The Chosen
an excerpt

Tommy was one of us—I have no doubt that he would’ve ended up at the Institute himself, if not for the accident. It was like that first recollection, that first memory, unlocked him: the war nightmares stopped, and he dreamed himself in a hundred different lives. He dreamt that he was an architect named Stan, back in the 1950’s; he was a butcher during the Revolutionary War. He was a private detective at the turn of the 20th century, and he was once a woman in 17th century Paris. He’d been wed to a housewife, to a dancer, and to a pilot. He was an amalgamation of so many people: Stan, Lily, Evan, Job, Cyrus, Colette, Nicholas. He remembered himself in all his incarnations, and as he dreamed he painted me a portrait of his life—not merely the life he had with us, but all the lives he’d lived before. He remembered everything.

I had my share of memories, too—although, granted, my recollections started younger than Tommy’s did. I remember waking up singing when I was three years old:

“We come from the land of the ice and snow
From the midnight sun where the hot springs blow
Hammer of the gods…”

My mother came to the door of my room, her mouth hanging open. “Honey,” she said, “What is that you’re singing?”

“The Immigrant Song,” I said, cheerful. “I used to listen to it on the way to work.”

And it was true. I knew every word.

I told her stories: I’d been a gay mechanic in the seventies, and a group of gay-bashers had slaughtered me outside a bar in downtown Atlanta. I’d been a lesbian actor in the forties, and I wrote songs for my girlfriend on my guitar in a Massachusetts apartment, praying to God that no one would find us out. I was a soldier for the North in the Civil War, over a century before the inception of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, and my boyfriend was a Confederate lieutenant named James (at some point, that story will be written, too). At three years old, I knew that I’d been gay in all my previous lives—moreover, I knew that I was in this life, too. As far as I can tell, queerness is bred into your soul more than into your body: it follows you through time and space, regardless of circumstance, in a way that gender and race do not. I’d lived in other countries, in my previous lives; I’d been male, female, and in between. What I’d never been was straight, and I told my mother so without shame, in my three-year-old pajamas, as I spoke to her about jazz in Cleveland and being a homeless woman on the streets of Mexico City.

After that, my mother knew what I was. It wasn’t a secret anymore: she didn’t have to look it up online or pore through New Age textbooks, like the mothers a few years prior had been forced to do. She knew full well what I was, and where I’d come from. I was Indigo, a Crystal Kid.

Most of us are, you know, nowadays. People used to think we were a myth. There were people who passed us off as theory, as coincidence, as new age psychobabble. But we’ve always existed, and we’ve always known what we are.

We remember what we were, too—that’s one of the things we notice first. We remember who we were before, every detail of the lives we’ve already lived. We know what we accomplished, and we know how we died. We know how we came to be the people we are in our current lives. And, perhaps most importantly of all, we know why.

We know why we’re here. But that’s all to be explained later.

We feel things—not just memories and emotions, but physical sensations that other people don’t pick up. Energy, for example: we feel it, as cleanly and clearly as we feel the wind on our faces in the fall. We resonate with it. We can almost feel our bodies vibrate with it. It surrounds us, controlling everyone and everything, and we can sense its motion as we sense our own.

We feel the energy of change, of transition; we feel the energy of emotion. We know when someone is happy, or excited, or angry, or sad. We don’t have to look at them or speak to them to know: we sense it. It’s second nature. We don’t need to ask. When the seasons change, we don’t need to look at a thermometer to know it—we can feel it in the earth. We’re not psychic or clairvoyant: we just have an added sense, a mechanism somewhere in our psychology that helps us to understand the things we cannot see.

We’re bright, or so I’m told. As a general rule, we’re intellectually advanced, despite the fact that few of us are conscious of the difference. Mathematical ability beyond our years, college-level reading skills before our first year of grade school. Teachers used to be unsure what to do with us: they called us geniuses, prodigies. In fact, our group does produce more prodigies than its share: pianists and mathematicians, mostly. A lot of them don’t have any speech, but they don’t need it. Their instruments and calculations are their voices. They contribute magic and brilliance to the world in their own way. Once upon a time, they called it “autism;” they said it was a disability, a lack of social cognizance. But in the end, it was just a variance; a subspecies of the Indigo breed, another sector of a world already beyond the norm.

Nowadays, of course, teachers don’t have to figure out how to teach us: we have schools of our own. Earthside schools, sure: there’s an Indigo Academy in Los Angeles, and another in New York. Both are boarding schools; day schools have sprung up in a couple hundred cities, scattered all around the world. Most Indigo schools Earthside are primary schools, elementary schools. They needed a place to put the very young. Once you hit high school age, they make a choice for you: if you’re standard, you go into the Earthside normie schools. If you’re One—if you’re really Indigo—you end up at I.T.I.