The Acolytes of Crane "Updated Edition" (9 page)

Then
it happened.

Wham!

It
was as if an invisible wall was placed before us. We plastered ourselves into
it at full sprint. We both experienced the full feeling of
The Intervention
—a
frontal body slam.

It
felt just like the time my body smacked the plywood at the bottom end of a
skateboard mini-ramp after executing a risky aerial ‘
drop-in
.’ Back
then, I was executing my first ‘
drop
-
in
’ on a skateboard.

Luckily,
Lincoln and I were not injured. Two concussed dorks, with stolen goods, would
have been difficult to explain to any conservative parents. After the
collision, everyone was looking at us. Lincoln turned toward the spectators and
screeched.

He
said, “We are working-on-our-drama-for-a-school-play.” He sounded like a
chipmunk on a tape player if one held down play and fast-forward at the same
time.

Everyone’s
eyes flitted away from our backs. A couple of tattooed punks from behind the
counter laughed and joked about us. Meanwhile, we returned the shoes to their
rightful home. Lincoln and I left separately, and we met in the food court to
hatch out any issues with the first test.

‘It
is official. You are a freak,’ Lincoln said.

‘Okay.
Dork . . . man. What in the world were you thinking with that, or was it
dork-boy?’ I asked.

‘Dork-boy
was the best I could do. Never mind that, we need to be careful. If we don’t
respect
The Intervention
, we could,’ he paused to lower his voice, ‘we
could get injured or worse…’ he paused yet again to scan the room and ensure no
one was listening, ‘…killed.’

Right
there, at the corner of a taco joint and a roast beef stand, it was our grand
discovery that what we were dealing with was extremely powerful and real. The
first trial was complete.
The Intervention
could not read minds.
The
Intervention
could only stop us from doing something bad.

I
recalled the baseball card incident of a week ago. Back then, I had attempted
to exit the store with an intent to steal. This time, with the shoes, I was
pushed out of the store by Lincoln, with no intent to steal. The outcome was
exactly the same.
The Intervention
had intervened both times at the
boundary between law and crime—the store exit. 

Lincoln
then issued what was to be known as Linc’s Commandments:

‘One,
we can never, ever-ever-ever speak of this to anyone. You and I have been
trusted by the power, and we have accepted it. Others will be terrified of this
power, and harm us because they are afraid. Two, we can never make a joke of
the power. We have to respect it. We felt the pain it dished out today, by
being goofballs. We don’t want to put anyone in that pain unless we have a good
reason. Three, we must never use the power for bad. We should only use it for
good.’

He
paused, with a solemn expression on his face. ‘We have to make a pact. If
either one of us speaks of this to anyone, we risk great danger.’

‘And
if you say anything, Lincoln, I will tell everyone about your crush on Samantha
Xiong,’ I said after a few giggles.

‘Fine,
I will tell them about your life-long crush on Mariah Espinosa,’ Lincoln sang
out in a taunting voice.

We
simultaneously agreed with a secret handshake, invented right there in the
mall. We glanced over our shoulder: the rent-a-cops of the mall were staying
behind a certain distance away, intently watching us.

Word
had gotten around. Our disturbance back at the skateboard store made us a
concern for mall staff. To shake them off, we shopped around like the rest of
the mall zombies, and we bought some orange drinks. While we sat sipping on our
drinks, Lincoln told me that if the security guards gave us a hard time, he
would use Aikido on them. 

Lincoln
had an orange belt in Aikido. He told me that in Aikido, one was taught to
return their enemy’s force against them. Ultimately, a person could manipulate
the force of their enemy to advance his own position, or defeat them entirely.

“After
we ditched the teen-monster-building mall guards, we darted to our next target.
It was a sporting goods store.”

“Do
you need something, prisoner?” the guard asks.

I
wasn’t sure why he was asking me. Days would usually go by without
interactions. Then I realize, I said,
mall guards
, when speaking to the
tablet. He must have overheard what he thought to be “guard.”

“No,
nothing sir,” I responded. After he grunted and walked off, I continued the account:
“The second test was to find out whether or not
The Intervention
could
control an object with accuracy. This would be so cool, as perhaps we could use
The Intervention
as a means of exercising great power at our command.
The object needed to be set into motion by me, and I had to want to hurt
someone with it...”

To
ensure success, we practiced in my backyard with a football the day before. I
would throw the football straight at Lincoln’s face. With his excellent
reflexes, he would catch it just before it hit him. We weren’t ready to engage
The
Intervention
just yet, thus Lincoln always held his hands up near his face,
to signal to any omnipresent force that nothing would happen. The aim was to
wear down my reluctance to throw that object straight at his face. 

We
spent a whole day practicing. My grandparents must have thought we were bonkers
while watching me practically attempting to maim Lincoln with a football, and
seeing Lincoln repeatedly dodge disaster with a wide grin on his face.

There
were to be two parts for the new trial, in which Lincoln would not defend
himself at all. For the first part, I was to be provoked into throwing the ball
straight against Lincoln. If
The Intervention
allowed my toss to hit
Lincoln squarely in the face, it would have meant that my actions were
warranted. In part two, I would chuck at Lincoln for no reason at all, and see
if
The Intervention
would halt the ball. If nothing happened both times,
Lincoln would be badly wounded, and we would be at square one. That would
really stink. What a brave guy.

We
talked about
The Intervention
as if it was a beast. We found that the
physical energy that we were toying with was not only intelligent, but was also
much more powerful than any beast.

We
entered the sports apparel store. It was lightly occupied with customers, which
allowed us to have witnesses around. My stomach churned in this public
environment. I felt this might be a bad idea, because I did not want to harm my
best friend. As I was about to turn to Lincoln to suggest canceling our trial,
he let loose the trigger statement:

‘You
are a loser, just like your dad!’

