The Great Unknowable End Page 29

  She lets go of me, and immediately I start up the metal stairwell leading to the surface. I ascend, and I do not look back. The man guarding the door gives me a hard look. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m going back out.”

  I feel calm. I feel fine. This is the only thing to be done.

  “You crazy, girl?”

  “I’m leaving. Let me out.”

  “Go on, Charlie,” the woman says from below. “She’s full grown. It’s her decision.”

  Charlie shakes his head at me as though I’ve lost my wits. In the end, though, he unlatches the iron door he is guarding, and I climb outside.

  The wind is strong. It forms a wall I push past, walk against. I am vaguely aware of Galliard shouting my name from below. I am aware of the thud of metal and heavy footsteps. I pay them no mind. I walk on into the dry, cold darkness.

  I can see very little, so I take out the remaining flashlight from my rucksack, and I turn it on. There are small squares of light in the distance that I take to be windows of a commune building. Beyond that are the streetlights leading east to Slater and west to Slater Creek. I find comfort in this. If the lights are working, nothing very bad can befall me. Though the world may be dark and the earth may be crumbling, these lights can guide me to my family. I have no family here, at Red Sun. He disowned me long ago, and now I have disowned him.

  In my other hand I hold the walkie-talkie. It’s silent, no transmission, but there’s a chance I can find Jill, and as long as there is a chance, I must try. I place one foot in front of the other. I am walking on soft grass. The wind is strong. It howls in my ears, a desperate, dying animal.

  There is a shout behind me. Pressure at my back.

  I turn, and Galliard is there, panting, blinking so quickly.

  I say, “You should go back.”

  He says, “Not a chance.”

  “I’m still mad at you,” I shout over the wind.

  “Okay.”

  “I’m not going back down there. I can’t look at him. I can’t—I’ll kill him.”

  Galliard squints against the iron press of wind. “Then where are you going?”

  “Jill. The drive-in. I have to find her.”

  “All right. I’m coming too.”

  I don’t argue. I hurry on, speeding into a jog. The rucksack thuds against my back, and the walkie-talkie grows sweaty in my hand. I keep running, past the Moonglow Café, deep into the cornfields, toward the Dreamlight, or what remains of it. The wind howls, blowing so hard into my lungs that I can barely breathe. The plant sirens wail on.

  Then the corn clears, and we are in a place familiar to me, but changed, too. Desolate. There are no more screams or racing bodies. They’ve cleared out. What’s left are abandoned blankets, cups, and popcorn containers; ruts and depressions in the ground; and ahead, a gaping black hole where the movie screen once stood.

  I head toward the hole. There is a feeling in my gut, deep and unshakable. I tell myself it isn’t dread. I tell myself it isn’t fear. I run on, and Galliard runs alongside me, until he’s reaching out, blocking my chest with his arm, and pointing at the ground.

  “It’s not stable,” he says. “Look.”

  Earth and grass crumble a few feet ahead of us, into a pit of nothingness. The sinkhole. Large enough to take down the screen, as well as any moviegoers sitting close by. Mr. Cavallo did a good job of roping off the perimeter, though. He wouldn’t have allowed anyone this near the screen; they wouldn’t have wanted to be this near, where the picture would be too close. Unless they weren’t here to watch the picture.

  Unless they were here to investigate.

  I slap Galliard’s arm away and get to my knees, waving my flashlight in slow, searching arcs.

  “Jill!” I shout. “Jill, where are you? Can you hear me? Jill!”

  “Stella,” Galliard says at my back. “I don’t think—”

  “Shut up!” I scream, extending the range of my searchlight. The bulb is flickering, sputtering out like a last, gasped breath.

  “Jill, I’m here! Where are you?”

  The light goes out. I yell, hitting hard at it with the heel of my hand. It’s no use, though. The batteries are dead.

  “Jill!” I’m sobbing, fumbling with the walkie-talkie. I jam the button and speak into it. “Jill, please, please. Tell me you’re okay. Tell me where you are.”

