by Tom Upton
Eliza started to cry, “Pins and needles. Pins and needles,” and jumped back onto the sofa and started massaging her feet. After the feeling in her feet returned to normal, she looked at me and exclaimed, “Ohmigod, I must look horrible.”
Though her hair was disheveled badly and her eyes somewhat swollen, I assured her she looked fine.
“Don’t give me that,” she said. “You don’t look so hot, and there’s no way I can look any better.”
She left the room briefly, and when she returned, she was trying to brush out her tangled hair. The brush was stuck in a particularly stubborn tangle, and pulling as hard as she could, she failed to tug it through the tangle. Frustrated, she pause, then, with the brush hanging from her hair, and said, “Sometimes, I don’t know if I hate my hair more, or if it hates me more.” She extricated the brush from her hair, and threw it on the sofa. “Well, if you do this thing, I guess, it won’t make a difference. It’ll just be another tangle that will never happen.”
“You see Doc?” I asked, trying unsuccessfully to crack my neck.
“No,” she said. “He probably fell asleep on his desk downstairs. He does that all the time.”
“You think we should wake him up, or just do it and get it over with?”
She thought it over, frowning slightly. “You know, I can’t see that he would object to the idea. It will put things back where they belong, after all. Also, it would be sending the artifact back to its home planet, where nobody here could get their hands on it. I think, maybe, it would be a kinder thing to let him sleep. The next time he wakes up my mother will be there again, and he will be none the wiser about anything else.”
“Then we should just do it,” I said.
“Yeah, if it has to be that way, let’s get it over with,” she said firmly, although her eyes looked sad and uncertain.
When I thought of the console, it emerged from the floor. I pressed the buttons in sequence as though I had been operating the control for years. “What will happen,” I explained, “is the artifact will return to a time before you discovered it. Then it will obey my telepathic command to return home; it will reintegrate with the space craft, the two again becoming one, and go on its way.”
“Please, Travis, I’d rather not hear the details. At the moment I hardly care.”
“All I have to do now is press this button to execute the commands,” I said, my hand hovering over the red octagon isolated on the lower right side of the console. “Is there anything--”
“Travis, I hate long good-byes. Please, just press the button.”
As I turned toward the console, she, as though by last-second impulse, jumped on my back and wrapped her arms around my neck. “I love you, Travis. Don’t ever forget,” she whispered in my ear.
I pressed the button.
4
There was a low hum that grew higher and higher in pitch, as though power were being built up. Just as the hum became intense enough to hurt my ears, the room began to shimmer and fade away. For a brief moment, I saw an image of what the room must have looked like before Doc and Eliza moved in, after the former owner, Mr. Wilkins, died and he son emptied the house. The walls were a drab faded shade of blue, with brighter blue squares and rectangles where pictures had once hung. The carpet was old and gray and natty, and I could smell the fleeting musty scent of old people. Eliza was still hanging onto me, but she seemed to become lighter by the second, as if she were slowly fading away, or phasing out of existence. Just as she seemed light as a butterfly, I glanced down at my hand and saw that it, too, was shimmering and becoming translucent. I, too, was fading away, presumably to reappear in the place I would be at this time had Doc and Eliza never moved in, which would probably be in my basement, doing sets of bench presses or something. I tried to say something before we vanished, but Eliza beat me to it. “Remember, Travis, always remember,” she whispered, her very words fading as though reechoing from a vast distance.
Just then, something happened. It was as though the entire world shuddered. Everything that had been a-shimmer and vanishing suddenly became solid again. Mr. Wilkens shabby old living room brightened again, and then turned back into living room we had been departing forever. Eliza’s weight returned so abruptly she pulled me back off balance, and we both tumbled to the floor. The humming grew softer and softer and finally stopped. The control console dropped and disappeared into the floor.
A moment passed in eerie silence.
I stood slowly, gazing around in wonder that we appeared still to be there. I helped Eliza to her feet. At first she seemed too stunned to speak. Finally she murmured, “We’re still here.”
“Yeah,” I said, puzzled. “We are.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“I’m not sure. I think it started to work, but then something…” my words trailed off. A chill ran through my entire body, then, an icy chill that ran down to my bones. I tried to shake it off, but couldn’t. My arms were covered with goose bumps, and my hands were trembling.
“You all right?” she asked. “You look white as a sheet.”
“Yeah--no--I don’t know,” I said, never recalling a time in my life when I’d been so confused. As I walked over to the sofa to sit down, she was right at my heel.
“Travis?” She sat next to me, and grabbed my hand. “You’re, like, freezing,” she said, and added, “Something went wrong, didn’t it?”
Though I had no clue what, I was certain she was right; something went wrong, all right, something went awfully wrong.
“Are you still connected to the artifact?” she asked.
I had to think a moment before I answered.
“Yeah, I think I am,” I said, “but I’m not getting anything from it.”
“How do you mean?”
“It’s not communicating anything. It’s quiet. It’s as though it’s too scared to speak.”
“Scared? Can that be?-- I mean, it is a machine, after all.”
