The First Line – Part 3 of 4

By David M. Fitzpatrick

There’s a great quarterly magazine called The First Line that has been around since the summer of 1999. What TFL does is give prospective contributors the first line of the story; their job is to write stories using that first line. I was lucky enough to be in the magazine once.

For its 25th anniversary, TFL let people submit stories beginning with any first lines they’d done before, with four chunks of five years, with 20 possible lines, for each issue. I immediately knew what I wanted to do: I wanted to write four stories, each of which used all 20 available first lines.

I did, and it was super fun to do. TFL did not agree and did not accept any of them, but here they are in this four-month feature. The stories are not related in any way.

This story, “Justice in a World Without Heroes,” features all first lines in the order that they first appeared. Any scene beginning is a first line, and any instance where you see (text within parentheses) to indicate the protagonist reading someone’s mind is a first line.

I highly recommend The First Line if you like to read innovative fiction. And if you’re a writer, it’s a fantastic way to get your creative gears turning. Check out TFL at www.thefirstline.com.

“Justice in a World Without Heroes”
Contemporary fantasy
by David M. Fitzpatrick

Herman Sligo was a bit actor who played Uncle Emil in three episodes of the popular television series The Five Sisters. That was pretty much his entire acting career, except for a few extra roles in the background in some half-known movies and twenty years of appearance in local theater. Maybe that’s how he ended up here with the rest of us crazies.

(For two weeks now, I’ve been trying to figure out if people are laughing with me or at me.)

I could hear him think it just as if he’d said it aloud. The common room was full of people, and Herman was forty feet away, sitting by the window, rocking himself gently back and forth. He’d done that since they’d brought him in two weeks ago.

More of the same. I’d been here a while in a world devoid of heroes—in a world devoid of my wife, of common sense, of humanity.

(My life is a sham.)

“Shut up, Gordon,” I said. I didn’t need another nutcase disrupting my concentration. I had to focus, to really hone in, to listen to someone’s thoughts.

(Waiting for change always seems to take longer than you would expect.)

It’s frustrating, though. Especially when there are so many people in such a small space, it’s hard to filter out the other minds. That was Grace, of course. She’d been some kind of progressive activist. Now she sat, practically comatose, every day in the common room, oblivious to everyone around her. I got up as Gordon continued fuming about how his life was a sham.

“It’s fake, every bit of it,” he snarled almost to himself as I walked away from our table. “They want you to believe I’m to blame, but I’m the victim…”

Grace was in her robe, sitting in an overstuffed chair. She leaned sideways, her head against the chair’s upswept wing. Her eyes were vacant. They said she wasn’t in there. I knew better. I heard her talking in her head all the time.

“Good morning, Grace,” I said, but of course she didn’t respond.

I rubbed my temples with my fingers. I got headaches a lot. The price of telepathy, I guess. Sometimes, if I had to work hard to listen to someone’s thoughts, I’d get nosebleeds. I hated those. I’d never been bothered by the sight of blood until the day I’d come home and found Geena.

I pushed the image from my mind. “I wish you could talk to us today,” I said to Grace. I could see the wide scars in three places on her head, where hair no longer grew. “I can hear your thoughts. I just can’t send you mine. And I know you can’t hear me.”

(Working for God is never easy.)

I sighed. Sometimes she was really focused on her activism. It sounded like she’d been the best of the good people, until some maniacal right-winger drove his car into a crowd of peaceful protesters and left her like this. That’s the world we live in. We’ve devolved from the nation of hope and equality into one of hatred and intolerance, run by maniacs without ethics or morals. They are powered by greed, lead the violent and arrogant minority into believing that the country is their personal playground, and justify any heinous act.

I turned from her and surveyed the room. There were thirty or so patients here today—they insist we’re patients and not inmates—with three orderlies watching over us like prison guards. They were there to make sure none of the lunatics would take over the asylum. Voices rolled all over that big room—lots of mumbling, thanks to the majority who were drugged beyond the capacity to carry on normal conversation, but a few noise-makers. Gordon was getting louder, lightly pounding the table with his hand.