  I don’t bother to release. I’m bent over, stitches in my sides, crying into the cold ground. Then there’s movement at my side. Galliard is sitting across from me in the dark.

  “You can’t do it!” I shout at him. “You can’t make plans for yourself—you, or any of your versions. The universe doesn’t care what we want to be. It doesn’t care if we live or die.”

  He doesn’t answer. I grab his tunic and drag him close to me. I put my lips to his ears so that he cannot misunderstand. I ask, “What happens now? Do we become stars?”

  “Stella, I . . . don’t know.”

  “Then what?” I demand. “Just the cold space in between?”

  I hear his mouth open and close, but no answer comes out.

  “Well, you better be praying. You better be praying to Buddy Holly, or whoever else can save us.”

  I am sobbing hard. Galliard’s arms enfold me. It is not meant to be romantic. I can feel that in the press of his hands on my shoulders: This is not a romancing; it is a comforting. A human and a human—a connection.

  We sit in the dark, on the edge of a gaping hole in the earth, the wind snarling around us in a deathly swirl. My flashlight is pressed between our bodies, and suddenly, defiantly, it bursts back to life, shooting up a column of blinding light. I cannot see Galliard’s face. I can only press my eyes shut against his shoulder and hold on to this one solid thing.

  Though I cannot see the numbers on my closet door or over town hall, I know they are close to a full count of zeros.

  And I know you cannot make any plans with certainty. I know I would probably never have become an engineer for NASA, and Galliard would probably never have played his music before a crowd. I would’ve liked to have tried, though. I think Galliard would have too.

  “I’m scared,” I say. “I’m scared this is it.”

  My words are absorbed by his tunic. Not even I can hear them. The wind roars in a deafening swell. My hair blows from my face, tugged so hard it stings at the roots. I struggle to stay upright, clinging harder to Galliard’s back.

  Another tornado, I think. Or something far worse. The extraterrestrial abduction. The nuclear blast. Or, as Pastor Barkley would have us believe, the hand of God come down to punish. Light bursts behind my shut eyelids. I open them to see the sky rent by pink lightning. There is no storm to accompany it, no thunder. The spindling fingers of light tear through the sky in bolt after bolt after bolt.

  “Stella.”

  I shut my eyes. I hold Galliard. I wait for the end. For darkness. Or light. Or heat. Or cold. Or oblivion. Nothingness.

  I wait.

  “Stella,” Galliard says, louder than before.

  I can hear his voice. I can hear it just fine, because the wind is no longer clogging my ears.

  There is no more wind. Everything is still.

  I open my eyes. The lightning has ceased. The sirens no longer sound.

  It is dark. Quiet. Like before.

  Only not like before.

  There is more light.

  I can see the stars.

  • • •

  I push out of Galliard’s arms. Scrambling to my feet, I turn a slow circle, head craned toward the sky. The world breathes around us, and the night proceeds as though nothing has been or ever will be amiss.

  “What’s happening?” I ask.

  Galliard shakes his head.

  “Hey! Stella? Stella! Over.”

  I whip around. It isn’t Galliard speaking. It’s my sister’s voice, coming from the walkie-talkie. It’s Jill.

  I grab the walkie-talkie from the ground, hands shaking.<
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  “Jill! Jill, where are you? Over.”

  There is silence—agonizing silence—as I wait for a reply. Galliard comes close, arms crossed, and we stand stooped, breathing hard.

  “On Eisenhower. We’re coming home. Over.”

  “Jill! Who’s—what’re you—who do you—”

  My sputtering is interrupted by a shrill, static screech. The walkie-talkie turns hot in my hand, too hot to hold, and I drop it to the earth, where it bursts into orange flames.

  “What the . . .” says Galliard, but I’m grabbing his hand and wrenching him after me as I run toward the road. Toward Eisenhower.

  On Eisenhower. Coming home.

  My sneakers hit hard, cracked asphalt. Towering cornstalks flit by, waving us on with leafy hands. My calves are burning, and my throat is too. I stop and turn, looking in every direction.

  For a moment, everything is still and dark.

