Chapter 23

Oak Ridge, TN – Sunday, May 29th, 1983 – 3:45 AM

The noise woke him up. At first, it was a humming, quiet at first but slowly growing louder, like a thousand young children humming off-key, far in the distance. And a throb—a low, deep throb that made his bones vibrate. He felt the slow, undulating basso profundo, the voice of a giant, in his back teeth, shaking the well of his skull. It was the thrum of an enormous turbine, turning slowly, with unspeakable power, far away, yes, but radiating energy, sending vibrations so deep, so far, they enveloped him. They penetrated him. Jon’s eyes, gummy with sleep, opened. He instinctively turned towards the direction of the sound: his closet, where he had left the book.

The light was blinding. Jon held his hands in front of his eyes, but the blazing whiteness of it did not diminish. The humming grew louder. It was a thousand—no, a hundred thousand voices—children, men, women—humming, singing, shouting, different notes in different keys. It was white noise—so many sources, so many notes, so many frequencies, so much information that it was overwhelming. It all came together, coalescing into a single blanket of sound—growing louder, growing more dense, carried on the impossibly deep, thunderously loud heartbeat that was coming from nowhere and everywhere.

Jon couldn’t help himself. The light was terrible—wonderfully terrible—and he had to look at it. It was so bright, it was going to burn his eyes. It was going to blind him, he knew it was. But he had to look. He swung his feet off the bed and stood up, slowly approaching his closet door. As he got closer, he could see, even in the impossible, nuclear brightness of the light, that it wasn’t just light—it was a thousand lights. A million lights, radiating from a central point. Different lights—different colors, and even shapes—lines, like lasers, dots, like sparks, even geometric shapes and letters and numbers and symbols, each already incredibly bright, overlapping one and then another until he could barely make out anything, except one burning white sun. In the middle of his closet.

There were bells, too. Or something that sounded like bells—thousands of bells, some tiny and tinny and some gigantic, so impossibly large he could not hear the clapper strike the note but could only feel it in the marrow of his bones. The bells rode the choir of voices, the deep, industrial throb, merging with them and becoming louder until Jon was sure his eardrums would burst. The vibrations, so deep and so low that he felt them not just in his bones, but in his blood, at the cellular level—they were going to tear him apart. He was going to burst. Not just exploded in a thousand pieces but trillions—he would be atomized. Blinded, deafened, and then disintegrated.

Then, he saw something more. His closet was open; he could almost make out the edge of the door in the whiteness. But nothing was in his closet. The interior simply receded for what looked like miles and miles, into a vast, brilliant emptiness, except for one dark triangle, in the very center. As the roar of everything there ever was ripped past his ears, as the light beat down him, exploded out at him, burning hot and yet freezing cold, he stepped into his closet. He could not take his eyes off the triangle. As he stared at it, the distance fell away, as if there was nothing between him and the shape—which was not just a triangle, of course. It was a pyramid. Not just the eight inches tall described by Dr. Bernhard, it was huge. Jon still felt like he was miles away from it, but it towered over him, a hundred stories—no, five hundred stories tall. It was covered in writing he could not read, pictures he could not understand. Billions of them. It was a cool oasis of darkness in the super-nova of light—yet Jon could feel that it was the source. The light and everything in the light, that monstrous, bone-breaking deep bass thrum—all that was coming from the pyramid.

Oh my God, Jon thought. This is it. I set it off. I’ve detonated it. The doomsday bomb. It’s going to blow us all up. It already has, and this is it. This is how it does it. Whatever it’s doing, this is it, we’re all in it, we’re all dead but not—

There was a pinprick of light inside the middle of the pyramid. A distinct, clear, separate light—blue, piercing blue, like a laser. It grew until the light consumed the pyramid, and the pyramid grew, taller and taller until it was a blazing column of blue fire in a field of endless white.

The infinitely loud, infinitely dense noise suddenly stopped. It was so abrupt, so complete, that it felt for a moment like all the air had been sucked out of his lungs. Like something had punched through his chest and pulled his lungs and heart out the back. For a moment, he thought: I’m in space! It’s teleported me into outer space and I’m having some outer space death fantasy before my eyeballs bulge out and I explode!

But he could hear himself breathe. He could hear a creak as he moved his feet. The floor? Was he in his closet? Still in his room?

The whiteness was breaking up around the single column of blue fire. He could see pockets of blackness between the lasers of lights, between the dots and sparks and the neon symbols that shot past him. Then even more darkness, as the light became showers of sparks, clear and distinct colors so that he could make them out, and as some passed close enough to him he could see that these too were symbols—sometimes letters or numbers, often ideographs he simply did not recognize. Slowly, those tapered off, and there was nothing but the column of blue fire in the blackness, far in the distance, yet moving rapidly closer.

No, Jon realized—he was moving closer to it. Drawn closer, like a chunk of metal to an impossibly powerful magnet, it was drawing him rapidly at an accelerating speed, and he could not stop himself. As he got closer, he could see that the blue flame was swirling, a column of churning fire. It was a vortex; a burning blue tornado, drawing him into it. Now would have been the time for a deafening roar of noise—as the whirlwind of fire filled his view, it looked to Jon like he was about to be sucked into a gigantic, endless explosion—a raging fire that had consumed not just a house or a neighborhood or even a city but an entire planet. But there was no noise, except the rustle of his own clothes and the sound of his own rapid breathing.

And he was inside it. The flame swirled around him; like the light before, burning hot yet freezing cold, an endless explosion, an ongoing nuclear chain reaction, yet completely silent in its terrible blue destruction. He seemed to float in the center, in the eye of the inferno, for a very long time. He could not move, and nothing moved him. He wasn’t sure how long it was before he realized that we wasn’t floating anymore, but moving again—that the tornado of blue fire whipping silently around him was so impossibly large he had lost all perspective, until something appeared in the distance, approaching rapidly.

