The Switch

  “Maybe you didn’t know you flipped it,” I said.

  “Sidetracked,” said Gordon thoughtfully. “Interesting idea.”

  “If that’s true,” said Mose. “Maybe I could get back to someplace better.”

  “I don’t know,” said Gordon. “I’ve been a lot of places, and none of ‘em have really been better. Better in some ways, maybe.”

  “That might be enough for me,” said Mose.

  I knew what he was thinking. That he’d come with us. And I couldn’t blame him, even though I had a feeling Gordon was right.

  “Gordon,” I breathed, frightened by what was about to come out of my mouth. “Remember yesterday when you said ‘the jokers who put those switches there wanted us to find them?’”

  “Yeah,” Gordon said. “Something like that. But the only clue I have that someone put them there is that we found ‘em. In my case, a few times.”

  “You mean,” I said, “besides in the bombed out basement?”

  “Oh yeah,” said Gordon. “I’m on number seven. After a while, it seems like they could pop up anywhere, depending on your moves. And they don’t always look the same. Sometimes they’re big factory switches like the one you said was in the little house, and sometimes they’re a pull-chain on an old lightbulb. It just has to be something that has the on and off positions.”

  “Like a computer chip,” I said, surprising myself. “Maybe we are in some kind of game. If we are, we’d better play well. I’m not sure you can come back from dying in this one.”

  Mose jumped up like a rocket. “Damn!” he shouted. “I’ve got an idea. Come with me, boys.”

  All this time, Mose had been listening to us talk about switches. But until Gordon said the thing about on and off, I don’t think he pictured them as ordinary switches. Maybe he thought they had to look like something on Starship Enterprise. Or that ‘switch’ was a code word for something mysterious. But suddenly his mind was on fire and his legs were running on nitro fuel, and we could hardly keep up with him. The only thing that slowed him down was that he had to stop to cough every so often. Gordon’s creaky catcher’s outfit didn’t help with the speed, and I finally turned and said, “You know, Gordon, I think you’d survive if you took that crap off.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not,” he said.

  It was clear now wasn’t the time for an intervention.

  I could see that Mose was taking us back toward the scene of last night’s donut crime, the Dominick’s supermarket. Fortunately, he skirted around the parking lot and headed straight for that back alley and what the old Duke had called the Hotel Clybourn. That was okay with me. I had wanted to see the old guy again. He’d looked into my eyes and seen the real me.

  Instead of climbing the fire escape up to the third floor, though, Mose jimmied open a sheet metal door located down a few steps from ground level. Immediately, a racket of buzzing, humming, and clattering filled our ears. It was some kind of boiler room and must have contained all the building’s furnaces and power transformers. Whatever was down there sounded like it was on its last legs.

  At first, there was only the light spilling in through the jimmied door, but after a minute, Mose found a light switch.

  “Wow,” said Gordon. “This place is huge.”

  “See,” said Mose. “It really did used to be a hotel. The Duke wasn’t kidding. Then it became what they call a flophouse. Now it’s just a squattersville, ‘cause ain’t nobody moving out.”

  I looked around, amazed at the size of the machinery. The furnace—if that’s what it was—was as wide as a giant sequoia trunk. I recalled what Mose had said about God looking after the Clybourn. About it being “a safe zone.” I couldn’t account for any other reason its equipment would still run after all these years. I doubted that the “hotel” had a maintenance budget.

  Piles of junk towered everywhere: old bicycles and baby carriages and trunks with rusty latches; stacks of wooden crates and cardboard boxes about to topple over, some with KITCHEN or HOUSEKEEPING written on them. Racks leaned against ratty walls, hung with old white uniforms for hotel kitchen workers, waiters, and maids, all of them now turned a dusty gray.

  It was like the history of the world in junk.

  “Over here!” said Mose, from a far corner. “Check this out.”

  “I don’t see anything but boxes,” I said. There were, in fact, four dangerously high towers of cardboard boxes wedged into that corner, almost as if they’d been stacked there to hide something. The highest of them was twice as big as me and as lopsided as the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

  “Well, help me move ‘em out of the way,” said Mose. “And be careful. They’re heavy. Some of them are full of machine parts, I think. It’s anybody’s guess what they got down here.”

