Static Mayhem

by Edward Aubry

  He looked back at the car. This would be a great moment to ask the pixie how she had found the K-Mart. If he could figure out how to talk to her without understanding less than when he started, he would do that. He hoped that she would be his scout, but it was now clear that whatever she had to offer would be on her own whimsical terms, or not at all. That game held no appeal for him. He was not about to spend any more time trying to recover from their bizarre exchange in the car. He couldn't afford it. He knew that goading her into using her real voice had hurt her feelings, but he also knew that he couldn't avoid that kind of problem until he could figure out how to communicate around her indirectness. He also didn't enjoy the continued suspicion that she was imaginary. In either case, though, he would have no choice but to make it on his own. He stared at the car for a few more seconds. Being on his own held little appeal.

  He put the compass back in the knapsack, pulled out a granola bar, unwrapped it, and put the empty wrapper back in the bag. Like many other behaviors, his aversion to littering gave him focus in an unfocused environment. He ate with slow care, taking the time to taste the sweet, the chewy, the crunchy. His entire mouth rejoiced at the pleasure of a chocolate chip as it melted, dissolved on his tongue, smeared itself across his taste buds, and infused them with the unique bittersweet flavor that defines the very idea of chocolate. He expected this moment to be the last pure sensual opportunity he would have until he made it to Chicago, and he refused to waste it. There would be more granola bars, but by the time he ate the next one, he would be tired and filthy, and it would not be the same.

  At last, he flicked the last bit of oat out from between his teeth with his tongue. It took several tries, and he relished the relief and the freedom of success. He called back to the car. "This is it! I'm going!" He waited. Nothing happened. "Right now!" he added. Still nothing. He turned and started to walk, trying not to appear reluctant, or to be moving too slowly. Just as he reached the edge of the forest, a green sparkly streak shot over his shoulder and out of sight into the trees. The streak hung in midair, faded to yellow, then rained out as sparks and vanished. He nodded. "All right, then," he said. "Here we go."

  His walk began pleasantly enough. The terrain was inviting and even. It gave the impression of not being a real forest at all, but a set or a sound stage dressed up to look like nature but without any of the pesky chaos. The ground was dry, but soft. His sneakers, which he had assumed would become a liability, now felt like the wisest choice. The weather was perfect, unusually dry for mid-August, and the forest canopy provided excellent shade. He could hear wind above the trees. What little breeze filtered through to him carried the improbable scent of fresh-mown grass, plus something floral. Every now and then, he caught sight of a pale glow in the distance ahead. Its color varied and reassured him that he still had company.

  He wore a watch, which he still believed was set to something close to the correct time, but resisted looking at it. From time to time, he took out the compass to check it and see if it had anything new to tell him. So far, all it did was point behind him, presumably at the Rolls. He took comfort in the optimistic fantasy that he was already making good time, at a rate of four, maybe five miles per hour. For the first time, he felt that the possibility of his mad quest succeeding was not remote. The very earth itself was rolling out a carpet for him and offering gracious bows as he passed. Unbridled cheerfulness was not in his nature, however, and the more positive his thoughts became, the more he admonished himself for having them. Perhaps, he reminded himself, the world was luring him. Perhaps it was granting him absurd hope and an unwarranted presumption of security. The incredible events of the last couple of days drove him to reexamine the new state of the world. It was starting to feel less like something that had happened and more like something that had been done. A seed germinated in the dark places of his mind. It began growing into a suspicion

  At last, he came to the inevitable hill.

  At first, it was a slight but noticeable incline, but it didn't take him long to figure out that the honeymoon was over. The ground became not only steeper, but more textured. He started to see more rocks, and it got harder to walk around them. At some point, he didn't notice when, he needed to climb up them to keep moving. As he ascended, he tried to estimate the width of the hill and how far he would have to go to get around it. It was impossible to tell just by looking left and right. At the leading edge of fatigue (which arrived far too soon), he stopped and sat down on a rock. Should he keep going or change course? As he pondered, he ate a beef jerky and drank the entire contents of one bottle of water. Only after finishing it did he realize how distracted he had become, that he hadn't even thought of conserving water. Having pulled himself out of this state, he remembered another of his potential resources. He stood, scanned in every direction for movement, and batted away the horrible impression of how stupid he was about to sound (even if only to himself). "Glimmer!"

  No response. Probably still pissed, he thought, and ripples of regret spread from his gut. "Nice work," he said in a soft voice. "First remotely viable companion you find, and how long did it take you? Bad enough to tell her she's not real. Now she can't even trust you." This bothered him. He wanted her to trust him. He wanted even more to trust her. But he wasn't there yet. He looked around again, this time with more care, squinting, looking for anything not forest colored. A flash of blue presented itself a short way further up the hill. He started for it, then stopped and looked with a more critical eye. It didn't move. "Shit." Still, it was blue. He climbed for it and was glad he did. Hanging on a twig was a tiny blue jacket, pseudo-military style. He plucked it off and inspected the back. No wing slits. "Damn, but that's weird."

