Turnabout

by Carmen Webster Buxton

Marjani put a hand on my shoulder like she meant to hold me back. “You’re risking your life.”

  I thought about Mom and Lorrie and Sancho and Ryan and Clara Barton High School. I even thought about Monica Martin. I considered what life would be like if I stayed on Makoro, and added that to how much I missed everyone and everything at home. “If you could get Esi back—if you could go somewhere and know that Esi would be there waiting for you—would you risk your life to get there?”

  Her eyes met mine. Her hand dropped from my shoulder. I could tell from her face she was wishing there was a way to do what I had said. “Yes, I would.” She looked at the track. “I’d be right there with you.”

  I set my shoulders. “All right, then. Here I go.”

  We hurried around the slope to where the pylons were still short. I pulled myself up on top of the pylon and crouched there. The maglev track was a single raised strip about five or six feet across. The magnets were probably in the underneath part, which was wider than the raised strip by a foot or so on either side.

  I waved goodbye to Marjani and then turned back toward the tracks. I wished I had paid more attention to how maglevs worked. I was pretty sure it wasn’t like the Metro back home, where the train got power from a live third rail down the middle of the tracks. But still, it felt kind of creepy stepping from the pylon out onto the middle of the track. I glanced around. To be terrified enough to Turn, I’d need to have no way out. I walked up the track a good ways, walking over the squat and up the track until I was a lot higher up in the air. I stopped when I was at the peak, over the creek and halfway between two pylons. It gave me a great view, even in the twilight. I could see the lights of the city in the distance,

  “Jason!” Marjani shouted. She had walked beside the track but stopped at the edge of the creek. I could still see her, but the light was going. “You won’t be able to get down from up there if you change your mind.”

  “That’s the idea,” I shouted back. “I’ll be fine. Thanks for your help.”

  She waved back, a big sweeping wave. “Good luck.”

  I suddenly remembered David’s wish that she return to their sisters’ household. “What will you do now? Will you go back to your sisters?”

  She shook her head. “Even if they would take me back, I couldn’t live like that again.”

  It occurred to me she could get in trouble if they caught her. “Will they punish you for helping me escape?”

  I could barely see her oversized shrug. “I don’t know if they’ll figure out it was me. But anyway, I feel like starting over. I’ll take the car and head north to Dodomah, or even farther.”

  “Good luck to you, too, then.”

  She waved again but didn’t move. I set my shoulders. The thing was, standing there in the gathering darkness, I was the opposite of turned on. The scared part was easy. I was already scared. But girls were the last thing on my mind.

  I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I wished I’d gone in for yoga or something. After a few more deep breaths, I felt calmer. I closed my eyes and remembered going back to my room at Hobart’s house and finding Teleza waiting for me. I remembered the way Teleza had unbuttoned her shirt so slowly and deliberately, one button at a time. I could see her slipping her shirt off, see her naked from the waist up, smiling at me.

  I remembered ripping my own clothes off, lying down with her on Gyasi’s bed, with the sunlight coming through the curtains and making patterns on Teleza’s skin. I recalled the feel of her fingernails stroking my sides, making me burn.

  I could feel myself getting into it. It wasn’t that difficult, really, to think about something that had felt so good. In fact once I had started thinking about it, it was difficult to think of anything else. I let myself dwell on the very pleasant details of what had happened next.

  And then I felt a tremor through my feet, a faint vibration that ran up my legs. I opened my eyes and saw a light in the distance, a bright light that seemed to be coming right at me.

  I stood frozen. I really wanted to run down the slope and jump off the tracks, but I didn’t. I made myself stand there, and at the same time I tried to think about how badly I wanted to be home, back on my own version of the Earth where my family was. I had thought about trying for our apartment, but I didn’t want to risk giving Mom heart failure. Instead I pictured the most open space I could think of that I knew really well—Ryan’s backyard. I wished really hard to be in Ryan’s backyard.

  I could see the train now, a dark shadowy shape behind the light that hurtled toward me like a comet. The bottom of the train engine curved around the raised strip of the track. It almost looked like a giant lighted zipper pull rushing along a huge zipper.

