Unknowable

Seeing Benji for the last time made her recall seeing him for the first time. Back when he’d been a person rather than remains to be identified. The hallway leaving the morgue was kind of reminiscent of the hallway leading into the ThinkTank at the agency. She was even walking at the shoulder of her supervisor, Patrick Bamford, just as she had been ten years ago.

“What do you know about psychics, Agent Laso?” Patrick asked abruptly.

Della had spent years working to reach this most classified rank in the agency and this was her first day in her new department: Intercessions. She was tall and her long stride easily kept pace with the thrusting chops of Patrick’s little legs.

“Psychics?” She tried to orient herself to the question. “Like Miss Cleo?”

Patrick didn’t slow down, but his eyes flicked her direction ever so briefly.

“I’ll take that to mean you’re not familiar.”

They arrived at the fifth set of doors on their journey which turned out to be the last. They each pressed their left ear to the sensory pad to gain entry and Della’s belly boiled with anticipation. The most classified place in the agency was bound to house technology beyond her wildest dreams: cyborgs, nanobots, invisibility coats, rocket boots… Or maybe just a rec room with some very average looking people inside. Patrick stepped beyond where Della had run out of steam and clasped his hands.

“Everyone, this is Agent Della Laso.”

“Yeah, we know,” a disembodied voice retorted to a smattering of lazy laughs.

Patrick was not dissuaded. “She’s the new one so please keep in mind how difficult it is to get people like her, okay?” He turned back to his charge and motioned for her to go on down the two steps into the room. “So, psychics for us are people who can predict the future. We’re not interested in mind readers or ghost talkers. Most of them only see one of the possible versions of an event. We call them level threes.”

“I also go by Tom,” a skinny, dark haired man nearby interjected with a snarky smile before going back to playing on his phone.

Patrick rolled his eyes. “Lots of level threes in here. Don’t mind Tom, he can only say sentences with ten syllables or less.”

“Wha?” Della shook her swimming head. Patrick dove on.

“Level twos are the ones who also only see one version of an event, but they see the most likely version. Quite handy. Several of those currently.”

Della eyeballed the people around her. They were playing ping pong and checkers, painting and listening to podcasts. They were in jeans and skirts and old t-shirts. Their faces were unshaven and their hair roamed in all manner of styles. They were as far from the polished, drilled, tailored agents she’d grown accustomed to working with as they could possibly be.

And all the while Della struggled to grasp what was going on, her guide continued in complete indifference to her state.

“Seeing the future isn’t free, Agent Laso. Everyone here has some quirk or other that is the price of their gift. Tom with the syllables, Carrol can only give predictions for Tuesdays. Edgar over there tells all of his predictions in Cantonese.”

Edgar waved. “I’m from Idaho. I don’t speak Cantonese.”

“And he can’t learn it,” Patrick sighed. “And we tried. A lot. You know we’ve got the best linguistic minds at our disposal. He just can’t do it.” Patrick strolled on, his pace turning casual, his hands going to his suit pockets. “We pull almost all of them from jails and mental wards.”

Della startled slightly at a hand thrust in her direction. It was a middle-aged woman with big purple glasses and a round face.

“Hi there Della, my name’s Syl. I hope you’ve not yet had your fill. It’s always nice to get someone new. Let me know what I can do for you.”

“Sylvia was committed because she has to rhyme. If she messes up, she can’t speak for 24 to 48 hours,” Patrick explained.

“Don’t let her fool you.” A young man in his late twenties strolled over. He had a friendly expression, one that comfortably bore a smile. “She’s like a really mean Dr. Suess.”

Syl did not seem so pleased to see him.

“If you only came to tease and scoff then you, dear Ben, can fuck right off.”

A boisterous laugh filled the room as the man put up his hands in surrender. He faced Della, still grinning. “I love it when she rhymes swears. Makes my day. I’m Benji.”

“Della,” she replied. The joke had finally gotten her grounded in the situation. She took a deep breath. “So… you see the future?”

“Constantly,” Benji confirmed.

