We had a great breakfast that morning. At the home, we would get a breakfast of bacon and scrambled eggs once a month. Pancakes were less of a rarity — we would have them once a week or so. But that day we had both, plus oatmeal and juice and English muffins, which were usually reserved for someone else. Grownups, apparently.
While thorough in his work, it seemed that my doppelganger was less than perfect in his removal of evidence. The two staff bedrooms were left barren of any personal effects. Even the beds were stripped. There were no clothes, no books, no jewelry or cosmetics, not even a bar of soap in the soap dish. In the office, the files all seemed to be in order, but there were blank spaces where names or signatures had once been. On the walls there were void spots where pictures must have once hung. A perusal of the home’s photo album would reveal similar gaps. And yet, in spite of all these omissions, the removal was not complete. Not quite. There were odd details like the empty bedrooms and the English muffins — things which couldn’t logically belong to us, and yet we had no recollection of whose they were. And there were what Lucinda called “contextual holes,” little gaps seemingly in reality itself, like continuity errors in a bad TV show. The most of glaring of these was the fact that we were there at all. A bunch of kids left unsupervised in an institution like the home? It just didn’t make sense.
Dr. MacHale had come and gone. He rang the front doorbell around two in the morning. We were still all out back looking at the mountains, trying to make sense of what we were seeing. Robert said that we shouldn’t answer, that it might be the cops or somebody from the County. Todd pointed out that neither the police nor Social Services were likely to give up and go away if no one answered the door.
MacHale was delighted when he saw Todd, and understandably terrified when he saw Raymond. Of course, he was really there to see someone else. Just another contextual hole. I think he had come in the hopes that he would remember who it was when he got there. But that person was gone. None of us could remember her. We didn’t even know for sure that her was the correct pronoun, although there was a certain logic which insisted that the missing person was a woman. Or maybe there were several missing adults. There was just no way of knowing. She was gone; the were gone. The operative word was gone.
Dr. MacHale and Todd went to one side and talked for quite a while. MacHale left right after that, promising to be back with “help” as soon as he could. Todd seemed to take him at his word — the two of them were pretty close. But if I read the look on the man’s face correctly, he was desperate to be gone: away from us and from all our strangeness. (I had seen that look before, not least from my own parents.) He had been pushed beyond his limits, and wanted no more. I doubted we would ever see him again.
We all went to bed shortly after that. As we made our way upstairs, Judy said that things would look better in the morning. As it turned out, she was right. We got up late. The sun was shining, and an entire day lay before us like none we had ever known. There was no one to tell us what to do or where to be, or what we could or could not have for breakfast. It was exhilarating. And frightening.
As she was mixing the ingredients for the pancake batter, Judy made a joke about the inmates running the asylum. Everybody laughed, but it also made us uncomfortable. The word asylum somehow conjured images of the State Home, a place we knew we were each slated to move to when we reached the age of 18, but that we now sensed we would probably be seeing a lot sooner.
The State Home. The very words were a source of dread. And yet now it seemed that it was where we would end up if we were lucky.
Anyway, by the time we sat down to breakfast, the joke had changed to the inmates running the prison. Everyone seemed more at ease with that, it was somehow a safer distance. After all, with the exception of my own metaphysical negligence (addressed inadequately if at all by the state criminal code) no one had done anything they could be sent to prison for. But then, the day was young.
As we were finishing breakfast, the question arose as to what, precisely, we should do next.
“We should go to the mountains,” said Grace. “The Mountain People can help Corey and Estelle. And maybe they can bring back the others.”
“Out of the question,” said Todd.
He got up and walked over to the television, and turned it on. There was a picture of the city on the mountain, from a slightly different angle than the mural provided. The announcer said something about a “massive hoax” and also something about the National Guard being called in. Todd changed channels. This time it was an announcer, with a picture of the city behind him. He was recapping the events of the past night, using a phrase that we would all hear and use over and over again in the years to come.
No one had ever seen a city peopled with living statues before, much less one that sprang up magically overnight. This was an unprecedented event in the history of the world. It was the stuff of myth, of fairy tales. What to call it?
The Phenomenon.
Todd picked up on this usage immediately, as did the others. And he uses it to this day. Now if ever there was a euphemism that detracts from the awful reality (and I use the word “awful,” here, in its original sense), surely this is it.
“We couldn’t get anywhere near there,” Todd continued. “If the Mountain People are going to help us, they’re going to have to come here.”
I shook my head.
“They can’t,” said Lucinda.
We all had this sense from the dreams that the Mountain People were constrained to live in their own city. They could not leave it.
“Well,” said Todd, “I don’t see us getting to them. Not any time soon.”
I watched the images on the TV for a while. A convoy of military vehicles was making its way up the mountain. Todd was right. It seemed unlikely that we were going to make it up there unnoticed.
“Maybe nobody has to go anywhere,” said Judy. “Corey, can’t they help you from where they are? Isn’t that what they did last night?”
I thought about that. I shook my head again. There was no way for me to explain, but I knew I had to go there. Angela had said so.
“All right,” she said. “I don’t think that’s going to work now that Corey has…changed. So we have to take him there. But I think it’ll be a long time before we’ll be able to get anywhere near that place.”
