by Ruth White
Am I jealous of her? Do I think maybe Mom and Gramps give her more attention than they give me? But she needs them more. She was traumatized when she was really young.
Then I think of taking the Lotus after Mom told me not to touch the stuff. What a stupid thing to do. I sleep off and on, fitfully, fearfully on that hard, cold table, and my dreams are gray, distorted, nightmarish—like the Land of the Fathers.
• 27 •
Back to Meggie
I can hear the sound of dishes in the kitchen. Mom and Gramps are eating their breakfast. Even with David missing, they must go to work whether they like it or not. You don’t get days off in this place for much of anything. Keeping the factories humming is the main purpose in life, regardless of the pain in your heart.
I don’t usually get up until eight or later, but how can I sleep this morning? I roll out of bed and join them in the kitchen.
“Heard anything?” I ask, but I already know the answer.
They shake their heads and say nothing. They are eating a nuked frozen dinner for breakfast, because that’s all we have. Mom’s eyes are weary from anxiety and lack of sleep, and Gramps seems to have aged overnight.
We hear the front door open. We all leap to our feet and run out to see David!
He’s filthy from head to toe, and his eyes look worse than Mom’s. We fall all over him, hugging him, crying, and everybody talking at the same time.
“What happened?”
“Where have you been?”
When we give him a chance to answer, he just looks at us with big sad eyes and says, “Sorry you were worried, but I’m all right. Nobody hurt me.” His voice is weird and doesn’t sound like him at all. “Right now I can’t talk about it.”
It occurs to me that something in my brother has vanished overnight and something else has come to take its place.
“Of course,” Mom says. “Go to bed and get some sleep.”
“Right,” Gramps says. “We have to go to work, but you can tell all tonight.”
“Will you wake me for my lesson, Meg?”
“Sure, and I’ll go to the store for you too.”
“Don’t you want something to eat?” Mom asks him.
“Not now. Maybe when I get up.”
And he goes down the hallway and disappears into his bedroom.
While David rests, I go to the grocery store, then spend the rest of the morning studying the Carriage computer. I think I’m able now to figure coordinates for different places. That part of traveling by Carriage is fairly simple. The more difficult part is what Mom and Gramps are up against—finding a place to settle in this great big universe. It has to be a place where we can blend in with the natives and where the climate is reasonable. The most difficult part of all is finding a place where either English or Chromish is spoken, and such a place seems not to exist. Plan B is to find a language similar to English or Chromish, so that we can learn it easily.
When I hear David moving around, I put the computer away. I find him standing in the middle of the hallway staring at the wall.
“David?” I say softly. “You all right?”
He looks at me but doesn’t seem to really see me at first. “Yeah, I was just thinking,” he says at last, as his eyes begin to focus on me.
“Thinking about what?”
“About last night. I met Kitty’s uncle.”
“No kidding?”
We both go into the living room, and he starts telling me the story. He has just told me about being found behind the AC unit, when his face clouds over.
“I’ll tell you more later,” he says.
At dinner David apologizes for his behavior yesterday. Then he tells his story in a flat, unemotional voice. For the next two days he keeps to himself. He doesn’t even want to see Jennifer. He says we’re not to worry about him, that he’s all right and just needs some time alone. No one feels much like singing without David. Gil strums his guitar in the darkness, but it takes on a sad, lonely tone.
Finally, on the third day, David joins the world again, because this is the day that our sector has free access to Fashion City Park from nine in the morning until curfew at eight-thirty. The adults are allowed the day off from work, and the kids are excused from chores and lessons.
At the crack of dawn, when the smog still lies thick over the city, we are up, preparing a picnic basket, gathering blankets and suntan lotion, water bottles, etc. When I think of the wild and wonderful places we visited on our Earth, it seems pathetic that we’re now so excited about one day at a city park.
