by Lisa Bunker
It’s nice, just walking. I shift the duffel in case by some wild chance he wants to hold hands, which even with all these people around I wish he would, but he doesn’t do anything, and I don’t have the nerve to take his hand myself.
So now I need to explain that in this part of Littlefield there’s a tree-filled place, and a corner of it lies between the bus station and our neighborhood. Hector’s house is farther, so we’re going to get to my house first, but to get to either house we either have to go around the Woods, as they are called, or cut through them. There’s a fence but it has loose places, and anyone who grew up close by knows veir way around the paths inside. There’s a fire ring and a couple of secret fort places, and another place where people have made little huts and lean-tos out of sticks, so it’s like a village of forest gnomes or something. And there’s one longer path that loops back and passes through a stand of tall pine trees, and right in the middle of that, you can almost feel like you’re far away from any houses or gas stations or schools or whatever. A little patch of wilderness.
We come to the first loose place in the fence and we don’t even have to talk about it. I hold the fence for Hector to squeeze through, and then he pushes with his foot so I can squeeze through, and still without talking about it we take the turn that leads to the deep path. Pretty soon the loudest sounds are wind and birds. I hear blue jays making a racket, and other birds Grandy hasn’t taught me yet twittering up high where I can’t see them. Then Hector says, “Um …”
We walk a little farther, and I say, “Um … what?”
“You said there was something else. Something I wouldn’t believe.”
We stop walking and I turn to face him. I can feel myself making a bunch of different faces that go along with the confusion in my head, but I don’t manage to get as far as words, and after a couple of seconds he says, “You can trust me?” It’s funny how he says it, like it’s both a statement and a question. He doesn’t look away, and I make myself not look away too. We’re right in the pines now. The breeze is shushing in the needles, and I have all these feels, feels with wheels, coiling and roiling. It’s like the spirals within spirals of the Experience Zyx gave me. The silence stretches out, and just when I’m starting to feel awkward he puts his head over on one side and says, “Felix, do you know what a trust walk is?”
“No.”
“It’s a thing I learned in camp.” His eyes flicker away for a second, but then they come back. “What you do is, one person closes his eyes, and the other person holds his hand and then they walk together, and the other person has to guide the one who has his eyes closed.” His face is all serious when he’s saying this, but then he does this shrug/smile that makes me want to hug him. “You wanna try?”
“OK.” I know he means, me close my eyes, so standing there under the tall pines I close my eyes and I feel him take my hand—his hand is warm and solid in mine—and then he pulls gently, and I take a step and another, and we’re walking. He’s leading me and I’m trusting him, not exactly following, but letting myself be led, side by side.
He doesn’t say anything except about the walking, like, “Be careful, there’s a root here,” and “Now we’re turning to the right,” and I don’t say anything at all, because I’m totally caught up in smelling and feeling the air, and listening to the space around me, and feeling how birds are flying through it in beautiful curving lines. Then I think about the pine needles and the budding twigs on the trees and how they’re connected to branches connected to the big gnarled trunks plunging down into the ground, and then the roots exploding out again like mirror-image branches, all the way out to the tiny rootlets right under our walking feet, and that gets me thinking about spirals again, and then I think about how the spirals that I feel inside me seem to be reaching out toward the spirals that I can feel spinning around inside Hector, and his hand is talking to me through mine, pulling, moving, a thing of its own not connected to me, but at the same time we’re touching and connected and twined together by all the pullings and pushings and little twistings … pull push closer farther, together apart together again a little closer… .
touch push pull intertwine be together
Exactly. And for a little while I am able to really let go and forget that I wish it could never end, but then I do start wishing that it could never end, and then it does. I feel a splash of hot sun on my face, no more leaves to block it, and I hear a car going by close, and Hector stops. I open my eyes and there’s the other fence in front of us, and then a ditch and then the road. My house is just up that street and around the corner.
