The Edge of Everything

by Jeff Giles

  He felt Zoe’s eyes on him all the while.

  Back in the house, Zoe informed everyone of X’s new name.

  Her mother laughed and said, “That’s not technically a name, but okay.” Jonah shouted, “I’m gonna call you Professor X!” And then immediately forgot to.

  Zoe’s mother steered everyone into the living room, where an awkward silence fell. The silver bowl full of questions had migrated downstairs, and sat on the coffee table now. X cringed at the sight of it. He dreaded telling the Bissells even more of his story. They should have cast him out days ago, and once they knew who he truly was, they would.

  Zoe was next to him on the couch.

  “You don’t have to tell us anything you don’t want to,” she said softly. “And no one will judge you.”

  Zoe’s mother picked up the bowl and handed it to X.

  “Time to find out who we’re dealing with,” she said.

  She did not say it unkindly, but it stung.

  X took the bowl and set it on his lap. Immediately, he felt anxious and unsettled, like there was an animal loose in his chest. Even if Zoe had told them everything she knew about him, they knew only the bare beginnings. But that was not the only reason he feared what was about to happen.

  He stared down at the nest of papers.

  He could not convince his hand to reach into the bowl. He sat paralyzed.

  “Pick one!” said Jonah.

  X pulled out a strip of paper. The bowl made a pinging sound as his knuckle brushed against it. He unfolded the strip and stared down at the words in his hand. The letters swam in every direction, as they always did.

  He looked to Zoe, helplessly.

  She did not understand—but then, all at once, she did. She leaned toward him to whisper a question.

  But Jonah beat her to it: “You don’t know how to read?”

  X shook his head the slightest bit.

  “Nor write,” he said. “Nor draw, now that I think of it.”

  X knew that Zoe’s mother was gazing at him now. Was she disgusted? Scared? Was she strategizing about how to separate him from her children? He was afraid to turn to her, so he didn’t know.

  “I can show you how to do that stuff,” said Jonah. “It’s actually not that hard.”

  “Thank you,” said X.

  Zoe took the paper gently from his hands so she could read it aloud. Her voiced quavered just enough to tell X that she was nervous, too.

  “‘Why’d you get sent to the Lowlands?’” she read. “‘Did you kill somebody? Did you kill a whole ton of people—like, with a catapult?’”

  “That one’s mine,” said Jonah.

  “We know,” said Zoe.

  X took a breath.

  “I know this beggars belief,” said X, “but I committed no crime. I was never even accused of one. I will swear it upon anything you like.”

  Across the room, Zoe’s mother coughed what sounded like an unnecessary cough.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but that actually does—how did you say it?—beggar belief.”

  “Stop it, Mom,” said Zoe.

  “Do not censure your mother on my account,” said X. “This is her home. She has shown me nothing but kindness.”

  “Thank you, X,” said Zoe’s mother.

  It was the first time anyone had used his name. Even in the unhappy circumstances, he liked the sound of it. It made him feel centered—present somehow, like a picture coming into focus.

  “I read about a lot of religions when the kids’ dad died,” Zoe’s mother said, “and there was something in all of them that helped me. I’m kind of a walking, talking Coexist bumper sticker now.” She paused. “And, I’m sorry, but … I’ve never heard of people getting sent to hell for no reason.”

  Zoe took the bowl from X’s lap and set it angrily on the coffee table, where it vibrated noisily.

  “This was a bad idea,” she said. “We’re done.”

  “No,” said X. “Your mother is correct: No one gets sent to the Lowlands without cause.”

  He turned to Zoe’s mother now, and found her eyes.

  “But, you see, I was not sent to the Lowlands,” he said. “I was born there.”

  No one spoke as X’s words settled. The only sound was Spock and Uhura barking in the distance. X hated speaking the sentence, yet now that he had he felt freer somehow.

  Zoe reached into the bowl.

  “‘Is it weird to be three hundred years old, or whatever?’” she read.

  X surprised them all by laughing.

  “And whose query is this?” he said, glancing around the room.

