Jumper: Griffin's Story

by Steven Gould

  Didn’t know it would burn so fast.

  My intention had been to jump to the surface, to listen to the explosion, but I flinched away to the Empty Quarter instead, and missed it.

  The air was full of dust and chemical smell when I jumped back into the cave, worse than my trip in the gypsum hauler, so I left and didn’t return until the next day.

  I examined the horizontal shaft from both sides. Rubble had dropped from above, mostly filling the bottom of the lift shaft. My tunnel was completely filled and the others mostly blocked. From the other side, the tunnel had collapsed back to the next roof beam, about fifteen feet of fill. It wasn’t totally blocked, for a breeze still drifted out that direction, but it was certainly proof against people sneaking up the tunnel.

  There is something very wrong when being in an underground cavern with no exit is the safest place to be.

  SIX

  Old Paths

  I tried over the course of several days, but it didn’t work. Finally, I returned to the San Diego library and found the image I needed in a UK tourist guide.

  The Martyrs’ Memorial in Oxford sits where Broad Street meets St. Giles. The guidebook reminded me of what it was for, but Mum never told me the gruesome details. The martyrs were three Church of England Protestants burned during the bloody reign of Mary.

  Burned … gross.

  How could people do something like that?

  The picture, though, brought me back—literally. It reminded me enough of the place. Horrifying memory, actually. One second I was there with Mum, waiting for Dad to snap the picture, then a car came out of Broad Street way too fast and slammed into a taxi not ten feet away. Horns, glass, screeching rubber, buckling metal and folding plastic. Noisy.

  Scared me all the way back to our flat in Lechlade.

  Instantly.

  But I had no memory of that flat. You’d think I would, but I can’t even remember what my room was like.

  It was raining in Oxford and cold, and the pedestrians walked by hidden under their umbrellas or hunched into their bright yellow macks like turtles.

  I crossed the street and walked, carried along in the stream. I was getting wet and cold but I didn’t mind. It had been ninety-two degrees Fahrenheit at Sam’s and I appreciated the chill. At least for a while. When I got too cold and too wet, I picked a jump site near Blackwell’s Bookstore on Broad Street, but walked on several more blocks.

  It was my new rule. Don’t arrive from where you left. You don’t know who might be waiting. I turned a random corner, brick and flats and a mini-grocery, and jumped.

  It was something I learned from recent experiments in shopping. If you jump as you turn a corner, and somebody sees you, it’s okay. If they were watching from behind, they think you just continued around the corner. If they see you from the other side, they think you stepped back.

  People flicker out of our sight all the time, through doors, around corners, onto subways, but we fill in where they went. We know that the body is still there just out of sight, on the other side of the door, in the receding subway, around the corner.

  But Kemp and his lot—they knew better.

  Had to warm up a bit at Sam’s. My new place is damp and dark—a bit too much like Oxford on a rainy night—but Sam’s at seven hours diff from Greenwich was hot, bright, and arid. A half hour in the sun dried me right out.

  I called the cavern the Hole, less like a Hobbit hole and more like a badger’s den, where the dogs had hounded me, gone to ground.

  It was comfortable, slightly damp, slightly cool—the kind of place where you wanted slippers and a cardigan or maybe a fuzzy dressing gown to keep the chill off. The chamber was lit around the edges with low-voltage landscaping lights. I had a few brighter lights, also low-voltage, near the bed and the desk; I only turned these on when I needed them, but the landscaping lights stayed on all the time—there were no windows, no sunlight touched the Hole. Last thing I wanted to do was fumble around for a light switch when waking in the night. Sure didn’t want to jump into that blackness.

  The whole lot was run off a bank of boating batteries that stood on a shelf down the old mining shaft. During the day, when sunlight hit the mouth of the mine and warmed all the surrounding rock, an updraft pulled air out through the rubble in the collapsed tunnel, causing a palpable breeze in the Hole. At that time I could run the petrol-fired generator to recharge the batteries, since the smelly exhaust fumes flowed out through the gaps and cracks.

  Only had to run it once a week or so—really overdid it on the batteries.

