Suddenly Dean stands up at the desk facing mine and yells across at me, “The phone!”
“Huh?” I jump, startled out of my thoughts. Then I realize my phone is ringing. I pick it up.
“Yeah?”
“Pickery is out. It’s Betheau.”
“Spell it,” I say, pulling a Post-it towards me and grabbing a pen.
A loud ripping sound, as if the hand of God has come down and grabbed a clump of earth, cuts through my concentration, and I have to ask the new world’s name again to make sure I wrote it down correctly.
“Betheau. What is it, French?”
“Louisiana.”
“Ah.”
By the time I hang up, the lighthouse has long since vanished, as have the seafront houses. Main Street is under almost three feet of water.
I check my watch. There’s almost two more hours to go. I feel a headache coming on.
The contractors are whining about having to work in a swamp. I’m not crazy about it, either, since it means additional insurance costs and a lot of extra paperwork. On the other hand, Betheau, Louisiana, has gone from being a major city to a plantation house that requires far fewer people, and people are much harder to construct. So in the end we’re still saving a bundle.
Wardrobe, meanwhile, has been whipped into a frenzy. They thought they’d be doing period dress, but it turns out that Betheau is to be a modern day sort of place—although what “modern day” is, exactly, I’m not really sure anymore. Now the creative department has had to scrap a load of material and design work and start over.
It’s amazing how all this can happen in such a short period of time. The Originator’s mind changes and presto! A whole new concept that requires us to start over from square one.
Meanwhile, Barton Crossing, Rhode Island, still has 24 minutes of breath in her lungs. I don’t look out the window anymore, not since seeing the black Labrador dog-paddling its way through the streets in an effort to find sanctuary. How long could it swim, I wondered. And what happened when it reached the border of fiction and found it could not step over into reality? What happened when it realized it was doomed?
“Your heart’s too soft for this work,” she says. I look up at where she stands by my desk, her over—lipsticked mouth pulled into a grimly satisfied smile. She looks like she’s won something. A bet, maybe.
“I build things,” I tell her.
“And I take them apart.”
I nod. It has always been the way of things. I am where the stories start, and she is where they end. And every day is just like this.
But does it have to be?
An inkling of an idea begins to burrow into my brain. Why? Why do we take these places apart when The Originator is done with them? Are they doing anyone any harm by existing? It isn’t as if the fictional space is limited, after all. There’s room for everyone.
She’s still standing next to my desk, her smile gone now, her eyes narrow as she peers at me. She had read my expression—I’m a lousy poker player—and now she wants to read my thoughts.
I try to smile through my preoccupation. “Twenty minutes,” I say. Even to my own ears, my voice sounds hollow.
She makes a sound similar to humph and strides off.
“Twenty minutes,” I repeat to myself. “Twenty minutes to save Barton Crossing.”
After walking the floor in what I hope is a nonchalant fashion, checking to make sure she’s really gone and not just spying on me from behind something, I turn my steps and walk past the row of windows to the Machine Room. This is the heart of our deconstructive forces. This is where hurricanes, rains of fire, and other elementals are powered. It’s a huge room, full of lights and screens and wires, and I have no idea how it works.
I hesitate. If I do this now, they may have time to stop me and finish the job on Barton Crossing. But if I don’t do this now, if I wait, there won’t be enough of the town left to save to make it worth the effort. Or the risk.
I go to the first console. The screen shows nothing but waves, huge waves, crashing over what is left of Barton Crossing’s shoreline. No one needs this, I think. No one ever sees this part after they close the book.
I look at the sliding levers that line the long black board; it looks like a stereo equalizer, and many of the settings are high, up past the red line. I place my fingertips on several of the levers and ease them down in unison. On the screen, the waves fall back. They become mere swells again.
Already I’m aware of the silence outside on the floor, followed by the low humming of questioning murmurs. I look at the Machine Room door, still open, and go to shut it. There’s a bolt, so I lock myself in.
