Fading Away

  I stopped in front of the occult bookstore and peered through the window. I was always a little paranoid about places I’d never gone to before. I couldn’t see much; the lighting inside seemed dim. I took a chance and pushed open the front door. Chimes tinkled overhead as I walked inside. It seemed like a cozy little shop, with rows of bookshelves on one side and a line of glass counters on the other. I wasn’t assailed by a hoard of spirits. The place seemed deserted of people, both the living and the dead. Then some guy wandered out from behind one of the rows of shelves. He had spiked hair, white make-up on his face, and was carrying a small silver tray on which burned a cone of incense. He wore a long black robe. He strolled past me, as though I wasn’t even there, turned round at the front of the store and then started toward the back, leaving in his wake a strong smell of jasmine. I figured the guy must work here, but I couldn’t figure what his job might be—maybe he was in charge of ambiance or something.

  While I stared after the guy, a woman appeared behind the glass counters. She was middle-aged, and wore a lot of wooden beads around her neck and a long colorful dress. Huge gaudy hoop earrings dangled from her earlobes. She looked at me placidly but said nothing. During the silence I allowed myself to read her, which involved releasing that thing inside me that I fought so hard to control. Two or three seconds of freaky insight told me that the woman owned the store, that she was a total fake that didn’t believe in any of the books of other items she sold, that she thought people were stupid for spending so much money on such utter garbage, that she had a pet boxer named Howard and a urinary tract infection for which she had a doctor’s appointment tomorrow… . I blinked my eyes, and reeled in the freak senses; they always seemed to enter the realms of TMI (too much info), like did I really need to know about her urinary tract?

  “Can I help you find anything?” she asked, pleasantly enough but she harbored nothing but disgust at the sight of me. Young punk. Street trash. Baggy clothes. Probably a shop-lifter… She would be of absolutely not help to me.

  “No…no,” I muttered, looking around, scanning the inside of store. I spotted a guy that was rearranging the books near the back of the store. He was tall and slim, and had a weird pale purplish light around him that I recognized. “No, thanks, but he can,” I said, pointing at the guy.

  The woman looked stunned, as though I’d just insulted her.

  I turned away from her and headed toward the back of the store. I came up behind the guy who was straightening the books on the shelves against the rear wall.

  “Hey, I need some help,” I said, stepping up behind him.

  He turned around. His face was thin but not unpleasant. His light brown hair was messy but in a good way. He gave me a look, a look that asked, What now?

  “Just ask Helen at the desk,” he droned, looking back at the books he was shifting around. “She knows everything about everything in the store.”

  “No, I think I need to ask you,” I said.

  He looked back at me. Maybe he saw me for the first time. Interest registered in his pale blue eyes.

  “Hey, you go to Adler, don’t you?” he asked, finally giving me more attention than the books.

  “Yeah,” I said. I didn’t recognize him, which didn’t surprise me; I spent most of my time at school trying to ignore just about everybody.

  “I thought I knew you,” he said. “What are you looking for?”

  “I need a book on some weird stuff,” I said.

  He looked at the books that lined the shelves around us. “You think you can be a tad more specific?”

  “I need something on reality.”

  “I’ll save you some money. Reality sucks,” he said, and seemed pleased with the joke.

  “I mean parallel realities.”

  He sighed. “I see,” he said. “Follow me.”

  He led me down one of the rows of shelves, and stopped at a section.

  “You might want to check in through here,” he said, pointing to a certain shelf.

  Before I could examine any of the books, I caught a drift from him: he totally thought I was just another crackpot customer. I found that deeply offensive. I was, after all, the real deal, not just some wannabe. This ought to be one of the few places on earth where being me was a good thing.

  “I am so not,” I said.

  “So not what?” he asked, staring at me, uneasy.

  “I’ve never been in a place like this.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, never mind,” I said. I turned my attention to the books. “So which one is the best.”

  He gave me a strange look, but said, “Well, honestly, they’re all pretty much crap.” He reached up and pulled down a thick leather-bound volume and handed it to me. “This is the only one that’s pretty much real, and that depends on what you believe is real.”

  I looked the book, which had no title. Then I glanced at him. He seemed absorbed in my interest. I could still see that pale purple glow around him; I’d seen that unusual shade of aura in people who were open, who were at least a little like me. I figured he had seen a few things, spiritual flashes or whatever, which he didn’t quite understand. He knew that there is more going on in the world than everybody thinks, but he didn’t know exactly what. He was curious about freaky things. This was why he had taken a job here, rather than at a local Kmart. He believed this place would satisfy his curiosity, but he was wrong. His name was Jack Kilgore….Actually, I was catching a good vibe from him. It was unusual; most of the impressions I got from people, especially guys, convinced me that you couldn’t trust anybody—ever—with anything.

  “If you don’t mind my asking,” he said now, “why do you need to know this?”

  “I just do,” I said, and then, against my paranoid nature, I added, “I need to figure out how to retrieve somebody who slipped into a parallel reality.”

  He frowned. “You’re not in Mr. Hammerstone’s physics class, are you?”

  “No, why?”

  “I heard he strays into metaphysics, sometimes.”

