The Strange Fascinations of Noah Hypnotik

by David Arnold

  A quick knock on the door, and Mom is inside, all, “Noah! You need to get dressed pronto if you expect to be at school on time.”

  Thing is, I don’t expect to be at school on time. Or even close, really.

  37 → action item number two

  From the hood of my Hyundai hatchback, I stare at a dick-and-balls-shaped pool of grease in the gas station parking lot and try not to read too much into things. Alan would certainly have a thing or two to say on the reading of this Rorschach test.

  If this works, I’ll probably miss first block today, but all in the name of investigation.

  And, like clockwork, a few minutes later, there he is. The fedora, the cane, the goiter; the myth, man, and legend: OMG himself. I hop off the hood, cross the parking lot as casually as possible. I’ve imagined this moment many times, tried to think of the perfect opener, an introduction to charm-and-disarm. I’m about to start in, something like, “Hi, I’m Noah,” when out of the blue, and without looking at me, OMG says, “Well, kid, don’t just stand there,” and walks right by me.

  I don’t know how much time passes, but walk we do. No talking, just two people basking in the inherent value of one foot in front of the other. A casual stroll.

  We take a right on Ashbrook, and it occurs to me I have no idea what I’ve signed up for here, having never actually seen where OMG begins or ends these walks, and just when I start thinking things like maybe he doesn’t actually live anywhere but just walks for days, circling the city like the world’s most peculiar guardian angel, he turns onto a quaint little stone pathway, which leads to a quaint little stone house with a quaint little stone sign that reads AMBROSIA’S BED & BREAKFAST. Ever so slowly, OMG climbs these quaint little stone steps to the front door, where he keys a code into a lock above the knob, opens the door, and disappears inside.

  And as mysteriously as it began—it’s over.

  I try the door. Locked. There’s a doorbell, but what in the world would I say? Uh, hey, I just took a walk with one of your elderly guests. Wondering if I can have a quick peek inside?

  On my way back to the gas station I get a text from Alan: Fool! Got your Sonic bfast goodness. WHERE YO FINE ASS AT?

  The whole thing lasted less than fifteen minutes, which means if I hustle, I can make this work on school days without being inordinately tardy.

  On the drive to school, I imagine my relationship with OMG in the coming days, weeks, months, the two of us owning the streets of Iverton.

  Well, kid, don’t just stand there.

  Something tells me those six words are just the beginning.

  38 → passage of time (II)

  Chiropractor visits, physical fitness drills with Coach Kel, homework, school, recurring dream, scour the Internet for information on Mila Henry sketches, Well, kid, don’t just stand there, says OMG, and I walk with him from the gas station to the bed-and-breakfast where, every day, he shuts the door in my face.

  No leads on Philip Parish. I’ve googled “the sun is too bright,” until I can google no more, memorized his Wikipedia page, and studied every Pontius Pilot image I can find to see if the guy from the photo shows up, but nothing.

  No response from the Fading Girl. Twice more, I posted on her YouTube page in the hopes a nudge might do some good, but the only emails sitting in my new Gmail inbox are Google welcomes and ALL-CAPS advertisements for risk-free ways to lengthen my penis.

  At some point Mom and Dad decided family dinners were their opportunity to corner me about the offer from UM. Once I detected this strategy, however, I countered it with a pretty brilliant strategy of my own: every afternoon, after studying Pontius Pilot’s Wikipedia page, I would hop over to Audrey Hepburn’s page and memorize a minor piece of trivia; then, like tossing a slab of meat to a starving dog, I would casually mention this trivia at the dinner table and watch Penny go to town.

  This worked until it didn’t.

  One day in mid-October, right when the leaves started turning colors, Mom knocked on my bedroom door. “Your father and I would like to speak to you in the kitchen.”

  This didn’t bode well. “Okay,” I said. “Well, I’m sort of swamped with—”

  “Nope. You’ll be downstairs in five minutes.” Mom gently closed the door behind her, and I knew—the time had come.

