Porter

by Laurence Dahners

  5

  Porter

  Porter

  By

  Laurence E Dahners

  Allie Dans formed her first “port” shortly after she turned eleven.

  She was at her cousin Mindy’s birthday party. It was a hot summer day and Aunt Stella hotfooted it across the burning pool deck to hand Allie and Mindy each a glass of icy Kool-Aid. In the humidity, the glass was sweating nearly as much as Allie was and she bowed her strawberry blonde head over it in puzzlement. “How does the water get to the outside of the glass?”

  With a puzzled tone her aunt posited, “Maybe the heat makes the glass leaky.”

  “For God’s sake Stella!” Allie’s dad said without opening his eyes behind his sunglasses. “It’s condensation! The cold condenses water onto the glass!” He laid his head back against the deck recliner and adjusted the brim of his hat to cover his eyes again.

  Not knowing what “condensation” was, Allie thought to herself that her dad’s explanation wasn’t at all helpful, big words but a complete lack of enlightenment. She didn’t want to ask her dad about it and thereby get a long and complicated elucidation though. Everybody thought her Dad was a genius, but he had a tendency to explain things in such detail that they became even more confusing than they were to begin with.

  Still thinking about it, she squinted and pictured a tiny tunnel through the glass, from the Kool-Aid on the inside to the air on the outer surface. As she visualized it, to her astonishment a big drop welled up on the surface of the glass, right where she was imagining the hole! During her moment of startlement, the drop stopped growing, but it then resumed growing and began dribbling when she concentrated on it again. Eventually it became a steady stream. After a moment, the level of Kool-Aid in the glass fell to the level of Allie’s “hole” and the stream slowed down and stopped. Allie picked up the glass and tasted the dribble. Yep, Kool-Aid. She tasted the other tiny drops covering the rest of the glass – they were just water.

  Allie took a sip and looked over at Mindy. Mindy was raising her glass to her lips. Allie focused on Mindy’s glass and was rewarded with a dribble down Mindy’s chin. “Ew!” Mindy set the glass down and wiped her chin, staring suspiciously at the rim of the glass and running her finger over it. She wiped sticky fingers on the table top with distaste. Then she brightened, “Let’s get in the pool!”

  The next night, when the Dans family sat down to dinner, Allie looked at the condensation on the surface of a glass the iced tea her mom had just served. Remembering, she held the glass up over her plate and pictured a tunnel through the bottom of the glass – sure enough the bottom of the glass began to drip onto her plate when she formed the port.

  She looked over at her dad. He had brought a paper to the dinner table and was studying it. His reading at the dinner table always made Mom mad, but he did it a lot anyway. He lifted his glass. Allie made a port just behind the lip and giggled as she saw tea run down his chin. “What the hell?!” he swore, setting the glass down and reaching for a napkin. He looked suspiciously over at Allie who was desperately trying to stifle a giggle. Then he examined the glass. It was one of their regular glasses. It didn’t have a convoluted surface like dribble glasses have. In fact, it had a perfectly smooth, one could say “glassy,” surface. “What the hell?!” he repeated and looked at Allie again. “Did you do that somehow?”

  With her hand over her mouth, Allie giggled a little more while nodding her head.

  He looked back at the glass, running a finger over its surface below the rim, both inside and outside. Puzzled, he asked, “How?”

  “I just made a leak like Aunt Stella said.”

  “What?”

  “Well, she said ‘the heat makes the glass leaky.’ You said it was ‘condensation’ I made a little tunnel through the glass ‘cause I don’t know how to make it ‘leaky’.”

  “What?”

  “She said ‘the heat made-’”

  “I know what she said! It was stupid! Heat doesn’t make glass leaky!”

  Allie bowed her head, “Sorry.” Her dad was mostly pretty nice but he could be a little scary when he was mad.

  “No, how did you make the glass leak?”

  In a small voice, “I made a little tunnel...”

  “There isn’t a tunnel there!”

