A sound was coming out of the cabin. No—music. Halting fragments of melody interspersed with long silences. Even from out here, Jake could tell they were frustrated. He guessed Lange’s playing hadn’t sounded like that in his other life.
Jake hated to interrupt, but it was snowing hard. He picked a silence, stomped up the porch stairs, and wiped his boots on the mat, a lot more carefully than necessary. Eliza rolled back and forth to clean her treads.
“Good girl,” Jake told her, theatrically loud.
When he opened the door, Lange had, at least, not hidden the guitar like it was evidence of illicit behavior. He’d simply stopped playing. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the wood stove.
“I called a therapist,” Lange said. “We arranged a remote appointment.”
“Okay.” Jake knew a peace offering when he saw one, but he braced himself for the next thing out of Lange’s mouth to be I did what you wanted, now can we have sex?
When it didn’t come, Jake let out a breath and took off his boots.
“You are under no obligation to stay here,” Lange continued. “At present I’m neither helpless nor a danger to myself. You’re free to leave.”
“You want me to go?”
Lange paused, his hand falling to the guitar strings. “No.”
“You… want me to stay?”
“That would be a logical inference,” Lange said, and then, thank fuck, he stared right at Jake and said, “Yes, I want you to stay.”
That was a fucking revelation. It struck Jake speechless for a second.
Misreading his silence, Lange added, “If you want to, that is. As I said, you don’t have to.”
Jake didn’t know what to do with this—this invitation. He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. The window behind him was probably splattered with snowmelt by now. “It’s snowing.”
“Ah,” Lange said.
Shit. Jake had taken the coward’s way out. “And I already told the team I’d stay longer. I don’t mind keeping you company. It’s probably good for both of us.”
Lange’s fingers moved against the strings. He muted the accidental sound almost as soon as he made it. “I agree that your presence is good for me.”
“Don’t give me all the credit. You’ve been a lot better since we arrived.”
“Yes. But I fail to see how you would benefit, though you are welcome to stay.”
“Well,” Jake said slowly, unwilling to respond to a question that hadn’t been asked and uncertain if he even knew the answer, “you’re pretty good at crosswords.”
“True, but irrelevant,” Lange said. “Absent other evidence, I am forced to the improbable conclusion that you like me.”
“Yeah, it’s weird for me too.”
“But you don’t want—”
Jake cut that sentence off with a hand gesture. Lange might be ready to go there, but he wasn’t. “Can’t we be friends?”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
“Honestly, I’m not sure I do either,” Jake said. “But it can’t be any harder than surviving a descent to the surface with a cracked heat shield. Between the two of us, we can figure it out.”
With that tenuous agreement, Jake and Lange spent the afternoon in surreal domesticity, periodically restocking the wood stove and clearing the drive of snow. They settled on Lange’s ability as the safest and most interesting topic of conversation, designing a new series of tests. Lange cleared some of the snow without a shovel, but he was unable to stop the snow falling from the sky. Jake made a solemn and disappointed noise when Lange reported that to him, and then had to duck a snowball, which didn’t work because Lange’s throws could change course mid-air. Likewise, all of Jake’s snowballs failed to make contact.
It would’ve been good sportsmanship to let one make contact—there was nothing wrong with Jake’s aim—but when Jake explained that, Lange said, “Wouldn’t it also constitute good sportsmanship for you to lose without complaint?”
“Was that a joke?”
“No,” Lange said, but one corner of his mouth pulled slightly to the side. It wouldn’t count as a smile for anybody else. Jake recorded it in his memory as a milestone anyway.
Lange had turned away too fast for any lingering glances. He walked back toward the house, the snow shovel hovering at his heels like a faithful pet.
Jake nailed him in the back with a snowball.
Lange didn’t turn around. A second later, a whole pine tree’s worth of snow got dumped on Jake’s head.
“Fuck,” Jake said, or tried to say. It was more like fuh and then the sound of him spitting out snow.
Lange peeked over his shoulder, and Jake definitely didn’t imagine that smile. The little shit.
Jake brushed himself off, returned to the cabin—he had to carry his own shovel using his hands—and followed Lange inside. Lange set his boots aside and sat on the floor near the wood stove, where the cats had made a nest of Jake’s bedding. Jake joined them on the floor.
“Did you do that a lot as a kid in Milwaukee?” he asked before he could think better of it. “Play in the snow, I mean. It’s okay if you don’t remember. Or if you don’t want to talk about it.”
“I did,” Lange said. “My cousins and I used to play outside every winter. Sometimes our parents would help us construct forts.”
“It sounds nice, having your cousins around like that,” Jake said, aware he was treading into dangerous territory. He didn’t know much about families, at least not happy ones.
“Most of my family is there. My mother probably should have moved to Nashville for her career, but she worked remotely because she didn’t want to leave. We lived right down the street from her sister,” Lange said. His gaze was fixed on the wood stove, and his hands were absently stroking Niels Bohr’s fur. “My father’s from there too. He was a high school science teacher before he retired.”
Jake forced himself to look away from Lange’s hands on the cat. It was a bad idea to think about physical affection. It made him burn with a kind of tingly, all-over tightness, like his skin ached everywhere he wasn’t being touched.
