Invisible Touch

Invisible Touch

Chapter 8 ~ Kim

High school graduation was bitter sweet. Time marches on and life marches forward. And children become adults. It was nice to be on the verge of entering college, but up until now, Ernie had always enjoyed plenty of space. There was a bigger world out there. He was probably going to feel like a fish out of water, but he was going to have to learn how to swim.

His dreams were becoming more of a problem and interfering much more in his daily life. Whenever Ernie would touch someone he felt a kind of spark sensation.

"It's similar to what you get when you touch something metal on a winter day after you've been scuffing your feet on the carpet," he wrote in his journal. "Only the spark feels hot and more intense. It sometimes comes with a wave of warmth throughout my entire body, but not always. I sometimes get a bad headache, too, but that happens less of the time."

And he wrote down what was happening because he really felt like there was nobody he could talk to about this. And who could he tell?

"Yes, Doctor," he could imagine the conversation he might have. "I touch somebody and I get a spark. Then later on, maybe at night, but maybe during the day I'll have a dream about this person and, well, it turns on that this dream is actually the person's future."

Right. Nobody would believe him. It was a very lonely feeling. Lonelier still was the problem of physical contact. He was going to be in charge of a charity organization that would need to interact with the community. He could only keep himself behind a desk so much. How was he going to shake hands with people? He pondered this for a while. It was a basic courtesy, but he was going to have to find a way around it somehow, he thought.

Ernie tried to keep track of the dreams in his journal, and while he was keenly aware that they were becoming more intense and vivid as he grew older, they were also happening more quickly.

"It used to be, if I touched somebody," he wrote, "I didn't have to worry about having a dream about that person until night time. I'll never forget that time I had just gotten off of my bike and one of my dreams started. If I had still been riding when my vision blurred, who knows what might happened -- I'd probably be toast. Well now they're happening even sooner than that. An hour, two hours after I touch somebody. How am I going to have any kind of life?"

High school graduation also brought a scattering of Ernie's friends around the state and across the country. He was glad that Doug was sticking around. It was always nice to be around somebody that you could trust, even if you had a big secret you had to keep from them.

And it was bad enough, Ernie felt, that he had been keeping this one secret his whole life. Now he had another. He didn't want the whole world to know that he had inherited a six million dollar trust fund. What kind of people might that attract? He wasn't being paranoid, he told himself. He was just being cautious.

Another of his friends was going to be attending the same college as Ernie. But this was how he had met Kim Wilson -- at one of the information sessions. They shared a number of interests, including writing. Kim wanted to be a novelist some day. Ernie just loved putting words on paper and couldn't even imagine having enough of them in the right order for them to end up in book form.

Kim had recently lost her grandfather, with whom she had been very close, and this was something Ernie felt they had in common. Mrs. Appleton had been like another grandmother to him, particularly where his own grandparents had taken over the role of parent.

And he had lost his mother, of course. But he didn't even think of her that way, he sometimes felt ashamed to admit to himself. He never knew her directly, only through the stories his grandparents and Mrs. Appleton would tell him. He never felt a sense of loss of his mother, and in a way this was a good thing. But it made him sad somehow, for her sake.

Ernie and Kim become very good friends that year and the summer after graduation. He knew that they could never be more than just friends. It was hard enough that he couldn't ever give her a hug, he thought. It wasn't that he didn't want to. He just knew what it would lead to -- a dream of her and a vision of her future. And that would violate her privacy, he felt. It was an intrusion he felt just wasn't right.

"I'm sorry I can't hug you," he imagined himself saying to her. "It's just that I don't want to sneak a peek behind the curtains of your life and spy into your future."

Right.

On her birthday, in the middle of July, Ernie gave her a gift. It was nothing big or special, just the new CD by Tricky Dick and the Cover-ups. That was so sweet, she thought -- she was a big fan. She went to give Ernie a hug and he quickly backed away. How strange, she thought. It wasn't as if she had been trying to kiss him or anything. Oh well, she thought -- everybody was different.

Ernie sensed her understanding and very much appreciated it.

College was great, Ernie decided. He was all moved into his own apartment, and he loved his new freedom. Academically, it was a whole new world, and he enjoyed each and every challenge he faced. His introductory business class could be mind-numbingly boring, but it was different from anything he had studied in high school.

And Kim was in his class. She seemed to understand him in a way he couldn't figure out. She gave him the space he seemed to need, and they just enjoyed their time together. They would study together -- business and English, another class they both attended. They would go the movies or watch videos. They would go bowling -- something she had introduced him to. Whatever they were doing, they had a really good time.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" he asked her once.

"Oh gawd, am I supposed to know that already?" she replied. "I'm just keeping my options open so far, and maybe I'll go to law school. Why, do you have your future figured out yet?"

"Yup," he answered. "I had this friend, an older lady next door,"

"Ooh, sounds tawdry," she teased.

He laughed. "Well she was really, really rich. Funny thing was, she didn't live that kind of lifestyle. I sure didn't know she had all that money squirreled away. And when she died, in her will, she created this charity organization because she wanted me to run it."

