He rubs a hand over his unshaven jaw, trying to focus. There’s so much he has to do if he’s going to save them. But what to do first?
Oh, right. Put on clothes.
He’s four years old and Maureen Telemachus is alive, so he’s not the World’s Most Powerful Psychic yet, just Buddy. He’s lying on his stomach in the living room, building a combination Tinkertoy/Lincoln Log trap for Frankie’s GI Joe. Joe is standing on a four-inch-high platform. Buddy pushes on a support log, and Joe falls over before the trapdoor opens. The action figure is so hard to balance.
“Are you even watching this?” Dad says, irritated. He’s only letting him stay up because Buddy pleaded to see the game. Dad’s stretched out in the recliner behind him, looking at the TV between his feet and over Buddy and his construction project. “Three up, three God damn down,” Dad says.
“Sorry,” Buddy says.
“Don’t be sorry,” Dad says. “You know why I’m raising you kids to be Cubs fans?”
Buddy shakes his head.
“Any mook can be a fan of a winning team,” Dad says. “It takes character to root for the doomed. You show up, you watch your boys take their swings, and you watch ’em go down in flames—every damn day. You think Jack Brickhouse is an optimist? No-siree. He may sound happy, but he’s dying inside. There’s no seat in Wrigley Field for a God damn Pollyanna. You root-root-root for the home team, and they lose anyway. It teaches you how the world works, kid. Sure, start every spring with your hopes and dreams, but in the universe in which we live, you will be mathematically eliminated by Labor Day. Count on it.”
Buddy tries to think of something to say to make his father feel better, but in that moment all he can remember is that the Cubs once beat the Braves, a team that Dad hates, by a huge score. “Eleven-zip,” Buddy says.
“Lie down,” Dad says. “You’re blocking the set.”
“A massacre,” Buddy says.
“Okay, how about this—run in the kitchen and get me a beer.”
Buddy hops up, runs into the kitchen, and there she is, the World’s Most Powerful Psychic. Alive. He can’t help but hug her legs in gratitude. Mom already has the can of Old Style open. “Here you go,” she says. “Keep the king happy. Then off to bed.”
Two nights later, Buddy’s construction project is a little more elaborate. There are Legos involved now, and some spare wood from the garage. GI Joe has been joined by one of Reenie’s Barbies. Dad squats down beside him. “Hey, Buddy. Whatcha working on?”
Buddy’s thrilled to explain. He shows him the first part of the trap, Joe and Barbie falling together into the box, and Dad lets him go on for a bit before he stops him and says, “That’s pretty great, kiddo. I need to ask you about something else, though.” Buddy sees he’s holding a newspaper. “Guess what the Cubs did today?”
Buddy has no idea.
“They beat the Atlanta Braves. Eleven to nothing. Eleven-zip.” Dad shows him the one-word newspaper headline. “Massacre.”
Buddy remembers this moment, seeing that long word on the page. He doesn’t know how to read that word, but he remembers knowing it, and that’s almost like reading it.
“You got it, Buddy.” His father is still squatting on the floor beside him. He never does this. “I want you to think real hard. Do you know any other baseball scores?”
Buddy nods excitedly. There’s nothing he wants more than to tell Dad all the things that will make him happy.
“So…” Dad says.
Buddy tries to remember some baseball scores, but nothing comes.
“Don’t try to think too hard,” his father says. “Whatever comes to mind.”
He tries to think of a number. “One to zero?” Buddy asks.
“Okay, good! Who’s playing, Buddy?”
“The Reds,” Buddy said. “And the Cubs. Cubs win.”
Dad sighs. “That’s the score of the game we were watching the other night,” Dad says. “Try to think of one that—” He stops himself. Mom is in the room now, looking at the two of them on the floor.
“What’s going on?” she asks.
“Nothing,” Teddy says. “Buddy’s showing me what he’s building.”
Buddy’s bolting a slab of steel to the basement wall when he remembers something. That memory—nothing but an image, a mental snapshot from the Zap Day—means that everything he’s done for several days will have to be redone. The three huge rectangles of steel he’s cut are now the wrong size, and will have to be trimmed or thrown out.
The original size of the rectangles came from his memory of the slabs covering the basement windows on Zap Day, and he’d cut them so that he could bolt them to the walls. But just now he’s remembered that the window was uncovered earlier in the day. Which means that the steel has to go up and down, like one of those grates that cover shop windows downtown. That’s way more complicated.
He wants to scream. But he doesn’t.
His curse, and blessing, is that his memory is full of holes. Everything that he does remember is a fact. Unalterable. The future, he learned when he was six years old, is no more mutable than the past. But there’s a loophole. If some future event seems awful, perhaps there’s something he does not recall that would change his understanding of what happened.
Say that he remembers a man in a bloodstained shirt. But does it have to be blood? Perhaps it’s only a terrible ketchup stain! Armed with this gap in his knowledge, it’s Buddy’s duty to fill a bowl with ketchup and throw it at the man. So what if he doesn’t remember throwing the ketchup? If he doesn’t remember not throwing the ketchup, then he is free to act.
His job is to make up stories. To suss out the best possible interpretation for the facts as he remembers them, and then guide events to a happy ending—or, failing that, the least tragic one.
But what if he fails to remember something important? What if throwing the ketchup so startles the man that he has a heart attack? The unknowns pile up around every remembered moment. If he acts, or doesn’t act, he may destroy everything. Each hole in his memory may be a deadly tiger pit or a sheltering foxhole.
When he does recall something new, it changes the meaning of what he (thought he) already knew. One stray image bubbling up into his consciousness adds a link to a chain, and seemingly unrelated events suddenly develop cause-and-effect relationships. He can rule out nothing. Everything may be important, everything may be connected to Zap Day. Worse, he is part of the equation. Every word he utters, every action he takes, may pervert the happy ending, or make it possible.
He once found a science book called Chaos that came very close to describing what it was like to work and live under these conditions. He asked Frankie to read it, hoping his brother would understand more about Buddy’s condition, but Frankie thought that Buddy wanted it explained to him. Frankie didn’t comprehend the ramifications of chaos theory, and so didn’t understand the question that haunted Buddy: How could anyone take meaningful action, when the results of that action could spin out of control and cause irreparable harm?
The World’s Most Powerful Psychic, however, cannot afford to lose hope. Yes, his memories are incomplete, a terrible foundation to build upon. Yes, his only blueprints are made of fog. But when he was awarded his medal, there was no guarantee that the job would be easy. So what if he has to move the metal sheet? So what if he has to move it again tomorrow? He has to make do with the information available.