Future Imperfect (16 page)

Not me.

Every day Paige would call or visit me at the hospital or bring cookies over to my house. Every day Paige would say, “Next time you’re going to die” or “Next time you’ll be in a coma.”

My summer job was getting my ass kicked.

Kicked from Broadway to Wazee. From Speer to I-70. There was a fight with five bums in the parking garage just off Paris on the Platte. A full-fledged mêleé with skaters on the Auraria campus. A hospital visit after a smackdown with gang-bangers near City Park. Fights with factory workers. With Air Force cadets. With bar backs. With strippers. With drunks. And with football players in a bowling alley.

It was last July, I’d spent the day all jacked up downtown and had taken the bus home but decided to stop at Monaco Lanes Bowling Alley for a soda. It was freakin’ hot out and I was exhausted. Maybe a little confused.

I got a Coke at the bar and sat and watched people bowl. Didn’t take long before I was itching for the Buzz again. Like really frantic. Started a fight with these football players from TJ, they kicked my ass all over the place and the fracas ended with me getting conked on the dome with a bowling ball. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t focused. Smash. Crash.

What I saw in the darkness didn’t seem far off at all. Maybe only days. I was standing in the middle of a street watching the aftermath of a car accident near my house. This guy from school, a guy I’d only recently met, Harold Vienna, was lying in front of a red car. He looked like he was asleep, only one of his legs was bent backward the wrong way, the way it shouldn’t bend. There were people getting out of their cars and covering their mouths to stop from crying or screaming or both. I couldn’t move. My heart had slowed to just this hollow thud, like when you hit the side of an empty can. Just metal in my chest.

And I woke up in the hospital.

The Buzz was pitiful.

Mom was bummed the vision wasn’t focused, wasn’t far out, but she was sympathetic. She said to me, “Isaiah 40:26: ‘Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one falleth.’” Paige didn’t quote any Bible, she cussed me out.

Dr. Borgo came to see me the second day I was there.

Still in my hospital gown, still in bed, feeling sick still from the vision. Back then Borgo had a goatee to go with his black-framed glasses. He’s a black guy and with the goatee he totally looked like Malcolm X. I told him that and he shrugged. He looked me over, asked some questions, and then leaned in and whispered, “You see anything?”

“Like what?” I asked him.

“Like things that haven’t happened yet.”

I wasn’t sure if he was for real, so I said, “Maybe.”

“Thought so. How far out can you see?”

“Mostly years. Decades.”

“But you can see sooner?”

“Yeah. Sometimes weeks. Hours one time.”

Dr. Borgo put his head on his fist, like how a shrink should look thinking, and said, “And you prefer one over the other, right? The further-out visions, right?”

I nodded. Face just blank, splotchy with bruises.

“You get a certain, well, feeling?”

“Feeling?”

“You get high from the visions, Ade?”

I nodded again. Mouth so dry.

“And the further out in time you see, the greater the high is, the stronger the high? I’m guessing that you control how far out you see by focusing. Pushing down, the ciliary body changing the shape of the lens. That’s how you do it. Just the same as normal seeing.”

I sat myself up in the hospital bed, asked, “How come you know all this, Doc?”

“I’ve seen people like you before. Only a few. It’s considered dodgy to research psychic phenomena, but there’s a group in Toronto studying it. Another in Omaha. Ten years ago I met a man who could see a couple weeks into the future if he held his breath and passed out. He was the best of the bunch, but there are others, some of them very young. Most of them can’t really see, they just get impressions, like random—”

“I see everything. Crystal clear, like in a movie.”

“I believe you.”

“What about these others, are there any here? That would be amazing to meet someone else who could do it. That would just be—”

“I don’t know. The ones I’ve met, and it’s only been a handful in a dozen years, had real problems. They weren’t what we’d normally consider well people. A lot of them go crazy. A lot wind up on the street. Ranting and raving like—”

“How come I’ve never heard of anyone else before? How come I’ve never heard of you before? I’ve been in this ER like twenty-three times.”

Like in a movie, Borgo picked my chart up, flipped through it. “Twenty-four,” he said. “Looks like almost ten this year.”

“Yeah. So?”

Dr. Borgo laughed. “I like to stay on the edges. Honestly, it’s risky for me to talk to other physicians, other researchers, about this. They assume, before I even get into the meat of it, that I’m a quack. That people like you don’t exist. I’m at peace with that. Not looking for fame.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Just knowledge, Ade. I’m fascinated. Curious.”

“Me too.”

And he told me about research that had been done in Canada in the mid-70s. About how the government had recruited people like me, people with divination skills, to lead some new armed force and how it all fell apart and was buried because of the precognitor’s addictions. He told me that it’s a quirk of nature. He told me that my ability, in the minds of most scientists, is a parlor trick, even if it’s real. He said, “Space-time continuum’s a bitch, you can see but you can’t change. Ever heard of Cassandra?”

I shrugged.

“Greek mythology. What you’ve got, I’ve been calling the Cassandra syndrome. The god Apollo gave Cassandra, daughter of King of Troy, the ability to see the future because he thought she was beautiful. Nice gift, right? Wrong. She wasn’t interested in him. So like any pissed-off immortal Apollo cursed her something terrible. His curse? No one would believe her predications and she couldn’t ever change them.”

“Yeah, that’s what I’ve got. But nothing about a high in that.”

Borgo smiled, “The high’s a modern addition.”

And later, just before I left the hospital, he gave me an illustrated book of Greek myths. He told me to call him whenever I wanted. He told me that he would help me so long as I kept him in the loop. He said, “Stop by my office from time to time and let me run some tests. Just humor me.”

