Rem World

by Rodman Philbrick

  Arthur told the box how his Other Self was still on Earth, fast asleep, which meant he was in two places at once, which was clearly impossible, which meant the Nothing had somehow found a crack and leaked into the universe. Which in turn meant that if he didn’t find a way to stop it, it would be the end of Everything.

  “And why should I believe you?” said the box.

  “Because you know Everything,” Arthur said. “Or that’s the rumor, anyway. And if you know Everything, then it stands to reason that you must know about the Nothing, too. Therefore you know that what I’ve told you is true, even if it seems impossible.”

  The box was silent. And then a shadow moved inside the box, and a head became visible.

  A human head. A head that was strangely familiar to Arthur.

  The head smiled. It was a kind and gentle face, and immediately Arthur felt an intense longing, for this was a face he had wanted to see for the whole of his short life.

  “Don’t you recognize me?” asked the head inside the box.

  “I-I’m not sure,” Arthur stammered.

  “Don’t be afraid. Speak from your heart.”

  Arthur felt like weeping, but he managed to keep the tears from falling by tipping up his face. “I’ve only seen him in photo albums, and in the silly video my mom plays when she’s feeling sad, but you look exactly like my father.”

  “And have you always wanted to see me?” the head asked. “More than anything? Have you wanted to see me more than you wanted to be thin? More than you wanted to have friends?”

  “Yes,” Arthur said, letting his tears fall at last. “Oh yes, more than anything.”

  The head began to laugh uproariously, and it was no longer his father’s kindly head but the head of a small, ugly demon. A demon with eyes like chips of ice and teeth as sharp as needles. “Fool!” the demon roared. “Like all humans, you only want what you can never have!”

  Arthur sniffed and dried his eyes. “So? What’s wrong with that?”

  “Everything!” Vydel screamed. “Everything and Nothing!”

  Arthur wiped his eyes. He was angry at himself for letting the demon trick him. “You haven’t answered my question,” he said stubbornly. “How do I get home?”

  “Fool!” the demon screeched. “Humans are so stupid! They ask a question when they already know the answer. You want to know how to get home? Use your imagination!”

  “What?” asked Arthur.

  “You heard me. USE YOUR IMAGINATION!”

  And with that, the door to the demon box slapped shut, and the ancient padlock relocked itself.

  THEY HAD BEEN all the way to the end of the world and beyond, and what good had it done them?

  Stupid demon.

  For the duration of their long journey back, Arthur sulked and fidgeted. He was barely aware of the changing landscape that passed beneath Droll’s thundering feet. What occupied his thoughts was how the demon had tormented him with a brief glimpse of his father’s face and then snatched it cruelly away.

  Until that moment, Arthur hadn’t understood how much he’d missed having a father, and now that he did understand, he wished he hadn’t. As Vydel had said, what was the point of wanting something you could never have?

  Oh, that was bad enough, but even worse was the demon’s answer: “Use your imagination.” Talk about lame advice! That’s what stupid teachers said when they handed you blank sheets of paper. That’s what stupid mothers said when you complained about being bored.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  He’d been the stupidest one of all, thinking that a rotten demon who lived in a box would help him save the universe.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” Morf said as Droll lumbered down from the high mountains, into the valleys behind the Beyond.

  “Keep your penny,” Arthur said bitterly. “It’s pointless.”

  “What’s pointless?”

  “Everything. I’ll never get back home. I’ll never be thin. I’ll never see my father. I’ll never stop the Nothing, and soon we’ll all disappear, and there will never be anybody to know we existed!”

  Morf sighed. “That bad, is it?”

  “Worse!” said Arthur vehemently.

  “You sound as if you’ve given up.”

  Arthur felt like lashing out at someone, and as it wasn’t wise to lash out at a giant, the only one available was Morf. And so he turned on Morf with a sneer. “What did you expect from a boy everyone calls Biscuit Butt, huh? You expect a boy like that to actually do anything? What a complete waste of time!”

