Superpowers (3 page)

"I could probably lift the whole machine," she said.

"Keep your voice down," Harriet said.

"Ms. Bishop!" Marcus Hatch smiled at Mary Beth but addressed Harriet. "I don't think I've ever seen you here before. Are you working on a story? Or are you still wasting your talents on hip-today, gone-tomorrow bands?"

"Oh, Marcus, you flatterer." Harriet, too, looked at Mary Beth when she spoke.

"Aren't you going to introduce me?" Marcus asked.

"Mary Beth, this is Marcus Hatch, the most egotistical man on campus. Marcus, this is Mary Beth Layton, my roommate."

"Nice to meet you." He looked past her. "What are you two doing? I don't usually see spotters in the circuit room."

"Mary Beth's just learning the machines," Harriet said. "I'm helping her find a good level to start with."

"It looked like she was doing all right." Marcus's eyes were narrowed, and Mary Beth realized he was trying to find the pin. Panic hit, and she started talking before she had any time to think.

"I was just about to try lifting four hundred," she said, and forced a laugh that came out as a mindless giggle.

"Really? Well, no harm in trying, is there?"

"I was just joking," Mary Beth said quickly.

"She could hurt herself," Harriet said.

"I doubt it," Marcus said. "You'll know pretty quickly whether it's going to happen. Why not try it? Just for laughs."

"Sure," Mary Beth said, ignoring the message Harriet was trying to send with her eyes. "No harm in trying!"

She took a deep breath and gripped the bar. Then she flexed the muscles in her arms and put on her best impersonation of a weak little girl. She made her arms tremble and held her breath until her face was red. Then she relaxed and let her arms fall to her sides.

"Not happening," she said, breathing heavily.

"I guess not," Marcus said. "Well, I've got to go run some laps. Nice to meet you, Mary Beth."

"Nice to meet you," she said, and watched him leave.

She stood up. "Pretty good, huh?"

"There's a problem," Harriet said slowly.

"What? He probably just thinks I'm dramatic." Mary Beth felt good, maybe better than ever in her life. She wondered if she was more powerful than a locomotive, or able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. She wondered if she could fly.

"It's not your acting ability I'm worried about." Harriet pointed to the bar. There was a subtle but noticeable bend near its center.

_______

It didn't work over the phone, and Charlie was sure that was all that was keeping him from losing his mind. He had to be near someone for it to work. Anything closer than ten or fifteen feet was too close, as he'd learned that morning.

It had started before he'd woken up. He'd been having someone else's dream. He couldn't have put into words how it differed from his usual dreams, because he rarely remembered them. But this jumble of images didn't belong to him.

When he had opened his eyes, feeling bleary and thirsty and sore, he had wished to be someone else; someone who hadn't gotten so drunk and slept with someone he barely knew.
I have to get out of here
, he'd thought.

"Where are my pants?"

Charlie had to do some mental connect-the-dots to make sense of the voice. It was a woman's voice. She sounded like she had just woken up. He was just waking up. He had slept with someone. Caroline.

"I found them, never mind." He blinked away sleep and rolled over to look at her. She stood beside the bed, pulling her khakis up over her lovely and quite naked ass. Her dark hair fell tangled down her bare back. She sat and started to pull on her socks.

Panties
, he heard her thinking.
Where are my panties? Forget about them. God, I have to get out of here before he says something
.

"What do you think I'm going to say?" Charlie asked.

"What?" She turned to look at him, pulling her top on as she did so. "How did—what are you talking about?"

But that wasn't what she was thinking.
This is creepy. He's creepy. No, it's not his fault. What was I thinking?
He could hear her need to escape, to be away from him.

"I have to go to work," she said, and although he knew what she was thinking, that she didn't have to be at work for five hours yet, he let her go without protest. It wasn't until later that he had time to be hurt.

He lay in bed after she had gone, trying to make sense of what had happened. He was remarkably calm, he thought. "I'm remarkably calm," he said out loud. He imagined narration by Stone Phillips: "Charles Frost is remarkably calm for a young man who's begun to hear other people's voices in his head. He lives life as he always has, with one small difference."

He stayed calm while he brushed his teeth and got dressed. There was no one around, and his thoughts were his own. It was when he went out to get some lunch that it hit him, like a slap in the face with an industrial dishwasher. Just scattered thoughts at first, but once he was among the Sunday crowds, he was overwhelmed.

