by Tom Upton
“Anyway, after that, he took roll after roll of pictures. My mom, while walking close to one of the walls, triggered a sensor, and an archway formed in the wall. The archway opened onto a corridor that lead to another enormous chamber. It was mind-boggling. Exactly how big was this thing? My father decided the best thing to do was go back to the camp, where he could figure out some methodical way to explore and map the place. So we left to go back to the camp, but there was only one problem.
“When we walked through the doorway we’d come in through-- instead of coming out into the cave-- we ended walking out directly into our garage back in Chicago.
“No kidding,” Eliza said now. She paused, biting her lower lip, studying my face as if to see what I might be thinking. It was a pretty fantastic story, after all; but she told it with such sincerity, with such a desperate need for me to believe her, I felt bad that I was having serious doubts of its truthfulness. Still I could see no reason for her to be making it up. Why would a person go through extremes to prove to themselves that they can trust you, and then end up telling you something that ended up being a large heap of horse manure?
“Well,” I said finally, and here she hung on my every word, “that’s pretty incredible.”
Her posture changed, then. Her shoulders slumped slightly, and the brightness of her eyes was suddenly gone.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” she said sadly.
“Well, look, if somebody told you a story like that, would you believe it without some proof?”
“Proof?” she said sharply; obviously this was exactly the wrong thing to say at this point. “You need proof? You won’t just take my word for it?” She was seriously offended now.
“It’s not that I don’t want to believe you,” I said, and really meant it; despite the fact that it felt as if I’d known her forever, I’d never spoken a word to her before today. So, yeah, I thought some proof wasn’t unreasonable, but her change in attitude suggested she believed otherwise.
It was becoming clear that whatever she thought I was, or whatever she wanted me to be, I might end up disappointing her.
She sat quietly for a long time, then. She looked lifeless, staring at the floor. When she finally spoke, her words were dull and distant. “I’ve made a horrible mistake,” she said miserably. “That’s my fault-- not yours. Please go now. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”
I was stunned at how quickly and completely she was shutting me out. I tried to protest, but she wouldn’t hear me.
“Just go, Travis-- please.”
There was such pain in this last word that I stood and headed for the front door, not wishing to cause her further pain. Before I walked out, I caught a glimpse of her sitting there on the sofa, legs crossed before her, staring down at nothing.
3
It was at that moment that I first experienced true heartache. I’d never before in my life felt so low. And the pain, the wrenching pain in my chest, weakened my legs and made me think I was actually having a heart attack. I wasn’t a step out the front door, and already I was feeling a desperate need to run back inside and reconnect with her.
I must have been in a daze as I walked down her front stairs, because I didn’t even notice her father, who was standing right there, just off to the side of the front walkway.
“Hello, uh, Travis, is it?” he said. I think he said it a couple times before I heard him and my brain registered his presence. He was dressed casually now, in a sweater, slacks and loafers.
“Uh, hi,” I managed to muttered; even that nearly stuck in my throat.
“Didn’t go too well, did it?” he asked mildly.
I just looked at him. I couldn’t answer.
“No, it didn’t,” he said with certainty. “Well, if you remember, last night I did say that my daughter was funny. I never did figure out where the girl gets it from,” he went on. “She’s not anything like me-- or my wife, either, for that matter. Well, look here, this is a perfect example,” he said, leading me a few steps over to his driveway. “Look at that-- what’s missing? The way I look at something like this is: I have a brand new car under almost a hundred feet of water in a flooded quarry, and what exactly am I supposed to tell the insurance company? The way you may be looking at the-- incident is: this crazy girl drove me off a cliff and almost got me killed. Right?-- or something like that. Well, the way she looks at it is: she cared enough to take the time and trouble to drive you off the cliff, and how could you not possibly understand that? See what I mean? Her reasoning, sometimes, is a little twisted. But if you think it over, she does make a lot of sense-- in an eerie way. What happened now,” he continued, slipping his hands into his pants pockets, “and I bet I’m right, is that she told you-- told you the story-- or some part of it, and either you didn’t believe her, or you questioned her, and she clammed up and is up in the house brooding about it.”
