by Matthew Fish
I sat against an old chest that rested beside the long table. I ran a finger against the dust covered glass—my father would have been so upset, he was constantly cleaning these cases. I flipped open the small gold latch and pull up on the case closest to me. I found a pile of quarters, all from 1991, near the front and gingerly grabbed one from the top. I got to my feet and concentrated really hard again—this time, focusing my ‘energy’ or whatever I felt it should be, to focus onto the far wall.
“Go!” I shouted as I threw the coin up in the air towards the wall. Without much fanfare it landed on the floor and rolled a short distance before hitting the brick wall and falling over.
I picked up another coin and close my eyes tightly. I imagined the coin in my hand; I felt the slight heft of it. I let it run through my fingers for a moment and then concentrated hard on getting some kind of reaction from the coin.
“Abracadabra!” I yelled as I toss the coin into the air. I followed this action with a quick gesture for the coin to shoot across the room. Much to my disappointment, but not with any measure of surprise, the coin did not react. Instead, the quarter fell to the ground.
I do not know why I was being stubborn. I should have just accepted my mediocrity and headed back upstairs. There was just this…nagging voice inside of me. It just…I just didn’t want to be unremarkable Mark anymore. I wanted to have some kind of purpose. I picked up another coin. I let out a heavy sigh. I closed my eyes once more and pictured the coin flying up into the air and shooting into the brick wall. As I opened my eyes, I quickly acted.
“Expelliarmus!” I spurted ridiculously as I sent the coin flying over towards the wall.
Frustrated…or maybe just overly disappointed…I picked up a small pile of coins.
“Fuck you…” I muttered as I tossed a coin senselessly against the brick wall. It bounced back and rolled beside my shoe.
“And fuck you…” I continued, tossing another coin.
“Fuck everything,” I added, just for good measure. Another coin, another failure—this just was not working.
“Fuck this….” I muttered as I placed the few remaining coins back into their respective slot.
I started thinking that I really was unremarkable. It was just a fact that I could not contest—no matter how hard I wanted it to not be true. I was not a Conductor. My father was one, I was simply not. I did not know why this simple fact would not permeate my overly stubborn mind. I started feeling like a real dickwad after all. Maybe that girl had a third power…just like Bradley could identify the year of a Perpetual’s birth, she could clearly identify dickwads. I shook my head and allowed myself to lose the battle against my own stubbornness. I ran my hand against the glass surface and began to close it. Just as I was about to do so—I noticed a particular year, 1997. I grabbed a quarter from the top and held it between my forefinger and thumb. These coins felt different somehow. I was attracted to it. Then again, why shouldn’t it? It was the year of my birth. What if…just what if …it starts with a coin made in the same year as my birth? It seemed ridiculous. I would have had to handle a coin of the same year at some point in my life—even with my germaphobic tendencies. Or maybe I had and I just never bothered to see if it did anything. Feeling another unspectacular failure coming, I placed the quarter in the palm of my hand. I let out a sigh and shrugged my shoulders. I set my mind to the coin. I pictured it going into that brick wall—the same wall that I had failed to hit so many times. I concentrated, and strangely enough I felt something…the coin was somehow vibrating. Half startled, half convinced I could actually do this—I let go.
I did not say a word as I tossed the coin up into the air. I opened my eyes just in time to see it vibrating madly until it began to glow a strange orange. Without warning, the quarter shot itself into the brick wall. A sound like a gunshot reverberated through the basement. “Holy shit…” I muttered as I rushed over and inspected the smoking impact. The quarter was embedded so far that a mere few millimeters could be seen protruding from the red brick.
“You alright down there?” Bradley asked from the top of the staircase as the door loudly creaked open.
“Yeah…” Mark said softly, still deep in amazement from what he had accomplished. “I’m not…unremarkable. Holy shit and spins...”
Bradley quickly rushed down the stairs. Perhaps it was the way the response did not seem very convincing. As he reached to bottom of the stairs he saw the quarter embedded into the brick wall. “Did…did you do that?”
“It was one from the year I was born,” Mark said as he nodded slowly and rubbed a finger against the impact, it was hot to the touch. “I thought about how it is for your people, and I…I guess I applied that to myself and it worked.”
“You’re a Conductor.”
“I’m…yeah,” Mark stuttered. “I’m….something.”
“So,” Bradley began as he placed a hand upon Mark’s shoulder. “How would you like to work as an official Conductor?”
“I don’t…know what I’m doing?”
“I watched your father enough times, we can wing it,” Bradley said confidently. “I have a few ideas on training…we’ll train for a few weeks, then we will get you onboard.”
“I mean…yeah, but my father. The same thing could happen to me?”
“We worked together for almost twenty years and that…that was a rare incident,” Bradley said as he looked down to the floor and squeezed Mark’s shoulder tightly. “I can promise, to the best of my ability that I will keep you safe. We will take older coins. I will do everything in my power to help you.”
“Well,” Mark muttered hesitantly. “It didn’t work out all that well for him.”
“And I beat myself up for it every day,” Bradley replied. “You can go—you can start a new life somewhere else, but…you are being hunted for some reason. Now, yes, you can run—or you can stay with me and fight. You can make a difference…”
“That’s what I want,” Mark said quietly. “I think that’s what I want.”
