Just Plain Weird (11 page)

         
“Naturally, it took me about three hours to convince him I hadn’t hallucinated the whole thing. All he wanted to do was harp at me for having ventured out into the jungle-- you know, typical: here I am telling him about this great thing I found, and there he is, checking to see if I’d been bit by a poisonous snake, whose venom was making me delirious.

         
“Anyway, I finally convinced him to follow me. When I led him inside the thing, his jaw nearly dropped to the floor. You think he was mesmerized by the metal ball he’d dug up! He wandered around the chamber, and all he could say was, ‘Eliza, what have you found?’ over and over, as if I knew the answer.

         
“He sent me back to the camp to get my mother and his camera. My mother-- she was never the outdoorsy type, you know? I remember a lot of yelling, and complaining about having to climb down the slope, and how this was positively the last time she was going out on one of these outings. Like I said before, my mother never complained as long as she didn’t have to participate in my father’s work.

 
        
“By the time we returned, my father was standing at the console in the middle of the chamber. He was studying the shapes and the symbols, trying to make sense of them. While he was doing that, my mom, who was just plain flabbergasted, walked around the chamber, snapping off pictures with the camera.

         
“After a while, my father started to press a few of the buttons. Now, I was just a kid at the time, but I still knew that this was not a great idea; my father, though very intelligent when it comes to some things, still had a hard time programming a VCR. What happened next was sheer luck-- that I know. He triggered something, and a large section of one of the chamber walls suddenly lit up; it looked like an enormous viewing screen. The screen showed a detail representation of the entire South American continent. There was a small symbol on the screen marking the spot where we were; it looked like the symbol for twins-- you know, two lines with a line running across the top of both lines. When he pressed a couple other buttons, he found that he could zoom in on the location. When he pressed a couple other buttons, a ghost image of the symbol separated from the symbol, and he found that he could move the ghost image anywhere on the screen. You could see he was pretty pleased with himself that he was figuring it out, you know. Then it was like he had a brilliant idea. He moved the ghost image to the top edge of the screen, and the screen switched over to a representation of Central American, and then to North American. He placed the ghost image on the spot where we lived at the time, which was Chicago, and then he zoomed in…. it was amazing-- like a spy satellite-- he actually zoomed into the city, into the neighborhood we lived in, and suddenly the screen showed our house and back yard from above. There, right on the patio was my bicycle, which I’d forgot to put away in the garage. By now my mother and I were gawking up at this huge screen. What my father said next I always considered famous last words: ‘I wonder what’ll happen if I press this button.’ Of course, by this time, nobody could have stopped him; he was on a roll, right? So he pressed the button. Absolutely nothing happened-- not that we noticed. On the screen the ghost image became solid-- that was all. My father looked disappointed, shrugged and said that there would be plenty of time to figure it all out.

         
“Anyway, after that, he took roll after roll of pictures. My mom, while walking close to one of the walls, triggered a sensor, and an archway formed in the wall. The archway opened onto a corridor that lead to another enormous chamber. It was mind-boggling. Exactly how big was this thing? My father decided the best thing to do was go back to the camp, where he could figure out some methodical way to explore and map the place. So we left to go back to the camp, but there was only one problem.

         
“When we walked through the doorway we’d come in through-- instead of coming out into the cave-- we ended walking out directly into our garage back in Chicago.

         
“No kidding,” Eliza said now. She paused, biting her lower lip, studying my face as if to see what I might be thinking. It was a pretty fantastic story, after all; but she told it with such sincerity, with such a desperate need for me to believe her, I felt bad that I was having serious doubts of its truthfulness. Still I could see no reason for her to be making it up. Why would a person go through extremes to prove to themselves that they can trust you, and then end up telling you something that ended up being a large heap of horse manure?

    
    
“Well,” I said finally, and here she hung on my every word, “that’s pretty incredible.”

         
Her posture changed, then. Her shoulders slumped slightly, and the brightness of her eyes was suddenly gone.

         
“You don’t believe me, do you?” she said sadly.

         
“Well, look, if somebody told you a story like that, would you believe it without some proof?”

         
“Proof?” she said sharply; obviously this was exactly the wrong thing to say at this point. “You need proof? You won’t just take my word for it?” She was seriously offended now.

         
“It’s not that I don’t want to believe you,” I said, and really meant it; despite the fact that it felt as if I’d known her forever, I’d never spoken a word to her before today. So, yeah, I thought some proof wasn’t unreasonable, but her change in attitude suggested she believed otherwise.

         
It was becoming clear that whatever she thought I was, or whatever she wanted me to be, I might end up disappointing her.

