Rogue Touch

by Woodward, Christine

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I said again. “I’m not from Mississippi. I’m from Flagstaff, Arizona.” I waited for him to ask me the address, which I’d memorized real careful, but he didn’t.

  Instead he smiled. Of course all I had to do to prove I was from Mississippi instead of Arizona was open my mouth, and I’d already done that. I couldn’t rightly not do it again. Then it occurred to me: I could rightly not open my mouth. I’d seen Law & Order. I had the right to remain silent!

  “Hey,” I said. “Am I under arrest or what?”

  “You bet you’re under arrest, little girl,” he said, tapping my file with his fat finger. I didn’t much appreciate him calling me little girl, especially when he wouldn’t be much taller than me if we stood toe-to-toe. “Under arrest for two counts attempted murder, plus larceny, plus resisting arrest. For starters.”

  “In that case,” I said, “I want a lawyer.”

  He got this dark, squinty look on his face. Then he slammed his hand on my file, picked it up off the table, and walked out of the room. I heard him call to the next office, “Lawyered up!”

  At least I’d gone and bought myself a little time. I crossed my arms on the top of the table and let my head fall into them. If I hadn’t cried all the tears in my body out that morning, after Touch disappeared, I might’ve cried again out of sheer frustration. Never in my life had I been locked inside a room with no way of escaping. It was a very particular, very dreadful, very primitive kind of feeling, one I never wanted to experience again.

  I didn’t want to raise my eyes and face that room, so I just stayed with my face buried in my arms. They kept the room warm, probably on purpose, and I could feel sweat pooling at the base of my neck. Time clicked on by, and I thought of the ways it could move forward or backward—an hour here, a thousand years there. What happened when something changed in time? For example, when Touch came to find me at my apartment and I wasn’t there, I must have been someplace else. Did that me disappear when he went back in time to find me? Or was she off somewhere, living the life I would’ve led if that Camaro hadn’t pulled up beside me? What if Touch decided to go back in time, like half an hour before his father found us at the Outer Limits Space Age Restaurant? Would that be a different me that he’d rescue, and I’d have to go on by myself in this continuum, or would the present suddenly change? The thought of a whole bunch of different me’s, all continuing according to when time had been interrupted or not, gave me a powerful headache. It also made me feel exhausted. But I refused to look up, just shut my eyes tighter against my arms. And I didn’t exactly fall asleep, but something happened—like a little lapse of some sort, my own kind of little coma—because for almost a full minute I wasn’t in the interrogation room at all.

  I was standing on a wide, white beach. The cleanest, purest, most sparkling sand you can imagine underneath my bare feet. The sun shone down, ultra bright. But the water lapped over my feet—the ocean!—and that felt wonderfully good.

  “It won’t be long now,” Touch said. Because he was standing right there beside me, not bundled up at all, just wearing a pair of loose khaki shorts and nothing else.

  “I’m not a strong swimmer,” I told him. Even as I said the words, they sounded like a lie, because I’d spent my whole childhood splashing in the currents of the Mississippi River, and before that, when I was a little girl, I’d splashed in the bayou with the water moccasins and the gators.

  “You don’t need to be,” Touch said. “I’ve got you.”

  When he said that, I realized that I wasn’t wearing much more than he was, just denim shorts and a bikini top. And Touch’s bare hand was reaching out toward me, getting ready to grab me around the waist and hold me close to him…

  Fssszzt. Above my head a fluorescent light buzzed and flickered. My head jerked up out of my arms. I could see through the glass in the room that officers were packing up, getting ready to go home. And here came old Jeanne Sincero, marching down the hall toward me. She opened the door.

  “Come on with me,” she said. “We can’t find a lawyer for you till morning. We’re going to have to keep you here in a cell till then.”

  Officer Sincero delivered me to a cell with a toilet in the corner and a little cot. “Someone’ll be by with dinner soon,” she said, then went off home, to her boyfriend, or her cat, or maybe even her family. Maybe in Lukeville, Arizona, people married young, just like in Caldecott County.

