The Power of Un (2 page)

“She can’t baby-sit?” I croaked.

Dad nodded. “She says she’s not feeling well. Sorry, kiddo. You’re going to have to watch Roxy tonight.”

“N-Not feeling well? She was fine at school today. I don’t get it.” But even as the words were leaving my mouth, I got it, all right. Rainy wasn’t sick. She was mad and she was getting even with me.

“Some kind of stomach bug,” said Dad.

“But I’m going to the carnival tonight! Ash and I have been planning this for weeks!”

“Well, you can take Roxy with you. I know she’d love to go.”

“Take Roxy?” A pain was growing somewhere behind my eyes. A picture formed in my brain of me going on the baby rides, holding Roxy’s hand—which would be stuck to mine with cotton candy—and taking her to the Porta-Potties. “Dad! If I do that I won’t have any fun at all! Can’t you guys just … I dunno … skip the dance tonight or something?”

He and Mom were going with my aunt and uncle to a square dance, one of those dumb things where everyone dresses up in Western clothes and stomps and whoops for hours while a country band plays songs with names like “Flop-Eared Mule” and “Shindig in the Barn.” I couldn’t imagine why anybody would want to do such a thing.

“Look, we don’t want to cancel our plans any more than you want to cancel yours,” said Dad. “Of course you’ll have fun. You’ll just have Roxy along while you’re at it.”

“But, Dad …” By now my voice was barely a squeak.

“No buts.” I knew by the way he said this that further arguments would just make things worse. Besides, I was afraid I might start crying.

The room was beginning to feel incredibly small
and hot. I opened the front door. “I’m going for a walk.”

“Make sure you’re back in time for dinner,” said Dad. His voice trailed after me as I closed the door. “Sorry things worked out this way….”

Sorry.
Sure
, I thought. There was an empty Coke can on the sidewalk in front of our house, and I kicked it as hard as I could. Then I found a rock, and I kicked that, too, every time I took a step, all the way to the woods at the end of the block. I wished I were an only child, that Roxy had been kidnapped from the hospital at birth or had been bitten by a tropical mosquito and died of malaria before the age of two. I wished Lorraine Frogner knew the meaning of the word
mercy
. Most of all, I wished I’d never heard of spitballs.

There’s a path through the woods, and I started to run along it, still kicking everything I came across. Dry leaves flew up in fountains. Twigs sailed through the air. The last thing I kicked was a tree trunk, and it hurt so much I had to sit on the ground, holding my foot and saying every swear word I knew.

I was pretty distracted, so it came as a shock when I looked up and saw, through a blur of angry tears, someone standing just a few feet away, watching me. I probably would have yelped if I could have, but I was so startled my throat closed and I jumped up, ready to run, before I had time to think about it. There was such
a roar of rushing blood in my ears that I could hardly hear anything else, and the world seemed eerily quiet.

Whoever it was stood in the deep shadow of a tree. The sun was about to set, and the woods felt too dark for comfort. The figure wore a long, shapeless garment—maybe a trench coat, maybe some kind of robe. When he opened his mouth, he spoke in a deep, raspy voice. “Don’t be afraid. I won’t hurt you.”

He might as well have said he was an ax murderer. He took a step forward, and there was just one word in my mind, flashing like a neon sign: RUN. Unfortunately, the heel of my high top caught on a root as I tried to back up. I landed hard on my rear.

The old man loomed over me. He smelled strange—like hot metal or lightning. I thought I saw smoke rising from his rumpled clothes and a wild halo of silvery hair that stood out from his head. He had an object I couldn’t identify in his raised hand.

“I’ve got something for you,” he said, and he opened his mouth in a crazy grin.

T
he old man continued to smile at me, his head tilted. Anybody would have thought he was admiring a famous painting or something. I squirmed. I’d never seen him before in my life—he could have been the premier of Siberia for all I knew. There was no way he could have something for me, at least not anything good.

“Wh-Who are you?” I asked. Not that I expected an answer. I was stalling for time while I felt around on the ground for a rock or a stick—anything I could use to defend myself.

