Mercury Man (13 page)

Tom shook his head. “You know I'm not an artist, Grandpa.”

“Look, don't play games with me! You're good enough to do me a sketch. I need a sketch to do some checking on this fella, understand? And you're the only one who can do it.”

Tom nodded doubtfully. He felt under pressure, but he couldn't say no to his grandfather.

“You've still got the sketch pad and stuff I gave you?”

“Yeah …”

“I know a few people who might be able to help me find out who this fella is. I also want to see if I can get hold of the Fabricon company reports and to check the newspapers for interesting stuff. So we need some time, a couple of days. We can't go to see Tarn before Monday at the earliest.”

“What do I tell the kids in the meantime? They're bound to ask questions.”

“Don't tell them a thing! Try to pretend what you did was a lark. Brush it off. But get as much from them as you can. You know what I figure?”

“What?”

“I figure we know a few things. It looks like Tarn does have something to hide. It's also possible that some kind of indoctrination is going on over there. It also looks like Tarn and the boys have an enemy who's watching them and looking out for ways to get at them. You know who Pavlov was, Tom?”

“Some kind of scientist, right?”

“A scientist who worked out conditioned reflexes. You know, stimulus and response stuff. You ring a bell every time you feed the dog, then pretty soon
when you ring the bell the dog salivates, food or no food.”

“Is that important, Grandpa?”

“It's important because what you saw might have been some kind of conditioning. If there was a worse kind of conditioning going on, where do you think it might happen?”

Tom looked at his grandfather. “In the Pavlov Room?”

Jack smiled. “Bright fella!”

They finished up the coffee and juice; Jack threw some change on the table.

“I'm going to pass up the comics this morning. I've got too many things to check out,” he explained, as they emerged from the dingy cafe into the sunlight. “If I don't die of a heat stroke I'll expect you to bring me that sketch over later.” Mopping his brow, he added, “In fact, it might be a good idea to do it before your mother gets home. She doesn't know anything about this, I hope.”

“No, she doesn't.”

“Well, keep it that way. We'll tell her as soon as we know more. She might have some good ideas — and anyway, she has to know eventually.”

Jack climbed on his bike. “Call me right away if that fella shows up again, although he said he wouldn't and I somehow believe him.”

Tom waved as his grandfather pedalled away. The old man, wobbling a little, picked up speed and began to cruise bravely among the light mid-morning traffic.

Tom glanced at the comic book shop. Sebastian had shoved the door half-open and was struggling to haul out some cases full of LPs for a sidewalk display, smiling wryly at his own clumsiness and muttering to himself as he did so.

Tom ambled over to help and Sebastian thanked him. “Coming in?” he asked, wiping his forehead and his grey mop of hair with an old dishtowel. “I see Jack's gone already.”

“Yeah.”

Tom didn't feel like looking at magazines this morning, but he didn't want to disappoint Sebastian, either. Some days customers were pretty scarce at Crosstown, so for a while he poked around among some copies of
Heavy Metal
, trying to find one he could buy, while Sebastian opened boxes and put on an old Pink Floyd album. A ceiling fan slowly revolved, doing little to cool the place, and Tom was just getting ready to move along when, much to his surprise, a bright red Camaro screeched up and stopped outside the store.

Two teenage hunks in cut-off jeans and a stunningly pretty blonde girl got out, laughing and playfully shoving at one another. The girl was nearly as tall as the big-shouldered guys, but she was as slender as a dancer and moved with the same kind of easy grace. Despite the sunglasses, there was no mistaking that face; Tom recognized Maggie Stevenson immediately.

The trio drifted across the sidewalk, and he saw to his horror that they were heading straight for
Sebastian's store. He started to move, to get out of there, but his clumsy actions upset a counter display. CDs tumbled down, and while he was frantically collecting them, the door swung open and Maggie entered with her friends.

All of a sudden the place seemed about as big as a walk-in closet or a tool shed. Tom picked up the last of the CDs and took a step toward the door.

