Tesla's Attic

by Neal Shusterman

  “There was a woman with red hair and a flowered dress who bought an old-fashioned dome hair dryer.”

  He pointed at the notepad on the table, reminding Caitlin to write down everything he said.

  “There was a brown Cadillac. Dented fender. License plate FGT385.”

  “Is that the car that almost hit us?” Caitlin asked.

  “No, that was a gold Buick.” He hesitated as the scene came back to him, the closeness of Caitlin, the warmth of her cheek against his as he saved her life.

  “Got it,” said Caitlin. “Keep going.”

  Nick reluctantly let the moment go and got back to remembering. “The old washboard went to a bearded man in a Hawaiian shirt. He wore tortoiseshell glasses and drove a green Saturn that made a funny noise when it dropped into reverse.”

  The effects of the tea lasted for about fifteen minutes before Nick’s memory began to slip. Soon he was back to normal, although normal felt pretty dense after a bout of total recall.

  “You feel stupid now, right?”

  “Yeah,” he confessed. “Even more than usual.”

  She laughed at that.

  Together they looked at the information he had spouted forth. Descriptions of people, vehicles, license-plate numbers, and a whole list of objects that he hadn’t even remembered selling. He didn’t have addresses, he didn’t have locations, but at least now he had dozens of clues.

  “If you saw those people again, do you think you would recognize them?”

  Nick closed his eyes and tried to imagine the people he had dredged forth from his memory. Now that they had been brought to the surface, he felt confident he could pull them out of a crowd.

  He nodded, and Caitlin smiled.

  “That’s quite a list of birdcalls you got there,” her father said as he passed through the kitchen, casually glancing at the notepad.

  “Yeah,” said Caitlin, smirking at Nick. “You won’t believe the things I’ve heard in this kitchen.”

  As a rule, Nick was not the type to skip school, unless you count the pretending-your-runny-nose-is-the-plague-because-you-didn’t-study-for-your-science-exam ploy.

  However, on this day, he was a blatant scofflaw, an unrepentant truant, spending his day on a reconnaissance mission around his neighborhood. He searched for the makes, models, and license plates of cars parked on streets and in driveways, and for faces in the markets and strip malls, refusing to despair when he couldn’t find anything or anybody all morning.

  Finally, around noon, his efforts began to pay off. After recognizing a license plate in a driveway, he rang the doorbell. He was greeted by a woman he remembered from the garage sale. According to the cheat sheet Caitlin had written up, she had purchased a set of old-fashioned hair rollers.

  Nick explained that he had accidentally sold some items that were of sentimental value, and he would be happy to buy them back at one and a half times the original price. The woman was more than happy to hand him back the set of hair rollers.

  “Never had the chance to use them anyway,” she told him. “I don’t know what possessed me to buy them.” Then she casually told Nick that one of her neighbors had purchased the dome-style salon hair dryer and was “having problems” with it.

  Nick discovered that the woman who had purchased it appeared to have a head slightly larger than standard human proportions. He had no idea if this predated her use of the hair dryer or not. Buying it back was costly, because, although the woman claimed it gave her migraines, she sensed Nick’s desperation and insisted on being paid three times what she originally paid for it. In the end, he made the deal and struggled home with the bulky, egg-shaped device.

  As the day wore on, he managed to find the flat-paddled electric mixer. It was being sold at a substantial markup in a thrift shop. But after that it all started to go downhill.

  He recognized an old man coming out of the grocery store and followed him home. “Excuse me,” Nick said, as politely as he could, just before the man went into his house. “I think you might have been at my garage sale.”

  The old man suddenly became jittery. “You’ll have to speak to my son,” he said. And when he opened the door, standing there was a man in his forties, clearly from the same gene pool.

  “It’s him,” said the old man.

  “I can see that,” said the younger one.

  In the shadows behind them, Nick could see a boy about his age, watching him suspiciously.

  Nick tried his tall tale about sentimental value of the glass vacuum tube the old man had purchased, but they weren’t buying it.

