Turnabout

by Carmen Webster Buxton

  I figured Mom would assume I was dead. If the driver’s ed car had crashed, it might well have burned up. Mr. Aiyuku might be dead for real. Would the police have been able to tell her whether I was in the car or not? My wallet and my cell certainly were, and probably there would have been traces of them left.

  I tried to think of a way I could Turn back to my own world. The turned-on part wasn’t a problem. I’d proved I could do that just by thinking about girls, and there were plenty of girls around to think about. But I’d need to be good and scared and that wouldn’t be so easy to do.

  I rolled over as I thought about it, and I heard something crunch in my jeans’ pocket at the same time I felt a coolness against my thigh. When I slipped my hand into my pocket, my fingers found the hole in the bottom first, and then closed over a familiar foil packet.

  I pulled it out and held it in front of my eyes. It must have been touching my skin through the hole. Of all the useless things I could have brought with me, a condom seemed high on the list.

  I put it back in my other pocket and went back to thinking about the real world and feeling sorry for myself. A minute later, from somewhere above me, I heard a lock click.

  I got up and went to the door. The bottom of the stairs was right outside my door, and when I opened it and looked up, I saw a woman cross the landing to the door I knew was Hobart’s. It was Adeola; she wore a bathrobe over a longer red nightgown that looked a lot flimsier than the robe. I pulled back and watched through the crack in the door. Adeola knocked, and in a moment Hobart’s door opened, and she disappeared from view.

  I went back to bed. It looked like Hobart wasn’t sleeping alone. Quite possibly he never slept alone.

  This world might look like mine, but it was really different. A household like this one would never have existed on the Earth I knew. Sure we had polygamists, even in America, but the guys with multiple wives were more likely to lock the women up than the other way around. It struck me all at once that there could be more than two Earths. Maybe there were dozens—hundreds—thousands! The thought made my head spin. I decided not to worry about any other worlds unless I ended up in one of them—and right now that didn’t seem likely.

  I tossed and turned on Gyasi’s comfortable bed until finally I went to sleep. The last thought to drift through my mind was to wonder if Monica Martin would find another date for Homecoming.

  Seven

  I woke with a start, convinced I had had a bad dream, but not sure what it was about. I sat up and glanced around the unfamiliar room in confusion. The bars on the windows brought it all back to me.

  So it hadn’t been a bad dream. I really was locked up in a house in Makoro. A sudden urge to cry almost overwhelmed me. Would I ever get home? I shut my eyes for a minute, and thought about Mom and Lorrie and our apartment. It was a school day. I should be getting up, doing my workout with maybe some Charlie Parker playing in the background for motivation, then taking a shower. If I were home, Mom would have yelled my name by now, to make sure I was awake, and to remind me to eat breakfast. Lorrie would have beaten me to the breakfast table even though her school started after mine. And Ryan would have called to let me know if he could pick me up or not.

  A knock on the door made me jump. “Come in.”

  Hobart stuck his head in the door. “Are you up?”

  I slid my feet onto cold tile floor and stood up. “Yes.”

  “Good morning.” He came into the room carrying a bundle of clothes. “I thought you might like something clean to wear.” He glanced at my rumpled jeans and tee shirt. “And then the girls can wash your things.”

  I looked at the pile of Makoron clothes. Other than being a little brighter colored, they didn’t look that different from what I wore back home. “Okay.”

  He set the bundle on the foot of the bed. “The bathroom’s across the hall—hell, ya’ll know that.” He cocked his head. “Should I come back to take you to breakfast?”

  I thought about the huge assembly of people in the courtyard the night before. My face must have shown my dismay because Hobart laughed. “Don’t worry. I can have someone bring you a tray again. How’s that?”

  “Thanks,” I said, suddenly conscious that my stomach had no qualms about being in Makoro, only about being without food. “That would be better.”

  He nodded. “Be sure to let me know how the clothes fit.”

