For I Could Lift My Finger and Black Out the Sun (3 page)

Interlude

Voices. Small, very quiet, but many all at once, coalescing into a buzz. Only in the dead of night, drifting in and out of sleep. Coming from somewhere close, all around me. Not saying words, but yet… communicating. Not with me, with each other. Like the static on a distant radio transmission being intercepted, vaguely electronic, squeals and hisses.

I hear you.

6

My knee improved quite a lot after that, to the surprise of my doctors. When my mom heard about my fall down the stairs — by
acciden
t
,
I assured her, completely vague about
where
those stairs were — she immediately rushed to get me checked out. The orthopedic specialist I was seeing then was named Dr. Mathers. He looked at me with great skepticism, assuming that he’d find a new tear. Instead, he reported that my knee seemed to have
regained
some mobility, and that the muscles around it seemed to be compensating. As a doctor, he felt he had to explain it. “Kids run around all day,” he said, his overly confident tone suggesting he was trying to convince himself as much as us. “They get exercise and improve their muscles and don’t even think about it.” Mom seemed happy and satisfied. That kept her from hovering over me, at least for a couple days.

I knew it was something else, but I simply didn’t want to tell anyone that my knee felt
healed
. Not
healed
, actually, but
reconfigured
. That was the best word for it. How was that possible? Much like the moment in the hospital where my mom suddenly changed, had Bobby done something to me? In my gut, I felt like whatever happened had originated inside me, and that maybe he just prodded it a little more. Or maybe my body was already healing, but my timid nature and conservative brain held me back. Maybe Bobby’s push got me past that point.

It was all very confusing. My knee felt great. No pain, no stiffness. And yet mentally, I felt
guilty
. Like I shouldn’t be doing so well. But why? My improvement was no harm to anyone. If anything, it meant less time and money spent on doctors. I should be glad to rid my parents of the burden. But somehow it was unnatural.

Bobby, meanwhile, had gotten to like the privacy of the self-storage building. He’d drop by my house and we’d go there for hours. It was our playground, hideout, and private world, all in one. Bobby knew something radical had happened with my knee. In fact, he told me, he felt changes himself, like the injuries he suffered in the car accident had been erased. Something had changed in our bodies, something important. And we could do things with our minds, too, make people change their minds. So far, it seemed like it was happening accidentally, but Bobby starting working on that, to channel it. Both his mind and his body.

I had to slow things down. To figure out what was going on.

“Bobby, what’s happening with us?” I asked, jangling a knee that should have been restrained to a 45-degree arc. Bobby was trying to mentally influence a cockroach climbing up the cinder-block wall of the self-storage building, but he stopped and looked my way.

He had a smile on his face. “Does it matter? We’re badasses!”

There certainly was no arguing with that logic. And this underscored one of the more fundamental differences between me and Bobby. I worried. He didn’t give a damn. There was no one for me to talk to about the reasons behind the change, so I found myself just going with the flow.

By this time, we were well versed in the art of avoiding Mr. Gerald, the guy who ran the self-storage facility We came to find that Mr. Gerald was a die-hard fan of what he called his “stories.” As in, he’d be diligently at work, then look at his watch and say “Ah, fer crap’s sake, almost time for m’ stories!” Mr. Gerald said bizarre things like that. Then he’d run off, back to his office. His “stories” were the afternoon soap operas. So for several hours every weekday, we were relatively sure we’d see no sign of him. And most weekends he watched golf, so those were wide open, too. But we couldn’t avoid Ike and Izzy, the two Rottweilers he kept around to guard the place. That was okay. Living close to the self-storage building his whole life, Bobby had become friends with the dogs, through a slow process of giving them little treats every once in a while. Out of training and habit, the two dogs would run at us, hackles up, whenever we snuck in. But Bobby would just pet them on the head. They must have accepted me simply because I was with Bobby. As for the occasional people who came around to poke through their storage units piled high with crap, well, worrying about a couple of kids playing in the building wasn’t high on their list of concerns. Still we avoided being seen as much as possible.

So we pretty much had the run of the place. One Sunday afternoon in late October, Bobby noticed one of the storage pods had been left open. In it, a plastic cigarette lighter lay amid a pile of someone’s important trash. Picking up the lighter, its yellow body glinting in the setting sun from the window, Bobby spun the mechanism to spark a fire. Then he put his finger into the flame.

“Ow, son of a
bitch
!” he yelled, shaking his hand.

“Very clever, Bobby. Next you’ll be hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.” I smirked. “I’m totally up for the entertainment value of you hurting yourself, so please, go ahead.” I don’t think Bobby always appreciated my wit. His loss. He flicked the lighter again, and put his finger into the flame a second time. He winced. It was clearly causing him pain. I can’t be certain, but I think I smelled burning flesh. Not pretty. But he kept his finger where it was. After a minute, he stopped. His finger was a little singed, but in a couple of minutes, the dark patches went away.

“All right,” I said. “That was a treat, but I was thinking about doing something that isn’t so… what’s the word?
Boring
. What do you say, Bobby?”