  I nicked them.

  I nicked the generator.

  I nicked the lights, too.

  Hell, I stole everything these days.

  I hated to think what Mum would say.

  The gunpowder I used to blow the mine tunnel was the start, of course. I justified it—they would never have sold it to me—but it didn’t take long at all to run out of money. The batteries alone would’ve wiped my savings.

  The batteries came from a marine supply place in San Diego, down where the jets heading into the airport thunder overhead and it seems like you can count rivets when you’re done ducking. I don’t know what I looked like. Maybe a bit dirty, a bit furtive, but one of the floor clerks followed me around as I checked off the stuff on my list. Batteries, Deep Discharge Gel Acid, pretinned battery cables, a three-bank automatic battery charger, and the generator.

  They had it all, I hadn’t pulled anything off the shelf, but I was careful not to linger in front of any of the stuff I was looking at. I asked a bunch of questions about their self-furling headsail gear and then bought a small anchor for my dingy.

  I hadn’t left the dingy in Oaxaca. I could just pick up the hull if I first removed the mast and the rudder and the daggerboard and oars. It sat in the Hole, upside down, all of its accessories stacked neatly around, the life jackets spread on top. My boat in a cave with no exit, in the middle of the desert.

  They had a monitor at the checkout counter, one of those things with a four-way split, showing the counter, the door, the emergency exit, and the counter where the marine electronics were. They didn’t seem to be monitoring the batteries or any of the other stuff on my list.

  Batteries are heavy. I took twelve that night and, since I’d emptied it, I took their sturdy display shelf, too, and the rest of the stuff from my list.

  I wore gloves.

  The furniture came from Ikea. The bed, the desk, the bookshelves. That was easy. Assembling them was easy. Getting them level?

  Stupid cave.

  Home Depot “donated” concrete and a level and a mortar mixing tub and the stuff I needed to level sections of the floor. They had lots of cameras but their own shelving blocked them. If I crouched under one of their racks, I could jump unobserved, even during business hours.

  The batteries were heavy, but ready-to-mix concrete is heavy, too. I could barely move the eighty-pound sacks but they jumped okay, and when I was mixing I tore them open and used an old coffee can to scoop the mix out.

  It was ugly when it was finished, rough, coarse, but it was level. My futon bed sat level. The desk was level. The three bookshelves were level. The dining table was level, but looked weird. It could sit four but I’d only taken one chair.

  I mean, after all, why did I need more than one chair?

  But it bugged me and bugged me and finally, one night, I jumped back into Ikea and completed the set.

  Of course that bugged me, too, but at least when my eyes passed over the table I didn’t flinch anymore. It was the right number if I ever wanted to bring Sam, Consuelo, and Alejandra there.

  It took Sam five days to get Consuelo out of detention. By the end of it, a border patrol supervisor was facing an official investigation. He was unable to account for a large deposit into his bank account around the time he’d ordered her arrest.

  “One of his own men tipped the lawyer,” Sam explained. “I’m not sure if he was pissed because his boss took a bribe or becaus
e he didn’t split it.”

  We met at the Texaco petrol station where we’d met the ambulance. I’d jumped in four hours before, even before it opened, and waited in the brush, with a book.

  Consuelo told me there was a new bellman at the Hotel Villa Blanca, a foreigner—meaning a Mexican from the north, not an Oaxacan—who took his breaks where he could watch Alejandra’s house and in his off time walked in the hills above the family compound, with binoculars.

  Alejandra had found an old schoolmate from the Instituto de Idiomas who wanted a change and was willing to take over the translation agency. Alejandra took a job on Saona Island in the Dominican Republic, translating for English and French-speaking tourists, and studied the local caribeño español, switching her l’s and r’s with abandon.

  Consuelo tsked-tsked about the boyfriend who returned to Huatulco “still friends.” Too much closeness had finished the relationship and I was glad until she told me that Alejandra was seeing someone else, a Dominican local.

  C’est la vie.

  They dropped me in El Centro and drove home. I jumped back to the Hole from there, a good hour after they’d left.