At first he wasn’t sure whether it was moving towards him, or if he was moving towards it but as he got closer he decided he must be the one moving. He could begin to make out a figure in the dull white glow he was closing in on, and just as he could tell that it was a figure, he could begin to see that it was riding a thin beam of light. That it was suspended by that thin, blue-white beam, arms outstretched and behind it, back arched and head thrown back, long hair swirling slowly, as if the person was underwater—and it was a person; Jon was getting to close enough to see that it was a woman. Although still distant and obscured by the light, Jon was suddenly certain it was Megan. He could feel it in the force that was drawing him towards her—the gravitational pull that had irresistibly drawn him to the pyramid, into the column of fire, was distinct enough now that he could feel her in it—like the waves of force pulling him in all had her personal signature. He was suddenly aware that he could hear her breath, her heartbeat. That he could smell her. Everywhere. Soap and water and fresh cut flowers, maybe honeysuckle—and a little something spicy, like cinnamon or ginger. The air was full of it—full of her. She was the blue fire.

His orbit drew closer. And it was an orbit. He had thought the figure was rotating but he suddenly understood that he, like the swirling flame circling around them both, was in orbit around Megan.

Soon she was only a few feet away. Her eyes were closed, her head thrown back. When he passed behind her in his orbit was when he could see her face, upside down and serene, clearly relaxed in what had to be an uncomfortable position. Her arms were outstretched and behind her head, fingers splayed, legs extended and thrust backwards, toes pointed down. Her hair swam behind her in large, languid, undulating loops. She glowed, as if illuminated from the inside, anchored to the white shaft of light that entered her at her breast bone and exited the middle of her back. Except for the serene, even beatific expression on her face—eyes gently closed, brow smooth and unconcerned, the slightest curve of a smile on her lips—it made Jon think of the bus station, and what had happened when Megan had reached into the locker. The way her back was arched, her head thrown back, the way she seemed to radiate the light–so much that he could see her scalp glowing white under the dark auburn roots of her hair– it was the same.

Jon didn’t realize he was going to touch her until he saw his hand out in front of him—drawn to her, without his consent. His fingertips made contact as the gap between them closed, touching her arm underneath her shoulder and tracing across the upper swell of her breasts as he continued to circle around her, slowly moving down as Jon was thinking, No, stop, stop it, no, it’s a trap, it’s something, there is something wrong here—what—what the hell am I doing?
Megan’s eyes snapped open. There were no pupils, no corneas—her eyes were just solid pools of electric blue light. Not changing position, her upside down-head turned just a fraction, eyeing him as he rotated behind her and his fingers lightly brushed across her shoulder and touched her cheek. Her hand shot out, clamping on to his wrist, pushing his hand away but, at the same time, her lips curled up into a broad smile—so much so you cold see her teeth, brilliant blue light crackling behind them.

“Jonathan,” she said brightly, “You’re here. I’ve been waiting for you.” Blue light flashed as she spoke. Her voice echoed, as if reverberating in an impossibly large, empty room. There was a sound before the words, too, as if Jon could hear them building up in her throat before they finally emerged from her mouth.

“You—waiting for me?” Jon asked. “Waiting for what?”

She laughed. It seemed to come from everywhere, the flames of the churning blue vortex swelling and brightening in rhythm with the sound. “I was waiting for you to touch me with your fingers.”

With her hand locked around his wrist, she was now rotating with him. “That looks—uh—painful,” he said, nodding at Megan as she turned with him, turning on the beam of light she was suspended on—a little like she was on a vertical barbecue spit, Jon thought uncomfortably—her back still arched dramatically, head thrown back so far that it was almost perfectly even with Jon’s, just upside down.

“I was waiting for you,” she said, as if that explained it. “Waiting for you to touch me with your fingers.”

“Uh—” Jon started, as Megan took his hand and brought it to her lips, kissing it softly, then slowly licking his forefinger with her tongue—it looked bright purple in the reflected light of the electric blue crackling in the back of her throat. Her tongue was wet and warm, though—he didn’t have much to compare it to, but it certainly felt normal. Although Megan licking his finger wasn’t really natural . . .

“You touched me with your fingers,” she said, as if he had somehow missed the point. Her tongue darted out, flicking his fingertip. “Mmmmm,” she hummed, and licked his fingertip again, more slowly.

“Um,” Jon said, and Megan took his finger into her mouth. Jon blinked. She opened her mouth and moved her head forward, softly closing her lips at the knuckle of his hand. Her tongue circled around his finger, the faintest trace of a smirk curling the corner of her mouth. Her cheeks hollowed as she sucked his forefinger, drawing it down until the knuckle of his hand had disappeared beneath her lips, to the point she could hardly go any further. Still, she worked her lips in a pulling motion, her tongue folding around his finger almost like a snake, the thumb of the hand she had clamped to his arm making gentle circles across the underside of his wrist.

Jon couldn’t breathe. He tried to swallow, and it felt like there was a lump of cold metal stuck in his throat. Something had shifted in him as Megan had put her mouth over the whole of his forefinger, gently guiding it in with her tongue. It was if his insides had fallen out. It felt like a chain that had constricted him so long, so long that he had forgotten it was there at all, had suddenly been broken, and he was suddenly free. Free in a way that was all at once exhilarating, terrifying, and painfully arousing.

He could feel his body—not one part, but his entire body, from the top of his skull to the very soles of his feet, ache for Megan. Ache with a brilliant, blinding pain that was excruciating agony and yet exquisitely beautiful. It was a terrible sensation—hunger, thirst, exhaustion, desperation, wonder, terror, all wrapped up in a desire so immense, so powerful, it felt like something inside him had broken in two, like something vital had shifted position. Like something that had never quite fit right suddenly falling into place.

