Jumper

by Steven Gould

  “I feel guilty about it.”

  “Why?”

  I shook my head. “I just do.”

  We turned onto Waverly Place.

  Millie hesitated a moment, then said, “He abused you both, but I think you realize that he is capable of feeling the loss. That he loved her in some sense. By no means was the relationship healthy, but you may be feeling guilty because you feel you deprived him of his chance to grieve.”

  “Humph. Let him do his grieving away from me!” I lowered my voice. “You might be right. Or I just might be feeling guilty because I defied him.”

  She nodded. “That’s possible. Oh... here’s the inn.”

  There was no room at the inn, so we waited fifteen minutes, just inside the door, out of the cold, trying to avoid tripping the waiters. When Millie and I had last eaten there, we’d sat on the terrace out back, but that had been summer.

  I told her about sergeants Washburn and Baker and why they’d been after me. She frowned for a moment, then said in a small voice, “You could have told me.”

  I looked away from her and swallowed. I didn’t want to get into an argument about it.

  She shrugged. “All right. Maybe I didn’t give you a chance to tell me.”

  I almost smiled. “The encounter didn’t reflect well on either of us.”

  The hostess led us to a table for two, wedged into a corner. I held Millie’s chair while she sat.

  “How do you do it?” she asked, wrapping her hands around the glass candle holder to warm them.

  I pursed my lips. “Well, you grasp the back of the chair and pull it out. Once the person is seated, you push it forward while they scoot in to the table.”

  “Ha, ha. Très amusant.” She did not look amused.

  “How do I do what?” I knew exactly what she meant.

  “How do you... teleport.”

  I exhaled noisily. “I call it ‘jumping’ and I haven’t the faintest idea how I do it. I just do.”

  She frowned. “You mean there isn’t some sort of device or anything?”

  “Just me.” I played with the salad fork. Then I shrugged and told her about the first time. She’d heard all the gory details, but she hadn’t heard how I got away. I told her some of my speculations, my attempts to find other jumpers, and some of the constraints. I told her about my revenge on Topper the attempted rapist and the guy at the transient’s hotel in Brooklyn, and, finally, I told her about stealing the money.

  “You did what?” She sat straight up in her chair, her eyes wide, her mouth open.

  “Shhh.”

  Other diners were staring at us, frozen in silent tableau, some with forks or spoons halfway to mouth.

  Millie was blinking her eyes rapidly. Much quieter, she said, “You robbed a bank?”

  “Shhh.” My ears were burning. “Don’t make a scene.”

  “Don’t shush me! I didn’t rob a bank.” Fortunately she whispered it.

  The waiter walked up then and took our drink order. Millie ordered a vodka martini. I asked for a glass of white wine. I didn’t know if it would help, but I figured it couldn’t hurt.

  “A million dollars?” she said, after the waiter left.

  “Well, almost.”

  “How much of it is left?”

  “Why?”

  She blushed. “Curiosity. I must look like a proper little gold digger.”

  “About eight hundred thousand.”

  “Dollars!” The man at the next table spilled his water.

  “Christ, Millie. You want me to leave you here? You’re fifteen hundred miles away from home you know.”

  The waiter arrived with the drinks and asked if we were ready to order. “You better give us a while. I don’t think we’ve even looked at the menu.”

  Millie took a swallow of her martini and made a face.

  “What’s the matter? Is it the wrong drink?”

  She shook her head, took another swallow, and made the same face again. “It’s perfect. You wouldn’t really strand me here in New York, would you? I mean, I’ve only got fifteen bucks with me.”

  “Well... I could drop you in Central Park. Or there are certain parts of Washington Heights that would be lively about now.”

  “Davy...!”

  “All right. I won’t abandon you.”

  She looked at me strangely.

  “What? I thought you’d be relieved.”

  “Strange choice of words.” She licked her lips. “Not so much strange as too appropriate.”

  “Huh?”

  She shook her head. “Abandonment. That’s the issue, isn’t it? She abandoned you again, didn’t she?”

  “She died. She didn’t run away.”

  Millie nodded. “The ultimate abandonment.”

  I felt myself getting angry. “Excuse me a second.” I got up abruptly and went to the bathroom. Someone was in it. I leaned against the wall, my arms crossed tightly, my eyes staring straight ahead and seeing nothing.

  I didn’t really need to go to the bathroom, but I didn’t want to shout at Millie. My mother was the victim of terrorism, not someone who’d abandoned me. Well, not this time.

  Nobody was watching so I jumped to the bathroom of the Stillwater apartment.

  I felt like hitting something hard. I didn’t have any plates left to break. I dropped to my knees by the bed and hit the mattress very hard, perhaps twenty times, until the heels of my hands began to ache. I took several deep breaths, then, and went into the bathroom and washed my face.

  My memory of the sidewalk outside the restaurant was fresh and I returned there. The hostess saw me come in and blinked. “I didn’t see you go out.”

  I shrugged. “Just needed a breath of fresh air.”

  She nodded and I went back to the table. I’d been gone about five minutes. Millie looked relieved.

  “The waiter came by again,” she said. “We should probably look at the menu.”

