How Oscar Indigo Broke the Universe (And Put It Back Together Again)

by David Teague

  Reading what the watch had to say about time, Oscar paradoxically lost track of time, so he was startled when his mother interrupted his ruminations by bustling in through the garage door. “Hi, honey!” she exclaimed, sending him jumping out of his skin. “I just stopped by to say good luck at your game.”

  “You aren’t coming?” Oscar asked, not surprised, but still disappointed.

  “I have to work the night shift at Café Karaoke. I’m really sorry.”

  “That’s OK,” said Oscar, turning back to the watch. His mother worked hard, especially now that his dad had left, so Oscar couldn’t blame her for missing the game.

  “There’s still coffee!” cried his mother, eyeballing the pot on the counter. “Hallelujah! I’m so exhausted!” And as she poured the dregs into a mug, she said, “By the way, I’m tired of finding your socks all over the house. Would you please start—”

  Oscar sighed. Sometimes, he wished his mother would quit yelling at him about his socks. His thumb darted to the red button. And before he could think about what he was doing, Oscar pushed.

  His mother quit yelling at him about his socks. In midsentence. The coffee she was pouring hung suspended in the air halfway between the pot and the cup.

  A robin swooping down from a branch outside the kitchen window stopped dead in midflight, dangling motionless, four feet off the ground.

  A car turning around in the street halted dead on the asphalt.

  Dr. Soul, who had been slowly waking up under the table, froze with only one eye open. The microwave clock, the oven clock, the toaster-oven clock, and the coffeemaker clock all flashed 6:00:59.

  Oscar blinked in surprise. He seemed to have frozen everything around him, including time. Yet he could still move! In an instant, he saw that the red watch button had turned green. Green, as in “go.” After a count of one Mississippi, he pressed it again. Whereupon everything started moving once more. His mom launched back into her lecture, the coffee cascaded into the cup, the car glided past, the robin snatched its worm, Dr. Soul yawned, and all the clocks marched forward.

  Oscar gazed in awe at the watch.

  “—putting them in the hamper when you take them off?” His mom was still talking. “What are you staring at?” she demanded.

  “Nothing,” murmured Oscar as he casually covered the watch with his left hand. He wondered if that time-stopped coffee was safe to drink, but it was too late, because his mother had already guzzled it. He watched her closely for a few seconds, and to his relief, she seemed fine.

  “I’ll pick you up after the game,” said his mother, gathering her keys and kissing him on the cheek. “Maybe I’ll get there in time to see the end.” The door slammed behind her.

  Oscar gazed at the watch on the table in front of him. He glanced at the coffeepot. “What did I just do, Dr. Soul?” he asked. But Dr. Soul didn’t answer.

  A few minutes later, as he put on his uniform for the game, Oscar slipped the watch into his pants pocket. He didn’t know exactly why. Maybe it was unintentional. Maybe he didn’t want to leave the watch at home unattended. Or maybe, in the back of his mind, he thought he might need it for something unforeseen.

  And Now, We Return to the Game

  Back on the baseball diamond, as you probably remember, Oscar had just smacked the ball over Taser’s head. As he watched his shot fly into the night, Oscar counted how many seconds he was keeping time stopped. This felt important, somehow, because if anybody ever demanded an exact number in the future, he felt like he should have one ready, though he really hoped nobody would ever ask.

  Since he’d already used up one second in his mom’s kitchen, Oscar started at two.

  Two Mississippi.

  The ball slowly stopped rising, and dropped, but ran out of steam and stopped in midair before it hit the ground, hanging a few feet in front of second base. Wow, Oscar thought sadly, even when I cheat, I can’t knock it out of the infield.

  He sighed and took off running across the diamond.

  Three Mississippi. Four Mississippi.

  He snatched the ball from the air above second base.

  Five Mississippi. Six Mississippi. Seven.

  He stopped at the edge of the outfield warning track and gingerly lifted the ball into the glare of the lights. Carefully, he let go, and just as he’d hoped, it hung where he’d put it, dangling tantalizingly above the fence in the clear summer night.

  Eleven Mississippi. Twelve Mississippi. Thirteen Mississippi. Fourteen . . .