  I guess they had me in the women’s section of the jail, and I guess I was the only woman to get arrested trying to cross the border that day. It was ghostly, spooky quiet. All I could think about was that hot, hot beach. It had seemed so real. Was it really Touch, standing beside me, talking to me? Did he have my coordinates, or my DNA, or whatever it was he needed? Would he be here soon?

  I knelt beside the cot and tried to duplicate the exact position I’d been in when the vision came. Of course I didn’t have any window in my cell, and my eyes were closed, but still I had a sense of the night growing dark outside, while I waited behind bars to find out my fate. At some point someone slid a tray with greasy green beans and some chicken slices slopped in gravy under the bars. I could smell the food but didn’t want it; the scent of chemicals rose from it, not any more appetizing than a can of lighter fluid. Primitive, a voice said in my head.

  But Touch didn’t come to me, so finally I crawled onto the cot, lay on top of the scratchy blanket and the cardboard pillow, and went to sleep.

  Bam! Crackle! Boom!

  Even in my sleep, where I first heard the noise, I welcomed it. It filled my head like fireworks, even louder and brighter, happening behind my eyelids and sounding somewhere deep in the cushion of my brain. I leaped from the bed, hoping it would be Touch standing there in the cell with me. The light that filled the little cell was blinding, more difficult to see through, for me at least, than darkness would’ve been. I could see a man in the midst of it, tall, with broad shoulders, and a long leather coat. I took one eager step toward him. That’s when his face came into focus, a face not unlike Touch’s, but twice his age, with arrogance in his eyes, and greed, in place of kindness.

  “You,” I said. The fear went away, replaced by hatred. For everything he’d taken away from me.

  Touch’s father spoke English. “It looks like I’ve found you in a spot of trouble.” I hated to admit, he had a beautiful voice. It somehow kept the same flair of their language, a low and musical quality.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  “I’m here to rescue you.”

  He sounded so kind. For a second it flickered through my head: Maybe Touch was wrong about him. Or maybe Touch had convinced him to come over to his side. Of course there was only one person who could answer all that for sure. “Where’s Touch?” I said.

  “Touch is home, safe and sound. He sent me here to collect you.”

  It had to be a trap, of course. Touch wouldn’t have sent his father. He would have come for me himself. But I didn’t care, so long as I had a way to travel forward, to his time. To where he was. Funny. In this time—my own time—I had no idea what to do about being arrested and put in jail. But for the future, a plan formed in my head instantly. One way or another I would find Touch, and we would figure out how to save Arcadia together. I would do whatever it took to save the world he loved, including give my own life, and including time travel with his evil father.

  “Well then,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  Touch’s father opened up his coat. I stood there in the crackling, too-bright light, staring at him. “You’ll have to come closer, my dear. If I’m to transport you.”

  I wriggled my fingers, still encased in Touch’s gloves, and took a step toward him. What if his hand touched my face as we began our trip together? Much as I wanted to bring this man down, I didn’t want his head inside of mine.

  “Not to worry, my dear,” Touch’s father said. “I know all about your gifts. I’m prepared to protect myself.”

 
He stepped toward me, that coat still open, and I realized with revulsion that I’d have to embrace him. I clenched my teeth. Whatever it took to get to Touch, that’s what I was willing to do and more.

  I closed my eyes and pressed my face against the older man’s chest. He closed his coat around me and I felt a huge pull, a deep whoosh, and we were surrounded by colors, darkness, and noise—the sounds of centuries passing by.

  When I traveled through time with Touch, we’d only gone a few hours. It happened so fast I barely got to notice the sensation; it was almost like a sneeze. But as his father and I went all the way to Touch’s time, images swirled around us, staticky voices, the increasing heat of the sun, and finally water—rushing water, gallons upon gallons of it, rising and splashing and covering almost every inch of ground. It went on for ages—so much time that I lost my ability to measure its passing.

  Finally the motion stopped. I opened my eyes and pushed away from him. He held on the barest second, maybe just for the pleasure of feeling me resist, then—like he remembered what all I could do—he let go.

  “Well,” he said. “Here we are.”