“Ben is our only level one psychic at the moment. He can see what will happen even in evolving situations. Real-time predictions, you could say,” Patrick informed her.

“What a toll, for all his swank,” Syl tsked as she moved away. “Tells a soul and draws a blank.”

“Want an orange, Syl?” Benji called lightly.

Sylvia glowered at him, a small growl escaping her as she headed for the air hockey table. Benji inclined slightly to Della.

“She’s going to lose,” he whispered.

“What?”

“What?” Benji and Della stared at one another, utterly perplexed, until the former slumped.

“Oh, I just told you something, didn’t I? Sorry, don’t remember.”

Della’s confusion was interrupted by an indignant bellow of defeat from Sylvia at the air hockey table.

“Ben can see anything he wants to,” Patrick clarified, “but if he tells anyone in any way, he forgets it immediately.”

“And I can’t be recorded,” Benji added.

Della sighed. Remembering his terrible jokes and his endless tormenting of Sylvia didn’t make her feel any better.

“Sir?” she asked, stepping a little closer to Patrick as they walked across the parking lot to their car. He seemed somewhere else, like coming back to talk to her was a struggle.

“Yes?”

“Do you…” She knew the answer, but she didn’t want to know it. “Did he know this was going to happen?”

The sheen that crossed Patrick’s eyes told her before he opened his mouth. It wasn’t in his nature to sugarcoat things. It wasn’t what agents did.

“Maybe it was something he saw before he came to us so he already forgot about it.”

The unexpected kindness made Della swallow hard.

It was their fourth mission together. A tropical location and a very uneventful few weeks. The thing about working with Benji was that Della never really knew if he was the reason things went so smoothly or if he just made their bosses believe something terrible was going to happen so he could go on a trip. Della preferred more espionage. Actually, she simply preferred knowledge. No one could know very much about anything at all when Benji was involved. You just had to trust him. Sometimes that was easier said than done. Like when he was sipping a pina colada at sunset in Tahiti.

“You know they call you the white trash James Bond,” Della told him, stirring the umbrella in her mocktail Mai Tai. Benji laughed.

“You know I started that,” he touted. He flicked his sunglasses up and down. Della rolled her eyes.

“They think you just pretend things are going to happen so you can go on vacation,” she pressed again.

Benji took a long pull from his wide, neon pink straw and shrugged.

“Can’t say.”

Della grumbled to herself. He was at once both insufferable and pleasant. She had not seen him in several months, just long enough to forget how his unsinkable happiness could get annoying given enough time. She ignored him when he swung his legs over the side of his lounge chair to face her.

“You know, when they’re not showing people around the ThinkTank, it is a terrible place,” Benji insisted. He pushed his sunglasses up into his light brown hair. “They put us back in the vats.”

“I watched Minority Report, Benji,” Della said blandly.

“I knew you would eventually.”

Della groaned. Psychic jokes were the worst jokes.

Benji flopped back into recline. He interlaced his fingers behind his head, looking out across the ocean.

“Where are you from?” he asked.

“Detroit,” she replied.

“Ooo, Michigan. Never been. Had enough of the cold in Wyoming.”

Della sipped her drink. “You’re from Wyoming?”

Benji nodded. “Crack baby left at the hospital. No one wanted the foster kid with the busted brain and I was in and out of jail after I aged out of the system. Kept running up to people and saying weird things and then not knowing how I got there.”

Della couldn’t suppress a chuckle. Benji joined her.

“Maybe it was cute when I was a little kid, but people aren’t as open to some homeless guy telling them not to take the bus and then asking what day it is,” he smirked, stretching. “Don’t know how many times I found myself out in a blizzard or something, all my stuff lost in some shelter I abandoned my spot in. I have a personal mission to never be that cold again.”

“Detroit can be pretty horrible,” Della mused. “Weather. People. It wasn’t a fun place to grow up. My dad and I had almost nothing.”

Benji held out his half empty glass and Della indulged him with a clink.

“To better circumstances,” he grinned.

“To work being a vacation,” she smiled back.