Radix

"It's my car, Ma. It's been mine for years." Sumner reached the top of the stairs and had to shove aside old Johnny Yesterday, who fell asleep night after night at the head of the stairs, reliving an early childhood habit. Johnny Yesterday was the boarder they had had in their house for the past eight years—since Sumner's father had died. He was half deaf, senile, and blind in one eye. But worst of all, a distort characteristic was just beginning to surface. In his case it was a deep mind distortion: He could move physical objects tele-kinetically.
In McClure, as in every Masseboth city, distorts of all types were efficiently and painlessly done away with. Johnny Yesterday's deep mind capacity had bloomed just after he had been laid off at the factory, two weeks away from his fifty-year pension. There, for forty-nine years, he had been relentlessly punching holes in the cardboard panels that swung under his nose on their way to becoming circuit boards at the far end of the assembly line. Sumner was convinced the layoff had precipitated the distortion, but Zelda couldn't have cared less. She stopped charging him rent (he didn't have any zords anyway) and discreetly incorporated his rare talent in her spirit guide business.
Sitting in the kitchen behind a thick curtain, amused and stimulated by glass beads and snake vertebrae necklaces that Zelda stored in crates for prospective clients, he performed on cue. When Zelda was ready to start her heavy oaken table thumping or have the flowers in the great brazen coiled-snake vase leap out and dance, she would enunciate very loudly Johnny Yesterday's mother's name: "Christabel Mira!" She had learned that whenever old Johnny Yesterday heard that name, his deep mind capacity went rogue.
The power was so rare that even when the thick curtain was itself blown away by Johnny's intense telekinetic nostal-gia, no one suspected that it was the leering, glassy-eyed old man with the twitching ears who animated the whole show. But Zelda had to be careful in her use of Johnny Yesterday's gift. The Masseboth were always alert to reports of deep mind powers. Once word got around that this was happening, they would haul her away for a quick and painless end.
Zelda, though cautious, was fearless. Convinced by sev-eral years of catering to people who needed miracles, whose emptiness could only be filled by the impossible, she truly believed that the Powers were communicating through Johnny Yesterday. That's why when Sumner shoved him aside at the head of the stairs, she became stricken.
"Be gentle, pudding. He's been like a father to you."
It was a lie. Johnny Yesterday and Sumner had never exchanged a word. By an unspoken agreement they com-pletely ignored each other. The old man didn't even break the rhythm of his snoring as Sumner propped him back up against the wall and stepped over him into the living room.
It was an expansive room with strange, forbidding hunks of furniture. Almost all of it had been given to Zelda by her patrons, either for services rendered or because nobody else would take it. A behemoth throne, complete with escutcheon-bearing dragons carved into the side panels and a tasseled canopy of royal indigo, occupied the far wall. It was flanked on both sides by peacock-blue urns big enough to stand in, and in which Johnny Yesterday usually did. There was also a massive bronze bust of somebody who looked furious; a candelabra whose candles stuck out at every possible obtuse angle; an ancient metal sea chest that had long ago fused shut and had never been opened, despite a muffled rattling when-ever it was moved; and phalanges of imitation ostrich feathers bowing shyly above a metallic-green shag sofa that had gone bald years before it had come here to die. The floor was covered with a giant oval rug with a life-size camel embroi-dered into it. Here and there were stools with wood-carved monkey feet; a settee shaped like a maw, replete with tiny bamboo teeth and leather lips; and a squat table with bro-caded legs and a filigreed surface depicting an angel whose once beatific smile had faded with age to a demented leer.
Sumner maneuvered himself through the clutter of stools to a narrow door beside the furious bust, but before he could open it Zelda grabbed him by the arm.
"Aren't you going to tell me what happened, pudding? You look just terrible."
"Nothing happened, Ma."
"Nothing happened?" she whined, and pulled the last two buttons off his shirt. "You think I'm zaned? Look at you." She slapped the bellyroll drooping over his belt and flopped one of his tits. "Pigging it," she said with disgust; then her eyes narrowed. "You're not beating up little boys for food money anymore, are you?"
"Ma!" Sumner gently pushed her off and moved to open his door, but Zelda put her hand on the doorknob.
"Hold on, you. You're always squirming, always itching to be someplace else. Stand still a minute and get a good taste of yourself."
Sumner sighed and scratched his belly. "What do you want, Ma?"
Her voice sharpened. "I want you to stand still a minute and look at yourself. What have you ever crafted?" She slapped his belly again. "Just this. That's all you're good for, taking food and turning it into—"
"Ma!"
"When was the last time you brought home anything but mud and moody wangol? Ha! Last time? There hasn't been a first time."
"Ma, I want to be alone."
"When aren't you alone? All I see of you is the mud you leech behind. Where do you go? What do you do? I'm your mother and I don't know. I feed you and I don't know."
Sumner turned to go, but Zelda grabbed his shoulder and, throwing her whole weight against him, turned him around. He felt her eyes grind into him, and he wondered if he would have to belt her. Instead, he started picking his nose.
Zelda stabbed him with a finger. "You're a half-witted rundi, running all over town, day after day. For what? An-swer me! For what?"
"Ma, it's my business—"
"Your business?" Her whole face clenched. "Take your finger out of your nose and listen to me. You don't own anything here. You've never earned even a slice of bread that wasn't for yourself. Don't go telling me what my business is. You're my business. I've given you everything you have. This house is mine. That car is mine. Those clothes are mine. And this gumbo is mine!"
She grabbed two big handfuls of Sumner's voluminous midriff and yanked at it until he shoved her off. "It's mine, I say!" She stared at him with apoplectic rage. "I created it, and I've fed it. What have you ever done? There's nothing—"
She stopped abruptly and her fury became an immense sadness. It happened so quickly that Sumner, even though he knew what was going to happen, was left waiting. "Klaus! Is this our son? Is this the boy we created?" She cocked her head as if she were listening to somebody behind her.
Sumner bit his tongue and shoved into his room, slam-ming the door behind him. Alone, he crumbled onto the beat-up mattress and its clutter of heaped clothes and bed-ding and covered his eyes with his arm. He heard the door snick open. Swiftly he tugged a shoe out from behind the mattress and hurled it at the blanched, shriveled face appear-ing in the doorway, missing it by inches. The door banged shut, and Sumner covered his eyes again.
Alone. But he was too keyed up to sleep. He stirred restlessly from side to side and finally heaved himself to his feet and started throwing the scattered clothes on his bed all over the small, dark room. The place, like everything else about Sumner, was a sloppy mess. There was a broken chair in one corner, a mattress with a feathery rent in another corner, and a desk propped up by zucchini crates against the one wall with a window. The window itself was cracked, thickened with grime, and splattered with paint. On the desk there was a moil of beat-up tools, stacks of crackling yellowed papers, springs, clips, rocks, mementoes, balled-up tissues, crumbs, a torn shirt, three toothbrushes, several broken pens, a dirty glass, and a gleaming chrome-plated scansule with a sixteen-inch screen and a push-button console.