FILTERS 5

ALL-AMERICAN

Andrew says "We need to tell dad."

They go up the stairs, through the mudroom and the kitchen, to their father's office, where Andrew opens the door without knocking. James is watching the little television, which he mutes, and Andrew knows when his father sees the holes, as his eyes convey in succession shock, fear, anger, relief–and pride?

"We got in a fight."

He takes the amalgam from his pocket and sets it on the desk.

"It was four guys. I took three of them down when the fourth drew that. Michael knows."

Michael immediately says "Dad knows? Does mom know?"

James says "Yes, your mother knows. I saw it the first time he ever used it. You were young, and–"

Andrew interrupts, "I should have told you sooner, Michael. I'm sorry I didn't."

Andrew, age twelve, in their back yard and tossing a baseball up and running under it to catch. James is in the driveway, detailing his car. He waxes in rhythm with music playing from the garage, overhead door open. The music is quiet, little more than setting. Atmosphere; local; Outkast, record seminal (day. . . also seminal.) Andrew takes off his glove to catch barehanded. James watches but doesn't think about it, he's thinking about taxes.

Finished waxing automotive, he's in the driver's seat, dashboard focus. Then the back-middle seat, his torso at skew in rotation. Door panel, window trim, a fine cloth runs over leather. Vacuum next. Floor mats drip-dry from garage wall-mounted alligator clips.

Andrew juggles three baseballs. James watches amused, behind the wheel, considering driving around the block. Instead he shifts to neutral and with one foot on the brake and one foot on the driveway lets the car move slowly, slowly back. He vacuums again and returns the mats, looks the car over one last time and grabs his mitt and closes the garage.

"Toss it to me," he says, Andrew drops two of the balls and throws a strike.

"When I was your age, your uncle was still playing high school baseball for our tiny school in Ava. The school got them bats and uniforms, but your grandfather bought the team caps and helmets, and he said since he bought them, he would get to design them. So it was AB, to the town this was Ava Baseball, but to dad, to me, to your uncle, we knew it was Ava Blacks."

He skies a ball, Andrew waits underneath, "Uh-huh?"

"They had a new coach. He was the history teacher and a Vietnam veteran. Have you studied Vietnam?"

Andrew catches the ball, "Yeah."

"What do you remember?"

Andrew throws it back, "Um, we talked a lot about 'Eidolon,' the um, the raid?"

James throws it back, "It was a raid on a military prison in Hanoi."

Andrew says "Oh yeah, it's that movie you said I can watch when I'm thirteen."

James smiles and says "For most of the Vietnam war, America was losing. The North Vietnamese were highly effective, and many of our campaigns were total failures, losing materiel objectives and morale. By 1972 the common sentiment was that the war was lost, but in the summer of 1973 something changed and we started winning. The official line is that our understanding of the war improved, and we were able to effect that new understanding in better training and strategy. What actually happened is that within the next wave of young men enlisting and being drafted into service, there were a small though adequate number who were profoundly stronger and faster than those who came before them. They would take objectives with ease and without incident, and in the rare times they were injured, they would rapidly recover from wounds that would maim or kill other soldiers. To say it bluntly, those soldiers were significantly better at killing, and significantly harder to kill."

Andrew doesn't throw, he's captivated by the story. James gestures for the baseball, catches it, and throws it back.

"The generals found a way to identify them and went on to build entire divisions around those guys, selecting the best of them for the special forces. Operation Eidolon was a mission to recover American prisoners of war, it wasn't planned as a raid, it became one when a bad storm turned everything ass-up. They decided to press on and made it to the prison. A team of six SEALs eliminated almost every soldier called in to stop them and exfiltrated with no casualties. It's considered the turning point of the war, as they saved more than American POWs, those others they freed jump-started an insurgency in the north and Hanoi fell thirty years and a day after the Nazis signed their unconditional surrender. For his part in the Eidolon raid, a soldier named Raymond Fiore was awarded the Medal of Honor. Fiore was your uncle's baseball coach, but everybody called him Coach Fire."

Andrew says "Woah."

