by Ellen Potter
“Owen!” Nima spotted me even as he toiled away. He smiled, then looked confused, although his hands never stopped working. “Why you not in school?”
The other people in line looked at me too.
“I got out early,” I told him. Not a lie really. My eyes anxiously flitted to the dumplings that he had just pulled out of the steamer with a spider spatula. Nima noticed—he noticed everything—and he plunked a half dozen of the dumplings on a paper plate, squeezed out some dipping sauce from a squeeze bottle into a little paper cup and handed them to me. This produced some grumbling from the line of people, and one of them actually walked away.
“No worry, no worry,” Nima assured the rest of the people in line, smiling in his good-natured way. “I work fast. Not wait long time.” His small hands worked even faster. At any other time I would have felt very guilty. But today I didn’t care. I sat on the steps of the museum and devoured the dumplings in minutes. I was still hungry afterward, but I felt better.
Gradually, the lunch rush dwindled and then stopped altogether. Nima came over and sat beside me on the steps. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket, shook one out, and lit it. I probably shouldn’t mention that he smokes because it gives a bad impression of him, but he’s trying to quit and anyway, it’s his business.
“So crazy at lunchtime!” he said after blowing out some smoke and glancing at me with his bright, dark eyes. “I need two more hands, I’m thinking. But I can’t afford to pay two more hands. So here’s my plan: I make momos with my feet. I have nice, long toes. Wiggly nice. I keep them clean. Not even hairy. Smooth as Pema’s cheek. The cheek up top, I mean. What do you think?” He kept a perfectly serious face. It took me months before I could tell when he was joking. When I first met him, I just thought he was a little insane.
“I think the Board of Health would take away your cart,” I said dryly.
I was in no mood for jokes.
Nima took another drag from his cigarette and shook his head solemnly.
“Probably right, probably right.”
We were quiet for a while, but he kept stealing glances over at me. It made me feel a little squirmy. There’s a lot Nima doesn’t know about me, and in quiet moments I feel like he’s trying to figure me out.
“I was heading down to a demolition site,” I told him, just to end the quiet moment. “A big one. Lots of great junk there. I’m looking for one more thing in order to get Nemesis working the way I need her to.”
“Jeremy is going to help you?” he asked.
“She’s in school,” I said, then remembered I had said that school got out early, sort of. He didn’t let on that he’d caught me at my lie. He just nodded thoughtfully and took another drag from his cigarette. By the way, I have never seen Nima eat. I know he must, but I’ve never seen it. The only thing I know for sure about his eating habits is that he doesn’t eat shrimp. He told me that once. “Too many shrimp have to die in order to fill just one belly.” That’s true, of course. But he doesn’t know what he’s missing.
A customer came up to his cart, so he darted away for a few moments. While he was gone, I watched a woman place a rubber mat down on the sidewalk in front of the museum. On the mat she placed a portable CD player. She was wearing a long dress with every conceivable color swirling though it. Looped around her neck was a long yellow scarf. She pressed a button on the CD player and some fast, whiny music started to blare. Spreading her arms wide, she began to spin in a circle, the way little kids do sometimes. It looked totally ridiculous. She was clearly a nut job. Still, I couldn’t take my eyes off her. The colors on her dress melted together as she spun, faster and faster. The air around her seemed to change, as though her edges were bleeding into their molecules. If she spins much faster, I thought, she’ll break apart and disappear.
“She come here every day and dance like that,” Nima said as he sat back down beside me.
“I thought she was just a crazy person,” I said.
“Oh, yes, she very crazy person.” He smiled as though he approved. “But she always look happy. So . . . what more she need?”
I shrugged. “I guess nothing, if she’s happy.”
“Oh no, no.” Nima laughed. “Not she.” He nodded toward the woman, who was now beginning to slow down. “I mean Nemesis. What more she need in order to work better?”
