Chapter 1: The Accident

I wasn’t always like this; I mean able to control minds. I’ve never heard or met anyone who was able to do it. But I can’t be the only person who can or who has been able to. The concept is too widely known. If, as linguists and anthropologists speculate, no culture will have words or expressions for what cannot be conceived of by them, then I can’t be the only person this has happened to. Similarly, clairvoyance, telepathy, and telekinesis must occur to some extent, or how could we conceive of them? Still, such instances must be exceedingly rare, or they would be common knowledge

However, this was not meant to be a philosophical dissertation. I just thought I’d let you know that it happened to me.

I was sixteen-years-and-three-months old, give or take a few days, and my friend Larry had just turned sixteen himself. His parents, possessing more money than sense had presented a new Chevy to him for his birthday, and he, I, and another couple of guys were going out to drive it around. “Death Seat!” I screamed and ran to the front passenger door.

How was I to know how prophetic this would be! Not five minutes later, Larry decided to try his luck on a yellow light and went through late. I looked out my side window in time to see the semi’s grill fill the view, then...

I awoke feeling very groggy and thirsty and didn’t seem able to move very well. I blinked weakly and tried to clear my eyes, but my hands didn’t seem to want to move either. I managed to croak something out and went back to sleep.

The next time I woke I felt much better. I was still thirsty, but didn’t seem as dehydrated as before, and my eyes came fully open. I was staring at a white tile ceiling. This time I could move somewhat, and I managed to move my head around.

Focusing, I could see that I was lying in a bed with rails along the side, like the beds you see in hospital shows on TV. What I could remember came back to me, the truck hitting the side of Larry’s new car and then nothing else. Okay, we had been in an accident, and I was in the hospital. I looked down at my body and was tolerably pleased to see that everything was in pretty much the same place as before. My left arm was free, and I could move it, albeit slowly and weakly. My right arm was strapped to the bed, with about a million tubes going in, but I could wriggle my fingers. A light sheet covered my torso and legs, but bumps indicated that all that stuff was still there, too. Strangely, I could wiggle my left toes and leg, but not my right.

“Hello?” It took me several seconds to clear my dry throat and croak this out, but no one responded. Looking around, I noticed a remote-control type of button clipped to my bedsheet near my left hand and hit the button.

About a minute later, a nurse opened the door and came in. “Great, you’re awake!” she said.

“Water,” I croaked.

The nurse, a towering battle-ax straight from Central Casting, came to my bedside and promptly poured a glass. Slipping in a flexible straw, she rather tenderly positioned my head so I could sip from it. I drained the glass and two more like it.

“Thanks.”

“Sure thing, honey. I’ve got to get the doctor.” She smiled down at me. “Don’t go away!”

Hospital humor is generally lost on me, but I smiled and nodded. A few minutes later the door opened again, and a medium-tall middle-aged bald guy walked in. He carried a clipboard and wore a white coat and a stethoscope, so I didn’t think he was the janitor. “I’m Doctor Stevings, Paul. How do you feel?” he said.

“Uh, I don’t know,” I replied, looking down at my body. “How do I feel?”

Just then, the door burst open, and a small whirlwind came through. “Paul! Paul! Oh, my God! Paul! Are you alright? Oh, God!” Mom collapsed onto the bed and tried to hug me, lift me, kiss me, and cry all at the same time.

I was shocked by her behavior, but even more when the MD pulled my mom off me. “Please, Mrs. Jones, you can’t move your son around like that until we’ve checked him over.”

“But...”

“Please, Mrs. Jones. He’s not going anywhere. Give me five minutes and he’s all yours,” he said with a smile. “Please wait outside.” He gently but firmly pulled my mother upright and directed her towards the door.

She looked over her shoulder and yelled back to me, “I’ll be right outside the door, baby. I’ll be back in a few minutes!” and allowed herself to be led out.

The doctor came over to me. “We really don’t like patients in your condition to be so roughly handled until we know the extent of your injuries. So again, how do you feel?”

