by E. C. Myers
She blinked. “Huh? What do you want with that old thing? How do you even know about it?”
“Like I said, I'm from a parallel universe.” He retrieved his wallet and pulled out Jena's senior picture, the same one he'd shown her grandfather in 1954. He handed it to Zoe.
“Did you have Nathan Photoshop this?” she asked.
“This is real. Your double in my universe, Jena Kim, gave it to me last week.”
“Uh-huh. And she's your girlfriend?”
“She was, but we just broke up.”
“If you're trying to dump me, this is a shitty way to do it, Ephraim.” Zoe turned away.
“No, no! I'm not dumping you.” He sighed. “We were never together. Not you and me. That's what I'm trying to say. I've never seen you before today. I'm a different Ephraim.”
“That's impossible,” she said.
“‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,’” Ephraim said.
“Where'd you hear something ridiculous like that?”
“From Jena. Quoting Sherlock Holmes.”
“She sounds like a geek.”
He smiled. “Completely.” He turned and headed up the stairs.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Attic,” he called over his shoulder.
“Ooh, we've never done it in the attic,” she said.
“We've never done it anywhere,” Ephraim said. “And we aren't going to.”
“You're in a very strange mood today,” she said.
“It's been a very strange day.”
Zoe followed him up to the attic door. “I haven't seen the radio in years. Dad probably sold it. We had a big garage sale a couple of years ago.”
Ephraim groaned.
“I'll get one on eBay for your birthday,” Zoe said.
“I need that specific machine.”
Nathaniel had said he needed to use the same ham radio, because they were all connected with each other on some quantum level.
They went into the attic. Zoe turned on the light, a dim bulb in the middle of the ceiling. The ceiling sloped at an angle the deeper you went, and the cramped space was warm and musty. Dust coated everything like a fine gray snow.
“It would probably be in the back,” Zoe said. “The older stuff is farther in.”
She shoved a box of Christmas ornaments aside. Ephraim picked up another box to move it out of the way. It was too light to hold the radio, but he lifted the flap to check the contents anyway. It was filled with shiny, colorful clothes. He touched the bright-blue shirt on top. It felt smooth like silk but stiff like a heavily starched collar.
“Those are Grumps' old Korean clothes,” Zoe said.
They worked side by side to excavate disintegrating boxes of books, videocassettes, and a broken air conditioner, making a narrow path toward the back of the attic. He had to crouch on the far end because the ceiling was so low.
“This isn't my idea of a fun date, Eph.” Zoe wiped her hands on her shirt, leaving grimy handprints over her breasts.
“Too dirty, or not dirty enough?” Ephraim grinned.
She made a face. She turned and knocked a small box from the top of a stack of cartons, and he heard glass break. She leaned over to pick it up.
“Uh-oh,” Zoe said.
“What?” he asked.
“I think I found the radio. Most of it.”
He helped her clear the pile of boxes out of the way so he could get to the ham radio. It was in an open carton, caked with dirt. The lid was loose and wires spilled out of it. Zoe blew on it, and a cloud of dust rose around them.
“It looks like Dad cannibalized some parts,” she said.
Ephraim found another box of radio components near it, with bits of wires and vacuum tubes. He grabbed everything that he recognized from Zoe's room and piled them into the carton with the radio.
“You think it still works?” she asked.
“I'll make it work,” he said. He tried to lift the box. It was heavier than it looked. “Can I borrow this?” he grunted.
“You can have it,” she said.
“I thought it was like a family heirloom.”
She gave him a funny look. “It's only junk.”
He dragged the cardboard box toward the door. Zoe pushed from the other side, and it went more quickly. The two of them managed to carry it downstairs. They rested by the front door.
“Ugh. I need a shower,” she said. He watched her chest rise and fall as she caught her breath.
She caught him staring. “Care to join me?”
He shook his head.
“You're really going to leave?” she asked.
“I have what I came for,” he said. “Thanks, Zoe.”
