Twilight in the Land of Nowhen

by Nury Vittachi

  ‘Little dream boy,’ he said. ‘The laws of physics are based on the assumption that the first thing God made was Time. After that, God made the other forces of physics. But I now know this belief is wrong. The first thing was not time, but the speed of light. It was set at 299 792 kilometres a second. If God exists, then that is the first sentence in his book of creation. That is the first rule. That is the only absolute, the only constant thing in existence. It was the first thing. Full stop.’

  Even though I followed his argument, I didn’t see why it was so important. ‘So what? What does it matter whether God made one rule first or another rule first?’

  ‘Good question. And I have a good answer. You see, everything in the universe has to fit around the first rule. Everything else has to bend to the speed of light. The duration of things, the size of things, the shape of things—these all have to be flexible, twistable, malleable. They all take second place to the rule that light travels at 299 792 kilometres a second. If anything comes close to breaking this number one rule—for example, if a man in a vehicle flying at 299 792 kilometres a second took a mirror out of his pocket—then all the other laws of physics bend to make sure the number one law does not get broken.’

  Ms Blit leaned into the conversation. ‘You see, Simon, up to this date, scientists believed that time and space are things that cannot be altered. A second lasts a second, wherever you are, whatever you are doing. A metre measures a metre, wherever you are, whatever you are doing. Al’s experiment tonight showed that this isn’t true. The speed of light always stays the same, time and space must change to fit. You can scrunch them up.’

  ‘I don’t know this word scrunch,’ said Al. He straightened up in his seat and wagged his finger. ‘I need some new terminology,’ he said. ‘The speed of light is a special law of physics, since it is constant in the way that other laws are not. So I’m going to call it ‘c’ for constant.’

  His eyes widened. ‘And now I need something else,’ he said.

  ‘Another bit of evidence?’ Ms Blit asked.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘A toilet. All this late-night excitement.’

  He climbed out of the car and into his bedroom window, leaving Ms Blit and me together.

  ‘Are you following all this?’ she asked.

  ‘I think so,’ I said.

  ‘It’s what happens next that shows how useful this little excursion has really been. Tomorrow, Al will start writing about his discoveries. Over the next decade or so he will write the Special Theory of Relativity and the General Theory of Relativity. Scientists all over the world will be very excited by these books. If the speed of light is the only constant, then it follows that other things are bendable. If distance can be altered, you can “warp” the solar system and travel across the galaxy really quickly. If time can be reshaped, you can travel into the future or the past.’

  ‘I understand. But why was there a picture of Al and the mirror in my dad’s car manual?’

  ‘Well, Al will write a lot of things, but his greatest work will explain that solid things that you can touch (objects with mass) and things that you can’t touch (like energy) are all related to the great constant, c. The book will also explain precisely how they are related to each other. Big Al will give people a mathematical formula to make the link easy to remember.’

  ‘Is it very long and complicated?’

  ‘No. It’s very short and simple.’ She reached into the glovebox and scrounged around until she found a pen and a bit of paper, on which she wrote:

  E = mc2

  ‘That’s pretty easy to remember, isn’t it? It means that the energy something has (E) is equal to its mass (m) times the speed of light (the great constant, c) multiplied by itself. Once Al had showed that energy was made of solid things and solid things were made of energy, people went on to realise that this was a useful discovery. Instead of burning coal or trees to make energy, you could release the energy that was locked inside solid things. Burning a single piece of charcoal makes a tiny bit of energy. But releasing the atomic energy in a single piece of charcoal would make a huge amount of energy—enough to provide light and heat for a whole city of people. Scientists went on to use this principle to set up energy factories called nuclear power plants.’

  I nodded. I knew about them, although I didn’t know that Einstein had come up with the idea.

  ‘Within four decades of Al’s death in 1955 there were millions of people around the world using electricity generated by nuclear power plants for warmth and lighting and cooking. Within a decade and a half of the beginning of the twenty-first century, people began using nuclear energy in engines, resulting in powerful vehicles, such as flying cars—like the Scala-Poynter X31. That’s why Al’s face is in the car manuals.’

