Lizard People (4 page)

I hurried to clean up the red crepe paper and ribbons in case they let Mom go early. Maybe if she didn't see the red stuff, she wouldn't think about the Lizards for a while.

I Couldn't See My Hand

Marco's
neighborhood was an unfinished subdivision on the northeast end of town by the freeway. Four or five blocks of look-alike three-bedroom homes. In the quarter-moon light, most of the rest of it appeared to be scrub trees in fields of dead grass. Breezes off the nearby Cascades pushed branches and moved the grass in slow waves.

His house looked barely lived in. Carpet but no furniture in the living room. No TV. No couch. I could see appliances like a stove and fridge, but no table in the kitchen, no dishes in the sink. Three wooden chairs in what I imagined was the dining room.

I followed him into his room. The walls were covered with detailed posters of stars and galaxies. His bed was a mattress on the floor with two pillows and a sleeping bag on top of it. He saw me looking.

“Don't like doing laundry,” he explained. He leaned against a wall and looked out the window into his backyard.

The floor was strewn with piles of news magazines and notebooks. I didn't see a computer. I don't know anyone who doesn't have a computer. There were no clothes on the floor, no books, no clock radio or CD player, no candy wrappers, no soda cans.

Marco brought in one of the dining-room chairs and put it facing his bed. He plopped down again, waited for me to sit, and started.

“I found something.” He stopped. Began again. “My mom's crazy, right? For a long time I've been wondering how to help her. I walk a lot. Zone out. Think. Try to figure things out. Worry. Stuff like that. Whatever. I always look at birds and trees and pets and kids playing and stuff. We haven't been here that long, but anyway, around here is a pretty large oak tree.” He nodded toward the window, to the field in back of his house. “I don't know why I kind of fixed on it. Live oaks are pretty interesting. Some keep their leaves year-round. You people give out bronze or gold oak leaves for military decorations, like for repeated acts of bravery.”

You people?

“Branches so big and thick they almost block out the sun,” he continued. “Makes a neat hangout. Like a natural tent. We never had them where I grew up. So, a couple of weeks ago, just messing around, I went inside by the trunk. I was actually thinking Indians from this area could have used a tree like that for shelter. You know. I was scanning the ground, wondering if I might even find an arrowhead. Anyway, near the back of the trunk, something weird was happening. There was this pattern like you see sometimes above the blacktop on a real hot day. A heat mirage, all wavy, distorting the light? And I was close enough to put my hand through it and … and, uh, when I did, I couldn't see it at the end of my wrist.”

I had shut my eyes, trying to picture what he was describing. When he stopped speaking, I opened them.

He had turned his head at an angle and narrowed his eyes. Assessing. “Do you believe me?” He wanted to know.

I was unprepared. I had just been listening. Curious. Just trying to visualize what he was saying and trying to remember whether Indians ever used live oaks for shelter and what the trunks looked like, and trying to remember the last time I had been inside a canopy of branches like that. I realized my mouth was open, and I shut it.

“Well?” he asked, not letting me off the hook.

“I don't know,” I said, which was true. “I'm just listening. Go on.”

He looked in my eyes for what seemed like a pretty long time, like he was trying to decide about me. Probably wondering whether I would use whatever he was going to say against him. I wasn't like that. But how could he know?

“Hey,” I said. “You met me at a psych hospital. You know the kind of stuff I go through with my mother.” It wasn't clear to me exactly what I meant by that, except maybe that he and I were struggling with the same kind of situation. I wanted his trust.

He put his hands together, almost like a meditation thing, and closed his eyes and started speaking in the third person.

That threw me for a minute until I remembered ESPN interviews where famous athletes talked about themselves and their lives using the third person—as if they had become their own story instead of their own self.

“Whoa, wait a minute,” I interrupted him. “I got spaced for a second. Start again, please.”

“Okay,” he said. He didn't seem impatient. “You remember that I stuck my hand in the wavy area and couldn't see it anymore?”

“Yeah, I followed you to there.”

“It turned out to be a wormhole,” he said. “Or a time portal. Or like string theory, another dimension, a parallel universe.”

4000

By
the year 4000, the climate had gotten much warmer, and in the city where Marco exited, people were mostly slender and everybody had coffee-colored skin decorated with bright tattoos or paintings. Outdoors, they wore a lot of variations on what people today call swimsuits, and they all had decorative earpieces with thin wire jewelry arranged around their cheeks and ending near their mouths. Telephones?

The buildings were smooth and rounded, spheres and oblongs of different sizes, but they didn't have signs. Maybe the shapes were supposed to tell you what they were. Or those symbols outside the doors could have really been signs, like logos or something. Maybe each building had everything anyone needed: shops and apartments and restaurants and movies and doctors.

The portal let Marco out beside a massive cedar tree in the middle of a field. A park? And people were gliding around on what looked like skateboards with a cane sticking up in front to hold on to. But there were no wheels and no motor.

While Marco was looking around, a small metal disk like a hockey puck whacked into him and bit him. Well, not bit him exactly, but attached itself to his shirtsleeve and began flashing a message on a small screen. Marco couldn't pull the disk off, and he couldn't read the message. It was a series of lines that looked liked unfinished letters grouped into words.
There was a blinking blue button at the end of the screen, and Marco pushed it but nothing seemed to happen.

When he looked up, several silver tube things, each about a foot in diameter and a yard long, were gliding toward him a couple of feet off the ground. The lead one had a flexible hose extending from the front of it. Trouble! He tore off his shirt and jammed back into the portal.

