LIFTER

by Crawford Kilian

  “He must have been some guy,” I said.

  “Some jerk is more like it.”

  “Yeah, maybe. But he attracted you, and he spoilt you for anybody else.”

  Melinda looked steadily at me, not quite focused properly, and smiled wistfully. “Yeah, he attracted me, all right, and I guess he did spoil me. Everybody else was boring by comparison. And I did some comparing, believe me.”

  “Melinda? Are you ever sorry you didn’t try to get back with him?”

  “Oh, sometimes. Most of the time I’m just sore that he had to be such a jerk, and glad I didn’t end up living with him so long I got tired of him.” She wiped her eyes and stood up. “Dinner.”

  It was good casserole, full of beef and noodles and mushrooms, and the salad was even better - spinach and hardboiled eggs and radishes and tomatoes, with one of those dressings Melinda makes up. We sat and ate and talked about football and architecture and computers. I talked a lot, but I wasn’t listening to myself very much. Instead, I sat back inside my head and debated with myself about other things. After dinner, we ate canned peaches and ice cream while the debate continued. Melinda went back to work in her study while I did the dishes under Marcus’s supervision. The phone rang just as I was finishing up, and Melinda picked it up in the study.

  “It’s for you. Jerry Ames.”

  Wiping my hands on a tea-towel, I went into the study and took the phone.

  “Yo, Rick. Doin’ anything?”

  “Nothing much at the moment.”

  “Feel like cruising Santa Barbara Boulevard? Kind of a good way to relax before a game.”

  I was too surprised to say anything for a moment. “I don’t know, Jerry.”

  “C’mon, it’ll do you good. We’ll pick up a couple of girls, have a good time, get ourselves relaxed.”

  “Uh, I think I better take a rain check on this one, Jerry. I have to see Pat tonight.”

  “Ah, hey, I didn’t know that was still alive, y’know?”

  Melinda, sitting in front of her computer, was giving me a big, smug, maternal grin. I could’ve slugged her with the phone.

  “Well, you know,” I said wittily.

  “Yeah. Well, okay, maybe we’ll do something this weekend, unwind, y’know?”

  “Yeah, maybe so. Take care of that arm.”

  “Take care of those legs, man.”

  I hung up and Melinda bellowed, “Yay! You’re really going to go see Pat?”

  “Well, I’m going to try. If she mails me back here in six small boxes, it’s all your fault. Okay if I bring her back?”

  “Sure! Why not? Go on, call her.”

  “Uh, I think I’ve got a better chance if I just show up.”

  “Do it your way. Just don’t fumble the ball.”

  “Would you quit it with the sports metaphors?” I begged. “See you later.”

  I went out and got into Brunhilde while fantasising that this was the Battle of Britain and I was climbing into my Spitfire. Maybe I’d come home in glory, and maybe I’d go down in flames.

  Pat’s place was relatively quiet; my sternum didn’t start vibrating to the stereo until I was actually on the front porch. After some aerobic knocking, I finally got a sign of life: one of the other girls, a sallow little kid with a handful of eye shadow on each lid answered the door. Her name was Lauri; she was Pat’s roommate.

  “Hi,” I said. Joe Cool. “Pat in?”

  “I dunno. Want to go see?”

  “Might as well.”

  Inside, the stereo crashed and banged while three girls sat squabbling in the lounge room about whose turn it was to help Morty and Joan with breakfast tomorrow. They glanced up at me and went back to their squabble. Morty popped in from the kitchen.

  “Please turn down the music, girls. Oh, hi, Rick. Didn’t expect to see you tonight. Shall I call Pat downstairs?”

  “Uh, maybe it would be easier if I just went up and knock on her door. My mother and I wanted to invite her over for the evening.”

  “Well, go on up. Maybe she can use a night out. She hasn’t been the greatest company the last few days.”

  Oh boy. I went upstairs and down the hall to the room that Pat shared with the Eyeshadow Queen, and knocked.

  “Go away.”

  I nearly did. The thought of going back empty-handed to Melinda was all that kept me from doing an about-face and retreating.

