by Spencer Wolf
Cessini put his feet to the yard, stretched his arms into the air, and approached a white, numbered gate. He rubbed his finger around the curve of the metallic numeral eight, which grew out of two adjacent fours. The number was as easy to remember as a breath of fresh air. Their new address was 448 Treeline Drive.
Daniel slipped past and took the first steps to the front door. “Feels like home to me,” he said as he fumbled the keys, and let them all in.
Cessini entered to find boxes stacked in piles of pre-packed chores. Their home would be cramped, but fine. The floors and the trim were a quaint, dark wood contrast over plastered white walls. Two columns of boxes stood in front of inset shelves that flanked a fireplace mostly hidden from view. Robin tossed her purse on the mantel, her ScrollFlex to its side.
Cessini turned a tight corner to his room. Meg found hers nicely across from his. There was no waist-high shelf around his walls, and hardly room for any tools, but the east-facing window had vertical blinds, which were the same as the ones he had left behind. A very good start. Better than that, he bent down to see an angled floor register that bathed the room from below in a cool, dry blanket of air.
“We’ll fix it up perfect,” Robin called out from the living room.
Five rooms, plus kitchen and bath. Cessini and Meg had already seen it all, and there was nowhere to sit.
“Unfortunately, it needs some color,” Meg said. “But it’ll do.”
“Fortunately,” Robin said, sneaking in a jibe, “I’ve got just the ticket.” She snatched up her ScrollFlex, pulled out the screen, thumbed for the picture from the plane, and dog-eared the upper right corner of its page. She clam-shelled the case and the screen went stiff. She set it back on the mantel, centered just so. “Okay, so, if everyone’s up for it, we need to keep moving, get out, and push through to beat the jet lag.”
Daniel hugged Robin from behind, catching her off guard. “Coming here is a big change. I know that,” he said as Robin accepted his arms. “But we don’t give up. I can fix things. Thank you for sticking with me. You know I can fix you, too.” He kissed her temple and she turned to face him.
“Funny, I could use a good fixing. It’s been a while,” Robin said, smiling for the first time in a while.
“Eww,” Meg said. She settled down on the floor, crossed her legs, and pulled out her tablet. She flared out its wings and tickled its keys to restart her game.
Daniel let go of Robin and tousled Cessini’s hair as he stood at the mantel of the fireplace. “And I love you; you know that, you’re going to be the best, better than me. Come here,” Daniel said, pulling Cessini in closer and getting down on one knee. “I’ve failed at a lot of things, but not this. I can fix us all, even if it takes me to the end of my days.”
“I know, we just need the right tools,” Cessini said as Daniel pulled him into a warming hug.
“If you could go anywhere on this adventure,” Daniel said, “where would you go? What would you see?”
“Get real. We’re not camping up north in Minnesota, okay? Let’s just relax for a minute,” Meg said as she stayed focused within her game.
“Don’t fall asleep,” Robin said to her. “You’ll feel better by morning, or maybe the next, if you keep moving.”
Cessini was groggy, crashing from the switch of the hours, but Robin was right. “I know. How about someplace where we can control the water?” he asked and waited on their collective surprise.
“Now where are we going to do that?” Meg asked.
“I have no idea,” Daniel said as he slapped his hands together. He threw Robin her purse from the mantel. “But I bet there’s got to be someplace on this island where we can. I’m in.”
“How about a hydroelectric plant?” Cessini asked. His smile grew huge.
“Yes!” Daniel said. “Now you’re thinking.” He opened the ScrollFlex and tapped.
Cessini yanked Meg up by the arm, which she hated. He grabbed the ScrollFlex from Daniel’s hands. “And ‘fortunately’ for all of us,” Cessini said as he swiped, “I know exactly how I can find one.”