"No one in town knew. Everyone knew he was a veteran, he and his wife still have a ranch in Bradleyville, which is just a bit more than a junction, southwest of Ava. My dad said he could still see the soldier in him, but none of us kids could think of him that way. Despite his nickname being 'Fire' he was cool. Everybody loved his classes, he would spend them talking back and forth with us and he wouldn't assign much work. I remember some of the parents being unsure of what to make of him, but he had been to war, so they gave him a pass. His coaching was a lot like that, he didn't push competitiveness, he just wanted them to play their hardest, have fun, and be good men on and off the field. That team stormed into the qualifiers and won every game but the state championship. They won state the next year."

Andrew has a large grin.

"In my senior year I wrote a paper for his class on Vietnam and that's when I discovered that Fiore of Eidolon was Coach Fire. He said one thing when I asked: 'Yes, that was me.' I was graduating, and I didn't have any good choices. Your grandparents couldn't pay for school and although Don was going into the majors I couldn't take money from him. Maybe it was sour grapes but at the time I didn't feel like college was right even if I could go. You know your grandfather and his father served in the Navy, so the thought was I would join as well. At my graduation I asked Coach Fire what he thought about me enlisting and he said 'There are worse things you could do with your life.' The next day I went to the Navy recruiter, and Coach Fire was there waiting to tell me 'If you're going to join, join the Air Force.' So I did."

They throw the ball back and forth again.

"I liked it at first, but when it turned, it turned bad fast. People are finally starting to find out about those soldiers, I've known about them for a long time and that's because at some point at camp they figured out I was one of them. Everything changed after that. I was getting a lot of attention, which I hated, and opportunities began to unfold for me that only a few others also got. They deliberately hide all of this from soldiers, but there are always rumors, so I talked to everyone I could, and eventually I found books with accounts of the men who served throughout Vietnam, describing the changes firsthand. After boot camp I went to what was basically a second boot camp made entirely of guys like me, and as soon as some of them got a hint of the power in the bureaucracy, they changed. There was only a half-camaraderie in the second camp, and a treacherous undercurrent, because being the best in that group was a big deal. Today, the highest officers in every branch of the military are those guys."

Throw, catch, throw.

"For most of history, having a bad leader meant you'd probably die, so having a good leader was important, in war and in peace. The military was once like that, but after Vietnam and the Second Korean War something changed. We became complacent. Some say it was because the companies that make money from war, the Military-Industrial Complex, got their claws into our government and they changed things for their own profit. That is part of it, that's why the US has clandestine operations in so many countries. I think that leaves something out of it, and it's that when leadership no longer risks death as its consequence for failure, leaders stop rising because of competence, and start rising because of their ability to navigate within bureaucracies. That's what I saw, I saw good men backstabbing each other because their thoughts were filled with starred epaulettes, and the twisted thing about that is knowing that some of these guys, who were greatly lacking in intellect and character, were abundantly skilled in lies and manipulation. So I had a choice, I could become a pilot and dive into that arbitrary game of bootlicking and subterfuge for ten or twenty years, or I could do just enough, work on planes instead of fly them, and get the hell out."

Quiet but for ball hitting glove.

"I'm saying this so that you understand, Andrew. Everything I have done has been for you and your brother, so that you can go to college, or work in my shop, or go learn a different skill, or do anything else productive that you want, so that you aren't left with the military as your only option. Because you and your brother are like me, you're like those soldiers who came before me, like Coach Fire, and if you joined, you would have to face the same decision I faced, but in an even more incompetent and corrupt hierarchy. The military turned out okay for me, it was the best I had in my situation. For you and your brother, there are few worse things you could do with your lives than join the military."

Andrew nods enthusiastically, "Yeah dad, I won't. I'll go to college."

James throws the baseball in a long, tall arc.

Andrew runs below, his read is off and he doesn't have a glove on it, he raises his bare hand and it just misses–until it doesn't. James sees the baseball, clearly beyond Andrew's hand, clearly arcing away, clearly slow and move into his hand. As if drawn there. Andrew cheers, saying "I finally did it!"

James knows what he's just seen, but he still feels compelled to ask "What do you mean, 'finally'? Is that some kind of trick?"

