Twilight in the Land of Nowhen

by Nury Vittachi

  ‘That does sound fun,’ said Mr Fowles. ‘I nominate you, Eliza.’

  She smiled and fluttered her eyelashes. ‘Why, thank you, Mr Fowles,’ she fluted. ‘And I would nominate you.’

  ‘Thank you, indeed, Eliza,’ said the principal.

  ‘But you are going to be on the judges’ panel,’ she went on. ‘So I might have to give my vote to myself instead.’

  Mr Fowles laughed, making a funny, low barking sound, which went Uh! Uh! Uh! Uh! This was the signal for all the teachers to laugh as well. It was sickening.

  Then I thought about it, and I started smiling too. It looked as if the school was going to spend much of its spare time this week occupied with a popularity contest. Well, that was something that definitely was not going to involve me in the slightest. I was quite sure about that.

  Care and Maintenance of the Fabric of Time, first edition

  3.1: Dropped stitches, fabric wear and lacerations

  Despite the countless collisions of objects in space over the eons, only a small number have been big enough to damage the space-time continuum. A few examples:

  I In quadrant 7569c in the year 149786, two black holes drifted so close together that the fabric of space-time between them was severely curved. The area had to be restitched over a period of two millennia.

  II In the Delta 17 Galaxy in the year 62048, a supernova imploded so violently that it knocked the entire universe 82 nanoseconds back in time.

  III Just as this report went to press, an Earth astronaut crashed into a black speck (a tiny portion of dark matter), causing a small rip in the fabric of time in the Sol galaxy. Maintenance Crew are investigating.

  6

  On the way home, I sat by myself near the back of the bus. People usually like to sit in the front half or right in the back row. So I always sit in one of the seats nobody wants—about three-quarters of the way down the aisle, over the back wheels, where I will be jogged up and down by myself.

  The driver spoke to me, but I pretended I hadn’t heard her. I eventually got home without speaking to anyone. The secret is to never look up, so you never catch anyone’s eye.

  Dad was in the garage working on his car.

  When I say car, I don’t mean an ordinary car. Just like when I say ‘Dad’, I guess I don’t mean an ordinary dad. Let me tell you about my father first. Dad wasn’t always Mister Poopoo, salesman of a Hawaiian snack food. He was born Harold Godfrey Peel in Houston. He went straight from school to the army, and then became an astronaut.

  By the age of twenty-six, he was a member of the first American and Chinese cooperative space station project. He was one of a team of sixteen men and women. He was a hero.

  At least, he was until two weeks into the mission, when a remote-controlled TV camera caught him kissing one of the Chinese astronauts, a woman called Ding Yuan. Dad described it to me, making it sound like a yucky, long, slow wet kiss like they do in movies. He said they even used their tongues.

  He got into big trouble. I guess the bosses thought that people who liked to kiss were not serious enough to be astronauts. Also, he was married to someone else at the time. No one liked him after that. Especially his wife, who immediately filed for divorce.

  My dad was ordered to come back to Earth on the next space shuttle. He lost his job, left Houston, and eventually got the job selling pupu snacks in Hawaii.

  Ding Yuan got into big trouble with her bosses too. She was transferred to a department that had the nasty job of running cargo between the moon and the mines in the asteroid belt beyond Mars.

  According to Dad, she discovered she was pregnant on her third day on the job so she came straight back to Earth. But it was too late, she had caught a strange space disease. She got sicker and sicker and died soon after I was born. ‘But the baby lived and grew into an apprentice pupu salesman,’ Dad used to say, whenever I asked about my mum.

  There are no pictures of Mum in our house. The first time I asked why I was about six. Dad explained that he had burned them all because they made him too sad.

  When I asked again for a picture of her, he gave me a mirror that used to be hers: a small, oval hand-mirror with a flower pattern on its handle.

  ‘You want to see her face? Look in there, kid,’ he had said.

