Jumper: Griffin's Story

Chapter One The Empty Quarter Every couple of months Dad and I would climb in the car and he'd drive out through the suburbs, out past the small towns, past the farms and ranches, until we came to what I called the Empty Quarter. I saw a BBC special on it once, I thought they said Ruby Kallie, but now I know they were saying the Rub al-Khali, the 'quarter of emptiness.' It's the sea of sand that makes up a fifth of the Arabian Peninsula, but for us it could mean Death Valley, or the Gila wilderness, or the Spanish Pyrenees, and once, it was an island in the Bay of Siam that we had to sail a small boat to. But it had to be empty, it had to be without people. That was the only safe place where I could do it, where I could practice. "We just can't chance it, Griff. You want to do this, this is the only way." We were living in the United States then, five thousand miles from England, in San Diego, in a garage flat at the north end of Balboa Park, but when Dad said that, we were a hundred miles east of the flat. We'd taken the Yuma cutoff, U.S. 98 off of Interstate 8, and it was hot and windy and sand was blowing across the road. I was only nine then, used to not knowing anything, always asking, always pushing. "Then why do it at all; why should we even take this chance?" He looked sideways at me and sighed, then back to the road, swerving slightly to avoid a bouncing tumbleweed the size of a Volkswagen. "It comes down to . . . could you do that? Could you walk away from it? I mean, for me, it would be like spending the rest of my life in a wheelchair, even though I could still walk. I'd be pretending I could do naught, you know, making myself do everything the hard way when by just standing up and taking a few steps I could reach that stuff off the wheelchair ramp, the stuff on the upper shelf." He sped up a little as we reached a rocky stretch where there wasn't quite so much blowing sand. "And, dammit, it's a gift! Why the hell shouldn't you be able to do it? Just because they..." He clamped his mouth shut and looked back at the road. For once I didn't push it. There were some things my parents just wouldn't talk about, and what happened back in Oxford was one of them. When I'd first jumped, at five, from the steps of the Martyr's Memorial in front of a busload of tourists. Well, not then, exactly, but after, the thing that caused us to leave the UK and keep moving. Dad began watching the odometer closely, checking the map. He hadn't been there before; our Empty Quarters were always different. He drove past the road, only recognizing the turn after we passed because a tangle of tumbleweeds hid the cattle guard that marked it. We were the only ones on the highway; he just backed up and made the turn, switching the Range Rover into four-wheel as soon as he was in the loose sand on the other side of the grate. "Tell me the rules," he said. "Go on, Dad!" I knew the rules. I'd known them since I was six. "So, back to the flat? It's two hours, but I'll do it." I held up my hand. "All right, all right!" I held up four fingers and ticked them off one by one. "Never jump where someone can see me. Never jump near home. Never jump to or from the same placGould, Steven is the author of 'Jumper: Griffin's Story', published 2008 under ISBN 9780765318817 and ISBN 0765318814.