Chasing Orion (18 page)

She breathed a sigh of relief, or rather, the machine breathed it for her. “Phew! I thought she’d never leave.”

“She’s so nice,” I said.

“Yeah, but there’s always some nurse around. I do need my privacy, now and then.”

“You want me to go?” I asked.

“Oh, no. Don’t get me wrong. I like my privacy with my friends.” Then she paused. “Especially with Emmett.”

I took a deep breath. “Are you like, uh, sort of . . . uh, liking each other?”

Phyllis’s eyes crinkled up, and she made a little giggle noise. “Well.” She gave me that crafty look she often had. “I’m trying to figure some things out, Georgie, and maybe you can help.”

“Sure. What?” This was what I had hoped. But ever since that one day, I had the feeling that Phyllis really felt I understood her better than a lot of people, like her parents for instance. I sensed that unlike her parents, Phyllis knew somehow that I had made a separation in my mind between her and the machine. I saw her as a person in her own right. I wasn’t quite expecting her first question, however.

“Has Emmett ever done more than kiss a girl before?”

What was I supposed to say? I was sure he hadn’t, but I felt as if I shouldn’t exactly be talking about my brother’s love life or nonexistent love life. Still I had to try my best to answer her. This was Phyllis, not the machine. She was seeming whole to me now. More whole than ever before. This was the Phyllis that I had vowed to protect. And I had honestly begun to forget about those scrawny little legs, or Phyllis the wet leaf, or Phyllis the freak. “If he has, I wouldn’t know. I mean I’d be the last to know. But to tell you the truth, I really doubt it.”

“Well,” she said with a new light dancing in her eyes, “how would you like to be the first to know?”

There was something definitely weird about this conversation. I started to get a little bit scared. And I thought briefly that maybe I shouldn’t be the first to know. But I told myself that this was part of my mission. “Well, I don’t know. I mean, I guess if you want to tell me — yeah, OK.”

“Well, I won’t tell you everything, but it was a little more than just kissing!”

I really did not want to hear about any of this, and I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t sure really why she was telling me, except that she trusted me and that she knew I believed in her, not simply the machine that ran her. It did seem funny to me when I thought about all the time I had spent worrying about Emmett’s social life and now here I was in a front-row seat having it served up on a platter with all the trimmings. Still, I was at a complete loss. “So?” Phyllis pressed.

“Uh, so, I guess that’s nice. I mean, you didn’t mind?”

“No, not at all. As a matter of fact — how should I put this — I encouraged him.”

“You did?” I don’t know why I sounded so surprised. It was almost impossible to think of Emmett making the first move.

“I did, and I’m really worried that maybe he doesn’t like me as much as I like him, and you know I’m not such a great date, after all. And all this basketball stuff.”

“Oh, that is a big deal for Emmett.”

“So I gather.” There was an indifference in her voice. I felt I had to somehow defend Emmett.

“You see, it’s not just basketball. A lot depends on it for college. I mean, this is the time the scouts come around and if he can get a basketball scholarship, well, that’s really, really good.”

“Why?”

Her reply caught me by surprise. “Why?” I repeated. “Well, it’s just like, you know . . . we don’t have that much money. For two of us to go to college, it will cost Mom and Dad so much.”

“Oh,” said Phyllis, as if she suddenly had the whole picture on us Masons. I was left wondering if I should have said that stuff about money. Mom always said it wasn’t very polite to discuss money in public. But Phyllis seemed so clueless, I guess because her family had so much money, it was hard for her to imagine people who didn’t have enough, or quite enough.

“Well, I suppose basketball is as tough to compete against as another girl or a prettier girl.” Phyllis sighed. The beast made her sighs sound hollow, not really like sighs at all.

I felt a panic well up in me. “Oh, but Phyllis there’s no one at Westridge High School half as pretty as you. I mean you’re so pretty.”

“As pretty as Betty?” She slid her eyes slyly in my direction. “Or wait — who was that girl who Orion loved — the princess?”

“Merope?”

“Yeah, Merope. Greek goddess. As pretty as her?”

“I’m not sure what she looked like, but you’re definitely prettier than Betty.”

“Well, there’s a problem,” she said.

“What’s the problem?”