Going to fail shouldn't have eaten those college kids think they can't be pregnant after I got the high score on one quarter to last me the fucking suits broke a nail I need to work out damn she's hot need sleep coffee food sex money wonder would he have sex with god don't let Grandpa die what's wrong with that guy?

Charlie slumped against the side of a building, clutching at the cool brick and sweating in the shade. He tried to focus beyond the cravings and revulsions flowing through him and figure out where he was. He managed to turn himself back toward home, too preoccupied with the foreign thoughts to be conscious of his own fear.

Some of the thoughts were not words, though he was able to turn some of them into language. Many were images and emotions that yanked at Charlie's under-brain and set his heart racing like a chipmunk on PCP. He could stay with one mind, but it didn't help; he found himself inside the thoughts of a homeless man at a bus stop who was convinced that the three girls across the street were assassins sent by his enemies. He jumped into one of the girls and found her cocooned in an elaborate fantasy involving a horse whip, a Great Dane, and a man who seemed to be her stepfather. He reeled away from her and into a bicyclist weaving down State Street between the buses and taxicabs, mulling over a mathematical proof that Charlie wasn't even capable of articulating. And yet in the seconds before the bicyclist passed out of range Charlie found that he understood what the symbols represented and saw the complex beauty of the problem. He thought he might weep for the elegant machinery of the cosmos; it was as if a door had opened in the fabric of the universe and he had been invited through—

"Watch where you're going!"

Charlie was sprawled on the sidewalk, and his hands were scraped. A sunburned man led his family around him, thinking that Charlie was high. An unforgiving corner of the man's mind wished the drugs would kill off all the junkies and leave the world to decent people. His daughter took her father's hand and thought that someone should call a doctor, that when they got to the movie theater she'd ask her mom for money to call a doctor, except money for a phone call might buy gummy bears too. . . .

Charlie got to his feet and focused on placing his feet. He found that he could block out some of the sharper thoughts and coast instead through the emotions, letting rage and doubt and lust and happiness flow through him like a stream. Disconnected and directionless, the emotions themselves were less overwhelming than the dark and irreconcilable ideas beneath them.

The crowds thinned closer to his block, only single pedestrians or small groups. Some people stared at him, and he realized that he was running. He was no longer swept up in the mindstream that threatened to pull him under and drown his thoughts in the press of so many others. Even so, he didn't slow down until he reached the last intersection before his block.

There was traffic, and after a few speeding thoughts sprayed over him he stepped back from the curb. Instantly he was inside someone else's thoughts.

Fucking bitch kill her talk to me like that she knows I love her kill her she had her chance teach her how much I kill her always treated her right ungrateful—

Charlie turned, nearly lost his footing, and came face-to-face with a nondescript sandy-haired young man. He'd seen him before; he lived on the block somewhere. He looked perfectly calm.

"You all right?" he asked Charlie.

"I'm fine." Charlie backed away. "Thanks. See you later."

The other man stared after him for a moment, then crossed the street. Charlie followed at a safe distance, remembering at the last second to check for cars. When he made it across, the other man was gone.

Back inside his apartment, Charlie thought about crying. He wasn't sure it was the appropriate response. It wasn't as if he'd suffered a great tragedy. It had been stressful—he was still trembling—and people cried from stress, sometimes. But it had been brief, and there didn't seem to be any lasting damage. He decided not to cry.

He lay on the couch and thought about telepathy. Telepathy was one of a large set of things that took so much energy not to believe in, like Bigfoot and UFOs and compassionate conservatism, that Charlie had always reserved judgment on their plausibility. He couldn't disprove their existence, but neither had they seemed very likely, until now.

Of course, there was always the chance that he wasn't reading minds but rather losing his. Charlie picked up the phone. He didn't need to call 911—if it wasn't worth crying over, it wasn't an emergency. Could the police trace incoming calls? There was a way to disable caller ID, but would it work on the police? It must. They couldn't trace every incoming call, he hoped. He didn't want them backing up the fruit truck yet. If he was going to go crazy, he wanted to do it on his own schedule.

He dialed *67 and the number for the nearest precinct.

"This is Detective Bishop, how can I help you?"

"Hi. I'm— I have a problem. I'm hearing voices. In my head."

"What are they saying?"

"Nothing right now. It's only when people are around."

"I see. Do people make you nervous?"

