Aware Read online

  The Side Ways:

  Aware

  ANDY HAVENS

  Copyright © 2017 Andy Havens

  All rights reserved.

  For Neil Singer,

  because so few good friends

  last this long.

  With thanks to the GURPS crew:

  when I had no stories, you brought me into yours.

  “The animal is never wrong.”

  ~ Ed King

  Chapter 1. Excursion

  Chapter 2. Discussion

  Chapter 3. Bargain

  Chapter 4. Observation

  Chapter 5. Intersection

  Chapter 6. Confrontation

  Chapter 7. Consideration

  Chapter 8. Consummation

  Chapter 9. Association

  Chapter 10: Vision

  Chapter X: Visions

  Chapter 1. Excursion

  "Thomas Brownfield Edgington."

  "Yes."

  "Thomas Brownfield Edgington."

  "Yes. Yes. That's right."

  It was a good day. Tom was sitting in a pleasant spot. It was warm. It was light. It was dry. He'd had a meal relatively recently. He could remember his name.

  "Tom, Tom, Tom. Brown, Brown, Brown. Field, Field, Field, Edge, Edge, Edge."

  When he repeated his name it made him feel better. It made him feel like there was something he knew for sure. Something that was his decision. Something he could take complete credit for and that, if you disagreed with him, you were the idiot.

  Brownfield, he remembered his dad saying, was my father's mother's maiden name. It's a proud name back in the part of England she came from. Her people were smart, feisty folks. One of them, it's said, had a hand in the invention of the first steam pump used in the mines of Wales.

  He didn't know any stories about the name Edgington. Or if he did, he didn't remember them.

  He liked the idea of steam pumps for some reason. He remembered something about science. Physics. Heating gas.

  "A mole," he said out loud.

  "I have a mole," the man sharing his picnic bench in the park said.

  Tom nodded. The other man, whose name he didn't know, was also "a wanderer." That's how Tom thought of himself. He knew the other words: hobo, bum, drifter, homeless. For a life so very different from most people's, those words seemed... trite. Judgmental. Tom had lived a very long time as a wanderer. Words like hobo and bum didn’t begin to touch what he had seen, learned, forgotten, dreamed.

  "Not that kind of mole," he said softly.

  The other man hadn't told him his name. But Tom thought of him as "Uncle Joe," because the couple of times he'd seen him around, he'd always had a cup of coffee in his hand. Just like now.

  Tom had names like that for the other wanderers he saw from time to time. Miss Pinky Ring. Laundry Ma'am. The Boxing Brothers. Penny Auntie. He didn't say these names to their faces, of course. That would be rude. He didn't want to be rude. But you have to keep track of things in your head. Over the years, many names, many stories. But when you’re polite, sometimes people give you some food or better shoes or a place to sleep.

  Uncle Joe was wearing an ancient yet surprisingly clean sports coat over a brown t-shirt and reasonably well kept jeans. He was older than Tom. Maybe forty-five or fifty to Tom's twenty-six. He still had great hair, Uncle Joe did. It was wavy and dark and fell over one eye in, what seemed to Tom, a rakish, casual swoop. That curl of hair seemed artfully and consciously arranged to emphasize his bright blue eyes. Joe had one, tiny earring in his left ear, a United States flag pin on his right lapel, a pale scar above his left eyebrow and a pulsing string of multicolored, flashing lights spiraling up out of the top of his head. A rainbow of color, like a halo that had been split open by a prism and sucked into the drain of the sky.

  The last didn't trouble Tom, because everyone had a similar string of shining lights coming out of them. They reminded him of the lines on sheet music, but wavy. Parallel lines with lots of marks on them. Dots and wiggles and stripes. Like music. Lines and symbols, lines and dots.

  Like sheet music, Tom didn't really know how to read these lines and dots. Sometimes he'd notice similarities between them. Sometimes not. Once he noticed them, though, they were consistent, as far as he could tell. That is, if you had mostly red and orange lines with green splotches and blue tick-marks on Monday, it would be the same on Tuesday.

