Knowing that they were watching me even now, I grabbed a pad and pen – at least they couldn’t see what I was writing! – and starting planning my imminent departure. I want to take as few things with me as possible, to travel light, also to avoid bringing anything that could be used to trace me. After looking around the apartment while trying to act casual for my watchers, I decided that all I really needed to bring was my $50,000 cash – everything else was replaceable.
I logged into the new encrypted and proxied email account I had just set up, and emailed myself stuff like telephone numbers and other info I didn’t want to lose. Then I started wiping my desktop and laptop PCs – really wiping them, hardcore. While the machines worked on that I pulled out my phone and jumped onto Facebook.
I typed: “Fam, Maxx here – I have a serious emergency issue and I absolutely need us all to meet tomorrow at 10am at Mom’s. Although I am physically all right, this is serious to the point that if you had other plans, cancel them. Do not bring kids or spouses. I only need about fifteen minutes of your time. I will be out of contact until then and won’t be responding to the phone, email, or Facebook, and I won’t be at home either, so don’t visit. Please just trust me and know I would not be asking this if it wasn’t critical. Finn, even though you live on Long Island, I think you will want to be there too, but if you can’t make it, know that I love you.”
I tagged my mom Katherine, my sisters Daphne and Esther, and my brothers Finnegan and Cameron, and sent it. Then I started resetting and hard wiping my phone too.
I eyed the attache case with all the money. I suddenly felt unsure of the carry limits of body-summoning – I had brought the case back from the assassination attempt by car, not astrally, if you recall.
What could I astral to me?
Obviously when I summoned my body, I would get my clothes (and I was not up to considering the Professor’s observation about bullet holes just yet!), but what else could I summon to me? What were the limits? It looked like this was the time to find out.
I decided to start small. I held my notebook in my hand and astralled to the other side of the living room. My corpse crumpled, still holding the notebook.
I retook my body again. The notebook was left behind.
Crap.
Well, I knew that if something was in my pocket, it would come. This time I tried holding a folded one dollar bill in my hand. And that worked.
I won’t list everything I tried, but over the next few hours I figured it out. In order to be able to summon something to me, it had to extend no more than about four to six inches from any part of my body at my time of departure/death – where it wound up after I dropped wasn’t important.
And if something did extend past that limit, it wasn’t just the part that extended too far that was left behind, but the whole thing. Guess it was a good thing I didn’t ski.
I determined that I actually could summon the attache case with my body, if I held it to my body tightly – but it was a good thing I didn’t need to take anything else with me.
As I did one more spin around the apartment, I couldn’t help feeling that one chapter of my life was ending, nostalgia already rising fast within me. I had lots of anxiety about all the looming unknowns waiting for me in the next chapter that was right around the corner.
I decided not to leave the apartment yet after all, but I didn’t go to bed either, thinking the watchers might just try to bug me with any opportunity, so I stayed up, splurging on snacks, watching TV, and just trying to stay awake. The favorite topic on every news show and discussion panel was of course, Quantums, so I surfed the latest theories and reports – from religious people who thought we were sent by Satan to test us, to other religious people who thought we were angels sent to rescue the world. There were those who hoped we were some kind of evolutionary leap, meteor rocks notwithstanding, and others for whom Quantums were just the latest ingredient in their complicated conspiracy theories. Some reports delved into any strange story from the past week about someone who might have a power, while other pundits weighed in on the short-term and long-term effects of Quantums on the stock market and economy.
I may have dozed a few times, but never for long, and no one was in my apartment whenever I jerked back awake.
Dawn arrived, the sun rose, and then it was time to go. I hugged the case with the money to my chest, and astralled to my Mom’s place in Keene. Not stopping to see who was already there, I flew invisibly to a nook nearby where I wouldn’t be seen, and summoned my body back to me – with the case, thank you very much!
I walked back to my mom’s. I could see many vehicles parked in her driveway, although I didn’t know which belonged to whom. I went in the door, up the stairs, and into my mom’s apartment.
My family was all there, already gathered. We were all on the rounder side of our physiques, to be honest – my mom’s genes at work, I imagined. Only my brother Finn hid it well.
There was my mom, Katherine, almost seventy, our matriarch with good humor – sometimes a bit oversensitive. I was her oldest, at fifty. The next oldest was my forty-four year-old sister Daphne, who almost always presented a jolly and good humored personality, but who I could tell was frequently stressed and anxious not far underneath it. Perhaps it was our near ages, or the fact that it was six years before my next sibling was born, or our family squabbles and rivalries, but I actually felt quite close to her.
My sister Esther came next, at 38, our family’s artist and cynic with a temperament to match – and yet she also had an child-like kind of happiness hidden inside, too. That combination was probably why I felt the most kinship of shared perspective with her.
Next came my brother Finnegan, who was one year younger, and as a child had been the sweetest little man you could ever imagine. At 37, he was still the sweetest, and we all loved him all the more for it.
Finally, my brother Cameron was only 28, and he lived with my mom. There was a purity and innocence in him that the rest of us took great joy in.
That was my family. And they were all there, some looking worried, others upset, everyone uncertain why I would ask this of them – Maxx, the eldest sibling and the one who never demanded anything from anyone.
That was why they came. So I began to tell them what I could.