On the word ankle, he stops. He turns and comes back to me, running as fast as he was running the other way. I don’t want him running at me like that. I back toward the nurse’s office, on my butt on the ground, streaking grass against my pants, the way I would if I were trying to keep away from a ferocious animal—
He arrives. He doesn’t attack me. He looks me over. I focus on his face: small ears, rounded nose, all red. Yellow, messy hair. Not blond—yellow like a highlighter. He does wear jeans—backward—and a black T-shirt. I look around: no one else in the field. No witnesses. A hallucination?
“Of course it’s gotta be the ankle,” he says.
A hallucination with visual and audio components?
He sweeps me up in his thick, stubby red arms.
A hallucination with visual, audio, and somatic components?
“What are you doing? Put me down!”
“Shh.” He tosses me over his shoulder. For a minute, I think both of us actually don’t know what to say to each other.
24
I HUG THE FERRULE’S BACK. HE SMELLS like iron. His body is stocky and barrelesque. By the time we get to the trees, I’m squeezing him tight, pressing my cheek against him and grinning.
“Stop that! Off!”
I shake my head, feeling his shirt bunch against my cheek. I look at his tail with the wooden trellis attached to the end. “You’re real!” It’s the iron smell that convinces me. No hallucination could smell like that. “I mean, look, I can be practical about this. A real ferrule here at camp. But you gotta give me like five minutes to just appreciate you or whatever—”
“Off!” He kneels. I hiss as my foot touches the forest floor. I hop to a tree. “Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, just be reasonable! How’s your ankle?”
I pull off my sneaker and peel down my sock. My right ankle is swollen fat and round.
“Not good. Who are you, sir?” I ask.
“We’ll get to that. First, I want you to think: if you hadn’t heard me call you an idiot—which you shouldn’t have—and followed me—which you shouldn’t have—and climbed out that window—which you know was a bad idea—is it possible that you could have injured your ankle some other way today? It’s important for me to know how out of the ordinary this is for you.”
“Meeting ferrules is very out of the ordinary.”
“Don’t call me that. And don’t be smart. That’s how you lost Anna.”
“How do you know about Anna? Who are you? Are you the real Pekker Cland?”
“You made up Pekker Cland. My name is Mortin Enaw.”
“Mortin Enaw? You’re the guy who did special consulting on the Other Normal Edition!”
“Pfff. Those guys put me in that as a joke. Don’t read into it too much.”
“Are you from the real world of Enthral Moor? Do you have a scimitar?”
“Stop.” He goes silent. I hear the birds and bugs around us. The dirt parking lot and nurse’s office and Ryu and Anna seem very far away, and I miss my brother—briefly, in a flash, his shaggy hair and teeth. Fear creeps into the air between me and Mortin Enaw.
“I know it’s hard for you to believe, but I have my own problems.” He reaches into his backward jeans and pulls out a pipe. It has an inverted U in the middle; it looks as if it was carved from a single piece of black stone. He picks up a few pebbles from the ground—just ordinary pebbles—and puts them into the pipe. He pinches it in his mouth and scrapes his tail against the ground. The back of the tail flares up. The thing attached to it is a lighter, I see, and after it strikes, a lick of flame burns steadily as he waves it over his pipe. He inhales, holds it in, and blows out … pebble dust, I guess.
“Ahhh, that’s the stuff.” He closes his eyes in a quick reverie and then turns to me with utmost seriousness.
“We’re working on an information discrepancy,” he says. “I know more about the multiverse than you do, so naturally you look at me with wonder, and you don’t think to yourself, Hey, this guy might have problems too. But I do. And my problems center around you, Perry Eckert. What I need you to do, the sooner the better, is find a way to have a decent romantic kiss with Anna, who you met back there.”
“Why? Is this a TV show?”
“No!”
“Is it part of a live-action role-playing game?”
“No! Do I look like a player? I’m a professional. I’m a consultant. And I’m telling you that if you can kiss Anna, just one decent romantic kiss, you’re going to save an entire world from certain destruction!”
“What world? The world?”
Mortin puffs. “My world.”
“Is your world … Enthral Moor? The world I’ve been playing with Sam?”
“Come with me. It’s easier to show you.”
“Where?”
He taps out his pipe and offers me a walking stick. “To an inconvenient place, to go and to say. It has a name that can’t be conceptualized by human thought. You remember how Prince changed his name to a symbol?”
“The musician?”
“Right, and you know how he changed his name for a while to a symbol you can’t pronounce?”
“No.”
“He did. And my home is like that. The name can’t be pronounced, written, or conceptualized by the human brain.”
I remember Dale Blaswell’s words turning into silence as they streamed out of his head. I remember all the small times in life when I have heard things wrong, or turned around because someone called my name but no one was there, or woken up with a strange bruise.... It’s all standard, right? There are ragged edges around everyone’s life, things that can’t be remembered or explained. Even the most normal people see ghosts, hear voices....
“What am I supposed to call your home?” I ask.
“People have called it different things over the years. I grew up calling Earth the World of the Other Normals, because you people here are sort of normal, but you’re a bit ridiculous. So you can call my home the World of the Other Normals and it’ll be fair.”