  “Complete waste of time, huh? Would you care to define that?”

  “The Frog People, the boat, the big wave, the windstorm, the giant, the Cloud People, the stupid borons, Mr. Pockets, the River Beneath the World, the raft, the river serpents, the bees, the other giant, going to see the rotten demon,” he said, ticking off everything he’d seen or done in REM World. “ALL OF IT! A COMPLETE WASTE OF TIME!”

  “Oh, really?” Morf said archly. “You missed ‘learning to fly.’ Was that a complete waste of time, too?”

  For some reason the mention of learning to fly really made Arthur seethe. “It was fun while it lasted, but so what? What good did it do me? What good did it do anyone?”

  “Some things can’t be measured that way,” said Morf. “Arthur Courage knew that.”

  Which made Arthur feel like the top of his head was going to blow off. “Arthur Courage is dead!” he shouted. “He’s so dead, he never existed!”

  Morf looked as if he wanted to say something, but then he changed his mind. He remained silent for the rest of the journey.

  · · ·

  Droll never slowed her pace, so anxious was she to get back to the world, and to Grog. With her two tiny passengers safe in the tangle of her hair, she slogged her way out of the Sea of the Dead. She crossed through the barren plains of Nowhere, and followed her own footprints back into the Beyond. From there she climbed out of the World Below and, smelling the scent of a planet teeming with life—and with Grog—she ran for the horizon, causing fractures so large in the tectonic plates of REM World that new continents formed and old continents slowly vanished beneath the waves.

  Giants in love can be dangerous beings, a wonder and a terror to behold. Half a world away, Grog woke up to the sound of Droll’s heart beating, and his joy was such that he ran like a hurricane. The wind of him flattened forests, blew rivers from their banks, and turned ten of the Eleven Seas to foam.

  Droll, being somewhat more sensible, stopped running when she heard Grog coming, and waited. Which was a wise thing to do, since two giants colliding at full speed are likely to set off a spontaneous nuclear explosion and blow themselves into atoms and quarks and other particles so small, they are the exact opposite of giants.

  “TAKE COVER,” Droll advised, setting her little passengers down while she awaited the arrival of Grog.

  Arthur and Morf found themselves on a beach—quite a familiar beach, actually, although they didn’t have time to notice that before Grog himself loomed over the horizon.

  “DROLL LIVES!” he roared, in a voice that flattened the hurricanes trailing in his wake. “DROLL LIVES, AND I AM HAPPY AGAIN!”

  The two lonely giants embraced, shedding a thousand years of sorrow and creating enough static electricity to power thunderstorms for eight or nine millennia, give or take. But there would be no rain on this day, for the heat of their joy brought a bright summer warmth to REM World, and the green sky was clear and beautiful.

  Droll and Grog vowed to get married as soon as their guests arrived, which would take a while, since every living creature would once again be invited to their wedding.

  Meanwhile Arthur wandered along the strangely familiar beach, kicking at clumps of seaweed. It seemed so cruel—just as Grog and Droll found each other, the universe was about to end.

  “Pointless,” he muttered to himself. “Everything is so pointless. We’re born, we live, we die—what does it matter what happens in betwe
en? It doesn’t last. Nothing lasts, not even the universe!”

  Morf followed behind him, kicking at the same piles of seaweed. The fog was rolling in, and this, too, was strangely familiar.

  “Maybe you’ve got it all wrong,” Morf suggested. “Maybe the Nothing was always there, and because it’s nothing, it can’t do us any harm.”

  Arthur sighed. “Have a look for yourself,” he said to his friend, holding out the wristwatch. “It’s hopeless.”

  Morf looked into the dark face of the watch. The terrible, dark Nothing had risen up to the level of the workbench in Arthur’s basement, and soon it would cover the boy’s sleeping face.

