For I Could Lift My Finger and Black Out the Sun (8 page)

Somewhere below, Ike and Izzy began to bark, and Mr. Gerald called out, “
What the hell is going on around here?
” We heard the elevator start to move. The sound of the crash had boomed and echoed through the building, enough to pull Mr. Gerald away from his stories for once. He would be headed to the ground floor, to the source of the commotion.

“We need to get outta here, Johnny,” Bobby said. “Unless you like being grounded for the rest of your life.” But we both hesitated, looking at the wreckage, waiting for some sign of life that didn’t come.

“We could go to jail,” I said, nodding toward the scene below us.

Bobby’s eyes bugged out. He turned and ran toward the stairwell. I followed, and together we raced down eight floors and out the back door, leaving Walter Ivory dead behind us.

PART TWO

MORN

1

Lice.

Pretty much every kid I knew got lice at some point. Around the time I turned 13, Tom did. Steve did.

But not me. Not Bobby.

Why?

Good question. Could it be that the lice bites were like tiny little versions of the hammer trick, and our bodies thwarted them? I mean, if they couldn’t eat, they weren’t gonna stay, right?

But you know what sucked? I still
felt
like I had lice, for the two weeks while everyone else was getting treatment. I’d constantly scratch my head, sure the little buggers were up there. Yet every time my mom would comb through my scalp… nothing. And I’m pretty sure she did a really good job of looking, because if I had ’em, she’d probably get ’em, too, and she was
very
clear that she didn’t want that.

Phantom lice.

The scratching at something that wasn’t there. The feeling of being infested with little …
things
.

It was an awful lot like how I came to feel about my entire body after Walter Ivory’s death.

When he died, something in him
screamed
. And something in me
screamed back
. Not out loud. But I could feel it.

I had to figure out what was going on inside me, or I’d go insane. I’d be twitching and scratching my head, and as far as anyone else knew it would just be the lice that drove me mad, but actually it felt like my body was trying to turn itself inside out.

I talked to Bobby about it a lot, but he’d just nod and say
uh huh
in a noncommittal kind of way that reminded me of my dad when Mom told him about her latest shopping adventure. In other words, Bobby didn’t seem to care.

So that left me on my own to unlock the mystery of my… could I call them
powers
? I had no idea. I only knew I couldn’t exactly ask anyone for help. Bobby wasn’t interested, like I said. Walter Ivory? Insane. Also, dead. My parents? Yeah, right. Tom or Steve? Did I mention they could be dicks when they wanted to? A teacher or a doctor? They’d put me away, or have me strapped in for experimentation. I imagined myself 20 floors underground, in a sealed room, labeled “Specimen A.”

I was on my own.

My first thought was that something was in my brain. How else could I push other people’s minds? But then I considered the other physical effects. The sluicing of my hand or fingers as the hammer came down, or the flattening and reshaping of Bobby’s head after the fall. No, I realized, my problem wasn’t only in my brain. It was
everywhere
.

A week came when Bobby’s family took a trip out of town — I think he said he was headed to his Uncle Mike’s house a few states away, and he wasn’t happy about it. So I had a lot of time to myself. I decided on a simple test. One that even a 13-year-old could do without raising suspicion.

“Dad!” I called to my father as he walked in the door one night after work.

“Hey, John, how’s your day?” he asked, hanging up his jacket by the front door, in a move he repeated almost daily.

“Dad! I was wondering if I could get a microscope!” Ah, damn. Way too excited. Way too early. I messed up. Dad frowned.

“A microscope, huh?” He gave a quizzical look and a little chuckle. “What do you want to do with that?” He put his briefcase down by the door and turned to face me.

Oh crap. I hadn’t thought I’d need a fake story. I mean, I was asking for a
microscope
, for God’s sake, not a crack pipe. Weren’t parents supposed to support educational hobbies? I had to think. Other than investigate the possibility of something in my body that gave me strange powers, what would I use a microscope for? What did other kids use microscopes for? Why couldn’t I think of anything?

“Um, yeah, I just think it’s cool,” I said. Internally, I was cursing myself. What a lame reason.

“
Cool?
” Dad repeated. “Well, yeah, it is cool, but how much does it cost? I don’t mind getting it for you if you’ll really use it, but I don’t want to spend the money just to see it sitting on your dresser gathering dust.”

“No way, Dad! I’ll definitely use it. I promise.” I dared to crack a smile. I mean, I
was
going to use it.

“Well, still, what do you want to use it
for
?”

Man, why did parents always have to have
reasons
? Why did things always have to make
sense
?

I blurted out an answer. “I want to study... plant cells!” I said, with the sort of energy one would not normally associate with studying plant cells.

“Really?” Dad said. “That sounds great!” I staggered. He
believed me
? God, parents were a conundrum.

I froze, then stammered, “I... I can have one?”

“Sure, son, why not?” Dad said.

Thanks to the miracles of online shopping, the microscope set arrived three days later.

