“Then what’s the point?” I murmured, but I wasn’t listening to Oscar any more, not really. I was back on the Sister Mary Margaret, hearing Neddie Hacker say:
“Damn that man and his bloody politics.”
“Try to think of this as another reality, Herbie, not virtual reality, but an other reality, because what is reality anyhow but the way each individual perceives his or her place in the world? Can’t each of us visualize the same place differently? According to the artist, M. C. Escher, we are each the focus of our own world. I read that from a lecture he never gave, but anyhow, if I can make this—” he tapped the helmet as he scanned through the manual “—my world, then when I’m mountain climbing I’ll be in an other reality, one as real to me as the one you and I are inhabiting right now.”
“Yeah, maybe.” I was still lost, caught in the eerie reality of this morning. I didn’t need a virtual reality helmet, though, to see the fog drifting around me, to feel the damp chill in the wind off the canal, or to hear the slap of the waves against the sides of the boat.
“No maybe about it, Herb my man. This is the real thing,” Oscar said.
“M. C. Escher,” I said absently. “The Regular Division of the Plane.”
“Herbie?” That jerked his head up. “You know his book? You’ve read Escher?”
“Teacher of mine had a copy of his book on her desk.” I shrugged uneasily. “Full of pictures. I looked at it once or twice.”
“Pictures? Prints! Herbie! The man was a graphic artist! And a genius! What would he have done with virtual reality programming? Can you imagine?”
“No,” I replied softly, “I can’t.” But I could. Just as easily as I could imagine the arm sliding back and forth on the deck, tattoo revealed. Something was bothering me, eating me from the inside out. Pulling up the pots, the clanging of bells, the clapping of the water, the distant bray of a foghorn. There off Smiley’s Island, a few miles south of the head of the canal, in a little trough, a little deep spot full of cold, clean water, rested a group of pots. Neddie’s pots, meant to catch lobsters but catching something else instead. Who? How? Why?
“Here you go, Herb,” Oscar said, plunking down an algebra workbook in front of me. “Pages 110 to 116, all laid out for you. You got your calculator? I’ve got one if you need to borrow it.”
“No.” I rose, went to where I’d dumped my knapsack. But as I did, I felt wrapped in that fog again, could almost smell it, taste it, touch it. Fog so dense it diffused the light, making everything appear muted, dull, gray. Except the water around it. The water was always so intensely, so painfully, black.
“So you’re interested in Escher, are you?” Oscar had gone back to his previous interest, was fiddling with the helmet now. “We’ll have to talk about it someday. Have you ever seen his print, ‘Bond of Union’? If that isn’t virtual reality material, nothing is.”
“I think I like ‘Drawing Hands’ better,” I said, still caught in that fog and on that boat as I opened my knapsack. Immediately I was assaulted by the odors of lobster bait, fish, and diesel fuel.
“Whew, Herbie, what the hell is that?” Oscar said from across the room.
But that paled beside what I saw in the knapsack, and for a moment I had a flashing sensation that this wasn’t my knapsack, that somehow I had picked up a different one off Neddie Hacker’s boat. But it was mine, the old worn denim bag I carried books to school in, had put my breakfast in this morning, and that held my notebooks and calculator for my tutoring session. They were all still there... underneath the sweatshirt Neddie had tossed me. Then I remembered. After seeing the arm I’d gotten a little hot, a little sick at my stomach, and I’d pulled off the sweatshirt and stuffed it in there, not thinking. But the shirt Neddie had given me, one of Little Brucie’s, had been gray, an ordinary gray sweatshirt with a drawstring and hood. This sweatshirt, however, wasn’t gray, it was red.
“It’s red,” I said aloud, mind ticking back. Had I not noticed its color? No, it wasn’t like me not to see, not to take notice of even the smallest detail. This had been a gray sweatshirt this morning. This afternoon it was dull brick red.
I looked up at Oscar, who was looking at me, a funny expression on his face.
“Herbie? Are you all right? You look a little green, pal. Hey, what’s going on?”
I thrust the sweatshirt out at him. “It’s red.”
“So?” Oscar looked like he wanted to laugh but didn’t know what to laugh at.
“This morning it was gray.”
“Sure it was.”
“Escher played with reality. He made us see things differently. Your helmet, if you can get it to work, does the same thing. It makes an other reality. But, Oscar, the fog this morning, it changed reality, too. The dullness, the way the fog... obscures the light. No color. No bright colors. Not enough light. Or just enough light to make things look different, and seem different. Enough maybe, to make a red shirt look gray, or a blue buoy look green. That’s it. And that probably explains why Neddie complains about Gussie Murphy raiding his traps. Gussie probably does, but if it’s foggy, he doesn’t know he is, he can’t see the difference between... yes, just like someone couldn’t tell the difference when he put Liam—” I stopped; how much was I telling Oscar? Enough to make him stare at me in confusion. This had happened before, I wanted to tell him, that I had seen where others couldn’t see. Where I had understood what should have been so obvious; but wasn’t. And what I saw was this:
There were two possibilities. One, we had pulled the wrong pot, the wrong buoys. We’d mistaken Gussie Murphy’s colors for our own. But that was doubtful — Neddie knows right where to go and even in the fog, and after forty years of this kind of work — I was sure he knew his traps and buoys better than anyone. No, the second possibility was more likely.
That being that someone else had put the arm in the wrong trap. Yes. And why would someone, anyone, go to the trouble of putting an arm with a tattooed hand in a lobster pot? As a warning? As a threat? Or as a means to terrify someone into doing something or into not doing something?
Like putting a horse’s head in somebody’s bed, I said to myself. To terrify. Suddenly I pulled myself together, said quickly, “Look, Oscar, I’ve got to go, I, um, remembered something I have to do. I’ll see you later, okay?” I scooped up my things, was out of there.
And out of the fog.
I didn’t get home in time. They had already come and gone, and Mom was in bed with a headache and a heart full of fear. I had to play stupid, lie, and was finally able to convince her it had to be some other kid the two men in dark suits had come to ask about. They had been agents, she told me. They’d shown her their identification right away. No, she wasn’t sure whether they’d been state or federal agents.
I guessed the second. And even though Mom was real upset, she was able to tell me most of the questions the two men had asked her. I promised her I’d get in touch with Jake and he’d straighten the whole thing out. She went back to bed, and I made two phone calls. The first confirmed what I already suspected; the second was to Jake at the station. I just told him squarely that Mom had had “some visitors,” and we needed to talk, now.
He was there in less than twenty minutes, inquired politely about my mother (I told him she was sleeping, and she was), and we went out onto the porch of the house we were renting. I closed the door behind us — Mom’s bedroom was right off the living room — and pulled up a wicker chair, waiting for Jake to sit down and this time tell me everything. He wasn’t getting away with anything less.