Chasing Orion (5 page)

“Sure,” I said. I quickly forgot my mission of collecting moss.

“What’s your name, dear?”

“Georgie.”

“And yours?” she said, turning to Emmett.

“Emmett.”

“Oh, you look like you’re about to be a senior. Just Phyllis’s age. This will mean so much to her.”

I ran home to tell Mom to go without me and then followed Mrs. Keller through the trees and into the long shadows of their yard, which was beautiful, with lush green grass and really big trees. We passed a flower bed thick with violets and inky green lilies of the valley. None of the lilies had their little white bells. “These lilies in May were always Phyllis’s favorite.” It made me shiver when Mrs. Keller said that. Was she talking about the flowers being dead and gone by, or Phyllis? It was as if we were being brought to meet a dead person. I was scared. I kind of wanted to hold Emmett’s hand. But I thought that would look really dumb. Suddenly a terrible thought struck me: What if Phyllis was wearing a diaper? In the newsreels and in the newspapers, they were always showing people in iron lungs, grown-up people, wearing baby diapers with their skinny ugly legs sticking out. I could not meet this girl if she was going to be in a diaper. And what about Emmett? Emmett was seventeen years old, and this girl was supposed to be a teenager. This would be so embarrassing.
Oh, good Lord!
I thought. I tried to imagine Veronica or Betty in diapers and Jughead and Archie looking at them. This was just too awful. I could hardly move my feet forward.

There was no turning back now. The machine, huge and glinting, was just ahead. Like some monster insect in a horror movie, its arms were reaching out toward us. We were suddenly caught in a radiant cross fire of reflected beams bouncing off the iron lung. I had to squint. It was as if she had been swallowed by this mechanical multi-eyed bug, every bit of her except for her head and neck. She was completely enclosed in the belly of this shining, glittering creature. The shell of the beast must have measured at least ten feet long and maybe a yard wide. So after I got by the metallic body and the shock of not seeing a human one except for this weirdly disembodied head, I saw Emmett’s and my faces crowding into mirrors. There were mirrors on almost every arm of the machine, and they all seemed to be reflecting us. Some mysterious force was rotating them, turning and tracking our movements. It was like an ambush of mirrors, and we were caught in a web of reflections.

“Hi. I’m Phyllis,” a voice said. But I wasn’t sure where it was coming from. The whooshing mechanical monster seemed to be sucking in almost every sound, swallowing up every whisper of the true wind and every birdsong from the trees. “Oh, hi.” Emmett laughed nervously. I followed where he was looking. A head with a mass of white-blond curls protruded from the opening of the glistening metal shell and rested on a pillow. A thick rubber collar encircled her neck.

Beneath the gusty whooshing of the machine there was another sound, sharper and hissing, still a part of the monster’s breath. I felt my chest tighten as if I might have to struggle for my next breath.

“What’s your name?” Phyllis asked. The mirrors all rotated to reflect just me.

“G-G-Georgie . . . Georgie.”

“And I’m Emmett,” Emmett said.

“I know the sound of the Creature breathing sort of takes your own breath away. Don’t worry, Georgie. You can breathe fine. Just relax. Sit down. Mother, get some lemonade for them.”

“Certainly, dear.”

It was kind of strange when she asked her mother to do this. It wasn’t like a kid speaking to a parent, exactly. It was as if she were giving an order military style, the way one would if one were the captain of a ship or the pilot of a plane, or spaceship for that matter. This might as well have been a spaceship. She was certainly in a space that none of us had been. I noticed that although she was talking to me now, it was only Emmett’s face in her mirrors.

“Some people, when they get around this thing, it makes them short of breath. Just remember, Georgie, you’ve got all the air in the world, the whole sky up there.” Emmett’s face slipped out of the mirrors. They mysteriously swiveled and tipped up, capturing clouds and blue sky. “I have eighty-seven cubic centimeters of air, but you have the world.”

I wasn’t sure what she was talking about. And it wasn’t exactly the air that was getting stuck in me. It was the words. I looked hard at Phyllis. She could talk. But there was an unvarying rhythm to Phyllis’s speech. It was the rhythm of the machine. She and the machine were one. The Creature set the pace, which was always the same. Neverthless I had this sudden thought that Phyllis in a sense was a kind of stutterer, but instead of words clotting for her, it was air. Phyllis was a stutterer of air.