  Then lights blind me. A car has swung onto the road, headlights blazing. It is speeding toward me and Galliard, swerving over the lane line.

  “Watch out!” I shout to Galliard.

  The car decelerates, then slams to a full stop yards ahead of us. Almost instantly, the driver’s door swings open.

  “Stella! Stella!”

  It is my father.

  All the muscles inside me turn weak. I run to him, straight into his arms.

  “Jill,” I choke into his chest. He smells of cigarettes. “Dad, Jill’s—”

  “She’s fine, Stell. She’s here.”

  And she is. I look past my father’s shoulder to see Jill scrambling out of the passenger seat. She stumbles toward me, encumbered by an overlarge piece of clothing—my father’s jacket. Then she crowds in on us and throws her arms around my waist.

  “I’m old enough,” she cries against me. “You don’t have to stay for me. I’m old enough.”

  I kneel to meet her eyes, pushing back sweaty hair from her brow.

  “Jill, you don’t have to be old enough.”

  “I know. But I am.”

  I look up at my father. There are a dozen questions in my face, and he sees at least a few.

  “She biked out to the plant,” he says. “Of course security made a to-do about it, and then the sirens—”

  “What happened?” I ask, even though I know he’s trying to tell me just that.

  “There was a misreading; we went into emergency shutdown. The engineers have confirmed that the reactors are stable. Gayle overrode the lockdown protocol so I could drive Jill out. So we could find you.”

  “Dad.”

  It is all I can say.

  “Galliard?” he says, and the rest of the world rushes back into my hollowed chest. I turn to find Galliard standing on the road. He looks unsure of himself, as though he is contemplating running away.

  “Come on, son,” my father says. “You get in the car. We’re clearing out of here.”

  Galliard does not move. “Where to?”

  “Home. Our home.”

  I know, with conviction, what I will find there. The violet numbers that have been on my closet door for seventeen days will be gone, as though they never existed. As though they were a hallucination.

  And perhaps they were.

  Perhaps all this was a shared hallucination. A mass hysteria. Stranger things have happened.

  Or it could be aliens. Aliens who don’t intend to make an appearance. Aliens who would alter the lives of an inconsequential Kansan town, and that of a seventeen-year-old girl living there.

  I wonder what Carl Sagan would postulate. I wonder, if the question were put to every higher-up at NASA, what explanation they would provide.

  Only, for now at least, I do not need an explanation. The countdown has counted down, and the time has passed, and we are still breathing. We are alive.

  The stars are back in the sky, Galliard’s gods all in their place.

  From where I stand in the road, I hear a whip-poor-will’s call.

  31

  Galliard

  FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 2

  Two weeks ago Slater, Kansas, came to an end.

  At least the Slater, Kansas, I knew.

  The work in the kitchen. The morning prayer. The Back Room. The Red Sun Yamaha. The nights spent talking to Archer in Sage House. The people I’d known my whole life. All of it gone.

  For me.

  I left it behind.

  • • •

  Two weeks ago, the countdown reached zero. The strange things stopped. The darkness lifted, and everyone came out of their homes.

  Some people were pretty busted up. There were bones broken and muscles pulled, contusions and internal injuries, but the strange things didn’t kill a single one of us. They simply started one day, and then they stopped.

  Slater got visits from the FBI and from nationally known scientists. When the blockades were lifted, tourists came to gawk. They took pictures of the sinkhole at the Dreamlight, and they gathered around town hall, even though the mysterious purple numbers weren’t there anymore. What these people really gawked at, though, was that, aside from the sinkhole and the wind damage, Slater, according to them, looked like any other Midwestern town. Just an ordinary place, visited by the extraordinary, and for no apparent reason.

  “But then,” said the philosophical tourists, “do extraordinary things ever happen for a reason?”

  I guess it’s only natural that people try to come up with explanations. They want answers to every question. Me? I don’t need to listen to any of the pastors or conspiracy theorists or scientists or even the Red Sun Council itself. I’ve already got my answer to everything:

  Get the hell out of Slater.

