Adventures of Matt Parkman, Chapter 18: Recovering the paintings
When Matt got out of the shower, he could hear unfamiliar voices. He dried off a little, just his hair and chest, then wrapped a towel around himself and stuck his head out. He was reluctant to use his ability at all after the feedback earlier. His father was overseeing two strangers taking away Ryan's corpse. They tied him to a stretcher, wrapped him in moving padding, then strapped the whole affair to a dolly. They wheeled him out and Maury followed them, shutting the door behind him.
Matt walked to the window and watched through the plastic blinds as they loaded the body into a straight truck and rolled down the door. His father talked with them a little longer and they handed him a hard plastic box. The truck drove away. Matt rubbed at his face with his free hand and went back to the bedroom to finish drying and getting dressed. He heard Maury come inside. Matt came back out a little later, buttoning his shirt. The box was on the table, clearly labeled as a first aid kit. It was an unusually large one.
He asked, "How did you get a moving van here so fast to dispose of a body? Can you really trust them that quickly?" He was thinking the orders to do something like that were complex, unless you were just sloppy about it. For them to get rid of the corpse reliably, he'd need to oversee it for longer than a few minutes.
"I used the power of technology," the older man pulled his phone out and waved it back and forth. "The Company has a station here. They've been put on alert to back me up. I didn't use my ability at all, though I went outside with them in case any of your neighbors got nosy."
"Oh."
Maury offered, "You need to let me look at your back. You're in no condition to be getting infections."
"I'm fine," Matt said, looking around for his shoes.
"Yeah, fine. Just like your hand there, with two fingers near-paralyzed. You're lucky to even have a hand, you know that? If gangrene sets in on your back, you're gone."
Matt scowled at him. "How much have you been going through me?" He felt through his mind again, wondering how Maury was managing to know his past without him having noticed it. He flexed his left hand. He could still use the thumb, index and middle finger. The other two were just there, with no strength or feeling to them.
"Not much. That's from your medical records. I'm with the Company, remember? Resources. People. Don't need abilities for a lot of this stuff. Now get your shirt off and let me see how bad I messed you up."
Matt grumbled for a moment, then said, "No," his resolve hardening. He did not want to be cared for by his father, touched like that or helped that intimately. Not from him - not from the man who did it to him.
Maury looked at him steadily for a moment, then shrugged. "Okay. Come on then. First thing we're going to do is get me settled in here, then we'll sit down and talk through your acquaintances and work out who we'll work on, in what order."
"You're… you're going to live here?"
"Well, all your stuff is here. Seems easier than moving you into the hotel with me." He put his hand on the doorknob.
"I'm not moving," Matt said firmly.
"Uh-huh. Didn't say you were." His father held open the front door and waited. Matt frowned and huffed, but walked out.
"What does settling in entail?" Matt asked, when they were in the rental car.
"Getting some real food in the house, picking up my suitcase from the hotel, something like that. I think I'll buy one of those inflatable mattresses. Had a friend tell me those weren't nearly as hard on your back as a futon. I'm not sure I want to sleep on your couch. I might stick to something." He grimaced.
Matt ignored the jibe and let his mind wander over the topic of Patty and what she'd do about Maury living there. His knee-jerk reaction was just to make her accept it, but he wasn't sure his father would let him do that. He glanced over at him uneasily, but Maury paid him no attention, giving him no insight on his thoughts on the matter. The younger man recalled his painting of her in bed with him, his father pointing.
He looked out the window and watched the town pass by, emptying his mind. As soon as he tried, a familiar craving wormed its way into his consciousness. He pushed it away for now. His father was right. Right now, he didn't want to know the future, but he still wanted the drugs. He shut his eyes and wished he could lean back against the seat. His back hurt too much for that, though. It occurred to him his father could take away that sensation of pain. Matt might be able to take it away himself if he applied himself to it. He didn't, nor did he ask. He felt he deserved it.
Instead, he turned back to a question he'd asked earlier. "How many zombies have you made?"
Maury shrugged. "Why do you assume I've made any at all?"
"You knew what he was right away. There can't be so many telepaths out there that it's common."
"Nah, that's not a good reason. You can make zombies using all sorts of abilities. Just about anything that burns out a person's mind will… can make one. But to answer your question, three."
"Three?"
"Yep. First one I tortured to death. The second was self-defense, at least to begin with. I got him down and left, thinking he'd die pretty soon. I'd been shot a couple times and couldn't stick around, but he didn't die and instead he got hauled off and there were complications… it's a long story. The last was because I was a sick puppy. It was revenge." He paused for a moment. "Pretty much the same thing as the first one, but with the first one that was revenge on the bastard I was doing it to. The last one was revenge on the bastard who cared about her."
