Things Not Seen (19 page)

W
hen I wake up, my alarm clock tells me it's 11:37
P.M
., so from the time I lay down on my bed to now is almost four hours. All I meant to do was think a little. Instead, I've had four hours of freedom. Four hours of not being furious with my parents and Alicia's dad for trying to tell me how they've planned out the rest of my life. Four hours of not beating my brains against a wall trying to figure out what to do next. Four hours of not worrying about being this way forever. Sleep is the great escape.

Mom must have been here, because someone has taken off my shoes, and the down comforter is tucked around me. Mom and Dad looked in to make sure their little baby Bobby was all right.

My eyes are wide open. Streetlamp light sneaks around the edges of the window shades. The night-light in the bathroom paints a thin yellow stripe at the bottom of my bedroom door. The furnace blower comes on, runs about three minutes, then stops. The whole house is quiet, and I hear a bus making its last run on the street out front.

Lying still in the dark, I try to imagine that everything is normal again. I'm just a high school kid. Soon it'll be a regular Thursday morning, and I'll get up and eat breakfast and catch the bus for school. I'll doze through math, avoid speaking in French, try to look smart in English, eat lunch with Kenny and Phil, play my trumpet in the jazz band during sixth period, and after school I'll go to the library and listen to some rare Miles Davis cuts.

But I know all that's a lie. Nothing is normal.

I replay Dr. Van Dorn's visit to our dinner table. Two things stand out. First, that ACE spacecraft. It's what collects the data he found about the two dates. I've never heard of that before. I've never heard of billions of things. Truth is, I know practically nothing. Except how to take almost anything that happens and make myself feel stupid because of it. Which is what I'm doing right now.

The other thing I recall is the quick look Dr. Van Dorn and Dad passed between them. It was a secret look, the kind people exchange when what they're thinking is too terrible for words. They exchanged the look when Mom asked about reversing the process. Dr. Van Dorn doesn't believe it's possible. He thinks there's no going back. Move over, Sheila. Make some room in the lifeboat for Bobby.

Rolling off the bed, I land softly on my feet. The hallway is faintly lit, and I can tell Mom and Dad are asleep. Their turn for some freedom.

I tiptoe down the back stairs, go through the kitchen and dining room to the den. The computer sounds like a diesel truck starting up, but I know it's not really that loud.

The browser opens up, and I get to a search page, and I punch in “ACE spacecraft.” And there it is, pictures and everything. ACE stands for Advanced Composition Explorer. This thing is out 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, feeding a constant stream of data to a bunch of ground tracking stations all over the world. Scientists in Japan, England, India, the U.S., they're all looking at information from ten different instruments on board. I click on the Real Time Solar Wind Data, and I'm plugged in. I've got graphs and tables and news from outer space, and the thing is updated every fifteen minutes—like the reports about traffic on the Dan Ryan Expressway.

Then I click on a link for SOHO—the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory—and it's another satellite up there in the sunlight. And there's a blinking “ALERT” on the screen next to a block of text:

And the date on the news release is 11:45
P.M
. February 24—and there's been an update every twenty-four hours right up to yesterday. The bombardment has slowed during the last month, but not by much. So what I'm reading about here on the screen, this is still going on. Now.

And it makes me smile. I wish I had a cat or something. I'd wrap it up in my magic blanket, and poof—invisible kitty. Which would be tough on the neighborhood birds.

I close the browser, open up an Instant Messenger window, and click on Alicia's screen name.

In about thirty seconds, the program chimes back at me.

And I shut the whole thing down. The trouble with screen talking is it keeps going on and on until someone finally decides to get back to real life. And that's what I'm doing.

I walk up to the front parlor, open the French doors slowly so they won't squeak and wake up Dad. He's got my blanket carefully folded into a suit box with the controller all reassembled, set to take to the lab in the morning. Because my blanket is a scientific artifact now. I pick up the box and wind my way through the dark house again, up the back stairs and into my room.

I plug the blanket into the controller and put the controller right where it always sits on my bedside table. After I toss the feather comforter onto the floor, I spread the blanket out over the bed. Then I plug the control unit into the wall, right where it was plugged in on that Monday night. And before I have a chance to chicken out, I close my door, shut off the light, peel down to my boxers, and climb under the covers. And with my right hand, I feel around in the dark until I find the controller, then the dial, and then the little switch. But I don't flip it. I can't. Because what will happen? Will I die? Those angry words I typed down in the den, are those the last words I'll ever say to Alicia? But I have to do something. I have to. And I do. I flip it on.

A faint orange glow lights the dial, and I squint and set it to five, right in the middle, just like always. Then I lie back on my pillow and pull the covers up so only my nose is sticking out into the chilly air. Just like always. Except my mouth is dry and my chest is heaving.

And I imagine the solar wind blowing the stardust around, trillions of energized particles bombarding the earth, radiation I can't see or feel. And then I imagine I can feel the X rays and the gamma rays, feel them pinging on my eyelids, shooting through my skull, making the palms of my hands tingle like they've fallen asleep.

And I'm under my blanket, and it's warm and toasty, and my heart is thumping and my mind is racing, and I'm watching to see if the room starts to shimmer or glow.

And I feel like an idiot. Like maybe I should start chanting some magic words. Because this whole thing is so ridiculous. I'm trying to recreate something that was probably a one-in-a-billion event. I mean, it could have been a certain cloud above our house with some weird mix of pollution and chemicals in it from some power plant in Joliet. Maybe that cloud messed with the solar-wind junk before it got to me sleeping in my bed. Or Dr. Van Dorn could have just gotten the whole thing wrong. Maybe the two dates relate to some phenomenon no one has even discovered yet. Who says he and Dad know so much anyway? Their machines are big and shiny and they whir and hum, but do they really know more than some Stone Age witch doctor with a rattle and a gourd full of ground-up frog bones?

Years don't scare me much anymore
. That's what Alicia just said. She's not wishing her life was different. She's dealing with the life she has. She's not trying to get back to how things used to be.

How things used to be. I don't want that. Not exactly. I'll never be exactly like I was. I just want some choices back. Even Alicia's got choices to make. Not me. I have only two. Stay hidden, or go public. And if I go public, instantly I'm a scientific oddity, front-page news. Two choices, and they both stink.

Fifteen minutes by the clock, and there's nothing. No unearthly glowing, no strange crackling sounds, no arcing electrical charges. Nothing. I feel like I should get up and go message Alicia. She probably thinks I'm turning myself into a gob of protoplasm or something. But it's 12:07 now. The digital thermostat has cut the temperature in the house back to 55. And I've been missing my good old blanket. It's too comfortable to get up and go downstairs again. Besides, that might mess up the big experiment. Right.

So I roll over onto my side and think about the things I'd like to say to Alicia. And after another five minutes or so, the sandman's got me.