The Starry Rift Part 4

It occurred to me that it might be fun to write a story in which you only got answers and had to figure out what the questions were, and put the pieces together in your head yourself. I turned on the computer and started to write.

By the time I got to San Francisco, I had a first draft of this story almost done, and I sat in baggage claim and e-mailed it to Jonathan.

Very few stories write themselves. This one did. Just in time.

THE SURFER.

Kelly Link.

In the dream I was being kidnapped by aliens. I was dreaming, and then I woke up.

Where was I? Someplace I wasn't supposed to be, so I decided to stand up and take a look around, but there was no room and I couldn't stand up after all. My legs. And I was strapped in. I was holding on to something. A soccer ball. It slid out of my hands and into the narrow s.p.a.ce in front of me, and it took two tries to hook it up again with my feet. The floor kept moving up and down, and my hands were floppy.

"One more pill, Dorn. Oops. Here. Have another one. Want some water?"

I had a sip of water. Swallowed. I was in a little seat. A plane? I was on a plane. And we were way up. The clouds were down. There was a woman who looked like my mother, except she wasn't. "Let me take that," she said. "I'll put it up above for you."

I didn't want to give it to her. Even if she did look like my mother.

"Come on, Dorn." My father again. Wasn't he supposed to be at the hospital today? I'd been at soccer practice. I was in my soccer clothes. Cleats and everything. "Dorn?" I ignored him. He said to the woman, "Sorry. He took some medication earlier. He's a bad flier."

"I'm not," I said. "A bad flier." I was having a hard time with my mouth. I tried to remember some things. My father had come by in his car. And I'd gone to see what he wanted. He was going to drive me home even though practice wasn't. Wasn't over. I drank something he gave me. Gatorade. That had been a mistake.

I said, "I'm not on a plane. This isn't a plane and you're not my mother." I didn't sound like me.

"Poor kid," the woman said. The floor bounced. If this was a plane, then she was a something. A flight attendant. "Wouldn't he be more comfortable if I stowed that up above for him?"

"I think he'll be fine." My father again. I kept my arms around my. My soccer ball. Keeping my shoulders forward. Hunched so n.o.body could take it. From me. n.o.body ever got a soccer ball away from me.

"You gave me Gatorade," I said. The Gatorade had had something. In it. Everything I ought to know was broken up. Fast and liquid and too close up and then slow like an instant. Replay. My lips felt mushy and warm, and the flight attendant just looked at me like I was drooling. I think I was.

"Dorn," my father said. "It's going to be okay."

"Sat.u.r.day," I said. Our first big match and I was missing practice. My head went forward and hit the soccer ball. I felt the flight attendant's fingers on my forehead.

"Poor kid," she said.

I lifted up my head. Tried as hard as I could. To make her understand me. "Where. This flight. Is it going."

"Costa Rica," the flight attendant said.

"You," I said to my father. "I. Will never. Forgive. You." The floor tilted and I went down.

When I woke up we were in Costa Rica, and I remembered exactly what my father had done to me. But it was too late to do anything about it. By then everything had changed because of a new flu scare. Costa Rica could have turned the plane around, but I guess by that point we couldn't have gotten back into the States. They'd shut down all the airports, everywhere. We went straight into quarantine. Me, my father, the flight attendant who didn't look anything like my mother, after all, and all the other people on the plane.

There were guards wearing N95 masks and carrying machine guns to make sure we all got on a bus. Once we were seated, a man who really needed a shave boarded and stood at the front. He wore an N95 mask with a shiny, tiny mike-pen clipped to it. He held up his gloved hands for silence. Sunlight melted his rubbery fingers into lozenges of pink taffy.

People put down their cells and their googlies. I'd checked my cell and discovered three missed calls, all from my coach, Sorken. I didn't check the messages. I didn't even want to know.

In the silence you could hear birds and not a lot else. No planes taking off. No planes landing. You could smell panic and antibacterial potions. Some people had been traveling with disposable masks, and they were wearing them now. My father always said that those didn't really do much.

