Spoonbenders

by Daryl Gregory

  He turned to look at the room, which was surprisingly well lit. There were two night-lights, and the ceiling revealed itself to be spangled with glow-in-the-dark stickers of stars, planets, and comets. The herd of boneless pets seemed to be sprawled across a miniature savannah. The room was getting warmer. The barely open window was a mail slot for the delivery of humidity.

  He closed his eyes. Took a breath.

  Concentrate, Matt.

  He clenched his fists, released them.

  He knew he could slip outside his body. The hard part—which he’d been working on for a month with limited success—was to do so without touching himself. He’d never be able to go onstage if the only way to use his power was to jack off in front of the audience. Uncle Frankie had told him they could make real money with his abilities if he practiced, and Matty had been imagining the return of the Amazing Telemachus Family, starring Matthias Telemachus, Astral Projector. They’d first bring the act to small theaters, building buzz, until they made a groundbreaking performance on live television. All he had to do was astral project. And not think of his cousin. And those cutoffs.

  Commandment #2. Do not have lustful thoughts about your cousin.

  “Damn it,” he said aloud. He tried to think of someone else, anyone else. How about Elle Macpherson?

  But suddenly he couldn’t summon a clear picture of the supermodel. Why hadn’t he packed his Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue? (Not actually the whole issue. He’d pulled a few of the good pages from the 1994 edition at the Waldenbooks in the Monroeville Mall in Pittsburgh, which was the most larcenous thing he’d ever done in his life, and guarded them carefully ever since.)

  After a half hour, he was still rooted to his body. The air was too close, and the bunk bed a coffin. He threw off the covers and crawled out onto the crinkly carpet, nudging aside plush toys. He rolled onto his back under the open window, spread his arms and legs to the artificial stars, and waited for moving molecules of air to touch his skin.

  Nothing. And why was the carpet so stiff? Had the girls spilled Kool-Aid or something? And why hadn’t they arranged the stars into real constellations? At least that would have been educational.

  Shut up, he said to his brain. Think of Elle Macpherson. But all he could visualize were those rectangles of pocket cloth, white against Malice’s brown thighs. Which was crazy. It was just cloth. Cloth that normally was not seen, sure, but it wasn’t lingerie. There was no reason a couple of inches of cotton should stop his heart.

  He pushed his hands away from himself and clutched the carpet.

  Commandment #3. Under no circumstances should you touch yourself while having lustful thoughts about your cousin.

  The rule would be easier to keep if it wasn’t such a reliable ticket to an OBE. (Which stood for out-of-body experience, aka astral projection, which was sort of like clairvoyance and remote viewing, but with a body attached. He’d been reading up.) Over the past few weeks, he’d been able to jump out of his skin half a dozen times. Mostly he barely got to his own ceiling, but twice now, fueled by a fantasy of being forced to sleep in the same bed as Mary Alice because of some unspecified family emergency, he’d pushed his consciousness up and out of the house, so that he was able to hover, kitelike, above the roof.

  He’d reported all his successes to Uncle Frankie, without explaining Malice’s part in them, and didn’t bring up the failures at all. Frankie was especially anxious to confirm that Matty was not just imagining the travels—after all, a roof was a roof. And so this test. All Matty had to do was breathe, relax, and not think of white cotton.

  A dozen glassy-eyed animals watched him suspiciously. God it was hot.

  Somewhere an air conditioner rumbled. Probably in Frankie and Loretta’s room. No wonder Malice slept in the basement. He could almost picture her down there, on the old hideaway bed. One leg poking out of the sheets, an arm thrown over her eyes. He imagined her surrounded by darkness but caught like a girl onstage by the spotlight of the unshaded lamp that sat on the milk crate that served as her bedside table. Her arm moved away from her face, and surprise, her eyes were wide open, more than awake, because it was clear she hadn’t fallen asleep tonight; no, she’d been waiting. She turned toward the milk crate, checked a small digital clock there, and rolled out of bed. She was still wearing that white Bowie T-shirt, but the cutoffs had been replaced by a pair of black jeans. She picked up a red flannel shirt from the floor and pulled it on without buttoning it, then stooped to tug on a pair of high-tops. She hustled toward the door that led to the back stairs, turned the lock, and vanished. She was sneaking out!