Just as he had a few minutes ago, he was rocketing through a tunnel, like one of those huge metal culverts, with brilliant red lines zinging along the walls. Fireworks shot into his vision, his skin was electrified, and then he was just standing back in the present, under the oak tree, like nothing had happened.

Whoa! Talk about a roller coaster! Where had he been? Scary, but what a rush! One of a kind, right? He bet no one had done anything like this before. He might be the next Magellan! He pictured his name in lights in Times Square. Marco Lasalle discovers … what? A new country? A new planet?

Marco was better prepared next time. He put on a heavy jacket so that when the metal disk struck, he could take off the jacket and wrap the thing inside it. He figured if he didn't press the blue button, and if he kept moving, he could find somebody to talk to. Also, he decided to go at night, when it might be easier to explore undetected.

The field was dark and there were just as many people gliding around as when he visited before. The gliders carried their own glow and illuminated the area around them wherever they went. In a few seconds the puck glommed onto him, and he caught it in his jacket, as he had planned. He began chasing nearby gliders, but whenever he got close, they speeded up and stayed just out of his reach. He waved at people and they waved back. They didn't stop.

When he was tired, he rested under the tree, but when he looked up, he could see the whole night sky. It was just a projection of a tree, transparent from the inside. He caught his breath and walked to a building.

He followed a sidewalk-type path to the front wall, and when he got a couple of feet away, a section of wall slid back. He went inside. The floor was a glossy tile that didn't make any noise when you walked on it. Immediately in front of him were a series of terminals that looked like computers on stalks.

Marco figured that this was where you got your directions. He walked to the nearest one and put his fingers on the keyboard. The keys were in the same script that had been flashing on the metal disk. He moved the cursor to the open address box at the top of the screen, closed his eyes, and tried typing using the key positions he knew. He typed “Google.com” and hit what he thought was the “Enter” key.

While Marco was watching the screen, he felt a poke on his arm. A tube with a hose had attached to him. He gave a tug to break loose, but it did no good. The tube made a noise like a short song in a foreign language.

“I don't understand,” Marco told it.

A tiny door opened in the top of the tube and a plain earphone and wire mike pushed out. Marco put them on.

“Who are you?” he heard when the earphone was in place.

“Marco Lasalle.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I'm, uh, I'm a visitor. I'm looking … for a cure. For mental illness,” Marco said, trying to make it sound like his business here was important. “Not for me,” he added, but he didn't think anyone heard him. The machine was already leading Marco out the door and over to a waiting skateboard—floatboard? Marco stepped onto it and began gliding through the city at high speed.

Once away from the park, there were lots of people gliding but no cars in the streets. Everything was spotlessly clean. No paper, no trash, no plastic bags caught on trees or bushes. No trees or bushes! The machine stopped abruptly near the entrance of a huge building that looked like four blimps joined together at their noses. A steady stream of people was going in and coming out. The gliders, or floatboards, were parked in a line along the edge of the walk. The tube led Marco inside to a front desk. Service counter? Nursing station?

The person ahead finished, and the tube propelled Marco forward. A large-chested middle-aged woman in a light blue apron uniform looked him over carefully.

“How can I help you?”

Marco heard her clearly, though those words didn't seem to match the words her lips formed. Then he heard what sounded like another foreign song, this, he thought, from the tube.

The woman's eyebrows lifted. “Wait here,” she said. She leaned her head down to her shoulder and sang something to a button that rested there. The tube pulled Marco to the side so the person next in line could step up.

In less than a minute, a light blue metallic tube came and attached to Marco. The silver tube let go and left. Light Blue led Marco at a leisurely pace down a long corridor, past a series of doors. Beside most of the doors were chairs, and sometimes people sat in them as if waiting for an appointment.

After a right turn into a perpendicular hall, the tube stopped in front of the nearest door and emitted a tone. The door opened and Marco was escorted inside. The tube released him and left. A coffee-colored man in a blue smock with black piping was waiting. He had five stripes where a chest pocket would have been, with a row of small medallions beneath. He was in his thirties or forties. Cleft-chinned, handsome, dapper, no smile. He combed his hair in a complicated arrangement of swirls. Marco wondered if the man was really conceited.

“Are you loose?” the man asked.

“I'm not sure,” Marco said.

“Then you are loose,” the man said. The man pressed a button on the console he was standing behind. The silver tube returned.

“Take him back to the University,” the man told it.

“I didn't come from there,” Marco said.

“None of us did,” the man said, barely concealing a smile.

“What is this place? Where are we? Is this a hospital?” Marco asked him.

“Are you saying you're one of our patients?” the man asked.

“No,” Marco said. “I'm just visiting, and I want … uh, I need to find your cure for mental illness.”

“So you are one of ours,” the man said. He sang something to the tube and it turned and projected a zoom-in of Marco in the park, Marco chasing gliders, Marco standing in front of the terminal in the other building.

The man sang again, and the tube clamped onto Marco's arm. “You'll go to Dr. Gila on the second floor,” he said.

“You don't understand.” Marco tugged at the tube. “It's not for me! It's for my mom. I arrived here through a tunnel, a space tunnel that let me out in that park you just saw. I just came out near that tree. Right before I started chasing the gliders.”

“I understand,” the man said. “That's what they all say.”

I kept listening, deep in the story, maybe like a trance, eyes closed, but in another part of my mind, questions accumulated.
A cure for mental illness? The year 4000?
Has he gone nuts on me?