He wished he could mute the sound of purring. Attraction was awful. It had scooped out half his brain and replaced it with this twitchy restlessness. It was making him jealous of a cat.
Jake cast around for something to say that had nothing to do with his thoughts. What had Lange just said? His dad was a teacher.
“Did you like school?”
Lange let out a bark of laughter. “I spent all my time in class bored and furious about being bored. School was hell.”
“Well, yeah,” Jake said, because school was hell described his experience, even though it had been drastically different. “But I just thought—you’re so smart—”
“So are you,” Lange said with apparent and shocking sincerity.
It took Jake a moment to recover from that. The number of people who had recognized his intelligence over the course of his life was still vanishingly small, and Lange had been pretty fucking rude about the robots. Jake had sort of assumed that Lange didn’t think of anybody as smart. If you were standing on the peak of a mountain, you couldn’t distinguish height differences among people who were down in the valley.
“Don’t tell me you liked school,” Lange said. “You dropped out.”
Lange remembered that? Jake said, “We moved around a lot. I was always the new kid. I tried to keep my head down and be quiet, but—I don’t know. I got into a lot of fights.”
“I got into a lot of fights with teachers,” Lange said wryly. “In my defense, they were always wrong.”
“I’m sure they were.”
Niels Bohr got up to stretch, arching his black back and reaching forward to knead Jake’s bedding with his white paws. Lange stretched, too, raising his arms above his head and then bringing them down so he could roll his shoulders, looking more at ease in his body. He unfolded his crossed legs and Jake thought for a moment that their conversation was
over, but instead what happened was that Lange lay down on his stomach in front of the wood stove. He pillowed his head on his arms.
The position put him closer to Jake, his head and shoulders now within easy reach. Lange was lying on top of a corner of the rumpled blanket Jake had been sleeping on, which was almost like he was in Jake’s bed, such as it was. Jake couldn’t afford to think about that.
Niels Bohr curled up in the small of Lange’s back and purred. Smug asshole cat.
Lange said, “School wasn’t as bad when I was younger. My cousins liked me. And I had my parents watching out for me. My father couldn’t start arguments with his colleagues, but Mama—nothing could stop her.”
“Your parents sound great,” Jake said, trying to keep the envy out of his voice.
“They were. They are. I wish—“ Lange stopped for a long time. He watched the fire. “I was afraid I’d hurt them, if I went back like this. I’m sorry, that’s a terrible thing to say to you. I shouldn’t have hurt you. And I shouldn’t have kept you here, made you responsible for me. That wasn’t right. I… don’t really know how to live like this. That’s not an excuse.”
“Hey, it’s okay.”
Words were never really adequate, because nothing was, and Jake couldn’t fight off his urge to comfort Lange. A hand on the shoulder, that was pretty standard stuff. Lange wouldn’t hate it. Probably. Jake was leaning back, propped up on both hands, and he went so far as to sit up straight and lift one.
Lange caught him in the act, his dark gaze more alert than his posture suggested. Jake froze.
“You can,” Lange said.
Jake lowered his hand to Lange’s shoulder like either of them might detonate at the slightest wrong move. When that didn’t happen, he relaxed a fraction, letting the weight of his hand settle there. He rubbed a small circle into Lange’s shoulder.
“I get why you were worried about hurting them, but for what it’s worth, I don’t think you would,” Jake said. “Not now, anyway. You’ve been doing a lot better.”
Lange relaxed. “Your touch helps me.”
“Helps you what?”
“It’s like an anchor,” Lange said. “It helps me stay here. It helps me feel right. This is my body, where I live.”
“Oh,” Jake said, unprepared for this intimacy—unprepared for how much he loved it. It fulfilled a craving he hadn’t known he had. “I get that, I think. It helps me, too.”
“And I like talking to you. Even about this. It’s good to talk about this,” Lange said, like he’d only just put that together and couldn’t quite believe it. “It hurts, but it’s good.”
“Yeah.”
The smile Lange offered him was sad, but it was there. “Being alive is like that.”
“That’s a better review than you gave it a few days ago,” Jake said. “And yeah, I’d say that’s about the shape of things.”
Jake wanted Lange to keep talking, even if it was about his parents. Jake didn’t have any stories about his own mom, except the one where she’d ditched him when he was a baby, and the stories he could tell about his dad were all pretty goddamn grim. Lange could bring him some souvenir from this country he’d never get to visit. “You said your mom did music, right? What kind?”
“She wrote everything. Pop, R&B, country, electro-ballads. She would tell you ‘anything that pays the bills,’” Lange said, amused. “She always underplays her talents. My dad never lets her get away with it. He loves showing off her awards.”
Awards. Electro-ballads. Jake hadn’t expected their conversation to go in this direction, but it wasn’t the first time Lange had known something surprising about pop culture. When they’d done the first crossword together, he’d known the name of Zinnia Jackson’s songwriter. Evelyn Holland. Maybe it hadn’t been a lucky guess.
“Lange,” Jake said. “Is your mom Evelyn Holland? Like in the first crossword we did?”
