The Storyteller

by Aaron Starmer

  “Jesus, you yourself just said someone whose niece is missing and presumed dead wouldn’t want to talk about that,” I said as I pulled the headphones off and placed them on Glen’s lap. “Why don’t you just let him be? He’s innocent.”

  “No,” Mandy said. “He’s creepy.”

  “Because he doesn’t want to talk about a dead kid in the Dead Sea who’s wearing armor?” I said. “Gimme a break. I don’t want to talk about that.”

  “It’s true,” Glen said. “She doesn’t.”

  “How many times have you listened in on him?” I asked.

  Mandy shrugged. “Five or six. Mostly when I’m at your place.”

  “What?”

  “In the bathroom,” Mandy said with a sigh. “For, like, ten or twenty minutes tops. I bring the walkie-talkie in my purse, but I didn’t want to let you know about it until I knew for sure I was onto something.”

  “But you just admitted you’re not onto something,” I told her. “You said all he talks about is stupid toys and stuff.”

  Mandy took her headphones off and handed them to me. “What I’m onto is that your brother is wrapped up in some shady business. With Kyle, with Charlie, with Fiona. And if Fiona’s uncle is wrapped up in it too, then you and your family need to be safe. He could come after you. So you keep that walkie-talkie. Dan and Chad won’t miss it, and I can’t come over all the time to listen and keep you safe. You should do the listening. If this creep slips up and says anything weird, you can tell the cops.”

  “Or me,” Glen said with his chest puffed up.

  “Yes,” Mandy said. “Or Glenny Boy here. I’ll give him the other walkie-talkie. He seems to know what he’s doing with these things. Maybe he can fiddle with the switches and knobs and figure out a way to listen from his house too.”

  Like a mermaid flapping her tail in excitement, Glen flapped his legs. “I’ll definitely try! Thanks!” he yelped.

  “Yeah … thanks,” I said, but it was hardly a yelp. It was more of a Great, now I’ve got something else to deal with.

  “I want egg rolls,” Mandy said as she stood. “Your house is closer. Your mom still buys those microwave egg rolls, right?”

  “I guess,” I said.

  “Good. Let’s do this.”

  MONDAY, 12/11/1989

  EVENING

  Glen insisted that we bring the walkie-talkies to school today, saying, “When you’re in your study hall and I’m in my study hall, we can put them on and chat.”

  “Won’t Ms. Hunkle notice?” I asked.

  “She lets kids wear Walkmen all the time,” he said. “What’s the difference? I’ll whisper.”

  “I don’t know if Mr. Gregson will be cool with it on my end.”

  “Tell him you’re listening to one of those books on tape. He won’t mind. Kids play cards in study hall. This is no worse than that.”

  Point taken. I knew I could get away with it. I just wasn’t sure I wanted to get away with it. During study hall, I was planning on writing more about the wombat. The whole concept of Alistair’s Aquavania was sparking all sorts of thoughts and ideas for the wombat story. A phrase keeps playing over in my head.

  Anything is possible. Anything is possible. Anything is possible.

  I went along with Glen’s plan anyway. I brought the walkie-talkie and tuned it to the frequency we’d agreed upon. I figured I’d let Glen do most of the talking, which I was sure he wouldn’t have a problem with, and when I sat at my desk, I propped my math book up so I could hide behind it and appear to be studying.

  “So what do you want to talk about?” Glen asked as soon as we connected, which was exactly the wrong thing for him to say. I didn’t want to lead this conversation. I hardly wanted to follow it.

  “Um … I don’t know,” I said, and let my head fall and rest on my folded arms. “What do you want to talk about?”

  “Hmm,” he said. “Ask me something that you often wonder about me.”