  So up it was. If she would speak to him, he would ask her to scout ahead, though it appeared that she was already doing so. He took out the compass for a second opinion, and for the first time it encouraged him to go forward. "Really?" he asked it. "There's something up there?" He was sold. He climbed with new energy.

  At the top of the hill, the world shifted again. The incline ended in a grassy plateau, maybe fifty feet wide, and on the other side, it descended to a vast, sprawling plain. Like the crest where he stood, this plain was covered with grass. He looked down. The grass was suburban-lawn quality: lush, thick, deep green, with nary a clover or dandelion to be found. This was a lawn to be coveted. Harrison's immediate (and conservative) estimate of its size placed it at hundreds of square miles. At the far edge of his vision, the plain appeared to terminate in brush or maybe more forest, though it was much too far away to tell. At the bottom of the hill, and a considerable distance off, lay a baseball diamond.

  It was absolutely beautiful.

  It was utterly terrifying.

  He took off his shoes.

  Down the hill he went. Accepting the world's continuing invitation and hospitality, he made for the only observable contour in the land, and as he approached it, he pulled out the compass and confirmed that it counted as civilization. Details became clearer as he got closer. In addition to the fence behind home plate, the benches in place of dugouts, and the bases themselves, he discovered an artifact, something that was without question man-made. A pixie was standing on it, trying to make it work. He observed that while she had lost the little hat, the jacket, and the gloves, she still wore the blouse and skirt. For which he was grateful. Traveling with a pixie created enough issues. Traveling with a naked pixie would be overload.

  "Hey," he said to her.

  "Hey," she replied. "Give me a hand with this, would you? My hands are too small to work the button."

  He stepped up and placed his thumb squarely on the smooth, round knob. A double column of water shot forth, an arching, textured stream. Glimmer hovered above it, dipped her face into it several times, then sighed with satisfaction.

  "Ah! That hits the spot."

  Harrison drank as well, and indeed it did hit the spot. The water was cold and had a mild, metallic aftertaste, which matched the taste he
had always complained about in high school. Drinking triggered a nostalgia to which he had thought himself immune. He gulped, relishing the bitter flavor of his childhood.

  "So," he said, filling his empty bottle from the drinking fountain, "now where to?"

  She silently pointed. Leading away from the ball field, too narrow for him to have recognized it from the hilltop, lay a dirt path. It led straight to the overgrowth on the horizon. "Somebody wants you to go that way," she said.

  Don't say it like that, he thought, but he opted for confidence instead of cowardice. "Yup," he said, "and that somebody is me." Even as he said it, he shoved away the horrible sense of being manipulated.

  * * *

  The path eventually led into the brush, at which point it became a gravel path, and after that, a paved walkway. The walkway led to a driveway, which led to half a house.

  They stood outside what once must have been a mansion. One side of it appeared to be sliced clean off. Half-rooms containing partial furniture were visible.

  Propriety drove Harrison to the front door. He rang the bell. It was more than just habit. He didn't want to risk or presume anything. Nevertheless, when no one answered, he tried the front door. It was unlocked. This no longer surprised him. Nothing was locked anymore.

  "Is this your house now?" Glimmer asked. "Salvage again?"

  Harrison shook his head. "Homestead Act," he said.

  The pantry was well-stocked with nonperishable food items. The electric and water still worked. He made himself a spaghetti dinner and devoured it. They found a giant television and an admirable library of movies. The home entertainment center and the collection of DVDs established to his satisfaction that this house was from his own time, or close to it. He made Glimmer watch The Shawshank Redemption, and they talked about it until after midnight.

  On his room-to-room quest for the most comfortable bed (before he settled on the gorgeous king-sized job in the master bedroom), he voiced a concern just to see how it would sound. It came across as stark, boding ill, something beyond pessimism, but less than wisdom. Intuition? He had never been a player of hunches, never felt he had that gift. But, he admitted, at least until tomorrow he would be living in half a mansion with a pixie. Whatever worldly theories or philosophies had previously ruled his world were debunked now. If it were intuition, and if it meant anything, he would have to take it seriously.

  "This should be harder."

  Glimmer kissed him on the cheek. Tiny electric shock. "It will be," she whispered. "Go to sleep."

  Chapter Five

  Artifacts and Gadgets

  It did get harder. The next night, they slept in a log cabin. The night after that, in a shanty made from welded, corrugated tin roofing. The night after that, they slept under the stars and took turns at watch.

  Harrison watched Glimmer sleep. He wore his high-tech sunglasses and had them set for night vision, secretly glad for the opportunity to experiment with them under this particular circumstance. Being able to see her through electronic eyes gave him reason to believe that she might be real. He might hallucinate her on his own, but the machine wouldn't lie to him. The obvious possibility that he could also hallucinate whatever he saw through the glasses did not dissuade him. What he saw was too fascinating to reject.

  Glimmer slept curled on a tiny bed of leaves she had spread across the ground. Without the aid of the glasses, Harrison saw her for what she appeared to be. She radiated a glow that was too faint to be seen in broad daylight, but which shone like a beacon at night. Her wings fluttered gracefully behind her each time she exhaled. She was unearthly and wondrous and impossible. The effect was only barely diluted by the presence of pink satin pajamas with a stylized B embroidered on the jacket pocket.