  Oscar Indigo ran back to home plate, picked up his bat, struck the pose of the guy he had always dreamed of being, the guy with his bat extended toward the horizon, waiting for his home run to drop over the outfield fence. Then he pressed the glowing green button, restarting the watch, activating time once again right after he got to nineteen Mississippi.

  The spectators and Oscar’s teammates and the opposing players blinked once and sat still for an instant, as if waking from a spell. Then all eyeballs in the park fixed curiously on Oscar, because the last thing anybody remembered, he’d been standing at the plate with shaky knees, clutching his bat while waiting for the fastball that was going to strike him out. His friends had been busily thinking up nice fibs to tell him, like, for instance, it wasn’t important whether he won or lost, it was how he played the game.

  But now everyone saw Oscar Indigo standing triumphantly in the batter’s box, waving his bat at a distant baseball as it dropped into the itchy weeds behind the outfield fence. A cheer slowly rose from the East Mt. Etna side.

  Looks like a walk-off home run from young Oscar Indigo, Suzy.

  Quite a feat, Vern.

  The crowd went wild.

  Oscar Indigo had become a hero.

  Or so he told himself.

  We Are the Champions

  Oscar didn’t have a chance to worry about the implications of freezing time for a total of nineteen seconds, because the East Mt. Etna Wildcats immediately poured onto the field, dogpiling him. He felt like he was in a movie; he felt like he’d just won the Most Valuable Player trophy; he felt like somebody somewhere was about to name a marshmallow-filled candy bar after him. He felt squashed. “Let me up!” he cried.

  “Holy cats,” said Axel Machado, setting Oscar on his feet. “My little sister is bigger than you. And she’s in fourth grade. How’d you hit that ball so far?”

  Oscar could only shrug and look at the sky and say, “Conditions must’ve been perfect.”

  And despite the balmy summer breeze tickling the back of his neck, Oscar felt slightly wintry inside, because he’d just cheated, possibly on a large scale—how large, he didn’t know. But as millions of stars twinkled down at him icily, something seemed out of place. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw a hole in the bottom of the Big Dipper.

  Just then, the heavy rumble of an old car sounded in the night, and he saw the black Cadillac that had been parked outside Miss Ellington’s house pass like a shadow on the street.

  But his teammates’ cheering soon drowned out his worries. Together, they sang “We Are the Champions” at the top of their lungs.

  Vern and Suzy commented from inside his imagination.

  Bona fide late-inning heroics, Suzy!

  You can’t stop Oscar Indigo, Vern, you can only hope to contain him!

  Congratulations bubbled up all around Oscar. Congratulations sounded awfully different, he reflected, when they weren’t just polite lies meant to spare his feelings.

  They would have sounded even better if he’d actually earned them, but he pushed that thought away.

  Once the cheering of the Wildcats’ moms and dads had faded into the night and the fact had sunk in that the East Mt. Etna Wildcats had actually just defeated the almighty West Mt. Etna Yankees to take a 1–0 lead in the championship series—and more than all that, once everybody had gotten used to the idea that Oscar Indigo was responsible for this—Kamran Singh cried, “What do we do now?”

  “Line up!” called Coach Ron. “
Shake hands!”

  The rival teams made two lines and snaked past one another, slapping high fives as tradition demanded. Everybody said what you always say, after any game, no matter what: “Good game, good game, good game.”

  Except for Oscar. He tugged his jersey straight as he made his way down the line to the end, where Taser stood, and when he reached the Yankees’ star, he said what he’d always promised himself he’d say to his opponent, if he ever won anything. “Congratulations.”

  For some reason, the sound of this word caused total silence to fall over the diamond, the field, and the parking lot for a quarter mile in every direction.

  “What?” said Taser.

  Oscar had actually been rehearsing this moment at home for five years, playing make-believe games with the assistance of his friend Steve and a handful of imaginary baseball heroes. After hitting a fictional walk-off home run in the street in front of his house, the next thing Oscar always did was behave like a gracious winner. So he knew just what to say. “Great effort,” he told Taser, extending his hand to shake.

