Subdivision, p.17
Subdivision, page 17
“Why not?”
“A storm is coming. We need to go back.”
“I didn’t see any clouds,” he said.
“Well, no one can see them yet,” I explained. “But didn’t you feel that wind outside? The weather is changing. A storm is going to come, and we have to be where it’s safe.”
But the child didn’t move. If anything, he seemed to grip the mail carrier even harder.
“I’ll tell you what,” I told the child, resisting the impulse to just grab him and run. “If you come with me, you can ride on my back, just like you’re doing with that lady. Except, unlike her, I’ll actually be moving. It’ll be like the Carousel, except better!”
The little boy didn’t move, but I could sense his resolve weakening. His feet again clambered against the mailbag, and they seemed less determined, less energetic. I took a moment to peer down into the mailbag and was surprised to notice that the effigy’s detail extended all the way into the parcels inside: I could even read the return addresses on some of the letters. PAST DUE NOTICE, read an envelope from a bank; another appeared to be a bill from a collective of family and marriage therapists.
“I suppose,” I said to the child, pretending to muse aloud to myself, “I’ll just have to happily race through this abandoned mall without you. I guess I’ll make horsey noises alone, and go trotting back to the guesthouse for cookies without anyone riding on my shoulders.”
The little boy merely frowned, and for a moment I thought I might scream in frustration. Didn’t he realize we were both in mortal danger? But then, at last, his grip loosened, and he began to slide slowly down the mail carrier’s slippery back. This time, he didn’t try to stop himself.
I knelt on the platform beside him, and offered him my own back to climb onto. Dutifully, he did so, wrapping his small arms around my neck with maddening slowness, and I stood up with a forced whinny. In a horse voice, I said, “Ti-i-i-ime to ri-i-i-i-ide back to the guesthouse!”
The child didn’t laugh, but I could tell by the way he squeezed me that he was pleased. I made my way through the crowd of horses, then hopped down from the carousel and moved out among the tables.
“Wait,” the child said in my ear. “Mr. Lorre’s roses.”
Oh, for Pete’s sake. There was no time—and I wasn’t going to have those smelly things brushing my face for the next fifteen minutes. I kept on walking, and said, “Those aren’t fresh anymore. We can get Mr. Lorre some new ones when we get back.”
The boy said, “He told me to bring them to Anna.”
“And you went outside with them, and you got lost?”
“I was looking for her house,” he insisted.
“Of course. You must have taken a wrong turn. It’s all right.”
“But I found you instead,” the boy told me, practically shouting. He gripped me tighter.
“That’s right,” I agreed. “And I found you.”
For a moment, I was seized by an unfamiliar series of emotions—mingled affection and longing for the boy, as though he were still missing, and I were still desperately searching. Unbidden, the image came to me of the two of us marching, hand in hand, through the gleaming gates of the City. This vision was absurd, of course—the road was still closed, and I didn’t even know if the City had gates, let alone gleaming ones—but it was powerful nonetheless.
I tightened my grip on the boy’s small arms and carried him down the grand hallways of the Oracle, looking for the exit. For whatever reason, though, I couldn’t find my way back. Nothing was quite as I remembered, and none of the stores I’d seen before could be found. Rather than nearing the shattered doorway, in fact, we seemed to be penetrating even farther into the depths of the building. I asked Cylvia for directions, but, except for a brief flash and a faint vibration, she didn’t respond. I suspected it was hard for her to get a connection, down here in the labyrinth of the Oracle.
The hallway was darkening, and I thought we might soon have to turn around and go back the way we came. Then I saw, up ahead, a faint glow. I plodded along, having given up entirely on pretending to be a horse, until I could make out the source of the light. It was something I’d seen before: the store called Memory.
A minute later, the child and I paused on the threshold of the place. I wasn’t sure what I’d expected, but what lay before me was disappointing, to say the least: a small, low-rent retail space, with a long laminate counter, empty shelves, and a few freestanding wire grids with hooks hanging from them. Bare fluorescent bulbs overhead cast a cold light over the room.