  There’s a field in Oxfordshire nowhere near the Thames or the hills or historic ruins but it is a few miles away from a village train station on the Reading line twixt Oxford and London. There’s a bull there, too, but he’s with his cows so he’s pretty calm, except when I pop out of thin air right next to him. Even then, he usually just snorts and shambles away.

  Mostly in the rain.

  At least it seemed that way. Picking my way between the cow patties through the damp grass, letting myself out the gate, and then slogging along the asphalt to the station was a good walk, but it was a bit damp.

  More than once, I showed up in the pouring rain and jumped to the station directly. But it really had to be unpleasant for me to do that.

  All it took was one of them to be riding through on the 9:52 to Paddington Station and they’d be waiting for me in the field one foggy day.

  Enough to give one nightmares.

  It’s not that I wouldn’t jump into London or Oxford proper, occasionally, but if I did, I hurried away from that spot as quickly as I could.

  I wanted the run of the place.

  I wanted the world.

  Phuket was easier than Oxford. My memories were stronger, the smells, the unbelievable colors of the ocean, the Portuguese-influenced architecture. I bought garlic sausage, sticky rice mixed with banana and shredded coconut or red beans wrapped in banana leaves from vendors carrying their wares in rattan baskets. Or satay sold from stainless steel carts pulled by motorbike.

  I was running out of money.

  I could’ve earned it, I suppose. Translating, perhaps, in Spain or France, but I was just a kid, and a short kid at that. Without someone like Alejandra to steer work my way—well, it would’ve been a hard scrabble.

  But still it took me a while to get up the courage.

  My first attempt would’ve been a miserable failure if it hadn’t been for the fact they didn’t even know I’d been there. I saw the armored-car guards (one of them the driver) leave the locked vehicle right outside the Safeway and head in with their canvas bags. I walked up to the other side, peeked in the thickly armored window, walked back between two vans, and jumped.

  The truck was empty. This was their first pickup.

  I took an assembled bicycle from Wal-Mart that afternoon and filled the tires. The next day, I followed the armored car as it meandered through that neighborhood going to three grocery stores, two jewelry stores, and then the Horton Plaza Mall. It took them multiple trips at the mall, back and forth

  I made my move when they made their next stop, servicing an ATM at a Henry’s Marketplace.

  Didn’t have to move close—I’d seen the inside of the truck the day before.

  Good thing I’d been moving batteries and cement bags. I cleared out the back of the truck in under five minutes, jumping back and forth to the Hole.

  Had to cut the bags open.

  Three hundred thousand dollars. Give or take twenty thousand.

  It was one of the big security companies. Surely they had insurance?

  Mum would not be happy. Nor Dad.

  Well, they’re not here, then, are they?

  The tourists drove me out of Oxford—them and their buses. The buses are the oddest thing. The companies run them and the tourists use them to get from place to place, but it’s more like a city bus, running all the time, and mostly empty.

  I hate diesel fumes.

  I found a karate dojo in Knightsbridge run in conjunction with a fancy gym. It was expensive and I had to fake my dad’s signature on a release, but they had a really nice locker room with showers. I paid for a year.

  It was my birthday present to myself—I was thirteen.

  I’d had it with cold sponge baths in the Hole, but the local solution called for more construction, maybe a propane water heater, and let the soapy water flow away with the clean under the flowstone wall, but I hated the idea. I pictured some desert spring where the bighorn sheep came to drink, foaming up with soap suds. It was the reason I used a bucket toilet odorized with pine-scented disinfectant back in the smaller chamber and, when I needed to, dumped it at one of the park’s picnic area pit toilets late at night.

  I was still careful. I certainly didn’t jump anywhere near the dojo. I used the Underground a lot, jumping to lots of different stations, always trying to pick a place, before I left, that I’d never jumped to before. Also someplace the video-cameras didn’t cover—where phone stalls or info signs made a blank spot.

  Leaving, going back to the Hole, I just jumped from the moving subway, whatever train came. I’d either pick a mostly empty car and jump when no one was looking, or I’d move to the next car, jumping when I was between the doors in the noisy, rattling space.

