Just Plain Weird (23 page)

         
“Let me check my house,” I suggested, and started to jog next door. Eliza followed me as the wind gusted up clouds of dust from the bare ground. We ran round back to enter by the kitchen door. The entire outside of the house was shadowed in grime. As we ran up my back stairs, we left footprints in the black ashy material.

         
The door was unlocked, and we entered the kitchen, which looked as though it had been abandoned many years ago. Everything was fairly neat and in place, but there was the air of the passage of a good deal of time since last a living person walked here. This must be the way it feels to an archeologist when he enters a tomb that has been sealed for thousands of years. I found attached to the microwave one of the mother’s notes-- instructions to warm my dinner, which was set atop of plate inside the microwave, spoiled and rotted and turned to hard black lumps. I stared at the note, wondering how long it had been since my mother had started doing this. I must have been eight years old, then, what they had used to call a “latchkey” child years before, and from then onward I used to find a note with every dinner, which I heated and ate alone at the kitchen table. My mother had developed the habit of drawing little funny faces along the bottom edge of the notes, which the note I now looked at had, but she suspended that practice when I reached thirteen-- probably believing I thought it had become a silly thing you do for a little kid and not appropriate for somebody who saw himself as almost grown up.
 
So the note was at least two and a half years old, I reasoned-- at least two and a half years since anybody had been inside the house. Was that possible?

         
As I studied the note, drifting off somewhat, Eliza scooted nervously about the house, checking this and that.

         
“Everything is out,” she reported finally. “The electric, the gas, the water-- everything. The phone is dead-- no dial tone, not even that faint background noise you get when it’s connected but the dial tone is out.”

         
We went upstairs to check my bedroom. Clothes lay scattered all over the floor. The dresser drawers were partly open, and shirts and socks hung out here and there. My schoolbooks were scattered across the rumbled bed. All kinds of junk was spilled out of the open closet.

         
“My God,” Eliza exclaimed. “It looks like a tornado went through here.”

         
“Actually, this is pretty normal,” I confessed. “Except for the hangers.” There were empty hangers strewn all over the room. I looked in the closet. “My suitcases are gone. Whatever happened, it looks like we packed in a hurry,” I said, and headed back downstairs.

         
I started for the front door, not exactly sure where I was going, when Eliza stopped me.

         
“Travis,” she said. “What could have happened here?”

         
“I don’t know. Some catastrophe-- that’s for sure.”

         
“And the artifact isn’t giving you a clue.”

         
“Nothing. Not a thing,” I said. “It’s as though it has its head buried in the sand. It’s weird-- I can feel its presence, but that’s all; it’s like being in a room with somebody who is just sitting there and staring at the floor.”

         
“Well, we need to do something,” she said, her tone determined.

         
“What can we do?” I asked. I went over to our beat-up old sofa, and sat down, putting my feet up on the coffee table strewn with mail-- mostly unpaid bills. I looked up at her as she started chewing at her thumbnail.

         
“There has to be something,” she insisted, and then added in dismay, “Oh, we should have woke Doc up, and let him know what we were doing. We should have run it past him.”

         
“I can’t see that it would have made any difference,” I said. “I think he would have totally agreed with the plan. The artifact gave us the perfect solution.”

         
“Well, it couldn’t have been that perfect, now, could it?” she asked archly.

         
“No, there had to be something-- something even the artifact couldn’t foresee.”

         
“Oh, that’s just peachy,” she said. “And what are we supposed to tell Doc when he wakes up? ‘Remember how you lost mom? Well, guess what? Oops….’ Travis, we didn’t lose just one person, here; it looks like we lost everybody, and whatever is left is all-- messed up.”

         
“It may not be as bad as it looks,” I said, but hardly believed it.

         
“Not as bad as-- come here,” she commanded me, made me follow her through the front door and out onto my front porch. “Look around… the people are all gone, Travis, the trees are gone. And do you hear birds? No? Yeah, even the birds are gone. Believe me, it’s as bad as it looks.” She turned her gaze upward. “And what’s the deal with the sky? Those aren’t clouds up there, you know. It’s all black, from east to west, and it’s not nighttime either. So what-- ohmigod,” she said, still looking skyward, her voice filled with awe. She stood there mute, her mouth slightly open, but unable to speak. Her hand reached out for me, groping, and found my shoulder. She pulled me down to the lower stair, on which she was standing, and then pointed skyward with a finger that was trembling. When I looked up I saw nothing but uniform blackness high overhead, but then I noticed the there was a thinning in the dark sheet as though wind currents at a high altitude were clearing an area of the sky, parting the dark particles and opening a gap, through which a vague light began to shine, growing brighter and brighter. The moon began to show itself, looking full and abnormally large, and you could clearly see with the naked eye that there was a large chunk missing from its surface where it curved near its northern pole. It looked as though an enormous claw had gouged out part of the moon, leaving a jagged gap from which a wide fissure ran crookedly across half its face.

