Part 2

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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.”

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