He took another step forward, and I got a better look at his face; shining eyes set in woven creases of skin. I could see the rest of him better, too. His coat—or robe or whatever—looked soft and crumpled.
Maybe he’d slept in it. From certain angles, it glittered, and there really did seem to be smoke or vapor rising from it. Maybe he was homeless, but even so, I’d never seen anyone like him. He was clean, but that electrical smell was very strong. I wondered if he’d escaped from a mental hospital. Anything seemed possible.

“Who am I? Not important,” he said. “Not important at all.” He laid one finger beside his mouth and frowned. “Well, that’s not quite right. It
is
important. It’s important that you not know. It’s also important that we hurry. I don’t have much time.”

My fingers closed around a nice, thick stick in the fallen leaves. I grabbed it and raised it over my head. “Get away! I’m warning you.”

His eyebrows drew together. He held up the hand with nothing in it, palm toward me as if to shield himself, which made me feel a little braver. “No, no, don’t worry. I’d never hurt you. Cross my heart and hope to die.” He traced a cross over his heart. I wasn’t sure I’d ever seen anybody older than thirteen do that before. “I’m just here to give you something. Really,” he continued, holding out his other hand. What I’d assumed must be a gun or a knife or some other weapon was actually a flat box that looked like it might be plastic. In the dusky light, it was hard to tell.

One of my mother’s favorite warnings scuttled through my skull, and I said it aloud before I could stop myself: “Beware of strangers bearing gifts.”

The old man closed his eyes for a second or two and smiled. When he opened them again, he said, “This is so weird. So great and weird.” He looked … well …
delighted
is the only way I can describe it.

I sat up.
Great
and
weird
? These weren’t words I expected to hear from a guy who had to be at least seventy. My heart finally slowed a little, maybe because he seemed to find all this just as strange as I did.

“Your mom’s right, of course. You shouldn’t take gifts from strangers,” he said. “At least not under normal circumstances.”

My heart sped up again. How did he know my
mother
had given me that warning?

“But these aren’t normal circumstances. Far from it!” He laughed, and I surprised myself by lowering the stick. It was the kind of laugh I’ve heard from my dad when he finds a rare book in perfect condition. Ash laughed that way once after we took a clock apart and put it back together and it started ticking. It wasn’t the laugh of an ax murderer.

The old man held the box up so I could see it better. It was about the size of a paperback book and looked a little like an overgrown calculator or an electronic game, but not quite like either one. The case was gunmetal gray. It had a keypad and colored buttons that might have lit up.

He reached toward me. “Let me help you up,” he said. I thought about it for a second or two, then took
his hand, which felt firm and cool. Not strong exactly, but solid. I dropped the stick in the leaves and brushed myself off.

“You kind of startled me a little,” I said.

“Couldn’t help it. It’s unavoidable. I tend to appear suddenly” He glanced at his wrist. So did I. He wasn’t wearing a watch there, but a small, square panel gleamed in the skin on the back of his hand. Maybe it was some kind of watch after all, because he said, “I tend to disappear suddenly, too. Sorry to rush you, but I really have to hurry. There’s no way of knowing how long it will be before the … well, there’s no word for it yet … before
things
begin to deteriorate.”

The guy was beginning to sound weird again, and I licked my lips, looking around for my big stick. But before I could bend to retrieve it, he said, “Isn’t there a good place to sit somewhere near here? We need to talk.” His voice was cheerful, and by this time I did want to ask him roughly a gazillion questions. So I decided to forget about the stick.

There’s a big, flat-topped rock in the woods where I sometimes go to think or just be alone. It was where I’d been headed when I left the house, so I led him there. It wasn’t far, maybe fifty or sixty feet down the path, but he walked slowly. He had a bad limp and he was wearing these funny little slippers, so thin they must have felt almost like no shoes at all. Along the way, he talked nonstop.

“How are things at home?” he asked.

I felt like saying not so hot, but I wasn’t sure how much I wanted him to know, so I just said, “Oh, I dunno.”

“How’s Dooms?” he asked with a strange, soft little smile.

“Dooms?” I frowned, partly because his nosiness was starting to annoy me, partly because the question and the way he asked it were so completely strange. Maybe he had me mixed up with somebody else, and this whole thing was just one big mistake. “Who’s Dooms?”