“Sure,” she said. “But you owe me.”
She put her hands on his shoulders. She was quick, just her lips brushing against his lightly. At the same time, she pushed the right sleeve of his T-shirt up to expose his bicep.
“You aren't my Ephraim,” she said.
“What made you believe me? The kiss?”
“The kiss. The fact that you usually can't keep your hands off me. You couldn't carry that radio by yourself. And you don't have a tattoo.”
Ephraim rubbed his bare arm. “What was the tattoo of?”
“My name.” She pulled the neck of her T-shirt lower. He saw a word written in calligraphy just above her left breast. Ephraim. “We both got ambigrams. The word looks the same in a mirror.”
“If that's all it took to prove it…” He sighed. “Why did you kiss me first?”
“I didn't think you'd let me later.” Zoe opened the door for him.
“I'll get Nathan to help me carry this out to the car,” he said.
Nathan was exactly where he'd left him, in the car playing recorded footage on his camera's tiny screen.
“You were in there a long time. Get what you came for?” Nathan waggled his eyebrows.
“Yes. I need you to help me carry it to the trunk.”
Nathan was disappointed when he saw the radio. “This is really what you wanted? An old radio?”
“It's vintage,” Ephraim muttered. “Where did Zoe go?” He'd wanted to say good-bye, but she wasn't in the foyer.
He heard a TV in the living room though. He poked his head in and saw an old man thumbing through the Tivo listings. The man jumped when he saw Ephraim.
“Who are you?” he shouted. He reached for his walker.
Ephraim put up his hands. “Calm down, Grumps. Dug. Mr. Kim.” It was shocking to see the man with wispy white hair and so shrunken, wrinkled, and hunched over after meeting him in his twenties.
“How do you know my name?” Dug Kim asked.
“We've met before. Almost sixty years ago.”
“Nonsense.” The man scrambled up from his seat.
“I'm a friend of your granddaughter, Zoe,” Ephraim said.
“I don't have a granddaughter,” Dug said.
“You live here alone?” Ephraim asked. “What about your son? John?”
“Get out of my house!”
“Ephraim?” Nathan came into the living room. “What's going on?”
“Don't hit him!” Ephraim said.
“I'm not going to hit an old man.” Nathan looked scandalized. “But we should get out of here before he calls the cops.”
Dug was already dialing on an old cell phone that looked a lot like the controller in Ephraim's pocket.
“Okay. Er, sorry to trouble you,” Ephraim said.
He and Nathan grabbed the box from the foyer and hurried out to the car. Ephraim's arm muscles burned with fatigue, and a tiny splinter of broken glass had worked its way into the palm of his right hand. He picked it out carefully and wiped his bloody hand on his jeans. Nathan popped the trunk, and they heaved the box inside.
Ephraim started the car. “We have to fix the radio and set it up. Not at my place. My dad might be there.”
“My house,” Nathan said.
“Mom's making her famous kugel. And Dad has every tool we could need in his workshop.”
Ephraim examined the ham radio in the Mackenzies' garage. The glass facing was cracked and one of the knobs was loose. He shook it. Something rattled inside, but he hoped it wasn't anything important. This radio was over half a century old. They built stuff to last back then, didn't they? He really needed it to still work.
He cleaned all the dust from the machine with a cloth and a small vacuum. He sneezed three times in quick succession. Then he plugged in the radio at Mr. Mackenzie's workbench and concentrated on sorting the jumbled cables and wires, inserting them where he thought they belonged. Nathan found a scanned copy of the radio's manual online and plenty of schematics.
Ephraim flipped the power switch and held his breath. Nothing happened.
He tapped the dial lightly. He rapped his knuckles against the side of the old metal cabinet.
Tears blurred his vision. It hadn't been much to hope for, but he didn't even have that anymore. He was never going to see Zoe again, or his real mom.
He wiped his eyes and cleared his throat. He made some hero. He had to pull himself together.
