Tesla's Attic

by Neal Shusterman

  His dad held out the money hopefully for a moment more, then put it away.

  “Well,” he said, “at least let’s appreciate Colorado rain.” Then he opened up three sagging lawn chairs and set them up in the garage, looking out.

  That could have been all there was to it, had the storm not had consequences completely unintended by those who had created it.

  The storm could not exist without a substantial accumulation of storm clouds, which by their very nature block out a sizable amount of sunlight. Thus the garage was dim, even at nine o’clock in the morning. Such a dim space required light, but it was an old garage that had never had a ceiling light installed.

  “I can’t see my comic book!” Danny whined as they sat there.

  “So go in the house,” Nick told him.

  “No!” Danny said. “I want to appreciate the rain, like Dad said.”

  Their father pointed to a back corner. “Why don’t you plug that thing in?”

  That thing was an old stage light, basically a single oversize lightbulb atop a rusty pole. It looked like a giant electric Q-tip. This was one of the items Nick had brought down from the attic with considerable effort, since the thing was so heavy and tall. They hadn’t put it out with the rest of the stuff because the slope of the driveway made it lean at a dangerous angle.

  Nick stood up and found an outlet, moved the lamp to the center of the garage, and plugged it in. He found a small knob just beneath the bulb and twisted it a quarter turn to the right. The oversize bulb lit up like a beacon and, for better or worse, began the process of changing the world.

  Caitlin was deathly afraid of getting struck by lightning again.

  Intellectually, she knew how low the chances were; she had removed both of her earrings, and the only metal on her person was her phone. Although it had an internal antenna, it was hardly the lightning rod that metallic pom-poms were.

  No one faulted Caitlin for her astraphobia—fear of lightning—because it was earned. But it was a nuisance nonetheless.

  Today she put that fear aside as she strode through the storm, because for some reason she couldn’t put her green fingernail on, something was drawing her toward that garage sale. Getting there was more important than protecting herself from a heavenly strike.

  As she neared the house, Caitlin had to admit she was impressed by the size of the old Victorian. But up close it was even more run down than it looked from the street. Cracked beams. A few broken windows and torn screens. Some of the gingerbread trim had rotted through or was missing altogether. The entire structure needed work. She wondered what kind of family would move into a house like this. How bad off would they have to be if this was the best they could do? Not to mention having to sell their old junk at a garage sale instead of hauling it all to the dump.

  To her surprise, in spite of the downpour, she found she was not the first to arrive. About a dozen people already stood in the rain, some with umbrellas, some without, searching through the waterlogged items with great purpose, even if they had no idea what that purpose was.

  Inside the garage was a most compelling light. It seemed to almost have gravity, pulling her, and apparently everyone else, down the driveway toward the garage sale.

  As Caitlin pushed through the crowd to the picnic table set up in front of the garage, she passed two desperately uncool kids she recognized from school. One was a gloomy dude dressed all in black, named Vince, and the other was a stocky Hispanic kid whose name she couldn’t recall. She gave each a courtesy wave and kept moving forward.

  The family running the garage sale—or, more accurately, the teenager running it—simply didn’t have enough hands to take all the money that was being thrust toward him. His little brother kept having to kneel down to pick up the fallen bills.

  At the picnic table, an older gentleman hefted a large multifaceted glass tube. He held it up to the lamp in the garage, watching as a prism at the core of the tube split the light into small rainbows.

  “It’s a genuine antique, probably worth a lot of money,” said the kid running the garage sale.

  “I’ll give you forty dollars for it,” said the man.

  The new kid laughed. “I was gonna ask for twenty, but I’ll take it.”

  The man handed over two bills and walked away, cradling the glass tube in his arms like a baby.

  Caitlin watched as two women vied for the boy’s attention—one buying what looked like an electric flour sifter, and another who wanted some kind of old-fashioned salon-style hair dryer. Both of them held out money simultaneously.

  “You must be quite a salesman,” Caitlin said to the kid after the two customers left with their purchases. “None of these things is worth what they’re paying.”

