Spoonbenders

by Daryl Gregory

  I have no more warnings for you, my husband, my one true love. No more advice, except this—be happy. You were always better at it than I was.

  I think I’m going to go for a swim now.

  Love,

  Mo

  P.S.

  Sooner or later you’re going to have to tell the kids they’re not Greek.

  “Like hell,” Teddy said.

  He didn’t try to get up. He let the weight of years roll over him and hold him there.

  He wiped old man’s tears from his cheek, coughed to clear his throat. There were people to see, games to finish. He dialed open the closet safe and placed this final letter atop the stack.

  Matty was waiting for him in the living room. He looked nervous.

  “Don’t worry, kid,” Teddy told him. “You’re going to do fine. You’re a Telemachus.”

  Matty grinned shyly. “Descendant of demigods.”

  “Yeah, well, don’t believe everything you hear.”

  He drove down Route 83, toward Mount Prospect. After a while he said, “So, Matty, when you’re up there, flying around, have you ever seen anyone?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Other minds. Spirits, maybe. Souls.”

  Matty thought about it. “You’re talking about Grandma Mo.”

  Teddy sighed. “I suppose I am.”

  “I’m sorry,” Matty said. “I…I don’t know if it works like that.”

  “Fair enough, fair enough.”

  “But I’ll keep looking.”

  Teddy laughed. “You do that. That would be swell.”

  They walked into the building where Destin Smalls had rented an office. Smalls, his arm still in a sling, met them at the door. He shook hands awkwardly with each of them, solemn as a wounded soldier greeting his troops. “I appreciate you coming in.”

  “You didn’t give us much choice,” Teddy said.

  “The boy’s still better off under our protection,” Smalls said, not denying it. “I have only his best interests at heart.”

  “And yours.”

  “They happen to coincide.”

  “Fine, fine. Let’s get this over with.”

  G. Randall Archibald waited in the next room, presiding over an array of humming transformers and control boards. The familiar Advanced Telemetry Inc. logo was stamped on the biggest pieces.

  “Matthias!” the little bald man said. “Good to see you again. We’ll be using the large-gain detectors instead of the portable set—no danger of blowing up this time, I assure you.” He had the boy sit before the machine as before, and began wiring him up to the electrodes. “We’re just going to take another crack at the torsion field distortion. As you know, there’ll be no discomfort for you.”

  “Right,” Matty said. The kid looked twitchy and nervous.

  “Let’s try a little OBE, shall we?”

  Matty closed his eyes and breathed deep. Almost instantly the detector needle bounced to the right.

  Smalls gasped.

  “Don’t get a hard-on,” Teddy said. “That’s my grandson.”

  The needle hovered in the five thousand tau range. “Yes!” Archibald said. “Highest on record!”

  “You don’t know what this means to the country,” Smalls said.

  “Please,” Teddy said. “You’re just using him to get Star Gate re-funded.”

  “We’ll make sure we keep his identity secret.”

  “Just like you kept Maureen’s secret? How many people up at the Pentagon know her name? Know our name?”

  Matty sat very still, his lips tightly closed. The needle edged even higher.

  “We have to get the psi-war program back on its feet,” Smalls said. “Now that we have Matt, that’s possible.”

  “Nope, sorry, not buying it,” Teddy said. “I don’t think you can ever keep someone like him safe. Not someone so valuable.”

  “You think you can keep him safe, better than the government can?”

  “Actually, no.”

  Smalls seemed exasperated. “Then what are we arguing about?”

  “Nothing,” Teddy said. “Nothing at all. Matty?”

  The boy opened his eyes. He looked shocked at the gun in Teddy’s hand.

  Smalls said, “You wouldn’t. Buddy made his own choice, but Matty has so much potential! You can’t do this.”

  “To save his life, I can. I’m sorry, Matty.” He pulled the trigger. The micro-lepton gun whined, higher and higher, and then the capacitor discharged with a loud snap. There was no visual sign of the distortion ray. Teddy thought, This thing would be more impressive if there was some kind of laser effect.