“I’m not who you THINK I am,” he almost hollered, pounding the table on THINK. “I’m a goddam HERO, I tell you. I’m a HERO for my COUNTRY, and no one KNOWS it.”

“Keep it calm, Gordon,” one of the orderlies hollered, “or it’s the quiet room for you.”

Gordon wrung his hands together. I could see him trying mightily to shut up.

(Paul and Miriam Kaufman met the old-fashioned way.)

Paul Kaufman hobbled past me, stooped low with a Quasimodo-like hunchback. He was wearing a Johnny, and as usual I could see his wrinkled backside. Paul had been a banker for fifty-three years before finally retiring. A week into that retirement, his beloved wife had died of a stroke. I guess he snapped. He talked sometime, usually narrating his life to anyone who would listen. When he wasn’t talking, he was thinking about his life. Poor bastard. Classic shell PTSD, I suppose.

He and Miriam had met at a church dance in 1945—post-World War II, a time of many heroes, unlike the world today. It was a very romantic courtship, but they’d married. He never spoke some of the sordid details aloud, but I heard them in his mind. They’d carried on intimately before they’d married, and he was gleeful about having violated the societal norms. It had been their exciting, illicit secret. Good for them.

Now he was hobbling around a psychiatric ward, a shell of the man he’d been. Would that be me? Would I spend the rest of my life here? I’d given up trying to convince everyone that I could hear people’s thoughts. Right, imagine that: You really can hear people’s thoughts, but they lock you up in a nuthouse, and you have to try to convince them that you have this power. Yeah, doesn’t endear you to the doctors. I stopped talking about it.

I found an empty sofa—there were three in the common room—and sank into it, weary and with the headache pounding. They’d never believe me. I just needed someone to say I was sane so I could finally get out of here.

Rudy approached me, his fingers steepled before him, frantically dancing fingertips to fingertips. His head moved back and forth, his eyes darting madly to and fro. It was like he was watching a high-speed tennis game that no one else could see. He always seemed to be trembling. He stopped next me, quivering and dancing like a terrified Chihuahua.

“Hey, Rudy,” I said.

He never spoke. He never looked at anyone. But he was always thinking. Rudy was like a car accident that you couldn’t help but rubberneck at. His thoughts were always disturbing, always way out there, but I could never help myself. I reached out with my mind, and I saw a visual manifestation of his mind open up before me like yawning vault doors, and his insanity blasted out at me like an explosion.

(Three thousand habitable planets in the known universe, and I’m stuck on the only one without a spaceship.)

I slammed the vault doors closed. Hearing his thoughts was like being hit by a freight train. I counted my blessings that I could never hear them unless I tried. There was no common thread, although being from another planet or being a secret wizard or being a demon banished from Hell were typical of the wild fantasies pouring out of his brain.

Rudy teetered a bit, but managed to make his way to sit next to me on the couch.

“Hey, Rudy,” I tried again, but he began to whimper like a puppy. He leaned forward, putting his head between his knees, and sobbed lightly to himself. Rudy had been a climate-change scientist, back in the day, but the push to declare climate change fake news and a liberal conspiracy put him out of work. He’d ended up on the streets and he’d slowly lost his mind. It was tragic and pointless—another example of a society gone to hell in favor of avarice, inflated egos, and the embracing of mythology over science.

That Rudy Blast had escalated my headache, and I knew I’d be tempted to peek into his mind again. I got up and headed for the nurses station, where they gave out the meds.

(Until I stumbled across an article about him in the paper, I never realized how much Walter Dodge and I are alike.)

I stopped next to Cynthia, who was staring, wild-eyed and gape-mouthed, at the daily newspaper.

“You’re nothing like Walter Dodge, Cyndi,” I said.

She looked at me in surprise. “What do you mean?”

“I can hear your thoughts. You’re reading about Senator Dodge. You’re nothing alike. He’s a man. You’re a woman. He’s sixty. You’re twenty-two. He’s a senator. You tried to kill a customer at Taco Bell.”

She’d looked surprised at my knowledge of her thoughts until the last bit, and then her face darkened. “He called me a whore.”

“I know he did.”

“But I’m not a whore.”

