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Andrew says “We need to tell dad.”
Up the stairs, through the mudroom and past the kitchen to their father’s office where Andrew opens the door without knocking. James is watching the little television, which he mutes, and Andrew knows when his father sees the holes as his eyes convey in succession shock, fear, anger, relief—and pride?
“We got in a fight.”
He puts the amalgam from his pocket on the desk.
“It was four guys. I fought off three of them when the fourth drew that. Michael knows.”
Michael immediately says “Dad knows? Does mom?”
James says “Yes, your mother knows. I saw it the first time he ever used it. You were young—”
Andrew interrupts. “I should have told you sooner, Mike. I’m sorry I didn’t.”
Andrew, age twelve, in their back yard and tossing a baseball up and running under it to catch. It’s a summer evening, James is in the driveway, detailing his car. He waxes in rhythm with music playing from the garage, overhead door open. Outkast, the music is quiet, little more than setting. Andrew drops his glove and catches barehanded.
Finished with his waxing he’s in the driver’s seat, cleaning the dashboard. Then he’s in the back, cleaning the door panels then the windows, then running a fine cloth over the leather seats. He vacuums as floor mats dry from garage wall-mounted alligator clips.
Behind the wheel again, he watches by the rearview as Andrew juggles three baseballs. He considers driving around the block but instead shifts to neutral and with one foot on the brake and one foot on the driveway lets the car slowly roll back. He checks for any last dirt, then returns the mats and grabs his mitt.
“Toss it here,” he says, Andrew drops two of the balls and throws a strike.
“When I was your age, your uncle had just finished his first year of baseball at the tiny high school in Ava. He was already their ace, after just that season. The school had covered the team’s bats and uniforms, but your grandfather bought the team their caps and helmets, and he said since he bought them, he got to design them. So it was AB, to the town this was Ava Baseball, but to dad and us, we knew it was Ava Blacks.”
Andrew says “Uh-huh?”
He skies a ball. “His sophomore year they got a new coach. He was the history teacher and a Vietnam veteran. Have you studied Vietnam?”
Andrew catches, “Yeah.”
“What do you remember?”
Andrew throws it back. “Um, my teacher talked a lot about ‘Eidolon,’ the um, the raid?”
James throws it back, “It was a raid on a military prison in Hanoi.”
Andrew says “Oh yeah, it’s that movie you said I can watch when I’m thirteen.”
James smiles, “For most of the Vietnam War, America was on the backfoot. The North Vietnamese were highly effective, so we pivoted to defense, hoping to force a ceasefire like what happened after the first Korean War. By 1972 there was doubt even that would work, and a lot of people thought the war was lost, but in the summer of 1973, something changed. We sent an entire new Army division, fifteen thousand soldiers, and then we started winning. The official line is that our understanding of the war improved, and we were able to effect that new understanding in better training and strategy, like that deployment that was called the ‘Summer Surge.’ What actually happened was that in the next wave of young men enlisting and being drafted into service there was a relatively small but more than adequate number who were profoundly stronger and faster than the ones who came before. They took objectives swiftly and without incident, and in the rare times they were wounded, they recovered rapidly from injuries that would cripple or kill other soldiers. To say it bluntly, those soldiers were significantly better at killing, and significantly harder to kill.”
Andrew doesn’t throw, captivated by the story. James gestures for the baseball, catches it, then throws it back.
“The generals knew a way to identify them, and those divisions they sent were built entirely around them. They weren’t all Army though, the Navy got plenty, and every branch took the best of them for the special forces, and that takes us back to Operation Eidolon. It was a mission to recover American prisoners of war and a bad storm tossed it ass-up from the start. The soldiers decided to push on, and a team of six SEALs eliminated more than a hundred enemy soldiers sent to stop them, exfiltrating with no casualties. It’s considered the turning point of the war, boosting our morale as it struck at the North’s resolve. The raid did more than free Americans, it freed South Vietnamese POWs, jump-starting an insurgency in the North, and Hanoi fell thirty years and a day after the Nazis signed their unconditional surrender. For his part in the Eidolon raid, a soldier named Raymond Fiore was awarded the Medal of Honor. Fiore was your uncle’s baseball coach, and everybody called him Coach Fire.”
