Chapter 29. The Spat

08/03/07 • -1 min

“Hey Bob,” said the gravely voice beneath the granite floor of the building atop the acropolis.

“Yes Eddie?” replied the pillar in the back corner.

“Should we follow them?”

“What do you think Eddie?”

“Yes, we should.”

“Good thinkin’ Eddie”

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The side of the talking pillar broke away, leaving a human-sized chunk behind. Bob took a few cautious steps to get the feel of his latest incarnation. Pillar marble was much more comfortable than he would have imagined - substantial and cool, and surprisingly flexible at the elbows and knees, thanks to hinged joints with glassy marble sliding over glassy marble. The pinkish hue was a bit lively for his taste, but understated enough to get away with in a pinch.

Bob rolled his head to get the kink out of his marble neck. He looked down at his marble toes and hummed his waiting-for-Eddie tune. The song was tantalizingly close to one he had heard ages ago, but couldn’t quite get right, which pissed him off even more than waiting for Eddie.

“Dammit man,” Bob said, clicking his pinkish marble foot on the granite.

The floor heaved. Eddie surged forward to his feet and stepped out of the hole he left in the floor. His broad granite chest was smooth and polished, as were the front of his legs and his forehead, all portions that had previously been part of the floor surface. His rounded sides and back were raw jagged rock. His eyes were tiny black specks set deep into craters below his flat forehead.

“Sorry Bob. I was just enjoying the ceiling for a moment.” He pointed upward with his arm of granite, which made a squeaking and grinding noise, like beach pebbles squeezed together in a child’s palm. “I don’t get the allegory there.”

“Oh geez Eddie.”

“I'm serious Bob. Look at the lower left part of the triptych. Everybody’s hanging out in paradise, and there’s that dragon peeking out from behind a bush bearing an absurd medley of fruit.” Eddie put his granite hand to his brow. “I mean, holy crap, what kind of bush produces apples, berries, bananas, and scrolls tied up with ribbon?”

“Dude,"said Bob, "let it go.”

Eddie persisted in his analysis of the artwork. “Then on the lower right," he said, "there’s a battle. The bush is dead and the fruit are rotting, and the dragon is kicking butt, slaying soldiers like flies – what with the flames and the pointy tail and all. And finally at the top, some naked guy with a helmet and a sword has the dragon on a leash, and there are little bitty bushes growing everywhere.”

“Dammit,” said Bob, his massive shoulders sagging in frustration.

“How’s a naked guy gonna capture a dragon anyway," asked Eddie. "What’s he gonna do with it now? And even if he could . . . Ow!”

A shard of granite skittered across the floor. Bob was relieved to find from his backhand swipe to Eddie’s head that marble was the stronger of the two stones.

“Oh, man.” Eddie rubbed the jagged notch over his left eye. “Look what you’ve done. Now I’m all lopsided.”

“You were never very well balanced to begin with.”

Eddie’s beady eyes glistened as he moved with sad grinding footsteps to retrieve the bit of granite skull. Bob could be so snippy now and then. He slipped the shard back in its place above his eye, where it fit like a piece in a jigsaw puzzle. Then he walked in grumpy silence to the stairs. Bob followed behind, rolling his pink marble eyes skyward in their pink marble sockets.

It’s going to be tough to make up for this one, he thought.

The shard shifted a bit as Eddie started down the steps. He held it tight with a thick stony finger to keep the piece from falling off during his descent. He didn’t really care about the damage that much, but he wanted to make a show of how absurd Bob’s thoughtless swipe had made him feel.

They trudged down the steps for a while in bitter silence.

Halfway down, Bob said, “Look Eddie.”

Eddie stopped, turned around and sighed. “Yes Bob?”

“No I don’t mean ‘Look Eddie.’” Bob thrust his arm toward the field. "I mean look over there."

Eddie craned his granite neck to see where Bob was pointing. The man and the woman were nearing the hedge in the distance.

“Oh. Yes, of course.”

Eddie swung around and continued to the bottom stair at the edge of the field and waited. Bob joined him and they stood side by side for a moment.

“Look Eddie.”

“I’m on it Bob,” Eddie snapped as he prepared to step onto the grass.

“No I m...

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Previous Episode

Chapter 28. In Country

A tingling numbness started in Max’s his scalp and spread downward to meet up with the fuzzy burn that radiated from the toy car in his hands. Suddenly, both the sensations and the little car were gone. Linda too had disappeared. Otherwise, the room was exactly the same as it had been a moment before.

He walked around to the desk chair, slipped the rifle off of his shoulder and sat down. It would take a few moments for Linda to follow him, assuming that she would even end up in the same place. He swung his feet up on the desk.

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It was possible that the little car had taken her somewhere else, or to a different incarnation of the same place – perhaps a copy of the room without Max in it.

A moan from the other side of the desk confirmed she had made it through. She called his name in a trembling voice.

“I’m here,” he replied without rising from his seat. Assuming that the beetle affected her in the same way that it affected him, she should be fine soon. Everything had at least started according to plan.

“That was freaky,” said Linda, apparently still on the floor. “Like wrestling with a paint mixer.”

Max stood up and leaned over the desk to see her sitting cross-legged on the floor, her hair mussed but otherwise looking well enough.

“It feels more like an electric shock to me.”

“I guess,” she said as she massaged one of her hands. “I’ve never been shocked. Not with an electric current anyway.”

Linda grasped the edge of the desk and lifted herself up.

“What now?”

“I guess," said Max, "we do what I did last time.”

He thought back to the first Beetle episode, trying to recall each of the steps he had gone through before.

“Exit environment,” he called. The room transformed into the cluttered lab. He held out his hand. “Come on.”

