He got out and strolled up to the passenger window of Aaron’s car. Inside, he discovered a mound of clothes in the back seat with the bagged bear on top. Although the windows were rolled down, he dismissed the thought of reaching in and taking back the bear. On the floor, a small dirt-covered spade shovel begged to be examined further.
The front door of the gas station swung open with a bang. Aaron argued back and forth with two women in their twenties. Adryk raced back to his own car, jumped into the driver’s seat, and ducked down to listen.
The two women exchanged sharp words with Aaron. Adryk peered up to see one of the women, dressed in torn black jeans, multiple earrings, and green hair jabbing her finger into Aaron’s face. The woman said, “So that’s what you’re all about? The money? So tell me. How much you gonna get?”
The other woman, with black spiked hair and wearing white shorts and a rose-colored tank top, wandered around the back side of Aaron’s car. She reached in through the back window and pulled out the bear. She clutched the bear tight in her arms and ran toward a powder blue Toyota Camry at the other end of the parking lot. “C’mon, Marissa,” she yelled to her friend.
“Hey!” Aaron yelled. “Give that back. That doesn’t belong to you.”
“Oh, listen to you. Mr. Moneybags,” the woman with the torn jeans shot back. She bolted over to the driver side of the Camry and stuck out her tongue. She stopped before she climbed in.
Aaron reached in through his passenger side window and pulled a pistol out of his glove compartment. He lifted it up, aimed it at the woman with the bear, and walked toward their car. “I didn’t wanna have to do this. Don’t make me do this,” he said. By the look on his face he had every intention of firing it.
The woman with the torn jeans put her hands in the air, but the one with the bear jetted behind the gas station and out of sight. Aaron aimed his pistol at the driver but gave chase to the woman with the bear. He disappeared behind the building and she reappeared around the other side without the bear. She scrambled back into the Camry. The woman with the torn jeans jumped in and in seconds their vehicle tore off through the parking lot with a squeal of tires.
Aaron ran by Adryk’s car and back into the parking lot. He lifted his gun and shouted at the women as they drove off. The gun did not fire. He walked behind the gas station again and searched the woods.
Adryk clutched his right arm. Beads of sweat dripped from his forehead and splashed onto the floor mat. He heard Aaron swear again and kick at the bushes behind the building.
Minutes passed before Aaron reappeared. His cheeks were red with rage. He stormed back over to his car and drove off empty handed. When the sound of squealing tires ceased, Adryk sat upright.
His right hand trembled. The bear was somewhere in the woods back there, he told himself, but wouldn’t it be better just to leave it alone and go home? Months ago he would have gone back to his apartment and drowned out his anxiety with a twelve pack. Instead, he steeled his nerves, got out of his car, and headed into the woods.
The trees started at the back of the building, and continued on as the ground sloped downward toward a marsh fifty yards in front of him. He secured his descent by clutching multiple tree branches along the way until he spied the plastic bag at the edge of the marsh. He rescued the bag, wiped the fresh mud onto the grass, and returned to his car.
He glanced skyward and set the bag into the trunk of his car. Only then did it dawn on him that the whole time he carried the bag his arm stopped twitching.
* * *
Adryk pulled up alongside Dr. Kendricks house again and parked. This time he pulled the bear out of the plastic bag and straightened out its yellow ribbon bowtie. He ascended the driveway with renewed resolve and rapped on the front door.
The door opened and Dr. Kendricks leaned out. This time he wore a pale blue dress shirt with black dress pants.
“Want this yet?” Adryk said before the doctor could respond. He held up the bear with both hands.
Dr. Kendricks reached into his front pocket. “What’s it going to cost me?”
“Nothing. Here.” Adryk tossed the bear at Dr. Kendricks.
“Thanks.”
“Who is it?” A young boy said from inside the house. This time the boy slipped past Dr. Kendricks and stood in between the two men.
“I was just thanking Mr. Meyers,” Dr. Kendricks said.
“Dad, what is that? Is that…?”
