Below The Fold

I don’t remember exactly when I first found it. Ima used to tell stories about me using it as a baby. She said she’d be putting me in my crib and the mobile would just start spinning on its own. Or she’d take the bottle from me and put it on the changing table and a moment later I’d have it back.

She knew right off what it was. She called it, “the Nes” (rhymes with place) which is Hebrew for miracle. A common prayer phrase during Chanuka is, “Nes gadol hayah sham,” which means, “A great miracle happened there.” It refers to the Maccabees’ reclamation of the Temple of Israel and the miracle of one day’s worth of oil lasting for eight. Except whenever she said it, she’d wink at me and gesture at my bedroom, where she first saw me use the Nes.

Ima told me Saba used to tell her stories at bedtime about his Savta who could make the pots dance in a line in the kitchen after Passover seder. They called it the Nes back then, too.

But Ima said the Nes was stronger in me than it was in my grandfather’s grandmother. She said my great, great Savta could only manage to move small things here and there. When I was eight, I stopped a car.

I was playing in the front yard with my puppy, Sadie. She ran into the street after a ball, and a car almost ran her over. I screamed and the car stopped.

The driver wasn’t wearing a seatbelt, though. He was ejected through the windshield and landed on the street on his head, which popped like the pumpkins my friends would smash on their way to school after Halloween. The police who came couldn’t figure out how it happened. Ima just shook her head when they asked her if I’d seen anything. Later that night, she told me the Nes I had was too powerful in me, and that it was better if I didn’t ever use it again.

I tried not to. But it was as natural to me as wiggling my fingers or smiling. One day, later that year, Bobby Stellman was spitting on my head from the top of the monkey bars. I looked at him, and the whole thing collapsed. Only, Rebka Keller was underneath it, and had to be taken to the hospital. She was in a coma with brainswelling for three weeks, before she finally came out of it. Now, her left eye doesn’t work anymore and she stutters when she speaks.

It always seemed to work like that. Some unintended consequence would occur whenever I used the Nes. It’s like the Newton law, “every action has an equal and opposite reaction.” Only, it’s nothing you plan for happening. It’s like, if you push against a wall, the reaction is your body moves away from the wall. Except with the Nes, if I push against the wall, a meteorite comes out of nowhere and obliterates the wall. And kills three innocent bystanders.

After Rebka, I only used the Nes one more time, until last night. That time, I had no choice. It was my freshman year of college at Northwestern. I was out with a few friends I made from the dorms, at a bar on Rush St. One of the guys with us named Jerry knew the doorman and got us all in. There were five of us, all fairly well hammered by the time we left, except for Paul, who was the designated driver. Or so we thought. On the way home from the bar, Paul lost control of the car and we slammed into the guardrail on the highway. The right side of the car showered sparks as we skidded along the rail, and our momentum lifted the left side up. The car was going to roll completely over the guardrail. Everyone was screaming and bracing themselves for a collision. I closed my eyes and grabbed the steering wheel. The car righted itself and pulled to a smooth stop. Our screaming trailed off… almost comically so. Paul turned his head slowly towards me, eyes wide as saucers. He knew I saved us, even though I said nothing. We sat in silence for a moment, and then our heads snapped around in unison to the sound of tires screeching.

It was a minivan. A woman was driving, chatting on her cell phone, and distracted enough that she didn’t see us until she was almost on top of us. She swerved hard to the left, fishtailing around us. We all watched her fight to regain control. She fishtailed three more times, then the front left tire caught the median on the left. The minivan launched into the air, crossed into oncoming traffic and slammed, head on, into a big rig headed the opposite way, erupting into a violent explosion of fire, glass and metal. The shockwave was so tremendous, it shook the car we were in, as though the car was shuddering with fear after bearing witness to the accident.

Both drivers were killed as were the three children in the back of the minivan.

We were all arrested that night. Paul faced the worst of it—DUI, reckless endangerment, vehicular negligence resulting in manslaughter, etcetera. The rest of us got off with a slap on the wrists—alcohol classes and community service. Paul got sentenced to 10 years in prison. Apparently, the woman in the minivan was the niece of a senator.

It’s been six years since then, and yesterday, Paul called me. He was out on parole. He had served his time quietly. By now, I was working for the Tribune on the city desk. I got hired on straight out of college—I interned here during my senior year and made some good friends—and had worked my way from obits to the police beat.

