Jumper

by Steven Gould

  When the hijacker walked out of sight again, I jumped to the partition, at the edge of first class. The three men seated there jerked, but the admonition from the hijacker kept them from shouting. I motioned for silence and they blinked at me.

  I used the dentist’s mirror to look around the corner.

  The hijacker was talking to one of the flight attendants, a stunning blonde with a very white face and spots of sweat soaking the armpits of her uniform. The hijacker would emphasize what he was saying with motions of his left hand and the stewardess would twitch in sync with the motion of the switch.

  A phrase from my recent reading came, unbidden. Insh’allah, I thought. If God wills.

  I raised the rod over my head, then brought it down very fast, very hard. Before it reached the height of the hijacker’s arm, I jumped.

  I appeared next to him just in time for the rod to smash into his ulna, two inches back from his wrist. As I hoped, his thumb straightened, lifting away from the switch. His other fingers loosened and the switch fell free, swinging on its cord down to his thigh.

  The pain must have been considerable—I’m sure I heard the bone break—but his right hand whipped the gun around very fast. The rod was moving back up then and it smashed into the bottom of that wrist, knocking the gun up as it fired. Grains of burning powder stung my cheek and the bullet burned along the top of my shoulder. The pistol fell behind him and his right hand reached for the switch.

  I grabbed him then, and jumped to the pit. As I let him go, he was still twisting, trying to grab the button. I flinched away, jumping to the edge of the pit above.

  He detonated five feet above the surface.

  A giant hand slammed into me, lifted me off my feet, and I jumped away, even before the sound reached me, before I could land on the rocks. I staggered out from the alcove at the Shock Trauma e-room and fell to the floor. My shoulder was bleeding, my face stung, and I was having trouble breathing.

  A nurse walked up to me and started asking questions, but I was still struggling to catch my breath, so I ignored her. Finally I took in a great gasp of air, followed by several progressively easier breaths.

  I kept seeing the initial flash of the blast. My mind filled in the results, even though I wasn’t there, from Mom’s death.

  “Sorry,” I said. “What did you want?”

  I killed him. I blew him up, just like Mom.

  She saw the blood then on my shoulder, saw the powder burns on my face. “You’ve been shot.” She turned her head and shouted, “Gurney here!”

  They seemed disappointed, almost, when the source of the blood turned out to come from a shallow graze across the shoulder and the only other wounds were the powder burns. After dressing the shoulder, a nurse carefully picked the grains from my face using very fine tweezers. “If we don’t get ‘em out, they’ll be like tattoos.”

  Before she finished with me, two Baltimore policeman showed up and took station just outside the door. I asked her what they were there for.

  “Gunshot wound. We had to report it. You’d be surprised at the number of drug deals gone wrong that end up in this place. They don’t want to talk to the cops, either, but they also want to live. We’re the best, so their friends dump ‘em here and leave. Who shot you?”

  I shook my head slowly, carefully, avoiding tugging on the shoulder. I stared at the wall. Dead.

  She frowned and checked my pupils again, using a small light to check the contraction, searching for a concussion. “It’s not my problem. You’ll have to tell them.” She put down the light and dabbed the small facial wounds with Neosporin. “Not even worth Band-Aids. Keep ‘em clean and they’ll heal right up. Unless you get shot again.”

  I nodded slowly, still looking at the wall. “Thanks.”

  She walked out between the cops through the only door to the room. “He’s all yours,” she said.

  They both turned to watch her walk down the hall. While their heads were turned, I jumped.

  I used a full wet suit and scuba gear to recover as much of the hijacker’s body as possible.

  It wasn’t a matter of respect for the dead—more a matter of respect for the environment. I didn’t want him to rot in the water. Every time I thought about his blood in the water, my lips clamped tighter around the mouthpiece of the scuba regulator.

  There were a lot of small pieces, but the blood had cleared out. An underground waterway filled the pit and an underground waterway drained it away, a fact I didn’t realized until I noticed the current moving me sideways along the bottom. I carried a mesh bag to put the pieces in and I could only work at midday, when the sunlight touched the surface of the water.