I thought for a second. “Okay, I guess. Kind of hungry. What happened to me?”

He ignored the question. Pulling a small steel rod from his pocket, he twisted it and pulled a needle from it. “Tell me if you feel this.”

I half expected him to jab it into me somewhere, but instead he simply traced lines and circles over my hands and feet. I simply kept saying, “Yes,” each time he asked.

Presently, he looked up at me with a look of relief. Lifting my free left arm, he asked me to move it through several positions. Unstrapping my right, we repeated the exercise. Finally, he pulled the sheet off my left leg, and we moved that around as well. I felt fine, though weak, I told him. “You have no idea how happy that makes me,” he said, and went towards the door.

“Wait! What about my right leg? We didn’t move that! What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Oh, I’m sorry.” He came back to the bed and lifted the sheet, letting me see the cast which extended from ankle to groin. “Not much point in moving this one around, is there?” he asked jokingly.

“So, what happened to me?” I asked.

“Let’s get your mother back in and we can both tell you.” He rearranged the sheet and went to the door. As soon as it opened my mother busted in and ran to my bedside. This time she looked tearfully at the doctor first, who simply nodded, and she burst out in fresh tears as she hugged and kissed me.

Finally, she calmed down enough to answer my repeated question, “What’s happened to me?”

“You were in an accident.”

“I know that, Mom. I was there, remember? And where’s Sue? Why isn’t she here?” Sue is my sister, who is almost fifteen. She’s a real pain in the ass most of the time, but we’re close.

Mom gave me a funny look. “Paul, she’s in school.”

“School? Mom, we just got out of school. What, did she have to go to summer school?” This didn’t sound right; I would have known if she was.

Another funny yet horrified look. “Paul, it’s the second week of September.” She looked over at the doctor in confusion. “You didn’t tell him?”

“Tell me what?” I demanded, staring at the doctor.

“Didn’t have the chance,” he said to Mom. Looking at me, he said, “You’ve been in a coma for three months, Paul.”

I felt like I had been hit by a second truck. Both my mother and the doctor started talking at the same time, with Stevings spouting off Latin terms for good measure. Eventually I got it sorted out. The semi had really slammed into the front passenger door. Despite the seat belt and airbag, I had bounced all over the front seat. My right knee had been crushed to the point where there had been worry that I would lose the leg, but worst was a major-league concussion which had put me in the coma. Topping the picture off, my heart had stopped in the ambulance, and they were worried about spinal damage as well. Oh, yeah, and I had busted three ribs and two fingers, but since they had healed while I was out, I never felt the difference.

No wonder I felt weak and hungry; I had been fed by tubes for the entire summer. However, now that I was awake again, the prognosis was much brighter. While much more testing was in order, it appeared that I wasn’t going to be paralyzed, and would sooner or later be kicked out to go home.

When I asked about my right leg, Stevings simply scratched his head and shrugged. “I don’t know, I’m a neurologist, not an orthopedics man. I can tell you a few things. While you were in the coma, we did three operations on your knee. Had to be done then, we couldn’t wait for you to come around. As far as I know, all the pieces are back in place. But, and this is a big but, because it’s not my specialty, nobody can really know until the cast comes off and you try to use it. I can guarantee you are in for some fairly serious physical therapy. How long and what percentage you get back, I don’t know.”

Now it was my turn to shrug. “I guess I should be thankful I’m still alive. Hey, whatever happened to Larry and Jake and Billy?”

“Who?” he asked.

“The other boys in the car,” said Mom. “They just had a few cuts and bruises. God only knows why, but they walked away from it.”

“Shit!” I exclaimed. “I’m going to get better just to beat the hell out of them, the bastards!” I laughed.

“Watch your mouth, Paul.”

“Yes, Mom,” I said contritely.

