by Anton Strout
Dead To Me
( Simon Canderous - 1 )
Anton Strout
Anton Strout
Dead To Me
1
I managed to get out a quick “Tamara, wait…” before I felt the interior doorknob of my SoHo apartment jab into the small of my back. Tamara ground against me like she was trying to make her body occupy the same space as mine-and I certainly wasn’t complaining. Our mouths locked, the sweet taste of whatever umbrellaed concoction she’d been drinking mixing with the Corona flavor of mine. It was a surprisingly good combination.
“Simon, shhh…” she whispered, pushing me even farther into the apartment. She fell toward me with a sudden “Ow!” It was dark, but I could still see her hopping about on one leg. She had been trying to strip off my brown suede coat and theGABBA GABBA HEY Ramones T-shirt I was wearing, but now she clutched her knee.
“You okay?” I asked, finding the switch from horn-dog to concerned a difficult one to make.
“Yeah,” she said, and hissed out a long, slow sigh of pain. “What did I hit?”
“Just a packing crate,” I said, reaching out and steadying her. I contemplated turning on the lights to check on her, but hesitated, debating whether or not the other two dozen packing crates around my living room might scare her off. It wasn’t that I was a slob, but given my workload at the Department of Extraordinary Affairs, my personal antiques acquisitions had become backlogged. They were spread out across my dangerously darkened living room like little landmines from the Ghost of Bruises Yet to Come.
Luckily, a little knee pain wasn’t enough to stop Tamara. We resumed our lip lock while I weaved us safely past the labyrinth of crates and down the hall to my bedroom. If she was still hurt, she hid it well. I guessed that the promise of sexual healing was helping her tough through any damage to her knee.
Thankfully the last part of the journey toward my bedroom went without incident. The edge of the bed hit the backs of my calves, bending me at the knees, and I fell back onto it as Tamara threw herself on top of me.
Ever since I’d accidentally knocked over her drink at Eccentric Circles three weeks ago, our encounters had consisted of one sexually charged (but unfulfilled) moment after another. But not tonight. Tamara straddled me, her hotness lit only by the moonlight coming in through the window. The smell of cinnamon rose off her, swirling around in my head, and under her jacket her tight little black dress-the one that every other woman in New York City seemed to own-clung to her like a second skin. I was in heaven.
Not that things stayed heavenly for long. Around me, things rarely did. As Tamara finished struggling out of her coat, she threw it to the side. Her cell phone slipped free from it, hit the mattress, and rolled to rest against my arm. No big deal for most people, but with my preternatural powers, that was all it took to ruin things.
It’s called psychometry-the ability to divine information about people or events solely by touching personal objects. As Wonder-Twin-powers cool as that might sound, it wasn’t. I tended to end up knowing more than I should about a person…or wanted to.
I started thrashing around underneath Tamara, desperate to avoid what I knew was coming. She seemed oblivious to my escape attempts, and when I tried to sit up, she pushed me playfully back down. With an evil grin, she pinned my shoulders to the bed before attacking me with a barrage of kisses. My last thought as the electric pulse of my power kicked in wasOh shit.
Once under the influence of a rush of psychometric power, I had very little control, especially when it took me by surprise. Without my emotions in check, the power latched on to the sexual energy between the two of us and buffeted me with a flood of details from Tamara’s past.
It was full Technicolor glory in my mind as I was struck by the psychic vision of Tamara’s firm, naked form. It stung all the more since I’d been mere seconds away from experiencing the real thing for myself. Instead I was forced to watch her getting it on with another guy-a goatee-sporting, muscle-bound blond who was, of course, infinitely more attractive than me. Tamara wore nothing but enough red, gold, and green beads around her neck to make Mr. T jealous.
Mardi Gras. Ithad to be.
