Spoonbenders

by Daryl Gregory

  Even though it’s cold in here, Frankie’s sweating just thinking about it. He’s broke, his business is failing, and lately cash has been evaporating at his touch. “When did you start seeing stuff again? I thought that was gone.”

  Buddy shrugs.

  “Jesus Christ,” Frankie says. He sits down on a cooler. Stands up again. Makes Buddy go through everything he saw.

  Buddy fills in details, getting quickly back to that stack of chips. “They think it’s a lucky streak,” he says. “But it’s you.”

  “Me,” Frankie says.

  “All you.”

  “Fuck,” Frankie says. Pacing again. “I don’t think I can do this. I’m rusty, man. Way out of practice.”

  “So practice. We leave in six months.”

  “I’m going to need a lot more information,” Frankie says. “Everything you’ve got.”

  “Don’t worry,” Buddy says. “I’m coming with you.”

  “You’re leaving the house,” Frankie says skeptically. “To go to a casino full of people.”

  “I need to be in Alton,” Buddy says, and that’s the truth. For that’s where he will meet his true love.

  Teddy is watching with an exasperated expression as Buddy sweeps up the sawdust. “Jesus Christ, you making a bomb shelter?” One of the windows is in place, attached to a heavy-duty hinge. Soon he’ll install a lever that will allow him to flip the steel shades up and out of the way.

  “Can you just tell me why?” Teddy asks.

  Buddy shrugs.

  “No, God damn it. You do not get to just look at me with that dumb look. What the hell are you doing?”

  Buddy makes a sound deep in his throat, a smothered moan.

  “I can’t take it, Buddy. I can, not, take it. This house used to be fit for human beings.” Teddy starts listing the damage, the rooms his son has torn apart and left unfinished. And what about the huge hole in the backyard! What the hell was that for?

  There’s nothing to do but wait for his father to tire. They both know how this will end: Teddy will storm out, and Buddy will go back to work. It’s a mystery why Dad hasn’t put a stop to the project. In all his memories, there’s nothing to tell him why his father hasn’t thrown him out of the house or threatened him with violence.

  “Okay, how about this,” Teddy says. “Just tell me when it’s going to end. Can you do that? Look at me, Buddy. Look at me. When are you going to stop?”

  Buddy’s lungs cramp in his chest. He opens his mouth to speak and quickly closes it. How can he explain?

  After ten seconds of painful silence, Teddy growls and leaves in the usual way.

  Buddy sits on the closed toilet, pondering. He hates to make anyone angry, even if it’s for their own good. For a couple of years, before Mom died, Buddy had given his father every Cubs box score he could remember. Once he wrote, in crayon, all the digits to a future Illinois lottery ticket, though he wrote a 6 instead of a 9 and his father won nothing. (Or perhaps, he realized later, Buddy remembered the way he’d written the numbers in the future, and so the memory was an accurate re-creation of his mistake. These things were so difficult to untangle.)

  Somehow Mom found out about the lottery. She got so mad that his father stopped asking him for predictions. Young Buddy was mystified by the ban, especially because he was still allowed to work the Wonder Wheel onstage. But it wasn’t until The Mike Douglas Show that he understood how dangerous the future could be.

  Buddy is five years old and Mom is alive. There she is, so tall, holding his hand, looking down at him with blue eyes. Her silver dress sparkles in the stage lights like magic. “We’re on TV, Buddy,” she says. But it doesn’t seem like TV at all. It’s just like being onstage at all the theaters they’ve been performing at. There’s even an audience. There shouldn’t be an audience for TV, should there?

  Mom says, “When Mr. Douglas comes over, you can do your spinner trick.” The Wonder Wheel has spokes that make a clackety sound, and on each wedge of the wheel is a different picture: duck, clown, fire truck. People applaud every time it stops on the picture he’s predicted, and that’s almost every time. His favorite part is starting the wheel spinning, not saying where it will land.

  He’s getting ready to spin the wheel when a memory hits him like a slap to his head. He remembers his sister holding his hand while they stand at the edge of a grave, looking at a coffin. Their mother’s coffin. Suddenly the gleaming box drops into the hole, too fast, and people shout. There in the TV studio, Buddy cries out with them, a wordless shout of fear.