Mom and Sue came back later that night during visiting hours. In the meantime, the battle-ax had returned and given me a sponge bath (which I really needed) and changed my catheter, which I didn’t even know I had. Don’t ask about the other side - you don’t want to know! Finally, she helped me eat a delicious meal of Jell-O and broth. When I complained that I wanted real food, she told me to pipe down, I’d puke it up in five minutes, and to eat what I was told. I was surprised how full the Oliver Twist gruel made me, and she said that my stomach had shrunk during the coma, and I would have to work back up to solid foods. Then she removed most of the IV tubes in my right arm, the ones which had been feeding me.

I was clean and presentable by the time Mom and Sue came in, and I just couldn’t get over the changes in their appearance. In Mom’s case, it turned out that I had come out of the coma yesterday, and Mom had stayed all day and night at the hospital for me to wake up again. When I saw her earlier, she looked like she had been dragged through a knothole. As for Sue, she was a teenager who had seemingly aged three months overnight. She was now fifteen and maturing rapidly.

One interesting thing though, I now had a beard and mustache. Just before my accident, I had started to shave, at least every four or five days or so. I guess it was simply that time in my adolescence. Now I had a respectable mustache and a considerably less respectable beard. As soon as I got the chance I lost the beard, but I kind of liked the mustache and let that stay. It’s funny, but I’ve never seen my upper lip since.

The orthopedic surgeon came in while Mom and Sue were there and explained that the cast was coming off in six days. Then we could all find out just how bad things were. He also went into some detail on the physical therapy I would need. He was a younger doctor, maybe mid-thirties, without a wedding band, and I noticed he kept an eye on Mom the entire time. This didn’t surprise me at all; Mom is pretty noticeable.

I should explain one thing first. Sue and I don’t have a father. Mom married right out of high school in a burst of love and stupidity. He stuck around after I was born, just long enough to knock Mom up a second time, then took off for parts unknown when he discovered that lightning can strike twice. I don’t remember him at all, and Sue was born after he left. Mom took back her maiden name (Sue’s and my last name is Harron), moved back to her hometown and raised us by herself, with the help of her parents. Still, she never complained - Mom is a firm believer in making lemonade if someone gives you lemons.

Looking back on it now, I have no idea how she managed to raise two kids without a pot to piss in and do as well as she did. Oh, Granny and Gramps helped, certainly, but Mom managed to go to the local community college and learn enough to become a secretary. Then, while working full time and raising us, she managed to go back to school and get a four-year degree. Now she was office manager for the regional headquarters of the local department store. Even though her parents weren’t much better off, she saved enough so that when they died and left her a small insurance settlement, she could buy a small house in an older development. I was, and still am, pretty proud of her. She raised Sue and me with that same no-tears, no-failure attitude. I made Eagle Scout on my sixteenth birthday, and Sue has never had less than an A- in school. Mom would kill us if we were to screw up.

That doesn’t explain why the surgeon kept ogling her all night. To put it simply, my Mom is a stone fox!

First, she’s only thirty-five. Most of my friends’ parents are ten years older, but you do the arithmetic. She was nineteen when I came along and I’m sixteen. Secondly, she’s tiny. She’s only five-foot-one and can’t weigh more than a hundred pounds soaking wet. Lastly, she has a killer figure - 36D-22-33 - topped by a wavy mop of curly auburn hair.

I’ve always thought my mom was pretty, but I suppose most sons think their mother is the most beautiful woman in the world. Still, once I hit puberty, I started to notice that most of my buddies and their fathers also liked to watch her. And Mom likes to be noticed!

Mom’s standard mode of dress is not the suburban jogging suit. Far from it! Mom likes to wear short skirts and tight blouses, and I don’t think she even owns a pair of shoes without at least three-inch heels. Mind you, she doesn’t dress like a slut or anything like that. She just always dresses real pretty. She knows she looks good and dresses to accentuate, not hide it.