In response, he looked at me with gleaming eyes and raised the lighter again. One more flick, and the flame appeared.

“Really?” I sighed. “Come on.”

He put the same finger in a third time. This time, he just stared at me while his finger hovered in the middle of the flame. There was no burning smell, no yelling, not even any wincing. He left his finger there for a minute, two, maybe more. I looked closely. The flame appeared to be splitting into a U shape, diverting itself around his finger, so close it was hard to tell, but maybe not even touching his skin.

Bobby pulled his finger out, not the fast pull of someone glad it’s done, but the slow draw of someone making a point. “I didn’t feel a thing,” he said.

“No way, liar,” I responded.

“Try it. You’ll see.”

“Um, no.” Despite the previous business with my knee, I assumed this was just some stupid juvenile trick, so I could think of many more interesting things to do. Like watching paint dry or grass grow.

“Johnny,” Bobby said. “I just had my finger in a fire for, what? Two minutes? I didn’t feel it at all. I’m not kidding.”

I squinted at him like a true skeptic. “Look, Bobby, I know something is going on with me and you. But that’s just crazy. You
felt that
. You did.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did.”

“I did
not
. Try it.” He held out the lighter.

“No way. Besides, it’s not even summer. Not the right time of year for a good ol’ John-B-Cue, I’m afraid,” I said with a tired chuckle. Bobby continued to hold the lighter. I looked at it, then at him. Then I grabbed it. “Fine.”

I spun the thumb wheel thingy and nothing happened.

“Hold the gas button down, stupid,” Bobby said, rolling his eyes.

I cocked one eyebrow back at him. “Yeah, you’ve been using a lighter for several minutes now, so I’ll definitely be considering you for the job of local expert.” I bowed slightly in mock deference. He ignored me and made a little wiggling gesture with his thumb —
push the button, stupi
d
.

So I pushed the button. I spun the wheel. The gas came out. The spark ignited the flame. I decided to try it, putting my finger into the flame the way I’d seen Bobby do.

“
Jesus!
” I shouted.

“Shut up, you idiot!” Bobby chided. “You want someone to find us in here?”

“Well, pardon me, but that really
freaking hur
t
.
” I grimaced at my charred finger and shook it.

“Just do it again,” Bobby said.

I laughed. “Yeah, right. That will
not
be happening.” I shook my head.

Bobby got serious, tilting his head down at me. It reminded me of the day on the stairs, with my hurt knee. “Just do it, Johnny,” he said in a low monotone. For a moment, I felt compelled. Then…

“Cut it out, Bobby,” I said, breaking eye contact.

“What?” he smiled. I think things changed a little then. He wasn’t trying overly hard, but I had repelled his mental push. Silently, we both considered what had happened for a second. Then he laughed. “Just do it anyway, jerk.” He stood in front of me, a huge goofy grin on his face. Though we both played it off, it seemed like he was a little surprised I hadn’t just gone along with his mental demand. We both realized that I could resist when he tried to make me do something, if I really wanted to.

“I’ll do it one more time,” I said. “That’s it.”

I flicked the lighter again, and as soon as the flame popped out, I put it right under my finger. To my surprise, the flame bent around my finger. I didn’t feel a thing...

For about a minute.

Then it went right back to hurting like hell. I threw the lighter back onto the jumbled pile of someone else’s stored crap.

7

Winter passed, a cold mass of air that occasionally turned moisture into snow, but never with enough staying power to interrupt the routine for more than a few days. Other kids got excited about snow days, but for me they came to mean a little bit of humiliation. When school was out, Bobby and I practiced our new skills, and while he got good at all of them quickly, I pretty much sucked. The only thing I seemed to do better than Bobby was the mind thing. I could repel him. If I tried hard, he couldn’t repel me. But the idea of mentally forcing my will on a friend seemed unfriendly, so I rarely did it. Unless he was really pissing me off.

Like I said, snow days were the worst. On normal days, we had school, homework, other stuff to take up the time. My parents were music lovers, so they gave me a choice: Pick any instrument to learn. I picked the French horn, mostly because I thought they’d laugh and say no. You know the expression
cut off your nose to spite your face
? Yeah, that. With apologies to anyone who finds the French horn to be a major turn-on, my experience was that it just made me a bigger dork. But when I tried to backpedal and choose something cooler, like say the electric guitar, Mom and Dad were having none of it. French horn it was. Well played, dork.

Anyway, at least French horn lessons had one thing going for them: Bobby wasn’t there to make me feel bad about what I couldn’t do. My music teacher was paid to handle that role on his own, but at least with him the stakes were scales and sight reading, not warping minds and lighting fingers on fire.

But snow days. Geez. On snow days, Bobby would be over early in the morning, begging me to go “out” — that was our word for the storage building. And every time it was the same. “Try to do something else to hurt me,” he’d say.

It was getting annoying. The trick with the lighter got old once Bobby mastered it. For me, it was harder. I spent a lot of time
concentrating
. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe Bobby’s seemingly effortless way of just
doing it
was the way it was supposed to work.

