When the World was Flat (and we were in love)

by Ingrid Jonach

  My eyes opened. “Jo?”

  She rushed back to my bedside. “Lillie!”

  “Jo, I have to tell you–”

  A throat cleared in the doorway and we looked up to see Mr Green. His lips stretched into a smile without sentiment.

  “Look at you, Lillie,” he said, walking into the room. “You banged yourself up a treat.” Like Sylv, he leaned against the bed and it slid under his weight. “Yep,” he said, looking at the top of my head. “We thought you were a goner.” His eyes met mine and I knew by “goner” he meant he thought I was going to slide.

  Jo frowned. “Dad.”

  Mr Green looked at Jo, as if seeing her there for the first time. “Honey, the nurse asked me to tell you visiting hours are over. We gotta go home.” He grimaced, like he was sorry, but I could see through him like cellophane.

  “Lillie, what were you–?”

  “Go,” I croaked, cutting Jo off. I closed my eyes, wanting to go back to sleep, wanting to see Tom in my dreams.

  She hovered for a moment, her shadow passing across my eyelids. “I’ll be back tomorrow,” she promised.

  “You go ahead, honey,” I heard Mr Green say. “I have a message to give Lillie.”

  My eyes flew open. A message? From Tom? Who else? If I had the muscle mass I would have sat up and grabbed Mr Green by the collar until he told me every word.

  He was watching the door, waiting until it closed with an audible click of its latch. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye like a vulture and then turned his head, his body following until his round stomach rested on the metal rail, as evidence of his transformation from call-me-Dave into evacuee Mr Green.

  “What do you remember, Lillie?” he asked, tapping his index finger on the rail. Tap. Tap. Tap. “What do you remember about…?” He hesitated.

  I looked at him, realizing that there was no message, unless he was typing it in Morse code. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. They say not to shoot the messenger, but I could have used a machine gun in that moment.

  “I remember you chasing us last week,” I said through gritted teeth. “I remember the tattoo behind my ear. The Evacuation.” I lifted my chin in defiance.

  Mr Green nodded thoughtfully and then his hand shot out as fast as a rattlesnake and caught me around the neck. “Then you must remember the Circle,” he growled.

  His fingers formed a vise, which tightened until the veins in my neck bulged and I thought my eyes would pop out of my head.

  “Loose lips sink ships, Lillie,” he warned, as I gasped for breath. “You keep your mouth shut and this here will be smooth sailing.” He gave me a shake, my head bouncing like a bobble-head doll, and raised his eyebrows, as if waiting for a response.

  I blinked a couple of times and he released his grip, letting me suck in a lungful of oxygen. I rubbed my throat with my good hand and then pointed to the space behind my ear. “I think these tattoos are going to rock your boat,” I said, my voice scratchy. “Jo will see hers – everyone will – and there goes your dimension secrets. They say a picture tells a thousand words…” My voice dropped off, as I remembered Tom saying this to me a week ago, a lifetime ago.

  I closed my eyes, as if I could make myself slide back in time, and when I reopened them I saw Mr Green was smiling, his fat lips stretching until they were paper-thin.

  “I would like to think that after four hundred and ninety-eight years we have ironed out a few flaws.” He leaned in close, his breath smelling of stale coffee. “You see, the Circle has a knack for fixing problems. We make them disappear. Like that.” He snapped his fingers and I flinched.

  “I have to say though,” he said straightening up, “I did consider sliding out of this hellhole the second I tracked down my double.” He shook his head. “A truck driver?” He laughed and then his eyes returned to me, burning like coals. “But then I saw what a balls-up dimension this was, with the tattoos and the unmerged evacuees. I decided it was worth the extra couple of weeks it would take to merge because of the cancer.” I remembered Jo saying last month that he had started forgetting things like that she had her license. I scowled as he patted his stomach, as if congratulating himself for curing his cancer.

