Tristan stumbled out of the ODEC, tugging convulsively at the oxygen mask. The balaclava came off with it. He was ashen-faced, and looked as if he might be sick. He stumbled dizzily and then collapsed to his knees barely beyond the threshold of the chamber.
“Tristan!” I cried, as Oda knelt down to help him, but Tristan pushed him away and looked around at us all, dazed and yet wild-eyed.
“Where am I?” he asked. “Is this a dream or are we really here?”
“We’re really here,” said Oda gently.
“Are we in Boston?” asked Tristan, and groaned. “God, what a terrible headache. Where’s Mom?”
I looked at Oda in alarm. “Give him a moment,” he said reassuringly.
“What just happened to him?” I demanded, not reassured.
“I think he’s just very disoriented.”
“Isn’t it five minutes ago?” said Tristan. “Don’t I have to go into the ODEC before we can have this conversation?”
“Somebody get him a glass of water,” said Oda to the room in general. And then gently: “Tristan, close your eyes for a few moments, you’ll be fine.”
Oda gestured me to step away, and I followed him, but my concern and attention remained on Tristan. He was now very still, glancing around at his surroundings with eyes only, as if trying to avoid vertigo. It seemed horribly wrong for Tristan Lyons to be so vulnerable.
“Is this what happened to the cat?” I demanded of Oda.
“Well, you can’t have a conversation with a cat. When I’d open the cavity, he would leap out in full Halloween mode. But I’d leave him, come back down an hour later, and he’d be fast asleep. When he woke up, you’d think nothing had happened. I repeated the experiment a few times, and the cat never seemed to remember what he was about to be subjected to. But then Rebecca saw and made me stop.”
Journal Entry of
Rebecca East-Oda
MAY 18
Temperature about 64F, moist, no breeze. Barometer rising.
Flowers and vegetables fending for themselves due to ODEC activity.
To begin, this morning the new ODEC was “successful,” insofar as Tristan came out of it in the same state the cat once used to come out of the old ODEC. Melisande kept her head better than I did when I first saw the cat, but was clearly concerned. The following conversation, more or less:
FRANK: I predict Tristan will be fine shortly. But I don’t think we should allow anyone to go into the ODEC until we have figured out how to protect them from that effect.
MEL: What is the effect? Why is it happening?
FRANK: He is teetering on the edge of becoming non-local.
MEL: Non-what?
FRANK: His brain was suddenly not sure which precise reality it was operating in—and perhaps his body too. So much to discover still! (NB: sounding like an eager child. Sounding as if none of it happened thirty years ago.)
Five minutes pass
TRISTAN (fully recovered): Why didn’t you take notes of what I said when I first came out?
MEL: Trust me, you said absolutely nothing noteworthy.
TRISTAN : That just sounds like your usual lip. I need corroboration.
FRANK: We were all here. She’s right.
TRISTAN : You do it, Stokes, so I can see what happens when you come out.
MEL: I don’t think so. Seriously, it was as if you’d gotten plastered at a frat party.
TRISTAN : Sounds like fun. Give it a go.
FRANK: I really don’t think that you should push her— (interrupted by)
TRISTAN : She could use a little loosening up. Come on, Stokes, it’s a hazard of the job.
MEL: I fail to see how “becoming non-local” falls within the parameters of my contractual obligations as a translator of dead languages.
TRISTAN : It falls within the parameters of your wanting to know what it’s like.
MEL: Apparently it’s like being drunk. Been there, done that.
TRISTAN : Y’know, you could be stuck in your tiny little office right now, grading papers about Aramaic declensions. Get your butt in there. Somebody get her a snowsuit. With a balaclava. And an oxygen mask.
I wish that had been the end of the nonsense. It was barely the beginning.
Diachronicle
DAY 294 (CONTD.)
NINETY MINUTES LATER, DESPITE MY own best judgment, I was geared up and ready to begin the most ill-considered experiment of my life (to that point, I mean. Clearly I have engaged in more boneheaded enterprises since then, else I would not currently be sitting here trying not to spill ink on my borrowed day dress.).
I hope it does not reflect badly on me to admit that I would have refused obstinately were I not so keen to please Tristan. A ridiculous impulse, given that he seemed to treat me as if I were his personal R2-D2 (which was still preferable to Blevins’s modus operandi). But there was something about his relentless, focused clarity of purpose that made all things else fade in significance—including my own mental balance. I submit that I was not falling in love with him, but there was inarguably an intellectual seduction at work. He operated on my psyche the way a lively Mozart sonata might.
And so, suited up to look like a cartoon character, I toddled into the ODEC. It was frigid inside, and my breath came out in clouds until I put the oxygen mask on. The cavity had a cool, clinical feel with all those LEDs staring at me. I felt as if I were on the set of a half-assed low-budget sci-fi flick. “All right,” I said with a purposeful nod, and the door closed. I could feel my pulse at my temples, hear my breath amplified within the mask. It was frightening and exhilarating and I had never felt so alive! Blevins could eat my shorts.
I cannot describe what happened next, because I do not remember. Immediately, it seemed, I found myself in a very bland, undecorated office, in a hard plastic chair near a Formica table under ugly fluorescent lights, shaking uncontrollably for no good reason. I was not cold or scared, simply . . . confused. And exhausted.
“Fascinating,” said a very handsome fellow about my age, with dazzling green eyes and neat, close-cropped hair, who was standing over me and contemplating me with a grin. “If that’s what you were like when you got drunk in college, no wonder you don’t have a boyfriend.”
“Give her a few moments,” I heard an older, softer male voice say. I knew that voice had a name attached to it—Yoda? No, Yoda was from Star Wars. Star Wars was on my mind because of R2-D2. And the fellow in front of me, I had seen him brushing his teeth before, so if he wasn’t my boyfriend maybe he was a brother I’d forgotten about.
He began to laugh. “Stokes,” he said, “you’re saying all of that out loud. I wouldn’t speak until you feel like yourself. But hurry up with it!” He leaned closer and whispered into my ear, “We’ve got our witch vault. Let’s go get our witch.”
Diachronicle
DAY 294 (CONTD.)
In which we meet Erszebet. And then we meet Erszebet.