Transfer

© 1998 J. L. Compton
All rights reserved.

"You want me to pose for you?" Beatrice asked, surprised. "You hardly ever draw from life."

She was right. From his first art classes in school, Kit had amazed teachers with his ability to draw true just from his mind's eye, even as his classmates struggled to correctly render the objects set up at the front of the room.

She was awaiting further instructions. He paused to think.

"Cross-legged, please," he requested.

When she sat with her back to the window, shadows immediately filled the many hollows on her frame. His twin sister was tall and thin, as was he.

She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and fixed him with a starlet's smoky gaze.

"I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille," she cooed.

Beatrice made a lot of jokes, and he liked her teasing, but never tried to match her speedy wit. Instead he said, "When you talk that way your face gets a smart-alecky look. Think about—" he rummaged gently in her mind. "Try to pose like you would if Jerry Tarica were drawing you in art class."

She almost flushed.

"Nothing's going to happen between Jerry and me," she said matter-of-factly. "That's why I never said anything about him." But she didn't mind that he'd brought it up. She knew he hadn't done it to embarrass her, just as he had known that she wouldn't squeal or fuss about it.

That was how well they knew each other. They had been born thirteen minutes apart. "The loneliest thirteen minutes of my life," she'd wail sometimes in exaggerated self-pity, when she wanted to flatter him.

"You never know," he said, referring to Jerry. He said it partly to make her happy, partly to preserve the expression on her face. It was uncharacteristic: wistful and dreamy. His pencil raced across the paper. He always started broadly, capturing the entire context before detailing.

Perhaps fifteen minutes had passed when she unexpectedly said, "Have you got enough to go on if I take off?"

"Where do you need to go now, for crying out loud?"

"The natural foods store closes at six," she said. "I want to get that really good root beer they don't sell in the supermarket."

Their parents were both at work. Kit was a loner by nature; Beatrice could not be expected to realize that, for some reason, he disliked the idea of being alone today.

"We'll finish later."

"You could probably finish from memory. Visualization, whatever."

He was silent. Beatrice came over to give him an unaccustomed kiss on the cheek, then she was gone, down the stairs.

When she was gone, he set his pencil down. He wanted to draw her explicitly from life, no cheating. She was correct; he usually drew directly from his mind's eye, but for the past few days he'd had no luck at that.

Kit went downstairs to do his chores. His parents supplemented their income by boarding horses; their daily care fell to him. Beatrice didn't share the work. Her studies were paramount. She would be applying to universities early next year.

His parents were just being pragmatic. Kit brought home mostly C's on his report card, and sometimes D's. No one pretended that he would be going to college.

He didn't resent his chores. He kind of liked the trips to the feed store, the sweet smell of grain and alfalfa, the murky equine perceptions he got from the horses. In fact, he liked it enough that he had converted the little-used storage room above the stable into his studio, washing years' worth of dirt and spiderwebs off the window and painting the walls. The color was a deep orange, but he'd mixed it specially to get a watery gouache effect.

He was scooping grain into a pail when tires crunched on gravel outside. It wasn't Beatrice returning; Chico, their shepherd mix, was barking steadily, the alarm he sounded when unfamiliar cars drove up. Then, abruptly, he stopped. Perhaps it was someone the dog recognized, a family friend.

Kit went back up the stairs to his studio, not sure he felt like making conversation with a friend of his parents. From the high window, he would be able to see who was parked outside the house.

But nobody was in front of house. Instead, close to the stable was a van Kit had never seen before. Nonetheless, it was instantly familiar.

He'd drawn it several days ago, racing along a highway. In fact, he had depicted it at the place where U.S. 395 crossed the main road outside of town. Strange how he hadn't realized that until now.

Strange how suddenly Chico had fallen silent.

Casting a quick glance around the room, he grabbed a utility knife, sliding the short, asymmetrical blade out. Then he nearly ran to the top of the stairs.

"Put that away," the stranger said indulgently from halfway up the stairs. "We won't be using it."

Kit's practiced eye took it all in. The stranger was perhaps five-foot-nine, lean, olive-skinned, with shoulder-length black hair and dark, glinting eyes. He wore the clothes of a long road trip: a leather jacket, boots. He had a narrow, somewhat weathered face, the lines around his eyes deep, yet Kit thought he wasn't yet out of his thirties. He carried no visible weapon.

Kit was about to say, Don't come any further, but he realized that what he was feeling was not sharp terror but hopeless grief. He set the knife down.

"It's too soon," he said, appealing. "I was going to be an artist; I wanted my folks—" he broke off.

"You wanted your folks to see you become a great artist," the stranger said. "Because they have never thought of your talent as worthwhile."

He nodded.

"You were never going to be a great talent. The greats all had a kind of genius. A vision. Your gift is entirely linked to your sight. You would only have gained notoriety as a psychic. You didn't know that?"

Kit didn't answer.

"Come here. I'll show you."

The stranger dug into a stack of sketches from several years back. He hadn't needed to be shown where Kit kept them. He held up one of a lovely young woman, perhaps nineteen. The angle was almost directly upward; her hair slid down sharply on each side of her rapt, tender face.