  Instead, I opened the door. Pat was sitting at her desk, doing calculus and wearing her usual at-home outfit: jeans, UCLA sweatshirt, and ear plugs. Her face hardened when she saw me.

  Moving fast, I crossed the room and sat down on the bed next to her desk.

  “I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

  “You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. Come back to our place for a little while. Melinda would love to see you, and if you’re still made at me when I’ve explained things, I won’t bother you anymore.”

  I could see her emotions battling each other. For a while it looked likely that she was going to bash me with her calculus textbook and leave me for dead.

  “Okay,” she said finally. “Let’s go.”

  We drove back through the chilly evening, not saying much and listening to a Bach tape. When we got home, Melinda was still at work but came out of the study to give Pat a big hello and offer her a cup of tea. We sat drinking and eating cookies in the kitchen for a few minutes, while Pat and Melinda nattered about nothing in particular. Finally Melinda said she had to go back to work.

  “Come on upstairs,” I said. “I can’t show you what this is all about down here.”

  Pat gave me a dubious look, but decided I wasn’t likely to do anything too violent. So we went upstairs, with her taking each step slowly and carefully just like the old days of a week before. Marcus came with us and flopped down on the carpet with his usual grunt. Pat settled into the chair by my workbench.

  “So what is this famous new experiment?” She asked coolly. “Some new EEG?”

  “No. I just want you to watch something. Please don’t make a fuss, okay? I don’t want to upset Melinda or anything. She doesn’t know anything about it. And I have to ask you to keep it a secret.”

  “Sure, but it better be good.”

  I sat cross-legged on my bed and took a deep breath. Believe it or not, I felt a little shaky, as if I was about to take off my clothes in public or something equally weird. “I learnt I could do this a few weeks ago - in fact, it was the day you started school.”

  And I lifted about a foot off the bed, with my hands on my knees. Marcus glanced at me and went to sleep. Pat watched without a change in her expression. Then one hand rose slowly to cover her mouth, and her eyes began to widen.

  Without saying anything else, I rotated clockwise through 360 degrees. Then I tipped forward and did a kind of slowmotion somersault in place. I moved sideways toward the window, then back towards the door. Pat didn’t move.

  “Can I come a little closer to you?” I asked quietly.

  She nodded, very slowly. With my legs still crossed, I moved across the room until I was close enough to touch her.

  “I’m still learning how to do it,” I explained. “That’s why I didn’t invite you over, because I was practising. I guess it’s what they call levitation, but I just call it lifting.”

  She reached up, taking my hands in hers, and she was smiling.

  “You look beautiful up there. Teach me how to do it, too.”

  Chapter 9

  THE BIOFEEDBACK DEVICE and the EEG had been gathering dust on my workbench all week. With slightly shaky hands, I set them up beside the bed. The only way I could fight the urge to babble was to keep my trap shut. After all these weeks, the desire to share everything was, in itself, nearly strong enough to lift me off the floor.

  Pat must have wanted to talk, too, but she took her cue from me: if silence was part of the drill, she’d be silent. I sat her down on the edge of the bed and taped the
electrodes to her temples and scalp. Paste would’ve made a better connection, but it was getting late and she didn’t need to explain to Morty why she had this weird gunk in her hair.

  “Okay,” I said at last. “You can sit or lie down, whatever feels comfortable. Relax as much as you can. When the light goes on, try to keep it on. It may be hard, because you’ll feel kind of sleepy and when you concentrate you start waking yourself up.”

  “I’m an old pro at this now.” She heaved her bad leg onto the bed, swung the good one up beside it, and stretched out. “I feel like the Bride of Frankenstein.”

  She shouldn’t have said that, because it set me off on the worst attack of giggles I’d had in years. And that set her off, too, so nothing much happened except the gadgets consumed electricity. After a while we calmed down, and talked quietly about nothing much; as if by agreement, we didn’t talk about lifting.

