At age three, Tad Lincoln Spiegel, Bernie’s nephew, could take watches apart and put them back together. He had an incredible talent, but nobody’s talent compared to what Bernie could do.
At age ten, in the year of our Lord 1986, Bernie Spiegel was reborn. That’s when he received his gift from God. Although after long enough, he started to think it wasn’t a gift, which is why he went to the shrink. For fifteen years he’d given himself clear reasons not to go.
Reason 1: It’s in my imagination.
Reason 2: If I tell them the truth, they’ll lock me up in a ward somewhere.
Reason 3: I’ve never been depressed, and I don’t feel like hurting anyone — yet.
Reason 4: Escalators screw up all the time, don’t they?
Bernie was sure of two things, and two things only: that he could control escalators (stop, start, reverse, accelerate) with his mind, and that he would never intentionally commit a crime involving escalators.
When it had first started he was around ten, and it was incredible. He didn’t pull pranks, he just liked to watch the escalators move. Gradually he found that he could control other things too, like conveyor belts and dumbwaiters. When he was 16 it was only natural that he got a job at the local grocery store. His power had brought him up from lowly bag boy to less lowly cashier and so on all the way up to assistant store director at age 22. His coworkers had never seen him break a sweat, even during peak hours on Friday nights. He was just good. A human machine. Even as director, he was a go-to if you needed someone to pick up the slack.
That used to be true, at least. Those escalators did whatever he wanted. But as he grew older his thoughts became cluttered. Maybe it was a byproduct of adulthood. He’d been sabotaging himself lately. Now just thinking, “stop!” would get one to stop. There wasn’t an easy explanation when $100 of groceries slid backwards off the conveyor belt onto the ground. A soup can hit a lady’s foot. She was threatening to sue. Bernie was nervous. He wasn’t responsible for what his thoughts did!
He didn’t want to hurt anybody. If the folks at the shrink believed him, that was good, right? What would they do? Could they make it stop? Would they try to make it stop? Did he want it to stop? He didn’t want more soup can-induced casualties, that was for sure.
Whether it stopped or not, something had to be done about the chaos that ensued every time he went inside a shopping mall or a subway station. Airports weren’t safe either. Those damn moving sidewalks. Who knows what else he could do? Heaven forbid he ever got the wrong idea next to a grain elevator.
Maybe science will benefit from all of this, he thought. Maybe mommies and daddies who get scared when the blender turns on every time their daughter walks into the kitchen, maybe they will have some answers now. They will know. If that would make a difference…but that depends.
The first appointment was pretty basic. He answered some questions. The head doctor nodded disinterestedly and clicked his pen. Bernie’s delusions were probably typical. That was it, for starters. It’s not like they had medication for this kind of thing. He would be back next week for further evaluation. They’d set up some cognitive tests.
Afterword, Bernie went to the park by his apartment and sat on a bench. He watched his breath fog the air like a dragon’s. The cold crept up underneath his gloves and into his hands. It was so cold that he could feel the hair inside his nostrils start to freeze. He came to the park to think. He didn’t come to the park very much. There was no snow tonight. The sky itself was dark, but cloudless, and the stars were bright. Bernie wanted to stay inside his skin; he was so cold.