Telekinetically Yours
Day 3 of Five Stories in Five Days.
If there was one power that Marv wanted, after having watched all of those sci-fi/fantasy movies, it was the power of telekinesis so he could move light and heavy objects (and even—or especially—people) with his mind. So many things about life annoyed him, especially when it came to people, and he so wanted the ability to do something quick and decisive about it.
Marv hated how the world seemed always to be conspiring against him, always trying to thwart him. This would happen, too, in a ruthlessly consistent manner. He’d be out one night at 2 a.m.; the streets and paths would be empty, but the moment Marv decided to cross, some car or biker would appear and force him to pause, thwarting him from a simple act—the act of crossing the street without having to think about it. What the fuck? Marv would grumble in such moments. Seriously, what the fucking fuck? It’s goddamn two in the morning, and this dude comes bumbling out of nowhere right as I’m at the same place? Almost like clockwork this happened: Marv, 2 a.m., empty street, sudden appearance of a biker or driver, forced pause. Thwarted. Each incident was a minor annoyance, but a whole Rolodex of similar annoyances became something much bigger in Marv’s mind.
And it wasn’t just the street-crossing thing. In dense crowds, people in front of Marv would stop for no reason, forcing him to stop. More thwarting by the capricious, malicious gods. Or there were people ahead who would do a sudden 180 for no reason, which was just as obnoxious. Then there were the bastards who ignored the signs everywhere, the signs telling people to WALK RIGHT. Marv would be walking along on the right side of a path, minding his own business, then some rude, ignorant shit would appear directly in front of him, walking toward him on a collision course. And the fucker wouldn’t budge, either, when he got up to Marv, and Marv would feel obliged to be the one to move while this idiot, walking on what was his left side, would continue cluelessly on, utterly ignoring basic courtesy (Walk right, goddammit!), probably because he was thinking Everybody does it or some retarded shit like that. Or maybe the idiot was so stupid that he was unaware he’d done anything wrong. In Marv’s experience, most people were like that.
Cyclists often ignored their own bike lanes to blunder heedlessly into the pedestrian lane where Marv would walk. That was an irritatingly routine thing, too. Other people would casually cut in line. One sly person even poked Marv from behind while everyone was standing in a crowd and waiting for the next subway. So many little instances of human obnoxiousness, all caused by people’s utter lack of consideration for each other, or their active desire to be insufferable assholes.
Marv didn’t spend any time thinking about what kind of world it would be if everyone ruthlessly followed every social rule. The conformity. The boredom. The cold, distant politeness. If anything, Marv sometimes fantasized about seeing some obnoxious person being rude, at which point he would Thanos-dust the person, just poofing him or her out of existence for being an inconsiderate shit. A suddenly riderless bike tumbling off the pedestrian path. A suddenly ownerless purse dropping to the ground after the person had tried to execute a sudden, unjustified U-turn. Poof. Gone, motherfucker. Marv didn’t think about the consequences of Thanos-dusting someone’s dad or mom or sister or son. He didn’t think about what the world would be like if everyone had the Thanos-dusting power and could vanish anyone who crossed them.
But as satisfying as it was to imagine Thanos-dusting people, Marv kept coming back to telekinesis, the power he sincerely wished he had. Telekinesis felt, in many ways, more primitive and brutal, and Marv enjoyed the idea of people experiencing the reality of being forced not to do what they were doing, of instinctively realizing they’d been doing something wrong and were now being corrected. With telekinesis, there was control. That’s what Marv wanted. Control over his world, over his circumstances. Ultimately, he wanted control because he wanted peace, freedom from all of his petty annoyances, which had piled up and didn’t seem so petty anymore.
Marv remembered something that had happened a week ago, a real incident and not a fantasy: he had been walking along a bike bath, and one overprivileged, twenty-something girl had been blithely riding directly toward him on her bike. Per Murphy’s Law, she was in the pedestrian lane, of course. And she’d had plenty of time to see him. Marv had angrily gestured, jabbing his finger adamantly at the bike lane. The girl had ignored him with casual arrogance, tooling along, and she’d eventually just slipped right by him, continuing to invade pedestrian space as she’d tra-la-la’ed away. Fucking witch. Marv replayed the moment in his head, thinking he should’ve stood directly in her way to force her to move or to crash into him since she sincerely appeared not to care and needed to be brought back to reality. He then imagined walking along with a heavy, wooden staff, swinging it at the girl like a baseball bat as she rolled by, cracking her head, snapping her neck, and caving in her stupid-bitch face.
Replaying these kinds of images, remembering these myriad incidents, only made Marv angrier. And over time, the anger built, and inside Marv’s mind, whatever was building began to curdle, then to take shape, then to acquire weight and heft, then to become real like some weird, endlessly branching sea creature settling into the dark, twisting crevices and recesses of his brain.
And one day, Marv woke up, feeling that something had changed. He couldn’t put his finger on it, but something felt fundamentally different. He did his morning rituals as usual, getting ready for work. He stepped out the door of his apartment building and started down the sidewalk to his car. As always, up ahead, the ground-floor neighbor’s damn dog barked obnoxiously at Marv, its head partly visible behind the patio slats, and Marv imagined squeezing the dog’s jaws closed as if huge, invisible hands had wrapped themselves around the dog’s muzzle and clamped down.
