by Liz Harmer
Marie came over to where Brandon was standing and sidled up close. “I think I need to be alone with my husband,” she whispered.
“Your ex-husband.” Brandon said. “There’s no way I’m leaving you alone with him.”
“Wow.” She grinned. “While I appreciate your chivalry, I’m the one with the gun, remember?”
“I remember.” But he would not move from the spot, would not let this man out of his sight. Despite the thousands of miles between them, he suspected Doors of some trickery. “But if there’s anything you want to beware of, it’s loyalty to any man. What if this is a hallucination?”
“One that we can both see and hear?”
“A hologram, then.”
Jason on the stone steps was pitiful, head hanging as though he were about to fall asleep. He put his hand on Gus, mumbled, “I always wanted a dog like this.”
Jason had given them a notebook, but it was filled with nonsense, with aphorisms. Marie picked up the camera and took pictures of both Brandon and Jason.
“I’ll ask the questions,” she said. “You take the notes.” She handed him a few loose pieces of paper and a marker.
“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve got a pen.”
* * *
—
The chicks bobbed around in their box, and there was one man there who seemed set on protecting her, a man who had information they needed, who had electricity, and there was Jason, whom she wanted to touch and to keep touching, whose presence she wanted to affirm and reaffirm, and she felt herself growing buoyant. She wanted to run up and down the street.
“It’s too much,” she said as though refusing an expensive gift.
Gus sat next to Jason, her Gus, her baby. Brandon calmed her, too, his calm its own testament not only to reality but to safety.
She had been right to wait! If Jason could come back, then Philip could, then anyone could. She sat as close to Jason as possible, the warm and musty odours of him a comfort, as was his thinning hair, as was, even, his apparent weakness, and she wanted the press of his body to anchor her.
“How is it that you were able to come back?” Brandon said. “When you got back, where did you end up? Back at your house? How did you get here?”
Jason looked up at him in bewilderment.
“Let’s ask that later,” Marie said.
“But it’s the most important thing for us to know! It’s the crucial thing. This woman that came back to PINA was disoriented. We never got her vitals up to where they should have been, or so I was told anyway.”
“What happened to her?”
“I don’t know. When I went to find her, she wasn’t there.”
“She wasn’t there?”
“Doors said that she left through the port again.”
Jason groaned, and Marie, frowning, turned to him. “Jason, can you go through it from beginning to end. Sweetheart, can you do that?” She had never before spoken to him like this, as though he were a child. “What happened after the port was installed? You and Maria were in the kitchen with the wine? The portician and his tweezers?” Her sentences were staccato bursts.
“The truth is, I don’t know how I came back. It has to do with this watch. Maria and Daisy and Micah were asleep—were, both functionally and metaphorically, asleep. The watch has kept me vigilant. Where they could not be.”
“What about Maria in the kitchen with the wine?”
“You sound like you’re playing a round of Clue,” Brandon said. He wished he still had the Timex with the Velcro band that had been so au courant at Stable, because if an alarm could make a person come back from beyond the port, he’d give the watch to Marie so that she could always come back. He stared at her wrist, its scattergram of freckles, the knob of bone. He wanted again to take it in his hand.
Instead he rubbed Gus behind the ears. Gus slumped down on the ground, whining gratefully, chin flattened.
* * *
—
Jason and Maria were in the kitchen. Micah was on the couch asking questions: How do you know where to put the pieces if you can’t see them? What did you study in college? The questions of a precocious five-year-old. If Jason tried, he could remember the sounds in the house. The screen door slapped as Maria stepped out and came back in, and next door the neighbours were splashing in their pool. Maybe it had been summer, after all. Years and years ago.
Upstairs, Daisy was leaping through the bedroom. French words would be coming from her tiny mouth, tendue and plié. Jason stood next to the woman with whom he’d shared most of the last six years of his life, a ballerina dressed as a professor, high neat bun, red lipstick, fine snug-fitting black pantsuit. The moment slowed as though it knew exactly how important it was.
“Why would you want to leave all this?” Jason said. They had just finished renovating the kitchen—slab countertops, open shelves to reveal copper pots, dark blue and white plates. “I thought you were happy.”
“But none of us is ever happy,” she said. “None of us is ever satisfied.”
They had talked about where they would have gone. It was just a parlour game, as everything in their lives had been, games and puzzles. Friends would come for dinner, and this was the current favoured topic, that was all. It was around that time that several Americans testified they’d been through and come back. “Green so green it hurts” was the phrase none of them could forget. Friends came over, and they all speculated. In classes and lectures, the students eagerly turned all talk to the ports. As it must have been for biologists after Darwin, ethicists after Hitler, and English students after Derrida. What if this? What if that? Doesn’t it change everything? Philosophy gained immediacy. Every conversation seemed to matter.
Maria’s fantasies took her to the very near past, to Italy long after the war but before the Internet. The Internet had ruined everybody, she said, this woman who refused to take photos of anything, who did not believe in using cell phones. Maria thought the ports could restore things. “It will give the kids a proper cultural education, for one thing,” she told Jason, mouth hidden behind the wineglass. She sipped. “Give them a chance to live life first-hand, to have a physical existence before the virtual world takes them over.”
