Wonders of the Invisible World Page 5

  “What are you all going to do now?” Gilbert asked, and I could tell immediately where he was going with this.

  “I’m not sure,” I said. “I figure I’ll take the rest of the school year to think it over.”

  “Good,” said Gilbert, nodding. “No hasty decisions.” And then, since I’d made myself unavailable, he looked Jarrod up and down, spotting potential in his athletic form. “What about you?”

  “No idea,” said Jarrod. “I’ll probably do the same as him.” He gestured at me with his tower of Coke. We were playing Hot Potato, I realized, throwing Gilbert Humphrey’s attention back and forth between us.

  “Well, in case you boys don’t already have this, here’s an information packet.” He handed us thick envelopes and we said thanks without looking at them. “We have all sorts of things you guys could do. Want to go to another country? Drive a tank? Amazing stuff out there in the world. Real different from here. And women? Let me tell you about the women.”

  “Thanks, Gilbert,” Jarrod said as he scraped his chair back and stood. “We’ve got to go meet some friends, but it’s been nice.” Jarrod looked down at me and I stood up like a soldier who’s received an order.

  “My number’s in the envelope,” Gilbert said as we walked away.

  And when we finally made it out of his range, I said, “That was awkward.”

  “Sorry,” Jarrod said. “I should have pulled you out of your seat when I first saw him. Those guys can be persistent.”

  “He’ll never get anyone to sign up like that,” I said.

  “Sure he will,” Jarrod said. “Even being that annoying, he’ll get people. If this place wasn’t full of cattle, though, I don’t know how he’d convince anyone.”

  “Cattle?”

  Jarrod nodded. “This whole place—not enough jobs around to give people hope of making a life here, just enough to keep people breeding kids who have nowhere to go but into Gilbert Humphrey’s waiting arms. They’ve got themselves a real army farm here.”

  “You really think so?” I said. I’d never heard Jarrod sound like this. Like he held some kind of a grudge against the world.

  Jarrod looked at me with raised brows, like he couldn’t believe I was so stupid. “How does it work on your dad’s farm?” he asked. When I didn’t answer, he looked almost guilty about even asking the question. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s just get out of this place.”

  “Where to?”

  “Wherever you want,” Jarrod said. “We could go to the moon, for all I care.”

  We didn’t go to the moon. Instead we drove out of Niles. Took Route 422 east to Youngstown, where the little roadside shopping plazas fell away, to be replaced by boarded-up factories and the collapsing remains of steel mills that had been built along the Mahoning River decades before we arrived in the world. This was our inheritance, these shambling buildings. They’d been left behind to rot in the brown fields of dead earth they once loomed over, their insides gutted like the deer carcasses my dad and Toby brought home from their hunts.

  “Where are we headed?” I asked Jarrod, who had fallen silent several miles back. Now he sat in his seat with pent-up emotion smoldering inside him. I could almost see the embers and smoke through his eyes.

  “Just keep going until I tell you where to turn,” he said, nodding his chin straight ahead before turning to look out his window.

  I wondered what was on his mind that had made him so sullen so quickly, but I didn’t press him. One thing I’d figured out fast about Jarrod was that his moods could take a left turn at any time, without any apparent reason, and usually when that happened he gave off a vibe that said more than words. The vibe said, Back off.

  So I backed off.

  I worried, though, that the reason he seemed able to fall into such a dark place was somehow connected to me. To something I wasn’t saying or doing that he wanted me to say, or wanted me to do. Like there was a script out there for us, but I wasn’t saying my lines. When I was around him, I felt like a man groping in the dark for a light switch.

  We only drove a couple more miles before Jarrod perked up and said, “Here. Take a right here,” and followed that up with a few more directions.

  I drove off the highway into a residential neighborhood where old narrow row houses stood side by side like faded soldiers, and a few turns later, after Jarrod told me to stop, I had pulled into one of the parking lots of Mill Creek Park.

