Jumper 1 - Jumper (28 page)

She shook her head. "I still can't approve of it. I don't think it's right."

I felt my face go remote, still. I crossed my arms and felt cold.

She spread her hands. "It doesn't change the fact that I still love you. I've missed you terribly. I've missed your phone calls, and I've missed your body in bed next to me. I don't know what to do about this. My loving you goes way beyond my disapproval of your theft."

I uncrossed my arms and reached across the table for her. She leaned forward and we kissed until the candle burned a hole in my shirt. Then we laughed and I held an ice cube to the burn and the food came and everything was all right.

I flew out of Kennedy to London's Gatwick South Terminal on American Airlines flight 1555. It left after midnight and arrived in Britain at 7:20 in the morning local time. It was a DC-10 and the man in first class next to me kept making stupid jokes about hydraulic fluid.

I seriously considered jumping him back to New York when we arrived in London.
Asshole.

The weather was wet and very cold and the people talked like they were on TV. If I hadn't slept so badly on the plane, I could have listened to them for hours. My connection to Algiers via Madrid did not leave for six hours. After clearing customs, I jumped back to Stillwater, grabbed the video camera, and recorded several jump sites at the airport. Then I jumped back to El Solitario, set an alarm for four and a half hours, and slept.

The flight to Madrid was on Air Algerie. They allowed smoking on their flights and eddies of the stuff kept drifting up to me from the back of first class where four Frenchman were going at it like chimneys. Fortunately the flight to Spain was only two and a half hours and the French were replaced by nonsmoking Arabs for the next leg to Algiers.

There was some difficulty at Algerian customs. I didn't have a return ticket or a hotel reservation, so they shuttled me to the side while they processed the other passengers. I would have just jumped away except they kept my passport.

After a forty-five-minute delay they offered me the choice of buying a return ticket or posting a bond. I bought a fully refundable ticket from Air Algerie to London for the following week under the watchful eye of a customs official. I also changed money for the minimum required amount, 1,000 Algerian dinars, about 190 U.S. dollars, and declared the U.S. dollars I had, over 5,000 DA (dinars Algeriere). Only then did he give back my passport with the admonition that all money changed must be recorded on the proper form and Allah help me if I couldn't account properly for my U.S. dollars on leaving the country.

I recorded a few jump sites then walked outside. It was cold, wet, and green, with mountains climbing up from the Mediterranean. If it weren't for the men in caftans and djellabas and a few women in thick veils, I would have thought I was anywhere but North Africa. A group of chattering English walked by carrying skis. They were off to Tikjda, where "the snow was particularly good this year."

Inside the terminal, a man at an information booth directed me toward the VIP terminal. I couldn't get into that area, but at a window near the security checkpoint I could look out on the tarmac where the hostage plane sat during two days of negotiation. I wondered if I should fly to Cyprus and see the similar stretch of tarmac where Mom died.

It only took a minute or two to record jump sites, but I couldn't jump away because the beggars were thick, persistent, and grubbier than anything in New York. As soon as I paid off one set, another group would move in. Finally, I went back into the terminal and jumped from a bathroom stall.

The gates opened at 10 A.M. so I jumped Millie into Disney World at five minutes after, right in front of Space Mountain. We were the second couple aboard and we rode it three times before the line started to build up. We did Star Tours at Disney MGM and followed it with Body Wars over at Epcot.

Next we hit Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion, and Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. By this time, since it was Christmas vacation, the crowds thickened to the point of unpleasantness, so I jumped her to London and we took a taxi into downtown London.

It was four hours later in London, and cold after the Florida sun, but the taxi driver took us to an old hotel that served a decent high tea. Afterward, we walked by the Thames until a chill, damp fog moved up the river, and I jumped her to El Solitario.

We'd seen the sun go down in England but it was still two in the afternoon in Texas, and the temperature was in the mid-eighties. Millie took one look from the top of El Mota and said, "I thought I was handling this all pretty well, but I think I need to sit down."

I jumped her to my cliff dwelling and sat her on the couch.