Andrew shakes his head, exuberant "No! I kept feeling like I could do this and I finally did! Look!" He tosses the baseball up and holds his hand to the side, where it slows again before being drawn to his palm.

James feels his heartbeat. He says "Come on, let's go to my office."

James is behind his desk.

Andrew gazes intently at the baseball in his open palm, and it rises.

James almost finds the thought amusing that a demonstration of profoundly novel physics is his twelve-year-old son playing with a baseball. "You've been trying to do this for a while?"

Andrew says "Yeah!"

"When did this start?"

Andrew has to think about it, "I always had this feeling, and then on my birthday it, um, got louder? It's really loud when I try to reach for something."

"How did it happen just then? What did it feel like?"

Andrew shrugs, "It just does?" He moves his arms up and down, "Like this. Um . . . reflexively?"

"But you have control over it? So you don't have to do it if you don't want to?"

Andrew says "I guess" and he tosses the baseball up and reaches it for it and it falls to the floor. He repeats, toss, fall.

"Good. Is it just your hands? Could you try it with, say, your elbow?"

Andrew pivots slightly, moving his elbow toward the ball until, once again, at about a hand's length, the ball moves to it, and hangs, as if stuck. Andrew keeps his arm tucked and sets the baseball in the space where his forearm meets his upper arm, and again the ball lifts.

James sits down, a hand on the side of his face. Fingers tapping his desk.

He calls out "Anna? Could you come into my office?"

Andrew is holding the baseball when she enters, James says "Show your mother."

Andrew again holds his hand out, again the baseball rises.

Anna laughs, "That's a neat trick. You're learning magic now?"

James says "It's not a trick. Take the ball from him and look it over."

Anna says "What do you mean?" and as she grasps the ball and runs her hands over it, her expression changes. "How were you doing that?"

Andrew looks at his father, who nods, and the desk routine repeats, now his hand moving closer until it's pulled to his open palm. He holds up his other hand and the ball moves back and forth in the air.

Anna says quietly, "That's impossible. James, what is this?"

Andrew speaks up, "Um. I know the word for it."

James doesn't quite smile, "Yeah?"

Andrew says uncertainly, "Telekinesis?"

James smiles, "Seems to be. Have you talked with anyone about this other than us?"

Andrew shakes his head, "No."

"Good. Nobody can know that you can do this. Your brother can when he's older, and that's it. Nobody else."

Andrew understands the seriousness in his father's voice. "I won't tell anyone, dad."

James has Andrew help him clear a room in their basement. It's full of old furniture and boxes and they push them to one wall, stacking them as best they can and leaving the rest of the room open. James says "In a few years, if you're still playing sports, we'll add some workout equipment. For now, if you're going to practice with your gift, I want it to be here or your bedroom, and nowhere else. Okay?"

"Okay, dad."

"And it is a gift. I'm glad you have it, and I'm glad I get to see it."

Andrew spends much of the summer in the basement, and as he practices he improves. His hand's length reach becomes an arm's length, his baseball-sized grasp grows enough to move boxes and crates. He shows his parents, who congratulate him.

Anna leans back in her chair, avoiding eye contact with her husband. "James, what are we going to do? I thought–I–how is this even possible?" and finally looking at him, "You always seem so calm about this. Why?"

"If you saw someone fly like Superman, how long would you marvel at the impossibility of it before it became just another part of life, and instead you just marveled at the vicarious thrill of it in light of your own envy?"

Anna says "I think I'd marvel at the 'impossibility' of it every time I saw it."

"Maybe. Maybe I would too, maybe being able to move a milk crate around is just easier to accept. But this is what our son can do, so what we thought we knew about the world is wrong, simple as. Or maybe I was primed to expect this. This is what I'm sure of: he's going to keep improving, which means he'll eventually be able to move larger things at farther distances, which means we're going to start hearing about people like him, and unless there's too many of them for the government to keep track of, at some point they're going to find out he has this, and stick him in a lab."

Anna has fear in her eyes, "What will we do?"

"Hope it's so widespread that he's lost in the crowd."

She takes a heavy breath, but then looks confused, "What do you mean 'primed'? What could have possibly made you think this could happen?"