  I wanted to look around. Aware of the sound of waves, and light almost as bright as what had filled the caves under Horseshoe Mesa, I wanted to see what Touch’s world, Arcadia, looked like. But I couldn’t. I was surrounded by heat. Heat like I’d never felt before. Hot, dry air, closing in around me, filling up my lungs, making me long for water, not only to drink but to plunge into—cold, cold water up to my chin.

  Sweat formed on my forehead, underneath my hair, in my armpits. I wanted to rip the clothes right off me, dangerous skin be damned. I couldn’t stand it. Not for a single second.

  “What’s wrong with her?” a woman’s voice said. Not in English, but in Touch’s language, but still I understood it—maybe, I realized, because of the wildebears inside me. But that didn’t make sense. Why would a wildebear understand that language any more than a grizzly bear would speak English? I couldn’t think straight; it was like the temperature had seeped right into my brain.

  “It’s the heat,” a man’s musical voice answered. “She’s not used to it.”

  I opened my mouth to say I was just fine, there was no problem at all, and what he needed to do was take me to Touch and pronto. Instead I staggered forward, my hands clutching my throat, and muttered something that sounded like “Water.”

  Then I fainted dead away, right at the feet of my enemies.

  Who knows how much time passed before my eyes fluttered open? Time had become very strange inside my head. I guess it would tend to when you found yourself on Planet Earth ten thousand and eighteen years after you were born. It took several minutes for my eyes to focus and take in the surroundings, which did not look futuristic at all.

  The room was nice and cool. I don’t know how they kept the temperature like this, because I didn’t see any air-conditioning vents, or feel any cold air moving through the room. It just felt nice and crisp, maybe about seventy-two degrees, cool enough so that I was comfortable with the light comforter laid over me. I wondered how in the world they’d got me into bed without touching my skin, then realized I was still wearing my pants, gloves, and T-shirt. Across the room there was an oversized armchair with clothes neatly folded on the seat. I guess I was supposed to change into them when I got up.

  I pushed the covers aside and sat up. The floorboards were wood, a pale color, and there was a round, braided rug on the floor. The bed had an iron headboard that someone had painted a pretty sage green. The walls were a very pale yellow, and the armchair that held my clothes looked like the perfect place to curl up with a book. There were two nice wide windows on opposite walls. Except for the ceiling, which was rounded instead of slanted, it looked like a room you’d find in any well-kept farmhouse: pretty, clean, comfortable.

  What I wanted to see was outside that window: what the world looked like, the world Touch had always lived in. So I threw my legs over the side of the bed. When I stood, they felt shaky, like maybe I hadn’t used them in a long, long time. I put my hand on the headboard to steady myself, then walked to the window. The view was beautiful. Acres of red dirt and sagebrush, and mountains in the distance. No snow on top of them, of course; the trees grew all the way up to the top, green pine trees. I couldn’t see any other houses, not through this window, anyway. Even through the window I could see that the light here had a different quality. Like there was not only no ozone layer, but no pollution to block the sun. It shone down so fierce it created a kind of mist, like if I were standing outside I’d be able to cup my hands and catch sunlight like it was rainwater.

  Before, when I’d imagined the future, it was out of some movie, I guess, with tall silver buildings and hovercrafts whooshing through the air. But what I saw instead was a pristine landscape, unpopulated and so bright you’d think any second God was going to part the rays of sunlight like they were curtains and step on through. I pressed my hand against the glass, and felt its heat trying to pulse through to the coolness of my room. Then the window went black, as if someone had suddenly painted every pane so I couldn’t see through it. I pulled my hand back real abrupt, as if I’d been scalded. Then I pressed my hand against the window again, and all the black disappeared. It wasn’t anything menacing. Just the future’s version of window blinds.

  There were two doors in the room, one opening into a white-tiled bathroom. I could see a deep tub with clawed feet. On the opposite side from where I stood there was a door like any other I’d ever seen, white wood, with a pretty crystal doorknob that kind of—but not too much—matched the headboard. Pretty, subtle details. I crossed the room and placed my hand on the knob. It wouldn’t turn. So here in the future, at least in this room, the main similarity to the past was the fact that I was a prisoner.

