The Orchid Eater (20 page)
“Uh,” Stoner
said, dropping his gaze for a second, finger in his eye. The magazines had
fallen open on the dirt floor, showing everything. His face was burning.
When he
looked up again, the kid moved out of the sun’s way, blinding him. Squinting,
painful tears in his eyes, Stoner could see that the kid was holding a chunk of
rock so big it made his arms bulge and tremble with the strain of raising it
over his head. Stoner was so embarrassed that although he saw the rock, its
meaning just didn’t register.
He started
to rise, propping his weight on the edge of the pit. “These aren’t,” he said,
awkwardly.
Then the
rock came down like a hammer, nailing him into the ground.
“Close your
eyes,” Edgar said. “Imagine a blank movie screen.”
Mike’s eyes
were already closed. He tried to see the screen as brilliant white, as if the
film had snapped and the bare bulb was glaring on the surface. He discovered
that his imagination produced a scene far more detailed than Edgar suggested.
He had an impression of empty seats around him, a lofty ornate ceiling
decorated with chandeliers and baroque plaster moldings, as if he were sitting
in an old fancy theater. Maybe it was a memory of someplace he’d seen as a
child.
“Keep your
mind empty,” Edgar said. “See only that screen. Now . . . pictures are going to
start appearing on it. They’ll just sort of pop into view. That’s what you
draw. And keep your eyes closed if you can.”
“Draw with
my eyes shut?”
“Sh . . .”
His grip
tightened on the pencil; the tip rested lightly on the sketch pad he held.
What should
he draw? The seats? The chandeliers? No, the exercise hadn’t started yet. He
was supposed to clear his mind.
He tried by
force of will to make everything vanish except the screen, so of course that
was the first thing to go. Alone in the dark theater, he called it back again.
When it finally returned, it was no longer very bright. His head felt full of
swirling gray mist.
“Relax.
Concentrate.”
Easier said
than done.
No, I’m not
even supposed to think that. I’m supposed to keep my mind a blank. But every
time I think about making my mind a blank, I have to think something, and then
it’s not blank. I have to think without thinking, somehow. Without words.
Maybe if I
could think in pictures, that would do it.
“Now I’m
going to try sending you a thought,” Edgar said. He didn’t feel at all ready to
receive it. Suddenly the carpeted floor of his room felt hard as granite; the
shag strands scratched his ankles. But he couldn’t tell Edgar he wasn’t ready,
not without further disrupting his concentration. Scott had said ESP was a
waste of time, but Scott wasn’t around to suggest anything better. By default,
because they lived a block apart, he and Edgar were becoming best friends.
“I’m going
to project it right on the screen,” Edgar said. “So you draw whatever you see.”
Mike’s eyes
fluttered open involuntarily. He had an instant’s glimpse of his bedroom. Edgar
sat against the wall, under the painted moon, a clipboard propped on his knees;
he was sketching. Mike looked down at the blank tablet in his lap, closed his
eyes again.
Now behind
his eyes he saw a blank sheet of paper. It was greenish, turning red, then
purple. No, he thought. Turn white! But the image, when he forced it, turned
black.
“Relax,”
Edgar said.
Mike must
have been visibly squirming.
“Come on,
Mike, ESP happens when you’re not trying. As soon as you pay too much attention
to it, it runs off like a skittish cat.”
So what’s
the point, he wondered, of exercises like this one? Wouldn’t
trying
to develop telepathy make
you certain to destroy it?
Try not to
try. . . .
According to
Edgar, everyone was linked through their subconscious minds. Humanity shared
the same thoughts, but everyone was so busy listening to themselves talking
that they never heard the greater murmur. If he could only be quiet, he might
hear Edgar’s thoughts instead of his own. He might break through the barrier
that separated them.
Edgar’s
reason for his ESP exercises was to create an entire gang with psychic powers—a
group of kids who never spoke, but knew each other’s minds instantaneously.
They would move as one entity, a single mind with a dozen bodies, working in
perfect silence. Think of the crimes they could commit!
Oh, shut up,
he thought. Edgar is nuts. And so am I for listening. Scott told me so already.
A pang went
through him. He missed Scott the way an amputee misses a severed limb. He had a
ghostly friend where before he’d had a real one. For years he had been able to
pick up the phone and Scott was there; he could hop on a bike or a bus, or
hitch a ride to Scott’s house. Scott had been his chief ally in school. Next
year, everything would change. Edgar was okay, but he was no genius. Mike
sensed that he would never have another friend like Scott, and with that
knowledge came a feeling of desolation.
This was
useless.
“Edgar, I
can’t—”
“Sh! Keep
trying!”
Sigh . . .
Blank
screen, blank page, white screen, window, empty house.
Blank,
blank, my mind is a—
Wait, now
what was that? A house? Do I draw that? Was that a picture from Edgar’s mind?
Stop
thinking and draw. What have you got to lose?
He peeked at
the paper and sketched a sloppy house, a square with a triangle on top of it
for a roof. He drew a round window like a porthole with cross-bars in it, then
closed his eyes again. He hadn’t drawn a house that badly since he was using
crayons. But artistic skill wasn’t the point of the exercise.
More
pictures came unbidden, tumbling after the first. It was as if, inside him, a
gate had opened. Dream images, too many and too fast to identify, flickered in
the dark behind his eyes and were just as quickly gone. A cat, a car, a flower
pot. He had taken hold of one picture, tugged on it, and found a dozen more
attached, like a magician’s trick with scarves. He sketched quickly, hardly
opening his eyes.
Mountains,
cities, the moon. He wondered if all he really saw was his imagination at work.
