Mr. Fahrenheit

by T. Michael Martin

  “A call about what, sir?”

  “A call from someone who wants to tell you the same thing I do: You’ve got one helluva future ahead of you. He asked for you by name.” They walked to the door to the conference room; diffuse light filtered through the pane of fogged glass. Quietly, Papaw said, “I just had to come down and meet this fella in person. He and I had a good chat about you this mornin’, and let me tell ya, son, he’s eager to meet you.”

  Suddenly Benji realized why Papaw didn’t look as old this morning. It was because he was excited.

  Papaw said, “This fella’s from the FBI. Now ain’t that somethin’?”

  Two times in his life, Benji had been sent to this conference room for meetings with the principal and guidance counselor (both times for talking to CR during class), and those had been two of the most existentially horrifying moments of his high school career. But as the doom-door swung wide now, Benji was too stunned to be frightened. What he saw inside didn’t align with reality. The vicious lurch of his stomach wasn’t from terror but from a kind of vertigo.

  The world shifted under his feet, and Benji saw the dark man.

  Past the conference room desk, the man from the FBI stood sharply silhouetted against the wall of glass on the far side of the office, gazing out on the white glare of the November daybreak.

  Slowly, like a planet, the man rotated toward Benji. His suit jacket, his slacks, his necktie loosened at the knot: all of them were night black. His stark-white shirt was his only light item, and it shone as bright as a searchlight. Black suit, Benji thought wildly. Man in black.

  And he became terribly aware of the question mark–shaped alien object in his backpack.

  “Mister Lightman!” said the man, crossing the room, closing the distance between them. “How are you? I’m Agent Joshua McKedrick. But you can call me Agent Joshua McKedrick.” He made a smile that never quite connected to his eyes.

  Benji took the agent’s offered hand, distantly hearing Papaw’s chuckle. Agent Joshua McKedrick’s grip swallowed Benji’s hand whole.

  He was forty years old, tops, and stood only a couple of inches taller than Benji, but Benji still felt dwarfed. The agent was broad shouldered, perhaps that was part of it. His hair was pale gold, slicked back on a pale scalp; his eyes were hard gray like tombstones or steel. Stale cigarettes and stale coffee were on his breath when he spoke, which he did with a voice sharp with a big-city accent Benji only knew from movies. Boston? New York? (Benji’d always felt vaguely inferior whenever he met people from big cities.)

  As the agent ended the handshake, Papaw said, “Well, Agent McKedrick, I’m real sorry to do this, but I should get back to the station. Paperwork calls, y’know?”

  “Absolutely, Sheriff. I deeply appreciate you coming down.”

  “Truly my pleasure. I’ll see you tonight, Benjamin. Agent, again, it was just so good to meet’cha.”

  As Papaw left with a wink Benji’s way, Benji felt the low panic of an irrevocable mistake, like he was little and had just gotten home and realized he’d left his favorite toy back in the park, and now the night was gathering and he just knew in his heart he would never see that toy again. Maybe McKedrick really wasn’t here for any reason connected to the saucer; probably he wasn’t. But Benji was still scared, ill prepared, and one of Papaw’s favorite phrases flitted through his mind:

  If you want to dance, Benjamin, you’ve got to pay the fiddler.

  “So,” said the agent into the silence that spun out after the door clicked closed, “I hear you’re a man with some amazing secrets.”

  What. The. Ass?

  Benji began, “What do you mean—?”

  “Hold on, I’m going to sit down, kid.”

  Homecoming decorations were stacked around the room, so at the moment, only two chairs were open. McKedrick sat in the leather chair the principal always used. Benji started to sit in the other, less-comfortable chair reserved for students, but when his butt was halfway down, McKedrick grabbed that chair, too, swinging it away, stationing it in front of himself as a footrest. His shoes were black, but shined to a glow. “I got a sore back like you wouldn’t believe, sorry, kid.”

  “No problem, I don’t mind standing.”

  “Do something for me: sit down. I’ll get a sore neck, too, if I have to keep looking up at you.” McKedrick winked. Which seemed friendly enough.

  But there was something strange about it—maybe the way the rest of his face stayed slack—that made Benji uneasy.