  I thought he meant that her face was hidden in the mirror somewhere. I spent many hours searching for it, looking at the mirror in different lights and from different angles. I was about ten when I figured out that he meant my face was like my mother’s face. By that time, I had become very attached to the mirror, in the way that some kids get attached to their teddy bears or blankets. I used to carry it with me everywhere, although I kept it hidden at the bottom of my school bag. It got cracked, but I still keep it.

  Sometimes I gaze into the mirror and try to imagine a woman with my nose and mouth and eyes but much older, and with long black hair.

  I have one other thing that used to belong to Mum. She left me a small Bible with a white leather cover. It’s a pretty book, but too hard to read. I tried once. The first stories are quite good. Then it gets boring, with all that stuff about who begat who begat who begat who. Dad isn’t interested in it at all.

  Written on the inside front page is Remember me, and then my mum’s name in Chinese.

  That’s all I know about my mother.

  After she died, I was put in my father’s care. Dad was supposed to divide his time between starting a pupu business, and raising me. That’s what he told our social worker.

  But that’s not what he really did. He just worked on his car all the time.

  You see, Dad had never lost his interest in the space vehicle business. The car he was working on was not what most people would call a car at all. It may have looked like a standard model Scala-Poynter X31 flying four-seater transport, but Dad had installed a miniature rocket engine in the back.

  It was built out of lightweight steel and it was airtight, so it could fly right up into the stratosphere, which is what they call the top of the sky. He’d spent our money buying what was probably the best flying car on the market (not counting the military ones), and then added a souped-up engine which made it super-powerful— although possibly not quite legal. It was a Breaker. And, maybe, the fastest Breaker in the world.

  Dad has his own ideas about what is important and what isn’t. Most of the money that he was supposed to be using to feed me and house me and clothe me was being put into building us a neat car. He didn’t tell the social worker that though.

  7

  Tuesday dawned bright and clear and devious.

  The sun shone and the sky was blue. It was a perfect day for not going to school. It was the sort of day when a kid is inspired to make eloquent excuses as to why he should stay at home. And that’s just what I did.

  I explained to Dad that my teacher was not just dumb but dangerously stupid. I told him how Mrs Stupid somehow turned the note telling her not to make me say anything into an excuse to have a conversation with me in front of the class.

  ‘How stupid is that? Mega stupid, that’s what. How can I learn anything from someone that stupid? It’s stupid to try to learn something from someone who’s so incredibly stupid. Who knows what a teacher that stupid would do? She might make us stick our fingers in electricity sockets or something to learn about electricity. Being that stupid is dangerous to kids. I might die. She might kill us by accident. She probably will. Probably today. I’m not going.’ I had my fists on my hips and my feet planted far apart.

  Dad stared at me. His eyebrows moved together. He pursed his lips, ready to sigh. I could see his I’m-fed-up expression gathering in his cheeks. Then his frown switched into a bright smile.

  My mouth dropped open. Huh? No problem? I could work on the car with him instead? I couldn’t believe what I had just heard.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘No problem. You stay with me and we can work on the Breaker instead. I need to replace the upper left brake oscillator. There’s something wrong with the way it
reacts to the pitch-and-roll lever.’

  I was going to thank him, but I stopped myself. This was such an unexpected answer that I was suspicious. Was this some sort of cruel joke?

  I was cagey for a while, but he seemed sincere. He dressed in oil-stained clothes and went out to work on the X31. I followed. He didn’t stop me. We spent ten minutes tinkering around, and then he announced that it was time to go for a spin.

  We put on our goggles and safety parachutes.

  Dad only drives his car a couple of times a month, so I was quite excited by the prospect of a ride. He wheeled the car out of the shed. I climbed in next to him and strapped myself in.

  Then he pressed the ignition button.

  Have you ever ridden a hovercar? Well, a Breaker is nothing like a normal hovercar. It’s jerky and powerful and LOUD. There was this roar and loads of smoke came out of the undercarriage. Then, with a loud whuuuumm-mmmp, the car lifted straight up into the sky. I always feel a bit sick when it does that—it’s like going up in an elevator. Really fast. (Once, we bumped into a very surprised bird on the way up and there were feathers under the seats for weeks.)

