The Mentor (9 page)

I shuffled
toward the headboard and leaned back up on my elbows. In an instant, my mouth
had gone dry.  Not wanting him to see how scared I was, I forced an angry
face.

“You drugged
her, you crazy fuck?”

“And, I
would suggest you start reading again,” he said, twirling something between his
fingers.  “Your vocabulary is suffering.”

As if he
held the reins of both darkness and light in either of his gloved hands,
something flashed in front of his belly.  

My body started
to hum as my panic began to transform into something more useful: rage.

This time,
I wasn’t going down without a fight.  

I looked
around the room for a weapon.  Any weapon.

In the dim
light, I saw Laura’s “Pocket Rocket” vibrator poking through the folds of the duvet.
 

Not ideal.

I’d
certainly never get close enough to him to use it and would need at least two
or three minutes, if experience were any guide, before it had any sort of
brief, debilitating effect.

Had to find
something heavy.  Or sharp.

I went to
stand, pushing the covers off my body, but my visitor shook his head and gave
me a
tsk-tsk-tsk
.

“No, no,”
he said.  “This would be easier for both of us if you didn’t move.”

“What if I
don’t
want
it to be easy?” I shouted, in part because I had hoped it
might wake up Laura.  I could have used the backup.

He moved
around the room so fast, I lost sight of him and covered my head to protect it
from a blow.  He chuckled from a dark corner.  We both knew how this was going
to end.

“What do
you want from me?”

“Dex, I
don’t want anything from you,” he said, his voice smooth, even playful.
 “Just a man putting in a hard day's work.”

“What?”

“Listen,
now.  Air velocity can be judged by relative objects on the ground—“

Oh.
 Damn.

“—but don’t
rely on their size as any sort of barometer because often you don’t
know
their size.  Instead estimate their distance and use static objects for your
computations.”

I screamed
at him: “Man, I don’t need this!”

“You
understand the Archimedes' principle, and you’ll need that if you want to survive.
 Also, the emotional response will be a problem.   Your instincts…
you’ll have to fight that because that would be your downfall,” he said and I
could see movement in the corner of the room, flashing again.  Terrified, I
pressed my back against the headboard and craned my neck, trying to see down
into the square below me.

“Goddamn
it, help me!”  

No one was down
there this early in the morning, and mine was the only apartment on the block.
 

Despite my
yelling, Laura hadn’t stirred, and I was sincerely worried about what he’d done
to her.

“You know
Newton’s second law of motion, his most powerful, and it will allow you to
perform necessary quantitative calculations of dynamics,” he said and I saw a
wide set of teeth.  “A little while back, some Japanese eggheads believed
they disproved parts of that theory—
theoretically
— using electrolysis
upon a molecule in a specially prepared liquid.  But, trust me; you won’t
be applying this within liquid.”  He chucked again and the strange winking
light in front of him stopped for a second.  “You hit liquid, and your
skin will boil off your bones, Dexter.”

Then he was
right there, right in front of me, dressed all in black again, and briefly I
saw a silver or gold ring as his hands came toward me, then the golf club,
which landed between my right cheek bone and my ear with a
thwack!

Purples and
blues swirled, the world folding in upon itself, my body falling back into the
bed, my head buzzing loudly… and through that din I heard:

“Lesson
begins.”

I'M TOO
SCRAMBLED FOR Ruthie’s funeral, and I hate myself for secretly not wanting to
go.  I can
take
pain.  My whole body’s been on fire for a week
and I've got these headaches that roar in then retreat just as fast.

What I
can't take is the pity.  The look of it.  The smell and the stain of it. 

And, I don’t
deserve it even if I could.

“Dexter,”
the young nurse says as a greeting.  “How’s the head?”

“Fine.
 My guts got scrambled not my head."

"Good,"
she says.  "Then your memory's coming back?  Such an amazing
gift, it'd be terrible if you lost it.  Terrible."

"Oh,"
I say.  "Yeah, slowly.  Bits and pieces."

"Good
because they're coming for it," she says, her painted-on smile unwavering.

"What?
 What are you talking about?"

She looks down
at her wrist watch casually, as if she hadn't heard me.

“You want
me to dial up the church?  Service starts in a few minutes.  You
could listen to it on speaker phone if you’d like.”

If she’s
wanting to change the subject, she knows right where to hit.    

“Funerals
are for the living, so the folks left behind can feel better,” I say then stop,
waiting until she looks at me.  “I don’t want to feel better.”

The nurse
smiles at me, parts her arms in a theatrical way as if to emote the word
surprise
and in a sing-song voice says, “Hospital.”  She then adds, dialing the phone:
“The whole ‘feel better’ thing is what keeps the lights on.”