Mom has been sewing shorts at the factory and has managed to purchase a pair for each of us to wear today. We walk to our destination with the Gilmores, who are also in shorts. Outside the entrance to the park, and pacing back and forth, we find Bonnie. Once again her affliction is creating problems for her, and again it’s Jennifer who helps.
“I couldn’t decide what to bring,” Bonnie says plaintively. “So I didn’t bring anything. I’m the only one not taking stuff to the park.”
“That’s okay, Bonnie,” Jennifer assures her. “We’ve brought enough food and water and other things to share with you. You can spend the day with us.”
“Oh, thank you, Jennifer!” Bonnie cries. “Thank you! You see, I just couldn’t decide!”
“Bonnie’s situation is unusual,” Gil explains as Bonnie and Jennifer walk ahead of the rest of us. “She was bitterly angry when her brothers were killed in the war, and her protests were loud and legendary. That’s why she had to be sent away to rehab so often—so many times, in fact, that she became disabled. People were surprised when she was allowed to return home again and again. Also, single women usually are not tolerated, but Bonnie, inexplicably, hasn’t been forced to marry. It’s rumored that she actually likes the factory work, and her skill is so exceptional that the Fathers have looked the other way in her case. They generously allow her to live in that tiny apartment next to yours.”
“How big of them,” Gramps mumbles.
“Yes indeed,” Gil agrees.
We find a shady spot, where we spread our blankets. For the summer season, there are several birthdays in our building, including Colin’s sixteenth and my twelfth. The first order of the day is to sing “Happy Birthday” to us and present us with gifts. I receive a watch from Mom, socks from David, and a T-shirt from Gramps that says You Are My Sunshine. It’s a drab brown color, but I’m pleased to see a phrase that has nothing to do with the Fathers.
Then, as bizarre as it seems to me, we are eating birthday cake in the middle of the morning. When the smog burns away, we find ourselves enjoying a shimmering summer day, and somebody organizes races, including sack and three-legged races. Mom, Gramps, David, and I enter each event and have so much fun, you might think we were in our own backyard at the old Fischer place.
For lunch we enjoy hot dogs, hamburgers, fried chicken, and desserts. And there are vendors selling ice cream and sodas, even cotton candy and snow cones. After lunch, everybody rests. We sit on our blankets and listen to Gil strumming his guitar. Mom rubs suntan lotion on my arms, and I’m so content and comfortable that I want to doze off, but I shake my head to clear it. Who would waste time sleeping on a day like this?
And that’s when I see him! He’s leaning against a tree licking ice cream from a cone. He’s tall and angular, with a distasteful expression on his stained face. Suddenly he stops eating, lifts his long nose, and sniffs the air like an animal detecting a scent on the wind. The shock of seeing him again sends tremors through my nervous system, and the skin around my skull tingles.
I am transfixed by the purple map of Mexico on his face when his wild eyes meet mine. I couldn’t look away from him now if my life depended on it, and before I can stop myself, I clutch Gramps’s arm and begin to babble frantically in Chromish. Screeching, clicking, whistling, gurgling. And I can’t stop.
Of course I immediately become the center of attention. The shrillness of my voice and the language itself seem alien
even to me now, and it’s a sure bet that no Earthling in any universe has ever heard such a tirade of grossly unique sounds.
Then Gramps pulls me close to him and gently places a hand over my mouth to dam the flood of words. I am silenced, but my wide eyes do not leave the madman. He is now gaping at us, and I see some sort of recognition on his face.
“It’s the man with the purple birthmark,” I hear Mom say to Gramps.
Now I’m disappearing into a place deep inside myself where I feel hidden. It’s a trick I learned the last time I saw this horrid man. It’s like a state of suspended animation, an escape into the still eye of the tornado. Nothing can touch me here.
In this safe, secret place it’s like I’m watching a scene that I’m no longer a part of. The man moves toward me and my family, growling like a dog. I see David rushing at the man, and yelling something about “my sister.” Several people help him grab the man, and there’s a rowdy scuffle, while someone else runs for help. When the police arrive in our midst, I hear the echo … echo … echo of that other day in that other world when I was first traumatized, and the long-suppressed memories wash over me.
