by Leah Thomas
“Do you ever wish you’d made different decisions?”
I should have covered my ears. But sometimes you have to hear things. They were talking about the owner of that lab coat, Moritz.
“Not really,” said Mom. “If I hadn’t gone abroad, I’d never have met him, which makes me think I never would have realized how to be silly. I mean, really, really happy silly. Seb. God, he used to buy Chiclets and jam them over his teeth whenever we rode buses, just so he could waggle his eyebrows and grin at people like a bucktoothed ape. Nearly gave an old man a hernia once.”
“I’m sorry I never saw that, but it does not surprise me.”
“He was silly about everything, apart from his work. I wish he’d been silly about that.”
“Lean forward.” The chair creaked; I guess he was pressing a stethoscope against her back.
“If I hadn’t met him, I’d never have had Ollie. It’d be silly to regret the things that made you. I mean, tch—do you regret the past?”
“Sometimes more than anything,” said Auburn-Stache, “but not always for the same reasons.”
“You know,” said Mom, “he could never knot his ties properly, either.”
I covered my ears with my comforter. One of them had started crying, very softly.
I couldn’t stay in that house. It was just coughing and wheezing and weeping and silences that no number of books and bottled ships could drown out, and lying around like a slug wasn’t changing any part of that.
So I climbed out of bed for the first time in a week, pulled the sticky gauze off my tongue, put on my boots, and went downstairs. Mom was just sitting at the kitchen table, staring at the lace-patterned tablecloth, running her fingers over the bumps and details. She’d crocheted the tablecloth herself, a few years back when she got really into making doilies and washcloths and stuff. Now she doesn’t make anything. All her hobbies have fallen away from her.
“I’m going for a bike ride. Please don’t lock yourself in the garage.”
She didn’t even wince.
“Wear a coat,” she said. “It isn’t summer anymore.”
“Right. Can I ask you something?”
“Are you going to needle me about the lab?”
“No.” I stared at her. “Did Dad have epilepsy, too?”
She didn’t blink. “He did.”
“How come you’ve never told me that?” I sat down; the seat creaked. “Did you think I wouldn’t care? You think I’d rather have a mystery?”
“The mystery of your father has always been better than knowing the truth about him.”
“What do you mean?”
She cradled her head in skeletal hands. “He made mistakes. He tried to make you better, but made you worse. He tried to give you the world, but took it from you instead. I wonder what he’d think if he could see us now, stuck out here in a cabin.”
“We don’t have to be.” I raised my voice. “Maybe you should let me go.”
Her eyes were buried in her arms, now. Her shoulders trembled just like my fists did. I flipped open the book light. The buzz was nothing to the aching in my head. I slid it across the table. She raised seeping eyes to look at it.
“Mom,” I said, “if I could go, you could go, too. You could go anywhere. You don’t have to be stuck because of me.” I pinched the bridge of my nose, ran a sleeve over my eyes. “I hate that you’re stuck because of me.”
“I was stuck before that, Oliver. Out here, I don’t have to make excuses.” She stared at me. “Out here, no one expects me to move on.”
I wonder if she still sleeps under the coat sometimes, Moritz.
“Why is there an electric fence surrounding our property?”
She stood up from the table and dragged her feet to the window. “I was a college student when I got pregnant. I never graduated. I’ve been worried that’s not enough to keep you.”
“The fence, Mom,” I said. “Why did you have to put up the fence?”
She turned to look at me. “I’m telling you. To keep you.”
“Right.” I pulled up my hood, wiped my nose, and headed for the door. “So you could preserve me like one of Joe’s stuffed deer? Okay.”
She tried to stop me, but her arms are like flimsy straws now, and so instead she said, “Wait!”
I remembered the sobbing. I waited.
“I didn’t keep you here for my sake. It was to keep you from being out there.”
“What?”
“The digital watch,” she murmured. “It stopped working.”