"She should have just given you all the money," Kim suggested. Ernie hadn't mentioned the part about his own inheritance.

"Yeah, that would have been nice," he said. It was only a little white lie, he thought. "Intergenerational relations, that's the organization's main mission."

"Sounds interesting," Kim said.

"Yeah. She was a nice lady, and I never really thought about... Well, I knew, obviously, she was much older than me. I guess I didn't really think about how out of the ordinary it was that we were such good friends."

"I know what you mean. My grampa and me," she started to say, and tears filled her eyes. "He was the greatest."

"Tell me about him," Ernie asked.

Kim thought of one of her favorite story about her grandfather and that brought a smile to her face.

"Grampa had this really old, ratty bowling bag," she recalled, "and he used to say it was his lucky bag. The zipper didn't work anymore. There was a hole in it. In fact, we were leaving the bowling alley one day and I saw a dollar bill fall out of his bag. 'Grampa, you dropped this,' I told him. 'Oh no, honey, that's not mine,' he replied. 'I saw it fall right out of the hole in your bowling bag,' I said. He smiled and said, 'there is no hole in my lucky bowling bag. You see, honey, this bag is so lucky, it's even magical -- it turns gum wrappers into dollars!'"

She was laughing now. And she was wiping more tears from her eyes, but these were happy tears.

"How about you," she asked. "You've told me you were raised by your grandmother and grandfather. What was that like?"

"Well," he began. "I guess I don't have anything else to compare it to. In a way, I didn't have any 'grandparents' at all. They were my gramma and grampa and that's what I called them. But really, they were they only parents I ever knew. On the other hand, Mrs. Appleton -- my next door neighbor -- we were close, like... well, like you and your grandfather, I guess."

Ernie paused. He had never really analyzed his own family situation.

"That's funny," he chuckled. "I never really thought about it like that. She was the one who spoiled me, if you could call it that. I always felt bad that my grandparents couldn't play that role in my life. They sacrificed that, and a whole lot more, just to raise me. I hope they know how much I've always appreciated that."

"Well, do you tell them?" Kim asked.

"Probably not as often as I should," he confessed, and made a mental note to call them tonight, and not wait for their weekly chat.

"Do you talk to them much? Your grandparents, I mean." Kim asked.

"Every Sunday evening," he said. And then said with a chuckle, "they've installed a second phone in the living room so they can sit together but both talk to me at the same time. Sometimes we'll be talking about -- I don't know, just anything -- and they will be speaking directly to each other. I can just picture it, the two of them in the same room, having a conversation over the phone."

"Have you always been a..." she searched for the right word. "...a talky family?"

"Oh yeah, we've always done things together, talked about stuff, interests, but mostly school, and the future, like future plans and all. It's funny how those plans have changed," he said.

"How so?" Kim asked.

"Well, we never knew that Mrs. Appleton was so rich, and then she created this charity, and then that became my new future. Don't get me wrong, I love the idea, and I can't wait to get started with it. But it's funny you mentioned law school before, because when I was a kid, and growing up, I used to picture myself going to law school. But you know what, I could never actually picture myself being a lawyer. I just have this -- I guess you'd call it an academic fascination with the law."

"What else did your family talk about?" Kim asked.

"We'd talk about art and science a lot. We'd go to Chicago sometimes, to the museums. That was always a lot of fun. They wanted to expose me to lots of... stuff."

"Stuff," she chuckled. "You are so eloquent!"

He smiled. "Yup, stuff. Smart stuff. Stuff to fill my brain, I guess. And there's nothing wrong with that, is there They had a mission to make me smart."

"Sure, nothing wrong with that. Lots of parents do that. Mine did, too. And I wonder if we ever bumped into each other at the Art Institute or the Museum of Science and Industry. We used to go there a lot, too."

"Huh, wouldn't that be funny if you and I met as little kids and we never even knew it."

And his tone shifted slightly.

"I know from Mrs. Appleton that's how they raised my mother, too. Education was their big thing with her, too."

"Did your grandparents talk much about your mom?" Kim asked. She didn't want to pry, and she suddenly wondered if maybe she shouldn't have asked that. "You don't have to..."

"It's OK. No, they didn't, and I always wished they'd tell me more. It wasn't as if they didn't want me to know anything about her. Mrs. Appleton would tell me story after story about my mother. I guess that's one of the reasons she and I became so close -- was through the memory my mother. No, I think they just didn't like talking about her. They were so devastated by her death, and their reticence was pretty much the only way they ever showed it, at least by the time I was old enough to notice."

"That's kind of sad," Kim said. "I can't even imagine. It's bad enough losing someone you love, and I've been there, and it was awful, but parents should never have to bury their children. It's just not right."

"What about your father?" Kim started. "Do your grandparents ever talk about him?"

"They never knew him," Ernie said. "Never even knew who my father was, at least as far as I know. And neither do I."

She was curious. Did he ever wonder about that? Somehow she sensed he didn't really want to talk about the subject.

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