By Josh Seligman
Written in 2012 for a class
Dale Tuttle tossed the tray of chicken pieces into the oven, boiled the Jasmine rice, and stir fried the green and red bell peppers, carrot rings, and green beans. He enjoyed cooking, so long as it was every once in a while.
Tonight his friends were coming over to visit his new house. It was actually Sally’s idea. Dale had considered declining hosting them, but remembered that he hardly ever had friends over, and was always satisfied when he had done so. Dale took out his pocket journal.
I might even tell them the truth, he wrote.
The first of his guests to arrive were Sally and John. When he saw them through the living room window walking by the front gate, Dale squared up the white pillows on the three-cushioned couch, and adjusted the glass globe on the coffee table so that whoever was sitting on the couch would have a clear view of the Pacific Ocean.
“We come with gifts,” said John, holding out two-liter bottles of ginger ale. Sally had brought a basket of oranges from her garden.
Robbie arrived a few minutes later.
“Where’s your gift?” John asked.
Robbie, standing in the doorway, held out his hands. “Gift?”
“I brought soda, Sally brought some fruit. Why didn’t you bring anything?”
“You didn’t have to bring anything,” Sally said.
“It is invisible,” Robbie laughed.
The oven timer beeped, the frying pan wailed, and the rice pot lid rattled. Dale had planned for them all to sit at the round table in the kitchen, but at the last minute, decided it would be more comfortable if they sat in the living room with the plates on their laps instead. His friends agreed. John snagged the plush recliner next to the bookshelf, Sally and Robbie sat on the couch, and Dale sat on the wooden chair by the living room desk.
For a while, they ate without saying anything. Sally looked around the living room, at the tree-like lamp next to the bookshelf and the short, sunny lamp on the little cabinet by the front door, and, hanging above her, a painting of a ship leaving or entering a port. “Well, Dale, it’s great that you have your own place now. It’s looking very nice.”
Dale scratched his head.
“I’m actually a little surprised you would buy a house, though,” Sally said. “You don’t seem like you’re ready to settle down yet. It’s like you’re still secretly waiting to go on some adventure. Not that it’s a bad thing. I mean you can have a lot of adventures here.”
“Maybe,” said Dale. “I don’t think I have quite settled down yet though.”
“Owning a house is a step in that direction,” said Robbie, cutting his chicken.
Dale cleared his throat. “I suppose I should mention now that I don’t really own this house.”
“Oh, so you’re renting it?” said Sally.
“Nah.”
“You stole it?” said John, pouring himself a glass of ginger ale.
“The most accurate way to say it would be ‘I’m house sitting.’”
John burped. “That’s it?”
Sally set down her multi-vegetable-piercing fork. “Why didn’t you say so before?”
Dale pulled out his pocket notebook. “It’s complicated.” From his other pocket, he brought out a stack of folded sheets of paper. “Would you believe me if I told you this house is owned by a quantum physicist?”
“I hear a story coming on.” John sat back in the recliner. “It better be worth our time.”
“Well whether it is or isn’t, here goes.”
About two months ago, Dale had received an e-mail from a scientist named Max Guillory asking if Dale would be interested in house-and-cat-sitting for two weeks. Dr. Guillory was looking for someone who worked at Pacific College, since it was in the neighborhood, and Dale, who taught linguistic anthropology there, had been recommended by the department assistant to Dr. Guillory, one of the reasons being that Dale didn’t have a family. Since Dale’s car had broken down, it certainly didn’t hurt for him to live closer to work for the time being, so Dale accepted.
After a month, Dr. Guillory hadn’t returned. (And, Dale realized early on, Dr. Guillory didn’t even own a cat.) He hadn’t left any emergency contact numbers, so a week after Dr. Guillory was supposed to return, Dale considered calling the police. The day he was considering it, a post-dated letter arrived in the mail from Dr. Guillory. It told Dale that in the third cushion of the white sofa was a key, with which Dale was to open the garage door. In the garage, Dale was to open the third drawer of the second desk and read the letter that would be sitting there.
Dale opened the garage door to find the room as busy as a laundromat. In the middle of the room was a kind of pyramid. Its hexagonal base consisted of wooden beams almost as long as bumpers of compact cars. At each corner of the hexagon rose two narrow steel planks leaning towards the center but not touching one another. With blue, red, and green wires, the pyramid was connected to black computer towers reaching the roof by the left wall of the garage. Beside these towers were bookshelves just as tall, full of books such as Riebelov’s Paradox, Gyration Theory, and Thrive and Survive: The Happy Scientist’s Diet, as well as journals.
By the opposite wall sat two desks. The desk closest to the garage door was metallic and carried an old PC monitor, on which was running code. The second desk was wooden and on it were a few sheets of blank paper weighted by a sleek, black pen. Dale sat in the cushioned chair in front of this desk, opened the third drawer, and found a letter.
Mr. Tuttle.