“Tell me what you mean!” I didn’t mean to shout, Moritz.
Her eyes were bright, foggy somehow. “When you were maybe two years old, Greg tried to—look. He had one of your father’s old watches. Tiny battery. He remembered the paddles when he resuscitated you, and he wanted to see how you’d react.”
The day they’d argued, the day of the house fire.
“He could have killed you. I walked into the living room and he was holding it out to you, and you were huddled in the far corner of your playpen, just shaking. I shouted at him; you heard me and got upset. You screamed. When you screamed, the watch sparked.”
I tried to pull away from her. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that it goes both ways. Electricity hurts you, but you hurt it, too. The screen cracked. The watch still won’t work.”
“Electromagnetism …”
“Greg thought that maybe we could build your tolerance. They do that with peanut allergies, you know. Gradually increase the dosage so a body can become immune. Maybe that’s why he gave you the watch. He wasn’t trying to hurt you.” Suddenly she seemed more aware. “But you weren’t his son.”
“I know where I learned to be so selfish.”
“It’s not selfish to love people.” Her eyes narrowed, lit on every part of my face. Rain battered the windows. Her hand was clenched around my sleeve, so tight it was starting to hurt.
“If there was even just a chance I could go to school and you could go to work. If I could go to Germany and you could study astrophysics …” I took a deep breath. “How could you not tell me?”
“All people do out there is hurt each other,” she said, and her eyes were strangely unfocused. “You’ll go out and hurt someone, Ollie. You can’t even help it.”
I thought of the phone, the stupid phone that shorted and how I couldn’t stop it from hurting Liz.
“People hurt each other here, too, Mom.”
I pulled her fingers from my arm and burst out of the house and onto the porch, into the rain. She doesn’t bother with locks anymore. I haven’t tried to leave in ages.
“Ollie!” she cried. “Your coat!”
I got on my battered old bike and rode toward the power line, spitting rainwater from my mouth. I didn’t look back to see if she lingered on the porch, silhouetted in the dim yellow light seeping from the cabin. I just didn’t even look.
The sky overhead was gray and brooding, and some of the clouds had a purple tinge that meant they might spit lightning in a little while. The driveway was more overgrown than before. I didn’t slow down until I could see bolts of orange up ahead, flashing above the trees.
I squeezed the brakes and came to a stop when the cable was still a little shadow on the horizon, a draping line of black surrounded by an orange haze. It was still raining, but drizzling more than pouring. The air was sharp and cold in my nostrils.
“We’re ending this,” I said, showing my teeth. I should have worn my fedora. “I’m going to a dance. And then I’m going to Kreiszig, motherfluffer. To drag a friend from newfound hermitdom.”
Because Liz is right, Moritz. It has been all about me. I don’t want it to stay that way. I don’t want to be selfish and alone in a cabin for the rest of my life. I want to go out there and get hurt. I want what everyone else has: not just power sockets, but conversation. Memories! I want to see things and meet people and become something more than myself.
So even if it hurts Mom,
I have to leave. Both of us can start living.
The cable didn’t sway. It was like the little orange tentacles hadn’t sniffed me out yet. They were hanging limply, ignoring my threat. Or maybe they just were indifferent to my challenge.
Not for long.
I stepped back onto my pedals and started pumping my legs with all my might. I gained speed faster than I’ve ever bothered to before, huffing and puffing within seconds and splashing mud and rainwater all up my jeans.
About half the distance from the power line, the electricity took notice. The tendrils reared back and up, and then seemed to intensify as I pedaled closer. I wanted to scream, but instead buckled down against the handlebars as icy rain hit my face.
My tires shook in the mud, the seat post knocked me up and down, and the great orange cascade of light formed itself into a tsunami and reared back, ready to crash to earth and make smithereens of me.
I was going to pass under. This time I was going to.
The nausea hit me before the wave began descending. I could feel a nerve in my temple going, but all I did was pedal, pedal, pedal and close my eyes, and the wave of harsh light came down on top of me.