The one promising thing about Memory was an open doorway in the back, which seemed to lead to some kind of long hallway. Perhaps this was a way out?
Sleepily, the little boy said, “We have to bring the flowers to Anna.”
“I’m sorry,” I told him, hiking him up higher on my back. “We just can’t do that right now.” I stepped over the threshold and into the store.
Something—the change in lighting, perhaps—seemed to rouse the child. He said, “Mr. Lorre was on his way home.”
“Mm-hmm,” I said, making my way through the space. My feet brushed the cheap gray carpet and I could feel a static-electrical charge building. A few hairs rose up around my face; a few more clung to it. I brushed them aside with a strategically oblique breath of air.
“He was driving his truck,” the child muttered into my ear. “He’d been making deliveries all day, and he stopped to buy her the flowers.”
“Well, that’s very nice,” I said.
“He was thinking that he was lucky to have her after all these years,” the child went on, his recollection becoming more confident. “After their son died of cancer, things between them had become strained. Mr. Lorre’s wife seemed to blame him for their son’s death—or maybe it was just too painful for her to face him, given all that they’d been through.”
“That’s interesting,” I said. I wasn’t really paying attention, to be frank: our journey across the retail space was taking much longer than I’d anticipated. I hazarded a glance over my shoulder, and saw the room stretching far, far back into the darkness of the mall; the counter appeared extraordinarily long, and more shelves and product racks were scattered throughout the area than I had initially thought. Still, the little boy and I did seem to be making progress: the rear wall was now somewhat closer, and I could make out more of the hallway beyond it. Far ahead, a point of light dully gleamed. Perhaps this was a door, one with a window to the outside!
“But lately,” the child said, “Mr. Lorre’s wife had seemed to come to terms with their misfortune. And just a few nights before, they had slept in the same bed for the first time in years. On the day of the crash, Mr. Lorre remembered that it was their wedding anniversary. They hadn’t celebrated their marriage in a long time. So Mr. Lorre stopped on the way home and bought his wife roses!”
“You know,” I told the child, “your chatter is a little bit distracting. I’m trying to reach that door, and your fanciful storytelling is not helping matters one bit.” I felt very tired, but the back door was closer than ever, and it was quite clear now that the mysterious hallway did indeed end in a second door, with a small square window to the outside. I could make out a patch of green through it, as though the woods lay beyond, and unless my ears deceived me, I could hear the caw of a crow. The crow, for its part, knew I was coming, and was wheeling overhead, watching the door, awaiting my exit. I did not want to let it down.
“When the car swerved across his lane, Mr. Lorre was imagining presenting the roses to his wife! She would greet him at the door, and take the flowers, and kiss him on the cheek. Then he would go to the cabinet for the bottle of brandy, and they would sit on the sofa together, holding hands, watching their favorite game shows.”
“Stop!” I told the child. “Stop it this instant!” We were almost there—just a few steps more, and we’d have passed through Memory and into the hallway. Over my shoulder, the store stretched almost infinitely back to a tiny point, a black square of mall.
“But that future was shattered when—”
“Enough!” I shouted, and then we were there, and I sprang through the doorway and pulled the heavy steel door shut behind me.
●
The hallway was cool and dark, with cinder block walls and an industrial linoleum floor; no light shone, except through the window at the end. I shucked the little boy off my back, and he slid down to the floor, then took my hand in his. Wordlessly, we began our walk.
I was pleased to note that the hallway seemed quite normal, and didn’t impede our progress in any way. We had reached the end in under a minute. The door, like the one we’d just passed through, was of steel, with a heavy-duty lever handle. The window, as I had thought, looked out onto vegetation, but it wasn’t the forest—instead, the glass offered a view of a tall hedge, neatly trimmed, standing just a few feet away, deep green in the evening light. I tried to remember whether I had seen this hedge while approaching the Oracle, but memory failed me—I had been concentrating on the mall’s broken entrance.
Confidently, I reached out and tried to open the door. It was locked.