  There was no doubt that the Nothing was eating away everything and leaving nothing behind, because the darkness it made wasn’t merely dark. Not the dark of shadows, or of night, nor even the dark of fear itself. The dark of the Nothing was emptiness, and absence of everything that had ever lived or existed, and absence even of the dead and those who remembered them. In the Nothing, stars had never shined, flowers had never bloomed, children had never laughed, love had never existed.

  The Nothing was nothing, just nothing at all, forever and ever.

  “I must admit it does look grim,” Morf said, turning away from the watch. “It hardly seems worth doing anything, if we’re all about to vanish. Still, the fog is beautiful today, don’t you agree?”

  “Fog?” asked Arthur.

  He’d had his head down and hadn’t noticed the fog rolling in. It was beautiful, in an eerie sort of way. It reminded Arthur of things he’d forgotten to remember. For instance, the strong smell of the seaweed when he’d first arrived on REM World, which was exactly how the seaweed smelled right now. And maybe because of that, he wasn’t at all surprised to see shapes approaching through the fog, shapes that had once frightened him but that now he recognized as Frog People.

  The first to emerge from the fog was Galump. She smiled at Arthur in her kindly way, and his heart broke as he ran to her. “I’m so sorry,” he sobbed, embracing her. “I failed, Galump. I failed.”

  Galump hugged him so hard he could feel her heart beating. “You can’t have failed,” she said. “You’re Arthur Courage, and you earned that name. Courage is not about success or failure.”

  “But the Nothing is going to win,” he sobbed. “I tried to get home and stop it, but I can’t.”

  Galump took him by the shoulders and stood him up. She dried his eyes with a small kerchief made of sea silk. “You must keep trying, Arthur. Even when there seems to be no hope. That’s the only way to keep the Nothing from winning.”

  Arthur took a deep breath and got control of himself. “You’ve been very kind, all of you, and for a while you made me feel like a real hero. But the truth is, I’m just a fat, lonely boy without any real friends, or a father to show me how to do things, and I’m just not smart enough or brave enough to save the whole universe.”

  Galump considered this. “There are three things you should know, Arthur Courage. The first is that although your father is dead, part of him survives in you, and helps make you who you are. The second thing is that you are exactly brave enough and exactly smart enough to save the universe, or else you wouldn’t have been chosen for the task. The third thing is that to accomplish your goal, you must use what you learned from the demon in the box.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. And no biscuits, either. Those days are behind you.” Galump coughed. “Hear me, Arthur Courage. The demon in the box was not always a demon. Once, long ago, he was on the side of all that was good, and he used his powers wisely. Since time grows short, I will not go into all the details of his story, which could fill a book, or several books. Let us simply say that the lust for more and more power was Vydel’s downfall, and now he is doomed to live in a trap of his own devising. You know him as a thing of evil, and that he certainly is, but the angel within still exists, and that part makes him speak the truth. Whatever he told you about how to find your way home, that is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

  “But all he said was, ‘Use your imagination.’”

  “And so you must,” Galump told him. “It is the only way home, from where you are now.”

  “But I don’t understand!”

  Galump reached out and stroked his hair. “Everything you need is right here,” she said, tapping his forehead. “Go with our love, dear boy, but go you must.”

  And with that, Galump and the other Frog People returned into the mist and fog, and when Arthur looked for him, Morf was gone, too. All he heard, fading away into the fog, was a faint, faint voice calling out, “You can do it, kid!” and then the voice, too, vanished utterly, leaving only empty silence behind.

  Arthur was alone. As alone as he had ever been. So alone that he ached from the inside out, which made him want to go home more than ever, wherever home was, and whatever awaited him there.

  “Use your imagination,” the thing in the box had said.

  And so he did.

  SURROUNDED BY THE soft white fog, Arthur closed his eyes and tried to imagine his way home. In his mind he pictured the house where he’d grown up, and all the windows that looked out onto the world, and all the rooms inside the house.

  He imagined the furniture in each of the rooms, and the paintings on the walls, and the posters in his bedroom. He imagined the model planes he’d never finished, and the books he hadn’t read, and the little desk where he’d found so many reasons not to do his homework.