  “I know,” he whispered back to her. “I don’t get it either.” He handed the bills to his brother, who was organizing the money in an X-Men lunch box.

  Caitlin figured he was about her age. The Tampa Bay baseball cap he wore revealed dark hair that was cropped short and only partially hid a small bandage on his forehead over his left eye. He had a nice tan, but his clothes were about three years behind the times. Florida, she thought, with a mental snort, and felt a bit sorry for him. The word assemblage went through her mind: a found object that needed bits and pieces of other things to make it into something new. Something better.

  The kid went on: “I never figured this part of Colorado had so much money.”

  “It doesn’t,” Caitlin said.

  She paused, waiting for the kid to overenthusiastically introduce himself, which was the way most boys reacted to her. When he didn’t, she took the astonishing step of introducing herself first. “I’m Caitlin, by the way.”

  “I’m Nick.” He spread his hands wide over the table. “You’re a little late for the good stuff, but there are still some things here, and there are a couple of bigger pieces in the garage I can show you if you’d like. Have fun!”

  “Thanks, I will,” Caitlin said, vaguely disappointed in his response, and she looked over the collection of objects.

  Vince, even gloomier than usual, walked up to the picnic table holding a black box that looked something like a car battery, yet not. Corrosion had eaten through the top surface, where wires, bent and frayed, were hooked loosely around electrodes.

  “So what’s this?” he asked Nick.

  Nick examined it. “I think it’s an old wet-cell battery. But it’s dead.”

  Vince shrugged. “Everything dies,” he pronounced. “Batteries are no exception. I’ll take it.”

  “Um, okay,” Nick said, handing it back.

  “Vince, are you crazy?” Caitlin asked. “It’s an old, dead battery.”

  “Thanks a lot,” said Nick with a smile. “Killing a sale with the truth, now that hurts.” Then he turned to Vince. “But she’s right. It’s not worth—”

  “I’ll give you ten bucks for it,” Vince said, and Nick’s brother opened up the lunch box like a waiting Venus flytrap.

  “But it’s not worth a penny,” Nick protested.

  “All right,” Vince said. “Nine.”

  “I’ll take three,” Nick said. “And that’s my final offer.”

  “You drive a hard bargain.” Vince dropped three singles into the cash-stuffed lunch box.

  “I don’t think that’s the way it’s supposed to work,” Caitlin said drily, after Vince left with the wet cell.

  Nick turned to Caitlin, the look on his face almost one of suspicion. “All these people coming in the storm, giving me all this money. It’s like there’s a conspiracy.”

  “That’s crazy,” said Caitlin. Then, as Nick was distracted by another buyer—a nun with an antique vacuum cleaner—she couldn’t deny a desperate feeling to find her own particular object.

  She moved to the end of the picnic table and found herself next to the Hispanic kid from school, whose name was on the tip of her tongue, but not really. Marshall or Randall or something. He had some odd family issue that rumored its way thro
ugh school last year, but she hadn’t cared enough to pay attention.

  “Hey, Caitlin,” Marshall/Randall said. “You’re not going to find much here that you’ll like. It’s all a bunch of old crap, you know, already picked over.”

  “Well, as it happens I’m looking for—”

  “For something new, of course,” Marshall/Randall interrupted.

  “Something old, actually,” Caitlin corrected. “Something—”

  “Something trendy, huh? Nah, nothing trendy either,” he went on, more than happy to finish her sentences. “It’s all ancient basura. What would you expect at a garage sale, huh?”

  “Mitchell, right?” Caitlin said, his name suddenly coming back to her.

  “Just Mitch.”

  She wanted to ask him if he’d felt drawn there, too, but all she managed was, “Why are you here?”

  Mitch shifted uncomfortably under her gaze. “Just thought I’d, um, drop by.…Uh, excuse me.”