James was always going to tell her this, he just didn't know when. "There's a story I've never told you about my great-grandfather's service in the Navy."

Anna says "He was on a ship during the Haze, right?"

"He told me what caused it. Or at least what the United States government thinks caused it."

Andrew, age fourteen. Far removed from the day in his yard. What once seemed like an invisible arm now seems like an entire invisible body. Every exertion he makes has become easier, from chores, to sports, to playing with his brother, to simply climbing a tree.

High school football, freshman varsity. Week six and phone calls. Strangers watch practice. He's often tapped to talk to cameras. His gift is like breathing, he wonders if it's actually in his breathing. It's in his sprint explosively, it's in his block absolutely. He's threats plural, two-ways at his own insistence, "You want to win, right coach?" Wide receiver, free safety. Get the ball in his hands and it's there for good, give him a window and he's uncatchable, an open quarterback and he's already sacked. The only year his team loses a game. More phone calls, more phone calls. Watch this kid, he's inhuman! Watch skeptically, his coach has no ability and now you see, with your eyes in-person-in-person, no need to pad the stopwatch.

Andrew, age fifteen. Football over, baseball in-swing. The best athlete in the state of Georgia, already destined for every All-American list. Colleges line up. The NFL or MLB a matter of when. He's played basketball, soccer, even a season of hockey, but he lost interest. He's not going to be quite tall enough to ball and his speed doesn't help on the court like it does on the field. Running down deep flies, sprinting ninety feet to first or stretching a triple. Or a hole in the defensive line to run his jets. He doesn't enhance his swing for fear of hitting a baseball six hundred feet or the pitcher six feet under on a comebacker, but his reaction time is more than enough, and he quickly resembles a second coming of Teddy Ballgame.

Still fifteen, with his parents in his father's office.

James says "When you discovered your gift, I thought it would be a matter of time before it was everywhere. That hasn't happened. In three years of crawling the news, conspiracy sites and random forums and boards I haven't found a single comment even hinting at something like what you have. Maybe you're the only one, or one of a few, and the others like you have had the sense to hide it, or maybe they live somewhere remote where it's gone unnoticed. I don't know. . . I don't know. But with what you've done in sports, I think we finally have a solution."

"What's that, dad?"

James says "If things stay as they are, if nobody else has your gift, in seven years you'll be graduating from a D-I school and getting ready to play whatever sport you want professionally. You're going to be famous, Andrew, and you're going to make a lot of money, and celebrity and wealth are the best protection you can have if and when the government finally comes knocking."

Andrew says "I can't play go pro right out of high school because of the Chipper Jones rule, right? What is that, anyway?"

James shakes his head, "Not exactly. In baseball, as you know, Chipper was drafted by the Braves as the first overall pick in 1990. He was the top of fifteen players who spent less than a single season in minor league ball before they were called up to the Show. All fifteen of those players–like Manny Ramirez and Donovan Osborne–you know as some of the greatest players of all time, every one of them is in Cooperstown. There were players here and there before them like that, like your uncle Don, but that was the first real wave. All these teams were discovering half of what the military had kept secret for so long as top draft picks uniformly came through as the best players in baseball. In 1994 there was a strike and part of the reason why was older players were getting carted out so teams could bring in kids. One of the terms that ended the strike was the requirement that players couldn't enter the draft until they were a full four years out of high school. The NFL already had their three-year rule, they changed it to a four-year rule, same for basketball and hockey. Association football doesn't have it and neither does the PGA–"

Andrew interrupts, "I don't like soccer and golf is okay but I'd rather play baseball or football. So I have to play in college."

"You could play in an independent league if you really wanted to, or go play in Japan, or play here in the XFL. Or you could go to college for free."

Andrew, age sixteen, the winter of his junior year. His father thought his gift would keep improving; it stalled at the crate. He's in the room in the basement, leaning against an old desk, looking at the fateful baseball a foot above his palm, asking again "Why is it limited to this?"

Again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again.

How many times has he thought this? How many times has he said it aloud?

