To the Vanishing Point

15

They waited in vain for a sunset. If there was a sun hereabouts, it worked longer hours than their own. Rather than coming from a source in the sky, the light of this country was evenly distributed, like particles suspended in water. Eventually they slept despite the ceaseless illumination.

Frank was dozing when Steven’s excited voice woke him.

"Dad, Mom, everybody, wake up!"

Frank’s eyelids rose ponderously. "What is it? What’s the matter, kiddo?"

"It’s Burnfingers! He’s coming back!"

"Steven, no!"

Ignoring his mother, the boy threw open the door and dashed outside. Everyone in the motor home rushed for the windows.

Steven stood on the grass that grew half an inch above the ground. He had his head tilted back as he stared skyward, using his cupped hands to shield his eyes. Everyone else looked up as the body of Burnfingers Begay seemed to coalesce out of thin air.

As they watched, he shrank and solidified. Soon he was no more than an Everest-sized Burnfingers, then hillside-size. His legs became opaque as he filled up the space where he’d been. Finally he was as he’d been before. He picked up Steven and tossed him into the air, catching him easily. Steven was still laughing as they walked back to the motor home together.

"I got big," he said in response to the questions on their waiting faces. "I just kept growing and growing and spreading myself out." He glanced at Frank. "Better to grow extra arms, I think."

"We thought you’d evaporated or something," said Alicia, relieved.

"Or come apart," Flucca added.

"Nope. I just got bigger. Than this place, than this world, than this whole reality line. I got so big I could see several reality lines at once. There’s a lot to see in just one reality. I got so big I could see right into our own reality. It looks real fine, let me tell you, and damned if it didn’t make me a little homesick.

"When I started to come back into myself I made sure to take a good look at part of all the realities I could see. Particularly the roads." He turned and nodded toward the windshield. "I know which line leads to your Vanishing Point," he said to Mouse.

"Did you see anything else?" she asked him intently. "Could you see how the Spinner was doing?"

Burnfingers shook his head. "I guess that was too far up the road. All I could see was that it was the right one. All the roads led to the same place, but this was the one that got there the quickest."

"All realities end there," she murmured. "That’s why it’s called the Vanishing Point. Are you sure that’s what you saw?"

"Sure I’m sure. It was impressive, let me tell you. Enough to drive a person insane. But since I am already crazy it did not bother me at all."

"I’m just glad you’re okay." Frank extended a hand. Burnfingers slapped at it and Frank returned the high five. He didn’t even mind when Alicia gave their startled guest a surprise kiss and hug.

"All right, then. We know which way we have to go to get where we’re goin'. Let’s go there and get this taken care of."

"What is really amusing," said Burnfingers, "is that the road to the Vanishing Point leads right back through Los Angeles."

"Now that’s funny." Frank was feeling better than he had in some time. "That’s the last place in the Cosmos where you’d think reality would be strong."

"A matter of perception," Mouse commented. "Many realities twist back on themselves. I’m not surprised I have to return to where I’ve been in order to get where I wasn’t. It may even be possible for me to leave you at your home and continue the rest of the way myself."

"Let’s not worry about that now." Alicia patted Mouse’s hand reassuringly. "We’ve come this far together. If we have to, we’ll see you through the rest of the way, too."

"Don’t promise so quickly. Once back among familiar surroundings, you may not be so eager to give them up."

"One thing at a time. Let’s get back to L.A. first."

Alicia looked past Mouse and Burnfingers. "Wait a minute, Frank. Don’t forget Steven."

"That’s right." Wendy retreated to look out the door. "He’s still outside, Mom. I’ll get him."

She walked to the doorway, stopped to stare. Her little brother was standing again where he’d gone to meet Burnfingers, but he wasn’t alone. He was talking to angelfish. A whole school of them. They swam in close formation around him, a whirlpool of orange and black and red and yellow fins and scales. They were talking to him, and he was talking back.

