The Great Interactive Dream Machine

by Richard Peck

  “Aaron, do we like it when The Watcher noses in on us? Let’s keep out of other people’s business. Especially adults. Besides, what could we do? You can’t change history. Can you?”

  “Mathematically, no,” Aaron said.

  But you could see his mind was working.

  When Nanky-Poo did her business, he snapped on a plastic glove and reached for a Baggie. Then Nanky-Poo came over to me, stamped a paw in the grass, bulged her eyes at me, and whined.

  “Check in the carrier bag for doggie candy,” Aaron said.

  I found a couple of pieces and handed them over to her. It doesn’t take a dog long to train you.

  When we got off the elevator on eleven, Miss Mather’s door was already opening. I wanted to make a quick dog drop and get out of there. We were this close to freedom when she said, “You may come in and pay a call.”

  This looked like part of our punishment, so we filed in. The curtains in the living room were closed, so it was dim in there. The air hung dead in the room. Miss Mather nodded to two chairs, and she and Nanky-Poo settled on the sofa. It was amazing how much alike they looked. On a low table there were three cups, a teapot, and a plate of vanilla wafers.

  “I expect you like it sweet.” Miss Mather poured out a couple of steaming cups of tea. “You may have a cookie each. Nanky-Poo too, naturally.” Nanky-Poo sat next to Miss Mather, still as a statue, waiting. “Teatime calls for conversation,” Miss Mather added.

  We didn’t have any conversation, so Miss Mather said, “Excellent though my family pedigree is, Nanky-Poo’s is better. As you will not know the history of the shih tzu, I will tell you. They were temple dogs in ancient Tibet.”

  She broke off a piece of cookie, and it disappeared into Nanky-Poo. “The lamas believed that the noble shih tzu had the soul of a lion.”

  Nanky-Poo roared low in her throat for more cookie parts.

  “They are not Chinese dogs—never think it. Only ignorant people assume they are cousins of the Pekinese.”

  Nanky-Poo gave a definite sneer.

  “However, the Dowager Empress of China was a great breeder. The Chinese grew so fond of the shih tzu that they allowed none of them out of the country. When foreigners tried to take them away, the Chinese fed the dogs ground glass so they would die on the voyage.”

  Nanky-Poo swallowed.

  “It was Lady Brownrigg who succeeded in introducing the breed to the western world. She was General Brownrigg’s wife, you know, and a great friend of Papa’s.”

  Aaron caught my eye and tapped his forehead. His lips formed one silent word: cuckoo.

  “Nanky-Poo is best of breed, as you see,” Miss Mather said. “Notice how well-feathered her paws are. And she has the face of a chrysanthemum.”

  Nanky-Poo posed.

  Miss Mather fed her the rest of her cookie. “I have always thought the shih tzu the most beautiful of animals.”

  She would.

  It got quiet then. I couldn’t drink anything this hot any faster.

  “You are Huckley boys, I believe?”

  We nodded.

  “My older brother, Clarence ‘Cotton’ Mather, went to Huckley. All our brothers did. The standards of that school have fallen badly over the years. I was a Pence girl, you know.”

  “My sister goes to Pence,” I said.

  “I had thought she was expelled,” Miss Mather said. “I have not seen her in her uniform lately.”

  “For the last month of school they could wear whatever they wanted to.”

  “I am sorry to hear it.” Miss Mather pursed her old lips. “Young girls have no taste. And you are in summer school? You jumped on my head only early this morning.”

  I nodded.

  “We’re studying World War II in History.” Aaron gave me a look.

  Miss Mather stirred. “World War II as history? Fiddlesticks. The Punic Wars are history. The Battle of Waterloo is history. Bull Run is history. World War II is a current event. Who on earth is teaching you this recent occurrence as if it were history?”

  “Mr. L. T. Thaw,” we said.

  Miss Mather gazed off into the distance. Then finally she said, “Education is wasted on the young anyway. How I wish I were back in my plaid skirt at P—”

  Aaron’s cup clattered on the table. “Miss Mather, don’t!” He was half out of his chair, waving a small hand in her face. “Don’t wish for anything!”

  She blinked, then stared. “Whyever not?”