They’ll just finish the job another day, I tell myself. And that could be true. I’m not convinced that The Originator can be reasoned with, and I don’t know The Originator’s own reasoning for demolishing worlds when a story is finished. But I’ve come to realization that I cannot continue investing myself in building what is only destined to be destroyed.
I hear someone trying the door, but I ignore it as I go to the next console. The sight is so sad to me—people on top of roofs, one of them a young girl in pigtails holding a bedraggled cat. The streets are flooded, and already some houses have given way; I know because I see the debris as it floats past places that are still standing.
They’re pounding on the door now. I hear her screeching with frustration. “I know it’s you!” she shouts at me.
Yes, it’s me. The weak link. Her antithesis and the one who hates her most.
“We’re going to do this, if I have to take a sledgehammer to the town myself!” she tells me.
I’m thankful the Machine Room door is steel. They’ll have to bring up a blowtorch from the welding shop. It gives me a little time.
Time. I look at the monitor that’s counting down to 5:00. There are sixteen minutes left.
I turn back to the console. A dial marked “Drainage” is turned to “off.” I turn it on, my reasoning being that by systematically reversing all the settings on the machines, I’ll be moving things in the right direction.
But it’s still raining in Barton Crossing. I glance around at other consoles, other screens. I need to turn off the wind, too.
Outside the door there’s a clanking sound; they’ve brought up the blowtorch or whatever else they’re thinking of using to get me out.
I spot a monitor that shows something like a weather map, with dark green hanging over what I assume is a representation of Barton Crossing. The labels on the console say things like “Drift” and “IpH.” I’m not entirely sure what it means, but I see “Drift” is set on “West” so I turn it back to “East” and sure enough the dark green rain changes direction, headed back out over the ocean.
“IpH?” I ask myself. “CC?” Using my method of turning off what is currently on, I reduce each of these to zero, and on the monitoring screen, the rain ceases and the clouds begin to break apart almost instantly. It’s like something out of a cartoon. The sun is shining and the water is receding. It’s a happy ending.
For Barton Crossing, anyway.
Via the monitor I watch the people on the rooftops, others in boats and paddling through the streets. They’re looking around, unbelieving. They’re hugging and crying and laughing. They’re not real people, but we gave them everything real people have: love, and hope, and fear.
The girl with the pigtails is still clinging to her cat as an older woman who stands with her, perhaps the girl’s grandmother, or maybe even Audrey Bennis, is helped down from the roof into a waiting boat. The men in the boat turn to help the girl, too, although it’s more difficult because her arms are full.
In another boat, I’m happy to see, rides a very wet Labrador.
A high-pitched alarm tells me that it’s 5:00.
Outside the Machine Room, there’s a shriek of frustration and thwarted ambition, followed by the sound of breaking glass as, I suspect, she’s shattered one of the front observation windows.
Even if it’s the last thing I’ll ever do, I’m pleased with myself.
At 5:01 I unbolt the door.
A.B.C.
That’s how they named us, in alphabetical order. Our mother is Dana. Our father is Elliott. We live in a Victorian, down in the old part of Bethel Hill, the “historic” district.
I’m Abbey, the oldest. But Bryan is the one who got all the size. The doctor says he managed to make the most space for himself in the womb. Poor Corey was the crowded one; he was small and pale and almost completely silent from the start.
I wouldn’t say we look especially alike. We all have similar faces, and blond hair and clear blue eyes. Corey was the fairest, and very fragile. Well, it was going to be one of us, and Corey was the prime candidate.
The day we were born was a big deal in Bethel Hill. It ran on the front page of the local paper, as well as most surrounding towns. It was in the Austin paper, too, but much further back, somewhere in the Regional section. We were billed as an amazing coincidence, triplets born in Bethel Hill almost exactly 100 years after the last set of triplets had been born here.