  • • •

  Two weeks ago, the strange things stopped. A day later, on August 20, America shot a probe into the sky: Voyager 2, destined for the planets and beyond. I thought of Stella when I saw the newspaper headline. I took a second to wonder if Voyager 2 would ever fly far enough to see my gods close up.

  I guess it’s possible. If I can leave Red Sun, anything’s possible.

  I can’t be entirely sure what they think of my decision—Holly and Hendrix, Joplin and the King himself. They’ve been silent for a while. No strange changes in the weather.

  Maybe they were never speaking to me. Maybe their stars are just gas, burning in an eternal sky. Even if that’s the case, though, I don’t mind. In the end, for the time that it mattered, they were real to me. Buddy gave me confidence. Janis gave me strength. Jimi gave me cool. And Elvis? He gave me what I needed most, through a song. He told me it was now or never. He told me to run.

  • • •

  Archer emerged from that Red Sun shelter, and he left the commune behind for good. He and I headed out yesterday morning, a day after the blockades were lifted. We hitched a ride with a tobacco farmer heading east on Eisenhower. We bought our Greyhound tickets at the Kansas City station last night, using our pooled allowances. We didn’t bring much with us, just a shared bag with money, food, paper, and a pen.

  Stella met me on the outskirts of town before we caught our ride. Kim came along too, to give me a certain LP, on hold no longer. She told me that Queen is going to change my life.

  Stella told me to write.

  She said, “You can if you sign it Galliard this time.”

  Then she turned and headed back to town—to her father and Jill and the woman named Gayle.

  She sent me on my way and went on her own.

  • • •

  I haven’t decided about writing Stella yet. Archer says it’s a bad idea, and once we get to Pasadena, I’ll have other things on my mind.

  But when we stop in Albuquerque to change buses, we have an hour layover.

  I walk to the post office next door, and I buy a dozen long envelopes and a book of stamps.

  “Mom,” says this kid in line. “Why’s he moving like that?”

  This little boy, this outsider, is talking about my tics.

  “Shhh, honey,” says his mom.<
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  But I turn with my purchases in hand. I smile at the kid, through the jerk of my jaw.

  “It’s fine,” I say. “It’s nothing to be scared of.”

  And I step out into the hot, terrifying, beautiful Outside.

  32

  Stella

  SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4

  “Is she here?”

  “No, Jill. Twenty more minutes. You don’t have to roll out the welcome wagon yet.”

  I smile at what, to me, is a private joke. The end of Slater has come and gone, and the mysterious numbers have disappeared, both from town hall and my closet door. Now here I am, in the aftermath, creating brand-new countdowns of my own.

  Twenty minutes.

  Twenty minutes until Gayle Nelson arrives to take me away to Lawrence, Kansas, for a campus tour of KU and an interview with her professor friend.

  Twenty minutes until my future begins.

  “Stop looking out the window,” Jill pouts from over her Nancy Drew book, The Crooked Banister. “You’re making me nervous, standing there like that.”

  Jill has a point. I packed my suitcase early this afternoon in a bundle of nerves and excitement, and since then I’ve had nothing to do but wait. Wait, and watch, looking for a sign of Gayle’s tan Karmann Ghia on our street, even though there are twenty more minutes to go.

  Once she picks me up, a new countdown will begin, and more waiting along with it. I don’t have appointments on campus until tomorrow morning, but both Gayle and Dad deemed it best for me to spend the night before at a nearby motel. I’m looking forward to the time alone with Gayle, talking about her work and her own story. I will have the chance to ask her questions I didn’t dare before. Because my new future is a daring one.

  I figured out something on Eisenhower Road, in that early dawn, after so long a night. To be That Stella is selfish, and to be This Stella is misery. That much I knew. What I figured out was this: Maybe it is possible to be a new Stella altogether. Maybe both Craig and my mother were wrong, and there are not just two options. I can be brave and loving, happy and giving. It is possible, and Dad and Gayle and even Jill are on my side. It’s an experiment, another project, only this time it’s my life. And it will begin when Gayle shows up at my door in—I check my watch—eighteen minutes.