by Lily Markova
Emily patted the side of the mattress. “Come on, get down here. Pretty sure this door can hold both of us, Jack.”
He didn’t want to. He felt more miserable than on the day she’d vanished, because at least then he hadn’t known for sure where and why. Evan took off his helmet and undressed anyway, got in the water without any of the show-offish diving stunts he’d mastered, and waded over to the mattress. Emily patted the vacant space next to her again, but he only leaned on it, propping his chin on his crossed forearms, and frowning at nothing in particular behind her.
“Shall we get the lights?” she asked.
“Go on.”
Evan mentally adjusted his settings, allowing her reality to affect his, so when she switched to Night Mode, he was plunged into darkness, too.
“Where do you think we are?” he said, looking up at the sky that had never been this starry over The City, not even when he had been little and everything had seemed brighter and more real. “Tumbling about inside a black hole?”
He wished he’d kept his mouth shut—Emily had that look on her face, the one she’d wear before imitating a drunk seagull to make him stop ranting. But she wasn’t that Emily anymore.
“We’re here, Evan. We’re right here.” She drew closer and kissed him. She kissed him the way she’d never had back on Earth, when they had been ten years younger. Then she kissed him again, exactly the way she had kissed him when they’d been ten years younger.
“Did this never happen?” she asked. “Is this just a dream in a dream in a dream?”
If Evan hadn’t turned off the theatrics, he knew he would have melted into the night or something.
“It feels different,” he said stubbornly.
“We’re different.”
They both were silent for a while.
“The sky looks the same,” said Emily.
“No, it doesn’t. There’s no fog, too many stars, and no spaceships.”
“Yeah. No spaceships. You remember—?”
“Yeah, Emily, of course I remember. You dumped me.”
“I didn’t dump you.”
“Yes, you did. You dumped me, and the world ended.”
“You’re so dramatic. You were sixteen and artistic and way too impressionable.”
“Seventeen, technically. I mean, the world ended? Like, the actual world?”
Emily stared at him blankly. Evan wondered if too many blue pills had damaged her brain. Had she gone mad? Really, this time? How could she not remember?
Then she laughed. “I’m just messing with you. You should have seen your face. I’m aware the world is over. I didn’t dump you, Evan.”
“Oh, you wanna compare our memories?”
“Sure, why not?”
“Hey, RoboShrink!” Evan yelled into the sky. “Can I have my phone, I don’t want to get out?”
Andreas materialized above them, dropped Evan’s phone into his hands, and was gone, all unnoticed by Emily, whose current settings must prevent other people’s realities from meddling with her day. She summoned her phone out of the air without any visible help from the system support’s embodiments.
“You go first,” she said.
They bent their heads over Evan’s phone. In his memory, which looked like a YouTube video, they were curled up on the same roof, back when it hadn’t been a gigantic pool.
The Emily on the mattress beside him pushed him in the shoulder. “That’s not even me, Evan! I had more clothes on than that and way smaller—come on. I look like a porn star, and is that a nimbus over my head? Don’t you think you were over-idealizing me a little?”
“Shut up. I idolized you.”
“Evan—”
“No, you watch this.”
On the screen, the teenage Emily’s face became witch-like, her hair turned into snakes, her nimbus transformed into horns, and she said, in a demonic voice, “I am dumping you, Evan Martins, it’s not me, it’s you, you’re useless, whiny—”
She never finished that sentence because an enormous monster piano dropped out of the sky and crushed Evan. Beneath it, his hand reached for his heart and tore it out of his chest, and before drooping limp, gave it to Emily, who gladly swallowed the offering and licked her evil lips.
“You know the rest,” said the real (ha, ha) Evan, turning off the screen.
“Evan, what the hell?” said Emily.
“I might have exaggerated a little, but that’s pretty much how it felt.”
“All right,” said Emily, and she shoved her phone in his face.
In the video, Evan was saying, “Blah blah blah we’re all going to die things really suck I am so depressed and I want you to be miserable too so you never have the energy to leave me—”
Emily, the one on the screen, said, “Evan, I decided to move to Finland. I knew you would be upset, so I didn’t tell you earlier. No, listen, they’ve got free higher education for foreigners, and I need a chance, and I need to be away from my family for a while, you know how they are. . . .”
Evan’s face became an oversized one-year-old’s face, and he started wailing and thrashing his legs around.
“Turn it off,” said Evan, knocking her phone away and fuming. “I didn’t cry.”
“Pretty sure you did.”
“Blow up.”
“You blow up.”
Neither of them spoke for another minute, then they both broke out in laughter.
“I missed you,” said Evan.
“I missed you, too. Really, I did.”
“Is that where you went? That night? Finland?”
“Not right away. I’d tell you all about that, but I don’t think we’ve got much time. I’m leaving this morning. Or evening. Whatever.”
“Emily, don’t.”
“You could come with me.”