IV.

HOW WE FRACTURED THE MOON

&

Other disasters

Presumably, aside from Eliza and me, Doc was the only other living being on the planet. He was now sitting at his desk, an old dinged and dented oak desk, with his arms folded on the desktop, his somewhat large head resting on his arms. He was sleeping contentedly, snoring every now and then. He might have been dreaming happy dreams of recovering his wife. He seemed so peaceful that I really didn’t want to wake him. I really, really didn’t want to wake him and tell him that somehow we had fractured the moon and misplaced the rest of mankind.

    
    
As Eliza and I stood in the doorway of the cluttered office, we carried on in whispers the debate as to who ought to wake Doc and break the news to him. I was of the opinion that Doc was Eliza’s father, after all, and that therefore she should be the one to wake him up and tell him what had happened. She, on the other hand, maintained that I was the one to whom the artifact conveyed the “master plan” and therefore it was up to me to wake him and tell him. The debate soon turned into a wrestling match, with me trying to shove her into the office, and with her-- much stronger than she appeared-- resisting me, and almost shoving me into the office. It was during this inane physical confrontation that Doc decided to wake up on his own.
 
He must have been watching us a moment-- after rubbing his tired eyes and replacing his glasses, probably-- and finally said, “Hey guys, what’s up?”

    
    
We instantly stopped our wrestling, pretended it never happened, and turned toward him. He was looking at us with growing amusement.

    
    
“What are you guys doing?” he asked.

    
    
“Just came down to wake you, Doc,” Eliza said simply.

    
    
“Uh-huh,” he said. He pushed himself back away from the desk, and leaned back in his chair, looking up at us. “Well, I was up for most of the night, trying to reason out some kind of solution for our problem. I think I came up with something.” When neither Eliza nor I said anything, he continued, “I was thinking if we could set the coordinates for a time just before we arrived in Batavia, maybe we could leave a message-- a warning. I was thinking maybe we could leave it somewhere on the property, somewhere so that I could find it for sure-- maybe, say, inside the mailbox. If the warning were written in my own handwriting, I would have no choice but than to believe it. I could change plans, then, before anything happens, before the energy signature of the artifact is even discovered. I think it’s pretty simple, really, and I think that’s why it will work. What do you think?”

    
    
Almost in perfect unison, Eliza and I hemmed and hawed at the idea.

    
    
Doc frowned somewhat, no doubt wondering why the idea wasn’t met with instant approval.

    
    
“It seems like the simplest way of undoing the damage,” he said.

    
    
“Omigod,” Eliza finally cried out. “Will you please tell him, Travis.”

    
    
“Tell me what?” Doc asked, turning to me.

    
    
“Well,” I started, “there’s something I didn’t tell you. I probably should have at the time, but I didn’t quite know how to put it.”

    
    
“Well, tell me now,” he said, as though the matter could be of little consequence.

    
    
“The artifact began to-- express its wishes to me.”

    
    
“Its wishes? It has wishes?”

    
    
“Oh, yeah,” I assured him.

    
    
“That’s astonishing. An artificial intelligence with wishes. And what would these wishes be?”

    
    
“Actually, just one,” I said. “It wants to go home. That’s why it has been looking for a pilot. It was never preprogrammed to return to its planet, so it needs a pilot to give it the command.”

    
    
“I see,” he said thoughtfully. “And is it aware of our problem, or is that irrelevant to it.”

    
    
“No, it’s very aware of it,” I said. “It conceived a plan that would fix everything. It wanted me to set the coordinates to a time just before you discovered it, and then give it the command to return home.”

    
    
Doc leaned forward, and placed his elbows on the desktop. He stared at his laced fingers as he considered the option at length.

    
    
“That would mean we would never remember ever finding the artifact, and that the artifact would no longer be on the planet.”

    
    
“That’s right,” I said. “It would restore the timeline that would have occurred had you never found it.”