He had difficulty keeping his mind on his work that afternoon. He managed to list the various expenses he had incurred in making the bomb on the sheet devoted to payments made to Mr. Jordan, and he smiled at the thought that he would be able to mark the account closed by morning. But he had trouble doing much else that day. Instead he sat and thought about the beauty of his solution.
The bomb would not fail. There was enough nitroglycerine in the cigar box to atomize not only Mr. Jordan but virtually anything within twenty yards of him, so the blackmailer could hardly hope to escape. There was the possibility—indeed, one might say the probability—that a great many persons other than Mr. Jordan might die. If the man was fool enough to open his parcel in the subway station, or if he was clumsy enough to drop it there, the carnage would be dreadful. If he took it home with him and opened it in the privacy of his own room or apartment, considerably less death and destruction seemed likely to occur.
But Myron Hettinger could not have cared less about how many persons Mr. Jordan carried with him to his grave. Men or women or children, he was sure he could remain totally unconcerned about their untimely deaths. If Mr. Jordan died, Myron Hettinger would survive. It was that simple.
At five o’clock, a great deal of work undone, Myron Hettinger got to his feet. He left his office and stood for a moment on the sidewalk, breathing stuffy air and considering his situation. He did not want to go home now, he decided. He had done something magnificent, he had solved an unsolvable problem, and he felt a need to celebrate.
An evening with Eleanor, while certainly comfortable, did not impress him as much of a celebration. An evening with Sheila Bix seemed far more along the lines of what he wanted. Yet he hated to break established routine. On Mondays and on Fridays he went to Sheila Bix’s apartment. All other nights he went directly home.
Still, he had already broken one routine that day, the unhappy routine of payment. And why not do in another routine, if just for one night?
He called his wife from a pay phone. “I’ll be staying in town for several hours,” he said. “I didn’t have a chance to call you earlier.”
“You usually come home on Thursdays,” she said.
“I know. Something’s come up.”
His wife did not question him, nor did she ask just what it was that had come up. She was the perfect wife. She told him that she loved him, which was quite probably true, and he told her that he loved her, which was most assuredly false. Then he replaced the receiver and stepped to the curb to hail a taxi. He told the driver to take him to an apartment building on West Seventy-third Street just a few doors from Central Park.
The building was an unassuming one, a remodeled brownstone with four apartments to the floor. Sheila’s apartment, on the third floor, rented for only one hundred twenty dollars per month, a very modest rental for what the tabloids persist in referring to as a love nest. This economy pleased him, but then it was what one would expect from the perfect mistress.
There was no elevator. Myron Hettinger climbed two flights of stairs and stood slightly but not terribly out of breath in front of Sheila Bix’s door. He knocked on the door and waited. The door was not answered. He rang the bell, something he rarely did. The door was still not answered.
Had this happened on a Monday or on a Friday, Myron Hettinger might have been understandably piqued. It had never happened on a Monday or on a Friday. Now, though, he was not annoyed. Since Sheila Bix had no way of knowing that he was coming, he could hardly expect her to be present.
He had a key, of course. When a man has the perfect mistress, or even an imperfect one, he owns a key to the apartment for which he pays the rent. He used this key, opened the door, and closed it behind him. He found a bottle of scotch and poured himself the drink which Sheila Bix poured for him every Monday and every Friday. He sat in a comfortable chair and sipped the drink, waiting for the arrival of Sheila Bix and dwelling both on the pleasant time he would have after she arrived and on the deep satisfaction to be derived from the death of the unfortunate Mr. Jordan.
It was twenty minutes to six when Myron Hettinger entered the comfortable, if inexpensive apartment, and poured himself a drink. It was twenty minutes after six when he heard footsteps on the stairs and then heard a key being fitted into a lock. He opened his mouth to let out a hello, then stopped. He would say nothing, he decided. And she would be surprised.
This happened.
The door opened. Sheila Bix, a blonde vision of loveliness, tripped merrily into the room with shining eyes and the lightest of feet. Her arms were extended somewhat oddly. This was understandable, for she was balancing a parcel upon her pretty head much in the manner of an apprentice model balancing a book as part of a lesson in poise.
It took precisely as long for Myron Hettinger to recognize the box upon her head as it took for Sheila Bix to recognize Myron Hettinger. Both reacted nicely. Myron Hettinger put two and two together with speed that made him a credit to his profession. Sheila Bix performed a similar feat, although she came up with a somewhat less perfect answer.
Myron Hettinger did several things. He tried to get out of the room. He tried to make the box stay where it was, poised precariously upon that pretty and treacherous head. And, finally, he made a desperate lunge to catch the box before it reached the floor, once Sheila Bix had done the inevitable, recoiling in horror and spilling the box from head through air.
His lunge was a good one. He left his chair in a single motion. His hands reached out, groping for the falling cigar box.
There was a very loud noise, but Myron Hettinger only heard the beginnings of it.