Andrew says “Woah.”
“Nobody in town knew. We all knew he was a veteran, and he and his wife had, still have, a small ranch in Bradleyville, which is just a bit more than a junction southwest of Ava. My dad said he could still see the soldier in him, but none of us kids could think of him that way. His nickname was ‘Fire’ but he was cool. Everybody loved his classes, he’d spend them talking back and forth with us and he never assigned much work. I remember hearing some of the parents talking about him at our church, they weren’t sure what to make of him, but he’d been to war, so they gave him a pass. His coaching was a lot like that, he didn’t push competitiveness, he just wanted them to play their hardest, have fun, and be good men on and off the field. That team stormed into the qualifiers and won every game but the state championship. They won state the next year, with your uncle starting and closing out damn near every game and winning every game he did start.”
Andrew has a large grin.
“In my senior year I wrote a paper for his class on Vietnam. I read a book about Eidolon, and you can imagine what I thought when I saw his name in the book. He said one thing when I asked, ‘Yes, that’s me.’ That paper was for the end of his class, and I was graduating and I didn’t have any good choices. Your grandparents couldn’t pay for school and though Don was about to start for the Cardinals I couldn’t take money from him, and maybe it was sour grapes but at the time I didn’t think college would be right even if I could go. You know your grandfather and his father served in the Navy, so the thought was I’d join too. At my graduation I asked Coach Fire what he thought about me joining the Navy and he said ‘It’s a worthy thing to do with your life.’ The next morning I was up early so I could drive to Springfield for the recruiter and when I went outside, Coach Fire was parked in the gravel there in his truck, waiting so he could tell me, ‘If you’re going to join, join the Air Force.’ So I did.”
They throw the ball back and forth.
“I liked it at first but it turned fast. They hide all this stuff about the soldiers, people are finally starting to learn now, but I learned back then because they figured out I was one of them. After boot camp I got sent to what’s called Echo Charlie, basically a second boot camp made up entirely of guys like me. There I learned about what actually happened in Vietnam, and I was getting all this attention, we all were, but I hated it. I didn’t much like the other guys, either, because being the best in that camp was a big deal, and as soon as some of them got a hint of power, they changed. There was only a half-camaraderie and a treacherous undercurrent, and now today the highest officers in every branch are those guys.”
Andrew says nothing.
“For most of history, having a bad leader usually meant you’d die, so having a good leader was important, in war and in peace. The military used to be like that but after Vietnam and the Second Korean War, we changed, we got complacent. Some people will tell you it’s because the companies that make money from war, the Military-Industrial Complex, sank their claws into our government and changed things for their own profit. That’s part of it, that’s why the US has clandestine operations in so many countries. I think it’s missing something, though, and it’s that when leadership stops risking death as its consequence for failure, leaders stop rising from real competence and start rising solely by their ability to navigate bureaucracies. That’s what I saw, men who started out nice backstabbing each other because their sight was on starred epaulettes, and the twisted thing about that was knowing some of those guys, who were greatly lacking in intellect, were abundantly skilled in lies and manipulation. So I found myself with a choice, I could become a pilot and dive into that arbitrary game of bootlicking and subterfuge for twenty years, or I could do just enough, work on planes instead of fly them, and get the hell out.”
Quiet but for ball hitting glove.
“I’m saying this so you understand, Andrew. Everything I have done has been for you and your brother, so you both can go to college, or work in my shop, or go learn a different skill and do anything else productive that you want, so you aren’t left with the military as your only option. Because you and your brother are like me, you’re like those soldiers who came before me, like Coach Fire, and if you joined you would have to face the same decision I faced, but in an even more incompetent and corrupt hierarchy. The military turned out okay for me, I made the best of my situation. For you and your brother, I don’t believe it’s a worthy thing to do, not anymore, and now I think there are few worse things you could do with your lives than join the military.”
Andrew nods, “Yeah dad, I won’t, I’ll go to college.”
He says “Go long,” and throws the baseball in a tall arc.