  Caitlin wasn’t used to people leaving her in the middle of conversations. That was her M.O. There were usually more important or interesting places for her to be than stuck in boring conversations with borderline entities. So she was completely unprepared for Mitch to walk away from her and cross to the picnic table, where he apparently found his Object of Interest.

  Even though the garage sale had at first appeared to be a bust, people began to arrive in droves just a few minutes after the storm had started. Nick never equated the illumination of the old stage light with the influx of customers. Why would he?

  First he sold the killer toaster to their next-door neighbor, an elderly woman who probably came from the same era as the appliance. Then a girl with a pinched face and uneven pigtails bought the old box camera. Some guy sprang for what Nick guessed was an ancient television set. A woman bought the odd-paddled mixer, someone else bought the thing that looked like a cast-iron clothes dryer, and he even sold the antique sewing machine (or vegetable juicer).

  His dad could barely carry the objects out to people’s cars fast enough, and Danny had to graduate to a toolbox, because the lunch box was too small to hold all the money. Yet as he made sale after sale, Nick’s thrill turned into bafflement, which turned into suspicion. Now he wondered what Caitlin had whispered to the pudgy kid. He wondered if they were talking about him behind his back. In fact, the kid was approaching him right now.

  “Hi, I’m Mitch, Mitch Murló.”

  “Merlot?” asked Nick. “Like the wine?”

  “No, Murló like Murphy and López smushed together, ground up, and pushed out the other end. My parents’ idea—a half-Hispanic, half-Irish name that sounds French.” Mitch looked around approvingly. “Nice garage sale you’re running—so, you gonna start at Rocky Point Middle School, or are you older or younger and I’m just not guessing your age right?”

  “Uh…” Nick had to take a moment to mentally diagram Mitch’s sentence. “Uh…yeah, no, you got it right, I’ll be in eighth grade. I’ll be starting—”

  “On Monday?” Mitch interrupted. “Great! We should talk—I’ll tell you which teachers to avoid, and where it’s safe to sit without risking a beating.”

  “Thanks. Actually I—”

  “Want to hear it now? Sure. First of all, there’s Mrs. Kottswold.…”

  Nick had already been assigned to classes, so any talk of avoiding teachers was moot. But apparently Mitch only needed himself to carry on a conversation. Nick endured another minute of school trivia before he could refocus the conversation on the garage sale. “Yeah, that’s all good to know. So…what do you have there?”

  “Oh, yeah, right.” Mitch looked at the object in his hands, almost as if he were surprised to see it there, a little embarrassed by it, even. “It’s a birthday gift for my little sister.” He held up the disk-shaped metal device, with a movable arrow mounted in the center. It was possibly a toy—it looked like an early See ’n Say cast in steel. But instead of barn animals, it had geometric symbols engraved around the circle. An ivory ring was attached to a pull string. “This looks good,” he said.

  “Uh…right…” said Nick. “I’m sure your sister would love a weird piece of junk instead of something—”

  “Something new in a box? You bet she would! She’s not into the whole corporate America commercialization-of-birthdays thing.” Mitch played with the string on the device. “Anyway, how much?”

  Nick shrugged. “I was thinking of—”

  “I only brought ten with me,” Mitch said, pulling his wallet out of his back pocket. “But I can go home and get more.”

  “Okay, what’s going on?” Nick demanded. “Did that girl Caitlin put you up to this? What are you all planning?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Mitch said indignantly, holding out the ten.

  Nick sighed and took the bill. “Fine. I hope your sister enjoys it.”

  As Caitlin wandered closer to the garage, she saw it. The perfect item.

  An old reel-to-reel tape recorder. A big, bulky thing the size of a suitcase, complete with two plate-size spools of audiotape. In a flash of inspiration, she saw her entire garbart project. She’d pull the guts out of the machine and drape the wires and other electronic bits over and around the thing. Then she’d wrap the entire mess with the audiotape. She even had a title.

  Media Frenzy.

  She raced back to Nick, unable to control herself as she pulled bills from her purse. Even though Caitlin realized she was falling into the same trap as the others, she was powerless to stop it. She only wanted to spend ten, but she found herself holding out a twenty to Nick.

