Where the Lost Things Are (2 page)

“Bert,” I muttered.

“One problem,” said Darly. “If we head off for this alsoverse—what about those teen vigilantes who shoot at us every time we venture off the London Earl grounds?”

“Oh, they just do that for fun,” said Amara. “And they're terrible shots.”

Jack held up his philosophical finger again. “According to my long-lost physics friend Chandler, the alsoverse is infinitesimally close to us. We wouldn't even have to step off the porch to go there. If we could find a dimensional crack. And it would help if we were smaller. Or more insubstantial. Most of the stuff that falls through is tiny. We're solid and huge.”

Darly glared at him.

“Relatively speaking,” said Jack. “Compared to a bluegene pill. Or a flatpick. Or a hearing aid.”

“Let's use science,” said Amara. “Atomic science. We're totally made out of atoms, right?”

Jack nodded.

“Then let's just shrink our atoms! Then we'll shrink all over.”

“That's stupid,” I said, trying to be helpful. “Atoms are already as small as they can get. How are you going to shrink them?”

“Your atoms were smaller when you were a baby, mister smarty-pants. All we have to do is make them that small again.”

That made sense until I thought about it. “Amara, that involves time travel and you don't even wear a watch.”

“Please!” shouted Jack. “Let's stick to my diamond-hard logic. Facts. The fact is, shrinking stuff is hard to do. Shrinking people is even harder. Maybe even impossible.”

Darly glared at him.

“At least difficult.” He tipped Early Times into our glasses. “Science can take you only so far. Maybe we should just forget about the alsoverse.”

Early Times is good for forgetting things. We sipped in silence while the crickets screamed. Amara was tapping one foot to their rhythm when she said, “Hey! Isn't math science? And isn't music made out of math? Well, music can shrink feet.”

“Huh?” All three of us at once.

“For real. Waddy's banjo player was this Iranian dude. He had these enormous feet but he could make them smaller by holding his breath while he was playing ‘Drown the Puppy.'”

“I hate that song,” said Darly. “It's mean and mournful. Makes me feel like I'm a lonely nobody.”

“That's what bluegrass is all about,” said Amara proudly. “This guy used ‘Drown the Puppy' to get his boots off when his feet were swollen, and they were swollen almost every night after the show. He'd sit on the edge of the stage, holding his breath and playing faster and faster and it was my job to pull his boots. He'd be turning blue by the time I got them off. They were snakeskin Tony Lamas.”

“Hhhmmmm,” said Jack thoughtfully. “Tony Lamas run tight. And that trick sounds a little like
Izzintit
, the arcane mathematical exercise developed by the ancient Assyrians for use in their personal search for zero. Documented in cuneiform, and on the Rhind papyrus. It's significant that the changes in ‘Drown the Puppy' are in a diminishing chromatic scale. If it was played fast enough, and if we held our breaths long enough, well, maybe…”

“I think it has to be in G,” said Amara.

“Most people play it in G,” I said. “I happen to have ‘Drown the Puppy' on my squidphone. Played by the bluegrass banjo master J. D. Crowe himself. And I have a speed-up app.”

Jack looked doubtful. “Remember that size isn't the whole problem,” he said. “We need a crack as well. A wrinkle in spacetime.”

“You want wrinkles?” said Darly brightly. She tapped the side of her pink leather sample case. “Karing Kate has a prototype wrinkle cream. It's experimental.”

Jack looked even more doubtful. “Doesn't wrinkle cream get
rid
of wrinkles?”

“Not this one,” said Darly. “It's made for making ‘em. It's sort of like a reverse mortgage. It's for girls who want to look all goth and jaded. If it gets approved, we'll call it Worldly Woman.”

So first we finished the whiskey. And then we held our collective breath while J. D. Crowe on my squidphone tore into “Drown the Puppy” like a bushhog into a rose garden. The frantic, lonesome music made me feel like nothing mattered. I was a lonely old man, fading away, forgettable and forgotten. And, holding my breath so long like this, I was feeling like I might pass out. Everything looked strange. I was dwindling.