  “Mine,” said Zoe. “I mean, no offense, but you talk like Beowulf.”

  Jonah giggled.

  “Wolves can’t talk, Zoe,” he said. He turned to X uncertainly: “Can they?”

  “I do not believe so,” said X. “As to my age, I was but a whelp when a woman we call Ripper began training me to be a bounty hunter. For years, hers was virtually the only voice I heard. I suppose I learned to speak as she does—and she was wrenched from your world nearly two hundred years ago.”

  “So how old are you?” said Zoe.

  X heard an urgency in her voice, as if this question mattered more than the others.

  “Ripper tells me that I am twenty,” he said.

  “Twenty?” said Zoe. “For real?”

  “Yes,” said X. “The only reason I have to doubt her is that she is quite nearly insane.”

  “Wow, twenty,” said Zoe. “If you want, I could help you apply to college.”

  X recognized this as a “blurt” and let it pass.

  Zoe unfolded another question.

  “‘Where are the Lowlands? What are the Lowlands?’” she read.

  “Those are mine,” said her mother.

  “Good job, Mom,” said Jonah.

  X sat motionless, trying to compose an answer in his head. Finally, he turned to Jonah and asked him to gather up all the little figures from his room—the soldiers, the animals, the wizards, the dinosaurs, the dwarves—and bring them outside in a basket.

  “I am not certain I can explain the Lowlands,” he said. “But perhaps I can build them for you.”

  six

  They stood in the backyard, looking at X as if he’d gone mad. He was rolling a mammoth snowball, circling them faster and faster as he did so, the tail of his shimmering blue overcoat taking flight behind him. Uhura chased him ecstatically, as if a game was afoot. Spock lay nearby, eating snow.

  “I believe the first query was, ‘Where are the Lowlands?’” X said.

  The snowball was about four feet tall now, and he had at last come to a stop.

  “Yes,” said Zoe’s mother.

  X gestured to his creation.

  “This is the earth,” he said. “Or as good a likeness as I can produce.”

  He was warming to his task. The dread he’d felt had been beaten back—replaced by the desire to give a true and clear accounting of himself. They deserved that much, and more, for taking him in when they had every reason to fear him.

  “The Lowlands,” he continued, “are here.”

  He thrust his left fist deep into the heart of the globe, breaking it open with such force that Jonah stepped backward and exclaimed, “Holy shit.”

  X had never heard the phrase—the words didn’t seem to belong together—but Zoe’s mother found it unacceptable, and told Jonah so.

  X had begun to perspire. He removed his coat—the left arm was encrusted with snow all the way up to the shoulder—and draped it over the low branch of a tree. Jonah and his mother, who’d crossed their arms and were shuffling their feet to stay warm, once again looked at him as if he were a lunatic. Zoe merely smiled. It pleased X to think that his ways were becoming familiar to her.

  “The query that followed was, ‘What are the Lowlands?’” he said.

  Zoe’s mother nodded.

  X knelt beside the ruins of what had, until recently, been the earth, and gestured for J
onah to join him. Together, they used the snow to sculpt a tall, curving wall that ran along the edge of a plain.

  Zoe’s mother stopped X as he was piling the plain with rocks, and drew him aside to say something only he could hear.

  “I’m not sure I want Jonah to see this,” she said.

  “I shall make it a game,” said X. “And I shall endeavor to hide from him what I say to you now: the Lowlands are an abomination.”

  X told Jonah to imagine that the snow was black rock, porous and damp. He instructed him to carve a grid of holes into the wall—he called them “the rooms where we sleep” rather than “cells”—and to tuck a figurine into each of them.

  “Guys or girls?” Jonah said.

  “Either,” said X. “Both.”

  “Civil War guys or World War II guys—or knights, maybe?” said Jonah.

  “You may use any of them,” said X. “There are souls of every kind in the Lowlands, all of them in the clothes they died in. I myself reside here, among the bounty hunters”—he pointed to a cell in a row midway up the wall—“and have two neighbors. To my left lives a man I call Banger. I brought him to the Lowlands in 2012. To my right lives Ripper, whom I spoke of earlier. She drew her last mortal breath in 1832.”

