Jumper

by Steven Gould

  Shit.

  I put the bottle back down on the table, turned off the light, and went back to my room.

  I took notebook paper, cut it dollar-bill-size, and stacked it until it felt as thick as the pile of hundreds. It took twenty sheets to match the stiffness of the money—maybe it was thicker or just newer. I put the cut paper in the wallet and put it back in the pocket of his slacks.

  Then I went to the garage and took down the old leather suitcase, the one Granddad gave me when he retired, and packed it with my clothes, toiletries, and the leather-bound set of Mark Twain that Mom left me.

  After I’d closed the suitcase, stripped off my dirty clothes, and put on my suit, I just stood looking around the room, swaying on my feet. If I didn’t start moving soon, I’d drop.

  There was something else, something I could use....

  I thought of the kitchen, only thirty feet away, down the hall and across the den. Before Mom left, I’d loved to sit in there while she cooked, just talking, telling her stupid jokes. I closed my eyes and pictured it, tried to feel it.

  The air around me changed, or maybe it was just the noise. I was in a quiet house, but just the sound of my breathing reflecting off walls sounded different from room to room.

  I was in the kitchen.

  I nodded my head slowly, tiredly. Hysteria seethed beneath the surface, a rising bubble that threatened to undo me. I pushed it down and looked in the refrigerator.

  Three six-packs of Schlitz, two cartons of cigarettes, half a pizza in the cardboard delivery box. I shut the door and thought about my room. I tried it with my eyes open, unfocused, picturing the spot between my desk and the window.

  I was there and the room reeled, my eyes and maybe my inner ear just not ready for the change. I put my hand on the wall and the room stopped moving.

  I picked up the suitcase and closed my eyes. I opened them in the library, dark shadows alternating with silver pools of moonlight. I walked to the front door and looked out at the grass.

  Last summer, before school, I’d come up to the library, check out a book or two, and then move outside, to the grass under the elms. The wind would ruffle the pages, tug my hair and clothes around, and I would go into the words, find the cracks between the sentences and the words would go away, leaving me in the story, the action, the head of other people. Twice I left it too late and got home after Dad did. He liked supper ready. Only twice, though. Twice was more than enough.

  I closed my eyes and the wind pushed my hair and fluttered my tie. The suitcase was heavy and I had to switch hands several times as I walked the two blocks to the bus station.

  There was a bus for points east at 5:30 A.M. I bought a ticket to New York City for one hundred and twenty-two dollars and fifty-three cents. The clerk took the two hundreds without comment, gave me my change, and said I had three hours to wait.

  They were the longest three hours I’ve ever spent. Every fifteen minutes I got up, dragged the suitcase to the bathroom, and splashed cold water in my face. Near the end of the wait the furniture was crawling across the floor, and every movement of the bushes outside the doors was my father, belt in hand, the buckle razor-edged and about the size of a hubcap.

  The bus was five minutes late. The driver stowed my suitcase below, took the first part of my ticket, and ushered me aboard.

  When we passed the tattered city-limits sign, I closed my eyes and slept for six hours.

  Chapter 2

  When I was twelve, just before Mom left, we went to New York City for a week. It was a terrible and wonderful trip. Dad was there for his company, all his days spent in meetings and business lunches. Mom and I went to museums, Chinatown, Macy’s, Wall Street, and rode the subway all the way out to Coney Island.

  At night they fought, over dinner, at the one play we went to, and in the hotel room. Dad wanted sex and Mom wouldn’t, even after I was asleep, because the company was footing the bill for one room only and I was on a rollaway in the corner. Three times during that week he made me get dressed and go down and wait in the lobby for thirty minutes while they did it. The third time, I don’t think they did, though, ‘cause Mom was crying in the bathroom when I came back and Dad was drinking, something he never did in front of my mother. Not usually.

  The next day I saw that Mom had a bruise on her right cheekbone and she walked funny—not limping on any particular side, but like it hurt to move either leg.