  Downstairs, Mom and Dad sat at the kitchen table over coffee. Mom pushed out a chair with her foot, while Dad poured me a mug. “Have a seat.”

  I sat, watched Mom sip her coffee. It was sad, but her scar had become a physical representation of our relationship these past couple months. Secretive, cagey, drawn across her skin like a line in the sand: Mom on one side, me on the other.

  “Noah, would you agree that your father and I have been exceedingly patient about the UM offer?”

  Mom with the classic lawyer move. She was good, I had to give it to her. If I agreed—yes, you guys have been patient—it presupposed an end to that patience. If I disagreed, she’d ask for a specific example, of which I had none. Because the truth was . . .

  “Yes,” I said. “I agree.”

  She nodded. “We felt it was important that you have space to make a decision. And maybe you’re still considering options, and that’s fine. But it’s time to talk solid timelines.”

  “Timelines,” I said.

  She looked to Dad for help. He cleared his throat, nodded. “That’s right. Timelines,” he said, sipping his coffee.

  Attaboy, Dad. Get in, get out.

  Mom glared at him, looked back at me. “I spoke with both coaches yesterday. Your drills with Coach Kel have helped. The UM offer stands, but I’m not sure how long we can assume that will be true. Coach Tao, as you know, has made no offer at all, but she’s still interested. Obviously, we’d love Milwaukee because we want you close, and because an offer is on the table. But if Manhattan State is something you’d like to consider, I think that’s still a possibility.”

  “You do remember we’re not behind schedule with this,” I said; part of this was my fault, but nothing was more exhausting than having the same conversation over and over again.

  “Noah—”

  “I just don’t understand the rush.”

  “We’re not rushing. We’re trying to be smart here.”

  “You’ve missed months,” Dad said. “Coach Kel says your junior year was strong, and your workouts have improved, but at this point you’re running on fumes, bud.”

  “You have to see how lucky we are to even have interest from colleges at this point,” said Mom. “Maybe most swimmers wait, but you don’t have that luxury. There’s a moment here, and we think it’s best to jump on it.”

  “What about my back?” I asked, barely able to get the words out.

  I could almost feel the weight of prior conversations in the room. Dad said, “Dr. Kirby doesn’t anticipate this being a permanent injury. So I have to ask, Noah. Do you?”

  I searched their eyes, tried to pick up on any clues that might suggest they knew, but nothing. “No, I don’t.”

  Mom said, “Okay. So. Forward motion, right?”

  Dad nodded. “Right.”

  I got out a weak, “Right,” and thought about number four on my WTF HAPPENED list. Honestly, if this wasn’t a parallel universe, I wouldn’t mind finding one about now.

  “So, a timeline,” said Mom. “What do we think is reasonable?”

  “December twenty-first,” I said.

  The look on Mom’s face was comical.

  “Noah,” said Dad. “Come on.”

  “You guys have always said ‘a fall decision.’ December twenty-first is the last day of fall.”

  “Actually, I think it’s the first day of winter,” said Dad.

  “Guys? Doesn’t really matter,” said Mom. “Because we’re not waiting that long.”

  “So what’d you have in mind?” I asked.

&
nbsp; “I was thinking two weeks.”

  Growing up, I got pretty good at knowing when the time had come to shift the conversation from Mom the Mother to Mom the Attorney. I also got pretty good at playing my parents off each other.

  “Okay,” I said, really counting on Dad to come through here. “I said two months, you said two weeks. . . . I don’t know, is there like a benchmark date we could use somewhere in the middle?”

  I could see Mom trying to follow my thread. “A benchmark date?” she said. “I mean—we’ll just pick a day and that—”

  “Ooh,” said Dad, and like that, I knew I had him. “Thanksgiving. Perfect.”

  Dad loved Thanksgiving.

  “Oh,” I said, a slight smile at Mom. “Good idea, Dad.”

  He rubbed his hands together—like he’d just mediated the entire agreement—and then set to work cooking dinner for the night.

