by Erika Swyler
Mr. Pete was talking. “If you’re sure. Annie made it sound like when she left there, the whole town was getting ready to tar and feather him.”
Her mother looked out the window. “But it’s high ground, a good distance away, and people will go there. After.” The sick sky had turned orange, lighting her mother up like a fire. “It’s best to face things head on.”
They were headed for the school.
Overgrowth cut off the end of College Drive and forced them to backtrack. Roads seemed to shift as they drove on them, and everything smelled like sawdust and melting rubber. Island Paradise Park was visible just above the trees. Kudzu had crawled up the side and bottom of the concrete head, bearding it. The gaslights still burned in its eyes.
Acacia Lane was the only route with a clear path to the school. They passed by Nedda’s house, the eave that marked her bedroom window, and the trellis that Denny climbed. There were no lights. There should be light in the basement, a flash every now and again, a spark. They passed the Prater house. Denny’s things were inside, his clothes and baseball cards, and his fishing rod, like an outline of him.
The kitchen timer beeped.
The hair on Nedda’s arms stood up, and she craned her neck to look.
“Don’t,” Betheen said. “He wouldn’t want you to see.”
He would. She knew that.
An explosion was many things; this one was photons moving in waves, currents drifting into the universe, rushing like a flood. It wasn’t so different from watching one on TV. There was a flash, but no screaming, no running, and no one telling her to pray. Her dad was in it. “We’re not there,” she said. “Light we see is from what’s already happened.”
Her mother looked forward, her back straight, her hand gripping the door handle. “It’s a good thought, but not exactly true. You’re always there, Nedda. It’s always happening.”
What do people become? What they always were: carbon, heat, and light, smashed together until they became something else for a little while. A star, a monkey, a boy. An old man. A baby.
“I can’t get any closer. We’ll have to walk the rest,” Mr. Pete said.
Cars jammed the school lot, closing off the entrance. When her mother didn’t move, Mr. Pete reached across to pop the door open. The air that came in smelled like school lunch—like onions, sweet, dirty, and sour—awful in its ordinariness.
They didn’t bother closing the car doors. They ran through the cars that were parked on the grass, leaning drunkenly into the road. She recognized some. Ellery Rees’s Gremlin, the weird truck car that Krissie’s father drove. The mail truck. Heat was at their backs, growing. She looked for Denny’s mom’s car and Denny’s bike, knowing they wouldn’t be there.
The door opened.
Hands on her back—her mother, Mr. Pete—shoved her inside, into a crowd of arms, bodies, people.
When her eyes adjusted to the black, there were faces—Mrs. Wheeler, Joan from the Bird’s Eye, kids from school. Vicki and Madeline. Jimmy La Morte and his mom.
Pop Prater. He moved people out of his way to get to the door, to get to them. She could see it, his fist hitting Denny’s eye. For all the things her father had ever done, for not wanting her to grow up, for everything that had gone wrong, he never would have hit her. He would tear himself apart if he’d ever hurt a kid on purpose.
“Desmond,” her mother said.
There was a flash.
Light ate the sky. Heat blasted through the doors, scorching, dry, like Easter never was. Whatever Pop Prater had been about to say died before it left his mouth. All that remained was heat and the crush of people. Her mother’s hip, Mrs. Wheeler’s back. Mr. Pete’s heavy boots by her foot. Someone’s dress, scratchy. The wetness of breath, moving in and out.
Then there was nothing but light. Burning yellow-green.
She felt them, everyone in Easter, bleeding together like water droplets, separate things fusing, all of one skin. A ripple of time moving through them. They were the same.
The bodies of the town clung together, a single roiling mass—grove pickers and hotel bums, children and parents, fading old money, the dog track men with their rattails and creased skin from late-night liquor, people who’d tumbled east and settled where the land ended. Crucible’s trail cut the air, the sky, and the thin walls that made them separate people. Without those lines they were a single thought. Longing.