Was he simply staring coldly at the processes of his mind? Was there nothing
mysterious about it after all? It didn’t feel all that different from the way
he normally dreamt up things to draw—dragons and demons and damsels. . . .
And here
came a rush of
them.
Women,
starkly posed, pictures of photographic clarity—in fact, most were straight out
of the magazines Scott had given him as a going-away present. So much for the
chivalric images of knights and ladies he’d once pictured in his dreams. These
noble folk wer
e going at it
in the most ferocious ways imaginable. They were, frankly,
unimaginable—except for the fact that he had photographic evidence. The
pictures wheeled past, not quite as clear as those in the magazines, shadowy at
the edges. He knew these were not Edgar’s thoughts, so there was no point in
drawing them. He was afraid to sit here with his eyes closed in front of Edgar.
Afraid because he could feel a lump growing in his pants, and once it got
going he would be helpless to dispel it.
He slapped
down the tablet deliberately and opened his eyes. “I can’t,” he said.
Edgar was
staring intently at his own clipboard. He had rolled a sheet of paper into a
cone and was looking at his picture through it, to hone his concentration. It
took him a second to come out of his trance; he looked up and let the cone
unfurl.
“What? You
haven’t—did you draw anything?”
Mike
shrugged and handed over his tablet, tangled with figures bearing little
relation to the things he had seen behind his eyes. As sketches they were embarrassing;
he would have to explain each one.
Edgar looked
confused and somewhat disappointed, but then he brightened.
“Hey, you
got one!”
“What? I
did?”
Edgar laid
his clipboard on the carpet, revealing a painstakingly but poorly drawn
hot-rod with huge rear tires, a long tapering body, and tiny spoked front
wheels. The driver’s compartment was a distorted bubble with a stick-figure
cramped inside.
Mike hadn’t
imagined—or drawn—anything remotely resembling a car. None of his sketches even
had wheels.
“See?” Edgar
said. “It’s amazing.”
Edgar was
pointing at the porthole Mike had drawn in his crude house. There was a
fanatic’s gleam in his eyes.
“That’s a
window,” Mike said.
“But see? It
looks exactly like this tire.” He touched the spoked front tire of his drag
car.
“Edgar, you
drew a car and I drew a house. They’re totally different!”
“Don’t be so
literal. These little spontaneous things, that’s where it really happens.
You’ll see.”
“I doubt
it.”
“Anyway, if
it’s confused, it’s ’cause we haven’t practiced much. My mind kept wandering, I
mean.” He grinned slyly. “I, uh, kept thinking about sex!”
At that
moment, someone knocked on the door. Ryan stuck his head inside. “Come here,
you guys!”
Edgar jumped
up. “What’s going on?”
“I think
somebody’s watching the house.”
“What?”
Ryan led
them down the hall into their mother’s room. The bedroom was dim, the light
from outside filtered through dozens of orchids that grew inside and out on
the deck, some in hanging pots, spilling falls of flowers, delicate petals that
looked like spiders or dancing dolls or gaping lips; others were bare leaves
and stalks now at some colorless phase of their slow life-cycles. Some stood in
pots, others grew from lumps of wood. They were Ms. James’s passion—her
Epidendrum and Brassia, Odontoglossum and Dracula orchids. Clustered pseudobulbs
bulged from the pots like grapes; rootlets and creepers probed the air,
brushing the boys as they went through sliding glass doors onto the deck.
There, behind the shade of a bamboo curtain, Ryan stopped and pointed down into
the hilly canyon.
“I was on
the deck in my room but it’s too easy for them to see us there.”
“Who?”
“I don’t
know. First I thought it was a deer, but I swear it ducked down when it saw me
looking. Deers don’t do that.” Edgar and Mike peered through the blinds,
scanning the shrubs in the canyon below. The sun was touching the houses on the
far side of the gulch, so it was dark and getting darker down there. Plenty of
trails ran through the bushes, including the one Edgar had taken the night
Sal’s gang cornered them. He had seen kids from houses across the canyon
playing war games in the bushes, battling for possession of the slope below Shoreview Road. But this evening he saw nothing.
Ryan said,
“I don’t see him. I don’t even know for sure where he was. He could have gotten
away by now.”
“If it was
anyone at all,” Mike said.
“It was!
There was someone there!”
“Better lay
off the hard stuff,” Edgar said.
“What’s that
supposed to mean?”
Edgar
laughed. “If you have to ask, you wouldn’t understand.”
“Yes I
would. Drugs, right?”
Edgar
laughed again.
Mike
meanwhile was thinking unwillingly back to the night of terror, wondering if
any of Sal’s gang might drop by every now and then to check the house. They
might still be waiting for their chance to use the key. . . .
The key was
never very far from Mike’s thoughts. It cropped up a few times daily, without
fail. Every time anything made him nervous or insecure, he remembered it and
felt a little worse, a bit more fearful. He supposed that eventually, when
nothing came of it, he would forget. Sal’s brother, if he was the one who’d
taken the key, had probably forgotten all about it. He was an adult, after all.
He had better things to do than pick on kids. Yes, the key would fade away like
everything that had bothered or frightened him, things that seemed so
desperately important one moment but were later harder to recall than the
details of a fever dream.
But for now,
the night he’d lost the key was still fresh in his mind. As it might be in the
mind of whoever had taken it. Sal’s brother or not. . . .
Of course,
he couldn’t say any of this to Ryan. Or even Edgar for that matter.
“It’s no
one,” he said. “Don’t be scared.”
“I’m not
scared.”
“No?” Edgar
said. “Even though your folks aren’t getting home till late tonight?”