The baseball moves up and down above his hand. Neat trick. He stares a hole into it. He wonders, in none of these exact words, if reality has some perspective-flexibility, physical principles irresolute at a whim. When the baseball is in-his-hand-above-his-hand, does it behave because he expects reality to accommodate? Except he controls it with reflex, not with conscious thought.

The immediate difference between the yes or no of this cosmic question are little. The yes is exciting, but he is precociously skeptical of such a conclusion. Besides, the no is obviously right. Yet isn't it just an equivocation to say he's only moving things in reality and thereby changing it, rather than reality itself changing according to his will? He thinks no, he thinks it's the former, whether the former is still essentially the latter is beyond him.

Baseball, desk.

Something, sometimes–when he so chooses–moves objects toward or away from his skin. Why is it limited to the shape of his body? Is it because it's intrinsic? What relation does "intrinsic" have with telekinesis and the shape of his flesh? Well why wouldn't they have such a relationship, since it's intrinsic? He thinks this passes the buck.

He wishes he were taking physics. But what area would this be? What's the gap of understanding? Surely the knowledge difference between the present paradigm and whatever this is would be the kind not typified by time so much as whatever breakthrough it takes to reach an entirely new paradigm that may not be conceivable until humanity's next entirely new paradigm. But he exists, right now. The ball is hovering in the air, right now, this thing emanates seemingly from his body, right now. If humanity is on the P paradigm then his existence is a necessary portent of the Q paradigm, regardless of anything they think they know, or suspect they don't know. Maybe they're close, maybe simply knowing that he can exist is enough for someone to figure out how.

He's pretty sure that isn't how science works. He also thinks his timeline is off. Regardless, they'll know it exists soon enough. How could he be the only one?

That would be nice. He knows better.

He thinks about how casually this seems to work, albeit as if casual can appropriately describe telekinesis. What's the spatial difference between his hand and the desk? Why would he assume spatial relation matters? Here he laps well-worn paths around the forest he is finally about to see.

The baseball spirals around his arm, he thinks about it coming off his body.

"Why can't I do more? Why do I feel like I'm borrowing it rather than creating it?"

He thinks. He thinks.

Again and again.

Until a new thought comes.

"Does it not come from me at all? Am I tapping into something?"

Gentle ringing.

What if there is no trick? What if there is no switch? A gift, yes, but no box hidden in the mind needing unwrapped. What if it isn't practice? What if it is a decision? What if it is conviction?

If he is using some of it, then he will simply choose to use all of it.

As clear as if spoken. Can you control it?

"Yes," he says, affirming epiphany, "and it's as simple as this."

His hands relax at his sides and the baseball remains in the air above the desk.

Not above his hand, not above his arm, not above his skin. In the air, on its own.

His hands and arms go numb as they follow the rest of his body to the ground.

He hasn't lost consciousness, but he has lost something, and gained something else.

He stands slowly, feeling no complaints from the parts that fell hardest.

He thinks "What happened?"

He walks around the spot, rolling his shoulders, stretching his arms and his legs. With each movement a new feeling grows. With each step his concern rises. Something is amiss, there's a ringing in his ears, a disconcerting itch over his body. His heart is pounding, his pace falters, step left, step right. A million hands pulling on his skin. "What is this? What is this?!" His movements worsen, his vision darkens, he walks to the door and tries to reach for the handle but now his arms won't respond. "What is. . . what am. . ." and he turns around.

The baseball is motionless in the air above the desk.

The sound of thunder fills his ears and he staggers.

He feels it. Understands it. Implicitly and totally knows its existence. The sense fills his mind, the quiet tone of his environment. A resonance. He knows the baseball is in the air, where he set it, the air around it, the desk beneath it. The resonance hums on, it saturates and pervades, he sees it and knows it in the air, the room, the objects, the floor, the walls, the ceiling. The house. The street. The forested neighborhood. The baseball lowers as the desk raises to meet it.

Andrew asks himself, not for the first time, but for the first time in earnest, the first time he actually appreciates what he's asking, "Why do I have this?"

He stands in the doorway of the office. He tosses the baseball to his father, who prepares to catch it when the ball halts, stuck in the air.

"I always wondered." says James.