  “If my father did buy something at your garage sale,” said the middle-aged man, “and I’m not saying that he did—it’s our property now.”

  “Yeah,” said the kid behind them. “So get lost.”

  Nick heard a baby crying somewhere deep in the house.

  “Now, if you’ll excuse us, we have family matters to attend to.” And he slammed the door in Nick’s face.

  Nick made a note of the address. The man who bought the tube clearly knew what it did, and he had shared that knowledge with his family. It might take some work getting it back, but at least now he knew its location.

  His final encounter that day was the strangest.

  He found the brown Cadillac with the dented fender sitting in front of an ordinary suburban tract home. A woman answered when he knocked at the door.

  Before he could say anything, the woman gasped.

  “No!” she shouted. “It’s mine!”

  “If you’ll just let me explain—” said Nick.

  “Go away or I’ll call the police!” And yet another door was slammed in his face.

  This time Nick was not going to be brushed off so easily. He pounded on the door. “I just want to talk!” he shouted. No response. He pounded again, a little louder this time.

  Then he heard a strange high-pitched warbling noise from inside. He reached to pound on the door a third time, but his hand fell upon empty air. The door was gone. The woman was gone. In fact, the entire house was gone.

  All that remained was the cement stoop he stood on, a hole where the basement used to be, and pipes gushing water into the air like a fountain, still believing there was a sensible place to pump it.

  “You there!” said a voice from behind him. Nick turned to see a pudgy man walking a pudgier dog. “What the hell did you do to that house?”

  Nick ran and didn’t stop until he got home. It wasn’t until he was up in his attic room that he began to calm down. He had secured his bed and desk to the wall, but that didn’t stop the “sweet spot” in the center of the attic from drawing him to it.

  More and more lately he’d taken to lying on the floor in that curious spot directly beneath the skylight whenever he felt uneasy. The warmth and uncanny sense of connection soothed him. They put his concerns in perspective.

  He knew this must have been by design as well. He could imagine Tesla sitting in the middle of the room, using this nexus like a relaxing bath for his hyperpowered brain. If it could somehow pull furniture from the wall, surely it could gather the disorganized thoughts of a genius.

  But not even the calming nature of the attic could give Nick perspective when an entire house did a quantum leap out of his neighborhood.

  “Breathe in, breathe out,” he told himself. “Don’t overthink it.” And soon he had his racing thoughts under control. It was amazing how many unthinkable things he could store in his mind when he had no other choice.

  Petula, on the other hand, was deeply embittered by the things she had to store in her mind. All day she had wandered through school like a sulking zombie, partially because she had gotten no sleep, and partially because she now knew the future, and it was not pretty.

  To add insult to misery, halfway through the day she had lost her purse. This meant she’d had to walk home, because the bus driver refused to let anyone on without a pass, even if he knew the passenger.

  She arrived home at T minus 15 and counting,
and with a mounting sense of inevitability and dread, she fluffed the pillows on the couch and waited. At T minus 5 the doorbell rang. She answered it to find Mitch at the door.

  “Gee,” she said flatly, “what a surprise.”

  “I found this at school,” said Mitch, holding out her purse to her. “I think it’s yours.”

  “Wonderful. A member of a crime family attempting to be honest.”

  “We’re not a crime family. My dad was set up.”

  “Whatever,” said Petula. “I suppose you want a reward?”

  “Well, I wasn’t expecting one, but hey, if you’re offering.”

  “Just get in here and let’s get this over with.”

  She led Mitch to the couch, and when he didn’t sit, she pushed him down on it. Mitch seemed a bit startled and perplexed, which just annoyed Petula further.

  “So,” said Mitch, “nice house you got here.”

  “Really?” said Petula. “Is that the best line you have?”

  “It’s not a line. I really think it’s nice.”

  “I know what you’re here for, don’t try to deny it. But you’ll have to wait precisely one and a half minutes.”

  “Oh,” said Mitch, “really?” And then he added, “What am I waiting for?”

