Simon Rising

by Brian D Howard

  Sometimes it depressed him realizing that with all those things in motion, he was only one of them when someone else moved him. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest. But for the most part the fascination of it all held him rapt and time passed.

  By the end of a second week he could recognize some of the people around him by their movements, or by how tall or heavy they were.

  He could stretch his sense further and further. Stronger movements were easier to find further out. He knew where the elevators were. They were heavy with a lot of momentum, even if they weren’t fast. That made sense to him now. He learned to differentiate mass-driven momentum from speed-driven by the size and speed of the object. His world grew more interesting.

  By that point he still hadn’t heard from a lawyer, so it occurred to him one day to ask.

  Four days later, an hour or so after breakfast, one arrived. He guessed it was a lawyer before the man even stopped to speak with the cop sitting outside. He decided it was a man based on the shoulder-to-hip ratio. The man carried something rectangular in his left hand—a briefcase.

  “Mr. Ambrose, I’m David Lewis. I’m here from the public defender’s office,” the man said, sticking his right arm out. “Oh, sorry,” the lawyer apologized with a sheepish frown.

  Public defender. Steven felt a little deflated at those two words. Everyone he had encountered seemed to already think him guilty and the best defense he had was a public defender assigned the case whether the man had any interest in defending him or not. The lawyer closed the door all the way behind him. It was probably the first time it had been completely closed his whole time here.

  “Mr. Ambrose, you know that everything you and I discuss is confidential, right?”

  “Yeah. Privileged.” He did not feel privileged at all by having a lawyer who couldn’t even remember to be considerate of his paralyzed client.

  “Ordinarily,” Lewis began, “I’d have you sign some paperwork giving me authorization to speak on your behalf. In this case, that’s already been seen to by the court.”

  Lewis slid over a chair taking up space in the far corner of the room. He sat almost tentatively, on the edge, setting the briefcase down on the floor to his left.

  “We need to talk about what happened, and discuss your defense,” Lewis suggested.

  “You know more than I do,” Steven pointed out. “I have no memories prior to waking up here.”

  “And we’ll use that as we can, Mr. Ambrose, but it’s not a very good defense to depend on.”

  “Let’s start with a little about what the prosecution is going to present,” the lawyer went on. “They are going to charge you with six counts of armed bank robbery and one attempted, which are federal felony counts.

  “You were apprehended in the act at the scene of the last robbery, where you were shot and arrested. That incident was captured on video, and will be offered as evidence. My understanding is that some kind of tear gas was used, and that affected the quality of the recording some.

  “Two of your associates were arrested and are in custody awaiting their own trials. They both describe you as the person responsible for planning each robbery, and I suspect they will testify against you in exchange for reduced sentences or possible immunity. They will probably each be called to provide narration for the videos, and they will single out which one is you. That doesn’t make the most solid case in history, but it might be enough.

  “As if that weren’t enough,” the lawyer added, “one member of your last robbery, the attempted one, was an undercover police officer. He will testify against you very credibly. You have a trial scheduled in six weeks.”

  An ominous weight sank in while the lawyer paused. Steven looked up at the sterile, unsympathetic white ceiling feeling trapped and doomed. Six weeks.

  “What kind of defense is there if I can’t remember anything?” he complained.

  “Well,” the lawyer hesitated, “that’s going to be difficult. We can try to discredit your prior teammates, but that might not be enough, and we’d have to successfully discredit both of them. On the plus side, they have to prove ‘beyond the shadow of a doubt,’ and we might be able to show enough reason for doubt. Obviously you won’t testify, but that’s not uncommon. The attempted charge will be the hardest. I don’t think there’s a way we can win that one.”

  “To be honest with you, Mr. Ambrose, I think you’re looking at fairly certain prison time. I think our best option is get your condition considered in sentencing and get you placed under a house arrest in a secure managed care facility. I will make the argument that any actual prison time would be cruel and unusual given your conditions and the level of care you will require.” It all sounded like the lawyer had already decided everything for him.

  “I know it probably isn’t what you want to hear.”

  “I’m stuck in this bed for the rest of my life,” Steven pointed out. “I’m not sure where makes all that much difference to me. Can you at least tell me about myself? Do I have any family?” None had come to visit him, but he supposed there was a possibility they had not been allowed to. Perhaps there was a wife waiting to hear something.

  “Not that I’m aware of,” the lawyer replied. “We weren’t able to find any relatives to sign off on your legal care. That’s partly why the court had to do it. You have a small apartment at Rochester and 75th. I’m going to try to arrange for you to be taken there to see if anything there helps your memory. That is, at the very least, part of your medical care. I don’t think that will be denied given the circumstances.”

  “No one has come to visit. I was hoping it was just that they weren’t being allowed to see me.” No, apparently that was not the case. He had no family. Maybe no friends, either. Maybe he really was as alone as he felt.