When Wendy said nothing, Alicia finally rolled down her own window. As soon as she saw what was going on she leaned out and yelled, "Steven! Get back in here! Right now!"

Frank leaned over his wife, the small hairs on the back of his neck rising when he saw his son engulfed by fish that were swimming in air instead of ocean. He rushed to the door.

"Steven! You heard your mother. Get over here!"

The boy turned toward the motor home, peering between the circling fish. His tone was apologetic. "Sorry, Dad. I can’t. See, I’ve been talking to my friends and I’ve gotta go with them."

Frank stood frozen in the doorway, gazing, dumbfounded, at his precocious, overweight son. "This isn’t a game, kiddo, and we don’t have time to play. We’ve got to be on our way. We’ve got to get home."

"Oh, I know that. You guys go on ahead and I’ll catch up."

"Catch up? What do you mean, catch…"

The sentence died away. He found himself standing and staring, without a net of reason to support him. Ascending at a sharp angle, the school of angelfish climbed into the western sky. Wearing a broad, innocent grin, Steven dog-paddled furiously after them.

"Steven!" Alicia had left her chair and crowded in the doorway beside her husband. "Oh my God, what’s happening! Steven, this is your mother! You get back here right now!"

The boy had caught up to the school, was surrounded by softly waving fins. He called back apologetically. "I can’t, Mom and Dad. I’m really sorry, but I have to go." He was at once astonishing and comical as he hung there, treading air. "See, these guys are my friends. They wanna help me find something. Something important."

At any moment Frank expected his son to plunge earthward. He was a hundred feet above the ground and had to shout to make himself heard.

"See," Steven was telling them, "this is the place where everybody finds out what they can do, what they’re really about. Dad, you can grow extra arms, and Mom, you’re just Mom, only more so. Mr. Flucca can copy himself, and Burnfingers can get as big as he really is, and Wendy just stays scared a lot, and Mouse — Mouse sings, just like she’s been telling us all along. Now it’s my turn, but I’ve got to go with these guys." He gestured at the milling, impatient school. "They’ve promised to show me the important stuff, but I have to go with 'em."

"Steven, you aren’t flying anywhere with a bunch of maybe-fish to see anything." Frank tried to make himself sound stern and threatening, but he was too frightened to do a really good job of it. "We’re going right now, and you’re coming with us."

The boy shook his head. "Sorry, Dad. It’s okay, they’re friends. I’ll catch up. I’ve gotta go with 'em. I’ll come back as soon as they’ve shown me how to do the stuff."

"What kind of stuff?" Alicia didn’t really want to know but didn’t know what else to say. There was no way for her to go and get him.

Steven’s grin got even wider. He sucked in his belly and puffed out his chest. "I can obulate!"

With that he turned and resumed his dog-paddling as the angelfish convoyed him in steady procession toward the clouds.

"Steven, Stevie!" Frank jumped out of the motor home and started running, trying to chase the fleeing flock — or was it school? — on foot. "Steven, come back here!"

"It’s all right, Dad." The little-boy voice was confident but very faint now. "Everything’s gonna be okay. You guys go on. Don’t worry about me, and tell Mom not to worry, too. I’m with my friends."

It didn’t take Frank long to run out of breath. He slowed, stopped, bending over and sucking air as he rested on the grass that grew above the ground. He lifted his gaze and stared until the school became tiny specks surrounding a slightly larger speck. Then there was only a single speck.

Then there was nothing.

Forcing down the lump in his throat, he turned and walked slowly back to the motor home. They were all waiting for him, silent. He ignored everyone’s eyes but Alicia’s.

"We have to go after him," she said softly.

"How?" It was a frustrated growl. "This is a Winnebago. Not a spaceship, not an airplane."

"Well, we have to do something. We can’t just leave him here." She was looking past him toward the horizon.

He leaned against the doorjamb. "What do you suggest we do?"