The beads swayed hypnotically, rhythmically-shink shink shink-as the two of them pawed at each other like cats in heat. I wanted to turn away, but in the vision I was incapable of doing so. One moment I was watching the guy’s well-muscled chest as he thrust his body against hers. The next brought Tamara’s face into focus, her eyes shut tight and her curly brown hair loose around her shoulders as this stranger enjoyed things I had hoped to be doing myself this very evening. And the beadsshinked on…
What the vision showed me was something deeply private from Tamara’s life. I was someplace I shouldn’t be, feeling every touch, hearing every sound of her and some guy from her past bumping uglies…it was enough to drive me mad. With every Mardi Gras-fueled gyration, gouging my eyes out started to seem like a better idea. Not that it would have blocked the visions.
Flashes of reality slowly began to slip back to me. Tamara was still oblivious to the private mental hell I was experiencing while pinned underneath her. Her lips were now clamped down on my neck like a vacuum hose and her hands were busy tugging up my shirt. All of these were things I would ordinarily have been thrilled to experience-but I couldn’t enjoy them. The images of Tamara’s own privateGirls Gone Wild moment had become a permanent scar in my brain. Parts of me withered in response. The troops retreated, as it were.
When the psychometric flash finally faded, the usual hypoglycemic side effects kicked in and my entire body felt drained of energy. Using the last of my will, I somehow found the strength to push Tamara off me. She fell back onto the mattress, and I rolled weakly off the bed and onto the floor.
“What the hell wasthat all about?” she asked as she righted herself on the bed. I could hear the surprise in her voice, but I ignored the question and started crawling for the door. Between my psychic disorientation, physical weakness, and the occasional Mardi Gras flashes echoing in my head, I felt like I might pass out. The images had almost faded for good, but then one last vivid burst of wild thrusting brutalized my poor brain. Tamara’s voice moaning his name echoed wildly in my head:Fergus! Fergus! Fergus! With that, my body gave out and I fell over, unable to move. The refreshingly cool wood of the floor pressed against my face.
“Fergus…?” I muttered weakly before I could stop myself. I still felt half in the vision, unable to control myself. I stared up at Tamara, her eyes now wide.
She leaned over and lowered her face until I could see the sheer shock on it.
“What the hell did you just say?” There was genuine surprise in her voice now.
All I could feel was intense sadness over the way things were rapidly unfolding-the way they always unfolded when I started to get close to anyone. For three weeks, I had been able to enjoy the myriad little things about the tease leading up to tonight. The way she walked across a floor, the way her eyes drew me in, the way I had become envious simply of her clothes because they had the pleasure of moving over her body. And now, it was all coming down around me.
Tamara jumped up from the bed and paced toward me. She looked embarrassed and shook her head like she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “How do you know about Fergus?” she said, confused.
Her words swam around in my head, but I couldn’t force myself to say anything more. My struggle to stand back up took all my focus and energy. I pressed my back firmly against one side of the doorway and began inching myself up. My legs shook beneath me with the effort, but shortly I found myself standing with the arch of the door stabilizing me. As I steadied myself, Tamara adjusted her dress and moved closer, getting in my face.
“How could you know a
bout that?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. Instead she became defensive. “It was New Orleans…just us girls away from our boyfriends. I…I got caught up in how much attention was being paid to me, but Inever toldanyone. I didn’t tell the girls later that night, I didn’t tell my boyfriend when I got back…nobodyknows about Fergus.”
All I could do was take it. Hell, I had to. I could barely stand, let alone tell her the truth. Besides, Tamara’s sense of normalcy had been pushed over the edge and she was desperately trying to make connections that might make sense.
“Have you been stalking me?” she said, still puzzled. She paused before discounting the idea completely. Then a new idea struck her and her eyes opened wide.
“Have you been reading my diary?”she asked with venom.
My first thought wasWhen the hell would I have done something like that? I had never evenbeen to her place-and for good reason. The last thing I wanted with my abilities was to surround myself with an apartment full of another person’s belongings. To Tamara, though, my snooping through her diary made a lot more sense than any explanation I could possibly share with her.