  The lawyer offered up a few other details, but nothing meaningful. He was not sure he wanted to see his apartment. All it would do was give him a glimpse into a life he could never have back, of sights he would never see again. Nothing about that appealed to him. If he was really so alone in life, then he saw no value in reconnecting to it just to leave it all behind for prison.

  The lawyer put the chair back where he had found it and left the door wide open when he left.

  Not long after that came lunch: a soggy peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and more applesauce. He imagined the sigh he wanted to give it, but of course nothing happened.

  After lunch he was left propped up with the television on. At first it served as a timely distraction. Two obese men discussed upcoming movies, reviewing each one. He tried to focus more on whether he would be interested in watching them rather than whether he would ever be able to or not.

  Then twelve thirty came, and the programming changed. Gone was the movie review show. In its place began a marathon of torture. An entire afternoon of reality courtroom shows where people sued each other over the most asinine things. The first half hour was boring and annoying. Each half-hour case after added misery and depression in ever-growing helpings.

  No nurses came in to check vitals and rescue him by changing the channel. The cop usually seated outside his door was over at the nurses’ station again. He tried to holler out for help but because he could not control his own damned diaphragm he could not make his voice louder.

  An ugly bald man who would have been booed off a daytime scandal talk show for being too stupid continued his insistence the money he had given a friend to start a business was an investment, and he deserved to be paid back for his investment after the business had failed. The judge put her forehead in her palm. He could not even do that. He groaned at the television.

  He just wanted it to stop. He could see the buttons to change the channel. He so wanted to see one glow that little bit as it was pressed. He envisioned it over and over in his mind. He felt and even sensed the barely perceptible glow of a tear rolling down his cheek.

  Just that subtle glow of the button was all he needed. He played the image in his mind over and over, fixating on it to
blot out the obese woman in the next case trying to blame her problems on her neighbor’s cat.

  -Click-

  And there it was. The channel changed.

  He blinked a few times in a row and then for a while he just stared in stunned disbelief, not even noticing what the channel had changed to, other than a soap opera had replaced the courtroom bullshit mid-sentence

  He focused again. With everything he had he focused on that same button.

  Glow-click-new channel.

  “What the fuck?”

  Was it really happening, he asked himself. But now he had to know; had to prove it to himself. He looked to the volume buttons. He focused on one, giving it the subtle glow of tiny motion, and the television got a little louder and a blue line along the bottom of the screen appeared and grew longer. He shifted over a button and it got quieter and the blue line shorter.

  One of the orderlies was coming with a cart—dinner. It was Jason, one of the friendlier ones. Jason walked with a slight limp favoring his left leg. Before he even realized what he was doing, he shifted his attention to the other end of the row of buttons to the larger one, and the TV clicked off.

  He knew he was grinning when Jason walked in.

  “Somebody’s in a good mood today,” Jason said with his slight drawl. “You had a lawyer visit today, right?”

  “Yes,” Steven said, having forgotten temporarily about the public defender. He had done something. He had changed channels and turned off the television. That meant he could also turn it back on. He could control the television. Succeeding in not drooling during feedings seemed less an accomplishment, and he could at last, possibly be more than a spectator in his own life.

  “I’m not feeling quite so helpless anymore,” he added.

  “Well, tha’s a good thing! It’ll be nice not seein’ you so depressed all the time.”

  He let Jason feed him unappetizing, bland meatloaf, forcing his attention elsewhere to keep himself from trying to move the food himself. The conversation with Jason was meaningless, but he was thankful for it distracting him nonetheless. He found himself watching, for lack of a better word, Jason’s lips as he spoke. Then he had to distract himself from that as he wondered whether he could move those the same way as he had the buttons on the television.

  He did not know how much time he had after Jason left before anyone else came in. One of the nurses was past due for another set of vitals, but they never seemed to come right after he’d eaten. Someone would be in to change him again not long after that. Perhaps he could move more than buttons on the television. The idea did not seem so complicated. Envisioning the sensation of movement in an object strongly enough seemed to create just that movement. There had to be other things he could try to move. He had an idea. The possibility was too exciting. Did he dare even hope for it? But he had to try. It was worth the risk.

  He focused his attention on the blood flow in his hand, then just one finger. He envisioned the end of the finger glowing and moving. It seemed to take forever before he could sense the actual subtle glow representing the finger lifting. With no sensation to go with the movement it was easy to write off as imagined. But he refused to give in. It would work, he told himself, it had to work. It would be like being both puppet and puppeteer but it would work. He believed.

  He was interrupted by a nurse. It was Gloria, one of the cranky ones again. He joked to himself about holding perfectly still. He was still grinning when she came in, but she said nothing about it. She rarely said anything to him. She probably had not even noticed. He was just an object in the room to her.

  When she left, he wondered if he’d imagined it all. He hadn’t made much progress when it was changing time. This he would have to find a solution for somehow, he decided. But first he had to prove to himself he was not a powerless cripple after all.