Dr. Kendricks handed the bear to the boy and put a hand on his shoulder. “Adam hasn’t stopped talking about this since he saw it on television.” There was a warm but condescending tone to his words as if the whole incident annoyed him to the point of anger.
Adam ran up to Adryk and hugged him. “Thanks, mister,” he said as Adryk hugged him back. “How’d you find it?”
Adryk explained, “I’m a starcatcher.” He pointed at the sky. “I fly around up there and catch things from falling back to earth.”
“Stars?”
“Sort of. If I didn’t catch your bear it would have burned up.”
The boy’s eyes grew large.
“But I think your Dad wanted you to have it back,” Adryk said.
A wave of sadness swept over the boy’s face. He ran back into the house without another word.
“Seriously. What do I owe you?” Dr. Kendricks said. “Meds? Bills? ‘Cause that’s what this is all about, right? You and your buddy go public, extort some money…”
“Keep your money,” Adryk said.
Dr. Kendricks lowered his voice. “What? It’s all I’ve been hearing about. Non-stop.”
“I’m sure.” Adryk gestured toward the front door. “I saw the way he looks up to you. His dad’s not your competitor.”
Adryk turned his back on the doctor and headed back to his car. He stuffed his hands into his jeans pockets and kicked a pebble with his shoe. Halfway down the driveway he stopped and turned around. “Hey. I thought of something. Think you could you get me a new arm?”
Dr. Kendricks lifted his open hands into the air and shrugged. “I can’t fix that, sorry.”
“No, I meant on my ship. It needs a new retrieval arm. The one I got now is broken.” Adryk reached into his wallet, pulled out a business card, and handed it to the doctor.
Dr. Kendricks took the card and twirled it between his fingers. “I’ll see what I can do.”
* * *
Back in orbit, Adryk wheeled his new robotic arm around to familiarize himself with its nuances. He grasped a magnetic rocket disc out of the cargo bay and then set it back down with a gentle click several times.
“Did you get the bear back?” Russ said. His voice crackled with ambient static.
“I got it back to its rightful owner. But not without a fight from his stepdad. The guy peddles pain meds like candy.”
“And what happened after that?”
“I went home. Watched some television. Fell asleep with the cat on my chest.”
“And your anxiety?”
Adryk gazed onto the expanse of the Earth and wondered if he would ever witness any rocket launches from his ship. He studied the beginnings of a storm whirling away from the coast of Mauritania.
He spoke up. “The ol’ anxiety was in full swing the whole time. That’s the problem with recovery. Some people expect you to be an addict for life. It’s like they want you to stay broken.”
“Don’t let him rattle you. So that really was your roommate I saw on the news,” Russ said.
“Ex-roommate. I haven’t heard from him in for over a week.”
“How’s the arm working?”
Adryk held out his right hand in front of him and stared at it. “Steady as ever. Or did you mean the robotic one?”
“The robotic one.”
Adryk picked up the rope basket from inside the cargo bay and slipped it onto the end of the robotic arm. The heat tile was lightweight and covered in black silica. He maneuvered the arm so that it caught a heat tile drifting by. He then set the bask
et down into the cargo bay, removed the tile, and slipped the basket off. He hoisted up the tile and reared back as if he was about to skip a stone across the mirrored surface of a lake. With ease he thumbed a red button on top of the new robotic arm’s joystick control.
The arm swung forward and released the tile at the apex of its motion. The tile whirled away into the depths of space until it struck a solar panel broadside and shattered into a hundred tiny black daggers.
“It works more like a slingshot,” Adryk said. “But it’ll do.”
A Tunnel in a Teacup
I hiked up the stairs to the second floor of the public library but every step of the way I looked for escape routes. Maybe I’ve seen too much or maybe something seemed off in the interviewer’s voice when I talked to him by phone. Why would the guy interview me at a place like this and not at his company? Then again, my Mom always said I tended to overanalyze things. She also said I was a talented escape artist, but she didn’t mean that in a good way.