  “Are they your best friends?” said Jonah.

  X considered this.

  “Yes,” he said. “If I can claim any friends at all.”

  He hadn’t meant it to sound self-pitying, but he noticed that Zoe frowned at the words, then came to sit next to him in the snow.

  Zoe and her mother watched as the Lowlands came to life. When the cells were filled with “residents,” X told Jonah they required five or ten more figurines.

  “To play the role of the guards,” he explained, before correcting himself and referring to them as “the helpers.”

  Jonah asked him to describe the helpers. “So I can get a mental picture,” he said. X said that they were fat and simple-minded, more often than not—and that they had waxy skin and bulbous noses, and were highly pungent.

  Jonah asked what “pungent” meant. Zoe spoke up and said, “They like puns,” which seemed to satisfy him.

  X asked what sort of figures Jonah would suggest for the helpers, and Jonah scrunched his eyebrows down and made his thinking-cap face.

  “What about orcs and dwarves?” he said.

  X asked to see representatives of each species. Jonah pulled a few from the basket, and held them out to X, their ugly bodies lying on their backs on the chubby starfish of his palm.

  “Well chosen,” said X. They placed the motley guards in a row atop the wall. “Now,” he continued, “we shall need a river and a tree.”

  “I have a tree!” said Jonah. “It’s Pooh’s honey tree. I don’t play with it anymore. Obviously.”

  He plucked it from the basket and handed it to X, who regarded it with a smile.

  “This is a far lovelier tree than the one in the Lowlands,” he said. “Yet for our purposes it is perfect.”

  He set it carefully on the plain, covering its base with snow so it wouldn’t topple, and then he and Jonah began discussing what might pass for a river. They were stumped, and were about to dig a long, snaking ditch through the plain when Zoe unwound the blue scarf from her neck and offered it up. X bowed his head in thanks—she thought he did it in jest, but he did not—and arranged the scarf so that it curved along the ground.

  When X announced that their model was nearly complete, Jonah made a confused face and raised his hand, as if he were in school.

  “Where does the devil live?” he asked.

  X faltered.

  “It’s said that some Higher Power rules the Lowlands,” he said. “Yet I have never seen evidence of such a presence, nor have I heard the same tale told about him twice.”

  So X told Jonah about the lords. He’d delayed describing them because he didn’t know how to disguise how terrifying they were. In the end, he simply said that they were angry beasts, and that he and Jonah must use the fiercest of figurines to represent them.

  Jonah’s hand shot up once more, his fingers wiggling excitedly.

  “T. rexes?” he said.

  Soon a half dozen dinosaurs were stationed in the miniature Lowlands. A few were raging on the plain, jaws agape, teeth flashing. Others were scaling the great wall and reaching into the cells.

  “The lords are the ones who sent you here?” said Zoe.

  “They are, indeed,” said X. “They put Stan’s name into my blood like a poison, along with the powers I needed to capture him. My powers are only a fraction of their own, however, and they will strip me of them when I return to the Lowlands.”

  “What if you never return?” said Zoe. “What if you stay in our world?”

  Hadn’t he told her already? Didn’t she understand how he endangered them every moment he lingered in the Overworld? Why was she so reluctant to believe him?

  “I suspect,” he said, “that they would obliterate everything—and everyone—you ever loved.”

  Building the Lowlands, even out of snow and toys, put X into such a grave mood that once it was finished he could hardly stand to look at it. Jonah continued to play. X was touched to see that he freed the prisoners from their cells and locked the lords and guards in instead.

  Zoe’s mother seemed as troubled as X. She took her daughter’s arm and steered her around to the front of the house, not knowing how keen X’s hearing was.

  “He’s cute—I get it—but I want him out,” he heard the mother say.

  The words, though wrapped in wind, were so clear that she might have been standing in front of him.

  “I’ll give him another day to make sure he’s recovered,” she added. “That’s it.”