  The light went on and off erratically, and then began going on for longer periods. Pat’s face softened; she didn’t look tired, just relaxed in a way I’d never seen her before. Sitting a few feet away, I watched her with growing surprise, she was more beautiful than ever, but that wasn’t what surprised me: I knew I was looking at the real Pat, the girl I’d intuitively known was trapped under the anger and hurt and loneliness. This was a girl who was utterly open and yet unknowable, mysterious; her faint smile made her seem both young and ageless.

  “I love you,” I said quietly.

  “I love you, too,” she murmured. She didn’t look up, or change her expression; her sleepy eyes were focused on the light, keeping it on.

  “I want you to try to feel something. It’s like being in a Jacuzzi, a kind of moving, tingly pressure all over your body.”

  “…No. I don’t feel anything like that.”

  “Like something strong and fast, moving over your skin?”

  “No…”

  She lay there for almost half an hour; the light began to go off, flickering uncertainly.

  “I can’t feel it, Rick,” she whispered.

  I pulled my chair closer and took her hand. “Just keep the light on. You’ll feel it.” And I turned on the Effect, not enough to lift but enough to make myself aware of the endless pulsing energy around me. Pat’s eyes widened a little, then closed.

  “Oh - I feel that. Feels good.” I could see the fine gold hairs on her arms stand up. “It is like a Jacuzzi.”

  “Can you feel it all over you?”

  “Mm-hm.”

  “Make it stronger underneath you.” I was still holding her hand, and I lifted about an inch.

  So did Pat.

  I held my breath, lifting ever so gently higher: two inches, three, four. The electrode cables began to tighten. Pat looked at me, her eyes half-closed, a faint smile still on her lips.

  “You’re lifting,” I told her.

  “I know.”

  The light flickered and went out, but Pat stayed up. I reached over with my other hand and, as gently as I could, I pulled the electrodes off.

  “I feel it, Rick. I really, really feel it.” She let go of my hand. Then she drifted up to within a foot of the ceiling. Slowly she circled the room, still horizontal, her fingers occasionally touching the ceiling. “It feels so strange, but so - ordinary. Natural, like I’ve always been able to do it.”

  “I know.” And I lifted up to float beside her, put my arms around her, and kissed her.

  Half an hour later, we were driving back to her place.

  “It’s got to stay a secret, at least for a while,” I said.

  “I know. But, oh God, I can’t believe it’s really happened. A couple of hours ago I was doing my homework, and now I can fly.” Just to prove it, she lifted off her seat and bumped her head.

  I laughed. “Quit that! Listen. This weekend I want to take you back up in the hills, where nobody can see us, so we can practice some real flying. And I’ll finally be able to tell you what’s been going on.”

  “You stinker, I can guess a lot of it already. That’s how you got me off the hillside, isn’t it? Uh-huh. And why you built the EEG in the first place.”

  “The first time, I did it with nothing,” I bragged. “The EEG was just to get me back in the mood.”

  “In the mood. I’ll never be out of the mood. It’s - oh, Rick, this is a miracle.”

  “Don’t let Gibbs hear you talking that way.”

  “Hey, let’s blow his mind tomorrow, some in through the windows.”

  “Don’t even talk about it. We’ll show it to him, but not just yet. I want to get a better idea of what the Effect is, what we can do with it. And I want to make sure we don’t get hurt when we do go public.”

  She nodded, a little sobered. “I don’t want to be famous. I just want to lift all the time.”

  “Don’t we all. But for now, we’ve got to do a real Clark Kent number, secret identities, all that good stuff.”

  “You mean I get to wear a mask and a leotard?”

  “No, just a mask.”

  “Anything you say. You’re the boss - on this.”

  “Boss, shmoss. I just don’t want us getting shot or put in some lab.” We pulled up in front of her house. “Uh, can I assume you’re coming to the game tomorrow?”

  “Sure, if you promise to take me out after.”

  “I promise.”

  I walked her to the door. Morty had seen us arrive, and had the door open.

  “Hi, Mort!” she chirped.

  “Hi, Pat. How are you?”

  “Just fine! See you tomorrow morning, Rick?”

  “Pick you up about eight?”

  “Great. G’night.” And she limped off inside. Morty glanced over his shoulder at her, then turned back to me.