That’s when I told him about my vision, about Harold. I asked him if he thought I could stop it. If he thought I could change things.

He just said, “Sorry, Ade.”

“Well, I’m going to try.”

“Best of luck. See you soon.”

I’ve seen Dr. Borgo a whole bunch of times since then and he never asked how it went with Harold. I’m glad for that. What he did do was hook me up to all sorts of machines. He did blood tests. Breathing tests. Sleep tests. He talked the school district out of placing me in special ed twice. This guy, my own personal mad scientist, is the sole reason I’m still in school.

But maybe not anymore.

Right now, the look on his face is super grim.

Right now, my own personal physician in crime tells me that he’s read over the MRI of my head and that it looks ugly. Very ugly. He tells me it’s serious. Says, “Ade, feel on the back of your head, a few inches back from your left ear.”

I try. “There’s a ton of gauze.”

“A lump?”

“Lump?” I go and feel, probe. Each touch and my skull is jumping. Definitely a lump. “Yeah. Lump detected.”

“The docs had to drill a hole in your head to relieve the pressure.”

“Pressure?”

“And repair a blood vessel.”

“—”

“Yeah, Ade. You were knocking on death’s door.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“Not like this. This, this was you just about ending up a vegetable. They thought you might be paralyzed. You almost got a colostomy bag. And I would be willing to bet that if you’d have had so much as a pin or a feather hit the top of your head, you’d be dead. Kaput. You came as close as you probably ever will and honestly, despite the fact that I am still in awe of what you can do, if I ever see you like that again, I’m gone.”

“Gone?”

“Gone. You can get someone else to talk to your principal.”

FOUR

I got home from the hospital with my head wrapped the way Vauxhall’s was at the party.

My mom dropped me at home ’cause she had to go to the church. Some emergency. Some lost soul had shown up desperate and Mom heard the call. When she heard the call, she had to go. Just had to.

Being at home alone, after everything, I was on edge.

On edge in a way I haven’t been before.

The phone calls.

The masked dude and his threat.

It was almost too much. I half expected a cat to come caterwauling out from my bedroom and give me a heart attack right there. Blow my blood pressure up so high I’d have some red geyser coming out of my neck. Or maybe it would be an old man with a sinus problem and a cell phone and a knife. Or a Mexican wrestler with his greased-up arms ready to just crush my bones on the living room carpet. So I was tiptoeing around. I was eyeing every door. I was reminding myself of where my baseball bat was. Of where a tire iron might be found.

I was ready for the cat.

The geezer.

The luchador.

What I found was Jimi Ministry.

He was sitting on my bed, once again wearing my clothes, my jeans, my sweatshirt, and he was tattooing himself. He had one of those little tattooing irons, the ones with the little needle that buzzes up and down like a dentist’s drill, and he was sitting on the couch, feet apart, grounded, putting little final touches on a bicycle remarkably similar to the BMX I got when I turned eight in black ink on the skin of his left arm. When I stumbled in, my mouth open, he stopped and looked up at me calmly. Said, “You’re dreaming.”

And then he got up, pulled the sleeve of my sweatshirt down over his inky arm, and walked out the front door. Left the door wide open and I watched him make his way to his car, just loping along like he didn’t have a care in the world, and not looking back once.

I know that I freaked out.

I did pinch myself, as if that would help, but really I couldn’t decide if what I saw was happening then or later. If it was really happening right there in my house or if I was seeing something that wouldn’t happen for twenty years. And yet that didn’t make sense either.

None of it made sense. Hence the freakout.

I ran outside after Jimi, hands all whirling in the air, and I was shouting. Shouting all sorts of crazy stuff. My head hurt. Hurt bad. I limped back inside and then passed out on the floor of the kitchen staring into the grill on the air vent over by the washing machine.

It’s night now.

I’ve been drifting in and out of sleep. The way my head feels, the way my eyesight is all fuzzy, I’m half convinced that I imagined the whole Jimi thing. I’ve been told that it’s amazing what you can see if you want to bad enough. You can make yourself see just about anything.

Fact is: I’m losing it.

Fact is: I’ve lost it.

Looking at myself in the mirror, my swollen face sticking out pink bulges between the bandages, my head looking twice the size it should, I decide that maybe the Buzz isn’t worth it.

Glorious as it is, maybe it’s just not worth all the damage.

As much as I love it, Dr. Borgo’s right. Even though I don’t ever see myself jacked up in the future, maybe it’s because the damage just takes longer and I haven’t seen that far out yet. Maybe just beyond the horizon of what I’ve seen, I’m serious effed in a wheelchair and drooling and shitting my pants. Maybe just a few seconds after the furthest I’ve seen there’s me rolling on the ground as my brain just dribbles out my head.

’Course, there is another possibility.

Maybe what Borgo’s right about is convincing me. Could it be that the reason I don’t see myself messed up in the future is because I quit right now? Because I will never go to the ER again? Because I won’t have another concussion? Dr. Borgo didn’t say it as fiercely as he could have: I need to stop because this isn’t a life.

FIVE

Set up in bed, Mom brings me a bouquet of flowers that she found on the porch.

Who would ever send me flowers?

My first guess, and already my head is swimming, is that it’s from the phlegmy old dude who’s been calling. I’m not sure why, but that’s the first thought that comes to my head. I even go as far as worry that the flowers might be poisoned. Read about that once in a magazine, these poisoned flowers that killed some reporter in Russia. But that’s stupid, right?

My second thought, well, it’s most likely Paige. Or Belle. Maybe it’s Belle trying to send me a message. What would the message be?

Ah, but there’s a card.