  Dangerous proposal. I wondered a lot of things about Glen. Not many that I was comfortable asking him about, though. Like, why would he be into a weird girl like me? Did he think I was using him? And if he did, why would he be okay with that? And if he didn’t, then …

  Hmm … these are really things I should be figuring out myself, I guess. But I don’t want to figure them out now, and I didn’t want to figure them out then. All I wanted to do was write my story. I wanted to think about Alistair and Aquavania and …

  That’s when it came to me: the perfect question to satisfy Glen but also indulge my curiosity about Alistair’s stories.

  “Okay,” I whispered through the airwaves. “How about this? If you had the ability to be, like, a god, I mean a real god, a guy who could create whatever he wanted, what would you create?”

  “Roger that,” he responded, because he’s a sucker for official lingo. “It’s a weird question. But weird is good. I guess I’d create a world where there were, like, dragons, centaurs, and elves, because those are the coolest kinds of places. Medievaly ones. But maybe there’d also be spaceships, because spaceships are cool. And lions and African animals, because they’re awesome as well. And dinosaurs. T. rex, definitely.”

  “Sorry, hon, but I don’t think you’d last long in that world,” I said.

  The hon—as in short for honey, as in you, Glen, are my honey—slipped off my tongue without me thinking about it. Really? Hon? What is wrong with me?

  It didn’t weird him out one bit, though. “Oh, I’d have force fields around me,” he said quickly. “And I would smite things whenever I wanted to.”

  “Smite?”

  “It means kill.”

  “I know what it means. I guess I don’t see you as much of a smiter.”

  “Gods smite. That’s what they do.”

  For weeks, there had been a vision in my head: Alistair holding a gun. Now, listening to Glen, my head hidden behind the book and buried in my arms, there was a new vision: Alistair the god. Flowing beard, sitting on a cloud, holding a lightning bolt, and bellowing that totally bonkers, totally creepy job description:

  “I am the guardian of the images and ideas. When daydreamers need the end, then I give them the end. I am the holder of the souls. And once I figure out how, I’m going to release them.”

  “Smiting is serious business,” I told Glen. “You’re talking about lives. Souls.”

  “Hey, you asked me what I want, and that’s what I want. Elves, dinosaurs, and smiting.”

  Glen sounded smug, so my vision of Alistair became smug too, his chin high and eyes squinty. There were now cages surrounding him, at his feet. Little birdcages with wispy souls imprisoned in them. Ghostlike things, specters in the shape of Charlie and Fiona. Before I knew what was happening, my arms were wet. I was crying.

  “I’ve gotta go,” I whispered.

  “Did Mr. Gregson bust you?” he asked.

  “Something like that. Goodbye.”

  “It’s not goodbye.”

  “Okay then,” I whispered, trying to keep my voice from cracking. “See ya … later.”

  “No,” he said. “This is a walkie-talkie. You say over and out.”

  “Oh … over then. Over and out.”

  Still hidden behind the book, I pulled the headphones off and laid them on the desk. I kept my face buried in my arms and I didn’t cry more than those first few tears, but I did realize something.

  Not all promises need to be kept. Someone else has to know.

  I’m afraid Glen probably isn’t that person.

  THE TUBES

  There was once this world without phones, without telegraphs or walkie-talkies or any communication devices at all. It was a perfectly happy world, and the people who lived there generally liked one another. They liked one another enough that they often wished they could talk to one another when separated by great distances. Tough luck. In case you missed it a few sentences ago, there was a clear obstacle: no phones.

  “Tubes!” a girl named Harriet hooted in cla
ss one day. It was one of those eureka! hoots, delivered as she stood up on her chair.

  “What’s this, now?” her teacher asked. “I’m sorry, but we don’t follow you, Harriet. Sit down, please.”

  Harriet didn’t budge. “That’s how we should talk to people far away,” she explained. “I’ve been thinking about this all day because my friend Georgie lives a few houses down and I can’t ever speak to her when we’re not together. But tubes will solve that! Tubes that go through the entire town!”

  “I haven’t an inkling what you’re talking about, Harriet,” the teacher said. “Now stop distracting the class and sit down.”