“People always behave the same way, Internet or not,” he claimed. “Avoiding reality, only associating with the sorts of things and people and ideas that interest them. The Internet did not invent ideological echo chambers.”
Her warm brown eyes were a pretty match for the maroon in the glass. “I want to raise our children in a less corrupt age, in a more beautiful place.”
“You want to stick our heads in the sand, you mean.”
“You always accuse me of naïveté,” she said. “But you’re the one who’s afraid.”
The portician came over to have them sign a series of waivers and receipts and agreements. This did not seem like a good sign, but Jason scribbled his name where required.
Within hours something shifted in Jason’s mind. It was like the toxoplasma parasite carried by cats, alleged to make humans act strangely. Toxoplasma adapted to confuse cats’ prey, and by accident, it also sent strange signals to human brains, so all cats were Trojan horses. Jason had been considering feline mind control as a potential paper topic but had never considered the possibility that his own mind was under attack. He’d never had a cat. Jason had always trusted his own mind. Even during the days of UFO-sighting, he’d seen himself as a skeptic searching for evidence. Marie used to joke admiringly that “not easily convinced” should be on his resumé, listed under “special skills.”
But after the port was installed, Jason had the eerie feeling that he was being placated. Soothed and calmed. It seemed to be coming from inside his own head: You’ll be all right. Don’t be afraid. Like something the angel says before he tells you the messiah is coming.
One morning he woke up and it was silent as the middle of the night. Normally he heard the whirr of Maria’s coffee grinder, followed by a rich espresso smell. He
checked to see if he was still dreaming and then went downstairs. He looked for them everywhere, the cellar, the attic, even the cupboards large enough to hide a child. They were gone.
* * *
—
“Do you need to take a break?” Marie said.
Jason was speaking calmly, but his face was pale and sweaty, like softening wax. “I’m okay,” he said.
“Let’s take a break. We’ll go back to see my friends. You can get some rest, and we’ll finish up later. It’s going to be a long day.”
They stood and stretched their legs, shook them out as though they had been on a long, numbing drive.
“We’ve had to get used to walking,” Marie said, her arm linked with Jason’s, as they set off again. “We’ve gotten used to a lot of things.”
Behind them, Brandon dragged the wagon. He glared at the vee of sweat soaking Jason’s T-shirt.
“So you never went through?” Jason said. “Neither of you?”
“Maybe ‘not easily convinced’ should be written on her resumé,” said Brandon. The back of Marie’s neck blushed red. Good, he thought. He wanted to make her blush.
“Indeed,” Jason said.
Chapter
16
THE HOSTAGES
Jason had no choice but to go in after his family. Maria had finished the dishes before leaving, she had taken their suitcases, and she had left her wedding ring on the coffee table. He put this on his right pinkie finger. She had taken his children while he slept. Without stopping to change out of the boxer shorts and T-shirt he’d slept in, and wearing only his rings and watch, he unzipped the machine. The portician had told them that it used something like voice recognition software but did not require you to speak, it was finely tuned, and that when they were ready to go, they had to concentrate their mental energy on the place and time they hoped to arrive in. Going in together would be no problem, though it was unlikely that more than two adults could fit. If it made things easier, they might come up with a script and say it aloud in order to prevent any misunderstandings.
Whenever Maria recounted this to others, Jason found himself desperate to convince her that if it wasn’t complete bullshit, it certainly was dangerous.
“Take me to where Maria, Daisy and Micah just went. Take me to my wife and children. Take me to Maria, Daisy and Micah.” His voice was loud and foolish, and he sensed no recognition from the port. He wanted there to be bleeps or bloops, for something to light up. A robotic voice to say, “Yes, Jason.” Filled with doubt, he stepped in. Nothing happened. He pulled the zipper closed. “Take me to my wife and children.” His voice echoed, as though the small space around him were a cavern. Before he could say it again, he lost his breath. The oxygen was gone, his breath sucked out of him, belts tightening around his neck, his chest. Then the floor disappeared.
He came to sometime later. Impossible to know how much time had passed. He found himself standing on a long narrow boardwalk, or, anyway, a thing that would have resembled a dock or a boardwalk if there had been water. The sky was a deep purple, filled with star formations and milky swirls of stardust he didn’t recognize. None of the planets that were usually visible. No North Star. It was another planet. If the Earth was out there, it was too far away to see.
He strained at the darkness eating up the end of the boardwalk in both directions. No lamps, no rush of water, just what appeared to be a human-built platform.
Anger rose in his throat. What had Maria thought would happen? The anger rushed his arms and legs, and he started running. He’d keep running until he reached the end of the boardwalk or found a person who’d explain everything. And then he’d find his children.
He ran until the adrenaline faded, turning his sprint to jog, his jog to walk, his walk to shuffle. The boardwalk had no end. He sat down on the splintered wood, and lay there. Whispering to either side of him were long grasses, but he feared touching anything that was not on the surface of the platform, felt that, if there was no water, there might also be no ground.
