She shakes her head. Her eyes are glazed. Then they snap into focus and she looks at me. “But the spooky thing is, when I woke up…it was still there. I could see those shelves through the bed and the ceiling, like the RV was made of glass. I was rubbing my eyes, trying to make sure I was really awake”—she rubs them now—“but it just kept going. I sat there in the bed for a full minute, just waiting for things to turn solid.”
She looks at me with a sudden soberness. “It was like in Detroit. But I was in the low shelves there. I was climbing down. This was…so different.”
I break away from her gaze and stare at the road ahead. It runs in a straight line through miles of empty fields all the way to the vanishing point, a vision of infinity. And it occurs to me that at this moment, I could be the only human being looking at this road. I could be the only complex mind for a thousand miles who’s thinking about it, correlating it, confirming it.
I feel a tingle in my spine as I let my vision blur. I look to the side, out into the fields. And in the corner of my eye, the road flickers. The straight line becomes a curve. Then a hill. Then a rushing river.
“Julie,” I whisper, and she looks.
She gasps.
And it’s a road again, long and straight. But the evidence that it wasn’t remains in Julie’s eyes.
“You saw that?” I say.
She nods, dumbstruck.
“Welcome to the Midwaste,” Tomsen says, peering at me in the rear view mirror. “America’s biggest mystery hole. A thousand miles of haunted house. Dreams or nightmares, take your pick.”
Julie twists around in her chair. “What the hell did I just see?”
“One of several reasons only crazy people cross the Midwaste. The Suggestible Universe calls it a vacillation. What reality does when no one’s watching.”
“What does that mean?” Julie persists, gripping the top of her chair.
Tomsen cocks her head. “If the idea could be explained quickly, why would there be a four hundred and thirty-three-page book about it?”
“Oh come on, Tomsen! Give me the synopsis.”
Tomsen blinks at her for a moment. “Okay. Synopsis. From the bestselling author of comes a mind-blowing that redefines the. We all assume. But what if? This timely will forever change the way you.”
Julie slaps a hand over her eyes.
“Okay, let me try again.” Tomsen steps over M’s snoring mass and puts a pot of water on the propane stove. She clears her throat. “Consciousness exerts a force. Or it is a force. Like gravity. Electromagnetism. It’s not locked in our brains, it’s out there. Without it, everything’s just potential. Things don’t decide what to be until someone observes them being it.” The pot drifts across the burner as the RV vibrates and Tomsen nudges it back into position. “A subtle effect. Other forces at work too, very weird and complex. But we’re in there somewhere. When we restart the internet, look up observer effect, double slit experiment, heated fullerenes, cosmic habituation. Also, prayer.” The pot jumps as we go over a pothole and she clamps it down, watching it intently. “Although the most obvious evidence is sitting right next to you.”
Julie glances at me. “Him?”
“They popped into reality exactly as we’d always imagined them, broke all kinds of scientific laws—only crazy people think it was a virus or some other dull normality. No way around it, zombies are magic.”
Julie raises her eyebrows at me, repressing a giggle. “Are you magic, R?”
I shrug.
“A few thousand years ago, this stuff was obvious.” Tomsen crouches down to eye level with the pot like she’s trying to intimidate it. “Happened all the time. Vacillations. Manifestations. Monsters and miracles. Reality was a stew of potentiality because there was so little sentience defining it. A few million complex minds on the whole planet? Anything could happen. But then we added a few billion more and built up assumptions and consensus, so reality hardened.”
The pot should be boiling by now, but I see no steam and hear no bubbling. Just a strange, rattling squeal like dry ice on metal.
“But then? But then?” Tomsen laughs. “Everyone died! Hooray!” She leans so close to the pot I see a few hairs curling. “And reality melted again. And now here we are, back in a primal world but with all our lessons learned, and anything can happen again.”
She turns her back on the pot. The squealing instantly becomes a bubbling roar, and a cloud of steam billows up.
While Julie and I stare at her, then at each other, then back at her, Tomsen pulls a sock out of a drawer, stretches it over a mug, dumps a pile of Lynda’s coffee grounds onto it, and pours the boiling water over this makeshift filter. She hands the mug to Julie, who hesitates only briefly before diving in.
“I could’ve used this before that conversation,” she mutters, wincing as she slurps the steaming brew.
“Very interesting book,” Tomsen says. “Of course no one really believes it, not enough to live it, however you’d even do that. But things are complex and this is a component, an ingredient, color, note, notion.” She pushes her fingers through her hair. “Borrow Nora’s copy when we save her. Sorry about the sock. It’s clean. I don’t have coffee tools. I make herbal tea sometimes. Rooibos.”
“Tomsen,” I say, catching her eyes in the mirror. “What are the other reasons?”
She cocks her head at me.
“You said only crazy people cross the Midwaste. Why?”
She starts shaking her head, but I can’t tell if that’s her answer or just agitation.
“Earlier…you said the Midwaste might digest us—”
“Do you want coffee?” she blurts to no one in particular. “You’ll have to take turns with the mug. I only have one. His name is Mugritte.”
I’ve never seen her avoid a subject and it’s making me as anxious as she is. “Tomsen. Are vacillations dangerous?”
“They can be. If you’re not prepared. If you let them rearrange your head.”
“But can they…eat you?”
She laughs stiffly and finally meets my gaze. “Not the vacillations,” she says. “The Ossies.”
The word buzzes in me, half-remembered, like the blocked-out face of an abuser.
Julie frowns. “The Midwaste is full of Australians?”
“Ossies as in ‘ossified.’”
A knot is tightening inside me. My forehead tingles and sweats.
“Oh,” Julie says, and her face pales. “Haven’t heard that term in a while.”
“What is it you call them on the west coast? ‘Boneys’?” She snorts. “Stupid name. Makes boys snicker. I prefer—”
“Tomsen!” I shout with unexpected intensity, and both women look at me. “Are you telling us…we’re driving into a swarm?”
“Well…” Tomsen looks at the ceiling as if searching for the best way to explain it. “Yes.”
I grip the wheel, shaking my head in disbelief. I feel the sensation of falling and I think of sinkholes, ancient voids eating their way up from the depths, waiting just beneath the surface to swallow us down to the earth’s primal basement. I feel it happening. I see the road crumble—
My head snaps forward, my teeth click together, Tomsen topples into the sink.