  “You making fun of me?” Taser asked, staring straight into Oscar’s eyes, ignoring his hand.

  Oscar slowly let it drop. “N-n-no,” he stammered. “I mean—you did a good job pitching.”

  “You want me to punch you?” asked Taser, stepping very close, each large hand now a fist.

  “Hey!” cried an extremely tan lady wearing gold sunglasses even though the sun had set an hour before. “Where’s the umpire? That’s unsportsmanlike conduct!”

  “It’s OK,” Oscar told her. “He’s just—”

  “I’m not talking about him. I’m talking about you!” she said to Oscar. “Hey! Umpire! This kid is taunting my son, Taser! Give him a fine, or suspend him, or whatever you do!”

  “No!” said Oscar. “I wasn’t taunting. I just want to tell Taser he did a good job. I just wanted to tell him—”

  “Tell me what?” asked Taser.

  Oscar tried to think of the things people said to the Wildcats when they lost, or said to him when he bobbled a throw or whiffed in the batter’s box. And he blurted out the first thought that came to mind. “It’s not whether you win or lose, Taser,” he said. “It’s how you play the game!”

  “See!” screeched Taser’s mom. “He’s taunting my little boy!”

  Taser laughed nastily. “Sheesh,” he said. “You’re a loser, even when you win!”

  And with that, he shoved Oscar into the dirt.

  Fifteen minutes after the celebrations ended, the field lay black under the thickening clouds, the darkened stadium lights ticked as they cooled, and Oscar shivered, alone, in the parking lot, hoping his mom would show up soon.

  Across the street, in the cool blue glow of the bus kiosk, sat Lourdes Mangubat.

  She glanced his way. Even though he’d never really spoken to her, and he’d just made her smash her toe, Oscar waved. She raised her arm as if to wave back, but at that moment, the bus pulled up to the curb, hiding Lourdes, and when it pulled away, she was gone.

  Now that was a bit of a disappointment, Suzy.

  I have to agree, Vern.

  Oscar also had to agree with the imaginary Vern.

  He shivered as he walked down the block to wait for his mother under a streetlamp, and he couldn’t shake a growing sense of foreboding. As soon as he leaned against the lamppost, the bulb blinked out.

  That wasn’t a good sign.

  Slowly, almost fearfully, Oscar slipped the giant gold watch out of his pocket again and regarded it nervously in the flicker of faraway lightning. Maybe, he was starting to realize, it would’ve been a good idea to learn a little more about how the watch worked before he’d pushed the big red button on top and halted time just so the Wildcats could beat the Yankees.

  9:17:47, it read as the second hand swept around the dial. 9:17:48, 9:17:49, 9:17:50 . . .

  He didn’t even need to check the World Atomic Clock to know that it now ran nineteen seconds behind the rest of the world. And the solar system, and the galaxy, and the universe.

  A gust of wind blasted across the deserted parking lot.

  A flock of blackbirds squawked to life in the beech trees behind the stands. They screeched toward him through the sky. Illuminated by a lightning flash, this one much closer than the earlier flickers, they appeared not to be birds at all. They looked like very small, flying . . . dinosaurs?

  But just as suddenly as they’d appeared, they disappeared. It was only a trick of the light, Oscar told himself.

  The wind now held steady.

  Thunder rolled.

  Suddenly, a dazzling flash blinded him. From very near by. Half a block away. He flinched. A sound began to grow like a gorilla jamming trash cans into a wood chipper. And it soon became apparent that the glare wasn’t lightning; it was headlights. Or one headlight, anyway. Approaching at high speed. Aiming straight for him. Tires screeched. A horn honked. And a small, rattly car ground to a halt at the curb. At the wheel sat Oscar’s mom.

  Just then, rain began to pelt Oscar in buckets and sheets. He fumbled with the obstinate door latch and scrambled into the car. His mother pulled away from the curb and made a U-turn in the opposite direction from the neat yards and lamplit streets of West Mt. Etna, crossing the invisible line into East Mt. Etna. Oscar gazed out the car window at mostly empty shopping centers containing only sad and neglected thrift shops that sold used clothes to families who would wear them awhile and then bring them back to be sold again, and he watched whole blocks of boarded-up houses slide by outside the glass, and he saw a factory surrounded by a rusty chain link fence secured by a padlocked gate.

