Forever Freaky (9 page)

Then there were flashes of pale blue light
all around, like claws of lightening, defining a tunnel that was
invisible because everything was so black. The humming in my ears
grew so loud I thought my eardrums might rupture. The pain was
unbearable. I screamed but couldn’t hear my screams because of the
humming. Just as I thought for sure that I would pass out from the
pain, I exploded into another place.

I landed with a sickening slap on a floor,
and slid forward and my head struck a wall. I rolled onto my back,
holding my head, my eyes shut tight in agony. Intense pain pulsed
behind my eyes, but then slowly receded. After a moment I was able
to sit up and look around. My eyes were blurry and I wasn’t sure I
was seeing right, because I found myself sitting on the floor in
another bathroom. It looked exactly like the bathroom I had just
left except for one thing: there were absolutely no colors.
Everything was black and white and shades of gray. It was like
suddenly finding yourself in an old movie. I shuddered to discover
that I, too, was colorless. I looked down and saw that my blue
jeans were dark gray, my arms and hands were so white they nearly
glowed, my hair looked like strings of ash. I wondered if maybe
something was wrong with my eyesight, but then decided that, no,
this was just the way it was here.

Well, this must be the place, I decided.

I staggered to my feet. I went over to the
mirror. I was stunned to see that I looked even worse in
black-and-white than I did in color.

Okay, now where would a tree-hugger like Mary
Jo go? I wondered. Three days had passed. It was too much to expect
her to stay here in the bathroom.

I walked out into the hallway, which
stretched gray and deserted in both directions. Everything was
filled with a dim light, although none of the lights were on.
Strangely, it did not seem like the middle of the night here, but
nor did it seem like day.

I called out Mary Jo’s name, loudly, but
there was nothing. My voice did not even echo, but sounded flat and
confined, as though it didn’t carry more than a couple feet.

I walked down the hallway. The rubber soles
of my shoes did not make their usual short squeaky sounds.

I searched the school for a while, the empty
classrooms, the deserted gym, the abandoned main office…. It didn’t
take long before I started to kick myself mentally. Some plan,
right? Just jump into the thing that looked like a big mouth, get
spit into another reality, and then what? Search for weeks, months,
or years to find a single lost girl? Brilliant, utterly
brilliant!

I walked through an exit door and discovered
that everything outside was just as gray and forsaken as inside the
school. The parking lot was empty, and no cars moved down the
street. The grass was a medium shade of gray. The leaves on the
trees were a slightly lighter shade of gray. The sky was milky
white and there didn’t appear to be a sun. There didn’t appear to
be birds or squirrels, and the world was as silent as the inside of
a locked closet. Man, I didn’t know exactly where this place was,
but they must not have got jack in the way of tourism.

I sat on one of the benches and tried to
think things out. Mary Jo had been here for three days. So exactly
where would a tree-hugger go in a place like this? Maybe she would
try going home. That was what I would do—go home and try to find
somebody. But what if she couldn’t find anybody at home, or
anyplace else? Where would she go, then? Really, she could be
anywhere in the city by now, wandering around, looking for help
that wasn’t there.

Suddenly there was a low rumbling noise. At
first I thought it was thunder, but then I felt the bench
vibrating. The tremor grew stronger and stronger, until it nearly
tossed me off the bench. Then it stopped just as abruptly as it had
begun.

An earthquake? In Chicago? That would be
rare, but then again this wasn’t my Chicago.

I went back into the school with a sense of
urgency. I needed to find out Mary Jo’s home address, so I went to
the main office. I sat at one of the desks, and tried to get into
the computer system. But, maddeningly, I couldn’t get the computer
to power up. Everything was plugged in—there just wasn’t any
electric. On a hunch I checked all the desk drawers. They were
empty—no forms, no staplers, no paper clips, nothing. Everything
was a fake, as though it was never meant to be used.