  They were pretty. The swirls and dots rose up out of people's heads along wavy lines and up into the sky. They stretched out, becoming thinner and finer, finally disappearing into ceilings or clouds or whatever was up there. In a crowd, if Tom looked up, it seemed like an entire jungle of spidery rainbows. Rivers of color and light moving softly up, up and away.

  Once, he’d remembered a documentary he’d seen – long ago, long long ago, long ago – about the Sargasso Sea. A scene of sunlight coming down through water, the wavy fronds of green vines or algae or whatever those things were. A bit like that, but with a disco feel, he’d thought.

  "Yours are mostly light blue," he said to Uncle Joe.

  "My moles?" Joe was drinking coffee and not paying much attention.

  Tom chuckled. "Nope. No. Nope. Your lights.”

  “All right then,” Joe replied, nodding sagely.

  The day grew warmer as they sat and Tom softly described people’s lights as they walked by.

  "Green like money, with gray spots. Silver and yellow. Ooh, that's pretty. Don't see that much. Two shades of tan. Subtle. I like that."

  As one older man in a nice suit walked by, Tom said, "Red and red and shades of red. A little black. But lots of deep reds. Kind of striking, actually. Red on red."

  The man stopped and turned back and Tom was immediately sorry he'd spoken out loud. Having Uncle Joe for an audience, even an inattentive one, had made him careless. People didn't like to hear about their colors. They didn’t like to hear anything from wanderers. They just wanted to live their own lives. Which was OK. Since that's pretty much what Tom wanted, too. There had been entire months and seasons when he didn’t speak directly to anyone. Because mostly when people paid attention to him, it was bad.

  Now he'd gone and said stuff out loud about the lines. And now this guy is going to give me grief. That had been a favorite saying of his dad's. Don't give your mother any grief.

  Tom’s life, for almost five years, had been a quest to avoid grief.

  This other fellow, with the red-on-red lights, was quite a bit older than Tom or Joe. Maybe in his seventies. Maybe eighties! White hair, gone thin on top. Caucasian skin with all the marks and blemishes that age and sun leave. His suit was very nice. A deep, dark blue that was almost black.

  "Darker than navy," Tom said out loud.

  "I'm sorry, what?" said the old man as he crouched down next to the picnic bench.

  "Your suit. Darker than navy. I don't know what that color is called. But I can see it."

  If I can make him think I was talking about colors of clothes, maybe...

  "The suit isn't important, son," said the white-haired man. "You said something about 'shades of red and black.' Why did you say that?"

  Tom looked uncomfortable. He'd tried looking fierce once when approached like this. He'd tried to scare off the person who was curious. But he wasn't a very big man and didn't really feel fierce, and you can't pretend to be fierce, really, if you just don't know how. That hadn't ended well.

  The old man put one hand on Tom's shoulder and said quietly, "It's OK son. I'm just interested in what you see. I'm not angry."

  Tom looked the old man in his eyes and saw that he wore a pair of spectacles. Tom thought they were very nice. They sparkled. More than they should. Almost as if they were trying to be shinier than normal.

  Behind the pretty, sparkling lenses he saw… kindne
ss. And concern. Maybe even a little friendliness. And something… more. Something deeper than simple observation. Just a nice old guy, maybe. Maybe not. Maybe more. But there was a connection there. And Tom hadn't talked to a really nice person in long, long time. So, OK.

  Taking a deep breath he said, "The lights coming out of you are mostly red. Five shades. And they blend. They're fuzzy. That's pretty unusual. And where there's black, it's like... threads. It's a very pretty pattern. Almost like a tartan. And I haven't seen many like it. That's all. I'm sorry to bother you."

  Tom looked down at his feet and hoped this nice old man would take that as his cue to go. Usually people did. After you asked for money or directions or help with one of those child-proof caps that was too hard to open on your own. Look down, conversation over.

  But he could tell that the nice old man -- Tom gave him the name Captain White -- was still standing there.