Megan slid down his finger and then let go, a tiny thread of spittle extending from his fingertip to her upper lip. Megan caught her end with her tongue, and drew the string of saliva back into her mouth. Then, she opened wide, pulling his hand towards her again, wrapping her lips around his forefinger. She slowly extracted it from her between her lips, lazily sliding her tongue around it as she did so. Her mouth was so warm, so wet, so supple, he felt as though it were his insides that were on fire, his body that was buzzing with electric power.

His chest was tight, constricted. He couldn’t feel his heart at all, as if he had stopped his heart mid-beat, the same way be might hold his breath, and now could not let go.

“Touch me, Jon,” Megan said, then slowly licked a circle around his thumb. “Touch me with your fingers.”

Her other hand floated out, slowly reaching for him, and he felt his free hand being pulled towards hers, drawn to her extended hand by the force of her will. As his hand passed hers, she placed the palm of her hand on his, pressing his palm down to her mouth, where her lips parted and she grazed his skin with her tongue. She moved that hand to her neck as she took the forefinger and index finger of his other hand into her mouth, sweeping over and between them with her tongue in warm, wet strokes. She held his hand at her throat for a moment, and he could feel the muscles in her neck tighten as she drew his fingers so deep into her mouth that her lips covered the knuckles of his hand, that he was almost sure she was trying to swallow his fingers. Then she moved the hand on her throat down, to the hollow of her neck and the hard protrusion of her collar bone, sliding across the taut skin of her breast bone to the softer, more pliant flesh below. His hand passed through the shaft of light that ran through the center of her chest, but all he could feel was her. He could feel the rise and fall as she breathed, and could hear it, too—the whisper of air as she inhaled and exhaled, the soft, liquid sound as she sucked on his fingers.

Jon opened his mouth, trying to say something, anything, but all that would come were dry clicks. She let go of his fingers and laughed. The blue electricity crackled in the back of her throat, like she had swallowed a ball of lightning. His fingers, slick with her saliva, glistened with reflected light. “Your fingers,” she observed. “They’re so . . . wet.” And she laughed again, the swirling blue inferno whirling around them blazing brighter with the sound. With each laugh, each sound she made, he saw that there were ripples in the beam of light. Each word was a pulse in the beam—two pulses, like opposite ends of a ripple in still water, flowing outward, both upwards and downwards, from where her body intersected the beam.

Jon was dizzy. He couldn’t breath, his heart wasn’t beating—he was going to pass out. Pass out, catch on fire, explode, and die. His skin tingled and burned. He ached all over, but especially where he touched her—where she touched him. And it was pain—bright, hot, needle-sharp. Yet the clarity of it, the brilliance of it—this was no dull headache, no queasy nausea, this was a pain like nothing he had ever known. At once sharper and more terrible than any pain he had ever felt, yet it was beautiful. It was impossibly beautiful. He could think of no sensation in his life to compare it to. Was death like this? Terrible pain, yet incalculable beauty? Was he dying? Was he already dead?

“Lay your hands on me,” Megan instructed, bringing both hands down across her chest, folding his fingers down so her breasts were cupped in his palms, then pushing his hands up. “Ahhhhh,” she sighed, a large, football-shaped pulse of light traveling up the beam from her chest, and down from her back. She closed her eyes and inhaled deeply through her nose, pushing his hands down firmly. Her hair curled around her head in large, slow, liquid swirls as she sighed again. “Mmmmmahhh.” The ripples of energy that went out along the beam were larger and brighter this time. “Aaaaammmaahhhh.”

The pain was unbearable. Wonderful. Exquisite. Yet so terrible. Megan’s head floated, serenely inverted, in front of him, eyes closed. Each time her lips parted in a sigh, he could see the incredible, incomprehensible power inside her. He could see it glowing in her skin. He could even see it through his hands.

Jon tried to shake his head, but couldn’t. As Megan pulled both hands in slow circles across her chest, he could see his hands were not entirely there. He could see through them—see his thin, transparent skin, his translucent bones, the glimmer of veins and arteries and muscles. He could see through it all to Megan underneath, pressing his hands against her. He could see, then, the indentions his fingers were making in her flesh, the rounded shape of the balls of his thumbs pressed firmly, yet almost invisibly, against the flesh beneath her collar bone. And then his hands were gone. He couldn’t see them and he couldn’t feel her. Megan’s hands, locked in empty circles, relaxed, and she opened her eyes.

“Do you know yet?” she asked. Her voice was no louder, but this time her words caused the beam to oscillate in violent convolutions, torpedoes of energy shooting out from her, explosive cannon balls of light, with each word. “Where to touch me? With your fingers?”

Jon couldn’t answer. He could see and hear, but he had no sensation of himself, of his body, at all. Even if he could have spoken, though, he couldn’t have answered. She was trying to show him, but he still didn’t know.

“I think you do,” Megan said, as if he had spoken. “Do you know where you are?”
Heaven? Hell? Purgatory? His bedroom closet? Jon didn’t have a clue. Even if he did, could he give voice to the words?

“You know where you are,” she said. “Say the words.”

Jon wanted to say something, but there was nothing. He couldn’t feel his body. He couldn’t make it say anything. He couldn’t even tell if it was actually there at all.

“You can talk,” she said. “You know them. Say the words. Do you know where you are?”

“I’m in the book,” he said, suddenly finding his voice, then realizing it wasn’t his voice he had found. As her lips moved with the crackle of blue energy, it was Megan’s mouth he was speaking with. Giant loops of energy surged up the beam, which writhed and contorted like an angry electric snake. “I’m in the artifact,” he clarified, in Megan’s voice, hearing his own voice only as a muted layer on top of that.

“That’s not an answer. I’ll ask again: do you know where you are?”