  I had a more important question. “Do they have anything like radio stations here?”

  He laughed. “I should have thought of that. I remember when I was your age I couldn’t go more than a few hours without listening to rock. I still remember the day Lennon was killed. I was crushed when I realized I would never get to meet him.”

  I didn’t mention that I rarely listened to musicians who were still alive, let alone still recording.

  Hobart pointed to a recessed panel on the wall above the dresser. “That’s the radio console. We have premium service—thirty channels.”

  He showed me how to work the console, and then he left. I tried all thirty channels, but I couldn’t find anything I liked. I hadn’t expected to understand the lyrics, of course, but the music itself was weird. Some of it sounded vaguely like the soundtrack from a Bollywood musical, and some of it was more like new age mixed with harp music, but none of it sounded anything remotely like any kind of jazz. I gave up and turned the thing off to get dressed.

  The shirt Hobart had brought wasn’t that different, but the pants were weird. They had a button fly instead of a zipper, and the waistband had a row of buttons to fasten it snugly instead of loops for a belt. There was also a knee-length, open robe—no buttons, hooks, or sashes—in bright blue. I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be like a jacket or what, because the temperature was warm enough not to need it. But Hobart had worn a sort of robe the night before and this morning, so maybe it was more of a fashion statement.

  I had just finished dressing when there was a knock at the door. Hobart came in with one of his older daughters, a black-haired young woman who carried a tray of food. I was disappointed it wasn’t the redhead. Hobart called this girl Zuwina.

  She put the tray down and frowned at me, then said something to Hobart.

  “Zuwina wants to know why you’re not wearing your thrya,” Hobart translated. “She picked it out for you.”

  I looked down at the blue robe I had left on the bed. “I don’t need it, and I feel silly wearing it.”

  He laughed and translated my answer to her. “You’ll get used to it.” He glanced around the room, saw my jeans and tee shirt, picked them up, and handed them to Zuwina. “We’ll go get our own breakfast if you have everything you need.”

  I could smell the aroma of some kind of egg and cheese dish and something that wasn’t quite coffee. My stomach would growl in a moment. “I’ll be fine, thanks.”

  I ate all alone, sitting on the bed. Somehow it made me less homesick than sitting at a table would have. After I had finished, I put the condom in the inside pocket of my jacket and hung the jacket and my belt up in the closet. I didn’t want to let go of everything that reminded me of home.

  A little while later, Hobart came back and offered me a tour of the house. It seemed like a good idea, so I said yes. It took a while because the house was huge, two stories plus an attic. Unlike the men’s area, in the main part of the house the bedrooms were all on the second floor, and we didn’t go in them, although Hobart let me look inside and told me who slept in each room. I noticed there were steep, narrow stairs from the second floor to the attic, but Hobart didn’t mention them, and we didn’t go up them.

  The common area rooms were on the ground floor, and the rooms for eating and sitting had been built to hold a crowd. The minaret, on the other hand, was more of a glorified flag pole than a real tower. It didn’t seem to have any usable space, as there was no way to enter it that I could see. I wondered if I could find a way to climb to the top of it. If I jumped, I would be darn scared on the way down. On the other hand,
I might not Turn, and then I would probably break my neck or end up crippled. I gave up on that idea, but I kept my eyes open as we went from room to room.

  One of the smaller ground floor rooms was the schoolroom. Hobart explained that after age ten the girls went out to school, but no one in Egume let boys leave the house just for school. Teleza’s mother was holding class for the two boys and the two youngest girls when Hobart and I went through on our tour.

  Walking from one unfamiliar room to another and seeing so many strangers I kept expecting to wake up and find I was indeed dreaming. I pinched myself just to make sure, but it didn’t help.

  After the tour, Hobart told me the first thing to do was for me to learn Neluan.

  “Great,” I said, fed up with not knowing what anyone was saying unless Hobart chose to translate for me.

  “Let’s get a place set up for you in the gym,” Hobart said. “We don’t want to get in the way of the regular classes.”

