by Zach Powers
I ran out of the bedroom. Warren was on the floor, curled up in a ball. A broken picture frame rested beside him. I heard Matty crying from the living room. John was in the bathroom, staring wide-eyed into the mirror. He reached up and touched the reflection of his face with two fingers, like he didn’t recognize himself.
He saw me in the mirror. His eyes watered.
To my reflection he said, “Cockpuncher really is a terrible name, isn’t it?”
Natalie stepped into the hall, over the trembling form of her brother, and skipped to a stop in the living room where the white mist hung thick in the air.
She breathed in deeply.
THE TUNNELS THEY DIG
I am not floating. I am falling.
Below me is the sky. I am falling toward the sky. I will never reach it. I will never reach it alive. What once was me, long since starved of oxygen, will graze the atmosphere. My corpse will flare. It will vaporize. It will become gas. It will become part of the sky.
I am falling toward myself.
Very slowly.
I am surrounded by a thin shell of air that is held in place by this ridiculous suit. I am also surrounded by the sound of my breathing. My breath is the air made loud. Sometimes it fogs the glass of my faceplate. My breath is the air made visible. It only hangs there for a moment. The glass resists the fog. It is special glass made specifically for that purpose. And to keep out cold and radiation. I blow my breath against the faceplate to watch the air fade away.
I hit my head in the explosion.
I am not thinking clearly. I am aware of this, but unable to do anything about it. The very fact that I cannot think clearly prevents me from trying to clear my head.
I have spun so that I am facing down at Earth. I am facing the direction I am falling, like a skydiver. I spread out my arms and imagine the wind rushing past. My breathing provides the sound effect. Whoosh.
My spinning continues and now I face the spaceship. The windows glow orange. That would be the fire. Something sparked in a computer console. The smell of burning rubber filled the cabin. I pried off panels and opened compartments. I could not find the fire. It flared up from behind the attitude controls. By then it was too late.
The other astronaut was a scientist. She was studying worms and the tunnels they dig when weightless. When falling. The bulkhead behind her experiment exploded. The explosion threw me against the wall. I hit my head. A piece of metal shot out, spinning, and sliced through the scientist’s neck. Her severed head bounced around the cabin. Her blood formed undulating orbs. I was a scientist studying the paths blood follows when weightless. I was charting the constellations in red.
I am an astronaut. I am an astronomer.
I abandoned ship and I am floating. I am falling.
In a small town in Indiana there is a pond where the ducks float on the water. They do not fall. They bob gently. The surface of the water ripples in the chill breeze. The clouds stream in from over Lake Michigan. On the shore of this pond there is a boy who will become an astronaut. He throws small pieces of bread into the water. The ducks paddle over and splash their bills against the surface. Sometimes a piece of bread goes unnoticed. It sucks up water from the lake. Slowly it sinks. Slowly it falls.
The boy was once bitten by a duck and he cried.
The tears gather in the corners of my eyes. When there are enough of them, they break free from my face and float in front of me. They float up to the faceplate. Some bounce off and some stick there. I spin to face Earth again. This time the view is obscured by my tears. They are like dots on the globe marking the cities toward which I am falling. The cities are all very sad. That is why they are marked by tears.
The spaceship comes back into view in time for me to see it explode. It is a bright, silent flash. The body of the ship cracks like a hatching egg, then pieces fly off in every direction. A number of large chunks hurtle toward me. I shield my face with my gloved hands, but the pieces sail past.
I am still breathing. My breath remains loud in my ears, gray on the faceplate. There is a gauge on the suit that tells me how much air I have left. I am not morbid enough to look. I do not need a countdown. A countdown is what brought me here in the first place. Three, two, one, fall.
I can see Earth again. Clouds cast shadows on the ocean. Something floats between me and the planet. I look at it. I look past the tears on the faceplate. It is one of the scientist’s worms. It is what is left of the worm after a fire, two explosions, and explosive decompression. The little body is torn and mangled. It looks like an earthworm on a driveway, run over and dried out by the sun.
The worm moves. It is alive and wiggling. I am not a scientist so I do not know much about worms, but this does not seem right. It wiggles more.
