by Dan Simmons
I soon found out that the only way I could enjoy teaching was to be the sage on the stage. I poured knowledge and facts and insights and questions and doubts and everything else that I was carrying around directly from my overflowing pitcher to those twenty-five or so empty receptacles. It was most fun when I taught sixth grade because the receptacles hadn’t been filled with so much social moose piss and sheer misinformation.
Luckily, there were a lot of things I was both acutely interested in, moderately knowledgeable about, and innocently eager to share with the kids: my passion for history and literature, my love of space travel and aviation, my college training in environmental science, a love of interesting architecture, my ability to draw and tell stories, a fascination with dinosaurs and geology, an enjoyment of writing, a high comfort level with computers, a hatred of war coupled with an obsession with things military, firsthand knowledge of quite a few remote places in the world, a desire to travel to see all of the world’s remote places, a good sense of direction, a warped sense of humor, a profound fascination with the lives of world historical figures such as Lincoln and Churchill and Hitler and Kennedy and Madonna, a flair for the dramatic, a love of music that would often lead to my sixth-grade class lying in the park across the street from the school on a warm spring or autumn day, sixty feet of school extension cord tapping my mini-stereo system into the electrical outlet near the park restrooms, the sound of Vivaldi or Beethoven or Mozart or Rachmaninoff irritating the other teachers who later complained that they had to close their classroom windows so that their students would not be distracted…
I had enough passions to remain a sage on the stage for twenty-six years. Some of those years, said the inscription on a tombstone I once saw, were good.
One of the incidents I remember with Kelly Dahl was from the week of environmental study the district had mandated for sixth-graders back when they had money to fund the fieldtrips. Actually, we studied environmental science for weeks before the trip, but the students always remembered the actual three-day excursion to an old lodge along the Front Range of the Rockies. The district called those three days and two nights of hiking and doing experiments in the mountains the Environmental Awareness and Appreciation Unit. The kids and teachers called it Eco-Week.
I remember the warm, late-September day when I had brought Kelly Dahl’s class to the mountains. The kids had found their bunks in the drafty old lodge, we had hiked our orientation hikes, and in the hour before lunch I had brought the class to a beaver pond a quarter of a mile or so from the lodge in order to do pH tests and to begin my stint as Science Sage. I pointed out the fireweed abounding around the disturbed pond edge—Epilobium angustifolium I taught them, never afraid to introduce a little Latin nomenclature into the mix—and had them find some of the fireweed’s cottony seeds along the bank or skimming across the still surface of the pond. I pointed out the aspen’s golden leaves and explained why it shimmered—how the upper surface of the leaf did not receive enough sunlight to photosynthesize, so the leaf was attached by a stem at an angle that allowed it to quake so that both sides received the light. I explained how aspen clone from the roots, so the expansive aspen grove we were looking at was—in a real sense—a single organism. I pointed out the late asters and wild chrysanthemums in their last days before the killing winter winds finished them for another season, and had the children hunt for the red leaves of cinquefoil and strawberry and geranium.
It was at this point, when the kids were reconvened around me in an interested circle, pointing to the fallen red leaves and gall-swollen branches they had gathered, that Kelly Dahl asked, “Why do we have to learn all this stuff?”
I remember sighing. “You mean the names of these plants?”
“Yes.”
“A name is an instrument of teaching,” I said, quoting the Aristotle maxim I had used many times with this class, “and of discerning natures.”
Kelly Dahl had nodded slightly and looked directly at me, the startling, unique quality of her green eyes in sharp contrast to the sad commonness of her cheap K-market jacket and corduroys. “But you can’t learn it all,” she had said, her voice so soft that the other kids had leaned forward to hear it above the gentle breeze that had come up. It was one of those rare times when an entire class was focused on what was being said.
“You can’t learn it all,” I had agreed, “but one can enjoy nature more if you learn some of it.”