  “Nothing like that,” I said. “And, by the way, Mr. Hammerstone strays into a lot of liquor stores.”

  Just then I became aware of an old man, withered and pale, his white hair wild. He was using a walker, edging down the aisle, nearing us. That he was wearing slippers and a hospital gown was a tip off he was no longer with us.

  Looking at the old guy, I had one of my distracted moments. When I looked back at Jack, he was eyeing me curiously. He glanced over to where I could see the old man, but obviously he saw nothing.

  “You okay?” Jack asked.

  I shrugged. “A.D.D.,” I lied.

  The old man now stood near us. He stared at Jack and wagged his head. Sometimes, the boy’s as dumb as a brick, he said to me. But he’s got a good heart….

  I blinked my eyes, and the old man was gone. Jack stood there looking at me, clearly concerned.

  “You’re sure you’re okay?” he asked.

  “Fine,” I said. “So, how much is this thing?”

  Jack took the book from me, and looked at the inside of the back cover. “Eighty-nine ninety-five.”

  I nearly choked. “Dude, I got, like, about thirty bucks.”

  He shrugged. “That’s Helen. She does all the pricing—she thinks everything’s worth ninety bucks. Hey, look, I’ll tell you what,” he said, lowering his voice. “Before I leave today, I’ll sneak it into the back room and make copies of the important parts.”

  “Yeah?” I said. I couldn’t help being suspicious; I knew how sneaky people could be—nobody does something for nothing. But I didn’t pick anything that suggested Jack had an ulterior motive. He was just trying to be helpful. Maybe the old man had been right….He’s got a good heart. “Okay, thanks,” I said.

  “I’ll bring the copies to school tomorrow. Where do you sit during lunch?”

  “Just about any table near an exit,” I said.

  That seemed to amuse him. “Okay, I’ll find you.”

>   I thanked him again, and left the store, passing the creepy guy wearing a black robe and carrying burning incense.

  I headed back toward my car, but didn’t make it half a block down the street before Jack came running up behind me.

  What now? I wondered.

  “Hey,” he said, a little winded.

  “What?”

  “I had to ask you something,” he said, falling into step next to me.

  “You couldn’t wait until tomorrow?”

  “They’ll be a lot of people around,” he said.

  “Oh.” I understood that; crowds of people were always a bummer.

  “Can I buy you some coffee?” he asked.

  “That was what you wanted to ask? It hardly seems that important.”

  “Uh, no, no,” he stammered. He took a deep breath. “What I meant was, there’s a coffee shop up ahead. Can I buy you a cup of coffee, so that I can ask you something—you know, while you’re drinking coffee.”

  “I can’t have coffee,” I said. “The caffeine doesn’t agree with me.” Actually, caffeine, or any type of stimulate, caused me to experience an onrush of psychic images. Two or three sips and I started seeing all kinds of weird things.

  “Oh,” he said, disappointed, and didn’t know what to say next. I almost felt sorry for him. I didn’t have to be a freak to see he liked me. Up until this moment that had been aside from the point—all I needed, or wanted, was some information on parallel realities. Now that his attraction to me grabbed my attention, my first thought was that he had terrible taste in girls. Really, I was no prize. I didn’t even weigh a hundred pounds. My bones stuck out everywhere. My clothes, though they were the right size, always looked baggy hanging on my body. I was pale, as though I had some awful disease, and always had little pouches under my eyes. If how I looked wasn’t bad enough, I had the personality of a cactus.

  “Look—” I started, intending to tell him I wasn’t his type—I wasn’t anybody’s type.

  He blurted out, “You have it, don’t you?”

  I was surprised, which seldom happened. I thought he was about to ask me on a date or something.

  “Have what?” I asked.

  “Oh, you know,” he said.

  “What? Do I have—a song in my heart? No, I haven’t had one of those yet. I don’t expect to, either.”

  “You know what I’m talking about,” he insisted.

  “A viral infection of some kind?”

  “Come on.”

  “A plan to stop world hunger?”

  “Stop.”

  “Really, I don’t understand the question.”

  “You see things.”

  “I see a lot of things,” I said. I pointed around as we walked down the sidewalk. “I see cars. I see the sky. I see a poodle taking on poop. I see the owner of the poodle not picking up the poop.”

  He looked down at the sidewalk. He didn’t say anything, just walked next to me for a while.

  I started to feel bad. I couldn’t understand why. Maybe it was because he was a decent guy. Maybe because it seemed so important for him to know. I was sure he had some personal reason to know. It would be easy enough to find out what. All I had to do was unleash the freak probe and see what was going through his mind. But I didn’t want to do that; it was like peeping through somebody’s bedroom window: you never know what you’re going to see, but it always ends up being something personal.

  “Why is it so important for you to know?” I asked.

  He shrugged, and looked moody.

  “Just stupid, I guess,” he mumbled.

  We walked along slowly now, as if one, or both, of us wanted the walk to last as long as possible.

  Finally, I confessed, “All right. I see things.” Although I knew it was bad for me to confess this to somebody, especially a complete stranger, I felt some relief to put it in words.

