Дж. Хатчинс - Personal Effects - Dark Art

5

How did he know?

I asked myself this question over and over as the L line train clack-clack-clacked southeast, back on Manhattan Island, far away from The Brink, toward Washington Square Park and my rendez-vous with Lucas. I felt slow, out of sorts. Martin Grace had done exactly what he’d said: pinned me, down to the six-month-old Vans on my feet. And he’d known what I was thinking. No, deeper and weirder than that. He’d known how I was thinking. I’d left Room 507 thirty minutes ago fully clothed, but stripped bare.

I stared at the passing darkness outside the subway, the occasional tunnel light (and accompanying graffiti) breaking the black. My eyes pulled focus from the tunnel wall to the window’s surface. There I was, reflected, just as Martin Grace had described, a MySpace generation refugee, a shaggy-haired painter, an inexperienced poseur. My fingers rushed over the array of colorful buttons pinned to the flap on my canvas satchel. These were my cheerfully ironic, subversive broadcasts to the world; my personality trimmed down to punchy, half-sentence slogans. There Is No Spoon. At Least the War on the Middle Class Is Going Well. Accio New President. Rape Is Fucking Wrong. WYSIWYG. What Would Scooby-Doo?

They now seemed self-referential, hollow, immature.

The train trembled onward. I checked the time on my Eterna, which was indeed an heirloom bequeathed from my late grandfather. 5:30. I tightened my grip around my black Cannondale hybrid bike’s handlebars. I watched my bicycle helmet hanging there, hypnotized by it swaying on its chinstrap.

How did he know?

I closed my eyes, silently asking for some enlightenment, for some distance from this throbbing, full-brain bruise I was experiencing. After a moment, the bespectacled, professorial side of me—the part that I always imagined sounded a bit like Leonard Nimoy—spoke up.

It’s obvious , my logical side said. Martin Grace isn’t blind . He “made” you because he could see you. It explains his description of your clothes, the reference to what you ate at lunch (you had a jam stain on your shirt; you can see it right there, in your reflection), even the fear you experienced when you stepped into Room 507. He’s not blind at all.

I nodded slightly at this, let it roll for a moment. And what about the things he’d said about… me?

Fascinating , my Spock-self replied. If Grace can see, then he did what you do every day at The Brink: He watched your facial expressions and body language and modified his message for maximum impact. His comments were barbed, yes, but generic—after all, you’re not the only twenty-something fretting about filling his professional shoes. Grace’s assumptions about Annie Jackson are equally elementary: He discovered, somehow, that you had lunched together, and exploited that. It’s Ockham’s razor: All things being equal, the simplest solution tends to be the right one. Extrapolate. Grace is not blind.

I frowned and opened my eyes. No. He was. I had a folder full of expert diagnoses saying he was. More important, I knew he was, I could feel it… which meant he’d literally smelled my fear, heard things in my voice that I didn’t hear.

Ah, and his intent . That’s what spooked me. He’d wanted to break me. Martin Grace was an old, blind shark, all teeth and hunger. I’d been devoured in there.

So. How did he know? I smelled some truth in what my logical side was saying. If Grace did this evening what I do every day—excavate a mind’s secrets—then what business did an audio engineer have knowing such things? That didn’t make much sense. Not a goddamned bit.

My eyed slid upward, met the gaze of my reflection. There was something missing here. My brain nudged at this like a tongue probing the gap of a missing tooth. I needed more information about Martin Grace, things not in his admittance report. That folder told me what he was, but it didn’t tell me who he was.

A secret smile rose to my lips. I knew a person who could help me. I just had to convince her it was the right thing to do.

The train screeched and slowed, rushing into the bright, tiled expanse of the 6th Avenue—14th Street station. I slipped my helmet from the bike’s handlebars, plunked it on my head. I hefted my Cannondale toward the door. Enough shop thought, for now. It was time to meet up with Lucas… and then with Rachael and Dad. And Gram.

The sun had sunk past New York’s skyline by the time I’d pedaled to “Well7,” Lucas’ nickname for Washington Square Park.

My kid brother is obsessed with slang, constantly inventing oddball words to describe the places and people around him—and always hoping those new words become mini-memes and spread beyond his circle of family and friends. “Well7” is an abbreviation-meets-amalgam of the “W” of Washington and the square you get making an “L” with your left hand and a “7” with your right. An unholy creation, sure, but I found it clever. Even my father, Mr. Windsor Knot, called the park Well7 now.

This pleased Lucas to no end.

I braked the Cannondale near a streetlight and watched my brother from afar. He was a hundred yards away, alone, burning calories around the park’s Arc de Triomphe -inspired seventy-seven-foot marble arch. He was practicing his hobby, parkour.

The brainbendingly fast-paced maneuvers Lucas was performing around—and now on—the Arch have not officially been classified as a sport, although anything that requires this intense level of physical dexterity and stamina falls into that category as far as I’m concerned. Lucas tells me it’s a state of mind, an urban survival philosophy whipped into blurred motion. He insists parkour is a discipline, a martial art whose opponent is the cityscape. I default to his expertise; he’s been doing this for two years now. Last year, my father and I spent Lucas’ nineteenth birthday in St. Vincent’s emergency room after Lucas suffered a nasty drop from a second-story windowsill. Dad’s fancy dinner plans were ruined. He’d fumed the rest of the night.

Them’s the breaks.

Lucas is half-Wikipedia, half-evangelist about all his passions, so everyone he knows, knows a lot about parkour. The word is a truncated, modified version of the French term for a military obstacle course. It’s also called the “art of displacement.” The point of parkour is as simple as its execution is complex: traverse your urban surroundings in the most efficient and speedy means possible. If a fence separates you from your destination, jump it. If it’s a wall, scale it. If it’s a building… well… get all Spider-Man on it. Brick walls are sidewalks for the parkour-proficient.

This is a scrappy, dangerous pastime. I once watched Lucas rocket up the fire escape of a five-story New York University admin building, scramble to its roof in rapid-fire movements evocative of both crab and gorilla, make a running leap to a neighboring building, bound down its fire escape, and land on the sidewalk on all fours, like an unperturbed house cat. By the end of this performance, I’m sure my heart was pounding faster than his.

And here he was in the gloaming of Well7, again dashing toward its legendary Arch, now in the air, now bounding up its surface, side-crawling several feet, now shoving himself upward and backward, away from the marble, twisting his thin frame into a back flip, his body trapped in graceful silhouette for an instant—a black-and-white still of human ambition and freedom, I thought—now landing on his toes, tucking his body into a roll… and now standing, panting, grinning in my direction, glancing back at the thing he’d conquered.

I pedaled over. Lucas yanked the bandanna off his head, freeing his long, curly brown hair, inherited from our mother. His fellow parkour practitioners (called traceurs and traceuses, depending on their sex) called him Socket, in honor of his shock-mop of hair and buzzy, infectious personality. (He usually acts like he’s French-kissed an electrical outlet.)