I roared against it.
My front tire twisted sideways in the mud.
I crashed into the wooden support post.
There was an almighty snapping sound as the cable split in two overhead, throwing a shower of sparks down onto the driveway. Not a digital watch. Not a phone. My nemesis, split in two because I wasn’t going to spend my whole life on one end of a driveway, Mo. The things that trapped me here, that held me here, couldn’t hold me forever. They wouldn’t.
My head was pounding, my heart was racing, and I was still on the wrong side of the cable, lying in the underbrush yet again.
But I wasn’t seizing. I was conscious.
And maybe I could walk past that sparking, broken cable.
Maybe I was still selfish. I still wanted the whole world.
I got on my feet and hobbled closer.
Shut my eyes.
Took slow, deliberate steps forward …
And walked past it.
The air, again, was the same air on the other side, soaked in rain, and I remembered very suddenly what I’d told Liz on the day I’d met her, while we sat on the Ghettomobile in the junkyard, about how I didn’t want to cross the power line if it meant I couldn’t go back.
Mom is never going to leave the woods again, is she, Moritz?
I was panting, suddenly feeling queasy once more. As if my allergies had caught up with me. I stepped backward across the line.
The tendrils were trying to grab me once more. They gathered their rage into a ball of something like fire where the cable was broken.
They groped at me the whole time I pedaled away. I could feel them on my back, boring into my spine.
At home, the door was still open. Mom wasn’t in the house. From my bedroom window, I could see the garage lights glowing. I could see the cloud of crimson emanating from the small generator.
She hasn’t come out since. I haven’t been able to apologize.
Maybe we’re on the wrong side of some metaphorical bridge where the grass is crusty and not grass at all, but sharp little spines of glass. I dunno, Moritz.
But the one little speck of green that I get is your letters, so please never stop writing me.
You got that?
Never stop.
Because you’ll never meet me, and it’s the closest we can get even if I beat all the power lines between here and Kreiszig.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
The Chamber
I would give you the world. But you might not want it. After this letter, you may wish to break me just like you broke your power line.
I have to tell you something now that I should have told you before. Before I even permitted myself to speak to you.
I have to tell you about Dr. Merrill’s anechoic chamber.
Dr. Merrill finally finished building an anechoic chamber inside the research facility. An anechoic chamber is a soundproof room, padded with jutting squares and triangles of foam insulation that absorb even the smallest whisper of sound. Even the floor is no more than a grate suspended above insulation underfoot. An ideal anechoic chamber creates a vacuum of sound. A body could scream in such a space and someone four centimeters away would hear no more than the tiniest whisper.
I was eleven. I saw him coming before he arrived. Recognized him from the telltale way he smacked his feet against the tiles in the hallway.
“There you are, Moritz!” Merrill said, popping his head through the doorway. He found me where my mother had deposited me. In one of the waiting rooms. There were a few young women waiting there as well, biting their lips. I rearranged my hair atop my goggles. One woman set aside her magazine. Gave me a hesitant smile. I walked out the door. Nudged it shut behind me.
“Wait till you get a load of this.” Merrill grabbed me by the arm. Steered me down the hall. “It’ll blow your mind.”
“You don’t need to drag me.” He led me to the elevator. “I can walk on my own.”
“I finally finished the chamber. It’s amazing! It negates sound to the extent of negative twenty-eight point two decibels. It’s the best one in the world. We beat out Sweden. Ha!”
“Ah.” I had known about the proposed anechoic chamber. Merrill had longed for one ever since he joined the staff. “I take it you want me to test it for you?”
He chuckled. “No, no. I want it to test you, Moritz! How would you adapt to an absence of sound, hey? Let’s find out!”
He pressed the button for the basement. The doors slid closed. I tensed, wishing that he would release my arm. Resenting that if he did, the buzzing in the walls would dizzy me.