  When I killed the Blue Bomb’s engine, I looked over at Jarrod and asked, “Why here?”

  “Time travel,” said Jarrod. One corner of his mouth lifted into a smirk; then he opened his door and jumped out into the late-afternoon sun.

  We walked from the lot into a large garden with a round stone fountain at its center. A gazebo was perched on a hill in the distance, and to our right a squared row of hedges held an old-fashioned rose garden inside it like a secret. At the far edge of the place was a wrought-iron railing that barred people from going any farther, and beyond the railing was a cliff that slid down to Lake Glacier, where even that late in autumn we could see a canoe skimming across the surface like a water insect. Otherwise, the place was empty.

  “Time travel?” I said, once we were sitting on a bench near the fountain.

  “You don’t remember what happened in this place?” Jarrod asked. His eyes widened a little, but not like he was angry with me. More like he was trying to pull something out of me. Something I didn’t know I had inside me.

  I shook my head. I hadn’t been in this park for years—it was a bit of a drive from Temperance—and what memories I had of Mill Creek were packed in the vague, cottony cloud of my childhood.

  “Why don’t you take a look at that fountain for a minute,” he suggested, and I turned to see where he was pointing.

  It was an ordinary fountain, as far as I could tell: a circular stone basin with one main font in the center, smaller ones ringing it, their jets sending up a frothy spray over and over on a timer. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be seeing that was so extraordinary, but just as I was about to say that, Jarrod put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

  “Just keep looking into the water,” he said. “Don’t think about anything in particular. Just look. Just see.”

  I did what he said, even though I thought he was setting me up for some kind of prank. But as I stared at the fountains going up and down, the light began to change, lowering from late-afternoon amber to a lavender dusk. It was the time of day I’d once heard my grandma call the gloaming. It was her favorite time, she used to say, when night and day met for a brief visit, before passing each other on their way to the other side of the world.

  The fountain continued to spray, and the sound of its rising and falling began to lull me into a daze. My head was thick with the rhythms of sleep and dreaming, but right before I was about to give up on this experiment of Jarrod’s, I saw something—or someone—through the curtain of water.

  Two boys. Two boys emerged from around a corner of the rose garden hedgerows to enter the circle of benches around the fountain, and they sat down directly across from us, the fountain spraying between us. The fountain lowered a moment later, and I could see them again. Two kids, no more than twelve or thirteen. One with shaggy brown hair and dark eyes, the other with trimmed curls and green eyes like mine.

  They were mine, actually, those eyes. Those boys were us—me and Jarrod—I realized as they leaned toward one another to talk conspiratorially, ignoring us, as if they couldn’t see their older selves sitting across the fountain.

  I opened my mouth to say something, but Jarrod’s hand on my shoulder squeezed harder. “Do you see something?” he whispered, hopeful. I nodded and whispered yes. “Good,” he said. “Don’t say anything. Just keep watching.”

  The boys were talking about something that upset one of them—the younger Jarrod—and my younger self was telling him not to worry. “It’ll be okay,” little Aidan Lockwood said, and I almost blushed to hear how I sounded as a kid, my
voice still squeaky. “Here,” he said to the younger Jarrod, and placed his hand in Jarrod’s. “Let me show you, so you’ll know how it will be.” Then both boys closed their eyes and slumped back against the bench, as if all the life had gone out of them in an instant.

  I could tell that wasn’t the case, though. I could see that something was happening between them, that they were having some kind of shared experience. On my own shoulder, Jarrod’s hand still rested, heavy and warm. And after a minute, the boys opened their eyes and looked at each other. They were smiling now. The younger Jarrod looked relieved by whatever he’d been shown. “So now you know it’ll all be okay,” my younger self told him. Then they hugged, tight and hard, as if they might never see each other again.

  “Boys,” someone called in the distance, and they separated to look over at the garden entrance, where a younger version of my mom stood holding her purse open in front of her, pulling out a set of keys. “Boys, we should get going,” she said. “Jarrod’s mom and dad will be ready to have him back home now, I’m sure.”