  The track under me thrummed with a vibration that raced up my body. It felt like an earthquake and a sexual climax at the same time.

  The train was so close and the light so bright that I couldn’t watch it any longer. I lifted my eyes and saw the horrified face of the engineer. She waved both her arms frantically, like she wanted me to jump down.

  God, I was crazy to do this! What had I been thinking? I just wanted to go home, and now I was going to die. I twisted to one side and shut my eyes.

  Nineteen

  I felt dizzy, and then suddenly it felt like I was falling.

  I opened my eyes and saw treetops rushing past. I was falling! Before I could figure out where I was, I landed feet first in a pool of water.

  I must have landed in the creek somehow. Water splashed everywhere, and my feet hit bottom quickly and hard, followed by the rest of me. I sat stunned for a second, holding my breath, and not seeing much but bubbles and churning water and my own knees. I pushed myself up to gasp for air and splashed even more.

  I couldn’t be in the creek. The water felt very warm, hot really. I was glad I didn’t need to take a leak.

  “Shit!” someone yelled in English.

  I stood up, staggering, and found myself staring down at Ryan and Allie. Ryan had his arm around Allie, who wore a pink bikini. I couldn’t tell if Ryan had anything on until he stood up and I saw his swim suit.

  “Jason!” Ryan shouted.

  I felt a little like I’d been through the spin cycle on Mom’s washer. On top of it all, what had been open lawn now had a deck with lights, benches, and a five-person hot tub. “When did your folks put in a hot tub?” was all I could think of to say. I didn’t want to comment on how hot Allie looked in a bikini.

  Ryan threw his arms around me and slapped me on the back. “You’re alive!”

  I was alive but shivering. It was December in Maryland, and I was dripping wet.

  Ryan let go, but he kept grinning. “You made it back!”

  I nodded and glanced around at his backyard. The swing set his little brother still used stood next to the azalea bushes his mother had planted. The row of pine trees that blocked the neighbors from view gave off a familiar scent.

  Ryan gave me his beach towel while Allie went inside to tell Ryan’s parents I had dropped from the sky into their hot tub.

  “Do your folks know about Makoro?” I asked, clutching the towel around me.

  Ryan wrapped himself in the damp towel Allie had used before she went inside. “I told them, but I don’t think they believed it.” He grinned. “Not like the suits. They believed it.”

  “What suits?”

  He tugged a corner of the towel loose and rubbed his wet hair. “A few days after the accident, some guys in dark suits showed up and started asking a lot of questions. They had badges from some government agency no one had ever heard of, and they never smiled.”

  “It sounds like Person of Interest.”

  He nodded. “I think it kind of is. They took Mr. Walters away for a few days, and then they let him go.”

  “You told them about Walters?”

  Ryan looked a little guilty. “Dude, you vanished. That flaky driver’s ed teacher swore you had disappeared before the crash, and the forensics guys backed him up—no human remains. It w
as in the news once, and then suddenly no one talked about it anymore.”

  I had almost forgotten about Mr. Aiyuku. “So Mr. Aiyuku lived through the accident?”

  “Yeah, but right after he got out of the hospital they deported him.” Ryan’s guilty expression changed to a pensive frown. “I’m not sure if that was the suits’ doing or not that he was deported, but it turned out he had lied to get into the U.S. His name wasn’t really Aiyuku, he was from the Netherlands, not Rwanda, and he had a record.”

  That explained the odd accent.

  The back door opened, and Ryan’s mother stood there staring. “Jason Miller,” she said after a long moment, “get in here before you freeze to death!”

  We trooped inside. Allie was wearing a fluffy, too-big-for-her white bathrobe over her wet bikini, and Ryan’s dad was on the phone.

  He held the phone out to me. “Someone would like to talk to you, Jason.”

  I knew who it had to be.

  “Jason?” Mom’s voice said, cracking. “Jason, are you there?”

  “Yeah, Mom,” I said. For some reason, I seemed to have something caught in my throat. “It’s me. I’m back.”

