Jumper

by Steven Gould

  Millie, seated on the couch, leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. “If I’d been watching this on television, I’d say it was a cheap special effect. You know, the kind where they stop the camera, have the actor walk offstage, and start filming again.”

  “Yeah. I’ll try it on super slow.” I rewound the tape and put playback on its slowest speed.

  We waited, watching my image ask Millie where to jump, my mouth opening and closing in ponderous slow motion. It took over a minute to get to the part where I disappeared. One moment I was there and the next I wasn’t.

  “What was that.”

  “What?”

  “Just as you jumped. There was a sort of flash, kind of.”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t see anything.”

  “Back it up. Can you make it go any slower?”

  “That’s the slowest, but I can single-frame it, I guess.” I stood by the camera and rewound to just before the jump, then started advancing using the still button and the frame advance. It took even longer to get to the point where I disappeared, but when I did...

  “Wow,” said Millie.

  The video image, held wavering on the screen, had been me standing, but, from this, it went to a rough outline of myself, a Davy-shaped hole. Inside this hole was the tail of an American Airlines 727 as seen through the windows of the airport observation deck.

  “What’s that?”

  I told Millie where I’d jumped to. She nodded vigorously, her eyes wide. I hit the frame advance again and the Davy-shaped window was gone. The scene showed my apartment living room.

  “Neat! No wonder the air doesn’t go ‘pop.’ You’re not disappearing one place and appearing in another—you’re going through a doorway. Or, the doorway is passing around you, since you don’t move. Fast forward to the point you reappear.”

  When the specific point on the tape had been located, I single-framed through images of the empty living room until another Davy-shaped window appeared, slightly different to reflect my changed posture. The view was a different slice of the 727, reflecting where I had been standing when I jumped back. When I hit the frame advance again, the window was replaced by my full body.

  “See?”

  I nodded. “What would happen if I couldn’t go through that door?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, uh, what would happen if I were handcuffed to something too big to move? Or if I was being held by someone I couldn’t lift?”

  Millie stood. “Try it. Here, I’ll grab you from behind and you try and jump.”

  I thought about it. “Uh, I don’t think I like that idea. What if part of you went with me, but not the rest?”

  She blinked. “Has that sort of thing ever happened to you?”

  I shook my head.

  “Well, it doesn’t seem likely, but I must admit that the idea of having just my arms go with you is not very appealing.”

  “Hold on, we can try this another way.”

  I jumped to a novelty store on Seventh Avenue near Times Square and bought a cheap pair of handcuffs. The clerk also tried to sell me a rubber mask of Richard Nixon, very cheap, on special, but I declined.

  “Well,” Millie said, when I showed them to her. “This is no time for kinky sex.”

  I laughed. “Let’s go someplace where I can lock it to something solid.”

  We went outside, on the porch. It was out of sight of other apartments and it had an iron railing firmly set in the concrete landing. Before I put the handcuffs on, I made sure both keys worked on both cuffs and handed one of the keys to Millie for safekeeping. Then I locked one cuff to the railing and put the other cuff on my left wrist.

  “Where are you going to jump?”

  “Just inside.”

  I pictured the living room and tried to jump. For one brief instant it seemed like I made it; then I felt a searing pain in my left arm and wrist, and I was still standing on the porch.

  “Shit!” I felt like saying all sorts of other things. My wrist was bleeding from scraped skin and I felt like my arm had been stretched by a gorilla. My shoulder and elbow both ached but I didn’t think either of them were dislocated. “Please unlock the cuffs,” I gasped.

  She took her key and unlocked my wrist. I cradled my arm to me and swore. Millie looked scared. “Bad idea, huh?”

  I laughed harshly. The pain was fading somewhat and the bleeding really was just scraped skin. We went back inside, and as I washed my wrist in the bathroom sink, Millie told me what she’d seen.

  “You blinked, sort of. I swear I could see the living room bookshelf for just an instant but you didn’t go anywhere. What did it feel like?”