  “As if you didn’t know.”

  She reached over and grabbed a crystal bowl of peppermint candies she had prepared in advance.

  “Have a mint,” she said.

  “No thanks,” Mitch told her.

  “I SAID, HAVE A MINT.”

  And Mitch, like a weak mind manipulated by the Force, obeyed.

  “I prefer wintergreen,” he said, chewing the mint to oblivion.

  “Deal with it,” Petula told him. Then she tossed her hair in that come-hither way that models do on TV, and her left pigtail smacked Mitch in the face.

  “Hey, watch it with that thing,” said Mitch.

  She grabbed him by the shirt. “I want to be clear about this,” she told him. “No matter what ideas you get in that pea brain of yours, this means absolutely nothing.”

  Then she checked her watch, pulled him closer, and got down to the business of kissing.

  At first Mitch resisted, perhaps overwhelmed by the sheer intensity and skill that Petula had cultivated, having practiced kissing her Chihuahua on numerous occasions in preparation for the real thing. Everything being relative, Petula found Mitch’s kiss to be far more appealing than her dog’s—and she found it went on much longer than she had planned. Indeed, much longer than was necessary to prove the validity of the camera.

  Mitch had long since gone limp, perhaps having fallen unconscious from lack of oxygen.

  Finally Petula pushed him away, handed him another mint, and herded him toward the door.

  “So,” Mitch said, “want to go to the movies or something?”

  And although she found the thought disturbingly appealing, she told him, “This didn’t happen. You will speak of it to no one.”

  Then she kissed him again and pushed him out the door.

  The imaginary number, i, is defined as the square root of negative 1. It’s a quantity that mathematically cannot exist, because no number times itself is a negative number…unless that number happens to be Petula Grabowski-Jones. After her encounter with Mitch, Petula found herself so completely confused and illogical, she was the very embodiment of i.

  This sudden and unexpected attraction to Mitch Murló flew in the face of all her plans. Her true goal was Nick. Furious at the treachery of her own emotions, she stormed out of her house with her camera, desperate to take pictures of a tomorrow with Nick she knew she could create.

  She resolved that at precisely four thirty tomorrow she would walk up to Nick’s front door. He would answer it. Then she would crush his resistance with the same practiced power-smooch that had rendered Mitch into mint jelly. She would steal his heart away from that flighty, artsy-fartsy Caitlin. Petula had no doubt in her mind she could make this happen.

  Now all she needed were the pictures to prove her success.

  And so, standing in front of Nick’s house, she snapped a series of shots of his front door. Then she ran off to Ms. Planck’s darkroom to develop them, convinced that there was nothing imaginary about her fantasy.

  But, oh, what a difference a day makes. Because the pictures, when developed, did not reveal a scene of romance triumphant at Nick’s threshold. Instead, they revealed policemen. And an ambulance. And someone covered by a sheet being wheeled out of Nick’s front door on a stretcher. Someone who, both in and out of focus, was very much dead.

  Theo had no illusions that his relationship with Caitlin was going anywhere. They were from two different worlds, after all. She lived in a world of creative expression. He lived on earth. She spent her time dreaming of how things might be. He spent his time on earth. And although she kept making lukewarm overtures of wanting to keep it going, he had already checked out, using the express lane. Because when it came to the list of reasons for being together, it was certainly twelve items or less.

  Getting over Caitlin wasn’t the issue, but he couldn’t ignore the fact that she was giving her time to that new kid from Florida who couldn’t pitch to save his life. Plus, Theo had to be reminded of him every day in science, because the goofus sat right across from him. It made the class unbearable. To Theo, Nick was like a peanut lurking in the trail mix. Not that Nick was deadly enough to send Theo to the emergency room the way a peanut would, but he was, in his own way, a threat to life as Theo knew it. There was some high-octane weirdness surrounding that kid—things that Theo couldn’t figure out—like maybe he was in the witness protection program. Or an alien. Or an alien in the witness protection program. And the fact that Caitlin would abandon Theo for such a weirdo was a foul ball he simply could not field.