  He reached down for his ThinkPad. “I’ve got my formula stored in here for extra backup. It could interactivate with your wish.”

  Miss Mather was still staring. “And then what would happen?”

  “You might get it.”

  She gave Aaron a really interested look. “And to think,” she said, “I am considered eccentric.”

  I was amazed that Aaron told her. There are things you just don’t talk about around adults. But then Miss Mather wasn’t your regular adult.

  “Is that device of yours on? It isn’t recording our conversation, is it, or doing anything rude?”

  “It isn’t on,” Aaron said, “but you never know. I’ve got a virus in my formula.”

  Miss Mather gave him a long look. You couldn’t tell if she believed him or not. “Ah, childhood,” she said finally. “My favorite storybooks were always about granting three wishes. And the moral of the story was that you must be careful what you wish for because you might get it. Will that appliance of yours grant three wishes?” She seemed to smile.

  “It already has,” Aaron said. “One of them was y—”

  “In my day, we had storybooks,” she said in a far-away voice. “Now you have machines.” She crooked a finger at the ThinkPad. “And are such devices as that going to change us all?”

  Aaron nodded. “We’re talking cyberrevolution here. We’re talking emerging technologies and totally new windows of opportunity. We’re—”

  “Fiddlesticks.” Miss Mather sat back. “People never change. All the wishes of the young are about the future. All the wishes of the old are about the past. At least those have been the directions of my dreams.”

  The clock on her mantel struck five, and Miss Mather stood up.

  “Tomorrow at four on the dot,” she said. “We will not take tea every day. Only on occasion.”

  Then we were out of there, hearing the locks on her door clicking shut. Aaron was duck-walking down to the elevator. “She might not be,” he mumbled. “It’s possible she’s not.”

  “Not what?”

  “Not cuckoo,” he said. “But she’s lonesome.”

  14

  Doodlebug Summer

  Summer school droned on, and so did Mr. Thaw. We were up to here with World War II. He’d already divided us into teams for oral reports:The Pacific Theater of Operations

  Winning the Battle of the Atlantic Against the U-Boats

  India and the Burma Road

  Against Rommel in North Africa

  etc.

  Fishface Pierrepont had put up his hand that day. “I’m a pacificist,” Fishface said, “a conscientious objector. I believe in peace at any price.”

  No wonder, since he’s the second-smallest kid in class.

  Mr. Thaw shot him a craggy look. “Pierrepont, a conscientious objector could be jailed during World War II.”

  “Lock me up!” Fishface said in his screechy voice.

  So he was assigned “The War on the Homefront,” but the rest of us got shipped out to overseas posts. Aaron and I were “Victory in Europe: The Crucial Final Months.”

  “Zimmer and Lewis!” said Mr. Thaw, drawing a bead on us. “For your own good, make your report the best in the class. I myself lost a toe to frostbite during the Battle of the Bulge in the winter of forty-four. I will know whereof you speak.”

  Just our luck.

  At least summer school’s out early. Most afternoons we’d swing past the deli, then head for our rock until it was time to report to Miss Mather. Aaron always had his ThinkPad, o
f course. He was storing Victory in Europe data he’d accessed. Or so he said. He’d sit hunched on the rock like a gnome, forking up salad and squinting at his screen.

  I’d doze off. Sometimes just before my eyelids drooped shut, I’d think I caught a glimpse of somebody snooping on us from behind a tree. I’d think it was The Watcher, but it probably wasn’t. Also, if I went completely to sleep, I’d start seeing my closet door opening again right here in Central Park. One time I said to Aaron, “Think you could access some information on The Watcher?” just to hear what he’d say. But his mind was in orbit. He heard me with only one brain cell.

  “When you hacked into the Big P—”

  “Just shut up about that,” he said.

  “That could have given them a Code Red alert, and now maybe we’re being stalked by the C.I.A. Maybe a rogue C.I.A. agent gone freelance. They’re always firing people.”

  Aaron’s hands hung over the keyboard. I was really distracting him. “Did that e-mail message sound like the C.I.A.?” he said. “That business about polymorphing our miserable small bodies? Please.”