Hector looks at me and I look back, and then we both drop our eyes and we drop each other’s hands and step a step away from each other, like we’re both all of a sudden really embarrassed. But then he looks at me again, and I see all the complicated layers of yes and no in his face, and I feel more solid than I can ever remember feeling, and I say, “If I tell you, you have to promise not to say anything if … if you don’t believe me or if you think I’m crazy or something.”
“I promise.”
I take a deep breath and say, “OK. I don’t have a brain tumor. The Procedure is not for that.” I swallow, but there’s no going back now. “No, what it is is, I have this kind of fourth-dimensional alien person stuck inside me. My dad was a scientist, and I was too close when an experiment went wrong, way back when I was three, and this being got stuck inside me, and now in three days they’re going to try to get us unstuck. And …” I swallow again, because I’m not sure I’m going to be able to say the last bit, but then I do. “And, there’s a pretty good chance it won’t work.”
His look asks the question.
“And if it doesn’t work, that will be the end. Nobody knows what will happen to Zyx, but I’ll die.” Then I stand there shaking, thinking, Wow, I told. I actually told. It feels so incredibly good.
And Hector says, “I believe you.”
So we start walking home, I mean, to my house. We don’t hold hands anymore, just walk side by side. Our steps fall into a rhythm together and stay that way, and we are close to each other but not touching. That’s fine with me. I need a little time inside my own skin again, because of the big tangle of feels roiling around inside me as I prepare to see my family again.
There is one more little bit of talk. Before we get to the corner, Hector says, “Zyx.”
“Yeah, Zyx. Short for *zyxilef.” He gives me a look at the cork-pop sound and I take a breath to start explaining, but then I think how little time is left before home, so instead I say, “I’ll tell you about it some other time.”
We walk for another ten steps or so and then he says, “So when you called me stupid, you were talking to Zyx?”
“Yeah.”
“And when I said, about you having an alien in your head … that was actually true.”
“Yeah.”
We walk in silence for about ten steps more and then he makes a little noise and I realize he’s trying not to laugh, and that makes me laugh, and he laughs, and for the first time we’re both laughing together, and it just feels so good like that.
A little more quiet walking and then Hector stops and says, “Um … Can I, you know … Is he listening right now? Can I talk to him?”
No surprise, that rouses Zyx. My whole body spasms. I say, going along with the “he” and “him”—no time to explain the V-words either—“Yeah, he’s always here.”
Hector does a laugh-face, like, This is so weird, looking at the same person but talking to someone else, and says, “OK, so, um … Hi, Zyx. How’s it going?”
This time I practically convulse, and I feel Zyx working in my mouth and throat. I’ve never felt ven try harder to use my body to speak not speak sad want answer
Yeah, you wanted to talk to him. I get that. But all I could do was flail.
Hector steps back a step, but his face stays calm. As soon as I can I say, “He can only talk by typing on a keyboard, but obviously he wants to say hi back.” A
nd Hector says, “Cool.”
We walk on and somehow we’re holding hands again, and sooner than I am ready we turn the corner onto my block, and then we come to my house, and right away—they must have been watching for me—there’s Mom on the front porch with Grandy and Bea behind. Mom’s hair is flying all over and her fingers are knotted in front of her, and even from the sidewalk I can see that she has been crying, and the coil roil spikes and I almost sit down right there in the street. But nobody does or says anything right away, because Hector is there.
I turn to him and there’s a look on his face that for a moment I think means I’ve hurt his feelings somehow, but then I realize he’s feeling for me. I’m too mixed-up to say or do anything, but he suddenly steps close and kisses me on the cheek—right in the triangle, he kisses me—and then he whispers, “Good luck, Felix … Message me after, OK? And, bye Zyx.” Then he gives my family a quick look and turns and walks away. He doesn’t look back.