Yearning for a lover, yearning for a houseboat—a solid vessel to live long and lazy days on; to hold Mama’s hand again and let her know she was loved; for money and ease; for a baby, to finally be a mother; for fame; for sleep without nightmares; for one day without aching joints; for a job; for Missy to come back; for someone to actually listen, just once, Jesus Christ; for a son, a goddamn son; for the sweet orange soda that they stopped making; for just one more hour and it would be enough; for a husband to take it all back and start again; for a truck; for a treehouse with three stories and a trapdoor rope swing; for galaxy cake; for a night in a kitchen with salt and steam in the air; for a space shuttle; for a father.
The sky cracked gold, then faded. They fell away from one another, skin and thoughts buzzing.
A small snap of a frayed thread.
Her father was gone. There was a hole where he had been. Nedda could trace it inside—not in her heart, but next to it, around it, a layer of skin gone missing.
Nedda buried her face against Betheen, cheek to collarbone, as lights came on in the lobby. She breathed her mother in and began to count. Seconds on the left hand, tens on the right. Two minutes. The rules said everything would be fine after two minutes. She wouldn’t lose count.
“I think it’s done,” Betheen said.
“I want to go home,” Nedda said.
When they opened the school doors, they blinked up into the brightness of an afternoon that was hot like early summer. A blue sky with clouds moving like they hadn’t in days.
People pushed by, wandering to their cars, looking up at the sky and rubbing their necks, stunned.
Pop Prater called her mother’s name, but they kept walking.
They walked through the woods, the trail she and Denny used. Her mother must have felt it too, the thread snapping. When they passed the coffee bushes, Nedda looked up and saw Betheen crying. Her hair had fallen from its French twist. There was grease and rust on her coat sleeves, wide brownish smears on the pink wool.
They walked through Mr. Pete’s yard. There was a paler spot of paint on the back of his house, like a scar, where the sequencer, Mitzi, had been. Everything left outlines.
“Mom?”
“Yes?”
“Dad said when we die, we go back to what we were, and that everything comes from carbon. We just become carbon, gas, and heat too. I wanted to know what thoughts were, what happened to the other stuff after—everything you think and who you are, what you feel and everything that ever happened to you, your memories. He said it’s all electrical impulses, that it’s light and shocks and stuff. And when you think about how electricity travels, there’s all this light to it, and it never stops. Right? It just keeps going. He said that maybe it keeps traveling forever. That all the light from the beginning of the universe is still traveling.”
“It was kind of him to say that.”
It made it hurt worse too, to know that he was traveling to places she would never see, that he was still in the universe but she was without him.
Nedda shrugged out of her jacket, afraid to wonder at the heat. Afraid to wonder what happened beyond the lab, beyond the grove.
“Mom.”
“Mm.”
“I felt him die.”
Betheen made a sound like a mouse choking. “Me too. We’ll figure it out,” she said, once she caught her breath. “We’ll figure out what to do.”
If all the light in the universe kept moving and never died, if all the light in the universe was still there, her father—like Judy, like the seven—was still traveling. Her brother was too. She want
ed, more than anything in the world—more than to have her own lab, more than to stand on the moon, more than she wanted space and an Agena rocket—she wanted to touch that light again.
“I love you,” Betheen said.
Had they been back on the kitchen floor, staring at the ceiling, with her father in the basement, Nedda would have said it back and not bothered to think whether she meant it. It was different now. There were things about her father she’d never know, an entire other person she’d never meet or understand. When the mixer had broken, her mother had said something to her about baby shoes that Nedda couldn’t remember. Those words had meant something else too. She grabbed her mother’s littlest finger. Any more would hurt too much.
Molecules, particles—everyone was made from the smallest things, and if she grabbed hold of them tightly, she might as well be grabbing the whole of something too.
They passed Haverstone House and stopped where Denny would have turned to go to his driveway.