  But the rest of the class did have an inkling, and the rest of the class would be distracted for the rest of the afternoon. Because what Harriet was proposing was like a secret system of communication the kids had already set up. You see, there were these old pipes that ran through the walls of their school but no longer carried water. A few industrious students drilled some tiny holes through the walls and into the pipes. Then, to listen in and to whisper to friends in other classes, they slipped the small ends of funnels into the holes. It basically turned the pipes into a series of megaphones.

  Harriet’s idea for tubes was more or less the same thing, but on a much grander scale. Instead of rigid old pipes, flexible tubing seemed a better choice, and instead of removable funnels, permanent amplifying cones seemed appropriate. With the help of her friend Georgie, she tested the idea out.

  Georgie’s parents owned an Italian restaurant, and they had more than enough pasta and cheese on hand. So the two girls cooked up a bunch of ziti—which is a hollow kind of pasta—and they connected the pieces together using melted mozzarella as glue. In no time, they had a cheesy, bendable tube that was about a hundred yards long. They crafted the amplifying horns from sheets of lasagna that were cooked, cheesed together, and shaped to look like tubas.

  Harriet and Georgie had tried in the past to communicate using tin cans linked by string, but it had never really worked. They’d scream into the things and barely get a whisper on the other end. Their ziti tube was the opposite. Whisper into it and a clear holler would burst from the other end.

  It was more than a success. It was a defining moment in their world.

  The girls brought the tube to a local scientist, who was so thrilled by it that he brought it to a banker, who gave them money to develop more tubes. Within a few months, tubes made of pasta were snaking their way through Harriet’s town and everyone was chatting with their friends without ever getting up from their beds or hammocks or wherever it was that they liked to laze about.

  Harriet had basically invented a telephone system, though that’s not what they called it because telephone wasn’t a word that existed in their world. They simply referred to the systems as the Tubes.

  The Tubes started simply enough, as a few dozen strung around town between houses, but soon businesses started making their own. They gave out tubes that connected directly to their shops and restaurants so that everyone in town would have a direct link. Before long, other towns were doing the same thing and the world started becoming a tangle of tubes. Because every time you wanted to connect with a new person or a new business, you needed a new tube. So if you had hundreds of friends, family members, and businesses you wanted to keep in touch with, then you needed hundreds of tubes.

  Pasta factories became tube factories and people stopped leaving their houses altogether, because they didn’t want to navigate over the tangle of tubes on the ground. To make isolation livable, engineers figured out how to widen the tubes and connect them to vacuums and fans so that objects, and even people, could be pushed through them.

  Problems were inevitable. Tubes started to break. Objects, and even people, got stuck. Mischievous teenagers rerouted tubes and spliced them together in different configurations so that when you thought you were talking to one person, you ended up talking to another. False accusations, ruined marriages, and all manners of strife resulted from the mischief.

  Harriet began to feel guilty. Her world had functioned fine without the tubes, and while they had made life easier in a few ways, they had made it harder in many others. She considered destroying them, burning them all, but there were too many and it would’ve been too dangerous. So she decided to leave.

  “This is all our fault,” Harriet told Georgie through their original tube. “I can’t live here anymore. I’m going somewhere the tubes haven’t reached yet. You can come with me if you want.”

  “I don’t think I could live without the tubes,” Georgie said. “But I’ll miss you so much!”

  “I’ll miss you too,” Harriet said. “But I have to do this. Goodbye.”

  Then she tossed her original tube to the side, packed a bag, and set out into the world. She knew she’d miss her other friends and her family, but she also knew they’d hardly realize she was gone. They were too obsessed with their tubes to notice much of anything.

  Traveling was actually easier than she expected. The tubes were everywhere and they were slippery and slimy, and she could ride on top of them like waves, sliding from one town to the next. After a few weeks, the tubes were still everywhere, but they kept her alive. Their composition of pasta and cheese made them edible. Harriet could also cut holes in them and steal bits of food that were being delivered from one place to another.

