The Other Normals (7 page)

“Upper middle class.”

“Yeah, like you’re a public-school student. I just got fired. How’s that for something to complain about?”

“I thought you said you were with the Sulice Corporation.”

“I was. That’s how it’s supposed to be. With them for life. I don’t know when I’m going to stop saying it.”

“What’d you get fired for?”

“Having
big ideas
.”

“How are you speaking to me in English?”

“What are you, racist?”

MORTIN ENAW LEADS ME FARTHER INTO the woods, transforming in five minutes from a mystical creature whose existence astounds me to a loopy companion who likes to smoke pebbles and talk. He seems happy and grateful that the pebbles are everywhere, just waiting for him to stuff into his pipe. When he dumps them out, they look about the same as when they go in, so I’m not sure what he gets out of them, but he likes the ones with quartz and emphasizes to me that quartz is “the stuff.”

“So your home that you can’t pronounce, did anybody ever try and pronounce it ‘Middle-earth’? Or ‘Narnia’?” I ask, keeping weight off my ankle with my walking stick.

“Tolkien said the climate reminded him of being a baby in South Africa,” Mortin says, pronouncing J. R. R. Tolkien’s name “Tol-
kine,”
which I know is wrong. He pushes aside a branch for me.

“You knew Tolkien?” I’m geeking out. I pronounce it the right way.

“Not me. A colleague, almost a century ago.”

“Is your world where Tolkien got his ideas for Middle-earth?”

“No, he made up Middle-earth.” Mortin stops. “You ever notice how nobody’s ever
broke
in Middle-earth?” He grimaces on
broke
and scrunches his face. “Sure, they’ve got no possessions because they’re all on an adventure, but have you ever seen somebody deal with a
bill
in Middle-earth? Or with, say, a punk punching them in the kidney because they owed him money for earthpebbles?”

“No,” I say. I hang back.

“What?”

“I’m staying here. You look like you’re going to get violent.”

“I just get frustrated. There’s a lot of repetition in my line of work. That’s why I need the pebbles to stay relaxed. You’re not the first person to ask about Tolkien, I’ll put it that way.”

“Tol-
keen
,” I insist. “He wasn’t Jewish.”

Mortin Enaw looks embarrassed. “That’s how you say it?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ve been mispronouncing it all this time?”

“Don’t worry. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize! I’ve been doing that for years!”

“It’s an honest mistake.”

“You know, one of the most insidious things you can do to a friend is hear them mispronounce a word and not correct it.” Mortin seems to recall a specific incident: “That guarantees the friend will mispronounce the word later in front of somebody important.”

“Well, you pronounced my name right.”

“You pronounced my name right too. Thanks.”

“We should shake hands,” I say, and we do, in the woods, before moving forward to wherever he’s taking me.

CRACK
—I STEP ON A BRANCH. THE SOUND scatters through the trees. My ankle flares up. Mortin shakes his head. “You’ve never walked in the woods before, have you?”

“No. The park?”

“Walk on roots, okay? Roots and rocks. That keeps you from leaving a trail—or a sound. What if you have to meet Anna at a secret location late at night?”

“Where are we going, Mortin?”

“We’re looking for an old car battery.”

“There?” I point.

“Good eye.”

We head over. The battery sits in front of a tree. It looks like a normal car battery—black paint, scratched up, rusty—with the air of something abandoned without premeditation. “Is it like Narnia? Is this a special battery instead of a wardrobe that’s going to lead us to the World of the Other Normals?”

Mortin Enaw takes a deep breath and shakes out his pipe. “This battery, you can tell me where it is, specifically, in space, right? With numbers?”

“Yes.”

“Well, not everything’s like that.”

“Of course it is. Everything can be described with numbers. That’s why they’re numbers.”

“Try electrons. They decide where they’re going to be when you measure them. What are the numbers behind that?”

“Quantum physics.” I can keep up with Mortin. Who does he think he is? “So you’re from another dimension, like …
Star Trek.
And this camp is like a special pen for human children where they’re brought for experimentation by people from your dimension if their parents are cheap enough to want them away for a summer—”

“You’re part of one universe in a multiverse. And it’s your consciousness that chooses, not the electron, because consciousnesses choose things and electrons don’t. Your American scientist Hugh Everett published the truth in the 1950s. Then he went to work on top-secret military projects and never published another paper. He knew the secret behind this battery.”

Mortin unscrews the caps. Upon closer inspection, the brand is “Logo Spermatikoi,” which I’ve never heard of and which definitely does not sound focus-tested.

The sun gleams off the battery leads. Mortin eyes me, and I think for a moment about God.
This—
meeting Mortin—is the first experience I’ve had that makes me think,
God exists
, and it’s pure madness! Where’s the sense in that? God needs to be doing more crazy things to prove himself.

“Do you have … access to the other universes?” I ask.

“Why?”

“Is there a universe you could take me where, like, I’m bigger? Or my parents are … not crazy?”

“They exist. They all exist. Every time something happens, a universe is created where it happens a different way, so universes are constantly branching off to infinity; that’s the multiverse. But I can’t take you to them all. I can only take you to mine. If you want to be bigger, I suggest you exercise, fix your posture, and eat chicken breast.”

“You don’t have a pencil, do you?” I pull my acne handout out of my pocket.

“No, I don’t have a pencil, and you’ve got to leave that here, so you better put it aside. You can’t bring anything over.”

“Is your universe safe? Does it have an oxygen-and-nitrogen-based atmosphere?”

“Please touch the battery right there.” Mortin points at the lead marked
negative
.

“I don’t want to be ‘negative.’ Is there running water? Is it ninety-three million miles from a star similar in nuclear composition to the sun? Is this going to hurt?”