"A little, I guess. But that's not what's causing this. It's like I can hear them inside my head. I can hear what they're thinking."
I sound like a lunatic
, Charlie thought.
He's sending a squad over right now
.

"You hear what they're thinking? What are they thinking about?"

"Sex, mostly."

"Huh. That sounds about right. How long has this been going on?"

"Since I woke up this morning."

"Have you been using any drugs, Mr. . . . ?"

"No." He was crying. Did that make this an emergency after all? "I don't use drugs. I just— I thought you might know what to do."

"Here's an idea. You own a hat? Ball cap, anything?"

"Yeah."

"You have some tinfoil?"

"I'm not sure."

"Take some tinfoil and line the inside of the hat with it. If you can find some pipe cleaners, tape some of them to the tinfoil, with the wires touching the foil. That should ground the mind energies and keep the foreign thoughts out of your head."

Charlie let out a breath. "Are you making fun of me? I saw this routine on NYPD Blue. I called you for help."

"Just try it, Mr. . . . what did you say your name was?"

He thinks I'm a loon
. "OK," Charlie said.

"And listen, if the voices don't go away, and if they start telling you to do things you don't want to do, like if they tell you to hurt people, or hurt yourself, call us first, OK?"

"It's not. . . OK. I will." Charlie hung up.

He turned on the TV and nipped through the channels for a while. The people there were flat and distant, for which he was grateful; if he had started hearing Opie's and Andy's thoughts he would have known he was crazy.

He walked to the front window and watched the people out on the street for a while. Then he went to his room, dragged his futon into the farthest corner from the door. Even if someone knocked, he shouldn't be able to hear their thoughts.

He locked the door and curled up in a ball in the dark.

TUESDAY

Professor Mason peered up at Jack, his eyes ridiculously enlarged by his thick lenses. Jack was never comfortable being the focus of Mason's attention. He was used to stares—he was a big guy, and people always gave him a good look, as if to make certain he wasn't dangerous. But Mason looked at him the other way, the way that Jack dreaded, as if he questioned the plausibility of someone so solid and muscular having a working brain.

"You must be careful to do good work, Mr. Robinson. Dirty slides and a dirty lab mean bad data, and my data is very important to me. Your work is not something to be rushed through simply because you want to lay around in the sun today."

It was raining sheets outside, but then Mason had probably slept in the lab again. Most of the time he wasn't sure what day it was.

"I understand, Professor," Jack said. "I'm doing good work, I promise you. I just finished a little early today."

"Go, then." Professor Mason waved his hands at Jack, as if shooing an animal.

"I'll be in early tomorrow," Jack said, but Mason was already back at his bench. Jack grabbed his jacket and left. There were people around, so he strode casually up the hall and down the stairs to the front entrance.

It was ten in the morning and yet almost pitch-black. Rain cascaded off the roofs and dripped through the maple leaves. There were only a few people on the street, and they were all hunched beneath umbrellas, struggling against the wind.

Jack looked behind him—there was no one in the entrance hall. No cars on the street, and no pedestrians nearby. No witnesses. He looked at his watch. 10:04:38.

He took off running, dodging raindrops as he went.

He couldn't evade them all, of course, not in this downpour. He had to be careful where he put his feet, and watch for obstacles— mailboxes, pedestrians, cars. They were all the same to him, at this speed—a bicyclist hydroplaning alongside the curb was as stationary as a lamppost. But if he ran into something or someone, he didn't know what might happen, and he didn't want to find out. He wanted to
know,
sure, but this wasn't like Mason's experiments. There were no controls, and no safe conditions to test it under.

He knew he was moving fast; he felt the exertion, and the exhilaration. But he saw his surroundings clearly, even more clearly than before. He was alert to everything around him, except sounds, which he left behind him. He heard only the sound of his own breathing, and that in a hollow, truncated way. It was more as though the world had slowed around him than that he had speeded up, but that was a relativity problem, and not one he wanted to think about.

He cut through Library Mall, where water stood immobile above the fountain like an ice sculpture. A thrown football hung over a knot of mud-soaked players poised on the grass, arms outstretched and legs planted in impossible postures. Raindrops hung like molten gemstones. Jack picked his way among them, down the alley between the University Bookstore and the Lutheran church, across University Avenue and down Lake Street.

