The Switch

by Hill, A. W.

  “What’s in the drink?” I asked.

  “They tell me—” he gestured toward the beach bar. “—my friends over there…that it’s an island recipe. All local ingredients. Macrobiotic, farm-to-table, doncha know. Kind of like a blue Gatorade Slurpee with a kick.” He offered me a sip. “Wanna try it? You’ll like it.”

  I waved it off. “How many of those do you have a day?”

  He looked at the drink, then at me, and said, “I forget. They just keep bringing them.”

  It took me a second, and then I gaped. “You mean…you come here every day? You just sit here with those…” I gave a nod toward the beach chicks, who were a few yards away, giggling over something that looked insanely funny but probably wasn’t. “…girls, chilling out?”

  “Not bad, eh, my young friend?”

  “Connor. Cut the hipster crap. It’s Jacobus. We’re tenth-graders. You don’t have a beard yet. We still eat Skittles. We pulled a switch together. In an empty little red house on a truck near Lincoln High School. We wound up in a parallel universe. Does any of this ring a bell?”

  I had to ask because he just sat there with his mouth open and a really clueless look on his face.

  “Not any more than the last time you said it.” He smirked.

  I turned to Mose and Jemma and whispered, “This is gonna be tough. Go see if you can find out what they’re putting in these drinks. And bring some barbecue.” They got up, and I made excuses. “Thanks, guys. I just need a minute alone with my old friend. To catch up.”

  “Sure, Jake,” said Mose. “No problem.”

  I watched them from the corner of my eye as they worked their way to the bar, splitting up to go around either side of it. I wasn’t sure what they could really find out, but any information was better than none. The bartender was a buff guy of around twenty-two, and I cringed as Jemma hopped up on a barstool and started flirting with him like she’d done it a hundred times. But then I saw the method to her madness. While she kept the bartender distracted, Mose snuck around behind him and watched him make the next drink.

  I turned back to Connor. “I talked to your mom,” I said, going for the family button. “The night of the day we pulled the switch.”

  “My mom?” he repeated, and I honestly got the feeling he didn’t know who I was talking about. Or at least, which one I was talking about.

  “Okay.” I sat down beside him in the sand. “I can see this isn’t gonna work. Let me try it from your world. You said I’d been here before, trying to get you to come home, but you didn’t want to leave. Why not? What’s so special about this place?”

  He turned to me with this blissed-out look. I could see it in his eyes, even behind the sunglasses. “What’s so special? What’s so special is that I’m sitting here on this beach doing nothing at all, soakin’ the blue rays of the late sun, havin’ some barbecue, and I am totally, completely happy. There is nothing more I want.”

  I could see he wasn’t kidding, so I took a different tack. “That does sound pretty great. No school…”

  “No school,” he repeated.

  “No pressure.”

  “None at all,” he affirmed.

  “No family crap.”

  “All gone,” he agreed.

  “Hot girls.”

  “Oh yeah.” He held out the glass to me again. “Here,” he said. “Just a sip. So you can see what I see. A sip won’t get you hooked or anything. Beach bum’s honor.”

  Now, if I’ve told this story well at all, some of you are sitting there going, “Do it, Jacobus. Take a sip and see what happens,” and others are warning, “Don’t do it! It’s a trap.” The red pill or the blue pill? What did I do? Honestly, it wasn’t a thought-through decision. It was more like I trusted Connor because he was my friend and I figured he’d never try to hurt me. I took the sip.

  The feeling came on slowly. At first, I just sat there thinking, okay, either this is all some kind of illusion, or possibly brainwashing like what we’d seen with the Reds, or maybe I didn’t drink enough. I looked around. The sun was still setting. The waves still crashed on the beach. The people around us still murmured and chattered and giggled contentedly. Then, in a very sneaky way, that murmuring merged with the sound of the surf and became like a musical chord. A single chord with all notes in it. Not only could I hear it, I felt it, too, warm on my face. Warm like a puppy’s belly is warm. And the sound had a color, and the color was powder blue, but that one color—like the one chord—contained all the other colors.