Andrew runs, his read is off and he doesn’t have his glove on it, he raises his bare hand and it just misses–until it doesn’t. James sees the baseball, clearly arcing beyond Andrew’s hand, clearly slow and move in, as if drawn there.
Andrew cheers, “I finally did it!”
James knows what he’s just seen but still feels compelled to ask, “What do you mean ‘finally’? What was that, some kind of trick?”
Andrew shakes his head, “No! I kept feeling like I could do this and I finally did! Look!” He tosses the baseball up and holds his hand to the side, where it slows again and is drawn to his palm.
He feels his heartbeat. “Come on, let’s go to my office.”
James stands behind his desk.
Andrew stares at the baseball in his open hand, it rises.
James could find the thought amusing that a demonstration of profoundly novel physics is his twelve-year-old son playing with a baseball. “You’ve been trying to do this for a while?”
Andrew says “Yeah!”
“When did you start?”
Andrew thinks about it, “I always had this feeling, then on my birthday it, um, got louder? It’s really loud when I reach for something.”
“How did it happen just then? What does it feel like when you actually do it?”
Andrew shrugs. “It just does?” He moves his arms up and down, “Like this? Um, reflexively?”
“But you can control it? You don’t have to if you don’t want to?”
Andrew says “I guess,” and he tosses the baseball slightly up and reaches for it, then it falls to the floor. He repeats, toss, fall.
“Good. Is it just your hands? Could you try it with, say, your elbow?”
Andrew puts the baseball on the desk and turns slightly, moving his elbow toward the ball until, once again at about a hand’s length, the ball moves to it, hanging as if stuck. Andrew keeps his arm tucked and puts the baseball in the spot where his forearm meets his upper arm, again the ball rises.
James sits down, a hand on the side of his face, fingers tapping his desk.
“Anna? Could you come into my office?”
Andrew is holding the baseball when she enters.
James says “Show your mother.”
Andrew holds his hand out, the baseball rises.
She laughs, “That’s a neat trick. You’re learning magic now?”
“It’s not a trick. Take the ball from him, feel it over.”
She says “What do you mean?” but as she grasps the ball her expression changes, “Andrew, how were you doing that?”
Andrew looks at his father, who nods, and the desk routine repeats, his hand moving closer until it’s pulled in. He holds up his other hand and the ball moves back and forth between his palms.
Anna says quietly, “That’s impossible. James, what is this?”
Andrew speaks up, “Um. I know the word for it.”
He doesn’t quite smile, “Yeah?”
Andrew says, hesitantly, “Telekinesis?”
He smiles, “Seems to be. Have you told anyone about this other than us?”
Andrew shakes his head. “No.”
“Good. Nobody can know that you can do this. Your brother can when he’s older, and that’s it. Nobody else.”
Andrew understands the tone of his father’s voice. “I won’t tell anyone, dad.”
James has Andrew help him clear a room in their basement. It has an old couch and desk and boxes, all are pushed to one wall, stacking them as best they can and leaving the rest of the room open.
“In a few years we can add some workout equipment for you and your brother for sports. For now, if you’re going to practice with your gift, I want it to be here or your bedroom, but nowhere else, okay?”
“Okay, dad.”
“And it is a gift. I’m glad you have it, and I’m glad I get to see it.”
Andrew spends many summer nights in the basement, and as he practices he improves. His hand’s length becomes an arm’s length, his baseball-sized grasp grows enough to move milk crates. He shows his parents, who congratulate him.
Anna leans back in her chair, avoiding eye contact with her husband. “What are we going to do? I thought–I–how is this possible?” Then finally looking at him, “You’re always so calm about this.”
“If you saw someone fly like Superman, how long would you marvel at the impossibility of it before it became just another part of life, and instead you marveled at the vicarious thrill of it in light of your own envy?”
Anna smirks, “I think I’d marvel at the ‘impossibility’ of it every time I saw it.”
