by Richard Cox
But in other ways the strangeness was difficult to describe. When Todd was around (which was all the time now) the dynamic of their group was different, as if the five of them had somehow vaulted past junior high and landed in high school or maybe college. Even stranger was the feeling that time was somehow irrelevant when Todd was around. Like they would get to talking or playing D&D or Atari or whatever, and Jonathan didn’t even notice how much time had passed. Five hours might seem like five minutes. Or the reverse. In the presence of Todd, Jonathan got the feeling they were somewhere else entirely, where clocks might not even tick. Which was a very strange thing to think, yet he could not stop thinking it.
Finally, reluctantly, Jonathan crept back to the kitchen. He stood near the corner where the phone was, listening, but there was no sign of the rocking chair. Without knowing the exact location of his mother, there was no point in making the call. He absolutely would not permit her to stage one of her surprise attacks, not while he was making the most important phone call of his life, which meant he had no choice but to retreat and consider his options.
But then he heard a drawer open in the bathroom, heard the metal and plastic sound of her hand searching for a brush or lipstick or a nail file. When his mother wasn’t in the rocking chair, she sat under the bright lights of her vanity and stared into the big mirror. Jonathan wasn’t sure why she did that, why she applied makeup at night when she had no intention of going anywhere, but he did know that from the vanity you couldn’t hear someone talking in the kitchen.
Jonathan approached the phone and instructed his hand to reach for it, but the hand refused him. It remained against his side as though it were perfectly within its rights to ignore direct orders.
What was the big deal? Why couldn’t he—
Jonathan picked up the phone. Dialed all the numbers at once. Screw this stupid fear. Fuck it.
5-5-5-1-2-0-8.
The phone rang once, twice. A voice answered. The mother again.
“Hello?”
“Hi, is Alicia there?”
“Yes, she is. May I tell her who’s calling?”
“It’s Jonathan.”
“Okay,” she said, and then paused. “Jonathan, you said?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Oh, no. Jonathan, I am so sorry. You called last week, didn’t you? And I never gave Alicia the message. You poor boy. Let me get her at once.”
Relief consumed him. The mom had forgotten about the message. Todd was right. Holy shit, he was right!
“Hello?”
“Hi, Alicia. It’s Jonathan.”
“Hi, Jonathan!” Her voice was as bright and shiny as he remembered. “My mom just said you called before and she didn’t give me the message. I’m so sorry.”
“Oh, don’t worry about it.” He felt like a hero, letting her off the hook like that.
“I’m surprised you didn’t call back sooner. Was it anything important?”
“I was just calling to see what you were up to,” he told her. “Have you been reading much?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Right now I’m reading Time Out of Joint by this guy named Philip K. Dick. Have you ever heard of him?”
“I haven’t,” Jonathan said. “But I did take your advice about Stephen King. They had The Dead Zone at the library, so I checked it out and read it in three days.”
“See!” Alicia said, laughing. “I told you!”
“Yeah, you did.”
He laughed along with her, and then sort of trailed off. Things had started out well, but now what?
“What else have you been doing since school?” he blurted.
“Oh, just hanging out with friends. You?”
“Pretty much the same. Actually, we met this kid, you may know him, he’s the guy who was catatonic for four years after the tornado?”
“Yes, I heard about him! He lives around here now, right? What’s he like?”
“He’s not like what you would expect. He’s really cool, actually.”
Jonathan talked for a while about Todd, about their club, even a little about his writing. Alicia told him how she’d gone stargazing with her dad and had seen Jupiter and Saturn and some of their moons. But it was obvious to Jonathan a cloud was hanging over their conversation, a cloud of expectation, and the closer he came to the big question the more he feared it. What if he opened himself to her and she cut him in half with machine gun fire?
No. He could do this. She was just a girl. A very kind girl, which is what had drawn him to her in the first place. She was on the phone with him, willingly, going on about Europa and Io and Ganymede, and all she expected out of him was a little confidence. All she wanted was to say “Yes.” If he could just form the question, if he could just ask her, say it out loud . . . but again there was the nonzero chance she would turn him down. It was conceivable she was only tolerating this entire conversation, and—
And no. That was crap. Either he was the kind of person who could summon the nerve to ask for what he wanted, or he wasn’t.
“Hey, Alicia,” he said, when she ran out of Jovian moons to name. “I actually wanted to ask you something.”
“Oh,” she said. “What’s that?”
And here it was. No turning back now. All he had to do was spit the goddamn words out of his mouth.
“I was wondering if . . . if maybe you wanted to go with me.”
The pause was less than a second, but it could have been an eternity.
“Sure!” she said, and there it was.
“Really?”
“Of course I will. You were worried I might say ‘no,’ huh?”
“You bet I was worried.”
“Well, stop worrying! I’m so glad you asked me. Ever since we worked on the assembly project, I just really felt like I wanted to get to know you better.”