  “Whoa,” I caught myself saying.

  “Hell, yeah!” said Connor.

  “Okay,” I said. “I get it. It feels good. Like nothing could ever hurt you.”

  Connor raised a slightly lazy hand to high-five me, as if I was all of a sudden a member of his special club.

  “But I have to break it to you, Connor. It isn’t like this without the blue juice.”

  “Who cares?” he said. “That’s like telling someone inside a nice warm house they should face the facts and give it up because in the real world, it’s twenty below zero outside.”

  I hadn’t realized my pal was such a thinker, but maybe that’s what happens when you sit around and stare at the ocean all day. He had a point, though. We’re all supposed to want to be happy more than anything else, right? And if one day you found yourself on a beach and totally happy, why would you leave?

  “So wait,” I said. “You’re telling me that you know it’s fake.”

  “Not fake,” he corrected me. “Just different. Look, we just need to get you inside my nice warm house, too.”

  I wasn’t going to persuade him with the fake versus real argument. Not after all we’d seen. I mean, who’s to say that one world is more real than another? But the effects of that one sip were starting to wear off, and I began to see the beach as I’d seen it before. A really nice place, all right, but not paradise. Paradise would have to offer a few choices.

  “Tell me this, Connor,” I began slowly. “Who makes the juice?”

  “The people at the bar,” he said, as if that was the most normal thing in the world.

  “Are they always the same people?” I asked him.

  “I dunno. I guess so. I never really checked them out.”

  “Man, Connor,” I said. “That’s kinda messed up. Aren’t you curious?”

  He turned to me, and he wasn’t sarcastic or playing a role or anything. “You still don’t get it, Jacobus. They don’t ask us for anything. They just give us the drinks and barbecue and let us be.”

  By now, Mose was making his way back to us with a plate of barbecued pig. Jemma was still talking it up with the bartender, but she looked my way.

  “Do you sleep here, too?” I asked. “When it gets dark?”

  “It never gets dark,” Connor said. “The sun goes to the same place in the sky every day. But we go to the grass huts when we want to sleep.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That tells me something’s not right. You’re not in the Antilles. The sun doesn’t stop in the sky. This has got to be some kind of illusion. Either that or we’re in a whole different solar system.”

  “Dude,” he said. “You are indeed blind to the multitudinous. You’re in a different universe.”

  I lay back on the sand to wait for Mose. For the moment, I was out of ammunition.

  “So how are we doin’?” Mose asked, his shadow falling over me.

  I got up and motioned him silently off to the side.

  “This is going to be a challenge,” I shout-whispered against the drone of the surf. “I tried the stuff. The blue juice.”

  Mose’s eyes widened. “You tried it? Was it heavy-duty? Are you okay?”

  “Yeah. I just had a sip. It wears off quick if you don’t keep topping it up. But now I understand why everyone’s so chill. Everything just looked…and felt…beautiful. Like, no worries at all.”

  “So it’s some kinda drug, you think?”

  “I dunno,” I said. “You tell me. You saw them
making it, right?”

  “All I saw,” Mose said, “was berries. Big bumpy berries. Like raspberries or blackberries, but dark blue, and big. As far as I could see, it’s just the berries, some kind of brown sugar, and ice, mixed up in a blender. Here. Have a rib.”

  I took one and looked over his shoulder toward Jemma.

  “Is that bartender guy hitting on her?” I asked, perturbed. “Or is she hitting on him?”

  Mose smiled. “She’s just being a good spy. She’s getting information. But I think somebody’s jealous. And whipped.”

  “Nope. Just worried she’ll get sucked in is all.”

  “Right,” said Mose.

  Jemma slipped off the stool and started making her way back to us. When she arrived, I hailed her to follow Mose and me down to the surf. Connor didn’t seem to care that we walked away. He didn’t seem to care about anything.

  “So what’d you find out?” I asked her. “Is that bartender a human or some kind of robot?”

  “Human as far as I can tell,” she said. “But he talks kind of weird, like ‘Hey, Girl…lookin’ good. You’re new here. On vacation with mom and dad? Or are you free and easy?’”