The official waited a few more seconds. The skin under his eyes was grayish and pouched. He said, "It's too bad, these precautions that we must take, but it can't be helped. You will be our guests for a short period of observation. Without this precaution, there will be unnecessary sickness. Deaths that could be prevented. You will be given care if you become ill. Food and drink and beds. And in a few days, when all have been given a clean bill of health, we will let you continue with your business, your homecoming, your further travel arrangements. You have questions, but I have no time for them. Excuse me. Please do not attempt to leave this bus or to go away. The guards will shoot you if you cannot be sensible."

Then he said the whole speech all over again in Spanish. It was a longer speech this time. n.o.body protested when he disembarked and our bus started off to wherever they were taking us.

"Did you understand any of that? The Spanish?" my father asked. And that was the first thing he said to me, except for what he'd said on the plane, when it landed. He'd said, "Dorn, wake up. Dorn, we're here." He'd been so excited that his voice broke when he said here.

"If I did," I said. "Why would I tell you?" But I hadn't. I was taking j.a.panese as my second language.

"Well," he said. "Don't worry. We'll be fine. And don't worry too much about the machine guns. They have the safeties on."

"What do you know about machine guns?" I said. "Never mind. You got us into this situation. You kidnapped me."

"What was I supposed to do, Dorn?" he said. "Leave you behind?"

"I have a very important match tomorrow," I said. "Today. In Glenside." I had my soccer ball wedged between my knees and the back of the seat in front of me. I was wearing my cleats and soccer clothes from the day before. For some reason that made me even more furious.

"Don't worry about the match," my father said. "n.o.body is going to be playing soccer today. Or anytime soon."

"You knew about this, didn't you?" I said. I knew that doctors talked to each other.

"Keep your voice down," my father said. "Of course I didn't."

There was a girl across the aisle from us. She kept looking over, probably wondering if I had this new flu. She was about my height and at least twice my weight. A few years older. Bleached white hair and a round face. Cat's-eye gla.s.ses. Her skin was very tan, and she wasn't wearing a disposable mask. Her lips were pursed up and her eyebrows slanted down. I looked away from her and out the window.

Everything outside the bus was saturated with color. The asphalt deep purplish brown. The sky such a thick, wet blue you expected it to come off on the bus and the buildings. A lizard the size of my forearm, posed like a hood ornament on the top of a Dumpster, shining in the sun like it had been wrought of beaten silver, and its scales emeralds and topazes, gemstone parings. Off in the distance were bright feathery trees, some fancy skysc.r.a.pers, the kind you see on souvenir postcards, mountains on either side of us, cloud-colored, looking like special effects.

I couldn't tell if it was the drugs my father had given me, or if this was just what Costa Rica looked like. I looked around the bus at the other pa.s.sengers in their livid tropical prints and their blank, white, disposable masks, at the red filaments of stubble on my father's face, pushing out of his skin like pinp.r.i.c.k worms. So okay. It was the drugs. I felt like someone in one of my father's Philip K.

d.i.c.k paperback science fiction novels. Kidnapped? Check. In a strange environment and unable to trust the people that you ought to be able to rely on, say, your own father? Check. On some kind of hallucinogenic medication? Check. Any minute now I would realize that I was really a robot. Or G.o.d.

Our bus stopped and the driver got out to have a conversation with two woman soldiers holding machine guns. There was a series of hangar buildings a few hundred yards in front of us. One of the soldiers got onto the bus and looked us over. She lifted up her N95 mask and said, "Patience, patience." She smiled and shrugged. Then she sat down on the rail at the front of the bus with her mask on again. Everyone on the bus clicked on their cell phones again. It didn't seem as if we were going anywhere soon.

There was a clammy breeze, and it smelled like some place I'd never been to before, and where I didn't want to be. I wanted to lie down. I wanted a bathroom and a sink and a toothbrush. And I was hungry. I wanted a bowl of cereal. And a peanut-b.u.t.ter sandwich.

That girl was still looking at me.

I leaned across and said, "I'm not sick or anything, okay? My father gave me a roofie. I was at soccer practice, and he kidnapped me. I'm a goalie. I don't even speak Spanish." Even as I said it, I knew I wasn't making much sense.

The girl looked at my father. He said, "True, more or less. But, as usual, Adorno is oversimplifying things."

The girl said, "You're here for the aliens."