I hold my breath. Something beeps inside my space suit.
The worm is floating toward open space. I do not know the escape velocity for a worm, but I know that this worm is free. It is free of falling. This impossible worm will wiggle into eternity. This worm alone will explore the cosmos and live the places that people dream.
I will not let it.
I will take the worm with me, or be taken with the worm.
I grasp at it with the thick fingers of my glove.
Worm in hand, I float away.
WHEN AS CHILDREN WE ACTED MEMORABLY
The smell of chlorine brings back a memory of the strange cabin on the hill. Each time it is a different memory of a different cabin on a different hill. It is a memory of brick walls or stacked logs or Sheetrock. The windows were high and wide or triple-paned or thick and old and full of distortions. The view was of bald hills or forest or rivers ribboning into the distance. The only constant in the memory is the loose concept of a cabin and the smell of chlorine caught in the air.
Ricky’s parents installed an above-ground pool the summer after we finished third grade. It never really got warm enough in our town for swimming, so it was the only pool any of us had ever seen, rising conspicuously from the rock-strewn backyard, forming a triangle with the doghouse and the yellow shed. It was made of straight panels, four feet wide, arranged in a jagged oval. I never bothered to count the sides then, to identify the shape more accurately. Dodecagon? Now, years later, it seems like an important piece of information, lost, except maybe in photographs stored in Ricky’s parents’ closet. If they’re still alive. They were Asian, Ricky’s family, and the only nonwhite people in our suburban neighborhood. His father did something for a corporation, earning enough to afford swimming pools and barbecue grills and trips to Caribbean islands in the winter. I remember his father best, again, by a smell. The scent of cigars, over-pungent to the undeveloped sinuses of a child, followed Ricky’s father like an olfactory shadow. In the evenings when Ricky’s friends came over to swim, he greeted us with a terse hello. The cigar smell was complimented by that of whiskey on his breath. He was an intangible presence in the room, something I was aware of but couldn’t wrap my hands around. A strong desire to hold something paired with the crippling inability to do so.
We settled into a routine, converging on the pool every day for the same set of games, the same races. After swimming, we would dry off with the gauze-like towels provided by Ricky’s mother. She would have cookies waiting for us on the porch table, which sat in the one patch of sunlight that reached down between the trees and the roof of the house. The type of cookie changed each day, baked fresh, and the smell of baking is how I best remember Ricky’s mother. She was the mother we all flocked to, wishing she was our own. After school we ran to Ricky’s house and stayed there until dinnertime, often through it, a half-dozen children huddled around the too-small dining room table. Ricky’s mother served us simple food, in nugget or sandwich form, on thin paper plates, and when we were done she whisked away the remnants before we could offer to help clear the table. She taught most of us our fractions. On our birthdays, Ricky’s gifts, selected by his mother, were always exactly what we wanted. Later, after our mothers forbade us fro
m going over to Ricky’s house, I missed Ricky’s mother more than anything. More than the pool, even more than Ricky himself.
That summer we learned to dive—unadvisedly—into the shallow pool. The first awkward bellyflops evolved into graceful needle punctures of the water’s surface. We pulled ourselves up just before we reached the bottom, skimming it with our stomachs, bodies held in torpedo shape, letting momentum carry us forward and buoyancy lift us up. Most of us bruised elbows and knees, sometimes a head, but as we got better the injuries became less frequent. Ricky was the proud master of the pool. The undisputed champion of breath-holding competitions, the fastest swimmer, a tenacious Marco and an elusive Polo. He was the first to master diving and the most graceful. It was from him that the rest of us learned the subtleties of the art. With his encouragement we overcame our fear and entered head-first into the water. I remember him by his hair, a black mass, always messy, as if intentionally so. And his stance, proud but relaxed, as he stood shirtless by the pool, awaiting his turn to dive. Looking back, he was my best friend, though I suspect I am not the only one from our group who would claim the same thing. His absence is a palpable void in the universe. I know that somewhere, in some empty space, he should exist. I suppose he does exist, somewhere. What I feel, then, is my own ignorance as to the location of the space he inhabits.