"This is your mother as she looked to you when you were four days old.

"And these, this unexceptional landscape you kept drawing? It's the field in Korea where your great uncle Bill died." He shuffled, looking for something else. He stopped at a series of dark, chaotic pictures.

"These are mostly symbolic. They're from your seventh-grade teacher; her name escapes me. She was raped. It was very much on her mind.

"Your past, other people's pasts, their thoughts, even sometimes their futures," the stranger went on. "You sort of knew what the pictures were. Otherwise you wouldn't have kept so many of them secret. You knew they'd upset people." His dark eyes met Kit's.

It was true. Only Beatrice knew about his sight, because it had been a part of their lives since before he had known enough to keep it secret, or she to be surprised at it. In her world, the grass was green, the rain was wet, and her brother could look into people's minds. No big deal.

"Part of you wanted to show them. You were the quiet one, not much to say in groups, not on any of the teams, lousy grades. Always going straight home to feed and exercise the horses and clean their stalls. You wanted to be special; that's only natural." He straightened up and found a recent stack.

"Now we get to it: your future." His tone was mild and assessing, like an art critic. "You did me way too tall, but that's a natural fear reaction." There were three of those, and the one of the highway.

"I knew you saw me coming. That's why I blocked you after a day or so. I didn't want you to panic and bolt. And it was kind of an anesthetic for you. I really don't intend to hurt you."

Kit said nothing.

"This one is me, too, did you know that?" It was a wolf in a pasture, devouring a lamb. "Can I keep it?"

"I guess you can keep any of them you want," Kit said, his voice leaden.

"I'd like for you to give it. I'm sorry. I really don't mean to cause you unnecessary pain."

The stranger set the picture down and stood up to face Kit.

"I don't want to die."

The stranger looked surprised.

"You're not going to die, Kit." He shook his head for emphasis. "I just need what you have."

Kit could no longer meet the man's eyes. He flinched when the stranger put a hand under his chin and tilted it upward. Forced into eye contact, Kit found he could not break away. His throat was likewise frozen.

"That's good," the stranger said. And then he struck, deep into a once-inviolate part of Kit's mind.

The stranger was thorough; he took it all. It was like wrenching a young tree from the ground and taking roots and chunks of soil with it.

He took Kit's gift, and with it he took the coordination between eye and mind and hand; the muscle memory in Kit's fingers that allowed him to accurately draw objects he had never attempted before; even the patient pleasure in craft that had allowed him to wash the walls of this room in an attenuated color that reminded the stranger of Venice, a city that this youth had never seen.

As he did, he felt Kit's pain at being robbed of the one good thing he owned. The stranger almost regretted it. He had once had what this boy had, a sapling of psychic talent. And one morning, he had just woken up knowing how to build on it. Psychometrics, clairvoyants, remote viewers, telekinetics—he had visited many of them just as he was visiting Kit now. Justice, injustice—those concepts didn't enter into the equation. To him, remorse was like algebra: he thought it but he didn't feel it. He was the wolf in the clearing. It had surprised and pleased him how well Kit understood that. It was a metaphor that had never occurred to him until he saw the picture. That, too, was a part of Kit's talent.

The stranger released him and stepped back.

For a moment it was all the boy could do to bring the gross trembling in his limbs under control. The stranger had seen it before, in the others. He imagined it was like the waking realization of an accident victim with partial amnesia. He knew Kit was searching inside his mind for a sliver of his psyche that wasn't there anymore.

And then the boy did look up, looked at the stranger, and an expression of fury crossed his face, a expression of which he would not have been capable only moments earlier. Perhaps today, the stranger thought, he had created a violent man; a felon. Curious, he probed for a moment.

Then he knew. The gentleness in Kit hadn't been part of the sight or the talent. It was integral to his personality. The rage that Kit felt would not go away, but it would be directed inward, at himself.

He discovered something else: He found he wanted to sketch Kit. Not now. He wouldn't rub salt in the boy's wound. But later he would have to do two drawings. One of Kit with his sight, with the grief and dignity in his face; and later, the Kit of violated, inarticulate rage.

But now it was time to go. Kit's sister was standing in a parking lot, prying open a bottle of root beer with her Swiss Army knife. After that she would get in the truck and come home.

That reminded him. There was one point on which he could relieve Kit's mind.

"Your dog is fine," he said. "I think you'll find him under the porch. I just told him that I'd have him quit that barking, and quit it now, and that's where he went."

He picked up his drawing, the one of the wolf and lamb. He glanced at it again. It's who I am , he thought, and told Kit the rest of it.

"You shouldn't bother trying to sketch any more. It's all gone; you'll find that out. You're going to have difficulty concentrating on your studies from here on out, even more than usual, and you won't finish high school. You'll become a groom at the racetrack and will be an alcoholic before you can legally drink. At the age of 23, you're going to burn to death in a fire caused by a lit cigarette while you're passed out drunk on your couch.

"I really am sorry."

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