At the top of the stairs I found several sets of tables and chairs full of people. I found my way to the interviewer quickly because I had seen his face before online in RecTech Magazine. As I reached the table, I set down my paper cup full of Darjeeling tea and two packets of sugar. I extended my hand to shake, we introduced ourselves, and then I sat down across from him.
“Thanks for making the trip today,” Mitch Tavis said. He pulled out my resume and set it onto the table in front of him. “It’s Evan McQuackshire, right? Let’s see here. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself, starting with your past employment experiences.”
Without thinking, I tapped my right foot on the floor in a slow steady rhythm. It was a nervous habit, but I knew why I was here. My Dad had put in a good word for me and this could be my only chance to make it into the magazine industry.
“The last place I worked at was a startup newspaper on the east side of St. Paul. I was hired through a temp agency to help them with typesetting and proofreading. It was a second shift job and I got to learn a lot about the industry,” I said.
“It says on your resume that the position only lasted six months. Why did you leave?” Mitch said without looking up at me.
“It was a lot of little things. Like the day I found out no one ever emptied the garbage in the office. I discovered that when I dropped a half-eaten orange into the wastebasket in the break room. A week later it was still there. Then I started finding the papers on my desk being shuffled around when I was gone. I also sensed their finances were in trouble. Every Tuesday the permanent employees sat in the break room in the morning and had a meeting. I was never invited because I was a temp, but one meeting they started shouting at each other and the owner used words like “afford” and “bankruptcy”. The argument spilled out into the hallway and by the end of it all they went to their own little offices and slammed the doors shut. I was left alone in the main room.”
“And then what happened?”
“I went downstairs to the bakery on the first floor. I bought myself a cup of tea and a cranberry-orange muffin. I came back to my desk and pulled out a sugar packet from my pocket. I tore it open, poured it in my tea, and stirred it up. The tea boiled over and gray smoke went up toward the ceiling.”
I kept watching his facial expressions but he did not look up at me. My foot continued to tap on the floor, but faster now. “When the smoke cleared I saw a black disc on the wall next to me. The disc turned into a hole, and I decided to step through it.”
This time Mitch looked up. I still could not tell if he believed me or not. So I carried on. “Next thing I knew I was inside another company. The hole closed up like water in a drain. Whoosh! I didn’t see any one else so I looked for a way out. I found one and took the elevator back to the main floor. Then I left.”
“All this from a cup of tea?” Mitch looked at his own coffee cup on the table and then back at my cup of tea. He pointed at my paper cup. “What’s in the cup? Tea?”
I nodded. “Darjeeling.”
Mitch stared at the sugar packets next to my cup. He took a deep breath and tried to focus on my resume again. It was only one page so there was not much to discuss. My right foot tapped faster now.
Mitch glared down at my shoe. He only looked up when I stopped tapping my foot. “Let’s talk about your schooling instead. What kind of classes did you take?”
“I took a class in reporting. Some classes in mass communications. I originally wanted to be a tech writer. I also worked with my Dad on a few weekends.”
“What was your favorite part?” Mitch leaned forward.
At this point, I could tell the interview was going off the rails but I gave it some thought anyway. “I think it was a Tuesday. Yes, it was a Tuesday. Tuesday morning. I was half-listening and half-daydreaming during a lecture on the history of yellow journalism or something like that when suddenly this girl three rows behind me jumps out of her chair and yells.”
I continued. “Professor Hitchcock turned around from the whiteboard and a bunch of us looked back. Here there was a black cat running back and forth down her aisle. It sure looked like my roommate's cat Schrödinger. I think he must have pulled a prank and set it loose. People were getting all jumpy and so I thought quick about what I could do. I checked my backpack but there was no way I was going to get the cat in there without a fight. I happened to have a cup of tea from the student store on my desk and so I pulled out a packet of sugar that my Dad gave me and dumped it into the cup. Only it wasn't sugar. I think it was a packet of nanomachines that he was working on. Looked just like a sugar packet.”
Mitch gave me an incredulous look. “Go on.”
