Empathy

by John Richmond

  “Ah,” Harlan said. “My little system.”

  “You mean random?”

  “Fuck you. No. I mean my little system. Everything’s by copyright date.”

  Charlie looked around the room and shuddered. There had to be close to a thousand books and that was just within sight. He could imagine looming stacks in the closets, under the bed, the shower maybe. “Why, dude?”

  “To get a taste of the collective unconscious for a particular time period. I figure there’s no better way to get what the world was into in any given year than to see what they were writing and reading.”

  Charlie stuck out his lower lip. “Okay, I can kind of dig that. But you don’t have that many books. How far back do you go?”

  “Oh, I didn’t start with like 1904 and then collect a certain number of books for that year and then move up to 1905. I’ve got random samples from random years, pretty much like most people’s libraries.”

  Most people’s libraries.

  Other than his texts from Nursing School, Charlie had all of Stephen King’s Dark Tower novels except for the first one and some old issues of Penthouse he’d stolen from one of his mom’s boyfriends when he was kid and never got rid of. There might be a little book on how to make martinis hiding behind some glasses in a kitchen cabinet. He hadn’t seen that one in a while. “Sure.”

  Harlan took a sip of beer and belched. “Shall we dispense with the small talk and get to the freakier-than-hell bits concerning Emily’s MRI?”

  “Yeah, you said you had something to show me on the phone?”

  “Check this out.” Harlan pulled out a large manila envelope from under the coffee table and slapped it down. “This was from a scan I took the same afternoon I did Emily’s: blow-ups of the cranial portion of a full body scan.”

  Charlie slid a couple of glossy prints from of the envelope. They were top and side views of a person from the neck up…if that person happened to be missing their skin, muscle and bone. The head was blurred out by an aura like the one that had occurred on Emily’s scan except instead of a white blur this was black. Charlie turned the picture this way and that. Not even black, really. It was more an absence of anything, a negative aura. He dropped the pictures on the coffee table.

  “So something was wrong with the machine after all.”

  “No, dude. Nothing’s wrong with Lucille.”

  “You named a multi-million dollar Magnetic Resonance Imaging machine after a woman?”

  “No, I named it after BB King’s guitar, but that’s not the point.”

  “’Kay.”

  “The point is that I had an appointment come in and run a normal scan just before this one and it worked out fine. In fact, the guy didn’t have anything wrong with him in the slightest and that’s the way it looked on the display. It was the guy who came in after the normal read who had this thing.”

  Charlie picked up the picture again. The black aura was beautiful in the same way a black hole is beautiful. The air conditioning was up way too high.

  “Who was this?”

  “A doctor. Shrink I think.” Harlan stared at Charlie. “Said he was interested in any neurological anomalies, especially in parts of the brain responsible for motor function in the hands. Had really weird eyes.”

  “Weird eyes?”

  “Like fucking lighthouse lamps. I’ve never seen anything like that before, man. You wouldn’t believe it. Very high score on the freakometer.”

  Charlie remembered a piece of description. Michael McCafferty’s voice as Marty Jenny echoed in his mind. “Fine,” he said.

  “Yes!” Harlan said. “Drummond Fine. I should have remembered a freaky name for a freaky guy. Hey, you know this dude?”

  “Man, Harl, you came close to one very bad man.” Charlie picked up his beer and took a long pull. “You been following the news about this guy the Post’s calling the Phobia Killer?”

  Harlan sat back in his chair, then sat forward. “Get the fuck outta’ town.”

  “No, man. It’s true.”

  Charlie explained everything. It took a few minutes, punctuated with the occasional “Holy shit!” from Harlan to bring his friend up to speed.

  “So, he just like, what, disappeared after the cops picked him up?”

  “Yeah,” Charlie said. “The Detective…”

  “Bilko, that’s so funny.”

  “Shut up. I know. Anyway, she got a call a few minutes after the first one. He went nuts on the cops or something. She wouldn’t go into it. But apparently he got away from them.”

  “You want another beer?”

  “Yes.”

