I couldn’t understand why they were so interested. It wasn’t an explosion at all. Apparently, people were talking. Dad, with his big mouth, let a few things slip to some of the student assistants and parents caught wind of it. Some pretty outrageous stuff was being said, so I guess it was natural the TV stations picked it up.
The reporters camped on the lawn for a week. Then came the phone calls. They started out just silly pranks, but soon became threatening. It all climaxed on the night of the emergency school board meeting, called especially to address Dad’s accident.
“MISTAKES ARE COMMON in scientific discovery,” wearing his trademark suit jacket and jeans combo, Dad had healed surprisingly well by then. Most of his eyebrows had grown back, and his scars were barely noticeable.
He defended himself valiantly in front of a packed house. They’d anticipated the attendance to be high that night, so they moved the meeting from its normal location at the school board offices to the Loo Wit Room, a mini-auditorium at the high school. The space sat 400 easily, and even then it was standing room only. It wasn’t a lynch mob, though there were lots of people pretty upset at Dad. The sternest of all was Dan Freeburn, the superintendent. He sat at the front table along with four other school board members, casting a skeptical eye on Dad.
“Mr. James,” Freeburn harrumphed. What was left of his graying hair clung like a sickly ferret. “Mistakes are things we try to avoid, not encourage.”
“On the contrary,” Dad waved his arms wildly. He’s theatrical that way. “We should encourage mistakes. We should leave room to allow children to fail.”
A collective gasp from the gallery. Freeburn, too, was flabbergasted.
“I-I can’t believe what I’m hearing,” he exclaimed. “You’re a teacher, sir!”
“See? That’s what I mean,” a woman in the audience stood up. She’d been complaining about Dad the whole night. “This man is insane! He shouldn’t be allowed to supervise our children.”
“Yeah,” an anonymous woman agreed. “Somebody’s gonna get hurt for real!”
“Not to mention the money he’s already cost the district!”
“Okay, okay, folks,” Freeburn pounded his wooden gavel on the table. “Let’s all come to order here, thanks. Mr. James, you do understand that we teachers have a solemn responsibility. It’s our job not only to teach, but to make sure the student learns what we teach. And if the student fails, the teacher fails.”
Dad clasped his hands and rested his chin on two extended fingers, evoking a pose of deep contemplation. Then he spoke again, gesturing passionately. It really embarrasses me when he does that.
“Ah, but in science it’s different. We need mistakes. Sometimes the best ideas and inventions have come directly from them. Really, sometimes the best way to learn is to make a mistake.”
“Sir,” Freeburn sounded patronizing. “I’d prefer to let other people make fools of themselves and then learn from their mistakes.”
Giggles percolated the room.
The superintendent continued. “However, this isn’t about differences in educational philosophy. This is about you putting children in danger.”
“Sir, that’s not true,” a teenage boy with a bad case of acne stood up in front. It was Walter, my dad’s student lab assistant. “He’s not putting us in danger. It was just an accident. A tiny, tiny accident.”
Again the audience grew restless. Murmurs led to passionate exchanges, which devolved into outright shouting. Then the rapping of the gavel and Freeburn’s pleas brought everyone down to general silence.
“Mr. James, I’m sure what you were working on was interesting…”
“It’s more than interesting,” Dad interrupted. “And when it’s done, it’ll have such a profound effect on the human race, they’ll have to enshrine this place. Willow High School will be forever recorded in the history books—where it all began!”
“You see? It’s that right there,” Freeburn had a firm grip on his own head. “You keep saying you’re developing this groundbreaking invention that will change the world. Well, I say show me, don’t tell me.”
“Ahhh!” Dad’s face came alight. “I’m so glad you asked! Finally, I’m ready to share it with an audience. Jack? Walter? That’s your cue!”
“Wait! No, I didn’t mean now!” Freeburn protested.
In a wink I was helping Walter cart Dad’s repaired and revised machine from the storage area behind the Loo Wit Room. It wasn’t too big by itself, just the size of a palm device. But the large power source increased the overall mass, making it difficult to move out to center stage without wheels.