  “I thought you did,” he said, pumping his fist, way too joyous. “I do, too, sometimes—not a lot, just enough to know something is there.”

  “Trust me. You don’t want to see more than that,” I said.

  “I would like to know if my grandfather is all right. I think he is, but I’m not sure.”

  “Your grandfather?”

  “He died a couple years ago.”

  “Was he about five-foot-seven, thin, crazy white hair, probably died in a hospital?”

  Jack’s eyes grew wider and wider.

  “Yeah,” he said, clearly in awe.

  “He’s all right,” I assured him.

  “You saw him?”

  “Just now—back in the store.”

  “That’s what you saw? I thought you might be seeing something.”

  “He walked up to us, said something, and then just vanished,” I said. “But he seemed all right—as all right as somebody can be when they’re dead.”

  “What did he say?”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “He said you’re dumb as a brick but you have a good heart.”

  “That sounds like Gramps,” he said, bobbing his head. He was satisfied, probably relieved. “So, aside from seeing and hearing dead people, what else can you do?”

  “Isn’t that enough?”

  “I supposed,” he said. “Listen—”

  “No,” I said.

  “No?”

  “I’m not the dating kind, so no, I won’t go somewhere with you sometime.”

  “You read my mind,” he said, more amazed that I did that then dejected that I turned him down.

  “I did,” I said, “which makes dating a big problem for me. As much as I try not to hear what guys think, enough slips through to ruin the whole thing. Honestly, would you want to date somebody who could know everything that went through your head?”

  He turned round and started walking backward out in front of me, so that he could see me better. “I could deal with that,” he said.

  I shook my head. “Trust me—you couldn’t. You’re a guy. You got guy things going through your head. Take now, for instance. We’re having a nice little chat, right? You’re attracted to me—I don’t know why, but you are. And right in the middle of this nice little chat, you’re wondering how I look naked.”

  His face turned a couple shades of red. “I see what you mean,” he said, and still walking backwards, not looking where he was going, began drifting close to the curb, as we neared the cross street.

  “Look, you’re a nice guy, Jack. You need to date normal girls, with normal problems.”

  “What if that’s not what I want?” he asked. “It’s my choice, right?”

  “No, definitely not.”

  “I don’t want somebody normal,” he brooded.

  “If that’s true, then you are dumb as a brick.”

  Then, as if to prove my point, he backed into the light post on the corner of the cross street, whacking the back of his head so hard against the steel post that there was a loud vibrating thunk. He grabbed his head, muttering something I couldn’t understand, thinking something I got loud and clear.

  I stood there and looked up at him as he massaged the back of his head. He leaned back up against the light post, and said simply, “Ouch.” He was so pitiful, so likeable, I wanted to keep him for a pet. I decided I had to get out of there quickly, before I did something stupid, like agreeing to go out with him.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah, sure—”

  It happened fantastically fast. Something snapped inside my head, making me act though I didn’t know why I was acting. I lunged at Jack and grabbed the front of his shirt. I pulled him forward and to the side, away from the light pole. I caught a glimpse of the shocked look on his face. I heard the grinding bang of something nearby. Then we were falling to the ground, landing hard on the sidewalk. The first thing I saw when I looked up was the small faded red pick-up truck. It had been coming out of the cross street. It had already jumped the curb. And now it slammed into the light pole, just where Jack had been standing, a few feet away from where we l
ay on the sidewalk.

  We got up slowly. Jack was gaping at the wrecked pick-up, its hood tented up, its radiator hissing steam. He turned to look at me with wide eyes.

  “I—I got to go,” I said, feeling a desperate need to escape, before the cops came, before people started asking questions, before anybody could realize I wasn’t quite human.

  I rushed past him, round the rear of the pick-up, across the cross street, toward where my car was parked.

  I started running.

  I heard Jack calling from behind me to wait up. I ran faster and faster.

  I heard him yell, “I don’t know your name.”

  But just then, I had no name. I am Freak, I thought.

  Freak

  Freak

  Freak

  Freak

  Freak

  Freak

  Freak

  4

  As soon as I got home, I went straight into the kitchen. I grabbed a glass from one of the cabinets, and then got a carton of orange juice from the fridge. I sat at the table and started chugging down the juice. I never understood why, but every time I had a major weird experience, I would get badly dehydrated. My mouth would be so dry. I would be so thirsty. I would feel weak in the knees. Sometimes I would feel dizzy until I got a couple glasses of liquid into me. The orange juice, going down, never seemed to make it to my stomach, as though it was being absorbed directly into my body.

  After three glasses, I looked up and saw my mom standing in the doorway, watching me.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She said Hey back, and then went to freezer. She took out a package of meat to thaw out for dinner. She put the meat in the microwave and set the dial, and then she sat across the table from me. She was dressed in jeans and a t-shirt, and her long hair hung loose on her shoulders. Mom always dressed young when she was not working. She was afraid of getting old, but, really, I didn’t think she had anything to worry about.

  She was studying me, as I poured yet another glass of juice. I never read either of my parents, but I knew the look on her face: she wanted to ask, but she didn’t want to ask. Finally she couldn’t help herself.

  “So what happened?”

  “You don’t want to know,” I said.