“I asked for proof,” I confessed.
He clucked his tongue. “Yeah, that would do it, too. Well, look, all I can tell you is don’t pay any attention to anything she might have said; everything will be all right tomorrow. It all just meant too much to her. She’s been wanting to share the story for so long, and for some reason she choose you-- I’m still not sure why. You know-- and I really shouldn’t be telling you this-- since we moved in, she’s been spying on you. She must have seen something, because she has a lot of faith in you. I hope she’s right-- that you’d keep this all to yourself.”
“Who’d believe me?” I asked.
“Probably nobody,” he admitted. “But you never know. We can’t take a chance. We’ve been in a very dangerous situation since the discovery was made.”
“Dangerous?”
“Yeah, very much so. You know, to this day, years later, I still haven’t figured out everything it does. I suspect what I do know doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of it. I did realize early on that I could never go public with it. Then the government would get involved, and no government should have anything to do with this thing. The potential for misuse of the artifact is immense, especially if any government gained control of it. That’s the way they always are; they never look at such a discovery in terms of how it can benefit humanity. First and foremost, it’s always military applications. You’ve already seen that it has medical applications. What, did you think you imagined being impaled by a strip of metal? No, that really happened. No telling what else it could do as far as medical science goes-- maybe cure every disease known to mankind. But if the government-- ours or any other for that matter-- laid its hands on this thing, I guarantee you medical science would not benefit one iota from it. On the other hand, some years from now, you’ll see on the news some incredible new weapons system that the government’s been working on. You’ll see them haul it out, with everyone patting each other on the back for the achievement they have contributed to the insurance of peace on earth. Always remember: it’s easier to destroy than to create or preserve, and it’s along those lines that nations shop for its tools….Anyway, let Eliza explain it all to you. It’s her story anyway-- as far as you’re concerned.”
“But she won’t talk to me now,” I said.
“Tomorrow,” he promised with a sharp nod of his head. “It will be all right, then. Knock on the door. She’ll be over what happened today. Buy her something-- not something normal, like flowers; buy her something-- weird-- something a guy would never think to buy a girl.”
After he gave me a few more encouraging words, I went home, leaving him standing there in his driveway. When I looked back, I caught him gazing at the empty space in driveway and shaking his head woefully.
4
I went home to an empty house. The scribbled note I found taped on the window of the back door said my dinner was in the fridge, all I had to do was warm it in the microwave.
I sat alone at the kitchen table and ate. Dinner turned out to be a beef stew-like dish that may actually have been beef stew, or something close to it. It tasted somewhat b
land, but I finished it just the same-- my mother’s cooking was always nutritious, if not always tasty.
I was still feeling pretty downcast about Eliza. I could see her in my mind moping about her house. The image bothered very much, and I tried to figure out why. I had just met the girl, after all, so, really why should I care so much? I thought maybe it was because, for whatever reason, she believed in me, and that I had let her down. No one-- not even my parents, even-- had every really expected much of me. So I had, never in my life, been in a position where I felt that I had disappointed anybody-- this was the first time. I decided I didn’t like the feeling at all; it was an empty, hollow, lonely feeling, and sitting there in my deserted house just made me feel worse. I ended up realizing how funny life can be; you wake up one morning and your greatest concern is the size of your biceps and whether you’ll be able to make the football team, and then the next thing you know, you realize you’ve wounded somebody’s feelings, and you have to figure out how to make it up to them-- until then you suffer this thing called guilt, which you never felt before because you never felt anything you’ve ever done or said mattered enough to anybody to hurt them.