  I went over to the armchair and picked up the outfit they had left for me. It was a pale, shimmery green jumpsuit, made out of the softest, lightest material I’d ever felt. Zipped up on the side, from the hip to the arm. It had a collar that would go all the way up to my chin, and built-in gloves, even built-in socks, like a little kid’s foot pajamas.

  It didn’t exactly make me giddy, the idea of putting on a prisoner’s uniform, which was what this was, no matter how pretty it looked, and how suited to protecting others from me. In fact it was a little too suited to that. Wearing this outfit, if for any reason I needed to use my… gifts, as Touch’s father had called it, I’d have to dance cheek to cheek with the person I needed to attack.

  But on the other hand, the Salvation Army outfit felt like something that had been slept in for days. I put the jumpsuit back on the chair and went into the bathroom. The toilet was filled with dirt instead of water, and there was a rope overhead that must be what flushed it. The room had its own windows, and from these I could see another building. It was shaped like a long tunnel, the same reddish color as the earth, and I guessed that from far away it would blend into the landscape nicely.

  I pressed my hand against each window, felt that pulsing warmth, and then the glass went black. There was a funny sort of shower, sunken into the floor with tiled steps leading down to it, and the shower nozzle up above. No shower curtain and no dial. I took off my clothes and stepped down into it. As soon as I stood under the shower, water started flowing and I braced myself a second, ready for the scalding temperatures Touch liked. But it wasn’t too hot, only just right, and despite the uncertain situation, I couldn’t help but sigh as the warm water hit my back. I could see a towel rack where someone had laid out big, fluffy white towels. So far this was a much more luxurious incarceration than the one I’d left behind in Lukeville, Arizona.

  But it was still an incarceration. As the time ticked by I became more and more aware of that, zipped into my green jumpsuit and pacing the room until my hair was dry. What’s more, I was starving. I remembered the tray of food back in my other cell. It almost made me smile, thinking of the border police looking through the bars to find me totally disappeared, th
at tray of food just sitting there untouched—unless of course some little mice came out of the cracks in the wall to nibble at it. Now my stomach rumbled away, reminding me that the last thing I’d eaten was those chips and hot dogs at the border. I’d barely even taken a sip of my soda, and my mouth felt powerfully dry.

  From the other side of the door came a knock, gentle and discreet. I froze. Was I supposed to call “Come in”? I sure didn’t feel like doing that, considering I had no idea who’d waltz on in there. On the other hand, maybe it was Touch. I put my hand over my heart.

  Before I could think what to do the crystal green doorknob turned. I stood stock-still. It would be too much to hope for that Touch might come walking through the door, and I reminded myself not to do anything rash. What I wanted to do was go charging through the door, past whoever was opening it, and go find him. But the smart thing would be to bide my time, get my bearings, figure out what all I’d need to do in order to get to him.

  The door opened. It wasn’t Touch. Instead, in walked Alabaster, all bundled up in a white fur coat, gloves, and a white knit hat. She closed the door behind her and I heard a little click. We were locked in here together, but when she shivered—a real pretty little shiver—I knew it wasn’t on account of being afraid of me. She gave me this little smile, like she felt sorry for me and hated me at the same time, and I felt my own, less pretty shiver inside of me. Alabaster looked like a porcelain doll. She had a pretty little face, with huge blue eyes and red lips. Dimples. Her hair poked out of her hat in gentle blond waves, and I could tell she’d arranged it just so. She’d wanted to look beautiful when she came in to face me, and it had worked.

  “And so we meet again,” she said, in English, with the same sort of clipped and elegant accent that Touch had. It made me feel sick to my stomach, noticing this sameness between them, as if he belonged more to her than to me. Before I could ask her how she’d figured out how to talk to me, she reached into her pocket and held out a little red ball of energy, like the one Touch used to have. A translator. It floated just above her gloved palm for a few seconds, then she closed her hand around it and put it in her pocket.