Annie Prater’s car was in front of the house. The lights were on.
She knew it like she knew the constellations: Denny was home.
Revelation
Randall Holt was asleep in his truck, and had been since crossing through Okefenokee. He wasn’t supposed to rely on the driverless feature, but tell that to anyone driving thirty-six hours straight. The company didn’t check logs, not until there was an accident, and he could drive the Atlantic route in his sleep. It’s what kept his wife from pitching a fit anytime he left the house. He was dreaming about Marla and her beautiful feet, that her toenails were live butterflies. She was scared she’d kick them when she walked so he had to carry her everywhere—over his shoulder in a fireman’s hold, or in both arms, like they’d just gotten married. Now, in his dream, her feet were resting on the dash beside him, those butterflies’ wings flapping in the sun.
He was still asleep when the light on his dash blinked on. The onboard computer searched the GPS and located a fueling station. It signaled, more often and more accurately than Randall ever did, and pulled over to the left on the highway. At five in the morning the road was nearly empty.
Randall rolled over as the computer took an exit. Now Marla was on a television show, and everyone was saying her butterfly toes meant she was queen of something. He was getting tired of carrying her places. His arms had stretched out like spaghetti and dragged on the ground.
The truck’s computer could do many things—course correct, prevent accidents, choose accident paths that would assume the least amount of financial loss—but it couldn’t fuel itself, which was why Randall was a driver, and why, when he eventually woke up, Randall found himself looking directly at the sign for the Easter Gas n’ Go.
Gas. Who used gas anymore? He hadn’t seen a gas station since he was a kid.
A few hundred miles of road left your knees stiff and your bladder screaming to piss like a racehorse. He hopped out of the cab, palm-locked the door, and hunted around for a john and the charging station. Damned AI could plot a route around storms a hundred miles off, and navigate so you wouldn’t hit a flea, but it couldn’t find a plug any more than it could find its own ass.
Easter. Weird name for a town. He eyeballed the bays. No charger. There were cars in the back. Old, boxy looking things with long hoods, sharp corners. He’d wound up at a classic car shop. That explained the gas. Still, no charging station? Seemed like a shit business move. He walked up to the office, knocked on the door, but no one answered.
“Hey. I got a semi out here I need to juice up. Can you tell me where the nearest charger is?”
Peering through the window showed a refrigerator case filled with plastic bottles of ancient Coca-Cola, and something on the desk that looked like a rotary telephone.
Purists. Probably some kids in their twenties with wide pants and fingernail tattoos.
“Hello?”
Well, fuck.
In the end, he pissed off the side of the road, into a canal. He kept an eye out. If you weren’t mindful you could wind up taking a leak on a gator, which never ended well. He stood in the shade of a billboard, and squinted up to take a look. Prater Citrus. Sounded familiar.
He was back in the cab, buckling in, when he remembered. His grandmother had a poster from Prater hanging on her living room wall. A girl in a bikini made of oranges riding sidesaddle on top of a heron with two giant grapefruits in its claws. His grandmother had baked grapefruits, broiling them with brown sugar on top until they tasted like cotton candy and summer. She said Prater grapefruits were the sweetest—something called a flame varietal. But then you couldn’t get them anymore. They’d gone under or stopped shipping up to Georgia. God, it was more than thirty years since she’d died. The billboard was shining and new, like it had been put up the week before. He had a hankering for grapefruit, but it was almost impossible to get now. Still, he could use a meal and little exit towns usually had good diners.
Randall shouted at his phone to point him to the next charging station, and it came up with something in Titusville. Sounded right. He let the computer do its thing. The semi rumbled out of the station, with him leaning out the window to watch the sunrise, praying the battery had enough juice to get him to a charge.
The truck went into a town that could have been a movie set, with cars from what looked like the late 1970s and early ’80s. A theater marquee advertised something called Iron Eagle.