In the weeks since I'd started construction, I'd finished the wall from overhang to ledge, complete with windows, door, and ducting for the wood-burning stove. I'd also built a separate enclosure at the far end of the ledge which now enclosed the largest gasoline-powered generator that I could lift. It provided the electricity for the five floor lamps I'd brought in to light the place.

I'd filled the worst spots on the floor so that it was fairly smooth, even if it did have a pronounced tilt. I'd bought several dyed sheepskin rugs and some rustic furniture made of knotty pine. At the back of the dwelling, where the overhang sloped down to meet the floor, I put a bed. At the tallest sections of my man-made wall, between the windows, I'd put more bookshelves, chocked and shimmied to be more or less level, and I was slowly filling them with new purchases.

Millie leaned back on the couch and closed her eyes. I jumped to my apartment in Stillwater and filled a large glass with ice water, then returned. Her eyes were still closed.

"Here's some water," I said, putting it on the end table.

She opened her eyes and focused on the glass, its side beaded with condensation. She sipped it and looked around, noting the natural rock above the couch and looking left and right to get the depth of the room. "Where are we?"

"Texas," I said. "It's not far from that mountaintop I showed you."

"Where did you get this?" She held up the glass.

"Stillwater."

She shook her head. "I am reminded of
A Midsummer Night's Dream."

"What part?"

"When Puck says, 'I'll put a girdle round about the earth in forty minutes.' "

"What a slowpoke."

"Then there's that part where the fairy says, 'Over hill, over dale, / Through bush, through brier, / Over park, over pale, / Through flood, through fire, / I do wander everywhere, / Swifter than the moon's sphere.' "

I smiled. "You know your Shakespeare better than I."

She smiled. "I was that merry wanderer of the night. I jested to Oberon, and made him smile. High school production. Great reviews, though. They wanted me to play that ass Hermia, but I stood my ground. All the guys wanted to play Puck, but I was the only one to audition who could do the first act without looking at the script."

She stood, almost timidly, and walked to the window.

The sun cast steep shadows from above and the stratigraphy of the rock was cleanly displayed on the opposite wall of the canyon, tilted at three degrees, matching my sloping floor. She leaned forward on tiptoe, to see past the edge. The floor of the canyon was just visible two hundred feet below.

"Why didn't I hear you when you popped off to Stillwater?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, the air should rush in or something, shouldn't it? Wouldn't it make some sort of popping noise?"

I hadn't thought about it. "Well, maybe you just weren't listening well enough. Maybe it's a quiet noise."

She put her glass of water down. "Well, try it again, and we'll see. I'll pay very close attention."

"Jump away and then back?"

She nodded.

"Okay." I jumped to the ledge outside, by the generator shack. After a deep breath, I jumped back and Millie flinched.

"Well?"

She exhaled noisily. "Nothing. And it's still unnerving as hell, even when you expect it."

I reached out and hugged her to me. "I'm sorry. That's one of the reasons I didn't tell you, you know. I didn't want to scare you. I don't want to lose you. I've lost too much already."

She leaned into me, her arms curled into my chest. I rocked her back and forth. After a moment she pushed away and said, "Where's the bathroom?"

"Uh... it's in Stillwater."

She rolled her eyes. "Great! I'll close my eyes."

I picked her up and jumped her to my Stillwater apartment. She'd never been in my Brooklyn apartment, so the furniture and toys were new to her. I showed her the bathroom and waited in the living room.

"I just had a horrible thought," she said, after she came out of the john. "What if you took me to your house in the cliff there, jumped away, and got hurt or killed?"

The situation was unfortunately easy to visualize. There was no water or food and no way out. She'd last less than seven days. "I didn't think of that."

She shrugged. "I don't mind going there, but I don't think I want to be left there. You know what I mean? Like, if you needed to go get something, I'd want to go with you or back to my own place. Okay?"

I nodded. "Yeah. That's more than okay."