  He trailed off as I reached across to my tray table, fumbling until my hand closed around the butter knife. I rolled over with a small moan and looked at my reflection in the shiny metal of the bed rail. A set of bleary emerald eyes stared back at me and when their irises moved upwards I saw a white bandage that covered the circumference of my head. Hair stuck out at odd angles between the gauze, lank and in want of a wash.

  I brought the knife up behind my ear, turning it this way and that until it revealed the space behind the cartilage. The blade showed a clear patch of pale skin with no markings. I touched the skin and realized it was stove-hot, tattoo or no tattoo.

  “What did you do? How did you–”

  Mr Green shook his finger and clucked deep in his throat. “Unlike your friend Tom, I toe the line on… What did you call them? Dimension secrets?” He chuckled, repeating the words under his breath as if adding them to his vocabulary.

  My friend Tom. “Where is he?” I asked in a whisper. “Has he gone?”

  Mr Green nodded with a smirk and I fell back into the pillows, wrapping my hand around my neck to hold in the sound of my sobbing. A single tear slid from the corner of my eye. Yes, Tom had shared dimension secrets. But it had been on a need-to-know basis, leaving so much – too much – unknown.

  I removed my hand, propping myself up on an elbow. “Jo deserves to know,” I said. “They all do. What happens when they slide? What will Jo think when she turns up in–?”

  “Because everyone else knows so much about the afterlife,” Mr Green said, cutting me off. But then he sighed and suddenly he looked tired, worn out, like the old Mr Green. “Jo will remember when she slides. Everyone will. Think of it as pressing a reset button.”

  “A reset button?”

  Mr Green raised an eyebrow. “Did you think you would live forever?” he asked, but it was without malice. “You should be thankful that eternal life is reserved for evacuees.”

  I frowned, thinking of Evacuee Lillie and how her memories filled my mind. I had her habits – her untidiness, her love of trivia. “I thought I was an evacuee.” But of course, Tom would not have loved me if I was Evacuee Lillie.

  Mr Green shook his head. “You won, Lillie.”

  I won. Tom had used the same word. They made it sound like a war.

  “And the winner takes it all,” he continued. “You came out of the merge a winner, but with a truckload of memories not of your making.” He shrugged. “Think of it as a bonus.”

  “A bonus?” I blinked back the last of my tears, wondering what was the point of winning if I lost myself when I slid? According to Mr Green and his reset button analogy, I could slide as Lillie from the Thirty-Fifth Dimension and arrive in a new dimension as Evacuee Lillie.

  Why then would Tom ask me to slide? I narrowed my eyes at Mr Green. I had no reason to trust him and every reason to trust Tom.

  “Evacuees are the losers Lillie,” Mr Green continued. “I worked that out in my first hundred years, which was when I joined the Circle.” His eyes clouded for a moment. “In those days we were just a group of likeminded Evacuees,” he said.

  I snorted as I remembered Tom telling me they were a band of vigilantes who had become their government.

  “We wanted to spread the word that merging allows us to live normal lives,” he said. “It makes us one with the dimension.”

  “It also makes you murderers,” I pointed out.

  “I thought we had established that you are not an evacuee,” Mr Green said with a raised eyebrow.

  “Merging either kills non-evacuees or evacuees,” I said.

  Mr Green scowled. “Evacuees are like cockroaches. We will be here after Armageddon.”

  “What about the antidote?”

  His scowl twisted into a snarl as he realized I knew another dimension secret
. “All you need to know is that I am determined to keep the theory of everything a secret at all costs,” he said. It was a threat and it made me wonder if they would be chasing Tom through his thirty-sixth dimension and beyond. It sounded like he knew too much.

  “For the good of science,” I said sarcastically.

  “For the good of humankind,” he corrected. “Do you think this is a life we want to pass on to anyone else? Stuck in this God-forsaken time warp, this abomination? Do you really think you would be helping them? Do you think it helped you?” He spread his hands out above the bed, indicating my injuries. “Tell me that Lillie.”