“When you observe our world, what do you see?” Dad addressed the crowd. “It’s just simple, three-dimensional space, four if you want to count time. But what if I told you there were more dimensions, an infinite amount, and therefore, infinite copies of each of us?”
“Now hold on, you two!” Freeburn tried to stop Walter and me from setting up the O/A’s complex fractal array. He couldn’t reach us.
Dad continued. “Imagine a device that actually lets us interact with those other dimensions…and much more!”
“I said, wait a minute!” Freeburn reached over the table, not ready to concede defeat.
“For years, now,” Dad said. “Hundreds upon thousands of scientists have toiled endlessly, spent untold fortunes and built particle colliders that have spanned small countries, and still haven’t been able to come close to the breakthrough I’ve accomplished, here, at Willow High School with this, the Omega-Alpha.”
“Benjamin James, I swear, if you fire that thing up in this room I’ll have you arrested for…for being stupid in public!”
“Don’t worry, sir. It’s on the lowest power setting, only a fraction of its capabilities,” Dad held his hand in place over the smooth interface, letting the machine sparkle like a blue-violet diamond. That’s when it started to sing. It’s the only way I can describe it. It sang. Chirps and tweets and other sounds—long, melodic humming and short, rhythmic notes pulsing with its own internal light.
Dad raised his voice above his invention’s vocalizations.
“If things go as planned, we will all be witnesses to a monumental event! Mark this down, boy—seven twenty-three p.m. Pacific Daylight Savings Time, October 3rd, 2011. Willow, Oregon…the first time human beings get a glimpse of another dimension!”
I scribbled down his dictated message.
“These four hundred-plus people are all officially members of a new age!” Dad imitated an orchestra conductor, sweeping his arm in his usual, dramatic fashion, bouncing to a standstill above the machine. He raised his brows and let the colored brightness twinkle in his eyes. Then he looked at me and pressed the single button, his smile so proud, so satisfied.
“Somebody STOP HIM!” Freeburn belted his final command.
Some people got up and attempted to leave. Others followed Freeburn’s request and tried rushing down the steps to get at Dad. Nobody got anywhere, though. The place was too packed. Most sat in stunned silence, cellphones up, cameras recording. Even pimply Walter looked like he knew he was about to see a ghost.
The second Dad pressed the button, it seemed everything stopped. People got caught in midstride. It was lucky, because one really large, toothless and angry man was about to throw himself on Dad. Nobody moved for what seemed an eternity, which turned out to be actually a fraction of a second. It was eerie. The eeriest of all was the dead silence. The machine quit singing and went mute, filling the air with a void even more deafening than the noise had been.
That changed in a hurry. From the earth’s mantle, the deepest, lowest frequency hum I’d ever heard rumbled toward us. I felt my ears pop. That was the least of my worries.
“Whoa!” Dad yelled, studying his invention’s configuration, shaking under the strain of some unseen force. He didn’t have time to make any adjustments. The machine came alive in such a brilliant, deep purple light that he had to take a step back. I tried to turn away, then
I noticed something just above Dad’s device, suspended in midair. It was a vortex, a bending of space. Behind it, the wall warped and twisted, becoming mirrors in a funhouse.
Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!
One by one, each light bulb along the walls and ceiling shorted out. It sounded like a machine gun, and would have been kind of cool if it weren’t for the fact that some were those big, florescent tubes. Shards of glass falling on you isn’t fun, especially when it seems the ground is about to swallow you whole.
“Uh, oh!” Dad screamed while trying to shield me. Then my guts jumped into my throat. The floor seemed to drop a thousand feet in a second. An extended gasp from the crowd told me everybody else felt it, too. In an instant, the vortex became one incredibly blinding light, bursting in all directions. I mean it was fast, and powerful. A hot, gale-force wind hit us, blowing people and paper and other stuff all over. It knocked me down, too. A still silence pervaded the room. I refused to look, wishing the whole thing had never happened. But it had. Dad diligently reminded me.