Jon tried shaking his head, but there was nothing to move. “No.”

“You know them. Say the words.”

Megan sighed, and closed her eyes. “The interstitium,” Jon said with her lips. “I’m in the interstitium.”

Megan’s skin blazed white hot with the words, each syllable forming a violent ripple in the beam, making it twist and turn with such profound oscillations that it snapped, breaking free from whatever infinitely distant point it had been anchored to, and began spiraling down as Megan, blazing white, opened her mouth and drew in a loud, surprised breath. The beam gyrated wildly, tendrils of lightning forking out and creating showers of sparks around them as it drew back into her, as if it was the beam she was inhaling.

With a sharp gasp, the last of it entered her, sparks flying out at Jon, drawn into the center of her chest, as she rolled over, back straightening, settling into a position facing him, face tilted slightly upward but, at least, now right-side up in relation to Jon’s perspective. She was almost blinding, the way the closet had been at the beginning. Filling up his entire field of vision with white light. The illumination blazed from the inside, making her translucent. Inside her chest, brighter than the rest of her, he could see her heart, a miniature super-nova, pulsing, burning. He could see her blood, like white hot plasma, being pumped throughout her body. The muscle beating inside her chest shone so brilliantly it could be seen through skin and bone. “Where are we together?” Megan asked.

“The interstitium,” they answered together. The light dimmed as they spoke the words.
“Who are we together?” Megan asked. Her skin was becoming opaque. She was still incandescent, as if lit from the inside, but no longer translucent.

“The insterstitium,” they answered.

The light was fading. Her skin now fully opaque, Megan closed her eyes. When she opened them, they were normal. They were just eyes—her corneas looked black in the blue light from the column of fire that still swirled around them, but they were just eyes. When she opened her mouth to speak again, there was no electricity crackling inside her. It was just her mouth. “Where do you touch me?” she asked.

“The interstitium,” they answered together.

“And where is—” they started together, and then Jon was talking with his own mouth. He could feel himself again, his own body. “—where is—what is—the interstitium?”

Megan smiled and looked to the side. “It’s the place where you touch me. Where you touch me with your fingers.”

“But—but where do I—what is it?”

“Jon,” she said, taking his hand. “It’s the small space between.”

“Between? Between where?”

“The space between,” she repeated. Then she lowered her hands to her side, raised her head, and closed her eyes. The glow in her skin left completely.

“Megan?” has asked. No answer. “Megan, please.”

Nothing. He reached out, touching her shoulder. She was as cold as ice. Her skin felt like metal. He tried to shake her, gently and first, then firmly, but she would not move. He put both hands on her shoulders, fingers spread. “Megan?” he asked again, but there was nothing. He pressed on her breast bone, then pressed his fingers against her ice-cold lips. Nothing.

Then, he knew. Raising his right hand, forefinger extended, he pressed his fingertip gently but firmly between her eyes, just over the bridge of her nose. Jon felt an electric charge the moment he did so, and she jerked, eyes fluttering open. “I told you,” she said. She raised her hands, putting them on Jon’s chest and pushing. “Get back.”

Jon felt himself floating backwards. As his finger tip left her forehead, he could see a bright blue ring where he had touched her. The interstitium, he thought. But why? I don’t get it.

Then there wasn’t time to think anything else. Megan rippled. Her entire body undulated, bending over, arms curving and legs pulling up, and then straightening out with snap. Head turned up, arms and legs splayed out at 45° angles, frozen in place. A tiny pinprick of light started at her breastbone, and then spread, pulsing. It was her heart, again, beating, pumping, exploding with terrible power, a white hot sun, shafts of shimmering luminescence shooting out from between her ribs.

Her fingers, spread out in a fan, erupted, emitting streams of brilliant, burning power that themselves spread out in ever-widening arcs. Blinding whiteness burst from her eyes and mouth, exploding out above her in expanding cones of energy. Flares of white fire shot out in massive jets from her feet, beginning at her toes and then spreading up her ankles to her calves. The fountains of light bursting—venting-—from her hands and feet, from her mouth and eyes widened, spreading up her legs and down her arms, across her cheeks and chin until she was consumed in the light, and everything was white. Yet Jon could still see her clearly.

He could still see his own hand clearly, as he held it out in front of him, the sense of being pulled returning. He felt himself being drawn towards Megan, as tendrils of blue flame snaked over his shoulders and between his feet, around his sides, disappearing into the churning nuclear furnace, the collapsing star, that was Megan’s heart. He was moving faster, now, the gravitational pull too hard to resist, an orbiting planet being pulled inexorably into the sun. Huge jets of blue fire shot past him from behind, into the singularity beating inside Megan’s chest, and Jon understood that this was it. It wasn’t just him; everything was being consumed, sucked into Megan, collapsing into one brilliant point of light. The vortex around them was now a raging, if noiseless, river of flame, disappearing into her. And so was he, getting closer, so close he didn’t think he could get any closer but still getting closer. So close he shouldn’t have been able to focus on her, but he could. He could see her skin, the pores on her skin, the tiny hairs on her skin, then more—she stretched out before him like a vast burning landscape. Barely discernible in the brilliant incandescence of her flesh were symbols, burning brighter still. Symbols and diagrams, billions of them, perhaps trillions of them, were etched into her. Beneath her skin, he could see the white hot plasma of her bloodstream pumping, a million tiny rivers of energy. He could hear the deep, thundering beat of her heart as it pumped, thrumming, throbbing inside of her. Then, as he heard the whirlwind of her breath, he felt himself being drawn down as she inhaled, collapsing, with everything else, into her. Suddenly, there was nothing but him. Nothing but him in the darkness, falling.

Jon’s body jerked as he landed in his bed and then rolled off onto the floor.