Once I became old enough to really notice and understand such things, about when I was thirteen or fourteen, I realized that Mom liked guys to notice her, because she liked guys. A lot! She likes to date and has for as long as I can remember, even before I understood it as dating. Then, one Friday night I discovered that she had had sex more than the two times it took to conceive my sister and me. When she went out, to ‘dinner’ as I recall, I noticed that her left stocking had a run up the back. She was out the door before I could tell her, but later that night, when she came home, the run was on the back of the right leg! It didn’t take me long to figure out that she must have taken her stockings off and then put them back on, which implied she had taken her clothes off, which implied she had been undressed with a man, which implied, well you get my drift.

The next weekend when she went out to ‘dinner’ I snooped around in her room after Sue went to bed. Boy, did I get an eyeful! First, I discovered she didn’t wear pantyhose, only stockings. In her nightstand, I discovered a small oval case with little pills. When I checked the name in the school library’s medical books, I discovered they were birth control pills! I also found a pair of dildos, one of which vibrated, although I had no clue what they were, even though one was shaped just like a big dick. There were also a couple of dirty magazines, some ‘bodice-ripper’ type books, and a few catalogs, which explained to me the purposes of some of her lingerie. I figured out her measurements by snooping in her closet and reading labels. It was obvious that Mom had some real sexy clothes, and the birth control pills certainly seemed to say that Mom had a reason to be taking them!

Like I said, my mom is a sexpot. She knows it and she doesn’t mind men knowing it.

Don’t get the wrong impression. My mother is not a slut. She didn’t bring men home and fuck them in the house. She didn’t have a different guy every night, in fact she seemed to prefer relatively long-term relationships. She wasn’t sleeping around every night and coming in at the crack of dawn. She came home at quite reasonable hours, didn’t reek of cheap booze from bars, and most nights was home with Sue and me, checking homework religiously. When she went to work, she dressed pretty but professional, not sleazy. Still, most weekends she went out at least one night and got well laid.

Mom didn’t really discuss this with us. Oh, she did joke to Sue once or twice that men were like busses, “One comes along every five minutes,” but other than those few times she kept it low-key. However, the fact of the matter is that Mom likes the guys and the guys like Mom. When she did break up with a fellow, she didn’t stay celibate long. And she seemed to feel that one marriage was more than sufficient.

I don’t think Sue ever noticed. As for me, well, I loved her and was smart enough to tell that she was doing a great job of raising us. If she wanted to have some fun, it was not for me to complain. She’d had a tough time, which I could remember if Sue couldn’t.

That describes Mom. As for Sue, just imagine a younger version of Mom. Same height, same build, same pretty face, same reddish-brown hair, same hazel eyes. At fifteen she was already a head-turner and a heartbreaker.

I’m told that I take after my father, who I don’t remember. If so, I suppose the bastard was adequate enough to look at. I’m six-foot-even and weigh 180, and, at least before the accident, was in decent enough shape, although I came out of the coma barely 150 and as weak as a kitten. It’s almost comical to stand with my mom and Sue since I tower over them. As for my looks, it’s hard for me to say, since my tastes don’t run to guys. I’ve never had problems finding girlfriends, and dogs don’t go howling down the streets at my appearance. Let’s just leave it at that.

The next few days were boring. Sue came by after school and Mom came in after dinner. Larry stopped by and we joked for a while. He was incredibly apologetic, but it seemed to me like it was only a few days ago, and he couldn’t really understand the concept of what had happened to me. I still have a problem with that. A reporter stopped by for a ‘human interest’ story, which was kind of neat. Even neater was the next day when a TV crew came by from a local station. Larry brought over Jake and Billy, and we mugged it up for the camera. Jake’s folks had taken a roll of film of the smashed car, and I made the appropriate ‘Ooohs!’ and ‘Aahhs!’ I should have been hosed out of that thing. Larry sheepishly admitted that the cops had yanked his license.

“Shit, Larry, what do you care? Your old man grounded you for life, anyway!” laughed Billy.

“Shit, longer if he can get away with it,” he admitted.

I first noticed I had The Power a few days later, the day before they were to remove the cast. By then all the IVs had been pulled, leaving only the catheter still stuck into me, and I had been wheeled into another room, one with another patient waiting for a gall bladder operation. From the moment the door opened, and I was wheeled in, his mouth was in motion, and it never stopped.