  “Like my left arm was on the rack. You know, pulled apart by wild horses.” I was moving my elbow and shoulder more freely now, and the bleeding was reduced to a slow welling. Millie walked back to her apartment and returned with a roll of gauze and tape. She neatly wrapped the scrape.

  “Well, at least we don’t have to worry about you taking part of things. If you can’t take it through the gate with you, it pulls you back. We should see what happens when I hold on to you from behind.”

  I had misgivings, but she was curious. We went out into the living room and moved the recliner back to give plenty of room. Millie grabbed me from behind, her arms around my chest under my arms. “Ready?” I asked.

  She tightened her grip. “Ready.”

  I jumped to the bedroom, braced for resistance from behind, and almost staggered forward when I appeared in the bedroom, sans Millie. I heard her gasp through the open door. I walked back and saw that she was on the floor, on all fours.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Just off balance. It felt like, oh, you were greased, like you sort of shot between my arms like a watermelon seed. Let me try again.”

  I shrugged. “All right, if you want.”

  This time she put one arm over my left shoulder and one arm under my right arm to circle my chest bandolier style. She grasped her wrists and squeezed so hard I had trouble breathing. “Go,” she said.

  It was harder this time, and when I appeared in the bedroom, Millie was with me, arms still wrapped around. She gasped in my right ear and let go.

  “Interesting, interesting, interesting.” I turned and saw her smiling, her back to the bed. I took a sliding step forward and pushed her over. This terminated experiments in teleportation for the day, but opened the way to experiments of another kind.

  Later she said, “Davy, today I’ve been in Florida, London, Texas, and Oklahoma. There’s just one thing I want to know.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do I get frequent-flyer mileage for this?”

  Chapter 14

  The Entreprise Publique de Transport de Voyageurs bus to Tigzirt was crowded with locals and smelled overly of sweat and strange spices, but the scenery, alternating between steep hills and azure waves, was lovely. The normal tourists who went to Tigzirt went by the buses chartered by the Algerian Tourist Agency or in rented Fiats. Although it was only twenty-six kilometers east from Algiers, there were many stops and the journey took an hour and a half. There were several attempts to talk to me in French, Arabic, and Berber, but I just shrugged.

  At noon the bus stopped on the N24, by a bridge where a small stream poured out of the Tellian Atlas Mountains and ran to the sea. I couldn’t see any buildings. The passengers and driver all poured off the bus and washed their hands in the stream. Some of them carried small rugs with them. Others knelt on the ground. All of them began praying to Mecca. After fifteen minutes of this, they got on the bus again and we drove on.

  In Tigzirt the clerk at the Mirzana Hotel had some English but kept saying that there were no rooms available. I hadn’t expected any rooms. I’d been told that Algeria’s beach resorts are booked months in advance.

  “I don’t want a room,” I repeated. “I am looking for someone. A guest.” I put down a twenty-dollar bill on the counter. The official exchange rate made it about ninety-five dinars,
but the street rate was over five times that. I wondered if the clerk knew that. I’d found out by reading the Fodor’s travel guide.

  The clerk took the bill and looked more attentive. “Who is it you are looking for?”

  “Rashid Matar.”

  The clerk blinked and was still for a moment and then said, “I have no knowledge of this person.”

  Bullshit. I took out the photocopy of his picture and showed it to him. He blinked again, shrugged, and said, “Sorry, no.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Very sure.” He shrugged again.

  “Well, thank you for your time,” I said, and went across the lobby and into the restaurant.

  They gave me a table overlooking the sea and the tennis courts. The Mirzana was on a hill, well up from the beach. People came to Tigzirt for the beach or for the impressive Roman ruins or for the Byzantine basilica. I ordered mint tea and showed the waiter my picture of Rashid Matar.

  He was visibly frightened and denied ever seeing him, even when I offered money. He wouldn’t touch the money.

  The tea, when it came, was brought by a different waiter who didn’t understand English and left immediately, ignoring the picture I held up.