“Hey,” Grace interjected. “What about the Balloon People? Maybe QuickDiver could help.”
I had never before had a conscious waking thought about the creature called QuickDiver and his “balloon people.” Those dreams had been very deep. Their world was fuzzy, almost an abstraction. There were no actual people there, and certainly no balloons. Or rather, the balloons were the people: strange wispy creatures who swam through clouds and skimmed the surface of mud seas in search of nine-legged lizards to feast on. They lived in hives that were the size of cities. They sang elaborate songs which were montages of signs formed by their tentacles, squeaks and whistles blown through their tails, and sequences of light and color emitted by their luminescent bodies.
The more I thought about them, the more I could remember. They were fascinating. The adventures of QuickDiver unfolded before me, and as I remembered him and his world, I saw images of dozens of other worlds I had dreamed about. Or was it thousands? Images flashed through my mind of beings as strange as Angela and QuickDiver, some even stranger. Was it thousands of worlds or tens of thousands? Some of them were so far beyond human experience that even now I lack the vocabulary to describe them. Others were just like the real world, the waking world, only with minor changes. A hair out of place here; a word left unspoken there. An election ends differently in one; a war ends differently in another. It wasn’t tens of thousands, it was hundreds of thousands. Millions. And I had visited them all in my dreams, looking for something. What? I couldn’t define it.
“I’ve never heard of the Balloon People,” said Lucinda.
Several of the others agreed with her.
“I…think I know something about them,” said Todd. “They’re aliens. Not like the Mountain People. Not even humanoid. They’re…”
His forehead tensed up. He visibly strained, trying to remember.
“Grace, are they the ones who fix themselves in place like trees?”
The little girl laughed.
“Silly Todd. Those are the Forest People.”
Todd nodded, slowly. It seemed that he, too, was recalling things learned in dreams and not remembered before that moment.
“Right,” he said. “Right. Well, the point is, Corey brought the Mountain People here, not the Balloon People or the Forest People. The Mountain People are the important ones. We all know who they are. They’re the ones who can help. Right, Corey?”
I nodded.
It was true, but there was so much more to say. Todd was right, the Balloon People did fix themselves in place, in those few worlds where they had merged themselves with several other species. The free-floating balloon stage was an early phase in a long lifecycle which ended several phases after the rigid tree stage. Somewhere in between, in some worlds, there was a human stage. What a strange existence — to live an entire human lifespan after having lived the life of creatures that were approximately a fish, an otter, a living balloon, a winged jungle cat, and a six-limbed ape. And then after the human lifespan to become an enormous walking stick, then a tree, then a crystalline structure, and finally a flame. There were millions of variations on this sequence, but even so it was a rarity. The worlds in which the species never merged, where humans lived and died as humans, and balloons lived and died as balloons (which was the case in QuickDiver’s world) vastly outnumbered those where species had been merged.
Todd was also correct in saying that the Mountain people were the important ones because of the role I sensed they could play in helping us out of our current troubles. But it seemed that the Balloon People were central to everything in a way that the Mountain people were not. But there was no time for all this.
“If the Mountain people are the ones who can help,” said Judy, “then we’ll just have to wait it out. There will be someone new sent to run the Home. Things will quiet down after a while. And we’ll figure out a way to get Corey to the mountains.”
“No,” said Lucinda. “That idea won’t work. We have to be realistic about what’s going to happen next. For all that I’ve forgotten, I remember that — even before what happened last night — we were facing the risk that this home might be closed down.”
Judy nodded in agreement. The two of them seemed to be the only ones who knew anything about that.
“If that happens, we may all be apart for a long time.”
I looked to Grace, worried that she would be frightened by this topic. But she had a renewed interest in her pancakes and was apparently not listening.
“Let’s run away,” said Raymond. “All of us. Together.”
“We can’t,” said Todd.
“It’s a good idea, Raymond,” said Lucinda, “but it will be too hard for us to pull off. Right now, we have to focus on keeping Corey safe.”
On what? Keeping me safe?
Judy nodded. She looked at me, and I guessed from her smile that she read the outrage in my expression.
“It’s true, Corey,” she said. “The ants were one thing. Raymond rising from the grave is another. But what happens to you if anybody ever figures out the part you played in that?”
She pointed at the TV and, just for a moment, I thought she meant the fact that I had changed it from black and white to color. But no, she was referring to images on the screen. The Phenomenon.
“There’s going to be a lot of confusion, what with people disappearing and this Phenomenon taking place,” said Todd. “There are a number of strange things to be accounted for. Not just Ray’s resurrection. What about our own anomalous intelligence? I think we can cover all that up pretty well, and the rest can be rationalized away. But Corey’s a different problem. If they find out what he can do, somebody might eventually connect the dots.”
“Or they might come after him even if they never do connect the dots,” said Bettina. “If they ever realize what he can do.”
Nobody had to say who they were. They were the people in power, the people who made decisions about where we would live and what our lives would be like. They were the people who wanted to shut the home down, the bosses of the men driving green trucks up the mountain, and everyone in between.
“So what do we do?” asked Lucinda.
Judy took a long look at me.
“We get him out of here,” she said.