  I nodded again, more slowly. ‘But none of this is directly related to my problem. I’m beginning to think this trip was a waste of time. Al wasn’t displaced from time after all. His face is reflected in the mirror, whether he’s standing still or going at the speed of light. The picture of him in Dad’s car manual was just an illustration of a scientific theory that we’ve helped him to prove wrong.’ I slumped down in the back seat. ‘He can’t help me after all. Take me home. It’s all over.’

  Before Ms Blit could answer, Al appeared at his bedroom window and shouted, ‘Hey, dream boy. You and your flying car have helped to answer many of my most important questions. Didn’t you say you had a question for me?’

  I clambered into the front seat and leaned out of the car window.

  ‘No thank you, Al. There’s nothing you can do to help. There is no cure for my problem. I am displaced. I have come loose from time. And I’m just going to go home and slip quietly into Nowhen.’

  Ms Blit leaned over and squeezed my hand.

  ‘I do not know this Nowhen that you speak of,’ said Al thoughtfully. ‘But coming loose from time—that is a very big problem for a small dream boy. I do not know how to help you.’

  ‘See!’ I hissed at Ms Blit, wrenching my hand from hers. ‘I was wrong. Can we go now?’

  But Al was still talking. ‘When did you first become separated from time? If my scientific training has taught me anything, it’s that you have to examine the origin of a problem if you want to solve it.’

  ‘That’s no help to me, Al,’ I said, sulkily. ‘I’ve suffered from displacement since I was born.’

  ‘Then I think you must go back before you were born. If you can identify the very moment you were cut loose from time, then, maybe, you will find a way to mend the tear.’ Al pulled his head in the window. ‘Good luck, dream boy. And thank you for your help. I can’t wait to wake up and start writing about our discovery.’

  I could hear him muttering about Frau Gesundheit’s toasted cheese bread as he shut his bedroom window.

  Ms Blit didn’t say anything, but she looked thoughtful as she revved the hovercar’s engines.

  I watched Zurich disappear beneath us. I hadn’t got quite the answer I was looking for, but maybe Al was right. Maybe I’d been looking in the wrong place.

  ‘I need to find out more about my mum,’ I said to Ms Blit. ‘I need to stay out of Nowhen long enough to find out what happened before I was born.’

  ‘We’ll manage it,’ she replied softly. ‘I don’t know how, but somehow.’

  27

  We flew back to the present day.

  It was still Friday. I walked into the playground.

  From the corner of my eye I saw the benches in the covered area. Safe, shadowy, quiet, out of the way. The perfect place for a hostile, isolated kid with a throbbing amygdala. The benches seemed to be calling my name. I could see shy kids sitting there. There was that girl Amy with the glasses, and the other usuals. I wanted to sit with them, but I forced myself to turn away.

  Things were becoming clearer to me.

  I had mysteries to solve. The biggest one was the mystery of me.

  And somehow, the mystery of me was connected to the biggest mystery in t
he universe: the mystery of Time.

  I needed to get my displacement under control. And I had to find out more about my mum. The only thing to do was to win myself some more time.

  I was on the verge of entering Twilight—from there, it was a one-way street to Nowhen. Ms Blit said that there was no point hiding at home.

  ‘You need to learn how to live a normal life, how to cope with stress, how to build up a support network, and how to deal with difficult people and situations without losing control. And you need to learn all that right now,’ she said. ‘It’s the only thing that will buy us time.’

  First, I tried to twitch my zygomaticus muscles into active service. Nothing happened. I pulled out my Steadtler Norris HB and stuck it in my mouth sideways. It helped. Now I could feel where those muscles were.

  Ms Blit had warned me against leaving the pencil in my mouth. She said it made me look crazy. So I just kept it in there for ten seconds and then took it out again, hoping my smile would stay in place. I practised making my eyes bigger, to work the oculi and labii muscles.

  I tried to remember people’s names as I walked past them in the playground.

