by Henry Clark
“I—I lost the quarter,” stammered Tom, and I knew he was lying. He really and truly hoped we would all stay in ancient China.
“Here,” said Ishmael, producing a gold coin from his pocket and handing it to Tom. “Don’t mind the hole in it. A crazy man once nailed it to a post.”
“Flip it!” ordered Frankie.
Tom tossed the coin. I picked up a stick and drew the six lines his tosses produced.
HEXAGRAM 29
THE WATERY ABYSS.
STUFF GETS WASHED AWAY. THINGS GO DOWN THE DRAIN. YOU HAVE TO BE QUICK TO CATCH THEM. IF YOU USE WAFFLES INSTEAD OF BREAD TO MAKE A BLUEBERRY SANDWICH, FEWER BLUEBERRIES WILL FALL ON THE FLOOR.
“‘The Watery Abyss,’” I read aloud from the book, getting a sinking feeling in my stomach.
“It must mean the mouthpiece is at the bottom of the waterfall!” said Tom, barely able to conceal his delight.
“And I know it isn’t,” said Frankie. “What’s the Morse?”
“The Morse?” said Tom, as if he had no idea what she was talking about. “Oh, the Morse!” He scowled at the hexagram. He shook his head. “There doesn’t seem to be any.”
I could hear a series of repetitive thumps, like the sound of many marching feet.
“Tom!” I said, and tried to get him to look at me. He wouldn’t meet my gaze. “Tom,” I repeated, more gently.
“All right, all right,” he muttered miserably, kneeling, and ticking off the parts of the hexagram. “It’s two dots, a dash and a dot, followed by a dot, then another dot, ending with a dot, a dash, and two dots.”
“Four letters,” I said. “What does it spell?”
“Feel.”
“Feel?” I was hoping for something a little more specific, like tree or rock, telling us where to search for the mouthpiece. Even gut, if I had, in fact, somehow managed to swallow it. “What’s feel supposed to mean?”
“Maybe we’re supposed to feel something,” said Frankie, looking around. The marching noise was getting louder.
“I do feel something,” I assured her. “I feel panic, like we’re all about to get drafted into an army of losers!”
Tom turned away and began flipping the coin again. Frankie stepped up to me and, without asking permission, started to frisk me. She briskly patted my chest and raised my arms so she could pat my armpits. She lifted my apron and started squeezing the cloth.
“I already looked in my apron,” I said. “The pocket is empty.”
She slipped a hand in the pocket anyway.
“There’s a small hole in it!” she said excitedly, and started running her hands along the apron’s hem.
The sound of marching feet washed down the dried streambed like the start of a flood. Mr. Ganto stood and positioned himself between us and the approaching noise. I don’t know what he expected to do, facing thirty thousand soldiers.
“Ha!” exclaimed Frankie, and ripped the apron’s fabric. She triumphantly held up the mouthpiece. “It fell in your pocket and wound up in the lining! We just had to FEEL for it!”
She picked up the Shagbolt and fitted the mouthpiece into place, looking like she was jamming a cartridge into a rifle. As she raised it to her lips, I noticed Tom consulting the I-Ching book. At his feet he had drawn a new hexagram:
Seeing the look on his face, I said, “Tom, what is it?”
He glanced my way, his face somehow both happy and full of regret at the same time.
“It’s the seventh hexagram!”
Frankie blew the first note of our area code. Tom quickly came over to me and surprised me with a hug. He clutched me like he was never going to let me go. As soon as I got over my shock, I hugged him back.
“Best friends!” he said. “Forever!”
Then he pulled away and started walking up the hill.
“What—” I started to say as Frankie played the fourth and fifth notes. She was facing Ishmael and Mr. Ganto; she was paying no attention to us.
A column of armored men swung into view, way up the streambed, so distant they looked like toy soldiers. It might take them a minute or two to notice us. By then, I knew, we’d be gone.
Frankie played the sixth note.
Tom raised his arms and covered his ears with his hands. I heard him start humming loudly to himself. It sounded like a Beatles song.