         
She sat quietly for a long time, then. She looked lifeless, staring at the floor. When she finally spoke, her words were dull and distant. “I’ve made a horrible mistake,” she said miserably. “That’s my fault-- not yours. Please go now. I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

         
I was stunned at how quickly and completely she was shutting me out. I tried to protest, but she wouldn’t hear me.

         
“Just go, Travis-- please.”

         
There was such pain in this last word that I stood and headed for the front door, not wishing to cause her further pain. Before I walked out, I caught a glimpse of her sitting there on the sofa, legs crossed before her, staring down at nothing.

3

         
It was at that moment that I first experienced true heartache. I’d never before in my life felt so low. And the pain, the wrenching pain in my chest, weakened my legs and made me think I was actually having a heart attack. I wasn’t a step out the front door, and already I was feeling a desperate need to run back inside and reconnect with her.

         
I must have been in a daze as I walked down her front stairs, because I didn’t even notice her father, who was standing right there, just off to the side of the front walkway.

         
“Hello, uh, Travis, is it?” he said. I think he said it a couple times before I heard him and my brain registered his presence. He was dressed casually now, in a sweater, slacks and loafers.

         
“Uh, hi,” I managed to muttered; even that nearly stuck in my throat.

         
“Didn’t go too well, did it?” he asked mildly.

         
I just looked at him. I couldn’t answer.

         
“No, it didn’t,” he said with certainty. “Well, if you remember, last night I did say that my daughter was funny. I never did figure out where the girl gets it from,” he went on. “She’s not anything like me-- or my wife, either, for that matter. Well, look here, this is a perfect example,” he said, leading me a few steps over to his driveway. “Look at that-- what’s missing? The way I look at something like this is: I have a brand new car under almost a hundred feet of water in a flooded quarry, and what exactly am I supposed to tell the insurance company? The way you may be looking at the-- incident is: this crazy girl drove me off a cliff and almost got me killed. Right?-- or something like that. Well, the way she looks at it is: she cared enough to take the time and trouble to drive you off the cliff, and how could you not possibly understand that?
 
See what I mean? Her reasoning, sometimes, is a little twisted. But if you think it over, she does make a lot of sense-- in an eerie way. What happened now,” he continued, slipping his hands into his pants pockets, “and I bet I’m right, is that she told you-- told you the story-- or some part of it, and either you didn’t believe her, or you questioned her, and she clammed up and is up in the house brooding about it.”

         
“I asked for proof,” I confessed.

         
He clucked his tongue. “Yeah, that would do it, too. Well, look, all I can tell you is don’t pay any attention to anything she might have said; everything will be all right tomorrow. It all just meant too much to her. She’s been wanting to share the story for so long, and for some reason she choose you-- I’m still not sure why. You know-- and I really shouldn’t be telling you this-- since we moved in, she’s been spying on you. She must have seen something, because she has a lot of faith in you. I hope she’s right-- that you’d keep this all to yourself.”

         
“Who’d believe me?” I asked.

         
“Probably nobody,” he admitted. “But you never know. We can’t take a chance. We’ve been in a very dangerous situation since the discovery was made.”

         
“Dangerous?”

         
“Yeah, very much so. You know, to this day, years later, I still haven’t figured out everything it does. I suspect what I do know doesn’t begin to scratch the surface of it.
 
I did realize early on that I could never go public with it. Then the government would get involved, and no government should have anything to do with this thing. The potential for misuse of the artifact is immense, especially if any government gained control of it. That’s the way they always are; they never look at such a discovery in terms of how it can benefit humanity. First and foremost, it’s always military applications. You’ve already seen that it has medical applications. What, did you think you imagined being impaled by a strip of metal? No, that really happened. No telling what else it could do as far as medical science goes-- maybe cure every disease known to mankind. But if the government-- ours or any other for that matter-- laid its hands on this thing, I guarantee you medical science would not benefit one iota from it. On the other hand, some years from now, you’ll see on the news some incredible new weapons system that the government’s been working on. You’ll see them haul it out, with everyone patting each other on the back for the achievement they have contributed to the insurance of peace on earth. Always remember: it’s easier to destroy than to create or preserve, and it’s along those lines that nations shop for its tools….Anyway, let Eliza explain it all to you. It’s her story anyway-- as far as you’re concerned.”

         
“But she won’t talk to me now,” I said.

         
“Tomorrow,” he promised with a sharp nod of his head.
 
“It will be all right, then. Knock on the door. She’ll be over what happened today. Buy her something-- not something normal, like flowers; buy her something-- weird-- something a guy would never think to buy a girl.”

         
After he gave me a few more encouraging words, I went home, leaving him standing there in his driveway. When I looked back, I caught him gazing at the empty space in driveway and shaking his head woefully.

4

I went home to an empty house. The scribbled note I found taped on the window of the back door said my dinner was in the fridge, all I had to do was warm it in the microwave.