Part 4

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Exhibit 6, excerpts from 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:

The convent at [redacted] was completely different than back home. There was no women’s shelter, for one thing. And no garden. It was in the middle of [redacted], which was an actual city and there was a lot of noise and traffic as soon as you went outside. The sisters there ran a homeless shelter, but not at the convent. It was in another building five blocks away. It was called the “Check Inn” and that was the theme of the place. All their clients were encouraged to check in a lot, so the sisters knew how they were doing. There was a doctor who came there once a week, and they had AA meetings there and other groups used it, too. The sisters there didn’t wear robes, either. They wore normal street clothes, and had their hair in regular styles. You couldn’t tell they were nuns by just looking at them, but they still used Sister in their names, at least to the clients.

They were nice to us. Mother Superior Agnes (who said we should call her Aggie!) took Sister Olivia into her office, telling me to wait on a bench. They talked for a long time and then came out. Aggie stared at me for a few seconds and then spoke to me for the first time.

“Sister Olivia is in charge of you. You will do everything she tells you to do, and refrain from doing anything she doesn’t want you to do. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Mother Superior,” I said.

“Aggie is fine. Now, ordinarily I would never think of doing this, but these circumstances require a measure of ... tolerance. I’m going to put the two of you in one of our temporary housing units. We use them for transitioning people from the street into their own apartment.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You’re a young man. Sister Olivia tells me you’re quite normal in most ways, and I wouldn’t usually put a man and woman in the same living space.”

I blinked.

“Because of the sex thing?” I guessed. “Because they might be tempted to fornicate?”

I didn’t know mother superiors could blush, but Aggie did.

“Yes,” she said, darting a look at Sister Olivia. My eyes followed and I saw Sister Olivia was smiling a little. When she saw me looking, though, she made her face stop smiling again. Her colors were still smiling, though.

“It will be okay,” I said. “Sister Olivia is trying hard not to think about fornication. I’ve never done it, except maybe a little with my hand, except I know that’s not called fornication. It’s masturbation.” I was pleased to be able to show off my new knowledge gained in my new class.

Aggie blushed again and then spoke before I could go on.

“Yes, definitely. You two will stay in a transition room. And Sister Olivia will supervise you and continue working with you on your ... gift ... as well as many other things.” She looked at Sister Olivia. “Tact needs to be his next lesson, please?”

“I told you his education has been neglected,” said Sister Olivia.

“You did,” said Aggie. “Sister Janice will take you to your new room. Good luck.”

I didn’t know what Aggie meant by wishing us good luck, until we followed Sister Janice to this building that looked really ratty on the outside. It was nicer on the inside. There was a man sitting on a chair right inside the front door, smoking a cigarette. He looked up at Sister Janice, who said, “Hi, Ed. This is Tiffany and Bob. They’ll be staying with us for a while.”

Ed raised the hand holding the cigarette and saluted us, like a soldier might. He didn’t say anything. I found out later Ed was the guard, to keep people who weren’t supposed to be there from just wandering into the building. Like drug dealers and prostitutes.

I had not known drug dealers (or drugs, for that matter) even existed, and the idea of women getting paid to fornicate just blew my mind. I learned a lot over the next week, as I found out what life outside the walls of a convent is like. At least life in a city like [redacted].

I had to learn to call Sister Olivia Tiffany, and not ever call her Sister. That was because the police might be looking for a nun and a boy. We couldn’t do anything about me being a boy, but we could disguise her nun-hood. There were six apartments in the building. All of them except ours had men in them. I saw new colors in their minds and had to learn what those meant, too. I found out some of those colors meant substance abuse. Alcohol was one color, and crack cocaine was another that was similar, but definitely a different shade. Heroin was a muddy version of what oxy addiction looked like. The first thing I learned there was that I couldn’t change the colors of addiction to something else. If they were angry addicts, I could make them calm addicts, but I couldn’t cure them of the addiction.

I was very busy for the first two weeks, just doing what I called ‘defense’. I wasn’t supposed to use my powers on anybody, but it was just instinct. There were a lot of angry people around there, and I got good enough at interpreting colors to know when an angry person was also confident, because he (or she) had a weapon. I couldn’t tell the difference between a gun and a knife, but I got pretty good at knowing who was carrying something. The calm ones were harder, but I found that most people who carried weapons didn’t stay calm very long. The other thing was that I couldn’t tell why someone was angry. I couldn’t read their minds.

I saw a lot of fear around where we lived, too. Sometimes I could tell by how they acted why they were afraid, or who they were afraid of. That was when I learned that fear isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Back in the women’s shelter, I had used my powers to make women less afraid. I did that exactly once, in [redacted] when I saw this woman running, broadcasting fear like it was the headlight of a car in the middle of the night. I “hugged” her with my mind and she stumbled and stopped, looking around like she was confused. A car screeched to a stop right next to her and two guys got out. They made her get in the car, and her color changed to the same one as Rhonda had when her husband came into the shelter, just before I killed him.

