Chapter 42

Isaac Milton

“So these are the stars, huh?” said Jacob Hollow, gazing up at the ceiling of Isaac’s room. Jacob reached for the light switch without looking and flipped it on and off a few times.

“Stop that,” said Isaac from his computer. “It’s not dark enough anyway.” Daylight streamed in through the windows; the stars’ glow-in-the-dark effect was barely perceptible.

“I noticed they don’t move,” said Jacob.

“Well yeah they’re glued to the ceiling. Or, like, stuck with sticky tack.” Isaac double-checked to make sure he had everything he wanted backed up onto the flash drive. He ejected it from his laptop.

“No, I mean the real stars,” said Jacob. “They don’t move here.”

“Huh,” said Isaac. After spending less than an hour with Jacob Hollow, he had already learned that sometimes you just had to not think too hard about anything he said. Isaac closed the Banana Quest 2 window. He’d keep up on his phone. Later.

“Your home too?” said Jacob, responding to someone else. “I guess that explains a thing or two.”

Jacob talked to himself a lot. Not like regular people talking to themselves, but as though he could hear someone else speaking. Jacob argued with this inaudible voice sometimes.

Isaac slipped the flash drive into his pocket, closed the laptop and slid it into his backpack. He reached for his water bottle and saw the white eyeless bird perched there next to it, standing on a sticky note that had the phrase “ Dorkus isaaci ” written on it. The bird changed shape and size when he wasn’t looking, but always took the form of some kind of bird. At this time, it had the form of a small songbird.

“Charlie,” said Isaac.

“Huh?” said Jacob.

“I’ll name the bird Charlie.”

“Huh. All right. Well I don’t think it sounds very stupid…okay, I’ll ask him. Hey, Isaac.”

Isaac grabbed the water bottle. “What?”

“Why that name?’

“Charlie Parker. Famous jazz musician. His nickname was ‘Bird.’ He got it because he ran over a chicken, then stopped to pick it up to eat later.”

“Huh.”

“I was originally thinking ‘Arcturus,’ after the star. But that seemed a little pretentious.”

“Ah. Wait, your stars have names?”

“Yeah of course they do. I mean the little ones have names that are just like coordinates and numbers and stuff ‘cause like who’s got time to name a billion stars? I always thought they should just outsource the naming, like on the internet or whatever, but you know then we’d be having names like…” Isaac stopped because the first few that came to mind all had swear words in them.

“They want to know more,” said Jacob after a moment.

“Who does? The voices in your head?”

Jacob nodded with complete seriousness.

Isaac continued going through his room accumulating Items of Potential Necessity. Spare glasses, change of clothes, his sheet music notebook, Eric’s CD… “I know you keep saying we don’t have much time,”

“We don’t.”

“—but who are these voices? And how can you not know that the stars don’t move? And what the heck is Black? And what are you ? And what is that ?” He gestured out the windows toward the blue northern sky. He paused to take the lens out of his pocket and check the sky again through it. Yep, still there. Apparently, Jacob could see it just fine, sans lens.

“Umm…” said Jacob. “Okay, that was a lot of questions.”

“The voices first.”

“I think I was made to be a little insane,” he said, which struck Isaac as the ideal self-affirming statement. Jacob tilted his head as though listening. “Shut up,” he said. He turned his attention back to Isaac. “But these voices are real. I think. But they don’t want to talk to you. Um, yeah except about the stars. They’re pretty interested in that.” Jacob looked out the window, at the invisible crack in the sky. “The rest…you’ll figure it out. I actually think that’s what you’re for, narratively speaking.”

“What?”

“I think you are going to play the role of the one who figures everything out. So don’t worry about it. For now, we just need to keep you and Charlie away from Abraham Black until the Cascade begins and you can get out.”

“Right, I’ve got to, like, escape the end of the world?”

“Pretty much.” Jacob sat on the floor, right on top of some probably-clean-enough socks that Isaac had been about to pick up.

“And this bird—this angel—will help me get out?”

“Yup. We gotta find a door. Or you can die. That’s a way out too. Not one I’d recommend, though. Risky.”

Isaac watched Jacob closely to see if he was joking. Jacob snapped his fingers while flicking his hand forward. A tiny marble of light darted forward, ricocheted off the floor and wall and back to Jacob. He caught it by snapping his fingers again.

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“Isaac,” said Jacob, “you ever wonder if you’re a character in a story?” Snap…snap. Snap…snap.

“Sometimes. It’s a pretty common trope in fiction. Because fiction is made by people who like thinking about stories, I guess. Like me. Self-aware characters can be a thing.” Isaac sat down on his bed to just chill for a minute and get used to the sight of this travel-worn guy in his room playing catch with himself with a drop of light. Charlie hopped over and pecked playfully at Isaac’s sleeve. Isaac cautiously stroked the tiny bird. It seemed to enjoy it.

“No, I mean you personally,” Jacob continued. “If you were in a story. How would you know?”