The AI took him through little turns, down Red Bug Road. The streets were empty, but there was a man sweeping off a bit of sidewalk in front of what looked like a diner. With chrome. A throwback in a throwback town. Randall pulled over.
“Hey, you open?”
The man eyed Randall’s truck strangely. “Yeah, just now. You gonna park that thing there?”
Randall Holt was the first man to enter Easter in fifty years.
Ellery Rees baked a grapefruit for the guy in the weird tractor trailer. What kind of truck had no exhaust on it? The guy also ate a grapefruit like he hadn’t seen one in his whole life. It was a slow morning, and Ellery was still feeling sideways. He’d thought about not opening up. It’d been winter yesterday, but it was summer today, and the change left him feeling like jelly and fighting the start of a head cold, among other things. But lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling, he hadn’t known what to do with himself except open. So he’d swilled coffee, doctored with the Cuban stuff, and served almost four whole grapefruits to a guy with the wildest truck he’d ever seen. How did it not have a grille on it somewhere? Where was the hood? He pretended not to stare, flipping through the paper.
“You got another copy of that?” the trucker asked.
“Nah, but I’m about done. Take mine. It’s a couple days old anyway. Delivery guy decided not to show up,” Ellery said, and tossed the paper to the trucker.
The man picked it up from the table like he hadn’t seen a newspaper before. “That right?”
“What?”
“The date.”
“Like I said, it’s a couple days old.”
“Holy fuck,” the man said. “You’re not screwing with me, are you?”
Ellery didn’t charge the trucker for the grapefruit or the coffee. He was too happy to see him gone.
Not long after, a detail from Titusville Police Department showed up. Then the first reporter.
The state responded with disaster management. The power company and water authority had to restore service to pipes and lines that hadn’t run in decades. Counselors were brought in. The television news called it future shock. Psychiatrists had a difficult time finding a diagnosis for the specific temporal dissociation the townspeople suffered from. Residents of Easter often refused to acknowledge the existence of technology at all. Mobile phones were confounding, as were computers, electric cars, cameras without film, tablets, televisions, the internet, the obvious signs of a digital age. The only other people to experience anything similar were prisoners paroled after long sentences. But the shock was different from how it was with
prisoners. The town had no knowledge that time had been passing, that they’d all been trapped in the days after the Challenger disaster.
Tabloids dubbed them Gappers, for the chunk of time they missed.
Scientists arrived, testing the ground, the plants and trees, the blood of the residents. They pulled samples from a lab at the college that had exploded: Small particles of gold and glass, bits of charred wiring.
During the second week, investigators interviewed a woman whose husband had died in the explosion. She stated he’d been working on a treatment for degenerative joint diseases using localized doses of radiation.
The lab and surrounding building were leveled and filled with concrete.
299,792,458 m/s
He’d spent his entire life in Florida, moving only once, from Tarpon Springs to the Atlantic coast. The more his body constrained him, the deeper the travels in his mind became. In death, all things expanded. From a single point bound by flesh, his very self protracted. At first, his light was caught in his laboratory, bouncing off Crucible’s remains, a leg of which pierced what had been his chest. His light bled through the door, down the corridor and out, spreading into the sky, stabbing the pellucid skin of time he’d been instrumental in creating. Each facet of his life distilled to a wish or impulse, riding photons into the night and beyond.
As time broke over Easter, Theo traveled, flying through decades of day and night as a flickering aura, liquid and sheer. He moved with it, his thoughts glancing along the tops of waves. Everything traveled.
The moment of awe when he first saw Betheen in his class, a mint green pencil tucked behind her ear, reached the moon to slide along the Montes Taurus, brushing each jut and crevasse as he had the supple skin below her ear. The moment he’d touched Michael’s thumb washed deep into space, riding a slow current, striving for the universe’s end. His father’s death wended to the center of the Horsehead Nebula, where it met other lights, others who had been but were no more. Their lights mixed, waves amplifying, surging together.