Kelly Dahl had shaken her head, almost impatiently I’d thought at the time. “You don’t understand,” she said. “If you don’t understand it all, you can’t understand any of it. Nature is…everything. It’s all mixed up. Even we’re part of it, changing it by being here, changing it by trying to understand it…” She had stopped then and I only stared. It certainly had been the most I had heard this child say in one speech in the three weeks of class we had shared so far. And what she said was absolutely accurate, but—I felt—largely irrelevant.
While I paused to frame a reply that all of the kids could understand, Kelly had gone on. “What I mean is,” she said, obviously more impatient with her own inability to explain than with my inability to understand, “that learning a little of this stuff is like tearing up that painting you were talking about on Tuesday…the woman…”
“The Mona Lisa,” I said.
“Yeah. It’s like tearing up the Mona Lisa into little bits and handing around the bits so everyone would enjoy and understand the painting.” She stopped again, frowning slightly, although whether at the metaphor or at speaking up at all, I did not know.
For a minute there was just the silence of the aspen grove and the beaver pond. I admit that I was stumped. Finally, I said, “What would you suggest we do instead, Kelly?”
At first I thought that she would not answer, so withdrawn into herself did she seem. But eventually she said softly, “Close our eyes.”
“What?” I said, not quite hearing.
“Close our eyes,” repeated Kelly Dahl. “If we’re going to look at this stuff, we might as well look with something other than big words.”
We all closed our eyes without further comment, the class of normally unruly sixth graders and myself. I remember to this day the richness of the next few minutes: the butterscotch-and-turpentine tang of sap from the ponderosa pine trees up the hill from us, the vaguely pineapple scent of wild camomile, the dry-leaf dusty sweetness of the aspen grove beyond the pond, the equally sweet decayed aroma of meadow mushrooms such as lactarius and russula, the pungent seaweed smell of pond scum and the underlying aromatic texture of the sun-warmed earth and the heated pine needles beneath our legs. I remember the warmth of the sun on my face and hands and denim-covered legs that long-ago September afternoon. I recall the sounds from those few minutes as vividly as I can call back anything I have ever heard: the soft lapping of water trickling over the sticks-and-mud beaver dam, the rustle of dry clematis vines and the brittle stirring of tall gentian stalks in the breeze, the distant hammering of a woodpecker in the woods toward Mt. Meeker and then, so suddenly that my breath caught, the startling crash of wings as a flight of Canada geese came in low over the pond and, without a single honk, veered south toward the highway and the larger ponds there. I think that none of us opened our eyes then, even when the geese flew low over us, so that the magic spell would not be broken. It was a new world, and Kelly Dahl was—somehow, inexplicably, unarguably—our guide.
I had forgotten that moment until yesterday.
ON the morning after she had tied me up, Kelly Dahl shot the shit out of my Jeep.
I had waited until sunrise to find my way back to Boulder. The night was too dark, the woods were too dense, and my head hurt too much to try to drive down the mountain in the dark. Besides, I had thought at the time with a wry smile, I might drive into a mineshaft.
In the morning my head still hurt and the woods were still thick—not even a sign of a Jeep trail or how Kelly had got my vehicle this far back—but at least I could see to drive. The Jee
p itself had multiple abrasions and contusions, a dented fender, flaking paint, and a long gouge on the right door, but these were all old wounds; there was no sign of tumbling down a three-hundred-foot mineshaft. The keys were in the ignition. My billfold was still in my hip pocket. The camping gear was still in the back of the Jeep. Kelly Dahl might be as crazy as a loon, but she was no thief.
It had taken me about an hour to drive up to the mineshaft the previous evening; it took me almost three hours to get back to Boulder. I was way the hell beyond Sugarloaf Mountain and Gold Hill, northeast of Jamestown almost to the Peak to Peak Highway. I had no idea why Kelly Dahl would drag me that far…unless the entire mineshaft experience had been an hallucination and she had found me elsewhere. Which made no sense. I put the puzzle out of my mind until I could get home, take a shower, have some aspirin and three fingers of Scotch, and generally start the day.