  “Maybe a foreign power,” I said, “but I still think it could be Daryl.”

  “Daryl’s not that subtle,” Aaron said. “When he’s got a message for you, he grabs you by the back of the neck.”

  “Aaron, aren’t you worried about The Watcher at all? He knows what we’re up to. He—”

  “Of course I’m worried about The Watcher.” He shook two small fists in the air. “I was born worried. But right now I’m a whole lot more worried about packaging enough data for our History report to keep Thaw off our cases. Especially mine. And you’re no help.”

  He had a point there. Basically I was leaving the research part of our report to him. All I knew about World War II for sure was that after the Battle of the Bulge, Mr. Thaw only had nine toes.

  Then one afternoon when we reported for dog duty, Miss Mather didn’t answer her door when we rang. We kept ringing, and Nanky-Poo seemed to be hurling herself against the other side of the door, wanting her walkies.

  Aaron tried the knob, and the door opened. We stepped into the shadowy front hall. Nanky-Poo can jump as high as our waists when she really wants to go out. She was all over us.

  “Miss Mather?” we said, but the apartment didn’t answer.

  “Maybe we can just take Nanky-Poo and leave,” I muttered. But oh no, not Aaron. He eased into the living room, so I followed.

  “Aaron, you weren’t fiddling your formula on your ThinkPad this afternoon, were you?”

  But the TV set was there. A Wall Street Journal was tucked into the arm of the sofa. Aaron went over and put his finger on the date. It was today’s.

  “The basic layout of this apartment is like yours, isn’t it?” he said in a low voice. “Three bedroom, three and a half bath, den?”

  “Aaron, let’s not search the place. What if we went into the bathroom and Miss Mather was taking a bath or something. That wouldn’t be good.”

  But now we were walking down a hall. The first bedroom was a dusty spare with nothing personal in it. We crept on. The next bedroom was different. A thin line of sunlight came in under a blind. I jumped a foot. I thought we’d been cellular-reorganized for sure. The room wasn’t from our time.

  But Aaron put up a finger. “No, it’s now, sort of.”

  But it smelled old. On a chest of drawers everything was laid out like a man had just walked in from some other decade and emptied his pockets: penknife, gold toothpick, fountain pen, pocket watch on a long chain, a few buffalo nickels, and a money clip with a two-dollar bill. A schedule of Brooklyn Dodgers games for the 1949 season.

  We looked up at the foggy mirror, and we both jumped. There he was.

  We spun around, and it was his portrait hanging over the bed. Heavy brows, piercing eyes, plenty of chins, and a tall white collar.

  “It’s her papa,” Aaron whispered. “It’s Old Man Mather. She’s made his room into a shrine.”

  Then we saw that the bed was turned down, and beside it his nightshirt was laid out across a chair. My flesh crept.

  “Aaron, let’s get out. He’s probably been dead since the Dodgers were at Ebbets Field.” Nanky-Poo herself wouldn’t come into this room. She stood in the door with her head hanging down.

  We crept out, and there was only one bedroom left.

  The door was half open with a strong whiff of mothballs coming out. You could see part of the room with some dim sunlight slanting in. Above Miss Mather’s bed was a picture of herself, probably. It was a little girl sitting with one leg tucked under on a bench. In her hair was a bow bigger than her head. She looked about six and serious.

  “She’s gone out. Let’s take Nanky-Poo to the park.” But why was I whispering? Aaron ambled into the room, so I did too.

  “Ah, there you two are,” Miss Mather said.

  It almost gave me a heart attack. Aaron and I ran into each other’s arms. Nanky-Poo waddled over to her.

  Miss Mather was behind us by an old dresser. She was wearing some kind of costume, really out-of-date, like dress code. A gray-green tweedy suit with a badge, a dark-red sweater, and a strange old felt hat with a ripply brim and another badge on it. You couldn’t tell who she was supposed to be.

  “Notice that I still fit into my uniform.” She posed a little.

  My heart was still in my mouth, but Aaron said, “And what uniform would that be?”

  “The W.V.S., of course. The Women’s Voluntary Services. I had it laid away in mothballs in case it might come in handy again. And so it has.”

