Intelligence Report

By Audrey Herrin

This is how you get inside someone else’s head:  

First, you have to find someone like me. Someone with telepathic sensitivity. 

You put your telepath and your subject (the mind you want her to crack open for you) in a room together.  

Then your telepath has to figure out some way to know exactly what’s going on in your subject’s mind for just one instant. Playing music, the same song over and over, is a good way to do this. Once she knows the shape and sound of the thoughts traveling through his brain, his thoughts become hers too. 

Every morning when I arrive at the compound, Jasper shows me the new subjects. I peer through the two-way mirrors into the interrogation cells. Each one contains a haggard prisoner who sits with his wrists cuffed to the table. I look at them, and decide which song to use. 

Now it’s past midnight and I’m working on my final subject of the day. At this point, he’s listened to “American Idiot” on repeat for 15 hours. He watches me strut into his cell and sit in the chair across from him.

One more time. 

“I’m tired,” I tell him. “Are you tired?”

He stares at me in my tailored suit with my Gucci belt, my manicured nails tapping on the surface of the table. He says nothing.

“Waiting for people to cooperate is exhausting,” I continue. “I’d give you one more chance to tell me the truth, but…that would probably be a waste of time.”

His mouth opens and closes again, bewilderment in his eyes. 

He responds: “Who the hell are you?” 

I lift a finger in the air, a gesture meant for Jasper. He’s lurking in the corner, wearing a giant set of noise-cancelling headphones. He smirks as he presses a button on his iPad. Immediately, the guitars crash over our heads from the loudspeakers and our subject moans. His hands jerk towards his ears, but the chains are too short. He pounds the table with his fist. 

“Goddamnit, not this fucking song again!”

That same riff plays over and over and I watch our subject’s face. I see the moment he surrenders, and allows the music to infiltrate the waves of his mind, drowning out all other thoughts. 

I show Jasper my palm, and he pauses the music in the middle of the verse. The room is flung into abrupt silence. Our ears ring. 

There we go, I’ve got him now. 

Hours and hours spent listening to the same song has ingrained it into our subject’s brain. Simultaneously, the two of us complete the lyrics in our heads. We both think the same words and the key fits into the keyhole. The lock clicks. Before he can even get to the chorus, I’ve cracked his mind wide open. 

It isn’t a nice thing, being inside someone else’s mind. You’re assaulted with his horror, confusion, repulsion. You have access to all his dark, dirty secrets that no one has any right to know about but himself.

I know he thought about being held by his mom last night when he couldn’t fall asleep and shed a few tears on the sandpapery pillowcase. When he woke up alone on the hard cot this morning, he missed his ex-wife. I also know about him jerking-off on the toilet earlier today, while Jasper waited outside the door. 

I know everything. But I toss these useless things aside like the guts of a fish I’m filleting. From far away, I am aware of Jasper pulling off the headphones. 

“Man, that never gets any less creepy,” he mutters. 

Our subject still sits upright in the chair, but he’s gone vacant like a puppet hanging in a closet. Anything I want becomes what he wants. If I had to, I could weave my mind inside of his like a surgeon’s needle. So subtle and elegant he would never notice. But it’s been a long day and the more tired I become, the less patience I have.  

I shuffle things around in there. I rearrange thought patterns, discover and abandon memory trails. Occasionally, “American Idiot” lyrics and guitar riffs float by with a bewildered tone, searching for something to connect with. It only takes about 20 seconds for me to find what I’m looking for, but by the time I do, our subject is altered.

I withdraw from the heady depths of his mind and leave behind an abused husk. I open my eyes, blink away the vertigo. Our subject has tears streaking his face, his upper lip shines with snot, and he trembles so hard the chair shakes.

His mouth opens and a little squeak escapes. “Wh-” he swallows and tries again. “What did you do to me - ?” His voice collapses.

I look at Jasper, who waits for my word. 

“Guilty,” I tell him. “Same as the others.”

As I watch Jasper approach the subject and uncuff him, I think about The Milgram Experiment which was designed to expose the extent of human cruelty. When you tell someone that a man is bad and order them to punish him, ninety-nine percent of those people will happily torture the man within an inch of his life. Or even further. So this is my excuse. I’m only as good as the ninety-nine percent.

I meet up with Jasper in the starch-white hallway, under the fluorescent lighting. He’s on his way back from depositing our subject in his cell. He smirks at the blackout sunglasses I’m wearing and I take the arm that he offers me. The chorus of “American Idiot” loops in my head. I grit my teeth.

“Want some aspirin?” He asks.

I check the time on my phone. It’s almost 1 am and we have work tomorrow. 

“I want to drink,” I tell him. “Are you coming?”

We reach the elevator, and he presses the button. We don’t have to wait long. There’s hardly anyone else in the compound.

“Sure,” he says, “It’s Thursday, The Mirage should be good.”