  “You want to send him back there?” said Zoe. She sounded as if she’d been struck. “Now that you know he’s innocent? Now that you’ve seen what the Lowlands are like?”

  “Yes, it has T. rexes, I know,” her mother said.

  “You think he’s lying?” said Zoe. “You didn’t see what Jonah and I saw on the lake.”

  “Honestly, I don’t know what I believe,” her mother said. “But last night—when I woke up at two in the morning in a sweat—it occurred to me that the best-case scenario is that he’s a delusional psychopath. I mean, that’s what I’m rooting for.”

  In the distance, X could hear a car—a truck, from the sound of it—shifting gears as it plodded up the mountain. He’d been so comfortably ensconced in the Bissells’ home that he had forgotten there was anyone else in the world. The reminder was unsettling.

  “I won’t let you send him back,” said Zoe. Her voice was rising now. “I won’t.”

  “I’m not sending him anywhere—except away,” her mother said. “He warned us not to take him in. It was the first thing he said. Look, I know he helped you and Jonah—”

  “He saved our lives,” said Zoe. “From Stan—somebody you should have warned us about.”

  “Don’t do that,” said her mother. “I made your dad stop speaking to that man back in Virginia twenty years ago.”

  “Why didn’t you ever tell me about him?” Zoe asked.

  “Because it’s not a pretty story,” her mother said.

  “Yeah, well, I want to hear it anyway,” said Zoe. “Right now.”

  Her mother sighed.

  The truck had grown louder. X watched it rattle into view. It turned out to be a van and—unlike Stan’s pickup, which had been as corroded and sinister as the man who drove it—the sides were painted to resemble the top of a snowy, majestic mountain. Strapped to the roof was a wooden carving of a bear. It appeared to be a permanent fixture for it was positioned to look as if it were the king of the aforementioned mountain. It was a happy bear, smiling and waving as it rode through the countryside.

  X knew nothing about transportation, but to him the van seemed … silly. For a moment, it stalled. The tailpipe coughed up smoke, like someone experimenting with his first cigarette. But the driver got it
started again and resumed the climb. X chastised himself for having let the van distract him. He turned his attention back to Zoe and her mother.

  “Stan was disgusting even as a teenager,” Zoe’s mother was saying. “But he could convince your father to do anything. They broke into a teacher’s house. They stole a garbage truck. Seriously: a garbage truck! You know what they did with it? They actually went around collecting people’s garbage. Have you heard enough now? Can I please stop—please?”

  “No,” said Zoe. “I want to hear everything.”

  “You don’t,” said her mother.

  There was a brief stalemate.

  The van labored closer.

  “When they hit eighteen or nineteen, the crimes started getting less and less cute,” her mother said. “It was like Stan was trying to figure out how weak your dad was and how far he could push him. There was stuff so ugly that your father cried over it. Eventually, he and Stan got arrested for something—I don’t even remember what, I’ve blocked it out—and I gave him an ultimatum: him or me. We got married a year later. I don’t think he changed his last name to mine because he was some big romantic—I think he did it because he had a criminal record. Now, should I have told you all that when you were a kid, Zoe? About your father? Who was a big enough disappointment anyway? Should I tell Jonah? How do you think that would go?”

  Zoe said nothing. X suspected she was crying. When her mother spoke again, her voice was hushed and kind.

  “I’m grateful to X,” she said, “and that’s why I didn’t turn him in to the police. But, sweetie, I think Jonah’s getting too close to him.” She paused, as the van drew nearer. “And I know that you are.”

  X was still waiting for Zoe to deny it when the van turned up the Bissells’ driveway, about a hundred yards away. The engine sounded absurdly, almost catastrophically, loud.

  “Crap, it’s Rufus,” said Zoe’s mother. “What’s he doing here?”

  “What do you think he’s doing?” Zoe said, still rattled by their conversation. “He’s obsessed with you, and it’s time for a new episode of World’s Slowest Courtship. ‘This week, Rufus starts growing a rose!’”