  There were almost no other people outside anymore. Even the installation of new tubes was done from inside other tubes. But during her journey, Harriet came upon a newborn baby, a little girl. She must have slipped into and out of the tubes somehow and was now lost.

  Harriet didn’t know what to do. She didn’t think she could raise the baby. So she slipped the baby back into one of the tubes, knowing it had to end up somewhere. “Good luck and Godspeed,” she said. And Harriet journeyed on.

  The tubes had taken over so many habitats that she didn’t see evidence that there were even animals left in the world, until one morning she heard chirps and howls in the distance. She followed the sounds of the animals, and within a few days, she was finally out of the range of the tubes and in a dense forest. Animals were everywhere, though they didn’t bother with Harriet. She still craved companionship, so she tried desperately to communicate with them, but they’d give her a look or a sniff and then move on.

  As discouraged by that as she was, Harriet was still glad to have found a home away from the tubes. She built a shelter next to a river and settled in for a new life.

  She lived as a hermit for many years, surviving off of fish from the river, berries, and other wild foods. The animals never really became her friends. They tolerated her, but they could sense that she was different and they didn’t welcome her into their various societies.

  By the time she was an old woman, she was becoming nostalgic. Knowing she didn’t have much time left, she decided to travel home to see if she might find her friend Georgie again, or at least discover what happened with the tubes.

  When she reached the first tangle of tubes, she cut into one and spoke into it.

  “This is Harriet,” she said. “Whoever hears this, please let it be known that I have been gone a long time, but I am coming home.”

  “Harriet?” replied a voice. “The Harriet who invented the tubes?”

  “Yes,” Harriet replied.

  “Stay where you are,” the voice said. “We’re coming for you.”

  Harriet didn’t need to wait long. Within seconds a giant mechanical claw shot out from the tube and grabbed her and pulled her in. At lightning speeds she traveled through the tube, and when she came out on the other side, she landed on a pile of sticks.

  Surrounding the sticks was a group of people dressed in ragged clothes and holding torches. Sitting on a tall throne behind the people and looking down on them was an old woman. She was wrinkled and withered, but Harriet recognized her. It was Georgie.

  “Harriet,” Georgie said. “You abandoned us long ago. And now you are sentenced to death.”


  “For leaving?” Harriet asked.

  “No, for coming back and using the tubes,” Georgie said. “You were right, it was our fault that the world became what it was. A baby was found dead in the tubes, years ago. It was a big wake-up call, and showed us the errors of our ways. So I led a revolution and we made the tubes illegal. We redirected them so they all lead here, and anyone caught using them is brought here and sentenced to death.”

  “But I only wanted to see you,” Harriet said. “I didn’t know it was illegal. I only wanted to know what had happened to the world.”

  “This,” Georgie said. “This is what happened to the world.”

  And Georgie nodded at the people, who lowered their torches and set the sticks aflame.

  TUESDAY, 12/12/1989

  MORNING

  I’m hunched over my desk in homeroom, writing this before first bell because hopefully this is a turning point, and I need to record it while it’s still fresh.

  I did it. I told Dad. It wasn’t too hard, actually. My parents have adjusted their work schedules so that at least one of them can be home at all times while the other is always available to walk me to school.

  Dad was on Keri-walking duty this morning, and I figured it was now or never.

  “I’m worried about Alistair,” I told him.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah.”

  But there was a lot more than yeah in those yeahs. His eyes, his posture, his breath crystallizing in big clouds with each puff into the frosty air, they all told me that the first yeah meant Aren’t we all? and the second yeah meant We’ve really got to do something about this, don’t we?

  “He’s having delusions, I think,” I told Dad. “He says he goes to a magical world. A place that grants wishes. I think he believes Fiona and Charlie are there.”

  Dad didn’t slow his stride. He didn’t look at me either. School was visible through the trees in the distance, and he was treating it like a finish line in a race. “When I was a kid—” he started to say, but I couldn’t let him take one of his inevitable detours down memory lane.