“Answer me!” she shouted suddenly, alarming me. Tears started running down her face, but I stayed silent. And woozy.
Without warning, Tamara swung at me, surprisingly making contact with my shoulder. It wasn’t terribly painful, but it was enough to unbalance me and send my weakened body falling back to the floor. My head bounced off the floorboards, and my vision flashed white with the searing pain of impact. I lay there, waiting for the disorientation to pass, watching helplessly as Tamara gathered her coat, her shoes, and lastly the cell phone that had triggered all of this.
She wiped at the tears running down her cheeks. “Find someone else who’ll put up with that, Simon. Someone who likes having their privacy violated. I hear a lot of women are really turned on by guys going through their stuff. Yeah, good luck finding someone likethat. ”
Tamara ran down my darkened hall, tripped over something, and swore. On her way out, she slammed the door fiercely. My strength slowly returned as I lay on the floor. I could have gone after her, but then I thought of my track record with women and didn’t bother. It was best to just let her go.
I understood where she was coming from well enough. Ihad violated her, albeit unintentionally. Fergus was a private shame from her past, and I had just thrown him out there on the table. But what could I have told her that would have made sense? There was no reasonable explanation I could have given. And even if I’d been able to explain it away and smooth things over with Tamara, I would still have to live with those images burned into my mind.
For now I would have to deal with the sad turn of events that the evening had taken, but maybe over time my work at Other Division at the Department of Extraordinary Affairs would teach me to cope better. It was easier this way, I told myself. Chalk up another loss in the relationship column. Alone was my natural state. It was better this way.
Saying it over and over in my head, the words started sounding convincing. But the dull thumping feeling in my chest said otherwise. Tamara was gone. I was alone. Again.
2
I was so shaken from such an intense psychometric reading that I hurried to the kitchen and grabbed my keys from the counter. I ran back up my hall to the door next to the bathroom, unlocking its three locks. I flicked on the light and was instantly blinded by the absence of color.
Every last object in the room was exactly the same shade of white. There was an unused desk, two empty bookshelves, and a block of large, square storage cubes. A single cushioned chair-also white-sat alone in the center of the room.
The White Room was my inner sanctum, a room I had put together to be as psychically neutral a place as possible. I needed a place that was clean of any potential triggers to my power, since everything else in my apartment was potentially chock full of other people’s pasts. I came there whenever I needed to calm myself after a particularly bad psychometric incident, and tonight’s Mardi Gras Slamfest definitely made that list.
I sat down in the chair before I collapsed. When my panic finally settled down after several minutes, I realized that sitting here doing nothing wasn’t the solution.
I just had to get out of my apartment for now. I got up from the chair, turned off the light, and relocked the three locks on the door. On the way out of the apartment, I chugged a glass of OJ to fight the hypoglycemic aftereffect of using my power. I slipped my black gloves on, heading for the elevator. I rarely went anywhere without my gloves these days. They were old and worn and the one thing that muffled my powers. It just made life easier to wear them, but second skin or not, they always made me feel a bit like the Bubble Boy.
As I walked from my digs in SoHo up toward Union Square, I stopped at my trusty coffee guy and caught word that some real vintage Antiques Roadshow action was happening under the West Side Highway at Seventy-Ninth Street. I jumped straight into a cab. When the taxi approached the turnoff, the driver spooked out on me, refusing to take his cab any farther west. After a minute of pointless arguing, I got out and slammed the door.
Prick. Did he think antiquarians really posed such a threat to society that he couldn’t take me a few streets closer?
I walked the last few blocks west toward the address my coffee guy had given me. Makeshift lights flooded an impromptu night market that had taken root directly beneath an underpass of the West Side Highway, its tables and booths looking hastily thrown up and capable of disappearing in a flash if need be. The first time I had heard of these quirky shopping markets was through a friend of mine who had visited Taiwan. They were a life-form all their own, he told me-spur-of-the-moment shanty towns that sprang up and broke down in a single night, only to reappear like a magician’s assistant in a completely different location the next. Last year, I noticed that the phenomenon had quietly made its way stateside, mutating into a scattering of caravan flea markets that popped up occasionally throughout Manhattan. I looked forward to the times when I was lucky enough to come across them.
