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 about 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.
I picked one end of the table to start with, took off my gloves, and began to run my hands across everything he had on display. A pair of wedding flutes. Nothing. A Legion of Doom lunchbox. Cute, but nothing either. A hideous collection of early eighties fast-food glassware. They didn’t trigger my power, but I knew they were valuable because the paint on them had turned out to be toxic. Still nothing. My confidence started to waver. Had I picked the wrong table? It had felt so promising.
Chip-tooth watched me closely as if I might try to steal something. Clearly he hadn’t heard of my reputation from the other vendors. I didn’t blame him. Still, I found it frustrating. I was about to give up on his merchandise and go check out some of the Victorian furniture I had noticed two tables back, when my fingers touched a rectangular video game unit. The name Intellivision was printed across the top of it and the majority of the unit was plastered withStar Wars stickers. Two keypad controllers with circular push pads dangled lifelessly from tightly wound cords. Next to it was a pile of game boxes—twenty in all.
Instantly the electric snap of connection flowed up my arm and I fought to keep my poker face in place. I picked up the gaming console, and held it in front of my face as I pretended to examine it, but what I really hoped was that it hid my sudden look of interest. I closed my eyes and the market around me fell away.
In the vision, I was a young male, eleven or twelve years old. I focused quickly for clues to his name or location because if I didn’t figure out who he was or where he lived, it would be impossible to sell this long-lost property back to its original owner, a gambit of mine that’s proved incredibly lucrative over the years, especially with childhood memorabilia like this.
I was in a bedroom and the décor clearly indicated the late seventies or early eighties. From a hook on the back of the bedroom door hung bell-bottomed corduroys and a plaid cowboy shirt complete with pearl white snaps. It was the Farrah Fawcett poster, however, the one every boy in my middle-school class had drooled over, that convinced me of the time period. The Intellivision console was pristine back then and the boy was cutting up bubble gum stickers withStar Wars characters on them. He proceeded to tape the assembled clippings across the face of the console, carefully avoiding the controllers. May the Dork be with you. He then proceeded to add color-coded stickers to the corner of each game box, but I couldn’t make rhyme or reason as to what they meant.
The world of the vision shifted and fell out of focus. When it surged again, what I saw made me feel real sorry for the kid.
Time had passed in the room and now the kid’s mother was there. She had discovered the console and the stickered boxes, and with the ferocity of a feral cat, she tore aStar Wars sticker from the unit. Thankfully for me, she did what mothers who were pissed at their kids always did—she called the teen by his full name. Kevin Arnold Matthews. I had what I needed to try and find him, but I couldn’t escape the vision. Kevin begged for her to leave them alone, but the mother just ignored him.
The vision went blurry again. I knew time had passed because Kevin’s toys had all shifted place. He was standing there, watching and crying as his mother packed up the unit and games and, this time, threw them away. I felt the burn of his tears, his nose thick with snot.
Whatever caused this hateful display in this boy’s mother, I didn’t know. It was beyond my power. Only select glimpses were imprinted on items like the game console. I had to do a great deal of interpretation to figure out the whole story behind an item, and I constantly had to remind myself that I was human and therefore wrong sometimes.
But my interpretation of this vision so far was that the woman was a stone-hearted bitch for throwing the games out in front of Kevin. I felt compelled to return them to him, though, and I hoped they would help the guy reclaim a bit of his youthful idealism or happiness. If I was able to find him via the Internet. Sometimes I simply couldn’t track someone down if his name didn’t come to me in the vision and I’d end up selling the item back to another antiques dealer who simply thought I had a good eye. When everything fell in line, it felt great. It was those little victories that kept me going. Well, that and being able to pay my maintenance with the finder’s fee they hopefully felt compelled to cough up. Kevin Arnold Matthews, I repeated to myself over and over.