Emmett said, “Yeah? Well, hey, there’s an old Gibson over there if you want to try it. Doesn’t look like much but it plays okay.”
Michael held the guitar reverently.
Garage-sale material, he thought, but the joints were good and the strings felt new. He finger-picked a G, Em, C. His fingers felt clumsy but the chords rang out.
Emmett fetched down his own guitar, a twelve-string Martin. “I have handmade guitars, I have foreign guitars. But I keep coming back to this old Martin. Bitch to tune, but I love the sound it makes.” He perched on a window seat with the Venetian blinds and the sea behind him and played complex runs that made Michael feel hopelessly amateur. Emmett smiled through his beard. “You want to play something?”
Michael said he might be able to chord along to some old folkie stuff. Union Maid or Guantanamera or something on that order. “Chord along, then,” Emmett said, and Michael tried gamely to keep up as Emmett launched into The Bells of Rhymney. His voice was a rough, strong baritone and Michael was amazed at the sincerity he brought to the old Seeger protest tune. “Is there no future, cry the brown bells of Merthyr—?” It made him shiver.
They played through half a dozen songs until Michael’s fingers were sore. Emmett grinned massively. “Not bad,” he said. He reached into the pocket of his shirt and took out something Michael was able to identify as a joint. He lit it, inhaled, extended his hand.
Michael maintained his cool. “It might be better if you didn’t tell my mom.”
“About the smoke?”
Michael nodded.
“She disapproves?”
“She would.”
Emmett said, “Okay, then… our secret.”
Michael toked carefully. He had smoked a couple of times in Dan’s basement, weekends. He managed not to cough. But the sweet, pungent smoke went through him like a wind. He felt instantly lightheaded.
He made a move to hand Emmett back the old Gibson guitar. Emmett said, “Keep it.” Michael goggled.
“It’s not an heirloom. Long as you play it, hang on to it. If you get tired of it I’ll take it back.”
He cradled the guitar in his lap. Afternoon sunshine glinted off the varnish. It was a better guitar than Emmett made it out to be. The pain in his fingers had retreated, so Michael hugged the Gibson against his chest and picked out a few bars of an old Paul McCartney song, Yesterday.
Emmett nodded appreciatively. “That’s pretty. You make that up?”
“What, you never heard it?”
“Nope. Should I?”
“The Beatles,” Michael said. “You know? Lennon and McCartney? Sergeant Pepper, Abbey Road?”
“New one on me,” Emmett said happily. “These guys play at your school?”
And so Michael was reminded again that he had come a long way in that car trip with Aunt Laura.
It was so easy to forget. It was not as if they were in a foreign country. Everybody spoke English, everybody drove on the right side of the road. But, he thought, it was a foreign country. The concept was familiar from the science fiction he’d read: a “parallel world.”
Easy to say. Less easy to deal with. He had played ball with Emmett on the beach; he had watched TV;
he had behaved—these last few days—as if everything were normal. He understood that his mother wanted that from him, and for now—at least for a while—he was willing to give it. And it worked, this illusion-making: for hours at a time he really would forget what had happened in the car, or before that, back home, with the Gray Man.
But then his mind would circle back and he would recall that he was a stranger here. And the questions would crowd in. Obviously Laura possessed this ability, to step sideways out of the world, and by implication so did his mother, and you could take that a little further: maybe he did, too.
So what did that make them? A family of monsters? Wizards? Space aliens?
The weed had dried out his throat; his voice was husky. He said, “Do you think there’s anything strange about my mom?”
Emmett seemed nonplussed by the question. “Too soon to tell, sport. What do you think?”
Michael shook his head: it was irrelevant. “How about Laura?”
“I’m fond of her,” Emmett said guardedly. “Is that what you want to know?”
“No, no … I mean, what would you think if I said she was a witch?”
“I would say you had better reconsider your vocabulary.” Added, “Maybe I want my guitar back.”
“I don’t mean it that way. I mean, like—magic powers and so forth.”
“Magic?” Emmett seemed amused. “Your mom was right, kiddo. You should probably avoid this stuff.”
So Michael went for a walk up the beach, by himself.
He brought along Emmett’s guitar—his guitar now. He carried the battered Gibson carefully, mindful that the weed had left him a little off balance. He picked his way among the rocks for what seemed like an endless time, but when he looked back the house was still plainly in sight. He perched himself on a flat piece of shale where he could keep an eye on his aunt’s place, so he would know when his mom got back—but where he would not necessarily be seen—and played aimless quiet finger chords. The dope was obviously pretty strong. Parallel-world marijuana. He closed his eyes and stretched out across the face of the rock, letting the afternoon sun roll over him.
I am what my mother is. Jam what Aunt Laura is.
Inescapable logic. The “what” remained uncertain.
There was a tingling sensation in his extremities; his fingers seemed to tremble. Michael pressed his palms against the hot, sandy surface of the stone. Hot shale and beach tar. Hanging on, he thought. Anchoring myself here.
All an illusion, of course: the solidness of things, the realness of things. What was a world if you could drive a car out of it? And he recognized that this was an old fear, that he used to go to bed with this fear, the fear that he might accidentally dream himself off the planet.
It had never happened. Not by accident. But maybe he could do it on purpose.
It was a possibility he had never dared consider. Considering it now—even in the privacy of his own mind—sent shivers through him. The strange tingling in his hands increased; if it were a sound, he thought, it would be a high-pitched whine.
He whispered, “Do it.”
Nobody to hear him but the sea and this cloud-rippled sky.
Emmett’s dope had trampled his inhibitions. Roll with it, he thought. Why not? Why not now, why not here?
“Do it.”
He sat up and held his arms out in front of him. He was aware of the sound of the sea washing in against the rocks, a distant gull wheeling and diving. He pressed thumb against thumb, forefinger against forefinger, so that a circle of sea and sky was framed by his hands. Like a private TV screen, he told himself. The tingling revved into a sensation like electricity. Four zillion volts screaming along his spine, now concentrated in this circle of air. It was a heady feeling.
So what’s on TV?
He narrowed his eyes.
Imagine a storm there. A vortex, a whirlpool, and the whirlpool is the sum of all things possible, doors and angles opening out from this locus in a hundred thousand directions. Pick one out of the multitude. Feel it. Follow it.
He closed his eyes and opened them.
He looked between his fingers at a green and red world.
It might have been the same seacoast. But in the landscape he could see through the frame of his hands there was no ocean. Green was the green of algae, of decaying sea wrack, and it occupied a long plain fading to the horizon. Red was the red of oxides and dust, the lifeless shore. He shifted his hands toward the place the town would be and saw a crater that was like the Astrodome turned upside down. Figures moved in the charred rubble around it: wheeled figures, derricklike torsos of shining silver. Machines.