  Mom says, “Buddy! Buddy!” She crouches down, and tells him not to be scared. But of course he’s scared, because all the memories are coming now, in a rolling wave: Astounding Archibald walking out onstage, calling them fakes. But Mom isn’t there to perform the showstopper trick, and because of that she ends up in a coffin.

  Mom, alive, says, “Can you put away your tears?”

  He can’t, because the memories are still coming, and now he’s remembering the night, months from now, when Mom falls in the kitchen and hurts her head. He remembers the medal she hangs around his neck. And he remembers dressing up to go see her in the hospital, and then the coffin falling, and Irene squeezing his hand.

  The memories come that fast, bam bam bam, from Astounding Archibald’s dramatic entrance to the casket disappearing into the dark. If one thing happens they all happen.

  Five-year-old Buddy doesn’t know how to make his mother’s death not be true. What can he do at this size, at this age? He has memories of being big, tall enough to look down on Frankie, to loom over his father, and he wants to be that huge man right now. He could stop crying, and the future could be different.

  “Jesus Christ,” Teddy hisses. They’re in commercial. Dad doesn’t know it, but Astounding Archibald is about to walk onstage, and Mom is going to die. Buddy collapses onto the floor, and the man wearing a headset steps back in surprise. “Get him out of here,” Dad says.

  Buddy’s worked himself into a blubbery, boneless state. He can only think of the hole in the ground, swallowing his mother. She carries Buddy out on her hip, and he doesn’t release her even after they reach the greenroom. He’s still crying, unable to stop.

  He hasn’t learned to invent stories yet. If he were older, if he were smarter, he could find some clever way to explain the coffin and keep his mother alive. But he’s too afraid, and his body is not in his control. He’s failed.

  Buddy’s twenty-seven years old but he feels older. Much older. Or maybe he’s just hungry.

  He makes a baloney sandwich and eats it standing up at the sink, then washes it down with a tall glass of Carnation Instant Breakfast. He loves that chalky residue in his throat. A whole meal in a glass! Perfect for the precog who has to keep up his strength.

  He likes it when the house is empty like this, Irene at work and Matty out with Frankie, and Dad—well, not even the World’s Most Powerful Psychic knows what Dad does with his time. He only remembers what he’s around for. Not like Mom, who seemed to know everything, everywhere. There was a reason she was the titleholder for so long. Yes, he feels like a fraud some days, or a next-best-thing champion, like Scottie Pippen after Michael Jordan retired, or Timothy Dalton. He does what he can with the talent he possesses.

  Sometimes, though, it’s as if the talent possesses him. For example, he’s just remembered taking a walk around the neighborhood with Miss Poppins, a walk that was to start in five minutes. Theoretically he could try to ignore the memory and stay home, but he can’t risk it. Everything may be connected to the Zap, even walking a dog. Or stealing a newspaper. The other day he suddenly remembered stealing a Chicago Tribune from a neighbor’s porch. Not only that, but he had a distinct memory of circling a headline in black marker and then placing the newspaper where his father would see it. Why a Tribune? Why that article? He still doesn’t know. Soldiers do not have to understand their orders.

  Besides, he sometimes likes what destiny has ordered him to do. He certainly
likes walking with Miss Poppins. Staying home would be cutting off his nose to spite his future face. And why? To preserve some illusion of free will? Nonsense. Duty eats free will for breakfast.

  Outside, the air is still humid, but he has to admit that it’s lovely out. Frankie routinely needles him for never leaving the house, but of course that isn’t true. He goes out all the time, when he remembers he’s supposed to. And he loves his little neighborhood, in all its various phases: the times when there are as many empty lots as houses and the grasses run with garter snakes; the other times when the mini-mansions start to pop up in place of the run-down ranch homes; the long, stable times in between. He feels a kinship with the trees of his street: the Benevolent Brotherhood of Patient Sentinels. They take the long view.

  Two doors down, he knocks at the front screen door and calls out, “It’s me.” Inside, Miss Poppins barks excitedly, tiny electric yips, and then the little puff ball is there at the door, paws against the screen.

  “I was wondering if our little old lady would like to go out,” he says.