My father's eyebrows shot up.

The fat girl said, "Well, you don't look like UCR students. You don't look wealthy enough to be tourists. Besides, tourist visas are hard to come by unless you've got a lot of money, and no offense but I don't think so. So either you're here because you work in the software industry or because of the aliens. And no offense, but you look more like the latter than the former."

I said, "So which are you? Aliens or software?"

"Software," she said, sounding a little annoyed. "Second year, full scholarship to UCR."

About three decades ago, a software zillionaire in Taiwan had died and left all his money to the University of Costa Rica to fund a progressive inst.i.tute of technology. He left them his patents, his stocks, and controlling shares in the dozen or so companies that he'd owned. Why? They'd given him an honorary degree or something. All the techie kids at my school dreamed about getting into one of the UCR programs, or else just getting lucky in the visa lottery and coming out to Costa Rica after college to work for one of the new start-ups.

"I'm Dr. Yoder," my father said. "General practice. We're on our way out to join Hans Bliss's Star Friend community, as it happens. Their last doctor packed up and left two weeks ago. I've been in contact with Hans for a few years. We're here at his invitation."

Which was what he'd told me in the car when he picked me up at practice. After I'd drunk Gatorade.

"Amazing how easy it is for some rich lunatic like Bliss to get visas. I bet there are twenty people on this bus who are headed out to join Bliss's group," the girl said. "What I've never figured out is why everybody is so convinced that if the aliens come back, they're going to show up to see Bliss. No offense, but I've seen him online. I watched the movie. He's an idiot."

My father opened his mouth and shut it again. A woman in the seat behind us leaned forward and said, "Hans Bliss is a great man.

We heard him speak in Atlanta and we just knew we had to come out here. The aliens came to him because he's a great man. A good man."

I had gone with my father to see Hans Bliss talk at the Franklin Inst.i.tute in Philadelphia last year. I had my own opinions.

The girl didn't even turn around. She said, "Hans Bliss is just some surfer who happened to be one of a dozen people stupid enough to be out on an isolated beach during a Category 3 hurricane. It was just dumb luck that he was the one the aliens scooped up. If he's so great, then why did they put him back down on the beach again and just take off? Why didn't they take him along if he's so amazing? In my opinion, you don't get points just for being the first human ever to talk with aliens. Especially if the conversation only lasts about forty-seven minutes by everyone else's count. I don't care how long he says he was out there. Furthermore, you lose points if the aliens go away after talking to you and don't ever come back again. How long has it been? Six years? Seven?"

Now the whole bus was listening, even the bus driver and the soldier with the gun. The woman behind us was probably twenty years older than my father; she had frizzy gray hair and impressive biceps. She said to the girl, "Can't you see that people like you are the reason that the aliens haven't come back yet? They told Bliss that they would return in the fullness of time."

"Sure," the girl said. You could tell she was enjoying herself. "Right after we make Bliss president of the whole wide world and learn to love each other and not feel ashamed of our bodies. When Bliss achieves world peace and we're all comfortable walking around in the nude, even the people who are fat, like me, the aliens will come back. And they'll squash us like bugs, or harvest us to make delicious people-burgers, or cure cancer, or bring us cool new toys. Or whatever Hans Bliss says that they're going to do. I love Hans Bliss, okay? I love the fact that he fell in love with some aliens who swooped down one stormy afternoon and scooped him up into the sky and less than an hour later dropped him off, naked, in front of about eighteen news crews, disaster-bloggers, and gawkers, and now he's going to wait for the rest of his life for them to come back, when clearly it was just some weird kind of one-night stand for them. It's just so sweet."

The woman said, "You ignorant little-"

People at the front of the bus were getting up. A man said something in Spanish, and the girl who didn't like Bliss said, "Time to go." She stood up.

My father said, "What's your name?"

The soldier with the machine gun was out on the asphalt, waving us off the bus. People around us grabbed carry-on bags. The angry woman's mouth was still working. A guy put his hand on her arm. "It's not worth it, Paula," he said. Neither of them were wearing face masks. He had the same frizzy hair, and a big nose, and those were his good features. You could see why he was hoping the aliens might come back. n.o.body on Earth was ever going to fall in love with him.