“But if it’s a soundproof room, I won’t be able to see.” I swallowed. “It’ll be worse than the water tank was.”
I did not say: “I am frightened.”
The elevator door opened. Merrill led me out into the narrow basement hallway. Our footsteps echoed in my head. There were cobwebs down here, even; they tickled my hearing in a way that made me shiver. It was like walking through a meat cooler.
“Don’t underestimate yourself,” Merrill said. “Did you know that over the past decade, you have been the most extensively researched subject here? Other subjects have come and gone, but you’re their muse, you know. The original. They just can’t get enough of the echolocation kid.”
“I’m aware.”
“Yeah, I guess you would be. I mean, you were the one dodging projectiles for your entire life. Heh. Good thing you’ve only ever gotten better at dodging things, according to the data. Your echolocation just gets stronger as you get older, and may spike again when you hit puberty. Maybe by then you’ll be dodging bullets!”
“My reflexes have very little to do with my mother’s research into treating cardiomy—”
“Oh, come on, Moritz,” he said. “You’re a clever kid. You know your mother’s not bothered much about your heart. Not anymore. I mean, you started it all! You’re the reason I came here in the first place.”
If I could have scowled. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
But Merrill was steering me into an unobtrusive observation room, devoid of chairs and cupboards. At one end of it was a substantial metal vault that spanned the distance from the floor to the ceiling. I clicked at it. Iron. Durable and cold.
“Isn’t she a beauty? I wanna paint her cherry red, like a Corvette.”
I crossed my arms.
“Oh yeah. I suppose that doesn’t matter much to you, eh, Momo?”
“Do not call me that.”
“Lighten up, kid. This is fun! Here.”
He pushed nose plugs into my hand.
“What are these for?”
“Well, some of the insulation smells a bit funny still because it hasn’t set entirely. It isn’t toxic or anything, but it reeks.”
“I’d rather not.”
&n
bsp; “Don’t be a party pooper! Please. I’m so stoked about this.”
I jabbed the plugs into my nostrils. Bowed my head in defeat. I’d seen that mad gleam plenty of times before. Scientists in that state of mind cannot be reasoned with. “Fine. If we must.”
Merrill opened the door to the vault and stopped my breath.
Beyond the door was nothingness. An absence of anything. Blank space. Impulsively I clicked my tongue at the open door. Rapid-fire clicks, sharp and clear. And I experienced the impossible, Ollie: an absolute lack of feedback in reply.
I shivered. “What does it … look like to you?”
“Like a bunch of foam books stacked up in horizontal and vertical lines, sticking out of the walls and ceiling and most of the floor. A whacked-out bouncy castle. So you really can’t see it, huh?”
I bit my tongue to stop the clicking. “It’s like staring into nothing.”
He smiled. “Well, come on in, then! Let’s see what you make of it.”
Dr. Merrill stepped backward into the gaping quiet. The moment he entered, he all but vanished from my sight. I could only hear him and see him at all because the door was open.
“Come in,” he said.
“I don’t think I should.” I could not help but notice the lack of monitors in the room. What did he mean to measure? And how? Surely some of the other staff should have been in attendance. Where was the ever-present group of women and men with clipboards? Where were the folks in face masks?
I was climbing the ladder to another water tank. Why didn’t I run, Ollie?
Merrill popped his head out of the vault. I could see only the sketchy outline of his torso, so he appeared to me like a disembodied head floating in midair. The momentary shock was enough that I let him grab my elbow.
“Come in!” He yanked me forward into the chamber.
Before I could say a word, he slammed the door behind us.
And then I knew what black was.
I could not see. Could not hear. Could not sense anything. I was blind as I have never been.
There was nothingness around me. Creeping inside me. I couldn’t feel a solitary sensation but Merrill’s hand wrapped around my forearm. I couldn’t smell the chemicals he had warned me about. It was a black hole, an abyss. It was hell.
