Tuesday the 21st
That insufferable brat was back again tonight. My latest manservant, Brad, even held the door
for her after she introduced herself to him. What is the point of vault-quality locks if a pretty face
can turn the keys? When I furiously pointed out to him that we are the only squatters in this
rotting five-story tenement, he defended himself by saying, “But she had grocery bags.” He is
clearly not challenged by the thought process!
I should note that the bags, which she abandoned once she gained entry, contained empty
cereal boxes. Apple Jacks, no less. Oh, but she mocks me at every turn, even in the midst of
failure. Clever Min!
As I have noted previously, she is one of those petty thieves who call themselves casters. I’ve
known their type for decades now—they come with their tiny blank cards and their tiny
ambitions, hell-bent on mapping my essence like a soul-stealing member of the paparazzi,
desperate for a sliver of fame garnered by riding my own honestly famous coattails.
But they have always been the punchline to a joke, for I suspect I have no soul.
Be that as it may, these strangers who know me have tried time and again to map me. Their
magic, such as it is, will capture my qualities and embed them, combined with those casters’
own attributes, on the special cards they carry. And thereafter, they will always be able to call
upon some duplicated memory of me whenever they like. Perhaps it’s a harmless process,
much like taking a photograph or painting a portrait. But I find it invasive. I have never felt the
desire to be cooperative when beggars try to choose me.
To her credit, Min has shown that she is an exception to the rule. She’s not some simple
foxhound, chasing me through the brush while baying and whining. She did her research not
just to find me but to understand me. She has come, I believe, to appreciate the whys of what I
do and how those motivations lead me to make other decisions.
Case in point: She must have seen the same article I did in the Times concerning the Broadway
star who claimed he had never been afraid of anything, “even my own mortality,” in his entire
life. Poppycock, of course. And a challenge, one we both recognized. Further, she understood
that when I stalked Mr. Broadway, I certainly wouldn’t approach him before, during, or
immediately after one of his performances. On 45 th Street? In broad daylight? With the actual
paparazzi swarming like gnats? Any slapdash casters looking for me would be there, but I would
be eight blocks away, waiting for Mr. Broadway at the hotel he called his home while working in
New York City.
The room below his was empty, and it wasn’t hard to get in—a surprising number of maids
leave their universal electronic passkeys in their trolleys while cleaning a room, so it’s simple
enough to borrow one. Ah, how they trust that a classy hotel must mean classy hotel guests.
My plan was a simple one, as the best ones are: Wait on the balcony below for the lights in the
room above to come on. Give Mr. “Never Afraid” Broadway a brief opportunity to step out onto
his own balcony, which would be pure serendipity and not a requirement for my plan. Then, leap
from my balcony to his with as much cacophony as possible to terrorize him. The anticipation
made my skin tingle. For an epilogue, wetting himself would be nice, or a girlish shriek would
do. I would regret anything more than a mild heart attack, I suppose.
Yet when I entered the empty hotel room below, it was most certainly not empty. I discovered
the young Asian woman right away—she was hidden behind the floor-length drapes covering
the balcony doors. I knew she was there because the drapes were closed. Hotels leave them
open when the rooms are unoccupied. A minor mistake, but a revelatory one.
She had attached her card for mapping me to the room’s mirror, where its magic would begin
when I passed betwixt it and her. Given my proclivity for bounding and the bonus of a high
ceiling, I opted to jump over its trajectory. I landed with a deliberate thud where I would be out of
her sight when she emerged from her hiding place.
And she did, of course—flinging back the drapes, her orange coat fluttering, her long hair awhirl,
and her palm pressed into a book where she planned to contain my purloined essence. She
muttered something meant to trigger her card across the room, but she instantly realized that I
was not in her magical line of sight. Her face snapped around toward me.
“Oops,” I said.
No doubt she had a backup plan, but I had no interest in seeing how that might play out. It took
me an instant to reach around her, unlatch the sliding glass door, and propel it open. Before she
could react, I had barreled us both outside onto the balcony, four stories above the sidewalk,
and danced her right over the concrete railing.
“Bye-bye,” I said and let her fall.
She did not scream, which I was hoping for, and in fact, she twisted in the air such that I believe
she might have been able to catch hold of one of the balconies below us had I not gone down
after her. Over the years, I have mastered the controlled fall—I snatched her from possible
death and certain catastrophic injury two stories down. She squirmed in my grip.
“Do you want to die?” I whispered, aghast.
“You underestimate me,” she said. We were about to strike the sidewalk. It raced up toward us.
“And you don’t know Jack,” I said.
