Mr. Fahrenheit

by T. Michael Martin

  “Ellie, don’t go,” Benji said. “CR, apologize. Right now.”

  CR’s mouth dropped open. “What?”

  “Do it,” Benji said. His voice was strong, free of the anxiety that usually tethered it. “I’m serious.”

  CR stared at Benji another moment, then cocked an incredulous (and condescending, frankly) half smile. “Oh, I’m very sorry, Eleanor.”

  CR, Benji thought angrily, can you just not be yourself for a while?

  Ellie might have left anyway, but right then the door at the back of the auditorium opened. The silhouette of a skinny guy in dad clothes carrying two full-to-bursting duffel bags stepped through. Benji smiled. Zeeko made his way to them and dropped the bags to the floor, breathing and sweating pretty heavily.

  He held his hand out in front of Benji. “That’ll be a zillion dollars,” he said.

  “Did you get everything on the list?” Benji asked.

  “You’re welcome,” Zeeko said.

  “Sorry, thank you.”

  “I’d say ‘Don’t mention it,’ but you already didn’t.” Zeeko sounded maybe a little hurt, actually, but he went on. “How’s it going, kids? Ellie, dahling, you look upset, which is upsetting me.”

  Ellie smiled in spite of herself. “Yeah. It’s Christopher Robin.”

  “Uh oh, a two-name offense! His social skills do leave something to be desired—specifically, social skills.”

  “Ha-ha,” CR said. But he was grinning, and whatever tension lingered in the air had gone.

  “I got most of your list, Neil deGrasse Tyson,” Zeeko said to Benji. “If I took any more, the hospital would notice. And I need it back tonight.” He pulled a crumpled piece of paper covered in Benji’s handwriting from his pocket. “What’s with leaving a note in my locker, though? Did your phone break?”

  “Oh my God,” Ellie whispered. She had opened one of the duffel bags and found some of the inventory. Benji had a moment to worry about how she would react, but when she lifted her face, it was lit with a kind of nervous delight. “Are we doing a science project, Benji Lightman? Are we going on a field trip?”

  Benji nodded, feeling the happy zing of that “I have the ultimate hall pass” freedom.

  “I left the note,” he told Zeeko, “’cause we need a rule: no texting about anything even slightly related to Thingy Thang. If we absolutely need to talk about it, call. But no voice mails. Also, Ellie, before we go, make sure you turn off Find My iPhone. And Find My Friends. And Foursquare and Whisper. And Frequently Visited Places on Google Maps and location-based reminders, and, umm—”

  “Why the paranoia?” Ellie said, looking concerned.

  “Just being absurdly careful,” Benji replied, quoting Ellie from last night, because he’d already concluded he shouldn’t say anything about Agent McKedrick, at least not yet. And Benji really wasn’t paranoid, at least not exactly. He just wanted answers, felt an extraordinary urge to go to the pod and try to make sense of everything. All his life he’d carried a vague anxiety that he was Missing Out on the Good Stuff. Now, for the first time he could remember, he thought he might know how to make that anxiety and longing vanish. If he could just understand the pod, just make sense of why the saucer had come . . .

  Ellie nodded at his response, the sides of her mouth twitching adorably at the secret code.

  CR, playing catch-up, asked, “When’s this happening, Banjo?”

  “Now.”

  “’Kay, I’ll drive.”

  “Oh. Yeah, I mean, it’s just, it might take a while, and I know you’ve got class.”

  “Just computer lab, and I was gonna skip anyway. Besides, I don’t want you spending time with that thing without me.” CR might just be acting protective. But he almost seemed more defensive, like he was trying to say My hall pass is bigger than yours.

  Well . . . whatever. Benji was taking a day off from soothing CR’s insecurities. To keep things light, he said, “Thanks.”

  Zeeko excused himself, saying he had to go help his dad in the community health truck, which that afternoon was hanging out in the Kroger parking lot.

  Benji picked up the duffel bags filled with (among other things) stethoscopes, scalpels, bone saws, and radiation detectors. It was showtime.