He pushed himself up with his hands and looked at the closet, then at his bed, then back to the closet. The closet was perfectly normal. The door was closed. It was dark. He didn’t hear anything out of the ordinary; just the hum of the central air conditioning. He touched his face—he was slick with sweat, but otherwise, he seemed to be all in one piece. He put his hand over his heart—it was beating like a jack hammer. He stood up and adjusted his underwear. He had discovered over the past few years that one of the many joys of becoming a teenager included frequently waking up with what he had often heard described as a “raging hard-on”, but this was the worst he had ever experienced. His entire body ached. He felt like he could explode. He adjusted himself again. Then he hit it. “Just stop it,” he said. “Just go away. There’s nothing for you to do here.” As usual, it didn’t listen, stubbornly refusing to leave him alone.

“Dammit,” he muttered, looking again to the closet. He glanced at the small digital clock beside his bed: 4:00 A.M., exactly. Still time to get more sleep, which was good—even though he had been sleeping, he felt physically exhausted. The dream had been . . . something else. Unusually vivid. Unusually visceral. Unusually sexual, too—normally, his dreams about sex amounted to him peeking into a girl’s shower room or something. He rarely remembered his dreams; even shortly after he woke up, they would be half-gone and well on their way to fading completely. Yet every detail of this dream was still blindingly bright and painfully loud. And the pull—the gravitational attraction he felt towards Megan, the aching for her that went so deep he felt it in the marrow of his bones, in the pit of his stomach, in the very center of his body. It was still with him, palpable in its burning intensity.

He had always liked Megan, and had always found her attractive, but this—this was like nothing he had ever felt. About anything or anybody. In his life. It was dying: suddenly, violently, hit by a truck and driven off the edge of a cliff. It was being born: terrible and beautiful, having the very breath of life blown into him by God and then getting smacked on the ass by a big guy with a white smock and plopped on a cold metal tray. It was the whole of life, condensed into a single snapshot. It was birth and death and everything in between; from the most beautiful sunset to the most brilliant sunrise, from the hottest scorching summer day to the coldest snowy winter morning, from the first kiss to the last touch. It was the sweetest, simplest moment he would ever know, side-by-side with the sharpest loss, the most painful sorrow, he could ever imagine. Even now, five minutes after waking up, he could not quite catch his breath.

So he found himself in the closet. All was as it was supposed to be—it ended promptly, stuffed with boxes and clothes and old toys and comic books and regular books and his Coke bottle collection. Nothing spectacular, here. But, if he stood quietly and listened, he could almost hear the thrum. The chorus of voices. Quiet, to be sure, but it wasn’t just his imagination. It wasn’t just the ringing in his ears. He could hear it.

He pulled out the book and sat down with it, in his closet. It glowed as he touched it, no brighter than a night light but glowed enough that, without any other illumination, he could read the cover: The Interstitium: Molecular Molding via Chemical Synthesis In Extremely Small Spaces. No doubt the title was some more of Dr. Bernhard’s cleverness, something he had picked in whatever transition he had managed to pull off between the artifact being an 8” pyramid and becoming an ornate technology cookbook. Yet the dream haunted him. He could see clearly, even now, the blue reflections shimmering on the gloss of Megan’s lips as he had felt himself speaking with her mouth: Where are we together? The interstitium. Who are we together? The interstitium. Having no idea what an interstitium was or was supposed to be, he made a mental note to look it up. It had to be something. Of course it was something. The small space in between, he thought.

He ran his fingertips over the letters that spelled “interstitium” on the cover. He could hear it: the thrum, the hum, the atonal chorus of voices. Very low. But it was the same sound, the one from his dream. It was very warm—almost hot. He opened it, noting the glow—just bright enough to let him read it—extended to the pages. He flipped until he found the page for the hover board. A highly stylized human figure with a smiley face for a head—no doubt, more of Dr. Bernhard’s inspired “programming” of the artifact—surfed amiably in the air. Next to it, diagrams and a laundry list, and at the bottom of the list, he noticed, were color-coded symbols with varying dots beside them. In the assembly instructions, Jon saw, there were places where the color coded symbol was inserted in the process, as if it represented a part. Which it obviously did, he realized. Most of the components for the hover board were pretty mundane—copper tubing, copper wire, 8 D batteries, toggle switches and some zinc. The critical elements were clearly the color coded symbols with dots—the symbols corresponding to, he realized, the embossed piece on the front and back of the book. The colors—that must be the colors the pieces flashed when he tapped them, the way Megan had discovered when he had first shown her the book. The dots beside the symbols—a series of long and short dashes, like Morse code. Tap sequence, perhaps?

He closed the book and then flipped it open again, stopping at the very first page, a blank page with nothing on it except the outline of a medium sized rectangle. Jon touched the rectangle, and it flickered. He touched it again, it flickered, but nothing more. Jon frowned, and turned the page.

The next page—the first real page– was actually an index. It broke down the contents by categories, some of them strange categories, some of them ominous. The last category was labeled TOTAL ANHILATION. Jon thought maybe he’d skip building any of those.
The earlier categories—LEVITATION DEVICES, CRYONIC VARIATIONS, HOLOGRAPHIC PROJECTORS, ORGANIC ENHANCEMENTS, ELECTROMAGNETIC SPECTRUM MANIPULATORS—seemed safer, if still potentially dangerous—or simply absurd—categories to work with. TOTAL ANHILATION—which came after WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION and SCORCHED EARTH AND OTHER GENOCIDALS in the list of categories he thought he might just stay away from altogether. If he did anything, he’d try and see if there was some way he could just pull them out of the book. He didn’t need to be messing with things like that, and neither did anybody else.

I would only mean to do good, Jon, Dr. Bernhard’s floating, holographic head had told him. I think that is the terrible trick of it. I would only mean to good.

