Jumper

by Steven Gould

  It was this third possibility that I distrusted the most. The one that meant I might finally be someone special. Not special in the sense of special education, not special in the sense of being a problem child, but unique, with a talent that, if anybody else had it, they hid. A talent for teleportation.

  There, I’d thought the word. Teleportation.

  “Teleportation.”

  Aloud it vibrated in the room, a word of terrible import, alien to normal concepts of reality, brought into existence only under special circumstances, in the framework of fiction, film, and video.

  And if I was teleporting, then how? Why me? What was it about me that made me able to teleport? And could anybody else? Is that what happened to Mom? Did she just teleport away from us?

  Suddenly my stomach went hollow and I began breathing rapidly. Jesus Christ! What if Dad can teleport?

  Suddenly the rooms seemed unsafe and I pictured him appearing before me, the belt in his hand, anywhere, anytime.

  Get a grip. I’d never seen him do anything like that. Instead, I’d seen him stumble down the street a half mile to the Country Corner, to buy beer when he’d run out, hardly able to walk or talk. If he could teleport, surely he’d have used it then.

  I sat on the narrow bed and dressed myself, putting on my most comfortable clothes. With extreme care, I combed my hair, checking the result in the tiny mirror on the wall. The bump, still large and aching, looked like a barber’s mistake. There was some slight seepage of blood, but it wasn’t really visible through the hair.

  I wanted some aspirin and I wanted to know if I was crazy. I stood up and thought about the medicine cabinet in our house. It was funny that I still thought about it as our house. I wonder what my dad would say about that?

  I didn’t know what time it was, other than after midnight. I wondered if Dad was asleep, awake, or even home. I compromised and thought, instead, of the large oak tree in the corner of the backyard. It was another place I used to read. It was also a place I used to go when Mom and Dad fought, where I couldn’t hear the words, even though the volume and anger still carried that far.

  I jumped and my eyes opened on a yard that needed mowing. I’ll bet that pisses him off. I tried picturing him behind the mower, but I just couldn’t. I’d done the lawn since I was eleven. He used to sit on the back porch with a beer in his hand and point out the spots I missed.

  The house was dark. I moved carefully along until I could see the driveway. His car wasn’t there. I pictured the bathroom and jumped again.

  The light was out. I flipped the switch and took a bottle of ibuprofen from the medicine cabinet. It was half full. I took a bottle of hydrogen peroxide and some gauze pads as well.

  I jumped to the kitchen then, because I was hungry and to see if I still could. He’d bought groceries since the night I’d left for New York. I made myself two ham-and-cheese sandwiches and put them and the stuff from the bathroom in a paper bag I took from the pantry. Then I carefully cleaned up, trying to make it no more clean or messy than I’d found it. I drank two glasses of milk, then washed the glass and put it back in the cabinet.

  There was the sound of tires in the driveway, that old sound of dread and tension. I picked up the bag and jumped back to the backyard. I didn’t turn off the light, because he would have seen it through the window. I hoped he’d think he’d left it on himself, but I doubted it. He used to scream at me enough for leaving the lights on.

  I watched the lights go on down the length of the house—front hall, living room, back hallway. The light in his bedroom went on, then off again. Then the light in my room went on and I saw him silhouetted in the window, a dark outline through the curtains. The light went out then and he walked back to the kitchen. He checked the back door to see if it was locked. I could see his face through the window, puzzled. He started to open the door and I ducked around the trunk of the oak.

  “Davy?” he called out, barely raising his voice above conversational level. “Are you out there?”

  I remained perfectly still.

  I heard his feet scrape on the back porch and then the door shut again. I peered around the trunk and saw him through the kitchen window, taking a beer from the refrigerator. I sighed and jumped to the Stanville Library.

  There was a couch with a coffee table in Periodicals that was away from the windows and had one of the lights they left on above it. That’s where I ate my sandwiches, feet propped up, chewing and staring off into the dark corners. When I was done eating I washed three ibuprofen down at the water fountain, then used the bathroom.