Outside, the cement is shiny from winter rain and light glitters on the sleek surface of the black Chevy that’s waiting for us. Jameson, looking snappy in his emerald suit and leather gloves, gets out and opens the rear door so we can slide inside.

“The Mirage, please, Jameson.”

As we pull away, I tilt my head back against the seat and close my eyes. I watch the pattern of city lights playing on the back of my eyelids as we pass them, feeling the gentle turns and stops, the rhythm of navigating the city grid.

The car pulls to a halt. 

“We’re here, Miss Deja,” Jameson says. “Would you like me to wait for you?”

“No that’s alright,” I say, “you should go home and get some sleep.”

He gets out and opens the door for me, leaving Jasper to fend for himself.

Jasper and I link arms as Jameson drives away. We can hear the music pulsing from inside. 

You have to know people to get inside The Mirage this time of night, and they know us here.  The interior of The Mirage is lit up all red with white leather booths and a reflective ceiling. Jasper and I check our jackets, then we order drinks and snag a booth. We drink, then we dance. We drink some more. Then dance, and my headache dissipates. 

While Jasper and I dance with some girl in a slinky dress, I catch the eye of a man with a mane of black curls and a snazzy blue blazer. A little quirk of a smile on my part gives him all the permission he needs to come on over and put his hands on my waist. This man smells like expensive cologne. 

I let him buy me a drink. They play Britney Spears while we loiter by the bar, his hand on my lower back. We used this song a couple of weeks ago on a Russian spy. It’s the end of the second verse with the dance breakdown, the synthesizers vibrate under our feet.

I ask this guy if he wants to take me back to his place.  

He ducks his head down so he can hear me over the music. 

“What?” He shouts. 

The song reaches its bridge, but the DJ cuts it off before it can get to the earworm of a chorus, it gets stripped down to its baseline. Simultaneously, the two of us complete the lyrics in our heads. We both think the same words. Then the beat shifts, slows down, bleeds into the next song. 

I wrap my arms around his neck, press my lips to his ear and say, “let’s go back to your place.” 

He nods and says something like “okay.” 

When Jasper sees me leave with the guy’s arm around my waist, he disentangles himself from the guy he was dancing with. He abandons the dance floor to catch up with us.

“Really, you were just gonna leave me?” He shouts over the music. “Where am I supposed to go? I don’t have time to go home!”

I look sideways at my man. Then I lean in and tell him I want my friend to come with us. We both pause, and he looks at Jasper. 

“Alright,” he says. 

So, I reach out and hook my fingers in Jasper’s belt loop. I pull him in close. After his initial confusion, he huffs and rolls his eyes at me, but surrenders. He wraps an arm around my waist. I’m grinning like a cat with a mouse between its paws, and the three of us leave together. 

That’s how I end up waking between a stranger’s satin sheets after about 2 hours of sleep to the beeping of the alarm on Jasper’s watch. I sit up, wince, and press my fingers to my forehead, blinking blearily at the panoramic view of early-morning downtown New York. Jasper’s buried under the covers next to me and I grab a handful of his wild hair. I yank on it until he groans and turns his alarm off. 

He manages to clamber out from between the sheets and escapes down the middle of the bed between me and the other guy. He finds his cargo pants on the floor and begins to pull them on. I venture an arm from under the covers and fish for my underclothes on the floor. 

When Jasper is mostly dressed, he hisses “I’ll call Jameson.”

“Tell him to pick up coffee,” I whisper back.

The man on the other side of the bed groans. He stirs under the covers. Jasper and I both freeze. I’m in the middle of adjusting my bra, and Jasper’s about halfway done buttoning his shirt. The bronze-skinned young man sits up, clutches his head, and stares at us. He’s beautiful in the daylight and a lot younger than I thought he was, no older than mid-twenties, and there’s absolute horror in his wide, brown eyes.

“Who the fuck are you people?” He asks, his voice high and tremulous. 

Jasper and I exchange glances. 

“Uhh…” Jasper says.

“Your one-night stands,” I say.

He stares for a long time with a lost expression that I find so disturbingly familiar. His fingers shake as he touches them to his forehead, his brows furrow. 

“I don’t remember…what happened,” he mutters.

The only thing to do in this kind of situation is act confident and casual until you convince everyone that things are under control. This buys you time to make a quick escape. 

Jasper and I end up shivering on the sidewalk. We stand around in silence until Jameson picks us up. Once we’re safely in the back of his Chevy, Jameson hands each of us a hot Starbucks latte and two Advil without comment.

“Man, that poor guy must’ve been drinking hard,” Jasper says as Jameson drives us out of there. 

His voice sounds doubtful even as he says it. I’m going over the events of last night in my head, I remember the moment when one song ended, and another began. I rest the to-go cup between my thighs instead of drinking it and swallow down my nausea.