Slob - Ellen Potter [18]
I was in no mood for jokes.
Nima took another drag from his cigarette and shook his head solemnly.
“Probably right, probably right.”
We were quiet for a while, but he kept stealing glances over at me. It made me feel a little squirmy. There’s a lot Nima doesn’t know about me, and in quiet moments I feel like he’s trying to figure me out.
“I was heading down to a demolition site,” I told him, just to end the quiet moment. “A big one. Lots of great junk there. I’m looking for one more thing in order to get Nemesis working the way I need her to.”
“Jeremy is going to help you?” he asked.
“She’s in school,” I said, then remembered I had said that school got out early, sort of. He didn’t let on that he’d caught me at my lie. He just nodded thoughtfully and took another drag from his cigarette. By the way, I have never seen Nima eat. I know he must, but I’ve never seen it. The only thing I know for sure about his eating habits is that he doesn’t eat shrimp. He told me that once. “Too many shrimp have to die in order to fill just one belly.” That’s true, of course. But he doesn’t know what he’s missing.
A customer came up to his cart, so he darted away for a few moments. While he was gone, I watched a woman place a rubber mat down on the sidewalk in front of the museum. On the mat she placed a portable CD player. She was wearing a long dress with every conceivable color swirling though it. Looped around her neck was a long yellow scarf. She pressed a button on the CD player and some fast, whiny music started to blare. Spreading her arms wide, she began to spin in a circle, the way little kids do sometimes. It looked totally ridiculous. She was clearly a nut job. Still, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. The colors on her dress melted together as she spun, faster and faster. The air around her seemed to change, as though her edges were bleeding into their molecules. If she spins much faster, I thought, she’ll break apart and disappear.
“She come here every day and dance like that,” Nima said as he sat back down beside me.
“I thought she was just a crazy person,” I said.
“Oh, yes, she very crazy person.” He smiled as though he approved. “But she always look happy. So . . . what more she need?”
I shrugged. “I guess nothing, if she’s happy.”
“Oh no, no.” Nima laughed. “Not she.” He nodded toward the woman, who was now beginning to slow down. “I mean Nemesis. What more she need in order to work better?”
“A certain kind of amplifier. I have a receiver, but I have to boost the signal to make sure it comes in strong enough. What I’m trying to do is very complicated. No one has ever done it before. At least, they didn’t know they were doing it, so it amounts to the same thing.” I felt a rush of excitement as I spoke about Nemesis. I had only ever spoken about her like this to Jeremy.
“I don’t understand,” Nima said, tapping out another cigarette from his pack. “How the other people not know what they do when they build something like a Nemesis?”
“Because they didn’t build it. It was something that happened accidentally.”
Nima took a drag on his cigarette and nodded. Most people would have pried at that point, but not Nima. He understood about people’s secrets.
But today, for some reason, I wanted to tell him. Not everything. Not yet. Just a little bit.
“That’s how I first got the idea for Nemesis, actually. There’s this show on TV called Skeptical Minds, where scientists investigate supernatural stuff, like ghost sightings and UFOs. Nine times out of ten they prove that the story was all nonsense. Well, I had the show on, but I wasn’t paying that much attention when all of a sudden something caught my eye. One of the places where ghosts had been spotted was The Black Baron Pub.”
“This the same pub right next to our apartment building?”
“The very same. It turns out the guy who owns the pub had a wireless surveillance camera in there that kept capturing these weird, fuzzy images of people milling around while the place was closed on Sunday. But there was no sign of break-ins, and nothing was ever missing. He said that when