  A smaller voice, “Only when I think it.”

  Goosebumps raised the hair on Albert Dans’ neck. “What?”

  Allie whispered, “Only when I think it.”

  He was holding the glass in the air and to his astonishment a small stream of tea appeared just below the glass and splattered on his plate. It wasn’t coming from the glass, or through the glass, it was appearing in space about an inch below the bottom of the glass then streaming straight down! He dropped the glass, leaping to his feet and knocking his chair over backwards, “Holy shit!” The glass shattered on his dinner plate, breaking it also.

  With a small cry Allie ducked her head and bolted from the table, running upstairs to her room.

  Allie’s mom looked away from Stephen, Allie’s towheaded 4 year old brother. “What just happened?”

  Al set the chair back up, shook his head and said, “I have no idea.” He got a broom and mop, cleaned up the mess, then dished himself another plate. He took his plate and Allie’s up to her room.

  Allie had curled up on the bed and when he entered, she looked apprehensively up through her hair at her dad. “You’re not in trouble; I brought you your dinner.” Al sat down on the corner of her bed, putting her plate on her desk.

  Allie pulled her hair partly back off her face to peer more clearly at her dad, who indeed did not seem angry. “I’m not hungry.”

  “OK.” Her dad calmly began eating his own dinner. “Do you think you could show me what you can do with your ‘tunnels’ later?”

  “OK.” Allie got off the bed, wiped her nose and went over to sit at her desk. She picked at her food for a while but didn’t eat much.

  “Are you done?” Her dad asked, nodding at her plate.

  “Yes.” She said in a small voice.

  He picked up both of their plates and took them down to put in the dishwasher. Shortly, he appeared back in her door with two bowls of ice cream. She raised her eyebrows. “But I didn’t eat all my dinner?”

  “I know. Some rules are made to be broken.”

  They ate their ice cream in silence. When it was gone he asked, “Ready to make me a ‘tunnel’?” Allie nodded, rubbing her wrist under her nose again. He heard a spraying sound and looked down in astonishment at a tiny jet of water shooting into the bottom of his ice cream bowl. “What the hell!?” He looked back up at Allie who was watching the spray too. He swallowed, “Where is that tunnel coming from?”

  “The pipe in the wall there.” She pointed over his shoulder with her chin. The spray stopped.

  “How did you know there was a pipe in the wall?”

  “I sorta feel them… Don’t you?”

  Her dad made a choking sound, “No... I don’t think anybody can… except maybe you.” He began asking a seemingly endless list of questions, most of which she couldn’t answer. She dribbled water out of glasses and sprayed it out of pipes. After a while she developed a headache and became unable to create more than a tiny tunnel. Still he wanted her to do more.

  Finally her mother came in and watched what was going on with growing astonishment. After a while though she said, “Al, she needs to rest. It’s past her bedtime.”

  He turned to snap at his wife, then looked back at Allie, all droopy around the edges. “OK Sarah. Allie, we’ll go into my lab tomorrow and learn more about what you can do.”

  Allie sighed and put on her pajamas. She wasn’t looking forward to it. Tomorrow, she and Mindy had been going to hang out at the pool. H
er head was throbbing. Her mom got her a Tylenol and she curled up to sleep with Oscar, her cat.

  Her dad spent hours on the internet trying to find credible evidence of teleportation or whatever the hell this phenomenon was. Not even a “less than credible” report of the same phenomenon was to be found.

  The next morning Allie’s dad got her up early to take her in to his lab in the physics department at the University. He ignored her protests about going swimming with Mindy. When her mother said something about it, he just told her to let Aunt Stella know that Allie was “busy.” At the lab, they did measurements until Allie’s head was splitting again. Her eyes would hardly stay open. They rested over lunch at Burger King and started over. Dr. Dans’ magnetic and electrical field measurements around Allie showed nothing different from those about his own head. Measurements around the ports found oddly “swirling” fields. Samples of distilled water and some organic solvents that had been through ports were put aside for assay by a friend in the chemistry department who later told them there were no changes from the control specimens that hadn’t been “ported.” Bacteria and yeast that had been ported continued to live. When Allie got too tired to make ports again her dad spent time on the phone with a friend at the medical school trying to arrange an MRI of her head “to see if there were any unusual structures.”