  The legs and arms were mostly intact and I’d found the head facedown, hair floating up like some aquatic plant. I didn’t look at the face, just pushed the head into the bag, averting my eyes.

  I threw up a lot.

  The first time I didn’t get the regulator out of my mouth and the vomit filled the mouthpiece. I was twenty feet down, about the deepest the water got, and I had to kick for the surface, choking and spitting. I jumped to the box-canyon spring to rinse the mouthpiece.

  I didn’t want to use the water from the pit.

  On the second day, when I had as much of him as I thought I was going to find, I dumped three buckets of bluegill perch, two buckets of small catfish, and four buckets of crawdads into the water. When I’d bought the fish, the Stillwater bait supplier had lectured me on trotline fishing at great length. I’d listened to him very carefully and thanked him when he was through.

  It was my hope that the fish and crawdads would find the rest of the hijacker. Call it my own form of bioremediation.

  Three days after the hijacking, I left the pieces of the body on the taxiway in Larnaca, Cyprus, in a galvanized washtub, covered with clear plastic to thwart the flies. I’d considered leaving a note, explaining that his own bomb did this to him, but I thought it would be better left unexplained. If they wanted to think I’d done that to him, fine. Maybe it would deter the next hijacker.

  Who picked up Mom’s body?

  Millie held me every night while I cried.

  Chapter 17

  There was a great deal of debate over the video footage that showed me appearing on the 727’s wing. Two different news organizations captured it, though, so some sort of conspiracy was implied. The views, video on extreme zoom, only showed my back. When the galvanized washtub showed up three days later, the debate intensified.

  In explanation National Enquirer suggested UFOs, the ghost of Elvis, and a new Anti-Hijacking Diet.

  Much was made of the American origin of the galvanized tub. Torture was claimed by some, but the Cypriot autopsy said death by explosion with subsequent immersion in fresh water.

  The soaking-wet terrorists from the Air France hijacking were remembered. The interviews from that incident received more airtime, along with the largely incoherent interview with the Pan Am flight attendant.

  I watched a little of the coverage, read a little, but the related memories depressed me. Again, I wondered if there were any other teleports out there, watching these stories.

  On Saturday, a week after the hijacking, I jumped to the Dairy Queen in Stanville and had a dip cone, seventy-three cents, please, here’s a napkin. I walked across the street to the town square and sat on one of the benches with the green flaking paint. There was old, dirty snow with footpaths carved across it, but there was no wind under the gray sky and the temperature was above freezing.

  Men and women walked out of the Baptist church basement in clumps of two or three. A woman detached herself from the back of one of the clumps and walked toward me.

  “I know you.”

  I tensed to jump; then I recognized her. It was Sue Kimmel, the woman who’d given the party—the one who’d taken me to her bedroom.

  “I know you,” I said. I felt embarrassed. “Uh, how’s college?”

  Sue laughed the kind of laugh that’s edged with pain. “Well, col
lege didn’t work out. I’m going to try again in the summer.”

  “I’m sorry. What was the problem?” Too late I thought she probably didn’t want to talk about it.

  She sat on the end of the bench, not close, not far away, and stretched her feet out before her. Her hands were deep in her coat pockets. “Booze. The problem was booze.”

  I shifted, uncomfortable.

  She jerked her chin at the church. “I just got out of an AA meeting. I’ve only been out of Red Pines a month.” Red Pines was a substance-abuse treatment center on the edge of Stanville. She shivered. “It’s harder than I thought it would be.”

  I thought about Dad and his bottles of scotch. “I hope it works out.”

  “It’s got to,” she said, smiling again. She looked at my cone, half eaten. “Boy that looks good. Care to join me for another one?”

  “Well, I’ll get coffee.”

  She looked back at the church. “I’ve had enough coffee. We’re very big on coffee in AA.”