“Promise not to tell anybody.”

“Cross my heart and . . .” I could have bitten off my tongue for starting to say that stupid thing.

“Hope to die?” She smiled, a hard glittery smile. “Hoping is easy.”

A dread began to swim up in me. I shrugged to try and cover it. “I-I don’t know wh-wh-wh-what you mean.” I had started stuttering again. This was not at all how my mission was supposed to go. Was she really talking about dying? A few seconds before, it had been about kissing — or a little more than kissing — Emmett, for God’s sake.

“What’s wrong?” she asked. I hesitated. “Come on, Georgie,” she coaxed in a sweet sympathetic voice. “Is what’s going on here too much for you?”

“No! What do you mean, what’s too much?”

“I mean that I’m sick — that I could die.”

“Did you almost die when they tried weaning you?”

“I’m not sure. I never know. No one tells me much. I just know it didn’t work.” She paused. “And Georgie.” She flashed a mirror that she seldom used. It had some slight magnification in it and both our faces seemed huge and crowded together on its surface. Her eyes had turned a sharp, brittle blue. “Georgie, it didn’t hurt. That’s one thing I can tell you.”

“It didn’t hurt — not breathing?”

“No. In fact, it felt good in a way. Even though it was scary and even though I have so little feeling, you know the weird thing is I can feel air — I mean real air. Not this pumped stuff that swirls around me. It’s sort of a beautiful place that I get to live in for a while.”

“A beautiful place?” I said. “You mean like my small world of
The Martian Chronicles.
”

“Yes, sort of. Maybe it’s like Martians — the stars could shine through them. Yes, the stars shine through me, and I am folded into the wind.” She closed her eyes as she talked now. “It’s like I am dying, but I feel so connected to life. Isn’t that odd? I mean the iron lung is supposed to be the thing that connects me to life, to breathing, but when I’m almost not breathing, just on the edge of dying . . .” She paused a moment.

I didn’t know what to say. This was a huge idea. How can someone feel so alive when they are almost dying? Usually big ideas excited me, but this one scared me.

“You know, maybe my life is like Orion’s — three levels. This is my second level, here in the Creature, floating somewhere between earth and sky on this manufactured air.”

I scratched my head and tried to think about these bizarre things Phyllis had just said.

“I’m not sure of any of this. Uh . . . you’re not really like Orion.”

Phyllis laughed at this, then began speaking again. “OK, then think of it this way. A person falls into the sea and cannot swim and knows that she is drowning. Do you think that at some point that person just opens her mouth and lets the ocean rush in, falls in love with the very thing that is killing her? Like if you would fall off a cliff, would you fall in love with the falling?”

I started to feel that she shouldn’t be talking to me like this. Phyllis must have sensed that I was thinking this was all very creepy.

“Oh, never mind,” she said brightly. “Listen, I have a great idea for a diorama for you to make.”

“What’s that?” I asked, relieved that we were talking about something else.

“How about Snow White?”

“Snow White?” I asked.

“Yeah, you know, ‘Mirror mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?’”

All the mirrors began pivoting madly, rotating and sparkling with Phyllis’s face. She was flashing smiles, winking one eye; even her dimples were twinkling. It was like an ambush — an ambush of Phyllises. And yeah, I did feel panic. Oddly enough, this panic was not for me, not for Phyllis, but for Emmett. I was scared for Emmett. This little-more-than-kissing did not seem at all romantic but dreadful in some way. How could everything change so quickly?

Nonetheless, I felt I had to be committed to my mission and charge ahead. My mission had been to be truthful. Never to lie to Phyllis. That was still my mission. After all, I’d given up God for Phyllis. But I wasn’t sure if this was enough. It seemed that there was more at stake here than I had thought. More risk, more danger. But I wasn’t sure what it was.

In the last days before school started, there was a beautiful stretch of cool, clear evenings. Emmett and Phyllis were together constantly, and I was rarely included in their star watching. It happened to be an exceptional time for watching, especially if you were like Phyllis with this weird talent of hers for seeing color.