“If you're done feeling sorry for yourself, the radio's working,” Nathan said.
Static burst from the radio, and the dial began to glow a soft orange. He put a hand on the box and felt it humming, like the coin always did.
“It takes time to warm up.” Ephraim laughed.
He quickly wrapped the controller in the copper wire from Dug Kim's house the way Nathaniel had in 1954. He plugged it into the back of the radio. He fiddled with the controller, but he didn't really know how it worked.
“Let me see,” Nathan said. “I'll figure out the new tech while you mess with the old.”
Ephraim nodded and handed it to his friend. If Ephraim was uncannily attuned to the coin, Nathan and his analogs were natural mechanics.
There were no speakers, but he optimistically pulled on the headphones he'd found in the box, with the rusted metal earpieces and fraying cloth covers over the cords.
He leaned closer to the console and held onto the microphone while Nathan worked the controller. He tried to find the spot on the dial that Zoe had tuned to, but all he got in that range was dead air. He didn't know if anyone would be monitoring his transmission; they had no reason to expect him to try to make contact.
“This seems promising,” Nathan said. “There's an option here for something called ‘tracking mode’?”
“That should do it. Nathaniel configured it to link up with the Large Coheron Drive.”
Ephraim coughed and squeezed the handle on the microphone a few times and started transmitting. “Hello? This is Ephraim Scott. I'm looking for Zoe Kim.” He remembered her call sign. “CHARON2. This is Ephraim Scott to CHARON2.”
Nothing.
He whirled the dial as far to the left as it would go and tried again, making his way through the bands incrementally. He got a few irate ham operators telling him to get off the radio, and some who were more helpful, warning him that he needed to get some training and a license before he started operating on public channels. He ignored them, pressing the headphones against his ears, listening intently for a familiar voice. Listening for Zoe.
“Anything?” Nathan asked.
Ephraim pulled the headphones off and left them dangling around his neck. He slumped back in the chair.
“It was easier when I had the coin,” Ephraim said.
Nathan rummaged in his pocket. “Have you ever tried putting a regular coin in the controller?” he asked.
“I never had a reason to,” Ephraim said. “What do you think would happen?”
“One way to find out. Only I don't have any quarters. I'll run and grab one from the change jar.”
“I have a quarter,” Ephraim said. He fished out his dad's car keys and popped the quarter out of its bezel on the key ring. He held it up and squinted at it doubtfully. He passed it to Nathan.
Nathan slotted it into the disc-shaped indentation in the controller.
Ephraim pushed his chair back, and Nathan backed away a step, but after thirty seconds, there'd been no reaction. Nathan leaned over it to check the readout on the screen.
“Careful,” Ephraim said.
“It isn't doing anything,” Nathan said.
Ephraim tapped the coin lightly with his index finger. Then he pressed his fingertip against it more firmly. “No change in temperature.”
Nathan snapped his fingers. “I forgot to engage the gyro mechanism.” He pressed a button on the controller, and the coin jumped.
They scrambled backward and watched the quarter skitter on the controller like the Mexican jumping bean Ephraim had made his father buy him when he was six. It hadn't been a bean at all. He'd been amazed, disillusioned, and disgusted when a tiny moth eventually hatched from it.
“Isn't it supposed to float?” Nathan asked. He aimed his camera at the controller and zoomed in so they could observe it from a safer distance.
“It's doing something,” Ephraim said.
The coin was glowing now, a dull red, growing brighter.
“Dude,” Nathan said.
Now the quarter was bright white, blotting out everything else on the video screen. Nathan tilted the camera to look at the controller's display. It was cycling through a series of numbers and broken characters.
“Looks like an error message,” Ephraim said.
“Uh, how do we stop this?” Nathan asked.
“Usually it stops when it finds the right frequency and then I grab the coin to shift.”
“Yeah, I wouldn't touch that if I were you.”
Nathan put down the camera and hurried over to the wall where various tools were mounted on corkboard. He found a pair of long pliers with a rubber handle and brought them over to the controller.
