Static Mayhem

by Edward Aubry

  "AAAUUGH!" She was gone again.

  This time he did not wait. He walked the rest of the way around the building. He did not have to search. She was on the hood of his car, pacing, and when he got there, she stopped and faced him, arms crossed. "Pick. See," she said. He shrugged again and shook his head. "Ugh! I'm a pixie, you asshole!"

  "Oh." He was starting to understand, sort of. "I can see that."

  "You called me a faerie," she reminded him and renewed her sulking.

  He could find no sensitive way to ask his next question. "There's a difference?"

  She beckoned him closer. "Faeries," she explained, in a calm voice. "Are. Ugly."

  "Ah," he said. "And pixies are …?"

  She opened her arms again, gave a slight curtsey, and said, "Beautiful?" She waited a beat. "See?"

  "Of course," he replied, and indeed, he did see. Now that he entertained the reality of her, he found her striking. Her features were soft, and her eyes were large (relatively speaking) and inviting. Her hair, which at first he had taken to be blonde, was silver, and changed color subtly as she moved, like a tiger's eye stone or polished wood. The time for denial had come and gone. Even if, as he still suspected, this was not real, he would never accomplish anything if he spent all his emotional energy fighting it. "I have questions," he said.

  "Fire away!" she said cheerfully. She sat down on the hood of his car.

  "What's with the lab coat?"

  "Oh!" She jumped back up. "Doctor Barbie!" she said, as if that explained everything. "Do you like it?" She walked up his hood toward the windshield like a model on a runway, then turned around and strutted back down to the edge. He noticed then that her feet were bare. "Check this out!" she said as she pulled a pink plastic stethoscope from under the coat. She made a show of plugging it into her ears and listening to her own chest. She inhaled with a loud hiss, then blew.

  "Where did you get it?" he asked.

  "There's a K-Mart back, um …," she pointed over Harrison's shoulder, "that way. Maybe fifty miles from here. It's underground, mostly, but the toy department's easy enough to get to." She sat down again. "I figured I should put together a wardrobe before I introduced myself. Didn't want to make a bad first impression." She was beaming.

  Harrison considered the first impression she had made and chose not to explore that. Instead, her remark had made him curious about something he hadn't thought of. "What do you normally wear?" She feigned an exaggerated look of embarrassment, as though the question were shocking or inappropriate, and it took him a few seconds to realize why. "Oh. Right. Um …" His awkwardness was not feigned.

  "Don't worry about it." She smiled again.

  He had to ask. "Why won't it work?"

  "Aaaah," she said, and leaned forward. "Now we return to the point. It won't work," she continued with an air of conspiracy, as though she were inviting him to the inner circle and that everything would now be different, "because compasses don't point north anymore."

  "They point to this convenience store?" he asked, still not quite there.

  She shook her head, and her face took on a shadowy quality. "They point," she said in a dark tone that was almost a whisper, "to civilization."

  He tried to make sense of that, but it seemed like a dodge. Like she had goaded him into asking a question to which she was not willing to give a straight answer. "Why?"

  "Don't know," she said, grinning again. "Maybe they miss it." She hopped up and fluttered to eye level. "I'm coming."

  "Coming?"

  "To Chicago, silly. I want to see it. Not to mention that you'll never make it all by yourself. Don't take this the wrong way, Harry, you're plucky and all, but we both know you're already lost."

  "I am not lost." It was a struggle not to be offended. "I know exactly where I'm going." She put her hands on her hips and stared down her tiny nose at him. He didn't buy it, either. "Well," he amended, "I know approximately where I'm going." Then he backtracked. "Wait a minute. You called me Harry."

  "Are you not a Harry?" The question seemed sincere, as if she didn't want to make the same mistake he had, identifying her as a fairy.

  "How do you know who I am?"

  "I've been stalking you."

  "How long?" he asked, somewhere between nervous and outraged.

  "The whole time." She giggled. "And you are definitely lost."

  Harrison closed his eyes tight and counted to ten out loud. When he opened them again, she was still there. He already knew she would be. "What do I call you?"

