Call Me Joe

by Martin Van Es

  Several of them called after her in alarm as she left the classroom and walked away down the corridor, telling her she should get someone from security to go with her because that was the rule, but she took no notice. She knew they were technically right, of course, but she was curious to find out more about this strange figure and he hadn’t looked dangerous to her. If she alerted security they would cart him off and she would never know where he had come from or why he was lurking outside her classroom.

  “Hi,” she said as she rounded the corner and found him still on the seat, his eyes closed as if enjoying the warmth of the returned sunshine. Her class were standing at the window, watching to see what would happen next and she sent them scattering back to their desks with a ferocious glare.

  “Hi,” he said, opening his eyes and rising politely from his seat to greet her with a respectful bow. “I hope you don’t mind me resting here for a while.”

  “Of course not.” She had no idea why she had said that, it just seemed like the right response to such a courteous request. Having those astonishing eyes look directly at her made her blush and flounder for words.

  “So,” he went on, sitting back down and draping his arm comfortably along the back of the seat, “how are you?”

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “but do I know you?”

  He smiled and she was taken aback by how white and strong his teeth were. They were definitely not the teeth of a tramp or a shipwrecked castaway.

  “I think,” he said, “that if you look deep into your memory, you will find that you do.”

  It sort of made sense as he said it, but the moment she thought about it, it started to sound weird and she wondered if he was delusional. Maybe the kids were right and she should do something responsible about the situation and call for help. Perhaps he had escaped from a local institution and they were already looking for him.

  “Are you here to see someone?” she asked in a voice which she hoped sounded authoritative and not just prim.

  “Is it so impossible that I might be here to see you?”

  She let out an embarrassing little giggle before regaining control of herself. Now he was just being flirtatious, which was a trait she normally despised in men, but not this time. For some reason she couldn’t quite put her finger on, she liked it when he did it. Maybe it was because he was smiling so genuinely and because it didn’t seem like he had any ulterior motives.

  “I’m sorry to ask so many questions,” she continued, “but do you work here?”

  “My work is pretty much everywhere I go,” he said, the warmth of his returning smile compensating for an evasiveness which would normally have incensed her.

  “How did you get past security?” She sat down on the bench next to him, even though his arm was still stretched proprietarily along the back behind her.

  “It was very dark. They couldn’t be expected to watch every part of a place as big as this. They’re only human after all.” He grinned mischievously, as if he was sharing a private joke with her – a joke she didn’t get.

  “You came during that eclipse?”

  “Is that what you think it was?”

  “I have no idea what it was. Do you know what it was? It was very alarming.”

  “You don’t have to be afraid of me.”

  “I didn’t say I was,” she laughed, “I don’t think I was even talking about you, was I?”

  “You’re fun to talk to,” he said. “Those children are lucky to have you as a teacher.”

  “Thank you. I wish you would tell that to my headmaster.”

  “I will if you like.”

  “No, really, I don’t think you should do that, unless you want to get thrown off the premises instantly.”

  “That would be a shame. I would like to spend more time talking to you.”

  “They are very jumpy about security at the moment, ever since that shooting at the mosque.”

  He spread his hands wide. “You can see I don’t have a gun. I come in peace.”

  “I’m still not sure what you are doing here, staring into my classroom.”

  “I believe it was me who was being stared at. I was just sitting here, resting.”

  “Well, I know it’s a free world and all that, but I don’t think you can stay here. This is a school and it is private property. Sooner or later someone is going to call security and you will be sent packing. They might even call the police and have you arrested. It would probably be better if you moved on voluntarily.” Even as she was saying the words she was regretting them, wanting to keep him there a little longer, just so that she could stare at him. There were so many questions that she wanted him to answer and the fact that he was avoiding all of them just made her more curious.

  “Do you want me to go?” he asked.

  She didn’t speak for a moment but he waited as if the silence between them was entirely normal.

  “Where are you staying?” she asked eventually, evading the question.

  “I’ve only just arrived.”

  “Arrived from where?”

  “I’m not sure you would believe me if I told you.”

  “Do you have any luggage?”

  “No” – he looked down at himself, gesturing towards the robe – “just what you see. Do you think I need some?”

  “People usually have luggage when they arrive in a new place.”

  “I just wanted to sit and rest for a while. I’m quite tired.”

  Sophie heard the sound of a security guard’s radio from the other side of the bushes. She looked back at the classroom windows and saw that the children were watching something that she couldn’t see. One of the girls signalled to her that someone was coming. It looked like they were enjoying the drama of the situation.

  “If security find you here they will call the police,” she said, surprising herself with how adamantly she didn’t want that to happen, didn’t want anything to spoil the moment. “You need to hide.”

  “Hide?” He seemed amused by the idea.