  He feels safe talking to Mrs. Klauser. Her days are so regular, and their conversations so circumscribed, that there’s little danger of causing side effects. She calls him in, and he edges through the door to keep the dog inside.

  Mrs. Klauser is in her usual chair, the TV on. “How’s your project?” she asks. “I could hear the band saw from here.”

  “All’s good,” he says, and hooks the leash to the dog.

  “And your father’s doing well?” Mrs. Klauser is frail currently, and that frailty makes her more tentative. Other times she’s energetic and forthright. During the year following his mother’s death, Mrs. Klauser made the Telemachus family meals two times a week. No one asked her to do this. She saw a need and did something.

  “Just fine,” Buddy says. “Back in a bit.”

  Miss Poppins quiets as soon as they get outside and trots eagerly ahead. Within minutes she squats and delivers a polite poop, which he nabs in the plastic bag he’s brought with him. They resume their walk, both of them perfectly in sync. The dog knows their usual route through the neighborhood. Today, though, halfway through their walk, Buddy surprises her by cutting between two houses, a shortcut back to their block. It’s a surprise to him, too. He didn’t remember he’d do that until he was almost about to make the turn.

  Miss Poppins adjusts to this detour with aplomb. Dogs live in the moment. Sometimes he wishes he were a dog.

  A silver van is parked a few doors down from his house. He remembers this van. A month from now, he will briefly talk to the van driver, a black man whom Buddy recognizes from his childhood. Weeks after that, on Zap Day, the driver will walk into the house. Is it the same driver who is behind the wheel now? Buddy doesn’t look through the windshield to check, because that’s not something he remembers doing. It’s possible to walk up to the van and yank open the doors and demand to know what the men are doing there, but not advisable. The consequences could be catastrophic. He walks past the vehicle, past his own house, and up to Mrs. Klauser’s door.

  “She was a good girl,” he tells her.

  “Did she poop?”

  “Oh yes,” he says. Then he remembers something. Something vital. “You should think about getting a puppy,” he says.

  “Oh no, Miss Poppins is enough for me.”

  “Think about it,” Buddy says. “She’d probably like the company.”

  He walks back home without once looking at the van.

  6

  Matty

  “This one’s Bones,” Polly said. Or maybe it was Cassie who’d spoken. He’d never been able to tell the twins apart. “And this one’s Speedy.”

  “Which is ironic, because he’s a turtle,” Matty said. The twins weren’t interested in irony, or commentary. They just wanted him to sit on the Pepto-Bismol-colored carpet in their bedroom while they dumped small stuffed animals onto his lap.

  The other girl—Cassie or Polly—hauled more creatures from the long drawer set into the base of the bunk beds. “This is Zip the Cat, and Quackers, and Valentino”—she pronounced it “tine-o”—“and Pincher, and…Squealer.”

  She placed this last one, a beanbag pig, in his palm. The heart-shaped tag attached to it listed its name (Squealer the Pig) and birth date (April 23, 1993). Keeping the tags intact—most of which, like the pig’s, were clipped to the ear, pirate-style—was evidently part of the deal, in the same way that hard-core nerds kept their Star Wars action figures in their original packaging. “Squealer the Pig is a little obvious,” he said.

  “This is Inky,” the first twin said, dropping a plush octopus in his lap. “And this is Goldie, Snort, Nip, and…Ally the Alligator.”

  “Ally the Alligator? That’s not even trying,” he said. “Plus, he’s clearly dead.”

  “He’s not dead!” one of them said angrily.

  “Sure he is—they put his tag on his toe.” They stared at him. He said, “Someday you’re going to get that joke and just la-a-a-ugh.”

  That was one of Grandpa Teddy’s most common lines, but these girls weren’t laughing. The twins looked at each other, brows furrowed, and one of them said to Matty, “It was an accident.”

  “They were on top of the TV,” the other one said.

  “What now?” Matty asked.

  A voice said, “A bunch of those things burned up when the TV blew.” Malice had appeared in the doorway of the twins’ bedroom. She wore cutoff jeans and a white T-shirt that said BOWIE NOW in hand-painted letters. “It was a tragedy. Do you know when they burn they just bleed plastic? It’s not even stuffing.”