  ‘Hi, Arthur Desmond Kwan. Hello, Stefanie Elizabeth Honeyfield. How’s things? Hey, Adam David Grishin. You okay?’ Then I remembered that Ms Blit had told me to try it with first names only. ‘Yo, Lauren. Hey, Rebecca. What’s up? Hi, Chris. How’s it going?’

  Some of them ignored me, but I reckon I got a half-friendly grunt from two or three of them. I was smiling. I was using people’s names. What else? Oh yes! Be interested in things.

  I noticed that Cheryl Wolowski was doing a cat’s cradle thing with elastic strings.

  ‘Hi, Cheryl. What are you doing?’ I asked. ‘By the way, in case you’ve forgotten my name most people call me Stinky Poo.’

  She looked at me curiously. It’s hard to be rude to someone who’s rude to themself.

  I remembered a really good rule that Ms Blit had taught me. When you walk through a playground or a party, always aim for clusters of people in odd numbers: three or five or seven. The chances are high that one member will be feeling left out of the conversation and will be happy to talk to you.

  There were five kids by the basketball net. They were talking about something they had seen on TV. One kid— I didn’t know his name—was standing slightly away from the others. Perhaps he was too shy to join in. He had some cards in his hands.

  ‘Hi, mate. What are those cards?’ I said, nodding at him. ‘Do you collect them?’

  He showed me one bearing an image of some sort of train.

  ‘I collect Japanese bullet train cards. I’ve got more than a hundred. Wanna see?’

  I kept nodding slowly.

  He talked for the next eight minutes about his collection. It was incredibly boring, but I was really good. I kept smiling and working my trapezius muscle—also known as nodding.

  He looked pitifully grateful. Clearly bullet trains were the only thing he could talk about and he had never found anyone with the patience to listen to him before.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, holding out my hand.

  He smiled and handed me a card. ‘I’ve got two of these. You can have one,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, maybe sometime,’ I said.

  ‘You want to come to my place and see my card collection?’

  I felt almost like a normal kid. I was going to conquer this.

  Before the bell rang for the end of break time, I went to the drama studio where the school chess club was meeting. Ms Blit told me that since I had trouble with verbal things I should try non-verbal activities.

  Do you know the best way to play chess?

  With pauses, that’s how. Lots of pauses. Everything that happens in chess is followed by a pause. Somebody makes a move, and then there’s a pause. The other guy makes a move, and there’s a pause.

  Also, you need to be incredibly clever to win, and I’m incredibly clever. (Have I mentioned that before?) Chess suited me perfectly.

  Although I didn’t win (the other player was more experienced), I was quite sure that I would eventually be the school chess champ, if not the champ for the whole district of Easterpark North. Life was going to be okay.

  The latter part of Friday morning was taken up by biology class with Mrs Stele and I was feeling remarkably calm. Mrs Stele was quite strict about silence in class, and this played straight into my hands.

  I spent most of the lesson ‘chatting’ with John McCloud. We passed an exercise book between us and wrote notes to each other. My almost-four-second displacement was no problem at all.

  It turned out that John was also an Everworld Combat Plus Special Edition fan. Can you believe it? His characters even fought my characters regularly. In fact, he had killed several of mine the other night while I was sleeping on the carpet.

  By lunchtime, when John and I walked down the steps to the playground, I was feeling more relaxed than ever before.

  Then Melanie Peet ran up to me.

  ‘Come on, Poopface. Come on, Poison Cloud,’ she said. ‘It’s time for the Void of the Year competition in the school hall. You two are the only nominees. All the kids are going. Eliza’s got a quiz ready and it’s going to be amazing.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ said John. ‘Just ignore her.’

  ‘If you don’t go, then you automatically get the title,’ she said. ‘And you’ll be branded a coward for the rest of your life.’

  ‘Don’t go,’ John repeated. ‘I’m not going. You can’t win against people like Eliza.’