“Hmm,” I said.
“Are we trapped?” the little boy asked me. “Are we stuck here forever? Are we going to starve to death?”
“Of course not,” I said.
“You’re not going to eat me!” he went on. “I’ll eat you first!”
“We’re not quite at that point yet,” I reassured him. “I’ll tell you what. You stay here. I’m going to go back and see if there’s a key in the Memory store. Maybe it’s hanging under the counter.”
“Okay,” he replied sullenly.
I hurried back down the hall to the door we’d come through, and tried the handle. It, too, was locked.
Back at the hedge door, I tried the handle a second time. I pulled it up, as well as pushed it down; I tugged on it, in the hope that the door wasn’t actually on the latch. But it was shut tightly.
I did notice, however, an unusual keyhole underneath the handle: a small circle, less than half an inch in diameter. This reminded me that I did have an unusual key with me: my key from the Dead Tower. I rummaged in my bag until I found it.
“You have the key!” the child said, clapping.
“Well, let’s see,” I said. I inserted the key into the lock, and it fit there quite comfortably. But the door didn’t react. It emitted no mechanical noises, and the handle remained frozen in place.
“Maybe we could break the glass,” the child said.
The glass looked very thick, and was reinforced with wire. And I hadn’t seen any loose item that we could use to break it. Even so: “I don’t think we could fit through the hole,” I said.
“We could yell for help.”
“Maybe.”
“Help!” the child screamed. I jumped. The word hung in the air, amplified by and echoing in the long hallway, and we listened to it decay into silence.
“Cylvia,” I said. “How do we get out of here?”
Cylvia woke, briefly, and flickered white and red. A few stuttered syllables issued from her, distorted and unintelligible. Then she switched off.
“Hmm,” I said.
“This is stupid,” the child said. “Do you think we can eat our shoes?”
“That won’t be necessary,” I told him, glancing down at our shoes, I suppose to assess their potential as emergency rations. They did not look very appetizing. But the sight of my shoes, with their purple patent leather, reminded me of something. I dug into my skirt pocket and drew forth the crayon I had taken from the child’s table at the bakery, the purple one marked BRUISE.
“Hey!” the boy said. “My crayon!”
It had been a peculiar day, and there was nothing to lose. I inserted the crayon, ceremoniously, into the keyhole. It fit perfectly, and once I’d pushed it halfway in, something grabbed it and pulled it in the rest of the way—digested it, really. We heard a loud click, and the door swung open.
It was with gratitude that we inhaled the moist and gusty air that greeted us on the other side. The child and I stepped through. “I would have started with your hands,” he said. “And your feet would be next. I would have cooked them on a fire!” He sounded mildly disappointed.
“That’s quite enough of that,” I said, trying to get my bearings. I shut the door behind us and saw that, incongruously, it was actually the door to a small garden shed. I peered left and right. The hedge led to a low fence on one side, and a road on the other. It all looked quite familiar, save for the gray cast of light everything was bathed in; the sun, for a change, was hidden behind a bank of clouds that obscured most of the sky, leaving only patches of blue. I feared that we were running out of time, and hoped we weren’t far from the guesthouse.
The child had run ahead. “We’re home!” he shouted. And indeed, he was right—I stepped out from behind the shed to confirm that we had already arrived. We were standing in the side yard of the guesthouse. The crow was perched on the neighboring rooftop, in the very spot where I had first spied him from the bathtub. I didn’t actually notice him now, but he was watching me, and he observed that all my possible futures had remained largely in sync—in fact, if anything, they had converged further. If I had happened to glance at the crow, I would have seen that his essence appeared stable, without a hint of flickering.
Cylvia woke up, flashing red. “Please lead the child through the front door,” she said.
“Oh! Nice of you to pop in,” I said, not without irritation.
“Please lead the child through the door,” she repeated.
Her command prompted me to glance around the yard—where had the child disappeared to? A bit of movement on the house’s side wall caught my eye: there he was, climbing the downspout, evidently on the way to his third-floor room.