  The only other place to sit was on the room’s heater, which was built into the wall beside them. It was so low that he had to look upward at McKedrick. It made Benji’s butt uncomfortably hot. He scooted forward, balancing on a sharp corner. “So. You were saying—”

  “Right!” McKedrick said. “You’re a man of hidden talents. I’ve gotta say, Lightman, your results were mindblowers.”

  Benji blinked. “‘Results’?”

  McKedrick snagged a manila folder from the conference table. He opened it and riffled through some papers inside. “Your West-Test scores. Your analytical thinking, your math, your comprehension of abstract uses of language. I won’t say the scores are off the charts, but they’re close enough for government work. Ha.”

  It took Benji a few moments to even figure out what McKedrick was talking about. Wait . . . those tests from last year? The West-Test was a standardized test everyone had to take at the end of junior year. It was supposed to help people choose a career path or whatever, but honestly, almost everyone thought of it as kind of a joke.

  “Oh,” Benji said. “I had no idea people actually, like, used that stuff.”

  “Usually we don’t. Law enforcement agencies get your scores, though; the armed forces do, too. But honestly, most of us think of it as kind of a joke.”

  It was mostly just Benji’s relief, but he couldn’t help it: He laughed.

  “Nonetheless, we make exceptions every once in a while if we find people like yourself.”

  “Like me?”

  “Special people,” McKedrick said casually. “Sometimes you come across an individual, and you simply know said individual is destined for greater things. Call it professional intuition, but if you spend enough time in my field, you learn to listen to that voice. The truth is, those people often aren’t even aware of their own extraordinary quality. That’s a tragedy for the United States of America. We conceal our secret aspects at our own peril, you know. That’s another thing you learn in my field.”

  Benji nodded, powerfully flattered but still confused.

  “Listen, I am loath to pry, but the sheriff mentioned that you hope to stay in the area for college.”

  Benji felt his shoulders twinge back microscopically. Well, it’s not really me who’s hoping to do that. But he nodded.

  “Have you ever thought of government work?” When Benji made a politely noncommittal sound, McKedrick laughed good-naturedly. “Of course not, kid! What kind of dream would that be? It can be a decent enough gig, though, no lie. You might’ve heard we’re creating a new criminal justice program at Indiana U? New forensics lab, a house for mock crime scenes. Real CSI stuff, minus all the people taking their sunglasses off oh-so-dramatically all the time. If you’re interested—and with a head like yours, I say in all sincerity that I hope you will be—I’d like to see about setting you up with a full scholarship. It’d be an easy commute for you, and we can always use another good man.”

  Benji didn’t quite know how to respond; it was all so sudden, so bizarre. More than anything, he simply felt good that this big-city guy thought so much of him.

  Except . . . just then, something bothered Benji. McKedrick made all this sound awesome, but wasn’t he really just offering to make Benji a cop? Maybe a different and shinier version, but ultimately another unit in the automated line of The Lightman Family Tradition.

  Don’t think that way. He likes you. Why can’t you just enjoy it?

  “Sounds pretty cool,” Benji said.
<
br />   “It is. Lot of mysteries out there, kid.”

  Benji waited for him to go on, but McKedrick only kept staring, the sentence clinging suspended in the air between them. Lot of mysteries out there, kid.

  A sound shattered the silence: second bell, which signaled that classes would start in two minutes. Benji flinched, then laughed a little at himself, slightly embarrassed.

  McKedrick didn’t smile back.

  McKedrick watched.

  “So. Do you have a pamphlet I can check out?” Benji asked, shrugging his backpack on as the bell stopped screaming.

  “Not with me,” McKedrick said, “but absolutely I can get you one. The rest of my day’s packed, but I can come by your house first thing tomorrow to drop off the literature.”

  Why can’t you just bring it to school? “I have practices before school, unfortunately.”

  “Practices! Wow, I do not miss being young. How long do those practices last?”

  “I think tomorrow’s is from six until school starts at seven thirty.”

  “And they’re not even paying you for it. The real world is a better place, kid. In any case, just so you are aware, we’ll give you a standard background check before the process moves forward. Any history of drug use and underage drinking will rule you out.”