She had no reply to that. It was left to Mouse to comment. "We must go on." The words were painful in the stillness of the day. "Remember, if we linger too long in any one place it will enable the Anarchis to locate us. Then all will be lost."

Frank turned to her, his tone bitter. "What about my son?"

"Little warrior did not look to be in danger." Burnfingers, too, was staring into the distance. "He said they were his friends. He was very certain. I think they are, and I think they will take care of him."

"But he’ll be marooned here if we drive off! He’ll be stuck on this reality line with no way of finding his way home."

"He seemed sure he would." Burnfingers looked down at his distraught companion. "Always children have to trust their parents. I think maybe this time you are going to have to trust him."

"Trust him? Trust him to what? A bunch of refugees from some airborne aquarium?"

"I think they are more than what they seem."

"What," asked Alicia numbly, "is obulating?"

No one knew. No one even had an idea. Not Burnfingers Begay, not even Mouse.

"It must be something really unique or special for him to leave his parents over it," Flucca observed.

"He’s just a kid," Frank snapped. "He doesn’t know what’s going on here. He doesn’t know what anything’s about. To him it’s all a big game."

"No, Dad." Wendy put an arm around her father’s shoulders. She was looking out past him, in the direction her brother and his friends had gone. "He knows it’s not a game. Steven’s, like, a pain sometimes. I guess all little brothers are. But he’s pretty smart. He didn’t think Hell was a game, and I know he didn’t think that place we just left was a game, when we were in that cage, and I don’t think he thinks it’s a game now."

She was interrupted by a distant rumbling, the throaty purr of something darker than hunger on the prowl. Flucca scurried to the rear of the motor home to peer out the back window.

"It’s getting dark in back of us, folks, and it doesn’t look like nighttime that’s coming up on us."

Mouse looked. "The Anarchis. It’s too close, much too close." She turned bottomless eyes to Frank. "We must go now. If we’re trapped here it will be the end of everything, including hope. The end of my mission to help the Spinner, of your chance to see your son again, of all of us. Do you know anything about the Unified Field Theory?"

"Huh, what?" Frank shook himself, blinked, turned away from the far horizon that had swallowed his boy.

"The Anarchis is kind of a unified field. It’s Chaos and Evil personified. If we don’t get away from here fast we won’t do your son any good at all."

"But if it’s coming this way," Alicia said, "and Steven’s still here…"

"I think he’s gone." Mouse nodded toward the horizon. "With his friends. And I don’t think he’s coming back to this spot whether you’re here or not." It was a cold thing to say, but with the entire sky behind them blackening rapidly Mouse had no time to lavish on tact. "He’s gone away with his friends, obulated or whatever it is they do. The only way you can help him now is by helping yourselves. We must go on."

"All right." An uncaring numbness had taken hold of Frank. His son was gone. Having accepted that, he found he didn’t much care what happened anymore. Not on this reality line or anyone else’s. All he wanted was his boy back.

But he was intelligent enough to realize he was out of his depth, caught up in a maelstrom of implausibilities beyond his or anyone else’s experience. Without any knowledge or ideas of his own he had to rely on people like Mouse and Burnfingers Begay to tell him what to do. Mouse said they had to go on. So he would go on. He climbed inside and moved purposefully toward the driver’s seat.

Alicia followed closely. "Frank …?"

He shook off her hand, grimly inspecting the instruments. "Mouse says we can’t stay here. So we’ve got to go."

"If we leave this reality he’ll never find us. We’ll never see him again, Frank."

He looked up at his wife. He couldn’t smile. His mouth wasn’t working properly. But he tried to sound reassuring anyway. "We don’t know that. Just like we don’t know anything else here." He started the engine. At least something responded to his wishes, he told himself.

"Frank, he’s only a ten-year-old boy. If he doesn’t know where he is now, how will he ever know where to find us?"