How had this happened? Yesterday he hadn't cared; he'd been having too much fun testing himself. He didn't care that much today, if he was honest with himself. But these were definitely strange phenomena. At some point he should try to find out what was going on.

Not today, though. He reached Mifflin Street, climbed the steps of 523, opened the left-side door as gently as he could manage, and let it fall shut behind him. He stopped at the base of the stairs and looked at his watch. 10:04:45.

Door to door in seven seconds. He could run to England in about—well, a few hours, anyway. He'd have to cross an ocean, but maybe he could run over the water at that speed, like a water skate. He'd have to test it out on the lake later.

I'm a superhero,
he thought.
I'm faster than a speeding bullet. I can walk on water, or at least run very fast on water. Maybe.

He slogged up the stairs to the apartment. He didn't want the girls downstairs to hear a staccato of footfalls and come up to find out what was happening.

The steps creaked. Dust motes revolved through the air. It took longer to walk up the stairs than to run three miles! This was going to be tough to adjust to.

He finally made it to the apartment. No one seemed to be home. He walked—slowly, ever so slowly—back to Charlie's bedroom, and knocked. Silence. He tried the door, but it was locked. He knocked again. "Charlie?"

"What."

"Are you sick or something? I didn't see you at all yesterday."

"Yeah. I'm sick."

"Too much beer, or too much Caroline?"

"What do you want?"

"Just checking on you. I'm going home for the afternoon. You need anything?"

"No."

"All right. Later."

Jack shoved a few books into his backpack, locked the door, moved slowly down the stairs and outside, and looked up and down the street to make sure no one was around. He looked at his watch. 10:10:33.

He hitched up his backpack and took off running.

He went northeast on Mifflin, turned right onto Bassett and took it to Wilson, then Wilson to Broom to John Nolen. He passed among speeding cars and leapt over the spray kicked up by them. It was like running through a freeze-frame.

He took John Nolen to the Beltline, the Beltline east to Highway 18. The speed limit here was sixty; the cars around him might as well be in a showroom. His heart was pounding; he was getting an erection.

Maybe he didn't need the job at the lab. He could do the work of an eight-hour shift in a few minutes—but he couldn't do it in a workplace, not without drawing a lot of attention. Discovery meant doctors and needles and those suction-cup wired sensor thingies you always saw in the movies. He'd be sedated and locked up and probed and pinched and shaved, and he wasn't going to let that happen. He had to be careful.

He turned off Highway 18 and onto Highway 26. Maybe he could work from home. Stuff envelopes or something. Of course, stuffing envelopes was still stuffing envelopes, no matter how fast he could do it. There had to be something more exciting.

Home was a farm off the highway, all but the top of the silo screened by trees. He slowed as he moved up the driveway, not wanting to kick up a cloud of dust. Grace was at school, but Mom's cherry red Blazer stood in the parking space out front, next to a silver Taurus Jack had never seen before. Dad's Chevy was tucked up next to the house, the same spot it had been in for months.

Jack ducked inside the machine shed and straightened his hair as best he could in the mirror inside the combine. He looked a bit ragged, but he didn't look as though he'd just run forty miles in—he checked his watch—under four minutes. He wasn't even winded.

He crossed the courtyard formed by the lee of the barn, silo, machine shed, and the garage that had been slumping toward collapse for almost a year now. It was a long walk, but now that Jack was here he was in no hurry to be inside. He paused before the screen door, knowing that its creaking would make retreat impossible. Then he took a deep breath and went inside.

"Morty!" His mother came into the living room while he was wiping his shoes on the mat. "I wondered if you'd be coming today." She squinted out the windows. "I didn't see you pull up. Where's your truck?"

"Parked behind the shed." He hugged her, looking past her to the bare spot on the wall where the TV used to be. "Whose car is that outside?"

"The new nurse. Sylvia moved to Milwaukee, you know." She followed his gaze to the bare spot on the wall. "We moved it into his room." She looked as though she would say more but smiled and squeezed his arm instead. "Are you hungry? I could make you some lunch."

He was starving. "That'd be great, Mom."

"I'll make some soup and sandwiches," she said. "Why don't you go say hi?"

She left him in the living room. He heard voices at the end of the hall—"his room," she had called it, though all Jack's life his mother and father had shared that bedroom. His father's voice was deep but rough, phleghmy. The new nurse's voice was cheerful, grating. Jack forced a smile—tentative and friendly, but not cheerful. It was important not to look cheerful, at least, not right away. He knocked at the open door.