  His mask had slipped for a moment, and underneath I had seen a sad and sorry man. The moment passed and his face hardened. “If I catch you sharing dimension secrets I will give you more than a sore neck,” he warned.

  28

  How do I describe the next eight months? That length of time between November and June that was like a knot in my ball of twine, with me on one side and summer on the other? It seemed like eight years for starters, with each second ticking by at the speed of an hour. And while they say time heals all wounds, I knew I was looking at an eternity with a hole in my heart.

  The snow became my cocoon. It was falling thick and fast by mid-November and the town went into hibernation, except for the rumble of snowplows and salt trucks. The occasional car followed, creeping like a sleepwalker in the dim daylight.

  Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, I would recite to myself, as I lay in bed until late or slumped over my desk at school. Shakespeare. A throw back from Literary Lillie from the Seventh Dimension.

  There were a few times when I woke from my slumber for a few minutes or even a few hours. But it was late December before I smiled and February before I laughed again. The girls staged two interventions – one at the Duck-In Diner and another where Sylv threatened to dye my hair pink and purple – but by Christmas they had given up shooting for the stars and settled for the Moon instead.

  I was talking after all, as in stringing more than two words together. The casts had come off my arm and leg. I had also started brushing my hair, which was growing back from the accident. I found that if I pulled it into a ponytail it covered the scar and surrounding shaved patch, letting me look into a mirror without thinking of Tom.

  Of course, I thought about Tom a lot. My dreams had become less like a Band-Aid and more like rubbing salt in the wound. I became an insomniac, drinking coffee and staying up until the early hours to avoid seeing him in other dimensions. I averaged five hours of sleep a night, but those five hours were filled with a lifetime of memories with him.

  I would lie in bed after waking up, wondering if I had seen into his thirty-sixth dimension. It made me think about sliding for the millionth time. I would have done it in a heartbeat, would have run the risk of becoming one hundred percent Evacuee Lillie if I could remember how to A: track him down; and B: slide without killing myself.

  I had given the latter a shot and had a scar the size of Alaska as a result.

  I confronted Mr Green about sliding at Thanksgiving, when he came over for our annual tofu turkey. I sat across from him during the appetizer, main and dessert, eyeballing his fat face, which seemed to have swelled to twice the size since he had started putting on the pounds again.

  When he excused himself to go to the bathroom, I cornered him in the hallway.

  “You have to tell me how to slide,” I said, my voice low in case we were overheard.

  He raised a caterpillar-esque eyebrow. “I have to tell you how to slide?” he asked and then laughed, a deep bubbling sound.

  “And how to find Tom,” I added with a firm nod, even though my knees were trembling. I had kept my mouth shut in lieu of his rough-up, but I needed answers to my questions and that was worth risking my neck. Hell, it was worth risking my spine.

  His laughter suddenly stopped and he slammed his forearm into my chest, pushing me up against the wall. “I have to tell you shit,” he spat, his round nose inches from my face. “You want to slide? Go ahead and kill yourself. The slide will kill you anyway.” He gave me one last shove and I felt the drywall behind me bend, coming close to breaking.

  Mr Green was lying about the reset button. I would bet my eternal life on it. Like he said, he toed the line on dimension secrets. He was not going to share the ins and outs of sliding with a non-evacuee.

  I started going to the public library with Jo in December, checking out tomes on physics and reading them cover-to-cover for a clue on how to slide. It was during this time that I educated myself on Einstein.

  I learned why the sky was blue, explained by Einstein with a formula for the scattering of light. I read about the fabric of space-time, which had four dimensions – height, width, depth and time, and how gravity was the weight of the universe on our shoulders, pushing us, not pulling us, towards Earth. But for me, it was the weight of universes.

  I read of his search for a unified theory, dubbed the theory of everything. His contemporaries believed Einstein had wasted the last thirty-odd years of his life on this theory. And I guess in my dimension he had.

  While I schooled myself in physics, Jo tutored me in a range of subjects from English to Biology, thinking I wanted to study for the SATs.