  “He was hitting on you,” I said.

  She gave me a look like that was a new concept.

  “Anyhow, I pretended like I belonged here, and I learned that they go into the huts at something called ‘sun-stop’ and sleep for a couple of hours, and when they come back, the sun starts to move in the opposite direction.”

  I looked at the orange ball hanging out over the ocean. It looked like the sun. But how could it be?

  “Now that,” said Mose, “is damn weird.”

  “Not really,” Jemma said. “Where I just came from, we didn’t even have a sun. I never saw it until we got on the train.”

  “Did he say what this place is?” I asked. “Like, is it some kind of resort?”

  “He just called it ‘the Retreat,’ and when I asked him how long he’d been working behind the bar, he smiled and said, ‘Oh, I don’t know…a thousand years?”

  I looked back over my shoulder at the people in the beach chairs with their blue drinks. Young people, mostly, but a few older, like my parents. All colors and races. What they had in common was that they were all attractive by normal earth standards, and they were all blissed out on the juice. Had they all come through the inter-dimensional portal like us? Were they pilgrims? No, that couldn’t be. They were more like a tribe, and Connor was one of them.

  “You know what I’ve realized?” They waited for my conclusion. “You can’t ever know exactly what makes a world the way it is. Or how it got that way. If someone came to my world and said, ‘Why do you people here watch reality TV, or have atomic bombs,’ I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  “So how are we gonna get him out of here?” Mose pressed.

  “We’re going to have to kidnap him,” I said. “Long enough for the juice to wear off. Then maybe we can talk some sense to him.”

  “And how do you plan to do that without causing a huge ruckus?” Mose asked. “We can’t just tie him up and carry him off the beach.”

  “No,” I said. “We’ll have to wait till they go to the huts. At ‘sun-stop’ or whatever it is.”

  “And then?” asked Jemma.

  “And then,” I said, “We’ll have to figure how to put him out.”

  “As in unconscious?” asked Mose.

  “Yeah. I guess that’s what I mean. I really wish I was a martial arts master. I heard there was a way to squeeze a place on the back of a dude’s neck and knock him out cold for a while.”

  “Like this.” Mose put his thumb and forefinger at the soft spot under my ears and squeezed. He didn’t even have to squeeze hard. My knees instantly buckled and my head spun. He caught me before I went down. “I got you, Jake. Just ride it out, man.”

  When I had my wits back, I said, “Where did you learn that?”

  “The only good thing my mother’s boyfriend ever did for me. He was a brown belt, and he knew all this weird stuff from being in the military. He taught me some things. And he also used some of them on me.”

  “He did that to you?” I asked.

  “If I ever mouthed off to him, yeah. Put me out cold. But at least I learned how he did it.”

  “Well, then I guess your pain is our gain, Mose.”

  “We’ll have to get him before he goes into the hut,” Jemma said. “That may not be easy with all these people watching.”

  “You know…” I looked around. “I’m not even sure how much these people notice. But just in case, we’ll use the oldest trick in the book.”

  She cocked her head, not understanding, but Mose smiled and said, “A honeytrap.”

  “Yeah,” I said, though I’d never heard the expression before. I turned back to Jemma. “We’ll tell Connor that you want to talk to him in private. Over there in the sand dunes away from the beach. No sixteen-year-old guy could possibly resist that.”

  She raised her eyebrows at that one.

  “Then we’ll sneak up behind him, and my man Mose will deliver the clamp.”

  But Jemma wasn’t convinced. “And then what? Assuming he takes the bait. He won’t be out forever. What do we do? Tie him up?”

  I looked at Mose and he shrugged.

  “If we have to,” he said. “Until we find the switch.”

  When the time came—which was after another forty-five minutes or so of sitting on the beach trying to act like we belonged there without drinking the blue stuff—it was easier getting Connor into the dunes than I’d actually thought it would be. In his juiced out state, he was easily led, as long as you weren’t trying to lead him out of this world. And somehow I think that even though he had all those girls around him, the idea of being with a real girl like Jemma, more his own age, was new and exciting to him.