Well, there was that, too. He decided to table further consideration on the issue until the morning. His head was still too muzzy and the dream still too vivid in his mind for him to think clearly. He needed to get back to bed

He flipped to a few more pages—levitating shoes made with magnets and batteries, turn anything invisible with a flashlight and some copper wires and some—oh, that was good, some aluminum cans. There was a chemical mix that would freeze water at room temperature at a 1:10000 ratio. Yowzer! There were fuel additives to make a regular car go up to—was that right, did it say up to 600 miles an hour? A regular car? A fuel additive could do that? Well, at least it did caution, as he read further, that actually going 600 miles an hour would cause most regular cars to break up and explode. Just skimming the first quarter of the book, at it was already getting dangerous. Although, the fuel additive thing—that might come in handy. He looked at the list of ingredients—chemistry set stuff, mostly. Sulfur, phosphorous, zirconium, iodine—and a little touch of whatever corner piece on the back of the book flashed blue when he tapped it—long, long, short, long. He wondered what it did, but decided he’d try it when he actually was ready to try and put something together. He didn’t want to get stuck with some mystery ingredient that he couldn’t get rid of. How would it come out? A spray? A nozzle? If he was building a set of flying skis or some sort of Magneto Ray, did it just spit out the critical missing components when appropriately tapped?

As he read the instructions for mixing up the fuel additive—the HYPER-MODULATED FUEL COMBUSTION FACTOR MULTIPLIER—that seemed to be the case. It seemed to suggest once he got everything else together, he tapped on the back of the book and it would spit out a capsule. He thought about it, tempted, but finally decided against. He was tired. He didn’t know what it would do without being mixed with the other chemicals in the recipe. Also, he didn’t think it would hurt to have somebody to ask what they thought about it. What do you think, Megan? Do you think it will sit their innocuously, or burst into flame and burn us all to death?

Which made him think of Megan. Which made him think of the dream. Which made him think about the fact he was going to see Megan tomorrow, and she was coming over, and he wasn’t exactly sure when. And that he was thinking tomorrow was going to be pretty busy. If, in the light of the a new day, they both still wanted to do this thing, they would need to spend tomorrow getting prepared. Planning, packing, shopping for parts, and maybe even building some things. They’d also need to figure how the rest of the crap in the briefcase worked. So, he closed the book, placed it gently under some dirty clothes, and stood up. Closing the closet door, he thought again of the dream. Of Megan. Touch me, she had said, her voice everywhere and nowhere at the same time. Touch me with your fingers.

Okay, that’s enough, he thought. He had to stop thinking about that or there wouldn’t be anymore sleep for him tonight.

He laid down, and forced himself to start thinking about trying to program in assembly language. Already a fairly dry process, he had, at this point, completely lost all interest in it. But, it was something other than the book, it was something other than Megan, something other than Dr. Bernhard. Although the image of Megan—good God, her mouth, and her tongue, what had she been doing with her tongue?—kept intruding, Jon managed to stop and re-center his attention back on the order of the address stacks for the Motorala 6809 processor—the blazing 1.25 megahertz heart of his TRS-80 Color Computer—and was shortly back to sleep.

This time, he did not dream.

Chapter 30

Oak Ridge, TN – Sunday, May 29th, 1983 – 8:42 PM

Jon yelped, his heart jumping up into his throat.

He had been looking at the diagram in the book, wrapping the copper wire around three nails as instructed by the illustration, when the sharp tap on his window about gave him a heart attack.
It was Megan, waving vigorously at Jon to come let her in. The first thing he noticed was the half-dozen different rings she was wearing on her fingers. Megan never wore rings. Well, maybe one, but not six on each hand.

“You scared the shit out of me,” Jon said, unlatching and sliding open his window. “Don’t do that. I could have been doing something that might blow me up or something.”

“You worry too much,” Megan admonished. She stuck her hands through his window, fingernails freshly painted a pearlescent pink, wrists rattling with bracelets. Jon counted nine. She was wearing a bright aqua Ocean Pacific T-shirt that, while it had seen better days, was still very loud. “Come on, help me over.”

Jon took her hands and she walked up the outside wall, pulling against Jon, until she reached the sill—and then leapt in, landing squarely against Jon. One of the rings she was wearing scratched against his wrist, drawing blood. They fell against the bed, knocking the book off, and then slid onto the floor with a thump. Something else fell down with a clatter.

“Ow!” Jon complained. “You just, like, ripped my skin off.”

“Sssshhhh,” Megan shushed, holding a finger across her bright pink lips, blowing in Jon’s face. Her breath smelled like Budweiser. “Don’t be so loud.”

“You’re drunk,” Jon said. “You made me knock the book off the bed.”

“I’ve only had two beers. That and a Coke. With vodka. And some vodka. With vodka.” She giggled and rolled off him. “Okay, maybe a little.” As they sat up, she leaned over, looking at him seriously. “Is that a bad thing?”

“I—you just startled me. I was trying to make the flying shoes, from the book—”

Megan inhaled dramatically. “The flying shoes! Cool!” She kicked her feet up in the air, sticking her shoes—red and white, laceless LA Gear sneakers—in Jon’s face. Jon thought they must have been Carla’s. “Can you make my shoes fly?”

Jon frowned. “How much vodka did you have?”

Megan put her feet down. “I dunno. Whatever was left in the bottle. Mom and Larry—and Carla—arguing, yelling, acting stupid. I was getting moody. I’m sorry.” She looked at Jon with a drunken slyness. “Would it be okay if I wasn’t wearing a bra?”

Even after all the kissing, and casual intimacy, of earlier in the day, Jon felt his cheeks flushing. “No, I’m not saying that—I’m not saying anything—”

“Are you sure?” She swayed a little, arching her eyebrows. “It can be arranged.”

“Yes, I’m sure—I—um—did you say—what do you mean, ‘it can be arranged’?”