For a brief time in the first grade I stuttered. I got over it very quickly, but I can still remember that there was this terrible sense of isolation because the words just dangled out there in front of me in a kind of half-light. I would reach for them, and a wind would blow them away or a shadow would pass over, and they would vanish into some dark empty place. I was always left with the horrible feeling that I would never be able to find the right word. It was a kind of death, a bunch of little deaths I suffered every day. And the loneliness was the worst part because I felt so disconnected. But, thank goodness, it ended.

I stepped closer to the machine. There were all sorts of dials and gauges.

“You can touch it,” she said.

I put out my hand. It felt hot from the sun reflecting on its shiny surface.

“Is it hot inside?”

“No. There’s a cooling system. My own private air-conditioning.” She laughed, but it sounded more like a hiccup. I looked slowly now over the machine. This was her world. She was the largest thing in that world. Nothing would change within that world. This thought unnerved me plenty. I stepped away. I didn’t want to touch it. I had unthinkingly called it a beast before, but now I realized that it had with my touch become just that to me: a hideous beast. I imagined the mirrors turning into arms like those of a huge, gleaming, panting spider. I could see them reaching out to drag me into that unchanging place.

Phyllis could turn her head a little bit to see us, but she didn’t need to because the mirrors rotated again and tipped down while the sky slid away, and now once again I could see only Emmett’s face filling one of the larger mirrors.

“Are those Spiegelman mirrors?” Emmett asked.

“Yes, how’d you know? No one ever asks that.”

“I’m interested in mirrors.”

This was so typical of Emmett! I know I was getting caught up in the machine because it was the strangest thing I had ever seen in my life. But Emmett should have seen beyond it and seen what had to be one of the most beautiful girls ever! With her shiny blond hair and the bluest eyes and dimples! She was the perfect high-school girl. She was prettier than Betty or Veronica. She could have been a cheerleader. No. She could have been a movie star! She was movie-star gorgeous. But, of course, she wasn’t going to be any of those things.

Emmett just kept studying the mirrors and not really looking into them, where my face and Phyllis’s and some of his face were reflected. He kept trying to sort of dodge out of the mirror. But she caught him! I don’t know how. She did something with those mirrors, tilted them some way, somehow, and then bingo! There was his face filling up the whole mirror. I was out of the picture. But Phyllis had Emmett just where she wanted him.

“An expert in mirrors. Don’t tell me you’re a narcissist! I don’t need any more narcissistic males.”

Narcissistic? Never heard of the word. Did it matter? Not at all. I couldn’t believe how she was zeroing in on Emmett. I guess maybe this was flirting, but it actually seemed halfway between flirting and a guided missile strike. I don’t think Emmett knew that
nar
word either, but he laughed as if he understood exactly what she was talking about. And that moment, Emmett’s face creased into deep lines that ran from just below his cheekbones to his jaw, and his dark red hair suddenly flashed in the sun, and his deep blue eyes radiated smile crinkles fanning from the corners.

But I saw all this in the mirrors, just the way Phyllis saw it. And for an instant he wasn’t my brother. He had been transformed into someone else. Someone that I didn’t quite recognize, but Phyllis did.

“Naw,” Emmett was saying. “I just fiddle around with telescopes.”

“He’s building a big telescope, and he’s already built three others. But this one’s going to be really big,” I piped up. I wanted to get in on this conversation even if I didn’t know what the word
narciss
-whatever meant. I sensed that something was happening, and I wanted to be in on it so badly.

But no such luck, because just at that moment the mirrors swiveled and I was cut out of the picture. It was the two of them again.

“I bet you’re good at math, Emmett,” Phyllis said, and narrowed her eyes as if she were thinking about something. There was a kind of sly sparkle behind the incredible blueness.

Emmett blushed. “Pretty good,” he said.

“Ah, come on,” Phyllis said. “I bet you’re better than pretty good.”

“He’s great!” I blurted out. “He got 800 on his SATs, the math part.”

“Oh, good Lord.” More hiccuppy giggles from Phyllis, and I was still not in the mirror. “I won’t even tell you what I got. Let’s just say my talents lie elsewhere.” A cunning look slid across her face.