  Harlan got up and was rummaging in the fridge when he called, “You think he can do the same stuff Emily can do?”

  “Kind of makes you wonder how he could get away from two of New York’s finest, doesn’t it? We are talking about the world’s most trigger-happy police department.” Charlie took the beer Harlan offered as he sat down. “You remember that poor pizza delivery guy or whatever he was from a couple of years ago? They sprayed that poor bastard for pulling out his wallet. Jesus, you’d think they would have been at least that jacked-up around the Phobia Killer.”

  Harlan thought about laughing.

  “Harlan,” Charlie bolted up straight, “does he know you have these pictures?”

  “Relax, Charles.” Harlan help up his hand. “The guy freaked me bad enough that I switched his print out with the normal read who came in before him. I also wanted you to see the similarity between his scan and Emily’s. But don’t worry, Fine left the office with a perfectly normal full-body scan…for a comparably-sized forty-seven year-old African American male.” Harlan grinned around a cigarette as he put flame to it. “We all look the same without skin, baby.”

  ~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 18

  EMILY WAS BORED as she had ever been in her entire life. She and Charlie couldn’t spend every minute of every day together. She had woken up early on her first full “day off” from him with the intention of doing the dos and seeing the sights. She was from Wisconsin and this was New York. There was the Statue of Liberty, the Staten Island Ferry, the Empire State Building, Wall Street, Times Square. There was Bloomindales and Macey’s. There was Miss Saigon and Cats. There was the Metropolitan Museum and the Metropolitan Opera.

  She’d set it up so she could look up the toga of Lady Liberty directly after viewing Ground Zero, but the symbols neither inspired or depressed. She’d expected to feel the heat of tears but felt only an itch to move on. Yeah, yeah, yeah, bunch of people got killed by a bunch of evil A-rabs. Yeah, yeah, yeah, bring me your tired, your hungry, your wretched masses yearning to earn green cards. The top of the Empire State Building stirred her curiosity because a fairly high number of people managed to throw themselves from the observation deck in spite of the inwardly curving wrought-iron bars. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you just can’t stand in the way of American ingenuity.

  Three o’clock rolled around with glacial speed and she found herself in front of an innocuous watering hole called The Last Swallow. The sign displayed the silhouette of a single bird on a wire. Emily adjusted the strap of the black bra under her wife-beater and blew a strand of hair off her forehead. The street buzzed around her. A woman wearing exactly the same outfit, down to the brand new retro blue jeans and combat boots brushed past her. Last swallow indeed..

  She pushed through the door exchanged the noise of the street for the hush and swirl of conversation and silence between songs on the juke. The bar stools were two-thirds full with men in rumpled suits and a couple of women, one of whom might have been a hooker. Knee-high boots with a short skirt just wasn’t that outrageous a combination anymore during working hours anymore, even in Wisconsin.

  Emily wasn’t into chatting, so she snuggled herself into an empty booth along the opposite wall. A waitress showed up a few minutes later, jerking Emily from her blank reverie (she’d been wondering without any real concern if the carcinogen levels were still high around Gr
ound Zero) and took her order for a shot of Jameson’s and a Sam Adams Light. Emily watched her walk away. She had a big butt.

  Jesus, what was the matter with her? She was in New York city for the love of Mike (Just who was this Mike anyway?). She had money and time. There was more to do in this town than, shit, anywhere, right? And what was she doing? Getting drunk in a shithole three hours before dinner. Emily dragged her fingernail through the film of old beer and spirits on the table top, spelling out So Fucking Bored.

  Once when she was supposed to be studying her fifth grade Spanish text Daddy caught her just staring off into the distance. He explained to her that boredom wasn’t something that just happened to people, it was a state of mind, an attitude that people got when they were doing something they didn’t want to be doing, like studying Spanish when Scooby Doo was on.

  The waitress appeared and plunked down a little glass with amber liquid and a big glass with thicker amber liquid. Emily thanked her and started a tab. She picked up the shot glass, took a whiff of the high-test contents and made them disappear. The whiskey left a fire trail in her throat. She doused it a moment later with a swallow of lager. She belched into the back of her hand and stared at the drinkers at the bar, swallows on a power line.