“No, it’s fear, all right-- a really deep fear; it’s scared out of its wits.”
“I don’t understand,” she said, frowning.
“Me either. We ought to be back where we would have been if you had never found it. Something started to happened, but then it stopped and it was as though we were snapped back here-- sort of like a rubber band snapping back on itself. I don’t get it. According to everything the artifact led me to believe, there should have been very little trouble accomplishing such a transfer.”
“You mean you think it lied to you?”
“No,” I said, still trying to shake off the shivers, “not lied-- not intentionally, anyway. Maybe it was just wrong.”
“You notice anything?” she asked, looking around.
“What?”
“Isn’t it darker in here than it was before?”
She was right. Before I had pressed the execute button, the sun was shining brightly outside, and despite the fact all the curtains were drawn shut, the room was fairly bright. Now the room was gloomy as though a storm were raging outside, but there was no thunder, no pattering of rain on the window panes-- nothing, just a silent stillness that was quite creepy.
I got up, walked to the front windows, and pulled back the draperies to look outside.
What I saw was mind-boggling. The first thing I noticed was that all the trees that had lined the street-- all of them old and towering and arching majestically over the street-- all the trees were gone. There were huge gaping holes in the front lawns, where the trees had once stood; it was as though the trees had been torn from the ground like weeds. The few cars parked along the street appeared dull, covered in what looked like the accumulation of years of soot. Every car tire was flat. And above the sky was very dark, not dark from storm clouds, but as if high in the atmosphere, there lingered a layer of blackness that blocked out the sun.
I let the draperies fall shut, and turned to Eliza.
“What is it?” she asked, her voice laced with dread. “You look like you saw a ghost.�
��
“See for yourself,” I told her.
She headed for the front door, and I followed her. As we walked out onto her front porch, I could feel the chill in the air; normally, at this time of year and at this time of day, it would already be about seventy-five degrees, but now it couldn’t have been much more than fifty.
“Ohmigod, what happened?” Eliza asked in a gasp. She ran down the stairs to the front walkway, and spun around, taking in everything. It was not the world we had wakened in, but a world that looked alien and desolate. It was a world made up more of shades of gray-- as though all the daylight hours were twilight-- than of all the bright colors with which we had become familiar. The trees were gone, true, but also all the lawns seemed to have dried up and blown away a long time ago. The flower gardens and hedges had apparently suffered the same fate. The only colors noticeable were the original color of the parked cars, the colors vaguely bleeding through the black sooty coat that covered them. “How is this possible?” Eliza wondered. “This is crazy, absolutely crazy.”
“Let me check my house,” I suggested, and started to jog next door. Eliza followed me as the wind gusted up clouds of dust from the bare ground. We ran round back to enter by the kitchen door. The entire outside of the house was shadowed in grime. As we ran up my back stairs, we left footprints in the black ashy material.
The door was unlocked, and we entered the kitchen, which looked as though it had been abandoned many years ago. Everything was fairly neat and in place, but there was the air of the passage of a good deal of time since last a living person walked here. This must be the way it feels to an archeologist when he enters a tomb that has been sealed for thousands of years. I found attached to the microwave one of the mother’s notes-- instructions to warm my dinner, which was set atop of plate inside the microwave, spoiled and rotted and turned to hard black lumps. I stared at the note, wondering how long it had been since my mother had started doing this. I must have been eight years old, then, what they had used to call a “latchkey” child years before, and from then onward I used to find a note with every dinner, which I heated and ate alone at the kitchen table. My mother had developed the habit of drawing little funny faces along the bottom edge of the notes, which the note I now looked at had, but she suspended that practice when I reached thirteen-- probably believing I thought it had become a silly thing you do for a little kid and not appropriate for somebody who saw himself as almost grown up. So the note was at least two and a half years old, I reasoned-- at least two and a half years since anybody had been inside the house. Was that possible?
As I studied the note, drifting off somewhat, Eliza scooted nervously about the house, checking this and that.
“Everything is out,” she reported finally. “The electric, the gas, the water-- everything. The phone is dead-- no dial tone, not even that faint background noise you get when it’s connected but the dial tone is out.”
We went upstairs to check my bedroom. Clothes lay scattered all over the floor. The dresser drawers were partly open, and shirts and socks hung out here and there. My schoolbooks were scattered across the rumbled bed. All kinds of junk was spilled out of the open closet.
“My God,” Eliza exclaimed. “It looks like a tornado went through here.”
“Actually, this is pretty normal,” I confessed. “Except for the hangers.” There were empty hangers strewn all over the room. I looked in the closet. “My suitcases are gone. Whatever happened, it looks like we packed in a hurry,” I said, and headed back downstairs.
I started for the front door, not exactly sure where I was going, when Eliza stopped me.
“Travis,” she said. “What could have happened here?”
“I don’t know. Some catastrophe-- that’s for sure.”
“And the artifact isn’t giving you a clue.”