“A certain kind of amplifier. I have a receiver, but I have to boost the signal to make sure it comes in strong enough. What I’m trying to do is very complicated. No one has ever done it before. At least, they didn’t know they were doing it, so it amounts to the same thing.” I felt a rush of excitement as I spoke about Nemesis. I had only ever spoken about her like this to Jeremy.
“I don’t understand,” Nima said, tapping out another cigarette from his pack. “How the other people not know what they do when they build something like a Nemesis?”
“Because they didn’t build it. It was something that happened accidentally.”
Nima took a drag on his cigarette and nodded. Most people would have pried at that point, but not Nima. He understood about people’s secrets.
But today, for some reason, I wanted to tell him. Not everything. Not yet. Just a little bit.
“That’s how I first got the idea for Nemesis, actually. There’s this show on TV called Skeptical Minds, where scientists investigate supernatural stuff, like ghost sightings and UFOs. Nine times out of ten they prove that the story was all nonsense. Well, I had the show on, but I wasn’t paying that much attention when all of a sudden something caught my eye. One of the places where ghosts had been spotted was The Black Baron Pub.”
“This the same pub right next to our apartment building?”
“The very same. It turns out the guy who owns the pub had a wireless surveillance camera in there that kept capturing these weird, fuzzy images of people milling around while the place was closed on Sunday. But there was no sign of break-ins, and nothing was ever missing. He said that when he bought the place three years ago, he had heard some stories about the building being haunted, but he thought it was a lot of nonsense. Now he was beginning to think it was true. So these scientists tested his story right on TV. They checked his surveillance camera and receiver to make sure it wasn’t rigged, and they hid in a backroom on a Sunday night, watching. They didn’t see a thing. But when they checked the surveillance camera recording in the morning, there were those fuzzy-looking people, milling around. You couldn’t make out faces or clothes or anything, but they were definitely people. You could only see them for a few minutes, and when they were gone, the place looked completely empty again. It totally stumped the scientists. It almost stumped me too. I mean, it really seemed like this guy had ghosts in his pub.”
“Ah.” Nima nodded. I waited for him to scoff at the notion. Or at least make a joke. He didn’t. He just listened, looking down at the spot between his black sneakers, frowning in concentration.
“You don’t really believe in ghosts, do you?” I asked him.
“Oh, sure, sure. Unhappy spirit. Tibetans call such kind of thing Hungry Ghost. It is very unfortunate to be a Hungry Ghost.”
Once in a while it was disappointing to hear Nima’s beliefs.
“Of course the guy didn’t actually have ghosts in his pub,” I said. “There are no such things as ghosts. When people die, they are just gone.”
Nima looked at me but said nothing. No, not looked at me. He watched me. His cigarette drooped between his narrow, brown fingers, forgotten for a few moments. He was thinking, not about the TV show, I was pretty sure, but about me. It made me uncomfortable, and he seemed to realize it suddenly. He took a puff on his cigarette and nodded, his eyes averted. I went on.
“Like I said, I was stumped at first. But they replayed those surveillance recordings several times as they were interviewing the pub owner, and that was when I noticed something strange. In the recordings, you could see out one of the windows to the opposite side of the street, where Fuji Towers is. You know h
ow there is that twenty-four-hour supermarket on the ground floor of Fuji Towers? The one with the giant tomato sign?”
“Sure, sure.”
“Well, when you saw the ghost figures in the surveillance recording, the supermarket wasn’t there. All you could see was scaffolding and the outline of the giant tomato-shaped sign. The supermarket was being built. But when the ghost figures went away and it was just a dark, empty pub again, you could see the supermarket in the background, totally built and lit up, with people coming in and out.”
Nima shook his head. “Something wrong with the videotapes?”
“There were no tapes. They were digital recordings. The scientists checked out all the equipment, and there were no problems.”
“So, how can be?” Nima asked.
“That’s what I wondered. I asked Mom about when the supermarket was built, and she said it had been built two years ago. So, here’s where things get real interesting. Have you ever taken a really good look at Fuji Towers? Have you ever looked at its roof?”
“It a funny shape,” Nima said, making a scooping motion with his hand.
