The Radio Magician and Other Stories (22 page)

. . . playing behind the closed office door. Brianna opened her eyes. The feeling she was someone else possessed her so strongly, she nearly threw up. Ray had switched to “Angels We Have Heard on High.” Strong bass line countering the melody. He held the high notes before dramatically entering the chorus. The room smelled of pine. Dad had bought a real tree this year, and no matter where she went she couldn’t escape the resiny odor.

“I’m not lost,” whispered Brianna. “If I open the door, I’ll be home. That’s all I have to do. I’m home now.”

But that wasn’t the lost that she felt. With her eyes closed she’d broken contact with Earth, for a second, as if she’d been cut loose and was spinning. “Where is the galactic center?” she’d thought. She clenched her fists. On her fingertips she could still feel the dials and levers and touch pads of what . . . a ship . . . a slippery road without a landmark . . . and there was something about [M]-space (she almost giggled at the sound of the term), but where am I? This is
way
out of control. What would my therapist think of this?

There is an answer, she thought. Her hand crept toward the desk drawer. There’s no confusion in the baggie. But her motion stopped when she touched the handle. In the room beyond, they sang,
Angels we have heard on high, sweetly singing o’er the plains, And the mountains in reply, echoing their joyous strains
. She leaned toward the monitor. The stars had stopped moving, or at least they were moving very slowly now. What did the screensaver represent? All the time she’d looked at it, she’d only thought about where she was going, never about where she’d come from. What star had she started from? Where was she? (A tiny voice said, “Yes, where are you?” and she felt again the panic of the man at the console. “I need to know where you are.”)

Brianna shook off the sleepiness growing in her. The room seemed so dreamlike. It was the drug spilling into her like ink in water, spreading away, darkening the center. Languidly, she touched the enter button, and the screensaver blinked off. She chose her encyclopedia program. Typed in “Milky Way.” A schematic flickered into focus on her monitor, spiral arms spinning away from the thickened blob of a middle, a little arrow pointing to a place halfway out on one of arms, closer to the edge than the middle. “You are here,” it said, and Brianna took a deep breath. “I am here,” she said. She switched to a picture of the night sky, the Milky Way, like light leaking around the edge of a closed door . . .

. . . Where am I? thought Laird. The truck barely moved now. His heater worked better at seventy miles an hour. At this speed he had to wipe frost off the windshield with his coat’s sleeve. It would be so easy to stop, but he had another vision: his truck parked not at the side of the highway, but in the middle. What if another truck, later in the night when things had cleared a little, came barreling down the road? It wouldn’t have time to swerve when the bulk of his truck loomed up through the snow. But I want to stop. He was so tired that he didn’t trust what he saw in the headlights. Fantastic shapes forming in the drifting flakes. Faces. He tried to think of his family, his wife, his son, his daughter, but they seemed so far away. They were the dream. Endless snow, a cold that bit through his coat, that numbed the backs of his legs, that was reality. He thought about hypothermia, dementia, the end of reason. There’s rest, he thought, in a bag full of blue pills with pink logos.

Laird punched his leg hard with a closed fist. The pain, for an instant, felt good. Cleared his head. What was that thought about pills? He could see them, resting in a desk drawer, Christmas piano playing in the background. I’m in trouble, he thought. She’s in trouble too. She’s
stopped
, parked in the middle, waiting to freeze.

He punched his leg hard, twice, twisting his fist when he did to sharpen the sting. It’s just a road, and I’m a few miles from
somewhere
, if I can keep going, but within minutes the snow ceased to be snow again: it fashioned itself into hands reaching to get him, into the backs of monsters blocking the road. Vertigo gripped him, and an impression that he was falling straight down instead of driving forward surprised a scream out of him. The storm was a mouth; he saw it open, teeth at the edges, swallowing him and the truck whole, but he couldn’t stop. He drove on. I saw it! He wept in fear. Hallucination or not, I saw it . . .

. . . Tremaine closed his eyes and opened them again. What had he seen? For an instant, it was there, a schematic of the galaxy, an arrow pointed on one spiral arm. The girl had thought, “You are here,” and then he’d seen a photograph of the stars. If he could align what he’d seen, just an approximation, the computer might be able to do the rest. He concentrated on the memory, the gauzy middle of the galaxy, the arrow, the long strands circling away, and the computer watched what he watched. The diagram was such a
rough
location, but the computer hummed contentedly while it worked, because even a rough guess eliminated the near infinite number of wrong choices.