  “How much do you want for that tape recorder?” she asked. “Is this enough? I have more.”

  Nick looked at the bill in her hand but wouldn’t take it. He just shook his head. “It’s junk! It’s not worth anything. What’s wrong with you?”

  Caitlin felt tears—actual tears—building in her eyes. “I don’t know! I don’t know! Just take the money and let me have it! Because if you don’t, I don’t know what I’ll do!”

  Nick reached out to her in a kind of daze, but whether he intended to take her money or take her hand wasn’t clear. Her last impression of him before he grabbed her was that he looked like a deer in headlights.

  It turned out there was a reason for that.

  The car, a Buick that had seen better days, wasn’t speeding down the street intentionally. However, the man driving found himself in such an unexpected hurry to reach the garage sale he couldn’t help himself. He barely noticed his car jumping the curb and, at the time, the tree in front of him felt like a minor inconvenience. With the rain beating down on his windshield and a pair of faulty wipers, he never even saw the two kids in his path. But he did notice the table of merchandise in front of the garage, illuminated by a certain light that could only be described as compelling.

  Nick didn’t have time to think, only to act. He rammed Caitlin, tackling her to the ground just as the car plowed into the tree. Had he hesitated a split second, they both would have been crushed by the car, but Nick’s reflexes were just fast enough to save them. Now, lying together on the wet grass, Caitlin just stared at him.

  “Excuse me, but did we almost just die?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” He helped her to her feet and they both stared at the car, its front end crumpled against the tree. Funny, but the moment after nearly dying felt as uneventful as the moment right before nearly dying. Nick figured the seriousness of the moment would hit him much later, when he actually had time to freak out about it.

  Danny hurried up. “Did anybody die?” he asked. “Dad’s in the bathroom, but if somebody died I’ll get him out.”

  The driver forced his way past the air bags, got out of the car, and instead of looking at his vehicle, asked anyone who was listening, “Is this the garage sale? Is there anything left?” Then he went to the long table to pick through the dregs of the dregs of Nick’s garbage, just like everyone else. All that was left were broken fragments
of things that could not be identified when they were whole, much less now that they were in pieces. Yet people still sifted through them like prospectors panning for gold.

  “These people are nuts!” Caitlin said, then added, “And I was just one of them!”

  Apparently the sudden shock of nearly getting killed had jarred her out of the weird state she had been in—yet even now, Nick couldn’t help but notice the way she was drawn back to that reel-to-reel recorder in the garage, and he followed her.

  “I already paid you for this, right?” Caitlin asked, standing over the recorder, her hand on it almost possessively.

  Drenched people kept arriving from the street. Many of them were not in rain gear or even carrying umbrellas. It was like they were drawn to the place like moths to a flame.

  Or a bulb, Nick thought.

  Nick turned to the oversize bulb on its stand, lighting up the garage and casting long shadows stretching out like spokes toward the mob examining the merchandise. There was something about that light. Not quite hypnotic, but soothing. Penetrating. Nick could feel it tugging at him like some sort of secret gravity. Was that crazy?

  He reached over to the light, took the switch between his thumb and forefinger, and clicked it off.

  The light died, its filament dimming to a faint orange glow before extinguishing entirely. And when he looked at the people scavenging the table, everyone took one last gander at the piece of broken junk in their hands and put it down.

  “Well,” someone said, “this was certainly a waste of time.”

  Everyone else seemed to agree, voicing thoughts from disappointment to disgust.

  “I can’t believe I missed the game for this.”

  “Look at my dress! Soaked!”

  “They have some nerve calling this a garage sale.”

  “Did I just run my car into a tree?”

  None of them seemed to remember that just an instant before they had been willing to shell out whatever money they had for whatever they could get.

  Caitlin, coming up beside Nick, breathed a deep, shuddering breath. “I feel better now.”

  “I guess you don’t really want that tape recorder, do you.”