CHAPTER 5
Shawn stopped the music and removed his earbuds as the bus driver announced their arrival in Emington, Minnesota. The trip had not been comfortable, had involved three buses, plus a night spent in a Chicago terminal, where Shawn was nearly robbed as he tried to sleep, propped up against an information kiosk. But now, as he strapped on his overstuffed backpack and disembarked from the bus, he felt a surge of adrenaline. The street on which he found himself was drab, lined with ranch houses and maple trees, pure middle-of-nowhere Americana, but for Shawn, it was Mecca, Eden, and the Emerald City all rolled into one. This was where he and the object of his obsession would finally unite.
Over the past four months, Shawn and Andrew Leland had exchanged no less than thirteen letters. Leland had made it clear early on in his first response that although he might conceivably enjoy exchanging ideas with a like-minded young physicsphile, he would under no circumstances discuss anything to do with his alleged abduction. Shawn had thus changed tactics and instead engaged him regarding his work. Several years earlier, Shawn had become an expert in some of Leland’s early, more obscure work, particularly his much-ignored efforts to combine Alcubierre drives and Krasnikov tubes, two separate and well-known theories regarding warp drive, into one unified formula for achieving faster-than-light travel.
In his letters to Leland, Shawn questioned the scientist about the practical implications of his theories on these subjects, while also engaging him in a variety of other topics, such as cosmic inflation and quantum nonlocality. Leland, in his responses (always typed out in Helvetica font on recycled stationery) seemed impressed by the young man’s grasp of the material and his eagerness to learn. He responded directly to some of Shawn’s questions, though more often than not would meet a question with a question, teasing Shawn, encouraging him to find the answers on his own.
Shawn, for his part, was thrilled on multiple levels to be in close correspondence with the world’s most elusive man. It was like a strange dream, something no one would ever have believed had he told anyone, which he didn’t. Shawn also observed that Leland, in his willingness to correspond with such regularity, actually appeared to fit the stereotype of a recluse quite well: deep down, it seemed, he had been yearning for human contact all along.
But Shawn wasn’t content with this type of relationship for long. As fascinating and enlightening as these exchanges were and as cool as it was to be in any kind of contact with Andrew Leland at all, neither contact nor friendship was what he truly wanted. What Shawn wanted was what everyone wanted: the truth.
“I think I mentioned to you previously that I have an uncle who lives in Rochester, MN,” Shawn wrote one day, after having been in contact with Leland for four months. “I’ll be visiting him again in several weeks. If there’s any chance we could meet in person, I would greatly appreciate it. There are several issues relating to Lambda-CDM that I still can’t quite wrap my mind around, and I think a longer discussion in real time would be extremely helpful. It would also, needless to say, be a tremendous honor to meet you in person, considering the profound impact your work has had on me. I would, of course, respect your wishes not to discuss subject matters which you’ve already previously indicated are off limits.”
This last part was a blatant lie. Those “subject matters” were the only things he wanted to discuss. However, Shawn knew for certain that Leland would never agree to talk about his abduction in advance and that a face-to-face was the only way he could force the subject without fear of being ignored or hung up on.
Shawn waited for a response to his letter, but none came. Weeks went by, and Shawn wrote again, this time dropping the issue for now and asking some fairly trivial questions about black holes. But he received no response to this letter, either. When a third letter went unanswered, it became clear enough to Shawn that his correspondence with Andrew Leland had come to an end.
Which meant, of course, that he now had nothing left to lose.
Leland, Shawn felt, had been hoarding a treasure trove of revelations he had no right to hide. Fate had for some reason chosen him to be the first point of contact between humanity and an alien world, and to treat the experience like a private, personal matter when it in fact had implications for everyone was unequivocally wrong. So Shawn had made a decision: he would travel to Emington, confront Leland in person, and wouldn’t leave without some answers.
Shawn sat down on the bus stop’s bench, pulled out his phone and retrieved the image he’d found on Google Street View of 123 Bay Berry Drive. The house, though blurry in the picture, appeared to be a beige Cape Cod, simple and nondescript. According to his phone, the location was only about twenty minutes away, walking distance, so Shawn figured he’d head over on foot.
As he walked, since he’d already rehearsed everything he would say to Leland countless times over the past few days, Shawn just took in the scenery. Lots of simple-looking houses, a large colonial-style post office, a bland, concrete Wells Fargo. This was where Leland had made his home, possibly for as long as the past three years. It was incredible that someone so notorious and sought after, an individual of global significance, could have been hiding in plain sight among such ordinariness. Shawn wondered if anyone in the town might possibly know him, if anyone had ever recognized or perhaps even befriended him. Maybe it was even an open secret. Maybe lots of people knew who was living among them but kept it under wraps out of loyalty or protectiveness or some sort of midwestern code.
Shawn reached Bay Berry Drive and soon after, judging from the house numbers, the actual block where Leland lived. It was a quiet stretch, consisting of more ranch houses and, in the center of the block, a construction site, where men in hard hats were laying bricks, while others cleared out debris from a ditch using excavators and backhoe loaders. Shawn examined the house numbers on each side of the site and felt his knees turn to jelly.