* * *

So
, I thought to myself after tearing open the package in my locked bedroom,
what to test?
Skin cells, blood cells, saliva? Hell, boogers? What should I try first? I decided on skin.

After a little research on the computer, I found that the human body loses between 30 and 40
thousand
skin cells an hour. I started there, flicking some dead-looking cells off my elbow. I figured they wouldn’t be with me long anyway.

I dropped the flakes of skin onto a glass slide from the kit, then slid that into the holding bracket on the microscope. Nervously, I jammed my right eye against the eyepiece to see what there was to see.

I should mention that I spent some of my three waiting days investigating the normal appearance of skin cells. I kept a printed diagram next to the microscope for reference, so I knew the round nucleus, the curved golgi complexes, the tube-like reticulum, the pods of mitochondria, the little starbursts of centrioles. I even memorized their names and basic appearance. I did mention I was a nerd, right? The problem was, under my shitty kid microscope (sorry, Dad), everything just looked like a blob. I could see the shape of the cells, the dark spot of the nucleus, but the rest was a sort of mottled grey.

Scouring the dead cells, I looked for
something
. Anything at all. I almost gave up. Then, on the fourth or fifth batch under my scope, I saw it.

A little triangular thing poking through the plasma membrane of a cell, like a splinter, but pointing out, not in.

Like it was
pushing
out.

What the hell was going on?

I scraped more skin and checked it under the microscope. Again and again, I found nothing unusual.

Then finally, another of the little triangular things. This time it was inside the cell. I strained to study it, twisting the focus knobs to get the best view. I was still new to the whole microscope thing, so I accidentally spun the coarse-focus knob instead of the fine focus, and everything went blurry. Cursing under my breath, I turned the coarse focus back to where it had been.

And saw that the triangular object had
moved
.

It had sort of slid to the edge of the cell. And damned if it wasn’t starting to poke out of the membrane. Like it was trying to escape.

I sat bolt upright.

This was
in my body
. This little triangular thing. And now, on the slide under my microscope, it looked like it was trying to get away.

Why?

I considered the possibilities.
Why would this thing want to be in the cells
inside
my body, but not want to be in cells
outside
my body?
And an idea came to me.

Because these cells are dead
, I thought.
Or dying.

A name came to mind, a name for a living thing that survives off another living thing.

Parasite
.

I needed to try something other than flecks of dead skin. Blood? Yes, blood. I decided to prick myself and look at my blood. Coming right out of my veins, the cells should be alive. If I had a parasite living in my blood… I didn’t want to think about what that would mean.

I looked around the house for some sort of needle. When I couldn’t find one — after the incident with Bobby and the sewing machine, my mom seemed to have stashed her needles — I went back to my room disappointed, thinking. And as I looked up from the little desk where I had set up the microscope, I noticed the pushpins holding up pictures on the cork board in front of me. One shot of me with a baseball bat from my single season in Little League, another of me honking away on the French horn.

I yanked out the pin that held the French horn photo and tossed the picture in the trash. Good riddance. Every time I played the thing, I imagined someone was killing a goose with a club. Not pretty. Holding the red plastic end of the pushpin, I prepared to stab my finger with the metal point. For a brief moment, I considered whether it would give me tetanus or something. Then I figured a little tetanus never hurt anyone, and jabbed.

Ow.

A proper needle would’ve been better. Smaller and sharper. But the pushpin did the trick. A single dot of blood welled up on my fingertip, and I grabbed for a slide.

Smearing the blood on the slide, I wiped my finger and then jammed the slide under the microscope.

Using the highest magnification level, I couldn’t believe what I saw.

Every cell had one of those little triangular shapes in it.

* * *

I was in shock. I mean, yeah, I went looking for answers, but I had no idea what to expect. Or that I’d really find anything. The idea that the cells in my body were overrun by some sort of parasite, these little thorns. I didn’t know what to say, what to do. Tell Bobby? Would he care? Tell my parents? I’d be strapped to a hospital bed in minutes. Just let it go? My mind couldn’t think about anything else, so how could I let that go?

What the hell were those triangles? How did they get in me? What were they doing in my cells? Were they responsible for the strange things I could do? That Bobby could do?

Were they what I heard screaming when Walter Ivory died?

Wait. Bobby.

I had to find out if his cells looked the same, to see if he was infested with this parasite, these odd things like lice inside my cells.

Bobby was still at his Uncle Mike’s and wouldn’t be back for a couple more days.
Why the hell did I do this when he wasn’t around? Oh yeah, because Bobby didn’t care about my little theories. But I bet he’d care now.

Damn. I really needed to talk it over with someone. And while Bobby wasn’t exactly Mr. Introspection, he was the only candidate.

Waiting sucked.

* * *

You know what sucks even more than waiting? Someone thinking you’ve lost your mind, for real.

When Bobby’s family got home from their trip, I called him and told him to come over right away.

In my room, with the door shut and locked, I told him what I’d found, what I thought, that our abilities came from these little triangular structures in our cells. I called them
thorns
, because I didn’t have a better name.