CHAPTER EIGHT
The Forgotten Memory
I
Iddo’s departure mirrored his arrival. The sync. The gears of time ground to a halt. Then, after an unmeasurable length of non-time, they ground back into motion, leaving Ez with the disoriented feeling of awaking from a dream. She stared, along with Wilburn and Gramma, at the empty place where Iddo had been standing. “You can see the far side of the universe from anywhere…” she echoed. “What do you suppose he meant by that?”
“What does Iddo ever mean by anything?” Gramma said irritably. She jiggled some hongos in her palm like dice, then tossed one in the air and caught it deftly in her mouth. It seemed to be National Eat Flying Food Day or something. That puzzled Ez too. Why had Iddo stolen the weenies? Not that she begrudged him them in the slightest—after all, they’d been more charcoal than meat, besides which, she and Gramma owed him big time for the hongos and the Astral bangle. What bugged her wasn’t the loss of the weenies themselves, or even the rudeness of the gesture, but the inconsistency of it—the inconsistency of Iddo. What kind of a person doled out priceless magical treasures and called you Ms. Totkins, and then turned around and stole your lunch? It just didn’t make sense. It hadn’t even been a good lunch! What kind of a person, given the power to bend time and space, would actually choose to eat burnt weenies?
Only a nutcase.
It was a deeply unsettling answer. Gramma had warned her that Iddo was insane, but Ez had taken this for antagonistic hyperbole. She hadn’t really entertained the prospect, because she’d always thought of insanity as a disease, a malfunctioning of cognitive equipment, and thus by its very nature disempowering. But if Iddo, the most empowered person in the world according to Gramma, was insane—and Ez was pretty much convinced of it—well, what did that say about the world...? What did that say about sanity...?
Stolen story; please report.
“I think,” Wilburn said, “what Iddo meant was, like, everywhere always is here and now at the biggest level, so there kind of isn’t any far side of the universe, because the whole universe is wherever you are. It’s called um… um…” Wilburn squinted and made a groping gesture in the air above his head, “…omnitemporal presence, yeah.”
Ez and Gramma looked at him. Then they looked at each other. Ez didn’t need psychovatry to know that they were thinking exactly the same thing. Like hell we’re letting Wilburn be that lunatic’s apprentice! It would ruin him. Iddo would pass on his insanity—it had already begun! The question was, could it be stopped? Could anything stop Iddo from doing exactly what he pleased, or as he would put it, following the Path? Not likely, Ez felt. But if there was one person with the stubbornness to do it, it was Gramma Fark, and this time she would have Ez’s full support… for however much that was worth.
“Right.” Gramma slapped her thigh. “Out with it, boy. You tell us every last word that rascal said to you, or thought to you or whatever, and don’t pretend you two weren’t chitchatting on the Astral Plane the whole time, because I know psychovates, and I know Iddo. And don’t go skipping around in time the way you usually do either. Start at the beginning and go straight through to the end, and don’t leave out anything in the middle, okay?”
“Okay…” Wilburn said, “only I’m not sure which part was the beginning. There was a bunch of stuff I kind of totally forgot about for a while, but then Iddo helped me remember… but now it feels like it happened in a different order than it did.”
Ez and Gramma exchanged another glance, full of dark significance. “Fine,” Gramma said, “tell it backward, then. Tell it anyway you like. Just make sure you tell us everything.”
“I’ll try…” Wilburn said doubtfully. “There’s one part I can’t tell you about, though, and I can’t tell you why. And I can’t tell you why I can’t tell you why. And I can’t tell you why I can’t—”
“We get the picture, Wilburn.” Gramma sighed heavily and rummaged in her pocket for her pipe and her tobacco pouch. Ez envied her the habit all of a sudden. For the first time in her life she wondered if perhaps she too should take up smoking—no, of course she shouldn’t—but it would be nice to have something at a moment like this, a little ritual, a button she could press, marked Feel Different For A While. They were in for a rambling tale of madness, Ez just knew it, and the longer Wilburn stood there looking lost for where to begin, the madder she suspected it would be. At last, she said, “Why don’t you start with Iddo showing up? I’d like to hear what that was like from your perspective. It was very strange timing, remember, because I was just asking Gramma—”
“Oh yeah!” Wilburn jumped in excitedly. “So, what happened was, you guys were talking like normal, right? But then all of a sudden, Mom goes, What’s a yyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…”