  The boys nodded, then stood and went over to her dutifully. She stroked the younger me on the head and smiled. “What were you two up to over here?” she asked, as if she could sense we’d been doing something we shouldn’t have.

  The younger me said, “We were talking about the future.”

  My mom’s smile fell into a frown when she heard my answer. Then she nodded toward the parking lot and said, “Okay. Let’s go home now.”

  As they turned the corner of the hedgerow and disappeared from sight, I finally turned to Jarrod—my Jarrod—sitting beside me. “What in the world was that?” I asked.

  And Jarrod said, “That was you showing me the future back when we were thirteen.”

  “No, really,” I said. “What was it?”

  Jarrod sighed but kept on going. “On the day my dad got tired of my mom drinking and asked for a divorce, your mom took me and you out here so they could figure out what to do next in private.”

  His hand still sat on my shoulder. When I looked at it, he took it away like he’d just been burned.

  “What was it that I showed you?” I asked. “What did I show you back then?”

  Jarrod leaned over, putting his elbows on his knees, propping his head in his hands, upset that I was still, after that revelation, somehow off script. He tilted his face to look up at me, and his hair flopped across his eyes like a curtain. “This,” he said. “You showed me this. You showed me us, right now, at this very moment, sitting here like this. Talking.”

  The trip home felt longer than the one we’d taken to get away from the confines of Temperance. And in the span of time between leaving and returning, though it was only a few hours, it felt like the moon had crashed into the earth, and now every mile of highway I drove down was a desolate stretch of pavement in a world that had come to an end. Because, really, even before Jarrod could get halfway through the rest of his story, everything I thought I knew about the world had truly ended.

  He told me that he’d hoped the fountain would jog my memory, because it was special, or at least, it was special to him. He told me that what I’d seen wasn’t one of my own memories, but one of his. He’d put his hand on my shoulder because he remembered that I had to be touching someone to show them the things I could see when we were little. “Like what things?” I asked.

  And he replied, “Like the future.” He said I’d been able to do that when I was little. And he said that I could do something other than see the future. I could show the things I saw to others if I touched them. “You said it was called reaching across,” he said now, and I just sat there shaking my head as I drove by the tired little houses that lined the sides of Route 193 like the facades of small towns in old movies. A gust of wind could have blown those houses over, they seemed so flat and unreal right then.

  After he finished his story, I stupidly asked if he had some weird kind of power. He laughed at me and said, “It’s not me, Aidan. It’s you. It’s you who can do this stuff. It’s you who showed me the future.”

  “A future where you were happy and living with your mom again,” I said. “A future where we were still friends. That’s what I showed you?”

  I looked over, but he hesitated to answer. He seemed worried, began chewing the inside of his cheek nervously, and then he abruptly looked away.

  “Yeah,” he finally said to the passenger window, where I could see his face reflected in the glass, his eyes downcast. He seemed disappointed in something he wasn’t saying. I was up to speed enough on him to tell when he too was going off script. “A future where we were still friends,” he said, repeating my words in this way that wasn’t believable.

  He reached into the pocket of his jean jacket to take out his cigarettes but began patting himself down within seconds. “Damn it,” he said. “I’m out.”

  “Want me to find a gas station?”

  “No,” he said. “We’re almost home, and that was my last pack.”

  “Last pack?” I said. “Really?”

  He nodded. “I told myself I’d quit after I’d smoked the last one. Guess that starts now.”

  “Why quit?” I asked as we pulled onto his road a few minutes later. The reflective mailbox that stood at the end of his trailer’s dirt drive glowed in the distance as my headlights fell on it.

  “I guess because you made me feel bad about it the other day at the lake,” he said. “And because you’re right. I shouldn’t smoke if I’m playing ball. I need to save my lung capacity for running bases.”

  “You’re coming back to school, then?” I asked as I pulled down his rutted drive, the Blue Bomb shuddering and knocking like it might fall apart around us.