Bobby would dare me to do crazy things. Light his hair on fire, smash his finger with a hammer, cut him with a utility blade. I tried to talk to him about
why
this was happening. Why were we able to do these things? Things no one should be able to do? Bobby didn’t care. And alone at night, turning it over in my mind, I had no answers.

We did our best to control the process, but in the end it came to seem natural and self-directed. It was something we didn’t have to do much about. Once our bodies got used to the various forms of damage we wanted to inflict on ourselves, they learned to adapt and overcome. I was just much more timid about experimenting, so Bobby flourished while I floundered. I could tell that frustrated him. He felt held back. I felt humiliated. He wanted me to move faster, try harder. In a way, he was bullying me all over again.

Thinking back, I don’t really know why I was such a stick in the mud. I could push people’s minds, at least within reason. I felt no pain from fire. When I relaxed, I could even manage the hammer trick without pain or blood. And yet, because I was a kid, I spent most of my time upset and moping about how Bobby could do it better.

Oh yeah, the hammer trick. That was particularly neat, and certainly not anything I planned to show my mom. She’d have me under round-the-clock psychiatric supervision if she had any idea what we did. What we could do.

When we did the hammer trick, we’d put one hand on a hard, flat surface. There were plenty of those around the storage building, especially when someone left a unit open — old tables, appliances, whatever. We didn’t even have a hammer, we just called it the hammer trick. We’d find something else hard and metal, compact enough that we could easily swing it with one hand, similar to a hammer. Then we’d bring it slamming down, crushing our other hand.

And that hand would
shif
t
.

On its own, with no input from our brain or muscles, it would move out of the way of the falling hammer-like object. Sometimes it was subtle, like a few of our fingers separating themselves to allow the blow to miss. Sometimes more drastic — watching closely, it was like our hand would sluice out of the way, losing distinct form where it sat waiting to be crushed and regaining form in a new place.

It was mind-boggling.

The first time Bobby tried it, I called him out. “You totally moved!” I cried.

Bobby looked back, eyes wide. “Didn’t. Honest.”

“Shut up, liar.”

“You do it,” he said, daring me.

“No way.”

“Then how about this,” Bobby said that first time. “You smash my hand while I’m not looking. No way I can move in time if I’m not watching, right?” I hesitated, then agreed.

Because, like I said, boys could be real dicks as friends. So, in order to call him out, I had to prove he was cheating by smashing his hand into a bloody pulp.

He handed me the hammer, which was actually just a discarded metal pipe. It was pretty heavy. Then he turned away, leaving one hand on the surface of someone’s credenza. “Go ahead,” he said, looking toward the back wall of the storage unit.

I couldn’t resist a joke. “You know,” I said, “this is gonna hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.”

Bobby turned back for just a second, with a serious but calm expression. “No, it won’t.” He turned away again.

And I brought the pipe down.

As I stood there, pipe wedged in the crack it had just made in the credenza’s mahogany surface, I thought to myself,
How’d he do it? How’d he know when to flinch?

But eventually Bobby convinced me. It wasn’t him, it was his body. It did the work for him. It just knew what to do, on its own, like it was
preserving
itself. Finally, he had me so convinced that I did the trick, too. First, with lighter implements that were unlikely to leave permanent damage. It worked. It wasn’t long before I moved up to pipes and other heavy hammers myself.

Still, Bobby was the brave one. More willing to try the next crazy thing. Every time I did the hammer trick, I always assumed,
this time it won’t work
, and I’d be in the hospital again like a dunce. But it always worked. Always.

As winter started to fade, Bobby’s appetite for stunts increased. One day, he was at my house and we were playing videogames. My mom was sewing at a table across the room. I could tell Bobby was anxious about something.

Finally, Mom got up to get a soda, and Bobby turned to me. “Let’s get out of here,” he said. “This is boring.”

“I don’t feel like going to… going out… right now,” I said, not taking my eyes off the TV.

“Come on, man. We’ve played this game like 50 times.” He got up and started pacing around the room.

I ignored him.

Then I heard the sewing machine start up. At first, I assumed my mom had returned.

“Johnny,” Bobby said. “
John
.” The second time it was more forceful, trying to get my attention. I paused the game and looked over, annoyed.

“
What
?” I asked, exasperated. Then I saw what he was doing. Bobby had one foot on the pedal powering the sewing machine and he was holding his hand out toward the moving needle. “No — cut that out!” I said in a harsh whisper.

He grinned. “I’m gonna do it.” I rushed over to stop him, and he thrust his hand under the rapidly bobbing needle.

At just that moment, my mom came back in the room, carrying a glass of fizzing soda and looking at us with alarm. “Boys. What are you doing with my machine?” Bobby quickly took his foot off the pedal and the machine went quiet.

“Um. Ow,” he said, not very convincingly. “Ow! Sorry, Mrs. B. Hey, I gotta go.” He ran out, holding the hand he had thrust into the moving machine.

Looking down, I saw the needle.

It was bent into a U shape, destroyed.