For the first time since Tremaine had realized the ship was off course, he relaxed. The stars in the viewvid weren’t moving now, and he wondered which star held the girl with the diagram. In answer to his question, without breaking its rhythm, the computer brightened one dot on the display. Tremaine enhanced the image. A plain star, unremarkable to look at. On further magnification he noticed an unusual ringed planet in the system. That wasn’t where she was. Third planet from the sun, almost a double planet, its moon was so large. Maybe if he concentrated, he could send her a thank you, although she’d never know for what. When he tried to see what she saw again, he only saw stars moving, and beneath the stars, a bag full of blue pills with pink logos. No galaxy. No arrow saying, “You are here.” On the viewvid he studied the planet’s blue face until the computer whistled happily. It had located them. Reluctantly, Tremaine clicked off the display while the computer recalibrated their course. I’m going home, he thought. They would be on their way soon, and he had duties . . .

. . . What duties? thought Laird. Where did that thought come from? All that kept him going was habit, now. Nothing he saw could be trusted. The reflectors, when they came seemed too far or too near (or too high or the wrong color). Was this hypothermia? He imagined his brain settling into a solidifying jelly, growing colder by the minute. For a second he thought the snow was stars, and he thought he could set a course by them, but now it was just snow again, flying through his headlights.

I could pull off, let the snow pile up. It would be so easy. His hands barely held the wheel, and his eyelids slid closed on their own accord. It’s dark in here. So comfortable to fade away into sleep, into dreams where a piano played “Angels We Have Heard on High” and a Christmas tree beyond a closed door smelled of pine resin and popcorn strings and people laughed at a joke he didn’t hear.

The truck can recalibrate itself, he thought. But if I keep moving, it will find my way home. . .

. . . I’m already home, thought Brianna, aren’t I? The sense of
home
formed within her, a longing for it. A vision of a forest with a woman someone loved; a Christmas morning so far away, and so wished for.
Home
, like she’d never thought of it before. She reached around her. There were the office chair arms; there was the desk, although they seemed vague, and she was so cold. She wrapped her hands around her arms, the skin stiff as marble.

How could this be? She gasped. The pills were working. She could barely move. After a long struggle, she put her feet on the floor. If she could get out of the office, maybe, and into the other room where it was warm, they could save her.

I’m alone, she thought, and I’m lost. The highway will never end. I’m in snowy hell. Her hands rested on the steering wheel. There was no place to go, only the truck cab stuck in front of clouds of dancing snow. (I’m
not
in a truck—I’m in my dad’s office) The steering wheel’s solidity seemed more real than the computer monitor. Frost on the window. The low rumble of the geared-down diesel engine. The accelerator and the clutch, more real than the office carpet beneath her feet. I’m going to sleep, she thought, but I have to get to my family . . .

. . . my family. Laird forced his eyes open. If he slept, he’d never get home. He imagined opening the front door on Christmas morning. “I’m home,” he’d say into the empty room, and there would be a giggle: his son behind the couch, his daughter behind the chair, waiting to surprise him. His wife smiling in the hall, just out of sight.

I’ve got to get home, he thought . . .

Yes, said Brianna in the darkness of her dad’s office. I’ve got to wake up . . .

They both hunched forward. Stay focused, they thought. Keep moving . . .

Brianna staggered out of the chair. Braced herself on the desk’s edge. She wept with fatigue . . .

Laird waited for the next reflector. There it was. The speedometer hardly twitched, but he was still going forward. The road ended somewhere, as long as he didn’t stop. . .

How far away was the office door? Brianna couldn’t see it. She couldn’t see anything now. Why not? The headlights were on. The reflectors marked the road, if she just kept them to her right. (Don’t stop now, came the thought through the diesel noise—there’s a light ahead).

There’s a light ahead; it came from under the door, where the piano played . . .

There’s a light ahead, beyond the headlights and the crashing snowflakes; it’s a gas station next to the highway . . .

Brianna grabbed the doorknob. It twisted beneath her hand. The door was opening. The light poured in, and the piano played “Angels We Have Heard on High.” Before she entered the room, she thought, how many times has he played that song? Maybe he’s played it all night.

She stepped into the light . . .