"My name's Naomi," the girl said.

"Nice to meet you, Naomi," my father said. "You're clearly very smart and very opinionated. Maybe we can talk about this some more."

"Whatever," Naomi said. Then she seemed to decide that she had been rude enough. "Sure. I mean, we're going to be stuck with each other for a while, right?"

My father motioned for her to step out in front of us. He said, "Okay, Naomi, so once I tell the people in charge here that I'm a doctor, I'm going to be busy. I'd appreciate it if you and Adorno kept an eye on each other. Okay? Okay."

I didn't have the energy to protest my father's request to Naomi to babysit me. I could hardly stand up. Those drugs were still doing things to my balance. My eyes were raw, and my mouth was dry. I smelled bad, too. I stopped when we got out of the bus, just to look around, and there was the hangar in front of us and my father pushed me forward and we funneled into the hangar where there were more soldiers with guns, standing back as if they weren't really making us do anything. Go anywhere. As if the hangar was our decision. Sun came down through oily windows high above us, and somehow it was exactly the sort of sunlight that ought to fall on you on a movie set or in a commercial while you pretend to sit on a white, sandy beach. But the hangar was vast and empty. Someone had forgotten to truck in that white sand and the palm trees and the beautiful painted background. n.o.body was saying much. We just came into the hangar and stood there, looking around. The walls were cinderblock, and a warm wind came in under the corrugated roof, rattling and popping it like a steel drum. The floor was whis-pery with grit.

There were stacks of lightweight cots folded up with plastic mattresses inside the frames. Foil blankets in tiny packets. So the next thing involved a lot of rushing around and grabbing, until it became clear that there were more than enough cots and blankets, and plenty of s.p.a.ce to spread out in. My father and I carried two cots over toward the wall farthest away from the soldiers. Naomi stuck near us. She seemed suddenly shy. She set up her cot and then flopped down on her stomach and rolled over, turned away.

"Stay here," my father said. I watched him make his way over to a heap of old tires where people stood talking. An Asian woman with long twists of blue and blond hair took two tires, rolling them all the way back to her cot. She stacked them, and then she had a chair. She sat down in it, pulled out a tiny palmtop computer, and began to type, just like she was in an office somewhere. Other people started grabbing tires. There was some screaming and jumping around when some of the tires turned out to contain wildlife. Spiders and lizards. Kids started chasing lizards, stomping spiders.

My father came back with two tires. Then he went and got another two tires. I thought they were for me but instead he rolled them over to Naomi. He tapped her on the shoulder and she turned over, saw the tires, and made a funny little face, almost as if she were irritated with my father for trying to be nice. I knew how she felt. "Thanks," she said.

"I'm going to go find out where the bathroom is." I put the soccer ball down on my bed, thought about it, and picked it up again. Put it down.

"I'll come," my father said.

"Me too." Naomi. She bounced a little, like she really needed the toilet.

I put my soccer ball down on the gritty concrete. Began to guide it across the hangar with my feet and my knees. My balance wasn't great, but I still looked pretty good. Soccer is what I was made to do. Pa.s.sengers in white masks, soldiers with guns turned their heads to watch me go by.

The October after I turned fourteen I became the first goalie for not one but two soccer teams: the club team that I'd belonged to for four years, and the state soccer team, which I had tried out for three days after my birthday. Only a few months later, and during state matches I was on the field more than I sat out. I had my own coach, Eduardo Sorken, a sour, bad-tempered man who was displeased when I played poorly and offered only grudging acknowledgment when I played well. Sorken had played in the World Cup for Bolivia, and when he was hard on me, I paid attention, telling myself that one day I would not only play in the World Cup but play for a winning team, which Sorken had not.

There was a smudgy black figure on the outside wall of the ranch house back in Philadelphia where I lived with my father. I'd stood up against the house and traced around my own outline with a piece of charcoal brick. I'd painted the outline in. When my father noticed, he wasn't angry. He never got angry. He just nodded and said, "When they dropped the atom bomb on Hiroshima, you could see the shapes of people who'd died against the buildings." Like that's what I'd been thinking about when I'd stood there and blackened my shape in. What I was thinking about was soccer.