“Stop whining. See that clump of mushrooms?”

I don’t see them until he points them out: a piddling cluster next to some ferns beside the battery. They don’t look special. “You’re going to touch those when the time is right, while holding the negative lead.”

Mortin takes the lighter off his tail and leaves it by the tree, along with his pipe. Then he takes off his clothes,
matter-of-factly, the way old people do in locker rooms at pools.

“I’m going first. You come after. Give me thirty seconds to make sure everything is safe on the other side.”

“Do I have to get naked?” I avoid looking at Mortin’s genitals, although they seem normal in my peripheral vision.

“You better.”

“I’d rather not. I don’t like being naked. I haven’t really had the Growth Spurt yet, you know what I mean?”

“Perry, I thought I knew about you from studying you, but I didn’t realize that at any given moment your brain is either scared, apologetic, or
thinking
about something. You need to make more room in there for
direct action
.” He points at my head. “Count to thirty and follow me. And remember, when you touch the mushroom,
don’t
think about me, okay? Whatever you do, don’t picture me.”

MORTIN TOUCHES THE MUSHROOM WHILE holding the negative lead. As soon as his finger hits it—one finger on the battery, one on the mushroom, crouched in the forest, stark naked, his tail curled behind him in a big S—his body begins to shake. It’s as if a great electrical current is running though him. He chitters, letting out clicking pops like a bug zapper being swung through a cloud of mosquitoes, as two halos of light shoot out from his bare feet.

I throw my arm over my eyes and peek through my fingers. I expect heat, but there’s just bright, clear light. The halos move up to Mortin’s ankles—and below them, his feet are gone. Zapped. Dematerialized.

I discern a
pattern
in the chittering, like rapid Morse code—
pop, pop, poppoppop—
as the halos move up his legs. When they reach his crotch, they join and become such an intense burst that my eyes can’t handle it; I squeeze them shut and see black spots and hear violent snaps until I open them again—and Mortin is gone.

I hear something loud and realize it’s my breathing. I blink. The animals know something’s up. The woods are quiet. If it’s
all been a hallucination, this should’ve been the violent brain-cleansing incident that knocked me out of it. I pinch myself, but I’m still in the same spot, a long way from the nurse’s office.

“No way,” I say. It’s time to go back. Not for me, no thanks. Interesting, but I’ve had enough adventure for one day; I prefer my fantasy life compartmentalized in books, without any nudity—

I hear a growl. In front of me, crouched, shoulders up, head down, is a gray wolf. I guess it could be a coyote—I’ve been reading that coyotes are more common in the tri-state area these days—but something in the lowness of its growl says
wolf.
It twitches its lips and shows its incisors.

I back toward the car battery.
Wolves?
No lawyers, no white kids, and
wolves
? What kind of a place is Camp Washiska Lake? I review my attributes as I had them figured for Pekker Cland: Intelligence 65? Might be more like 10.

I touch the negative lead of the battery, peering over my shoulder at the wolf. I brush my finger ever so lightly against one of the mushrooms.

What did Mortin tell me not to think about? Himself, that’s right.
I try not to think about him, so of course I do, and with the image of his legs scrolling out of existence firmly in mind, I enter

IT’S LIKE HAVING A SEIZURE—LIKE HAVING one seizure followed by another followed by two more, at ever tightening intervals. My body spasms and my teeth clench. The trees in front of me shake back and forth, and then they shake up and down, and then they shake in a direction I never noticed before and can’t describe: it’s a bit like a diagonal, but it also has something to do with
time,
because the leaves alternate between reds and yellows and summer greens, faster and faster, like they’re aging and getting younger, and the sound goes with them, warping in and out as if someone’s detuning me on a big radio dial, and I chitter:
pop, pop, poppoppop
....

My feet crackle and glow. Electricity runs through me. I’m not sure if it hurts or if my body is experiencing new things and the only way it can register them is as pain, but I scream. I try to pull my fingers away from the battery and the mushroom, but they’re suddenly, inexplicably far from me.

“Yaaaa—!”

The halos shoot out from me and move up. My feet shimmer and disappear below my ankles. The pain ascends my spine as the ring eats my stomach, and then I feel my stomach
isn’t there
,
as if it fell asleep the way my legs did on the toilet reading the
Other Normal Edition
.

The ring moves up my chest—my chest disappears. It takes my neck and my face. The forest explodes in light, brighter than the sun. The light comes from me, from my eyes.

My mouth doesn’t exist, so I can’t scream anymore except in my head, but that does the job—
Yaaaaaaaaaagh!—
bridging the moment between when everything explodes to the moment after, when I realize I’m somewhere different, somewhere with a roof.

“Aaaaaagh!”

I am in the center of a chamber, on the floor. My body is back, but it’s naked.

A CIRCULAR ROOM. DARK WOODEN WALLS. No windows. Barrels and crates are stacked around the perimeter, along with shelves holding folded sheets of burlap and small sacks that look like ice packs. A few smooth-worn, bone-colored levers stick out of the wall. Fat white candles in simple metal sconces provide light; the smoke leaves through a dainty chute in the center of the ceiling. It reminds me of a submarine, or a witches’ den.

Mortin stands in front of me, wearing a brown loincloth. He has good musculature. He’s rubbing something under his eye, like sunscreen. He turns away to finish up, as if he’s hiding something from me, and then I notice a girl standing next to him.

She seems about my age, with pale skin and bright blue hair. My brain registers two things: First, she’s beautiful. Second, I’m naked. Women allegedly like naked men, but I’ve never seen this confirmed. I cover myself on the floor.

“Hey!” Mortin says, whirling around. His face looks fine; I don’t know what he was doing to it. “You made it!”