  Other than the fellow at the medical school whom her dad told that she had “an unusual ability,” no one else was told that Allie was the center of a new research program. When the MRI was done there was no recognizable difference between her brain and any other. Dr. Dans’ grad student kept working on Dans’ grant funded research project, getting barked at when he interrupted the “Allie research” with questions about their funded study. Everyone that came into the lab was told that Allie was there to “keep her out of her Mom’s hair” or to “see how science worked.” Her dad strictly forbid her to tell any of her friends or to do any tricks for anyone except for him. Videos he made of the effect in action carefully excluded Allie from the field of view. He was very pleasant to her, ordering out lunch from all her favorite restaurants and setting up a computer for her to use between tests. But nonetheless, she was there in the lab all day almost every day! Even most weekends!

  The rest of Allie’s summer was ruined with 12 hour days at the lab and she began to look forward to the start of school simply because it would provide a break from the constant testing. Her mother and father had started to argue about it – out of her presence, but she could hear them fighting through the walls.

  At the end of her first day back at school Allie was dismayed to see her dad’s car parked in front of the school. She opened the door, “Dad, I’ve got homework!”

  Distractedly he looked up from the paper he’d been reading and smiled at her, “I know Kiddo. It’ll just be for an hour. Besides you can do your homework during my setup time between the first experiment and the second. You look great in your new outfit!”

  Sullenly, she got in the car. As she expected, one hour turned into two, then an angry call from her mother was needed to get them home for dinner.

  Her dad became more and more frustrated as test after test demonstrated odd but miniscule physical phenomena around the port area at both entrance and exit. There was a tiny rotating electrical field, fluctuating magnetic phenomena and a slight attractive force, possible gravitational, around the “ports.” The electromagnetic and possible gravitational fields were so tiny they were at the limits of detection for the most sensitive measuring devices he had available. Worse, the measurements would be different from one repetition of a port setup to the next! He worried that all he was detecting was “noise” in the measurements.

  He determined that materials only flowed through the ports like they would through a hose, from high pressure to low pressure. Interestingly, Allie was able to open ports over a longer distance when the flow of material through the port was energetic. Thus a port from a high pressure pipe could be opened over a much greater distance than a port from a glass of water. When it was opened over a very long distance, the water sprayed out with little pressure, as if the energy of that pressure was being used to cross the distance. When Allie was fresh she could open a port as big as 3mm in diameter but the diameter dropped off quickly when she got tired.

  Her dad had no handle on the phenomenon, and therefore could not reproduce it; much less magnify the effect as he had hoped. He became more and more frustrated and, though it seemed impossible, even more absent minded. Allie’s parents started to fight. Her mother threatened divorce if he didn’t let Allie have time to “be a kid.”

  But then, Thanksgiving weekend came and Allie got sick. High fevers and a cough, the doctor diagnosed “the flu that’s going ‘round” and prescribed “rest and fluids, it’ll get better.”

  While she was sick Allie discovered that she couldn’t make a port. To her dad’s great dismay, when the flu resolved, she didn’t recover her ability. He checked her morning and evening, first in dismay, then in frustration, then in anger, accusing her of just refusing to make ports. But, as the weeks and months passed, it seemed that the startling physical phenomenon/ability was likely gone forever.

  Allie wasn’t too happy about her dad’s constant queries about her ability which had so rapidly gone from exciting, to irritating, to maddening. Then she started puberty and became a sullen teenager. Sullen and angry about everything, and especially about her lost ability. She locked herself in her room for hours on end, playing electric guitar into headphones. Sarah offered to pay for lessons, Allie didn’t want them.

