by Jack Womack
‘She sold herself,’ Eulie repeated. ‘For parts. Expenditure necessary if I was to college.’
‘Parts?’
‘Transplants. Back door’s this way. Come, Walter.’
I nodded, and followed. The more questions I asked, the less I wanted to hear the answers. All I wanted for the moment was to stop long enough to let it all sink in. I’d forgotten any fears I’d had of what the Kennedys would do to me, or Bennett, or any of the other fools I’d been so preoccupied with, not two days earlier; and there was no need to worry about needing to get to Hawaii; I didn’t think I could get any farther away from where I’d been than where I was now. Eulie unbolted three or four locks on the back door and we stepped outside into the dark. A cool breeze blew; helicopters flew over, shining searchlights down on the ground. I heard people shouting, on the next street over. A high board fence surrounded her tiny yard – her lot couldn’t have been more than twenty feet wide, and not quite thirty feet long. The black silhouettes of surrounding houses poked up on all sides. I looked up; the stars I was able to make out looked to be in roughly the same place as the ones I was used to – not that I’d really seen any for a while, New York not being the optimum place to get into astronomy. The moon was there, and full. I saw the Gibson girl outlined in its surface facing left; just the way I’d have seen her back home. ‘You have moon cities there?’
‘Last man who walked on the moon died twenty years ago.’ She looked at me, not the moon. ‘Walter,’ she said, ‘Do you want to go back, or stay here?’
I smiled. ‘What’d the first man on the moon say, once he got there?’
She looked blank for a moment; then giggled, trying to remember and realizing she couldn’t. Then it came to her. I guessed it was something she’d been told back in second grade.
‘“One step for man,” she said. ‘“Two for mankind.”’
Then, she kissed me. We held each other so tight that I think each of us was trying to blend into the other one, that we could somehow jump into each other’s worlds and stay there. When at last I came up for air I looked at her, and she looked happier than I’d ever seen her; and I knew where I was going to be sleeping that night at least.
‘I want to stay here,’ I said. ‘I’m getting used to it quicker than I thought I would.’
At that moment I think I was about as happy as I’d ever been. But then before I could kiss her again I saw her expression change; her eyes widened, as if she were seeing something that she’d always known she’d have to see one day, however much she didn’t want to see it – the minister coming up the walk, the doctor with the chart, the angel at the gate. I stepped away from her, still holding onto her waist, just moving off far enough to turn around and see what she saw. In the western part of the sky (for all I knew, here, it might have been in the east) there was what appeared to be the thin white tail of a comet, stretching across the bowl of the sky, reaching unbroken from one side to the other. When I first saw it, the line seemed to be fixed, and steady; but as I kept my eyes on its narrow course, I saw it slowly beginning to widen.
‘Walter,’ she said, ‘we may not have a choice.’
NINE
Throughout most of the rest of the night, while Eulie shook those little black boxes of hers out of her bag, diddled their absence of knobs, and made phone calls, I lay on her couch and found myself making my acquaintance with the dream world as I found it on her side of the aisle. Truth be told, and I’m truthing now, I’ve never been much ridden by nightmares, at least not of the sort that come during sleep, but that night I suffered a series that grew progressively worse. First I saw figures standing, covered in white sheets, no holes cut out for eyes; they were talking to me, but I didn’t cop the plea they wanted to hear and they started piling on like blankets, suffocating me underneath. Then, nothing; then my father, sitting at the kitchen table back in our house on Queen Anne Hill, reading the newspaper. The headlines were large, but I couldn’t read them. On the floor, near his feet, was our dog, a small mixed breed, like us; although it was disembowelled it was still alive, and tried to lick itself. Another pause; then I imagined that I lay on her couch, and tried to rise as a black form took shape inside my chest – first it was a square, then it became a circle, then a square again, increasing in size every time until I could see the points sticking out between my ribs. Relief; and then came the worst. I dreamed I was an island, my friends, an island at night, surrounded by ocean. Tiny Arabian pirates were trying to land on my shores, jabbing tiny iron hooks into my skin, jabbering and hollering and poking away. That was more than I could bear, and I shocked myself awake, drenched in cold sweat.
