by Tom Upton
“I feel fine,” I said. “But it doesn’t count. It’s all just a dream, you know-- it’s not real.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
I opened my eyes, then, and she was frowning, almost scowling, at me.
“Well, the whole thing. What you said before was true: the artifact must have rubbed off on you-- on me, too. What you feel isn’t real; it’s just an impression we picked up from this-- thing. It’s like we assumed the nature of the people who built it. That’s all. If this thing disappeared tomorrow, that would be the end of it; all those feelings you’re acting on would be gone.”
She tilted her head and stared at me. “I can’t believe what you’re saying. You actually believe that?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s all very unnatural, don’t you think? If we had met under different circumstance, if the artifact had never been involved in any way, do you really think you’d feel the same right now? No, you wouldn’t-- not at all. You would feel the way you ought to feel. We would just be two people who met, and that would be that.”
“But you’re wrong, Travis, I know,” she insisted. “I’m not saying that the artifact didn’t have some kind of influence on us, but that doesn’t mean that nothing of it is real. It’s all part of fate, Travis. You’re saying if this didn’t happen, or if this did happen…. Well, don’t you see the point? What happened, happened-- and that’s all that really counts. If the artifact had something to do with it all, so be it-- it’s all fate, our fate,” she said solemnly. “And you’re not going to tell me you don’t feel the same way.”
“No, I’m just looking at things a different way,” I said.
“No, what you’re doing is resisting fate,” she said, and her eyes seemed to flash a lighter shade of green. “You’re doing what you always do-- nitpicking. You can’t accept something that you can’t completely understand. You need to know the whys and wherefores of everything. Just like when I drove you out to that clearing. It was a nice peaceful place, but you couldn’t enjoy it. No, you had to know what it was, how it came to be there-- never mind just accepting it and enjoying it.”
“What you’re talking about is going along with everything no matter how bizarre.”
“And what’s wrong with that?” she wanted to know. “There is such a thing as trusting fate. Just go with your feelings. What could ever be wrong with that?”
“Nothing, if they really are my feelings, and not just something I picked up from the artifact-- like a virus. This thing is alive, and it carries with it the same qualities of the people who built it. But we’re not those people-- we’re not from some planet orbiting Bellatrix or whatever. For them, it’s fine. Every love is love at first sight, and it lasts forever. You have to remember what planet you live on. You have to remember who you are.”
She had listened patiently, chewing her thumbnail, glancing at the floor.
“It’s real, Travis,” she said, then, wearily. “All the nitpicking in the world isn’t going to change that.”
“I never said it wasn’t real. I just said it’s not natural.”
“So what? All right, we’re not natural. What’s the big deal?” she asked.
“Eliza, I’m not sure I even want a girlfriend.”
“You’re not--” she started. “Oh, I know what’s really happening. You’re thinking about things. My god, you’re such a -- a-- a-- guy, sometimes,” she hissed, squinting hard at me, “You know, at times like this I really hate you-- I really, really do.” She just knelt on the floor, fuming for a while, refusing even to look at me. When she finally did, I could see the hurt in her eyes. “You just won’t let yourself be happy, will you?”
“With everything that’s going on?” I said.
“Especially with everything that’s going on. What we have is real-- no matter how we got it-- it’s the only thing that is real at the moment. You think everything that’s happening is real? That’s the dream-- that’s the nightmare. Travis, the more you deny the truth, the more you fade into the nightmare. As long as we have each other, nothing else matters-- no matter how strange or bizarre things become. We’re like… Romeo and Juliette, for gosh sake.”
“Yeah, and what happened to them, again?”
“All right, they died,” she admitted, “Bad example maybe, but what they had was real. They may have had it for only a short time, but they had it and it was real. That’s all that counts, really.”
“‘Tho’ there be no tomorrow/ and the winds of madness whirl ’round me today/ I hold this precious gift in my hand/ and about that doubt has nothing to say’ ” I said in a musing way, not sure at all from where the words came.