The Boy Who Disappeared Clouds
Jeremy’s desk was at the left end of the fifth row. Alphabetical order had put him in precisely the desk he would have selected for himself, as far back as you could get without being in the last row. The last row was no good, because there were things you were called upon to do when you were in the last row. Sometimes papers were passed to the back of the room, for example, and the kids in the last row brought them forward to the teacher. In the fifth row you were spared all that.
And, because he was on the end, and the left end at that, he had the window to look out of. He looked out of it now, watching a car brake almost to a stop, then accelerate across the intersection. You were supposed to come to a full stop but hardly anybody ever did, not unless there were other cars or a crossing guard around. They probably figured nobody was looking, he thought, and he liked the idea that they were unaware that he was watching them.
He sensed that Ms. Winspear had left her desk and turned to see her standing a third of the way up the aisle. He faced forward, paying attention, and when her eyes reached his he looked a little off to the left.
When she returned to the front of the room and wrote on the blackboard, he shifted in his seat and looked out the window again. A woman was being pulled down the street by a large black and white dog. Jeremy watched until they turned a corner and moved out of sight, watched another car not quite stop for the stop sign, then raised his eyes to watch a cloud floating free and untouched in the open blue sky.
“Lots of kids look out the window,” Cory Buckman said. “Sometimes I’ll hear myself, standing in front of them and droning on and on, and I’ll wonder why they’re not all lined up at the windows with their noses pressed against the glass. Wouldn’t you rather watch paint dry than hear me explain quadratic equations?”
“I used to know how to solve quadratic equations,” Janice Winspear said, “and now I’m not even sure what they are. I know lots of kids look out the window. Jeremy’s different.”
“How?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” She took a sip of coffee, put her cup down. “You know what he is? He’s a nice quiet boy.”
“That has a ring to it. Page five of the Daily News: ‘ “He was always a nice quiet boy,” the neighbors said. “Nobody ever dreamed he would do something like this.” ‘ Is that the sort of thing you mean?”
“
I don’t think he’s about to murder his parents in their beds, although I wouldn’t be surprised if he wanted to.”
“Oh?”
She nodded. “Jeremy’s the youngest of four children. The father drinks and beats his wife and the abuse gets passed on down the line, some of it verbal and some of it physical. Jeremy’s at the end of the line.”
“And he gets beaten?”
“He came to school in the fall with his wrist in a cast. He said he fell and it’s possible he did. But he fits the pattern of an abused child. And he doesn’t have anything to balance the lack of affection in the home.”
“How are his grades?”
“All right. He’s bright enough to get C’s and B’s without paying attention. He never raises his hand. When I call on him he knows the answer—if he knows the question.”
“How does he get along with the other kids?”
“They barely know he exists.” She looked across the small table at Cory. “And that’s in the sixth grade. Next year he’ll be in junior high with classes twice the size of mine and a different teacher for every subject.”
“And three years after that he’ll be in senior high, where I can try teaching him quadratic equations. Unless he does something first to get himself locked up.”
“I’m not afraid he’ll get locked up, not really. I’m just afraid he’ll get lost.”
“How is he at sports?”
“Hopeless. The last one chosen for teams in gym class, and he doesn’t stay around for after-school games.”
“I don’t blame him. Any other interests? A stamp collection? A chemistry set?”
“I don’t think he could get to have anything in that house,” she said. “I had his older brothers in my class over the years and they were monsters.”
“Unlike our nice quiet boy.”
“That’s right. If he had anything they’d take it away from him. Or smash it.”
“In that case,” Cory said, “what you’ve got to give him is something nobody can take away. Why don’t you teach him how to disappear clouds?”
“How to—?”
“Disappear clouds. Stare at them and make them disappear.”
“Oh?” She arched an eyebrow. “You can do that?”
“Uh-huh. So can you, once you know how.”
“Cory—”
He glanced at the check, counted out money to cover it. “Really,” he said. “There’s nothing to it. Anybody can do it.”
“For a minute there,” she said, “I thought you were serious.”
“About the clouds? Of course I was serious.”
“You can make clouds disappear.”
“And so can you.”
“By staring at them.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Well,” she said, “let’s see you do it.”
He looked up. “Wrong kind of clouds,” he announced.
“Oh, right. It figures.”
“Have I ever lied to you? Those aren’t individual clouds up there; that’s just one big overcast mess blocking the sun.”
“That’s why we need you to work your magic, sir.”
“Well, I’m only a journeyman magician. What you need are cumulus clouds, the puffy ones like balls of cotton. Not cumulonimbus, not the big rain clouds, and not the wispy cirrus clouds either, but the cumulus clouds.”
“I know what cumulus clouds look like,” she said. “It’s not like quadratic equations, it stays with you. When the sky is full of cumulus clouds, what will your excuse be? Wrong phase of the moon?”
“I suppose everyone tells you this,” he said, “but you’re beautiful when you’re skeptical.”
She was sorting laundry when the phone rang. It was Cory Buckman. “Look out the window,” he ordered. “Drop everything and look out the window.”