So then there’s nothing left to do but to walk up the sidewalk and up the steps, and seeing the tears on Mom’s face makes my eyes sting too, and then there’s a bunch of crying and holding and, you know, the order of who hugged whom and for how long is not important. One thing, though—at some point I realize that nobody’s mad at me, and then I realize that the whole time since I left I’ve had this clenched thing inside of me, this bracing for the impact of everyone being mad at me for running away. But no one is mad, so the clenched thing begins to unclench, and then they ask where I went and I tell them.
Next there’s an awkward little stretch—how do you get from everyone on the porch having a big scene to just another Sunday at home with the Yz family? But somehow with little jokes and laughing through hiccups and so on we manage to get inside. The offer of lunch helps, because I’m starving. Also, Mom thinks of the perfect subject-changing question to ask as we’re going in. “That was Hector Dandicat you were with, wasn’t it?” I glance at her face and she’s still not mad or suspicious or anything, just trying really hard to be casual.
My face goes hot, but Bea saves me the trouble of answering. “Yeah, that was Hector,” she says, giving me an X-ray vision look, because of the kiss no doubt.
Mom’s brow gets ridges in it. “Was he with you …” she says, and waves a hand toward where Portland would be if she was facing the right direction.
“No. He met me at the bus.”
“Oh.”
I am expecting more questions, but she seems ready to let it go, and then I think I know why, because Ursula is in the kitchen. As soon as I see her, Mom gets all flustery, and I don’t know Ursula well enough yet to be sure, but it looks to me like she might be embarrassed, what with how she can’t seem to figure out where to point her eyes. She fumbles a coffee cup down onto the counter and says, “Perhaps I should go.”
Mom goes to her and lays a hand on her arm for a second and says, “That’s probably a good idea—for now. But thank you for stopping by.” So then Ursula is making her way out. She still looks embarrassed, but there is the moment when she pauses for a second, going by me, and says, “Felix, if you like, after the Procedure, I will teach you to play chess,” and then she’s gone.
That takes me a couple of seconds to compute—it’s a little involved—and then it’s a good thing I take another second to think it all the way through, because my first impulse is to say, “You TOLD?” I mean, I don’t actually care that she did, but it has just been so tiresome with Mom constantly harping on the Powers That Be and “Don’t tell, don’t tell!” Also, she’s giving me this look like, Please don’t be mad, which I am not, so what I end up saying is, “Not to worry. I told Hector too.” And then we all burst out laughing.
The next part is not so fun. Mom does the parenting thing she does and tells me I need to hear how what I did affected the people around me, and then she says they were all really scared for me, especially because they were afraid that if they told anyone I had run away, the Powers would mobilize the National Guard or whatever to look for me, so they couldn’t even call the police. All they could do was sit at home and worry and hope I’d come back. So then I feel really bad because of how much I scared my family.
Then we have to talk about how tomorrow it’s going to be time to go to the Facility, and the weight of everything falls down on me again like an enormous boulder, and the conversation gets bumpy. It seems so close all of a sudden—not close even, already here—and I don’t feel ready, so I get tense. “Can’t we have just one more day of regular life?” I say. Mom gets tense too, and Bea goes and starts playing the piano. Only Grandy stays calm, in that irritating way of veirs. But it’s not too bad, really. The feels of the porch are still there, so somehow we get through it.
And, here’s Mom, standing in the door of my room again. I should say, I came up here with orders to pack, but I’ve been writing this instead.
Me: “I’m typing what we’re saying again.”
Her: “OK.”
Me: long silence, like, What?
“Felix, I just spoke with Dr. Yoon on the phone, and she says that, if we want, we can take one more day at home before we go in. It’s not ideal, but it’s doable. So I thought, let’s get out of our house and our lives, off this track we’re on, for just a day, and go do something fun. Together. All of us.”
I flop my mouth at her for a second and then say, “OK. Sure.”
She smiles. “Good.” She twiddles her hair for a second. “It’s too bad we didn’t think of this sooner—we could have made more elaborate plans. As it is, we’re limited to where we can get to and back from in a day, and of course the Powers have to sign off on your choice, but Dr. Yoon says she can arrange that within reason. So, what do you want to do, sweetheart? Where do you want to go?”
