11

 

THE DOORKNOB TWISTED WITH a whine. Krane dragged his feet into the apartment. Defeat was a prisoner inside his wrinkled, sleep-starved eyes. Cracking his back, he let out a long sigh, and with it, pent-up frustration. The amount of damage incurred back in his underground city was a weight he wasn’t prepared to carry. Not when he was so close to weeding out the imperfections.

The last few hours hadn’t gone as he’d hoped or planned. But plans often changed. After all, besides testing a girl who didn’t appear to show any signs of manifesting genuine power, he had the privilege of working with a subject whose body and mind were in constant flux, unstable and uncertain. Like the future. Like the dreams he and Morpheus fought hard to steal. 

Was he stupid to think there was even a point to it all? The troubling idea toyed with him too often, and each time, he remembered his mother’s words, words he believed were buried with the past. “Do something miraculous with your life, Emanuel. Help people. Change the world.” Well, the world would be changed because of his work.

Hope I made you proud, Ma.

 

Krane rubbed the tension from his body by massaging his temples. It felt as though a stampede were crashing through his skull. He set his briefcase down on one of his ripped sofas and stumbled into the kitchen.

Cluttered countertops and unwashed dishes welcomed him. No wife to kiss, no child to scorn for homework she didn’t have done. Just home, sweet home. Little ever changed in this apartment. The off-center picture frames hadn’t been moved in nearly four years and were now weighed down by dust. Newspaper clippings and magazine articles were pasted and stuck to the wall at the center of the kitchen so he could easily scan the contents and judge the progress made. Words and pictures ran along the dull-colored Sheetrock, pieced together by sloppy glue and thumbtacks. His research. His life. Their lives.

The filth had never really bothered him, not in all these years. In fact, he wouldn’t know what to do with himself if these rooms were clean. Odd how much of a hypocrite he could be, so quick to notice another’s imperfection, perhaps quicker to notice his own, but unwilling to change.

A bottle of ibuprofen spilled out into his palm the moment he opened the cabinet door. He must’ve forgotten to cap it the last time a migraine fought to split his brain. He spent the next four and a half minutes reorganizing the shelf full of prescriptions before giving up completely when he realized it would never be as he wanted things.

He walked over to the sink, flipped up the faucet handle, and cradled a handful of water, drawing it to his mouth. It tasted like copper. He swallowed the pills and reached into the freezer to pull out a frozen dinner—Salisbury steak and mashed potatoes. With a sigh, he tore the package. After popping open the microwave, he tossed the frozen entrée onto the wheel and nuked it.

The microwave finally beeped moments later, not enough time to allow him to escape his thoughts, the ones still stuck in the obscurity of the lab. After forcing himself back to the reality he was in, Krane grabbed the platter without using a glove. He quickly jerked back with a curse. The pain made him think of the arson, probably afraid now yet unable to burn, even if the sick desire lingered to do so.

He imagined controlling that kind of power. Such power was beautiful.

Krane licked the burn already beginning to blister the tips of his fingers then found a fork amidst the dirty items in the sink and used it to eat. The clock on the microwave glowed yellow. He didn’t bother to register what time it was. He was too busy thinking on what he’d say when Hoven came to prod for an explanation for the loss of visual data.

He just needed the arson to keep dreaming. Whatever mysteries roamed inside the fire-breathing teenager turned him hostile, made him react. Reacting, as long as it could be controlled, was a good thing. Losing expensive equipment wasn’t.

Krane shuffled over to a sofa that was falling apart in the corner of his small, unimaginative living room. Balls of years-old cat hair, magazines, and papers with statistics littered the carpet. With the remote, he turned on the television, an outdated unit with a big back end. He proceeded to surf the static channels, eventually settling on a Travel Channel special. Some re-run of a magician’s journey to prove he possessed true magic. His name was easily forgettable once he performed the first trick, but it was at this point that Krane became intrigued. He leaned up in his chair, pushing around the bad flavor of the Salisbury steak and soupy potatoes in his mouth, and focused on the screen as the magician began to levitate. Or so he was expected to believe. But he knew a scam when he saw one. The crowd, unlike him, was in awe; some were terrified. Even the camera man leapt back momentarily, perhaps not expecting such a stunt. “It’s just television,” Krane mocked. But was that all it was? A cheap stunt created for a gullible audience?

The next scene shifted to the magician in the middle of a downtown city square. Probably Chicago. Again, a crowd had gathered to hear him speak his slow, soft words, almost hypnotic. He began guessing their thoughts, and the people were amazed, like the crowd before. Next, he gave a homeless man a gold coin then allowed him to scratch a lottery ticket, said to be worth a fortune. As predicted, the beggar won several thousand dollars with the ticket and the coin.

Krane grunted. These were such trivial things. Hocus-pocus nonsense. As a man of science, he couldn’t be perplexed, just frustrated at how easily people believed in such dull magic. It was nothing more than a trick, a distraction or the proper lighting. “Bring someone back to life. Heal an infant. F-feed a th-th-thousand men.”

If a man could really do these things, without trickery, that man would become someone to be feared. Perhaps even one to be set on high, if he possessed the proper genes to rule. Why, then, was this vagabond hungry for an audience? He wasn’t a god. He wasn’t something to be feared. Why was he walking street corners and doing signs and wonders that undoubtedly could be manipulated or reenacted for an unintelligent target market?

“Nothing but ch-cheap-cheap tricks,” Krane concluded, shutting off the television.