Jumper

“What’s false about it? First of all, I am not trying to create an implicit contract between the two of us. I have this money and I like spending time with you. The only thing I expect from it is the time itself. Time that I’m not alone. I wouldn’t mind something else, but I don’t expect to buy it.

“And this age thing is a crock of sexist shit. I’m surprised at you.”

She frowned. “What’s sexist about it?”

“If I were three years older than you, romantic involvement would be possible, even probable. Have you ever dated someone that much older than you?”

She blushed.

I went on. “I think it’s acceptable in society because older men have accumulated more worldly goods. Therefore they make better suitors. Perhaps that’s the original reason. Perhaps it’s that alpha male crap. Older bulls have survived longer, making their genes worth coveting. Aren’t you above those outdated factors? Are you going to let a male idea of what and who you should be make your choices for you?”

“Give me a break, David!”

I shrugged. “If you don’t want to spend the time with me for other reasons, just say so. Just don’t use that age thing.” I stared down at my feet and said in a quieter voice, “I have to put up with enough shit because of my age.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time, until we were walking past the fountain café. My ears started to burn and I was mad at myself—almost ashamed for some reason. I wished I’d kept my mouth shut.

“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 it.

A woman on the phone told me that to open an account with her bank I would need a driver’s license and a Social Security number. I had neither. Even talking to her I had to use a public phone. I was afraid to try and get a phone without I.D.

I put a thousand dollars in my pocket and jumped to Manhattan, west of Times Square, where the adult bookstores and porno theaters line Forty-second Street and Eighth Avenue. In two hours I was offered drugs, girls, boys, and children. When one of them said they could provide a driver’s license, it was only to lure me down an alleyway, so they could “jump” me. I jumped first and quit trying for the day.

* * *

The Stanville Public Library is just off the downtown district, a three-block-by-two-block area of public buildings, restaurants, and dying stores. The Wal-Mart at the edge of town and the big mall twenty miles away in Waverly were taking the downtown business.

I walked along Main Street and thought about how different this stupid little town was from New York City.

The boarded-up front of the Royale movie theater had graffiti on the plywood, but the message was “Stallions Rule!” In New York the graffiti on theaters was obscene or angry, not high school athletic bragging. On the other hand, there were over fifty movie theaters in the mid town section of Manhattan and that didn’t count the porno houses. Here in Stanville the only theater was closed, done in by the video business. If people wanted a real movie theater, they had to drive to the sixplex in Waverly.

It was pointless to compare restaurants, but the variety and range of them hit home when I came to the Dairy Queen. It was brick with high glass windows and bright fluorescent lighting. It had all the atmosphere and charm of a doctor’s examining room. I thought of seven spots in Greenwich Village that would serve me anything from gourmet ice cream to “tofutti” to frozen yogurt to Bavarian cream pie. I could be at any of them in the blink of an eye.

“I’d like a small dip cone, please.”

I didn’t know the elderly woman behind the counter, but Robert Werner, who used to be in biology class with me, was flipping burgers. He looked up from the grill, saw me, and frowned, as if I was familiar but he couldn’t place me. It had been over a year, but it hurt that he didn’t recognize me.

“That will be seventy-three cents.”

I paid. In the Village it would have been considerably more. As I walked back to one of the plastic laminated booths I saw myself in the mirror that ran along the back wall. No wonder Robert couldn’t place me.

I was wearing slacks from Bergdorf’s, a shirt I’d gotten from some snotty clerk on Madison Avenue, and shoes from Saks Fifth Avenue. My hair was cut neatly, slightly punkoid, far different from the untrimmed mess I’d worn a year before. Then I would have been wearing worn, ill-fitting jeans, shirts with clashing patterns, and three-year-old tennis shoes. There would have been holes in the socks.

I stared for a moment, a ghostly overlay of that earlier, awkward me causing me to shudder. I sat down, facing away from the mirror, and ate my ice cream.

Robert came out from the kitchen to bus a table near me. He looked at me again, still puzzled.

What the hell.

“How’s it going, Robert?”

He smiled and shrugged. “Okay. How about you? Long time no see.”

He still didn’t place me.

I laughed. “You might say that. Not for over a year.”

“That would have been at …?” He paused, as if remembering, inviting me to fill in the blank.

I grinned, “You’re going to have to remember all on your own. I won’t help you.”

He glared then. “Okay. Dammit. I know you, but where from? Give me a break!”

I shook my head and nibbled on my cone.

He turned to finish bussing the table, then straightened up suddenly. “Davy? Christ, Davy Rice!”

“Bingo.”

“I thought you did a milk carton.”

I grimaced. “Poetically put.”

“Did you go back home?”