  “Damn,” Gordon grunted, as we moved the first stack, shimmying it inch-by-inch across the concrete floor. “You weren’t kidding.”

  It took us probably ten minutes to clear a path, but about halfway through, I spotted what all the huffing and puffing was for.

  “Damn!”

  If it wasn’t an exact twin of the switch from the little red house, it was at least a close cousin. It was just as big, maybe bigger. Like the first one, it was painted silver and secured by springs almost as heavy as those you see on cars. But that wasn’t what made my hair stand on end.

  I stepped forward and wiped a thick coating of dust and grime from a metal sign riveted into the brick wall. The letters were faded, but it was clear what they said:

  NE UNUS, SED PLURES

  CAVETE!

  “Gordon,” I said. “I think we hit paydirt.”

  “What does it mean?” Mose asked.

  “‘Not one, but many’,” Gordon replied, without missing a beat. “And then, ‘Beware.’ It’s Latin.”

  “That’s strange.” I stared at the inscription.

  “What?” Gordon asked.

  “The other one said ‘Plures Mundi’.”

  “Many worlds,” Gordon translated.

  “This one just says ‘Plures.’ I wonder why.”

  “Maybe it means ‘many switches,’” Mose quipped. “Who knows? By the way, ‘beware’ of what?”

  Gordon and I both gave him the eye.

  “Check it, dude, I don’t even have my real face anymore. And Gordon’s imprisoned in a catcher’s outfit.”

  “Well,” Gordon sniffed, “not exactly imprisoned. But put it this way: if you were going to fight a dragon, wouldn’t you want your armor?”

  I turned to him with a nod to the switch. “So you’ve seen one like this before, too, right?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “This seems to be the standard model. But like I said, not all of ‘em.”

  I grabbed hold of the handle and gave it a tug, and soon as I did that, Gordon and Mose rushed me like they were tackling a quarterback.

  “Noooo!” they yelled together.

  “Chill out, guys,” I said. “I just wanted to get an idea of how tight it was sprung.”

  “I say we go talk to the Duke before we do anything,” said Mose.

  “Sounds like a good idea,” I agreed.

  Gordon snapped his catcher’s mask down over his face and nodded.

  The Duke was in his royal corner of the beat-up, scratched-up, yellow-lighted hallway. He was cooking bacon on his hotplate, a very long process since the plate no longer got very hot. It didn’t seem to matter. He kept patiently turning and turning the bacon until it browned, and for a while, the three of us just stood and watched. What made it so engrossing was that he was so relaxed, making every move like it meant something. He was in some kind of zone.

  Finally, he looked up, immediately noticing Gordon, who still had his mask down.

  “Mm-hmm,” the Duke said.

  “Yeah, this is Gordon,” said Mose. “He’s a little cracked, but he’s cool.”

  The Duke set his old wooden spatula down and extended his hand. “‘S a pleasure, Gordon. They say the same thing about me, ‘cept for t
he ‘cool’ part.” He motioned for us to sit. “Take a load off, boys. You look a little agitated. Ain’t nothin’ worth waiting for that can’t wait another minute. You see how I apply that to this bacon.”

  “Smells good,” I said, the first to sit down on his blanket. I couldn’t tell him how good it smelled because he’d probably have felt obliged to share one of his skimpy three pieces of bacon, and I was pretty sure it was his meal for the day.

  “You boys mus’ be hungry,” he said, reading my mind.

  “That’s true enough,” said Mose.

  “Here.” He took an old beat-up fork from his pack and twirled the bacon pieces up from the hotplate. One at a time. One for each of us.

  “But we can’t—” I protested.

  “Sure you can, now,” the Duke said. “You’re gonna need it. And I got other victuals.”

  After we’d chewed our bacon, gratefully and guiltily, I spoke. “We were wondering, what do you know about that big silver switch down in the basement?”