  We moved some chairs, a bookcase, and a desk from the schoolroom into one corner of the gym, and then Hobart took out a kid’s book and showed me the Neluan alphabet. I’d never had to learn a new alphabet, but at least it wasn’t like Chinese or ancient Egyptian, with pictograms instead of letters. We spent a solid two hours going over the Neluan alphabet, and then Hobart started teaching me a bunch of nouns.

  It turned out that Neluan had words we didn’t have in English. Hobart translated the words for father, daughter, son, husband, and wife easily, but he had more trouble with the word haru.

  “It’s what my wives are to each other,” he said.

  “Do you mean the relationship that exists between them” I asked, “or the word they call each other?”

  He shrugged. “Both.”

  Similarly, he had trouble explaining the word keesai.

  “It means stranger,” Hobart said. “You and I are considered keesai.”

  That made no sense to me. “But how can you be a stranger when you live here and have several wives and children?”

  Another shrug. “I don’t know why, but the word can mean a man you don’t know, or it can mean a man who came here from another world.”

  I took notes better than I ever had in school, just because I was desperate to know what everyone was saying.

  The second day Hobart started on some verbs and simple sentences. I worked at it, but it was frustrating. Just as Monica Martin had been fluent in Spanish without being able to explain the rules of it, Hobart wasn’t good at explaining the syntax of Neluan. I actually missed Mr. Walters.

  The boys joined us that afternoon, and watching them have their fencing lessons was more fun than struggling through a dense language with a bad guide. Hobart showed me some fencing basics, but it was all I could do not to stab myself in the foot.

  The third morning Teleza showed up just as Hobart got the books out. She slipped in through the steel door of the gym and stood there waiting.

  Hobart smiled when he saw her and signaled with a ‘come closer’ gesture. “Teleza is off school today, so I thought she could help us. She has kayel.” As usual, he slipped between Neluan and English with perfect ease.

  Teleza walked across the room and waited a few feet from my desk. The dark green of her shirt made her hair seem redder, and her pants were tight enough to make me take notice.

  I didn’t mind her joining us in the least, but I was curious. “What’s kayel?”

  “It’s short for kayel gazan, which translates as openness of mind.” Hobart jerked his head at me and said something to Teleza.

  She stepped up to my desk and put her hand on my forehead. I managed not to pull away from her, and sure enough, all at once I had a vision in my head of Adeola’s household sitting down to dinner in their enormous dining room, which I had seen but never eaten in because I was still eating in my room or the gym. In Teleza’s vision, Hobart had a central place, with Adeola beside him, and assorted wives and offspring grouped at four tables laid out in a hollow square. The oldest daughter Zuwina was serving food with help from her sister Panya. In a second I realized Teleza was serving, too, and I was seeing everything from her point of view as she moved around the room offering a basket of bread.

  The family seemed sociable but organized. It looked like Zuwina was in charge of the workers, as she directed Teleza and Panya and then took her place across from Adeola. The younger kids were intent on their food, but the older ones talked across the tables and called out to other family members.

  It reminded me of Thanksgiving dinner in one of those Hallmark Hall of Fame TV movies my mom liked to watch. I’d never had much extended family around—none since my grandmother died.

  Teleza moved her hand and the picture vanished, just like turning off a television. It dawned on me that I should act surprised.

  “Shit!” I hoped I sounded convincing. “How does she do that?”

  “It’s not a rare gift here. Women have been able to do that for as long as Makorons could write.” Hobart was watching me closely, so maybe I wasn’t a good liar.

  “But how does it work?” I asked.

  He sort of grimaced, like he didn’t like having to explain. “I have no idea. This world has its own rules. It’ll be easier if you just accept them and don’t worry how things work.”

  His reluctance only made me more curious. “But why is Makoro so different?”

