But then his mind would circle back and he would recall that he was a stranger here. And the questions would crowd in. Obviously Laura possessed this ability, to step sideways out of the world, and by implication so did his mother, and you could take that a little further: maybe he did, too.
So what did that make them? A family of monsters? Wizards? Space aliens?
The weed had dried out his throat; his voice was husky. He said, “Do you think there’s anything strange about my mom?”
Emmett seemed nonplussed by the question. “Too soon to tell, sport. What do you think?”
Michael shook his head: it was irrelevant. “How about Laura?”
“I’m fond of her,” Emmett said guardedly. “Is that what you want to know?”
“No, no … I mean, what would you think if I said she was a witch?”
“I would say you had better reconsider your vocabulary.” Added, “Maybe I want my guitar back.”
“I don’t mean it that way. I mean, like—magic powers and so forth.”
“Magic?” Emmett seemed amused. “Your mom was right, kiddo. You should probably avoid this stuff.”
So Michael went for a walk up the beach, by himself.
He brought along Emmett’s guitar—his guitar now. He carried the battered Gibson carefully, mindful that the weed had left him a little off balance. He picked his way among the rocks for what seemed like an endless time, but when he looked back the house was still plainly in sight. He perched himself on a flat piece of shale where he could keep an eye on his aunt’s place, so he would know when his mom got back—but where he would not necessarily be seen—and played aimless quiet finger chords. The dope was obviously pretty strong. Parallel-world marijuana. He closed his eyes and stretched out across the face of the rock, letting the afternoon sun roll over him.
I am what my mother is. Jam what Aunt Laura is.
Inescapable logic. The “what” remained uncertain.
There was a tingling sensation in his extremities; his fingers seemed to tremble. Michael pressed his palms against the hot, sandy surface of the stone. Hot shale and beach tar. Hanging on, he thought. Anchoring myself here.
All an illusion, of course: the solidness of things, the realness of things. What was a world if you could drive a car out of it? And he recognized that this was an old fear, that he used to go to bed with this fear, the fear that he might accidentally dream himself off the planet.
It had never happened. Not by accident. But maybe he could do it on purpose.
It was a possibility he had never dared consider. Considering it now—even in the privacy of his own mind—sent shivers through him. The strange tingling in his hands increased; if it were a sound, he thought, it would be a high-pitched whine.
He whispered, “Do it.”
Nobody to hear him but the sea and this cloud-rippled sky.
Emmett’s dope had trampled his inhibitions. Roll with it, he thought. Why not? Why not now, why not here?
“Do it.”
He sat up and held his arms out in front of him. He was aware of the sound of the sea washing in against the rocks, a distant gull wheeling and diving. He pressed thumb against thumb, forefinger against forefinger, so that a circle of sea and sky was framed by his hands. Like a private TV screen, he told himself. The tingling revved into a sensation like electricity. Four zillion volts screaming along his spine, now concentrated in this circle of air. It was a heady feeling.
So what’s on TV?
He narrowed his eyes.
Imagine a storm there. A vortex, a whirlpool, and the whirlpool is the sum of all things possible, doors and angles opening out from this locus in a hundred thousand directions. Pick one out of the multitude. Feel it. Follow it.
He closed his eyes and opened them.
He looked between his fingers at a green and red world.
It might have been the same seacoast. But in the landscape he could see through the frame of his hands there was no ocean. Green was the green of algae, of decaying sea wrack, and it occupied a long plain fading to the horizon. Red was the red of oxides and dust, the lifeless shore. He shifted his hands toward the place the town would be and saw a crater that was like the Astrodome turned upside down. Figures moved in the charred rubble around it: wheeled figures, derricklike torsos of shining silver. Machines.
The machines were singing to themselves.
Change, Michael thought hastily.
He paged again through the book of possibilities.
A better world this time. A world off the cover of an old Popular Science: winged cars, domed buildings, obsidian piers that stabbed across the water. There was a harbor full of boats with blinding white sails. A banner flew from a flagpole yards away, red with black insignia, a leaf and a hammer in silhouette.
Michael was sweating but mesmerized.
Change, he told himself.
An empty shore this time, no boats or people, young seals playing in the tide pools. The seals put their noses up as if they sensed his presence.
Change.
Snow swirling down on dark, spiral structures of riveted iron… Change.
…men in furs building a fire… Change.
… a sea full of ships as big as cities… Change …
He stopped when he was exhausted. He fell back against the reassuring blankness of the rock.
His head was spinning.
It’s all really out there, he thought. All those places and a million others.
And it was not just seeing them. He could have gone there. Walked there across the thinnest of barriers.
He understood that he had a lot to learn. He was shotgunning his attention in a dozen directions, and maybe that wasn’t good. Moreover, he couldn’t toke up every time he wanted to do this—and he knew that he wanted to do it again. But at least he had proved this to himself: anything they could do, he could do.
He thought, It runs in the family.
No secrets anymore.
He turned back to the house in time to see Aunt Laura’s car pull up. His mother climbed out, already scanning for him, anxious as she was so often anxious these days.
But things had changed.
Michael stood up, held Emmett’s battered Gibson guitar by the neck, brushed the sand off the seat of his pants, and began the walk back home.
Chapter Six
1
Michael kept quiet over dinner that night. His mom was quiet, too, frowning into the broad Oriental bowl Aunt Laura had set out for her. It was Laura who did most of the talking, between chopping ginger or tending the wok.
She talked about her work. Laura was a potter, had a kiln in the big shed out back, did clays and porcelains that fetched big prices in the tourist stores out along the highway. She was thinking about maybe a new floral pattern… something simple. Classic. Oh, and the Chinese cabbage was fresh today. (Everything smells so good, Michael’s mom said listlessly.) And wasn’t the weather nice? (The weather was nice.) And so on.
But every once in a while Laura would look at Michael in a thoughtful way, and he was aware of it and began to feel self-conscious. He understood that his aunt’s secret talent was strong and obvious, once you knew what to look for—a kind of glow or aura^-and Michael wondered whether he had acquired the same look.