"Maybe the damn fish will show him. How the hell do I know?" Seeing the hurt on her face, he softened his tone. "Look, sweetheart. We don’t have any choice. We can’t stay here. Even if we could, I don’t think the kid’s coming back right away anyhow."

"Dad’s right, Mom." Wendy tried to comfort her mother, who was on the verge of tears. "I don’t like leaving the little brat here, either, but like Mouse says, we don’t even know if he’s here anymore. This is the craziest place we’ve been yet. Maybe — maybe he’s on his way home already. Maybe that’s where the fish took him. He might even be waiting for us." She made herself sound cheerful. "What if that’s what obulating is? Finding the way home?"

Alicia tried to reply but choked and could only nod.

Frank put the motor home in gear, spoke without looking back over his shoulder. "Which way, chief?"

"Straight ahead. First turn to the right," Burnfingers told him calmly.

Hoping Alicia wasn’t watching, Frank leaned slightly forward and looked to his right as he pulled out onto the road. There was no sign of Steven or his patrimonial pisceans. Tricky little bastards, he thought furiously. They swim aboard, act curious and friendly, then make off with his kid.

No, that wasn’t right, he told himself forcefully. Steven had left with them voluntarily. His friends, he’d called them, and seemed to mean it. He’d always enjoyed flying. Frank prayed fervently that wherever his son was and whatever he was doing at that moment, he was enjoying himself.

It was very quiet inside the motor home. As they accelerated, the ominous thunderheads and querulous lightning shrank behind them. Mouse stood in back watching the clumsy, deadly Anarchis recede. It was tenacious but undisciplined. They could not go around it, but as long as the motor home functioned, they could outrun it. It only suspected their presence here, smelled their intentions. Like a blind killer, it would follow remorselessly, intent on stamping out the hope they represented. They had to continue to stay two steps ahead of it. One wrong step and they would all perish.

Along with everything else, she knew.

The Sonderbergs sat side by side, speaking little. They kept their attention on the road ahead, no longer interested in their constantly changing, surreal surroundings. They thought solely of their vanished son.

He’d sounded so relaxed, so confident, Frank mused. Much more sure of himself than any ten-year-old had a right to be. In spite of Mouse’s and Burnfingers’s reassurances he still had to wonder if he’d ever see his boy again. He found himself regretting all the times he’d yelled at him, usually over little things, inconsequentialities. Now he’d lost him to a world of permanent inconsequentiality.

The highway climbed a grassy knoll before splitting on the other side into a second tangle of curls and twists. Burnfingers Begay confidently pointed the way, remembering the view from his earlier near-cosmic vantage point. Frank drove on, through holes in mountains that weren’t solid, avoiding solid holes that drifted in the midst of insubstantial mountains. Climbing vertical lanes that passed between clouds and dived down into dark earth.

They drove a corkscrew of a road, around and around, making half a dozen loops without falling from the summit of each before the highway straightened out. Mist began to close in around them. Frank switched on the motor home’s fog lights. They helped some, but the poor visibility forced him to slow. There’d been no sign of the Anarchis for several hours, but he had no intention of stopping and waiting for the soup to lift. Besides, there was no place to pull over. There was only the road and the fog.

Long, thin shapes with multiple wings were dimly glimpsed rafting through the grayness. They had bright yellow bodies stiff as rulers and tiny, unmoving black eyes. They didn’t so much fly as paddle through the sky. Later they passed a pair of cow-sized creatures that resembled the deep-sea nightmares Frank had once seen in a National Geographic documentary: all mouths and guts. But they had no teeth. They were consuming the fog, taking huge gulps of the stuff. Wherever they bit, a perfect sphere of clarity appeared. They paralleled the motor home for ten minutes, eating lazily, before falling behind.

The road commenced a gradual descent. It also narrowed, which forced Frank to shift into low and kiss the brakes repeatedly as they negotiated one tight turn after another. After a while he could smell the burning brake shoes, a sharp acrid odor which drifted up through the center console.

