Just Plain Weird (22 page)

         
“There’s no solution,” I said simply. “It can’t be done-- not neatly, anyway.”

         
“What did Doc say about all this?”

         
“I didn’t have the heart to tell him,” I admitted.

         
Eliza gave me a strange look. “Travis, is this thing communicating with you right now?”

         
“Yeah,” I said.

         
“This far away?”

         
“I don’t think distance has anything to do with it. The telepathic link is not broken, no matter how far away-- at least that’s the sense of it that I’m getting.”

         
“Well, what does it want you to do, exactly?”

         
“It wants me to set the coordinates to a time before you found it, and leave instructions for it to return home.”

         
“Ohmigod, that would mean that everything that happened afterward would be different-- absolutely everything.”

         
“Right. It would be as though you never found the artifact.”

         
“But that would mean we will never meet,” she said sadly. “That would be for sure-- no doubts about it. Finding the artifact is what led us to start moving all over the place. And if we have no reason to move, then definitely I would never move in next door to you.”

         
“That’s true, but then again, any plan Doc could possibly cook up will end the same way-- with us never meeting. Let’s face it-- that’s a certainty in any case. But the good part will be you will be reunited with your mother. It will be as though you were never separated. And you will not remember all this, because it will have never happened.”

         
We sat in silence for a moment, a heavy morose silence. Eliza pushed away the basket that held her food, which was half-eaten.

         
“It’s not fair,” she murmured. “It’s just not fair.”

         
“Maybe not, but then again, maybe that’s how it’s meant to be.”

         
“How do you mean?”

         
“Look, you say you believe in fate, right? Well, maybe that’s what fate is in this case. Maybe we were never supposed to meet. Did you ever consider that? You can’t believe in fate only when it sends you something you want, only when things turn out right. You have to accept what fate sends you or doesn’t send you, no matter whether or not you like it. Right now, what we might be doing is cheating fate. Besides, hasn’t that been what you wanted all along. How many times, already, have I heard you say that you wish you’d never found the artifact. It would only be correcting a mistake that had been made a long time ago. It would be putting things back to where they belong.”

         
“And nothing that’s happened in the meanwhile means anything?” she asked.

         
“Of course, it means something. It will always mean something.”

         
“What will it mean after it’s all undone?”

         
“I don’t know.”

         
“Nothing,” she said firmly. “That’s what.”

         
“We have now.”

         
“That’s not enough.”

         
“You know, in their language, they have no words for ‘before’ or ‘after.’ All they have is ‘now.’ And maybe they’re looking at things the right way. Maybe anything that anybody ever has is for now. What happened before is gone, and what will happen later is an illusion.”

         
“So where does that leave us?”

         
“It leaves us here, now, with these cold greasy French fries and half-drunk sodas, and, you know what, in my opinion, that isn’t bad.”

         
We sat in silence for a long time then. It was almost as though we were savoring the moment. She playfully kicked me under the table now and then, and gave me an occasional sly glance. Finally she sighed.

         
“Oh, Travis,” she said. “You are so maladroit. Don’t you even know when the time is right to tell somebody you love them?”

         
“Don’t forget,” I said. “I still have a connection to the artifact. Maybe I’m starting to think the way the people who built it think.”

         
“Oh, and what’s their deal on such matters?”

         
“If everything is perfect, nobody has to say a word.”

         
She considered this at length, biting her low lip.

         
“All right,” she said. “I see that, and it’s probably true. Still, I’ll bet it was one of their males that started that.”

         
We left the hot dog stand, then, and wandered aimlessly down the dark streets.

         
“What a minute,” Eliza cried suddenly. “I just had an idea.”

         
“Stop. You’re scaring me already,” I said.

         
“No, really, listen,” she said, growing excited and more animated, until she was walking backwards out in front of me, her arms flailing here and there as she spoke. “This is great. Why didn’t I think of this before? Look, if you do this thing the artifact wants you to do…”

         
“It’s the right thing to do,” I said, starting to suspect she was about to try to talk me out of it.

         
“Yeah, whatever-- that’s aside from the point I’m trying to make here. If you do this, then now-- tonight-- is the only time we have, right?”

         
“Assuming I do it tomorrow morning. I think it’s best if it’s done right away-- the sooner the better.”

         
“And once it’s done, it will be like none of this has ever happened, right?”

         
“Right,” I said cautiously. I noticed how her eyes were flashing in a very mischievous way.

         
“Well, that means tonight we can do whatever we want, right?”

         
“I suppose,” I said, now downright leery.

         
“We can do whatever we want without suffering any consequences.”

         
“Why? What did you have in mind?”

         
“I don’t have anything in mind in particular,” she said, still walking backward before me. “I just love the idea of it all. Isn’t it wonderful? Think about it.
 
The freedom for one moment in time to do whatever you want to do--no matter how outrageous-- without having to worry about doing it. I’m not suggesting we go out and find a liquor store and knock it over, but if we wanted to, we could.”

         
“I could never hold up a place,” I told her, scoffing at the notion.

