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“Right there in the office?”
That did sound pretty unlikely, but there’s no backing down now. “I managed to doze a little. They were just trying to get some basic results. A baseline, he said.”
“Hu-uh,” Grandad says, and gets up to clear the dishes. “That must be why you were so late.”
I pick up my plate and walk to the sink, saying nothing.
Later that night, when I’m covered with dust but most of the upstairs is clean, we watch Band of the Banned. On it, curse workers who belong to a secret FBI team use their powers to stop other workers, mostly drug dealers and serial killers.
“You want to know how to tell if someone’s a worker?” Grandad asks with a grunt. He’s saved the chair I hate and is sitting in it, his face lit with blue from the screen. The hero of the show, MacEldern, has just kicked down a door while an emotion worker makes the bad guys weep with remorse and begin a rambling confession. It’s pretty lame, but Grandad won’t let me change the station.
I look at the blackened stumps of my grandfather’s fingers. “How?”
“He’s the only one gonna deny he’s got powers. Everyone else thinks they got something. They got some story about the one time they wished for a bad thing to happen to someone and it did, or wished for some moron to love them and got loved. Like every goddamn coincidence in the world is a working.”
“Maybe they do have a little power,” I say. “Maybe everyone does.”
Grandad snorts. “Don’t go believing that crap. You might not be a worker, but you come from a proud worker family. You’re too smart to sound like—wasshisname—who said that if kids took enough LSD, they’d unlock their powers.”
One in a thousand people is a worker, and of all of them, 60 percent are luck workers. People just want to game the odds. Grandad should understand that.
“Timothy Leary,” I say.
“Yeah, well, see how that turned out. All those kids trying to give each other the touch, winding up half out of their heads, imagining they’d worked and been worked, imagining they were dying from blowback, clawing each other apart. The sixties and seventies were stupid decades, full of misinformation and crazy rock stars trying to be prophets, pretending to be workers. You know how many workers were hired just to do the work Fabulous Freddie said he did alone?”
There’s no point in trying to distract Grandad from his rants once he’s gotten started. He loves them way too much to bother realizing I’ve heard them about a million times before. The best I can hope for is to push him toward some new rant. “You ever get hired by one of them? You would have been, what, twenty-, thirtysomething back then?”
“I did what old man Zacharov said, didn’t I? No freelancing. Know some people who did, though.” He laughs. “Like a guy who toured with Black Hole Band. Physical worker. Really good. Someone pissed off the band, that someone’d be in traction.”
“I would have thought emotion work would be more popular.” Despite myself I’m drawn in. Usually when he delivers this speech, I feel like he’s giving it to the rest of the family and I’m just overhearing it. This time we’re alone. And I think of all the stuff I’ve seen photos of on the Internet or on VH1 specials from back then. Performers with goat heads, mermaids who danced in tanks until they drowned because the transformer hadn’t known what she was doing when she’d cursed them, people remade like cartoons with big heads and huge eyes. All turning out to be the work of a single transformation worker who died of an overdose in her hotel room, surrounded by worked animals that stood on two legs and spoke gibberish.
There aren’t any transformation workers for bands to hire to do any of that today, even if it was legal. There might be one in China, but no one’s heard about him for a long time.
“Well, no one can work a crowd. Too many people. There was this one kid who tried. He figured what the heck; he’d ride out the blowback. He’d let a whole crowd of people touch him, one after another, and make them feel euphoric. Like he was a drug.”
“So the blowback would be euphoric too, right? Where’s the harm in that?”
The white cat jumps onto the couch next to me and starts shredding the cushions with her claws.
“See, that’s the problem with kids—that’s how you all think. Like you’re immortal. Like all the stupid things you’re doing, no one ever thought of before. He went crazy. Sure, drooling, grinning, happy crazy, but crazy all the same. He’s the son of one of the bigwigs in the Brennan family, so at least they can afford to take care of him.”
Grandad goes off again on his rant about the dumbness of kids in general and worker kids in specific. I reach over to pet the cat and it quiets under my hand, not purring, just going still as stone.
* * *
Before I go to bed that night, I root through the medicine cabinet. I take two sleeping pills and fall asleep with the cat at my elbow.
I don’t dream.
* * *
Someone’s shaking me. “Hey, sleepyhead, get up.”
Grandad hands me a cup of too strong coffee, but this morning I’m grateful for it. My head feels like it’s packed with sand.
I reach for my pants and pull them on. My hands automatically tuck in the pockets, but halfway through the gesture I realize something’s missing. The amulet. Mom’s amulet. The one I tried to give Maura.
Remember.