"Better get to the bottom of this soon, or find a place to pull off," he grumbled. "We have to let the brakes cool down."

"Maybe there?"

Alicia pointed. The fog was rising. Trees materialized out of the mist surrounding them. They looked like normal evergreens. Their roots were planted firmly in the ground, not an inch or so above it. As the mist thinned further they could make out a sweeping panorama of high snow-covered peaks and deep tree-lined canyons. A noisy river rushed down the gorge that paralleled the road. The pavement beneath the motor home’s wheels had given way to dirt somewhere back in the fog, Frank didn’t recall when or where. Now it straightened and turned to two-lane blacktop.

As he accelerated tentatively, another car whizzed past in the opposite lane. It held another family. Buick, Chevy, he couldn’t tell. They were all so interchangeable these days, and it went by fast. Not too fast for him to make out a mother, father, and a couple of kids in the back seat. It might have been the Sonderbergs, except all four were five years younger.

It was followed in a couple of minutes by a battered pickup. Each bruise and paint scrape was a wound of reality. The fog had almost dissipated completely.

"Which way?"

Burnfingers’s eyes narrowed as he surveyed the intersection ahead. "I don’t know. I did not see this place. My concern was to find the right road, but I did not have time or vision to follow it to its end."

"Turn right," Alicia said suddenly.

Frank eyed her in surprise. "Don’t tell me you’ve developed some kind of special sensing ability."

"N-no." She hesitated. "It’s just that right feels, well — right."

When Burnfingers said nothing, Frank shrugged. "What the hell. I’ve taken everybody else’s advice."

He made the turn, found himself back on concrete highway. In a little while they found themselves atop an overlook. The road continued on, descending to the vast basin ahead in a series of neat switchbacks. A large truck was grinding its way laboriously up the steep grade.

Ahead lay a vast alkaline lake. A thin ribbon of white, the highway skirted the southern shore before disappearing between two volcanic slopes, like a bit of dental floss cutting between a pair of molars. Something was wrong, Frank told himself. Everything looked too right. His brain was still unwilling to trust his eyes.

Alicia was equally contemplative, but Wendy was bouncing up and down by the time they pulled into the little town that clung to the highway beyond the lake. She read every sign and advertisement aloud, as though claims for fishing lures and ads for chicken dinners were declarations of conquest.

It was so heartbreakingly ordinary it left Frank dazed. He walked through the dream in comparative silence, pumping gas from a real pump, downing fast food at a McDonald’s. The teen who took their orders marveled as they polished off three normal dinners apiece. The sole objection came from Flucca, who was disappointed they hadn’t been able to find a Taco Bell instead.

"Don’t worry," Alicia told him as she finished her second Big Mac and drained the last of her vanilla shake. "I’ll introduce you to the right people once we’re back in L.A."

"A dream," the dwarf mumbled around a mouthful of fries. "My own reality, the city of the holocaust, all a dream. Only this is real. I proclaim it so!"

"We can all relax, then." Frank wasn’t too tired or relieved to be sarcastic. He tapped his fingernails on the Formica, inhaled the smell of salted potatoes and hot grease. "It’s real, all right. It’s hanging on too long for it to be anything else. We’re back. We made it back. Back to reality, our reality. Back to normalcy." He smiled at Alicia, then looked to his right. His smile faded. "Only you aren’t normal. Are you, Mouse? Or whatever your name is."

She sipped daintily at her Coke. "What is normal?"

"Why do you have to answer all my questions with another question? I hate that."

"Steven’s not here," Alicia reminded him. "That’s not normal, either."

"No. It’s not normal and it’s not right."

"When I reach the Vanishing Point," Mouse told him, "everything will be made right again."

"Meaning Steven’ll come back to us? You can promise that?"

She just looked at him. It was not an answer.

They learned they were in Lee Vining, a little tourist town that catered to fishers and hikers. It sat on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, not far from Yosemite National Park. A straight drive of six to eight hours would put them back in Los Angeles Back home.