  I knew he was right. But when I saw large numbers of students streaming into the hall I felt a gulp of nervousness in my throat. Would it be more stressful to face Eliza now, in front of everyone, or to run away and know that she was orchestrating all the kids in school to hate me?

  With a sigh I followed Melanie Peet into the school hall. John ran away, to hide in the toilets. I’m going to keep calm, I told myself. I’m just not sure how.

  28

  I was on the stage in the school hall. There was a lectern for the quiz master, a small table for the two candidates, and a projection screen.

  I sat at the table and frantically rehearsed the things that Ms Blit had taught me. I kept sticking my pencil in my mouth, trying to keep my cheek muscles high.

  Edward Lin was setting up the microphones.

  ‘Eddie,’ I mumbled. He couldn’t understand me, so I took the pencil out of my mouth. ‘Eddie, pass me a glass of water, Eddie. Thanks, Eddie.’

  I found that my cheeks were having trouble rising, so I stuck the pencil back in again.

  ‘Eddie, tell me all about your life,’ I said, forgetting that it was hard to be the world’s best listener while simultaneously doing all the other things on my list.

  Edward ignored me, so it made no difference.

  The hall quickly filled with students, but there was no sign of the Glossy Girls.

  The digital clock at the back of the school hall flipped over to 12.34. But where was my tormentor? Eliza was nowhere to be seen. No time to worry about that. I just had to concentrate on keeping my displacement factor from rising any more.

  Bang! The door at the back of the hall crashed open and in marched Eliza Marshmallow, along with Trudie, Melanie and Lisa. They all looked incredibly attractive.

  Eliza marched to the front of the hall.

  ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘I’m here. So we can begin.’

  I was calm. Well, calm for me, anyway. I was smiling. I was reciting everyone’s names quietly in my head. I planned to press the buzzer after every question and then cough for three or four seconds before answering—that way my answer might more or less match the question that everyone else heard.

  Eliza took to the stage and tapped the microphone to make sure it was working before launching into her speech.

  ‘In the run-up to the Personality of the Year competition this afternoon, we are going to identify the person who is most devoid of any personality at all, the Void of the Year.’r />
  The audience hooted.

  ‘We have two candidates,’ Eliza continued. ‘Kid Poopoo is already on the stage. Our other candidate will be here any minute.’

  On cue, the doors opened and a group of large boys manhandled John McCloud into the hall. He was sobbing.

  They pushed him up the steps and forced him to sit down next to me. He wailed and wailed, stopping only to draw breath with a watery sniff.

  ‘Please welcome Poison Cloud, also known as the Smell Factory.’ Eliza picked up a sheet of paper from the small pile on the lectern in front of her. Then she stabbed a button on a computer. The first thing that appeared on the large screen was a photo of a middle-aged woman I had never seen before—but she looked vaguely familiar. It was bizarre. She was in a wheelchair and wore white clothes, as if she were in a hospital or something. Her black hair stuck out in all directions. She had Chinese eyes.

  ‘The first question goes to Simon Excrement . . . I mean Simon Poopoo,’ she said, triggering a raucous laugh from the audience.

  ‘Simon, who is this woman?’

  I stared at the image. I had no idea who she was or what her name might be. But I felt I should.

  I had seen her before. Somewhere, some time, I was sure I had seen her before.

  ‘Running out of time . . .’ said Eliza, looking at her watch. ‘Five more seconds. Four. Three. Two. One.’

  I couldn’t take my eyes off the image.

  Eliza was giggling. ‘You wanna know who this is?’ she asked the audience. ‘Simon the Poopoo doesn’t know.’ She turned to me. ‘Simon, you want to know who this is? This is . . .’

  I gasped. ‘It can’t be!’

  ‘. . . your mother.’

  The audience burst into laughter and applause.

  Everything went into slow motion. I stood up and gazed at the image. Now I knew where I had seen it before. I’d looked at that face every day in the mirror. I’d seen it in my mind’s eye. That face had bits of my face on it. Or, to be more accurate, I had bits of that face on mine. But her face was rounder than mine. She had longer hair, and higher cheekbones. She was beautiful.