  Even though the sun still hung there, just above the horizon, the light behind the sand dunes had gone down to a kind of dusky pink, so Connor never saw Mose creeping up behind him. He was out before he knew what’d hit him. And there we were—the three of us—standing around Connor’s limp body on the sand.

  That part was a cakewalk, but it was only the beginning. At sun-stop, the beachgoers got up and headed for the huts. They didn’t move like zombies, but more like you’d imagine people on an island in the Lesser Antilles would move after a day in the sun. Totally relaxed, kind of shuffling, chill.

  The two guys and the girl who had been behind the bar came out and did lazy zigzags among the beach people, counting heads and herding them into the huts. Counting heads? I hadn’t even thought they were paying attention. It turned out they had a system. And when they realized they were a head short, they started calling for Connor. Except that they called him, ‘CQ.’

  “Oh shit,” said Mose. “They know he’s missing.”

  “What are we gonna do?” Jemma asked in an urgent whisper.

  “Why are you guys lookin’ at me?” I said. “I don’t know.”

  The truth is, my heart was beating so loud, it drowned out my thinking. “Talk to me, Gordon.” I glanced up at the sky. “Gimme a clue.”

  “Whatever we’re gonna do,” Mose said. “We better do it quick.”

  But my mind wasn’t running quickly. On the contrary, time had slowed down, and my eyes tracked across the sky above the beach and followed a thick electrical cable that ran from a metal mast on top of the bar hut and across the dunes to someplace back in the hills where the pink light turned to purple twilight.

  “An electrical wire,” I said, “means a switch.”

  “Did that just come to you?” Jemma asked. “You looked far away.”

  “I think maybe Gordon was in my head for a minute.”

  I squatted down, took Connor’s feet in my hands, and said: “Mose, you take his shoulders, and Jemma, you take his butt.”

  As soon as I’d said it, I felt stupid, but she was way too nervous to get embarrassed, and after Mose and I had lifted him,
she just stepped right in and planted her hands beneath his butt-cheeks.

  It’s not easy walking uphill in sand, let alone walking backward and sideways like a six-legged, drunken giant crab. But somehow, we managed to do it. Until we heard the shout.

  “CQ!” It was a man’s voice, uncomfortably close. “Sun-stop! Time to get your REM’s. You’re AWOL. Get your ass out here, and bring the new girl.”

  If he’d said it in a relaxed way, it might have seemed funny, but he didn’t. He was urgent. What happened, I wondered, if one of their beach people didn’t go inside at sun-stop?

  “Okay,” I said from Connor’s feet, as softly as I could. “I’m the only one walking forward. I’m gonna steer with his feet. If I push on his right leg, Mose, you go left. Your left, not mine. If I push on his left leg, go right.”

  “I’ll try to follow that,” Mose said with a dark laugh.

  “What do I do?” Jemma asked.

  “Just watch me,” I said. “You’ll know what to do.”

  The first time I tried to make a hard left, we toppled over, and I thought sure it would wake Connor’s brain up. But it didn’t, and we struggled back to our feet. On the next turn, I was more restrained.

  The dune grass behind us lit up with flashlight beams, and more voices calling for Connor.

  “Move!” I said. There was a patch of darkness ahead, and I wanted to get to it. I also did not want to lose sight of that electrical cable.

  “All right, let’s double time it,” Mose said. “But we all gotta do it together.”

  The darkness led us steeply uphill, and for every three feet we made, we slipped two feet back—and each time we did that, the flashlights got closer. Then, without warning, there was a noise from way over on the right that made them all turn their beams in that direction—a noise like the engine of some monster truck turning over. That distraction gave us time to stumble over the top and find a place in the woods to hide. But what the hell had caused it?

  The searchers stopped short of the woods, and just stood there, pointing their beams at the trees. They were afraid to go farther.

  We waited to move, or even talk, until they backed away. They seemed a little shocked, and one of them shook his head and said, “We lost him. Damn. Lost another one to the Leviathan.”