“Okay.”
“And you can call me Mortin Enaw, or just Mortin, correspondence consultant. I’m based out of Subbenia, with the Sulice Corporation.”
“And I’m Perry. Which you seem to know. I’m a student … ah … based out of Manhattan or Brooklyn, depending on whether I’m with my dad or my mom, with no corporation. And no friends. I had one friend, Sam, but he doesn’t seem to like me anymore.”
“Don’t say that. I’m your friend.”
“Really?”
“Yes, and don’t complain to me. You have nothing to complain about, with your mind and your rich parents.”
“My parents aren’t rich!”
“No? What are they?”
“Upper middle class.”
“Yeah, like you’re a public-school student. I just got fired. How’s that for something to complain about?”
“I thought you said you were with the Sulice Corporation.”
“I was. That’s how it’s supposed to be. With them for life. I don’t know when I’m going to stop saying it.”
“What’d you get fired for?”
“Having big ideas.”
“How are you speaking to me in English?”
“What are you, racist?”
25
MORTIN ENAW LEADS ME FARTHER INTO the woods, transforming in five minutes from a mystical creature whose existence astounds me to a loopy companion who likes to smoke pebbles and talk. He seems happy and grateful that the pebbles are everywhere, just waiting for him to stuff into his pipe. When he dumps them out, they look about the same as when they go in, so I’m not sure what he gets out of them, but he likes the ones with quartz and emphasizes to me that quartz is “the stuff.”
“So your home that you can’t pronounce, did anybody ever try and pronounce it ‘Middle-earth’? Or ‘Narnia’?” I ask, keeping weight off my ankle with my walking stick.
“Tolkien said the climate reminded him of being a baby
in South Africa,” Mortin says, pronouncing J. R. R. Tolkien’s name “Tol-kine,” which I know is wrong. He pushes aside a branch for me.
“You knew Tolkien?” I’m geeking out. I pronounce it the right way.
“Not me. A colleague, almost a century ago.”
“Is your world where Tolkien got his ideas for Middle-earth?”
“No, he made up Middle-earth.” Mortin stops. “You ever notice how nobody’s ever broke in Middle-earth?” He grimaces on broke and scrunches his face. “Sure, they’ve got no possessions because they’re all on an adventure, but have you ever seen somebody deal with a bill in Middle-earth? Or with, say, a punk punching them in the kidney because they owed him money for earthpebbles?”
“No,” I say. I hang back.
“What?”
“I’m staying here. You look like you’re going to get violent.”
“I just get frustrated. There’s a lot of repetition in my line of work. That’s why I need the pebbles to stay relaxed. You’re not the first person to ask about Tolkien, I’ll put it that way.”
“Tol-keen,” I insist. “He wasn’t Jewish.”
Mortin Enaw looks embarrassed. “That’s how you say it?”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve been mispronouncing it all this time?”
“Don’t worry. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t apologize! I’ve been doing that for years!”
“It’s an honest mistake.”
“You know, one of the most insidious things you can do to a friend is hear them mispronounce a word and not correct it.” Mortin seems to recall a specific incident: “That guarantees the friend will mispronounce the word later in front of somebody important.”
“Well, you pronounced my name right.”
“You pronounced my name right too. Thanks.”
“We should shake hands,” I say, and we do, in the woods, before moving forward to wherever he’s taking me.
26
CRACK—I STEP ON A BRANCH. THE SOUND scatters through the trees. My ankle flares up. Mortin shakes his head. “You’ve never walked in the woods before, have you?”
“No. The park?”
“Walk on roots, okay? Roots and rocks. That keeps you from leaving a trail—or a sound. What if you have to meet Anna at a secret location late at night?”
“Where are we going, Mortin?”
“We’re looking for an old car battery.”
“There?” I point.
“Good eye.”
We head over. The battery sits in front of a tree. It looks like a normal car battery—black paint, scratched up, rusty—with the air of something abandoned without premeditation. “Is it like Narnia? Is this a special battery instead of a wardrobe that’s going to lead us to the World of the Other Normals?”
Mortin Enaw takes a deep breath and shakes out his pipe. “This battery, you can tell me where it is, specifically, in space, right? With numbers?”
“Yes.”
“Well, not everything’s like that.”
“Of course it is. Everything can be described with numbers. That’s why they’re numbers.”
“Try electrons. They decide where they’re going to be when you measure them. What are the numbers behind that?”
“Quantum physics.” I can keep up with Mortin. Who does he think he is? “So you’re from another dimension, like … Star Trek. And this camp is like a special pen for human children where they’re brought for experimentation by people from your dimension if their parents are cheap enough to want them away for a summer—”
“You’re part of one universe in a multiverse. And it’s your consciousness that chooses, not the electron, because consciousnesses choose things and electrons don’t. Your American scientist Hugh Everett published the truth in the 1950s. Then he went to work on top-secret military projects and never published another paper. He knew the secret behind this battery.”
Mortin unscrews the caps. Upon closer inspection, the brand is “Logo Spermatikoi,” which I’ve never heard of and which definitely does not sound focus-tested.
