The Power of Un

by Nancy Etchemendy

  One of my mother’s favorite warnings scuttled through my skull, and I said it aloud before I could stop myself: “Beware of strangers bearing gifts.”

  The old man closed his eyes for a second or two and smiled. When he opened them again, he said, “This is so weird. So great and weird.” He looked … well … delighted is the only way I can describe it.

  I sat up. Great and weird? These weren’t words I expected to hear from a guy who had to be at least seventy. My heart finally slowed a little, maybe because he seemed to find all this just as strange as I did.

  “Your mom’s right, of course. You shouldn’t take gifts from strangers,” he said. “At least not under normal circumstances.”

  My heart sped up again. How did he know my mother had given me that warning?

  “But these aren’t normal circumstances. Far from it!” He laughed, and I surprised myself by lowering the stick. It was the kind of laugh I’ve heard from my dad when he finds a rare book in perfect condition. Ash laughed that way once after we took a clock apart and put it back together and it started ticking. It wasn’t the laugh of an ax murderer.

  The old man held the box up so I could see it better. It was about the size of a paperback book and looked a little like an overgrown calculator or an electronic game, but not quite like either one. The case was gunmetal gray. It had a keypad and colored buttons that might have lit up.

  He reached toward me. “Let me help you up,” he said. I thought about it for a second or two, then took his hand, which felt firm and cool. Not strong exactly, but solid. I dropped the stick in the leaves and brushed myself off.

  “You kind of startled me a little,” I said.

  “Couldn’t help it. It’s unavoidable. I tend to appear suddenly” He glanced at his wrist. So did I. He wasn’t wearing a watch there, but a small, square panel gleamed in the skin on the back of his hand. Maybe it was some kind of watch after all, because he said, “I tend to disappear suddenly, too. Sorry to rush you, but I really have to hurry. There’s no way of knowing how long it will be before the … well, there’s no word for it yet … before things begin to deteriorate.”

  The guy was beginning to sound weird again, and I licked my lips, looking around for my big stick. But before I could bend to retrieve it, he said, “Isn’t there a good place to sit somewhere near here? We need to talk.” His voice was cheerful, and by this time I did want to ask him roughly a gazillion questions. So I decided to forget about the stick.

  There’s a big, flat-topped rock in the woods where I sometimes go to think or just be alone. It was where I’d been headed when I left the house, so I led him there. It wasn’t far, maybe fifty or sixty feet down the path, but he walked slowly. He had a bad limp and he was wearing these funny little slippers, so thin they must have felt almost like no shoes at all. Along the way, he talked nonstop.

  “How are things at home?” he asked.

  I felt like saying not so hot, but I wasn’t sure how much I wanted him to know, so I just said, “Oh, I dunno.”

  “How’s Dooms?” he asked with a strange, soft little smile.

  “Dooms?” I frowned, partly because his nosiness was starting to annoy me, partly because the question and the way he asked it were so completely strange. Maybe he had me mixed up with somebody else, and this whole thing was just one big mistake. “Who’s Dooms?”

  He made a sound like “phhtt” and rubbed his forehead hard. “Silly me,” he said, waving a hand in the air as if swishing away gnats.

  When we came to the rock, he sat down on it with a sigh. Walking the short distance seemed to tire him out. He patted a place beside him, inviting me to join him.

  He looked at the back of his hand again and frowned. “We’d better hurry,” he repeated. He lifted the little box so we could both see it better in the twilight. “This is yours. It’s what I came to do, give you this.” He spoke very fast, the words tripping over each other so I had to listen hard. “This is important. Remember what I’m telling you. This is a device, a delicate piece of equipment. As you can see, it’s handmade. It’s the only one of its kind.”

  Now that I had a better look, I could see he was right. It reminded me of a found-object sculpture. There was a little screen at the top, maybe an LCD. But it was slightly crooked. So were the number keys below it. There was a large red key that said ORDER in bold letters. The little buttons that might have been lights were different sizes and colors, as if somebody had stuck together whatever was handy. They, too, sat crookedly in the face of the device. A strip of battered black tape held the front of the case to the back. The whole thing looked like a piece of junk.