“I know you’re not. He was just mad about his tacos having sour cream on them. It wasn’t your fault, and there was no need for him to say such horrible things to you.”

Her face twisted up. “How the hell do you always know what I’m thinking?”

I left it at that, with her calling after me as I walked away. I saw that Dr. Steve Jergens had entered the common room and was standing near the nurses station, watching me. He often did.

(Sam was a loyal employee.)

Bob Gillison’s thoughts. “No he wasn’t, Gilly,” I said as I walked by. “He screwed your wife.”

Gilly looked up from his game of solitaire as I passed. “How do you know that?”

“Reading your mind, buddy.”

“He was still a good employee. Best I ever had.”

“Shouldn’t have killed him, then.”

I was almost to the nurses station when Dr. Jergens stepped in front of the door. I hit the brakes. I hated this guy. He was the one who mattered, the man who had the power to let me out or keep me here. His eyes were on me. I didn’t want to deal with him today, but sooner or later he’d have me.

*     *     *

“We need to talk.” His voice was slightly nasal and very arrogant.

I sighed. “I just need a Tylenol, doc. I have a splitting headache.”

“I just heard you talking to Gilly about mind-reading.” He looked over his glasses at me. “The nurses tell me you’ve been doing this a lot.”

“Just messing with them, doc.”

“I’ve been paying attention to the things you’ve said to some of the patients. You’ve revealed some very personal information—sometimes about patients who can’t even talk.”

“You know I can. I’ve read your mind.”

He shrugged. “I’ve seen stage entertainers who could cold read subjects very effectively. It looks to the subjects like they’re reading their thoughts, but of course they aren’t.”

“Okay, doc,” I said, “write down something. Write down anything. Just write a sentence down and don’t let me see it.”

He regarded me with a smile and pulled a notebook from his back pocket. I turned around so there could be no chance I could see how his pen was moving, and I even clamped my hands over my eyes for theatrical effect. I heard the pen scribbling and finally he said, “Okay.”

I stayed back-to, so he couldn’t think I was seeing it reflected in his eyes or something silly like that. “Concentrate on what you wrote. Just read it over and over in your mind.”

He raised a brow and began to focus on his paper.

I reached out with my mind and pried. His mind wasn’t particularly strong, and instead of vault doors he pretty much had a screen door. I tore it off its metaphorical hinges and listened...

(Edwin spotted them the moment he stepped off the train.)

“Edwin spotted them the moment he stepped off the train,” I said.

I spun about to watch his face freeze and then melt into the expression of bewilderment, as it had so many times before. I loved seeing that. I could still hear him thinking about how he could claim that I was wrong, so I reached out and snatched the notebook away before he had time to think. I could see the words on the page.

“It was from a short story you read,” I said, handing the notebook back to him. “Just yesterday. It was the first line in the story and it stuck with you. I heard you thinking about it.”

I realized that he was still smiling. He wasn’t bewildered as he often had been. That confused me. “You’ve been here a while, Mr. Daly,” he said.

“Too long.”

“Maybe it’s time we did something about that.” He turned to the nearest orderly and said, “Bring Mr. Daly to my office—after he gets some Tylenol.”

*     *     *

It had been a long year. Jergens’ demeanor seemed positive, but I wasn’t ready to trust him. I got my Tylenol, but then it was lunch. I ate quickly before an orderly came to get me. He escorted me through the dark, empty halls, neither of us saying a word. We were about to enter the wing where Jergens’ office was when the orderly stopped me with a hand on my shoulder.

“Can you actually do it?” he asked. “Read minds, I mean?”

I looked him up and down. He seemed nervous—not like a guy looking to report me for saying crazy things. So I listened in to his mind and said, “You’re worrying about someone named Rachel… and you think I can help her. Should I dig deeper into your mind?”

He turned white, then shook his head and backed up a step. “No. I just… hope it’s real, so you can.”

He led me to Jergens’ office. I wanted to dig deeper to find out more, but I figured I was about to anyway.

*     *     *

“There are a few things you need to know before we start.”

“Start what?”

Jergens looked at me. “You don’t know?”