Like a cat, I am possessed of what’s called the righting reflex—my feet instinctively jockey
underneath me, and my joints and muscles brace for impact from a fall. Unlike a cat, I am also
possessed of the ability to regain immediate control of a fall—and project myself upward again.
Thus, Spring Heeled: I pulled her in closer to me and bent my knees to meet the concrete, the
soles of my shoes taking the brunt of the impact. And thus did Miss Min find herself sprawled on
the second-floor balcony after we struck the pavement, bounced like an entwined pair of
kangaroos, and I deposited her rather roughly two stories up.
“Consider yourself warned, missy,” I said as I sprang again, scaling up balconies along the hotel
as if they were stepping stones. Mr. Broadway’s room lights were still dark, and after my
encounter with Min, I had spent my excitement for the evening. I took to the rooftops and made
my way home once more.
That was less than a week ago. Over the weekend, the show closed, and Mr. Broadway
returned to being Mr. Blockbuster in Los Angeles. My interest in him faded like many a hope on
Broadway. With nearly nine million residents, New York City does not lack those I can just as
easily terrorize, so my last thought on Mr. Broadway was that should he come to town again to work on the reported sequel to his latest cinematic drivel, I’ll be there to show him what a real
horror show is.
This brings me up to tonight. I returned quite late from rattling some glass of the Edge
Observation Deck at Hudson Yards—it’s over a thousand feet in the air, and smarmy tourists
who step out onto the deck with nothing but glass all around them are highly susceptible to
terrorizing.
Brad, whom I’d hired to tend my more mundane affairs and provide security, had failed at the
latter and was already asleep when I came in. I took note of the Key Food bags in the hallway
beyond our flat as new additions to the rubbish that had accumulated since the city had branded
the structure as an “unsafe building,” leaving me as the sole tenant. Oh, I suppose I should
count Brad as another. Two tenants. And tonight, we were three, for we had a visitor.
She was fairly well hidden this time—in a sizable old wardrobe by the window—but once again,
her shiny caster’s card was utterly out of place amidst the rooms' ubiquitous gray and faded
surfaces. I saw it out of the corner of my eye and leaped toward it, seizing it from where she’d
affixed it to the fireplace mantle and whipping out to determine the line of sight she would
require. That was when Min burst from the wardrobe with her book in hand.
“Just wait, Jack,” she said.
“No more warnings,” I said and lunged at her feet first.
What I must say is this: It was not my intention to kill her. Perhaps injure her a bit so as to jolt
her out of this obsession with mapping me—the word “fan” comes from “fanatic,” let me note.
Min was, in my defense, a fan who’d crossed the line. But as she stumbled backward out the
open window, desperately grabbing for the edges, I tried to tell myself that it was only three
stories. She could survive. But as she disappeared down into the darkness, I knew better. I
rushed to the sill, prepared for a terrible sight.
She rose before me from below, as if flung into the sky. When she was level with me, she
reached forward and snatched her card from my fingers.
“For next time,” she said and down she fell again.
When she reached the darkened street below, she bounced away, as surely as if she were my
heir. I heard the springs in her boots coil and recoil, and for just an instant as she propelled
herself between the abandoned buildings across the avenue, I could see them glimmer in the
half-light of the moon. She leaped again, as spring heeled as I, and vanished into the night.
I was both enraged and impressed. I woke Brad to belittle him, and then I apologized and told
him to find out who she was.
“Min,” he told me. When he told me how she’d gained entrance, I clenched my fists and tried to
sound conciliatory.
“Last names apply in this culture, Brad,” I told him. “An address, a telephone number, a lurking
presence at a www computer site. I want you to find her.”
Apologetic for letting her get so far, he promised he would track her down. But as agreeable and
malleable as he is, I have my doubts Brad will find her—without a map and an incentive, I’m not
certain he could find his own buttocks.
Sunday the 17th
I stand corrected! It took him almost a month, but Brad, my manservant, discovered the
whereabouts of the self-important Miss Min, she who’s tried twice to corner me so she could
pillage my essence for whatever nefarious purpose motivates casters to do so.
Alas, he also brought news of her condition: It would seem that she has taken to her deathbed.
He was unable to determine if she fell ill or if she simply fell while leaping about, but regardless
of the circumstances, she has been checked into a hospice care facility upstate in the last few
days. Her prognosis remains shrouded in privacy, but this fact alone tells the tale. So young!
Such a waste of talent and potential! In all, such a tragedy.
Therefore, I am obligated to visit her in order to mock her failure.
Monday the 18th
You should have heard Brad wail when I told him of my intentions.
“Hasn’t she suffered enough?” he cried.
I looked for the twinkle in his eye, but there was none to be found. I said, “Surely you jest.”