  "Glimmer!"

  "Oh, great," he moaned. "Now I know you're not real." He scrutinized her face, looking for the smirk, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It didn't. "Is Glimmer your name? Or is it some kind of job title?"

  She rolled her eyes and explained, as if to a child, "It's a pixie name, doofus."

  Chapter Four

  Departure

  The next morning Harrison was denied the opportunity to sleep late.

  "Rise and shine!"

  In his half-waking state, he could feel tiny feet on his chest. Still half-invested in his last dream, he was not yet able to distinguish the real from the imagined, and thus, when he opened his eyes, he was not exactly surprised to see the pixie, but nevertheless struggled to remember whether he believed in her.

  She looked different. In place of the lab coat, some sort of military dress uniform gave her an unexpected air of authority. After several sleepy blinks, Harrison downgraded his initial assessment to pseudo-military. She wore a blue jacket whose wide collar contrasted with her narrow skirt. A short, cylindrical hat and a pair of white gloves completed the look. The pinned-up hair exposed her pointed ears for the first time. She held a miniature clipboard and wore a bird-like metallic pin. The uniform tripped a childhood memory. It helped wake him up.

  "So you're a stewardess now?" he grumbled.

  She kicked him in the nose. It hurt, like a shock from a doorknob. "Excuse me, Mr. Troglodyte," she scolded. "I am a flight attendant."

  She hopped down to his pillow as he sat up. He rubbed his nose, then his whole face, before inspecting her feet to see what pointy plastic thing had poked (zapped?) him. She wiggled her bare toes.

  "Doesn't that outfit come with shoes?" he asked.

  She pursed her lips. "Have you ever seen Barbie shoes?"

  He tried to recall if he ever had and was amused to acknowledge that the question was not rhetorical. His sister had played with Barbies, but she was ten years older than he was, which left him far too young to notice any particulars. "No, actually, I don't believe I have."

  "Well, they're not designed for real feet."

  He toyed with the idea of debating whether her feet counted as "real" feet. Then he considered the pros and cons of teasing her for making excuses to go barefoot, but he couldn't think of a way to make it funny, or even seem important, so he let it go. Instead, as he looked more closely at her jacket, a bizarre nuance dawned on him. It so confused him that he couldn't figure why he hadn't seen it yesterday, with the lab coat. "How do you," he began, and paused, pointing over his own shoulder with a thumb, "uhh, how do you get your wings …?" He couldn't construct the rest of the question.

  She waited a couple of seconds, then replied, deadpan. "What wings?"

  He waited a bit more than a couple seconds, long enough to evaluate pressing the point. "Never mind." He sighed.

  * * *

  That morning they hit the road. Harrison's provisions consisted of beef jerky and granola bars. He also had four plastic bottles of water, which he imagined himself refilling at streams or convenient spigots along the way. He brought two flashlights, two compasses, and many maps, cramming all of these into an Adidas knapsack. He brought a Walkman radio as well, which would be tuned to the only station he knew was on the air. Batteries, like water, would be available from numerous sources, or so he planned. These preparations, and a fair amount of luck, would be sufficient to see him through his thousand-mile hike.

  He had deci
ded to begin his journey by heading north. The longest stretch of westbound road he had yet discovered was a section of Route 2, which intersected the I-91 in Greenfield, close to the Vermont border. He felt that he should give himself as much of a leg up as possible, reasoning also that the further north he encountered major rivers, the narrower they would be. The drive to Greenfield took the better part of an hour. The pixie rode along beside him.

  Harrison tried the radio and for the second day in a row found nothing. He dismissed the idea that he had hallucinated Claudia's broadcast. He was not yet ready to embrace a world where pixies turned up real and human voices on a radio were imaginary.

  "Tell me a story," Glimmer said.

  He looked at her. She was holding a dime in both hands, turning it over and rotating it like a wheel.

  "What kind of story?" he said. Grateful for the distraction, he turned off the radio.

  She shrugged. "Tell me a story that has you in it."