“Duck Soup!” he crawled to his feet. That’s his way of saying, ‘Eureka!’ or ‘I’ve got it!’ For the life of me I don’t know why he can’t just say, ‘Eureka!’ or ‘I’ve got it!’ “Jack, my son, tell me—was it you who set up the Gravitomiton?”
“Y-yes,” I squeaked, shyly glancing at the gaunt faces, made even more ghostly by the glow of the emergency lights.
“Did you calibrate it exactly the way I told you?”
My blood iced over. He was onto something. Since Dad was public enemy number one at the school, it was up to me to assemble the O/A’s power supply. I had detailed instructions, and Dad had spent hours going over them with me, drilling them into my brain. Despite all the training, though, when the time came for me to actually perform the setup, I must have done something wrong.
“I think so,” I swallowed hard.
“Well, you did something different, and you know what? I think you found a way to reduce its size exponentially! It’s genius, my boy! You’re a genius!” Dad hugged me so tight I couldn’t breathe.
“But…but it just broke. I screwed it up,” I managed to get out of my deflated lungs.
“You haven’t been listening to me, have you? There are no screw-ups in science, or in life, only breakthroughs!”
People started to come out of their catatonic states. Mr. Freeburn emerged from behind the table, which had toppled over in the blast. He stood and swept the dust from his jacket and tie, then cleared his throat while glaring at Dad.
“All in favor of firing Mr. James, say ‘aye.’”
“Aye,” the other board members mumbled in unison, each still on the floor.
“All opposed?”
Silence.
“Mr. James, you’re fired!” Freeburn ruffled through the mess of coffee cups and notepapers to find his gavel. He swung sideways and hit the overturned table. “Meeting adjourned!”
As usual, Dad wasn’t daunted. Even while the O/A lie in pieces on the floor, he continued on and on about how my mistake was going to further revolutionize his invention. I was more focused on the people. I wondered what they were thinking. What kind of stories were going to emerge when they all filtered back to the community?
It didn’t take long to get my answer. The court of public opinion came down hard. Not only did Dad lose his job, he was also under investigation by the police. They confiscated his machine and examined it, but couldn’t figure out how it worked, so they gave it back and no charges were filed. Still, he was all over the papers and the news, even popped up on YouTube. It was ugly.
And it got even uglier. A little later, Mom went ballistic when she found Dad rebuilding the O/A in the garage. She accused him of putting us kids in danger, saying he might have killed us, and she wasn’t going to give him the chance. She threatened to take us and leave right then and there, so Dad volunteered to move out. Before he left, he promised to pay for the family’s expenses. But since he was a marked man, nobody would give him even a minimum wage job. Mom got work at Winmart. That doesn’t pay enough, so the house went into foreclosure and here we are, at glamorous Tangled Trail Estates.
That was over seven months ago. I see my dad sometimes. Not enough. He’s determined more than ever to make his invention work.
That’s the end…for now.”
AMELIA SAT ATTENTIVE and alert the whole time Jack spoke of his father. Despite her civility, he began to question the sanity of anyone who would still be in the same room with him after hearing such a wild story.
Of course, he was glad she didn’t run for the hills. And actually listening to him without so much as breaking into a giggle? A development of galactic proportions. It was nothing, though, compared to what she did next.
“Let me try something,” she grabbed his right wrist without waiting for permission. “I gotta see if I’m right.”
“Right about what?”
“Hold on,” she flipped his hand over, examining every finger, every crease.
“What? Are you going to read my palm?” he snickered.
“Shhh!” she glared at him, then placed an open palm over his while cupping her other hand on the feather dangling from her necklace.
“What’s with the feather?” he tried again not to laugh.
She said nothing. Her stare widened. She jerked away, inhaling deep and trembling as if she felt an icy touch down her back. Then she let out her breath, her expression of worry replaced by one of confidence. “I knew it!”
“What? You knew what?”
“Your spirit clothes.”
“My spirit clothes?”