“Hello there, young fellow, I’m Bob Sammiel, what’s your name?”

“Paul Harron, how do you do...”

“Fine, just fine. Whatcha in for, broken leg? Never had one of them. Broke my arm once. Had a cast the size of Mount Rushmore on it. Let me tell you...” He just ran right on, never letting me get a word in edgewise. I didn’t need to - he talked enough for an entire hospital.

Nothing could stop this guy. He had the remote for the TV set and flipped it to some damn soap opera. When he wasn’t talking to me about this idiot show, he was talking back to the TV itself! “What she sees in him, I’ll never understand...” When a news bulletin came on, he started commenting on the news, “In my day a fellow like that...” After the news, he flipped to a game show and started giving answers!

You couldn’t shut this guy up! When I told him at one point in the afternoon that I was tired and was going to take a nap, he just said “Okay” and kept right on going! I pulled the pillow over my head to drown him out and eventually fell asleep. When I woke up, it was to the sound of Bob talking to himself.

{Jesus! Just shut up, will you, mister!}I thought to myself - and he did! Just like that. I didn’t think twice about it, but simply counted my blessings. Maybe he finally ran out of steam.

Surprisingly, he didn’t say a word when the orderly brought dinner. Later that night, a nurse came by and took our temperatures and gave him a pill to swallow. When she asked him how he felt, he kept quiet.

“Mister Sammiel, I asked how you felt? Mister Sammiel? Are you alright? Sir?”

She was starting to get worried, and I was thinking, {Well, answer her, you fucking idiot!}and he did. He was off and running again, with a full head of steam and an empty track in front of him. Looking back on it, I suspect that was the longest he had been silent since some dumb bastard had taught him to talk, but at the time, I just figured he had his second wind. He kept it up the rest of the night, and I woke to those nasal tones the next morning.

I wanted to tell this guy to just SHUT THE FUCK UP, but I was taught to be polite to my elders. But when the nurse came in to prep for my grand opening, and this clown was still yammering, I just had to think to myself, {Can’t you people get this idiot out of here?}

She simply glanced over at him in the middle of his latest diatribe on Regis and Kathy Lee and left. A few minutes later she returned with a pair of orderlies. As they started to move his bed, she said, “Mr. Sammiel, we’re going to be moving you down the hall to another room, closer to the OR.”

Thank God! I kept my thoughts to myself (not even knowing what that would come to mean to me) and gave her a big smile. She smiled back and the orthopedic surgeon came in a few minutes later and removed the cast. Mom was there, watching, as he had me try to move my leg. I could move it, just barely, but with hardly any front-to-back motion. The doctor frowned and reached down to try to help me move it, and I yelped as he bent it back at the knee. He kept frowning. Mom wanted to know what was wrong.

“Well, Mrs. Jones, Paul doesn’t have as much movement to his leg as we would like to see. I’m not quite sure whether the problem is the damage from the accident, nerve problems, muscle problems, or post-surgery trauma. I am going to order up a full string of tests to see what we can determine.”

So began the wildest string of medical tests it has ever been my misfortune to endure! There were enough X-rays to irradiate lead, and MRI scans from head to toe. Those damn machines are noisy as hell and could give claustrophobia to a submariner! Of course, my favorite was the neurological tests. Stevings had learned his craft at the Marquis de Sade College of Medicine. The basic premise is that they stick needles in you, then plug them into the wall socket and measure how high you jump! If they don’t think you’ve jumped high enough, they up the voltage until you jump higher. Great fun; I can’t wait till Disney finds out and puts it in their ‘Pirates of the Harvard Medical School’ ride!

The only benefit to this that I could see was that the cast was off, and I could go to the bathroom again, or so I thought. Now that I was conscious, I could lose the giant diaper, and I had lost the catheter, and now had to use a bedpan. Very embarrassing. That night, when I needed to go, I buzzed the nurse and asked her to help me get to the bathroom.