  Papaw’s cruiser wasn’t in the driveway, but Benji still told CR to wait in the truck. Ellie hopped out with Benji, and after they’d verified the house was empty, Benji helped CR back his truck up the driveway to the tree house in the backyard. The feelings of excitement grew stronger as he physically got closer to the tree house. Images of touching the pod again grew clear in his mind, like a video unpixelating on a better internet connection. He kept thinking of the years of carnival mornings with Papaw, and how although the world right now had none of that predawn visual mystique (it was just typical Indiana winter afternoon weather, low steely skies binding the brutally cold air), it felt like he’d always hoped those carnival mornings would.

  As CR turned off the truck, wind gusted. The oak limbs around the tree house chattered. Wearing a fashionable-but-way-too-thin thrift store peacoat, Ellie shivered.

  “Want to borrow my scarf?” Benji asked.

  “What scarf would that be?” He wasn’t wearing one.

  He reached up his sleeve, pulled out a long, rainbow-colored “infinity scarf,” and wrapped it gently around Ellie’s neck. “You keep that for a while,” he said. “You make that look better than I do.”

  Maybe it was just the cold, but roses appeared in Ellie’s cheeks. “Benji Lightman,” she said, laughing a little, “you can be so damn cheesy sometimes.”

  “I’m not sure if that’s a compliment.”

  “It is.”

  For once, she was the one who broke eye contact.

  As CR got out of the truck, his phone beeped.

  “Stow it in the car, buddy,” Benji said.

  CR checked the screen. “Coach wants to know why I left. Also he’s telling me for the billionth time not to do a revenge prank against Newporte this week. Which, I dunno, are you guys sure you don’t want to do it?” CR frowned when Benji and Ellie nodded. “Well, thank you, World, for pooping my party. Just let me text him back.”

  Benji sighed inwardly and took out his own phone to turn it off. But actually, it already was. When Ellie checked, hers was off, too. He remembered how so many metallic and electronic objects had gone bananas at the quarry when the saucer arrived. He realized he was closer to the tree house than CR—maybe fifteen feet from the ramp.

  “Come over here first,” Benji said to CR.

  CR, texting, took a step forward and, beep, his phone went black. “The hell?”

  Benji couldn’t help but feel a small thrill. “It’s the pod, I think. It’s like a force field.”

  “What, seriously? Thanks for telling me! I don’t have Apple-Care, bro!”

  “No, the phone’s fine. It just won’t work while you’re close to the pod.” CR still looked annoyed or something, and Benji thought, YOU CAN BUY A NEW PHONE. YOU CANNOT BUY A NEW POD.

  “Oh,” CR said. “Well, I guess at least I don’t have to worry about pictures getting online again.”

  Benji felt a reflexive disappointment that the pod was unphotographable—the phrase “pics or it didn’t happen” flashed in his head like an obnoxious neon sign. But, after a moment, he really liked the idea. He wasn’t sure whether he eventually wanted to tell the world about the pod, but until he decided, it was comforting, even exciting, to know it was unsharable (and un-Share-able).

  It was almost, he thought, like the pod wanted to be kept hidden.

  They donned the radiation protection Zeeko had given them: three thick lead-lined aprons used by X-ray technicians in hospitals. Benji pointed out the little green card under a plastic sheet on the chest of the aprons. On the off chance that the pod was radioactive, he explained, the green card would turn yellow. On the off-off chance that it was dangerously radioactive, it would turn red. “But don’t freak out. The card changes colors before th
e radiation gets strong enough to hurt people.”

  Then, duffel bag in hand, he led the way to the tree house ramp, the upward spiral to their chamber of secrets.

  The snow on the ramp was untouched, the lock on the door still in place, just as he’d left it last night. He didn’t think McKedrick knew about the pod or anything, and certainly didn’t expect McKedrick to come kicking in the door to the tree house shouting, “REACH FOR THE SKY, YOU POD-HARBORING SONS OF BITCHES!”

  But seeing the smooth powder on that ramp was a relief, partly because Benji’s own footprints from last night had been erased. Not that Papaw would have spotted the prints, rubbed his stubble, and instantly deduced, “Oh, dear God above, my grandson is concealing wreckage from an alien vessel in my very own backyard!” But Papaw might wonder why he was suddenly interested in his abandoned tree house.

  Benji spun the combination into the lock, unhooked it, and opened the door. Ellie and CR followed him inside.