She was holding the receiver in one hand and a pair of tennis shorts in the other, and she looked out the window without dropping either. “It’s still there,” she reported.
“What’s still there?”
“Everything’s still there.”
“What did you see when you looked out the window?”
“The house across the street. A maple tree. My car.”
“Janice, it’s a beautiful day out there!”
“Oh. So it is.”
“I’ll pick you up in half an hour. We’re going on a picnic.”
“Oh, don’t I wish I could. I’ve got—”
“What?”
“Laundry to sort, and I have to do my lesson plans for the week.”
“Try to think in terms of crusty french bread, a good sharp cheese, a nice fruity zinfandel, and a flock of cumulus clouds overhead.”
“Which you will cause to disappear?”
“We’ll both make them disappear, and we’ll work much the same magic upon the bread and the cheese and the wine.”
“You said half an hour? Give me an hour.”
“Split the difference. Forty-five minutes.”
“Sold.”
“You see that cloud? The one that’s shaped like a camel?”
“More like a llama,” she said.
“Watch.”
She watched the cloud, thinking that he was really very sweet and very attractive, and that he didn’t really need a lot of nonsense about disappearing clouds to lure her away from a Saturday afternoon of laundry and lesson plans. A grassy meadow, air fresh with spring, cows lowing off to the right, and—
A hole began to open in the center of the cloud. She stared, then glanced at him. His fine brow was tense, his mouth a thin line, his hands curled up into fists.
She looked at the cloud again. It was breaking up, collapsing into fragments.
“I don’t believe this,” she said.
He didn’t reply. She watched, and the process of celestial disintegration continued. The hunks of cloud turned wispy and, even as she looked up at them, disappeared altogether. She turned to him, open-mouthed, and he sighed deeply and beamed at her.
“See?” he said. “Nothing to it.”
“You cheated,” she said.
“How?”
“You picked one you knew was going to disappear.”
“How would I go about doing that?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a meteorologist, I’m a sixth-grade teacher. Maybe you used math.”
“Logarithms,” he said. “Cumulus clouds are powerless against logarithms. You pick one.”
“Huh?”
“You pick a cloud and I’ll disappear it. But it has to be the right sort of cloud.”
“Cumulus.”
“Uh-huh. And solitary—”
“Wandering lonely as a cloud, for instance.”
“Something like that. And not way off on the edge of the horizon. It doesn’t have to be directly overhead, but it shouldn’t be in the next county.”
She picked a cloud. He stared at it and it disappeared.
She gaped at him. “You really did it.”
“Well, I really stared at it and it really disappeared. You don’t have to believe the two phenomena were connected.”
“You made it disappear.”
“If you say so.”
“Could you teach my nice quiet boy? Could you teach Jeremy?”
“Nope. I don’t teach sixth graders.”
“But—”
“You teach him.”
“But I don’t know how to do it!”
“So I’ll teach you,” he said. “Look, Jan, it’s not as remarkable as you think it is. Anybody can do it. It’s about the easiest ESP ability to develop. Pick a cloud.”
“You pick one for me.”
“All right. That one right there, shaped like a loaf of white bread.”
“Not like any loaf I ever saw.” Why was she quibbling? “All right,” she said. “I know which cloud you mean.”
“Now let me tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to stare at it and focus on it, and you’re going to send energy from your Third Eye chakra, that
’s right here—” he touched his finger to a spot midway between her eyebrows “—and that energy is going to disperse the cloud. Take a couple of deep, deep breaths, in and out, and focus on the cloud, that’s right, and talk to it in your mind. Say, ‘Disappear, disappear.’ That’s right, keep breathing, focus your energies—”
He kept talking to her and she stared at the loaf-shaped cloud. Disappear, she told it. She thought about energy, which she didn’t believe in, flowing from her Third Eye whatsit, which she didn’t have.
The cloud began to get thin in the middle. Disappear, she thought savagely, squinting at it, and a hole appeared. Her heart leaped with exultation.
“Look!”
“You got it now,” he told her. “Keep on going. Put it out of its misery.”
When the cloud was gone (gone!) she sat for a moment staring at the spot in the sky where it had been, as if it might have left a hole there. “You did it,” Cory said.
“Impossible.”
“Okay.”
“I couldn’t have done that. You cheated, didn’t you?”
“How?”
“You helped me. By sending your energies into the cloud or something. What’s so funny?”
“You are. Five minutes ago you wouldn’t believe that I could make clouds disappear, and now you figure I must have done this one, because otherwise you’d have to believe you did it, and you know it’s impossible.”
“Well, it is.”
“If you say so.”
She poured a glass of wine, sipped at it. “Clearly impossible,” she said. “I did it, didn’t I?”
“Did you?”
“I don’t know. Can I do another?”
“It’s not up to me. They’re not my clouds.”
“Can I do that one? It looks like—I don’t know what it looks like. It looks like a cloud.”
“That’s what it looks like, all right.”