“Maybe. Maybe I would too, maybe being able to move a milk crate is just easier to accept. Maybe it’s how this is what our son can do, so what we thought we knew about the world is wrong. Or maybe I was primed to expect this. Whichever it is, this is what I'm sure of: he’s going to keep improving, which means he’ll be able to move larger objects at farther distances, and that means we’re going to start hearing about people like him, and unless there’s too many of them for the government to handle all of them, if they ever find out he has it, they might stick him in a lab.”
She’s afraid. “What will we do?”
“Hope it’s so widespread he gets lost in the crowd.”
She sighs heavily, then frowns. “What do you mean, ‘primed’? What could have possibly made you think this could happen?”
He always wanted to tell her, he just never knew if it was true. “There’s a story I never told you about my grandfather’s service in the Navy.”
“When he was out in the Haze?”
“He told me why it happened, or at least what the government thinks is why.”
Andrew, age fourteen, well past the day in his yard. What once seemed like an invisible arm is now like an entire invisible body. Every exertion has become easier, from chores, sports and playing with his brother, to simply climbing a tree.
High school football, freshman varsity. Week six and phone calls. Strangers watch practice. He's often tapped to talk to cameras. His gift is like breathing, he wonders if it’s actually in his breathing. It’s in his sprint explosively, it’s in his block absolutely. He’s threats plural, two-ways at his own insistence, “You want to win, right coach?” Wide receiver, free safety. Get the ball in his hands and it's there for good, give him a window and he's uncatchable, an open quarterback and he's already sacked. The only year his team loses a game. More phone calls, more phone calls. Watch this kid, he’s inhuman! Watch skeptically, his coach has no ability and now you see, with your eyes in-person-in-person, no need to pad the stopwatch.
Andrew, age fifteen, football over and baseball in-swing. The best athlete in the state of Georgia, already destined for every All-American list. Colleges line up, the MLB or NFL a matter of when. He’s played basketball, soccer and even a season of hockey, but he lost interest. Speed doesn't help on the court like it does on the field. Running down deep flies, sprinting ninety feet to first or stretching a triple, or a hole in the defensive line to run his jets. He watches his swing for fear of hitting a baseball six hundred feet or killing a pitcher on a comebacker but his reflexes are more than enough and he quickly resembles a second coming of Teddy Ballgame.
Still fifteen, with his parents in his father’s office.
His father says “When you discovered your gift I thought it’d be a matter of time before it was everywhere. That hasn’t happened. In three years of crawling every site I can for rumors I haven’t found one single comment even hinting at something like what you have. Maybe you’re the only one, or one of a few, and the others have also had the sense to hide it. Or maybe the others live in remote places where it’s gone unnoticed. I don’t know. I just don’t know. But with what you’ve done in sports, I think we have our solution.”
“What’s that, dad?”
His father says “If things stay as they are, if nobody else has your gift, in seven years you'll be graduating from a D-1 school and getting ready to play baseball or football professionally. You’re going to be famous, Andrew, and you're going to make a lot of money, and celebrity and wealth are the best protections you can have if and when the government finally comes knocking.”
Andrew says “Why can’t I just go pro? The Chipper Jones thing?”
“Yeah. Chipper was drafted by the Braves as the first overall pick in 1990. He was the top of fifteen players who spent less than a single season in the minors before they were called up to the Show. All fifteen of those players–like Manny Ramirez and Donovan Osbourne–you know as some of the greatest players of all time, every one of them is in Cooperstown. There were players here and there before them, like your uncle Don, but that was the first full wave. All those teams were discovering half of what the military had kept secret for so long, as top draft picks were uniformly coming through as the best players in baseball. In 1994 there was a strike and part of the reason why was older players were getting carted out so teams could bring in kids. One of the terms that ended the strike was the requirement that players couldn’t enter the draft until they were a full four years out of high school. The NFL had their three-year rule, they made it a four-year rule, same for basketball and hockey. Association football doesn’t have it and neither does the PGA—”
Andrew interrupts, “I don’t like soccer and golf is okay but I’d rather play baseball or football. So I have to play in college.”
“You could play in an independent league if you really wanted, or play in Japan, or play here in the XFL. Or you could go to college for free.”