  We walked back to the DQ and I bought her a cone and myself a small coffee. We sat at the booth in the corner and I put my back to the wall.

  “Your dad’s an alcoholic, isn’t he?”

  I was surprised at the comment and even more surprised at my first reaction—to defend him. “Yeah... he sure is.”

  “He’s come to two meetings in the last month, but he left each one before it even started. He looked terrible, like he had the shakes. Somebody saw him back at Gil’s later, both times. An advanced alcoholic can kill themselves trying to detox by themselves. Did you know that?”

  I shook my head. “I didn’t.”

  Sue nodded. “Yeah, the aldehydes replace neurotransmitters and if you go off booze suddenly, you’re left with no little messengers, no little chemical sparks. You can go into convulsions and die. Do you see your father much?”

  I shook my head. “No. I don’t.”

  “Well, he should get into treatment. I think he even knows it, he just can’t get past that last bit, that rough edge.”

  I sipped my coffee and didn’t say anything for a moment. Then I asked, “What caused you to seek help?”

  Sue looked embarrassed. “Lots of things. Secret stashes of booze. Drinking in class. Hallucinations. Like when I hallucinated at that party you came to. Uh, you did come to my party, right?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “Well, I had this weird waking dream where you flew out the window of my bathroom.”

  I stared at her.

  “Don’t look at me like that. I know it was crazy.”

  My ears started getting red.

  “Anyway, I want to apologize for how I acted that night. I was pretty drunk. I’ve had a lot of apologies to make. We call it a ninth step.”

  I choked on the coffee. Ninth step?

  When I was breathing normally again, I said, “My mom wasn’t an alcoholic, but she said she was doing a ninth step with me before she left for Europe. Before she died.”

  She nodded. “Yeah, Alanon is based on the twelve-step program, just like AA. I was in treatment when your mom died, but my parents told me. I was sorry to hear about it.”

  “Uhm.”

  She sighed. “Hope I haven’t talked too much. I tend to go on and on about it. It’s like religion, you know, and I’m a new convert.”

  “I don’t mind. Anytime.”

  We talked for a bit about common acquaintances and then she had to go.

  “I’m glad I ran into you,” she said.

  “Me too,” I said. I meant it.

  After she left I stared into the empty cup. I wondered if Dad still had the NSA camping out at his house.

  There was a pay phone by the bathrooms in the Dairy Queen, but I liked to come there. It was a pleasant part of my past. If I called from here, the NSA would camp out, hoping for my return. I went out back by the dumpster and jumped to the Stanville bus station.

  The little waiting room with the vending machines seemed exactly the same as it had eighteen months previously, when I’d left to go to New York. Some of that time’s fear and sadness seemed to permeate the place, coat the walls and drift in the air. I went inside and put a quarter in the pay phone.

  The phone rang twice and Dad picked up the phone.

  “Hello?” He sounded irritable and I knew he needed a drink.

  “Hi, Dad.”

  The ordinary room noises that you don’t normally notice went away and, with their absence, became prominent. I felt even sadder. “You don’t have to cover the mouthpiece, Dad. They know to trace the call.”

  He stammered, “What are you talking about?”

  “Go in for treatment, Dad. You’ve got insurance. Check into Red Pines.”

  “Hell, no! You know the difference between a drunk and an alcoholic?”

  It was an old joke—the answer was “Drunks don’t have to go to all those meetings.” Before he could give the punch line I said, “Yeah. Drunks get worse until they die. Some alcoholics get better.”

  He said, “Fuck you.”

  “Get treatment.”

  He was silent for a moment. “Why are you running from these government men? Don’t you have any respect for your country?”

  I almost hung up then, angry. Then I took a deep breath and said, “I have more respect for the Bill of Rights than they do. I have more respect for the Constitution. I’m no threat to them, but they don’t believe that. They probably can’t believe that.”

  There was the squeal of a tire from the parking lot—nothing extreme. It was more like the sound of someone turning into a tight parking place just a little too fast, but I knew better.

  “Get treatment, Dad. Before you die. Before you fuck up anybody else’s life.”