  The car rose and rose until we jerked to a halt, about sixty metres in the air. It was time to fire the rockets. I held on tight to the bracing handles and pressed my body as far as I could into the seat.

  Woosh! My neck jerked backwards into the headrest as we zoomed forwards.

  This was pure joy. This was living. These were the moments I existed for.

  In seconds, we had left the housing estate and were soaring up into the air, the buildings shrinking into small boxes below us. As usual, Dad had left the top down. The wind roared all around us. My hair whipped into my face so hard that it stung my skin.

  ‘This is really cool,’ I screamed.

  He nodded and shifted his weight to one side, turning the car.

  In case you have never been in a flying car, let me explain how it works. The Breaker has an aircraft-style steering wheel, like a normal hovercar. But you don’t actually have to turn it, not much anyway. It’s a bit like when you ride really fast on your bicycle—you don’t need to turn the handles; you just lean slightly one way or the other.

  In a flying car, the WOI—that’s the weight offset indicator—adjusts itself to the exact weight of the passengers. The whole thing is delicately balanced. The driver shifts his weight to the right or left to make it turn, and leans backwards or forwards to make it go up or down. But you have to be careful not to overdo it—it’s easy to get into a spiral or a tailspin.

  We had a fabulous time flying over town—until I saw a salmon-pink building that I vaguely recognised.

  ‘Yuk,’ I said. ‘School.’

  ‘Bye, Simon!’ said Dad, pushing a button on the dashboard. My seatbelt clicked open and I was flung out of the vehicle by the spring-loaded platform built into the seat.

  ‘Noooooooo,’ I yelled. ‘I haven’t got my school uniform on.’ I fell. ‘I hate you I hate you I hate you,’ I screamed. But the sound of the parachute opening drowned my words and I drifted slowly down to the school playground.

  8

  Ms Blit was cleaning the boys’ toilets.

  ‘Well, she said I could come here to do my community service this period,’ I said.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be in Mrs Stoep’s class?’ Ms Blit asked.

  I smiled back at her.

  Then she smiled at me.

  ‘Yes, please,’ I said.

  ‘Shall I show you something?’ she asked.

  Something odd was going on. The out-of-sync conversation and my permanent echo seemed to be happening just as badly as ever. Yet somehow we seemed to be communicating successfully.

  Was it coincidence? Or could she somehow understand me? She seemed to expect me to talk in an out-of-whack way.

  Ms Blit led the way to the sanitary supplies closet, a walk-in cupboard full of bottles of detergent and mops. There was a small metal locker in it. To my surprise, she opened the locker and stepped inside. It was a door—a door to a secret room.

  I followed. The room looked like some sort of laboratory. She had an amazingly complicated experiment set up in a corner. It had all sorts of valves and tubes and wires and things sticking out in all directions.

  ‘It is?’ I replied.

  ‘It’s simpler than it looks,’ she told me.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘I need to tell you something,’ she said.

  I felt weird. Very weird. I realised, after thinking about it, that this unfamiliar feeling was a mixture of shock and happiness. Here was someone I could apparently communicate with, at school, despite my problem. This was a big deal. This was unbelievable. This was amazing. This must be a dream. I pinched the skin on the back of my hand, but I didn’t wake up.

  Ms Blit was looking right into my eyes. I could tell, even though I was looking anywhere except into her eyes.

  ‘I’m not really a janitor,’ she said. ‘I am a Stitcher.’

  Care and Maintenance of the Fabric of Time, first edition

  4.3: Maintenance Crew

  The fabric of time is primarily kept in order by a team of celestial seamstresses known officially as the Maintenance Crew. In popular speech, they are known as Stitchers.