  After a moment of uncomfortable silence, Captain White spoke. "Are you lost?"

  "I don't think so," answered Tom, still looking at his feet.

  "Are you from Sight, son?" he asked.

  What Tom heard was, Are you frightened?, though. So he just shook his head.

  The old man stood and Tom looked up to see if he was finally going to leave, but he wasn't. Instead, Captain White raised his arm and began to turn his hand back and forth, as if he was doing a weird salute or a dance that was just about your arm. Tom felt something pull at his eyes, compelling him to watch more carefully. The old man’s hand made swooping motions… like when you put your hand outside the car window and the wind pushes it up and down, he thought. I did that with my dad on a trip to…

  But he was distracted by Captain White. After a few minutes of the “hand dance,” he put up his other hand and placed both of them into the stream of colors coming off of his own head.

  And the colors changed!

  Tom stood up. He’d never seen that happen before. The colors were different! The red had become lighter, orange and pink, and the black lines were more pronounced. Like lines of ink rather than pencil sketches.

  "Did you see that?" Captain White asked, and Tom nodded.

  The old man moved his hand over Uncle Joe's head, then. Joe was looking the other way so he didn't notice. But Tom saw the colors over his head gradually change, too, over the course of a few seconds. The complex mix of orange and green and white that was unique to Joe pulsed a bit brighter, shifted up and down the spectrum.

  "And that?"

  Tom nodded again, and Captain White nodded back. He put his hands down, stopping the dance, returning his colors and Joe’s to normal. He took Tom’s hands in his own and said quietly, "I'm not sure what's ailing you, son. But we'll get you back to the House and have our people..."

  Captain White was interrupted by two joggers who came chugging around the corner of the path, nearly tripping over the old man as they tried to pass him at the same time.

  Both joggers, Tom saw, had similar silver and yellow colored lines tracing upwards from their heads and into the sky. They wore similar running outfits, too. New, white sneakers. Baggy sweatshirts and sweatpants. Which was a little odd, since it was pretty warm.

  The old man turned to apologize for blocking the path as one of the joggers bumped into him. The two running men stopped for a moment, catching their breath and offering their own muttered apologies.

  "Sorry about that, pops."

  "No, no. My fault. Don't worry about it."

  The one on the far side of the path was bent over, hands on knees, breathing hard. Seeing that there was no real problem, Captain White turned back to Tom and began to speak, saying, "I know a fellow we should go see. I think you may have..."

  But he was interrupted by the jogger who'd been closest to him reaching around his neck and clamping a hand over his mouth. The other one, who'd been bent over, stood up and took a gun out of his sweatpants pocket and placed it against Captain White's side, underneath the elbow of the older man.

  Tom couldn't see the gun, but he heard three small, muffled, "thumps," and saw the look on Captain White's eyes as the bullets went in. Surprise. Anger. Shock. Fear. The stream of red lights coming out of his head pulsed very strongly three times, so bright that it almost hurt his eyes to see. Then the lights sputtered... faded... and were gone.

  The jogger with the hand around Captain White's mouth grabbed him under the arms, lifted him easily, and let him slide slowly to the picnic bench next to Tom, propping him up a bit to make it look like he was sitting and having a nap on his arm.

  The other jogger, the man with the gun, asked simply, "The other one?"

  Still arranging Captain White's head on his arms, the second jogger shrugged and answered, "I think so, yes. Just to be safe. I wouldn’t want to explain it if we didn’t and anything came of it."

  Uncle Joe had turned around at this point, clearly confused by the situation. But he, like Tom, was often a bit confused by life. He didn't look alarmed, even, when the jogger with the gun walked behind him. Instead, he took off his cap, scratched his head, and looked at Tom as if to ask, What's going on?

  Tom didn't know. He was alarmed. Scared even. Though confused, he was pretty sure these guys had just killed Captain White. He opened up his mouth to say something, but the man arranging Captain White made the, "Shhhh," please be quiet sound to him, one finger up to his lips, and so he stayed silent.