  The effect on Matty, though, was immediate. The boy shouted and gripped his head. His body began to shake as if he was having a seizure. Then suddenly his head fell back, and he slumped in the seat.

  “What have you done?” Smalls exclaimed.

  Archibald studied the main control panel. “There’s no signal. No field.” He looked up in surprise. “He’s inert.”

  Teddy knelt in front of the boy. “Matty, talk to me. Are you all right?”

  He looked around in a daze. “I feel…different,” he said.

  “Do you realize what you’ve done?” Smalls said.

  “We’re going home,” Teddy said. “Don’t bother us again.”

  MATTY

  He was afraid to speak until they reached the interstate. “So,” he said finally. “Did I overdo it?”

  Grandpa Teddy laughed. “You, my boy, are a born showman. The shaking was a nice touch.”

  “It just sort of came to me, so I went with it. But then, I wasn’t sure how the gun affected Uncle Buddy, and I worried that—”

  “No! No! Kid, when a mark’s as committed as Smalls, it’s almost impossible to oversell. You reeled him in, my boy. Reeled him.”

  Matty’s laugh turned into a giggle. He kept thinking of the look on Destin Smalls’s face when the micro-lepton gun went off. It was like he was being shot.

  “I think you deserve a drink,” Grandpa Teddy said. “Something tropical.” They pulled off 294 and drove down Grand Avenue. “I had a pal loved the tropical drinks. I grew up with him, both of us loved the magic, wanted to be Blackstone. Both of us the shortest kids in class, a pair of pipsqueaks. Anyway, he turned into a pretty good escape artist, then started building tricks for people. A magician’s magician, you know? Great mechanical mind. Anyway, he never liked the hard stuff, but by God, give him a drink the color of Kool-Aid, stick an umbrella in it, and he’d drink you under the table.” He parked in front of a wooden shack with a gaudy sign out front: THE HALA KAHIKI LOUNGE. “You’re gonna love this.”

  The inside was a movie set for a late-night jungle melodrama on WGN: walls of grimacing island gods, plastic leis and paper lanterns, and enough bamboo to build an Indonesian aircraft carrier. “Don’t worry, the Pusateris don’t have a piece of this.” Matty didn’t know he should have been worried about that until he mentioned it.

  They took a table at the back of the room. The waitress, a plump, dark-haired woman in her fifties, greeted Grandpa with a kiss on the cheek. “Patti, this is my grandson, Matty. We’re celebrating. How about a piña colada? You like coconut, kid?”

  “Virgin?” Patti asked Matty.

  He felt his face heat. “Uh…”

  “Semi virgin,” Grandpa said. “Give him a taste. Like I said, big day, big day.” He rapped his hands on the table, as full of energy as Matty. “So. How’s school?”

  How’s school? He barely thought about school, even when he was there. Nothing seemed as real as the things that had happened to him this summer. After Nick Pusateri Senior, who could fear a high school senior? What could a math teacher possibly do to him?

  “It’s good,” Matty said.

  The drinks came. Matty’s was some kind of white slushy with a huge slice of pineapple riding the side of the glass. He sipped at it through the straw and felt the tingle of incipient head freeze. Or maybe it was the alcohol. Matty had no i
dea what was in the drink, or what it would do to him. He’d only smoked pot.

  Grandpa waved at someone at the door. “And here’s my pal now.”

  G. Randall Archibald strode across the room. “Mai tai, my dearest Patricia! And a platter of calamari!” He slapped Matty on the shoulder. “What a performance! We should go on the road!”

  Matty was so confused. Archibald shook hands with Grandpa Teddy and plopped down in a seat. “Whew!”

  “So Smalls bought it?” Grandpa asked.

  “Literally. He’s planning on big orders. Once he got over the disappointment over losing Matty, he realized the defense possibilities. The micro-lepton gun is the greatest weapon ever created to combat psi-spies, foreign and domestic!”

  Matty couldn’t figure out what was going on. It was as if Hitler had sat down at the table with them, and Grandpa was asking about the weather in Berlin.

  “So he’s in, then,” Grandpa said, and he couldn’t hold back a grin.