AS I AWOKE,
MY shoulders were killing me, but I realized this only ranked second in the
sensory overload department.  

The smell.
 Damn, the
smell
.  That’s what made me wake up, I was sure of
it. 

I started
gagging, a clot of phlegm had been brewing in my throat, and my eyes began to
water. 

Spitting it
out, the mucus was gray-black.  

My eyes
hadn't focused yet.  I was still very, very groggy.  Tired.

I could hear,
and this was odd, what sounded like… waves.  Or the ocean.  Actually, it
sounded like one
long
wave. 

No
breakers, just a roar of one long wave, like maybe the seconds before a tsunami
hits.

Incredibly,
it just went on and on and on…

Trying to
shake the thick film from my mind, I sucked in another breath of rotten-egg air
and opened my eyes wider, which stung a little in the hazy sun and… something
in the air.

That’s when
I snapped fully awake.  I realized
what
was in the air.

Me.

My arms
raised, bloodless hands Velcroed into steering toggles, I was falling from the
sky in a frigging
parachute
.  The sound was not a tsunami but instead
the Earth’s atmosphere-- the wind-- screaming past my skull.  

And
speaking of screaming, a moment later, I was doing that, too.

Blinking,
blinking, and trying to focus on the ground below, but there was still such a thick,
heavy fog in my head.  

I looked up
to the straps and instinctively tried to pull my hands free.

This drew
both straps down. 

My descent
suddenly slowed, and I arched up then nearly fell backward, and—in one of the
longest moments of my entire life—I just hung in the air and watched in horror
as the parachute above me began to wither and collapse, as if deflating at its
edges.

Quickly,
hands back up.

For a few
seconds, I felt like the Coyote in those old cartoons-- impossibly suspended in
the air, moments before crashing to the ground in a fat ring of dust. 

If I'd had
a sign that read
Help!
, yes, I would have held it up.

Slowly, the
roar picked back up.  Louder, then louder still. 

My brain
seemed unclear what to do with the images of my parachute
failing
above
me, so the moment just played back in a loop for a few seconds.

But, as my
head began to clear, I realized that I might have only imagined the parachute
crinkling at its edges. 

Imagined
?  

No.
 It’d been more colorful, like a hallucination.  

So-- drugged.
 

Again, I
was coming out of some sort of drugged state.

Falling
quickly now, I could feel my heart start beating again, as if some translucent
EMT on butterfly wings had given me a blast with its defibrillator.  

A tug left,
a tug right and my parachute changed direction each time: left, then right. 

I thought:
My
parachute
? 

How did
I even..?

Ah, sure.
 The midnight ninja again.

This time,
I had no idea what he wanted me to do.  Not that I’d really known last
time.  But, at least, in a van trapped underwater it's clear what's at the
top of your
To Do
list.

Trying to
remember what he’d said just before the golf club hit me—and for a fleeting
instant, I wondered why my cheek didn’t hurt more—I was having a hard time with
my recall.

Sure, I’ve
got near perfect audio retention, but whatever he'd given me had been powerful
stuff and was hard to shake. 

Once again,
I didn't know where I was.

Once again,
I'd lost complete control.

But I think
the thing that scared me the most, the thing that was really messing with my
mind, was looking down past my feet and seeing all that lava.

Chapter
Five

I took in
another gulp of air, trying to get my thoughts straight.

They
weren't having it.

"
Lava?
"

  Hanging
in the air, even this high up, the anticipated pain of final contact felt very
real because I was dropping like a stone.  

Still, I
guessed (and I could only guess), I had about a minute before becoming a
dumpling in lava soup.

The chute had
been opened for me.  I wasn’t sure if it had been pulled as I left some
aircraft or not.  

Looking
down at my chest, I saw a large gauge with numbers and it seemed reasonable
that this was some sort of altimeter set to release the parachute at a
predetermined point.  

I stared at
the gauge strapped to my chest and wondered that, if I died here and my charred
body was discovered, if there'd be an initial celebrity death report lamenting
the tragic yet bewildering passing of Flava Flav.

Focus!

Below me,
the molten earth appeared to stretch for miles in every direction.  Like
something out of an old Heinlein novel, a planet of fire.

Not all of
it was bubbling, molten lava—some of it was black but even
that
was
steaming.  Ultimately, I couldn’t be sure by the color alone of which areas
would be safe and which would not.

 A quick
scan of the horizon for anything that didn’t look like it’d been created by the
lava flow—a rock, building, anything—turned up zilch.  

I was
falling down in an easterly direction.  At least, I thought it was east.
 The sun was arching behind me and looked like a late day sun, so east it
was.