“The running part or the making a difference..?”
“Oh,” Mark said as he shrugged. “The making a difference.”
“Sorry, I wasn’t sure.”
“I should have been clearer,” Mark added. “That…that was my bad.”
Chapter 2
I remember giving the house one last look as we finished loading my father’s extensive coin collection into the back of Bradley’s black police issued Charger. In a way, it felt like an ending just the same way it did as a new beginning. It was a little sad. Everything I had wanted to take fit into two small suitcases. There was something sad about the idea that your life is so small at times that everything that marks the years of your life on earth can fit into two small cases. I realized the reason—the house was not safe. I could easily be found here. I just didn’t have to like it. At that moment in my life I did not feel that I had control over very much. However, I did have control over how I could feel about things…and the overall general feeling was shitty…with a little corn of hopefulness. (A rather gross analogy I realize, but somehow fitting for my “shituation.”)
“Maybe when things settle down,” Bradley said as he climbed into the driver’s seat of the car. “Well...if you decide you want to return here, you should be able to someday.”
“That’s comforting,” Mark said as he shrugged and climbed into the passenger seat. He nervously gripped his hands against the bottom of the leather seat—preparing himself for Bradley’s somewhat unique driving style. “Let’s take it a bit slower this time, remember…one of us will die if you wreck.”
“You know how long I’ve been driving cars?”
“Judging by the seemingly reckless abandon, I’d say a week?”
“Funny,” Bradley retorted as he shifted the car into drive and sped away. “I used to race cars once as a hobby…seems like forever ago.”
“Did you always want to be…you know—what you are now?” Mark asked. He had about a billion other
questions popping around his head all lined up in queue like a never ending Pez dispenser.
“Nah…Never thought I’d be doing this,” Bradley said as he took a turn at a ridiculous speed while still managing to pass a car that was modestly attempting to take the same turn. The driver honked and displayed his middle finger. None of these actions seemed to phase Bradley much…or at all. “Acting…That’s what I wanted to do. Shit, that’s what we all would want to do probably.”
“Are there many actors that are Perpetuals?”
“Quite a few actually,” Bradley said with a nod. “Famous ones too, you know how some actors seem to never age—or Hollywood is always saying that this person is the next big name person. Well, in some cases that’s true. Sometimes it is actually the same person.”
“But you don’t age, don’t people catch on?” Mark said as he braced himself as they sped past a compact car only to come to a grinding halt at a stop sign. The whole display seemed rather pointless to Mark. However, he figured it must amuse Bradley to a great extent.
“We can choose to age, but we can go to sleep at night and wake up like we’re twenty-four again, it requires a lot of energy and even more sleep. I could do it tonight; I’d probably be unrecognizable to you. It’s the only thing about us that keeps as secretive as we are—that and the council”
“Let me guess, secret society for Perpetuals that lets you get away with like getting shot…and when you should have died it’s labeled a miraculous miracle, when in reality…you just can’t die.”
“Pretty accurate actually,” Bradley said as he looked over to Mark and made an odd face. “How’d you figure that out?”
“I’m just coming up with the strangest shit I can think of and the most off it is the most right it probably is.”
“Fair enough,” Bradley said as he laughed. “They do other services—for actors they find replacements, mortal replacements…they pay them well to basically grow old and die. Ringers who have a fair bit of talent for being other people and can keep secrets. That’s what Elvis did.”
“Elvis is still alive?” Remembering that when he was a child his father used to talk about how people used to spot him and there was a fair bit of controversy surrounding his death. Mark never really took interest.
“No,” Bradley said with a short sigh. “He had a drug problem—was pretty well known actually. That kind of living takes a toll on the mind that he couldn’t stand. He eventually opted to go through something we call The Passing.”
“So there is a way, other than a Conductor, that a Perpetual can die then right?”
“No, it still involves a Conductor…it’s just more of a willing way to go. Some of our people like to age, we live as long as we care to—after that we hire the services of a Conductor so that we can die just like you can.”
“This is so…so very fucked up,” Mark said as he buried his head against his palms. “Do you ever look at the way things are and just go…wow; this shit is just…complicated and fucked?”
“Yes,” Bradley said with a single nod. “Don’t you?”
“Yes,” Mark said as he thought about how his side of the world worked, or more often at times…didn’t. “Fair enough…”
As we pulled up to a modest white ranch style house with a very well manicured yard, Bradley announced that we were home. This was to be my third home in just under two months. I remember feeling a healthy amount of apprehension of living with someone I did not really know. We pulled into an oversized garage and started to unload my father’s coins into the basement.
“This is my workout room,” Bradley said as he gestured with his chin, his arms filled with cases of coins, towards a large basement room filled with various exercise equipment that looked more akin to torture devices to Mark.
“Quite a spread you have here,” Mark said as he noted the various punching bags, weightlifting things, and other crap that Mark really did not have much interest in.
“Should work well for getting you into shape, and for your training,” Bradley said as fumbled for a moment with a door at the far end revealing a large room filled survival equipment, guns, and large tables with various boxes of ammunition and knives. “And this should work for our armory.”