He made a sound like “phhtt” and rubbed his forehead hard. “Silly me,” he said, waving a hand in the air as if swishing away gnats.

When we came to the rock, he sat down on it with a sigh. Walking the short distance seemed to tire him out. He patted a place beside him, inviting me to join him.

He looked at the back of his hand again and frowned. “We’d better hurry,” he repeated. He lifted the little box so we could both see it better in the twilight. “This is yours. It’s what I came to do, give you this.” He spoke very fast, the words tripping over each other so I had to listen hard. “This is important. Remember what I’m telling you. This is a device, a delicate piece of equipment. As you can see, it’s handmade. It’s the only one of its kind.”

Now that I had a better look, I could see he was right. It reminded me of a found-object sculpture. There was a little screen at the top, maybe an LCD. But it was slightly crooked. So were the number keys below it. There was a large red key that said
ORDER
in bold letters. The little buttons that might have been lights were different sizes and colors, as if somebody had stuck together whatever was handy. They, too, sat crookedly in the face of the device. A strip of battered black tape held the front of the case to the back. The whole thing looked like a piece of junk.

“Are you positive you’ve got the right person?” I asked. By now I was really beginning to wonder. Nothing about this made sense.

“Your name is Gibson Finney, right? And you live at 410 Cherrywood Drive?”

“Yeah, that’s me.”

“You’re the right person, then. There’s really no doubt.”

“But I don’t understand.”

The old man sighed through his nose and smiled. “That’s what I’m trying to do. Help you understand. Now, please listen carefully, because we’re running out of time, and I still have a lot to explain.” He was beginning to remind me of a teacher. “I want to ask you a question,” he said. “Have you ever made a mistake in a game and asked your opponent if you could take your turn over again? Say, a bad move in checkers, or
you were unfairly distracted while trying to shoot a basket?”

“Sure. A do-over,” I said. “Everybody needs a do-over sometimes.”

“You can do this with your computer, too, am I right? If you make a mistake, there’s an ‘undo’ command. Give it, and you’re back where you started before you made the error.”

“Sure, it’s one of best things about computers.”

The old man’s eyes shone. “Exactly! And what if you had a machine that gave you the power to undo any mistake? Not just in a game, but anytime, anywhere, any mistake at all?”

“Wha—” I said. His meaning hit me all at once, so hard I couldn’t finish the word. I could barely even finish a thought, there were suddenly so many of them jostling each other in my brain. “You mean, this machine … I could … with this? …”

“Yes,” he said. And he flashed a huge grin.

My heart was galloping again. I reached for the box, then stopped myself. “Could I touch it?”

“Of course. It’s yours.” And he started to give it to me. I reached out for it, but an inch from the little machine, my hand stopped as if there were invisible bricks in the air. I pushed hard. I could see the old man was pushing, too. He clenched his teeth. Veins in his arms and neck stood out. “Come on,” he whispered. “This has to be possible!”

He grunted and shoved so hard he almost fell off the rock when my hand finally touched the box.

It was heavier than I’d expected and cool against my skin. I stared at the screen and the keypad in the dusk and wondered if I was dreaming. Everything that had happened since I met this strange old guy was unbelievable.

“Are you serious?” I asked. “Undo any mistake? A chance to do anything I want over again?”

“Well, there are limits, of course. But basically, yes, do anything you want over again. We call it the Power of Un.”

“Why me?” I whispered.

The old man looked at me in that strange way again, as if I were a piece of art in a museum or some other weird thing. He smiled, but he never answered the question. Instead, he went on as if I’d never asked it. “Shall I explain how the unner works?”

Unner
. The word sounded magical. I said it softly as I looked at the controls and realized they made no sense at all. I recognized the letters and numbers on the machine, but they were arranged in mysterious ways. There were letters beside the screen:
H, M
, and
S
. And there were words, if you could call them that, under each of the three colored buttons: HMODE, under a round yellow one; MMODE, under a bigger blue one; SMODE, under a square greenish button that looked as if it needed to be straightened. The numbers 1 to 9
were arranged on the keypad, but there was no 0. Then there was the big red
ORDER
button.
Order what
?