Parkinson’s Pete Rides Again

“Good, Good, Bad Vibrations”
or “Parkinson’s Pete Rides Again”
An extremely short story by:
S.Redenbaugh


Vibrations deep within the earth go unfelt by most, yet he noticed them all. Each day as he went about his business he could sense the coming wave of movement. He had learned not to say things about them because the others never understood, and they would pass. He also hated the sound of cardboard.

To his knowledge and based upon earlier experiences, these feelings were only shared with common ants and certain birds. One day when he was eight he had felt one coming, somewhere near the mile deep mark he happened to glance back at the ant farm he was holding. The ants were noticeably upset and were scurrying in circles, almost as if they had all been held beneath a magnifying glass in the hot sun. Then it hit. They all knew. He also knew not to tell his parents again.

When you and I feel an earthquake we know it and we will talk about “it” at the water coolers of the work place. If it has been above a 7.0 we’ll talk about it again the next day. The 1989 California quake was talked about for months. For him, that earth shift sent him to the Holland Hospital for the Mentally Disturbed until yesterday. Yesterday he was “released” after spending the past sixteen years there. He wasn’t crazy, we just needed to run a few tests on him and lost track of the time.

He had been at the market shopping that day. He had first felt it as he opened a carton of eggs to check them. As the first shock wave shot upwards toward the surface the eggs began to vibrate. The shells quivered slightly, nothing we would notice, but he had. The noise that glass bottles make as they began to touch each other had sent him racing towards the exit. No one ever knew he had dropped the eggs because a minute later every egg there was destroyed.

We estimate the quake to have been at least 8 miles below the crust when he first felt it. What he felt at that moment was what we feel when a big one over 7.0 “hits”. For him the quake had lasted 4 minutes longer then the one we “felt”. He knew the power this one had as he had ran out into the street. His eyes had searched for someway to tell the others, but the beatings as child crying wolf would not let him say the words out loud. Each ten thousandth of a second it grew closer, his ears ached as if concert speakers from a heavy metal band had been duct taped to each one. The vibrations would have almost been detectable on a rector scale at this point. He ran towards the alley and crawled beneath a pile of boxes, cardboard boxes. His worse fears were nothing compared to the next 8 minutes.

His Doctor used to tell me that if I were to watch his right index finger I would see that he lifted it several times an hour. Like a serrated nerve gaining a split second of connectivity it would jump straight out, pausing, then slowly relaxing back into the ball his hands made when he slept. We finally proved those were connected to actual earth movements as the technology improved. Hooking up a Chisel 5000, which is a super sensitive earth movement monitor we recorded his “marking” of the beginning of each one to a, however small, tremor. He could “predict” earthquakes up to 2 minutes before the machine picked it up. He was a deep earth seismograph. We never told him that ours had come in a cardboard box.

Annie had long grown tired of the waiting for him to return back to their life. She only had known about his vibration sensitivities through the secret readings from his journals. He had kept them from his childhood and they contained hundreds of thousands of “events”. His writings of them seemed to be an outlet to purge their damaging effects on his life. He had suffered alone through them all after being put into a hospital by a drunken father who accused him of knocking over his beer when he was four. The Sperm Donor didn’t like his kid blaming the earth for ruining his prized perfect bowling scorecard with a lap full of suds. No matter how much he had begged between each slap, each hit his word vocabulary was no match for an abusive father. He left with Annie yesterday.

The sun was just starting to come up as they left and he drove. Annie smiled watching him as they finally were through with the tests. She had watched us hook him to countless devises through out the years, and even though some of them had hurt, she never got upset. She seemed to understand that we would one day tire of his abilities and find someone new to play with. I will always remember him fondly as an incredibility gifted man and she as the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.

I made my final notes when the phone rang. I picked it up and felt chills run up my spine. I had never told anyone else about this, it was my secret, my burden. Someone was rubbing cardboard on the other end of the wireless line. I hung up and shivered. This wasn’t funny, but I thought I understood why he had called. He had learned as much about me as I had of him. Then I felt something else, and I called out to Martha, my secretary. “No”. she replied, she hadn’t felt anything………………..