  He opened his eyes. He’d been asleep, and now his heart thudded with dream excitement. But maybe he wasn’t dreaming. He jumped up and lurched to the window.

  There was Mary Alice, walking quickly across the lawn, heading to the street. Dressed in red flannel and black jeans.

  “Mary Alice,” he hissed. She didn’t hear him. Louder, he said, “Malice.”

  She whirled as if shot.

  “It’s me,” he said in a stage whisper.

  She froze for a moment, then walked closer to the window and looked up at him. “I know it’s you,” she said, also whispering. “What do you want?”

  He pushed up on the window, and managed to shove it a few inches higher. “Where are you going?”

  “Go to bed, Matty.”

  Matt, he thought. “Wait there. I’m coming out.”

  “No! Just—”

  But he’d already ducked away from the window. He yanked off his shorts and pulled on his jeans, a maneuver that required much hopping and teetering. Then he grabbed his gym shoes and eased open the bedroom door. A few feet away, Frankie and Loretta’s door was shut. The air conditioner groaned obliviously. Matty crept down the hallway, holding his shoes.

  In the living room, the blanket fort had collapsed and the twins lay in the polyester wreckage, unconscious. He stepped over their bodies and unlocked the front door.

  Malice was gone.

  He crossed the lawn, the grass slicking his bare feet, and looked down the street in both directions. Nothing.

  He couldn’t believe it. She’d ditched him.

  Yet—he’d had an OBE! Without touching himself! Though once again he’d been thinking of Malice, so that was a problem.

  Another problem? Getting back into the twins’ bedroom.

  He moved quietly around the side of the house, carrying his shoes in each hand like weapons. He could hear nothing but the moan and rattle of the air conditioner jutting from Frankie and Loretta’s bedroom window. He reached the rear of the house, where the light from the garage window cast a yellow light across the backyard. The twins’ swing set crouched in the half shadows like a huge spider.

  He sat at the top of the basement stairs and pulled on his shoes. Malice had closed the door behind her, of course, but if it wasn’t locked he could get back into the house that way. But now he didn’t want to go back inside. Why couldn’t Malice have waited for him? No doubt she was having fun, joyriding across the northern suburbs. He was wide awake with nowhere to go. He could take a walk, but Uncle Frankie’s neighborhood was sketchier than Grandpa Teddy’s. The cars were older and rustier, the beige-brick houses narrower and closer together. Chain-link fences were a recurring landscaping motif. This block was probably safer than the one he’d left in Pittsburgh, but back there he knew which people were the bad people, which ones looked like bad people but weren’t, and which people looked like nice people but were assholes.

  Then he remembered what was in the garage. He went to the side door and pushed inside. It took him only a few seconds to find the white poster board, set out on the hood of Loretta’s Toyota Corolla. In black capital letters it said, SEIZE THE DAY.

  That was hardly a random phrase. Frankie said “Carpe diem,” like, three times a day. But what about the night? What was a fourteen-year-old supposed to do with the night?

  —

  He woke to cartoons blaring from the li
ving room. His bladder was full and he was desperate to get to the toilet. He looked both ways down the hallway and, seeing the coast was clear, scampered across to the tiny bathroom. It was like a closet-sized version of a dollar store, crammed with shampoo bottles and bath toys and scented candles. When he lifted the toilet lid, he rattled the row of UltraLife bath products balanced on the back of the commode. How did five people—six, counting himself—share one tiny bathroom?

  When he got to the living room, the twins for once didn’t mob him; the television claimed their complete attention. In the kitchen Uncle Frankie sat at the table reading the Sun-Times, a plate smeared with dried egg yolk in front of him. In the center of the table was a mound of cigarette stubs in a plastic ashtray, but Aunt Loretta was nowhere in sight. Neither was Malice. He imagined that she’d slunk back to her underground lair before dawn.