Lange huffed out a laugh and lifted his head from his arms. “Are you offering me a helpful hint about my own mother’s identity?”
“Shut up,” Jake said, his embarrassment tempered by the knowledge that he’d made Lange laugh. “I mean, that’s her, though, right?”
“Yes, Evelyn Holland from the crossword is my mother,” Lange said. “I’m gonna tell her that’s the only way you knew her name. She’ll get a kick out of that.”
The thought of Lange talking to his mother about Jake—how the hell would he explain their relationship?—made Jake uncomfortably warm, and yet he didn’t hate it.
Lange stilled, the last little tremors of his amusement dying down, and then said, “Well, maybe some day, anyway.”
“You haven’t told them what happened,” Jake guessed.
“I will eventually,” Lange said. “If we live.”
“Yeah,” Jake said, at a loss.
“I wish I could play you something my mother wrote,” Lange said suddenly, twisting so he could sit up. “On the guitar, that is. Not with a recording.”
“Why can’t you?”
Lange closed his eyes. “My fine motor control isn’t what it once was.”
“So?” Jake asked. They’d had plenty of conversations about what Lange could and couldn’t do, and usually Lange was frustrated and cranky, but not embarrassed. If that’s what this reaction was, even. The way Lange was pressing his lips together, it almost seemed like he wanted to laugh.
Jake didn’t poke at it. He plowed ahead. “Who said you have to use your hands?”
Playing the guitar with telekinesis turned out to be just as hard as playing it the regular way, or so Jake assumed, since he couldn’t do either. But the experiment entertained both of them. By the end, Lange could play “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star” with either method, and he had laughed at Jake’s dumb “look Ma, no hands” joke, and that was good.
“It’s important to me to perfect my control,” Lange said, setting the guitar down. As Jake was nodding and on the verge of agreeing, Lange added, “So I don’t hurt you. It’s important to me not to hurt you.”
“Yeah, that’s important to me too,” Jake said, as lightly as he could. “Probably it would be good if your goal was not to hurt anyone, though.”
“Of course. That is also one of my goals.”
Jake clamped down on the things he wanted to blurt out, like are you still thinking about having sex with me, because any variation on that question was an admission that Jake was still thinking about it. Better to take this special consideration as a sign of friendship, which was the relationship they’d agreed on. Still, it was fine to feel flattered, he reasoned. Having your heart rate accelerate and your mouth go dry because somebody admitted they liked you best was just normal friendship stuff.
It had never happened to Jake before, but he didn’t exactly have a wealth of friendship experience to draw on.
Shit. Time to change the subject.
“Can I ask you about your research?” Worst possible subject change, Jesus fucking Christ. “Uh. We don’t have to talk about that, if you don’t want to.”
“Ask,” Lange said, and even though they were still sitting on the floor next to the wood stove, the air between them had cooled.
“I guess I just wondered—why change the Nowhere so regular people could walk into it?”
“Greater access to instantaneous travel could save lives. That’s merely one advantage among an expansion of possibilities so immense it’s almost impossible to imagine.”
“Yeah, I get that, or at least I think I do. But the bulk of the other research is focused on changing people, not changing space.”
“One could argue that my research was also focused on changing people. I just didn’t know it until it nearly killed me and I came back permanently physically and psychologically altered.”
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have brought this up.”
Undeterred, Lange said, “If you’re asking why I didn’t start with human experimentation, one reason is because it’s so often unconscionable, as our ex-colleague
s demonstrated.”
“But you wouldn’t have kidnapped and tortured anyone,” Jake objected.
“Except myself, by accident,” Lange said. “Another reason is that my work has always been on the nature of folded and unfolded space, not on the nature of human beings. Your why question is the simplest thing about my research: I wanted to learn more about the Nowhere.”
“And when you want to learn more about something, you take it apart,” Jake said. “That, I get. Will you tell me about the machine?”
“I’ve never been good at explaining my work to people outside my field,” Lange said, and probably people outside my field meant everyone except Dax, and Dax didn’t need anything explained to them.
“You wrote a popular book about this,” Jake pointed out.
“I’m told my first draft was incomprehensible,” Lange said. “And the book doesn’t discuss the machine.”
“I know I won’t get it, not all of it, not the way you do, but tell me anyway. Do a bad job. I give you permission,” Jake said, and the corner of Lange’s mouth quirked. “I like to know how things work. Whatever you say will interest me, I promise.”
“The easiest way to understand it is by thinking about sound,” Lange said. He picked up the guitar again and plucked the bottom string with his thumb. “I strike one string and the string beside it vibrates, even though I never touched it. That’s what the machine does to matter.”
“And if everything’s in tune, a regular person can pass into the Nowhere?”
Lange nodded. “Though in my case, entering turned out to be easier than exiting.”
“And even the part where you entered didn’t go to plan, right? Dax said you had bad luck. And Emil, well, he said the whole room sort of imploded and exploded at the same time.”
“The Nowhere is not static, nor is it truly empty,” Lange said. “It moves. I caught it at a bad time.”
“And you didn’t have a sensor that could pick up on that? You and Dax talked about readings.”
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