  “What switch is that now?” he asked coyly, without looking up.

  “Down there with all the machinery, heaters ‘n boilers ‘n stuff,” I said. “It looks big enough to turn the whole city off. You remember me telling you about how I got switched, right?”

  He nodded and said, “Mm-hmm.”

  “Well, you’ve got a switch exactly like it in the basement. Even had the same sign on it. In Latin. Not one, but many.”

  The Duke looked up, and for a second, I couldn’t tell if his look was angry or just serious. Either way, it shut me up. “And you’re thinking you oughta pull it and see what happens, right?”

  “Me too,” piped in Gordon. “Not just Jer—Jacobus. We’ve gotta get home, sir. And I have a theory that—”

  “That what?” said the Duke.

  “Well.” Gordon scratched his face guard. “That…in a way, we’re being led. That there’s a pattern. And that maybe, once we get far enough, we can hack through the system.”

  My eyebrow arched, and the Duke noticed and chuckled. Then he cast a glance over at Mose, who was half-hiding behind Gordon’s turtle shell chest guard. “And where are you goin’ home to, young Moses?” I guess the tension must’ve brought on Mose’s cough, because he started hacking worse than ever.

  The Duke went into action faster than I thought an old man could, fished in his old pillowcase sack, and instead of the glass vials he’d used before, brought out a tin container. A raw and rank menthol smell powerful enough to make my eyes water came out of it when he opened the lid and started rubbing it all over Mose’s back till finally Mose calmed down.

  “Oil of camphor,” said the Duke. “Ever hear that ol’ song?” And he proceeded to sing it.

  “John Brown’s baby had a cold upon his chest,

  a cold upon his chest, a cold upon his chest.

  John Brown’s baby had a cold upon his chest

  So he rubbed it with camphorated oil.”

  It had the same melody as The Battle Hymn of the Republic. The second time through, he substituted a cough for the word, “cold,” and thumped his heart in place of the word, “chest.” With the Duke’s encouragement, we all finally joined in and sang along.

  And then, so did everybody in the hall. Twenty people or so, like a an old movie where everyone breaks into song on cue.

  “You see, Duke,” said Mose, his voice raw. “I’ll die if I stay here. If this thing in my chest doesn’t kill me, my mama’s boyfriend will.”

  The Duke spoke to us in a low, serious voice. “What makes you boys think flippin’ that switch won’t take you someplace even further from home? Someplace you can’t come back from.”

  Mose and I looked to Gordon, who shrugged and said, “I guess that’s always a possibility.”

  “Damn right it’s a possibility,” said the Duke. “Ne unus, sed plures.”

  My eyes bugged out, and Mose got a look on his face like he was reconsidering things.

  “But—” Gordon flipped up his mask. “I think the odds are against it.”

  “And just how have you reached that conclusion, son?” asked the Duke.

  “By inductive logic,” said Gordon.

  “Is that so?” said the Duke.

  “And because I read a lot of stories,” Gordon added.

  I hadn’t heard that one before.

  “Let’s start with the logic.” The Duke packed the tin away. “Not that logic’s my game. I’m better with stories.”

  “Okay,” said Gordon. “This crazy thing happens to me and Jacobus—and other people.” He paused and looked square at the Duke. “Anyhow, that it did happen is a fact, right?”

  “We’ll accept that for the sake of discussion.”

  “All right,” Gordon continued. “In order for it to happen at all there had to be a highly improbable occurrence.”

  “No doubt about that.”

  “The Switch. And this improbable thing didn’t happen just once. It kept happening, and it’s about to happen again.”

  “We’ll see about that,” said the Duke.

  “The more times improbable events occur in succession, the more likely they are to represent a series, or a pattern. A pattern could be intentional, like a maze, or natural, like a snowflake. But all patterns repeat themselves. Right?”

  “Can’t argue with that either.”

  “And they all have certain shapes, right?”

  “I s’pose that’s true, as well. You’re a very bright boy.”

  “This pattern is circular. Or maybe I should say self-enclosed.”