  Light leaked through the boarded windows and gaps in the walls. When the door sealed shut behind them, the nostalgic smell of pine bloomed with such intensity that Benji had to momentarily close his eyes against the feeling: a joy that hurt.

  He still couldn’t see much when he opened his eyes. He pulled out the matchbook he’d grabbed from the kitchen and dragged a match across the strip. Lumos! some part of him whispered as it sparked. Where did that come from? he wondered, half smiling.

  Then the pod glimmered into view, quicksilver in firelight, and as Ellie drew a sharp breath beside him, Benji’s half smile went full. Snow had slipped into the tree house and spread a thin, bright carpet across the floor; the pod itself tossed the match light in a hundred directions, the firelight whirling over the walls like a carousel. It all gave the tree house the slightly otherworldly feel Benji’d always associated with holidays at night, and the pod was the Christmas tree.

  “CR, could you pass me that lantern?” Benji asked. He was struck by an in-church feeling that he should be polite and reverent, and added, “Please?”

  CR grabbed the scuffed red camping lantern off the trunk in the corner. Papaw had gotten it for Benji when he was maybe eleven. They always had two birthday parties for Benji: one for his friends (or, until CR moved in, friend) with a grocery store cake that came under a plastic bubble, and another “for the family” . . . which always comprised an awkward slice of cobbler split between Benji and Papaw at Dave’s Dine-In out on the highway. Papaw would slide his gift, wrapped neatly in newspaper, across a tabletop that was checkered like a picnic blanket; Benji would open it and begin the time-honored childhood ritual of pretending to be happier with your gifts than you really are.

  Sometimes Papaw would say a word or two about the gifts.

  “That bat is a Louisville Slugger, just like what Babe Ruth used.”

  “That biography is about Benjamin Franklin—your namesake, Benjamin, a real self-made man if ever one walked these United States.”

  But mostly Papaw let his notes (written on Bedford Falls Police Department stationery) do the talking. “To Benjamin—This lantern’s a Coleman! Good American family company. Maybe we’ll go camping & have a fine time. Happy birthday—Sheriff Robert Lightman.” They never did go camping, but the lantern remained Papaw’s most memorable gift. Benji had seen the faint impression of ghost letters on that note, and later on, he gently rubbed the lead of a pencil sideways across the letters. The message materialized: A lantern for you, because you’re the light of my life. How beautiful those words were. They pierced him like an arrow, and he thought for one fleeting instant that he understood the deeper chambers of his grandfather’s heart.

  But no. Of course no. The moral of that story wasn’t what Papaw had written, but what he had erased.

  Now Benji tipped some lighter fluid he’d gotten from the house into the lantern, then lit the wick with the match. A bright vertical flame blossomed, cutting through the gloom.

  He lifted the lantern to the radiation-detector card on his apron. “How am I looking?”

  Ellie gave him the A-OK sign.

  “So, what’s step one, pod-wise?” CR asked.

  Benji glanced at Ellie. In the lamplight, she looked even prettier (and hotter, honestly) than usual, her face flushed with excitement, her green eyes sparking. “There is no instruction manual for the impossible,” he said.

  They shared a private grin.

  Benji kneeled down a few inches in front of the pod, motioning for Ellie and CR to do the same. The highest point of the pod was even with their hearts.

  He set the duffel bag on the floor. In addition to all the medical equipment Zeeko had supplied, Benji had added some of his own items from the house. Now he pulled out the first one: a square electronic box, roughly the size of a deck of cards. It was a stud finder, a carpenter’s tool that you could run along the surface of walls to find “studs” (solid pieces of wood or metal, basically) hidden inside the walls.

  He handed the stud finder to CR. “Go ahead,” Benji said.

  “Go ahead what?”

  “Go ahead and make the joke I know you want to make.”

  CR’s goofy-huge smile spread over his face. “Banjo, we’re like a married couple in a nursing home. It’s disgusting. I love it.” He placed the stud finder against his chest and depressed the device’s single button. The device beeped, and a small green light on the top lit up. “Found a stud!” CR said.

  Maybe it was just the desire to ease the tension between them from the mini confrontation in the theater, but CR’s joke still made Benji laugh.