I should have known things were screwed up long before I got to Boulder. The paved road in Left Hand Canyon, once I crept out of the woods and got onto it headed east, seemed wrong. I realize now that I was driving on patched concrete rather than asphalt. The Greenbriar Restaurant sitting at the exit of Left Hand Canyon where the road meets Highway 36 seemed weird. Looking back, I realize that the parking lot was smaller, the entrance and door painted a different color, and there was a large cottonwood where the flower garden had been for years. Small things on the short ride south to Boulder—the shoulder of Highway 36 was too narrow, the Beechcraft plant along the foothills side of the road looked spruced up and open for business despite the fact that it had been empty for a decade. Nursing my headache, mulling over Kelly Dahl and my screwed-up suicide, I noticed none of this.
There was no traffic. Not a single car or van or cyclist—unusual since those spandex fanatics on bikes are zooming along the Foothills Highway every pleasant day of the year. But nothing this morning. The strangeness of that did not really strike me until I was on North Broadway in Boulder.
No cars moving. Scores were parked by the curb, but none were moving. Nor cyclists hogging the lane. Nor pedestrians walking against the light. I was almost to the Pearl Street walking mall before I realized how empty the town was.
Jesus Christ, I remember thinking, maybe there’s been a nuclear war…everyone’s evacuated. Then I remembered that the Cold War was over and that the Boulder City Council had—a few years earlier and for no reason known to humankind—voted unanimously to ignore civil defense evacuation plans in case of a wartime emergency. The Boulder City Council was into that sort of thing—like declaring Boulder a Nuclear-Free Zone, which meant, I guess, that no more aircraft carriers with nuclear weapons would be tying up there again soon. It seemed probable that there hadn’t been a mass evacuation even if the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Plant six miles away had melted down—a core of Boulder’s politically correct citizenry would protest the advancing radiation rather than evacuate.
Then where is everybody? I had the open Jeep slowed to a crawl by the time I came down the hill to Pearl Street and the walking mall there.
The walking mall was gone: no trees, no landscaped hills, no tasteful brick walkways, no flowerbeds, no panhandlers, no Freddy’s hot dog stand, no skateboarders, no street musicians, no drug dealers, no benches or kiosks or phone booths…all gone.
The mall was gone, but Pearl Street itself remained, looking as it had before it was covered with bricks and flowerbeds and street musicians. I turned left onto it and drove slowly down the empty boulevard, noticing the drugstores and clothing stores and inexpensive restaurants lining the sidewalks where upscale boutiques, gift stores, and Haagen-Dazs parlors should have been. This looked like Pearl Street had looked when I had come to Boulder in the early ’70s—just another western town’s street with rents that real retailers could afford.
I realized that it was the Pearl Street of the early ‘70s. I drove past Fred’s Steakhouse where Maria and I used to have the occasional Friday steak dinner when we’d saved enough money. Fred had thrown in the towel and surrendered to the mall boutique rental prices…when?…at least fifteen years ago. And there was the old Art Cinema, showing Bergman’s Cries and Whispers. It hadn’t been a real movie theater for a decade. I could not remember when Cries and Whispers had been released, but I seem to recall seeing it with Maria before we moved to Boulder after my discharge in ’69.
I won’t list all the rest of the anomalies—the old cars at the curb, the antiquated street signs, the antiwar graffiti on the walls and stop signs—just as I did not try to list them that day. I drove as quickly as I could to my apartment on 30th Street, barely noting as I did that Crossroads Mall at the end of Canyon Boulevard simply was there but drastically smaller than I remembered.
My apartment building was not there at all.
For a while I just stood up in my Jeep, staring at the fields and trees and old garages where my apartment complex should be, and resisting the urge to scream or shout. It was not so much that my apartment was gone, or my clothes, or my few mementos of the life I had already left behind—some snapshots of Maria that I never look at, old softball trophies, my 1984 Teacher of the Year finalist plaque—it was just that my bottles of Scotch were gone.