Hello Goodbye.
“WAIT!” I shouted.
Frankie played the final note.
CHAPTER 25
Transformations
I was flour going through a sifter; I was grass seed being spread. The atom-sized pieces of me clumped back together and I was sitting on the lawn next to the parking lot of Ambrose Bierce Middle School in Freedom Falls, Ohio.
Frankie and Ishmael were to the right of me. Mr. Ganto was to my left. I leaped to my feet and spun, searching in every direction.
Tom Xui wasn’t with us.
“Tom’s missing!” I exclaimed. “We have to go back for him! Those soldiers could kill him!”
I snatched the Shagbolt from Frankie’s fingers and raised it to my lips. A large, hairy hand wrapped itself around the slide before I could move it. Mr. Ganto gently, but irresistibly, pulled the instrument from my hands.
“No,” he said, in a voice that didn’t invite argument.
I argued anyway.
“We can’t leave him three thousand years in the past! He’s got a math test on Monday! He’s my best friend! We have to go get him!”
“He covered his ears,” Mr. Ganto stated. “He hummed. It was his decision to stay.”
“What if he changes his mind?”
“I am returning this to Shofranka’s father.” Ganto hefted the Shagbolt. “You can petition him. Perhaps he will grant your request. There is no rush. It is, after all, a time machine.” He turned his penetrating gaze on Frankie. “But there can be no further unauthorized trips. It is way too dangerous. We are lucky to have returned to a time and place almost identical to the time and place we first departed from. It would not be wise to imperil success.”
“Almost identical?” asked Frankie suspiciously.
Mr. Ganto inhaled deeply, held it, considered it, let it out. “There are more chrysanthemums in bloom. I would guess it is about a day after our original departure.”
“Is that the only difference?”
“As far as I can smell.”
I looked around. The school was the way I remembered it. No new wings enclosed a prison exercise yard, no razor wire edged the roof. We had returned everything to normal.
“I will take the Shagbolt back to the carnival,” said Mr. Ganto, slipping into a shadowy area beneath some trees. “I will also visit Dr. Lao in the infirmary. I have need of his skills. Perhaps Mr. Dinklehooper would be so good as to accompany me.”
Ishmael was staring wide-eyed at the cars in the parking lot.
“Metal huts?” he asked. “Do people live in those things?”
“Practically,” I said.
A minivan with its headlights blazing pulled into the parking lot’s far end. Ishmael jumped. Ganto reached out and put a reassuring hand on his shoulder.
“Horseless carriage,” I tried to explain, but I could see the phrase didn’t help.
“It will take getting used to,” Ganto acknowledged. “But if I could do it, you can do it. Come. I may need a shoulder to lean on.”
Ishmael, moving like a sleepwalker, turned to follow Ganto. With a rustle of branches, they disappeared into the grove bordering the school property.
“So. No harm done,” Frankie said, more to herself than to me.
“I’ve lost my best friend!” I reminded her.
“He made a choice. He knew what he was doing. We should respect his decision. If you really feel strongly about it, maybe we can convince my father to let us use the Shagbolt to go back and get him. Don’t be surprised, though, if he puts up a fight.”
“Your father?”
“Your friend. I think Tom is exactly where he wants to be.”
“Maybe if we spoke to your mother and father together,” I said. “I mean, it’s your mother who thinks you’re destined to be the Shagbolt’s Keeper.”
Frankie sighed. “We can’t speak to them together. I have a single parent.”
“What? You mean—they’re divorced?”
“No. I mean my mother is dead.”
“DEAD?”
“She died when I was eight months old. In a fortune-telling accident.”
“A fortune-telling accident?”
“She failed to foresee the oncoming bus. Her death totally messed up my dad. He had a nervous breakdown. He got over it quickly, though. I think, deep down, he knew I needed him. And he knew I needed her.” Frankie paused, like she wasn’t sure she should go on. But then she took a deep breath and said, “So he developed a split personality. Not intentionally or anything. He’s not aware that he does it.”
“Does what?” She had lost me.