And do what? Swim, surf, ski, go to restaurants and bars, adopt a virtual Finnish baby?
“Okay,” said Evan.
“We could go to Japan. I’d show you where I was born, it’s so beautiful. . . .”
“Okay,” said Evan.
“Or we could take the blue pill together and try to remember and find each other among imitations.”
“Okay,” said Evan.
“Do you think you could find me?”
The sun was rising—Emily was making it rise. Evan reached out and hugged her. He wanted to say, yes, he could, and he would, he would never lose her again, he would always find her, wherever—
WALLE
Evan’s eyes flung open. It was disturbing, because he didn’t remember closing them. That wasn’t the only disturbing thing about his eyes, either: He did remember having eyelashes just the moment before, but his eyes were now naked. There was some sticky, wet veil over them, too, which made everything appear blurry. Evan tried to blink whatever was clouding his vision away while assessing what useful data his other senses could gauge.
Most of his body was numb, but judging from the position and weight distribution of his head, he was lying on his back, on something squishy and wobbly, like a leaky waterbed. A squelchy waterbed with a bristly surface. The prickling at the back of his neck and head was also alarming. It took Evan’s mind—which was also clouded—quite some time to deduce that the reason this seemed unnatural was he wasn’t supposed to feel any fine sensations with the back of his head. His hair was supposed to prevent that. And the reason it didn’t, Evan’s mind inferred after some more grueling analysis, was he didn’t have any. He was decidedly bald.
What else could he gather? The air smelled—oh, there was air. Evan, who had grown used to not needing to breathe, concluded that his not breathing in enough of this air might be why his mind was so foggy. He made it a point to inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, and it was a shame he had to do that for the air smelled of something repulsive, if vaguely familiar.
Blinking harder, Evan strained to study his surroundings as far as his head would turn. Aha, the waterbed wasn’t a waterbed; it was some kind of soggy, yellow moss. All right, h
e was lying in a marsh. A marsh that had walls and a ceiling, though, also mossy and dewy. A cubic marsh it is, then. All over his face, he had the same viscous film that wouldn’t let him see clearly, like saliva. The eyebrows and facial hair were gone, from what he could tell. Wait a minute. He had what all over his face? Saliva? Evan’s mouth was dry. It wasn’t his saliva, that’s for sure. Well, never mind, it must be the saliva of that funny creature drooling onto his chest now.
Evan attempted to rub the goo off but couldn’t move a finger, much less lift his hands. He raised his head instead and discovered that his arms were made of moonstone.
Hang on. What funny creature?
The shape of it blurred in and out of view, but after a few dozen seconds, Evan managed to form a more or less distinct idea of what it looked like. Its skin (or maybe bark?) was thick and ochre-colored, with many deep squiggly grooves, like a brain or a walnut. The thing didn’t seem to have any limbs, just the seven-foot-tall. . .trunk? It did have a mouth, a great slobbery hollow currently dripping saliva onto Evan’s right arm, flanked by two curved dirty-white. . .tusks? Yeah, those looked like tusks, like a walrus’s. A walnut, a walrus. Mystery solved, Evan was dealing with was a walman. A walwoman, perhaps, he corrected himself. A wal tree?
As he took deeper and deeper breaths, Evan’s chest heaved and expanded more freely, liberated from its pearlescent corset. The stiff glove on his right arm dissolved inch by inch as well, reacting with the walman’s saliva. His mind was now well-fueled enough to wrap itself around what all this meant. He had been rescued.
“Oh no,” groaned Evan. “Oh no, oh no, oh no. This just keeps getting worse, doesn’t it?”
Save the dry mouth, he didn’t experience any difficulties with his speech apparatus. The robots’ “extraordinary invention” had done a good job of maintaining his system, he had to admit.
The creature stopped salivating and opened a slimy hole in the middle of its body. The hole stared at Evan’s half-pearly, half-normal stomach, then closed, and reopened at the top of the trunk, where it could get a better view of the part of Evan that had produced the sounds.
Evan screwed up his eyes. “Hold on, and why is it that you’re you drooling, exactly? You’re not, like, planning on eating me or anything, are you? That would really suck.”
The walman’s hole continued to silently gape at Evan’s face.
“Uh, not good,” said Evan.
It finally dawned on him that the walman didn’t speak English. By the looks of it, the walman didn’t speak anything.
“Um, hey, RoboShh—oh.”
His insides clenched with a strange sense of loss he hadn’t known he could have for a—no, this was ridiculous. Was he really wishing he could talk to a robot? The robot. He missed him. Evan shook his head at the notion. That he missed someone else was easier to put up with. He was used to missing her, after all.
“Oh no, what have you done, man? I didn’t even get to say good-bye to Andreas. I was such a jerk to him in the pool. I was such a jerk to him everywhere. I was in the middle of something with Emily, for Christ’s sake.”