  Two days after we got back from New York, I came home from school and Mom was gone.

  Anyway, I really liked New York. It seemed a good place to start over—a good place to hide.

  “I’d like a room.”

  The place was a dive, a transients’ hotel in Brooklyn, ten blocks from the nearest subway stop. I’d picked it with the help of the Pakistani cabdriver who drove me from the Port Authority Bus Terminal. He’d stayed there himself.

  The clerk was an older man, maybe my dad’s age, reading a Len Deighton novel through half-glasses. He lowered the book and tilted his head forward to look at me over the glasses.

  “Too young,” he said. “You’re a runaway, I’ll bet.”

  I put a hundred down on the counter, my hand still on it, like Philip Marlowe.

  He laughed and put his hand on it. I lifted my hand away.

  He looked at it closely, rubbing it between his fingers. Then he handed me a registration card and said, “Forty-eight a night, five-buck key deposit, bathroom’s down the hall, payment in advance.”

  I gave him enough money for a week. He looked at the other hundreds for a moment, then gave me the room key and said, “Don’t deal here. I don’t care what you do away from the hotel, but if I see anything that looks like a deal, I’ll turn you myself.”

  My jaw dropped open and I stared at him. “You mean drugs?”

  “No—candy.” He looked at me again. “Okay. Maybe you don’t. But if I see anything like that at all, you’re history.”

  My face was red and I felt like I’d done something wrong, even though I hadn’t. “I don’t do stuff like that,” I said, stammering.

  I hated feeling like that.

  He just shrugged. “Maybe not. I’m just warning you. And don’t bring any tricks here either.”

  A memory of rough hands grabbing me and pulling down my pants made me cringe. “I don’t do that either!” I could feel a knot in my throat and tears were dangerously close to the surface.

  He just shrugged again.

  I carried my suitcase up six flights of stairs to the room and sat on the narrow bed. The room was ratty, with peeling wallpaper and the stench of old cigarette smoke, but the door and the door frame were steel and the lock seemed new.

  The window looked out on an alley, a sooty brick wall five feet across the gap. I opened it and the smell of something rotting drifted in. I stuck my head out and saw bagged garbage below, half of it torn open and strewn about the alley. When I turned my head to the right I could see a thin slice of the street in front of the hotel.

  I thought about what the clerk had said and I got mad again, feeling small, diminished. Why’d he have to make me feel like that? I was happy, excited about being in New York, and he jerked me around like that. Why did people have do that sort of shit?

  Wouldn’t anything ever work out right?

  “I don’t care how talented, smart, bright, hardworking, or perfect you are. You don’t have a high school diploma or a GED and we can’t hire you. Next!”

  “Sure we hire high school kids. You seem pretty bright to me. Just let me have your social security number for the W2 and we’ll be all set. You don’t have a social security number? Where you from, Mars? You come back with a social security number and I’ll give you a try. Next!”

  “This is the application for a social security number. Fill it out and let me see your birth certificate. You don’t have your birth certificate? Get it and come back. No exceptions. Next!”

  “I’m sorry, but in this state, if you’re under eighteen, you must have parental p
ermission to take the GED. If you’re under seventeen it takes a court order. You come back with your mother or father, and a birth certificate or New York driver’s license, and you can take it. Next!”

  There is a point where you have to give up, at least for a while, and all you want to do is shut down. I rode the subway back to Brooklyn Heights, and walked numbly in the direction of my hotel.

  It was late afternoon, heavily overcast, and the dingy, gray street seemed entirely appropriate to my mood.

  God damn them! Why did they have to make me feel so little? With every interview, every rejection, I’d felt guiltier and guiltier. Ashamed of something but I didn’t know what. I kicked out at a piece of trash in the gutter and stubbed my toe on the curb. I blinked rapidly, my eyes blurring, the breath harsh in my throat. I wanted to just crawl into bed and hide.