Eliza was pleasantly startled.
“Why, Travis, that’s beautiful-- and exactly what I meant. Where’s it from.”
“I don’t have a clue,” I confessed. “It’s like the words just popped into my head.”
“You don’t read poetry?”
“What, are you kidding?” I said. “It would look really funny, I think, reading Emily Dickenson between sets of bench presses at the gym.”
“Oh, Travis,” she said, with deep affection, laughing that gurgling laugh of hers. “You’re such a nut case.”
Before I know what was happening, she surged forward, pinned me down to the sofa, and was kissing me all over my face. When she hit my lips again, she lingered there for a long time, and in the end, I found myself not minding it, not minding in the least. Suddenly I felt that something was wrong; there was a tingling feeling building in the pit of my stomach. I gently pushed her away, and sat up on the sofa as she watched me curiously. It was not a normal sensation I was experiencing, not the thrilling kind you get from being on a roller coaster when it rushes down a steep dip, not the panicky kind you have from getting caught doing something wrong when you’re a kid. It was a much deeper feeling, very physical, as though a fairly intense charge of electrical energy was running through my stomach, with the voltage slowly but surely increasing.
“What’s the matter?” Eliza asked now, growing concerned. When I explained to her what was happening, she giggled and said, “Why, you silly, that’s love. That’s how you feel when you’re in love.”
I stood up as the sensation became so intense that it could only be something serious.
“I don’t think that’s it,” I said, glancing down at her. She was still kneeling on the floor, and looking up at me oddly.
“Travis, are you all right?” she asked, getting to her feet.
“I’m feeling very strange,” I said.
“Are you in pain?”
“No, I just feel-- I don’t know--” I struggled to find the right word. “I feel-- light.”
Eliza frowned. “Light? How do you mean?”
“I don’t know-- not heavy,” I said, not intending sarcasm.
She looked me up and down, then, and when she looked down, she jumped a foot back, as though startled. When she tilted her face upward, I saw the bug-eyed, almost comical, look of extreme confusion. She appeared unable to speak, and she dropped her eyes as though motioning with them for me to look down. When I did, I saw that my feet were not touching the floor, literally, and as the feeling intensified in my stomach, I slowly edged further away from the floor. The slow ascent finally stopped, and I was hovering about a foot off the ground.
A long moment passed before Eliza regained her voice.
“All right,” she said, almost calm, “That’s really strange.” She walked around me, then, looking high and low and all around, as though searching for wires or something that would make the event nothing more than a magic trick. She stopped in front of me, squatted down, and ran her hands through the air below my shoes. She stood and gazed up at me, asking, “I give up. How are you doing that?”
“I’m not doing anything,” I told her, more than a little edgy.
Before any more could be said, I was suddenly propelled backward, as though I’d been struck in the stomach with a forceful blow. I slammed against the b
ack wall of the living room, and then fell to the floor.
I lost consciousness for a while. I couldn’t tell whether it was a few seconds or an hour. When I opened my eyes next, I saw Eliza and Doc looking down at me, and I had the distinct feeling of déjà vu. I looked up from one to the other as they spoke.
“And you say he was levitating?” Doc was asking Eliza.
“Yeah,” she said, “and it was plenty weird. You all right?” she said to me, then.
“Oh, fine,” I said, sitting up on the floor, and rubbing the back of my head, on which a sizeable lump had swelled. Suddenly a cacophony of noise ran through my mind; it was like a thousand voices all jabbering at the same time, each voice trying to get across its own singular message. A series of images accompanied the noise, pictures flicking off in rapid fire, blurring together in a jingly mass of colors. I found it impossible to isolate a single voice or a single image, yet somehow I knew what had to be done at the moment, what imperative first step must be taken to set everything right. I looked up at Doc and Eliza, and to their puzzled, vaguely concerned, expressions, I announced, “We have to go shopping.”
“How hard did he hit his head?” Doc asked Eliza.