I never found out what happened to that woman, but I knew that, because I had “hugged” her, she’d stopped running, and I felt like it was my fault that those guys caught her. I hoped they were police and had arrested her, except I didn’t really think so. Why would someone be that afraid of being arrested?

So I didn’t stop people from being afraid anymore. I did stop them from being interested in either me or Tiffany, though. If I saw “interested” in a brain while a stranger was looking at us, I washed them with a color I’d seen in Sister Margaret, back in [redacted]. She was in her nineties, and I learned that color meant she’d forgotten something and was trying to remember it. When I dumped a bucket of that color on people, they got confused and started trying to remember something they probably hadn’t forgotten.

Mostly I used that on men who got interested in Tiffany, and showed the color of sexual interest. That was a color I learned right away once we arrived in [redacted].

Tiffany did continue what she called ‘home schooling’ me. Aggie got her some books. There was actually an online school in [redacted] but Tiffany didn’t enroll me in it. She said we were still hiding. She didn’t know if we needed to hide, but we were hiding anyway. Every so often she’d get some cash from Aggie, and that’s what we used to get food.

We had to walk everywhere. I don’t know for sure, but I think somebody drove the car back to St.[redacted]. I know I never saw it again.

I experimented on Tiffany. I was supposed to tell her every time I did something, or was going to do something, or before I did something, but it didn’t work out that way. One of the experiments I used was to paint her with the same color I saw other people expressing, and see how she felt. Anger was easy and she felt it instantly. I already knew fear and contentment, but we verified those. I learned or verified worry, eagerness, hope, amusement, and relief.

One of the most interesting was when I asked her if I could try painting her with a color I had seen on lots of men when they looked at her. It was the color I had called “interest” and gotten rid of, routinely. She said okay and I got my mental hands wet with that color on them and massaged her brain.

“Stop!” she moaned.

“What is it?” I asked. We were used to doing this, and she usually took notes.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she said.

“Come on,” I coaxed. “You know you can’t do that.”

“It’s not normal!” she groaned.

“It’s not something you chose to feel,” I reminded her. “I put it on you.”

“I felt it one time, a long time ago,” she said. She shook her head. “Make me horny, please?”

“What?”

“Like you did in the car. Use that color on me,” she said.

I remembered those berries and I got one hand wet with their juice. I stroked her brain, like I was simply stroking her hair. She relaxed immediately.

“Okay, that’s enough,” she said.

I stopped and just looked at her. We knew each other pretty well, by now, so she knew I was waiting to hear what she’d learned. It took her a while and I saw colors of embarrassment and fear dart around her head like butterflies.

“When I was a girl, I had a friend come to my house for a sleepover,” she said. “Her name was Annie.” She stopped.

“Okay,” I said.

She closed her eyes, but went on.

“Annie and I were very close. We felt things for each other we weren’t supposed to feel.”

“Sexual things,” I guessed.

She opened her eyes and looked at me.

“You’re getting very good at this.” She gave a little shake, like a shiver, but then her colors firmed up to be ‘normal’ Tiffany colors. “Yes, we were sexually attracted to each other. What I felt a moment ago was what I felt for her, back then. I’d almost forgotten that, but it came back to me crystal clear when you painted me.”

“It’s not the same color I just used. The color I just used was the one I used when you had that orgasm,” I said.

She blinked and thought.

“I have a theory, but we’ll need to test it carefully, because these are very strong emotions. We haven’t talked about sexuality in a while. I think you need another chapter.”

“Okay,” I said. I liked learning about sexuality.

“There is normal sex ... between a man and a woman ... and then there is perverted sex, where a man has sex with a man and a woman has sex with a woman.”

I tried to imagine that. It didn’t compute. It must have been obvious, because her aura turned flaming embarrassed and she taught me about homosexuality, and how that often works. She said all the these people did was what she called mutual masturbation, but her colors told me there was more that she didn’t want to talk about. It was interesting, but I thought it was pretty silly. It seemed like regular sex would be less complicated. I mean God had built us that way, you know?

In the end, her hypothesis was that sexual desire for a woman was one color, and sexual desire for a man was a different one. We knew what color made Tiffany feel sexual interest in a man. We’d learned that in the car, at the rest stop. Now I tried painting her very delicately with this color I saw in a lot of men’s brains and, presto! She felt like she used to when she and Annie made love, way back then.

We both thought it was pretty interesting that sexual interest colors were gender based. It was hard to prove it, but as I hung around different places I started to see these colors were a lot more common. There was a guy named Jack who had one of the apartments in our building. I had never talked to him, except to say Hi. He was standing there talking to Eddie one day and I saw the “I like guys” color in his brain, so I stopped.

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