Besides Ricky, the only other childhood friend I remember clearly is Lindsay. She was Ricky’s opposite, awkward and flighty. She seemed to stumble with every step, tripping over flat sidewalks and stubbing her toes on anything that poked even an inch out of the ground. Her long blond hair, cobweb thin, was picked up by the lightest breeze and danced around her head like an electric halo. When she got out of the pool, her hair clung so close to her scalp that she looked almost bald. She spoke, when she spoke at all, in a high voice, high even for a young girl. She was the smart one, tasked with looking out for the rest of us. It was her small voice that warned us of oncoming traffic when we were about to dart into the street, or alerted us to the presence of overhead power lines when we swung sticks in mock sword fights. She was like a sister to me and Ricky, a figure of unassailable purity. Given the opportunity, in later years, we would have looked at her differently.
One day in the middle of summer, Lindsay mounted the deck and looked down at the pool. From behind her, those of us waiting our turn to dive urged her to hurry, but she just stood there, gazing into the rippling aquamarine, the lining of the pool lending its hue to the clear, filtered water.
“I see something,” said Lindsay.
Before we could ask what she saw, she leapt high off the deck, inverted herself at the apex of her flight, and dove straight down into the water. The angle was too steep. There was no way she could pull up, no way she could avoid smashing her face into the bottom of the pool. She entered with barely a splash. We waited, breath held as if we were underwater. Lindsay did not resurface. Ricky was on the steps. I don’t know if it was panic or instinct, or if something called him as it had called Lindsay. He bounded across the platform, and without hesitation, in a near-perfect imitation of Lindsay’s dive, followed her into the water. I screamed his name, but he was already submerged. I scrambled up the steps and looked with terror at the bottom of the pool. There was nothing there. No Lindsay. No Ricky. I looked around the yard, trying to discern the nature of the trick, the means by which the two of them had perpetrated this magnificent illusion. But they were nowhere. The others, standing on the porch, mouths agape, looked at me. I shook my head.
Something seemed to move at the bottom of the pool, like seaweed waving in ocean currents, directly below where my two friends had disappeared. Before I could think anything, unable to think at all, I found myself making the same vertical dive into the water, aimed directly at the kelp-like something below. I opened my eyes wide and tried to scream but produced only bubbles. The floor of the pool rushed up. I swallowed a gulp of the medicinal water. I hit the bottom. But it wasn’t hard. I passed into it as through a thick gel and floated there. The substance was warm and comforting, like the embrace of Ricky’s mother, like the smell of fresh baked cookies. The longer I was inside it the more I relaxed, until, at the last moment, I felt like my mind left my body, and with it went all stresses and agitations. As a blank slate, I entered the cabin.
I dropped onto a mattress covered with a down comforter. When I tried to wipe the water out of my eyes, I realized that I was completely dry. Instead of my bathing suit, I was wearing old, unfashionable clothes, a sweater and pants I could imagine Ricky’s father wearing when he was a child. I propped myself up on the bed. The room around me was the size of an average living room, and besides the bed, I saw a kitchen table, a sink, and a sofa. Ricky and Lindsay stood looking out a yellow-curtained window.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Ricky, “but there’s snow outside.”
I half-hopped, half-stumbled off the bed and joined them at the window. The hill was bare of trees, and as far as could be seen undisturbed snow covered an undulating landscape, more hills like the one on which we found ourselves, but the others just a bit lower. I touched the window and felt the cold move from the glass to my fingertips. A circle of condensation formed where Ricky’s mouth pressed near the pane. I looked at my clothes more closely. They were tailored for the environment, the sweater heavy and the pants thickly padded. The pattern on the middle of the sweater was of interlocking triangles, white on teal, the colors like the surface of the pool. Ricky and Lindsay were similarly dressed.