They say babies that share a womb also share a sort of connection. Some say it’s spiritual or mental or even supernatural. I can’t say I know what it is that connects me to my brothers, but it’s there, an invisible but tangible string that I can sometimes picture as a bright ribbon of light that stretches from one to another of us. Even Corey. Even though he’s dead. It’s like he’s here anyway; I keep turning to look for him, as if he might be just behind me, like he’s catching up to us.
Before he was dead, we were all thirteen, all of us with a growing sense of something coming towards us like a big wave waiting to break over our heads.
A few months after our thirteenth birthday, I was digging through some of our mother’s stuff. She keeps this hope chest full of albums and newspaper clippings. I don’t remember what I was looking for, if anything; sometimes I just like to go through all that and look at her old pictures and stuff. She wrote a lot of poetry when she was in high school, and she has notebooks full of it, and I sometimes like to read them. On that day, though, I found a bunch of brittle, yellow newspaper clippings from when we’d been born. I was surprised because Mom is usually very careful with those kinds of things, and she would normally put them in an album. But these were crumpled and torn, shoved to the bottom of the chest.
I pulled the clippings out for a look and realized they weren’t so much about me and my brothers as they were about the triplets born a century earlier. They had been Xavier, Yancey, and Zenia Tate. Their mother had been Willa and their father had been Victor. People had stupid names back then.
It had been nothing short of a miracle for Willa to survive giving birth to triplets. Fuzzy pictures accompanied the articles. No one looked very happy in them. It must have been the clothes. They wore a lot of them, and Texas is hot.
The articles went on to note what all of them considered the “Tate Family Tragedy.” When the triplets had been thirteen, Yancey had drowned in Bethel Pond.
I thought about how we sometimes went to the pond, how Bryan and I would hang out up at the swings and Corey would just go stare at the water. Bethel Pond is clear and green and always cold. It has a few small fish, minnows I guess. The bottom of the pond is smooth gray rocks and gravel. Weeds and funny little white flowers grow all around the margin. There’re some daffodils, too. And a lot of oak and pecan trees.
I started and looked again at the pictures. Yancey was the thin one in the middle. He stared dully out of the photo, his eyes penetrating me from a distant past.
Slamming Mom’s chest shut in a way that she always told me not to, I ran to show the articles to Bryan. Why Bryan? I don’t know, except to say that if I ever wanted to work through something, I always went to Bryan. Corey was not the type to elicit much response. Corey was more of a listener.
When we showed Corey the article a little later, he didn’t say anything right away. But a few days later he mentioned that he wanted to go to the pond. He would have gone alone, maybe, but we never did. None of us. It was always the three of us at Bethel Pond.
When we arrived, Corey went to his usual spot right by the pond’s edge and stared out at the still water. Bryan and I sat down on the scrub and grass about a yard back. When Corey finally spoke, he didn’t turn around. “He’s still out there, isn’t he?”
“No,” I snapped. “They buried him of course.” I silently added you moron to my sentence. I never would have said as much out loud, but I sometimes thought Corey wasn’t the brightest star in our little constellation.
“That doesn’t mean there isn’t something left of him here,” Corey said evenly. Corey never shouted, never raised a fuss. On the few occasions I’d seen him cry, he’d been perfectly silent and still, like a statue that leaked from its eyes. I’d always known there was something off about Corey--Bryan had too--but it wasn’t until that very day that the word “creepy” presented itself to me as a description for my youngest brother.
I would have said something else to him, told him to snap out of it, but when I glanced at Bryan I saw that he was seriously considering what Corey had said. “Let’s get Buchanan’s boat,” Bryan suggested.
Clint Buchanan is an older man who looks a lot like his bloodhound Mitzi. He lives near the pond and has an old row boat that no one has ever seen him use. And why would he? There are no fish in the pond besides the minnows. No one knows why Mr. Buchanan has a row boat, but he sometimes lets us use it. That day he said to us, “Go on, take it. Needs some exercise anyway.” I remember looking over at Bryan when Mr. Buchanan said that, to see if the old guy was serious. But Bryan was already dragging the boat down towards the pond. Corey followed behind; he didn’t even bother picking up the back end of the boat, so it left a wide, muddy skid in its wake. I picked up the oars and Mitzi barked as I ran to catch up with my brothers.