• 28 •
I was in my third-grade classroom in California, and my teacher, Mrs. Barton, was preparing us for the next day’s field trip to the sea. She had brought in some shells, which were spread out on her desk. I was excited to be going to the sea.
Suddenly my classmates fell silent, for there was a man standing in the doorway, looking into the room and sniffing the air with his long nose.
“It’s in this room,” he said. “I can smell it here.”
The purple stain on his face seemed to throb and deepen in color as his eyes searched our faces.
“Excuse me, sir,” Mrs. Barton said to the man. “Can I help you?”
But he didn’t answer her. He was moving slowly into our midst.
“It’s here,” he said with a wild bright gleam of madness in his dark eyes. “There’s an alien here.”
“Don’t come any closer!” Mrs. Barton commanded.
“I’ve been given this great gift,” he said in a dreadful voice. “So that I can sniff them out and eliminate them from our society.” He took a knife from his pocket and waved it over his head. “You don’t want to sway me from my mission.”
My classmates began to shriek and cry. Mrs. Barton tried to place herself between us and the awful man. That was when he zeroed in on me.
“Sir!” Mrs. Barton shouted loudly at the man as she shielded me with her body. “Please leave the premises at once!”
But he knocked Mrs. Barton aside as if she were a rag doll and reached his long bony fingers toward me. I remembered the terror as only a momentary thing, for I was falling, falling like a leaf on the breeze, before entering this hidden safe place inside.
Fortunately, the man’s hands never reached me, and I was pulled from the brink of some horrible fate as the school security guards appeared. I knew no more until I saw Gramps. He lifted me from the couch in the principal’s office, where I lay curled up, and held me close. He smelled of freshly baked bread.
The man was taken into custody, declared insane, and locked away so that he couldn’t hurt anybody. Gramps explained to me that there really were people in the universe with superreceptive senses who were able to identify aliens.
“But I’ve never known them to be insane or violent,” he told me. “On Chroma they were revered as wise men.”
One night I heard Mom saying to Gramps, “This incident has brought unwanted publicity to us. We are no longer anonymous. Also, insane people don’t stay locked up forever, and that man will get out someday. When he does, I’m afraid he’ll come looking for us.”
That was when we moved across the country to North Carolina, where I was somehow able to put behind me the horror of being hunted like an animal. Only in nightmares did I fully feel my fears.
This time it appears that the madman has sniffed out and tried to attack my entire family. Still, he is my personal childhood monster who hides in the closet or under the bed. I feel he is after only me and has tracked me across two worlds.
When I come back to the present, I find Mom, Gramps, David, Bonnie, and the Gilmores hovering over me. Mom is bathing my face with a wet cloth.
“Not to worry, Meggie B.,” Gramps says. “Officer Brent took him away.”
“He’s a weird one,” Gil says, and laughs. “He claims to be an alien hunter.”
“Isn’t that ludicrous, Meggie?” Mom says, and tries to laugh too, but I can see the anxiety in her eyes.
I want to comfort her, to tell her I’m okay, but I can’t be sure I really am okay. And Colin is looking at me with an expression I’ve never seen before.
“Meggie, what were those sounds you were making?” he asks me.
Everybody looks at me and waits for an answer. But what can I say? What can anybody say? I feel that Mom, Gramps, and David are searching their brains for some explanation.
“Clearly she was terrified,” Mom says to Colin. “Wouldn’t you be if that maniac came after you?”
But Colin and Jennifer are exchanging glances that I can’t interpret. What must they be thinking?
“It’s bizarre how he lunged at you all like that!” Bonnie says.
“Yeah,” Colin agrees. “I’ve seen him lots of times, hanging around town, sniffing the air, and talking crazy about aliens among us, but I’ve never known him to be violent.”
