Anton Strout: Dead To Me

“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.

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.