. . . light in the darkness. The sign said WAGON MOUND GAS AND CONVENIENCE. Laird edged the truck onto the exit ramp. People sat in the café. He could see them, drinking coffee. Beside the window, under the wreath they’d painted on the glass, waited a phone booth topped by six inches of snow.

He could call his wife.

When he stepped out of the truck, the wind picked up. For a second, the snow came straight at him, unswerving lines, glittering in the parking lot’s light, like stars sweeping past a starship. He was a Watch Commander. He was a young girl hoping to escape. In the last tremor of [M]-space, he was the three of them, trying to get home.

Laird beat his hands together against the cold.

THE INN AT MOUNT EITHER

A
fter a minute spent weighing a fear of appearing foolish against his anxiety, Dorian approached the concierge. Behind the glassy mahogany of the concierge’s booth, through the floor to ceiling windows, the afternoon clouds swept toward them across the neighboring peaks. As always, the view was spectacular. The sun cast long shadows through the valleys while the racing clouds caressed the mountain tops before swallowing them in gray, whale-like immensity, and when the clouds parted, the mountains would be the same but different, just a little, changed by their time in the clouds. That’s why people always looked. Are the mountains the same, they seemed to say, or have they changed?

If Dorian stood at the window, he could peer down the mountain at the long, railed walkways that connected one section of the inn to the next. Curved glass covered some of the walkways so the guests could pass in comfort from the casinos to the restaurants, or from the workout facilities to the spas, or from the tennis courts to the pools, but others were open and guests could walk in the unencumbered mountain air, their hands sliding along guard rails with nothing but the thought of distance between them and the rocks in the sightless haze below.

Dorian cleared his throat. “I can’t find my wife, Stephanie Wallace.” His fingers rested on the polished wood.

Without raising his head from the clipboard he’d been studying, the concierge looked at him. “It’s a big inn, sir. When did you see her last?” The man’s eyebrows had a distinctively rakish look to them, turning up at the ends like a handlebar moustache, and his hair was silvery-gray.

“We were supposed to meet for lunch, but she didn’t show up.” Dorian glanced into the lobby, hoping that she might appear. Behind him, the room towered fifty feet to skylights. Opposite the window, the mountain’s rocky side made another wall. Exotic plants that would never grow outside of the inn’s protection filled every nook, spilling vegetation over the deep-toned stone.

The concierge put the clipboard on the booth. “Perhaps her plans changed, sir. There’s much to do here at Mount Either.”

Dorian gritted his teeth. “
Yesterday
’s lunch! I’ve been looking for her since last night. Stephanie’s not
late
. She’s
gone
.”

“It won’t help for you to be short with me, sir. What is your room number?”

“4128.”

The concierge tapped at a personal digital assistant that nestled in his palm. “This is your wife, sir?” A picture of a smiling blonde woman, glasses slid part way down her nose, peered back at Dorian from the screen.

“Yes.” She’d worn her glasses on the airplane. Once they checked in, she switched to contacts.

“I show that she’s still a guest.”

Resisting an urge to throttle the man, Dorian said, “I know that. What I want is some help in finding her. Can’t you ask the other employees to keep an eye out?”

“Of course, sir. But, as I said before, this is a big inn. Maybe she wants some privacy. Perhaps she’s admiring one of our many gardens. She wouldn’t be the first guest to spend a few uncounted hours sitting on a meditation vista. In fact, getting lost at the inn is a selling point. We advertise it. ‘Lose yourself in the experience.’”

“It’s not supposed to be literal!” snapped Dorian.

The concierge picked up the clipboard again. “I will alert the staff. You don’t suppose she went through a transitionway unaccompanied, do you?”

Dorian felt himself blanching. “No, of course not.” But he remembered how she’d lingered yesterday morning in the Polynesian hallway.

“Guests are to be escorted through the shift zones.”

“I’m sure she wouldn’t do that.”

The concierge sniffed. “We’re very specific in our agreement when you signed in. The management will respond strongly to guests who ignore the rules.”

Dorian turned away from the concierge. A new tramload of tourists had arrived, pulling their suitcases behind them. Most were couples. Newlyweds, by the look, or retired folk. A pack of bellboys scurried to meet them, while a mellow-voiced recording intoned, “Welcome to the Inn at Mount Either. You are standing in the new lobby, two-hundred and fifty feet above the historical first lobby built on the site of where Mount Either’s special properties were discovered. If you are interested in a guided visit to the old lobby, dial 19 on your room phone.”