You’ve found my secret, the work on which I have spent nearly half my life. My thoughts, my hands, my accidents and dead-end equations, and, ultimately, my rewarding surprises culminate in this room. Two collaborators initially worked with me on this project, but they were incompetent and mischievous, so I abandoned them. That makes you my only witness.
I have not returned within two weeks for one or more of a variety of reasons. I obviously cannot conceive of them all, but here are three probable ones.
- My return has been delayed. There is no way to know this for sure, but is that not how most, if not all, things are?
- I am stranded. I suppose there could be worse places to be.
- I have perished! If you somehow learn that I have perished, or if you decide to leave my house before discovering whether or not I have perished, then please find my children and give them the box that is in the first drawer of this desk. The key to the drawer is in the third drawer of the desk to your right.
At this point, John got up to put his empty plate on the coffee table. “This is pretty good. I almost believe it.”
The note went on to explain that Dr. Guillory was a quantum physicist who had hypothesized that the universe was a conglomeration of rotating spheres. But rather than rotating in three dimensions of space, he believed these spheres rotated in at least four dimensions of space, so that objects on the spheres, such as planets and stars, consistently overlapped with other objects without actually touching—at least not the way three-dimensional objects normally touch. In other words, it appeared, to whomever could see such an occurrence, that the objects occupied the same space at the same time.
Dr. Guillory believed that these orbits repeated predictably. After 14 years, he discovered how to detect the presence of certain overlapping celestial bodies, and then actually found one. Every five to six weeks, he observed, a celestial body of similar mass to Earth overlapped with Earth.
“So he went to another planet?” Sally said.
“If it worked out as planned, then yes,” Dale said.
If Dr. Guillory was indeed stranded on a parallel world, the note said, he would likely need Dale’s help to bring Dr. Guillory back. For although he had constructed a passageway to the other world, Dr. Guillory had not known if, once he got there, he could replicate the passageway to bring himself home.
Of all the professors I researched, Mr. Tuttle, you were the one who seemed most disposed to help me should need arise. I am aware that this is an impossibly heavy burden for you. I cannot make you help me, and you are not expected to. If you decide not to help, I ask that you keep my machine hidden. No one else must use it. If you do choose to help, I ask that you remain in my house as long as you can. I may find a way to send you a message indicating what kind of help I might need.
Beyond,
Max Guillory
By the time Dale finished reading the letter and telling the story to his friends, the sun had set, and it felt as though the sky were closing its eyes and breathing softly.
“So,” said Robbie, “that’s what you’re doing here? Waiting?”
Dale nodded.
“Can we see the machine?” said Sally.
“I’ve been debating whether or not to show you. But I’ve decided it’s too dangerous. I can’t risk you—”
John laughed. “Dangerous!”
“You’re not serious about all this—are you?” said Robbie.
“I’m not really trying to make you guys believe me,” said Dale.
“Then what are you trying to do?” said Sally.
“I guess I’m telling a story.”
“Maybe it’s not a story,” Sally said. “Maybe it’s a test.”
“You could look at it that way, if you want to.”
“You want to know what I would do?” Sally said. “I would live my own life and not be here waiting for someone’s message, even if he’s trapped on another planet. You’ve been living here for two months, and you can’t even settle in because you never know when a secret message might come and tell you what to do next. You have to decide for yourself what to do. You get to decide. You’re living in someone else’s story. I would live my own story.”
“But what if you heard back from him?” said John. “What if tomorrow he sent a letter and said ‘The gateway is open and I need your help, and by the way, you get to go to a new planet?’ Would you go?”
Sally looked at the globe, and then out the window. The sky was now fading from a blush on the horizon to a deep, wide pupil, behind the silhouettes of palm and eucalyptus trees framed by the shadows of a stage curtain. In the garden outside the window stood a crooked juniper.
“Maybe,” Sally said. “But not because he needed my help. I mean that might be part of it. I would mostly go to see someplace new.”
“I wouldn’t,” said John. “Too many papers to grade. As much as I love traveling to new places, I like the thought that someday I’ll be coming back. And when I return, I want a job to return to. As for helping this scientist, he put himself in this situation. He’s endangering you, Dale, if he asks you to join him. That’s a big risk to take.”
“So Dale,” said Robbie, “what will you do?”
“Good question. I wish I knew. Let’s hope I don’t have to decide anytime soon!”
Sally grunted. Dale brought out a plate of ginger cookies and four mugs of tea. John and Sally began talking about work—John taught theology at the college and Sally was a photographer—and about people important to them. Dale stared around them and smiled or nodded occasionally. When no trace of the sun remained in the sky, Robbie excused himself; it was time to put his children to bed. Soon Sally and John left together.
After cleaning the dishes, Dale sat at the living room desk to write. While his story had seemed to momentarily engage all three friends, he wrote, it eventually appeared to serve mostly as an existential, unprecedented conversation warmer, at least for Sally and John, who said Dale had too much time on his hands to come up with such a tale. Dale realized he had told them the story to get their advice, and while it was good to hear Sally and John’s thoughts, Dale was still confused.
