by Gant, Gene
The walls of her den were a tribute to her sons’ achievements—photographs of each boy in cap and gown at his high school graduation, their high school diplomas, sports letters, pictures of the elder son and his bride on their wedding day, the bachelor of science degree in biology Caesar earned at Morehouse College.
Mrs. Smith was just now hanging up the phone after receiving no answer at Caesar’s apartment. She was worried. Caesar had missed Sunday dinner; Caesar never missed Sunday dinner. More ominous still was the fact that his car had been abandoned, engine running, in her driveway. She had no idea her baby boy had been involved with drugs. She loved her sons dearly. It would break her heart when she realized Caesar was gone forever.
From Whitehaven, my consciousness moved east to Fayette County, where Owen Cummings Senior lay shackled to a bed in the Guthrie Nursing Home. He was being fed his breakfast through a tube that emptied into his stomach. Afterward, drugs would be pumped into his veins, putting him to sleep for the day. Everything that made him who he was—his personality, his memories, his skills and education—had been eaten away by Alzheimer’s disease. He would never know or care that Owen Junior was dead. Owen Junior had been paying the fees that kept his father in Guthrie, a facility that actually provided dedicated and compassionate care to its patients. Owen Senior had no other family. With Junior gone, it was just a matter of time before Guthrie would be forced to remove Senior, probably into some state institution that was overburdened and understaffed.
Well, hell.
Gathering the human particulate matter from the Jovian metal ocean took the better part of a minute, but once that was done, reassembling the bodies of Tyree, Owen, and Caesar was accomplished in an instant. All three men were essentially the same as they had been when I killed them, except for their having no memory of each other or their drug dealings. The rest of Tyree’s “staff” lost their memories of and interest in the trade as well. Their wares were converted into cans of vegetables, which overflowed the shelves of the Memphis Food Bank. They all now had a driving desire to pursue more legitimate avenues of employment.
That afternoon, Owen Junior would discover that his father had become the first person ever to fully recover from Alzheimer’s disease. Caesar would find himself painting his mother’s house, something he had been promising her for months. Tyree would develop an irresistible urge to volunteer his time cleaning toilets at the local drug rehab center. They would go on, feeling relatively pleased with their lives. But deep in their respective subconscious, Tyree, Owen, and Caesar would each carry memories of his death at my hand, fuel for nightmares in the years to come.
When Tyree walked into the living room of his house, where his wife was now huddled with Kayla, the little girl screeched “Daddy!” in delighted relief and ran to hug him. Emilia burst into tears. Tyree was confused by it all. So far as he knew, he’d just come in from a tiring morning of job hunting. Then Emilia stood up and slapped him so hard he toppled over sideways, taking his laughing daughter with him.
“Don’t you ever scare us like this again!” Mrs. Jacks screamed.
My hope was that she’d knock him in his head one more time. Instead, she let loose a quivering sob, dropped to her knees, and gathered him into her arms.
THE TELEPHONE rang again. I didn’t even consider answering it. The orb was feeding me the thoughts of sick, dying patients in a Chinese hospital, and I was seized with an urgent desire to help them. My body dissolved into a bolt of energy that passed through my ceiling, heading for China, just as someone knocked at my door.
15
I RETURNED home seven hours later, exhausted but feeling exhilarated too. It’s gratifying, the reaction you get when you appear out of thin air in a dying person’s room, spread your arms over the shriveling body, and belt out an authoritative “Be healed!” Some of the gathered family members looked at me as if I had escaped from a basement psychiatric ward—that is, until their sick loved one rose up from the deathbed. Then the screaming usually started, some of it in abject terror, of course, but much of it in stunned, tearful joy.
There’d be a lot of hugging among the family, and then they would turn to lavish gratitude on me. I never hung around for that part, given the daunting number of other people in need of healing, but I could always hear their generous thoughts through the orb. And it made me smile, knowing that I had given back a husband, a mother, an aunt, or a dear friend to people who had given up hope.