  She gave us some time to figure out for ourselves how it was coming in handy again. Then she gave up and said, “For your oral report in that so-called History class.”

  We’d told her we had to do a Victory in Europe oral report, and it had to be good because Mr. Thaw was on our case. We’d been to tea with her two or three times. We didn’t mind it after a while, though I was personally up to here with vanilla wafers.

  “You were in World War II?” Aaron gave her an owl look. “On our side?”

  “Of course I was in World War II. Did you imagine I would sit at home while the world caught fire? And women won that war. If it had been left to the men, we’d still be in bomb shelters.”

  Aaron stroked his jaw. “That uniform doesn’t look too American.”

  “It is the British W.V.S.,” she said. “I crossed the Atlantic on a destroyer chased by U-boats in order to join. I am not British, of course, but the founder of the W.V.S. was the Marchioness of Reading, a great friend of Papa’s.”

  Aaron looked thoughtful. “Your papa let you join up in the war?”

  “He was a great patriot,” she said. Then she looked out to the hall and across at his room. “And I suppose he would rather have seen me dead than married.”

  Silence fell, and you could see these little nebulas of dust dots in the slanting sunshine.

  “I have a scrapbook of my wartime career,” she said, dragging it out of a dresser drawer. “You will be interested in it. It will be invaluable for your report.”

  In her uniform she moved like a young girl. She dropped down on the end of her bed and motioned Aaron and me to sit with her. Nanky-Poo jumped up to join us, thinking this was teatime.

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “Whatever I was assigned to do,” Miss Mather said. “I developed a talent for driving staff cars and ambulances during air raids. Women are better drivers than men, you know. Men are too easily distracted. The Blitz was long over before I reached Europe, and so London had already been thoroughly bombed. But then in the summer of forty-four, the Nazis sent over their secret weapon.”

  “The doodlebug,” Aaron said.

  Miss Mather had opened to a scrapbook page that was snapshots of bomb craters. “So you know about the doodlebug.” She turned to me. “It was the flying bomb that could come over anytime, day or night.”

  Aaron nodded. “I’ve got doodlebug data stored in my Inline Memory
Module.”

  “So do I,” Miss Mather said in a long-ago voice.

  She talked us through the scrapbook of her doodlebug summer until the room began to get shadowy. The book was full of black-and-white snapshots: Miss Mather working under the hood of her ambulance, Miss Mather on parade in her dress uniform, Miss Mather in a London park, drinking tea in her metal helmet. “This is my gas mask carrier, not a purse,” she said, pointing it out. “We never knew what Hitler would send us next.”

  I wanted to ask her about Teddy, but I didn’t know how. I wondered if she’d joined up in the war so she could find him. He wasn’t in her scrapbook.

  Then Aaron said, “What happened to your boyfriend?”

  The room dimmed a little more.

  “I had several,” she said softly, “naturally.”

  “Did they all come back?”

  “Not to me.” She closed the book.

  She stood up, and it was time for us to go to the park. Somehow I wasn’t in a big hurry to leave, though Nanky-Poo was beginning to get desperate. She was out at the front door, hurling herself against it again.

  “I’d like to get you on tape for our report,” Aaron said. “With your data, Miss Mather, we’ll be a shoo-in for an A each. You’d be like oral history—I mean oral current event.”

  “Certainly not,” she said, showing us out. “I do not speak to machines. Besides, it won’t be necessary.”

  Whatever that meant.

  I dreamed that night. It wasn’t about The Watcher. It was even realer than that.

  Aaron was in it, and he looked ridiculous. He was in dress code, but it sure wasn’t Huckley’s: boxy little striped jacket, flannel shorts with his knobby knees showing, long socks, a little cap with a bill on his head. Hilarious. I looked down, and I was wearing the same. We were British schoolboys, with gas masks.

  I looked around, and we were in a crowd of other British schoolboys, outdoors somewhere. I looked up into a gray sky, and I thought it was full of Fuji Film blimps. But they were barrage balloons sent up on cables to try to keep the Nazis from dive-bombing. Somehow I knew we were outside a railroad station. You couldn’t tell. Every wall was sandbagged. We were waiting for a train to take us all out of London, away from danger. We were being evacuated.