  The space-time continuum is continuously monitored by planet-sized organic superprocessors. Small tears triggered by ripples of dark matter can be fixed by auto-hyperchips. Black holes sometimes need more serious intervention. On rare occasions a life form will come unstuck from its place in the fabric of time. Then a member of the Maintenance Crew will be dispatched to fix the problem by hand.

  Key numbers:

  • The number of threads in the fabric of time is 16 quintillion.

  • The relationship between energy, time and matter is E=mc2.

  • The number of Stitchers is 20.

  9

  I started counting out loud. ‘One elephant. Two elephants. Three elephants. Four elephants . . .’

  ‘Simon, I want you to count out loud in time with me. One elephant. Two elephants. Three elephants. Four elephants. Five elephants . . .’

  Soon Ms Blit and I were counting together, but not quite matching.

  ‘Seven elephants,’ she said.

  ‘Ten elephants,’ I said.

  ‘Eight elephants,’ she said.

  ‘Eleven elephants,’ I said.

  I stopped.

  ‘Nine elephants, ten elephants, eleven elephants,’ she said. ‘Now stop.’

  She looked at her stopwatch and scribbled on a piece of paper.

  ‘Three point two seconds. That’s a record. That’s amazing. I’ve never seen a case of synchronitis so bad. It’s a miracle you’re alive.’

  ‘As long as I can remember.’

  ‘How long have you had this?’

  ‘I really hope you can.’

  ‘We’re going to have to see if we can do something to make sure this doesn’t get any worse.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, disappointed.

  ‘But I don’t want to raise your hopes too much. Simon, I need to tell you something important. There is no cure for what you have. We can’t fix it. We can’t make it better, not even a little bit. All we can do is try to stop it deteriorating.’

  She said this as if it was really bad news. But the mere fact that someone knew about my problem had left me stunned.

  It was amazing. She spoke slowly, with pauses before starting each sentence. She wasn’t in the least surprised that I answered questions before she asked them. Ms Blit seemed to know instantly what even my dad hadn’t worked out till I was five or six. She knew that my brain worked in a funny way. She knew that I heard things before they were spoken and tried to walk through doors before they were opened.

  We sat down. She gave me a little lecture. The first thing she said was that I had to start talking in paragraphs, instead of phrases or sentences.

  ‘Your conversations will not crash so often, and you’ll sound like you’re alm
ost making sense. Now, explain your problems to me. Take as long as you like. Just talk and talk and talk, for as long as you can. And you don’t have to look at me as you talk, although it would be nice if you glanced at me occasionally.’

  I stared down at my shoes and started talking.

  ‘I’ve always had a problem. Dad says I am really, really shy. I didn’t start talking till I was four. Even then I only spoke to my dad. He’s the only person I can talk to because he knows he has to pause a lot when we chat or anything. Dad makes me go to school but I never talk to anyone. Sometimes people make me talk, but I can never have normal conversations. I hear and see things twice over, like there’s an echo. But I respond to the wrong one. I always answer the wrong bits at the wrong time and I grab things before they’re handed to me. I used to laugh at jokes before the punch line. When I used to laugh, I mean. People think I’m stupid. People think I’m mean and unfriendly. I am mean and unfriendly, I guess.’ ‘Go on.’ She kept nodding as I spoke.

  ‘I don’t know what’s going on. It’s like things really happen after I see them happen. Often, I see the same thing take place twice over, once normal and once blurred. Kids think I’m weird. I guess they’re right. I am weird. What’s that thing you said I had? Dis-something?’ Ms Blit was holding her chin with her index finger and her thumb. ‘Displacement. Synchronitis. Acute inflammation of the amygdala. The worst case I have ever seen.’ She slowly shook her head in amazement. ‘The last case I had was seven hundred and thirty milliseconds, and she was screwed up enough. Three seconds is incredible. As I said, I’m amazed you’re alive.’

  ‘Okay, I’m listening,’ I replied.

  ‘Now, my turn to tell you a few things,’ she said.

  She chewed her pencil for a bit before beginning.