Maggie swung her hips, twirled her sunglasses in one hand, looked at him, and laughed. The hunks — they were high school football players, and one of them he remembered was named Jeff — wore expressions of smug impenetrability.
Don't look at me
, they seemed to say.
If I want your attention I'll ask for it
. It was only when they exchanged glances with Maggie that they dissolved into smirking non-resistance: if she had even so much as stuck her tongue out, it seemed, they would have melted away into Sebastian's dusty carpet.

“Morning, you guys,” Sebastian greeted them. He was warming up a can of soup on a Bunsen burner.

The boys grunted but didn't deign to look at him. Maggie ignored the greeting and said, “God, it stinks in here!”

Sebastian treated this remark as if it were a piece of ordinary social discourse. “Haven't seen you guys in a while,” he said. “Looking for something special?”

The hunk named Jeff elbowed the other one and guffawed.

“Seems like he's hidden the stash already, Pudge. Didn't know we were coming, huh?”

Pudge seemed to choke on his own half-suppressed laugh. “They must have raided him again. The cops took all his bubble gum and dirty pictures.”

This remark launched Maggie and the two men into gales of laughter. When this subsided there was a brief pause, and Maggie cast a look at Tom, who stood with one hand clenched on the last CD he had retrieved from the floor.

“Look who's here,” she said, “the Fabricon kid!”

More laughter. Tom tried half-heartedly to join in. He wondered how he could get past them and out the door. The grim shopping mall outside looked like paradise.

Maggie drifted toward him; the curve of her white T-shirt and the flash of skin at her thighs made him feel a little weak and at the same time stupidly happy. He tried not to look at her.

“Hey, he's smiling!” Pudge said. “He's been smoking up with Sebastian.”

“You shouldn't do stuff like that,” Maggie said. She stood so close now he could almost feel the warmth of her body — at the same time she was miles away. “You know it's bad for the complexion.”

Tom blushed. He cursed the acne that had pitted and marked his cheeks and neck. His mother claimed it was better now, but that was just his mother.

“He doesn't have any complexion,” Jeff said. “He's a robot. Old Dr. Tarn turned him into a robot.”

Another gust of laughter. Before it had quite subsided, Maggie said quietly, “A robot with a face only a mother could love.”

Tom couldn't believe what he'd heard. Full of hatred and pain, he found he could hardly swallow, hardly move his lips.

“You shut up,” he managed, but his voice broke.

The jocks stared at him; they seemed to be waiting for a signal from the girl.

He felt Maggie's smile like a searchlight. “Touchy, isn't he?”

“Touchy but not feely,” Jeff murmured.

“Were you buying something?” Maggie asked, reaching for the CD he still clutched tightly in his left hand. He pulled it away quickly and murmured, “I wasn't buying anything.”

The jock named Pudge stepped forward and held out his beefy hand. “Let's see it,” he said, in a serious voice.

Tom handed him the CD. Pudge read the label slowly: “
Overcoming Jealousy Through Self-hypnosis
…?” He looked baffled, as if making a joke about this was a little beyond him.

“Maybe he's jealous of his mother's boyfriends,” Jeff said, a wild shot that found its mark.

The laughter that followed, however, was a bit mechanical, as if they had exhausted the subject. Pudge tossed the CD onto the counter. Maggie yawned.

“I thought we came here to get that Smash and Grab poster?” she said, turning her back on Tom. Smash and Grab was a rock group; Tom hated their headbanger music. He wondered how he could get out of the shop; the three of them were still blocking his way and paying him a kind of subliminal attention, as if he were a call on hold.

“Smash and Grab — I sold that one yesterday,” Sebastian said, looking up from his soup. He had seemed to be invisible, to shrink away, while they picked at Tom. “You might try The Green Dragon over on Market. They seem to have just about everything.”

The Green Dragon was part of a comics chain, a bright, spacious, and well-stocked store that would have driven Sebastian out of business, if he had been a businessman in the first place.

“Shit! And we wasted our time coming here!” Maggie said.

“So what are we hanging around for?” Pudge wondered.

