The room came to life. A lighted diorama dominated most of the room, like a model-train set without a model train. It showed the town of Baleful, obviously. She recognized the motel and the movie theater and the garage, though the garage had a different name. The motel’s pool was full of plastic water. The tiny cinema marquee offered the same tiny movie options as she’d seen today. If possible, there were even fewer cars on the roads and in the parking lots. The back of the movie theater was a bubbling crater.
She looked around the town again. Everything else looked roughly the same. Nobody was inside the discount store. Lights were on in the downtown stores and the apartments above them, too, but all the stores and streets stood empty. The detail on the buildings amazed her: tiny letters carved into the tiny post office said “Established 1903”; tiny placards in the window of the real estate office advertised acreage perfect for cattle; tiny beer logos hung inside the miniature bar. She found the museum, which looked like a small house, sans gutter-tree, and the silo she’d noticed from the road.
Back to the bizarre centerpiece, then: the shimmering hole in the movie theater, swallowing brick and plaster and screen and toppled seats. The thing emerging from the hole, a blur of teeth and eyes, made even more unsettling by the fact that Lynette couldn’t make sense of it. Layered translucent shapes, filaments like cilia. She blinked to focus her eyes, but everything else remained in focus, and the shape of the thing remained obscure.
There was only one person in the whole diorama: a woman standing in front of the blurred thing, a device in her hands the relative size of an Etch-a-Sketch. Beside the woman: a narwhal-shaped car pretty much exactly like the one Lynette was driving across the country. A narwhal-shaped car that hovered above the ground, hanging from the top of the case by an almost invisible wire. A narwhal-shaped car with a red LED at horn’s tip, and something coming out of it, and it occurred to Lynette that when their trip resumed, maybe she should be more careful which buttons she pushed. She stared for a long time, eventually giving up because staring didn’t help anything make more sense.
Another illuminated case stood along the room’s far wall. This one held newspaper clippings: TOWN EVACUATED; NONE HARMED IN CONTROLLED EXPLOSION; BALEFUL CINEMA LOT FOR SALE. That was it. None of the articles explained the bizarre diorama in the center.
A third case held a bowl of dirt, a small popcorn box with a hole burned through it, and a device that looked like an old Nintendo controller, but larger, the size of an Etch-A-Sketch, silver-blue, and covered with buttons and knobs. She recognized some of them.
The old man sat on the couch waiting for her when she returned to the front room. “Let me guess: You want your money back?”
Lynette shook her head. “No, but what is it? I don’t understand.”
“I think it’s pretty self-explanatory. What you see is everything I know.”
“The articles say the town was evacuated and the movie theater blew up. Nothing about a . . . whatever that is.”
“That’s all anybody knows.”
“Then how do you know it happened?”
He grunted and hoisted himself off the couch. She followed him back into the museum, where he pointed at the southeast corner of the cinema. A tiny figure she hadn’t noticed before peered around the corner. “That’s me.”
“You?”
“We still had a weekly paper back then. I was the only reporter. I wasn’t going to miss the only interesting thing that ever happened in this town. Everybody evacuated except me; I hid my car in a barn and doubled back to see what was going on. Except I should have known they’d never let me publish any of it. Someone bought the paper before the evacuation was even lifted, and I got canned. Nobody else would take the story.”
“Did you take pictures? Your figure has a camera.”
“Of course. But the negatives went missing before I had a chance to print them. It wasn’t like today, where you upload your phone’s photos to the cloud.”
“Huh,” Lynette said. She wouldn’t believe the man at all if it weren’t for that one strange detail. The one she had to ask about. “What’s with the whale car?”
He looked away from his miniature. “Narwhal. I don’t know. I don’t know who she was; I never managed to track her down. I guess the big heroes all had their own cities to defend and couldn’t be bothered with little towns. Anyway, that car was hard to forget. The rest of the scene is, uh, dramatic re-creation, I guess. The closest I could get to truth.”