         
“All right, bad example. But think-- think over the possibilities. Isn’t there anything that you always wanted to do but were afraid to do because you knew you would get into trouble? Think about it.”

         
I was thinking about it. I found the idea absolutely frightening. Eliza was, after all, a person who actually drove a car off a cliff-- an act for which there could have been dire consequences. It was terrifying to think what activities she might dream up if there were absolutely no consequences.

         
“No,” I said. “I can’t think of a thing.”

         
She was doubtful. “You’re kidding, right? You mean you’ve done everything you ever wanted to do?”

         
“I didn’t say that. That’s not the same thing. There are plenty of things I want to do and never had the chance, but none of them would end up with me getting into trouble of any kind.”

         
“You mean you never, say, wanted to get even with somebody?”

         
“Get even? Get even for what?” I asked.

         
“For whatever they did to you.”

         
“And what would that be?”

         
“I don’t know. You tell me.”

         
“Nobody ever did anything to me.”

         
“Right,” she said, vaguely disappointed. “You know, you’re taking the joy out of this opportunity.”

         
“Sorry.”

         
“Well, how about other things.”

         
“Such as…”

         
“How about mooning. Wouldn’t it be a hoot to moon the cars passing by?”

         
I just looked at her.

         
“Right,” she said glumly. “Mooning is out, apparently.” She went on to list a number of things, for the most part zany, that we could do-- from teepee-ing Raffles’ house to letting the air out of all the tires of the squad cars in the police parking lot. All of her ideas seemed rather silly to me, and though one or another sounded amusing, I couldn’t get into the mood under the circumstances to try to do them. So we ended up going back to her house, where we sat in the dimly lighted living room, and watched videos-- old comedies for the most part-- and ate pizza until we finally fell asleep, there, cuddling together in the corner of the sofa. And when you get down to it, that might have been the best way of all to spend what little time we had left together.

3

When we woke the next morning, we were still entwined on the sofa. We had slept in such an odd position that when Eliza stood up she hobbled around for a few minutes trying to get the feeling back in her feet while I had a monumental crick in my neck that threatened to cause me to walk around for what little time I had left in the current timeline as though I were looking under the furniture for a lost quarter or something.

         
Eliza started to cry, “Pins and needles. Pins and needles,” and jumped back onto the sofa and started massaging her feet. After the feeling in her feet returned to normal, she looked at me and exclaimed, “Ohmigod, I must look horrible.”

         
Though her hair was disheveled badly and her eyes somewhat swollen, I assured her she looked fine.

         
“Don’t give me that,” she said. “You don’t look so hot, and there’s no way I can look any better.”

         
She left the room briefly, and when she returned, she was trying to brush out her tangled hair. The brush was stuck in a particularly stubborn tangle, and pulling as hard as she could, she failed to tug it through the tangle. Frustrated, she pause, then, with the brush hanging from her hair, and said, “Sometimes, I don’t know if I hate my hair more, or if it hates me more.” She extricated the brush from her hair, and threw it on the sofa. “Well, if you do this thing, I guess, it won’t make a difference. It’ll just be another tangle that will never happen.”

         
“You see Doc?” I asked, trying unsuccessfully to crack my neck.

         
“No,” she said. “He probably fell asleep on his desk downstairs. He does that all the time.”

         
“You think we should wake him up, or just do it and get it over with?”

         
She thought it over, frowning slightly. “You know, I can’t see that he would object to the idea. It will put things back where they belong, after all. Also, it would be sending the artifact back to its home planet, where nobody here could get their hands on it. I think, maybe, it would be a kinder thing to let him sleep. The next time he wakes up my mother will be there again, and he will be none the wiser about anything else.”

         
“Then we should just do it,” I said.

         
“Yeah, if it has to be that way, let’s get it over with,” she said firmly, although her eyes looked sad and uncertain.

         
When I thought of the console, it emerged from the floor. I pressed the buttons in sequence as though I had been operating the control for years. “What will happen,” I explained, “is the artifact will return to a time before you discovered it. Then it will obey my telepathic command to return home; it will reintegrate with the space craft, the two again becoming one, and go on its way.”

         
“Please, Travis, I’d rather not hear the details. At the moment I hardly care.”

         
“All I have to do now is press this button to execute the commands,” I said, my hand hovering over the red octagon isolated on the lower right side of the console. “Is there anything--”

         
“Travis, I hate long good-byes. Please, just press the button.”

         
As I turned toward the console, she, as though by last-second impulse, jumped on my back and wrapped her arms around my neck. “I love you, Travis. Don’t ever forget,” she whispered in my ear.

         
I pressed the button.

4

There was a low hum that grew higher and higher in pitch, as though power were being built up. Just as the hum became intense enough to hurt my ears, the room began to shimmer and fade away. For a brief moment, I saw an image of what the room must have looked like before Doc and Eliza moved in, after the former owner, Mr. Wilkins, died and he son emptied the house. The walls were a drab faded shade of blue, with brighter blue squares and rectangles where pictures had once hung. The carpet was old and gray and natty, and I could smell the fleeting musty scent of old people. Eliza was still hanging onto me, but she seemed to become lighter by the second, as if she were slowly fading away, or phasing out of existence. Just as she seemed light as a butterfly, I glanced down at my hand and saw that it, too, was shimmering and becoming translucent.
 