I wandered out of the office, not sure what
to do next. When I saw the drinking fountain in the hallway, I
realized how thirsty I was. But the fountain probably didn’t work.
Nothing here seemed to work. Still I tried the fountain, and was
surprised when an arc of water rose from the faucet. It sampled the
water; it was cold and tasted normal, and I drank some more. When I
finished, I was struck with a thought. Basic needs. Water is a
basic need. Mary Jo would need water. She would need shelter, too,
but here that would be no problem; this city, this entire world,
seemed uninhibited, but there were thousands, maybe millions, of
buildings. That left only food. The lunchroom, I thought, and
started running down the hallway.

The large room was silent and sad. Row after
row of tables at which nobody would ever sit to eat. Absent was the
low hum of gossip, punctuated by the occasional catcall. There was
no lunch line of kids jostling each other to see what was in the
glass cases. There were no white-uniformed lunch ladies wearing
hair-nets and doling out dubious dishes from the steam trays. But
there was something, I noticed; the lingering aroma of food. Was it
just my imagination? After I sniffed the air some more, I
determined that it wasn’t my imagination at all. I could
smell—what?—buffalo wings, pasta sauce, maybe enchiladas. The smell
of food was real, the realest thing I discovered so far in this
place.

As I approached the lunch counter, I heard
the clang of a folk or spoon hitting the floor. I stopped in my
tracks, startled because I couldn’t see anybody. But then Mary Jo
popped up behind the steam tables.

She didn’t notice me, but went about her
business, which seemed to be searching through the shelves under
the counter. She had that all-American look that lot of people
like, but that tended to make me want to vomit. The bright blue
eyes. High cheekbones. Toothy smiles. Pert nose. A light dusting of
freckles across her face. Now as she stood there, looking down at
the low shelves, she frowned—in an adorable sort of way, of course
– and I wondered why did I want to rescue her again? This was a
person who in a million years would never be my friend. She had as
much reason to like me as I had to like her. Yet I could never
leave her here, like this, all alone in a gray world.

I stepped up to the counter.

“Mary Jo?” I said.

She looked up at me. “Oh,” she said, but
wasn’t startled; she seemed to take my sudden presence in stride.
“You don’t happen to know where they keep those little wet towel
thingies, do you?”

“Uh, no,” I said.

She shrugged in a perky way. “Oh, well, I
guess they ran out.”

She had a plate, which she started to pile up
with food from the steam trays. There were chicken wings that
looked charred black, and gray enchiladas covered with a light gray
sauce. There was a tray that was filled with some kind of soup that
looked like a mud puddle.

“I thought you were supposed to be a vegan or
something,” I said.

“I am,” she said pleasantly. “But this
doesn’t count. How could it?” She looked up from her plate at me.
It was as though she saw me for the first time. “Hey, I know you.
You’re that spooky girl, right?”

“I suppose,” I said. I was wondering whether
she had hit her head even harder than me when she slipped into this
reality.

“Strange that you’re here.”

“I think so,” I said. “But, really, we need
to get out of here.”

“But why?” she asked. “It seems that I’ve
been running around all day, looking for people, and now I’m
starved,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Well, you know how it is.
What are you anyway?—a starver or a barfer?”

“What?”

“Anorexia or bulimia. Or maybe both. Let me
check out your teeth.”

“My teeth?”

“Look, nothing counts here, right? So why
don’t you grab a plate and pig out. Might as well.”

She took her plate and walked out from behind
the counter. I followed her to one of the tables, where she sat and
started to eat.

“We don’t have time for this,” I said,
looking down at her.

“Sure we do,” she said. She took a chicken
wing and shoved it up toward my face. She tried to put it in my
mouth, but I blocked her and grabbed it from her.

I wondered what was wrong with her. I was
pretty sure this wasn’t the way she normally acted. I remembered
what Jerry had said about no telling what kind of damage might be
caused to a person who stayed too long in an alternate reality.

Then the floor started to shake, as it had
done when I was outside. A couple dishes fell somewhere and
shattered. I decided to sit across from her before I was knocked
off my feet. Through it all, Mary Jo kept eating, completely
untroubled. When the earthquake stopped, she smiled at me, and said
in a playful way, “Rumble, rumble.”

“Let me ask you something,” I said.

“You going to eat that chicken wing?”

“No.”

“Then you can’t ask.”

