At last I was able to turn off the waterworks. Mr. Sharpton handed me a hanky and I wiped my eyes with it. “How did you know?” I asked. My voice sounded all deep and weird, like a foghorn.
“Once you were spotted, all it took was a little rudimentary detective work.”
“Yeah, but how was I spotted?”
“We have certain people—a dozen or so in all—who look for fellows and gals like you,” he said. “They can actually see fellows and gals like you, Dink, the way certain satellites in space can see nuclear piles and power-plants. You folks show up yellow. Like matchflames is how 235
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this one spotter described it to me.” He shook his head and gave a wry little smile. “I’d like to see something like that just once in my life. Or be able to do what you do. Of course, I’d also like to be given a day—
just one would be fine—when I could paint like Picasso or write like Faulkner.”
I gaped at him. “Is that true? There are people who can see—”
“Yes. They’re our bloodhounds. They crisscross the country—and all the other countries—looking for that bright yellow glow. Looking for matchheads in the darkness. This particular young woman was on Route 90, actually headed for Pittsburgh to catch a plane home—
to grab a little R-and-R—when she saw you. Or sensed you. Or whatever it is they do. The finders don’t really know themselves, any more than you really know what you did to Skipper. Do you?”
“What—”
He raised a hand. “I told you that you wouldn’t get all the answers you’d like—this is something you’ll have to decide on the basis of what you feel, not on what you know—but I can tell you a couple of things. To begin with, Dink, I work for an outfit called the Trans Corporation. Our job is getting rid of the world’s Skipper Brannigans—
the big ones, the ones who do it on a grand scale. We have company headquarters in Chicago and a training center in Peoria . . . where you’ll spend a week, if you agree to my proposal.”
I didn’t say anything then, but I knew already I was going to say yes to his proposal. Whatever it was, I was going to say yes.
“You’re a tranny, my young friend. Better get used to the idea.”
“What is it?”
“A trait. There are folks in our organization who think of what you have . . . what you can do . . . as a talent or an ability or even a kind of glitch, but they’re wrong. Talent and ability are born of trait. Trait is general, talent and ability are specific.”
“You’ll have to simplify that. I’m a high-school dropout, remember.”
“I know,” he said. “I also know that you didn’t drop out because you were stupid; you dropped out because you didn’t fit. In that way, you are like every other tranny I’ve ever met.” He laughed in the sharp way people do when they’re not really amused. “All twenty-one of 236
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them. Now listen to me, and don’t play dumb. Creativity is like a hand at the end of your arm. But a hand has many fingers, doesn’t it?”
“Well, at least five.”
“Think of those fingers as abilities. A creative person may write, paint, sculpt, or think up math formulae; he or she might dance or sing or play a musical instrument. Those are the fingers, but creativity is the hand that gives them life. And just as all hands are basically the same—form follows function—all creative people are the same once you get down to the place where the fingers join.
“Trans is also like a hand. Sometimes its fingers are called precogni-tion, the ability to see the future. Sometimes they’re postcognition, the ability to see the past—we have a guy who knows who killed John F. Kennedy, and it wasn’t Lee Harvey Oswald; it was, in fact, a woman. There’s telepathy, pyrokinesis, telempathy, and who knows how many others. We don’t know, certainly; this is a new world, and we’ve barely begun to explore its first continent. But trans is different from creativity in one vital way: it’s much rarer. One person in eight hundred is what occupational psychologists call ‘gifted.’ We believe that there may only be one tranny in each eight million people.”