  “Shut up, Mary Alice!” one of them yelled, and the other said at the same time, “Get out, Mary Alice!”

  “They don’t like to speak of the Great Beanie Fire of Ninety-Four,” Malice said.

  “We’re telling Mom!” one of them said, and the twins rushed out. Malice looked back at Matty and caught him looking at her legs—specifically at the white pocket flaps that peeked from the bottom of her shorts. Those flashes of white cloth were inexplicably, unbearably, sexy.

  Commandment #1 (Don’t look down her shirt, it’s creepy) required an amendment: Don’t look at her legs, either.

  “So you’re staying the night,” Malice said.

  “Yeah.” He got to his feet, sending little toy bodies tumbling.

  “Why?” Malice asked.

  “Why?” This was a question not even his mother had asked. And why hadn’t she? Matty had no good reason to spend the night at Uncle Frankie’s—none that he could talk about anyway. When Frankie asked her if he could sleep over, she’d let him go without an interrogation. Now that he thought about it, that was deeply weird.

  “Your dad thought it would be fun,” Matty said finally.

  “Fun,” she said skeptically. “To hang out with us.”

  “He said we’d order Chinese.”

  “Ooh, I take it back, then. Ordering Chinese is a regular cocaine orgy.”

  He laughed—too loud—and tried to blank the images flashing in his head. “Yeah, well. Have you spent a night watching TV with Uncle Buddy?”

  “Good point,” she said. “See you round the chow mein.”

  She walked away. In blatant violation of all rules and amendments, he watched her go.

  —

  Compared with Grandpa Teddy’s house, Frankie’s house was loud. Not so much in actual decibels (Uncle Buddy’s construction projects made plenty of racket), but in emotional volume. Aunt Loretta yelled at the twins; Uncle Frankie yelled at Malice; the twins yelled for the sake of yelling. Bottled up as they were in this two-bedroom ranch, there was nowhere for their shouts to dissipate and nowhere for him to hide. After years of living alone with Mom, and another six months of living in a house where hardly anyone spoke, Matty found the din to be nerve-wracking. He felt like the new recruit in a war movie, the one who jumped at every boom of the artillery.

  Only Malice was quiet, though her scowl could blast everyone bu
t the twins into silence. Before the rest of the family finished dinner, Malice disappeared into her basement lair. Everyone else decamped to the living room, where the TV was cranked up to a volume that turned the canned sitcom laughter menacing. Cassie and Polly, excited that Matty had been assigned their room, were building a blanket fort between the couch and Uncle Frankie’s recliner where they could spend the night.

  Aunt Loretta left the room at regular intervals to have a smoke on the back porch. During one of these absences, Frankie looked over at him and said, “So. You think you’re ready?”

  “I’m going to try,” Matty said.

  At ten, after a laugh-injected episode of Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper, Uncle Frankie clapped his hands and said, “Bedtime, ladies!” They protested, but Aunt Loretta herded the girls to the bathroom and back. Uncle Frankie walked Matty to the girls’ room. The beanbag menagerie had not been put away.

  “Let’s get you some fresh air,” Uncle Frankie said. He undid the latch on the sole window in the room and tried to lift the sash, but it didn’t budge. “Usually we—ugh, little stiff—we keep ’em closed, because it’s the ground floor, and rapists.” He slammed the heel of his palm upward and the window shrieked up a few inches. “There we go. But you’ll be all right, right?”

  “I guess so,” Matty said.

  Uncle Frankie leaned in close. “I put a sign in the garage,” he said in a low voice. “I even left the light on.”

  Matty nodded.

  “A simple three-word phrase,” Uncle Frankie said.

  “Don’t give me any clues,” Matty said.

  “Right. Good thinking. Got to make this a real test.” Frankie looked him in the eye, said, “Good luck, Matty,” and closed the door.

  “Matt,” he said quietly.

  He opened his backpack and quickly changed into the gym shorts and T-shirt he’d brought—no way was he going to sleep in just his underwear. He turned out the lights and crawled under the pink covers of the lower bunk. His feet touched the footboard. The upper bunk was alarmingly close to his face.