  With the glasses on, however, Harrison saw a different Glimmer. Her glow, or aura, or whatever it was, did not give off any heat and was invisible in infrared. So were her wings. When he looked at her through objective, clinical, machine eyes, he couldn't tell what she was at all. He saw a small, human-shaped object resting on the leaves, warmer than the ambient temperature. Beyond that, the glasses showed him nothing spectacular. He cycled through settings and found that she did show a heartbeat, but it was random, not the expected regular pulse.

  Either she was a hallucination, and his mental illness was just not refined enough to carry the illusion through, or she was so alien that she confounded any mundane attempt to inspect her. He had no idea which option he preferred to be true.

  Frustration turned Harrison from the glasses to his other source of information and hope-the radio. In his daily checks, nothing but static ever came out of it. He was now past the point where he would consider calling off his expedition, but its purpose grew more questionable with each day of radio silence.

  He flipped the switch again. His headphones responded with a loud Cha-ching!

  Afraid something had gone terribly wrong, he almost pulled them off his head, but in less time than it took for his hand to twitch, the sound effects continued. He soon recognized the Pink Floyd song, "Money."

  Claudia was back on the air.

  * * *

  Every day greeted them with a variation of their first day. They walked through huge stretches of undisturbed wilderness that were interrupted by the occasional building or other structure. Many of the buildings were intact, but some, like the house where they spent the first night, had been at least partly destroyed.

  Every evening at sundown, Harrison turned on the radio and listened to Claudia's broadcasts. The station only came in after dark. He didn't know why this was so. It was a phenomenon he had always associated with AM radio, but Claudia was broadcasting from an FM station. Granted, he shouldn't be picking her up at all, this far from Chicago, but he was so overwhelmed and relieved to have found her again that he didn't dare complain. Still, it frustrated him. He also suspected that Claudia's broadcasts were, at least sometimes, recorded. He got to know the rhythm and cadence of her speech, and too often they synched up with her speech as he remembered it from earlier shows. This troubled him. He resisted the notion that Claudia was a clever piece of fiction, however, created by someone with a sinister motive, or worse, created by a machine. More than once, he imagined the prospect that he would arrive in Chicago, only to be immediately killed or enslaved. This thought haunted him, but it did not slow him down.

  The compass proved an invaluable tool for locating man-made objects and buildings, and Harrison usually pulled it out late in the afternoon to find a secure place to sleep that night. Some days he found a place, whereas other days they slept in the wild. So far, every time they found a building designed to accommodate some level of technology, everything in it worked. He grew accustomed to this as a constant, although he kept reminding himself that the next house might be the one with no power or the next office building might have toilets that didn't flush.

  They also found more portable things. A week in, they came across the remains of a shoe store. Harrison picked out a nice pair of boots and left his sneakers tied together, hanging over a cable that led from the store to a telephone pole. Once, in the middle of an empty parking lot, he found a briefcase filled with cash. Although it had two locks on it, it opened on the first try. He didn't count it, but he took a band of twenties.

  After that, they found what Harrison supposed had been a sporting goods store. Looking for a better compass, he found one with a wrist strap so he wouldn't have to keep fumbling for it in his pocket. This compass had the same pointing preference as the ones he had been using. He now believed every compass had that preference.

  He also traded in his knapsack for a larger backpack with a metal frame. As soon as he put it on, he discovered that it had some interesting properties. The pack itself had mass, and therefore weight, but built into the material was some sort of impenetrable gravity shield. Anything placed inside the pack suddenly acquired zero weight, allowing him to fill it, but bear only the burden of the pack itself. It took him most of a day to figur
e this out, and once he did, he tested his theory by filling the pack with stones. They didn't weigh it down. Harrison could find no sign of a power source for this feature, but he did find a small circuit board concealed behind a Velcro flap. This was some sort of advanced technology, and it troubled him that he couldn't figure out how it worked. But not enough to leave it behind.

  And then there were other artifacts, also perhaps man-made, perhaps not, but not made by or from any technology that Harrison understood.

  Once, on a gravel path, he found a stone much larger and darker than its neighbors. He picked it up, planning to throw it, a simple act of ennui. It was almost as big as his hand, and when he held it, he found it to be much lighter than it looked. It felt right in his hand, somehow. Comfortable.

  "Leave it," said Glimmer.

  He turned to look at the pixie. She looked serious, which seemed uncharacteristic. "This?" he asked, holding out the stone. "Why?"

  "You won't need it," she said.

  He frowned. "It's a rock." He was about to tell her that his lack of need for it was obvious, when he noticed writing on it. He turned it over and saw that someone had etched several faint lines of text into it. Trying to clean it so he could read it, he rubbed some of the dust with his thumb and blew on it gently. A pronounced breeze tickled the back of his neck and tossed his hair up. He turned around, surprised. Glimmer flew around him.

  "Leave it," she said again.