It made me want to help still more people. But after six hours beaming from one Chinese province to another and curing hundreds of stricken people along the way, my still-human limitations asserted themselves, forcing me to take a break. I materialized in an unoccupied room of a Hilton Beijing Hotel and sank into a coma for an hour before beaming back to the United States.
The little clock mounted on my living room wall had just begun chiming the five o’clock hour when my body materialized inside a haze of energy. Dick was gone, and I was too tired to worry over his whereabouts. I fell across the sofa, as limp as a wet towel. I closed my eyes at once, planning to sleep for a couple more hours, then rummage through the kitchen for something to eat before heading out again to see what other souls I could help.
“Hold my calls,” I said aloud, and the orb cut off the desperate, fearful thoughts it had been feeding me.
The house was silent, and sleep was already pulling at me. Then came a quiet hiss, followed immediately by a short static spurt and a click. I sat up at once. I turned my gaze to the living room window. Against the curtain, a tall silhouette loomed.
I sighed angrily. The rage energized me, overrunning my fatigue. I got up and went to the door, pulled it calmly open, and stepped out onto the porch.
There were two men outside, both white and in their midthirties. They were tall, clean-shaven, and dressed in dark suits. They looked overheated in the late afternoon summer sunlight, although neither one had even a drop of sweat on his face. One was sandy-haired, the other bald. They were in the process of approaching my front door, and they were momentarily startled when I walked out. They stopped.
The bald guy recovered first, raising the badge he had cupped in his right palm. “Federal agents, Mr. McGhee.”
A week ago, I would have been quivering. Today, I just wasn’t impressed. “Yeah, well, I’ll try not to hold that against you,” I shot back.
The two agents moved forward like a single unit. Bald Guy blocked my front door while Sandy stood in front of me. “For your own safety, Mr. McGhee,” Sandy said in a kind of stage whisper, “we need you to come with us.”
“I can take care of myself, thanks.” I reached around Bald Guy for the doorknob. He grabbed my wrist. I snatched away from him. “Man, don’t touch me!”
“We just want to talk—” Bald Guy began.
“You’ve got no cause to take me in,” I protested. “I haven’t broken any laws.”
“There’s an outstanding warrant on you for driving without a license,” Sandy patiently explained.
I almost laughed. “And? So I got caught taking a joy ride with my friend in his dad’s truck two years ago. That was a city of Memphis traffic violation. You fools don’t have any jurisdiction over that.” Having contact with the minds of lawyers was coming in quite handy.
Sandy gave a little smile. “They do,” he said, nodding toward the street.
I looked. There were six Memphis city police cruisers parked bumper to bumper along the curb in front of my house, forming a perimeter that kept a staring, anxious crowd of at least a hundred people at bay. Twelve uniformed police officers stood just inside the perimeter, at attention and ready to take action.
I turned back to Sandy. The smile was gone, and he leaned down, getting in my face. My body stiffened. Sandy took this to mean that I was suitably intimidated. In reality, I was fighting the urge to hurl him into orbit.
“We need to get you someplace secure,” said Sandy. “And we need to talk to you. That’s all. We don’t want to arrest you.”
“But that’s what the cops will do if I don’t go with you, huh?” I clenched my teeth so hard it made my jaws ache. “I hate you cocky sons of….” I bit back the curses. “Look, I’m not scared of you, and nobody’s taking me anywhere I don’t want to go. Now, for your own safety, get the hell off my property.”
I pushed past Sandy and started down the steps. I had no particular destination in mind; I just knew that I had to get away from all these people. Bald Guy snagged me by the collar, stopping me.
My entire head felt hot with rage. “Skip away from me,” I said quietly.
Sandy and Bald Guy exchanged puzzled looks. A moment later, they were horrified to find themselves moving against their will. Bald Guy released me and took Sandy’s hand. Together, they skipped daintily from my house and down the street, past a dozen bewildered cops. News crews stationed just behind the police line were filming the entire thing, and loads of people in the crowd jeered.