  He let out a sound that was half annoyance and half amusement. “It just is. Before the Great Folly and the Rage, Makoro’s past was more like Earth’s past. Men were in charge, and women stayed home. If anything, they advanced a lot faster than us, because they had modern weapons and mechanical vehicles four hundred years ago, when America was just a bunch of British colonies.”

  It sounded more interesting than learning a new alphabet. “What were the Great Folly and the Rage?”

  He tapped one of the books. “You can read about it once you know the language. The Folly happened during a war hundreds of years ago. Some scientists tried to manufacture biological weapons to kill enemy soldiers. They created a virus that killed a lot of the men, but not the women.”

  “How many is a lot?”

  “Most of them. Only one man in ten survived.”

  It sounded a lot worse than the Black Death.

  Hobart was still talking. “But it was a lousy weapon. It didn’t recognize friend from foe. After it spread, it damn near destroyed civilization. This world has been trying to recover ever since.”

  The thought made me shiver. I could have already been exposed to a killer virus.

  “The virus doesn’t seem to work on men from our world,” Hobart said, like he knew what I was thinking. “That’s why we usually have more sons.”

  Except Hobart only had two. “You have six times as many daughters as you do sons.”

  “True,” he said. “But then my father had five sisters and no brothers.”

  So maybe the virus wasn’t the reason for his lopsided family. “What was the Rage?” I asked.

  He grinned, but it was a grim sort of grin, with his lips pulled back to show his teeth but no humor in his eyes. “The Rage was women’s answer to what men had done. Within thirty years of the Great Folly women ran every government in the world. In some places they took over peacefully, others not so peacefully.”

  I tried to imagine a world-wide holocaust that killed close to half the population and couldn’t do it, so I went back to the immediate question. “So, how many of your wives and daughters have kayel?” I asked, pronouncing the word carefully.

  He smiled at my efforts, a genuine smile this time. “Four.”

  And yet somehow it was the hottest girl in the house who was helping to teach me Neluan. Not that I minded.

  A thought suddenly struck me. “Can she see anything from my mind when she does that?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. Kayel is strictly a one-way street.”

  I was glad of that.

  We settled into a pattern. Hobart would go over some words, and Te
leza would illustrate them for me. I got to see the city of Egume through her gift. Her life didn’t seem that different from mine back home except there were no boys in it—other than her brothers—and nothing like dating. I saw scenes from her going to school, hanging out with her friends, driving a hovercar, and swimming in a lake at what seemed to be a summer camp. That last one was quite a shock because with no boys around, they didn’t need swim suits. All the girls swam naked. It sure made that lesson fun for me.

  Hobart must have realized I was getting turned on because he pulled Teleza’s hand away from my forehead. “That’s enough of that one.”

  Teleza laughed, and we moved on to some less exciting verbs.

  When Kafele and Gyasi came in for their fencing lessons, Hobart suggested I practice Neluan with Teleza.

  “Ya’ll will learn it faster if you speak it for real,” he said. “And if ya’ll can’t figure out what she means, she can show you.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I mean,” I smiled at Teleza and spoke in careful Neluan, “Very well. Let us go.”

  “We go,” she said, and took my hand.

  We went into the courtyard and sat down on a bench. Teleza clearly took her task seriously, because she promptly started pointing at things and asking me to name them. I knew a few words like sky, flower, and bird, but not bench, wall, door, or countless others. I felt like I’d walked onto the set of Sesame Street. I learned a lot of words though, including the name of the minaret-like tower which was called a janullo. After I diligently practiced my new vocabulary, I tried to make conversation in Neluan.

  “Do you like school?” I asked, figuring it was safest to stick to the present tense.

  She nodded and rattled off a couple of sentences of which I caught only the words ‘the,’ ‘of,’ ‘more,’ and ‘less,’ and then she laughed at my expression.

  “Too fast,” I said.

  A mechanical sound made me look up. A ways above us, well above the flag that flew from the top of the janullo, I could see something hovering overhead that might have been a helicopter.