“It’s not particularly fair, is it,” she said, finally. “We get this conditioning, this mind-set. It’s pumped into us from the time we’re little kids.” She stopped walking when we were back on the sidewalk, and sat on a nearby bench. “Let me try it another way. It’s not fair to get involved with you, not for either of us, when I’m flying back to Stillwater tomorrow.”
I shrugged. “I already travel a great deal. OSU isn’t that far out of the way.”
She shook her head. “I just don’t know.”
“Come on.” I grabbed her hand and pulled her up. “Ι’ll buy you an Italian ice.”
She laughed. “Νο. I’ll buy you an Italian ice. My budget will stretch that far.” She held on to my hand after she was up. “And I’ll try to keep an open mind about things.”
“What sort of things?”
“Things! Just things. Shut up. And quit smiling.”
It wasn’t until after I got the apartment that I went back to Dad’s house. While I was staying in the Gramercy Park, I had the hotel do my laundry and I ate room service if I didn’t want to go out, so I had less reason than usual to jump back to Stanville.
My second day in the apartment, though, I needed a hammer and a nail to hang a framed print I’d bought in the Village. I could have jumped to a store, but I wanted to hang it right then.
I jumped directly to Dad’s garage and rummaged through the shelves for a nail. I’d found one and was picking up the hammer when I heard footsteps. I glanced out the garage door windows and saw the top of Dad’s car.
Oh. It’s Saturday.
The door from the kitchen started to open and I jumped back to my apartment.
I hit my thumb twice while pounding in the nail for the picture. Then, when I hung it, I found that I’d put it too low and had it to do all over again, including hitting my thumb.
Damn him, anyway!
I jumped back to the garage, threw the hammer down on the workbench with a loud clatter, and jumped back to the apartment.
Serve him right, I thought, to come running back in again and find nothing.
The next week I jumped to the house and, after determining he wasn’t home, did a load of laundry. While the washer ran I walked through the house, seeing what was changed.
The house was much neater than when I’d done laundry four weeks previously. I wondered if he had hired someone since I wasn’t there anymore to do the housework. His room was not quite as neat, socks and shirts thrown in a pile in the corner. A pair of slacks hung crookedly over the back of a chair. I remembered finding Dad’s wallet when I’d pulled a pair of pants like those off him. That was when I’d found the hundred dollar bills.
The back of my head throbbed, as usual, when I remembered that money. Most of that money had been taken from me when I was mugged in Brooklyn. I felt a twinge of guilt.
Hell.
It took me less than half a minute to jump back to my money closet, pull twenty-two hundred-dollar bills, and jump back. The money made a nice pattern on his bedspread, five rows of four, with a single hundred dollar bill for each side.
I thought about him coming back into the house and finding them there, laid out. I savored the surprise, the shock, and thought about the language he’d use.
When I took the clothes out of the dryer, I resolved to find some other place to do my laundry. I liked the feeling of being out of debt to him.
The only things I would take from the house from now on, I resolved, would be things from my room, things that belonged to me. Nothing else from him. Not a solitary thing.
I started looking for other jumpers in the places I was most comfortable—libraries. My sources were books I used to laugh at, shelved in the occult/ESP section. There wasn’t much I could credit as anything more than folklore, but I found myself reading them with a desperate intensity.
There were an awful lot of books in the “woo-woo” section of the library: pretty bizarre stuff—rains of frogs, circles in wheat fields, hauntings, prophets, people with past lives, mind readers, spoon benders, dowsers, and UFOs.
There weren’t very many teleports.
I moved from the Stanville Library to the New York Public Library’s research branch, the one with the lions out front, There was more stuff, but lord, the evidence wasn’t very convincing. Well—actually, what evidence?
My talent seems to be documentable. It’s repeatable. It’s verifiable.
I think.
To be honest, I only knew that I could repeat it. I knew that my experience seemed repeatable. I hadn’t performed it several times before unbiased witnesses. And I wasn’t about to, either.
The only objective evidence I could point to, was the bank robbery. It made the paper, after all. Maybe my hunt for other teleports should pursue reports of unsolved crimes?
Right, Davy. How does that help you find other teleports? It doesn’t even guarantee that there are other teleports, just unsolved crimes.
I dropped the search for a while, discouraged, and instead thought about why.
Why could I teleport? Not how. Why? What was it about me?
Could everybody teleport if they were put in a desperate enough position? I couldn’t believe that. Too many people were put in those positions and they just endured, suffered, or broke.
If they escaped the situation it was by ordinary means, often—like my encounter with Topper—running from the frying pan into the fire. Still, maybe there were a few who escaped my way.
Again, why me? Was it genetic? The thought that perhaps Dad could teleport made my blood run cold, made me look in dark corners and behind my back. Rationally I doubted it. There were too many times he’d have jumped if he could. But no matter how many times I told myself that, the gut feeling still remained.
Could Mom teleport? Is that what she did? Jump away from Dad, like I did? Why didn’t she take me? If she could teleport, why didn’t she come back for me?
And if she couldn’t teleport, what happened to her?
All my life, I’d wondered if I was some sort of alien— some sort of strange changeling. Among other things, it would explain why Dad treated me the way he did.
According to many of the more extreme books, the government was actively covering up all this information— concealing evidence, muffling witnesses, and manufacturing spurious alternative explanations.
This behavior reminded me of Dad. Facts constantly shifted around our house. Permissions changed, events mutated, and memories faded. I often wondered if I was crazy or he was.
I didn’t think I was an alien, though … but I wasn’t sure.
My landlord gave me a funny look when I asked if I could pay him the monthly rent in cash.
“Cash? Hell, no. Those postal orders are bad enough. Why don’t you get a bank account? I thought it was strange when you paid with those postal orders, but I put it down to you being new in town. You want to have the IRS down on me?”
I shook my head. “No.”
He narrowed his eyes. “The IRS really frowns on large cash transactions. I wouldn’t want to think there’s something funny about your income.”
I shook my head. “No. I just have a lot of cash left over from a trip I took.” My ears were burning and my stomach felt funny.
Later in the day I gave my landlord another postal money order for the rent, but I could see him thinking about