Isaac shrugged. “I might not. Maybe we’re all in a story. Actually, I do kind of believe that. That we’re all like characters in a big story where God is the writer. But it’s not quite like that. It’s more like God is the GM, in control and deciding what happens, but we’re the players so we still get to determine how we react and the decisions we make.”

“God.” Jacob’s voice was flat. He sat perfectly still. “Shut up,” he said. “Not you, Isaac.” His voice, normally energetic, now sounded dead.

After a moment he raised his head and gazed at the far wall of Isaac’s room. “I only know the Genesis Machine. And it’s not God.”

Isaac turned his head to look at the Bible on his nightstand. Eh. Not now. But it would go in the backpack. A tense silence began to coagulate. Isaac attempted a conversational reset. “I don’t know what difference it would make if I were in a story or not. If I never knew…I mean, it would be like being in the Matrix, right? Like, how would it even matter to me?”

Jacob began snapping light off the wall again. “I’m from a story, you know,” he said. “I’m a character who left his story.”

A light went on inside Isaac’s head. “And Black is one too?”

“Yup. Same story.”

That made sense. One of the most disturbing things about Black—something that had taken Isaac a while to figure out—was the way in which he seemed so archetypical . Like a mashup of “bad guy” characteristics. The way he looked and moved sometimes like a cartoon, as though he’d escaped from one of Eric’s anime. Hitting the uncanny valley directly at its nadir. Plus, he and Jacob both had some kind of powers. Darkness and light (classic).

“But I can be more than that,” continued Jacob, and now his voice moved with growing passion. “Just as Black has become more than he was intended to be. I can change things. I can make a difference. That’s why I’m here.”

They sat in uncomfortable silence for another minute or two, with only the sounds of Jacob’s snapping and some little chirps from Charlie. Isaac, at least, found it uncomfortable. Maybe Jacob was just fine.

“We’ve got to talk to Dwayne before we go,” said Isaac.

Snap…snap.

“He’ll know what to do.”

“Right,” said Jacob. “And who’s this Dwayne?”

He’s my friend. He’s a mountain. He’s as frightening as Abraham Black, but in the opposite direction.

“He’s this guy,” said Isaac.

“Huh,” said Jacob. “Well, just make it quick, okay? No. I don’t care.”

Snap…snap.

“Is that a spacecraft?” asked Jacob suddenly. “They want to know.” He snapped, and a grey circle appeared on the wall they faced, singling out a NASA poster which depicted the Apollo 11 rocket launch. The poster had some sticky notes on it, but the image was clearly visible.

“Yeah,” said Isaac. “I’ve wanted to be part of NASA, that’s the space agency, since I was a kid. I’ve always wanted to someday be the one piloting one of those spacecraft. That one there was carrying the first humans to ever set foot on the moon.”

“Huh,” said Jacob. “Yeah, they think that’s pretty cool.”

Isaac reached over and snagged a half-drank bottle of orange juice from his desk, at the far western extent of his arm’s reach. It was warm and therefore a little nasty, but at the moment Isaac didn’t care. He felt a little as though he were basking in weirdness: sitting in silence with Jacob Hollow as the latter bounced light off the walls and muttered an argument with the voices in his head. Meanwhile Abraham Black was out there somewhere, maybe hiding in the shadow of a crack in the pavement like tar or diffused into the darkness of the interior of the grain bins. Waiting to kill. And also meanwhile, the northern sky was cracked like the viewport of a cheap submersible and only he and Jacob knew it, and Isaac didn’t want to think about what would happen if it broke.

But it was all strangely peaceful; the classic (or cliché?) calm before the storm. No, that wasn’t a cliché. It was undoubtedly a Real Thing that Happened Indiscriminately in both fiction and reality. The clam before the storm. The image of a shellfish lying on a beach as a hurricane rolled in ominously from the distant dark sea came to mind. Heheh. Stupid. The bad jokes, Kate would say. Isaac had all of them, she would say.

“Are you ready?” asked Jacob. “We should go.”

“Yeah,” said Isaac, suddenly hesitant to just…leave. He realized that he had been delaying. “Do you have a plan?”

“A plan?” asked Jacob.

“Yeah, like a car, or…?”

Jacob looked baffled. “I was just going to walk.”

“Walk? We’re in the middle of nowhere!”

“Isaac, pretty soon everywhere is going to be the middle of nowhere.”

“What?” Isaac cleared his mind, and the answer was simple. Dwayne. “Okay, I know what to do. We go to Dwayne’s place. He’s got a truck. Sort-of. Mr. Hartman will know what to do.”

The snapping abruptly stopped. “Heart Man?” Jacob asked. “Dwayne is…the Heart Man?”

“Well, that’s his name, yeah. Although it’s ‘Hartman.’ One word. Without an ‘e.’ Why?”

“Nothing, nothing,” said Jacob, although there was something odd about his expression. “Yeah, that’s a good idea. We should go see him. Quick.”