“Not because we like robot face,” Jeff decided.

They looked at Tom without seeing him. The two jocks turned and moved lumberingly toward the door. Maggie danced after them, as if annoyed that they had dared to move without a signal from her.

“Come on, you jerks, wait up! I might trip over a dust bunny and fall on my face.”

“Don't worry, we'll give you restitution,” Pudge said, groping for the right word.

Tom stood still, breathing deeply. He could have shouted for joy. They were really going.

The door swung open, then shut, and he was alone with Sebastian. He watched his three persecutors as they jostled around on the sidewalk. He prayed that they would climb into the car and go, that no wayward impulse would pull them back in his direction.

“They're not very nice people,” Sebastian said. He had finished his soup and was wiping the corners of his mouth carefully with a paper towel.

Tom nodded; he was too upset to say anything. The bastards were climbing into the car now, and if he could have snapped his fingers and killed them he wouldn't have hesitated.

“As a matter of fact I do have that Smash and Grab poster,” Sebastian went on. “I don't s'pose you want it? Give it to you for a couple of bucks. Or maybe for nothing. Your grandpa buys a lot here.”

Tom shook his head. He swallowed hard to keep the tears back.

“No, thanks,” he murmured, not looking at Sebastian. “I gotta go.”

With his hand on the door he heard Sebastian's high-pitched voice behind him. “Don't let those folks bother you; they think they're somewhere, but they aren't anywhere, and that's what really irks them.”

Tom turned and nodded gratefully at the benevolent figure bent over the counter. Sebastian began to straighten out the CDs.

Out on the sidewalk, uncertain where to go, he took small comfort from Sebastian's thought:
Maggie's already got a modelling contract and both those guys have football scholarships at good colleges. They're
already
somewhere. I'm the one who's nowhere.

He made his way home in a kind of daze, wondering if he could ever get his life together.

Tom lay on his bed, hardly able to move. Coming back to the stifling apartment he had turned off the portable fans, and now he was sweating miserably, staring at the blotchy ceiling and the grim walls, but determined to make do without Reichert's gifts.

He knew he should be working on that drawing his grandfather had asked him for, but even though the stranger's face was clear in his mind, Tom still wasn't sure he had the skill to get it down on paper.

In fact, he wasn't feeling any too good about himself. Maggie's poisonous words had stuck with him. Arriving home, he had twisted around in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to get a better view of his face and neck. He remembered those terrible months, a couple of years ago, when acne had struck and nearly disfigured him. His grandfather had taken him to a specialist and the heavy drugs had done their job. He knew he was looking better now, but the habits formed then hadn't died. The
affliction had made him shy away from people, just as he had when his father had left them and the kids began to ask embarrassing questions.

It seemed that every once in a while, whenever he felt strong enough to get his life in motion, something would happen and he would have to crawl back into his room, pull the shades down, and sit, with gritted teeth, waiting for things to improve.

All this summer he had felt much better — had almost forgotten his troubles, only to find himself left behind while all the kids flocked to join Fabricon. His suspicions had isolated him again, and nobody but his grandfather admired him for pursuing the issue.

Disgusted, Tom rolled over, threw his pillow at the wall, and cursed his bad luck. He couldn't sleep and he still couldn't work. He stumbled into the living room, flopped onto the couch, and turned the television on. Almost immediately, he began to sink into the lethargy that seemed to be part of staring at the small screen. Not caring what he watched, he flipped aimlessly, filling up his head with meaningless pictures, but soon he settled down to a pattern. He locked into two or three shows at once, switching channels during the ads and returning in time to watch a car chase, a fire, or a shoot-out, to wallow in some grotesque story of incest or rape, or to laugh mechanically at the hollow jokes of the sitcoms. After a while, even though he didn't feel so lonely, he began to despise himself.

When the phone rang, it was almost a relief. He glanced at the clock and saw that was nearly five-thirty.
Evening was coming on, and he'd done absolutely nothing. He was relieved to think that the day would be over soon.