of our two departure doors is closed shut.”

“Except for August,” Sy said.

“And Connie,” Saligia added, mentioning the woman who “jumped.”

“Yes,” Dr. Hetzel said, lifting her head to look through the window at August. “Those very rare exceptions.”

Was she suggesting that we do some sort of therapeutic work on August? I did not feel in any way competent to do that sort of thing.

“His befuddled metacognitive state is the issue,” Dr. Hetzel said. “It threatens to push him into a state of existential distress.”

“But he wants his memory back,” I said. “That’s all.”

“Oh, he has plenty of memory,” Saligia muttered.

“Memory is a complicated thing,” Dr. Lydia said.

“Is it?” Sy didn’t sound convinced. He walked over to the window to get a better look at August.

“Clearly he is—well, was—a very well-read and educated man,” Dr. Hetzel said. “With what appears to be a photographic memory. But, other than his name, he’s made almost no progress at all recovering those personal memories. His own life events. His biography.”

“Amnesia!” Sy turned to Dr. Hetzel. “Like in the movies? I’m starting to like our mystery man.”

“Amnesia doesn’t work that way,” Dr. Hetzel said. Then her voice fell to a whisper. “No, there’s something not right about this one.”

We all looked at August sitting motionless in the other room. Saligia finally broke the silence.

“It’s because he’s hiding.”

“That sneaky rat,” Sy said with a sly smile.

“His thoughts, Sy. He’s hiding his thoughts.”

“Can he do that?” I asked Saligia. “Hide his thoughts from you?”

“He can if he’s hiding them from himself,” she said, returning to her knitting.

I didn’t believe her. Suddenly I felt a tension in the room and I wondered if I shouldn’t excuse myself.

Sy began to laugh. He crossed back over to the sofa and dropped down beside Dr. Hetzel.

“Now I know why you called me down, Lydia. You want to crack August like a boiled egg. Get at those hidden secrets. But Sal—the noggin expert—is resistant. So you want me to sweet talk her, right?”

“We need your help, Saligia,” the doctor said, turning away from Sy to look at Saligia. “August needs your help.”

Saligia stopped knitting. But she didn’t look up.

“Delving?” Saligia finally said, her voice a whisper. “Plumbing? Try to crack through what he can’t recall or, more likely, what he’s hiding?”

Dr. Hetzel nodded. “I know that that immersive level of contact isn’t always pleasant for you,” she said. “But you wouldn’t be alone.”

I knew the doctor was talking about me. I had no objections—of course, I had no real idea of what all this might entail—but Saligia looked so uncomfortable with the idea.

“But why?” I decided to ask Dr. Hetzel. “What would it serve?”

“Well, this could have some impact on you, Rose. You should know that I have as much responsibility for the mental well-being of the trained Readers as I have to our guests. And we’ve seen what can happen when a Reader gets too deep into the mind of someone who is deeply troubled, like Bianca did with that unfortunate contestant.”

“Connie,” Saligia said. “Her name was Connie.”

“We’re all still rattled,” Dr. Hetzel continued. “That incident has eroded all our collective confidence. You feel it too, Saligia. I know. Doubt. Doubt is the worst in this work we do.”

Sy was doing something I found interesting. In a fluid and silent fashion he had gotten to his feet and positioned himself at a point in the room where he could see Dr. Hetzel, Saligia, and myself without having to move his head. We were all like players in some staged scene being presented for his personal entertainment. I wondered if he were even aware of what he was doing.

I watched as Sy fine-turned his voyeurism by shifting about five feet to the left to that he could “frame” August into his view as well.

That was when I realized that August made me nervous. Why was that? What had changed? Was it some unconscious bit of behavior where I was aligning myself with my new friend, Saligia? Or was there some psychic leakage from August’s unsavory mind that my super-sensitive brain was picking up on? With Saligia’s help, no doubt. Whatever the case, I was less favorably disposed to that man than I had been when I entered this room.

And though I felt compassion for all the contestants—even those who might have some unsavory bits floating about in their heads—I wondered why they didn’t do the obvious.

“Why don’t you choose him tonight?” I asked. “Get him out of our hair.”

There followed an awkward silence that made me think I had overstepped my station. Asking them to break the rules of the game. The random nature of the choosing of the contestants.

The silence lasted a little too long. And then, I knew. I knew that there was nothing random about the show at all.

“We don’t play God on this show,” Saligia said softly.

But obviously no one in the room believed that to be true.

“Saligia?” the doctor asked again. “Can we do this?”

“Maybe tomorrow,” she said, looking at her hands as she stroked her knitting needles. “Maybe next week. That man,” she said in a whisper, “he scares me.”

“Okay,” the doctor said, taking a breath. “So I guess we need another subject to work with today for Rose’s session. How about that woman who arrived the same day as August.” Lydia leaned forward and selected a piece of paper from the pile on the table. “Stacy.”

“I’d like that,” Saligia said. “Thank you, Lydia.”

“I’d go get Ed to bring in Stacy,” Dr. Hetzel said.

“Oh, I’ll go tell him,” Sy said, standing up. “Besides, I need to get back to my egg salad.” Sy removed the lab coat, exposing a teal cardigan partially hidden by a candy cane striped apron. “Salmonella hides everywhere.”

Dr. Hetzel nodded.

“And now, Rose,” she said to me, “let’s get back to your exercises.”