“The scientific name for it is dissociative identity disorder. DID. He became my mother. I mean, he really… DID. He still becomes her. He spends about half of each day as her. She even has set fortune-telling hours on days when the carnival is open. His glammering ability makes it easy. When he’s her, he believes it so completely, even his face changes. At least, that’s the image he projects. Usually, glammer is all in the clothes.”
“That’s nuts!” I exclaimed.
“That’s what Dr. Lao said. But he got his psychiatry degree many years ago, when they had different words for things.”
“I heard your mother looking for Twizzlers!”
“Yup. You did. He was her at that particular moment. Sometimes he even flickers back and forth, one to the other, like a lightbulb about to burn out. He’s totally unaware he’s doing it. Madam Janus and Orlando Camlo are one and the same person, but they have two distinct personalities, with different knowledge and different opinions. Neither has any memory of what the other one has said or done. They leave notes for each other on the fridge. When they’re having an argument, you can barely see the door.”
“I saw your dad only a few minutes later on the midway.”
“What part of glammering don’t you understand?”
“All of it.”
I tried to imagine missing somebody so badly that you took their place. I wondered if I would start dressing like Tom Xui. Then I remembered we already dressed alike.
Frankie sighed. “And here you are, upset because your dad sometimes wears chain mail. You’d never be able to handle it if you had a parent who was truly different.”
“Actually,” I said slowly, thinking about it, “I think I could handle it fine. Or, at least, a lot better than I used to.” I remembered seeing Frankie’s father in her mother’s crystal ball. I thought maybe this was the reason it had happened. It was the final piece of a puzzle I had been working on for the past three thousand years.
“Hurry up, Mikey!” came a familiar voice. I turned to see our neighbor Mrs. Larrabee getting out of her minivan, pulling her two kids after her. “We have to show our support for Mr. Brody!” She tugged the twins toward the school. Mrs. Larrabee was a single parent, raising her kids all by herself, and she had only the one personality. I couldn’t imagine how she did it.
“Holy cow!” I said. “It’s Thursday night! They’re going to decide whether or not to fire my dad at this meeting! We have to get in there!”
“That would explain why we arrived now, rather than yesterday,” Frankie said breathlessly as she raced to keep up. “This must have been in the back of your mind all along! You affected our time trip!”
We reached the doors and I saw myself reflected in the glass. I skidded to a halt.
“Wait!” I said. “I can’t go in there like this! This isn’t how I want to look!”
“So? Take off the dress.” Frankie sounded disappointed.
“That’s not what I mean,” I said, squaring my shoulders. I had made my decision, and I was sure it was the right one. “I’ve lost my bonnet. Can I borrow yours?”
Frankie’s bedraggled bonnet hung from the tightly knotted string around her neck. She pulled it off, punched it back into shape, and fitted it to my head.
“How do I look?” I asked.
She pursed her lips and thought about it. “Like a hero,” she said.
The auditorium was packed. It looked as though the entire town had gotten wind of the special meeting and had turned out in force.
The seven members of the school board sat on the stage, in the middle of the set for The Crucible. They had moved the Salem witch trial’s judge’s bench forward to the edge of the stage, and Principal McNamara occupied the center position. To his right sat the three board members we had overheard plotting with him the night before—Billy Osborn’s father, Cynthia Moon, and Millicent Mordred. To his left were the other three board members. Their faces were familiar; I had seen them around town, but I wasn’t sure who they were or how they would vote.
Quentin Garlock sat on the floor of the stage with his legs dangling over the edge, a little to one side of McNamara, like pictures I had seen of court jesters at the feet of their kings. My father occupied a folding chair stage left, picked out by a single spotlight that isolated him from the board members, who were sitting in a sea of red.
All the stage illumination came from the lighting designed for The Crucible. Moments after Frankie and I entered, the spotlighted shadow of a dangling hangman’s noose flickered and disappeared from the back wall as somebody in the control booth came to their senses and cut that particular switch.