This morning, I left him with his back to me, the silent treatment for my lack of compassion and,
worse, for my spiteful manner. He thrust the address of the hospice in Albany at me, and as I
took my leave, I told him I trusted he’d still be my manservant when I returned. He didn’t argue,
so I knew he would be.
“It’s only teasing,” I told him. “I wouldn’t do it to you, you know.”
The guilt stayed with me as far as Penn Station, so a good twenty minutes.
No one troubled me on the train ride north, as is often the case when I move in crowds. I go
unnoticed—unless I wish to be noticed, of course. I changed cars a few times and found
children in three of them who merited a good fright to silence their screaming, childish behavior.
When they cried, I left for another car, satisfied.
By the time I found the quiet, treelined neighborhood of the hospice, it was almost midday, and
with my headache at the brightness came a realization: It could be a trap.
This new thinking changed everything. Min the clever could have found a way to ensure Brad
would learn of her “medical state” in order to reach me indirectly. And knowing my nature, she
could have determined that I would come to gloat, making myself vulnerable to her caster
trickery. To have one’s nature turned so successfully against you would make one even more
determined to thwart such a plan.
Once I was of this mind, there was no turning back. And I knew what to look for to frustrate her
yet again.
I roamed the perimeter of the building unobserved, looking up at all the windows. She would
expect me to leap to her room, of course—and so the trap would begin there. And sure enough,
I finally spotted what I was looking for: a rectangular shape, barely visible in the bottom corner
of one of two French door windows on the third floor. Her card. The second window was
partially open inward, an inviting doorway for me to waltz through and put my back to her card,
undoubtedly in a direct line of sight between it and her as she lay on her farcical deathbed. And
in that way would Miss Min map me.
Unless, as I decided to do, I removed her card from the window once I’d leaped to her terrace.
The room within was quite ordinary, littered as one might expect with the symbols of sympathy
from well-wishers: stuffed animals filled the only chair, a veritable garden of flowers occupied
most flat surfaces, a sizable mass of get-well cards had been taped to the back of the closed
door of the room’s entrance, and helium balloons bumped with hollow thumps against one
another in the gentle breeze I created upon entering. I glanced into an open door across the
room—just a toilet. She was alone.
And how alone she looked! A monitor beeped next to her bed, the only noise, and she lay as
silent and still as one in the grave. Stiff white blankets and sheets had been pulled up to her
chin, and all that remained visible of her was her face. Her black hair was pulled tightly behind
her head. She seemed small and inconsequential. More importantly, she seemed asleep, which
would not do.
“Wake up, Min,” I said, and her eyes flew open. “Oh, yes, Brad remembered your name.”
She bit her lip, the defeated doll, as I moved to the foot of her bed and flicked her card at her,
sending it skittering across the blanket. It almost hit her chin.
I said, “Whether you’re truly dying or not—which I doubt, given the card in the window that I’m
sure was there to trap me—this will be the last time we meet. I don’t scare you—clearly—and I
believe there are more things in heaven and—"
There, my soliloquy ended. Min threw back the sheets, revealing herself to be fully dressed and
holding her open book beneath the covers. I dared a glance at the door behind me, the one
decorated with get-well cards, and I spotted it hidden among them: a second card like the first
I’d found in the window.
It illuminated for a moment, a glow neither warm nor comforting, and a square of it raced over
me and the length of the bed. It swirled for a moment around Min as she scrambled from the
bed, her book held before her and pointed at me as if she were about to read some glorious
text, and it coalesced above a spot in one corner of the right-hand page. An image appeared
there: I recognized my own static face.
She had mapped me.
And then she pushed a button on the device beside the bed. A shrill whistle began in the halls
beyond the room’s door.
“Time to hit the road, Jack,” she said, smiling at me, and slammed her feet onto the floor beside
her bed. The springs in her shoes rocketed her away from me, straight into the water closet with
its toilet. She turned, waved once to me, and slammed the door. I heard the lock click.
I turned toward the entrance as footsteps approached, giving me no time even to confiscate the
card she had camouflaged among the greeting cards from non-existent well-wishers. Preferring
a loss to a confrontation, I sprang for the open French windows and leaped to the lawn three
stories below. I took another two leaps to reach the edge of the property and the shadows of the
tree line there before I looked back.
Min stood at the window, book in one hand, card in the other, watching me go. She waved
goodbye to me as if we were friends instead of bitter rivals, and caught up in the moment, I
waved back.
Well done, clever Min.
I decided then and there I would, upon my return to the flat, tell Brad that he was summarily
fired. He would not be, of course, but the sudden fear in his face would make up for an
otherwise dispiriting day.