  “Yeah,” he said. Then he sighed, long and drawn out, like he was giving up on something other than cigarettes. “I’ve got to. Otherwise, I might as well go back to the mall and sign up with Gilbert Humphrey.”

  I put the car in park and turned off my headlights, but left the engine running. We sat there for a while, staring into the dark. Jarrod’s mom’s car was pulled up the drive a little farther. She was probably asleep already, Jarrod speculated. “Has to get up for an early shift at Times Square tomorrow,” he said as he reluctantly grabbed the door handle. The door squealed a little as he opened it, and before he pushed himself out, he looked back at me and said, “What are you going to do about what you saw tonight?”

  I looked at my hands gripped on the wheel in front of me and shook my head. “I’m not sure,” I said. “I mean, I know what I saw. But I have no clue what to do about it.”

  Jarrod nodded, then slid off the seat into the dark. Before he closed the door, he leaned down and said, “Maybe you’ll see more things now, at least. Maybe you’ll see things that’ll answer your questions.”

  “Can’t you just tell me?” I asked. “Can’t you just share more memories with me?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know the whole story,” he said. “Just know my part in it. My dad moved a few weeks after you showed me we’d still be friends in the future. I don’t know what happened to you after that, because I went with him. The rest you’re going to have to find out on your own.”

  My hands were white-knuckled in the moonlight, clenching harder and harder, and I sighed like Jarrod had a minute earlier.

  “Hey,” Jarrod said. He ducked his head farther into the car and put his hand on my shoulder like he had in the park, but there was no vision accompanying his touch this time. Instead of reaching across, as Jarrod had called what happened between us in the park earlier, he just used words with me. “Hey,” he said again. “I might not know what happens next—that was always your territory—but I will help you however I can.”

  If I needed help, it was the sort that might make me feel better about my head being so broken. I knew what Jarrod was trying to do, though. I knew he was trying to give me whatever parts of myself he could—to help put Humpty Dumpty back together again—but everyone knows the end of that story. It
doesn’t really work out.

  At that point, I just hoped I might someday look inside myself and not feel like I was staring into a long, empty hallway. At that point, I wanted the clutter of memories. Good or even bad ones, it didn’t matter. I just wanted to feel like there was something to me. Something real I could hold on to.

  There was something, of course; I just couldn’t see it. I was as invisible to myself as I was to anyone. I’d have to make myself seeable, then, I decided. And to do that, I’d have to start making new memories instead of worrying about the ones I was missing.

  So when Jarrod invited me to a party he wanted to throw for Halloween, I said yes without hesitating. “Yes,” I said, nodding once, firmly, like I’d just made a huge decision. And then, after thinking about it a second longer, I asked, “Who else is coming?”

  We were in the cafeteria for lunch period. Around us, people were talking and laughing, filling the room with the voices of their incredibly normal lives, lives that all of them could remember with great ease. But at our table in an out-of-the-way corner, everyone felt far away, as if they were on other planets, and we were on a moon base, orbiting at a distance.

  “Just a few of the guys from the team,” Jarrod said. He took a bite of his pizza, then nodded at someone who was walking by our table behind me.

  I looked over my shoulder, and sure enough, it was one of the guys from the team. Patrick Morrison. I hadn’t held a conversation with Patrick Morrison since the sixth or seventh grade, most likely, and whenever our eyes met now, it was like he looked right through me.

  Great, I thought. A party. A party with people who don’t acknowledge my existence.

  My instinct was to bolt, to just not go in the end, then apologize for not showing up later. But since it was clear to me by then that I couldn’t trust my own instincts, I just nodded and said, “Cool,” and hoped it sounded like I meant it.

  On Halloween morning, as I spooned up oatmeal at the kitchen table before heading off to school, my mom looked over her shoulder as she washed dishes and said, “Hey, if he’s not busy tonight, why don’t you bring Jarrod over for dinner?”