  “I cannot overstate how much that will not be a problem,” Benji deadpanned.

  McKedrick just peered up from the chair. The agent had a kind of relaxed confidence, a man utterly at home in his own flesh. But there was something in the clear gray eyes that gave the impression of a machine ticking stealthily in his skull.

  “Just one last item before you go, chief,” he said. “Something’s been troubling me. That plane crash last night. A pilot with a perfect record is flying in good weather, and he just drops outta the sky like Wile E. Coyote? I’m not a NASA man, but something about that doesn’t quite calculate.”

  A thread of adrenaline stitched inexplicably through Benji’s veins. He nodded noncommittally.

  “You wouldn’t know anything about that,” McKedrick said, “would you?”

  “Why would I?”

  “Weren’t you out last night?”

  The unease gathered in his gut. Why is he asking this? “No.”

  “You weren’t? Because the sheriff said—”

  “Oh. Yeah, no, we drove by. But we didn’t see anything until it was over.”

  McKedrick’s gaze grabbed Benji’s and wouldn’t let go. In another life, he could have made a killing as the world’s greatest hypnotist.

  “It’s an unpleasant situation, don’t you think? Not that it’s my assignment, but I’ve heard how serious football rivalry pranks can get around here.”

  Benji again gave a vague nod. McKedrick’s insinuation that anyone in Bedford Falls would have sabotaged an airplane was funny, even ridiculous. McKedrick seemed smart. Why would he believe that?

  He doesn’t, Benji thought, and it was then that his instinctive grasp of magic (call it professional intuition) offered him a conscious realization: McKedrick wasn’t really interested in the plane crash. He was misdirecting Benji.

  For what?

  “I’m sure I can trust you,” McKedrick said, “to tell me if you hear or think of anything strange, isn’t that right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Sure I can. You’re a smart kid.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re a smart kid.” The emphasis made his point as sharp and unmistakable as a knife: You’re Little League, sonny boy, and I’m the damn New York Yankees. All at once, Benji felt like a time traveler: not a senior in high school at all, but a little boy, heartsick and scared, about to be punished by a man in a uniform. He pictured McKedrick taking away the pod—

  And he felt something strange.

  Rather than feeling helpless, Benji suddenly thrummed with a kind of low electrical anger. It was an emotional electric field so powerful that it made his skin feel like it was vibrating.

  It was alien to him.

  And it was beautiful.

  “We were just cruising.” Benji shrugged. “I better get to class.”

  McKedrick’s gaze trailed over Benji’s shoulder. Benji realized: His skin actually was vibrating. The silver saucer shrapnel was buzzing in his backpack.

  McKedrick saw Benji’s utterly shocked expression before Benji could disguise it.

  “What have you got in there, kid?” McKedrick said in response to Benji’s strange reaction. McKedrick stood, and for one millisecond, something flashed in his eyes that shocked Benji: something like compassion, or pity. I know you’re in over your head, Lightman. Don’t you lie to me.

  “I dunno,” said Benji. “But it came from . . .”

  . . . outer space . . .

  “. . . it came from you,” Benji finished, and moved so smoothly that McKedrick did not notice Benji’s hand retrieving a small silver object from his coat pocket. Benji reached up and pulled that object from McKedrick’s ear, and showed it to the agent.

  A joy buzzer.

  McKedrick gave a single dry, confused chuckle.

  And Benji, filled with a gorgeously reckless courage, said, “Out of this world, right?”

  Benji strolled into the hallway and rejoined the stream of students, feeling an urge to shout to the population of the planet, GUESS WHO IS A BADASS?! He settled on smiling, the fantastic metal of adrenaline filling his mouth. Even when the tardy bell rang and a group of stragglers jostled into him, he felt untouchable. Lighter. So this is how CR always feels, Benji thought. He stopped walking, just paused right there in the middle of the main hall, watching the last kids rushing into classrooms while the echo of the bell faded. And then the doors shut and the hallway filled with that almost-eerie almost-silence that you hear only and always when you’re walking through school with no one else around. It was oddly exhilarating, that feeling—like you had this power or freedom that all the kids tethered to their desks didn’t, even though really you were just going to the bathroom. So this is how I’m always going to feel, Benji thought.