“No!” I blinked, surprised at the force in my voice. More softly I said, “No, I didn’t. I’m just seeing the old hometown.”

“Oh.” He put his hands in his pockets. “Well, you look really good. Really different.”

“I’m doing all right. I …” I shrugged.

“Where are you living now?”

I started to lie, to tell him something misleading, but it seemed petty. “I’d rather not say.”

He frowned. “Oh. Is your dad still putting those posters up?”

“Christ, I hope not.”

He started wiping the table. “You going to be here on Saturday? There’s a party at Sue Kimmel’s.”

I felt my face turning red. “I was never in with those guys. Half of them are college kids. They wouldn’t want me there.”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. Hell, maybe they think too much about clothes and things. They only invited me because my sister’s close to Sue. You look more like you’d fit in now than I do. If you want to go with me, I’ll vouch for you.”

Christ, I must’ve changed a lot.

“Don’t you have a date?”

“Nah. Nothing definite. Trish McMillan will be there and we sort of have this thing, but it’s not a date.”

“It’s nice of you, Robert. You don’t really owe me anything like that.”

He blinked. “Well … it’s not like I hang out with a high-class group. Maybe you’ll add something to my image.”

“Well … I’d like to. You working here all week?”

“Yeah, even Saturday until six. That old college-fund grind.”

“When do you think you’ll be ready to go?”

“Eight, maybe.”

“You driving?”

He pointed out into the parking lot. “Yeah, that old clunker’s mine.”

I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to go to his house. I didn’t know what his parents would say to me or about me to Dad. The thought of going to that party, though … that really tempted me. “Could you pick me up here?”

“Sure. Eight sharp, Saturday night.”

I spent some time that evening talking to Millie on the phone. It was frustrating because I kept having to put quarters in the pay phone.

“So, how’s school so far?”

“Okay. Haven’t really had to struggle yet. It’s just the first month.”

A recorded message asked me to add more money. I shoved several quarters in. Millie laughed.

“You really need to get a phone.”

“I’m working on it. Getting a phone in New York … I’ll call you with the number when I get it.”

“Okay.”

I was standing at the phones in the back lobby of the Grand Hyatt by Grand Central, a small mountain of quarters on the ledge in front of me. People swept past, going to the bathrooms. Occasionally a Hyatt security man in a suit would roust nonguests out of the bathroom. They were usually black, poorly dressed, and carrying plastic bags filled with miscellaneous belongings.

For some reason it bothered me that the security guard was black, too.

“What did you say?”

Millie was indignant. “I said there’s a party I’ve been invited to in two weeks. I don’t want to go because Mark will be there.”

“Mark’s your old boyfriend?”

“Yeah. Only he thinks I’m still involved with him.”

“How’s that? I thought you didn’t return his calls or let him in your apartment.”

“I don’t. He’s amazing. Oblivious. And the sonofabitch keeps it up even though I know he’s dating someone else.”

“Hmmm. You sound like you’d really like to go to this party.”

“Well. Shit. I don’t want to make decisions based on avoiding or seeing him. It pisses me off.”

“I could—”

The recording had me put more money in.

“What did you say, David?”

“I could go with you if you like.”

“Get real. You’re in New York.”

“Sure. Now. In two weeks I could be in Stillwater.”

She was quiet for a moment “Well, it would be nice. I’ll believe it when I see it, though.”

“Hey! Count on it. Will you pick me up at the airport? Or should I take a taxi?”

“Christ! A taxi won’t run sixty miles to Stillwater. I’ll come get you, but it will have to be after classes,”

“Okay.”

“What, you mean it?”

“Yes.”

She was quiet again. “Well, okay then. Let me know.”

That took care of my next two Saturday nights. I said good-bye and hung up. The security guard came out of the rest room following closely behind another street person. I swept the rest of the quarters off the ledge and dropped them in one of this guy’s plastic bags. He looked at me, startled and, perhaps, a little frightened. The security man glowered at me.

I walked around the corner and jumped away.

Leo Pasquale was a bellboy at the Gramercy Park, the nice hotel I’d stayed at before I got my apartment. He was the winner in the hotel-staff dominance due over who waited on me.

I tip well.

“Hey, Mr. Rice. Nice to see you.”

I nodded. “Hello, Leo.”

“Are you back with us? What room?”

I shook my head. “No. I’ve got an apartment now. I could use your help with something, though.”

He looked around at the bell captain, then tilted his head to the elevator. “Let’s ride up to ten.”

“Okay.”

On the tenth floor he led me down the hall and opened a room with a passkey. “Come on in,” he said.

The room was a suite. He opened a door and we walked out onto a large balcony, almost a terrace. The afternoon was pleasant, warm without being muggy. The traffic noise rose up from Lexington Avenue in waves, almost like surf. Buildings rose around us like mountain cliffs.