TWELVE
BORN ON A PALLET
CESSINI TWISTED IN his seat for a last glance out the rear window of the Jeep. Gerald Aiden sealed the gates of Tungatinah Hydroelectric Power no more than two hundred yards behind them. The man’s trumped-up stare was a guise so all would know he stood in control of his water. He pivoted his stiff leg about and marched back to his warehouse of power. Cessini knew the name of the place meant “falling water,” but far more than water had just fallen apart from their visit. It wasn’t because of the bumps in the road that he and Daniel could fix with the right set of tools, nor was it the faulty air conditioner that dripped and left a ring of pain around his temple; it was everything, and for that he had only himself to blame.
Daniel slammed on the brakes. He jumped out and stormed over to the roadside curb. Robin unbuckled and turned back to Cessini and Meg in their back seats. “Wait here,” she said as she opened her door and ran around the hood after Daniel.
“You know when I said if I could bear all the clouds in the sky,” Cessini said to Meg, “I still would never want to come back to this world?”
“Yeah, what about it?”
“But, that I’d probably do it for you?”
“You said ‘most likely,’ not probably. That was mean.”
“I meant it to be nice,” he said.
“I know what you meant. But I’m the one every day who still takes care of you. And I’ll still probably do it tomorrow. But I’d never have said it would take a gazillion rain drops to make me want to do it again. I’d still do it for nothing, for you.”
“Thanks,” he said. She was right.
“See, now that’s how you say it whether you mean it or not. That’s how you’re supposed to say it.” Then her focus pulled through the windshield to the rising screams outside.
“How can we live like this?” Daniel asked. “I’m sick of it. He’s sick of it.”
Cessini looked toward the valley below. There were only trees beyond the curb that could hear.
“We don’t live like this,” Robin said. “I do! Luegner sending us here was because of me, not you. I have to live with all of our problems. All of them.” Then Robin pounded her fist on Daniel’s chest. “Can’t you see?” she cried. “Luegner owns all of us—and now he owns me more than ever before.”
Meg squeezed her eyes shut.
“You think you can fix me? You think I’m broken?” Robin shoved and pinned Daniel against her side of the car. “Well, you can’t! I haven’t given you that permission. You can’t fix what you don’t own, and you don’t own me!”
Daniel pulled her in tight, grabbed at her pounding fists, but she fought herself free and away. He stood without another word. She wrapped one shaking hand across her stomach, the other over her mouth. She approached the trees and circled away in a sob.
“You have to understand her,” Meg said to Cessini in the car. “I think I do.”
“You think I’m absent?” Daniel yelled outside. “You don’t think I’m doing everything I can to keep us together? What about my ambition? When do I get to achieve?”
Robin hurried back, opened her front passenger door, and fell back into her seat. She didn’t turn around. “It’s okay, sweetie,” she said into the rearview mirror. “It’s not your fault. It’s mine. Okay?”
Daniel slipped back in his driver’s seat. Robin turned away to her window. Daniel reached up and adjusted the rearview mirror. Cessini saw his stare. Were they good eyes or bad? It was too hard to tell. “This place was a terrible idea,” Daniel said. “You should have never made us come here.”
Cessini shriveled in his seat. Absolutely everything was his fault.
Daniel drew his shoulder belt across and locked all their doors. As he drove down a switchback on the hill, Cessini’s view through the rear window of the aging Tungatinah Power Plant was more disheartening than its promise on approach. He wondered wh
y this place should have been any different as Robin cried out her own private well of regret into the deep fold of her hands.
The trees rushed by the car, all out of his control. He was trapped. Maybe he should open the door as they rushed by en masse and try his freedom, instead. A freedom to scream, to toss back the jet-lagged hours he stole from the sun. He hammered his fist on the door.
Meg rested her head on her window and pressed her palm deep over a pain in her chest. “Can we go home now, please? I’m kind of tired.”
Cessini rocked in his seat as she settled to stillness. She closed her eyes and slouched into her door. If his anguish now caused her heart to pain, it was no one’s fault but his own. He owned their suffering, her fate. Meg’s hand slipped down from her chest to her seat. She was fading.
“Meg! Wake up.” He lunged to pull her upright.
“What? I wasn’t sleeping.”