  Emily knew what was going on—she was bored because the one thing she really wanted to be doing was against the rules. Charlie had made her promise not to do her new party-trick until they knew more about what was going on with the resulting tremors in her hand. It was killing her. She had a freaking superpower for the love of Mike or whoever. How was she supposed to concentrate on land marks and musical theatre when she could be moving stuff around just by thinking about it? She had a lot of power, too. Emily thought back to her first date with Charlie, stopping that careening SUV by putting out her hand. She drank down the rest of her beer.

  The waitress appeared and Emily ordered another shot n’ beer combo. Fifteen minutes later she was mired in a slurred internal dialogue, tapping her foot along to the Pink Floyd montage someone had fed into the juke. Us and them indeed. Well, she certainly was different from everyone else, that was for sure. Maybe this new telekinetic thingy was like a gift? Did Charlie ever think of that? (Oh, he was so cute and so talented with that thing he could do with his tongue.) But what if, what if… She lost her train of thought. Oh yeah, what if she was, like, supposed to use this power? What if she actually was, like, a superhero? Ooh! She should think of a good name! Wonder Woman was what she really wanted but that, of course, was taken.

  Emily sighed, the bar was beginning to fill up a little more now, but no one interesting had yet made the scene, just more of the same. A trio of forty-something men bustled in, their ties loosened, their wedding rings flashing in the slanting yellow sun as the door swung shut behind them. One of them missile-locked on Emily and tipped his chin at her. She snorted laughter and pretended to be interested in the wrestling match on the TV bolted over the bar. The actual competition hadn’t started yet. A man in a blue Speedo bulged from his fur coat, skin resplendent with oil. He mounted and dry-humped one of his nymphet corner girls against a ring post. Emily couldn’t hear the sound of the match over the juke box.

  The man in the suit slid into the booth across from her. Emily noted the strip of white flesh where the wedding ring sat only a moment before. She went out on a limb and guessed he hadn’t taken it off in memory of his beloved late wife.

  “Hiya,” he said. “My name’s Roger.”

  “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding.”

  The funny thing was that before she had come to New York and blocked out her power, Emily would have been as drawn to this balding, socially retarded yutz as he was to her. The empathy would have blurred their boundaries, his lust bleeding over into her. Time was, she would have fucked his brains out.

  “Kidding? What’s that supposed to mean?” His salesman grin hardened. “You some kinda’ dyke or something?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I am a lesbian.”

  He laughed. “Oh, now you’re just messing with me.” He nodded. “I get that.”

  “Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Okay,” Emily said. “I’m going to buy you a shot.” She called the waitress over. “Two more Jameson’s, please. Thanks.” She faced him. “Roger, don’t talk until the drinks get here, okay?”

  “Okay, hon’.” His eyes tracked along her bra strap. “Whatever you say.” Rodriguez from legal had been right. Always go after the hot ones drinking by themselves. It was like bondage and Catholic girls. Never failed.

  The drinks came and Emily thanked the waitress. She nodded toward Roger’s glass, “G’head.”

  He picked it up and paused. “To beautiful strangers.”

  “Uh-huh,” Emily muttered, she was starring hard at the glass. “Close your eyes, sweetness.”

  “What?”

  The shot glass exploded with a stark Pop!

  Roger blinked in time to save his left cornea from the sliver that bounced off his eyelid. He jerked back in the booth. “What the fuck?” He burst up, bumping the table and spilling half of Emily’s shot across the surface. He brushed the spray of Jameisons off his suit in frantic, angry swipes. “What the fuck?”

  Emily tried to pick up her drink but her left hand was a fluttering mess. She switched to the other and drank it down, shuddering as the whiskey ran down her throat. “Roger,” she said. “I’m telekinetic. Wanna’ see what else I can do?”

  But he was already walking away and muttering, “Crazy dyke bitch.”