  He imagined the warm smells of his mother’s cooking, and the funny way his grandmother laughed when she was happy, and the different way she laughed when she was mad. He imagined the cool, crisp feel of the floor under his feet, and the way the carpets made his bare toes tickle.

  He imagined all of the memories that home had given him, the good ones and the bad. He imagined the taste of cookies and milk, and the lovely cake he’d had for his birthday, and for all the birthdays as far back as he could remember. He imagined riding down the banister when they told him not to, and the time he sprained his ankle, and the tears he’d shed when the other children called him names. He imagined being happy and sad and everything in between.

  He imagined the basement, his secret, private place, and the mysterious tools that had once belonged to his father, and would someday be his, if only he learned how to use them. He imagined himself on the workbench, and the steps that led up to the bulkhead, and the way the sky looked when he threw open the door. A sky so blue, and so perfect, it made you glad to be alive.

  When he’d built the house in his mind, and filled it with all the things he knew, he opened his eyes.

  And there in the fog, looking so real and solid he could almost reach out and touch it, was the bulkhead door.

  Go on, he told himself, what have you got to lose?

  So Arthur reached for the handle and lifted the door. Just below the door were the old, familiar wooden steps that led down into the basement.

  He was halfway down the steps before he saw the Nothing. There was no longer any floor to the basement, and the Nothing was rising fast, eating up the walls. From where he stood he could just make out the corner of the workbench where his Other Self lay fast asleep, unaware that Everything was about to end.

  “Wake up, you doofus!” he shouted. “Hey, lamebrain, wake up!”

  But his Other Self lay unmoving, his face and ears covered by the special helmet.

  Arthur was so close, but how could he get from here to there?

  The Nothing slowly rose higher, eating the step just below his feet. He had to do something, and right this instant.

  Arthur looked up, and his eyes lighted on the plumbing pipes that ran through the floor joists.

  Without thinking about it, or what would happen if he missed, he jumped up and grabbed a pipe.

  He swung away from the steps, and now there was no going back. So he reached and grabbed the next pipe, swinging himself forward. Arthur reached for the next pipe, and th
e next, and before he knew it, he was directly over the workbench, directly above his Other Self.

  “Wake up,” he begged himself. “Wake up!”

  And then his hands slipped, and he fell on top of his Other Self, and everything went black.

  · · ·

  Arthur couldn’t see a thing. Everything was dark. Darker than night, darker than dreams, exactly as dark as the Nothing. This, surely, was the end.

  Blindly he brought his hands up to his eyes—and that’s when he felt the helmet on his head.

  Instantly he sat up and pushed away the helmet and was dazed by the single lightbulb hanging above the workbench.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw the terrible, dark Nothing vanishing down into the farthest corners of the basement. But when he tried to look directly at it, it was gone, and the basement and his house was exactly as it had always been.

  With a mixture of fear and pure joy he leaped down from the workbench and rushed up the basement stairs to the kitchen.

  “Hello!” he cried, opening the door. “Is anybody home?”

  His mother turned from the refrigerator, where she’d been putting the party food away.

  “Of course we’re here. Where would we go?”

  Arthur rushed up to his mother and gave her a hug, which was very unlike him. “I’m so glad to be home,” he said. “So totally, totally glad.”

  “Glad to be home?” she said, sounding concerned. “Where have you been?”

  “I’ve had the most terrible dream,” he said. “And the most wonderful dream, too. I can’t really explain it. But I really am glad to be home, even if I never went anywhere at all, even if it was all a dream.”

  “What a strange boy you are!” His mother looked puzzled, but she was smiling.

  That’s when Arthur remembered to feel in his pockets for the cookies he’d taken down into the basement.

  The cookies were gone.

  “Why, look at you!” his mother said, staring at him, amazed. “I hadn’t noticed before. You’re not fat anymore. You’re thin! As thin as your father when he was your age!”