“I have to wonder why he hasn’t been apprehended before now,” Gil says. “His gross uniqueness is glaringly obvious.”
“Good point,” Gramps says. “Why hasn’t he been arrested before now?”
“For the same reason I’ve been given special treatment,” Bonnie says. “They need him. He knows more about the sewing machines than anybody. They usually keep him well medicated, but today he was unsupervised.”
“Surely he’ll be sent away now,” Jennifer says. “Don’t you think?”
Much to my dismay, nobody can answer that question.
I don’t want to ruin this day for the others, so I pretend to be all right, and I insist that they continue to participate in the activities. I’ll just remain here on the blanket, I tell them, and get my bearings. Mom and Gramps, however, won’t leave my side, and David stays close by. The rest of our group do manage to go back to their holiday and put aside the man with the purple birthmark, but I know he’ll reappear in my dreams for many nights to come.
Several times throughout the day, I find Colin staring at me with knitted brows. When his puzzled eyes meet mine, he turns away quickly. When we finally leave the park to go back to Building 9, we see Elvis Presley performing on the sidewalk again.
As we stop to listen to his music, Gramps whispers to me, “It really is Elvis.”
Yes, it really is, and apparently he’s back from rehab, but not in all his glory. Gone are the shiny, silky clothes and blue suede shoes. Now he’s dressed in beige from head to toe, and his dark wavy hair has been mutilated into a crew cut. Worse yet, all the light has gone out of his eyes, and he doesn’t allow his body to sway in the least. Worst of all, he sings that most bland of all love songs, “Tea for Two.”
I think of the other Elvis, and the contrast makes me long for those sparkling golden days in America. Not just the green mountains and valleys, and blue waters, but also the happy people who were in charge of their own destiny. The energy. The wild music. The spirited laughter. The freedom from fear. And my heart aches to see that Earth again.
• 29 •
On The Family Hour we hear that the madman has been sent away for “an indefinite period of time,” but now I have a hard time trusting anybody or believing anything I hear in this place, and a new phobia creeps into my mind. I’m afraid of going outside, even for a walk. My family is patient with me, but Jennifer and Colin simply don’t get it.
“You need fresh air and sunshine,” Jennifer tells me. “A strong body serves the Fathers far better than a weak one.”
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br /> I can’t help thinking that I really have not breathed fresh air since coming to Fashion City. In fact, it’s likely that the air-conditioning is safer than the polluted air outside. Mom has told me that it’s only a matter of time before the lifelong residents here begin to come down with pollution poisoning, as they did on Chroma.
This morning Mom told us she has found what she thinks is a promising planet. Its name is Tranquility, its language is very much like Chromish, and it has strict environmental regulations. Now she and Gramps have to study the various governments to see if they can find a place like the United States.
I wonder how the Gilmores will take it when they wake up one morning and find that the Blues have vanished overnight. I’ll miss them, but we knew this day was coming.
Later we’re sitting on the balcony on a night so dark you can’t see your hand in front of your face. No moon, no stars. It seems that Mom’s refusal to marry Gil has only made him more in love with her, and he keeps asking her, “How can I win your heart? What must I do?” Mom has tried patiently to explain to him that her heart can’t be won, but on this night she tries a different tactic.
“You can give up those stupid pills, for one thing,” she snaps at him.
Gil is obviously surprised. “Give up Lotus? But why?”
“They take all the natural survival instinct out of you, Gil, and make you sluggish.”
“But they make life bearable. You should try them yourself, my dear. David had a bad reaction. They usually make you more agreeable.”
“Oh, yes, I’m sure of it,” Mom replies with a laugh, “more agreeable and more submissive. That’s how they turn you into zombies.”
“Meggie!” This cry from Colin is sudden and shrill. “What’s in your hair?”
Once again, all eyes are on me, and from the corner of my right eye, I can see why. OMG! I am glowing!