I was standing now, though light-headed and weak-kneed.
“It’s necessary,” I murmured, and started to step toward the sofa. I almost tripped over the coffee table before I flopped down onto the thick cushions.
Doc and Eliza stood over me, staring down at me.
“The artifact?” Eliza asked.
I nodded by head, which ached badly-- I wasn’t sure whether it was from hitting the wall or from the intensity of the message I’d received.
“Shopping for what?” Doc demanded.
“Bunch of things,” I muttered, rubbing my forehead.
“Things for what?”
“I’m not sure,” I said.
“You’re not sure?”
“I have a list of things in my mind. I think it wants me to build something.”
“Build something!” Doc cried, and turned abruptly away, as if he were stricken by the sudden need to pace. He turned back, and asked, “Build what?”
“I don’t know yet.”
Doc paused, frowning. “This isn’t good,” he said. “How do you even know you can trust this thing, anymore? How do you know it doesn’t want you to build a bomb or something?”
“That doesn’t make any sense,” I said.
“Look around-- nothing makes much sense does it?”
“All I know is that it put a shopping list in my head. That and a sense of urgency.”
Doc paused to consider the matter carefully, and then wagging his head, said, “I don’t know…. What kind of things are on this list.”
“Circuit boards, transistors, resistors, capacitors, walkie-talkies, software… a lot of things.”
“It’s going to take you hours to get all that,” he noted. “No telling how many stores you’ll have to go to. No telling if you’ll even be able to find it all.”
“I know a place that will have most of it,” I said. “It’s a big warehouse place, just outside of down-- just outside of where downtown was.”
“Maybe you should wait till tomorrow,” Doc suggested. “The temperature is dropping pretty fast out there.”
“We have snowsuits,” Eliza said, and Doc glared at her.
“Snowsuits won’t do you much good if the temperature drops abnormally low, and you don’t know it won’t. What if it drops to a hundred below zero? It’s possible, you know-- we just can’t tell how much damage has been done to the atmosphere. And you hear that noise outside?” he asked. It was true, now and then as we spoke, there was a distant roaring, muffled so that you could barely hear it within the living room. It didn’t sound exactly like thunder-- not the crackling booming thunder I had known-- but rather a dull edgeless low rumble, as though the atmospheric conditions on the planet were now completely changed. When the thunder sounded again, deep vibrations ran through the floor, and Doc said, “There, see? Sounds like a storm coming, doesn’t it?-- but what kind of storm? How can you know for sure? Maybe you’ll get caught in a blizzard-- the sky can drop twenty, thirty inches of snow on you, and then what? You’re stuck; you’re dead. You have to start viewing this as an alien world, literally, because, really, it is.”
“I’ll go outside and bring the snowsuits in,” Eliza said, heading for the front door.
Doc gawked after her in amazement. “She just doesn’t listen, does she?” he said to me. “It’s incredible how natural it is for her, too. And you probably won’t listen either.”
“Doc, I think this is really important that we do this, and do it right now.”
“You don’t know what it wants you to build, but it has to be done right this minute?”
“I think it will all make more sense after the thing is assembled,” I said.
Doc sighed. “And I probably couldn’t talk you out of this, could I?” When I didn’t say anything, he said, “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Well, at least leave Eliza here, with me.” The moment the words came out of his mouth, he appeared to realize how futile it would be to keep Eliza pent up at home. Misery poured over his face. “Well, I guess that’s a dumb idea. She always has been pretty spirited. Since she met you, she’s bolder than ever. I’d probably have to bind and gag her and lock her in the closet to get her to stay home.” He wagged his head, defeated, and added, “This isn’t a good idea.”
He dropped his head and turned away, then, headed back down to his office.
When Eliza rushed back into the house, she slammed the door after her and cried, “Burrrrrrr!” Her usually pallid checks were rosy from the cold. She carried the bulky bundle the snowsuits made over to the sofa, and threw them down.