“What do you need, David? Girls? Something in a recreational drug?”

I took the money out of my pocket and counted out five hundred-dollar bills. I gave them to him and held the remaining five hundred in my other hand where they were still visible.

“Down payment The rest you get on delivery.”

He licked his lips. “Delivery of what?”

It was my turn to hesitate. “I want a New York State driver’s license good enough to pass a police check.”

“Hell, man. You can buy a fake driver’s license for less than a hundred … a good one for under two-fifty.”

I shook my head. “Your money is just a finder’s fee, Leo. I’m not paying for a fake ID with this thousand. I’m paying to be hooked up with an expert. I expect to pay for his services myself.”

Leo raised his eyebrows and licked his lips again. “All of the thousand is mine, though?”

“If you come up with the product. But if it’s hackwork, if it’s no good, forget the second five hundred. Find me a wizard and the rest of the money is yours. Can you do it?”

He rubbed the bills between his fingers, feeling the texture of the paper. “Yeah. I’m pretty sure. I don’t know anyone directly, but I know a lot of illegals with really good papers. You got a number I can reach you at?”

I smiled. “No.”

“Cagey.”

I shook my head. “I don’t have a phone. I’ll check back. When will you know something?”

He folded the money carefully and put it in his pocket. “Try me tomorrow.”

I paid a homeless man twenty dollars plus cost to go into a liquor store and buy a magnum of their more expensive champagne. He came out with the large bottle in one hand and a jug of wine under his other arm.

“Here, kid. Have a hell of a time. I certainly intend to.”

I thought of Dad. I considered taking this guy’s wine away from him, grabbing it and jumping before he could do anything. Instead I said “Thank you” politely and jumped back to my apartment as soon as he’d turned away.

The champagne barely fit in the tiny refrigerator lying down, but not standing, and even then it bumped against the door. I leaned a chair against the door to keep it shut.

I spent the next two hours up on Fifth Avenue, buying clothes and shoes. A few of the clerks even remembered me. After that I went to my hairstylist in the Village and got a haircut.

You don’t even like those people, Davy. Why all the fuss?

I shaved carefully, scraping the few whiskers from my face with only a few nicks. I resolved to buy an electric razor. Hope the bleeding stops before tonight. The face in the mirror was a stranger’s, quiet and calm. There was no trace of the shaky stomach or the pounding heart I wiped at the tiny bright beads of blood with a damp finger, smearing them.

Hell.

I still had three hours before the party, but I didn’t want to read or sleep or watch the tube. I dressed in some of the old, comfortable clothes, the ones I brought with me to New York, and jumped to the backyard of Dad’s house.

The car wasn’t there. I jumped to my room.

There was a thin film of dust on the desk and windowsill. There was the faint smell of mildew. I tried to open the door to the hall, but the door was stuck. I pulled harder, but it wouldn’t budge.

I jumped to the hallway.

There was a bright, shiny padlock hasp screwed into the wood on the door and frame. A large brass padlock held it secure. I scratched my head. What on earth?

I walked down the hall to the kitchen and found the note on the refrigerator.

Davy,

What do you want? Why don’t you just come home? I promise not to hit you anymore. I’m sorry about that. Sometimes my temper gets the better of me. I wish you wouldn’t keep coming into the house unless you’re coming home for good. It scares me. I might mistake you for a burglar and accidentally shoot you. Just come home, okay?

Dad

It was held to the refrigerator by a magnet I’d decorated in elementary school, a day blob in green and blue. I slipped the note out and crumpled it into a little ball.

More promises. Well, there’s been enough broken promises in the past. As an afterthought I uncrumpled one corner of the note and stuck it back under the magnet. It hung there, a ball of paper held to the refrigerator by the blob of colored clay.

Let’s see what he thinks of that.

I was angry and my head hurt. Why do I keep coming back here? I picked up the flour canister from the counter. It was a large glass jar with a wooden top. I tossed it up, high above the floor. It slowed, just below the ceiling, hung there, and then dropped. Before it hit the floor I jumped.

SIX

“Christ, where do you get your clothes?”

I shrugged instead of answering and climbed into Robert’s car. The springs creaked and I had to slam the door twice before it would catch. I put the champagne bottle on the seat between us, a white ribbon tied around its neck.

Robert eased out of the parking lot gingerly, the springs rocking excessively as we went over the gutter. “Shocks are shot,” he said. “But it’s ugly.”

“Great. How many people are going to be at this party?”

He waved his free hand “Oh, fifty, a hundred, who knows. They got band for it, I think. She can afford it.”

“What will her parents be doing?”

“They’re out of state.”