  I took a small cross street to get over to the avenue the hotel was on. The street was narrow, making it even darker, and there were plastic bags of garbage piled on the sidewalks, up against the stoops of old brownstone buildings. I didn’t know why they called these row houses brownstones; most of them were painted green or red or yellow. The garbage was piled so high before one building I had to step out into the street to pass. When I stepped back on the sidewalk, a man stepped out from a doorway and came toward me.

  “You got a subway token to spare? Any change?”

  I’d seen lots of panhandlers that day, mostly around the subway stations. They made me nervous, but those hungry days hitching away from Dad were still fresh in my memory. I remembered people walking past me as if I didn’t exist. I dug into my pocket for the sixth time that day while I said, “Sure.”

  My hand was coming out of the pocket when I heard a noise behind me. I started to look around and my head exploded.

  There was something sticky between my cheek and the cold, gritty surface I was lying on. My right knee hurt and there was something about the way I was lying that didn’t seem right, like I’d been especially careless in going to bed. I tried to open my eyes but my left one seemed stuck shut. The right one looked at a rough concrete surface.

  A sidewalk.

  Memory and pain returned at the same time. I groaned.

  There was the sound of footsteps on the sidewalk and I thought about the muggers. I jerked heavily up onto all fours, my head throbbing like the dickens, my sore knee becoming even more so as I put weight on it. The sticky stuff on the sidewalk was blood.

  Standing seemed impossible so I turned over and sat, my back to a row of garbage cans. I looked up and saw a woman carrying two grocery bags slowing down as she walked around the giant pile of garbage bags and saw me.

  “My gawd! Are you okay? What happened to you?”

  I blinked my open eye and put my head in my hands. The effort of sitting up made a sharp, throbbing pain stab at the back of my head.

  “I think I was hit from behind.” I felt for my front pocket, where I’d been carrying my money. “And robbed.”

  I pulled the lids of my left eye apart with my fingers. My eye was okay, just stuck shut with blood. I carefully touched the back of my head. There was a large lump there, wet. My fingers came away red.

  Great. I was in a strange city with no money, no job, no family, and no prospects. That stabbing pain at the back of my head didn’t compare with the hurt of somehow feeling I deserved this.

  If I’d only been better as a kid. Maybe Mom wouldn’t have gone, Dad wouldn’t drink so much....

  “My apartment is just two doors down. I’ll call nine-one-one.” The woman didn’t wait for a response. I watched her hurry past, a container of Mace in her hand, connected to her key chain. As she walked down the sidewalk, she stayed away from the buildings, checking the doorways as she went by.

  Smart. Much smarter than me.

  911. That meant police. I’m a minor and a runaway. I have no ID and I don’t want my parents notified.

  I thought about my hotel room, still three blocks away. I didn’t even feel like standing, much less walking three more blocks. I knew I’d feel safer there. I thought about my arrival there, of the steel door with the good lock, of the torn wallpaper. It was even paid up for three more days.

  I closed my eyes and jumped.

  The hotel floor was warmer than the sidewalk and I felt much safer. I edged over to the bed and pulled myself up, slowly and carefully.

  I got blood on the pillow but I didn’t care.

  Around midnight I went down to the bathroom, walking carefully, like my Dad after a night of drinking. It was empty. I locked the door, then ran a bath while I peed.

  In the mirror I looked like something out of a slasher movie. Blood had run across my hair from the scalp wound, matting it and making the light brown stuff black and nasty. The upper left side of my face had also lain in the blood where it pooled and it was patchy, flaking off and leaving the skin underneath discolored. I shuddered.

  If I’d felt well enough to walk back to the hotel, I doubt I would have made it without the police being called every block.

  I got into the tub, amazed that there was hot water. The last two days it had been tepid at best. I eased onto my back and lowered the back of my head into the water. There was a slight stinging but the heat felt good. I worked soap into the hair gently, and washed my face. When I sat up, the water in the tub was brownish red. I rinsed the soap and residual blood out of my hair with the tub’s faucet, and was drying off when someone tried the door.