“Nothing. Not a thing,” I said. “It’s as though it has its head buried in the sand. It’s weird-- I can feel its presence, but that’s all; it’s like being in a room with somebody who is just sitting there and staring at the floor.”
“Well, we need to do something,” she said, her tone determined.
“What can we do?” I asked. I went over to our beat-up old sofa, and sat down, putting my feet up on the coffee table strewn with mail-- mostly unpaid bills. I looked up at her as she started chewing at her thumbnail.
“There has to be something,” she insisted, and then added in dismay, “Oh, we should have woke Doc up, and let him know what we were doing. We should have run it past him.”
“I can’t see that it would have made any difference,” I said. “I think he would have totally agreed with the plan. The artifact gave us the perfect solution.”
“Well, it couldn’t have been that perfect, now, could it?” she asked archly.
“No, there had to be something-- something even the artifact couldn’t foresee.”
“Oh, that’s just peachy,” she said. “And what are we supposed to tell Doc when he wakes up? ‘Remember how you lost mom? Well, guess what? Oops….’ Travis, we didn’t lose just one person, here; it looks like we lost everybody, and whatever is left is all-- messed up.”
“It may not be as bad as it looks,” I said, but hardly believed it.
“Not as bad as-- come here,” she commanded me, made me follow her through the front door and out onto my front porch. “Look around… the people are all gone, Travis, the trees are gone. And do you hear birds? No? Yeah, even the birds are gone. Believe me, it’s as bad as it looks.” She turned her gaze upward. “And what’s the deal with the sky? Those aren’t clouds up there, you know. It’s all black, from east to west, and it’s not nighttime either. So what-- ohmigod,” she said, still looking skyward, her voice filled with awe. She stood there mute, her mouth slightly open, but unable to speak. Her hand reached out for me, groping, and found my shoulder. She pulled me down to the lower stair, on which she was standing, and then pointed skyward with a finger that was trembling. When I looked up I saw nothing but uniform blackness high overhead, but then I noticed the there was a thinning in the dark sheet as though wind currents at a high altitude were clearing an area of the sky, parting the dark particles and opening a gap, through which a vague light began to shine, growing brighter and brighter. The moon began to show itself, looking full and abnormally large, and you could clearly see with the naked eye that there was a large chunk missing from its surface where it curved near its northern pole. It looked as though an enormous claw had gouged out part of the moon, leaving a jagged gap from which a wide fissure ran crookedly across half its face.
IV.
HOW WE FRACTURED THE MOON
&
Other disasters
Presumably, aside from Eliza and me, Doc was the only other living being on the planet. He was now sitting at his desk, an old dinged and dented oak desk, with his arms folded on the desktop, his somewhat large head resting on his arms. He was sleeping contentedly, snoring every now and then. He might have been dreaming happy dreams of recovering his wife. He seemed so peaceful that I really didn’t want to wake him. I really, really didn’t want to wake him and tell him that somehow we had fractured the moon and misplaced the rest of mankind.
As Eliza and I stood in the doorway of the cluttered office, we carried on in whispers the debate as to who ought to wake Doc and break the news to him. I was of the opinion that Doc was Eliza’s father, after all, and that therefore she should be the one to wake him up and tell him what had happened. She, on the other hand, maintained that I was the one to whom the artifact conveyed the “master plan” and therefore it was up to me to wake him and tell him. The debate soon turned into a wrestling match, with me trying to shove her into the office, and with her-- much stronger than she appeared-- resisting me, and almost shoving me into the office. It was during this inane physical confrontation that Doc decided to wake up on his own. He must have been watching us a moment-- after rubbing his tired eyes and replacing his glasses, probably-- and finally said, “Hey guys
, what’s up?”
We instantly stopped our wrestling, pretended it never happened, and turned toward him. He was looking at us with growing amusement.
“What are you guys doing?” he asked.
“Just came down to wake you, Doc,” Eliza said simply.
“Uh-huh,” he said. He pushed himself back away from the desk, and leaned back in his chair, looking up at us. “Well, I was up for most of the night, trying to reason out some kind of solution for our problem. I think I came up with something.” When neither Eliza nor I said anything, he continued, “I was thinking if we could set the coordinates for a time just before we arrived in Batavia, maybe we could leave a message-- a warning. I was thinking maybe we could leave it somewhere on the property, somewhere so that I could find it for sure-- maybe, say, inside the mailbox. If the warning were written in my own handwriting, I would have no choice but than to believe it. I could change plans, then, before anything happens, before the energy signature of the artifact is even discovered. I think it’s pretty simple, really, and I think that’s why it will work. What do you think?”
Almost in perfect unison, Eliza and I hemmed and hawed at the idea.
Doc frowned somewhat, no doubt wondering why the idea wasn’t met with instant approval.
“It seems like the simplest way of undoing the damage,” he said.
“Omigod,” Eliza finally cried out. “Will you please tell him, Travis.”
“Tell me what?” Doc asked, turning to me.
“Well,” I started, “there’s something I didn’t tell you. I probably should have at the time, but I didn’t quite know how to put it.”