It was only a few years since I’d given up a life of thievery and running with a criminal crowd. That meant that these days I was always on the lookout for my next biglegitimate score, because the only true luxury I had established for myself was my apartment. Keeping up with my outrageous SoHo maintenance fees was hard, but now that I worked for the Department of Extraordinary Affairs, I was determined to do it somewhat honestly.
I had worked hard to put my unscrupulous use of my powers behind me. Long before finding the D.E.A., I had been an impressionable, confused kid with burgeoning powers, working part time for any antique shop that would have me. Cutthroats swarmed that business like sharks being chummed, and there were plenty of sketchy opportunists more than willing to drag me into the world of big scores, petty cons, and fast money. I started stealing from the legitimate stores I worked for, lying to them as I found hidden treasures I psychometrically discovered were worth a lot. All my less-than-honest role models just thought I had a knack for it, never guessing that I had some strange power, and I was happy to keep them thinking that. By the time I turned twenty, we were going for the big cash scores-priceless pieces of artwork-but we were sloppy and worse, greedy. After one too many close calls and the constant betrayal and backstabbing that you encounter with bottom-feeding miscreants, I was lucky enough to barely escape a stint in jail. Others weren’t so lucky. I took the whole misadventure as a serious wakeup call to get my act together and disappeared off their radar.
My life of crime had started gradually, but it ended the second that fear pushed me to see who I’d really become. I wasn’t a clever kid using his powers to pull the wool over a couple of too-rich dealers anymore. I was a thief. A criminal. I was a bottom feeder, too.
I sold off the last of my stolen goods to finance a new apartment and start fresh. After all, I knew it would be easier to turn over a new leaf in style.
At these midnight markets, I still found it impossible
to resist going for a score-that feeling of finding something only I could tell was valuable. The call of life’s secret treasures waiting to be reclaimed was too great, and as long as I was paying for the goods, it was all on the up and up.
These markets fueled a deeper need in me, an emotional one that appealed to the same part of my secret heart that loved design-on-a-dime TV shows. I was as excited as a club kid finding out about a late-night rave. Plus if I could discover the right hidden treasure, it meant I would finally be able to fill my fridge with something more edible than its current contents of baking soda, packets of mustard sauce, and a month-old chicken marinara that was on the verge of growing its own legs and leaving on its own accord.
For 4 a.m., the aisles were crowded with an interesting assortment of people. Euro trash, insomniacs, and a few better dressed New Yorkers like me. I recognized a few familiar faces working behind the tables at their crude little stands. Over the years, I’d grown to know some of these wandering salesmen well. Some, I might count as friends, but even those I knew best were probably mostly after my greenbacks. All of them, though, had told me how much they admired my impeccable taste. Little did they know.
I wandered for twenty minutes before coming to a table that I thought was abandoned until a chipped-tooth Native American forced his bulk out through the trailer door behind the table. I nodded politely and then put on my poker face to look through his merchandise, pretty sure that Chippy wouldn’t be hard to outnegotiate if I found something worthwhile. I needed my poker face. Some of these vendors were con artists, and I refused to get ripped off by overpaying for a Snoopy Sno-Cone Machine or a warped LP ofSing Along with Mitch!
Chip-tooth had two long tables sitting under his watchful eye. They were full of eclectic junk spread out cleverly without price tags. He wanted haggling room, which was fine by me. The smug look on the big guy’s face showed that he thought he had the art of the haggle down to a science, which was also fine by me. There was no way he was going to outhaggle a psychometric. As long as I could downplay any real finds, I’d get a bargain and he’d be none the wiser.