Then I realized how silly that response was, drove to the first liquor store I could find—an old mom-and-pop place on 28th where a new mini-mall had been the day before—walked in the open door, shouted, was not surprised when no one answered, liberated three bottles of Johnnie Walker, left a heap of bills on the counter—I might be crazy, but I was no thief—and then went out to the empty parking lot to have a drink and think things over.
I have to say that there was very little denial. Somehow things had changed. I did not seriously consider the possibility that I was dead or that this was like that “lost year” on the Dallas TV show some years ago and that I would wake up with Maria in the shower, Allan playing in the living room, my teaching job secure, and my life back together. No, this was real—both my shitty life and this strange…place. It was Boulder, all right, but Boulder as it had been about two and a half decades earlier. I was shocked at how small and provincial the place seemed.
And empty. Some large raptors circled over the Flatirons, but the city was dead still. Not even the sound of distant traffic or jet aircraft disturbed the summer air. I realized, in its absence, how much of an expected background that sound is for a city dweller such as myself.
I did not know if this was some half-assed sort of random confusion of the space-time continuum, some malfunction of the chronosynclasticinfidibulum, but I suspected not. I suspected that it all had something to do with Kelly Dahl. That’s about as far as my speculations had gone by the time I had finished the first half of the first bottle of Johnnie Walker.
Then the phone rang.
It was an old payphone on the side of the liquor store twenty paces away. Even the goddamn phone was different—the side of the half-booth read Bell Telephone rather than U.S. West or one of its rivals and the old Bell logo was embossed in the metal there. It made me strangely nostalgic.
I let the thing ring twelve times before setting the bottle on the hood of the Jeep and walking slowly over to it. Maybe it would be God, explaining that I was dead but I’d only qualified for Limbo, that neither heaven nor hell wanted me.
“Hello?” My voice may have sounded a little funny. It did to me.
“Hi, Mr. Jakes.” It was Kelly Dahl, of course. I hadn’t really expected God.
“What’s going on, kid?”
“Lots of neat stuff” came the soft, high voice. “You ready to play yet?”
I glanced over at the bottle and wished I’d brought it with me. “Play?”
“You’re not hunting for me.”
I set the receiver down, walked back to the Jeep, took a drink, and walked slowly back to the phone. “You still there, kiddo?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t want to play. I don’t want to hunt for you or kill you or do anything else to you or with you. Compren
dé?”
“Oui.” This was another game I suddenly remembered from sixth grade with this kid. We would begin sentences in one language, shift to another, and end in a third. I never asked her where an eleven-year-old had learned the basics of half a dozen or more languages.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m leaving now. You take care of yourself, kid. And stay the fuck away from me. Ciao.” I slammed the receiver down and watched it warily for at least two minutes. It did not ring again.
I secured the second bottle on the floorboards so it wouldn’t break and drove north on 28th until I got to the Diagonal—the four-lane highway that runs northeast to Longmont and then continues on up the string of towns along the Front Range. The first thing I noticed was that the Boulder section of the Diagonal was two-lane…when had they widened it? The ’80s sometime…and the second thing I noticed was that it ended only a quarter of a mile or so outside of town. To the northeast there was nothing: not just no highway, but no farm houses, no farm fields, no Celestial Seasonings plant, no IBM plant, no railroad tracks—not even the structures that had been there in the early ’70s. What was there was a giant crack in the earth, a fissure at least twenty feet deep and thirty feet wide. It looked as if an earthquake had left this cleft separating the highway and Boulder from the high prairie of sagebrush and low grass beyond. The fissure stretched to the northwest and southeast as far as I could see and there was no question of getting the Jeep across it without hours of work.
“Sehr gut,” I said aloud. “Score one for the kid.” I swung the Jeep around and drove back to 28th Street, noticing that the shorter route of the Foothills Highway had not yet been built, and drove south across town to take Highway 36 into Denver.
The fissure began where the highway ended. The cleft seemed to run all the way to the Flatirons to the west.
“Great,” I said to the hot sky. “I get the picture. Only I don’t think I want to stay. Thanks anyway.”