“Yeah,” Jonathan admitted. “Same here. When we talked before I never wanted to stop. It seems like we could talk for hours.”
“Oh, we definitely could. I like smart guys. I like you.”
The relief was so great it was like someone had turned off gravity. Not only was the weight of asking her gone, but so, it seemed, was his own weight. Jonathan felt as if he could float around the room on a cloud, the cloud that just moments before had been casting a shadow over him.
Their conversation gradually wound to a close, and Jonathan assured her he would call again tomorrow. He was so excited and filled with joy that he forgot where he was.
“Bye, Alicia,” he said.
“Goodbye, Jonathan. Sleep well, all right?”
“Okay. You, too.”
“Okay, bye.”
“Bye.”
He hung up the phone, and it was all he could do not to scream Hallelujah! at the top of his lungs. All he could do not to erupt into somersaults and cartwheels and jumping jacks right there in the kitchen. Tonight he felt like he could sit down and write an entire short story in one sitting, maybe a whole novel, a teenage love story about—
He heard a creaking sound then, what he recognized instantly as his mother’s rocking chair.
“Jonathan?” his mom called. Her voice was uncharacteristically calm. “Can you come in here for a minute?”
It was grave, the error he had made, but somehow in his giddiness Jonathan wondered if his mom might be happy for him, wondered if she would even be proud of him. At dinner she had challenged him to live in the real world, and what could be more real than finding the courage to ask someone like Alicia to be your girlfriend?
He turned the corner, stepped out of the kitchen and into his mother’s bedroom. Her hair had been recently brushed, her makeup was fresh, but she was wearing a red flannel nightgown and sitting in the wooden rocking chair.
“Who were you talking to on the phone just now?” she asked in that same voice, the calm one that was nothing like her usual reptilian hiss.
“This girl I know from school.”
“What were you talking about?”
Jonathan had ne
ver fought in a war, but he knew what a minefield was, and talking to his mother was like trying to cross one.
“Oh, different stuff. Books we’ve read. She was telling me about her dad’s telescope.”
“What else did you talk about?”
“I told her about that kid, Todd. I told her about my other friends, what we’ve been doing since school let out.”
His mother smiled, but her lips pulled thin when she did it, and in her expression Jonathan could read nothing but bitterness.
“What else?”
The discussion wasn’t a minefield anymore. His mother had abandoned any pretense of stealth and was simply lobbing grenades at him in plain sight.
“I asked her to go with me.”
“Go where?”
“It’s not . . . it’s not a specific place. I—”
“Jonathan, you aren’t making sense.”
“But it’s not, I mean you don’t underst—”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I was asking her to be my girlfriend.”
“Ah,” she said. “Now it comes out.”
“I was trying to tell you.”
“You were trying,” his mother hissed, “to hide it from me. ‘We were talking about school! We were talking about telescopes! We were talking about that kid, Todd!’”
“We were talking about those things.”
“You’re only thirteen years old, Jonathan. What do you suppose you’re going to do with a girlfriend?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. And it was true. He couldn’t invite her to come over, not with his mother here, and Tanglewood was so far from the rest of town that there was nothing to do within bike-riding range. No movie theaters, no shopping malls, nothing they could get to without an adult chaperone. And still his mom sat there, waiting for an answer.
“We’ll just hang out, I guess.”
“No, you won’t,” she hissed. “You’re only thirteen years old. You think you can have a girlfriend and go on dates and kiss girls without my permission?”
Jonathan didn’t see how any of those things were her business, but he didn’t say that. What could he say to her without his dad to run interference?
“There you go again, you Dodo bird! You are forbidden to go on a date until you are sixteen years old. Do you understand? Sixteen. And then you’ll be driven to and from the dates by me. No Dodo son of mine is going to get a girl pregnant while he’s still in junior high.”
“But Mom—”
“You’re not to call her. You’re not to see her. And if I catch you slinking around behind my back, there will be hell to pay. You can bet on that.”
What was the point of arguing? Right or wrong, who could stop her?
“Do you understand me?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Fine.”
Jonathan stood there defeated.
“You can go now,” his mom said. “Go to your room and live in your fantasy world until it’s time for bed.”
22
The song played at a thunderous volume, and images flickered one after the other, black and white film clips of a child playing the drums, a couple on a beach, a pretty girl painting her toenails. The song was “The Boys of Summer,” Todd’s song, only the lush recording of real guitars and percussion produced a sound impossible to create on his own keyboard. And the voice was not his. It belonged to a man Todd had never seen, who was singing the lyrics as if he had written them himself. Who was the kid? Who was the girl? Who were any of them, and what were they doing in his head?
Todd knew something was coming. Something bad was going to happen.
And then he saw it, a tornado in the distance, black and orange and churning into the ground. Though it was miles away, the storm somehow stretched the width of the entire horizon, and it sounded like a distant but powerful train. As it widened and became louder, Todd realized the storm was not going to pass harmlessly by the way most tornadoes did. No, this one was headed right for him, growing so huge and so near, so loud, that it was too late to run away. It was going to get him.