  He went to the bathroom.

  Nobody at the urinals or sink; no feet in the stalls. He locked the last stall behind him, kneeled on the scuzzy floor, and tore open his backpack. The silvery cylinder lay at the bottom of it, smushed between his tuxedo and community college brochures. The curve in the metal looked a little like a kid’s drawing of a smile.

  No, Benji corrected himself. Like a question mark.

  And now the Question was silent. Cautiously, he put his index finger on it. Buzz-less.

  So he lifted it. The Question caught the bathroom fluorescents, bathing the interior of the backpack with a video game treasure-chest glow. He turned it in his hands. Fractals of light washed over the graffitied stall walls.

  Here’s a question: What the ass just happened in the office? Benji didn’t know. All he knew was that rather than feeling powerless, he’d felt almost mighty. And the Question had seemed to somehow respond to that intense emotion.

  Like magic.

  Presto.

  And for once, I kept my magic secret.

  Change-o.

  10

  The rest of the morning felt a month long. When the lunch bell finally rang, Benji not-quite-jogged to the new wing of the school. The school’s main building was really old, like days-of-disco old, but in the early 2000s it seemed like Bedford Falls’s future was one big fat check from the natural gas companies, so the city cut down some forest land to build the new football stadium, and also added this new wing with computer labs and a huge auditorium. A plaque beside the auditorium double doors read: To all fine arts, this theater is dedicated. It was currently occupied by the football team, who were watching a video, projected on a portable movie screen, of rival Newporte High’s latest game. Coach Nicewarner stood by the screen, illustrating Newporte’s weaknesses with a laser pointer.

  Benji spotted Ellie at the small audiovisual control booth in the middle-back of the auditorium. There were severa
l boards covered in the buttons and sliding switches that controlled the auditorium, but Ellie was focused on her laptop.

  Benji wove through the plushy blue-and-gold seats. “You’ve got your independent study period this afternoon, right?” he said when he reached her.

  Ellie glanced up. “Howdy to you, too.”

  “Sorry, hi.”

  The glowing red eye of a laser pointer hovered on Benji’s chest. “You got something real important to say to all of us, son? You got a message from the pope?” Coach grumbled.

  Benji waved without apologizing, took the stool next to Ellie, and mostly whispered, “I need your help.”

  “Ellie,” Coach called, “fast-forward to the end of the fourth quarter, would’ja, hon?”

  Ellie offered Coach a plastic smile, punched a key on the control panel, and told Benji through her teeth, “When a man asks a question that ends with ‘hon’ or ‘sweetie,’ I always want to answer, ‘Ew.’” She punched another key; on the movie screen Newporte resumed pummeling the other team at normal speed.

  “I’ll write that in my diary to make sure I remember, Tootsie-Wootsie,” someone whispered to Benji’s right. It was CR.

  Ellie casually scratched her cheek with her middle finger—not smiling, Benji noticed.

  “You need to watch the game, don’t you?” Benji asked CR.

  “Nah, I already did, like, three times. I had a double period of Phys Ed this morning.” Ellie laughed under her breath. “What?” CR said.

  “Two gym classes,” Ellie said, “because you simply can’t fit all there is to learn about the intricacies of indoor kickball into a single ninety-minute block?”

  “Damn, Eleanor, moody much? I guess I’m not the only one having a double perio—”

  “Nope!” Benji said warningly, raising his hand in front of CR’s face like a stop sign.

  CR stared at it for a moment, then at Benji, like he didn’t understand what Benji was doing. Then, with a confused tentativeness, CR gave the hand a high five.

  Ellie snapped her laptop shut, and just before she did, Benji saw that a Word document named “Short Film Narration” was open—a blank document. She slid the computer into her backpack. His chest tightened. It wasn’t like he’d never been caught in the crossfire between CR and Ellie before. When they’d dated sophomore year, they’d bickered practically all the time. Benji had been the Switzerland of those conflicts: studiously neutral. During their rare post-breakup fights, Benji was always reminded of their prior relationship, which was unpleasant on a number of levels.