The Worldly Woman wrinkling cream came with an applicator that looked as big as a shovel by the time Darly had finished laying a stripe on the porch. The stripe folded in on itself, and now it was a milky river—or a canyon full of mist. Jack dove in. Still holding our breath, the rest of us followed, anxious to get some air, or die trying. Somewhere nearby a crow had begun to caw.

I fell, but only what seemed like a few feet before I hit ass-first with a thump on a patch of dirt. I looked around, gasping great gulps of air. Darly and Amara were on either side of me, looking shocked. Jack was already on his feet, desperately going through his pockets.

“Lost my Bugler!” he said. “Must have fallen out of my pocket as we passed through.”

“Let's hear it for Karing Kate, huh?” said Darly.

We were in a field of bare clay studded with rocks the size of trash cans. The sky above was pale shade of yellow-orange, as if we were inside a gigantic birthday balloon. A few big birds circled high overhead.

Jack was smiling in spite of the loss of his Bugler. His voice took on a celebratory tone. “We made it!” he said. “We've made history! We're the first humans to pass from the universe to the alsoverse. “

“Don't be so sure,” said Darly. With both hands, she pointed toward the edge of the field where a gloomy man with a white goatee sat on one of the rocks. He was dressed like a Kentucky Colonel, in a gray cutaway frock coat and a string tie. He was rolling a cigarette from a pack of tobacco on his lap.

“That's my Bugler!” Jack hurried toward him and we followed. The man glanced up as we approached, and when Jack saw his face he stopped in his tracks.

“Chandler! From Knowledge College.”

“Jack! Is that you?”

“It is, and I believe that's my stash,” said Jack in a firm but friendly way. “I'd like it back if you please.”

Chandler shook his head. “Finders keepers,” he said. “That's the rule here. But I'd be glad to roll some up for you.”

And so he did. His twists were almost as tight as Jack's.

“Anybody got a match?” asked Chandler, passing the cigs around. “Tobacco and matches are hard to find here.”

Jack pulled a kitchen match from the pocket of his jumpsuit. “Here's hoping,” he said, “that
strike-anywhere
means
works-in-both-worlds
.”

Turned out it does.

We all had a smoke while Jack and Chandler caught up on past events. “Finding out there's only this one extra universe threw me into a tailspin,” said Chandler. “I was ready to quit being a professor. For some insane reason, I started moonlighting at KFC.”

“That explains the weird duds,” whispered Amara.

“Workers at KFC don't dress like Colonel Sanders,” whispered Darly.

“Have you ever looked in the kitchen?” hissed Amara.

“Talk louder!” I snapped. “But be quiet.” I wanted to hear Chandler.

“The KFC job was a mistake. All that slimy, pimply skin. The nodules of fat. Sure I'd been depressed about the alsoverse, but now I was suicidal. Back in my pathetic rented room, I let the bad feelings take over and I started to—attenuate. Evanesce. Dwindle. I slipped through a crack, and into the alsoverse.” He paused, looking around. “Yes, I found another world—but I'm stuck inside it. And it's a dump. Come see.”

He led us across the field to where it ended on a low bluff.

“So much stuff!” said Amara. “Like my cousin Jessie's yard.”

Indeed. We were overlooking a wide barren plain studded with pyramids of junk that rose even higher than our bluff. The sky was all in shades of cream and peach.

“There's a pile of giant keys,” said Darly, pointing at the closest of the mounds.

“And funny shaped surfboards,” said Amara, pointing to another nearby heap.

“Those are guitar picks,” said Jack. “Don't forget, we're tiny.”

“I'm bigger than a guitar pick back home,” protested Darly. “Why should I be smaller than one here?”

“We look smaller because we're further away,” said Amara comfortably.

“Farther from
what
?” I asked.

“You'd understand if Chandler and I could teach you the rudiments of space-time-scale continuum mechanics,” said Jack.

“But such an attempt would be quite quixotic,” said Chandler. He and Jack exchanged a snobby, knowing look—bullshit artists that they were.

“You see, Bert?” said Amara. “I'm right.”