  Mom sipped her coffee, smiled at me over the rim. “Well played, counselor.”

  39 → a concise history of me, part twenty-nine

  August 1949. Mila Henry publishes her first novel, Babies on Bombs. In it an aspiring poet named William von Rudolf uses the word absquatulate, only to discover the word is all but dead. He then ponders the life of a word, its birth and death, and eventually arrives at the conclusion that words are simply people in hiding.

  William von Rudolf writes the following rhyme:

  People on a page, people on a page

  Words are people on a page, it seems

  Hiding in mouths and lurking in scenes

  Muddied on signs, waiting in the wings

  Some wear glasses, some a hat

  Some are round, some lie flat

  Some contort this way and that

  Disguise all they want, those slippery fiends

  They don’t fool me by any means

  William von Rudolf spends the rest of the novel trying to give birth to new words. With the exception of umyumtopia (noun: a society that subsists entirely on a pancake-and-whiskey diet), his efforts are deemed unsuccessful.

  Umyumtopians beg to differ.

  October 1895. A different William (William James, who was an actual person and not a character in a book) puts pen to paper and writes the word multiverse.

  No one had ever done that before.

  1935. A different Rudolf—Erwin Rudolf Josef Alexander Schrödinger (whose parents presumably had a difficult time making decisions)—devises a thought experiment, which would come to be known as Schrödinger’s cat. Very boiled down: a cat is in a box with a radioactive source that may or may not decay and trigger a poisonous gas that will kill the cat. By quantum mechanic principals, until one opens the box and observes the radioactive substance, it exists in a superposition. It both has decayed and has not decayed—or, more simply, the cat is both alive and dead.

  On the one hand, this seems utterly senseless. Impossible, even.

  On the other:

  Yesterday I got online and looked at pictures of New Zealand, imagined myself among the mountains, and it was easy to do so—they were right there on the screen. I thought, Maybe I’ll go there someday.

  Not long ago, someone somewhere wanted to look at pictures of New Zealand, so they went to the library and pulled a book off a shelf. This person imagined themselves among the mountains, and it was easy to do so—the mountains were right there on the page. This person thought, Maybe I’ll go there someday.

  Some time before that, someone somewhere had heard of New Zealand, in school maybe, or from a family friend. Sounds exotic, they thought, and then moved on about their day.

  Not too long before that, someone somewhere barely thought of the world at all. It was simply too big a place.

  I often consider the timeline of the world, and my place on it. And when I look into the past and see all the things humanity so drastically misunderstood, assumed impossible— ideas once shelved under science fiction now housed in science—how ignorant would it be for me to turn around and, facing the future, say, “Impossible.”

  More and more experiments seem to verify the possibility of a single particle existing in multiple spaces simultaneously until observation causes them to collapse into one. And because all matter is made of particles, theoretically, why couldn’t this apply to a cat? Or a person? Or a universe? And if the cat’s fate is not determined until observed, when we consider the outcomes of our own fates, it does raise the question: Who is observing us?

  I do not understand these things. But that’s okay. Not understanding isn’t the same as misunderstanding. And maybe one day, not long from now, a new word will be born, and a book will be moved from science fiction to science, and we can turn to face the future—perhaps even the multiverse—and say, “Maybe I’ll go there someday.”

  40 → senioritis

  Halloween approached as it did every year, with the same forewarnings. Penny cleaned out the top drawer of her dresser for the bountiful quantity of Snickers and Milky Ways to come. (Full-sized of course, because nothing is more déclassé to the true Ivertonian than to seem apologetically small; and let’s face it: nothing says I’m sorry like a “fun-sized” candy bar.) Mom and Dad watched The Nightmare Before Christmas no fewer than a half dozen times. And Val was devising her yearly scheme to suck as much candy as possible from the neighborhood.

  “The way I figure,” she says, “if we really hustle, we might be able to fit in three rounds this year. First round with Scream masks, second round as Bears players—the helmets should effectively disguise our faces—and third round as hobos, by far the quickest change.”