"Oh." Matt wondered what Maury had done with his life. There was so much of it he didn't know. Nearly all of it, in fact. Children so rarely really understood their parents. Matt wasn't sure he wanted to even now. Obviously, his father had killed and tortured and done horrible things in his life and that was only on this one subject. Matt didn't ask to know more. He was afraid Maury would tell him, as blunt and matter-of-fact as he just had.
After they'd picked up Maury's bags and gone shopping, his father asked him, "About that painting you thought about earlier… I didn't see any paintings where you were staying. Where is that painting?"
Matt frowned at him and looked out the window, thinking his father wanted to see his future. Hypocritical of him, but what did I expect? He shook his head. "They're at my apartment. It's close to here." He gave directions.
Maury looked around the place. It was crowded and tight, stinking of paint, half-eaten food and worse things, but it was also a treasure trove. There were over a hundred paintings here, maybe two or three hundred. He flipped through a stack set against one wall while Matt sat on his painter's stool, leaning forward.
"What are you going to do with these?" his father asked with a sense of wonder.
Matt shrugged. He was looking at his injection set and heroin sitting out in front of him, ready at hand for whenever he came here. His feelings about the drugs were complex. He wasn't particularly trying to sort them out, he was just staring at the equipment.
When he didn't answer, Maury went on, "Can I have them? Do you care about them?"
Matt looked up at him briefly. "There's only a few about you." He went back to staring at the heroin.
"I don't give a shit about the ones about me!" His father sounded angry again. Matt's brow furrowed and he started actually paying attention to him. Maury's eyes caught on the eclipse. "Again?" he muttered. "Do you have more on this?" He pointed excitedly at the image.
Matt shook his head and said slowly, "No, I don't think so. I have one of some stars over there…"
"Stars? Huh. Matt, can I have these? Can I send them to the Company to be analyzed, for storage?"
The younger man looked around the room blankly, unsure of why Maury cared. He could always make more. "Most of these just involve me, things I was going to do, things I've already done. A lot of them are already past, just small stuff, you know? Lives I tried to save, accidents, that sort of stuff. Why would the Company want that?"
Maury exhaled and shook his head, muttering, "Youth. Youth and stupidity." He spoke more loudly, "Fine, Matt. It's a bunch of useless old paintings you don't want anymore. Can I please have them, since, like you say, like you're thinking right now, they're not worth anything to anyone?"
Matt shrugged. "Sure."
Maury whipped out his cell phone immediately and started dialing. His son looked at that, then gazed around at the paintings, wondering what it was Maury saw in them that was that important. He didn't explain, but the same truck that had taken away Ryan's body would be there within the hour with a packing crew. Matt had had a painter's block for the last couple weeks about events beyond his father's appearance. His father's arrival had been depressing, perplexing and frightening to him, so after a while he'd stopped painting. He looked at the eclipse and watched as his father struggled to figure out how to get his cell phone to take a picture of it. He finally managed it.
They left, leaving the door unlocked for the movers. Matt turned to his father in the car and said, "What did you think of that painting on the wall? You seem to think all those things I drew meant something. What did that one mean?"
Maury was tempted to imagine he meant the eclipse, but he could see Matt was asking about the regression painting. "You were mired in painting, lost in it, caught in a pointless loop of doing the same thing over and over for as far as you could see in the future."
Matt's mouth dropped open slightly, then he caught himself and shut it. "It… I… It wasn't pointless!"
His father shrugged. "Okay," he said agreeably.
Matt snorted. His father was acting like he was agreeing only to agree, not because he believed it. "My life has not been pointless!"
"I said okay."
"Well it hasn't been!" Matt was angry, getting angrier. It incensed him that his father didn't think much of what he'd been trying to do.
"Listen, don't get your panties in a wad there because I'm not bowing down and worshipping at the altar of the oracle Matthew Parkman, buddy-boy. Been there, done that and to a much nicer-looking oracle than yourself. If I didn't think what you'd done back there was important, what you could do with your ability was vital, then those paintings wouldn't be on their way as we speak."
He shook his head, recalling that Matt hadn't thought his paintings were important either. What the hell are we arguing about here? He turned and looked at Matt for as long as he safely could while driving. It became clear Matt wanted him to care about what he'd done because of the paintings, not about the paintings themselves. He supposed he could understand that. Being the man he was though, he didn't give his son any positive reinforcement for it.