She smiled. “Watch this,” she said, pulling the dozen rings on her fingers off and dropping them casually onto Jon’s already littered floor. Then she pulled her arms into her shirt. “This is cool.”
After a moment of gyrations pushing and pulling the bright aqua Ocean Pacific T-shirt back forth, almost as if she were trying to stretch it out–or make brand new armholes–her right arm popped back out, holding her silky, cream-colored bra.

“Tada!” she said with a flourish, and tossed it to Jon. “Put it under your bed so your mom can find it. After we’re gone. That’ll freak her out.” She put her left arm back out, and adjusted herself. Both the way her bosom shifted, and the outline of her nipples against the Ocean Pacific t-shirt, were a clear testament that she had actually taken off her bra, right in front of him. Which was pretty damn cool, even if she had kept her shirt on while doing it. So what if she smelled like cigarettes and paint remover?

Jon blinked. “Wow,” he said.

Megan grinned blearily at Jon, her eyes lidded as she almost slurred her words. “Cool, huh? May not be quite as cool as your big book of magic. But I know some magic tricks, too. Yes, I do.”
Yes, she did. And she was good at them, too.

Megan abruptly lay down across his lap, staring up at him with bloodshot eyes, giggling. “I can see up your nose,” she said. “You need to blow your nose.” She nodded confidently. “Uh-huh. Blow it. Uh-huh, uh-huh.”

“Thanks,” Jon murmured. As she lay across his lap, Ocean Pacific t-shirt stretched tight across her torso and pulling over her navel so he could clearly see her belly button, she gazed up at him drunkenly. Jon wanted desperately to kiss her again. To touch her. Even if she did smell like she had doused herself in rubbing alcohol and eaten a plateful of cigarette butts. But there would be time for that, he thought. Later, there would be time. Right now, they needed to get ready. Plus, if they were going to make out—and maybe it was a minor detail, but Jon thought it was important—it would be nice if Megan was reasonably sober.

“You’re looking at me funny,” Megan said. She laughed, and reached up and touched his nose, bracelets sliding down to her elbow. “Honk!” She giggled. “You’re cute. Hey! How do you like my bracelets?” She raised her other arm up and shook them both. “And the hair band and the makeup and everything? I was trying to, you know, sorta disguise myself. I raided Carla’s closet. Mostly stuff she doesn’t wear, anyway.”

“I think you might have other options than, uh, dressing like a prostitute,” Jon said. It didn’t look all that different from what his mom might wear to go out drinking some nights, but he didn’t want to say anything that mean to Megan. “That might—” She rattled her bracelets noisily, as if to illustrate his point. “—might actually attract attention. Which probably wouldn’t be the idea.”

Megan stuck her lower lip out in a pout. “Fine,” she said. She sat up—and braless, in that tight aqua t-shirt, it was something to behold. Hormones, Jon though. Insanity. One of the two. No other explanation.

She stood up, clumsily, and then lay down on Jon’s bed. “There it is,” she said, and reached over and grabbed the book. She lifted it up and plopped it on the beaten pillow at the foot of the bed. She started flipping pages. “Lessee. Flying Nikes. Where are the flying Nikes? Hmmmmm. Oh, hey now, I want one of these.”

Jon got up off the floor and sat on the bed beside her. “Huh. A ‘A Variable Field Unidirectional Magnetic Pulse Bomb’. Um. Why would you want one of those?”

“Look at those cool circles coming out of it,” she said, nodding down at the illustration, on which animated rings emitted from what looked like a curling iron welded to a set of aluminum cans. As the rings spread across the page, they faded and then disappeared. It was a neat visual effect, especially on something that looked so much like paper.

“I don’t think it really works like that,” Jon said. “It’s just, you know, a diagram. Shows how it is supposed to work. I don’t think you’d actually see magnetic waves.”

Megan nodded. “Ah. Well, I still think it looks pretty.”

She flipped some more pages, stopping on an illustration of what could have been an open cigarette case in front of a smiley face with a crooked smile and comical spirals for eyes. The title of the page was Inductive Hyper-Hypnotic Suggestive State Generator. “Hey, cool,” Megan said. “Is that, like, for hypnotizing people? Like, putting ideas in their heads?” Her face lit-up. “Could I, like, make Carla think she was a lesbian? Or that she wanted to join the Peace Corps? Could I make Larry be—I dunno, not such a butthead? Or eat nothing but Twinkies?”

“I’m not sure. But I’ve actually already got some of these—there are some in the briefcase.”

“Hey, cool. Can I borrow one?”

“Um. I’m not so sure that’s a good thing to play with. I mean, what if I used something like that on you?”

Megan offered a sly smile, arching an eyebrow. “I guess it depends. What would you make me do?”

“Dress in a chicken suit and tell everybody your name was Irma. Irma Horsefeathers.”

Megan shrugged. “That wouldn’t be so bad.”

Jon sighed. “Point being, it might be better not to make everything a mess before we leave. And I don’t know if—you know, using something like that might do something to the person you used it on. Mess up their head or something. I just don’t think we oughta—”

“Fine, spoilsport,” she pouted again. “Hey, what about for getting hotels? Making people think we’re older. Or making people think we looked different? Or were never there! Could come in handy for that. We can use it for that, right?”

Jon nodded. “That makes sense. I guess we’d have to.”

She turned back to the book, flipping pages. “’Cryogenic Suspension Mines’,” she murmured. “I saw these last time. ‘Set mine for perimeter activation or set in grenade mode for timed target activation. Will place target in instantaneous superfrozen cryogenic suspension with less than point-oh-oh-oh-oh-seven percent tissue damage. Suspension lasts for up to thirty-six hours after activation.’ Can I at least leave on of those at the house? Put it next to the toilet for Larry?”
“Um. Maybe we should talk about it more,” Jon suggested. “Like, after you sober up.”