Ricky went to the door. He jiggled the knob back and forth, but it would not turn. He returned to the window and tried to push it open, but it was frozen shut. I joined him in attempting to raise it, but still it would not move. My hands felt numb where they had pushed against the glass, and I rubbed them together. Lindsay stood beside the bed, looking up at a point on the ceiling directly above it. A wisp of white energy hung there, like a tiny version of the Northern Lights. After watching it for many minutes, I realized it was the same as the kelp-like thing I had seen at the bottom of the pool. I had fallen into the room from that point. It was the portal.
That first cabin is the one I remember best. We spent much time there, inspecting each corner, the sparse furnishings, the grain of the wood-paneled wall. We tried to force open the door, each of the windows. None of them would budge, so we returned our attention to the interior. The circular rug in the center of the room, made from a coarse brown material, sprouting fuzz all over, was woven with a design of random green triangles. Leaning close, I first noticed, from the fabric, the smell of chlorine that would later define the whole experience. Once I had smelled it, I couldn’t ignore it. It became overpowering, forcing itself up my nostrils, pounding inside my head. I grew dizzy. I saw that my friends were experiencing something similar, staggering under the attack of an unseen assailant.
“We need to leave,” said Ricky.
“But how?” I asked.
“I’m not even sure how we got here,” said Lindsay. “It was like a voice called out to me, and next thing I know I was diving into the pool.”
Ricky gestured to the ceiling. “We’ll go back the same way we came. The spot of light got us here, it must be able to take us home.”
He climbed onto the bed, bounced slowly at first, then faster and higher, extending his arms straight out, spinning in tight circles as if dancing a dervish. Light descended like a liquid and surrounded him, suspending him in the air halfway between the bed and the ceiling. He spun there for a moment, wrapped in light, floating. Once per revolution he faced me, his expression slack, eyes closed, the countenance of sleep. His turning slowed, stopped. He opened his eyes and they were nothing but whites. Tilting back his head, he rose toward the ceiling. The light grew too bright to look at, filled the whole of the cabin with whiteness, washing out even the outlines of our bodies. I groped in blindness for Lindsay, to stabilize myself against the dizziness, to assuage my fear, but I found nothing. The
floor beneath me lost substance. My body dissolved, turned to mist. I screamed with the mouth, throat, lungs I no longer had. All that came was silence, then gurgling. My head broke the surface of the pool. I gasped for air, though my chest was free from the burning sensation of held breath. The familiar sights of Ricky’s backyard surrounded me—trees and slatted fence and the rough red-brown brick of the house. I was back in my swimsuit. Ricky and Lindsay stood with me in the water. Like any three points, we formed a triangle, but this one was special, the distance between us and the subtleties of the angles. I can’t explain how, but I knew its specialness in the same way I knew to dive into the water and Ricky knew the way to return us home.
In the world outside the cabin, I had expected time to stand still. I had expected our friends to be waiting for us, waiting to hear the story of where we had been and what we had seen. I imagined them sitting on the deck, feet dangling in the water, faces to the sun. But the shadows had shifted to cover the yard and our friends were gone. There was no sign that they had ever been there. Usually we left a trail of towels and toys in our wake. But the surface of the back porch was empty, even swept free of fallen leaves.
“You’re back,” Ricky’s mother spoke to us from the porch. “I was worried you would not return, as you spent much time in the cabin, long enough, surely, to feel its effects, the vertigo that overtakes you, that sends you spinning.”
“Why couldn’t we stay longer?” asked Ricky.
“It gets easier each time. It is a dangerous place, the cabin, but I know better than to forbid you to visit. You three form an interesting triangle. Maybe you can conquer that place. Maybe you can open the door.”
She held out three towels toward us.
“Come,” she said, “have some cookies. I just finished baking them.”
Inside, fresh cigar smoke filled the house. I heard the sounds of a baseball game coming from the television in the living room. We passed Ricky’s father and he looked at us, would not look away from us. I’m sure he kept staring in our direction even after we were out of sight, but he did not speak a word. In the kitchen, wrapped in the thin white towels, we ate cookies. My thoughts left the strange place we had visited and turned to the activities of the evening, the cartoons to be watched and video games to be played. I tried to speak of such things to Ricky and Lindsay but they remained silent, in their eyes the vacant look I had seen on Ricky’s face as he hung above the bed in the cabin.