I was walking quickly in the opposite direction, aware that it wasn’t wise to dematerialize in front of the camera crews, but I knew I could not stay here, either.
One of the cops, a white woman who didn’t look much older than me, took exception to my leaving. “Hey, you! Stop right there!” This galvanized the rest of them. All twelve cops moved to intercept me.
I spun on them, eyes blazing. “Go to hell!” In my anger, I fed the orb instructions, and the cops pulled their guns, training them on each other. Gasps went up from the crowd.
The urge to have the cops pull the triggers was overwhelming, driven by every memory of helplessness and intimidation I’d ever felt. I wanted to strike back, lash out, and it was the sudden realization that I wouldn’t stop with just wiping out these officers that sobered me. Frightened, I took advantage of the diversion—all eyes and cameras were on the cops—and I sent my molecules streaming away in flash.
The terrified cops felt their self-control return. They quickly lowered their guns. One of them, a burly middle-aged man with twenty years on the force, began to cry.
16
I WAS beaming through the late afternoon sky toward the eastern border of the city when the orb fed me the prayers of Cedric Hardy. He was in Baptist Hospital East, outside Germantown. I went down immediately and materialized inside a small janitor’s closet near the hospital cafeteria. Once my body was solid, I slumped against the wall, dizzy with fatigue and hunger.
The orb was capable of curing all human ills and ending poverty around the world in one single function. But it hadn’t been programmed to do that, and I didn’t know how to reprogram it. It gave me the ability to heal the sick and resurrect the dead, but a human mind is far too limited to do such things on a global scale. I could only do them on a piecemeal basis. Using the power physically drained me as if I’d run a marathon or something. If I didn’t eat and sleep after a few hours of healing sick people or making crops grow in the desert, I’d become so weak my body would shut down like a car that had run out of gas.
I stepped out of the closet, staggering slightly, and walked down the hall to the cafeteria. Luckily, I had cash in my wallet. My metabolism seemed to have revved up since the resurrection. I bought two turkey sandwiches, a Cobb salad, and two cartons of orange juice. Then I settled at a table in an isolated corner and chowed down like a starving man.
As I ate, I wondered how I had come to the attention of the FBI. From the crowd and the camera crews outside my house, it appeared there were plenty of regular, everyday folk who’d taken an interest in me too. To avoid information overload, I had limited the orb to just feeding me the thoughts of the suffering. Now I asked it for news.
It turned out I was the hot topic of the moment. News organizations around the world were broadcasting stories about the mysterious “miracle worker” who had been very busy in the United States, Africa, and China. Some of them even had footage, captured on cell phone, of me healing a horribly burned man in Beijing and walking across dry, barren land in Ethiopia, waving my hand and making trees rise up fully grown and heavy with fruit. I was also the subject of millions of blogs, tweets, and texts. There was plenty of skepticism, with some people saying this was all some hoax or publicity for some Hollywood summer special-effects blockbuster. There were also many who took the stories quite seriously. They were trying to reach me, to get miracles of their own.
I’d never even considered hiding my identity or taking a more clandestine approach in helping people through the power of the orb. I just wanted to take away as much pain as I could. Now I’d made myself into some kind of celebrity or urban myth. I could use the orb to erase the stories about me from human memory, but the stories had already reached millions of people. It would take me weeks to affect such a large number of minds. How many sick and injured people would die while I devoted time and energy to doing that?
I took a stack of paper napkins, held them in my lap under the table, and rearranged the molecules into a pair of shades and a baseball cap with the US flag across the front. As a disguise, it wasn’t much, but it would help keep people from recognizing me.
When I finished eating, I felt stronger. I still needed a nap—a long yawn rolled out of me as I piled empty cartons and plastic wrappers on my tray—but the food would give my body enough energy to go for a few more hours. After dumping my trash and leaving the tray in the appropriate stack atop the trash can, I took the elevator up three floors to the intensive care unit.