  I could hear her crying. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine, Mom.”

  I heard Lorrie’s voice in the background. “Is he okay? Can I talk to him?”

  There were a couple of sobs, and then Lorrie’s voice said, “Jason?”

  “Hi, Squirt.”

  She laughed. “Mom’s crying too much to talk. I’m glad you’re back, Jason.”

  My eyes were welling up. I swallowed. “I’m glad I’m back, too.”

  “I’ll drive you home,” Ryan’s dad said. “Tell your mom you’ll be there in half an hour.”

  I relayed the message, and Lorrie told Mom.

  After I hung up, Ryan’s mom told Ryan to find me some dry clothes and sent us both upstairs to change. The shirt Ryan gave me was okay, but I could tell from looking at them the pants were too going to be too short, and the only shoes he had that fit me were bedroom slippers.

  “Dude,” Ryan said when I had stripped off the Makoron shirt, “you been working out?”

  “There wasn’t a whole lot else to do,” I said. “They never let me go out.”

  A look of intense curiosity spread over his face, but he didn’t say anything.

  “The only recreation I got was lifting weights and having sex,” I said as casually as I could.

  He snorted and laughed at the same time. “Really? You’re not making that up, are you?”

  I shook my head. “Five times, five girls.”

  “Dude!” Curiosity changed to astonishment. “Awesome!”

  “Some of it was,” I said. And some of it wasn’t, but I didn’t want to go into that just then. Still, it felt great to have a guy my own age to talk to about girls and sex. I hadn’t realized how much I had missed that until that moment.

  And then his dad called out for us to come downstairs, and I didn’t get to ask Ryan about him and Allie.

  I felt a little silly getting into his dad’s Lexus looking like I was wearing a nerd costume for Halloween. I even clutched a grocery bag full of wet Makoron clothes like a trick-or-treat bag. On the other hand, it was great not to worry about getting snatched.

  And then right after we parked in front of the Westmoreland Apartments, two guys in dark gray suits jumped out of an SUV with smoked windows.

  “Jason Miller?” the taller one said to me.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Come with us, please.”

  AT least they let me see Mom and Lorrie first. Mom wanted to come with us, but they wouldn’t let her. Another guy in a more expensive suit showed up and waved a paper at her and quoted the PATRIOT Act. Mom was shouting when they took me away, but at least she just looked angry instead of sad.

  They took me somewhere in Virginia; I’m not sure where. I spent most of the next day talking into a video recorder about everything that had happened in Makoro—almost everything. I didn’t tell them everything about me and Teleza and her sisters. It was none of their business.

  They were definitely interested in Makoro—they even kept the Makoron clothes—but mostly they wanted to hear about how I got back. It seemed they had figured out the pattern of guys disappearing—they had even talked to a few guys who made a full Turn and seen Makoro for a few seconds. But they hadn’t ever found any guys who had spent time there and then come back, except me and Mr. Walters. They hadn’t realized Walters had been to Makoro until Ryan had told them.

  I couldn’t tell for sure, but it seemed to me they were looking for a way to use teleporting through Makoro as a weapon, or maybe a way to spy on people. It struck me as a risky thing to do. It would have to be a guy who went, and once a guy was in Makoro, he was no longer in charge of anything.

  Finally, they let me go, but they told me they didn’t want me to tell anyone about Makoro who didn’t already know about it. They even concocted a story for me, about how I’d been thrown from the driver’s ed car, wandered away in a daze, and accidentally hitchhiked to Pennsylvania where I’d lapsed into a coma and spent months in a hospital as a John Doe.

  It was a crazy story, but I knew I’d be happier telling it than telling the truth.

  And then finally, they let me go home.

  I SPENT the first day and a half eating, sleeping, and listening to jazz in my room. My iPod was gone, but fortunately, I had lot of stuff on CDs. After I put them into chronological order, I played one disc after the other until I got up to Coltrane. I felt a lot better by then, and I decided I needed to come up for air, so I went out to the kitchen to talk to Mom.