  He thought for a moment, trying to remember any of his favorite anecdotes, but the only story in his head right then was one he had never told before.

  "I was on my way to work one day," he began. "There wasn't much traffic because it was a Sunday morning, so I was making pretty good time. I remember feeling good about that. I wasn't the most punctual person, and I was going to be early for once. I worked at the mall, and I was supposed to be there by eleven o'clock." He considered the possibility that Glimmer did not know what a mall was. But she didn't ask, and he continued. "I stopped at a traffic light, and that's when it hit. For about a second, I felt like I was upside down. Then I saw all the cars waiting at the light in front of me, going up like smoke. Just dissolving into thin air. In a sort of wispy, swirly way. The ones further ahead were going up before the closer ones did, and I had just enough time to realize that my car was coming up real soon. I imagined getting out of it, but there was no time. Suddenly I was on the ground, no car, and I turned around to watch all the cars behind me go up like the ones in front had. The road was gone. The stoplights, the buildings, all gone. The ground was just bare dirt. Then the trees came up. I heard the roar before I saw them. They just tore straight up out of the ground in a huge wave. The tree line came right up to me in seconds. It moved past me without slowing down. I was sure I was going to be killed, but the exact spot where I was sitting didn't get a tree. Then it was over, and I was in a really, really big forest. I walked for a few hours, until I found a Laundromat. It was standing out there, all by itself, in the middle of the woods. It was shelter, I thought, and it had a bunch of unlocked snack machines, so I lived there for a while."

  He stopped. Spoken out loud for the first time, the sound of the story gave it a power and a reality for which he was not prepared. He looked at Glimmer. She gave him a curious look. It was impossible to tell if any of it resonated for her. "What did you see that day?" he asked her. He said it before he thought about it. He found in himself an urgency to know.

  She shook her head in a rapid shiver. "Not a whole lot," she said. "Big flash. Everything changed. Did you steal this car?"

  The subject change irritated him. This was the second or third time he asked her what seemed like a reasonable question, only to hear her deflect it. If she wanted him to believe in her, or trust her, she was off to a poor start. He couldn't tell if he was being baited, but he was certain that he didn't want to rise to it. "I salvaged it," he told her.

  "Hmm." She was inspecting the upholstery. "It's nice."

  "I guess." The truth was, it was nice, but he didn't expect it to stay that way for long. He had owned several cars in his life and had driven them all to scrap. After only four weeks of his ownership, this current ride already showed signs of wear.

  "But you do know," she said, "that you're driving a Rolls Royce?"

  "Oh, yes," he said through a concealed smile in spite of his sense that she was toying with him. There was no question now that he was being baited. It had not occurred to him that she would even recognize the car. It had been his private joke that he would tool around what was left of the world in a car he had only ever read about. The irony soon wore off, though. Deprived of its symbolic status, the Rolls had become merely a mode of transportation to nowhere.

  "Hmm," she said again. "Somebody just up and left the keys in it, did they?"

  "Didn't need keys." He felt like he was being interrogated, and it made him uncomfortable. She avoided his questions on the one hand and raked him over coals on the other. Not fair. Besides, he hadn't done anything wrong. Well, he had, but it wasn't wrong by any useful ethical standard. He tried to resist going on the defensive, but found himself explaining anyway. "It wasn't locked when I found it, and the ignition lock's busted." He held up his right hand as if to show her that there was no key in the ignition, but when he looked down to gauge her response, she was playing with the ashtray. He scowled and changed the subject. "Why aren't you all high and squeaky?"

  This got her attention. "I beg your pardon?"

  "Your voice," he said. "I've been thinking about it. Your vocal cords have got to be, like, microscopic, but you sound like … well, like a normal person."

  "Oh," she said, "um …" She tapped the side of her head in thought. "It's not really a 'voice.' It's kind of complicated. Here, watch." She pinched both of her lips between her thumbs and forefingers so they couldn't move. She then sang, "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," without opening her mouth. He tried to watch her do this and keep an eye on the road. The complete absence of any other traffic facilitated this. She finished her song, released her mouth, and said, "Get it?"