“Exactly. It’s shaped like a giant parabolic dish, like a satellite dish. And it’s steel, which makes it a perfect reflector of radio waves. It’s like an accidental radio telescope. And it’s facing The Black Baron Pub. What if, I wondered, the radio waves from The Black Baron Pub’s surveillance camera hit the Fuji Tower’s roof, were reflected off into space, where a star reflected them right back, and the camera’s receiver captured them again? Since those images might have originally been caught on the surveillance camera when the pub was open, you would see people walking around. That made perfect sense. And because the reflected signal is weak, the people would look all fuzzy and you’d only be able to see them for a few minutes at a time. That also made perfect sense. What didn’t make perfect sense was this: in order for a radio wave to come back to earth two years after it’s been sent off into space, it has to bounce off a star that’s only one light-year away. But the closest known star system, Alpha Centauri, is about four light years away. So I started doing research, and I found something interesting. Some astronomers believe that there is this red dwarf star which rotates around our sun. They call it Nemesis, and they believe it’s only about one light-year away from earth. That’s incredibly close. No one knows where this star is located exactly, but I have a hunch that the roof of Fuji Towers is pointed directly at it, and The Black Baron Pub directly faces the roof of Fuji Towers. That’s why those images from the past came through on the surveillance camera.” I paused. Here was the beauty part.
“Our apartment building faces the roof of the Fuji Towers too.”
Nima nodded. He was trying not to look confused.
“The thing is, I want . . . I need to see a particular thing that happened in the past,” I explained to him. “Something that happened almost two years ago.”
“At Black Baron Pub?” he asked, still confused.
“No, no. Somewhere else.”
“So your machine Nemesis,” Nima said slowly, “she will show a moment that have already passed?”
“With the help of the Fuji Towers roof, yes.”
There was a pause during which I waited, not breathing, for him to ask the question that I desperately didn’t want him to ask:
What was that moment?
A slow smile twisted up one side of his mouth.
“What?” I asked nervously.
“Maybe Nemesis can show me at Pema’s cousin’s house last week, looking most depressed. Looking like so.” He cupped his chin in his hand and looked most depressed.
I smiled. “And we’ll show it to Pema.”
“And she will weep with happiness.”
7
After I left Nima, I was in a much better mood. My stomach had lost that empty feeling, and the sound of Mr. Boscana’s voice was no longer ringing in my ears. I decided to go to visit the demolition site after all. It was a big one. You could tell it was a brand new site because the plywood fence around it was still a pale yellowish color and there were no posters taped to it or things scrawled on it. I walked around it once, scoping it out casually. Then I walked to the end of the block, turned around, and walked by it again slowly, this time letting my hand drag along the wooden fence. I put pressure on the boards at every seam to see if there was any give. There wasn’t. In a way I was relieved. I’d never scavenged without Jeremy before. I wasn’t entirely sure I had the guts to do it alone.
Just as I had satisfied myself that that there was no way in and had passed by the final board, I noticed something off to my right. Next to the demolition site was a community garden with a six-foot chain-link fence around it. The high wooden slabs of the demolition fence butted up against the chain-link fence, all except for one spot toward the back. The wooden fence hadn’t quite been long enough to reach the length of the site, and since there was already a chain-link fence right there, they hadn’t bothered to close off the foot-wide section.
I hesitated. It would mean scaling the chain-link fence, then trying to squeeze through the opening. I had images of myself being wedged between the wooden board and the adjacent building and of firefighters arriving to pry me free. Or worse, if someone called 911 and Mom found out about it. I started to walk past, then stopped again, stared at the opening. I could fit. I’d have to suck in my stomach and do some wiggling, but I was fairly sure I could get in there. What if there was an amplifier just sitting there? I had to try. I would be ashamed of myself if I didn’t.
I opened the gate to the community garden and walked in. There wasn’t much of anything growing at this time of year, just some odds-and-ends flowers and weeds. There was garbage too, probably tossed into it from the tenement building next door. People can be such pigs when they think no one’s looking.