I, too, was fading away, presumably to reappear in the place I would be at this time had Doc and Eliza never moved in, which would probably be in my basement, doing sets of bench presses or something. I tried to say something before we vanished, but Eliza beat me to it. “Remember, Travis, always remember,” she whispered, her very words fading as though reechoing from a vast distance.

         
Just then, something happened. It was as though the entire world shuddered. Everything that had been a-shimmer and vanishing suddenly became solid again. Mr. Wilkens shabby old living room brightened again, and then turned back into living room we had been departing forever. Eliza’s weight returned so abruptly she pulled me back off balance, and we both tumbled to the floor. The humming grew softer and softer and finally stopped. The control console dropped and disappeared into the floor.

         
A moment passed in eerie silence.

         
I stood slowly, gazing around in wonder that we appeared still to be there. I helped Eliza to her feet. At first she seemed too stunned to speak. Finally she murmured, “We’re still here.”

         
“Yeah,” I said, puzzled. “We are.”

         
“What happened?” she asked.

         
“I’m not sure. I think it started to work, but then something…” my words trailed off. A chill ran through my entire body, then, an icy chill that ran down to my bones. I tried to shake it off, but couldn’t. My arms were covered with goose bumps, and my hands were trembling.

         
“You all right?” she asked. “You look white as a sheet.”

         
“Yeah--no--I don’t know,” I said, never recalling a time in my life when I’d been so confused. As I walked over to the sofa to sit down, she was right at my heel.

         
“Travis?” She sat next to me, and grabbed my hand. “You’re, like, freezing,” she said, and added, “Something went wrong, didn’t it?”

         
Though I had no clue what, I was certain she was right; something went wrong, all right, something went awfully wrong.

         
“Are you still connected to the artifact?” she asked.

         
I had to think a moment before I answered.

         
“Yeah, I think I am,” I said, “but I’m not getting anything from it.”

         
“How do you mean?”

         
“It’s not communicating anything. It’s quiet. It’s as though it’s too scared to speak.”

         
“Scared? Can that be?-- I mean, it is a machine, after all.”

         
“No, it’s fear, all right-- a really deep fear; it’s scared out of its wits.”

         
“I don’t understand,” she said, frowning.

         
“Me either. We ought to be back where we would have been if you had never found it. Something started to happened, but then it stopped and it was as though we were snapped back here-- sort of like a rubber band snapping back on itself. I don’t get it. According to everything the artifact led me to believe, there should have been very little trouble accomplishing such a transfer.”

         
“You mean you think it lied to you?”

         
“No,” I said, still trying to shake off the shivers, “not lied-- not intentionally, anyway. Maybe it was just wrong.”

         
“You notice anything?” she asked, looking around.

         
“What?”

         
“Isn’t it darker in here than it was before?”

         
She was right. Before I had pressed the execute button, the sun was shining brightly outside, and despite the fact all the curtains were drawn shut, the room was fairly bright. Now the room was gloomy as though a storm were raging outside, but there was no thunder, no pattering of rain on the window panes-- nothing, just a silent stillness that was quite creepy.

         
I got up, walked to the front windows, and pulled back the draperies to look outside.

         
What I saw was mind-boggling. The first thing I noticed was that all the trees that had lined the street-- all of them old and towering and arching majestically over the street-- all the trees were gone. There were huge gaping holes in the front lawns, where the trees had once stood; it was as though the trees had been torn from the ground like weeds. The few cars parked along the street appeared dull, covered in what looked like the accumulation of years of soot. Every car tire was flat. And above the sky was very dark, not dark from storm clouds, but as if high in the atmosphere, there lingered a layer of blackness that blocked out the sun.

         
I let the draperies fall shut, and turned to Eliza.

         
“What is it?” she asked, her voice laced with dread. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

         
“See for yourself,” I told her.

         
She headed for the front door, and I followed her. As we walked out onto her front porch, I could feel the chill in the air; normally, at this time of year and at this time of day, it would already be about seventy-five degrees, but now it couldn’t have been much more than fifty.

         
“Ohmigod, what happened?” Eliza asked in a gasp. She ran down the stairs to the front walkway, and spun around, taking in everything. It was not the world we had wakened in, but a world that looked alien and desolate. It was a world made up more of shades of gray-- as though all the daylight hours were twilight-- than of all the bright colors with which we had become familiar. The trees were gone, true, but also all the lawns seemed to have dried up and blown away a long time ago. The flower gardens and hedges had apparently suffered the same fate. The only colors noticeable were the original color of the parked cars, the colors vaguely bleeding through the black sooty coat that covered them. “How is this possible?” Eliza wondered. “This is crazy, absolutely crazy.”