  “Listen” – she felt herself blushing as she spoke, shocked by her own forwardness with a stranger – “I have a staff apartment in that block over there. It’s very small but you are welcome to rest there for a couple of hours while I finish my class, and then we’ll work out what to do with you. Would that be helpful?”

  “That is an act of great kindness,” he smiled again and she felt her blush deepen even further. “Are you sure that you won’t get into trouble?”

  “The caretaker is a friend,” she said, “he’ll cover for me. We need to go quickly.”

  Without looking back at the classroom window she hurried him across to the staff block and opened the outside door with a code. Inside an old man was wrestling with a large rubbish bin, trying to get it out from under a staircase.

  “George,” Sophie said, “can you do me a favour?”

  “Of course,” the old man replied, looking suspiciously at the stranger. “What do you need?”

  “This is a friend of mine. I need to get back to my class. Can you let him into my apartment and show him where everything is? He just needs to rest for the afternoon.”

  “Of course, not a problem.”

  “And maybe not mention that he is here to anyone else?” Sophie added. “He hasn’t exactly been through all the security procedures.”

  “Don’t you worry about any of that nonsense,” George said. “I don’t talk to any of them.” He gestured contemptuously towards the area where the guards most often patrolled. “I know more about what’s going on in this place than all of them put together, with their smart uniforms and guns and dark glasses. If they knew half of what I know…”

  “Thanks George.” Sophie pecked him on the cheek, making him chuckle.

  She couldn’t believe she was d
oing anything so spontaneous. She knew she was breaking at least six school rules, all of which were potentially sackable offences, but she didn’t care. Helping this kind, strange, beautiful man seemed like the right thing to do. It felt good to trust a stranger for a change. She was fed up with being warned about men and strangers and all the other dangers that were supposed to be waiting in the outside world to ambush her. Maybe this guy really was just as amiable and harmless as he seemed. Why should she distrust him just because she didn’t know anything about him?

  “Help yourself to anything you fancy from the fridge,” she called out to him as she walked away. “Not that there is much.”

  “You’re very kind,” he said. “Thank you.”

  She tried to work out where his accent was from. There didn’t seem to be much point asking him since he didn’t appear to want to give straight answers to any personal questions.

  “See you both this evening,” she said, and started running back to the classroom, feeling like a naughty schoolgirl herself and realising that she didn’t even know what his name was.

  “Did security catch him, Miss?” one of the boys asked as she arrived back at the classroom looking flushed and breathless.

  “Is he your boyfriend, Miss?” one of the girls asked, making the others snigger.

  “No, he is not my boyfriend,” she said, “and none of you appear to have any books out.”

  “It’s actually games time, Miss,” one of the boys pointed out. “Can we go back outside now the sun has come back out?”

  “We need to wait until we are sure it’s safe.”

  “Why did the sun go out, Miss?” Hugo asked. “Lots of people on the internet are saying it was aliens.”

  The others all roared with laughter but Hugo seemed as unperturbed by mockery as usual.

  “It would be great if it was,” he added.

  “I agree, Hugo,” she said, “it would be great if it was, but the chances are slim and you are not supposed to be on the internet during school hours. You know that.”

  For the rest of the afternoon, Sophie found it hard to concentrate on work. Her mind was constantly wandering back to the stranger and imagining what he might be doing in the apartment. Would he have fallen asleep on her bed? Would he have used her shower? Would he have rifled through her clothes or her paperwork? Would he steal whatever he could carry and run away before she got there? From time to time she felt suddenly fearful that she might have been very unwise in allowing a stranger into her life so quickly, but then a sense of delicious anticipation would sweep over her at the thought of seeing him again and she would glance at the classroom clock, only to see that it had barely moved since the last time she looked.

  Five

  “Does anyone…” The Director of National Security raised his voice over the babble of noise and argument around the room and coming from the screens, waiting until he had all their attention before continuing. “Does anyone in the entire world know anything about what happened? Are there any plausible theories?”

  The scientists shifted uncomfortably in their seats. All of them had spent their careers searching for logical, scientific explanations for all the miracles of life, from understanding the workings of the smallest quarks to developing theories about the origins of entire galaxies; it was exciting but unnerving to find themselves confronted with an entirely new puzzle which no one had foreseen and which had left no clues in its wake.

  A Swiss scientist, who had been pulled away from his work at the Large Hadron Collider to attend this meeting in Washington via video link, cleared his throat. “It is possible that it was an imaginary event, a mass delusion of some sort which affected the entire population of the planet…”

  “Good God!” the Director barked. “Are you trying to tell me that the entire world imagined the whole thing? That it was some sort of mass dream?”

  “There have been recorded instances,” the scientist continued cautiously, “where large crowds have been deceived into believing they have witnessed something which can’t possibly have happened.”

  “Like a rabbit appearing from a magician’s hat?” the Director asked.