  “Are you positive you’ve got the right person?” I asked. By now I was really beginning to wonder. Nothing about this made sense.

  “Your name is Gibson Finney, right? And you live at 410 Cherrywood Drive?”

  “Yeah, that’s me.”

  “You’re the right person, then. There’s really no doubt.”

  “But I don’t understand.”

  The old man sighed through his nose and smiled. “That’s what I’m trying to do. Help you understand. Now, please listen carefully, because we’re running out of time, and I still have a lot to explain.” He was beginning to remind me of a teacher. “I want to ask you a question,” he said. “Have you ever made a mistake in a game and asked your opponent if you could take your turn over again? Say, a bad move in checkers, or you were unfairly distracted while trying to shoot a basket?”

  “Sure. A do-over,” I said. “Everybody needs a do-over sometimes.”

  “You can do this with your computer, too, am I right? If you make a mistake, there’s an ‘undo’ command. Give it, and you’re back where you started before you made the error.”

  “Sure, it’s one of best things about computers.”

  The old man’s eyes shone. “Exactly! And what if you had a machine that gave you the power to undo any mistake? Not just in a game, but anytime, anywhere, any mistake at all?”

  “Wha—” I said. His meaning hit me all at once, so hard I couldn’t finish the word. I could barely even finish a thought, there were suddenly so many of them jostling each other in my brain. “You mean, this machine … I could … with this? …”

  “Yes,” he said. And he flashed a huge grin.

  My heart was galloping again. I reached for the box, then stopped myself. “Could I touch it?”

  “Of course. It’s yours.” And he started to give it to me. I reached out for it, but an inch from the little machine, my hand stopped as if there were invisible bricks in the air. I pushed hard. I could see the old man was pushing, too. He clenched his teeth. Veins in his arms and neck stood out. “Come on,” he whispered. “This has to be possible!”

  He grunted and shoved so hard he almost fell off the rock when my hand finally touched the box.

  It was heavier than I’d expected and cool against my skin. I stared at the screen and the keypad in the dusk and wondered if I was dreaming. Everything that had happened since I met this strange old guy was unbelievable.

  “Are you serious?” I asked. “Undo any mistake? A chance to do anything I want over again?”

  “Well, there are limits, of course. But basically, yes, do anything you want over again. We call it the Power of Un.”

  “Why me?” I whispered.

  The old man looked at me in that strange way again, as if I were a piece of art in a museum or some other weird thing. He smiled, but he never answered the question. Instead, he went on as if I’d never asked it. “Shall I explain how the unner works?”

  Unner. The word sounded magical. I said it softly as I looked at the controls and realized they made no sense at all. I recognized the letters and numbers on the machine, but they were arranged in mysterious ways. There were letters beside the screen: H, M, and S. And there were words, if you could call them that, under each of the three colored buttons: HMODE, under a round yellow one; MMODE, under a bigger blue one; SMODE, under a square greenish button
that looked as if it needed to be straightened. The numbers 1 to 9 were arranged on the keypad, but there was no 0. Then there was the big red ORDER button. Order what?

  “Yeah, how does it work?” I asked.

  There was a sudden movement in the shadows not far off. The old man turned sharply toward it and said, “Not yet, I need more time! Can’t you get me just another minute or two?”

  I stared in the same direction but couldn’t see anything, though I heard a faint hiss that rose and fell like voices on a bad phone. A chill scurried up my spine. “What’s going on?”

  The old man stood up slowly, as if he didn’t really want to, and began to back away from me, shaking his head. “Ironic. I’ve run out of time! I’m sorry, Gib. Believe me, I’d stay longer if I could. We’re just not very good at this yet. I’ll be gone in a few seconds, whether I want to go or not. You’re going to have to finish learning about the unner on your own. It won’t be easy, but I know you can do it.”

  The shadows were so deep and he had moved so far from me that I could barely see him. “Wait! I have no clue how to work this thing,” I called.

