Jumper

by Steven Gould

  “Your parents are that rich?”

  I thought about Dad, the skinflint, with his Cadillac and his bottle. “My dad does all right, but I don’t take anything from him. I have my own money—banking interests.”

  “You don’t go to school and you don’t work? What do you do?”

  I smiled without humor. “I read a lot.”

  “You said that.”

  “Well... it’s true.”

  She looked out the window on the other side of the cab. Both her hands clutched tightly around her purse. Finally she turned back and said, “I ate before the show, but some cappuccino or espresso at one of those sidewalk cafés would be nice.”

  A couple of days after the bank robbery, when my nerves had settled somewhat, I moved into the Gramercy Park hotel. This was nice for a while, but the atmosphere of the hotel and the size of the room got to me after a month.

  I started looking for an apartment in the Village, first, but, even though I could afford things there, most of the places wanted references and ID and bank accounts—stuff I didn’t have. Finally I found a place in East Flatbush for half the money with half the hassle. I got a year’s lease and paid the landlord in postal money orders for the deposit and three months’ rent.

  He seemed happy.

  Shortly after I moved in, I did some minor repairs, added iron brackets on both sides of the doors to hold two-by-four drop bars, and walled up a walk-in closet off the hall. When I was done, it was just another blank wall, a room without an entrance.

  Except to me, that is.

  And, except for the odd pounding, which I was careful to do during the day while my downstairs neighbors were at work, nobody was the wiser since I’d jumped the materials directly into the apartment from a lumberyard in Yonkers. Nobody saw me carry the lengths of two-by-fours or Sheetrock into the apartment.

  I moved the money from the library after that, stacking it neatly on the shelves in the hidden closet and devoting an entire week to replacing the Chemical Bank paper straps with rubber bands and then burning the paper straps in the kitchen sink.

  Before that, I just knew that I was going to show up at the library and find a policeman waiting for me. Now the worst I feared was the landlord coming in and wondering what I’d done with the closet.

  Covering the wall so cleanly really did something for me. It wasn’t something I bought with money. It wasn’t something someone else did for me. It left me feeling good about myself.

  I resolved to do more work with my hands in the future.

  To furnish the apartment I bought only furniture that I could lift. If something was too big for me to lift, it had to break apart into liftable pieces. That way I could jump them directly to the apartment.

  Most of my furniture purchases were bookshelves. Most of my other purchases were books.

  Millie was in town for four more days. She let me follow her through several traditional New York sights—the Bronx Zoo, the Metropolitan Museum, the Empire State Building. I took her to see two more Broadway shows and to a dinner at Tavern on the Green. She accepted them reluctantly.

  “You’re really sweet, David, but you’re three and a half years younger than me. I don’t like you spending money on me under false pretenses.”

  We were walking in Central Park across the Sheep Meadow on our way to the mall. Kites, bright daubs of flitting pigment, tried to paint the sky. Bicyclists went by in clumps on the sidewalk on the other side of the fence.

  “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. “I’ll buy you an Italian ice.”

  She laughed. “No. 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 midtown 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 hea
d 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.”