I had tried very hard not to think of Cedric since I quit school. Every time I remembered the things he did to me, it made me angry all over again, and I wanted to hurt him somehow. I would fantasize about paying some ox of a guy twice his size to sexually harass him for a few months and dunk his head in a toilet. See if Cedric could take it as well as he dished it. I hated him as I hated no other person on earth.
When I heard his prayers, I could not ignore them. He was deathly afraid. I accessed his memories in the orb and learned that he had been riding his motorcycle early that morning when a little boy ran out into the street right in front of him. He had swerved to avoid the boy, hit the curb at high speed, flew over the handlebars, and struck a tree headfirst. The accident had left him paralyzed from the neck down.
Now he lay in a bed in the ICU, hooked to a ventilator that kept him breathing, slipping in and out of consciousness, unable to move or feel anything in his body. I stopped at the nurses’ station, unable to make myself go any farther. His room was the second one down the corridor to my left. His terror filled my mind. He had overheard the doctors when they spoke to his frightened parents. His neck was broken, he was no longer able to fully breathe on his own, and he was facing multiple, risky surgeries.
He wanted to ride his motorcycle again. He wanted to hang out with his friends again, play football with the guys in Jamie Fisher’s backyard, take a swim in his family’s pool. He wanted his life back, the way it was when he climbed out of bed this morning. I also tuned into the thoughts of Cedric’s parents as they sat beside his bed, staring at him anxiously. They were drowning in fear and uncertainty for their boy. They had dreams for him, to see him graduate from college, get married, and have children.
I wasn’t sure why I had come here. As much as I hated Cedric, I could never stand over him and gloat about the devastating injury he had suffered. No one, not even him, deserved that. On the other hand, I wasn’t exactly inclined to heal him. He had made me feel worthless and filthy. No one deserved that, either. But he was so afraid. And his parents were in so much pain. Feeling all that anguish, I knew I had to forgive what he’d done to me.
A skinny young nurse in yellow scrubs walked up to me, a look of concern on her face. “Can I help you with something?” she asked. “You look confused. Are you okay?”
I sighed and gave her a little smile. “Yes. I’m fine now. Thanks.” With that, I turned and headed back to the elevator. It only took one thought to tap into the orb’s power. As I waited for the elevator, there were shouts from Cedric’s room, shouts from his pare
nts as they saw their son smile and raise his hands to the tracheal tubing in his neck, motioning for it to be removed. He began to gag, though he kept trying to smile, and I made another wish that caused the tubing to easily and effortlessly slip out of his body and drop to the floor. There were more shouts of joy as Cedric sat up in bed and reached out for his mother and father, happy tears streaming down his face. Stunned, his parents went to him, and they all hugged fiercely.
As nurses rushed to the room, the elevator doors opened, and I stepped inside. There was pandemonium when Cedric got out of bed and stood. Despite being hooked to various medical devices, Cedric began to jump crazily and swing his arms, reveling in the power of the healed body he had once taken for granted. His parents clapped and cried and laughed and called out thanks to heaven while the nurses stood there dumbstruck.
Finally, fearing that Cedric would hurt himself, a couple of the nurses moved in and began guiding him back into bed. Another nurse went to summon the doctor on duty. There would be more tests, x-rays, and ultrasounds, but they would only confirm what was already evident. The injuries to Cedric’s body from his motorcycle accident were gone as if they had never been. This would become yet another in the string of miracles the world was talking about.
There was one miracle, however, no one would know about except me. In accessing Cedric’s memories, I’d learned why he’d made me suffer those terrible things. He was gay and attracted to me, but he was very ashamed of those feelings. He hated his desires and took out his hatred on me. I still despised what Cedric did to me, but now I felt sorry for him and hoped he would one day come to peace with who he was.