Spoonbenders

Matty felt embarrassed. “I mean, yeah, but…” He took a delaying sip from the mug. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether I’m imagining what I’m seeing, or I’m really seeing it.”

His uncle frowned, and Matty hurried to explain. “Like, I traveled last night, definitely traveled, but—”

“Holy shit! Where to? How far’d you go?”

“Uh, just around the house. But I was also kinda sleepy, so I was thinking, well, what if I just dreamed some of it?”

“You can’t think like that! There are always two explanations for what happens, the one that skeptical people fall back on, and the real one, the one you know in your heart. The doubters are going to say, Oh, you moved it with your foot, oh, you peeked at the cards, you imagined it. You can’t let them get to you. You have to believe in your talent, Matty, and then you go out there and…and…”

“Seize the day?”

Frankie looked stunned. “What did you say?” Then he roared with laughter. “What the fuck did you say?” Now Matty was laughing, too. Frankie wiped a tear from his eye. “You bastard. Just slip it in there like that! You got a hell of a poker face, kid!”

Matty was too embarrassed to correct him. And after all, he did astrally project last night. The fact that he tried to follow Malice was beside the point.

“I didn’t think you’d be ready for the next step so quickly,” Frankie said. “Do you need to get back home today?”

“Well, I should probably—”

“Because I think you need to stay another night.”

“Okay,” Matty said quickly.

“Finish your coffee,” Frankie said. “Then we move on to phase two.”

—

Phase two evidently involved visiting every pawnshop in the suburbs—for what, Frankie wouldn’t say. He’d leave Matty in the Bumblebee van, go inside the shop, and come out minutes later, annoyed that he hadn’t found what he was looking for. Then they were off again, across the unbroken sprawl of Chicagoland, a single city made up of interlocking strip malls, decorated at random intervals by WELCOME TO signs with defiantly rural names—River Forest, Forest Glen, Glenview—and enough dales and groves and elms and oaks to populate Middle Earth. The flatlanders had been especially determined to tag every bump of land with a “Heights” or “Ridge.” Pity the poor hobbit trying to find anything to climb in the town of Mount Prospect.

In the van, Uncle Frankie always talked to Matty as if he were an adult—or, more accurately, as if Frankie had forgotten he was a kid. It was during the trips to and from work that Matty learned about the phone business, city driving (“never signal on a lane change, it just warns them”), multilevel marketing, Greek mythology, and politics. Frankie delivered monologues on such topics as how Mayor Bilandic had lost the ’79 election not because he failed to clean up the snow after those storms, but because he looked like a wimp apologizing for it, while Jane Byrne was clearly the toughest, most unapologetic woman in Chicago. (“You know how sometimes it gets too cold to snow? That was Jane Byrne’s face.”)

There were some topics, however, that Matty would have been fine skipping. He could not unhear that Frankie’s first night with Aunt Loretta was “the craziest sex of my life. A whole ’nother level, like I’d been playing Little League and she was throwing ninety-mile-an-hour fastballs.” He couldn’t imagine what a fastball might mean in this metaphor.

The best was when Matty could get him to talk about what life had been like when Teddy Telemachus and His Amazing Family were on the road. But a lot of Frankie’s stories about their showbiz career were short on details, and those details started to repeat. That made some sense, since Frankie was a little kid at the time, but it was unsatisfying. Even more disappointing was Matty’s gradual realization that this glorious, colorful era, which loomed so large in his imagination, turned out, when he did the math, to have lasted less than a year.

Today, though, his uncle wanted to talk about Matty. He couldn’t stop brainstorming on the possibilities of Matty’s power, and describing the feats accomplished by Grandma Mo. His uncle was jittery with nervous energy, and seemed to grow more twitchy with each stop. “It’s not just about viewing things far away, Matty. It’s about being specific. It’s about focus. Like the telephone trick—did I ever tell you about the telephone trick?”

Frankie had, but Matty never tired of hearing about it. “It was usually the climax of the show, right? Mom would be backstage, and Dad would call up somebody from the audience, and tell them to write down details about their house, what was in their refrigerator, all kinds of shit. Put it all in envelopes. Then Mom would come out, sit down next to the person, and start talking. These people were amazed, Matty. She could tell them all about their lives, things only they would know. She didn’t even have to touch ’em!”

“What about the telephone?” Matty said, encouraging him.