  The jogger with the gun stepped all the way behind Joe and calmly shot him in the back of the head. Joe flopped forward, twitching, and the man put the cap back on his head where it absorbed a small but growing pool of blood, turning the dark blue cloth slightly darker. Joe’s lights faded and went out, too.

  The man next to Tom said, "You're Thomas Brownfield Edgington."

  Tom nodded. I'm about to die, he thought. But even facing that prospect, the repetition of his full name calmed him quite a bit.

  "Say it for me, please," the man asked in a very polite, reasonable voice.

  "I... I'm... I'm Tom. Thomas. Thomas Brownfield Edgington," Tom said. That feels better, he thought.

  The man smiled in a very friendly way and patted Tom on the arm. "We're here to take you home, Tom."

  Tom wasn't sure what home he meant. The home he'd shared with his dad and sister for a few years before... before something happened. The apartment he'd lived in for a time as a young man. He seemed to remember that he'd written something scientific. Something about chemicals, he thought. He didn't remember that home well. Just flashes of a small, yellow kitchen and bills piled up on a folding table.

  "Home?" he asked, as the two men took him by the arms and began to lead him down the park path.

  "Yes," said the one who'd had the gun. But he’d put it away, and that helped.

  "Back to the Farm," said the other one.

  Ah! thought Tom. That home! The Farm! Yes...

  "I like the Farm," he said, smiling quietly. The Farm had been his most recent home. The one he’d left. It had been nice, very nice, and then it stopped being nice. He didn’t remember why. Just that, one night, he’d woken up, very scared and angry and had gone for a walk. A long, long walk.

  "I had forgotten about the Farm. But I liked it, until it scared me. They have lots of space there and I can go and sit by the stream."

  "This is a different Farm,” said the one with the now pocketed gun. They were walking briskly, but not too fast, looking like a trio of friends who were maybe late for lunch. “But it has a pond.”

  Tom nodded. “I like ponds, too. The water is nice.”

  “Water is nice, yes,” said one of the men. Tom really couldn’t tell them apart.

  "The Farm had a brown field," said Tom. "That makes me laugh sometimes."

  "I can see how it would," said one of the men. They were very similar. One of them, he thought, had a gun. Or something. Maybe a phone. It was in his pocket. But it wasn't important. The Farm was important. It was home.

  The field is brown in winter. Maybe I should change
my name to Thomas Greenfield Edgington in summer, Tom thought. That made him smile.

  They reached the street and the three of them got into a gray minivan. Something that any family of four-to-six might use to go to soccer games or band practice.

  Tom got into one of the middle row captain’s chairs, leaned against the large window and looked out at the city. So many lines of color, moving up and into the sky. They blended into something that looked like a giant tapestry, weaving itself in and out above the cars and shops and trees.

  "There's no pattern," he said.

  The two men ignored him. One driving, one sitting next to Tom in the other second row captain’s chair.

  "I thought there was," he continued. Not even really sure if he was speaking out loud. Sometimes it was hard to tell.

  "It's pretty," he went on. "But it's just random. Just a mess."

  The driver nodded and replied, "I feel the same way."

  The other one, the one sitting next to Tom, put a hand on his arm and said, "It's a long drive, Tom. You walked a long way. Try to get some sleep."

  "OK," Tom said and curled up against the window. But he didn't sleep. Not at first. He just quietly watched all the colorful, pulsing lines that came out of cars and trucks and houses and gas stations and fast food restaurants. The walking ones and the driving ones. Somewhere, beyond a hill, he could tell there was a train because hundreds of them were moving along, all in the same direction in a kind of parade of color and light. That was nice. Everybody likes trains.

  Finally, though, the vibration of the van and the calm he felt about going back to the Farm got to him and he began to nod off.

  One of the men said, “This is the last one, right?”

  The other replied, “Yes, thank god. More than four years for this guy.”

  The first said, “Sight is harder. Less active. Fewer signs.”

  “Yeah, but still. Four years.”

  “It’s not like we weren’t busy with the others.”

  “True.”

  Then they were silent.