  Emily didn’t even watch him go. She focused her attention on her twitching hand and thought stop. Her hand froze mid-shake. It felt like it was encased in an invisible cement glove. Well, that took care of that. She tried to move her fingers, and found that in stopping the shuddering, she had succeeded in stopping any movement at all. It wasn’t a cure, but it would be good enough to fool Charlie.

  Emily heard raised voices and looked up. Roger and his two friends had congregated a couple of booths away and were shouting about dyke bitches for her benefit. She heard something about cute little magic tricks. Exactly what kind of parlor trick did he think she had just pulled off? Every now and then Roger would turn around to make sure she was paying attention and then let something extra charming fly over his teeth. It was when he brought up the question of her mother’s likely interest in canines as sexual partners, that Emily decided she’d heard enough. She closed her eyes and took a deep, slow breath.

  With a screech of tearing metal, the TV tore free of its moorings and hurled across the room. It smashed into the wall above Roger’s booth and fell onto the table in front of him, the screen blowing out in a glory of sparks and glass. A blanket of silence settled over the bar. Emily rose, and swinging her hips in the tradition of triumphant crazy dyke bitches the world over, walked out of The Last Swallow and into the flames of the evening sun.

  ~~~~~~~~

  Chapter 19

  “HOW LONG HAVE we been at this at this now, Sharon?” It had been nearly twenty-four hours since he’d burst her partner’s heart and kidnapped her, but Drum wanted to hear her say it. “How long since you’ve had a fix?”

  It was hot in the warehouse, but she was freezing. She could tell it was hot because THE BASTARD had big sweat stains in his stinking pits and at the throat of his expensive shirt. Meant IT was human after all. That was good because that also meant that if she somehow got through this she could hurt HIM and hurt HIM and hurt HIM…after she got a fix. Her LITTLE FLUFFY CLOUDS, her PILLS, were still in their bottle behind the crate HE was sitting on. She knew this because HE would show THE PILLS to her from time to time. She was pretty sure it had been almost a full day. Sharon thought she remembered the sun moving all the way past the windows a full beat. “A long time,” she managed. Her voice didn’t sound like hers anymore. The authority, the harnessed anger and flattened affect were gone. She sounded like someone who’d been on the bad end of a torture session for the last day or s
o.

  At one point, THE BASTARD had even left and come back. It seemed like a long, long time ago. HE’D left her PILLS on top of the crate like it was a fucking pedestal in a jewelry store or an art gallery while HE’D done something with her prowl car. She’d heard it start up and drive away, not trusting to the mad hope that HE was leaving her there to whatever end. Sharon had stretched her wrist to the point where she could feel the bones separating before sinking back against the pipe HE’D cuffed her to. She sank back and cried out in frustration as much as in pain. Something scuttled in the dark. Eventually a thin sleep misted over her.

  She awoke in a acrid pool of her own urine, wet and sore, the inside of her skin itching, her veins buzzing. Just one LITTLE CLOUD, half of ONE. God, she’d have traded her breath to lick the DUST from inside the BOTTLE. HE was back, sitting on the crate, staring at her through those Coke-bottle lenses, like little television screens tuned into the Demon Channel. HE smelled different, swampy. Her senses were confused, but they were up, like every last nerve ending had been rubbed with a metal rasp. HE had dumped her car in the swamp. Ah, well, now at least she knew where they were. Jersey. Great.

  It had been deep night when HE’D left. Now, the sun painted a grid of hot white on the floor where it cut through the glassless windows. Must be around noon. It didn’t occur to her be hungry. Not for food.

  HE hadn’t said what he wanted. Not really. HE’D asked her what the worst thing she had ever seen had been and she’d told HIM about the spelling champion. For a second, then, after she’d looked at him and explained about her reasons for strapping on the gun and the sticking the badge to her chest every day when it still hurt like hell to walk up more than three flights of stairs, for a second it looked like he hadn’t been in charge anymore. It looked like SHE had scared him. But that had passed. Her power ran out with her resistance to the NEED.

  “What d’you want from me?”