This was all a matter of moral timing. When did the property of innocents transform into the corrupt holdings of criminals—as soon as it entered the safe? Maybe it was like the miracle of transubstantiation, but in reverse. An anti-Communion.
“Hello, Matty?” Frankie said. “You need anything else?”
“Oh. Let me think.” He examined his inventory: a Chicago-area map, spread on the floor, with big red arrows marking the way from Frankie’s house to Mitzi’s Tavern; two cans of Coke in a Styrofoam cooler; a spare pillow in a My Little Pony pillowcase.
“I’m good,” he said.
But was he?
“Almost ten o’clock,” Frankie said. “Better get crackin’. I’ll leave you to…whatever it is you do.”
Frankie closed the garage’s side door behind him. Matty reached into his back pocket for the baggie.
The door popped open. “Good luck,” Frankie said.
Matty stood very still.
Frankie started to say something else, seemed to think better of it, and closed the door again.
“Oh my God,” Matty said to himself. He waited five minutes before taking another look at the baggie. Finally he slipped out one of the three tidy joints that Malice had rolled for him (he never succeeded in rolling one himself) and flicked the Bic lighter she’d loaned him (“All part of the service,” she said).
Ready for liftoff, he thought. Ignition.
Liftoff did not occur. He sat on his baby-mattress launchpad for several minutes, inhaling and coughing, coughing and inhaling, and told himself everything would be fine if he stopped worrying. And he was right. At the same moment he noticed that he’d stopped worrying, he noticed that he was sitting beside himself.
“Hey, good-lookin’,” he said. His body giggled. The joint dangled between his fingers.
“Maybe you should put that down,” he said.
His body took one last toke, then placed the joint on the cement.
“I’ll be back in a bit,” he said. He drifted through the wall of the garage and hovered a few inches over the grass. He thought about looking in on Malice, but decided against it. That was one habit he needed to break. He couldn’t be a drug addict, a burglar, and a perv.
Flying, though, that was a pure good. He coasted over Uncle Frankie’s rooftop, and moved slowly up into the trees, then over the streets, gradually gaining altitude, until he could again make out the towers of the city, glittering in the distance. Acres of air hung below his feet, and he was only mildly disturbed by this.
He thought, Probably a good thing I’m high. (High. Heh.)
Moving took no effort at all; he was pulled along by the string of his own attention, reeled in by whatever caught his fancy. That brightly lit water tower next to I-294, painted like a rose. The jets, roaring toward O’Hare. Quick as a flash he was flying alongside the windows of a plane, inches from the face of a bored red-haired woman staring out.
Matty made wings of his arms. “I’m an astral plane,” he said. Far away, his body laughed; he could feel the echo of it.
“Focus, Matt,” he said. Where was Mitzi’s Tavern? He had no idea. And he couldn’t see the map of Chicago without zooming back to the garage, or reentering his body.
Speaking of which, where was his body?
Holy shit!
He spun in the air, panicked, lost in the night sky. Below, dots of light fenced dark rectangles of rooftops and yards. Which of those was Frankie’s house? The only time he’d gone this far from his body, he’d been sucked back into it by Malice slapping him around.
He began to fly at random, zooming close to street signs, trying to remember the map of Chicago. Why hadn’t he studied it more? Why hadn’t he arranged for Frankie to come wake him up?
His body was the anchor. He’d gotten this far from it by following whatever drew his attention. Maybe, then, he only had to pay attention to his body.
He tried to think about his arms, his chest. His throat. The tickle of smoke at the top of his lungs. He coughed—and felt his body move. The sound of the cough seemed to come from far away.
“Okay, Matty,” he said aloud. His voice came through more clearly, and he began to follow it back across the network of roads and houses. “Here we go.”
A minute later, he slipped through the roof of the garage. His body said, “Next time, maybe you should be less high.”
He didn’t make it all the way to Mitzi’s Tavern until ten days later. The biggest obstacle was finding a place and time to smoke. He couldn’t keep staying at Uncle Frankie’s house. Grandpa Teddy’s place, though, was crowded and chaotic. The basement was out of the question; Mom had made that her second home, camping out there when she wasn’t at work to talk to the Joshinator. Buddy could barge into any room at any time. And the garage was too risky; Grandpa Teddy had a door remote, and the thought of the door sliding up while he was passed out on the floor terrified him.
He eventually settled on a spot behind the garage, between two overgrown bushes. If he sat cross-legged, with his back to the garage wall, he was invisible unless someone walked up right in front of him. He thought of it as his nest. But the only time to slip into it was between the end of work with Frankie and the return of his mother from work.
At least it was easier to travel in the daytime. He memorized the route from Grandpa Teddy’s to Mitzi’s, and after a few trips he was able to get there in seconds, as long as he didn’t let his mind wander—literally. Anything could distract him: sirens and church bells; old ladies and young girls; animals, especially birds, which were amazing, and seemed to be everywhere he turned his attention, a nation of tiny, officious observers who could not only see Matty’s astral form, but hungrily track it.
That last bit of paranoid insight, he realized later, came courtesy of the marijuana. He was having trouble fine-tuning his cannabis intake. Too much and he never arrived at the tavern, too little and he barely had time to look around before his body snapped out of it.
And time was a problem. Barney the Bartender never went to the door alarms during the day. Finally Matty was able to get there early enough one morning to see him open up the bar and type the disarm code into the alarm console: 4-4-4-2.
Frankie was overjoyed. Then almost immediately he forgot the joy and started worrying about the safe. Days went by without Matty being able to give him the combination. “What’s the problem?” he asked one afternoon in the Bumblebee van. “It’s just three numbers.”
“Most of the time I’m there, she never gets up from the desk,” Matty said. “I’ve only seen her open the safe twice—and the first time she hunched over it, so close I couldn’t see the numbers. Practically on top of it. And the next time she went for the safe, I tried to zoom in, but I overdid it. I went straight through the wall, and then—whoosh.”
“Whoosh? What’s whoosh?”
Matty felt his face grow hot. “I ended up…away. Like, really far away.”
“Like what, Glenbard?”
“Over the water. Lake Michigan.”
“What the fuck!” Frankie had said that too loud, and lowered his voice. “What the fuck?”
“I know! It kinda freaked me out. I panicked. Luckily, the—” He was about to say that the pot wore off, and squelched that. “I came to, and I was back at home.”
“Okay, okay, this is good news,” Frankie said. “You’re getting stronger. You just need control. It’s a classic Telemachus problem. Too much power.”