He led Linda to the heavy metal door that opened from the lab to the outer office. The scene outside was familiar; Stephen’s desk, the gray waste basket, the cinder block walls covered in glossy gray paint. There was a subtle shimmer to the room and the items in it, as if at any moment they could suddenly change into something else. He kicked the trashcan. It tumbled over with a clang that was very much, but not quite, like the sound he would have expected.

The route to the exit that opened on the darkened parking lot was shorter than he remembered, and when they stepped into the night, his was the only car in the lot. It was parked under the bright spot of a street lamp.

He grasped the handle. A muted click and a beep indicated that it recognized his touch and that the doors had unlocked. Max nodded to Linda. She walked around to the passenger side and climbed in.

He handed his rifle to her as he settled into the driver’s seat. The seatbelt secured itself across his lap and over his shoulder as the engine purred to life.

“Home please,” he ordered the auto-chauffeur program. The car glided out of the parking space toward the street.

“Nice car,” said Linda, waving her hand at the dashboard.

“I guess, for an econo-box. I don’t really keep it this clean.”

Linda nodded soberly. “A little light on the details?”

“So it seems.”

The streets of the campus were uncharacteristically empty, and the route felt to Max to be distinctly abbreviated. He realized that enough details were missing from the road and landscape that he might have had a tough time finding his way home, if it weren’t for the automated guidance. Clearly, whoever had programmed the environment had left the reality turned down a bit too low. That must have been what made the trip home feel so odd the last time he’d been here, although it had been good enough that it hadn’t registered as anything more than mild disorientation at the time.

His car pulled up in front of the awning that sheltered the steps leading into his apartment. They stepped out and Max led Linda up the stairs. He stopped and turned to watch his car park itself in his reserved space. As at work, the lot was empty save his lone car. It was an absurd omission, considering that nearly all the residents should surely have been home in the evening.

They made their way up the steps to the second floor landing. Max turned the key in the lock, pushed open the door with the rifle-butt and found the apartment in the exact condition he remembered from the day of his abduction. The furniture and laundry piles, the television and his laptop, everything was just as before. A prickly cold chill swept over him as he ...

Next Episode

Chapter 30. Tourists

Linda and Max walked the cobbled streets in silence. The town was essentially as Max recalled it, with stone buildings on either side that were vaguely reminiscent of a classical ancient city, like a schoolbook rendering of the Roman forum during it’s heyday, or an artist’s reconstruction of the courtyards of Pompei before Vesuvius smothered it in ash. The streets, however, were no longer empty.

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People meandered aimlessly and milled about on corners lost in conversation. They were clearly tourists, dressed in everyday clothes that clashed with the classic architecture.

They were everywhere. Arched doorways opened through bright white walls to reveal them seated at long wooden tables with their arms draped over each others shoulders like long lost brothers and sisters at a family reunion. A little farther along, groups of them lounged on a wide flight of marble stairs that rose up from the street to an obelisk perched high at the top. Snatches of guitar music drifted down from a musician who, even from this great distance, looked out of place in a red and white Hawaiian shirt as he sat on the uppermost step and lazily strummed a guitar to an attentive audience of young lovers.

Linda stopped and cupped her ear to listen to the tune for a moment.

She dropped her hand to her side, and tilted her head as she scanned the scene. “Who are these people?” she asked.

“I have no idea.”

There was nothing particularly remarkable about them. They looked like any collection of people out to enjoy a lazy afternoon in the sun {{Pause=0.25}} – some in shorts and tee shirts, some in skirts. Others were wearing business suits, or jeans, or slacks. A few were clad in uniforms, as though they had just stepped away from their jobs as police officers, crossing guards, or sales clerks. If there was anything unusual about them, it was that there were no children, and no infants. People who go out on beautiful days such as this sometimes bring children. There were none here, or anywhere else on the street for that matter, as far as Max could see now or recall from their walk.

“Do you notice anything strange?” she asked.

“About the music?” said Max. “No.”

“Look at them up there,” she said, waving her hand broadly at the people on the steps. “Everyone is touching someone else.”

Considering the setting, it didn’t seem unusual to Max. It was perhaps a bit too idyllic, but no different than a spring day in the streets of Paris, Rome, or Atlanta.

“It’s all part of the sugar-coated illusion, I guess.”

“No it’s not just couples holding hands. They are all connected.”

Linda was right. It was hard to discern at first, but like someone pointing out a subtle pattern on a tiled wall or a lifelike shape in a cloud, it suddenly became obvious. Groups sat crowded together. Pairs of entwined lovers reached out to touch other pairs. Here and there, it was no more than one casually placed ankle against another, or an extended hand resting on an arm. In other places a woman’s head might lay on one man’s shoulder while her legs rested on someone else’s lap. Tight groups were connected by long chains of people brushing hair, massaging calves, or leaning back to back. It was an orgy of semi-intimate contact. The chains broke from time-to-time when someone stood and wandered off, sometimes up the stairs and sometimes down. Inevitably, the gap was closed as people on the steps turned and stretched, or another person shuffled in to fill the space. But as a rule, it was all one broad and connected web, from the musician high above to a girl with long red hair at the very bottom of the stairs who leaned back against the shins of the boy on the step behind her. She wore a white blouse and tight blue jeans on her slender legs, which she hugged to her chest in a kind of upright fetal position as she gazed at the sky.

“Yuck,” Max grimaced. “They’ve lost their sense of personal space.”

“It’s not very American of them.”

Max nodded absently. “Maybe they’re Italians.”

The people walking the streets as well appeared inclined to keep in contact with their companions, though not quite as closely or extensively as the crowds on the steps. The street people mostly stood in small bunches with arms linked or hands on shoulders. Others walked in two's and threes, holding hands as they drifted from corners to benches to cafes, always ending up literally in touch with one group or another. Now and then, a small cluster would make their way up the steps to blend into the lounging audience.

Lin...