The sun gleams off the battery leads. Mortin eyes me, and I think for a moment about God. This— meeting Mortin—is the first experience I’ve had that makes me think, God exists, and it’s pure madness! Where’s the sense in that? God needs to be doing more crazy things to prove himself.
“Do you have … access to the other universes?” I ask.
“Why?”
“Is there a universe you could take me where, like, I’m bigger? Or my parents are … not crazy?”
“They exist. They all exist. Every time something happens, a universe is created where it happens a different way, so universes are constantly branching off to infinity; that’s the multiverse. But I can’t take you to them all. I can only take you to mine. If you want to be bigger, I suggest you exercise, fix your posture, and eat chicken breast.”
“You don’t have a pencil, do you?” I pull my acne handout out of my pocket.
“No, I don’t have a pencil, and you’ve got to leave that here, so you better put it aside. You can’t bring anything over.”
“Is your universe safe? Does it have an oxygen-and-nitrogen-based atmosphere?”
“Please touch the battery right there.” Mortin points at the lead marked negative.
“I don’t want to be ‘negative.’ Is there running water? Is it ninety-three million miles from a star similar in nuclear composition to the sun? Is this going to hurt?”
“Stop whining. See that clump of mushrooms?”
I don’t see them until he points them out: a piddling cluster next to some ferns beside the battery. They don’t look special. “You’re going to touch those when the time is right, while holding the negative lead.”
Mortin takes the lighter off his tail and leaves it by the tree, along with his pipe. Then he takes off his clothes, matter-of-factly, the way old people do in locker rooms at pools.
“I’m going first. You come after. Give me thirty seconds to make sure everything is safe on the other side.”
“Do I have to get naked?” I avoid looking at Mortin’s genitals, although they seem normal in my peripheral vision.
“You better.”
“I’d rather not. I don’t like being naked. I haven’t really had the Growth Spurt yet, you know what I mean?”
“Perry, I thought I knew about you from studying you, but I didn’t realize that at any given moment your brain is either scared, apologetic, or thinking about something. You need to make more room in there for direct action.” He points at my head. “Count to thirty and follow me. And remember, when you touch the mushroom, don’t think about me, okay? Whatever you do, don’t picture me.”
27
MORTIN TOUCHES THE MUSHROOM WHILE holding the negative lead. As soon as his finger hits it—one finger on the battery, one on the mushroom, crouched in the forest, stark naked, his tail curled behind him in a big S—his body begins to shake. It’s as if a great electrical current is running though him. He chitters, letting out clicking pops like a bug zapper being swung through a cloud of mosquitoes, as two halos of light shoot out from his bare feet.
I throw my arm over my eyes and peek through my fingers. I expect heat, but there’s just bright, clear light. The halos move up to Mortin’s ankles—and below them, his feet are gone. Zapped. Dematerialized.
I discern a pattern in the chittering, like rapid Morse code—pop, pop, poppoppop— as the halos move up his legs. When they reach his crotch, they join and become such an intense burst that my eyes can’t handle it; I squeeze them shut and see black spots and hear violent snaps until I open them again—and Mortin is gone.
I hear something loud and realize it’s my breathing. I blink. The animals know something’s up. The woods are quiet. If it’s all been a hallucination, this should’ve been the violent brain-cleansing incident that knocked me out of it. I pinch myself, but I’m still in the same spot, a long way from the nurse’s office.
“No wa
y,” I say. It’s time to go back. Not for me, no thanks. Interesting, but I’ve had enough adventure for one day; I prefer my fantasy life compartmentalized in books, without any nudity—
I hear a growl. In front of me, crouched, shoulders up, head down, is a gray wolf. I guess it could be a coyote—I’ve been reading that coyotes are more common in the tri-state area these days—but something in the lowness of its growl says wolf. It twitches its lips and shows its incisors.
I back toward the car battery. Wolves? No lawyers, no white kids, and wolves? What kind of a place is Camp Washiska Lake? I review my attributes as I had them figured for Pekker Cland: Intelligence 65? Might be more like 10.
I touch the negative lead of the battery, peering over my shoulder at the wolf. I brush my finger ever so lightly against one of the mushrooms.
What did Mortin tell me not to think about? Himself, that’s right. I try not to think about him, so of course I do, and with the image of his legs scrolling out of existence firmly in mind, I enter
THE
WORLD
OF THE
OTHER
NORMALS
28
IT’S LIKE HAVING A SEIZURE—LIKE HAVING one seizure followed by another followed by two more, at ever tightening intervals. My body spasms and my teeth clench. The trees in front of me shake back and forth, and then they shake up and down, and then they shake in a direction I never noticed before and can’t describe: it’s a bit like a diagonal, but it also has something to do with time, because the leaves alternate between reds and yellows and summer greens, faster and faster, like they’re aging and getting younger, and the sound goes with them, warping in and out as if someone’s detuning me on a big radio dial, and I chitter: pop, pop, poppoppop....
My feet crackle and glow. Electricity runs through me. I’m not sure if it hurts or if my body is experiencing new things and the only way it can register them is as pain, but I scream. I try to pull my fingers away from the battery and the mushroom, but they’re suddenly, inexplicably far from me.