  It was a relief not having to worry about someone crashing through the door. I soaked a few gauze pads with hydrogen peroxide and dabbed at the cut on the back of my head. It stung more than the time before and the pad came away with fresh blood. I winced, but cleaned it as best I could. I didn’t want to end up in a hospital with an infection.

  I bagged the ibuprofen, gauze, and peroxide, then flushed the used gauze down the toilet. I jumped, then, back to my hotel room in Brooklyn.

  My head hurt and I was tired, but sleep was the last thing in the world on my mind.

  It was time to see what I could do.

  Chapter 3

  In Washington Square Park I appeared before a bench that I’d sat upon two days previously. There was a man lying on it, shaking from the cold. He had newspapers tucked around his legs and his fists knotted in the collar of a dirty suit jacket, pulling it close around his neck. He opened his eyes, saw me, and screamed.

  I blinked and took a step away from the bench. He sat up, grabbing for his newspapers before they blew away in the light breeze. He stared at me, wild-eyed, still shivering.

  I jumped back to the hotel room in Brooklyn and took the blanket from the bed, then jumped back to the park.

  He screamed again when I appeared, shrinking back onto the bench. “Leave me alone. Leave me alone. Leave me alone.” He repeated it over and over again.

  Moving slowly, I put the blanket on the other end of his bench, then walked away down the walk to MacDougal Street. When I’d walked fifty feet or so, I looked back at the bench. He’d picked up the blanket and wrapped it around himself, but he wasn’t lying down yet. I wondered if someone was going to steal it from him before morning.

  As I neared the street, two men, dark figures silhouetted by the streetlights, blocked my path.

  I looked over my shoulder so I wouldn’t be taken by surprise again.

  “Give us your wallet and your watch.” There was the gleam of a knife in the streetlight; the other man hefted a length of something heavy and hard.

  “Too late,” I said. And jumped.

  I appeared in the Stanville Library, back in front of the shelf that went from “Ruedinger, Cathy” to “Wells, Martha.” I smiled. I hadn’t had any particular destination in mind when I’d jumped, only escape. Every time I’d jumped from immediate, physical danger, I’d come here, to the safest haven I knew.

  I mentally listed all the places I’d teleported to and considered them.

  They were all places I’d frequented before jumping to them, either recently, in the case of Washington Square and the New York hotel, or repeatedly over a long period of time. They were places I could picture in my mind. I wondered if that was all it took.

  I went to the card catalog and looked up New York. There was a listing under guidebooks, Dewey decimal 917.471. This led me to the 1986 Foster’s Guide to New York City. On page 323 there was a picture of the lake in Central Park, in color, with a bench and trash can in the foreground, the Loeb Boathouse to one side.

  When Mom and I were touring New York, she wouldn’t let us go farther into Central Park than the Metropolitan Museum on the park’s east side. She’d heard too many stories of muggers and rapes, so we didn’t get to see the boathouse. I’d never been there.

  I stared at the picture until I could close my eyes and see it.

  I jumped and opened my eyes.

  I hadn’t moved. I was still standin
g in the library.

  Hmph.

  I flipped the pages and tried the same thing with other places I hadn’t been—Bloomingdale’s, the Bronx Zoo, the interior of the base of the Statue of Liberty. None of them worked.

  Then I hit a picture of the observation deck of the Empire State Building.

  “Look, Mom, that’s the Chrysler Building and you can see the World Trade Center and...

  “Shhhh, Davy. Modulate your voice, please.”

  That was Mom’s expression, “Modulate your voice.” Much kinder than saying “Shut up” or “Pipe down” or my dad’s “Shut your hole.” We’d gone there the second day of that trip and stayed up there an hour. Before I hit the picture I hadn’t realized what an impression it made on me. I thought I only had hazy memories of it at best. But now I could remember it clearly.