  The tea was too sweet.

  Two olive-skinned men with bushy mustaches and painfully white tennis clothes were playing on the court, the ball flying back and forth across the net as if it was shot. Through an open door I could hear the thwack, thwack of the rackets addressing the ball. Neither of them were Matar. There were several motor and sail yachts anchored offshore, rolling gently in small swells. And I could make out a strip of crowded beach off to my right.

  I sipped my tea and kept watch, comparing every passing figure with my photo.

  Matar might not be here. This was the best hotel, but there were some private residences that might be for rent. My informant had only said that Matar had been seen here.

  “He was on the beach there, I’m sure of it. There were police around, keeping an eye on things, protecting him, or the local Wali, I think.”

  Dr. Perston-Smythe from Georgetown University had given me a letter of introduction to Mr. Theodore, who was with the British Embassy. He took me out to the Bacour restaurant on rue Patrice Lamumba. The food was local. We finished with much better mint tea than the Mirzana offered.

  Mr. Theodore spent most of his time recommending against the more or less official guides who hung around the Museum of Popular Arts and bemoaning the state of the Casbah, whose picturesqueness has long been overwhelmed by the sordid. “You see, the French left Algeria with an excellent hospital system and some pretty good public works, but the economy was driven by oil until the crash and now you have a nation with a population explosion, thanks to decent medical care, and a crumbling economy. Algeria used to be a net food exporter but now everybody crowds into the city and the desert is overtaking some of the best farmland. The Casbah is one enormous slum, now.” He drank some of his tea carefully, with precision. “I’m left-handed, you know, but it never does to use your left hand to eat. Not in public. Use to make terrible messes.”

  About Rashid Matar he was only able to tell me that he’d been seen in Tigzirt, apparently on vacation, apparently relaxing. “There’s no direct evidence, you know, that links him to the hijacking.”

  “Do you honestly believe he didn’t?”

  He smiled. “No. He’s guilty all right. It’s just that obviously the Algerians made a deal with him to release the rest of the hostages, and they’re keeping up their end of it. They won’t be sympathetic to any attempts to extradite him.”

  I nodded.

  He looked at me almost critically. “You aren’t planning anything stupid, are you? I mean, I shouldn’t blame you if you were planning to kill him, but that won’t work. He’s the killer and they’ll see you coming from miles away.”

  I felt my ears getting red. “I don’t know what I’ll do. For the time being, though, I just want to find him.”

  “Well, if you were a British national, I would seriously consider bundling you back home.”

  So, here I was in Tigzirt, where Rashid Matar had been seen playing on the beach and consorting with the Wali, the governor of the local Wilaya. I decided I’d stay in the hotel another hour, then come back the next day and try the beach. I paid the bill in dinars, then moved back out to the lobby. There was a bench just inside the main entrance with a good view of the lobby and the elevator. I took a paperback from my pocket and began to read.

  There were some German tourists who came in and out, as well as a party of French. The occasional Arabs who came through looked nothing like Matar. I was about to give up when two uniformed members of the Darak al Watani, the national gendarmerie, came through the door. They went up to the clerk and he looked over at me.

  Son of a bitch! I stepped to the door and went through it. Behind me I heard someone yell, “Arrêtez! Arrêtez!” Immediately I turned to the right and, out of sight of the cops, jumped to my apartment in Stillwater. My ears popped hard and I sat down immediately, my knees feeling weak. I heard a bus on the street and jerked.

  Calm down. Do you expect them to walk through the door? They’re on the other side of the planet.

  I took deep breaths. Why was I so timid? I was untouchable, really. I could jump back there now, and, as long as I jumped before they handcuffed me, there wasn’t any way they could keep me. I could even wait until they threw me in a cell, then jump away.

  They could kill you, too. Well, yes.

  Millie was at her father’s home, in Oklahoma City, for the first week of Christmas break. On Christmas day she’d drive up to Wichita, Kansas, to spend the next week with her mother and her stepfather. In any case, she was busy with family and, though we’d scheduled some dates in that period, I had to leave her alone most of the time.