  We all just gawked at Gordon for a minute. Kids like him didn’t come along all that often. I’d heard about prodigies and kids who got college degrees at fifteen, but if Gordon Nightshade really had figured out how to find his way around a multiverse, he was one of a kind.

  “A closed system,” the Duke said, as if trying to picture it.

  “Yeah,” said Gordon. “Like a circle. But with little nodes on it.”

  All of a sudden I could almost see the pattern. The “nodes” were like bumps—like beads on a bracelet. Or the ring of four-dimensional playing cards he’d tried to describe to me yesterday.

  “For example,” Gordon continued. “This is my third time in some version of Chicago. I was born here, but I didn’t pull the switch here the first time. So I must keep coming back because there’s a connection.”

  “This is number two for me,” I said. “Only as a different, well…”

  “That’s because it’s a closed set,” said Gordon. “The set of all possible branches of our own histories. Of course, that’d change if my dad was elected President, but how likely is that?”

  “More likely that you will be, son,” said the Duke. “If we elected Presidents for their smartness.” I wanted to blurt that in my world—the one where I was Jacobus and not Jerrold—a President had been elected for his smartness, and that he was a black man from Chicago, but I decided that would take us on a big detour.

  With the blanket around his shoulders and his arms crossed, the Duke looked like an old Navaho chief or a holy man from the mysterious East.

  “I’m gonna tell you somethin’, young Mr. Nightshade,” he said, very seriously. “The reason I’m inclined to agree with you is that you all found your way to me. Jacobus here found you, and then Mose found him, and that brought you all here, to the Hotel Clybourn, third floor—a place that, as you may’ve noticed, has some unusual qualities.”

  “I kind of picked that up,” said Gordon.

  “Well, boys,” the Duke went on. “There’s one thing I’ve learned you must never, ever do. And that’s to get in the way of somebody who wants to get home.” He paused and looked us over. You wanna go and pull that switch? I won’t stop you. I’ll miss your company—’specially young Mr. Mose’s here—but God’s speed to you.”

  s soon as we wrapped our fingers around the handle and began to tug, I could feel there was something different about this switch. Namely, tightness. It was sp
rung as tight as a bridge cable. The three of us together couldn’t budge it.

  “Maybe it’s a sign,” said Mose. “Maybe we aren’t s’posed to.”

  “Nah.” Gordon flipped his mask up. “We just need leverage.”

  “What if we got up higher?” I asked. “Stood on some of these boxes.”

  “That would give us even less leverage,” said Gordon. “Don’t you remember Newton’s Laws? It’s physics.”

  “They slipped my mind,” I said.

  “I got an idea,” Mose said. “We use the wall to give us leverage. It’s concrete. If we all hold onto the handle and, like, walk up…”

  “Excellent!” said Gordon. “Eventually, the back weight will pass the point of resistance. It’ll have to flip.”

  “It might flip us, too,” I reminded them, thinking of the lump I’d taken on the head the first time.

  “I think that’s a chance we’ll have to take.” Gordon patted his chest guard. “I’m protected, I guess.”

  Mose looked him over. “Yeah, long as it doesn’t flip you on your back. You’d be stuck like a damn turtle.”

  Mose and I got a laugh out of picturing that, and after a few seconds, Gordon joined in. He was one of those rare kids who laugh backward, like snorting, and a barrel-shaped midget laughing backward in a turtle suit is quite a sight.

  That would be the last laugh we shared in a while.

  When the echo of Gordon’s final snort had died away at the far end of that big, dark basement, he stepped forward with a dead serious look on his face, flipped down his mask, and said, “Okay. Let’s do this. Jacobus, Mose…grab the switch with your right hands, and grab hold of my mask with your left. See those buckles on either side? Wrap your fingers around those.”

  “Okay, but why? Wouldn’t it make more sense to use both hands? More power, I mean.”

  Gordon answered me as if it were all as logical as the Pythagorean theorem. “No. First off, we can’t get six hands on that handle, and even if we did, mine are so sweaty, yours would prob’ly slip right off.”