“I don’t eat meat,” I said.

“Admirable. But I told you: it doesn’t count
here. It tastes like real food, but it isn’t.”

I looked at the chicken wing in my hand. I
decided what the heck, and took a bit. Although it was black, it
tasted like a regular hot wing. Not only that, I didn’t get any
flashes of the chicken as its head had been cut off, or any other
grisly images that usually flashed through my mind whenever I ate
meat.

I stared at Mary Jo, and, still chewing her
food, she smiled.

“Good, isn’t it?” she asked, and a fleck of
meat flew from her mouth.

I reached over and grabbed her arm, much
tighter than I intended. She yelped a complaint, but I held on. I
wasn’t getting anything from her, not a single thought or errant
feeling. It freaked me out. I always got something from people, but
now Mary Jo seemed as empty as a zombie.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

I shook my head, eyeing her warily.

“Then you think I could have my arm
back?”

I let go and she resumed eating.

“Mary Jo,” I said. “What do you think is
happening?”

“Right now—I’m eating.”

“I mean, where do you think you are?”

“That’s obvious,” she chortled.

“Tell me.”

She shrugged her shoulder. “In a dream, of
course.”

“This isn’t a dream.”

“Of course, it is,” she said, looking at me
as though I were an imbecile. “Look around. Everything is in
black-and-white. I dream in black-and-white. Most people do, you
know. Dreaming in color is pretty rare—or so I’ve heard.”

“And why would I be in your dream?” I
asked.

She wagged a half-eaten chicken wing at me.
“You know, I’ve been wondering that. I don’t even know you, right?
You’d think that my friends would be in a dream. But aside from you
I haven’t seen anybody—not a soul. It’s sort of strange.”

“Because it’s not a dream.”

“Then what is it? You tell me,” she said,
starting to lose patience.

“I don’t know—not a dream, though.” I wasn’t
about to tell her that we had ended up in an alternate reality.
She’d never believe that.

“It has to be a dream. If it wasn’t a dream,
I’d be running around in a panic tearing my hair out.”

“Why?” I asked cautiously.

“When I first found myself here, I went
looking for somebody. Who wouldn’t, right? A dream is a lonely
place. But I looked and looked, but couldn’t find anybody. What a
dumb dream, right?

“So I walked home. It’s not far—six, seven
blocks. I found the house unlocked. My mom, who is almost always
home, wasn’t there. My grandpa, who has a small apartment in the
basement, wasn’t there, either. That was really strange; he’s
confined to a wheelchair, and never goes anywhere.

“So I decided to grab my bike and ride
around. I could cover a lot more ground that way, right? I didn’t
see anybody anywhere. The whole city is, like, a ghost town. Then a
tremor hit. It knocked me right off the bike. Well, I knew this is
a dream. So I figured I was lying in bed sleeping at home and maybe
my kid brother decided to jump on my bed. He does things like
that—the little nuisance. Anyway, I didn’t think much about the
earthquake until I reached the lake. Boy, that was weird! The lake
wasn’t there. No kidding. Nothing was there. There was the beach,
and then a drop-off to nothingness. Then when another tremor hit, I
saw what was happening; the beach crumbled away and fell into the
nothingness.”

“Was that the first day you were here?” I
asked, starting to feel a bit panicky myself.

“The first day?” she asked, frowning. “What
are you talking about? I’ve only been here for, maybe, seven, eight
hours.”

So, on top of everything else, time didn’t
work the same here as I did in the real world. That plus the fact
that this reality seemed to be collapsing into oblivion gave me a
greater sense of urgency. I jumped up from my seat.

“We really need to go—now,” I said.

Mary Jo seemed amused.

“Go? Go where?”

“Look, this ‘dream’ is vanishing.”

“Yeah, I know, but so what? I figure when
it’s gone, that’s when I’ll wake up. Until then, I plan to finish
lunch.”

I grabbed her by her arm, and started pulling
her out of her chair. She whined and shrieked, but finally allowed
herself to be dragged away from the table. I started towing her
toward the exit.

“I don’t get it,” she said, still chewing on
food. “This is the weirdest damned dream I have ever had.”