“Holy tits,” Mark said as he gazed at the vast arsenal of weaponry. Some of the rifles looked old; others appeared to be the heavy duty stuff that Mark had seen in shoot-em-up action movies. One wall was handguns, ranging from revolvers to semi-automatic pistols.
“Well we’re not hunting squirrels,” Bradley said as he placed the boxes of coins down on a clear spot on one of the tables and picked up a rifle with a large scope mounted on the top. “It takes about eight well placed shots to render one of our kind unconscious for about a night. Remember that, if it ever comes to that.”
“You’ll teach me to shoot?” Mark said as a strange twinge of excitement rushed over him.
“As a last resort,” Bradley answered as he returned the large gun back to hang against the wall. “Getting eight shots off before one of them gets to you is the trick—relying on your skills as a Conductor is the best option.”
“Why not a gun that shoots quarters?”
“Doesn’t work that way,” Bradley said as he shook his head.
“Why not though…as a Conductor—can’t I shoot a gun that shoots quarters?”
“Just doesn’t work like that…”
“Here…” Bradley muttered as he searched through a box in the corner of the room. He pulled out a black leather belt; the front of the belt was lined with silver containers with small tabs on the bottom—he tossed it gently over to Mark. “This was one of your father’s.”
Mark examined the belt for a moment. It was pretty light—the containers were probably empty. He attempted to put it on, fumbling with the containers which gave the belt an awkward and uneven weight.
“You can’t run it through the loops on your jeans…it has a little latch on the back and front that holds it in place once you loop it on.”
Mark nodded as he wrapped the belt around his waist. He pulled the end until it fit snugly against his jeans and flipped a small latch on the back to affix it to the rear of his pants. He looked down at the grouping of silver canisters counting ten in total. “I look fucking retarded. I look like I should be giving change at a Laundromat somewhere.”
“It’s about functionality,” Bradley said as pulled out a black long-coat and helped place it over Mark’s shoulders. “It’s not about looking cool.”
“It’s a little big too,” Mark complained as he allowed the jacket to fall over the belt and into place. “Trench coats were cool like twenty years ago.”
“It looks good on you,” Bradley said as he pointed to a mirror hanging on the back of the door.
Mark gave himself a good look-over. He placed his hands beneath the jacket and rested them atop a few of the silver canisters. “Yep…I’m a dickwad.”
Training began that same day. It started with very simple stuff. I learned how to get a feel for a coin, how to tap into the energy within myself to cause it to start to vibrate. It was such an odd feeling—it was almost like a quarter had a pulse. Once I could catch a hold of that pulse, I could cause it to quicken—the more it sped, the faster it began to tremor, it would begin to glow. At the right moment, with just a gesture of my hand, I could send it flying off. Not…exactly accurately, however. For the first two days my aim was akin to that of a child trying to pee standing up for the first time. After my first few tosses, a lot of the guns had to be moved to safer harbor. It was not too long after that—that the guns got put away and the walls were blank. One of those large sheets representative of a person was hanging on the far edge of the room. I had yet to hit it with a coin, and when I mean it…I’m talking about the wall—not the target. Most of my coins spent themselves errantly into the wall beside me, more than a few into the ceiling…a couple lodged themselves into the concrete floor. One of them almost hit Bradley while he was working out. Luckily
he was not born this decade, so I was of no harm to him. However if this room was full of children, I would have been deadly.
By the fourth day, I was still missing my target.
“You’re not concentrating on where you need it to go,” Bradley said as he let out a heavy, long winded sigh.
“I am, it’s just…not listening to me,” Mark protested. “All these quarters are stupid…this outfit is stupid…”
“Your father proudly wore an outfit like that until the day he did,” Bradley spoke sternly as he shook his head.
“Should have buried it with him…”
“Just concentrate,” Bradley said, ignoring the snide remark. “Think of it…like you’re conducting a symphony.”
“I’ve never conducted a symphony…”
“But you’ve seen it on TV…at some point, right?” Bradley asked with a heavy touch of concern in his voice.
“Yeah, guy in a suit in front of a bunch of people waving his hands around like a spastic bucket of cocks as the people actually playing instruments do all the work.” Mark said as he shrugged. “I make the coin vibrate, I send it up in the air—then it goes wherever the fuck it wants to. I gesture towards the wall; it goes into the floor…five stars all around.”
“Ok so,” Bradley said as he ran a hand through his hair and began pacing. “Why are you gesturing.”
“Because that’s what you said to do,” Mark responded in a frustrated tone. “You call the year, I pull it out of the cylinder and then I toss it like a jackass into air and it heads down to the floor. It’s not working. Maybe I need a wand or something.”
“Let’s just work through this,” Bradley said as he placed a hand on Mark’s shoulder. “The coin goes up, you should still have control of the coin at that point—soon you’ll have to handle having twenty of them up at once. Something must be breaking your concentration between the times it leaves your hand to where it ends up…wherever it ends up. What are you thinking when you gesture?”
“I’m not; I’m trying to move it with my hand by gesturing it towards the target.”
