Spoonbenders

“Don’t try to think too hard,” his father says. “Whatever comes to mind.”

He tries to think of a number. “One to zero?” Buddy asks.

“Okay, good! Who’s playing, Buddy?”

“The Reds,” Buddy said. “And the Cubs. Cubs win.”

Dad sighs. “That’s the score of the game we were watching the other night,” Dad says. “Try to think of one that—” He stops himself. Mom is in the room now, looking at the two of them on the floor.

“What’s going on?” she asks.

“Nothing,” Teddy says. “Buddy’s showing me what he’s building.”

Buddy’s bolting a slab of steel to the basement wall when he remembers something. That memory—nothing but an image, a mental snapshot from the Zap Day—means that everything he’s done for several days will have to be redone. The three huge rectangles of steel he’s cut are now the wrong size, and will have to be trimmed or thrown out.

The original size of the rectangles came from his memory of the slabs covering the basement windows on Zap Day, and he’d cut them so that he could bolt them to the walls. But just now he’s remembered that the window was uncovered earlier in the day. Which means that the steel has to go up and down, like one of those grates that cover shop windows downtown. That’s way more complicated.

He wants to scream. But he doesn’t.

His curse, and blessing, is that his memory is full of holes. Everything that he does remember is a fact. Unalterable. The future, he learned when he was six years old, is no more mutable than the past. But there’s a loophole. If some future event seems awful, perhaps there’s something he does not recall that would change his understanding of what happened.

Say that he remembers a man in a bloodstained shirt. But does it have to be blood? Perhaps it’s only a terrible ketchup stain! Armed with this gap in his knowledge, it’s Buddy’s duty to fill a bowl with ketchup and throw it at the man. So what if he doesn’t remember throwing the ketchup? If he doesn’t remember not throwing the ketchup, then he is free to act.

His job is to make up stories. To suss out the best possible interpretation for the facts as he remembers them, and then guide events to a happy ending—or, failing that, the least tragic one.

But what if he fails to remember something important? What if throwing the ketchup so startles the man that he has a heart attack? The unknowns pile up around every remembered moment. If he acts, or doesn’t act, he may destroy everything. Each hole in his memory may be a deadly tiger pit or a sheltering foxhole.

When he does recall something new, it changes the meaning of what he (thought he) already knew. One stray image bubbling up into his consciousness adds a link to a chain, and seemingly unrelated events suddenly develop cause-and-effect relationships. He can rule out nothing. Everything may be important, everything may be connected to Zap Day. Worse, he is part of the equation. Every word he utters, every action he takes, may pervert the happy ending, or make it possible.

He once found a science book called Chaos that came very close to describing what it was like to work and live under these conditions. He asked Frankie to read it, hoping his brother would understand more about Buddy’s condition, but Frankie thought that Buddy wanted it explained to him. Frankie didn’t comprehend the ramifications of chaos theory, and so didn’t understand the question that haunted Buddy: How could anyone take meaningful action, when the results of that action could spin out of control and cause irreparable harm?

The World’s Most Powerful Psychic, however, cannot afford to lose hope. Yes, his memories are incomplete, a terrible foundation to build upon. Yes, his only blueprints are made of fog. But when he was awarded his medal, there was no guarantee that the job would be easy. So what if he has to move the metal sheet? So what if he has to move it again tomorrow? He has to make do with the information available.

He begins loosening the top lag bolts, regretting now that he made them so tight, then regretting his regret. That’s a death spiral if there ever was one. Just keep your mind on your job, he thinks. Both jobs: the one in front of him, and his larger responsibility to the family. But there’s so much he hasn’t done, and now there’s so little time. He always thought he’d go back to Alton. He’d walk into the hotel lobby and she’d be sitting at the bar like the first time he saw her, reading a magazine, legs crossed, one high-heeled shoe dangling from her foot, jiggling like bait on a line. She’d look up at him and smile, and say, “About time you got here.”

He yanks the bolt from the wood with a squeal. Mad at himself. He knows the difference between fantasy and memory. He knows this will never happen. September 4 is coming, and he’s never going to see his true love again.

Buddy is twenty-three years old when he tells Frankie that they need to visit a riverboat.

“You fucker,” Frankie says.

“What?” He didn’t foresee this reaction.