  “I’m almost done,” I said.

  A voice from the other side of the door said loudly, “Well hurry it up, man. You got no right to be hogging the toilet all night.”

  I scrubbed harder and decided to let the hair dry by itself.

  There was a loud noise, like someone hit the door with the flat of their hand. “Come ooooonnnnn. Open the fucking door!”

  “I’m getting dressed,” I said.

  “Fuck. I don’t care about that—let me in, you little faggot, so I can pee.”

  I got angry. “There are bathrooms on the other floors. Go use one of them!”

  There was a brief pause.

  “I’m not going to no other bathroom, shithead. And if you don’t let me in right now, I’m going to hurt you real bad.”

  My jaws hurt and I realized I was grinding my teeth together. Why can’t they leave me alone? “So,” I finally said. “You gonna wait there, with a full bladder, or you gonna go find someplace to pee?”

  “I’m not going anywhere, little fucker, until I carve a piece of your ass.”

  I heard a splashing sound and yellow liquid began running under the door. I picked up my clothes and, without dressing, jumped back to my hotel room.

  My heart was pounding and I was still angry—”pissed off,” you might say. I opened my door a crack and looked down the hallway to the bathroom.

  A tall Anglo, heavily muscled and wearing nothing but jeans, was zipping up his pants. Then he hit the door again and shook the doorknob.

  From one of the other rooms, someone said, “Shut up already!”

  The man at the bathroom said, “Come and fucking make me!” He continued to pound on the door while he reached into his back pocket for something. When he brought it out he flicked his wrist and something shiny flashed in the hall’s dim light.

  Jesus Christ.

  I still felt scared, but the more I looked down the hall, the angrier I got. I put my clothes on the bed and jumped back into the bathroom.

  The pounding on the door was deafening. I flinched away from the force of it, then picked up the trash can from the floor and dumped its few paper towels out onto the floor. Next I filled it with bloody, soapy water from the tub and propped it above the doorway, on the arm of the spring-loaded mechanism that closed the door. I studied it critically, my heart still beating, my breath hard to catch. I shifted it slightly to the right.

  Then, one hand on the lock catch, I turned off the light, unlocked the door, and jumped back to the hotel room.

 
I opened the door just in time to see him rattle the doorknob, find it was loose, and push forcefully into the room. There was a dull thud and water splashed out into the hall. In the middle of that he yelled and slipped on the floor, his head and shoulder coming into view as he slammed down on his back. He grabbed at his head with both hands in a manner I could identify with, if not sympathize. I didn’t see where the knife had gone, but he wasn’t holding it at the moment.

  Other doors opened slowly in the hall and heads cautiously peered around doorjambs. I shut my door softly and locked it.

  For the first time since I arrived in that hotel, I smiled.

  Well, it was time to face it. I was different. I was not the same as my classmates from Stanville High School, not unless some of them were keeping a pretty big secret.

  I saw several possibilities.

  The first was that Dad had really given it to me that last time, inducing brain damage or other trauma to the point where I was dreaming the whole mess. Maybe even my mugging was just a detail added by my subconscious to correlate with the “real” injuries. I could be lying in the St. Mary’s Hospital intensive care unit back in Stanville, a little screen going beep, beep, beep over my still form. I doubted this, though. Even in my most terrifying nightmares I’ve had an awareness of the dream state. The stench of the garbage from the alleyway seemed too real.

  The second possibility was that I’d done most of the things I remembered and most of the bad things that had happened to me had. My mind just warped reality in dealing with the results, giving to me the more palatable alternative of escape by a singular paranormal ability. This seemed more likely. Each time I’d “jumped” there was a feeling of unreality, of disorientation. This could be my shift into an irrational psychosis, an adjustment to a nasty reality. On the other hand, it could be the result of every sense reeling as the environment surrounding me changed completely. Hell—the very nature of the jump could be disorienting.