  She didn’t ask me what had happened—not about the coma story or anything. Instead she focused on school. “There are only twelve days until the end of the semester, Jason, so I think it’s just as well if you wait and go back to school after winter break.”

  “Okay.” She seemed deliberately cheerful, which surprised me. “Don’t you want to know what really happened to me?”

  A flash of pain crossed her face. “Only if you need to tell me about it.”

  I got it. She thought I’d been abused or tortured or something, and she was afraid to hear about it. So I ignored the orders of the Super Secret Government Agency, sat her down at the kitchen table, and told her about Makoro, and about making the Turn.

  Her eyes got big, and I could see she had a hard time believing it, but she never said anything to contradict me. I didn’t tell her about me and Teleza and what it took to restore haru, but I did tell her what almost happened with Dorscha and the Kabarega women.

  Mom glanced into the living room where Lorrie was lying on the floor watching TV. I could hear a newscaster relating an account of my miraculous appearance after I had come out of the coma and told the doctors in Pennsylvania who I was. “Don’t tell Lorrie about this,” Mom said. “Not until she’s older.”

  “I won’t.”

  Her hand grasped mine. “I was so afraid I’d never see you again.”

  I nodded. “I was afraid, too.”

  She started to talk about how I’d need to go to summer school, and how many credits I had to make up.

  I figured I had twelve days to think about that, so I cleared my throat. “I think I’ll go for a walk now.”

  Her forehead crinkled. “A walk?”

  “Yeah.” I hadn’t been out alone since I had been back. “Just around the neighborhood.” I wanted to walk outside and know that no one was going to grab me off the street. I wanted to be an inconspicuous bystander and not a treasured possession to be hidden away. And I needed to see Mr. Walters.

  Mom hesitated. Her hand clutched mine again, and then she let go. She picked up her knitting basket. “All right, but don’t be too late.”

  I noticed, as I promised her that I’d be home by 9:00, that she was still working on the same yellow sweater.

  I remembered the way to Walters’ house with no trouble. Ruveka opened the door to
my knock.

  “Will you tell your father I’m here, please?” I said in Neluan.

  Her surprise showed on her face, but she nodded and held the door open.

  I stepped inside. Same Ikea-looking sofa and chairs. Same prints on the walls.

  “Ruveka, who—” Mr. Walters stopped in the doorway from the kitchen.

  “He’s here to see you, Daida,” Ruveka said in Neluan. She slipped past him into the kitchen and I heard water running, like she had turned on the faucet.

  Mr. Walters shut the door very carefully and then turned to face me. “Sit down, Mr. Miller.”

  I sat on one of the chairs.

  Walters seemed reluctant to come to the point. He stood by the door for a moment, and then he crossed the room and sat on the sofa. “I’m happy to see you again.”

  “I’m glad to be back,” I said in Neluan.

  He shifted to the edge of the sofa, his eyes locked on me. “You were in Dodomah?” he said in the same language.

  I shook my head. “Egume.”

  His expression went neutral, like he wasn’t sure if that was good news or not. “Did you ever hear what happened to Bejida?”

  I nodded. “She died.”

  His shoulders dropped, and he hung his head. I thought for a moment he was going to cry. “I—I never dared hope too much. The mob sounded very angry.”

  “She refused to share you.”

  He looked away. “It’s ironic. If I tried to have ten wives here, they’d lock me up. And yet on Makoro it’s monogamy that’s seen as criminal.”

  To me, the real irony was that the one other guy in the world who spoke Neluan had never experienced Makoro the way the rest of the keesai did. Bejida Urbi Siti had sheltered him from that. “It’s a different world.”

  “Yes.” He looked me up and down like he expected to see physical evidence of my adventures. “How did you get back?”

  I told him about the maglev tracks.

  He shook his head just like Marjani had. “You’re nuts.”

  “I’m here, aren’t I?”

  A small grin started. “I suppose so.” He ran one hand through his hair. I noticed it was getting thinner, and I noticed he had stopped wearing his wedding ring. “At least now I can stop wondering if I should try to go back to Dodomah.”