  “Gee - she sure must’ve needed a night out. Nice to have her so cheerful for a change. Night, Rick. Thanks.”

  Friday morning, Pat was waiting out front on the footpath. It was a crisp, clear morning, with dew on the grass and the promise of frost before long. Pat was wearing a blue duffel coat and jeans, with her books in a backpack. She swung into the car and kissed me hard enough to dent my face.

  “I could hardly sleep last night,” she said as I started the car. “I kept lifting.”

  “What about your roommate, the eyeshadow monster?”

  “Lauri? She snored all night. Besides, I was just lifting myself up off the bed a little - just an inch or two. I can’t get over it, Rick. It’s just the greatest feeling in the world - happy and scary all together. Are you sure this isn’t a dream?”

  “I doubt it. Melinda would never let me sleep for a month and a half.” I squeezed her hand. “It feels good to have someone else to share it with.”

  “Mr Stevenson, I’ll tell you this. When you have a secret, it’s a doozy. I can hardly wait for your next revelation.”

  “The next revelation is that San Cristobal is going to be massacred tonight,” I predicted modestly.

  “I can’t wait. Can I play, too?”

  “You get your turn after the game.”

  “Rick - are we really going outside, up in the air?”

  “What’s the point of lifting just inside a room, when the whole world is out there? It’s a great feeling.”

  “How high are we going?”

  “A few hundred feet. You have to remember to wear dark clothes.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “And I’ll get you a balaclava to cover your face. It makes you look like Spiderman, but it keeps your face warm and covers it up.”

  “Fine. And are we really going hiking tomorrow?”

  “Why not? You got something better to do?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  Jason Murphy’s white Trans Am swam up behind me in my rear view mirror. He tailgated me for a minute, then swung out and passed with a roar. One of the Tricycle Rats, sitting beside him, gave us the finger.

  I sighed. “Some people have no respect for superheroes.”

  Gassaway was lurking in the lab, and when we came in he pounc
ed on me.

  “The great prophet!” he crowed. “The Nostradamus of Santa Teresa! The famous UFO predictor.”

  My jaw dropped. “I fᚓ” Just in time, I caught myself from saying I’d forgotten all about my predicted UFO, and gone straight to bed last night. “What d’you mean?” I asked coolly.

  “No UFOs! Not a trace! And you predicted one.”

  “Yeah.” I shrugged like a good loser. “Well, can’t win ‘em all.”

  “Ye of little faith.” Gassaway grinned. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

  “Maybe you’ll get lucky tonight,” I suggested.

  “Want to make that a prediction?”

  “Not this time. But keep your eyes peeled. One of these nights you might even see the Great Pumpkin.”

  Actually, I felt embarrassed. Here I’d started to set up a great practical joke on Gassaway and the whole U.S. Air Force, and then it had slipped my mind. Maybe too much lifting could induce amnesia? No, it was just my usual absent-mindedness.

  Pat and I sat together, which interested Gibbs not at all but caused Angela to go into spasms of curiosity until Pat finally got a chance to talk to her that all was well. She looked a little disappointed; I think she’d been enjoying despising me. The rest of the Awkward Squad was agog about our reconciliation for all of fifteen seconds, which was about its maximum attention span.

  The morning went along smoothly; Gibbs did a great job of teaching and I did a great job of fretting about the game. Finally I had to go to the john. Jason and a couple of the Tricycle Rats were there, conducting a tobacco seminar, and they cheered up when they saw me.

  “The mutant!” Jason exclaimed. “Faster than a speeding bullet. Able to leap tall buildings.”

  I finished what I was doing and went to wash my hands. If I’d had any sense, I would’ve ignored him and left. Instead, I said: “Jason, what’s your problem?”

  “Man, I don’t have any problems. I get along pretty good. But I got, y’know, standards. Like, a code? The code says you don’t have to put up with jerks who think they’re cool, y’know? ‘Cause that’s dishonest, it’s like lying if you’re a jerk and you try to cover it up. You’re a jerk, you should act like a jerk.”