She looked around the living room and saw the video equipment. I'd told her about recording jump sites and she looked back and forth from the camera to me. "Hmmmm. Have you recorded yourself jumping? Maybe there's something to be seen in slow motion?"

"Hmm. Let's try it." I set the video camera and tripod up and pointed it at the middle of the room. I hooked the cables into my large monitor for playback and set the camera on slow-motion record.

"Where should I go?"

Millie was watching my image on the monitor. I looked at myself on the screen, then looked away, uncomfortable with the stranger there.

"Anywhere, Davy, but jump right back to where you are after a count of five?"

I jumped to the observation deck at Will Rogers World Airport. The altitude was roughly the same and it wasn't hard on my ears. I looked around, turning to see the entire deck. The place, fortunately, was deserted, and I counted slowly to five before jumping back.

Even though she was expecting me, Millie started again.

"Sorry."

She exhaled sharply. "I'll get used to it. Maybe. I sure wish you could teach me how to do it."

"If I knew how..."

I rewound the tape and played it back at normal speed. I stood in the middle of the living room, cut off from the knees down by the framing; then I was gone. I counted to myself again, and at roughly the same moment, I appeared again.

Millie, seated on the couch, leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. "If I'd been watching this on television, I'd say it was a cheap special effect. You know, the kind where they stop the camera, have the actor walk offstage, and start filming again."

"Yeah. I'll try it on super slow." I rewound the tape and put playback on its slowest speed.

We waited, watching my image ask Millie where to jump, my mouth opening and closing in ponderous slow motion. It took over a minute to get to the part where I disappeared. One moment I was there and the next I wasn't.

"What was that."

"What?"

"Just as you jumped. There was a sort of flash, kind of."

I shook my head. "I didn't see anything."

"Back it up. Can you make it go any slower?"

"That's the slowest, but I can single-frame it, I guess." I stood by the camera and rewound to just before the jump, then started advancing using the still button and the frame advance. It took even longer to get to the point where I disappeared, but when I did...

"Wow," said Millie.

The video image, held wavering on the screen, had been me standing, but, from this, it went to a rough outline of myself, a Davy-shaped hole. Inside this hole was the tail of an American Airlines 727 as seen through the windows of the airport observation deck.

"What's that?"

I told Millie where I'd jumped to. She nodded vigorously, her eyes wide. I hit the frame advance again and the Davy-shaped window was gone. The scene showed my apartment living room.

"Neat! No wonder the air doesn't go 'pop.' You're not disappearing one place and appearing in another—you're going through a doorway. Or, the doorway is passing around you, since you don't move. Fast forward to the point you reappear."

When the specific point on the tape had been located, I single-framed through images of the empty living room until another Davy-shaped window appeared, slightly different to reflect my changed posture. The view was a different slice of the 727, reflecting where I had been standing when I jumped back. When I hit the frame advance again, the window was replaced by my full body.

"See?"

I nodded. "What would happen if I couldn't go through that door?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, uh, what would happen if I were handcuffed to something too big to move? Or if I was being held by someone I couldn't lift?"

Millie stood. "Try it. Here, I'll grab you from behind and you try and jump."

I thought about it. "Uh, I don't think I like that idea. What if part of you went with me, but not the rest?"

She blinked. "Has that sort of thing ever happened to you?"

I shook my head.

"Well, it doesn't seem likely, but I must admit that the idea of having just my arms go with you is not very appealing."

"Hold on, we can try this another way."

I jumped to a novelty store on Seventh Avenue near Times Square and bought a cheap pair of handcuffs. The clerk also tried to sell me a rubber mask of Richard Nixon, very cheap, on special, but I declined.

"Well," Millie said, when I showed them to her. "This is no time for kinky sex."

I laughed. "Let's go someplace where I can lock it to something solid."

We went outside, on the porch. It was out of sight of other apartments and it had an iron railing firmly set in the concrete landing. Before I put the handcuffs on, I made sure both keys worked on both cuffs and handed one of the keys to Millie for safekeeping. Then I locked one cuff to the railing and put the other cuff on my left wrist.