“Huh,” she said again. “So, who comes to your museum? People who live here?”
“Nah. Nobody comes.” He laughed. “I keep it open a couple hours a week, but nobody comes. Nobody here believes it happened, and nobody else cares. It’s a pretty lousy museum.”
Lynette searched for a compliment. “Your diorama is fantastic. I’m sorry nobody believes you.”
“Do you?”
She considered. “Yeah. I think I do. Truth is always too weird to be fiction, right? In high school I told people that once a year circus elephants walked down my street, but nobody believed me. You don’t have any postcards, do you?”
“No. I thought they would look like a joke.”
Oh well. She’d keep the brochure as a souvenir, anyway.
Unless. “Look, um, I know this might sound strange, but would you let me borrow that controller thing that’s in the case? I’ll bring it back to you tomorrow.”
The man frowned. “Why would I let you do that? I told you they already took my photos. Where did you say you were from again?”
“I swear. I’ll bring it back. You can keep my student ID for the night. Or my driver’s license. Or”—she fished in her pocket—“this is my lucky coin. It’s not worth much, but you can see where I’ve worn it down playing with it in my pocket. I’m not leaving town without it. I promise I’ll be back in the morning, and I’ll make it worth your trust. Like you said, they already took your photos. The awesome part of your display is the diorama. An old controller doesn’t say much to anyone unless you know what it is, and I think I know what it is.”
“You do?”
“I think. Maybe.”
She wasn’t sure she had convinced him, but he crossed to the case and swung it open. It hadn’t even been locked. She handed over her lucky coin and accepted the device he handed to her. It was heavier than it looked.
“See you tomorrow?” He sounded resigned. She had a strange desire not to disappoint him.
The fence around the repair shop had been closed and locked as promised, but the narwhal’s bay stood open, probably because the horn extended a few feet beyond the garage door. It still looked friendly. She looked around, but the mechanic seemed to have left, and nobody else was on the street.
Hopefully the device didn’t need batteries. The directional toggle was self-explanatory, and the antenna, and the on/off switch. She examined the icons, trying to match them to the ones inside the car. The one with a horn on it seemed obvious, but she looked over her shoulder and realized it was aimed at the window of a two-story building across the street. Better to be careful.
Finally, she chose a button with two wings on it. Took a deep breath. Pressed it. Nothing happened at first, so she pressed again, for a little longer. A chuffing noise came from the garage. The whale chassis rose on its tires, then lifted, tires and all. Just a couple of feet. She lowered it as gently as she could back to the ground.
She walked back toward the motel, heading west into a setting sun, low enough and bright enough she had to turn her head slightly rather than watch where she was going. Her sunglasses were still in the whale. The narwhal.
The grocery and thrift store had both closed for the night. Beyond them, the ruined cinema. The chain-link fence stood seven or eight feet high, but there didn’t seem to be any security. No cameras, no razor wire at the top, nothing to say anybody was trying to keep anybody else out par
ticularly badly. She walked perpendicular to the road until she drew parallel with the building, then scaled the fence.
The cinema’s wall was intact until it wasn’t. Wall, wall, wall, then a crumble of beige bricks and stucco. Beyond that, a large circular area that indented slightly, filled with dirt.
“Not much to look at.” Dahlia sat in an unanchored velveteen seat. She beckoned. Lynette flipped the seat beside her, which fell off its hinge. She sat cross-legged in the dirt instead.
“I think my mother came here once when I was a kid, but I can’t figure out why.” Dahlia held out the photo from her purse. “It has to be this place. The movies are still the same.”
“I think she was here, too.”
The Boss’s habit of turning her whole attention to the person beside her was much less terrifying when they weren’t driving. Her surprise showed clearly on her face. “What makes you say that?”
“Something happened here. There’s a museum about it in town.”
“What?”
“Yeah. Only open Fridays, but he’ll open the door for you. Your mother’s car is in his diorama. You’d probably make his decade if you drove up in it tomorrow.”