  “I wouldn’t put it exactly like that, but there was the incident of Our Lady of Fatima in 1917 when an image of Mary appeared before a crowd of thousands. It was said to have been accompanied by a ‘dancing sun’…” The scientist’s words were drowned out by other voices wanting to dismiss his suggestion out of hand and putting forward their own views on this particular theory.

  “Are you suggesting this was a gigantic magician’s trick?” the Director boomed, making the others fall silent. “Or that the entire world got high on some invisible drug for twelve minutes and all imagined the same thing at the same time? Are you saying it was all a dream, like in some hokey TV drama?”

  “All I am saying is that it is a possibility that it was a mass hallucination of some sort, but I have no evidence to support that theory yet,” the scientist on the screen mumbled lamely. “At this stage we need to keep our minds open to all possibilities.”

  “Does anyone have anything better than that?” The Director addressed the whole assembly.

  “To be honest,” a voice with a deep southern accent spoke up from the back of the room, “there only seems to be one possibility.”

  “And what is that?” the Director asked.

  “That it was an act of God. It lasted for exactly twelve minutes and twelve is a very important number in the Bible. It could be significant. We all know that there is a lot we don’t know about, that there must be something ‘bigger’ behind creation that we haven’t discovered yet, the thing some people like to label ‘God’…”

  Silence fell across the room as the finest scientific minds in the Western world took in the suggestion that all the research and experimentation of the previous centuries had been in vain and that they were no further on in their understanding of the universe than primitive tribesmen doing rain dances or making sacrifices to appease some all-powerful gods.

  “Personally,” the Director growled, “I think it is more likely it has something to do with the bloody Chinese. We need to find out how much they know. I doubt they will be suggesting it’s the work of God or a magician. Do the Chinese even believe in a god?” No one answered and he sighed deeply before continuing. “So you guys are the geniuses. Explain to me what will happen if the sun goes out for any length of time.”

  The scientist sitting closest to him cleared his throat before speaking. “Everything on Earth, except some deep-sea worms, depends on the sun. Because it is about a hundred million miles from the Earth, which is around eight light minutes, nothing would happen for about eight minutes.

  “Once the gravity well of the sun disappeared, however, the Earth would no longer move around the sun, but would follow a straight line. The Earth would continue to rotate on its axis, but there would be no seasons any more. We would just be staring at the same stars all the time.

  “Other planets would disappear, Venus and Mercury after a few minutes, Mars within an hour, Neptune and Pluto within ten hours. The stars would remain visible, as well as the giant planets.

  “Temperatures would drop rapidly, just as they do at night. Within a week the average temperature on Earth would be minus thirty degrees Celsius. Billions of people would die in tropical countries during that week. The ice sheets on Antarctica and the Arctic Ocean would expand rapidly. It would snow everywhere, first at the poles, and finally at the equator. After a few weeks, the sea would freeze everywhere.

  “Power stations would soon give up and the remaining people and animals would die.”

  “Would anyone survive?” the Director asked in a subdued voice.

  “Hiding in mines might be a temporary solution, because geothermal heat provides some relief. The best places to go would be volcanic hotspots like Iceland. But food a
nd oxygen would soon run out, as would energy.

  “Some seeds and trees would last for several more decades but once the temperature had fallen far below a hundred degrees, the CO2, then the nitrogen and finally the oxygen would freeze.”

  As the scientist stopped talking, a terrible silence fell across the room.

  *****

  “The Americans don’t know anything,” the intelligence officer informed his superior in Beijing. “We have listened to their chatter and they have no ideas beyond an attack by aliens.”

  The Ministry of State Security Chief allowed a smile to flicker across the corners of his normally austere, clenched line of a mouth.

  “Do they believe everything that the Hollywood movies tell them? Are video games their answer to everything?”

  No one in the room responded beyond the occasional nod of agreement.

  “What about the Russians?” he continued.

  “It is harder to know what they are thinking. They have been in touch with the Indians but they are not giving anything away.”

  “So, if none of us know what caused it, then it might happen again and we have no idea how to avoid that happening?”

  “Yes, sir,” several voices agreed.

  “So we need a plan as to how we will survive on a planet with no light or warmth.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Find a way for me to talk to the Head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, but make it clear I do not want to involve his president – and we do not need to trouble our president at this time either – not until we have a plan that we can put to him. He trusts us to do our best for our country. We must not disappoint him.”

  The heads of all the world’s security services were talking to one another more than ever before, cautiously at first but with growing confidence as they all came to believe that no one else had any more information about the twelve minutes of darkness than they did. One thing that many of them were agreed on, though none of them were brave enough to speak the words out loud, was that they wanted to postpone directly involving their political leaders for as long as possible, knowing that those leaders would all be looking for ways to use the situation to further their own political agendas, jeopardising the possible security issues which they all foresaw could happen were the sun to disappear again, perhaps for ever.