Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

“You pick one for me.”

“All right. That one right there, shaped like a loaf of white bread.”

“Not like any loaf I ever saw.” Why was she quibbling? “All right,” she said. “I know which cloud you mean.”

“Now let me tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to stare at it and focus on it, and you’re going to send energy from your Third Eye chakra, that’s right here—” he touched his finger to a spot midway between her eyebrows “—and that energy is going to disperse the cloud. Take a couple of deep, deep breaths, in and out, and focus on the cloud, that’s right, and talk to it in your mind. Say, ‘Disappear, disappear.’ That’s right, keep breathing, focus your energies—”

He kept talking to her and she stared at the loaf-shaped cloud. Disappear, she told it. She thought about energy, which she didn’t believe in, flowing from her Third Eye whatsit, which she didn’t have.

The cloud began to get thin in the middle. Disappear, she thought savagely, squinting at it, and a hole appeared. Her heart leaped with exultation.

“Look!”

“You got it now,” he told her. “Keep on going. Put it out of its misery.”

When the cloud was gone (gone!) she sat for a moment staring at the spot in the sky where it had been, as if it might have left a hole there. “You did it,” Cory said.

“Impossible.”

“Okay.”

“I couldn’t have done that. You cheated, didn’t you?”

“How?”

“You helped me. By sending your energies into the cloud or something. What’s so funny?”

“You are. Five minutes ago you wouldn’t believe that I could make clouds disappear, and now you figure I must have done this one, because otherwise you’d have to believe you did it, and you know it’s impossible.”

“Well, it is.”

“If you say so.”

She poured a glass of wine, sipped at it. “Clearly impossible,” she said. “I did it, didn’t I?”

“Did you?”

“I don’t know. Can I do another?”

“It’s not up to me. They’re not my clouds.”

“Can I do that one? It looks like — I don’t know what it looks like. It looks like a cloud.”

“That’s what it looks like, all right.”

“Well? Can I do the cloud-shaped one?”

She did, and caused it to vanish. This time she could tell that it was her energy that was making the cloud disperse. She could actually feel that something was happening, although she didn’t know what it was and couldn’t understand how it worked. She did a third cloud, dispatching it in short order, and when it fell to her withering gaze she felt a remarkable surge of triumph.

She also felt drained. “I’ve got a headache,” she told Cory. “I suppose the sun and the wine would do it, but it doesn’t feel like the usual sort of headache.”

“You’re using some mental muscles for the first time,” he explained. “They say we only use a small percentage of the brain. When we learn to use a new part, it’s a strain.”

“So what I’ve got is brain fatigue.”

“A light case thereof.”

She cocked her head at him. “You think you know a person,” she said archly, “and then you find he’s got hitherto undreamt-of talents. What else can you do?”

“Oh, all sorts of things. Long division, for example. And I can make omelets.”

“What other occult powers have you got?”

“Thousands, I suppose, but that’s the only one I’ve ever developed. Oh, and sometimes I know when a phone’s about to ring, but not always.”

“When I’m in the tub,” she said, “that’s when my phone always rings. What a heavenly spot for a picnic, incidentally. And private, too. The ants didn’t even find us here.”

She closed her eyes and he kissed her. I have psychic powers, she thought. I knew you were going to do that.

She said, “I’ll bet you can make inhibitions disappear, too. Can’t you?”

He nodded. “First your inhibitions,” he said. “Then your clothes.”

The hardest partwas waiting for the right sort of day. For a full week it rained. Then for two days the sky was bright and cloudless, and then it was utterly overcast. By the time the right sort of clouds were strewn across the afternoon sky, she had trouble trusting the memory of that Saturday afternoon. Had she really caused clouds to break up? Could she still do it? And could she teach her Jeremy, her nice quiet boy?

Toward the end of the last class period she walked to the rear of the room, moved over toward the windows. She had them writing an exercise in English composition, a paragraph on their favorite television program. They always loved to write about television, though not as much as they loved to watch it.

She watched over Jeremy’s shoulder. His handwriting was very neat, very precise.

Softly she said, “I’d like you to stay for a few minutes after class, Jeremy.” When he stiffened she added, “It’s nothing to worry about.”

But of course he would worry, she thought, returning to the front of the room. There was no way to stop his worrying. No matter, she told herself. She was going to give him a gift today, a gift of self-esteem that he badly needed. A few minutes of anxiety was a small price for such a gift.

And, when the room had cleared and the others had left, she went again to his desk. He looked up at her approach, not quite meeting her eyes. He had the sort of undefined pale countenance her southern relatives would call po-faced. But it was, she thought, a sweet face.

She crouched by the side of his desk. “Jeremy,” she said, pointing, “do you see that cloud?”

He nodded.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said, thinking aloud. “The glass might be a problem. You used to be able to open classroom windows, before everything got climate-controlled. Jeremy, come downstairs with me. I want to take you for a ride.”

“A ride?”

“In my car,” she said. And when they reached her car, a thought struck her. “Your mother won’t worry, will she? If you’re a half hour or so late getting home?”

“No,” he said. “Nobody’ll worry.”

When she stoppedthe car, on a country road just past the northern belt of suburbs, the perfect cloud was hovering almost directly overhead. She opened the door for Jeremy and found a patch of soft grass for them both to sit on. “See that cloud?” she said, pointing. “Just watch what happens to it.”

Sure, she thought. Nothing was going to happen and Jeremy was going to be convinced that his teacher was a certifiable madwoman. She breathed deeply, in and out, in and out. She stared hard at the center of the cloud and visualized her energy as a beam of white light running from her Third Eye chakra directly into the cloud’s middle. Disappear, she thought. Come on, you. Disappear.

Nothing happened.

She thought, Cory, damn you, if you set me up like this to make a fool of myself — she pushed the thought aside and focused on the cloud. Disappear, disappear—

The cloud began to break up, crumbling into fragments. Relief flowed through her like an electric current. She set her jaw and concentrated, and in less than a minute not a trace of the cloud remained in the sky.

The other clouds around it were completely undisturbed.

She looked at Jeremy, whose expression was guarded. She asked him if he’d been watching the cloud. He said he had.

“What happened to it?” she asked.

“It broke up,” he said. “It disappeared.”

“I made it disappear,” she said.

He didn’t say anything.

“Oh, Jeremy,” she said, taking his hand in both of hers, “Jeremy, it’s easy! You can do it. You can make clouds disappear. I can teach you.”