  The business of choosing and ordering the food got us safely through the next ten minutes. When we were alone again, Millie seemed unwilling to talk about anything serious. I guess she didn’t want to scare me away again.

  “I’m sorry, Millie. I’m not too rational about Mom right now. I’d rather not get into an argument about her.”

  Millie nodded. Her face looked pale in the table’s candlelight and her hands glowed red as she wrapped them around the candle again. My irritation faded, melted like wax. She was very beautiful, very desirable. I felt tears forming and blinked rapidly. I looked away from her, toward the wall, and said, “I’ve missed you, Millie.”

  She reached a hand out and squeezed mine. Her hand was very warm. Impulsively, I kissed the back of it and her lips parted. I enclosed her hand with both of mine. She said, “I’ve missed you.” She didn’t say anything else for a moment, then pulled her hand back gently.

  “I’ve got to tell you that I’m disturbed about the money you stole. I don’t think that was right.”

  “I didn’t hurt anyone.”

  “What about the depositors?”

  I’d thought about this for a long time. “That bank loses that much money in bad loans every month. They make that much money in interest every day. They’re a big bank. The money I took was small change to them. No depositor was hurt.”

  She shook her head. “I still can’t approve of it. I don’t think it’s right.”

  I felt my face go remote, still. I crossed my arms and felt cold.

  She spread her hands. “It doesn’t change the fact that I still love you. I’ve missed you terribly. I’ve missed your phone calls, and I’ve missed your body in bed next to me. I don’t know what to do about this. My loving you goes way beyond my disapproval of your theft.”

  I uncrossed my arms and reached across the table for her. She leaned forward and we kissed until the candle burned a hole in my shirt. Then we laughed and I held an ice cube to the burn and the food came and everything was all right.

  I flew out of Kennedy to London’s Gatwic
k South Terminal on American Airlines flight 1555. It left after midnight and arrived in Britain at 7:20 in the morning local time. It was a DC-10 and the man in first class next to me kept making stupid jokes about hydraulic fluid.

  I seriously considered jumping him back to New York when we arrived in London. Asshole.

  The weather was wet and very cold and the people talked like they were on TV. If I hadn’t slept so badly on the plane, I could have listened to them for hours. My connection to Algiers via Madrid did not leave for six hours. After clearing customs, I jumped back to Stillwater, grabbed the video camera, and recorded several jump sites at the airport. Then I jumped back to El Solitario, set an alarm for four and a half hours, and slept.

  The flight to Madrid was on Air Algerie. They allowed smoking on their flights and eddies of the stuff kept drifting up to me from the back of first class where four Frenchman were going at it like chimneys. Fortunately the flight to Spain was only two and a half hours and the French were replaced by nonsmoking Arabs for the next leg to Algiers.

  There was some difficulty at Algerian customs. I didn’t have a return ticket or a hotel reservation, so they shuttled me to the side while they processed the other passengers. I would have just jumped away except they kept my passport.

  After a forty-five-minute delay they offered me the choice of buying a return ticket or posting a bond. I bought a fully refundable ticket from Air Algerie to London for the following week under the watchful eye of a customs official. I also changed money for the minimum required amount, 1,000 Algerian dinars, about 190 U.S. dollars, and declared the U.S. dollars I had, over 5,000 DA (dinars Algeriere). Only then did he give back my passport with the admonition that all money changed must be recorded on the proper form and Allah help me if I couldn’t account properly for my U.S. dollars on leaving the country.

  I recorded a few jump sites then walked outside. It was cold, wet, and green, with mountains climbing up from the Mediterranean. If it weren’t for the men in caftans and djellabas and a few women in thick veils, I would have thought I was anywhere but North Africa. A group of chattering English walked by carrying skis. They were off to Tikjda, where “the snow was particularly good this year.”

  Inside the terminal, a man at an information booth directed me toward the VIP terminal. I couldn’t get into that area, but at a window near the security checkpoint I could look out on the tarmac where the hostage plane sat during two days of negotiation. I wondered if I should fly to Cyprus and see the similar stretch of tarmac where Mom died.

  It only took a minute or two to record jump sites, but I couldn’t jump away because the beggars were thick, persistent, and grubbier than anything in New York. As soon as I paid off one set, another group would move in. Finally, I went back into the terminal and jumped from a bathroom stall.

  The gates opened at 10 A.M. so I jumped Millie into Disney World at five minutes after, right in front of Space Mountain. We were the second couple aboard and we rode it three times before the line started to build up. We did Star Tours at Disney MGM and followed it with Body Wars over at Epcot.

  Next we hit Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, and Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride. By this time, since it was Christmas vacation, the crowds thickened to the point of unpleasantness, so I jumped her to London and we took a taxi into downtown London.

  It was four hours later in London, and cold after the Florida sun, but the taxi driver took us to an old hotel that served a decent high tea. Afterward, we walked by the Thames until a chill, damp fog moved up the river, and I jumped her to El Solitario.

  We’d seen the sun go down in England but it was still two in the afternoon in Texas, and the temperature was in the mid-eighties. Millie took one look from the top of El Mota and said, “I thought I was handling this all pretty well, but I think I need to sit down.”