  I jumped and my ears popped, like they do when you take off and land in an airliner. I was standing there, the cold wind off the East River blowing my hair and ruffling the pages of the guidebook I still held in my hands. It was deserted. I looked down into the book and saw that the hours were listed as 9:30 to midnight.

  So, I could jump to places I’d been, which was a relief in a way. If Dad could teleport, he wouldn’t be able to jump into my hotel room in Brooklyn. He’d never been there.

  The view was confusing, all the buildings lit, their actual outlines nebulous and blurring together. I saw a distant green floodlit figure and things fell into place. Liberty Island was south of the Empire State and I looked down Fifth Avenue toward Greenwich Village and downtown. The twin towers of the World Trade Center should have clued me in.

  I could remember Mom feeding quarters into the mounted telescope so I could see the Statue of Liberty. We didn’t go out to the island because Mom was queasy on boats.

  I felt a wave of sorrow. Where had Mom gone?

  I jumped, then, back to the library and replaced the guidebook on the shelf.

  So, was it just any place I’d been?

  My granddad, my mother’s father, retired to a small house in Florida. My mom and I visited only once, when I was eleven. We were going to go again the next summer, but Mom left in the spring. I had a vague memory of a brightly painted house with white tile on the roof, and a canal in the back with boats. I tried to picture the living room but all I could picture was Granddad in this indefinite, generic sort of room. I tried to jump anyway, and it didn’t work.

  Hmph.

  Memory was important, apparently. I had to have a clear picture of the place, gained from actually being there.

  I thought of another experiment to make.

  I jumped.

  On Forty-fifth Street there is store after store specializing in electronics. Stereo equipment, video equipment, computers, electronic instruments. Everybody was closed when I appeared at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-fifth, including the vendor of Italian ice that I’d patronized the day before.

  I could see into the stores, though, their interiors lit for security or display purposes. There were steel bars lowered over most of the windows, secured with massive padlocks, but you could peer between them.

  I stopped before one store with wider bars and better lighting than most. I studied the floor, the walls, the way the shelves were arranged, the merchandise closest to the window.

  I had a very real sense of location. I was here on the sidewalk just six feet from the inside of the store. I could picture it clearly in my mind. I looked up the street both ways, closed my eyes, and jumped.

  Two things happened. First, I appeared inside the store, inches from hundreds of bright, shiny electronic toys. Second, within an instant of my appearance, a siren, very loud and strident, went off both inside and outside the store, followed by the blinding flash of an electronic strobe which lit the interior like a bolt of lightning.

  Jesus! I flinched. Then, almost without thought, I jumped back to the Stanville Library.

  My knees felt weak. I sat, quickly, on the floor and shook for over a minute.

  What was the matter with me? It was just an alarm, some sort of motion detector. I didn’t have this reaction when the two thugs in Washington Square accosted me.

  I calmed down. That hadn’t been so unexpected, so abrupt. I took several deep breaths. I could probably have stayed there, transferred several VCRs back to my hotel room, before the police showed up.

  What would I do with them? I wouldn’t know who to sell them to, not without getting ripped off or busted. The very thought of dealing with the kind of people who bought stolen goods made my skin crawl. And what about the store owner? Wouldn’t he be hurt? Or would insurance cover it? I started feeling guilty just picturing it.

  Another thought set my heart to beating harder and faster. Maybe that flash was for photos? Maybe they have closed-circuit TV cameras set up?

  I stood up and started pacing across the library, breathing faster, almost gasping.

  “Stop it!” I finally said to myself, my voice loud in the quiet building. How the hell are they going to catch you, even if they had your fingerprints, which they don’t? If they did catch you, what jail would hold you? Hell, no merchandise was stolen, no locks forced, no windows broken. Who’s going to believe there was someone in the store, much less press charges?

  Suddenly, like a weight descending on my shoulders, I was exhausted, weaving on my feet. My head began to ache again, and I wanted to sleep.