Memories
of my kid-beating dad flooded me, triggering vitriol throughout my veins. I
grabbed a baseball and spun around with fury.

I
was like a wild behemoth on the mound of a baseball diamond, ready to beam the
batter for angering me at the plate. I blasted off the ball straight at the
forehead of the mocking Lincoln, who kept his hands at his waist this time. I
then recoiled at what I had done, covering my mouth. Shock finally registering
within Lincoln, he grew bug-eyed and attempted to duck, but was too late to
avoid the ball’s blazing path.

   Then,
the ball froze in mid-air.

   Our
eyes bulged and our jaws dropped.

   The
rapidly spinning ball was like a yo-yo that went to sleep and never came back.
It sat rotating in front of Linc’s face for about a second-and-a-half, then
fell to the checkered floor.

We
both gaped at each other in awe.

Shaken
and excited at the same time, I suddenly recalled I had to complete the second
part of the trial. Quickly, I picked up another baseball, and fired it straight
at Lincoln. This time, he merely stood, jaw wide open, transfixed by the
spectacle of impending doom.

The
second ball did something I would never forget. Just as it was about to
rearrange Lincoln’s nose, it hovered. There was a localized burst of light
enveloping the ball, and then it vanished.

An
elderly lady, attired in a floral-themed blouse and beige pants, clucked at us,
and shakily walked ahead, muttering to herself as she did so.

“That
ball just went gone!” a child’s voice rang out behind us. We turned.

A
little girl, about six years old, tugged at the pants of her father, a
middle-aged spectacled man who appeared to be a bit of a jock, with a
tight-fitting T-shirt. They both stared at us, with jaws open.

The
man blinked in shock. He rubbed his eyes. “No, no… it didn’t,” he told his
daughter. He, too, was shaking his head in amazement.

“But
I saw it!”

“Shush,
shush,” the man said as he took the hand of his daughter, and gently turned her
around. He darted one more quick glance at us just before he left, not certain
what he thought he saw. 

I
made the call: we were finished. I could not take the testing any further. We
were bound to invite tragedy. Obviously, there was a strange and powerful
energy that we knew little about. It was intriguing, but equally frightening.

The
conclusion was that I could not do wrong, and if I dared to try any further to
do wrong beyond my first mistake, the results could be unpredictable and
dangerous.  Where that ball disappeared to, we had no clue.

We
excitedly chatted about our agreements concerning the just-concluded second
trial: it didn’t matter whether a harmful act was justified or not.
The
Intervention
controlled objects.
The Intervention
stopped your
weapon if you intended to harm someone with it. I breathlessly said to Lincoln,
‘It’s as if it adapts. The first time, when you called me names, it made the
ball stop. The second time, when you did nothing to deserve it, it just made
the ball disappear!’

Lincoln
just nodded, too overwhelmed by the experience to be in a talking mood.

We
rode the city bus home from the Staplewood Mall. I will always remember that
ride. The green vinyl-covered seat in front of us was ripped, and the yellow
stuffing within was torn out. I read all the stickers and graffiti on the seats
and on the inside wall of the bus, and while I pondered, Lincoln watched the
passing traffic through the window. I spotted writing on the seat that read:
Your
mom was here
.

It
was funny. I laughed from the simplicity of the joke. “Your mom…” jokes were
popular, along with wearing your clothes backwards and deploying the ultimate
cool joke: the whoopie cushion.

‘So
you busy tomorrow?’ Lincoln said.

‘I
don’t have anything going on, really. I have to clean my room. It’s crazy in
there, and my grandma is on my case. Did you see these stickers on the seat? I
have one for ya that I heard in school:
your mom is so fat she pays taxes in
three countries
.’

‘Okay,
that’s really lame.’

I
pointed toward the back of the seat in front of us despite his lack of
interest. ‘There. It says:
your mom was here
.’

Lincoln’s
shoulders jumped; his eyes flashed anger. ‘Ted, I said it was lame, don’t be so
immature.’

‘Dude,
relax, I didn’t realize you were going to get all upset. I was only—’

‘Only
trying to be funny. I know, but it wasn’t,’ Lincoln said. He turned away from
me and lowered his chin onto his fist as he bent forward.

‘
Cheese
,
it is only a joke. I don’t see why you are getting all mad.’

‘Listen,
my mom died when I was five, okay? She died of breast cancer, and you keep
saying, cheese. I believe what you are trying to say is
geez
,’ he said.

For
a moment, we sat in silence.

‘I
am sorry,’ I said, as I rested my hand on his shoulder, ‘I didn’t know. I guess
there is a lot I don’t know about you. What did your mom look like?’

‘I
looked a lot like her. She was beautiful. Her hair was black as night. When she
smiled, there were these little dimples on the sides of her cheeks. Almost
every day before school, she would make some pancakes that were so good. They
were amazing, and they didn’t taste funny like at school. She would always
arrange my bacon and butter scoops into the shape of a face on top of the
pancake. I miss her so much.’

Spellbound,
I gazed at him. I felt like crying as I recalled the memories of my troubled
parents.

Lincoln
saw my expression and recognized the hurt within me. He turned away and
continued softly, still staring ahead in open space. ‘I would say the thing I
miss the most about her, was her hugs. She squeezed me so hard that I would
start to feel like I couldn’t breathe. I heard about your friend Jason. That
must have been horrible. You must miss him too.’

‘Yeah,
a lot. I really miss him. He always knew what to do. He could really help us
out right now, because he always had great ideas, and he was good with the
ladies.’