  I dropped the phone to hang on its cord, then walked over to the hall leading to the rest rooms and stood just inside, in the slight shadow.

  They hit both doors at once, four men, each carrying something that looked like a short-barreled rifle with a huge bore. Christ! What the hell is that? I swear there was something just visible, sticking out of the gun barrel, that gleamed in the station’s fluorescent lighting. One of the men saw me then and jerked the gun to his shoulder.

  I jumped.

  I phoned Dr. Perston-Smythe from a phone booth on the street. I’d yet to explore much of Washington but I stayed away from the Mall. I didn’t want them watching the Air and Space Museum before I had a chance to see it.

  He answered his own phone and I wondered if he had an agent sitting in his office, one of those short-barreled rifles in his hand, or one of the dart guns they’d shot me with the first time, at Dad’s place.

  “What on earth are those nasty-looking rifles they’re carrying around?”

  He drew in breath sharply. “What do you want, Mr. Rice?”

  “I want to be left alone. I’m not harming anyone, much less ‘national security,’ and you guys are going way overboard.”

  There was a click and someone else’s voice came on the line. “Mr. Rice, please don’t hang up. This is Brian Cox.”

  “Surely you aren’t spending all your time in Dr. Perston-Smythe’s office?”

  “Well, no. We arranged to switch the call to me in the event you called. Dr. Perston-Smythe is no longer on the line.”

  “What do you want?”

  “We want your services.”

  “No.”

  “All right, we want to know how you do it.”

  “No.”

  “You’re already working for us. That was quite a job you did in Algiers and Larnaca. Especially Larnaca.”

  I felt my nose wrinkle. “Hardly. I didn’t go after them for you.”

  He laughed quietly and I swiveled my head around, watching the streets. I wondered if he was trying to distract me deliberately, to let them sneak up. I wanted desperately to ask him if there were other teleports that they knew of, but I was sure he was capable of lying to me about that, to lure me in. I didn’t want to hand him that obsession, that tool.
r />   “Well, even if it was revenge for your mother, it works for us. We could give you Matar, you know.”

  Bastards. “In return for what?”

  “Ah. A favor here and there. Nothing arduous, nothing unpleasant even. Certainly nothing worse than Larnaca.”

  I shouldn’t have, but I told him, “He blew himself up. All I did was collect the pieces. Everyone on that flight would have died if I didn’t.”

  “Oh.” His voice was utterly neutral. I don’t know if he believed me or not. “How can you be sure? For all you know he might have given himself up in the next five minutes. Are you sure you didn’t endanger the passengers more? He might never have pushed the button if you hadn’t interfered.”

  He was only verbalizing what I’d been saying to myself all week long.

  A car was easing up the street, four men inside. Others walked the sidewalks. They were wearing long coats, the fronts open; each had one hand clamped against his side, holding something beneath the coat. They stopped fifty yards away in plain sight.

  “I see your men, Cox.”

  “Well, they’ll stay away while we talk.”

  “Why’d you bother? Do you think they can catch me? What is that nasty gun they’re carrying around.”

  “Tranquilizer.”

  I thought he was lying. The bore was too big. “And if I’m allergic to the drug? I jump off someplace and die. You get zip.”

  “You should work with us. We protect the country. Is that a bad thing?”

  “I’m going to puke.”

  “Do you want Matar?”

  “I’ll get him myself.”

  “We’ll get you eventually, unless you want to stay in hiding forever.”

  “Aren’t you afraid you’ll drive me to work for the other side? Perestroika and all, I’m seeing less and less difference. They, at least, seem to be getting rid of their secret police. We still have you. Leave me alone.”

  “What about your father?”

  “Do what you want to him,” I said. “He deserves it.”

  I dropped the phone and jumped.

  I spent eight hours in the air flying from DFW Airport to Honolulu. Japanese Red Army terrorists seized and held three hundred tourists outside of security at the Honolulu airport. By the time my plane arrived, it was all over.