Just to the
north was a river of fire.  I know as much about volcanoes and lava flow
as the next guy.  Which was to say, absolutely nothing.

My
breathing was labored and my eyes watered constantly because of the fumes.  And
it was getting worse from moment to moment, as I got closer to its source.

Before me
was an expanse of smoldering black-- it looked like a giant insect's mottled
shell.  Cutting through it were rivulets of churning, red lava which all fed to
a thick river of fire directly below me. 

Clearly
there was nowhere to land.

Pulling
down to my right, I moved right.  I wanted to get as far away from the
lava flow as I could.

The air
around me cooled, which I was grateful for, but strangely the roar in my ears
got louder.  Was I going faster?

The
emotional response will be a problem.   Your instinct… you’ll have to
fight that because that would be your downfall.

I didn't
know if the Midnight Ninja had a proclivity for puns but… I realized that my
downward fall had sped up. 

Dammit!
 Is that what he was talking about?
 

My instinct
was to get away from the lava flow, head south from here.  Was north the
right route?  Was the tar-black field shorter on that side?

Looking
south, I couldn’t see its edge.  And there was no telling from here if
another flow was just out of sight.  The haze around me was getting
thicker and my eyes began to water more.  

I was
closing the gap between me and the lava flow too quickly.

You know
Newton’s second law of motion, his
most powerful, and it will allow you to perform necessary quantitative
calculations of dynamics.

Admittedly,
I’d always been good at math.  Just something that came easy to me.

I was
told-- but did not remember-- I’d taken freshman physics while in college.  One
of the advisors who I'd met with afterward told me that I’d even toyed with the
idea of making it my major.  

But that
part was gone to me and had been for years.  Lost somewhere in my mind.
 And now, this guy wanted me to pull out the
laws of motion
from
that black hole?  From six years earlier?

I yelled at
the top of my lungs, gripping the straps tight, my arms shaking. “
What do
you want from me
?”

That moment
was my first bit of luck, it seemed.  While yelling, I'd inadvertently pulled a
bit on the straps-- not too hard-- and my descent had slowed some.

I could buy
a little more time by holding the straps taut.

You understand
the Archimedes' principle, and you’ll need that if you are to survive.  

Here's what
confused me: he believed he knew
what
I would know.

How?

Here's what
terrified me: he was wrong!

I didn't
have
that knowledge anymore.  Those were parts of the "blank index cards"
I'd told Pavan about.  

My eyes
fell closed for a moment, and I exhaled slowly.  

His
question about the baker.  My midnight visitor knew about my audio recall
ability.  Again,
how
?

He said
that I
knew
Archimedes.  
Understood
Newton.  For
whatever reason, he was aware of my ability to remember what I’d heard.
 But, I couldn’t recall Archimedes.  I couldn't recall Newton's laws,
or anything I’d learned in college
.  That was all gone!

I looked up
at my hands in the parachute’s steering toggles, then down at the molten earth
rushing up toward me.  The thick river of lava getting wider now, staring
into it, I could feel its heat on the skin of my face.  

Falling.

Falling.

My eyes
were too quickly trading open sky for the angry black and red flow.

Mr. Jepson
had been my physics professor.  I'd also had him for Chem the following
year as a sophomore.  This much I'd learned from my own transcripts;
however, my personal recollections had been stolen the night of my crash.
 Still,
maybe
, I knew his voice, somewhere.

It was getting
hotter.  

He's in
my head somewhere!  I just have to… find him.

I'd only
had hints, flashes of those days.  Never anything tangible.  For those
black-void years, the ones leading up to the accident, I just had fragments of
people, places, sounds, voices.  

But, if I could
remember the sound of his voice…

Sometimes,
when I had to recall something that had happened before my ability kicked in,
one way to get at it was to concentrate its source—remembering the tonality,
timbre, cadence.

I could
never quite bring images up like those with so-called “photographic memory,”
but by concentrating on a sound-- or the source of a sound-- I could create a
patchwork of image
echoes
and cobble together an image from that.

What about,
maybe, then… in reverse?  

Images to
induce sound?

Photos from
my college yearbooks-- the only real records I had from those missing years-- those
were easy to remember because in the hospital I'd poured over them for hours.

My eyes
still closed, I recalled his image.  Jepson looked like someone out of a
fifties, black and white personal hygiene film.

Bony arms
dripping out of a short-sleeve dress shirt, goatee like a first baseman, and prescription
safety glasses that Mr. Jepson always wore, even outside a lab.

My thoughts
were interrupted by a hissing.

Or perhaps,
sizzling.  

This sound was
from
outside
, not from within.  