No, he thought to himself. It can’t be.
Trying to keep himself together, he approached one of the workers, who appeared to be inputting information into a tablet.
“What are you guys building here?” Shawn asked, trying to sound calm.
“School,” the man replied, his eyes still on the screen.
“What happened to the house that was here before?”
“Torn down, what do you think?”
“How long ago?”
“About eight months, maybe,” the man replied. “Why?”
Shawn had to prevent himself from gasping.
“Who lived there?” he barely managed to get out.
The construction worker looked up and gave Shawn a once-over and didn’t like what he saw.
“Hey, who the fuck are you, anyway?”
Shawn staggered away and moved back onto the sidewalk. His heart was racing, and he felt nauseous. He struggled to make sense of it all. Was he in the wrong place? Could that explain it? He called up the image on Street View again. It was definitely the same address and, based on the water tower visible in the background, the same location, as well. But, he now realized, the image capture date on the corner of the screen was actually from three years ago!
This left only one thing that still didn’t make sense: How could Shawn have been exchanging letters with someone for the past four months who lived in a house that had been torn down eight months ago?
There was an old-fashioned rail car–style diner several blocks away, and Shawn wandered in and settled into a booth, hoping to gather his thoughts. After ordering a plate of chocolate chip pancakes and a cup of coffee, he pulled out a stack of papers from his bag, all of the letters he’d exchanged with Leland, and began to pore over them, hoping for any kind of clue that might help him make sense of the situation.
He decided to go back to the beginning, to Leland’s first letter. “Dear Mr. Ferris,” it had begun, “I didn’t want to respond to you up until this point out of a reasonable concern that you, like many others, were attempting to trick or exploit me. If that were the case, responding
and thereby confirming that you have my address correct would put my privacy and potentially my person in serious jeopardy. I have made it clear on several occasions that I do not recall the events said to have taken place in Southern California, that as far as I’m concerned, they did not occur at all, and I will under no circumstances discuss that matter further. However, it does seem to me from your most recent letter, that you have an impressive…”
Shawn put the letter down as the waitress brought over his food. She was a pretty girl, probably in her late teens, and wore a faded Taylor Swift T-shirt. As she set down his pancakes and coffee, Shawn looked up at her and was struck with a sudden idea.
“Hey, can I ask you a question?” he said.
“Sure,” she responded, smiling hospitably.
Shawn leaned forward a little and lowered his voice. “The rumors about this town. They true?”
“What rumors?”
“You know. That somebody very famous lives here.”
The girl gave him a confused look. “Not that I’ve ever heard.”
“Hey, I’m not a reporter or anything. You can trust me.”
“I don’t know anything about anyone famous living here or any rumors,” the girl said. “Randy Williams from the Vikings used to live in Wadena County, but he moved out last year. Is that who you mean?”
Shawn shook his head.
“Then I don’t think I can help you. Sorry.”
The girl went away from the table, and Shawn reflected that if the letters hadn’t actually been coming from Bay Berry Drive, who’s to say they’d been coming from anywhere in Emington—or anywhere in Minnesota, for that matter? He turned his attention back to Leland’s first letter. He would go through each letter, one by one, he decided. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for, but he hoped maybe he would know when he found it, even if that meant sitting in that diner all day. Fortunately, he was only into the fourth letter when something caught his eye.
In his third letter to Leland, Shawn had asked a fairly straightforward question regarding the scientist’s support for the quantum consciousness hypothesis, which theorizes that quantum mechanics might play an important role in understanding how human consciousness works. He wanted to know why Leland supported this controversial view, which seemed to actually contradict several of his other positions. Leland had responded with a detailed account of how his mentorship under Nobel Prize–winning physicist and prominent champion of quantum consciousness Eugene Wigner had led him in this direction.
The problem, though, was that Leland had never supported this view and had in fact been vocal in his opposition to it. For some odd reason, Shawn had been confused on this point, an error he only became aware of when he chanced upon a 2002 paper by Leland arguing that Wigner, genius as he was, had been all wrong about this particular subject. By the time Shawn discovered this paper, it was several months since his exchange with Leland on quantum consciousness, and he had forgotten the matter had ever come up.
Why, he now wondered, sitting there in the diner, would Leland have given him an account of how he came to support a theory that he not only never supported but had openly criticized? It was understandable that Shawn might have confused Leland’s views, but how could Leland himself have done so?
There was an obvious answer: if the person Shawn had been corresponding with was not really Andrew Leland.
The thought was both mortifying to Shawn and plausible. All the time, his correspondence with Leland had seemed like a fantasy, too mind-blowing and incredible to be true. Maybe it was. But if Leland hadn’t been writing the letters, who had? And what did he or she want with Shawn?