When I kicked the ball, I aimed for that black silhouette of me as hard as I could. I liked the sound that the ball made against the house. If I'd knocked the house down, that would have been okay too.

I had two expectations regarding my future, both reasonable. The first, that I would one day be taller. The other, that I would be recruited by one of the top international professional leagues. I favored Italy or j.a.pan. Which was why I was studying j.a.panese. Nothing made me happier than the idea of a future in which, like the present, I spent as much time as possible on a soccer field in front of a goal, doing my best to stop everything that came at me.

A pretty girl in a mask sat cross-legged on the floor of the hangar, tapping at her googly, earplugs plugged in. She stopped typing and watched me go by. I popped the ball up, let it ride up one shoulder, around my neck, and down the other arm. During flu season, up in the bleachers, during matches, everyone wore masks like hers, b.u.mping them up to yell or knock back a drink. But our fans painted their masks with our team colors or wrote slogans on them. There were always girls who wrote DORN on the mask, and so I'd look up and see my name right there, over their mouths. It was kind of a turn-on.

Sometimes there was a scout up in the bleachers. I figured another year or two, another inch or two, and I'd slip right into that bright, deserved future. I was the future. You can't stop the future, right? Not unless you're a better goalie than me.

I went in a circle, came back around, making the ball spin in place. "Hey," I said.

She gave me a little wave. I couldn't tell whether or not she was smiling, because of the mask. But I bet you she was.

I was magic out on a field. In front of a goal. I stopped everything. I was always exactly where I needed to be. When I came forward, n.o.body ever got around me. I put out my hands and the ball came to me like I was yanking it through the air. I could jump straight up, so high it didn't matter how short I was. I had a certain arrangement with gravity. I didn't get in its way, and it didn't get in mine. When I was asleep I dreamed about the field, the goal, the ball sailing toward me. I didn't dream about anything else. This year, on the weekends, I'd been wearing that black silhouette away.

I stood a few feet away from the girl, letting her see how I could keep the ball up in the air, adjusting its position first with one knee, then the other, then my left foot, then my right foot, then catching it between my knees. Maybe she was a soccer fan, maybe not. But I knew I looked pretty good.

I was already a bit taller than that silhouette I'd painted. If you measure yourself in the morning, you're always a few centimeters taller. I'm named after my mother's father. (Italian, but you probably guessed that. Her mother was j.a.panese. My father, if you're curious, is African American.) I never met my grandfather, although one time I'd asked my mother how tall he was. He wasn't. I wish they'd named me after someone taller. My father is six foot three.

I circled back one more time, went wide around my father and Naomi. The little lizard-chasing, spider-stomping kids were still running around in the hangar. Some of them were now wearing the foil blankets like capes. I kicked the ball to a little girl and she sent it right back. Not too bad. I was feeling much better. Also angrier.

You could have gotten half a dozen soccer matches going all at once in the hangar. According to my watch it was less than two hours until the start of the match back in Glenside. Sorken, my coach, would be wondering what had happened to me. Or he would have been, except for the flu. Matches were always being canceled because of flu or civil unrest or terror alerts. Maybe I'd be home before anyone even realized what had happened to me.

Or maybe I'd get the flu and die like my mother and brother had. That would show my father.

Along the wall closest to the hangar doors where we'd come in were the soldiers who were still guarding us. Whenever people tried to approach them, the guards waved them back again with their machine guns. The N95 masks gave them a sinister look, but they didn't seem particularly annoyed. It was more like, Yeah, yeah, leave us alone. Scram.

The makeshift latrines were just outside the hangar. People went in and out of the hangar, got in line, or squatted on the tarmac to read their googlies.

"So you're pretty good with that thing," Naomi said. She got in line behind me.

"Want my autograph?" I said. "It will be worth something someday."

There was a half-wall of corrugated tin divided up with more tin sheets into four stalls. Black plastic hung up for doors. Holes in the ground, and you could tell that they had been dug recently. There was a line. There were covered plastic barrels of water and dippers and more black plastic curtains so that you could take a sponge bath in private.

I tucked my soccer ball under my arm, took a p.i.s.s, then dunked my hands into a bucket of antiseptic wash.