Even if Maria had wanted out of the marriage, she would never in her right mind have taken his children away like this. His Daisy. His Micah. His kids to teach, his children’s eyes to guide as they peered through telescopes and microscopes. Images of them bobbed in his mind, Daisy in her black tutu, Micah scowling at a chess game he couldn’t win. Their faces in sleep, their faces in thought, when they believed they were unwatched but had always been watched.
He pushed his knuckles into his bare heels. Now there were bigger problems than a failed marriage. Another failed marriage. The Infinite Boardwalk like a title to spoof his work. Subtitle? He’d come up with one. Maybe “Travels and travails of a failed father.” Maybe he’d die here, terribly slowly, one cell at a time. All that existed in this place was himself, these grasses and this narrow dock.
What if he was running in the wrong direction? Which way had he come from? Deep in this deliberation, which was itself almost enjoyably puzzling, his watch flared. Beep. Beep. Beep. Beep. “Am I awake, or am I asleep?” He pressed the stop button.
If he were dreaming, he could control what happened next. He waited for the scene to waver as it did when he went lucid, but it refused to warp. The dream did not threaten to end, did not toss him off the dock. He willed his family to appear. They did not appear.
But then the dock began to quaver. Steps were coming down from the endless purple-glowing dark, soft as a tiny ballerina. Only one set. They were coming closer and closer.
* * *
—
They were swarmed as soon as they arrived back at the fire near the woods. Bonita greeted Jason like a pleased mother-of-the-bride, touching his cheek with the back of her hand, hands on his arms as she walked him to her house. Marie followed, shuddering with laughter, tears in her eyes, as Bonita led him to the couch. Marie took a wet cloth to his face, and she brought him some of the few pieces of fresh fruit from their last forage: some raspberries, a bruised apple.
Brandon was out in the yard, Gus beside him, allowing Steve’s children again to pick the chicks out of the box and feed them from their hands.
“Philip would have killed to meet you. You’re the first one to return,” Bonita said. “You have no idea what it feels like to know nothing about what’s happening.”
“I do have an idea about that, unfortunately,” Jason said. His eyes were closed. He lay there pale as a cadaver.
“It’s his worst nightmare,” Marie said, and he smiled weakly. “He hates not knowing.”
Steve came into the living room through the sliding door, gave them a thin smile, and perched on the arm of Marie’s chair. This warm leather furniture would become worn and soiled, and soon the pleasures of interior decor would, too, be something from an era never to return.
“Listening to you, it sounds like the ports are sending people out to remote—I don’t know—planets or something? Dreamscapes?” Bonita said, sitting on the edge of the coffee table like a small child.
“I don’t think so,” Jason said. “I didn’t see anyone else there. Just the one apparition.” He sat up and coughed into his elbow. “I think I was lucid by accident. The rest of them, the people who leave? I think they become woven into the fabric of their new world so completely that the idea there is somewhere they might return to is….It’s like this. Before ports, we thought we were the only universe, right? The only version.”
“You think these are other universes?” Bonita said.
Beside Marie, Steve shifted. His stiff posture emphasized his refusal to agree. “How would you know that people get woven into the fabric or whatever you just said? Since that’s not what happened to you?”
Jason gave Steve a calm, assessing look with his red-rimmed eyes. He coughed again, violently, into his sleeve. “You tell me.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“How long have you had that cough, sweetheart?” Bonita said, passing over Steve’s hostility as though she were smoothing and tucking sheets o
n a bed. She leaned forward and checked the compress they’d heated in boiled water. “How long have you been feverish?”
“Not that we have a doctor on staff here,” Steve said.
“He thinks he’s hallucinating,” Marie said. “He thinks this is just another hallucination.”
“A meta-hallucination,” Jason said.
“It’s not like a precise description of symptoms will give us information that will help him,” said Steve.
“Hey, maybe lay off,” Marie said. “Your hostility has been noted.”
“I don’t know how long,” Jason said. “I started to think that maybe being there was what I had wanted. That there, on the boardwalk—”
Steve laughed meanly. “Boardwalk under strange stars.”
“That there was the still unchanging point. What if when I was saying Take me to Maria, I was holding another request in my mind? What if that request came through more clearly? If it’s finely tuned. Take me to the place where all things can be known.”
Steve shook his head, as if they were all idiot sons who’d disappointed him. Outside, the children were shrieking, running in circles around the chicks, who ruffled their feathers and then stopped to bob their beaks into the grass and then opened those little beaks making sounds too small to reach them beyond the glass. Marie went to open the heavy sliding door to let air in. Brandon was crouched next to Gus, talking to the chicks or to him or to the children. Regina had a wistful look on her face, and Marie flashed with a feeling she’d sometimes have when watching a small child immersed in experience being gently corrected by an adult, a kind of déjà vu for an experience one couldn’t consciously remember. Mo and Rosa stepped down into the scene, holding hands, and Brandon stood up to talk to them.
“You’ve been here in the city now about three weeks. Or four weeks, was it? Does that sound right, Jason?” Bonita flipped the cloth over, touched his cheek and neck. Words like here and words like now reverberated, clanging bells, meaningless. “Did you start getting sick once you were here? Or were you ill when you were over there?”