“Maybe I’ll do that, if we’re not running too late.”
They sat for a while in silence, the sun setting over the filled hole.
The Boss chewed at her nails and flicked them toward an imaginary window. “She used to disappear sometimes, but my dad always said ‘She’s off making sure there’s enough good to go around’ or ‘She thinks if help doesn’t come it’s because you’re supposed to be the one doing the helping.’ I thought she went gambling or something. There was this one time, just once, when I was a teenager, where she kissed me goodbye like she wasn’t sure she would see me again. I asked my dad where she was going, but he wouldn’t say, or else he didn’t know. She was gone for days. And here we are.”
“Here we are,” Lynette repeated, like the museum guy’s parrot.
She reached into her pocket for her lucky coin, but it wasn’t there. She took a deep breath. “Not maybe. We’re definitely going to knock on the museum door tomorrow, both of us. We’ve got time. We’re running early by your schedule. We’re going to knock on the museum door, and I’m going to show you both something awesome. Then we’re going to keep driving, and we’re going to stop at Arches National Park, and I’m going to get out of the car and actually see the arches, and then I’m going to buy a T-shirt or a postcard or one of those pressed-penny things. Or all of the above. I haven’t decided.”
Dahlia didn’t agree, but she didn’t say no either. Lynette thought that was progress.
The ground didn’t shimmer. There were no heroes on hand, no monsters either, nothing remarkable about this place to put on a postcard, not anything that anyone would believe, anyway. Nothing to see, nothing to write home about. Still, for the first time on the trip, she felt like she’d been someplace.
— And Then There Were (N-One) —
I considered declining the invitation. It was too weird, too expensive, too far, too dangerous, too weird. Way too weird. An invitation like that would never come again. I’d regret it if I didn’t go. It lay on our kitchen table for three weeks while I argued out the pros and cons with Mabel. She listened, made suggestions; I countered her, then argued her part, then made both arguments, then reversed them again.
“How do I know it’s not a hoax?” I asked, studying the list of backing organizations for the twentieth time. “The website looks legit, but how could it not be a hoax?”
“Look at it this way,” Mabel said. “Either you’ll be part of a groundbreaking event in human history, or a groundbreaking psych experiment. Someone benefits either way. And you’ve never been to eastern Canada, so at least you get to see someplace new even if you just end up standing in a field somewhere looking silly.”
She always had a way of making an adventure out of things that would otherwise stress me out. Four months later, I flew to Nova Scotia, took a bus to a seaside town too small for a dot on a map, boarded a ferry to Secord Island, and stepped through the waiting portal into an alternate-reality resort-hotel lobby swarming with Sarah Pinskers. At least two hundred of us by my estimation, with more straggling in.
It was easy to tell who had just arrived. We were the ones planted in the lobby, bags in hand, eyes wide and mouth open. My body and face, even my expression, reflected back at me in two hundred funhouse mirrors. Stranger even than that, an energy in the air that I couldn’t quite explain, a feeling that every single Sarah had stepped through to the exact same thought, to the same curious-amazement-horror-wonder, to the same rug-yanking confirmation that the invitation had been real and we were no longer alone, or maybe we were more alone than we had ever been.
Large groups gathered around the hotel check-in desk and SarahCon registration, no doubt trying to pick themselves off the long lists of near-identical names. A third faction, which I decided to join, had adjourned to the lobby bar, hoping to use alcohol to blunt the weirdness of coming face-to-face with our multiverse selves. I found a barstool and shoved my suitcase and backpack under my feet. Space was tight amid the other suitcases and backpacks.
“The stout,” I said when I caught the bartender’s attention, pointing at the third tap handle.
He grinned and held up a glass. “Seventh one in a row. You all go for the stout or one of the good whiskeys.”
I filed that information away. Took a sip. The Sarah next to me did the same. We both put our glasses down at the same time. Both raised eyebrows at each other.