“If she did go . . .” said Dorian. A hand seemed to be grasping his throat. It was all he could do to croak out, “. . . unescorted?”

The concierge said, “It’s a
big
inn, sir. We will do all we can to help, but we don’t really count a guest as missing until forty-eight hours have passed.”

Dorian didn’t know what to say. He drummed his fingers on the counter. Some of the new arrivals were at the window, looking down. The glass leaned away from the mountain, and the lobby itself protruded like a shelf, so they had an unimpeded view of the two-thousand foot drop and the rest of the inn on this side of the peak, clinging to the sheer face.

“I can’t wait that long. I’m going to look for her myself.”

“That is your privilege, sir,” said the concierge. “I’m sure she’s just around the corner. Nothing stays lost here forever.”

The elevator to the Polynesian transition they had visited yesterday was out of order. Dorian looked both ways down the long, curving hall, but there wasn’t another elevator. The inn’s maps were almost impossible to read since the inn itself was aggressively three-dimensional, riddled with elevators, stairs, ramps, sloping halls, ladders, bridges and multilevel rooms. They’d followed a guide to the Polynesian transition, but none were in sight now. Dorian went left, around the curved hall.

Finally, he reached a stairwell that spiraled down for fifty steps. He didn’t recognize the hall it emptied into, but a distinctive arrow in blue and yellow pointed toward a transition. Yesterday, as they approached the zone, the wallpaper had changed from the art deco they’d grown used to, to a palm and beach motif. Following the guide, he’d held Stephanie’s hand until they stepped through the transition’s door and into a Polynesian mountainscape.

“You’re lucky, today, folks,” said the guide. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it looking this good.”

The sun pouring through the open veranda spread heat like a warm flush on their skin. Stephanie’s hand drifted from his own, and she walked to the platform’s edge as if in a dream.

“Oh, Dorian,” she’d said. Instead of the snow-capped mountains of the Inn at Mount Either, a series of rounded hills rose in front of them, covered with forest so thick that it was hard to imagine ground beneath it. A flock of long-necked birds wheeled below, skimming the treetops and crying out to one another. She’d stared into the distance, entranced, her blonde hair just brushing her shoulders, and for a moment he saw the young woman he’d married twenty years earlier, the jaunty athleticism in her posture, the grace in her wrists and hands.

A waiter in a flowered shirt offered them drinks off a platter.

“Can you smell it?” Stephanie said, delighted. “It’s the ocean.”

And Dorian could smell salt and sand under the rich vegetable forest. Stephanie loved the ocean and all that was associated with it, the seals and birds and spiny creatures crawling in tidal pools, and the way the waves slid underneath her bare toes. Her passions were intense. She’d spend hours studying art or collecting children’s literature or working with other people’s kids. Once she’d gotten hypothermia in a mountain stream while sorting through rocks on her hands and knees. “I thought there might be quartz crystals,” she’d said through the shivers. She laughed often.

Stephanie hadn’t wanted to leave the overlook. The hotel guide finally had to insist. “My shift ended twenty minutes ago, ma’am. Perhaps you can come back another day if it’s still here.” Then he took them back through the hallway and into the inn they had left. “This was one of the original shift zones,” he’d said as they walked back to the main lobby. “They found it third.”

“How marvelous it must have been,” Stephanie said. “I can imagine them climbing the mountain. Squeezing through a crevice, and there they were.” She looked behind them.

Dorian rushed down the corridor. He remembered fewer doors in the hallway yesterday, and the carpet had been a different color. Closing his eyes for a second, he tried to picture the inn’s structure. The elevator had only gone down a couple of floors, which was about the same distance the spiral stairs had taken him, but nothing looked the same. Maybe he was in a parallel passage. He passed another blue and yellow arrow. The decor changed from dark-polished woods and brass fixtures to natural pine siding. A long mural of a desert canyon rimmed with cactus covered one wall. Then the hall ended at a door, a rough-hewn, heavy-planked structure marked by a solid iron handle to open it instead of a doorknob.

It was a transition way, but not the one from yesterday. Still, it was close. Maybe Stephanie had come down this path. The elevator might have been out of order for her too. Dorian took a deep breath and opened the door.