It meant driving through the desert again, a different part of the same Mojave they’d traversed when starting out, so long ago, on their interrupted journey to Las Vegas. They would pass uncomfortably close to Barstow, to the beginnings of bad memories and disconcerting images. No one paid any attention to them as they exited the restaurant and returned to the motor home.

"What will you do when we reach Los Angeles?" Alicia spoke as she settled back into her seat.

"Continue on my way, with or without you," Mouse replied. "We have shaken the Anarchis for a while. I feel confident."

"When we picked you up you were going away from L.A.," Frank reminded her.

"Sometimes to get where you are going you have to return to where you have been. Traveling a Moebius strip, you would call it. Not all roads take familiar turnings."

"I don’t understand," said Alicia.

"I barely understand myself. The way is difficult and complex. The Vanishing Point does not lie on a map, but rather beyond it." She put a hand on the other woman’s shoulder. "Do not worry about your son. He’s all right. I’m sure of it."

"I wish I could believe that. I wish I could believe you. I’d feel better if I knew what this obulating was."

"Someday I think he’ll explain it himself."

Only exhaustion prevented Frank from driving straight through. After what they’d been through, what they’d experienced, it was a joy to eat ordinary food, to use plain cash and receive change in kind, and to talk with people who looked back at you out of eyes that did not glow. Even Burnfingers Begay, who insisted he needed no sleep, confessed to being tired.

So they spent the night in the town of Mohave, luxuriating in the sappy, reassuring programs and loud commercials on the TV in their room. Not even the rattle of the freight trains that rumbled down the tracks that paralleled the main street could prevent them from sleeping deeply and soundly. Nor could Frank’s unease at closing his eyes one more time in the desert.

He awoke with a start, to what he thought was growling outside their door. It was only a couple of college students starting up their aged, reluctant sedan. He slipped out of bed and cracked the door of their room. The morning smelled of desert dampness, old boxcars, oil, and grease, and coffee. All was as it had been when they’d turned out the lights and gone to sleep, with the addition of sun. He felt almost human as he gently woke Alicia.

He made himself linger over breakfast. Waffles and bacon, eggs and hashbrowns and toast. Burnfingers offered to pay for his own, but Frank grandly refused the proffered doubloon.

It was evening when they finally entered Los Angeles. A bad time to be on the road, but Frank didn’t mind. There were only two kinds of traffic in Los Angeles anymore anyway: rush hour and not quite rush hour. He delighted in the sight of the overloaded eighteen-wheeler that crowded him from behind, cheered the Corvette that cut him off in the slow lane. The freeway at rush hour was an old friend newly revisited, harbinger of normalcy, a great rough pet sucking in the sharp odor of unleaded gas and exhaling huge gouts of smog. The lungs of the city breathed around him, and he knew he was home at last.

All that was missing was a familiar, whiny, complaining face from the back of the motor home. Steven’s continued absence was proof that memory and imagination were not the same. Everything he remembered had happened. In his mind’s eye he saw his son happily paddling away into the sky accompanied by a school of oversized angelfish. Not the last image one expected to have of one’s youngest child.

What had been so fascinating? What pull had been strong enough to draw him away from his family? The fish? Obulating — whatever that was? Steven’s farewell had been a confident one. "I’ll be okay!" he’d insisted. How could he be so certain? What ten-year-old knew anything of the future and its prospects? Frank wondered if he’d ever see the overweight little rug rat again.

Of course, he reminded himself unsparingly, they could all four of them just as easily be dead. Or worse, if Mouse’s stories of the Anarchis were true. At least father, mother, and daughter were alive and together instead of chained forever in Hell, imprisoned by thugs in an otherworldly casino, or undergoing the torments nuclear-devastated mutants might devise.

Not at all the thoughts to have while cruising down Artesia Boulevard on a bright, sunny summer morn.