  He was all but invisible, but his disembodied voice, fuzzy and echoing, floated through the evening woods. “Sorry about the zero. I was in a hurry. No time. Take it with you tonight. But Gib, watch out …”

  “Watch out for what?” I ran toward his voice, but he disappeared into the gloom.

  The pumpkin-orange light of a rising hunter’s moon peeked between tree trunks. A chilly breeze rattled the dead leaves that hadn’t yet fallen. Somewhere nearby an animal I couldn’t identify made a chittering sound, and I shivered, my hand sweating on the greatest power any human being, living or dead, had ever held.

  3

  FEAR OF THE DARK

  I went back to the big rock and sat down. Fix any mistake. Get a second chance at anything. Ideas poured into my head, one on top of another: flunk a test, take it over again; swing at the ball as many times as I wanted till I finally hit the winning home run; make bets with people, and if I lost, go back and bet the other way. This was better than winning the lottery!

  My hands shook as I studied the unner in the twilight, turning it over and over, brushing the keypad with my fingers, touching the screen. It took me a minute to get up the courage to press one of the keys—the 9, because I’ve always liked that number.

  Nothing happened.

  No numbers appeared on the screen. No lights lit up. The little box made no sounds, ominous or otherwise.

  I pressed a bunch of different keys. Nothing. I pressed the colored buttons. Nothing. After a while I got so desperate I even squeezed my eyes shut and dared to punch the ORDER key. Still nothing. Maybe the old man was just a crazy vagrant after all, and the amazing machine was no more than what it seemed: a cobbled-up pile of junk that had never worked in the first place.

  Deep twilight had crept into the woods, and I could no longer see things clearly, not even my own hands on the unner. Luckily, my watch has a tiny, built-in light. A quick look confirmed what I already feared. I was late for dinner. My parents are fairly reasonable about a lot of things, but late for dinner isn’t one of them. If I didn’t get home soon, there was a major possibility they would ground me. In which case, abandon all hope—the carnival might as well be on Mars.

  I jumped up from the rock and started to run back along the path toward the house. There was no daylight left anymore, just the faint glow of moonlight wherever it could find its way between the branches. Confusing checkerboards of shadow dappled the ground. I thought I knew every inch of that path and could have run it blindfolded, but I was wrong. The toe of my shoe caught on something—I couldn’t tell what it was—and I sprawled facedown.

  I turned over and sat up, spitting leaves, and rubbed the tip of my nose, which burned. I’d scraped it on something. I forgot about that completely, though, when I realized the unner was no longer in my hands. I peered around but couldn’t see it anywhere in the chaos of leaf shadows.

  Stay cool, I told myself. You’ll find it. But my stomach didn’t believe me. It felt suspended in midair, as if I were falling out of a tree. Still on hands and knees, I crawled all over the forest floor, scattering leaves and dirt like a maniac.

  I spent five precious minutes searching, knowing that every lost second moved me closer to being grounded. Finally I had to admit it was useless. I needed light. So I headed reluctantly for the house again, mumbling the worst words I could think of.

  By the time I ran up the walk, Mom was standing at the front door with her hands on her hips. A ruffly square-dance skirt mushroomed around her waist. I never would have told her so, but it looked all wrong on her. I’m used to seeing her in the clothes she wears at the hardware store: canvas carpenter pants and a green shirt with her name on it. The best plumbers in town listen with respect when she talks about the difference between copper and galvanized steel. Whenever she wears those frou-frou square-dance ruffles, it’s like looking at a kid’s puzzle: What’s Wrong with this Picture?

  “Gibson Finney, where have you been?” she said. She never calls me Gibson except when she’s mad. And she never calls me Gibson Finney unless she’s really, really mad.

  “Over in the woods, kicking rocks and, I dunno … dunking,” I said. Realizing how lame that must sound, I added, “I would have been home sooner, but there was this weird old guy in there and he … wanted to talk. Sorry.” I knew a second later that admitting I’d been talking to a stranger might not be the best way to convince her I shouldn’t be grounded. I stared at my shoes and tried to get myself ready for whatever would come next.