‘Twelve nine seven four,’I heard Eulie saying. ‘Five seven three three one –’
Reading aloud some list of numbers, I inferred, blinking myself into fuller consciousness; wondered why she was standing in the middle of the front room talking to herself until I remembered what she’d shown me last night, that this was how she made telephone calls. I supposed she was yammering on to superiors or inferiors somewhere else about the silver thread on high, seeing if they understood what it might signify. Every so often she’d pause and walk down the hall, or into the kitchen – she’d explained to me that there was so much titanium in the walls of her house that she had to shift around regularly, or else she’d lose the connection. Her phone apparatus was in her head, somehow; and all she had to do to get on the party line was to say the number and she’d be hooked up immediately. This seemed no more peculiar than anything else she’d told me; she said that the only time taking calls got tricky was when more than four came in at the same time. She didn’t tell me how she put them on hold.
When I hauled myself off the couch I could tell that it was nearly dawn. Murky aquarium light seeped through the front room’s bamboo shades. While Eulie carried on I wandered down the hall until I found the bathroom. The toilet told me where to aim – I could imagine that might be useful at times – and flushed itself, after I was finished; while I wouldn’t have minded taking a shower, I didn’t see anything inside the stall that looked like faucets, and it was only too easy to picture myself getting steamed like a lobster without even blinking. There were postcards stuck onto the wall of the bathroom – photos of Italy, and of a painting by Modigliani, and a picture of kittens playing with yarn. Curious, I pulled back the corner of one to take a look at the postmark, but there wasn’t any.
Eulie was in the kitchen, standing by the window and running her fingers over one of her boxes when I came back out. ‘Blixamixa wooblegone,’ she was saying, something like that; she’d returned to what I gathered must have been her native tongue, that impenetrable blend occasionally enlivened by recognizable words – ‘badger,’ or ‘work,’ or ‘shit.’ She stood by the kitchen window, running her fingers over one of the little boxes. She pointed to a round chrome ball with a black handle and stuck a small white package marked Kaftast in my hand. There was a cup nearby, and I made the necessary connections. Emptied the package into the cup, poured the hot water in after it. Nothing like good strong coffee, I thought; Nature’s best amphetamine and brain clearer. I read the ingredients but wished I hadn’t – one was soy powder, and nicotinamide another, and there was something just after the ingredient ‘coffee enhancement’ called Manipulated Fiberic. The stuff looked like coffee, smelled like coffee, even tasted like coffee – kind of – but it had a distinctly noticeable aftertaste, though it was hard to say exactly what – vitamins, pork, lime Jell-O; couldn’t really tell.
‘Walter,’ Eulie said to me, ‘televise if desired.’
I nodded, but before I went into the living room I took a peek out the window, looking up. The sky was overcast again, nothing but thick grey clouds except for where the white line ran; it was wider now, more of a hawser rope than a thread. As impossible to see where it began or ended as a rainbow. I glanced over at Eulie; she shook her head, and kept talking.
When I touched the TV screen it came on. Picking up the switcher I started run
ning through the channels; it didn’t take that long, as about three-quarters of them appeared to be on the blink – at least they were showing nothing but a screen as grey as the sky, a burble of movement sometimes breaking up the stillness of the image. The stations that were on did seem to be keeping their eye on the sky. I turned on the volume and listened, but can’t say I was much enlightened. The places that showed up, besides New York, were identified as London, Moscow, Shanghai, so forth, but every place looked so much alike that for all I could tell they just kept using the same backdrop to save money. In between the travelogues, on top of them sometimes, men and women would be coming on to blow hot and cold, and sounding no more understandable than Eulie did when she consulted with her own experts. I couldn’t help but wonder if anyone understood them. The only thing I could be sure of was that they were all talking about the thing in the sky; every minute or so, there’d be another shot of it, and it always looked the same. Struck me as very odd that no matter where they were supposed to be broadcasting from, it was cloudy. The line seemed wider over some places – Rio, for one; Calcutta, for another – than it did where we were. Or maybe it had simply widened just in the time I’d spent watching. As said, once you park yourself in front of one of these things it’s just about impossible to drag yourself away; but one by one, over the course of just a few minutes, all the stations took on that full-tilt grey tone, and went off the air. I heard Eulie saying a recognizable word, over and over again, in the kitchen.
