Passenger

“I think I know what you’re saying, Con.”

“I keep thinking how we need to put the pieces of the lens back together,” he said.

We sat there for a few minutes, not talking, until it was light enough to see.

The thing in the sky had faded to just a ripple in the dusty blue of morning.

Co

I started the engine, lowered our windows, and turned on the air.

“We should go somewhere else to do this, Con. Let’s not do it on the street here.”

“I was thinking that, too.”

*   *   *

We drove south on the 101.

We headed for the two-lane pass that led out to the ocean, toward Cambria. Along the way, the side of the highway was clogged in some spots with cars and motor homes filled with people who’d brought out their telescopes or cameras to wonder at the thing in the sky.

Most of them had pale and weary expressions of panic on their faces, like they were witnessing the end of the world, or maybe an alien invasion.

When I thought about it, I supposed they were right on both counts.

Co

We passed a rest area that was completely filled with motorists. Some of the cars there looked like they’d been packed up with household belongings.

“Look at that shit,” Co

“I don’t know, dude. Maybe they’re scared.”

“Of a fucking Christmas-tree light in the sky? I could show them some shit.”

“Yeah. We both could.”

*   *   *

I pull the truck off the highway and follow a lightning-bolt string of rusted barbed wire along a single-track path of wheel ruts cut into the drying summer grass.

The roof scrapes beneath the clawed fingers of low-hanging oak branches.

Another Jack would worry about scratching his paint.

At least there is shade here.

Co

We’ve done all this before, and it always feels the same: We are standing on a cliff, looking down into deep black water, daring each other to jump first, watching.

Watching while your best friend falls and falls.

I get out of the truck, leave my door open, and a bell keeps ringing to say that I’ve left my key in the ignition.

Ding. Ding. Ding.

Co

“I hope nobody ever finds us,” I say.

“This place doesn’t exist, anyway,” Co

Ding. Ding.

I have the glasses in my right hand.

It feels like being at the front of the line, waiting to get onto the next roller coaster car that stops.

“It exists. But we don’t belong here.”

“We fucked up worlds, Jack.”

I think about the thing in the sky, the jagged edge of the Marbury lens.

What can I say?

Co

Ding. Ding. Ding.

“I don’t know.”

“Look. Let’s try to remember what I said, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I will find you, Jack.”

“Okay.”

“And, Jack? If something happens. I mean, if, let’s say, we end up with one of us in hell and one of us in the Bahamas…”

Co

I say, “Fuck that.”

Then Co

He backs off.

I raise the glasses.

Ding. Ding. Ding.

“Bye, Con.”

Part Three

THE UNDERWORLD

thirteen

How much time?

A second? A year?

There were neither clocks nor calendars in Marbury. They had gone away, disappeared along with certain words.

I lay on my side, curled up on the stained and bare mattress that tilted downward in the ruins of a bedroom that was mine in some other world.

It was mine here.

I watched the window. The rain stopped; there was no dampness beneath the sill, only dust. When I moved my hand, the glasses fell from my fingertips and onto the floor.

Clack.

This is real.

How much time?

I had things to do.

Get up, Jack.

I sat up, waited for the blood to stop swirling in my head, and took stock of what I was—this Jack.

The new and improved Jack Whitmore.

I turned my hand in front of my eyes, looked at my aching palm. Still bandaged, dry like parchment paper; the wound felt tight.

How long has it been?

I was dressed in the splitting dungarees, the prison uniform I’d had on when I woke up on Ben and Griffin’s garage floor. My boots were the same fraying things that showed open windows onto my filthy socks, and I wore the loose, rusty T-shirt I’d taken from Qui

It was stupid, but I suddenly felt so lonely and isolated. I almost wished the kid was there with me.

I shook my head, put my feet down onto the floor.

I nearly stepped on a finger-scrawled SETH written in the dust on the floor between me and my broken mirror.

“Seth?”

I listened. Nothing.

I bent down and picked up my glasses. The third lens—the smaller green one—was still flipped over the large blue eyepiece. Things moved and swirled in the glass. I had to shut my eyes and feel with my thumb until I could pivot the lens away, out of place, and jam the glasses back inside their sock.

“Con?”

Nothing.

I pictured him standing there in the shade of the oak forest, listening to another Jack’s truck go ding ding ding because the key had been left in the ignition, on another world where people had been lining up on the edges of the highway to witness some unexplainable apocalypse.

“Con?”

I had to believe he made it here, too; that he had things to do, and that everything was going to be okay now.

I had to believe that.

When I stood, I noticed two things that had changed.

Things keep changing because you fucked everything up.

The door that had smashed open when I first came into my room was now closed. The upper hinge was completely disco

And Seth Mansfield was standing in the corner, watching me.

I said, “Seth.”

That was all. We just stared at each other. And of all the things slightly changed, moved just a bit, between there and here—the Glenbrooks that weren’t Glenbrooks and Marbury, fucking Marbury—Seth looked exactly the same: pale and scrawny, barefoot, without a shirt, his torn pants held up by some kind of braided cord, his dirty yellow hair that hung down into his eyes.