“I’m out. We need to meet.” Was the message he left a few nights ago, along with where and when.

We met at the same bar on Rush St. we’d been to that night. Jerry’s doorman friend was long gone. The bar was quieter than it had been that night. I saw Paul, sallow and small, sitting in a booth near a window. I slid into the booth across from him.

“How you doing, old friend?”

“I’m free,” he replied. “This morning, I walked the Lake shore drive. From the Lincoln Park Zoo to the Shedd Aquarium.”

“Wow, that’s a hike.”

“Yeah.”

He was quiet, staring out the window as Rush begin to bustle a bit more. I let him be, figuring he’d get to whatever it was he needed to say in his own time.

“Jason, what happened that night?” His voice was low. He looked at me expectantly.

“We all had a few too many, Paul. We almost wrecked. We got lucky. Someone other folks weren’t so lucky.”

“Lucky.” He said it like it was the punch line to a joke. He cocked his head slightly to the side, and I noticed the top of some sort of tattoo creeping up his neck from under his collar. “Right. Lucky.” His stare became cooler and accusatory.

“What did you do, Jason?” He asked me.

“What are you talking about? I grabbed the wheel and tried to help you get the car back under control,” I said.

“No. It was something else,” he said. “You did something. You changed something.” Paul’s look was twisting into anger, and I suddenly realized he was thinner, but in far better shape now than when he went in.

“Paul, I’m not sure where this is going,” I said, reaching into my pocket to pull out some cash. “But I don’t have time for—” he grabbed my forearm and yanked my hand out from my coat. He leveled his gaze at me.

“Jason,” he said, quietly. “I learned a lot in prison. Much more than I learned my freshman year in Northwestern. You’re not leaving yet.”

I relaxed the tension in my arm and leaned back.

“All right, you’ve got my attention.” I said, my voice betraying my ice cool façade.

Paul laughed at me.

“Look at you, college boy. You’re scared shitless. And you don’t even need to be. Because you could pick me up and throw me through this window without lifting a finger, couldn’t you?”

“I don’t know—”

“DON’T LIE TO ME!” He fairly shouted. A few people at the bar glanced uncomfortably in our direction. He lowered his voice. “Don’t lie to me, Jason. I’ve been through a hell you only see in your nightmares for the last five years. I’m capable of things now I wasn’t capable of when you knew me.”

“Paul, I’m not lying,” I started, measuring my words carefully.

“Christ!” Paul picked up the salt shaker and whipped it at the cocktail waitress’ head. Her back was turned and she didn’t have a chance to avoid it. I looked at the shaker as it flew, and it shattered in mid air.

A girl sitting in the booth next to where the waitress stood started screaming. She held her hand to her eye as blood trickled from between her fingers.

Paul grinned at me.

“We better get going. Jay. Cops’ll be here with a quickness.” He took off like a shot out the back of the bar. People saw him leave and started moving my direction pointing at me. I jumped up and followed him.

We ran about three blocks through alleys before Paul stopped, leaning against the side of a dumpster. I was breathing much heavier than he was.

“I knew it,” he said. “How do you do it?”

I lost my temper then. I grabbed him by the shirt lapels and slammed him against the dumpster. He kneed me in the groin and head-butted me in the face. My nose shattered and I crumpled to the ground, and the pain blinded me for several seconds. He knelt down next to me and handed me a bandana he pulled out of his pocket. “How do you do it?” he repeated.

“I don’t fucking know,” I said, leaning my head back and holding the bandana to my face. “But it always happens like that. I try to change something and something just as bad happens, but differently. It’s like I just re-channel the energy in a different direction. I don’t think about it, it just happens.”

“Of course,” he said. “We were supposed to crash. You stopped it, but only for us. Someone still had to crash.”

“Yeah. Which is why I don’t use it anymore.”

“Until tonight,” Paul said smiling.

“Yeah, but never again.”

“Actually, one more time, Jason. You see, I knew you saved us as much as I knew I was serving time for your crime. You killed those other people to save us. So, I’ve been spending the last five years thinking about how you were gonna pay me back, Jason. Five years is long enough to come up with a lot of ideas, Jason.

“A lot of ideas.”