I walked to the back of the garden, and I took one quick look around. No one. Then I glanced up at the tenement building, but the way the sun was hitting its side, I couldn’t make out much inside the windows. I took a deep breath and started to climb. As you might have guessed, I’m not much of a climber. I made a huge racket what with the fence jangling against the post and my foot slipping once so that I yelped like a dog whose paw had been stepped on. Swinging myself over the fence was a fumbling “oof—oh, crap—ouch” production. It’s amazing that I didn’t have the entire 20th police precinct circling me by the end of it.
On the other side of the fence, I squeezed between the wooden board and the building, and let me tell you, it took some major breath-holding. There was one point where the edges of the board held me in a vise, pinching my belly and my butt so hard I thought for sure I’d have to start screaming for help. But then I had visions of Winnie the Pooh stuck in Rabbit’s hole and all his woodland friends pulling his paws to uncork him. I have no woodland friends. The best I could hope for was a couple of snickering pedestrians poking at me with Zabar’s baguettes. I sucked in my breath harder, wiggled, and, finally, I was through.
The place was amazing! A field of rubble, studded with treasure: microwaves, sink tops, an exercise bike, several floor lamps, a shower stall, a bunch of computers, five dining room chairs, a dog kennel, three air conditioners, four vacuum cleaners, a mountain bike in mint condition except for a flat front tire, a beautiful spill of wires and cables, and so much more. It took my breath away. Fully half of one of the tenements still stood. It looked like it had been chopped in two by a giant’s ax, and the giant had smashed the front half to bits but left the back half alone. You could see right into the ruined rooms, with curtains still hanging, televisions still sitting on their stands, but everything dark and gloomy. All that talk of ghosts with Nima now gave me the heebie-jeebies. I could imagine one of those fuzzy figures in The Black Baron Pub recording walking through those rooms, pausing to pull aside the filthy, tattered curtains, then settling on a broken chair. It made me goose pimply, so I told myself I was an idiot, opened my backpack, pulled out my tools, and got down to work.
>
Before a half hour was up, I had managed to fill my backpack. I even found a silver ice-skate charm for Jeremy, who happened to be a stellar ice skater, and a set of brand-new ratchets for myself. Still, nowhere in that mess of rubble was an amplifier. I left my heavy backpack on the ground and moved closer to the half-standing tenement. That was where there were some thicker piles of brick and mortar chunks. Crouching low, I pushed away rubble to inspect what was underneath.
That was when I heard the loud plink-plinking noise. It sounded like it was coming from an enormous wind chime. I froze where I was, kneeling on a knoll of bricks, listening. The sound came again, and this time I was fairly certain it was from inside the still-standing, sliced-in-half tenement.
My instinct was to make a run for it, but I had left my backpack several yards away, in the opposite direction of the hole in the fence. It would take me too long to scramble over the wreckage, retrieve my backpack, then squeeze myself out through the fence again. I estimated that it was better to hunker down and wait to see what was coming. Hopefully, the person wouldn’t notice me amidst the piles of debris. Then my mind began to stray back to the image of the ghost passing through the rooms.
The plink-plinking came again, louder this time, and I tell you, I nearly fainted from fear. The fact that I didn’t makes me think that it must be amazingly difficult to faint from fear.
I saw no figure of ghostly light. Instead, a figure of darkness appeared within the depths of the ruined tenement’s third floor. It was black and bent, a giant bug with massive feelers stretched out in all directions. Mom had once been to Puerto Rico and she told me that she had seen cockroaches the size of kittens. They had nothing on this thing. It shuffled along, disappearing behind the exposed beams, keeping in the shadows, plinking as it moved.
I couldn’t run now even if I wanted to. I was paralyzed with terror.
Then I saw the others.
There were two more of these bug things, creeping along in the shadows, their feelers extended. It was too much for me. I couldn’t hunker any more. I bolted back to my knapsack, snatched it up, and ran, not caring that my backpack was plinking like mad.