  “In? He’s already talking RFPs, taking the gun straight to the military,” Archibald said. “He’s fired up to get us a contract, no matter if Star Gate’s canceled. The safety of these United States depends on it.”

  Grandpa was nodding. “I was thinking we need to add a visual component. The sound effects are great, but a laser doodad would really sell it.”

  “Wait wait wait,” Matty finally said. “You guys are working together?”

  The men regarded him with amusement. He was not amused. Everything he knew about his family was not wrong, exactly, but turned sixty degrees. It was like the big red Picasso statue downtown—it became something different when you found a new angle.

  “How long’s this been going on?” Matty demanded.

  “Since the beginning,” Archibald said. “Before there was even a Telemachus Family.” His circus-animal eyebrows arched their backs. “Or a Telemachus.”

  “But you destroyed us! On TV!”

  The magician looked chagrined. “That was regrettable.”

  “Regrettable? You wrecked everything.”

  “That wasn’t Archie’s fault,” Grandpa Teddy said. “He was following the plan. Your grandmother was supposed to come out and do her best trick. The audience would have eaten it up. And then he—”

  “And then I,” Archibald put in, “the world’s most notable debunker of psychics, would have eaten crow. Loudly, chewing openmouthed. My endorsement of authenticity, my imprimatur, would have catapulted them over the heads of that Israeli faker himself.”

  “May he burn in hell,” Teddy said.

  “But that didn’t happen,” Matty said.

  “Fate intervened,” Grandpa said. “And your grandmother refused to try again. I must admit, I sulked for a while. But in the end, it was for the best. What would fame have gotten us?”

  “Jail, perhaps,” Archibald said.

  “Heartache,” Grandpa said.

  “Better to take the money,” Archibald said.

  Grandpa put his hand on Matty’s shoulder. “The company Archie and I started—ATI? It was built from the start to milk as much money from the government teat as possible. That milk was running dry, what with Smalls’s retirement. But now that the ol’ boy is jazzed up—”

  “We’re back in business,” Archibald said.

  “Sorry I couldn’t tell you about what was up,” Grandpa said. “Didn’t want you to tip our hand.”

  Patti set down Archibald’s drink, a tall orange-colored thing decorated with a sprig of something green, a slice of pineapple, and a pink parasol. Archibald raised it high. “To ATI!”

  “Archibald and Telemachus Incorporated,” Grandpa answered.

  “Okay, but, but…” The number of questions in Matty’s head was turning into a multivehicle pileup. “Is the micro-lepton gun fake or not?”

  “Oh, it’s real,” Archibald said.

  “And totally fake,” Grandpa said.

  “Ever hear of a placebo?” Archibald asked.

  Matty nodded, even though he wasn’t exactly sure what the word meant.

  “The gun, my young friend, is that dark cousin of the placebo, the nocebo. If a placebo provides false benefits, the nocebo imparts false harm. The damage to the patient is psychogenic, but no less real.”

  “If you believe in it,” Grandpa explained, “it hurts.”

  “We’ve tested it on several ‘psychics,’ ” Archibald said. “Once we explain what the gun does to the torsion field, they lose all ability to function. Of course, half of those people were fakers—”

  “Unconscious fakers,” Grandpa put in.

  “—so we’re faking the fakes.”

  Matty took a moment to think about this. “So Uncle Buddy…?”

  “Buddy needed to be normal,” Grandpa said. “It was a mercy killing.”

  Matty took a sip from the frozen drink, thinking. The two men started talking about the details of government contracts. When the calamari arrived, Grandpa noticed him and said, “What’s the matter, my boy?”

  “Nothing,” Matty said. “I was just wondering about…me.”

  “You?”

  “My power is real, right?”

  “My boy, my boy,” Grandpa Teddy said. “Just because there’s a lot of cut glass in the jewelry case doesn’t mean there aren’t a few diamonds. You, Matthias, are descended from greatness.”

  “I know, I know, demigods.”

  Archibald snorted.

  “I mean Maureen McKinnon,” Grandpa said. “The World’s Most Powerful Psychic. I made that medal for her for Christmas one year. A joke between us, but not a joke, because let me tell you, Matthias, she was, indisputably, the real deal.”