  It was nearly bedtime, time for someone to come turn off his light, by the time the glow that should be a raising hand and arm was confirmed as such by his eyes. He stared as he watched his fingers moving to his puppet strings. Telekinesis. This, at least, he had a word for!

  He still could not feel it, but he could see it happening. It was unreal watching the puppet hand move, he could forget for a moment it was his hand. Yet it was his hand, moving not because of electrochemical nerve impulses from his brain traveling to his arm. It took a lot of concentration to make the movements, but he stared and concentrated, visualizing the result, and his fingers curled into a fist. Quadriplegic or not, he could move his own body.

  He laughed until Gloria came back in and asked if everything was alright.

  “Yes,” he explained, “I saw my lawyer today, and for the first time since I woke up I think I have a reason to hope for something.”

  CHAPTER 3 – ANDREW BARTON

  Saturday, April 14

  Andrew Barton poked at condensation on his water glass with a thick finger. His blood pressure always rose when things did not go the way he expected, and he imagined he could feel the pulsing in his neck and his forehead. Sandy, his wife, always claimed she saw it there.

  “It has been three weeks,” Kurt Müller said with his slight German accent from across the restaurant booth, “and still Ambrose remembers nothing.”

  The restaurant was quiet. While a few other patrons sat in scattered, isolated bubbles clinking silverware to plates, now and then laughing to each other, and the occasional clatter rose from the kitchen, with seldom enough noise to drown out their conversation. They both spoke in lowered tones, even though no one sat close by. The orange-haired waitress starting the next pot of coffee two empty tables over, rocking her aproned hips to the soft classic rock playing quietly in the background, was the closest person.

  Müller had more access to Ambrose’s doctors than he did, and he did not like Müller holding the upper hand in anything. Müller had moved fast to get Ambrose brought to St Mary’s Hospital, in Müller’s own turf in Bridgeview east of downtown, rather than General. Faster than he had been able to move. He still wasn’t sure whether the German prick hurried to pull strings or if he somehow arranged it in advance. Müller had shown himself to be more a man of action than of planning, but the young German was getting better at this business and that did not sit well with him.

  “Then we should be good?” He tried to sound more confident than he was. He had a lot invested in Ambrose and his crew getting this last job right. It was the last one, all the others had just been building up to this one. Too much rode on it. And Ambrose’s plan, what he mentioned of it to Barton, had been perfect. Ambrose’s execution of plans had been perfect—with one notable exception which got a man killed—and Barton held few doubts about the man’s talents.

  Oh, how he wanted to know how the cops found out. There was no way they could have guessed which bank and when. No, someone told them—warned them. Who had tipped them off? If he ever found out, the shithead would pay. He made himself unclench his big hands, laying them flat on the table to keep them still.

  “Unless the cops can get anything useful out of anyone else,” Müller said, fidgeting with his stupid, effeminate, manicured nails, finally showing a nervousness Barton had been sure was hiding under the cool facade of indifference the German usually wore.

  “No,” he replied, confident of this part at least. “Ambrose was the only one on his crew that knew what they were really after. I made a point of confirming that with him.

  “We’ll still have to find a way to get it, but nobody knows what was really going on. He hit six other banks first so nobody would look too hard into why this particular one.” He had been adamant with Ambrose at least that one vital detail of the plan—that they were really breaking in for an alien artifact secreted away there—was for him alone; he would not tell his crew that part. Ambrose had proven himself reliable, he could be trusted. Andrew liked the man and trusted him. It was a shame what happened, but at least the portly Honduran followed Barton’s secret orders. Ambrose in the morgue would be safer, but at least i
t looked like the man was not a liability at this point. A sad and frustrating way to have to treat an old friend.

  “What if they move it?” Müller asked, wrinkling his brow and leaning forward, sounding concerned for the first time since they had started their plan together. And it had been, at times, a complicated plan. But to take over the city, to split it between them, they had to take out the Boss, the man who too quickly rose from obscurity and was becoming the man in charge of all crime in the city. Before they could take him out, they had to get closer—much closer. This job was supposed to garner them a good deal of favor with the Boss. He did not even know the man’s name. A few people whisperingly referred to him as the ‘Etherax,’ but no one seemed to know if it was a code name or some kind of coded title. So everyone simply called him the Boss.

  “It was the seventh bank he went after,” Andrew reminded, sliding his water glass off to the left, next to a discarded plate with leftover crust from a cherry pie. He slid it away from where he might fidget with it. It was important to project confidence and power right now. “To everybody else it’s just another in a string of robberies in a city with an escalating crime problem. There’s nothing suggesting to them they need to move it. Besides, the bank’s security is going to be at its tightest for a while, so there’s no gain in moving it.”

  “Besides,” he added, “it might be riskier for them to move right away. I think it’ll be fine.” Out of reach, he left out, but fine. But the Boss wanted it, and Barton so wanted to be the one to hand it over unless it turned out to be something game changing. Either way, he wanted it.

  “Then we just need someone else who can get it for us,” Müller pointed out.