The answer is right there. “I want to go somewhere where I can hear some jazz,” I say.
She blinks. “Jazz?” she says. Then she waggles her head and says, “Well, all right. That sounds like fun. I’m not sure … I’ll have to do some research. But let’s see what we can find.”
I nod, and she comes into the room and puts her hand on my shoulder and kisses my forehead, and coils and roils and all that, I put my head down, but it’s fine.
So how about that? Jazz. Maybe she’ll find Steven’s band. Wouldn’t that be great? I could say “Hey,” and he would say “Hey,” and then everyone would wonder how I knew him.
jazz pretty
Yeah, jazz pretty. Those records—it was like what you showed me, sorta. Getting lost in the patterns, with time always going underneath, making it all run.
yes
OK, so maybe in three days I’ll be dead, but I’m going on a field trip tomorrow. Another one, I mean, here in three dimensions. So, my life isn’t over quite yet.
2 Days to Go
For once, typing that doesn’t fill me all the way up with dread. Mostly, but not fully. Because, we’re on the train to Boston to hear some jazz. Field trip! And, btw, it’s a lot nicer to be inside the train than sitting out in the wind.
We got a set of four seats facing each other in pairs. I’ve got the window facing forward, and it’s so cool watching the scenery go by, all those backyards and bus parking lots and loading docks. I have the laptop on my lap. Bea is next to me, and Mom and Grandy (in skirt and panty hose, it being Monday) are across from us. OK, no particular reason why, but I’m going to type whatever anybody says, just to capture a little bit of real life. [Note added right after: The talk happened too fast to catch it all, so I filled in the rest after with Zyx helping, and added these bracket notes too.]
Bea: You know what would be cool, in a sick sort of way? If you saw a murder happening in a backyard as you went by. Good setup for a detective novel.
Grandy: I feel certain that it has been used, though I cannot immediately cite a reference.
Bea: Like, just as the train goes by, you see one person pointing a gun, and then the flash of the gun going off, and the other person starts to crumple to the ground,
and then, zoop!, you’re past it.
Me: And you’re the only one who saw it—
Bea: Yeah, and maybe the person with the gun was disguised somehow … something odd—
Mom: A mask, perhaps—
Me: Yeah, a clown mask!
Grandy: Overused, I fear.
Me: OK, how about a full-head monster mask? Something green and yellow with lots of bumps and teeth on it?
Grandy: Less used.
Bea: And then you search online and you can’t find any mention of it anywhere, but you become obsessed and start investigating yourself. You figure out which two stations you were between and you start snooping around—
Me: And … hey, are there cookies in there? [Grandy has pulled out the tote bag of snacks vo has brought.]
Grandy: Indeed there are. [hands me a couple of ginger snaps]
Mom: And what’s in that thermos? [top sticking out of bag] Coffee?
Grandy: No, dearheart, it’s tea.
Mom: Really?
Grandy: Anagram of “tock.”
Bea: Say again?
Grandy: Anagram of “tock.” [Grandy has this thing about making up word puzzles. We’re all used to it, so we all know that that’s what this is, and all three of us start thinking aloud—This one’s hard, I don’t get it, stuff like that.]
Bea: I give up.
Grandy: [handing the filled cup lid to Mom] Tea. See? OK?
[all three of us groaning and complaining, Grandy smiling that cat-smile of veirs]
Me: Oh, sorry, crumbs on the keyboard.
Mom: Well, honey, just blow them off gently.
Bea: Hey, do you remember? Cone full of jimmies? [Nelson, this is taking a lot of explaining. She’s talking about something that happened a couple of summers ago at the lake. She asked for a cone completely full of jimmies, and the ice cream person gave it to her.]
Bea: [laughing, talking to me] I kept throwing them at you, but only one at a time, and they were so small you couldn’t feel them, and pretty soon your hair was full of candy sprinkles.