  “To fair Maureen,” Archibald said, raising his glass again.

  “To the love of my life,” Grandpa said.

  Matty lifted his piña colada. “To Grandma Mo.”

  BUDDY

  He turned the plastic-coated pages in a slow simmer of panic. Each picture was more luscious than any pornographic photo he’d ever seen: seductively crossed chicken strips; gleaming pot roast; wet, juicy quesadillas; steaming piles of spaghetti. Too many choices. Far too many. The Build Your Own Burger section made his heart race. For years he’d known what to order, because he remembered ordering it. It was a causal loop that had long ago stopped feeling strange and become reassuring: remembered meals were the ultimate comfort food. But to be set loose in an environment where not only could almost anything be ordered, but if that failed, could be assembled from a vast number of ingredients? Madness.

  Then he turned the page, and a squawk escaped his throat. Breakfast Any Time.

  The waitress appeared. She was shorter than Buddy and ten years older, with a narrow chin and a nose that was a bit loo large for her face. “See anything you like?” she asked.

  For a moment Buddy couldn’t speak. He took a breath and said, “Denny’s is a hellscape of unfettered free will.”

  The waitress laughed. “I’m with you on hellscape. Can I start you with a drink?”

  “Just ice tea, thanks.”

  The waitress smiled cryptically, then walked away. Buddy had asked to sit in her section. For the past four weeks, he’d been engaged in his own experiment in choice. Could he really do anything now? Travel anywhere? Talk to anyone? He’d become that terrifying and terrified thing: a free agent. And yet it was thrilling. He was responsible for no one but himself, and he could do anything he wanted. At least until his money ran out. He’d traveled to Alton, Illinois, then to St. Louis, Missouri, and then, following rumors and referrals, to two other small midwestern towns. At each step, the number of decisions he’d been required to make was nearly paralyzing. But he’d made them. He’d made them without knowing if they were right or wrong. Finally he’d arrived, at nine-thirty at night, at an all-but-empty chain restaurant in Carbondale, Illinois.

  He was so nervous.

  To soothe himself while he waited, he took out his crayon and drew a line across the paper place mat. He’d drawn this lin
e several times during his trip, on napkins and hotel stationery, to remind himself of where he’d come from and where he was going. Call that his lifeline. He made a mark near the right end of the line that was September 4, 1995. Until that date, his mind had wandered up and down the line, remembering in both directions. But now he was on the tip of the line, which crept forward moment by moment. He never knew when it was going to stop. He kept doodling until the waitress returned with the tumbler of tea.

  “Pretty color,” she said. “What happens then?” She nodded at the numbers Buddy had absentmindedly drawn far to the right of the line: 11 2 2016.

  “No idea,” Buddy said. Suddenly he was embarrassed. He must look like a little kid. “Do you remember me?”

  The waitress glanced toward the woman working the cash register. “I’m not in that line of work anymore.”

  “No! I didn’t mean that! I’m so sorry. I just wondered—”

  “I looked you up,” she said. “That story you told me. You really were famous once.”

  “It didn’t turn out well.”

  “What does?” The woman at the cash register walked into the kitchen, and the waitress seemed to relax. “So you stalking me, Buddy?” Then she quickly said, “Just kidding. It’s okay.”

  Oh, but he had been stalking her, across two states and four weeks. Buddy said, “I wanted to—” What did he want? This moment was so different than he imagined. He had no memory to guide him. The script was blank.

  “I just wanted to say thank you. You were very nice to me.”

  “And you were a sweet kid.” She extended her hand. “I’m Carrie.”

  “Carrie,” Buddy repeated, as if he hadn’t found out that name early in his search. “Glad to meet you.”

  “So,” she said. “Have you decided what you want?”

  26

  MATTY

  The World’s Most Powerful Psychic is fourteen years old. He sits on his bed in the attic bedroom, eyes closed, with an orange and white box beside him. The box is empty now. The gift, the inheritance, hangs around his neck, the steel cold against his bare chest.