I had to
ignore it, ignore the fire below me.

Only… Jepson’s
image, color, texture, the cigarette-stained smile--

There!
 

An audio
artifact!  Like a sun flare's burst picked up by shortwave radio, I had one.
 A small fragment.  A piece, a small piece of his voice.

That was
enough, and the rest came as shimmer turns to ripple, ripple turns to wave.

“—
killed
by a soldier even though the Roman general said to not harm him.  So
valuable, even his enemy wanted him alive.  ‘Course, this was the man who
discovered Pi, for gosh sakes
.”

I could see
Jepson now, leaning against the chalkboard as he spoke.  By the end of the day,
the white dust caked to his shoulders.  Holding a piece of chalk but never
really writing anything down.

Then,
clearer, his voice filling my head: “….
of his theorems, the Archimedes
Principal which states: an object immersed in a fluid experiences a buoyant
force that is equal in magnitude to the force of gravity on the displaced
fluid.”

I thought,
how
does this
—

“
What
we’ll do, though, is apply it to gas, not liquid—because it’s more fun.
 And because it’s an excuse for you all to go ballooning and have the university
foot the bill.”

I had it.

The old,
familiar slap to the back of my eyes jarred me when I opened them-- as I moved
from "filing system" back to "data collection."

I steered
the parachute north, turning directly into the thickest haze billowing up at me.

My visitor
had said:
You know Newton’s second law of motion, his most powerful, and it
will allow you to perform necessary quantitative calculations of dynamics.

Now I
understood exactly what my late night golf pro meant by "fighting
instincts."  

Gripping
the steering handles, I swallowed hard and headed back toward the red-hot lava
flow.

I estimated
there was about seven hundred feet until splash down.  At best, the rest of my
life would amount to about ninety seconds.  But, at least now I had a plan.

It might
not be a good one, but I
had
one.  And sometimes that's enough.

Essentially,
Archimedes was dealing with buoyancy and Newton said, hey if you want to be
buoyant you’ll need to have more force below than above.  

In my case,
that meant staying directly
over
the lava flow-- the hot gas creating a
higher pressure zone below me.  Then, I should be lifted like a hot air balloon
as that high pressure rushes upward toward the low, taking my chute (and me)
with it.  

Now, if it
didn’t work, Archimedes and Newton would soon get word that a new arrival in
the afterlife was looking to kick both their asses.

Steering
farther into the blazing updraft, the angry sighs of the dragon below me coming
now from deeper and deeper breaths, my well-developed fear response began hammering
away at my fledgling, new-found confidence.

The acid
haze sucked water from my eyes and dirty tears dripped down both cheeks.
 Trying to control the flex response of my throat, fighting off a coughing
spasm, I drew shallow breaths but could still taste grit and ash on my tongue
and teeth.

Every second,
it was getting hotter, and moments later I was dry as desert bone.  The
instant a bead of sweat would burst to the surface of my skin, the blistering
air would lap it up.

Four
hundred feet up maybe, and I wasn’t yet slowing.  

I yanked
down, both hands on the steering handles; braking as much as I could and I
started to pitch forward slightly.  Looking down, I could see black
pustules and lesions mar the surface of the lava flow, now a fat, bubbling vein
below me.

Panic
gripped my heart, but the muscle just pounded between its fingers.  Adrenaline
was rippling through my arms, my legs, and now the glow of the river of fire
stained the insteps of my shoes.

Despite my
commitment, I felt for the first time in my life that I was about to die.

“Oh my
God,” I croaked, my mouth covered with a thick paste, and this was what I
feared.  That I had to rely on myself to get it right, rely on working it out
and I’d fuck it up and be wrong, wrong,
wrong
!

All-in now,
no choice, I fought the urge to yank hard and steer away.  On either side
of the lava flow— just beneath the giant fields of black scab-- was a sight
that stole my breath: white-hot embers waited just below the dark surface.

If I were
going to live, even for a few seconds longer, I had to find the hottest air I
could.

About two
hundred feet to go, hotter by degrees every inch of the way, my parachute was
now center-line above the boiling river.  If this were my last ride, I had
indeed
just turned down the highway to hell.

The bottoms
of my legs were on fire, burning, I knew it, but this was how it was going to
be to the end.  My skin felt like it was bubbling and blistering inside my
jeans.  My stomach churned, empty, and the acid within it felt as though it had
begun to boil.   

Had to hold
on, had to keep it slow, so I lifted myself up toward the parachute with both
hands yanking on the straps like the
fattest
Olympic athlete to ever
take on the rings.

One hundred
and fifty feet, I sped up—racing now.  Racing!