There were other questions, too. Shawn had been tipped off to Leland’s supposed address by the mysterious poster on Schrödinger’s Rat called AmberQ. Who was she really? Why had she given him that particular address? And how could Shawn’s letters have been met with a response if they were actually being mailed to a construction site? This last question, Shawn thought, he might be able to guess an answer for. He had generally not used a mailbox but instead had given the letters to his building’s mailman, which meant the letters could have conceivably been intercepted somewhere along the line, even if that seemed like a big stretch. Finally, Shawn wondered, why would anyone who wasn’t Leland have amassed such an in-depth knowledge of Leland’s early and more obscure research to the extent that he or she could fool someone as obsessed with Leland’s work as Shawn?
Shawn felt like his head was spinning, and he stared straight ahead at the tiled wall near the diner’s exit, trying to focus, to center himself. His quest for inner calm, however, was swiftly interrupted by a sudden vibration in his left pocket.
Shawn pulled out his phone. There was a text message on the screen from a number he didn’t recognize, containing a simple, two-word instruction:
Go outside.
Shawn took a deep breath. He stuffed Leland’s letters into his backpack and stood up. His eyes zeroed in on the exit, and as he walked toward the door, he felt as if he were in a dream, the door getting closer and closer, some unknown fate awaiting him on the other side. He thought he could hear the waitress calling out to him, but he couldn’t focus on what she was saying.
He stepped outside. A dark gray SUV was waiting at the curb. He received another text:
Get in the van.
Now, Shawn had a decision to make. The person in the van might be Andrew Leland. More likely, it was whoever had been lying to him for four months. Either way, he would be at their mercy. Yes, the mystery in which he had become engulfed would probably be cleared up very quickly, but the risk was great.
Too great.
Shawn took a step forward, as though intending to advance, then did a sudden about-face, ready to run the opposite way, but someone had snuck up from behind and had been ready. In a blur of movement, he felt his legs get swept out from underneath him, and the next thing he knew, he hit the ground hard and was lying on his back, staring up, wincing from the pain. The last thing Shawn remembered seeing before the world suddenly turned black was the face of a young woman bent over him, injecting a needle into his arm, her hair dangling over his face, shiny and jet black with deep amber highlights.
CHAPTER 6
A miniature Mount Vesuvius, baking soda and vinegar lava erupting out of its crater. A red balloon attached to a test tube, inflating by itself. Cups of Coke, Sunkist, and Poland Spring, each containing human teeth.
These are some of the experiments Shawn is up against at the Bridgewater Elementary School annual science fair. His own project is far less flashy. No models, no props, just a large piece of oak tag covered in diagrams, sketches, and handwritten text. But if you pay close attention and follow through on Shawn’s detailed instructions, you’ll find yourself having built a nifty self-driving car that not only operates flawlessly but is cheaper and more efficient than most previous designs.
The other kids don’t bother trying to understand it, while the adults gather round, some studying the poster board in a vain effort to follow the science, some asking Shawn informed questions, some just smiling, proud and amused that a twelve-year-old in their own town could be so ambitious and precocious.
Shawn’s science teacher, Mr. Wilcox, however, seems decidedly unimpressed, possibly even disturbed.
“Hadn’t we discussed metamorphic rocks?” he asks.
“I started on that, but I got bored.”
“Come with me.”
Twenty minutes later, Shawn is sitting in the principal’s office, being asked the same basic question for the third time, as his father and Mr. Wilcox look on.
“Shawn, we’re all very impressed by your project,” Principal Davis asserts, “but we know the design itself isn’t yours. So whose is it?”
This time, Shawn just stares at him.
“Shawn?”
“I have a question. If you don’t know whose it is, how can you know it’s not mine?”
Principal Davis glances at Mr. Wilcox, who turns t
o Shawn and smiles.
“Shawn, you’re the smartest student in my class by a country mile. We both know you’re good. We both also know you’re not that good.”
Shawn can’t believe this. He’d awoken that morning full of excitement. He was going to make everyone so proud. What a joke that turned out to be.
He turns to his father, who’s staring out the window, obviously wishing he was anywhere else.
“Dad, you saw me make this. You know how hard I’ve been working on this project!” he exclaims.
His father nods.
“Yes, you did put a lot of work in,” he answers in a soft voice. “But I can’t say who came up with what.”
And then his father smiles, a sweet, sympathetic smile that just makes everything that much shittier.
“Shawn, I’m not going to punish you. Don’t be afraid. You can be honest.”
That’s it. He’s had it. He can’t sit there another second. In fact, he physically can’t; he’s sick to his stomach, needs to hurl right away, and he sure as hell can’t do that in the principal’s office. That would really make him look guilty.
But when he tries to stand up, he can’t. It’s as though he’s glued to his seat. He keeps pushing down on the armrest to lift off, but his butt won’t move.
Principal Davis starts to laugh. Shawn looks up at him and can’t believe what he sees. His principal’s eyes have taken on a bright red hue, and his irises have become thin and catlike. As he laughs, a long, serpentine tongue protrudes from his mouth.
Shawn turns quickly to Mr. Wilcox and then to his father. They, too, have undergone the same transformation. Panic rising, Shawn desperately tries to get out of his seat, but it’s no use. He’s completely stuck, trapped, as the three men or whatever they’ve become continue to laugh their horribly shrill laughs with more and more glee and more and more menace …
The Return Page 4