One night just before school started, I decided to go over uninvited. Cygnus was absolutely blazing up there. I had even made potato-chip sandwiches because Phyllis had once asked about them. So with my snacks packed in my school lunch box, I made my way through the grove. When I came up on the patio, they didn’t even notice me. Their heads were very close together as Emmett was adjusting the scope to Phyllis’s eye. He had even built a little extension piece onto it so it could dip right down and fit close to her eye.

“You see,” he was whispering, “if you get it out of focus a little bit, sometimes it actually helps bring the colors out more.” Phyllis said something I couldn’t hear, and they both giggled and Emmett ran his fingers through her hair.

“Oh, Saint Georgie!”

“I . . . I . . . I brought you some potato-chip sandwiches.” I was sorry I had come. It was so embarrassing to barge in on them like this.

“Oh, how sweet. I’ve been dying to try one ever since you told me about them. Oh, Emmett, you’ll help me, won’t you?”

“Sure thing.”

I opened the lunch box and handed him one. He crouched by Phyllis and began to break off little pieces. He was feeding her! I felt I shouldn’t be watching. It was so . . . so private.

“Mmmm good!” Phyllis said. She was still looking through the eyepiece. “Oh, Emmett, I’m starting to see the colors.”

Please, please,
I thought,
don’t say neon grape. I’ll throw up.

“Rumpelstiltskin gold!” she sighed. “Yes, someone is spinning gold up there in that beautiful place.”

“That beautiful place,” Emmett echoed.

I almost gave a start when I heard those two words. It was bad enough the first time she had said it when she was talking about the weaning. But now it was worse. It was as if she and Emmett had stolen them from me for their own private reasons.
Beautiful place
were my words for the ancient city Ray Bradbury had written about.

And then Emmett got this dreamy look on his face. The two of them seemed to have a special knowledge of the beautiful place, but I was the one who had named it. It was my small world, not theirs. Why had I shared it with Phyllis, and why had I brought over the Orion one? I suddenly felt a fierce sense of possession about my small worlds. It was almost as if they had been invaded. In my head I seethed,
Get out of my small worlds! Get your own damn worlds.

Emmett and Phyllis whispered some more. Sometimes the words were intelligible, but they had no meaning for me. It was as if they were speaking a private language and we were in two different worlds. They were nestled in this little cocoon of light and stars and colors. I knew I didn’t belong on the patio. I picked up my lunch box and left. No one said good night. They weren’t being rude or anything. They just didn’t notice.

When I got back, I went right to work on the second level for Orion. I completed the staircase of waves and was now at the fun part of landscaping the earth. I used some more moss from the grove, which I could keep alive if I spritzed it every other day or so, and then I had these tiny model trees that are used in architectural models. By the time I went to bed, I had built half the forest. The next thing I would have to do was make Orion the hunter. I had a patch of fake fur that I would sling over his shoulder, like an animal pelt of something he killed, and I would string a belt with itty-bitty sparkly beads. It would be beautiful. But I was too tired now. So I went to bed.

That feels squishy, but nice, I thought, looking down at my toes. They were slightly submerged in the green blue gel. It hasn’t set yet, but I’ll try it. I took a tentative step on the waves staircase. Like Orion, I thought, I’ll become a wave-walker! I was determined to get to land and help Orion. I carried a piece of fur for him. The small trees that had somehow grown huge shook as the ground on which I stood began to reverberate with a thunderous thumping. The trees shook, and many of them crashed. “They’re only little fake ones!” I cried out. “Model trees for architects! Not real life. What is happening?” A figure streaked by half-naked. Orion! And then from deep in the tremulous woods, the very woods I had anchored in the clay base, came an immense boar, followed by a lion. This is all wrong! I wanted to shout. All wrong. You are the hunter, not the hunted! Not yet. “NO!”

The sound of my own voice woke me up. I sat straight up in bed. A cool breeze was blowing through the window, the coldest of the entire summer. I was shivering, but my arms and face were slick with sweat. I got up and, as if still in a dream, walked across my bedroom to the window by my desk where the diorama sat, but I didn’t look at it. Maybe I was frightened. I reached up to pull down the window sash. Outside, the Milky Way undulated like a ribbon in the sky, but I caught the red glow of that heart, Antares, rearing high in the night. Scorpio had risen to his highest point in the summer sky. I shivered and closed the window as if to shut out the deadly venom that dripped from his claws.