  I jumped to the hotel room and kicked off my shoes. The room was chilly, the radiator barely warm. I looked at the thin sheets on the bed. Inadequate. I thought about the man in Washington Square Park. Is he warm enough?

  I jumped into the dark interior of my room in my father’s house, scooped up the quilt from the bed, and jumped back to the hotel room.

  Then I slept.

  It was midday when noise from the street, a horn I think, woke me. I pulled the quilt higher and looked at the cheap hotel room.

  It was Wednesday, so I thought my dad should be at the office. I stood up, stretched, and jumped to the bathroom in the house. I listened carefully, then peered around the corner. Nobody. I jumped to the kitchen and looked out at the driveway. His car wasn’t there. I used the bathroom, then, and had breakfast.

  I can’t live off my father forever. The thought made my stomach hurt. What was I going to do about money?

  I jumped back to the hotel room and sorted through my clothes for something clean to wear. I was running out of underwear and all of my socks were dirty. I considered going to a store, picking out a selection of clothing, and then jumping without paying the bill. The ultimate shoplifter.

  Real class, Davy. I shook my head violently, gathered up all my dirty clothes, and jumped back to my father’s house.

  There—more and more, I was thinking of it as his house, not ours. I considered that a good step.

  Well, he had left some of his clothes in the washing machine without moving them to the dryer. From the smell of the mildew, they’d been there a couple of days. I piled them on the dryer, then started a load of my clothes.

  If it was his house, then why was I there? He owes me at least the odd meal and load of laundry. I refused to feel guilty for taking anything from him.

  Of course, while the washer ran, I paced through the house and felt guilty.

  It wasn’t the food, or doing laundry. I felt guilty about the twenty-two hundred I took from his wallet. It was stupid. The man made good money but made me wear secondhand clothes. He drove a car that cost over twenty thousand dollars but kept me, so he wouldn’t have to pay my mom child support.

  And I still felt guilty. Angry, too.

  I thought about trashing the place, tearing up all the furniture, and burning his clothes. I considered coming back tonight, opening his Cadillac’s gas tank and lighting it off. Maybe the house would catch fire, too.

  What am I doing? Every minute I stood in that house made me feel angrier. And the angrier I got, the more guilty I felt. This is not worth it. I jumped to Manhattan an
d walked through Central Park, until I was calm again.

  After forty minutes, I jumped back to Dad’s house, took the clothes out of the washer and put them in the dryer. Dad’s mildewed clothes I put back in the washing machine.

  There was something else I needed from the house. I went down the hall to Dad’s den—his “office.” I wasn’t supposed to go in there, but I was a little past caring about his rules and regulations. I started in the three-drawer filing cabinet, then moved to his desk. By the time the clothes were finished drying, I was finished, too, but I hadn’t found my birth certificate anywhere.

  I slammed the last drawer shut, then gathered my dried clothes up and jumped back to the hotel room.

  What am I going to do about money?

  I put the clothes on the bed, then jumped to Washington Square, in front of the park bench. There was no sign of the sleeper from the night before. Two old women sat there, deep in conversation. They glanced up at me, but kept on talking; I walked down the sidewalk.

  I’d tried to get honest work. They wouldn’t take me without a social security number. Most of them also wanted proof of citizenship—either a birth certificate or a voter’s registration. I had none of these. I thought about illegal aliens working in the U.S. How did they get around this problem?

  They buy fake documents.

  Ah. When I’d walked down Broadway in Time’s Square, several guys had offered me everything from drugs to women to little boys. I bet they’d also know about fake IDs.

  But I have no money.

  I felt very third world, caught in a trap between needing money to make money and no superpower’s loan in sight. If I didn’t pay my hotel bill the next day, I was also back out on the street. I would need some form of debt relief.

  The shriek from the Forty-second Street burglar alarm seemed less frightening in broad daylight. I thought about stealing VCRs or TVs and hocking them at pawn shops, then using the money to try and buy fake ID.