Bryan and I got the boat into the water, and I gave Bryan the oars. He was the biggest and strongest of us. Then I called to Corey to get in, but he just stood there.
“Corey!” I shouted again. “What is wrong with you?”
He made his way slowly towards where I held the boat to keep it from floating off; Bryan was already seated in it. Corey’s eyes stayed on the center of the pond the whole time he walked. He acted like some kind of ceremony was taking place as he gingerly climbed in to sit in the middle. I pushed off and waded to clamber in last.
Bryan steered unerringly to the center of the pond. Bethel Pond is not especially deep, maybe eight to ten feet, and that’s only at the very middle. Most of it isn’t more than three or four feet.
Once we were at about the center of the pond, Bryan stopped paddling and we all just sat there. Bryan and I faced into the boat, and Corey sat between us, sideways, his legs folded under him and his hands on his knees. He leaned out and stared down into the clear green water. You may wonder how water can be both clear and green, but Bethel Pond is. Like bottle glass.
“What are you doing?” I finally asked and was immediately sorry for opening my mouth. My voice carried sharp and flat over the still water, cracking the calm. I felt bad for it, and I don’t even know why.
Bryan flashed his eyes at me, a silent signal for me to keep quiet. I was surprised at how seriously he was taking Corey’s behavior; usually Bryan was even more impatient with our youngest brother than I was. But sometimes being the only girl left me out of things.
“He’s down there,” Corey murmured.
“No, he’s not,” I said, trying to keep my voice patient and even. “They buried him. I told you. We can go to the cemetery and see him if you want. What has gotten into you?” Although I wasn’t all that surprised by Corey’s going on; he had always been susceptible to these kinds of things. He felt like he was connected to everything, you see, not just me or Bryan, but the whole world. He felt caught in its web. Every little thing was one more thread. The article, that had been more than one thread--Corey was tangled up in the
coincidence.
I said as much to Bryan later and he shook his head. “It’s not a coincidence,” Bryan told me.
“What do you mean?” I asked. We were out on the porch after supper, watching the stars come out. I sat on the top step and hugged my knees to my chest while Bryan sat on the old porch railing that threatened to give under his weight.
“Something like that,” Bryan said, “it’s too much of a coincidence. We need to do some more research.”
“I’m beginning to be sorry I ever found that stupid article,” I sighed.
“That wasn’t a coincidence either,” said Bryan. “You were meant to find it. We’re thirteen now. They were thirteen then. And Corey—”
“I’m Yancey.” Corey’s voice seemed to float out of the darkness. I whipped my head around so fast that my ponytail slapped my cheek with a sting. Corey was leaning a shoulder against the corner of the house. In the cut of moonlight that crossed his chest, his white shirt seemed to glow.
“God, Corey, don’t do that,” I said. “And you’re not Yancey,” I added.
“He is,” said Bryan. “You saw the pictures, read the article. Yancey was the youngest.”
“The smallest,” Corey added. “I’m the one who has to die.”
“No one’s going to die,” I said.
“We’ll go to the library tomorrow,” Bryan announced as if I hadn’t said anything to contradict their stupid idea. “Maybe we’ll be able to stop whatever’s coming.” He said this for Corey’s benefit more than mine. I could tell from his tone that he didn’t really believe it. And there was something else, something that made me think Bryan was actually enjoying this.
“It’s a game, right?” I asked Bryan later that night. “You’re just messing with him. Or maybe you’re both messing with me.”
Bryan kept his eyes on the Monopoly board. He always won, so I never bothered to put too much effort in. Trivial Pursuit was more my game. Corey didn’t like board games at all; I couldn’t remember him ever playing one with us.
The World Ends at Five & Other Stories Page 4