Just Plain Weird (39 page)

    
    
Doc must have noticed. “She’s upstairs.” he said, “trying to do something with her hair.”

    
    
“Oh.”

    
    
“The two of you have become pretty close, haven’t you?” he asked. There was really no accusation in his voice, but my own guilt put some there.

    
    
“I suppose,” I said.

    
    
“It happens. People grow close quickly under trying circumstances. But all this won’t last forever, now, will it?”

    
    
I thought I saw what he meant. It was nothing that hadn’t crossed my mind a dozen times each hour. Hearing it from him, though, I found extremely aggravating, if not downright maddening.

    
    
“I just don’t want you to be too disappointed-- neither one of you,” he said, and I thought his sympathetic tone was a bit strained. “You’re a nice kid, Travis, but this is not normal life. Someone said once-- I can’t remember who-- that the people you meet during a war are unlike anyone you meet while in the peaceful comfort of home. It doesn’t mean that those people don’t exist during peacetime, or that you might not meet them; it means that war changes people in a unique way. Well, this is not war, exactly-- but I think the same idea applies here. The life we’re living right now is not real. None of us is acting the way we would if everything was normal. Eliza, you, me-- we’re all not our real selves. How could we be? So anything that happens here, anything you feel or think you feel, means absolutely nothing. It’s all an illusion. Oh, you don’t have to say a word. I know what you’re thinking. I tried to tell her all this, but she about told me to jump in the lake. I imagine you’d like to tell me to do the same thing, if not something worse. I just felt I should mention it-- that’s all. I just don’t want you two to be hurt. In the end I’m sure that that’s what will happen, and whatever I say won’t change a thing, but I wanted to say it just the same.”

    
    
I didn’t say anything, and he remained quiet, too, for a long time, slowly clearing the floor of debris until the trash bag grew big and bulky.

    
    
“Is the interface working? That’s what it is, isn’t it?-- an interface.”

    
    
I told him it seemed to be working fine. “I was talking to it last night-- or early this morning, actually.”

    
    
“Then it has a plan?” he asked, though hardly sounding interested.

    
    
“I don’t know. If it does, it doesn’t want to talk about it until it finishes building its communication matrix.”

    
    
“Which is what?”

    
    
I shrugged, not a clue. “Whatever it is should be finished in a couple hours.”
 
I explained to him what had gone wrong the first time we tried to correct everything-- how the aliens had tracked the artifact back to earth and that was how earth had been attacked. “I feel sort of sorry for the thing, really. It’s like a puppy that’s been lost for a long time and finally finds its way home only to be kicked and beaten.”

    
    
Doc shook his head. “It’s just a machine, Travis. An advanced machine, but a machine. It’s funny how we tend to read into machines qualities they could never have. The television starts to act up and not work right, and the next thing you know we say that it’s being difficult or that it doesn’t like us-- as if that was possible.”

    
    
“I don’t know. I think the artifact may be different. It’s not like anything we have here. While I was talking to it, I had the impression that I was talking to an actual living being. It weirded me out a little, the way it talked about God. And fate, too-- it didn’t come out and call it fate, but that was what it meant.”

    
    
Doc stopped picking things up. He stood there holding the garbage, which was nearly filled. “That’s nonsense. What could any machine know about fate? I don’t care where it was build. I don’t care who build it. No matter what, a machine will always be just a machine.” He tied off the garbage bag, then, and walked to the kitchen.

    
    
I found his attitude hardly surprising. He would have to believe it all to be so simple. If he ever admitted the artifact might be more than an ordinary machine, he would also have to admit that he had made an enormous mistake when he had decided to tinker with it. He would have to take absolute responsibility for losing his wife. He was one of those people who, when everything goes right, is the first to step forward and take credit, but who, when things end in disaster, always finds someone or something to blame.
 
Doc, I noticed, was not prone to confess his sins.

    
    
I heard Eliza bound down the stairs. When she walked into the living room, I was stunned; not only did she manage to do something with her hair, but also she had actually put on make-up. She was very attractive without make-up, but with make-up, she could have been a model-- at least I thought so. She was wearing a bright pink top and clean cut-off jeans, and when she rushed past to sit next to me on the sofa, she took a playful swipe at my head and I could the sweet fresh scent of perfume.

    
    
“You look tired, Trav,” she said cheerily. “You could use something to eat, maybe.”

    
    
“I’m not really hungry,” I said.

    
    
“What do you want to do, then?”

    
    
“Just wait, I guess.”

    
    
“For what?”

    
    
“I talked to the artifact last night,” I said, and then went on to tell her everything that had been said.

    
    
“So you think it’s going to come up with a plan that will work this time?”

    
    
“Yeah, I think this is it. I think it wants its communications matrix completed so that when it does relay information, nothing is misunderstood. There can’t be any more mistakes. Who knows where we’d end up next time.”

    
    
“So this is it?” she asked.