  But having classes to go to was good; it meant I had a schedule, a structure that I didn’t have before.

  It meant I had to buy a watch.

  It was one of those time-zone clocks, showing the time in two different places at once. I kept it on U.S. Pacific Time, minus seven, and London, Greenwich zero. If I hit a button it would show me the time in Phuket—Greenwich plus seven.

  Breakfast, cereal, I tended to eat in the Hole. Got a little twelve-volt fridge to hold the milk. Eight o‘clock in the morning and it was time for the four o’clock afternoon teen class at the dojo. I wasn’t the youngest one there, but I was the shortest.

  But I made up for the lack of size.

  “Fierce ’un, eh?” That’s what the senior instructor, Sensei Patel, would say to Martin, the junior instructor who had our lot, after watching me spar. I was swathed in pads and usually picking myself up, yet again, but I was right back in there, punching and kicking.

  “Not right, that one,” Martin would say, a big smile on his face. He knew I could hear. He was just teasing. “Oi! Less blocking with the head, there.”

  After class I’d drop off my laundry (done by the pound), usually yesterday’s clothes and the day’s practice gi and the linens every week or so.

  Lunch was whatever, usually in London, without jumping. Sure it was evening there, but if you want a particular type of food and you can’t find it in London, you aren’t trying very hard. Well, except Mexican, perhaps. I ate Indian, Chinese, and the occasional bit of fish and chips.

  There was a library branch not too far from the dojo where I’d do my homeschooling workbooks. I was still working through the French science series and the Spanish math so the ladies who worked there kept coming up to try out their “Bonjour, mon ami” and “¿Como esta?”. They were a bit disappointed when they found out I wasn’t so foreign, but they were always good for a pointer or two when I got stuck on a bit of math or a bit of chemistry.

  Reference librarians, they explained, lived to answer questions. And I was a nice change from the kids who wanted them to tell them “where the reports are kept” or came to snog in the
stairwell or score some weed back by the toilet.

  Dinner might be anywhere. Morning in Phuket, something in San Diego. Not London, though—getting past midnight in London.

  Sometimes I’d just jump my dingy down to Bahía Chacacual, a bay twenty miles west of La Crucecita, and I’d skin-dive for my supper, lobster or fish, cooked on the beach with limes and peppers.

  Then home to Hole and hearth and up again, pick up my laundry and repeat as needed.

  After six months, Sensei Patel said I could come to evening adult classes. They tested me for nikkyu, low brown belt, after that and I passed, barely.

  Didn’t really like forms, the kata. Didn’t see the point, so I didn’t practice them as much as I should.

  “Well, then,” said Sensei Patel when I expressed this opinion, “you’re a right git, aren’tcha?”

  He sat me down on the floor and said, “Watch.”

  He did the first two steps of Heian Shodan, a lower block and a stepping midlevel punch. He paused between the block and the punch. “That’s how you do it. Now, come here and attack me. Front kick.”

  I got up and did my best kick. He blocked it to the side with the lower block and the knuckles of his fist brushed my nose and I fell backward, overbalanced. Hadn’t even seen him step in but he had. For the barest second, I wondered if he’d jumped.

  “How do you think I learned that? Made it mine? It wasn’t from sparring. Now—watch.” He did the whole kata, but this time there was a different rhythm and intensity to it. Block-punch, block-block-punch. He didn’t even move that fast but everything flowed from one to the other.

  “You want to spar better, you get on with your katas, eh?” He tapped me on the forehead. “Use a little imagination. You think you’re out here by yourself but that’s not what it’s about. Enemies surround you. Start acting like it.”

  Ouch.

  Every couple of months I’d give Sam a call, using a pay phone. I’d talk in Spanish and ask for Carlotta or Rosa or any of a bunch of different names. If he said tienes el número incorrecto and hung up, we’d meet the next day down the road from the Texaco, on a rise where you could see for miles. If he said, “No la conozco,” I’d have to postpone—he couldn’t make it the next day or he felt like it wasn’t safe.