  A few years ago, Val worked out a foolproof trick-or-treat system: we’d get dressed up in Costume A, which required a mask or head covering of some kind, hit the streets for round one, then reconvene at the Rosa-Haas house to change into Costume B (no masks this time) and hit up the same houses again. Apparently this year, she’s going for the trifecta.

  Alan is all, “Very ambitious. I like it.”

  The entire senior class is in the school theater, a giant screen onstage; behind us a projector flips from an image of class rings to a pair of graduating class sweatpants.

  Val pulls out her phone, snaps a photo of the screen. “Nothing immortalizes like a quality pair of sweatpants,” she says under her breath while typing up a post.

  “I’m holding out for the fanny pack,” says Alan.

  Some guy from a company called Zalsten’s is giving his sales pitch, trying to squeeze every last drop from the Iverton High trust-fund crowd. He passes around yet another form, this one for something called the Mascot Package, which is basically a bundle offer including cap, gown, tassel, announcement cards, thank-you notes, a T-shirt, and, yes, sweatpants, all for the low, low price of $296.90.

  “That’s a pretty huge package,” says Alan, far louder than necessary, to which Val elbows him. “What?” he says. “I’m just saying the Mascot Package is a great deal. Way more bang for your buck than some smaller packages.”

  “Such a child,” says Val, putting her phone away.

  Principal Neusome takes the microphone from the Zalsten’s guy, puts on that stern voice of his, and threatens to take away our senior trip if we don’t quiet down.

  No one is listening.

  Some teachers pass out stacks of FAFSA forms for loans and grants, and someone from some agency is talking about how if we don’t fill out these forms properly, we won’t be eligible for “any monies for any colleges, at all, period,” to which Alan whispers, “What do you think she really means, though?”

  “This part is of actual importance,” says Val, leaning over one of the forms with a pen. “As opposed to sweatpants.”

  All these color-coded forms are giving me a familiar sense of dread. Mom helps out with the senior advisory board, so I knew most of this stuff was coming, but seeing the actual words on the actual pages in my actual h
ands—

  “Speaking of college,” says Val, “you talk to Coach Stevens lately? Or who was the other one? At Manhattan State?”

  All air in my body rushes for the exit.

  “Coach Tao,” I say.

  Ever since the incident in the cafeteria when I first learned of Val and Alan’s plans to attend UCLA, they’ve altogether avoided the topic of college—until now.

  “Right, Coach Tao. You talk to either of them recently?”

  Principal Neusome has the mic again; he’s going through a list of certain dooms for those who haven’t properly filled out their FAFSA, and I just let loose: “Why is college a given? I mean, I’m not saying I don’t want to go, like, ever, just that I’d like a choice in the matter. Like, let’s all calm down and realize a person’s life doesn’t expire the day they decide maybe they won’t go to college.”

  “Can’t blame people for looking out for your future,” says Val.

  “Yeah, but it’s like everyone in my life thinks they know what’s best for me, but how can they when they’re not me? Like, if only we knew someone who was me, maybe that person could tell us what I think. Oh, wait.”

  “Okay, Noah.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “And I’m just saying college is a huge privilege, and maybe it’s not for everyone, maybe it’s not for you, but also maybe keep the whining to a minimum. You don’t know everyone’s situation.”

  Alan says, “Titi Rosie would murder us if we talked like Noah.”

  “Murder us good and dead,” says Val.

  Every couple summers, the Rosa-Haas family visits Mrs. Rosa-Haas’s mother and sisters in San Juan. During their last trip, Alan took the opportunity to come out to everyone, including his beloved Lita, who was bordering on a hundred. Before they left, Alan told me he was afraid his announcement might do her in, but as it turned out Lita’s only concern was that Alan do his part in carrying on the Rosa name. This apparently led to quite the conversation about surrogacy and adoption, which led Alan to confess his reluctance to ever have kids in the first place, which produced the wailing and gnashing of teeth he’d assumed would accompany his initial announcement.