  “I’m sorry, honey. I couldn’t get away from work,” said his mother. “At least I got here before the storm hit. Sort of.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” said Oscar, shivering as he glanced through the windshield at the strengthening rain. His anxiety must’ve shown on his face.

  “Don’t worry about the game,” said his mother, noticing his look. “You’ll do better next time. After all, you had to play the Yankees. They’re the best! And it’s the championship series! Nobody thought you guys would ever get this far.”

  Oscar could tell his mother had expected the Wildcats to lose and had prepared a list of comforting things to say.

  “Mom,” said Oscar, turning toward her. “We won.”

  “Good one!” she said, laughing. “You are a such a great kid! No matter what, your sense of humor always shines.”

  “I’m not joking,” Oscar said. “We beat the Yankees. We’re ahead in the series.”

  “I’ve had a long day, buster,” his mother replied. “Don’t mess with me.”

  “I’m not messing with you,” said Oscar, grinning finally, even as the rain fell ferociously, flooding the streets here and there. “We won!”

  “Really? How?” asked his mother, a hint of disbelief rising in her voice, although she smiled brightly to disguise it.

  “It wasn’t easy. Lourdes got hurt. And she’s our star,” said Oscar. “But I guess we just put it all together right at the end, when it counted!”

  “So the Wildcats scored a bunch of points,” said Oscar’s mom.

  “We call them ‘runs’ in baseball, Mom,” said Oscar. “The final score was 2–1. It was really exciting.”

  “And this was all in the fourth quarter?” asked his mother.

  “No, Mom—baseball has innings,” said Oscar. “Not quarters.” He had only been having these conversations with her since he was seven. One day, he still hoped, she’d figure out the great sport of baseball. As in, you scored runs, not points, and you played innings, not quarters. In the meantime, the overall concept still baffled her.

  And he didn’t quite know why, but he decided to leave out the part about Lourdes’s toe, and all the Wildcats backups being at the beach, and his getting put into the game and going to the plate and smacking a “homer.” And of course he didn’t mention the watch he’d hidden in his palm. “We scored in the bo
ttom of the ninth! We won right at the end,” said Oscar.

  “Five! Four! Three! Two! One!” cried his mom. “It’s over! The crowd goes nuts! Wildcats are victorious!”

  “Yeah,” said Oscar. “Something like that. Except there’s no clock in baseball. So the final seconds don’t tick off—”

  “That’s it!” cried Oscar’s mom, sawing her steering wheel viciously to the left and slaloming through a small lake in the middle of the road. “We’re going to Rossini’s to celebrate.”

  “Are you sure?” said Oscar. “We haven’t been there since before Dad—”

  The light in the intersection ahead suddenly turned from green to red, skipping yellow altogether, as if something had happened to its sense of order and time. His mother slammed on the brakes, and the Corolla skidded to a halt.

  “Crazy,” muttered his mom, craning her neck to stare up at the light.

  “I mean—” began Oscar, and stopped. He hadn’t meant to bring his father up. It had just slipped out. But it was true; they hadn’t dined at Rossini’s since his dad had left home.

  And Rossini’s was the place where the three of them used to celebrate.

  Birthdays, holidays, and the time when Oscar got the part of Christmas Present in A Christmas Carol. Mr. Rossini, short and round, served wine for the adults and bubbly water for the kids. Mr. Rossini’s menu featured five kinds of spaghetti. At Mr. Rossini’s, the servers were all opera singers from Philadelphia who waited tables on their days off to earn money to pay their rent and, in addition to that, just plain loved singing so much they surrounded your table while you enjoyed your dessert to serenade you in Italian. And Mr. Rossini kept his restaurant open until eleven every night, brightly lit and full of music, even when thunderstorms raged outside. It was truly a place of celebration.

  The last time they’d visited had been Oscar’s eleventh birthday party. When the singers sang “Happy Birthday,” Oscar’s mom had taken the high part. And performed it more beautifully than the opera stars. Mr. Rossini had even said he would hire her to work there, if she applied.