  It was on the day of the science-lab earthquake that Theo decided to do something about it.

  Mr. Hoffman, the science teacher, had determined that everyone would present their lab projects throughout the year, in alphabetical order, to the despair of Adam Aaronson and Heather Aardmore.

  Theo, safely nestled among the L-M-N-O-P bloc, knew he could look forward to weeks of blissful procrastination before slapping together a half-assed “household magic” demo.

  Today’s science lab was being presented by Jason Boring, as Theo liked to call him, although he knew his name was really Berring.

  “My project,” announced Boring from the front of the room, “is a homemade, localized earthquake machine that I myself designed myself from spare parts I found at home, myself.”

  Boring put what looked like an old-fashioned radio on the table in front of him.

  Across the aisle from Theo, Nick jumped up. “I object!” he said.

  “This isn’t a courtroom, Mr. Slate,” said the teacher with a chuckle.

  “Just sit down and let Boring get it over with,” Theo said, pleased to see Nick back off and sit.

  “Moving on,” Boring said, twisting one of the device’s two dials. “I just have to find the room’s resident frequency.”

  “Don’t you mean resonant frequency, Jason?” suggested Mr. Hoffman.

  “Yeah, that too,” said Boring.

  As he kept twisting the dial, tuning in greater or lesser levels of static, Theo shouted, “If you could just rattle off Miss Flannigan’s bra, I’ll give you an A-plus!”

  Laughter came from all around, even from the girls.

  “Got it!” Boring said proudly, and he moved his hand to the volume dial.

  Theo felt it, first as a low-level rumbling in his gut. He could tell from the expression on Nick’s face that he felt it, too. Although Nick seemed far more panicked about it. Then Theo’s desk began to tremble, and it skittered a few inches away.

  “Now watch this,” Boring said as he turned the dial up a few more notches.

  The whole room started shaking, the light fixtures rocking back and forth as acoustic ceiling tiles dropped like giant snowflakes.
/>   As the earth beneath the classroom floor rose up and then dropped, like the Kamikaze roller coaster at Six Flags, someone started screeching like a maniac. The Kamikaze was not Theo’s favorite ride, and he wasn’t one hundred percent sure that he wasn’t the one screeching.

  He was too terrified to do much of anything and could only watch as Nick leaped for the device. With all the shaking, Theo doubted Nick would even reach it, but he did, and he turned it off.

  The tremors stopped, and the room returned to more or less normal. Before he could even catch his breath, Theo watched Nick grab the earthquake machine, throw a dirty look at Jason not-so-Boring-anymore, and run out the door with it.

  Principal Watt, unsure how to deal with this incident, closed the science lab for the rest of the day and gave Jason detention, claiming “disruptive behavior.” As a precaution, he also put Mr. Hoffman on probationary leave.

  In the meantime, Nick had managed to save the day. As far as Theo was concerned, that was like pouring salt in an open grave. Both Nick and Caitlin disappeared from school. Rumor was that they had ditched together.

  Now there was no question in Theo’s mind that this was war—and it wasn’t a matter of who ended up the object of Caitlin’s affection. All that mattered to Theo was who didn’t. As far as he was concerned, Caitlin could devote her time and attention to anyone she pleased—except Nick Slate.

  Theo had already heard through the grapevine that Nick’s dad had once been a professional baseball player. Such a thing, under different circumstances, could have brought him and Nick together as friends. And then Theo realized that indeed it still could, because it’s like they say, “Keep your friend’s clothes…in your enemy’s closet.”

  Nick had no doubt that if he hadn’t shut down Tesla’s earthquake machine at that instant, the entire school, maybe even the entire neighborhood, would have come crashing down around them.

  Tesla was clearly a genius. And he was also clearly out of his freaking mind.

  “I can’t believe you didn’t feel it,” he said to Caitlin as they hurried away from the school.

  “Well, I was at the opposite end of the building.”