  I jumped her to my cliff dwelling and sat her on the couch.

  In the weeks since I’d started construction, I’d finished the wall from overhang to ledge, complete with windows, door, and ducting for the wood-burning stove. I’d also built a separate enclosure at the far end of the ledge which now enclosed the largest gasoline-powered generator that I could lift. It provided the electricity for the five floor lamps I’d brought in to light the place.

  I’d filled the worst spots on the floor so that it was fairly smooth, even if it did have a pronounced tilt. I’d bought several dyed sheepskin rugs and some rustic furniture made of knotty pine. At the back of the dwelling, where the overhang sloped down to meet the floor, I put a bed. At the tallest sections of my man-made wall, between the windows, I’d put more bookshelves, chocked and shimmied to be more or less level, and I was slowly filling them with new purchases.

  Millie leaned back on the couch and closed her eyes. I jumped to my apartment in Stillwater and filled a large glass with ice water, then returned. Her eyes were still closed.

  “Here’s some water,” I said, putting it on the end table.

  She opened her eyes and focused on the glass, its side beaded with condensation. She sipped it and looked around, noting the natural rock above the couch and looking left and right to get the depth of the room. “Where are we?”

  “Texas,” I said. “It’s not far from that mountaintop I showed you.”

  “Where did you get this?” She held up the glass.

  “Stillwater.”

  She shook her head. “I am reminded of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

  “What part?”

  “When Puck says, ‘I’ll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.’ “

  “What a slowpoke.”

  “Then there’s that part where the fairy says, ‘Over hill, over dale, / Through bush, through brier, / Over park, over pale, / Through flood, through fire, / I do wander everywhere, / Swifter than the moon’s sphere.’ “

  I smiled. “You know your Shakespeare better than I.”

  She smiled. “I was that merry wanderer of the night. I jested to Oberon, and made him smile. High school production. Great reviews, though. They wanted me to play that ass Hermia, but I stood my ground. All the guys wanted to play Puck, but I was the only one to audition who could do the first act without looking at the script.”

  She stood, almost timidly, and walked to the window.

  The sun cast steep shadows from above and the stratigraphy of the rock was cleanly displayed on the opposite wall of the canyon, tilted at three degrees, matching my sloping floor. She leaned forward on tiptoe, to see past the edge. The floor of the canyon was just visible two hundred feet below.

  “Why didn’t I hear you when you popped off to Stillwater?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, the air should rush in or something, shouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it make some sort of popping noise?”

  I hadn’t thought about it. “Well, maybe you just weren’t listening well enough. Maybe it’s a quiet noise.”

  She put her glass of water down. “Well, try it again, and we’ll see. I’ll pay very close attention.”

  “Jump away and then back?”

  She nodded.

  “Okay.” I jumped to the ledge outside, by the generator shack. After a deep breath, I jumped back and Millie flinched.

  “Well?”

  She exhaled noisily. “Nothing. And it’s still unnerving as hell, even when you expect it.”

  I reached out and hugged her to me. “I’m sorry. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t tell you, you know. I didn’t want to scare you. I don’t want to lose you. I’ve lost too much already.”

  She leaned into me, her arms curled into my chest. I rocked her back and forth. After a moment she pushed away and said, “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “Uh... it’s in Stillwater.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Great! I’ll close my eyes.”

  I picked her up and jumped her to my Stillwater apartment. She’d never been in my Brooklyn apartment, so the furniture and toys were new to her. I showed her the bathroom and
waited in the living room.

  “I just had a horrible thought,” she said, after she came out of the john. “What if you took me to your house in the cliff there, jumped away, and got hurt or killed?”

  The situation was unfortunately easy to visualize. There was no water or food and no way out. She’d last less than seven days. “I didn’t think of that.”

  She shrugged. “I don’t mind going there, but I don’t think I want to be left there. You know what I mean? Like, if you needed to go get something, I’d want to go with you or back to my own place. Okay?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. That’s more than okay.”

  She looked around the living room and saw the video equipment. I’d told her about recording jump sites and she looked back and forth from the camera to me. “Hmmmm. Have you recorded yourself jumping? Maybe there’s something to be seen in slow motion?”

  “Hmm. Let’s try it.” I set the video camera and tripod up and pointed it at the middle of the room. I hooked the cables into my large monitor for playback and set the camera on slow-motion record.

  “Where should I go?”

  Millie was watching my image on the monitor. I looked at myself on the screen, then looked away, uncomfortable with the stranger there.

  “Anywhere, Davy, but jump right back to where you are after a count of five?”

  I jumped to the observation deck at Will Rogers World Airport. The altitude was roughly the same and it wasn’t hard on my ears. I looked around, turning to see the entire deck. The place, fortunately, was deserted, and I counted slowly to five before jumping back.

  Even though she was expecting me, Millie started again.

  “Sorry.”

  She exhaled sharply. “I’ll get used to it. Maybe. I sure wish you could teach me how to do it.”

  “If I knew how...”

  I rewound the tape and played it back at normal speed. I stood in the middle of the living room, cut off from the knees down by the framing; then I was gone. I counted to myself again, and at roughly the same moment, I appeared again.