She was groggy, maybe her head hurt. Maybe her head was as painful and twisted as his. On the plane, people said to drink plenty of water to beat the jet lag. Were they insane? Did they also think the sun went around the earth? “I wish I wasn’t like this,” he said as she pulled away again. “I wish—”
“You weren’t like what?” she said as she rolled down her window for a breath of air. “You are what you are. Now stop it. You don’t have to worry about me. I can take care of myself.”
She said it, he thought, but did she mean it?
She slumped back into her seat. “I’m fine. Even if I wasn’t, it’s not your problem.”
He pushed his forehead against his window’s tempered glass as they drove farther away. The sun was setting for the night. Meg settled into the rhythmic breathing of sleep. The dry floor of the valley approached as they drove closer to darkness. The power and percussion of the water they left behind was the least of his growing list of fears. Grief hurt broadest, but mostly deep.
Headlights shifted to the road. The earth continued to rotate. If he was going to fix his course, his perspective of life had to change. Maybe if the sun rotated around the earth, instead, then everything in his world would be clear. An impossibility. But, if it did, then the morning’s light would be altogether something to see.
*
At one minute to six the next morning, the sun’s rays crested over the home-salted hills of the eastern shore of Sandy Bay. The sun had risen in the east as usual and glistened across the morning’s waves to the west. The masts at the western dock tangled like pickup sticks standing vertical against the tide. The main university campus awoke under a bath of golden light. The striking glow of a dawn breached the windshield of the Jeep head on, and Daniel threw down his visor.
He angled the Jeep off Grosvenor Crescent into a spot facing the campus’ sports field. He twisted over his shoulder past the empty front passenger seat and lifted a grin to Cessini and Meg to open the early start to their day. “We’re here.”
“Is this it?” Meg asked. She was still tired, but ready to go.
“It is,” Daniel said. “And when the rest of the city wakes up, we’ll go get something nice for your mother.”
Cessini hurried the handle of his rear door and followed Daniel out without another word. He and Meg followed him across Crescent Drive toward the glass foyer between the east and west rectangular wings of the four-story building shaped like an “H.” Daniel held the foyer door and Meg slipped under his arm. Then they took two stairs at a time to the second floor.
A glassy-eyed all-nighter student on a stepladder was mapping out tedious proportions on part of the wall.
“That’s going to be you someday,” Daniel said to Meg as the student glanced down from her ladder.
She was sketching colored swirls for a beautiful piece of mixed media art. She referred to her plaque’s Mandelbrot set, and its printed equation of Z = Z^2 + C. It was a mathematical simplicity that hid a cornucopia of delicious detail within. On her wall, an abstract flower’s petals twisted into a Chinese dragon in clawed fighting form. Tidal waves curled, mammalian brains swirled, and galaxies spun from the edges of her frame. Her canvas had come alive with mesmerizing complexities, all singularly explained by the higher-context Mandelbrot set.
“I like it,” Meg said. “It must have taken you awhile.”
“Thanks, it did, and you’re the first person to like it so far,” the student artist said from the ladder as she perked up and tightened back her hair. “I’ve still got a lot to do before it’s done.”
Cessini walked through to the hall. “Come on, it’s time to go see it.”
Ahead was the entrance to the western wing of the H. Two graduate students tinkered around the steel-studded construction of a roughed-in eight-by-twelve-foot mantrap. They hoisted the robotic torso of a security monitor up onto a front counter.
Daniel stepped through the construction, mindful not to tread on or disturb their work. “Mainframe’s just around . . .?”
“Yup, through and around to your right,” the grad student said. “Don’t mind the dust.”
“Don’t worry, we don’t,” Cessini said. “Mainframe might, though.”
“Had a bugger of a time getting her up here,” the grad student said as he scooted under the counter with a ratchet wrench to tighten the bolts of the torso. “It’s all wrapped up, but no worries, you can’t miss it.”