Robbie, though, hadn’t offered his own opinion. For nearly the rest of the night, in fact, he had sat in silence. Had the story touched him that deeply? Robbie’s silence reminded Dale of the night Dale and his friends were stranded in Iowa City, Oklahoma, sitting in silence around a bonfire after their host Joe had told them a story.
That road trip had changed Dale’s life. Dale was a sophomore in college, and when his friends invited him to join them on a spring break road trip to Kansas, he declined.
“I’ve got homework,” he said.
“You can bring it with you.”
“I can’t read in a car though.”
“We can read it out loud, then.”
“I can’t listen in a car, either.”
“Okay, so don’t do your homework.”
“Then what will I do?”
The week before his friends left, though, Dale surprisingly felt like he wanted to go. It took him the week to decide, and he eventually said yes. It was a lot of fun, and he finished most of his homework, and when they were driving home through Iowa City, the car broke down and they were stranded for a week.
That is a story of its own, but the important part for this story is that an older man named Joe saw them stranded at the car shop and invited them to stay at his home until the car was fixed. On the night before the car was fixed, Joe built a bonfire in his backyard, and as they ate roasted beans and home baked bread, Joe told them a story from the beginning of the world.
“When the valleys were not yet carved and the dogwood trees were as tall as your pinky fingers,” Joe had said, “Hawk carried the world on his wings. At first Hawk enjoyed this honor, but soon became tired, so Hawk set the world down and rested.
“Tortoise saw that the world had been set to rest and that Hawk had become tired, so Tortoise said, ‘I have a shell on my back and strong legs to keep me going. Why can I not help Hawk and carry the world?’ So Tortoise carried the world.
“When Hawk awoke, he flew down to where he had put the world, but it was not there. He flew for many days but could not find the world. Then the Good Wind said, ‘Hawk, what are you looking for?’
“‘I am looking for the world that you gave me to carry,’ Hawk said.
“‘I will give you a pair of sharp eyes to find the world,’ said the Good Wind.
“So the Good Wind gave Hawk sharp eyes, and Hawk saw the world from far away. He flew to it faster than the waterfall and saw that Tortoise was carrying it.
“‘Tortoise,’ said Hawk, ‘why have you taken the world from me? It is my job to carry it.’
“‘I found it resting, and saw that you were tired. The Good Wind gave me a shell and strong legs, so I thought I would help you by carrying the world. Do you want to carry it again?’
“‘Yes,’ said Hawk. But while Hawk had been resting, the world had changed. Trees grew thick and spread their seeds. Mountains now held up the sky. Animals multiplied and people built weapons and houses. Hawk tried lifting the world, but found that it was too heavy to carry. That is why to this day Hawk circles in the sky. Hawk follows the world, and with sharp eyes looks to see where Tortoise and the world are walking.”
The story of Hawk and Tortoise had awakened something in Dale. He became curious about such stories, and the people who told them. He realized that he had had this curiosity for much of his life. And that is how Dale decided he would study linguistic anthropology.
The day after Joe had told them the story of Hawk and Tortoise, their car was fixed, they thanked Joe for his hospitality, and began their drive home.
“So are you glad you decided to come?” Robbie asked Dale.
“Yep. It’s been a good trip with you all.”
“If you hadn’t come, you wouldn’t have gotten stranded in Iowa City,” said Sally.
“Nope. And I wouldn’t have heard Joe’s stories.”
“Well we’re not home yet,” said John, looking as far as he could down the highway.
Through the side window, Dale saw two hawks circling in the sky. He wondered if, by the time he returned home, home would be too heavy for him to carry.
At the desk in Dr. Guillory’s living room, Dale had fallen asleep. Suddenly, he heard a quick, light slap in the distance. Dale went to the hallway, where he saw a soft light clapping along the floor like a bonfire, coming from the garage. He unlocked the garage door. The whole room was illuminated by sheets of light waving from the machine. A gentle wind blew from the light, as if the light and wind were one, shuffling loose objects on the bookshelf and the papers and pen on the wooden desk. At Dale’s feet lay a thick, round, black pen. He pulled out his notebook.
Strange pen on floor. Could be from other--
While writing, Dale’s pen ran out of ink. He picked up the pen on the ground and twisted it, but no tip emerged, only resistance. He untwisted the pen and found a note rolled inside.
Mr. Tuttle. If you’re still there, you’re a saint. I need your help. You have no more than 5 minutes to walk through. Bring the box for my children. It will be dangerous. But there are people here you must meet. MG
Dale stared into the planes of light and saw blurry shadows. He looked down and saw that his own shadow filled half of the room. Then he leapt to the wooden desk and wrote a note on one of the blank sheets of paper and left it there. He opened the third drawer of the first desk, grabbed the key, unlocked the first drawer of the wooden desk, and lifted a wooden box the size of a dictionary. Dale returned to where he picked up the pen from the ground and hurled the box into the light. The box was swallowed in shining fog. Then Dale walked into the shadows in the light, and the whole room vanished.