“Yeah, your aura. Off the charts, man.”
“What does that mean?” Jack was skeptical, yet intrigued.
“It means exactly what my intuition has been telling me. You’re destined for big things, Jack. Your life will be defined by huge, wonderful, exciting, maybe even historic events. What will happen, when it happens, I can’t tell. One thing I do know, if you follow where fate takes you, it’s gonna be one uncanny ride.”
SEVEN
THE VOICES SOUNDED faint at first. Gentle, lapping waves. Steadily, though, they became more and more distinct, like some enigmatic code being deciphered in his subconscious.
“I tell you, he’s drunk!”
“For the last time, he’s not drunk! He had one of these.”
“An energy drink? One energy drink and he passed out?”
“What a lightweight.”
“He must be allergic to caffeine or something.”
“Haha! He’s a wimp!”
“Now, Pud. You know how you get with garlic.”
An explosive burst of flatulence, followed by a guttural belch and finally a sheepish, “‘Scuze me.”
“Pud!” three voices broke out in unanimous disapproval—three hauntingly familiar voices.
Were they Tanakee? It had to be a dream. He was on the supermarket floor, conjuring it all up unconsciously. Still, it sure did seem awfully real. Even started to smell real. The unmistakable scent of his own species reawakened in him a faint glimmer of awareness, pulling him out of the hallucination.
“Wait, he’s moving. I think he’s coming to,” said a male Tanakee.
“We should knock him out again. Better safe than sorry,” proposed a different Tanakee, a female.
“No, no, no,” said another female. Her voice grew louder. “He’s one of us. We have to help him.”
Takota felt his head being gently lifted from the cold floor and cradled in a cozy, soft lap. He coaxed open his eyes to a glorious vision of a cream-colored angel. He knew by her cheekmarks she was the same as him, a Tanakee, though he’d never seen her in his woods. Her pearlescent, fluffy fur gave her an ethereal appearance. And an emerald, luminous haze surrounding her created even more mystery. An exquisite image of heaven itself.
“I love you,” he said to her, and the one she’d called Pud broke out in noisy laughter.
“All right, all right. That’s en
ough” the first male pulled her away from Takota. His cranium unceremoniously slid off her lap and hit the thinly tiled concrete with a Plunk!
“Ow!” Takota cried. The laughing hyena roared even louder.
“Serves you right, flirting with another guy’s girl,” declared the surly female. With his sight coming back, Takota made out her features. He wished his vision would fail again. She wasn’t ugly, far from it. Her black and silver striping and richly colored cheekmarks made her blue eyes sparkle like gemstones at the bottom of a sunny stream. It was the way she used them, though, scolding and squinting. It reminded him of Orzabal back home.
“I’m sorry,” he squeaked. His stomach churned. It was still calling the shots, and it didn’t approve of him speaking.
“You sure are,” she bent down, grabbed two good handfuls of his fur and forced him to his wobbly feet. “Come on. Get up.”
“Okay, okay. Wait a sec,” he rested against the cooler, desperate to calm his angry gut.
“Uh-oh! He’s gonna puke!” howled Pud, an orangish, scruffy bum with the wildest hair and malformed cheekmarks. The oddest things about him were his eyes. Light blue on the right and dark brown on the left. And all the greaseball did was laugh. How rude.
Takota took a step. The floor buckled beneath his knees and he had to lean back. Then an enormous wave convulsed in his stomach, forcing up chunks of half-digested human food in a colorful vomit fountain.
“Wow!” the comedian sounded impressed. “Funky!”
“Are you okay?” cried the nice one, the fluffy, snowy angel.
“Um, yeah. I think so,” Takota answered, and meant it. He did feel better.
“Get him something to drink, not another one of those energy things, either,” she ordered her mate. Reluctantly he obeyed.
“Who’s gonna clean this up?” he sounded disgusted, tiptoeing through globs of barf.
“He is,” the mean one pointed her finger at Takota. “It’s his mess, he cleans it up.”
Jack James and the Tribe of the Teddy Bear Page 6