“Hey!” I said. “Come down from there!”
“We’re home!” he shouted over his shoulder. “I’m going home!”
“You don’t have to go in that way,” I said. “Come through the door with me.”
“I can’t go through the door,” he said, as though stating a well-known fact of which I ought to have already been aware. “I have to go in this way.”
“You don’t,” I explained. “You’re with me now. So you can go in the front door.”
He appeared to contemplate this for a moment, and then, with a subtle nod, carefully lowered himself back to the ground. I held out my hand to him, and he took it, and we walked through the gate to the sidewalk, and then up the steps to the door of the guesthouse.
The Judge was perched on a stepladder, sinking the final screw into a sheet of plywood that covered the dining room window. “Ah,” she said, noticing our approach. “Just in time to not help me.” Her expression, though—a rare, if modest, smile—belied her words. Clearly she was pleased to see us. She hopped down with surprising agility, opened the door for us, and ushered us inside with a wave of her power drill.
Inside, the smell of something delicious greeted us. In the kitchen we found Clara and Mr. Lorre bustling around, bringing steaming serving dishes to the table. Clara looked up.
“Oh! You’ve found him!”
She and the Judge applauded, delighting the little boy. Mr. Lorre merely scowled at us.
“Now, this is progress!” Clara said, beaming, once the clapping had died out.
“Thank you,” I replied. “Though it seems to me we’re back where we started, before this one got lost.” I tilted my head at the boy.
“I wasn’t lost!”
“Oh, you would have found your own way back?” I said.
But the boy, distracted by the food, was already climbing onto a chair. This seemed to spur us all to do the same: chairs scraped and creaked as we settled onto them.
Mr. Lorre, who had evidently been tasked with setting the table, glowered at the little boy. He obviously wanted some kind of confirmation that his flowers had been delivered, but when it became clear that no such thing was in the offing, he grunted and continued his task. He wasn’t very good at it, really—the place mats were crooked and the dishes off-center; the cloth napkins were wrinkled and wadded, and silverware had been tossed haphazardly nearby. This must have been a job traditionally assigned to his wife, the one he’d bought the flowers for.
The ladies had made a warm, savory stew; a sweet, rustic corn bread; a tasty mélange of seasoned vegetables; and apple pie, which they served with a side of vanilla ice cream. We ate for a long time and said almost nothing to one another, except for the little boy, who occasionally piped up, “This is delicious!” As the meal neared its end, and the sun at last began to set, the Judge looked me in the eye and said, “You’d better get to sleep.”
“I suppose so?” I responded, unsure of the intent behind the suggestion.
“I think what Clara is saying,” Clara explained, “is that you have a big day ahead of you.”
“Well,” I said. “You’ll recall that I do have an important job in the Dead Tower, processing incident reports and researching quantum tunneling.”
“Well, that’s not false,” the Judge said, and I sensed that, on some level, she was humoring me.
“So, every day is a big day, is what you mean?” Clara asked me.
“That’s right.”
The Judge said, “Then you should get ready for another big day.”
I wasn’t sure what they were driving at, but it was true that I’d had quite an exhausting afternoon, and I was ready for bed. I got up and reached for the empty plates, but Clara stopped me. “Mr. Lorre can help with that,” she said. If the delivery truck driver seemed surprised or annoyed by this responsibility, he didn’t betray it; instead he nodded and began to clear the table.
“Oh, by the way,” Clara added, feigning casualness, “nice work on the puzzle.”
“You were really thinking ‘out of the box,’ so to speak,” the Judge joked from the sink, where she had gone to wash the dishes.
The little boy got up, too, and again took my hand. It was small and warm and slightly sweaty, and I can’t say that I minded holding it. We said good night to everyone, then climbed the stairs. “I’ll bring you up to your room,” I said, glancing back at the puzzle. It looked as if I’d misremembered the X scrawled on the Oracle map; in fact, the whole Oracle section of the puzzle had an X through it. This, I suppose, was appropriate, since I’d successfully completed my task there.