  “You look like a man who needs a cup of joe,” Uncle Frankie said. He was inordinately proud of Matty’s new addiction to coffee. It was an inevitable consequence of working with the crew, as it was practically the only thing they drank. Matty had started with a training-wheels concoction that could have been marketed as Sugared Milk—now with slight coffee flavor! and then gradually darkened the mix. In six or seven years he’d be able to take it black.

  Uncle Frankie waited (impatiently, Matty thought) while he mixed his drink. “So?” Frankie asked. He raised a significant eyebrow. “Anything?”

  “Yeah,” Matty said. “I’m pretty sure.”

  “Pretty sure?”

  Matty felt embarrassed. “I mean, yeah, but…” He took a delaying sip from the mug. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether I’m imagining what I’m seeing, or I’m really seeing it.”

  His uncle frowned, and Matty hurried to explain. “Like, I traveled last night, definitely traveled, but—”

  “Holy shit! Where to? How far’d you go?”

  “Uh, just around the house. But I was also kinda sleepy, so I was thinking, well, what if I just dreamed some of it?”

  “You can’t think like that! There are always two explanations for what happens, the one that skeptical people fall back on, and the real one, the one you know in your heart. The doubters are going to say, Oh, you moved it with your foot, oh, you peeked at the cards, you imagined it. You can’t let them get to you. You have to believe in your talent, Matty, and then you go out there and…and…”

  “Seize the day?”

  Frankie looked stunned. “What did you say?” Then he roared with laughter. “What the fuck did you say?” Now Matty was laughing, too. Frankie wiped a tear from his eye. “You bastard. Just slip it in there like that! You got a hell of a poker face, kid!”

  Matty was too embarrassed to correct him. And after all, he did astrally project last night. The fact that he tried to follow Malice was beside the point.

  “I didn’t think you’d be ready for the next step so quickly,” Frankie said. “Do you need to get back home today?”

  “Well, I should probably—”

  “Because I think you need to stay another night.”

  “Okay,” Matty said quickly.

  “Finish your coffee,” Frankie said. “Then we move on to phase two.”

  —

  Phase two evidently involved visiting every pawnshop in the suburbs—for what, Frankie wouldn’t say. He’d leave Matty in the Bumblebee van, go inside the shop, and come out minutes later, annoyed that he hadn’t found what he was looking for. Then they were off again, across the unbroken sprawl of Chicagoland, a single city made up of interlocking strip malls, decorated at random intervals by WELCOME TO signs with defiantly rural names—River Forest, Forest Glen, Glenview—and enough dales and groves and elms and oaks to populate Middle Earth. The flatlanders had been especially determined to tag every bump of land with a “Heights” or “Ridge.” Pity the poor hobbit trying to find anything to climb in the town of Mount Prospect.

  In the van, Uncle Frankie always talked to Matty as if he were an adult—or, more accurately, as if Frankie had forgotten he was a kid. It was during the trips to and from work that Matty learned about the phone business, city driving (“never signal on a lane change, it just warns them”), multilevel marketing, Greek mythology, and politics. Frankie delivered monologues on such topics as how Mayor Bilandic had lost the ’79 election not because he failed to clean up the snow after those storms, but because he looked like a wimp apologizing for it, while Jane Byrne was clearly the toughest, most unapologetic woman in Chicago. (“You know how sometimes it gets too cold to snow? That was Jane Byrne’s face.”)

  There were some topics, however, that Matty would have been fine skipping. He could not unhear that Frankie’s first night with Aunt Loretta was “the craziest sex of my life. A whole ’nother level, like I’d been playing Little League and she was throwing ninety-mile-an-hour fastballs.” He couldn’t imagine what a fastball might mean in this metaphor.

  The best was when Matty could get him to talk about what life had been like when Teddy Telemachus and His Amazing Family were on the road. But a lot of Frankie’s stories about their showbiz career were short on details, and those details started to repeat. That made some sense, since Frankie was a little kid at the time, but it was unsatisfying. Even more disappointing was Matty’s gradual realization that this glorious, colorful era, which loomed so large in his imagination, turned out, when he did the math, to have lasted less than a year.