  “How did that work?” Ellie asked, confused.

  “Extremely well,” CR said.

  She swatted the air like she was dismissing a gnat. “How come it could turn on? Doesn’t the pod interfere with electronics?”

  Benji had thought about this already, actually. At the quarry, when the saucer had made its first appearance, the engine and headlights of CR’s truck had turned on by themselves. But Ellie’s RustRocket station wagon, a much less modern vehicle, hadn’t reacted at all.

  “I think it only does it sometimes,” Benji said, “and mostly with things that have digital parts, not just basic batteries.”

  “Why?”

  “No clue.”

  Ellie frowned a little, not quite satisfied. “I never thought I’d say this, but I really wish I’d taken more science electives.”

  Benji took the stud finder back. Though he had an urge to use his bare hands, he knew CR would object, so he tugged on his gloves, then moved the stud finder toward the pod cautiously. A fun house–mirror version of Benji, reflected on the pod, did the same. He touched the stud finder against the silvery surface; the pod sang a thin, cheery musical note: diiiing!

  He pushed the button. This time, the little light turned red.

  He carefully traced the stud finder along the pod, first side to side and then top to bottom.

  The indicator light on the stud finder stayed red the whole time.

  “So the pod’s empty?” Ellie asked.

  “I suppose,” Benji said, feeling weirdly disappointed.

  “Then why’s it kinda heavy?” CR said. There was a note of concern in his voice.

  “We’re dealing with interstellar technology here,” Ellie said in a terse voice that made CR blush. “The pod could be made of a new element, for all we know.”

  “True,” Benji said. Although, admittedly, I took as little science as legally possible, too.

  He put the stud finder back in the duffel bag, and pulled out Item Number Two.

  A stethoscope.

  CR still looked a little stung by Ellie’s reply, and as soon as he saw the stethoscope, he recovered by saying, “Okay, pod, now turn your head and cough.” Benji gave a chuckle, and even Ellie had to smirk.

  Benji plugged the eartips of the stethoscope into his ears. For a trial run, he ran a thumbnail across the listening pad of the stethoscope. The noise in his ears was like the rumble of distant thunder.

&
nbsp; After placing the listening pad on the pod with the same gentle caution he’d used with the stud finder, Benji’s heart gave a series of quick, hard beats: He thought he heard something shift within the pod, and then (his heart seemed to stop) swore he heard a voice within the pod speak. He held his breath, straining to hear.

  The voice he’d heard became clear: “Yoooouuuu’re the next contestant on The Price Is Right!” The stethoscope was just picking up the sound from ancient Mrs. Bainbridge’s TV next door, which (to Papaw’s annoyance) she blasted all day, every day.

  So that was a little frustrating . . . but only a little. Mostly, as the “science project” continued, Benji felt nothing but a mixture of happiness and curiosity. All their radiation detectors stayed green as he used progressively more aggressive equipment from Zeeko’s bag and Papaw’s toolbox. First, he tapped a wood-carving chisel against the pod. The chisel was sharp steel, but it didn’t leave so much as a scratch on the pod, even when CR stabbed it pretty hard.

  Next up was Papaw’s blowtorch. An inch-long blue flame emanated from its pistol-like tip. Benji held the fire against the surface of the pod, then inspected the spot it had touched. No burn mark, no discoloration at all.

  The pod also stood up invincibly to efforts with both a manual bone saw and a handheld device with a spinning blade that Benji was pretty sure was used to cut skulls. The invincibility was amazing, but even better was the feeling Benji had through all the experiments: full immersion.

  Part of it was that the itchy urge to check his phone (which he’d never really known he’d had) had vanished.

  But the best part was the feeling of mattering, the certain knowledge that he was living a centrally special moment in his life. The only really important feeling in the world, he realized, was that the things you experience matter, that they mean something, like all the pain and inadequacies are only pixels in this beautiful bigger story you can’t see yet. Most people refuse not just to see the story, but to acknowledge even the possibility that it might exist. Maybe that was why Spinney and Papaw tried so hard to claw back in time: They couldn’t summon the kind of courageous faith required to face all the uncertainty and possibilities of the present, so they clung to the certainties of the past.