Daniel peeked around into the hallway’s rough construction debris. A daisy-chained string of light bulbs in small yellow protective cages hung from beneath the ceiling’s grid and lit the way.
The first lab on the south side of the windowless hallway was finished with drywall awaiting compound and sanding. Daniel led them to the second lab that extended back toward the end of the hall. Its side was nothing but a line of metal upright studs and a long strip of sagging yellow tape tied from its doorway to every other stud down the line.
Daniel, Cessini, and Meg approached the room. A tall box glistened in angled teases through the spacing of the studs. It was seven feet tall. Daniel and Meg ducked under the yellow tape at the door. Cessini stopped outside of the wall’s frame. There it was. All wrapped up and delivered in a blanket of shrink wrap. It sat askew in the middle of the rectangular room. A brushed-black metal cabinet on a pallet.
The gray slab floor beneath it was scuffed by black pallet jack wheels. Wood splinters cracked free from the thrust of the jack were scattered over the floor. What kind of rough delivery could such a precious cargo have endured in its travel across the sea?
Cessini rattled the strength of the hallway’s metal studs, checked their cut holes where lines of conduit would be sewn. Then he slipped sideways through the framing into the room. Daniel circled the seven-foot cabinet and trailed his hand over the crinkly wrap. Yellow stickers pasted on each side had a mini-ball meter that recorded the last, greatest angle of tilt. Too much lean and the mini-balls would pour into a red zone. But with proper delivery, all the mini-balls would stay unmoved in their upright well. Daniel checked around. All four sides’ upright wells were full. He let out a breath. Cessini smiled. It was all going to be okay.
Cessini and Meg had paced the whole of the room in a matter of steps. It would all have to be filled with more equipment. There would be no place for a new working table. Playing was over. This was Daniel’s new life.
“You can both come here after school if you want,” Daniel said. “I might like the company and extra hands while I work. A new life starts here. Smaller, yes. But better.”
Cessini pulled at a separation between the layers of shrink wrap for a peek and a poke.
“Imagine the potential in this box,” Daniel said, “and in us who traveled across this world.” An anteroom was roughly framed in behind the end of the lab. “And that room there, that will be my office, my studio.”
“And up there would be a good place for a camera,” Cessini said. He liked what he saw. He measured around the room, counting off heel to toe for each of the two rows of eight cabinets. “I think we can make this work.”
“We’ll get it all back,” Daniel said. “It’s going to be perfect. We’ll get Packet back. Your body, my code. All of it, right here. Packet born right here on a pallet.”
“Excellent. When can we start?” Cessini asked.
“I’ll get it all hooked up and installed. You two come right here after school. And, hey, since we’re in an actual school this time, no one can complain that you’re here.”
“This is going to work out great. And you know what else?” Cessini asked.
“What?” Meg asked.
“If a whole module of the data center back home fits into this room today,” Cessini said, “then tomorrow we’ll be able to fit everything from here into a tablet.”
“How about a blood cell?” Daniel asked as he tore free the tape at the end of the shrink wrap. “We won’t use chips side-by-side.” He circled faster to unwind. “We’ll stack them in 3D. No, forget stacking them. We’ll pour chips in droplets of nano-particle-infused liquid.”
“We won’t even need wires,” Cessini said. He yanked down on the folds of the wrap and followed Daniel around. He stomped through the swelling pile of wrap on the floor. The top of the cabinet became bare, unprotected.
“Air-cooled, no liquid, we’ll design the room just for you,” Daniel said as he waited for a chuckle to burst, but Cessini couldn’t get there, not yet. Meg elbowed him.
Cessini looked around on the floor. Splinters of the pallet’s wood were buried under the wrap. More were kicked into the crease between the wall’s stud plate and the floor. Dust filled the recesses of the studs.
“It doesn’t pay what we’re used to,” Daniel said, “but it’ll do.”
“What are we used to?” Cessini asked.
“Lap of luxury. I thought you knew?” A wad of tape from the shrink wrap caught Daniel’s pant leg as he came forward. He bent down to un-tack it.