Evan groaned once more. Listen to him—wasn’t this what he’d dreamed of? He’d been saved. He had been saved, and he could feel, almost physically, all hope draining out of him. He waited, but there were no special effects, no screaming vortex blossoming out below, yearning to swallow him up. He missed special effects, too. God, he was actually aching for Inearthia. He wanted to go back to the Moon, bicker with Andreas over a cup of hot chocolate, take the blue pill with Emily or, if nothing else, be annoyed about Tamagotchi. What was he supposed to do in the stupid, bland real world, alone?
It wasn’t until the walman creaked that Evan remembered he wasn’t technically alone. Having attracted Evan’s attention, the creature pointed. Well, not so much pointed as shot out an arm (a branch?) toward the rear of the marshy room, stretching it all the way to the moss-covered wall, beside which stood. . .a cow. A furless cow. The animal seemed unflustered by its lack of hair or by anything else, really, too busy chewing unvaried elements of the alien interior design.
“Well, that explains the smell,” said Evan.
Cracking and popping, the branch retracted into the walman’s trunk, and its mouth resumed the drooling over Evan. Soon the rest of the iridescent coating came off, and Evan found that his eyes weren’t the only part of him that was naked. Unprotected, his clothes and hair must have been incinerated in the explosion. Damn robots with their animosity toward hair. Hang on, the explosion. . . .
Evan sat up and buried his clammy face in his clammy hands. And here he’d thought he had come to terms with the explosion years ago. The understanding struck him with new force. It hadn’t felt so real before. It did now. It felt final now. It had truly happened. This was truly happening. The real world, a real universe where Earth was no longer there. It had been there, with all its history, its music, its grass and snow and sand, and now it wasn’t. Gone. Everything, gone. How could he have been such an idiot, wishing things felt more real? How much easier it had been, mourning the planet while still walking on its ground, swimming in its water, feeling its winds beat at his skin. . . .
No, he had to pull himself together, he didn’t get to fall apart, not right now. First, he needed to make sure the walman wasn’t going to mistake him for breakfast. It probably wasn’t, seeing as the cow was too serene to have just gotten here. If the walman had brushed aside that much flesh, surely it wouldn’t be tempted by Evan’s bony frame? Great, now he had to figure out what he himself was going to eat. The walman didn’t look particularly delicious, and Evan didn’t feel like chipping a tooth on its hide, anyway. That left him with the moss and the cow. He couldn’t eat the cow; it was the only earthling other than Evan himself he knew for a fact was still alive. Besides, he couldn’t just tuck into raw meat. To cook it, he needed water. He needed fire. He needed. . .his mom. He was only seventeen, wasn’t he?
Well, at least his legs hadn’t atrophied. Evan stretched them, rose to his feet, and tiptoed across the swaying floor to the nearest wall. There, he ripped off a strip of moss and fixed it around his thighs like a loincloth, the scratchy side out. Once his dignity had been restored, Evan looked up and froze. Underneath the torn moss glistened a dark glassy patch: a porthole. It wasn’t the sight of the scatter of distant stars itself that left him feeling both empowered and lost—Inearthia had much more heartbreaking spacescapes to offer. But the brilliant dots streaked by too fast. His body hadn’t crash-landed on an alien planet. It had been picked up by a spaceship.
He turned to the walman, who was preoccupied with sucking up the remnants of Evan’s pearly spacesuit into one of its vagabond cavities. Evan waved for it to come over. The creature stopped cleaning up and stared. The beckoning gesture must mean something different to it, figured Evan, if anything at all. For lack of better ideas, he extended an arm toward the porthole, re-enacting, inasmuch as his physical limitations allowed, what the walman had done to get him to look at the cow. The alien ducked down.
“Uh, this is going to be difficult.”
A quarter-hour of awkward dancing, leaping, and belly crawling later, Evan managed to convince the creature to grow another limb in his direction. At the end of the branch, a hole grated open and peered out the window. Evan breathed on the glass—or whatever the transparent panel was made of—and traced a figure on it with his index finger.
“Now, listen to me carefully, WALLE, if you’ve got any ears. I’m going to draw you my rose. I’m going to draw you Emily. She looks like this, see? One hand sticking out, like she’s trying to catch a raindrop. We’re going to look for her, me and you. The cow’s welcome to join, too, of course. We’re going to find her, and as much as I hate the idea, you’re going to drool on her.
“Yeah, I know, it’ll probably take a while,” said Evan, patting the walman’s branch reassuringly, “but if you can find me a guitar, the trip’ll be a lot more fun.”
The walman pulled the limb aw
ay and creaked and squelched its way through the moss on the opposite wall, hopefully off to search for an alien musical instrument in another compartment.
Evan turned back to the porthole, to the drawing of Emily he’d made on its steamed-up panel.
“Could I find you, you ask? Of course I can find you. I’ll always find you, wherever you are.”
The whole of space, one tiny moonstone girl, how hard could that be?
He just needed to hurry lest entropy get him first.
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