Poor Emmett got all flustered. “I’m sure they weren’t that bad.”

Wrong thing to say, Emmett. Wrong!

“Oh, yes, they were.” She giggled again. If Phyllis had been a normal girl with a normal body, I could have just pictured her shoulders kind of doing a little shimmy. As it was, the hiccuppy giggle sent a tremor through her blond curls.

Then she whispered something to Emmett. But I couldn’t hear. And he couldn’t either. “Come over here. I’ll tell you,” she said, meaning Emmett and not me. Emmett walked over to where her head poked out of the machine. He had to maneuver around some of the things sticking out from it. “Now bend down,” she said. “Put your ear close to my mouth.”

Oh, my word!
I thought. What was I about to see? Emmett was blushing right to the roots of his red hair. There was now absolutely no difference between his hair color and his skin color. I was too afraid to look, so I studied a small ant colony that I had discovered emerging from between the stones of the patio. I wondered what would happen if an ant got into the iron lung. Would it live? If a male and female ant got in there, could they reproduce? Could the female lay eggs in an iron lung, or would the concentration of the eighty-seven cubic centimeters of air crush everything somehow? Then Emmett backed away. He looked incredibly pleased with himself, and I don’t think it was just because of his SAT scores.

Then suddenly she swiveled the mirrors and I was caught.

“Tell me about Nubian goats, Georgie.”

“What?”

“Your T-shirt.”

“Oh,” I said.

But then Emmett interrupted. “Hey, how come you can read that? How come it’s not backward?”

“My special reading mirror! My dad invented it. But he’s made improvements. A whole new model that will make it even easier for me.”

“Wow!” Emmett whispered.

“Come on, tell me about the goats,” Phyllis urged.

I stood up and came a little closer to her head, sticking out from the machine. It was weird to talk to someone this way. It felt as if her head were just sort of floating there, attached to nothing.

“Uh, I just like them, that’s all.”

“Why do you like them? Tell me all about goats. I know nothing.”

“Well,” I began, “you’ve got your dairy goats, your pygmies, your Nigerian dwarf goats, and dozens of others.” I paused and looked at her in the mirror. She still seemed interested. So I continued. “It’s my true belief that there is a goat for every kind of person. And goats are very affectionate. They love it when folks scratch them. They are the most companionable of farm animals — that’s what my grandma says.”

Phyllis made another little hiccuppy sound. It sounded like a sputtering waterfall, except instead of water, it was air.

“Now, turn around,” she said. “I caught a glimpse in the mirror of something on the back of your shorts.”

“Oh,” I said. “My mom sewed a cut-out poodle on them.”

“So you like poodles and goats, I see.”

“I don’t really like poodles that much. I think they’re kind of silly. They just make a nice decoration, you know.”

“They are supposedly among the smartest of dogs,” Phyllis said. I kind of shrugged.

“Maybe, but goats aren’t nearly as dumb as people think.”

Just then Mrs. Keller came out with a tray of lemonade and a plate of cookies.

“Now, let’s see,” she said, setting down the tray. One of the glasses was special and had a straw in it about a foot long. She set this glass into a metal claw that stuck out from the iron lung, then put the straw into Phyllis’s mouth. I was fascinated as Mrs. Keller put the glass in the claw and then somehow the claw automatically brought the glass, straw and all, closer to Phyllis. Mrs. Keller had been talking while she was doing this stuff with the glass and the straw. I was thinking about how beautiful Phyllis was, and I was thinking that when her face and Emmett’s had been trapped in the mirror together . . . well, they looked really nice. If that mirror had been heart-shaped, it could have been like a Valentine card.

“Georgie! Georgie!” Emmett gave me a nudge.

“Yeah!” I jerked back to attention.

“Mrs. Keller was asking you where you are going to school.”

“Oh,” I said, and straightened up. “I used to go to Peter Stoner Elementary School, but now I’ll go to Crooked Creek since we’ve moved into this neighborhood.” I wanted to tell them how this was a stinking rotten deal that I had to change schools and Emmett didn’t.

“And you’re going to Westridge, I assume,” Mrs. Keller was saying to Emmett.

“Yes ma’am, I’ve been there all along.” Then he turned to Phyllis and leaned forward a bit. Both their faces crowded into the mirror. “Where did you go, Phyllis? North Tech?”