“What's that horrible sound?” Nathan asked.
Ephraim lifted the headphones and listened with one ear. A high-pitched whine came out of the earpiece. He winced and pulled it away from his head. The frequency became more piercing. He spun the dial, but it was the same on every channel, with the addition of a cacophony of voices complaining about interference.
“Some kind of feedback loop,” Ephraim said. “Get the coin out of there!”
Nathan held the shaking pliers closer to the controller. He winced as he clamped the ends around the coin. As he lifted the coin, the controller went with it.
“It's stuck,” Nathan said.
“Great. Is it melting?” Ephraim asked.
Nathan pulled on a dark visor from the bench and peered closely at the coin and controller. “They're separated by about a half-inch of air, but there's some kind of force holding it to the controller.”
“Can we slide something between them to break the connection?” Ephraim asked. “A sheet of metal?”
“On it,” Nathan said. He dumped a box of odds and ends open on the concrete floor and pawed through it while the dark garage got brighter and brighter with light from the coin, now glowing like a tiny star. Their shadows elongated across the room in harsh relief.
Ephraim felt the heat of the coin against his bruised cheek, even from a couple of feet away.
He kept cycling through the stations on the radio until he heard something under the crackling static and whining frequency. It might have been his imagination, but the lights on the dial were getting brighter too and the radio was generating heat of its own.
A vacuum tube popped and a wisp of smoke rose from the vents on the radio. The lights on the dial darkened, and the headphones went quiet. Ephraim smelt burnt ozone.
“Shit,” he said.
The controller itself was rattling now too.
“Nathan, do something!” Ephraim said.
“Got it!” Nathan jumped up and hurried over with a steel ruler. He pulled on a thick gardening glove and clutched one end of the ruler, while he slowly slid the other end under the coin like he was trying to flip a pancake on the
stove with a spatula. Sparks flew and the ruler vibrated.
“It's resisting.” Nathan gritted his teeth. He wrapped his bare left hand around his gloved right and pushed harder. Blue electricity crackled over the steel ruler, and Nathan's hair drifted up from his head. “Not good,” Nathan said.
Suddenly the coin disappeared with a cartoonish zing, and they heard a crash on the other side of the room. The controller settled down on the table, and Nathan threw the steel ruler to the floor.
Nathan leaned against the table and pulled off his face mask. “That was a terrible idea,” he said. He held up the tinted visor. A thin crack ran down the left side. Nathan touched his cheek.
“Are you okay?” Ephraim asked.
“I'd swear the coin hit me,” Nathan said. “I think it went through me. I felt it plink against the mask and there was a hot pinprick on my face.”
“How's the controller?” Ephraim asked.
“It's still on,” Nathan said. “It looks like some of the coin melted off on it and the edges are a little scorched.” He poked at the controller with his gloved finger. “I can scrape it off, I think.”
Nathan rubbed his cheek again and shook his head in disbelief. “What about the radio?”
“It kinda blew up,” Ephraim said.
“I'll take a look under the hood. You find the coin before it starts a fire or something.” Nathan lifted the top off the radio and held up a wiring schematic for comparison.
Ephraim found his father's quarter on the other side of the room, embedded halfway into the plaster wall like a thrown shuriken. The area on its edges were burned, but it had been even more of a close call—the coin was lodged just to the right of a small propane tank for the barbeque grill. He decided not to mention that to Nathan. He held his hand above the coin and waited for it to cool off enough for him to touch before trying to retrieve it. It still took him a couple of minutes of wiggling to pry it from the wall.
He brushed off the loose plaster and examined the damage. The edge that had hit the wall was actually bent flat. Washington's face was distorted, melted half off. He turned the coin over. The other side was blank; all he could make out was the faint lettering at the top: “E PLURIBUS UNUM.” His hand tingled.
Ephraim went back to the bench. Nathan was poking around in the radio's guts.