Again.
He was dreaming.
The thing was, though the tornado was the defining event of his life, Todd could remember almost nothing about it. The only thing he could recall about April 10, 1979 was the failing progress report he had received for Social Studies, and how he had been halfway through forging his mother’s signature on it when the world had gone crazy. Of his two parents, his mother’s script was less precise and thus easier to imitate. He had done it three other times already with great success. Todd often wondered what had become of that progress report, since his parents had never mentioned it. Had it been lost in the storm, or had its importance been lost when Todd was so gravely injured? He would have liked to ask, but if his parents had no knowledge of his propensity for forgery, there was no reason to bring it to their attention now.
And none of this mattered because the tornado was still bearing down upon him. As it approached its structure became more detailed. Now he saw long, spiraling tentacles orbiting the tornado as if the entire thing was some kind of gigantic, whirling octopus. The sound of it became less like a freight train and more like a lion’s growl. He saw it demolish the junior high school and tear the press box off the football stadium. He saw it reach Southwest Parkway, where it ripped a bank from its foundation, leaving only the vault behind. And he saw it tear through The Plex, an amusement park where you could ride go karts and play putt-putt and video games all day long.
Except there was no place on Southwest Parkway called The Plex.
It was only a dream. Dreams were usually weird and often ridiculous. Yet Todd could not shake the feeling he was seeing a real business being destroyed, some complex where he had watched Adam and his daughter play miniature golf, where Bradie had spoken the truth her father was too afraid to admit.
He saw the tornado lower itself further, squatting upon the ground, widening, until it had engulfed the entire city, until it was a swirling monster the size of Texas. Across the landscape it plowed, destroying discriminately, into cities across the state and beyond, somehow always leveling the worst damage upon trailer parks and other low-income neighborhoods. Todd watched the disaster unfold with awe and disgust, unable to comprehend such willful destruction, but he was even more baffled by victims unable or unwilling to get out of the way of it. If someone didn’t stop this murder machine, it would destroy the entire country. And yet it seemed to go on for years, thirty years or more, which to Todd seemed like forever.
Underneath it all, with spooky, chamber-like reflections, the song continued to play. Certain lyrics called more attention to themselves than others, including these lines that might have repeated thousands, even millions of times:
I saw a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac
A little voice inside my head said
“Don’t look back, you can never look back.”
By now the tornado covered his entire field of vision, and Todd felt himself being sprayed, even soaked by the blood of its victims, the millions of defenseless victims. It was all over him, sticky and warm and smelling of copper.
He screamed.
He screamed anger and sorrow at a population who had been given plenty of information and ample warning and still chose to turn a blind eye to the approaching destruction.
He at once hated and pitied them.
He screamed again, louder this time, and thrust his fists into the air.
“Todd!”
His fists operated as if by their own command. He swung and connected with something hard.
“Ow!” a woman screamed.
“Okay, that’s enough,” a man replied.
Hands grasped his arms, and Todd felt himself being sucked upward by the tornado, shaken back and forth, and gradually he swam up and out of sleep.
“Todd, wake up! Todd!”
He opened hi
s eyes and saw his father’s face only inches from his own.
“Todd,” his father said, calmer now. “Are you awake?”
Moments ticked this way and that as Todd shook free of the grogginess and collected himself.
“Yeah, Dad. I’m awake.”
“You hit your mother.”
Todd turned his head and saw his mother sitting on the floor against the far wall, hand cradling her jaw.
“Shit. I’m sorry, mom.”
“Todd!” his dad said. “Language!”
“Crap. Sorry.”
“What were you dreaming about?” his father asked. “Was it a nightmare?”
“It was the tornado. It was killing everything.”
“You remember the tornado? I thought you said that was all blank.”
“It wasn’t the tornado, not the real one. It didn’t look like the pictures you showed me, anyway.”
“He needs to see the doctor, Pete. Like tomorrow.”
“He’s fine, Cassandra. He just had a nightmare.”
“He looks fine,” his mom said. “But it’s still so new.”
“It’s been two months.”
“He was asleep for more than four years! Just because he’s found a few friends and seems okay, that doesn’t mean he is okay, Pete! He was asleep for four years!”
“Todd,” his dad said. “Do you feel okay?”
“Yeah. I just had a bad dream.”
“I think we should treat him like a normal thirteen-year-old instead of a medical patient. He can’t go through life worrying all the time. If he feels fine, I’m inclined to believe he is.”
“He is not qualified to diagnose himself,” his mother insisted. “I’m making an appointment tomorrow. I don’t care what the two of you think.”
She stood up, glared at his father, and walked out of the room.
“It’s all right, buddy. She’s just upset. We thought you might never come back to us, and your mother is worried you could leave again, this time for good.”
Todd rubbed crystals of sleep out of his eyes.
“Are you worried about that?”