My father was dressed as a Russian serf from the time of the czars. It was a good look for him. Wringing his peasant cap in his hands made him look humble, but the defiant set of his jaw suggested he might, at any moment, rise up and overthrow the government. I wondered if his decision not to dress as a samurai was because of me.
In the middle of the center aisle was a lectern with a microphone, and people were lined up behind it, awaiting their turn to speak. As we came in, the man at the mike was Bruno Killbreath, Lenny Killbreath’s father, the man who, in the alternate reality we had prevented, had been president of the United States.
“… must be stopped,” he was saying. “We can’t let our kids be led astray! This whatchamacallit, this trans-temple culture—weasel words for cross-time dressers!—is flyin’ in the face of our American way of life!” He waved a tablet over his head, displaying the home page of Out of Time: A Journal for the Trans-Temporal Community, as if this proved there was a trans-temporal community. He pointed the tablet at my father. “This son of a bickwidus—”
McNamara banged a gavel. “Language!” he said sternly, and I got a jolt, realizing our time trip had added a naughty word to the dictionary.
“Sorry,” said Killbreath. “This man’s behavior is NOT somethin’ I want as an example to my kids. It’s a… it’s a—”
“Aberration?” suggested McNamara.
“Yeah! Right. A burration! Showing up in public wearin’ the clothes of George Washington’s day, or… or the woolly mammoth robes of a caveman—that’s a crime against nature! For the sake of society, his suspension has to be permanent!”
“Thank you, Mr. Killbreath,” said McNamara. Garlock nodded enthusiastically.
Killbreath shook his tablet one final time in my dad’s direction and turned away. I cut ahead of the next person in line and grabbed the microphone. The man behind me harrumphed.
I popped the mike from its holder, stepped into the aisle, and froze. Everybody was staring at me. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Frankie nodding encouragement. I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders, and said, “Hello! My name… is Ambrose Brody. Most of my friends call me Bro. A few call me Rose. I’m the son of Hannibal Brody—and I am a cross-time dresser!” I pulled the bonnet from my head and waved it in the air like a Fourth of July flag.
My father jumped to his feet the moment he heard my voice. He stood watching me with a look that I was pretty sure was
pride. A woman sitting in the front row, in the seat closest to my dad, had also stood and looked my way.
My mom!
She was sitting with my aunt Maya.
“I don’t dress this way often,” I continued, “but over the past day or so I felt I needed to, just as my dad feels the need to, more often than that.” I lifted one corner of my apron. “I think it’s perfectly comfortable. I think it’s perfectly all right! I didn’t always think so, but now that I’ve swallowed an eraser, I know I can correct my mistakes!”
I ran down the aisle to where my mom was standing, turned my back to McNamara and the school board, gripped her hand briefly, and addressed the crowd.
“Yes! My father has a woolly mammoth caveman robe, but it’s not real woolly mammoth fur. It’s not animal fur at all. No woolly mammoths were hurt in the making of that robe. And that’s the thing. What my father does doesn’t hurt anybody, or anything. It just makes some of you uncomfortable. Because it’s different. Because it’s out of the ordinary. There was a time in this country when we enslaved people because they were different. Because they were extraordinary. That’s all the justification we needed. We thought they were different. If we start thinking that way again, if we start fearing people who are different, where will it end? Mr. McNamara”—I spun and faced him—“what if you could be arrested for wearing a kilt?”
“That’s different!” he sputtered. “I only wear it for parades and assemblies!”
“And Angus McOffal’s birthday,” I reminded him. “But if you start persecuting cross-time dressers, don’t be surprised if you’re next! Then it’s anybody who isn’t wearing the newest fashions, and then it’s anybody who isn’t wearing fashions approved by the state. There goes your turban, Mr. Singh; there goes your sari, Ms. Patil.” I pointed out people I knew in the audience. “There goes whatever that is hanging off your earlobe, Mr. Curtis!”
“It’s a small working glockenspiel,” he called back, nodding his head and softly chiming. Mr. Curtis ran Freedom Falls’ only coffeehouse. “My sister designs jewelry. I’m here tonight to support your dad, you know. I think quite a few of us are!”