The bartender hovered. “Room number for your tab?”
“I haven’t checked in yet. Cash isn’t okay? Oh. The cross-world currency thing.”
“You can put her drink on my tab,” said the me next to me. She wore her hair in a long braid down her back. I’d worn mine that way when I was thirteen.
I lifted my glass and toasted in her direction. “Thanks. Appreciated.”
“My pleasure. I’ve never bought myself a drink before. Well, not like this, anyhow. Do you know how many there are altogether? How many of us here, I mean.”
I shook my head. “No clue. You could ask someone at registration.”
A third Sarah, maybe a decade older than me, joined our conversation. My parents were married years before they had me. I’d always wondered if I’d still be me if they hadn’t waited. “I’m sure she’ll tell us the numbers in her opening address.”
“She?” asked One Braid. “Sorry if it’s a stupid question. I checked into my room but I haven’t braved convention registration yet. I hate lines.”
Older Sarah rummaged in a SarahCon commemorative tote bag and pulled out a program. She turned to a bio page and started reading. “‘Sarah Pinsker [R0D0]’—I don’t know what ‘R-0-D-0’ means—‘made the discovery creating the multiverse portal. She is a quantologist at Johns Hopkins University.’” She looked up. “I think that’s her over there. She’s been rushing back and forth as long as I’ve been sitting here.”
We followed her pointing finger to a Sarah bustling through the lobby, walkie-talkie to her lips. Her hair was pixie-short, defeating the frizz that plagued me. She looked harried but better put together than most of us, elegant in a silk blouse and designer jeans that fit and flattered. I had never been anything approaching elegant. Never had the guts to cut my hair that short, either.
“Quantologist,” I repeated.
Older Sarah paged through the program. “It looks like there are four other quantologist Sarahs on the host committee.”
One Braid scratched the back of her neck. “I’ve never heard of quantology. I don’t think it’s a real field of study where I’m from.”
“Not where I’m from, either. Where are you from? I mean, answer however you want.”
“I’m from all over the place,” One Braid said. My usual answer. “But I live in
Seattle.”
Eerie. “Me, too. I went out for a job after college and stayed.”
“Same! Summer job, then I met my girlfriend and settled for good. I’m in West Seattle. How about you?”
“Ballard.” I raised my glass to clink hers, though that particular girlfriend and I hadn’t lasted.
Older Sarah chugged her beer and waved for another before turning back to us. “Our Seattle was destroyed in an earthquake.”
We both stared at her. She sipped her fresh beer and continued. “I never got out west myself, so it wasn’t a personal thing for me, but it was horrible. Four thousand people died. The city never recovered.”
I pictured our little house bucking and buckling, our yard splitting down the middle. Mabel, my friends and neighbors, the coffee shop up the street. Shuddered. It was too much to imagine. “This is so damn weird.”
Older Sarah waved her program at me. “That’s the name of the first panel. ‘This Is So Damn Weird: Strategies for Navigating SarahCon Without Losing Your Mind.’”
One Braid and I both reached for our beers.
The registration line thinned as a programmed cocktail hour began in some lounge somewhere. Since I’d already been drinking for a while, I took the opportunity to check in and register.
“Find yourself on the list,” said the Sarah behind the convention registration table. I could tell she was fried, like she was already too tired to remember how to put expressions on her face. I knew that feeling.
Looking at the list, it was easy to see why she’d had a long day already. My mind was still boggling at the handful of Sarahs I’d met; she’d come face-to-face with all of us.
The list grouped us by surname first. Mine the most common, a trunk instead of a branch. I paged past, curious. Mostly Pinskers like myself. Made sense if we were the closest realities to the Pinsker who had invited us. There were other random surnames I chalked up to marriage. A full page of Sarah Sweetloves. I’d never really considered changing my name for anyone, even Mabel, but apparently others had.
Sooner or Later Everything Falls Into the Sea Page 24