    
    
“Yeah, I think so.”

    
    
“And how do you feel about it all?”

    
    
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it’s what my father would call a bag of mixed nuts, really. I’m just so tired. I just want to go home. I know my real life is sort of lousy, my family is sort of messed up, but, you know, I miss it all just the same.” I had to stop and laugh when I realized something. “You know, it’s an awful lot like how Raffles explained the artifact works. It can occupy space both here and there at the same time. I wish I could do that. I wish I could take the best things from here and bring them back there. But I know that that’s not a choice. It’s either here, the way everything thing is now, or there, the way everything was before. You just can’t mix and match. It doesn’t seem fair, really.”

    
    
“No, it does,” Eliza said. “But it’s what it is-- you can’t do anything about that. I’ll tell you one thing, though-- and I promise this is true-- I’m not going to cry. When it comes time to say good-bye, I’m not going to cry. Even if it does seem like I’m losing everything. I’m just living in the moment, now, and now I’m very happy. I’ll be very happy right up to the end. You know why? Because I’m lucky I found you, Travis-- I really am. We have something real-- don’t deny it-- and even if it’s not going to last long, it’s still special-- loads better than nothing, that’s for sure. So, really, there’s nothing to cry over. I don’t care whether the artifact influenced us or not-- it’s all so very real.”

    
    
“I have a confession to make,” I said.

    
    
“Well, now’s the time.”

    
    
“I don’t think the artifact influenced me at all.”

    
    
She frowned vaguely, a brief twitch of her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”

    
    
“I think I’ve felt this way since the first time I saw you, while you were moving in, and that was long before I even stepped into the artifact.”

    
    
“You…” she began, and then her voice faded off. She stared at me, her bright green eyes glistening, and then she lunged at me and hugged me around the neck. She hugged so hard I seriously thought she would break something. I could barely breathe. She whispered in my ear, “That’s the nicest thing you could have said right now. Trust me, you are not maladroit-- not at all.” When she finally pulled away, I could see the tears streaming down her cheeks. Mascara ran down from beneath her eyes. “Oh, look, wonderful,” she said. “Now I have to redo my face.”

    
    
“I thought you say you weren’t going to cry?” I said.

    
    
“From being sad, Travis. I didn’t say anything about crying from being happy, now did I?”

    
    
The next thing I knew, she fled the room. She went upstairs and didn’t return for a long time. When she finally returned, she wasn’t wearing make-up at all. She looked fine just the same. It was about time to contact the artifact. I slipped down to the floor, to sit before the keyboard and monitor on the coffee table, while Eliza sat on the sofa right behind me. I just sat there, in no real hurry to start clacking out messages on the keyboard. Maybe I was trying to delay the inevitable. If I was, it was pretty lame, really. I was just enjoying the moment, enjoying that Eliza was right behind. Even though I didn’t turn round, I could feel her there. It was a warm, satisfying feeling, and I wished it could last forever.

    
    
Just then, she started giggling. Maybe she was reading my mind again. I couldn’t tell for sure. Sometimes she would giggle that way for no apparent reason, and then would never confess what had started her giggling. Maybe she didn’t know herself. Who could tell? Then she stretched out her leg, and rested it on my shoulder. Her bare foot flipped back and forth in front of my face, and she was giggling harder than ever.

    
    
“Eliza, this is going to hard enough to do without trying to look through your foot.”

    
    
“I was just thinking,” she said, and paused. She paused in a way that made me believe that she was trying to make up something to say, so that she didn’t have to tell me what was really on her mind at the moment. It was strange; I was really certain this was true, but I couldn’t explain how I was so sure. “We’re like the little piggy,” she finally said, “the one that went
weee weee weee
all the way home.” And she wiggled her toes, and giggled insanely.

    
    
“Eliza, please!” I chided her. What’s going on here? I wondered. Suddenly I was in a Quentin Tarantino movie.

    
    
“Oh, what’s the matter,” she said, “don’t you love my feet. Are they stin-key? No. Are they ugly? No. Are they humongous? No. Actually they are quite petite, no? Sometimes I think they are so small, how do they support my weight? Why don’t I fall down more often?”
 
Just then, she slipped off the edge of the sofa, and landed behind me, squeezed between my back and the front of the sofa. She started laughing now, loud and hysterical. She couldn’t stop laughing, though she was in obvious discomfort; her right leg still rested on my right shoulder, the back of her right thigh was flat against my back, her left leg was curled round so that her left foot rested in my lap, and her torso was squished back against the sofa so that her lungs had to labor for her to laugh. Still she never tried to extricate herself, just remained in that contorted position, content just to stay there and laugh her head off. For a moment, I seriously considered the possibility the artifact had been right; she really was insane. Maybe because I loved her, I hadn’t quite noticed how loopy she really was. And now she was laughing harder than ever, so hard in fact that she could scarcely breathe.