  Today, though, his uncle wanted to talk about Matty. He couldn’t stop brainstorming on the possibilities of Matty’s power, and describing the feats accomplished by Grandma Mo. His uncle was jittery with nervous energy, and seemed to grow more twitchy with each stop. “It’s not just about viewing things far away, Matty. It’s about being specific. It’s about focus. Like the telephone trick—did I ever tell you about the telephone trick?”

  Frankie had, but Matty never tired of hearing about it. “It was usually the climax of the show, right? Mom would be backstage, and Dad would call up somebody from the audience, and tell them to write down details about their house, what was in their refrigerator, all kinds of shit. Put it all in envelopes. Then Mom would come out, sit down next to the person, and start talking. These people were amazed, Matty. She could tell them all about their lives, things only they would know. She didn’t even have to touch ’em!”

  “What about the telephone?” Matty said, encouraging him.

  “Okay, so sometimes—and I never knew why she did it sometimes and not others—she’d say, I see you left somebody home tonight. They’re at home watching television. It’s a man, yes? A man with reddish hair—or a blonde woman, whatever. And then Dad would bring out the telephone, and they’d run the sound through the speakers so everyone could hear, and Mom would say, Why don’t I call home for you? And bam, she’d dial the number without even asking ’em.” Frankie shook his head in remembered amazement. He was sweating even though the van’s air conditioner was blasting. “Brought down the house, Matty. When that guy or gal answered, just like she said they would? People went nuts. If she’d done that on TV, the Astounding Archibald would have looked like an idiot, and we’d have been world famous.”

  “Mike Douglas!” Matty said.

  “The same. Fucker played into Archibald’s hands.”

  Finally, somebody had mentioned the television show. After the tape disappeared, Matty was afraid that he’d imagined the whole thing. “But why didn’t she come back out?” he asked.

  “Blame Buddy. He kept her from coming out, and he ended the act forever. Nobody found out how great she was. How great we were.”

  “But the government knew, right?” Matty asked. “She worked for them?”

  “Who told you about the government?” Frankie was driving fast, changing lanes without even checking the side mirrors. “That’s top secret.”

  “You’ve brought it up a couple times.”

  “Right. Listen carefully, Matthias. Your grandmother, Maureen McKinnon Telemachus…”

  “Uh-
huh?”

  “She was a spy. Maybe the greatest spy ever.” He glanced at Matty. “Oh, do not laugh, my friend.”

  “I’m not laughing,” Matty said. And he wasn’t. But Mom said her brother was a bullshitter, and sometimes he worried that Frankie was more interested in a good story than in total accuracy. Then again, Mom was more interested in total accuracy than a good anything. “So,” Matty said. “Did she have, like, a gun?”

  “What? No. She was a psychic spy.”

  “Okay…”

  “Remote viewing,” Frankie said. “We’re talking long-distance, highly targeted clairvoyance. Top psychics from around the country were recruited to locate and detect Soviet assets, stuff the satellites couldn’t find. Missile silos, nuclear submarines, science bunkers, all kinds of shit.”

  Science bunkers? Matty thought.

  “The Commies did it, too,” Frankie said. He wiped his palm on his pants, then switched hands on the steering wheel and wiped the other one. “They had their own psychics, working to jam ours. Classic Cold War, Matty. High-stakes ops.”

  “Wow,” Matty said.

  “But all that’s over,” Frankie said. “The wall’s down, and we won. New World Order. And the way I see it, it’s time for some peacetime dividends. Shit.” He almost missed the off-ramp, and jerked the van over. Matty grabbed the dash. Behind them a car honked, and Frankie flipped them the bird even though the driver couldn’t possibly see it. “The question you have to ask yourself is this,” Frankie said. “What’s the market value of your abilities?”

  “Right. Sure.”

  “You said you wanted to help your mom, right?” He’d confessed to Frankie that he was worried about her. “Then this is your chance. You being my apprentice, that’s great and all, a little cash, every little bit helps. But it’s not a game changer. It doesn’t get your mom out of that shit-hole job, and it doesn’t get you to college. You want to go to college, don’t you?”