On the other side, a wooden bridge reached an open platform. Drooping ropes hung from thick posts that lined the bridge’s side, serving as protection from the drop into the depths below. Dorian leaned on the rope at the platform’s edge. The general shape of the mountains was the same, but no snow covered the peaks. The sun glared, radiating off slick-rock, dark with streaks of desert varnish. He shaded his eyes to look up the mountain. Wood structures covered most of the slope, all light-colored pine. For a moment nothing looked familiar, then he spotted the main lobby buttressed by tree-thick pylons jutting from the mountain.

A man wearing a cowboy hat and a leather fringed shirt joined him at the edge. “First time to Mount Either?” he said.

“Yes,” said Dorian, confused. “How could you tell?”

“Your duds. Not quite in the motif, pard.” He smiled, a gold tooth flashing in the sun, then glanced at his watch, a large-faced instrument ringed with turquoise. “You going to the barbeque? I’m going to find my wife and head that way. Gosh, I love the grub you get here.” His leather boots clacked against the wood flooring as he headed to the stairs.

Dorian was alone on the platform again. “I’m looking for my wife too,” he said. Overhead a lone bird circled. He thought, is that a buzzard?

A tram like a large ore cart glided past the platform, heading down. Cowboy-hatted tourists sat at one end, while a pile of saddles and bridles filled the other. At the bottom of the ravine where the tram’s cable ended at a tiny building, a dozen horses no larger than grains of rice milled about in a corral.

The set of stairs that gold-tooth had ascended looked like they led to the main lobby. Dorian took the steps two at a time. If Stephanie had come this way, she hadn’t returned. Would she have realized right away that she was lost? Would she have gone to the lobby for directions? She could be there even now, maybe sipping a cool drink at one of the many, nearby cafes.

But at the top of the stairs were three passages, and none of them looked like they headed up. Dorian paused. If he chose the wrong way, he could become lost himself. A bellboy in flannel shirt tucked into jeans, carrying a tray of dirty dishes on one hand above his shoulder, came out of one hallway.

“How do I get to the lobby?” said Dorian.

The bellboy transferred the heavy tray with practiced ease. His suntanned face crinkled into a weathered smile. “Right hallway until you come to the elevator. The button is marked.”

Dorian nodded, then started forward.

“My right,” said the bellboy as he descended the stairs.

In the lobby, Dorian took a moment to orient himself. It wasn’t that this sage-scented lobby was completely different; it was the similarities that threw him off. The same tall window gazing out on the deserty-looking mountains, the same exposed rock making one wall, a familiar reception desk dominating the room’s center, but all the materials were different: hand-hewed timbers replaced the slick chrome support beams, big-looped throw rugs covered the plank floor where before he’d walked on expensive carpet, but what was most disorienting was the concierge, whose distinctive upward-flaring eyebrows and silver-gray hair waited for him at the reception desk as Dorian crossed the room.

“Thank goodness,” said Dorian. “I wanted to find the Polynesian transition, but I ended up here instead.”

“Excuse me, sir?” said the concierge. His expression was completely bland. No recognition at all.

“It’s me, Dorian Wallace. I told you ten minutes ago that I was looking for my wife, Stephanie.”

“I’m sorry, sir. You have me at a disadvantage.”

“We talked. You said nothing stays lost forever.”

The concierge shook his head. “Maybe I was thinking about something else when we chatted. What room did you say you were in?”

The situation was ludicrous. In the window behind the concierge, the sun blasted the peaks. No snow. No smoothly curved walkways stretching from wing to wing. Just heavy rope and solid wood and thick iron cable strapping the structures to the mountain. It was like an 1860 version of Dodge City turned vertical. “I’m from the
real
Inn at Mount Either. I’m in one of its rooms.”

The concierge’s forehead wrinkled. “
This
is the real Inn at Mount Either, sir.”

Dorian stepped back. The man looked similar, but the business suit Dorian remembered had been replaced with a leather jacket, and where the silk tie had hung before, a silver clasp held a black bolo. Something about his face was different too. More wrinkles maybe? More silver in the hair? Suddenly Dorian was sure that they would have no record of his registration, and he realized he’d gone through a transition without a guide. What had the first concierge told him about management “responding strongly” to guests who ignored the rules?

Keeping the panic out of his voice, Dorian said, “My fault. I mistook you for someone else.” He forced a smile. “There’s so many employees here.”

Nodding, the concierge turned his attention to a stack of papers on the desk. “This is a big inn, sir. Perfectly understandable.”