  I jumped to Stanville, by the Dairy Queen on Main Street, and walked slowly down the street, looking at the Christmas decorations.

  There’d been a snow just after Thanksgiving and the cold weather had held, so the yards and park were covered with the stuff, dirty with blown soot and detritus. Thin dark trails, trod down to dead grass, cut across the gray snow in front of the courthouse. The streets were clear except where the snowplow had packed drifts up against the curb.

  The Christmas decorations, marvels of petrochemical science, were the same plastic stars and candy canes used by the city for the last six years. The plastic fringes on the holly were looking tattered, and on one of the red stars on a courthouse lamppost someone had spray-painted REVOLUTION NOW! Somebody else had spray-painted a line through the “now!” and put, instead, “... whenever.”

  The powers of imperialist Stanville were probably trembling in their boots.

  It was late afternoon in Algeria, but midday in Stanville. There were quite a few shoppers on the street. If it was this busy in our relatively sterile downtown, I shuddered to think what it was like out at the Wal-Mart. Then I saw Dad’s car parked outside Gil’s Tavern by an expired parking meter.

  Coming up the street was the three-wheeled utility vehicle the police used for the meter maid. Mrs. Thompson, overweight and overdressed in her genuine police jacket with the blue fur collar, was writing up a BMW with out-of-state plates. I wondered if the meter had in fact expired or if Mrs. Thompson was simply ticketing the owner for sinful decadence and/or being a foreigner. Mrs. Thompson was the wife of Reverend Thompson, the Baptist minister.

  I reached in my pocket and pulled out some coins. Half of them were Algerian and there were a few English 5p coins but I had enough nickels to put forty-five minutes on the meter.

  Only when I saw the little arrow pointed up did I realize that I was helping my dad.

  I frowned. There was a cinder block by the front door of Gil’s, used in warmer weather to hold the door open. I considered picking it up and pitching it through the windshield of the Cadillac. I even walked over and was looking down at it when Mrs. Thompson’s three-wheeled scooter drove slow
ly by, distracting me.

  Dad must have seen Mrs. Thompson through the window, for he came through the door at that moment, looking down at silver change in his left hand. Then he saw me standing there, between him and the meter.

  He looked frightened.

  “Davy?”

  The anger was still there, somehow increased by the shock on his face, the fear. I reached out and slapped the change from his outstretched hand. Then, as the coins bounced on the sidewalk, I jumped away, to my cliff dwelling in the Texas desert.

  When I returned to Tigzirt, I dressed differently, more formally, in a tropical-weight linen suit. I avoided the hotel, and instead walked down through the village to the beach. There were a few beggars on the street, but far fewer than there had been in Algiers. The wind was off the Mediterranean and the sun was shining brightly. I hoped my description was not circulating or, if it was, I hoped it differed substantially from my present appearance.

  The beach wasn’t crowded and the only women in bathing suits were non-Arab. Along the water, dressed in the full-length chadour and veil, three women (who could tell?), their robes pulled up to ankle height, walked along, their bare feet in the foam. I could tell they were Saudi Arabian by the black robes and just as much tourists as the Swedes in their bikinis.

  The fifteenth sunbather recognized the picture. He was French, but his English, though thickly accented, was good. “Ah, yes. The man with the bodyguards. He was staying on the big yacht.” He looked out at the bay, toward the cluster of yachts anchored in the lee of the right headland. “Hmmm. It’s not there. It was the large motor yacht with the blue smokestack. It was very big, at least thirty meters. This man would come to the beach and talk to the beautiful women, to take them water-skiing.”

  I thanked him and confined the rest of my inquiries to this yacht. No one on the beach could tell me its name or when it had left, though several had seen it. An Englishwoman suggested I try the fuel dock at the harbor, by the fishing boats. “There’s a couple of shops there, where all those boat people restock. The harbormaster is there, as well, and he should know.”