I stared out across the plain. Each of the vast plain's ziggurats of pelf held a different category of lost items. A gargantuan haystack of long legs and platter-sized lenses—glasses. A cathedral of gold hula hoops—wedding rings. A ticking stack of menacing machines—watches. A mountain of single socks. Other less easily categorizable mounds stretched into the distance as far as the eye could see. But there, only a quarter of a mile off, was—

“A pile of pills,” said Jack, pointing “We're here for my bluegene meds,

“Who are those people?” said Darly. “Look at them down there.” Milling mournfully among the mounds were men and women in regular clothes, busy as ants.

“Stackers and sorters,” said Chandler. “Missing persons, like me. People who let themselves disappear. We never talk. We spend our time arranging this crap. As if it might come in handy some day.”

“You do this for occupational therapy?” asked Jack.

“It fills the time,” said Chandler with a shrug. “We're stuck here for good. We might even be immortal. If the crows don't eat us.”

“You mean those big birds flying around?” said Amara. Her google glasses were glittering away. Documenting the scene.

“I think they're pretty,” said Darly, who found many things pretty. “What do they want?”

“Hard to say,” said Chandler. “Sometimes one of them snatches up something shiny and carries it off. To where, I don't know. The other crows always chase the one that's flying away. Like they want to follow.”

“The crows are in charge?” asked Jack.

“Maybe,” said Chandler. “Sometimes a crow will swoop down and snack on a slacking stacker or on a loitering sorter. That's why it's risky to be idle.”

Amara mimed a shiver.

“You're slacking on your own right now,” Jack pointed out. “Smoking my Bugler.”

“The crows honor me because they like my second-hand smoke,” said Chandler. “Watch this.” He took a drag and blew the smoke straight up. One of the birds caught the scent and came spiraling down.

I shivered when the iridescent black crow landed in the field beside us. He was the size of a private plane, with wide wings, a broad back and a stubby neck. He sat back on what passed for haunches and lowered his head so that Chandler could blow smoke into the nostrils of the great beak.

“These guys are smart,” said Chandler. “You gas them up with smoke and they'll do what you tell them—for a while.”

“Hhhhmmmm,” said Jack. “What if you were to tell him to fly me over to that pile of pills in the distance, so I can score some bluegene?”

“Why not?” said Chandler. “Seeing as how you gave me this Bugler. And the matches too.”

“Good deal,” said Jack.

“Once you have your bluegene pill, you'll come back and help with the stacking and sorting, right?” said Chandler. “We're always falling behind.”

“Sure,” said Jack. “As you say, we're stuck here forever, and there's nothing else to do, and life sucks. And all this stuff might come in handy someday.”

“Are you nuts?” I asked Jack in a whisper.

“Shut up,” he murmured. “Do what I do.”

Chandler blew more smoke into the great crow's nostrils and he chirped at the crow from the back of his throat. “Get on now,” he told us.

Jack perched on the crow's neck like he was mounting a dragon. The women and I nestled into the dark feathers in the middle of the crow's back. The great wings beat the air and we rose, skimming along the underside of the peachy clouds of the alsoverse.

Below us, the mournful missing persons were sorting and stacking: coins and pen-tops and contact lenses, hairpins and hats, sausages, credit cards, batteries, screwdrivers—

“Hey!” I yelled, “There's my hearing aid!” It lay atop a stack of such devices, all types and sizes, like an exhibit at a medical museum. Fairly unpleasant to see, some of them waxy and carrying that disgusting geezer vibe. At Jack's bidding, the gigantic crow swooped down and circled so that I could snatch my hearing aid from the pile. Compared to my present size the thing was, hell, the size of an orange crate. I managed to tuck it into the crow's plumage. Maybe I could jigger our relative sizes if and when we got back home.

Jack looked back from his perch on the crow's neck and grinned.

“I want a guitar pick,” called Amara. “For a souvenir.”

No sooner said than done. The crow circled back to near where we'd started, and the boogie-board-sized plastic pick was soon wedged among the feathers, nestled beside my cumbersome hearing aid.

“Are you steering this bird?” I called to Jack, raising my voice against the wind.

“Yeah, baby!” he exulted. “Remember back at Journey's End, when I got my knees replaced?”

“Sure I do,” I said, though I didn't.

He slapped his thigh. “I can guide this bird with my knees, like a Sioux warrior on an Indian pony. Titanium!”

“I want my dangly gold earring,” said Darly. “I can see the pile over there!”