Steven Gould - Jumper

I thought about my hotel room, still three blocks away. I didn’t even feel like standing, much less walking three more blocks. I knew I’d feel safer there. I thought about my arrival there, of the steel door with the good lock, of the torn wallpaper. It was even paid up for three more days.

I closed my eyes and jumped .

The hotel floor was warmer than the sidewalk and I felt much safer. I edged over to the bed and pulled myself up, slowly and carefully.

I got blood on the pillow but I didn’t care.

Around midnight I went down to the bathroom, walking carefully, like my Dad after a night of drinking. It was empty. I locked the door, then ran a bath while I peed.

In the mirror I looked like something out of a slasher movie. Blood had run across my hair from the scalp wound, matting it and making the light brown stuff black and nasty. The upper left side of my face had also lain in the blood where it pooled and it was patchy, flaking off and leaving the skin underneath discolored. I shuddered.

If I’d felt well enough to walk back to the hotel, I doubt I would have made it without the police being called every block.

I got into the tub, amazed that there was hot water. The last two days it had been tepid at best. I eased onto my back and lowered the back of my head into the water. There was a slight stinging but the heat felt good. I worked soap into the hair gently, and washed my face. When I sat up, the water in the tub was brownish red. I rinsed the soap and residual blood out of my hair with the tub’s faucet, and was drying off when someone tried the door.

“I’m almost done,” I said.

A voice from the other side of the door said loudly, “Well hurry it up, man. You got no right to be hogging the toilet all night.”

I scrubbed harder and decided to let the hair dry by itself.

There was a loud noise, like someone hit the door with the flat of their hand. “Come ooooonnnnn. Open the fucking door!”

“I’m getting dressed,” I said.

“Fuck. I don’t care about that—let me in, you little faggot, so I can pee.”

I got angry. “There are bathrooms on the other floors. Go use one of them!”

There was a brief pause.

“I’m not going to no other bathroom, shithead. And if you don’t let me in right now, I’m going to hurt you real bad.”

My jaws hurt and I realized I was grinding my teeth together. Why can‘t they leave me alone? “So,” I finally said. “You gonna wait there, with a full bladder, or you gonna go find someplace to pee?”

“I’m not going anywhere, little fucker, until I carve a piece of your ass.”

I heard a splashing sound and yellow liquid began running under the door. I picked up my clothes and, without dressing, jumped back to my hotel room.

My heart was pounding and I was still angry—“pissed off,” you might say. I opened my door a crack and looked down the hallway to the bathroom.

A tall Anglo, heavily muscled and wearing nothing but jeans, was zipping up his pants. Then he hit the door again and shook the doorknob.

From one of the other rooms, someone said, “Shut up already!”

The man at the bathroom said, “Come and fucking make me!” He continued to pound on the door while he reached into his back pocket for something. When he brought it out he flicked his wrist and something shiny flashed in the hall’s dim light.

Jesus Christ .

I still felt scared, but the more I looked down the hall, the angrier I got. I put my clothes on the bed and jumped back into the bathroom.

The pounding on the door was deafening. I flinched away from the force of it, then picked up the trash can from the floor and dumped its few paper towels out onto the floor. Next I filled it with bloody, soapy water from the tub and propped it above the doorway, on the arm of the spring-loaded mechanism that closed the door. I studied it critically, my heart still beating, my breath hard to catch. I shifted it slightly to the right.

Then, one hand on the lock catch, I turned off the light, unlocked the door, and jumped back to the hotel room.

I opened the door just in time to see him rattle the doorknob, find it was loose, and push forcefully into the room. There was a dull thud and water splashed out into the hall. In the middle of that he yelled and slipped on the floor, his head and shoulder coming into view as he slammed down on his back. He grabbed at his head with both hands in a manner I could identify with, if not sympathize. I didn’t see where the knife had gone, but he wasn’t holding it at the moment.

Other doors opened slowly in the hall and heads cautiously peered around doorjambs. I shut my door softly and locked it.

For the first time since I arrived in that hotel, I smiled.

Well, it was time to face it. I was different. I was not the same as my classmates from Stanville High School, not unless some of them were keeping a pretty big secret.

I saw several possibilities.

The first was that Dad had really given it to me that last time, inducing brain damage or other trauma to the point where I was dreaming the whole mess. Maybe even my mugging was just a detail added by my subconscious to correlate with the “real” injuries. I could be lying in the St. Mary’s Hospital intensive care unit back in Stanville, a little screen going beep, beep, beep over my still form. I doubted this, though. Even in my most terrifying nightmares I’ve had an awareness of the dream state. The stench of the garbage from the alleyway seemed too real.

The second possibility was that I’d done most of the things I remembered and most of the bad things that had happened to me had. My mind just warped reality in dealing with the results, giving to me the more palatable alternative of escape by a singular paranormal ability. This seemed more likely. Each time I’d “jumped” there was a feeling of unreality, of disorientation. This could be my shift into an irrational psychosis, an adjustment to a nasty reality. On the other hand, it could be the result of every sense reeling as the environment surrounding me changed completely. Hell—the very nature of the jump could be disorienting.

It was this third possibility that I distrusted the most. The one that meant I might finally be someone special. Not special in the sense of special education, not special in the sense of being a problem child, but unique, with a talent that, if anybody else had it, they hid. A talent for teleportation.

There, I’d thought the word. Teleportation.

“Teleportation.”

Aloud it vibrated in the room, a word of terrible import, alien to normal concepts of reality, brought into existence only under special circumstances, in the framework of fiction, film, and video.

And if I was teleporting, then how? Why me? What was it about me that made me able to teleport? And could anybody else? Is that what happened to Mom? Did she just teleport away from us?

Suddenly my stomach went hollow and I began breathing rapidly. Jesus Christ! What if Dad can teleport?

Suddenly the rooms seemed unsafe and I pictured him appearing before me, the belt in his hand, anywhere, anytime.

Get a grip . I’d never seen him do anything like that. Instead, I’d seen him stumble down the street a half mile to the Country Corner, to buy beer when he’d run out, hardly able to walk or talk. If he could teleport, surely he’d have used it then.

I sat on the narrow bed and dressed myself, putting on my most comfortable clothes, With extreme care, I combed my hair, checking the result in the tiny mirror on the wall. The bump, still large and aching, looked like a barber’s mistake. There was some slight seepage of blood, but it wasn’t really visible through the hair.