The dog’s mouth slammed shut, and for a couple of beats, it kept trying to bark, puffing and wheezing sounds coming through its nose, ribcage pumping like a bellows, muffled noises coming out of its throat. Next, it tried thrashing, wrestling with whatever invisible manacle was keeping its mouth shut, but the force was so strong and so immovable that the dog couldn’t shift its head, which meant its body did all of the moving. Newton’s third law. Marv thought, Am I doing that? Relaxing after the satisfying sight of the thwarted dog, Marv imagined releasing the animal.
Now free, the dog began barking even more ferociously as Marv passed it, and almost without realizing it, Marv imagined hurling the dog forcefully into the apartment’s wall. The dog flew back into the wall with a crash, a meaty crunch, and a horrible yelp, then it slammed or flopped heavily to the ground. No noise. No movement. Marv couldn’t see through the patio slats to assess the damage to the house, and frankly, he didn’t give a shit. Serves those assholes right for never disciplining their mutt, he sneered. Marv took a grimly satisfied sniff of the morning air. Today would be a good day.
The first leg of Marv’s daily commute took him to the parking lot by the subway station. He never drove into the city where he worked. As per usual, he parked, entered the station, passed through the turnstile, and went to stand with the crowd. Marv couldn’t believe his luck: He’d somehow managed to end up at the edge of the platform, which meant he’d be the first to get aboard.
The train approached. And that’s when some asshole, thinking he was clever, tried to shove Marv between the shoulder blades. But along with whatever power Marv had acquired to move things without his hands, he had also acquired a kind of preternatural perceptiveness. He immediately knew who in the crowd had shoved him, and his instantaneous reaction, fueled by years of anger, was to imagine gut-punching the bastard like Mike Tyson. Marv’s vision of the guy who had tried to shove him was so clear that he didn’t even need to turn around to deliver the furious blow, which simply blasted out of him as an articulation of his will.
But he felt satisfied that this was God’s justice. And he didn't care that this was the same God he normally blamed for all of those obnoxious, vexing incidents whenever he tried to cross a road or a path at night, or a person suddenly stopped in front of him, or another person suddenly decided to do a U-turn. Marv’s beliefs didn’t make theological sense, but they felt good.
What the waiting crowd witnessed was a man behind Marv suddenly doubling over and reeling back into people as if he’d been struck by a cannonball. The blow hadn’t been quite what Marv had intended, though: Instead of being a full-on gut punch, it had been a massive liver shot—excruciatingly painful, and the type of punch to make even experienced boxers crumple into a pile of helpless agony as their vagus nerve sang an opera of doom. The would-be attacker couldn’t even suck in his breath to yell hypocritical accusations of assault at Marv. As for Marv, he never once turned around, not even with the crowd reacting to this fuckhead’s collapse. Totally uncaring, face utterly neutral, Marv stepped onto the train. Some flustered members of the crowd, maybe trying to help the man, missed their opportunity to board. The train pulled away. Marv, meanwhile, considered the social implications of using his new gifts in public, and he decided that, from now on, he’d have to be discreet. Very discreet.
Marv headed on to work, smiling ever so slightly.
This story was born out of the frustrations I experience daily while living in Seoul, where people generally do not follow stated rules and guidelines ("Walk right"), opting instead for selfish convenience and a complete lack of consideration for others. Of course, I realize that Seoulites are generally considerate on some vaguely abstract level, and that conflicts don't normally erupt into disturbances of the social order here the way they often do in big American cities. Still, the annoyances described in the story (the arrogant-girl part of the story really happened to me, just not the cave-in-her-face part) still plague me daily.
I ended up combining Korean bad behavior with an American setting; back when I used to work and study in DC, I would often park my car (well, my parents' car) at Huntington Station in northern Virginia, the last stop (at the time) on the Yellow Line of the DC Metro (still true? apparently yes). Honestly, I have no idea how the DC Metro has evolved over the decades; do riders still use flimsy little fare cards fed through slots, or did the system change over to a tap-the-sensor, reusable-plastic-card style like what we have in Seoul (where you can also tap the sensor with your cell phone if you have the right app or even pass through the turnstile hands-free—on some lines—thanks to Bluetooth)?
Marv is an angry guy, with a streak of cruelty. When I'm at my angriest after a string of annoyances in crowds or on paths, I can sometimes entertain dark thoughts, but I don't fervently wish for the ability to poke brains or crush skulls or punch guts telekinetically. But if Marv had been written to be as milquetoast as I am, the story would've been pretty boring.
Where do you think the story might go as Marv inevitably begins to experiment and discover the limits and consequences of his new power? Does it all end happily for Marv? Does he get away with forcing people not to be assholes? Or does he inevitably suffer some form of karma or cosmic retribution? What does your own sense of justice tell you? And do you ever feel similar frustrations when the world doesn't go your way? Or do you not even notice problems?