The new nurse was small and plump and looked to be in her forties. She was taking his father's blood pressure, and only glanced up at Jack. "You must be one of the sons," she said around her stethoscope.

Jack's father was sitting in his old recliner, the one he wouldn't let them get rid of since it smelled of cigarettes. "If I have to quit smoking 'em, maybe I can still get a buzz off the chair," he'd said when they tried to buy him a new La-Z-Boy for Christmas. Jack wondered if his father could actually smell anything anymore. He'd told Jack a few weeks ago that everything he ate tasted like cardboard.

He looked better today, relative to how terrible he had looked last week. His hair was all but gone, and what was left looked like gray thread. An IV drip was hooked into his arm, and a breathing tube in his nose. He looked like a deflated version of the man Jack had to look at pictures to remember. He wondered if he had ever really looked at his father before the diagnosis. Not in a long time, he decided.

"Hi, Dad." He crouched in front of the chair, and put his hand over his father's. He squeezed it gently.

"Morty." His father's eyes were still alert, most of the time, but they looked at him slantwise from a head that rested at an odd angle against the back of the chair. "Morty, this . . . this is Alice. Alice, this is Morty. The rest of the world . . . calls him Jack, but here he's still. . . Morty."

"Nice to meet you, Morty."

"Nice to meet you."

Alice tore the Velcro of the blood pressure sleeve and unwrapped it. "You're doing well, Zeke. Ready to eat something?"

"I suppose."

Alice put away the blood pressure kit. "I'll let you two chat, then, while I get you some lunch."

"So, Morty . . . ," his father said, pausing to catch his breath, "you get your . . . grades yet?"

"Not yet, Dad. Probably be a couple of weeks."

"Ah. Still raining out there?"

"Yeah."

"Traffic bad?"

Jack almost smiled. "Not too bad, no."

"I was hoping you'd . . . you'd come down today."

His father's breathing was so slow and labored that Jack felt guilty for the speed he had awoken with on Sunday. He wondered if the cells in his body were living faster, too. If his father had been given this instead of him, would his body be able to outpace the cancer, to kill it and heal? Or would the cancer be killing him even faster?

"We need to . . . discuss some things. I spoke to your brother." Jack's brother Lloyd was an actuary in Chicago, though he visited a couple of times a month.

"What about?"

"The land. Mom told you we hired . . . the Carlson twins for the summer?"

"Yeah."

"They'll do good work . . . they'll need help during the harvest, but. . . they'll do good work."

"I'll be able to help a lot," Jack said. "Weekends, and sometimes during the week, too."

"That's good," said his father. "What I'm worried about... is after this year. I'm worried about who's . . . who's going to take on the farm. After."

A chill ran from between Jack's shoulder blades to the base of his spine. "Is that really something we need to talk about now? We don't know what's going to happen."

"Mortimer." Zeke Robinson's voice was firm. "Don't. . . don't bullshit yourself. Listen. Your mom can't do it alone. Lloyd doesn't want to . . . take it on. He's got a life . . . down there. He's engaged, did Mom tell. . . tell you?"

"No." Jack didn't even know Lloyd had a girlfriend.

"Yup. Ask Mom . . . about it. Now Lloyd don't want it. . . and maybe I'm old-fashioned, but... I wanted to ask you . . . before I talk to your sisters. I know you got school. . . and I know it's a lot to take on. But maybe you wanted to, once. All I'm asking ... is you think about it."

Jack thought he would start crying if he answered, but he managed to contain himself. "I'll think about it, Dad."

"That's all I ask."

Jack's mother brought in a card table. "Soup'll be ready in a minute," she said as she set it up.

Alice followed with a plate heaped with roast beef sandwiches.

"Would you like a sandwich, Zeke?" Jack's father made an expression of distaste. "All right. I'll get you something to drink, then, so you can take your medication. That's not optional."

Jack turned on the TV, and they watched
Judge Judy
while Alice fed pills to his father. Zeke sipped cranberry juice through a straw to wash them down, and forced down half a bowl of the vegetable soup his wife brought in, but the effort seemed to exhaust him. Jack ate half a dozen sandwiches and three bowls of soup, and he was still hungry. Neither of them said much of anything, just sat and watched the TV while Mom brought and cleared dishes and Alice made scattered, unanswerable comments.