  Her parents were completely unaware of just how astonishingly good Allie had become on the guitar because they couldn’t hear the sound in her headphones, and she balefully refused to let them listen. When they insisted, she thrashed loud distorted pieces with dissonant chords. They learned not to ask.

  Dr. Dans spent long hours going over and over the data that he had accumulated, trying to find something that he had missed and searching the literature for someone else who may have made similar observations. He had no doubt that there must be some physical way to reproduce what his daughter had been able to do for those few fleeting months. When Sarah questioned him, he admitted that there seemed to be little practical use for a port no bigger than 3mm over distances of no more than 20-30 feet, but, if the phenomenon could just be understood, he hoped that it could be scaled up.

  Allie’s mother gradually forgave her husband for his earlier behavior, but when he occasionally stopped by Allie’s room to ask her to “try to create a port” again, he could count on Sarah being there to tell him to “stop badgering the girl, surely she’ll let you know if it starts to work again.”

  Allie’s teenage years slowly and morosely passed. Though she never seemed to study, her parents couldn’t complain because she got excellent grades. She joined a band and spent long hours at practice with them and playing a few gigs. Her parents were never invited, either to practices, or to gigs, and in fact were actively discouraged from attending.

  Then, in her senior year of high school, her mother knocked on her constantly closed bedroom door, first lightly, then loudly. “Come in.”

  Sarah opened the door. Guitar on her lap, Allie sat on the floor in baggy jeans, and a ripped t-shirt. She had apparently cut her hair to a ragged inch long and dyed it black since her mother saw her going out the door that morning. As usual her room was a disaster with clothes strewn everywhere. Gritting her teeth, Sarah ignored the mess. She tried to sound chipper and upbeat, “Hey Allie, I’m hoping that we can plan a trip to visit some of the colleges you’re interested in?”

  “I’m not going to college.”

  Startled, “What?!?!”

  Grimly, “Not going.”

  “Of course you’re going, what did you think you were going to do?”

  “Band’s going on the road.”

  “You can’t do that! We won’t allow it.”

  “I’m eighteen, you can’t tell me what to
do anymore… Well you could make me move out now I guess. Do you want me to?” Allie raised an eyebrow.

  “What!? Where do you think you’d live?”

  “Friends, or the homeless shelter.” She shrugged, “I’d have to work it out, so I hope you’ll give me a little warning if you’re tossing me.”

  A tear formed and ran down her mother’s cheek. “Never,” she croaked. She turned suddenly and left.

  “Close my door!” Allie shouted after her. Then after a minute, she got up and closed it herself. She wondered if “Never” had referred to the homeless shelter, or going on the road?

  Months of shouting, pleading, arguments and long glowering silences passed without any change in Allie’s resolution. She was a musician, she wasn’t going to college. She might go to college if music didn’t work out, but she was sure she was going to make a music career work. Her mother got little support in the battle from Allie’s dad, who as usual seemed too distracted to get very involved in the argument.

  The morning after Allie’s high school graduation Sarah Dans knocked on her door to ask what she’d like for breakfast but there was no answer. When she opened the door she was astonished to see that Allie’s room had been straightened up. Not great, but better than it had been in years. Then, with a sinking heart she saw that the guitar and amp were gone.

  There was a note on the bed. “We’ve got gigs in Atlanta.” No “goodbye,” no mention of when she’d be back, no mention of where in Atlanta.

  Sarah Dans sank down on Allie’s bed and had a good long cry. When she had herself in control she called Allie’s cell phone but it went straight to message. In a trembling voice she said, “Sorry we didn’t get to see you this morning. We wish you luck. Call if you need anything.”

  Several days passed before Albert Dans noticed that his daughter was missing. He asked Sarah about it and when Sarah said that she was on the road, doing her music, he nodded distractedly and went back to the paper he was reading on wormhole theory. Sarah wasn’t sure he’d actually comprehended the calamity that had befallen their little family.