“Gotta be about twenty degrees out there,” she said, putting her hands to her mouth so that she could blow hot air into them. “That thunder-- if that’s what it is-- sounds really nasty, too. It doesn’t sound like it’s coming from any one place; it just rumbles across the whole sky, from east to west.” She lowered her hands from her face. “Where’s Doc?”
“He went back downstairs,” I said.
“Huh,” she said, as though expecting Doc to put up a fight about her going out. She kicked off her deck shoes, then, and picked up one of the snowsuits. It was purple, jumpsuit style. She balanced to step into the suit, pulling it up over her bare legs, which were pretty pink from the cold. She reared back a little to slip her hands into the arms of the suit and pulled it on. After she zipped up the zipper, she sat on the sofa. She pulled out a pair of black winter boots from under the other snowsuits, and put them on. She looked down at the boots appraisingly, nodded as though satisfied, and then looked up at me. “Well, aren’t you getting dressed?”
“Which suit is mine?”
She reached over, grabbed a suit and tossed it to me. The bottom half of the suit was blue and the top half-red with wide white strips that formed X’s on the front and back of the suit. On the white strips were series of small blue stars. I held the suit by the shoulders out in front of me; though I’d never been big on fashion-- seldom gave a second thought to any of my clothing-- I realized that this could possibly be the gaudiest piece of outerwear in the cosmos. As I pulled on the thing, I hoped that the zipper wouldn’t get caught, trapping me inside. The fit was pretty good, though, and for the moment-- as there was no mirror in the room-- I could go on unaware of how much a looked like Evil Knievel.
Before we left, Eliza insisted on going to the kitchen and filling a couple thermoses with hot coffee from the food dispenser. She also retrieved a paper bag filled with ham and cheese sandwiches. We walked out the front door, then, and I saw that she seemed giddy with excitement, as if we were going out on a picnic or something. As she bounded down the front stairs, heading for the four by four, I felt uneasy though I couldn’t understand why. Maybe because the thrill she seemed to be experiencing was entirely inappropriate. This little outing probably wouldn’t d
evelop into anything resembling fun. But that was just the thing about Eliza: no matter whether the unknown was good or bad, still she rushed forward to meet it, totally trusting in fate. I wished I, too, could do that.
As I walked down the stairs, it began to snow. I saw the first fluffy flakes by the porch light, fluttering down. I reached out a hand and one of the flakes landed in my palm. The flake was black, and melted quickly from the heat of my hand, leaving a dark smudge on my skin.
“I think I see how everything got covered with this black junk,” Eliza commented as she drove along. “It snows like this at night, and during the day, when the temperature rises, the snow melts, and all that is left is the black junk that was in the snow.” The streets were pitch-black by now, and the headlights of the four by four did not throw much light onto the pavement. Even the high beams seemed to be weakened by the darkness, as though it had the secret ability to drain the energy out of any light source that attempted to penetrate it. It began to snow for real now, the black flakes invisible in the dark. When they dotted the windshield enough, Eliza turned on the wipers, and dark smears formed on the glass. She had to repeatedly hit the washer button to spray the glass so that the sooty stuff could be cleared away. “This isn’t working too well, Trav,” she said, then. “We’re going to run out of windshield washer soon, and we’ll be flying blind.”
“Maybe we should just break the glass out,” I suggested.
She glanced at me, and though it was too dark to see her face clearly, I knew she had a horrified expression.
“Just break it out?” she cried. “Are you kidding? Doc’ll kill us for sure-- besides, we’ll freeze our butts off.”
So we stopped at the next gas station we came across, and I went inside and grabbed a couple gallons of windshield wiper fluid and a half dozen road flares. I went outside and popped the hood of the four by four, and started to fill the reservoir that held the wiper fluid. Wind whipped the dark snow around, and by the time the plastic container was full, I had snow in my hair and sticking to my face. I jumped back into the passenger seat, and threw the rest of the wiper fluid and flares on the floor, next to the shotgun and bag of shells.