I went up to my bedroom and retrieved some money I had set on the side. I had no idea what to get Eliza. Frankly the only gift I’d ever bought a female, outside of my mother, was when a bought a birthday gift for a cousin’s three-year-old daughter. I bought her a doll that slept when you laid it down. You could also feed the doll with a baby bottle, and a short time later the doll would wet its diapers and start crying. The kid had been thrilled with the doll, but maybe it was just me, I couldn’t see why. It actually seemed like a very stupid doll, as dolls go. One of its main functions was sleeping; how can a kid play with a doll that looks like its sleeping? Also, there wasn’t a big enough time lapse between the time you fed it and the time it wet its diapers. It took only about five or six seconds, which is hardly realistic, as the manufacturer claimed. If they had wanted to make it truly realistic, why didn’t they make it so that they doll wets its diapers and starts crying when the kid was watching her favorite television program, doing homework, or eating dinner? It finally occurred to me that manufacturers are forbidden from making dolls that are too realistic, because if they did and little girls around the world saw how troublesome babies really are, by the time they grew up they’d never want to have any. And then there would go human race, down the tubes along with the toy manufacturer’s future consumers. At least, this was what I had reasoned.
Now, as far as Eliza was concerned, I figured I would heed what her father had suggested-- just get her something odd. After all, he knew her much better than I did.
There were no large shopping centers in walking distance from my home, but on the main street, a few blocks away, there were a scattering of stores, mostly small, mom-and-pop shops, mixed in with apartment buildings and small offices. So I walked over there and wandered up and down the street. There was a florist that was run by a couple elderly sisters, so old in fact that they had always seemed timeless-- but flowers, for some reason, were out of the question, at least according to her father. I wondered why. Maybe everything with Eliza worked backward. Maybe if you got her something totally normal, the kind of thing everybody gives everybody else, she got offended or something…. I passed a few apartment buildings and a small insurance office. I almost went past the hardware store, but had the sudden urge to go inside and looked around. It seemed like a very unlikely place for me to find I gift for her, and maybe that made it the perfect place to check. I wandered up and down the cramped aisles, through the paint section, through the fastener section, through the gardening section. I must have looked lost wandering around, because the store manager approached me and asked if I needed help to find anything. When I told him I was looking for a gift, he didn’t appear the least bit surprised. He asked whom I was buying the gift for, and I told him just a friend. He suggested I check out the tools, which sounded good to me because Eliza certainly wouldn’t expect anyone to get her a lug wrench or something. I searched through all the tools hanging on hooks behind the sliding glass doors of the tool aisle. What I found, and thought might be perfect, was a socket wrench set. It came it a small metal box-- the wrench and about a dozen sockets of different sizes. So I bought it, and the headed home.
As luck would have it, I ran into Raffles-- about the last person I wanted to see at the moment. It was one of those awkward encounters; I was walking down the main street approaching a side street, and he popped out of the side street right in front of me. There was just no way to avoid him.
“Hey, sport,” he called out to me. As he turned and walked over to me, I noticed how much he reminded me of a stork. Tall and rail thin, with the strange bobbing way of walking. He started to walk next to me. “So how’re all the aliens doing?” he asked.
“There are no aliens,” I said, thinking, No, just nice normal people who might have found an alien artifact-- so there, you’re wrong, smart guy.
“You suddenly sound like a non-believer, sport,” he went on, always speaking just a little too loudly. “You mean, given the vastness of the universe, you believe the human race is condemned to eternal loneliness?”
“You’re born alone, and you die alone,” I said. “Why shouldn’t loneliness be the eternal human condition, then?”
He shut his mouth a moment. I didn’t look at him, but felt him staring at me, his swollen eyes boring through me.
“What’s in the bag?” he asked then.
“Nothing.”
“You’re carrying an empty bag?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure? Or is it you just don’t want ole Raffles to know what’s inside?”
“Yes.”
“In other words it’s not of my business.”
“Exactly.”
“Well, why don’t you just say so?” he asked.
