****
He was up there for two days and three nights; if it were up to him, they would’ve built a house up here and stayed. His grandfather’s and his father’s descriptions had been accurate, if not a little under-exaggerated.
The days were spent exploring this flat island in the clouds, cooling off in the creek, whittling sticks.
His parents proved very tight and proficient campers. Their campstove was elaborate and each meal was planned in advance, scribbled in his mom’s journal in her atypical seismograph handwriting. She always had the journal, but David had never seen her make entries in it so much, but he understood. This place was beyond special and he felt the need to capture it, to bottle it somehow too.
His parents were asleep and he lay in his own small tent listening to owls talking to each other from several random dark quadrants around them. The magic of the place kept him awake the first two nights too. And there was something else; he was old enough to know that magic, like the sparking wizard magic of movies, didn’t really exist, but this place had begun to weaken his conviction.
Each night the mountainside murmured in myriad voices to be sure: Nightbirds, the creek, insects, and the sound of the huge mountains taking up space, but there were other things too; magical things.
There were long periods of humming each night, an unnatural sound, like the sound a perfectly tuned appliance would make. There were sometimes flashes of light dancing on the serrated screen of the fault scarp behind the tents. He saw them through the material of his tent, but the couple of times he worked up the courage to leave his tent and investigate, they would be gone along with the humming.
The humming was back tonight, but this time, in the brush outside the tent, and through the thin walls, an undulating chain of soft colorful lights coiled out there in the mountain night. By the time he poked his head out of the zipper, the lights had moved off and hovered in a softly pulsing ring at the edge of the fir forest they drove through to get here. Their campfire had collapsed to dull red embers that burned along lines prehistorically coded into the wood.
He followed the hypnotic lights into the trees where one of the owls he had been listening to flared ghostly from where it sat on a low branch. The lights led him out onto the mountain road, then disappeared over the brink of the abyss they had skirted coming here. A tube of light the same azure as the bellies of the glaciers fell around him, sucking the atoms of his body into the night sky like beads up a vacuum cleaner.
He was on a table, strapped to a table, then he was stepping down from his schoolbus in front of his driveway. There was something wrong with his right eye; it seemed in search of something and he could feel it rotating on its own far back into his skull as if it had a root like a tooth.
David walked into his house calling for his parents. No one answered. The eye searched.
The bathroom door was ajar and in the vanity mirror, he could see his mom leaning over the tub, checking the water’s temperature.
“Mom?”
When she turned to him, her face was huge and insectoid. She had several sets of glittering compound eyes and large, terrible pincers that clicked open and closed constantly. Tiny white parasites crawled over the coarse hair.
He screamed and then he was back on the table. In another second he was at the mall with his parents, the lot of them suspended in bubbly orange gel; the whole world was made of it.
Back to the table. Back to a world that wasn’t quite right. Back to the table again.
This went on for years.
Sometimes the differences in dimensions were obvious, like the orange gel world, and other times they were subtle enough to keep him in a wrong Universe for months, or years. Always the eye was scanning, hunting for the tiniest discrepancy: The wrong trees, too many wings on a bottlefly, a blue marigold. Whoever had taken him from that campsite in the mountains that night so long ago just couldn’t get it right.
The traveling, this unimaginable zipping around, made him nauseous and afraid to keep living. At first, even in the heartbreakingly similar worlds, (especially in those), he could never adjust, but over time, and when he would visit one of those like worlds for a longer period, he began to adjust to this inter-dimensional transience; in time he was even able to trust each set of incorrect parents by telling himself that he was probably home finally.
He was usually comfortable enough with whatever set of wrong parents, so his life was as normal as could be expected. He even went camping in that same spot with more than one set of other-parents.
****
A record six years passed in the same dimension, and David was sure he was home. It was the summer of his eighteenth year, and he was looking at his acceptance letter to university with what he thought was his actual mother in the kitchen when the eye that he had just started to forget about began to wiggle. It zoomed in on the letterhead of the school and David noticed the color of the ink on the paper was not quite the same shade of yellow that he had seen so many times on the shirts and hats and mugs his parents owned from their alma mater.
“Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” he said as his not-mother dissolved into particles in front of him.
He was back on the table. Then he was back in that serene mountain campsite. The mountains, his mountains, towered above. His right eye was normal again; they had finally gotten him home.
His dad’s Subaru sat rusting on flat and rotten tires in the sunlight. David’s sudden appearance scared a pine marten that had been napping inside the car, and it loped away, squealing and baring its little razor teeth.
Their tents still stood where they had pitched them, the poles poking through the tattered cloth like the bones of birds.
The small tent was empty, but inside the larger one laid the desiccated corpses of his parents still in the loving embrace of sleep. Below him, the town was choked with vegetation. All but one church steeple had crumbled over and been swallowed by the rushing green. Nothing moved.
He tried to call to them, tried to force the eye into action, but his eye was only his. Once they were sure that they had him back where he belonged, they were gone from him forever.
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