“I wasn’t listening.”

He leaned in, face darkening. “Then listen.”

I dug into his mind.

(Rachel’s first trip to England didn’t go as planned.)

“Your daughter Rachel,” I said. “She was…”

A flurry of thoughts bombarded me, and I saw images in his mind.

“She was… raped and beaten in London,” I said, my voice quavering. “They… they found her floating in the Thames. Brain damage…” I recoiled, staggering back. “Jesus, doc.”

Why must there be such horror in the world?

Tears streamed down his cheeks. “I didn’t believe your claims when you first got here after you tried to kill that man. But I’ve come to believe you. I think you really did look into your wife’s mind, and that is indeed how you came to believe it was Reardon who did it.”

Like a burst dam, the memories I tried to block—tried to hold back by focusing on the thoughts of everyone else—flooded in like a tsunami.

Coming home. Finding the door smashed in. Finding Geena in the bedroom. Blood everywhere. She was dying, stabbed twenty times in her chest and abdomen. She couldn’t speak.

“She lived for a week in a coma,” I said, and I couldn’t stop the tears from flowing. “I just wanted to say good-bye. I’d have done anything to speak to her one more time.”

“She spoke to you.”

I nodded. “She told me who did it. I hunted the bastard down but they stopped me before I could kill him. If I ever get out of here, I’ll spend the rest of my life hunting him. The world is full of people like him, doc, and it shouldn’t be!”

Jergens reached out and clasped my forearm. “I agree. That’s why I need your help.”

He pulled on my arm and led me to the room behind his office. And there she was: Rachel, his daughter, in a wheelchair. A bag of Ringer’s lactate hung on the attached IV stand, and she was receiving the fluids via a drip.

“Reach her,” he pleaded. “Please.”

I felt energy surge within me. “And you’ll get me out of here?”

“Tell me who did this to my baby girl, and I’ll buy your plane ticket to wherever Charlie Reardon is!” he cried.

I stepped close to Rachel and opened my mind. Hers welcomed me in like a long-lost lover.

Maybe my long year was about to get shorter.

*     *     *

A light snow was falling as Charlie Reardon left the diner and made his way down Madison Street.

I watched him, as I had for several nights. He wasn’t Charlie Reardon here, of course. In Cedar Springs, he went by Chuck Milton—taking his mother’s maiden name, just in case anyone ever came looking for him. But he hadn’t fooled me. I’d found him inside of three weeks, just by scouring the Internet.

He kept to himself here. Worked odd jobs. Lived in a crappy house at the outskirts of the village. Had dinner nearly every night at Betsy’s Diner.

Tonight, he was mine. I let him get a good distance ahead of me before I followed his snowy footprints. As predicted, he stopped just before his house to buy a six-pack of beer and some cigarettes at Tillerson’s Store. When he went in, I hurried past and got to his house before he could. The world would be less one monster tonight.

Some would call me every bit as monstrous. I was all right with that. There’s a fine line behind justice and vengeance in today’s world, and I was just fine with blurring it.

*     *     *

(Sometimes, when it’s quiet, I can remember what my life was like before moving to Cedar Springs.)

His mind was weak and easy to enter. I stood in the closet, silent, listening to his thoughts as he popped open a beer and slumped on his sofa. I heard the TV come on.

I heard him remember what his life had been like. He’d been a handyman who became infatuated with my wife after we’d hired him to do a few jobs. But he’d waited for three months before coming back to rob the place. She’d come home and found him, and he’d panicked and stabbed her. Over and over and over…

I could hear him crying for her in his mind. I could feel his regret.

I didn’t care.

When I came out of that closet, I was prepared to make him suffer for a long time.

And I did.

*     *     *

On a perfect spring morning with flat seas and clear blue skies, Captain Eli P. Cooke made a terrible mistake.

That was the morning he’d left his room, hung over and sick, and headed down to the River Thames to where his little fishing boat was anchored, waiting for another trip out to the North Sea to help supply Londoners with fish to go with their chips. On his way, he’d seen young Rachel Jergens doing the usual tourist stuff. He’d offered to give her a ride in his boat, and she’d agreed.