‘Hello? Hello?’ A long pause. ’Hello?’
‘I’m here,’ I piped up. She walked back into the living room, past me, and over to the front door. Throwing it open, she stepped outside into her small concrete front yard. I came up behind her, and slipped my arms around her waist. She didn’t pull away. ‘What’s up?’
She didn’t turn around to look at me; but kept her eyes focused on high, on that long, broadening stripe. It seemed to lie on top of the clouds, but I didn’t see how that could be possible; as I squinted my eyes and gave it a closer onceover, though, I could see that the clouds were simply vanishing as the line touched them – that the line was, in fact, something that nearly seemed solid. ‘All readings confirm theory,’ she said, turning and stepping back inside.
‘That means –’
‘Spatial displacement, as I tried to detail last night.’ ‘It’s happening now?’ I asked. She nodded. ‘So what’s happening to us?’
‘We’re –’
Eulie stopped dead in the middle of her word as if she’d suddenly choked on something. She fisheyed the table and I looked over to scope what brought her up short. The coasters she’d been using, trying to explain what was happening; none of them were touching the table, contrary to her theory. All floated slightly above the surface of the glass, and I couldn’t figure out what kind of magical trick was making them levitate.
‘Godness,’ Eulie said. ‘Walter, we’ve got to go. Fast. You’re ready?’
‘Anytime,’ I said, yawning. ‘Go where?’
‘Your place, if possibled.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘No, why?’
‘Come on,’ she said, snatching up her bag and grabbing my arm, almost yanking it off as she pulled me out the front door. She had a grip like Chlojo’s when she chose to use it, I could tell. Streetlights were going on and off as if somebody was playing with the switch, and it sounded like half the people in the neighbourhood had decided to start honking their horns. She pounded at the side of her car, but the doors refused to open.
‘What’s happening, Eule?’ I asked, hearing the oddest sound behind me; as if someone was peeling labels off cardboard packages, lots of them. ‘Eulie?’ Turning to see what was making the racket, my brothers, I don’t have to tell you what kind of notions went through my head when I saw the paint on her little house literally stripping itself off the clapboards, and floating up into the air like ash, or dandelion fluff. Fuck-!!!’ I shouted, forgetting my manners; as I’ve never been one to use the vernacular around ladies.
‘Follow, Walter,’ she said, pushing open the front gate; at least it didn’t seem to lock from the inside. ‘We have to position ourselves if we can chance. Come on.’
When I touched the metal I felt an electric shock, but nothing too severe. Once we were out on the sidewalk she fumbled through her bag until she found a long flat blue rectangle, not much thicker than a chequebook. Flipping it open she looked at the inside top while running her hand over the inside bottom. If I shifted my head into the right angle I could just catch what she was looking at – some kind of map, with green lines, I thought – but couldn’t tell what she did with her fingers. ‘Five blocks that way, Walter. There’s a park. Run.’
‘What are we running to?’ I asked as I started to let my feet do their stuff. ‘What’s happening? Eulie –?’
‘Run, Walter,’ she shouted, taking the lead, ‘life depends. Our life.’
I didn’t have to look up anymore to see the white line; it was directly in front of us, somewhere between ten and a thousand miles away. It was really starting to open up now; what was apparent in daylight was that it didn’t quite reach the horizon – it stopped just short of the treeline, so I couldn’t exactly see where it came to a halt. Thing was, I could tell that it wasn’t just widening, but lengthening as well, getting closer to the tops of the trees and the houses. Every horn in New Jersey sounded as if it were going off, every air-raid siren, every civil defence signal, every ambulance bell. Eulie’s neighbours poured out of their houses, trying to get their own cars started; I saw that some were trying to cut their way through their fences, or climb over – those were the ones whose gates must have kept them locked in. The air felt heavy, and full of electricity. The clouds were starting to swirl now, as if they were being mixed from above. A tornado, I thought, but there was no wind. I didn’t hear any birds, but when I thought about it, as I raced on, feeling my heart pound as I kept up with my little one, I remembered that I hadn’t heard any real birds since getting here; it occurred to me that they probably didn’t have any.