“Okay, then the cup of tea started to boil over. Never seen anything like it. I set it on the floor and the smoke condensed into a box. A big box. Don't know how it happened. But I got up, grabbed the box, and ran after the cat.”
“Did you catch it?”
“I did. But he gashed the back of my hand. I brought Schrödinger back to my apartment and came back to a hero's welcome.”
“So let me get this straight. Your Dad gave you a packet of sugar? And it turned into a box? And you used it to catch a runaway cat?”
“What?”
“I asked you about your classes. I was hoping you'd elaborate on a topic you found interesting.”
“Yeah, but you said to recall your favorite part. I thought it was an illustration of my problem solving skills. Besides, my Dad was always tinkering with weird things. That day he was messing around with some kind of quantum computing machine and something or another went haywire. He told me about it a week later. And that cat is always running off.”
The conversation at the table fell silent. I wanted to elaborate on how it was funny the cat was named Schrödinger since that was an old thought experiment about whether a cat in a box was dead or alive or simultaneously both dead and alive, but I sensed the time was not right. Some days I felt both dead and alive in college, just like this interview today. Dead to the real world out of boredom and alive in my own imaginary world.
I looked at Mitch. I got frustrated since it was obvious he was spooked. I picked up one of my sugar packets and tore the top off. I held the packet above my cup of tea. “What?” I said in a last ditch effort to save the interview.
“Is it black? Does it have white on the tip of its tail?”
“What? The cat? I think so, why?”
“And does it have white paws? Like it stepped in paint?”
“It does. How did you know?”
“I think I saw it the other day. When I was driving away from your Dad’s lab.” Mitch leaned back in his chair and scratched his chin.
“Oh. Well, he is missing again. I thought he was dead.”
“No, no. I think he’s alive.”
“Where did you see him?”
“Near Tyler Street in northeast Minneapolis. It jumped on the hood of my car and ran off.” He pointed to his coffee cup. “I had some coffee in my cup and I…”<
br />
Mitch stopped talking and I set my packet of sugar down onto the table. Maybe I didn’t need to escape another interview after all.
“Go on. Pour the sugar into your tea,” Mitch said. He watched my movements with great intensity.
“Are you sure?”
Mitch nodded. He pulled out a pen and readied himself to take notes.
I poured the sugar packet into my tea. At first, nothing happened and I thought I grabbed the wrong packet on the way out of my apartment. A minute later the tea boiled up and toppled the cup onto the floor. The liquid spilled out but morphed into a black vortex that consumed the cup, the floor tiles, and a napkin.
As it whirled about, Mitch leaned over and dropped his pen into the vortex. The pen disappeared without a sound. “Where’d it go?”
“I have no idea.”
Mitch pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and dialed someone. He spoke up when the person answered. “Mr. McConnell, it’s Mitch. Remember that lab I investigated a few weeks ago? The one with the quantum accidents? It’s not a dead story. It’s alive.”
All I could hear on my end was muffled chatter.
“No, it’s true. I’ve seen it myself. The vortex thing…I’m looking at one right now.”
Next, there was more muffled chatter. The call ended with a disgusted look on Mitch’s face.
“That was my boss. He doesn’t believe me,” Mitch said as he pocketed his phone. He glanced at me and then back at the vortex on the floor. “Where do you think it goes?”
“I’ll find out,” I said as I stood up from the table. I put one foot into the vortex and then pushed off with the other. Everything around me went black until I saw flashes of silver, copper, and pink. I crashed down onto a set of soft mauve lounge chairs with a bang. From what I could tell I was on the lower level of the library.
I reached down to the floor and picked up Mitch’s pen. My next instinct was to move out of the way in case he threw anything else down the hole. I slid over and noticed the librarian was staring at me. The ceiling above continued to whirl about in a black spiral.
Seconds later Mitch tumbled through the opening in the ceiling and landed in a heap on one of the lounge chairs. Although the cushions broke his fall, the momentum threw him onto the floor. He groaned several times but eventually rolled over to look up at me.
Windows Out Page 11