  I let her teach me about sentence structure and integers, knowing she would leave me alone if she thought I had a purpose, even if it was to put one foot in front of the other until the end of our junior year.

  April arrived with the speed of a snail crossing the Southwest and I submitted my major work for Art Studies. We were allowed to submit our major works individually. Like I said the class was made up of social outcasts and two restraining orders later the school board decided teamwork was not worth the lawsuits. I got an A, which gave me a bit of a buzz, if that was the word for a spark lighting in my chest and then blowing out within the same second.

  A few weeks later an exhibition of our major work was held in the gymnasium. Jackson roped me into the exhibition committee, which meant I gave up an afternoon of sipping coffee and staring out of my window at the veggie patch to set up partitions and hang the works.

  Mr Hastings was giving directions like it was an exhibition at the Met. I knew he had merged, the skin behind my ear heated up whenever he came close. And he had a new lease on life, like Mr Green with his cured cancer. He had handed in his resignation at Green Grove High and was moving back to New York at the end of the school year to relaunch his career. He already had a show booked.

  “OK. Explain,” Jackson said, after he had hung my work. He squinted like it was an optical illusion.

  “I would if I could,” I said truthfully.

  The image had been exposed multiple times and showed me standing in the center against a white background. At my feet was another Lillie, curled into a ball. Leaning against the white wall behind me was a third Lillie. My foot could also be seen in the bottom corner as a fourth walked out of the frame. There were twenty-six Lillies in total and it had taken me at least seventeen overexposed negatives before I got the shot. I called it “The rule of repetition.”

  I continued to hang the works one after another, canvases of dead insects, and sketches of semi-naked women and fairies. I paused when I picked up a drawing of a girl with unbrushed hair and traced my fingers across the freckles that dotted her nose. It was Jo. She was laughing, her mouth open and head tilted towards the sky. The signature in the bottom corner read “Jackson Murphy”.

  I envied Jo. As they say, ignorance is bliss, and thanks to Mr Green she was completely and utterly ignorant that she had merged with evacuee Jo, leaving her like me, somewhere in between yourself and someone else.

  29

  I took the SATs in June, the week after school wrapped up. It was kind of like going to another world where I had three and a half hours without Tom, as I identified sentence errors and solved all kinds of problems that started and ended on a piece of paper.

 
; Jo skipped town the next day, starting out on a two-month road trip with Jackson.

  “To celebrate the state giving back his license,” she explained, as we watched him pack the trunk.

  “And my parents giving me back my baby,” Jackson added, patting the rusted roof of his repaired hatchback.

  It was about eight in the morning, but it was as hot as midday. Jo was wearing a sleeveless top and shorts, showing off her toned arms and thighs. I looked ready for a blizzard by comparison, wearing jeans and a shirt with three-quarter length sleeves. It was as if my bones had frozen during winter and I was now like a leg of lamb thawing on the counter. But it would take more than a day to defrost me.

  I shivered and stepped out of the shade of the cottonwood.

  “Did someone walk over your grave?” Jo asked.

  I laughed without humor. “You said it, sister.” I crossed my arms for warmth and tilted my face towards the sun. “Where will you go?”

  “Arizona.”

  “We want to check out Phoenix,” Jackson called out, heaving a second suitcase into the tiny trunk. “And take a look at that big hole in the ground.”

  I guessed the destination had been his decision. Jo would fry like a hash brown in Arizona, but then she told me how she had been looking forward to the road trip for months.

  “Arizona,” she breathed, looking into the distance as if she could see the sign. “When I think about that state I have a funny feeling, like homesickness.”

  I remembered that Jo had not been at my wedding in the Seventh Dimension. I could now guess where she had been – Arizona. In another dimension Mr Green was probably the head of Area 51.

  As we were saying goodbye, Jo asked for the hundredth time for me to be their third wheel.

  “We saved you a seat,” Jackson added, tilting his head towards the back, where there was a foot-by-foot of saggy car seat cover with luggage piled on either side.