‘Walter,’ Eulie shouted back, slowing enough to let me catch up with her and then taking my hand so she could help me move at her pace. ‘Left here. That park, over there. It’s windowed. Hurry.’
‘Eule,’ I panted, ‘what’s happening?’
‘When the breach underhorizons,’ she said, nodding at the white gash in the sky, ‘that times it. Walter, hurry.’
A few minutes more and we reached the park, a small strip of green running through the middle of Maplewood, at the bottom of the hill that led up to her house. We were surrounded on all sides now by people running, shouting; where they were heading, nobody knew, but I guessed that was as good a way to spend the time they had left as any. The screams in the air made me think of the last game in the Series the year before, Dodgers versus Yankees. Brooklyn won. No time for hot dogs here, though. Breaking loose of the crowd Eulie and I dashed into the park, stumbling through bushes, nearly running into a bench. A stream ran through the centre of the green; the water looked as if it were starting to boil.
‘Here!’ Eulie said, coming to a dead stop in the midst of a sloping meadow. She knelt down, throwing her green thing back into her bag and starting to look for something else. I heard thunder, but saw no lightning. I watched this part of the town of Maplewood running toward Milburn. Eulie took out a small metal box the size of a cigarette pack. This one had a visible button, round and blue and located dead centre at the top. A thin red bar was inset along the side of the box. ‘Your world evidences no changes. We’re safe there, momento.’
‘What if this happens over there, later?’ She shook her head. ‘Dryco can’t do anything?’
‘Nada,’ she said. ‘Not anymore. Dryco’s going. Gone.’
My head began to sting, as if someone were plucking at it with needles; as I watched Eulie slide a small red bar along the side of the little box, I understood where the pain was coming from. Our electrified hair was being pulled out, one a
t a time; I saw Eulie’s wriggling like thin worms as they drifted skyward.
‘Walter,’ she said. ‘I’m uncertain if transience remains workable. If not –’
‘We won’t be worse off than we are.’
‘Ready yourself,’ she said, looking off toward the west. As the white line drew closer to the earth its colour, nearest the ground, began to change. From white it darkened into something of a lemony yellow; then deepened further into Halloween orange. As the line dropped, the orange turned into firetruck red, and then into a deep predawn purple. The orgone in the sky shimmered, waved, seemed ready to catch fire; red halos flared up around everything in sight – trees, people, cars. There came a roar as if from underneath the earth, far below; as it grew louder and louder I saw blades of grass pulling out of the ground, sailing into the air; leaves fell upward from the trees, and then the trees themselves began to rise, their roots churning and tearing the earth apart into great clumps as they heaved loose of their footing. Nails pulled out of the boards in the park benches, and both flew into the air. The bricks of chimneys came apart, the roofs of cars, the laundry on lines. The sky was filling up fast with all the pieces of the world – kitchen utensils, shingles, bicycles, clothing, slices of bread, trash cans, twigs, frogs, dogs, children. Everything floated up more slowly than you’d have expected, as if being drawn towards the now rainbowed split. Just as we found ourselves beginning to lift off from her world, just before the split came up against it, Eulie pressed the button.
‘Godness, enshield –’
‘Valentine –!!’
We both saw the flash, but neither felt nor heard it; we shut out eyes, and when I opened them again we were back in that place between, where all was flat and white and silent. This time I knew that what I felt or didn’t feel, was genuine, and not merely Pi-induced tactile sensation, and marvelled at how still everything had become, so suddenly. I was still holding onto Eulie’s hand, but wouldn’t have known that I was, had I not been looking at her. She looked back at me; smiled. For several moments we floated there, silent, at peace. I wondered why my ghost, that poor fellow trapped within, had never come to like it. Honestly, it seemed more like being on the ultimate horse trip than anything else – this gizmo of hers was definitely something to keep out of the paws of junkies. All at once it seemed to me that we were coming in for a landing. Eulie’s mouth began to move, and though I couldn’t hear her yet, I knew it’d be only a matter of seconds.