“You’re no fun,” Megan mumbled, flipped a few more pages, and then just put her face down in the book. “It’s so warm,” she said. “Like fresh laundry. Smells pretty good, too.”

“I think it’s like a machine. Dr. Bernhard—I read some of the notebook he left in the briefcase, he said it was something else. It was something entirely different, and I guess he made it—he told it to become the book, somehow. And I guess maybe it could be just about anything. Maybe I could make it like a computer, so I could type commands in—”

Megan shook her head against the book. “Uh-uh. You’re such a geek. This is cool. A book of magic oughta be a book. Computer of magic? What the hell is that? Calculator of magic? Pocket-protector and slide-rule of magic? That’s, just like, overly nerdy. Even for you.”

“Okay, okay,” Jon mumbled. “Just thinking.”

“Invisibility Belt. No shit. That’s, like, right out of Flash Gordon or something. What you could do with something like that.”

“Sneak into the girl’s locker room?”

“I can just walk in. It’s not that exciting. We don’t spend a lot of time half-naked snapping each others butts with towels or anything. It’s not like Porky’s, sorry.”

Jon shrugged. “Oh, well.”

She closed the book. “Did you write your note yet?” she asked.

“The good-bye note? No.” Jon knew he should have, but hadn’t been able to get further than a sentence into one without getting stuck. He had to get something soon, though.

“Yeah, I need to do mine, too,” Megan said. “I’ve been thinking about it. It needs to be good.”

“Yeah,” Jon agreed.

“But everybody was yelling. Carla wished everybody was dead. Larry wished he had never met our stupid family. I couldn’t think. Well, I wrote one note.” With some difficulty, she manage to hit a hand into the back pocket of her jeans and pull out a crumpled piece of paper, which she tossed to Jon.

Jon took it and unfolded it. It was on a piece of cream-colored stationery ringed with tulips, and scrawled across it were big block letters in fat red magic marker that read: I HATE YOU FUCK YOU GO TO HELL.

“Wow,” Jon murmured. “That’s sweet.”

“Needs work.” She yawned. Then she pushed on his mattress with one hand. “Your bed’s comfy. I like it.” She scooted closer to him. “You mind if I crash with you tonight?” she asked sleepily. “You think your mom will find out?”

“Um,” Jon said. “In the bed?”

“Your bed’s comfy,” she said again. “There’s a enough room for both of us.” She nuzzled her head against him, the shampoo-and-cigarettes smell of her auburn hair something like ambrosia. “If we snuggle.”

“Okay,” Jon consented. He had been planning to actually build something out of the book, but—well, this was actually better.

“You’re a really good guy, Jon,” Megan murmured against his chest. It was clear she was fading fast. “Real good.”

After a moment, she was snoring.

Jon had to get up to turn off the bedroom light, which disturbed Megan momentarily, but she shifted, smacked her lips, pulled at covers that weren’t there and began to snore again. Jon turned out the bedroom light, leaving only his little kitschy boy-gone-fishing lamp to dimly illuminate the room. He thought for a moment about just laying down on the floor and going to sleep, but she had seemed very open to the idea of them sleeping in the same bed. So, he grabbed a blanket off the floor and scooted back in next to her.

She shifted, turning so her back was towards him, wiggling her butt up against his midsection as he gingerly put an arm around her shoulder. He put his head down against her back so his cheek lay against her silky brown-red hair where it spilled across her shoulder blades.

There was something perfect about the scent of her hair. Something mature and wonderful. It was the smell of seasons changing, from spring to summer. Them smell of his life changing, from being a dorky kid who played video games and read comic books and collected Coke bottles and argued about who was better–Superman or Spiderman–to someone a lot closer to adulthood. To someone with a real live girl–one who was, to Jon, really a woman–in his room, late at night. In his bed. Laying against him. She was the sight, sound, taste, and touch of the future—of the incredible potential of a wide-open world of wonder yet to come. To be near her, to smell her, to touch her, was finding out that the world was bigger and brighter and more wonderful than he had ever imagined, even just a few short days ago.

It was if he had grown up in a small, drab little room, and had been happy enough with it, for what it was. But then Megan had come and opened the door. Hell, she was the door. She was the door through which he could suddenly see that there was a world outside of the plain little box he had always lived in—great cities, deep forests, wide canyons, high mountains, hot deserts and cold blue oceans. Long, lush meadows of sweet green trees and cool breezes and still, clear ponds—that was Megan.

He touched the bare skin of her hip, right above where her jeans pulled tightly against it. She sighed softly, the sound almost like music. He propped himself up, craning his head over her shoulder so he could see her face, smashed against his pillow, in the dim light. For all the things he had seen, for all the things he had read in the past three days, if there was any book of magic in his room, it was Megan. In the end, the book on the floor, the one with the flying shoes and magnetic pulse guns was all smoke-and-mirrors—or gears and pulleys. Very advanced gears and pulleys, perhaps. Very small gears a pulleys. But in the end, it was just science and physics and algebra and programming. Nothing magical, really, just the same numbers and formulas, the same bits and bytes, he had steeped himself in almost since he had learned to read. Taken up another thousand notches, yeah, maybe to the very end of technology, as Dr. Bernhard had apparently been convinced was the case. But, even if: at the end of the day, it wasn’t sorcery, it was science.

The real book of magic in Jon’s world was laying in bed with him, smelling of Prell shampoo and cigarettes and snoring softly through her mouth. Drooling a little, too, he noticed.

Jon kissed her softly on the ear, and she mumbled incoherently and raised a hand to side of her head, brushing at it. Then she put her hand back down, and continued to snore.

Jon laid his head back down, smiling. Real magic, indeed.

A few minutes later, Jon was asleep.