Andrew, age sixteen, the winter of his junior year. His father thought his gift would keep improving but it stalled at the crate. He’s in the basement room, leaning against the old desk, looking at the fated baseball a foot above his palm, again asking Why is it limited to this?
Again and again and again and again.
How many times has he thought this? How many times has he said it aloud?
The baseball moves up and down. Neat trick. He wonders, in none of these exact words, if reality has some perspective-flexibility, physical principles irresolute on whim. When the baseball is in his hand, does it move because he tells reality to accommodate? Except he controls it with reflex, not conscious thought.
The immediate difference between yes or no is little. The yes is exciting but he is precociously skeptical of such a conclusion. Besides, the no is obviously right. Yet isn't it just equivocation to say he’s only moving things in reality and thereby changing it, rather than reality changing according to his will? He thinks no, it's the former. Whether the former is essentially the latter is beyond him.
Baseball, desk.
Something, sometimes–when he chooses–moves objects to or from his skin. Why is it limited to his body? Is it because it's intrinsic? What relation does “intrinsic” have with the shape of his body and telekinesis? Well why wouldn't they have a relationship, if it's intrinsic? He thinks this passes the buck.
He wishes he were taking physics, but what specific topic? What's the gap of understanding? Surely the knowledge difference between the present paradigm and whatever this represents isn’t typified by time so much as whatever breakthrough it takes to reach an entirely new paradigm that may not be conceivable until humanity’s next entirely new paradigm. But he exists, the ball is hovering in the air, this thing emanates seemingly from his skin. If humanity is on the P paradigm then his existence is a necessary portent of the Q paradigm, regardless of what they think they know and suspect they don’t. Maybe they're close, maybe simply knowing he can exist is enough for someone to figure out how.
He’s pretty sure that's not how science works. He also thinks his timeline is off. Regardless, they'll know it exists soon enough. How could he be the only one?
That would be nice. He knows better.
What’s the spatial difference between his hand and the desk? Why would he assume spatial relation matters? Here he laps well-worn paths around the forest he is finally about to see.
The baseball spirals around his arm, he thinks about it coming off his body.
Why can’t I do more? Why does it seem like I’m borrowing it rather than controlling it?
He thinks. Again and again, until a new thought comes.
Does it not come from me? Am I tapping into something?
What if there’s no trick? What if there’s no switch? A gift, yes, but no box hidden in his mind needing unwrapped. What if it’s a decision? What if it’s conviction?
If he is using some of it, he will simply choose to use all of it.
He hears the words clearly, as if spoken. Can you control it?
“Yes.” he says, affirming epiphany. “It's as easy as this.”
His hands relax at his sides and the baseball remains in the air. Not above his hand, not above his arm, not above his skin. In the air, on its own.
His hands and arms go numb as they follow the rest of his body to the ground.
He hasn’t lost consciousness, but he has lost something, and gained something else. He stands slowly, feeling no complaints from the parts of his body that fell hardest. He thinks What happened?
He walks around the spot, rolling his shoulders, stretching his arms and legs. With each step a feeling grows, with each his concern rises. Something is amiss, there’s a ringing in his ears, a disconcerting itch racing over his body. His heart pounds, his pace falters, a million hands pull on his skin. “What is this? What is this?!” He feels faint, his vision darkens, he walks to the door and tries to reach for the handle but his arm doesn’t respond.
“What is . . . what am . . . ”
He turns around. The baseball is motionless above the desk.
The sound of thunder fills his ears and he staggers.
He feels it. Understands it. Implicitly and totally knows its existence. The sense fills his mind, the quiet tone of his environment. The resonance. He knows the baseball is in the air, where he placed it. He knows the air around it, the desk beneath it. The resonance hums on, it saturates and pervades, he sees it and knows it in everything, the floor, the walls, the ceiling, the house, the street, the forested neighborhood.
The baseball lowers as the desk raises to meet it.
He asks, not for the first time, but for the first time in earnest, the first time he actually understands what it is he’s asking, “Why do I have this?”
Andrew is standing outside the office. He throws the baseball at his father, who reacts quickly, ready to catch it, but it halts, stuck in the air.
His father smiles, “I always wondered.”