  “I ought to ground you! You were talking to a stranger? A man? In the woods at night?” She made it sound as if I’d decided to shake hands with a crocodile.

  “Well … I only said a couple of things. He did most of the talking.”

  Then I felt her hands on my cheeks, which surprised me more than a little. Her eyes still had sparklers of anger in them, but when she spoke, her voice was softer than before. “You had me so worried, honey. Are you all right?”

  I smiled a little. We’d moved from Gibson Finney to honey. Maybe there was hope after all.

  Then she noticed the scrape. “Oh, your poor nose! Did he hurt you? If he hurt you I’ll … I’ll make him wish he’d never been born, that … that …” She patted my arms and shoulders semihysterically, maybe checking for broken bones. Her cheeks were bright red.

  I felt strangely happy. She would actually make somebody sorry they were ever born if they hurt me? She sounded like she meant it.

  “Mom, Mom, it’s O.K. I was in a hurry to get home and I tripped in the woods. That’s all.” I stopped her hand just as she started patting my hips. “He didn’t touch me. He didn’t even try to touch me. He was just a crazy old homeless guy or something. All he did was talk awhile. Then he disappeared.” I didn’t mention the unner, though I felt a little guilty about it. Something inside me wanted to keep it a secret, at least for now.

  She frowned and touched my face beside my nose, almost on the scrape but not quite. The wound was probably dirty, and I suppose she was battling to keep herself from brushing at it. She may be unusual in some ways, but when it comes to obsessively cleaning open wounds, she’s the same as every other mom in the known universe.

  “You’re sure he didn’t hurt you?” she asked.

  “Positive.”

  She looked doubtful for a second, then pulled me firmly toward the house. “Well, let’s get that scrape cleaned up. Your dinner’s ready. Roxy’s already eating, and Dad and I are leaving in a minute.”

  Before long, I had a Band-Aid on my nose and was seated beside Roxy at the table, shoveling down a big helping of Dad’s beef stew.

  “Do you think we should call the police?” Mom asked Dad as he helped her don a mind-numbing jacket with fringe and sequins.

  “Mo-o-o-m!” I said. “He didn’t do anything. He just talked to me.”

  “There’s nothing so bad about that,�
�� said Dad.

  “Yeah, but anybody who hangs out in the woods at night is creepy,” said Roxy. “I’m scared!” She held her butter knife with both hands, as if she might have to use it for self-defense.

  “He wasn’t creepy. And he’s not hanging out! He’s gone. I already told you,” I said.

  Mom frowned as she picked up her purse—which had fringe like her jacket, plus red, white, and blue stars and stripes. I squirmed when I realized I was glad I wouldn’t have to be seen with her.

  “What if you only think he’s gone?” she asked. “He could still be out there, hiding. What if he watched you walk home and he knows where you live …”

  Dad said, “Sh!” and gave Mom a fierce look. “Gib, are you scared?”

  “No!” I didn’t want to get the old guy in trouble. I was beginning to feel sorry I’d ever mentioned him.

  Dad shrugged and held his hands out, palms up. “There’s your answer. Gib’s not scared. I trust his judgment. Rox, you don’t need to be scared, either. Gib’s got the situation under control.”

  Roxy frowned and huffed.

  “Oh, all right,” said Mom, sounding annoyed. She kissed me on the cheek. “But you be careful, Gib. You and Ash and Roxy stick together at the carnival. Don’t dawdle. And,” she gave Roxy a kiss, too, “have a wonderful time.”

  I couldn’t help rolling my eyes a little. Dad grinned at me as soon as Mom wasn’t looking, and they waved as they closed the door behind them.

  I peeled the Band-Aid off my nose and looked at the clock on the wall. I was supposed to meet Ash at 7:00. It was already 6:45, and Ash didn’t know about the Roxy debacle yet. I needed to make another change in the plan, too. I wanted to get a flashlight and look for the unner before we started for the carnival. I figured I’d better phone him as soon as I finished dinner. I grabbed a hunk of bread and used it to soak up the last of my stew.