A few too many drinks later, and Eli had decided an old sailor deserved to have his way with a young American girl. She’d fought back, but he’d beaten her within an inch of her life and dumped her in the Thames.

There was no evidence pointing to him, of course—nothing to justify a warrant to search his boat. Learning about all of this from my telepathic contact with Rachel would never make a bit of legal difference. But Dr. Jergens had plenty of money and lots of accrued vacation time. I didn’t have to guess what had happened when I read about Cooke’s murder. They found his mutilated corpse on his boat, set adrift in the Thames. From what the authorities had gathered, someone really had vengeance on his mind against the captain; it had taken him a very long time to die.

Good for Jergens. I didn’t think the guy had it in him.

*     *     *

I started collecting secrets when I was just six years old.

That’s when I first began hearing others’ thoughts. It was really more like getting vivid impressions about what someone was thinking, and at the time I hadn’t known that this was abnormal. As I got older, it became clearer, and I could hear voices. I taught myself how to pry into strong minds, learned how to sift through the mass of background telepathic noise and tune into the consciousnesses of others.

I used it to my advantage—to cheat on tests and at poker, to tell bosses what they wanted to hear, to get women into bed. When I met Geena. I started our relationship like all the others, but the first time I burrowed my way into her mind, I heard her mentally screaming for me to GET OUT! As it turned out, she had the same gift that I did. We quickly became the perfect couple—each possessing a great power, neither ever daring to use it on the other. Well, except when we consented. You haven’t known true lovemaking until you’re both physically and mentally intimate with your partner.

Then she was gone. I told too many people that I’d telepathically connected to her comatose mind and she’d told me that it was Charlie Reardon; when I went after him, they locked me away.

At least now I’d done some good. I’d rid the world of Charlie Reardon, and made it possible for someone to rid the world of Eli Cooke.

*     *     *

There must have been thousands standing in the rain that day.

Jergens was a wealthy, respected doctor, and his daughter had had so many friends. When she passed, it was no surprise that so many came out in such dreadful weather to see her put into the ground. There were heads and umbrellas as far as I could see.

Jergens had called me when her health had deteriorated. He’d asked me to visit on a few occasions since he’d released me, always asking me to look into her mind. He wanted one last look at his daughter.

“You said you could only read minds,” he said. “What if you read mine and Rachel’s at the same time?”

I knew what he was driving at. I opened both their minds and heard their thoughts, and I focused on linking them somehow. I guess it worked, because I felt a rush of love; I heard a young girl giggling and laughing for her daddy, and I withstood an onslaught of wondrous memories.

Her as flower girl at her father’s second wedding… learning to ride a bicycle as he ran along beside her holding the seat… the trip to Disneyworld when she was nine…

All the happy birthday parties she’d enjoyed… her father running to her room to comfort her when a nightmare woke her, screaming… a lifetime of hugs from her Dad…

The prom dress he bought her… his proud smile at her high-school graduation… the day he took her to college…

The day he saw her off at the airport as she headed to England.

I felt him return the love to her, even as her life waned and the vision I had of her mind dimmed and faded until she was gone. Then I held Jergens while he cried—in sorrow for his loss, in gratitude for the final chance he had to speak to her.

“You’re the greatest man I’ve ever known,” he said.

*     *     *

I came of age in a time of no heroes.

I was ready to graduate high school when Trump became president, and all the horrors of inhumanity descended upon the United States like a black cloud. I had felt that we’d never recover from it—that no one who mattered could do anything about the downward spiral that we were in.

I’d done horrible things in the name of justice and vengeance. I’d done good things, like connecting a father with his dying daughter.

Maybe I was a hero. At least, the best hope for a hero in today’s cruel world. I could dig into the minds of others, reveal the truths no one wanted to be revealed. Yes, at least that I could do.

It wouldn’t bring Geena back, but it would give me a reason to live.

David M. Fitzpatrick is a fiction writer in Maine, USA. His many short stories have appeared in print magazines and anthologies around the world. He writes for a newspaper, writes fiction, edits anthologies, and teaches creative writing. Visit him at www.fitz42.net/writer to learn more.