“Because if I just say so, you’ll start pestering me until I tell you what’s inside it.”
“Well, if you understand that, then why don’t you just save yourself the aggravation and tell me?”
“Because I don’t what to.”
“Why don’t you want to?”
“It’s just a secret.”
“Oh, a secret,” he said, scowling. “Well, sure, you can have a secret, I guess. But keeping secrets from ole Raffles? That’s never happened before.”
“Things change, remember?”
“Of course, and before long you’ll have all kinds of secrets, I suppose.”
“Maybe.”
“Well, it’s your right,” he said, now actually brooding.
We walked in silence for quite a while, then.
“Well,” he said. “If you won’t tell me what’s in the bag, at least tell why you won’t tell me.”
I sighed. “Because if I tell you, I’ll end up having to answer twenty more aggravating questions about why I have what I have in the bag.”
“I see,” he said slowly, thinking. “Then that means whatever it is, you shouldn’t have it.”
“I never said that.”
“Good God,” he cried. “It’s not a gun, is it?”
“If it were a gun,” I said, “I would’ve already taken it out and shot you.”
“All right,” he relented. “I get it…I get it…. How you’ve changed in a day,” he commented then. “You even used a couple fairly large words too. For a moment, you didn’t even seem like the same monosyllabic mesomorph I have come to know. Well, I’ll see you later, sport.”
As we came up on the side street where he lived, he split off from me, and crossed over to the other side of the street. Watching him walk away, with his bird-like gait, I couldn’t help feel I had just survived an attack by a pterodactyl. It was something of a victory-- the first time I could ever recall not being forced to share everything that was going through mind. I started to dwell on what he had said about my having changed, and couldn’t deny the truth of it. I really hadn’t noticed-- maybe was on
ly somewhat aware of it-- but I didn’t feel like the same person I was when I’d woke up that morning. I felt transformed in some way, but couldn’t put my finger on it exactly. Maybe this is normal for someone who has been driven off a cliff and survives. You hear about it all the time; somebody survives a near-death experience, after which they change, become enlightened. Though I didn’t exactly feel enlightened, I sure did feel changed. Maybe I would even find a dictionary and look up ‘monosyllabic’ and ‘mesomorph.’
The rest of the walk home was a peaceful experience, though I had an occasional pang of guilt, a little tugging sensation in my chest, whenever I thought of Eliza.
***********
That night I had a hard time falling asleep. I had an antsy feeling that kept me tossing and turning in bed. It was an exceptionally warm night. I must have ventured downstairs in the dark a half dozen times to adjust the air conditioning. When I turned the temperature down, and then went to bed, suddenly it seemed too cold to sleep. When I reset the temperature high, it seemed to hot to sleep. I just couldn’t find the setting to make me comfortable. Through it all, all that went through my mind was Eliza; I kept visualizing her sitting on her sofa, as I’d left her, alone and defeated, her spirit broken. A couple times, I got out of bed and went to the window. Resting my elbows on the sill, I stared at her dark house across the driveway. There were no signs of activity; no lights went on and off. I dreaded my next encounter with her, not sure how she would respond, but at the same time I wanted to get it over with, wanted to reconnect with her. Until then, I knew, I wouldn’t feel right.
At about one in the morning, I heard my mother come home. The station wagon pulled up to the curb, rumbling away with a hole in its muffler. Then I heard the front door slam shut as she came into the house. She sounded a little tipsier than usually, which led me to believe there was more drinking done than bowling tonight. She must have bounced off a couple pieces of furniture before she made it upstairs, and headed to her bedroom. I could hear her humming something, but couldn’t make out the song she was so off key. She paused by my partly opened door, as if checking on me. I tried really hard to stay still, not wanting her to know I was awake. As she continued toward her room, she started singing something about being so lost nobody could ever find her…. Her bedroom door closed, thankfully, and all I could hear was the beating of my heart and the mournful murmuring of the night.