  "Not even a little bit." This exchange mystified him on several levels. He had finally stumbled on a question she would answer in detail, and he not only couldn't figure out what made this question different, but he didn't understand her answer. It was frustrating as hell. "Some kind of ventriloquism?"

  She shook her head. "I'm not really talking. I'm stimulating your inner ear directly, so you're hearing me, even though I'm not really making any sounds. If we had a microphone, I could show you. I only do the moving-my-lips thing because otherwise it freaks people out."

  Harrison was torn between fascination and feeling violated. "What? You're in my head? Like telepathy?"

  She rolled her eyes. "No. Like magic."

  He shivered. He had actually begun to experiment with the belief that she might be, if not real, well, at least manageable. The unlikelihood of his imagining her in the first place persuaded him on this matter. Even as a child he was never big on Santa Claus or ghosts or fairies, or any of the quasi-magical people and critters on which children often fixate. He didn't find it probable that his unconscious would invent such a critter now, even as a defense mechanism. Still, believing that was a far cry from accepting her. If, and it was a big if, she were real, he was seriously creeped out by the notion that she was somehow doing something, something with magic, to his brain.

  "Can you?" he asked.

  "Can I what?"

  "Can you talk?"

  "Oh!" she said. "Uhh, yes. Sort of."

  He waited. She climbed up on the armrest of the passenger side door and stared out the window. Soon she started to hum a tune he didn't recognize. He was trying not to sound angry or nervous while being plenty of both. Traveling with this creature certainly underscored his newfound desire to find another human being. "I meant," he said, "can you talk right now?"

  She stopped humming and turned to face him. "See, the thing is, I don't use my voice much. And I'm a little self-conscious about it."

  "I promise I won't laugh." At that moment, he would have been hard pressed to laugh at anything at all.

  The better part of a minute went by. Harrison watched the road instead of the pixie. He could not tell if she was embarrassed or being just plain stubborn. Right around the time he decided that she was not going to speak, really speak, and that he would have to drop the subject, she cleared her throat.

  "To be, or not to be," she said, and this time she
sounded precisely the way he expected her to sound: like a chipmunk. "That is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of out-" She made a choking noise and began to cough. She stopped speaking, slumped down on the seat, and hid her face in her arms.

  Harrison was dumbstruck. He felt foolish and cruel, felt that he should say something, but everything he rehearsed sounded like it would just make things worse. After too much time, he said, "I just wanted to hear what you really sound like."

  "Well," she said without looking up, and in the fuller, alto voice that she had explained was not a true voice. "I guess you got what you wanted." She climbed down to the floor and crawled under the seat. She spent the rest of the drive there.

  * * *

  Harrison got off the interstate at Greenfield. The exit led to a traffic circle, which took him to Route 2 West. He drove it all the way to the end, which was a little less than ten miles, where the road led straight into a dense cluster of trees and became unnavigable. He parked the car and took a moment to roll down all the windows. Glimmer might or might not have any intention of coming out from under the seat, but Harrison knew he didn't want to be responsible for cooking her to death in an unventilated car. Then he got out and looked westward. Like much of what he had seen of the rest of the world (or, he admitted, at least the rest of New England), what lay before him was forest. The ground, at least from here, appeared level, and he hoped it would stay that way for a good long while. He had not found anywhere to salvage a decent pair of hiking boots, and therefore wore the only pair of shoes he had, which were sneakers. As long as he didn't have to climb on rough stones or step in anything wet, he felt confident that his shoes would hold out for at least a few weeks.

  Pulling one of his dashboard compasses out of his backpack, he held it up and looked at it. It wobbled in indecision, then pointed back to his car. He wondered how far he would have to travel from the car before the compass stopped looking at it. If his luck held, he could use the device to find buildings, roads, maybe even another car or a place to spend the night. As the most likely outcome nagged him, however, he pushed it away. He couldn't know what the compass would lead him to, and he had no reason to believe it would help him.