Waking Up

"Follow me," he said.

"I can't," she said.

"I think you can," he said. "You just have to decide you can do it."

She groaned. "It's too early for this."

They were in her room at the Seaside Inn. He had brought bagels and cream cheese for breakfast, but that wasn't enough. When he first got there, she had a pulse but was non-responsive. It took several loud knocks before she opened the door, then she dove back under the covers and hid there. She refused to come out until he agreed to bring her coffee. Her part of the deal was that she was supposed to get up and get dressed while he was out fetching it.

Now she sat on the side of the bed, dressed and semi-conscious, nursing her espresso. Things were looking positive for an early departure until she put the cup down on the bed stand, fell down on the pillow and pulled the covers over her again.

"I thought we had a deal," said her father, sitting on the other bed.

"I lied," said Theo, eyes closed. "All I wanted was the coffee."

"Ah, but you already drank half of it. That will have an effect eventually."

"Nooooo!" she moaned, pretending to sleep.

"We've got places to go, things to do."

"Where are we supposed to go today?"

"I have some ideas, but you have to follow me."

She opened her eyes. "I didn't think I could do that."

"You don't know until you try. There are probably lots of things you can do that you don't know you can. You have to experiment to find out what's possible."

"I know you can follow me, but you have powers I don't have. You can see into the future. You can slow down time. All I can do is walk through walls. Stupid skill, really. I don't even get any frequent flyer miles for it."

"No skill is stupid if other people don't have it. Walking through walls gives you enormous power. If you use it right, you can change the world.

"I don't want to change the world. I just want to sleep."

"Sleep is important, but you've had plenty of time to do it. It has been over 24 hours since Paris."

"I had work to do. I had television to watch. I had to try to spend that drug money you gave me. Do you know how hard it is to spend money when you know you can't take anything with you?"

He laughed. "Yeah, that's a problem. You can buy a nice dinner or a new set of clothes. You can buy services and information. Otherwise, there's not much you can do with money. Anything solid you buy is just going to hold you down."

"I gave money to a homeless guy, down on the boardwalk. He reminded me of you."

"And what did you accomplish by that?"

"It made me feel good. I gave him a hundred dollar bill. You should have seen the look on his face!"

Her father feigned shock. "Wow! That's a lot of money! What do you suppose he'll do with it?"

"He's going to use it as seed money to start a new life. That's what he told me."

"Ah, yes, that's one possibility. Another possibility, dear Theo, is that he's just going to buy booze or drugs with it. I bet the money is already gone."

"It's drug money anyway, so what difference does it make?"

"It makes a difference. Whenever you have control of a resource -- any resource -- you have an obligation to put it to the best possible use."

"Says who?"

"It just makes sense. A hundred dollars is a lot of money to most people. They have to work a long time for it. Wouldn't you have felt better if you had given it to, say, a struggling single mother who you know would have used it well?"

"I guess so, but a struggling single mother didn't ask me for money. This homeless guy did. It made him happy. It made me happy. It seemed easy at the time."

"That's the trouble. The things that seem easy aren't usually the best way to help the world. Sometimes they just make the situation worse. There's no easy formula for helping people. You have to be smart. You got to figure out what's really happening and see the big picture. You have to make hard decisions other people might not like and that might be painful even to you. You thought you were helping this guy, but probably you just made his life worse by enabling his addictions."

"Ha, but you gave me the money, didn't you? Money I didn't need. Do you think that's the best way to spend your hard-stolen money -- hand it out to some irresponsible teenager? Aren't you just enabling my addictions? Shame on you!"

"Well, I guess I'll just have to keep my money to myself then."

"Um, yeah. Unless of course I ask you for money, then you have to give it to me."

"Your self-serving logic dazzles me. You should become a lawyer."

"I might," she said. "Four years at Colby, then I could go to law school."

"I predict you won't last more than a year at Colby."

"Thanks for the encouragement, Dad!"

"Your skills will get in the way."

"You mean the walking through walls thing? It's just an annoyance. I can turn it off. It won't come between me and a normal life."

"That's what I thought, too, but I was wrong. I was cursed by skills I didn't want, but when I denied them, my life only got worse. I guess you'll have to find out on your own."

She pulled away the covers and sat up on the bed. "Okay, I'm awake," she said. "How does this 'follow me' thing work?"

"If you can track down a place then you can also follow a person. They are basically the same thing. Everybody leaves behind a trace of emotion wherever they go. I call it a 'thread'. At some places, a lot of threads come together, like the Eiffel Tower. That's a 'node'. In most of the jumping you have done so far, you targeted a node, because obviously they are very strong, but you are also capable of following a single thread. It's like pulling a single conversation out of a noisy cocktail party. It just takes focus and attention."

"Yeah, I've never been someplace where no one has gone, but I have been places where only one or two people have been, like the Razor's Edge."

"The cliff you fell off of."

"Won't try that again."

"Getting smarter are we? A little self-preservation doesn't hurt, does it?"

"I'm starting to give self-preservation some serious thought, but I'm not committed to it yet. It's more fun being young and impulsive."

"Anyway, you have the idea. Probably only a handful of rock climbers have been to the Razor's Edge, but you could still find it based on those few traces. Now, if you can tease out one individual trace, maybe you can follow it back to the climber himself. I can do it, so maybe you can, too."

"Sure, why not? I'll give it a shot."

"You can smell me, right?"

"Actually, no." She was puzzled for a minute. "Oh my God, look at you! You took a shower -- and you shaved! And are those new clothes you're wearing? I like the new Hawaiian shirt. I am so proud of you!"

He looked embarrassed. "I mean, can you smell me in that other way?"

She closed her eyes and was quiet for a moment.

"Yeah," she said. "I can smell you -- or whatever. It's like pixie dust following you around. It smells like... spearmint. Or maybe that's just the mouthwash you used."

"Listerine," he said.

She opened her eyes. "My, aren't you becoming a respectable member of society! Keep up the stellar hygiene and we might find you a woman!"

"It's a temporary facade," he said. "I'll be back to normal in no time. The place we are going today won't help anyone's hygiene."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Just follow me. I'm going into the bathroom. Give me a couple of minutes, then you follow my pixie dust. I could go anywhere in the world. It's somewhere you haven't been before, so the less you know the better. If you don't find me in fifteen minutes, I'll come back here."

"Okay, but what about the room? Don't I have to check out?"

"I just paid ahead for the next week. The room will still be here."

"This is like Hide and Seek, isn't it?" she said.

"Indeed, except this time with a worthy adversary. I'm going to get lost, somewhere in the world, and you find me."

He got up off the bed and went into the bathroom.

"Count to 100," he said, as he closed the door.

She waited patiently on the bed, silently counting.

"I can't hear you!" he said from behind the closed door.

She said: "Ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen..."

When she got to about thirty, she heard the toilet flush. Then the door opened and her dad poked his head out.

"Did you go someplace?" she asked.

"No," he replied. "I just went potty."

She smiled.

"Shut up and get lost!" she said.

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