8/7/2000 Geoff Ashbrook
As they readied themselves, as Norman opened the hatch, they stood around thinking, wondering about the world they were about to explore. Friedrich held up a diagram and looked it over, and said, "Remember, we are going to be walking out into May third, two thousand and twenty six. Many of the people we will find may be alarmed to see us, we've been through all that, I'm sure you remember what to say and how to explain yourselves. If you run across an object that you would like to study further, grab it and put it in your sack. If someone tries to stop you, just tell them not to worry. How's it going, Norman? [pause] Ok, we're almost there. Put on your helmets." They all picked up their large metal helmets and eased them onto their heads. "Today, we are explorers," he said, "Tomorrow, is our home."
The hatch in the wall opened and the light blazed in through the portal, filling the dimly lit room so that Jenny realized that the walls had been green after all. She punched Linda in the arm and pointed. Eric tapped the side of his helmet and said loudly, "Ok, now synchronize your watches with the big clock on the wall." They all checked and all except Eric found that their watches were already in sync. There was a moment of plot tension, and one by one they walked up to the hatch and jumped into the blinding light. Laurie was the last to jump. She kept her eyes open as she plunged in then she felt her feet hit solid ground, and her hands felt someone's arm. When her eyes adjusted she found herself standing on a small crowded platform near the top of a telephone pole. Everyone else was looking down and when she followed she saw Gary, spread out face down in the middle of the lawn below. A man opened the door of the house and walked out onto the grass. He walked over to Gary, reached down and picked up the newspaper next to Gary's head, and then he stretched and went back inside. A large brown Lincoln drove by followed by a little yellow econo-coup that had the windows down and the voice of Ray Charles finding love under an umbrella.
Norman led the rest in descending from the small metal platform, down the pegs that stuck out from the sides of the pole, down to the sidewalk. When they were all down, Ron picked up a small piece of cement and put it into his sack. They all fanned out, walking slowly with their arms extended to either side, or in front of them and behind, their heads constantly searching in all directions. Ted went to check on Gary, but he had arrived too late. And after a moment of silence he dragged Gary to the curb where he laid him between a trashcan and a bag of yard waste. From there he looked up suddenly and ran across the street, nearly colliding with a girl riding a bicycle, and dove behind a hedge.
Some of the team members were examining the outsides of houses. Some were taking leaf samples of garden plants and weeds from the sidewalk cracks. Two of them were taking apart a car. One had a mailbox dragging behind her in her sack. A group of three were measuring the proportions of bodily extremities of residents of the neighborhood who seemed hardly to notice as they talked to one another about the price of gas going down and Ron Lundry's son's golfing accident. One was taking flash photos of every reflective surface he found, from windows to rear view mirrors to polished doorknobs and even the vaccination tags of local dogs and cats. Others had made it further down the street more quickly, to where there were a few stores.
Laurie walked up and down the isles waving something like a Geiger Counter over the vegetables and packs of playing cards and balls of twine, rolls of aluminum foil and cans of mechanically separated meat products. A young boy walked up to her and asked her what she was doing. After a long pause she said, "Shopping."
"I have a helmet like that, but mine's at home," he said. "Say," he said, "Are you new in town? Where do you live?"
"In the future," she said, and she walked to the door that led outside.
The boy followed her and said, right as she was leaving through the door, "Neat! Where in the future?"
"May fourth, two thousand and twenty six," she said.
"But that's tomorrow," he said, and paused. "What's it like there?"
Laurie took another two steps away from the store and looked up at the sky. After a while she said, "I wouldn't say no to some tea, if you've got some."
"IIIIIIIII think," the boy said winding himself around a pole that held up an awning, "That my parents have some." And he walked off and down the street and she tagged along after him.
Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Oliver had just infiltrated an office building and gotten to the fourth floor via an elevator full of other people. He began walking around and grabbing things off of bulletin boards and people's desks and shoving them into his sack. He even undid a man's tie while he was talking to another man at the water fountain, and put that into his sack. Then, just when he had gotten to the end of the hall, to a pair of frosted glass double doors, someone came quietly through one of the doors and handed him a stack of papers and told him to go to office 318, and to be snappy about it.
Also at this time, Jenny was moving through a farmer's market documenting everything rounded and green. And while inadvertently waiting in a line she turned to face the woman behind the counter just as she was next. "Yes?" The woman said, and sniffed. The lady took her hat off and pinched the sides and put it back on. Then she looked up and saw Jenny peering at her through the glass of her helmet. "Oh, my goodness." The lady said, covering her small lips with her fingers. "Are you with the newspapers? Wait right here, the corn is worth seeing." The women ran off and reappeared a few moments later with a gigantic ear of corn nearly two feet long. "I don't know what my husband used to grow it, I don't imagine he used anything different from last year, but look at the size of this, I know, and you should see the butternuts. I keep telling him he should try for grapes because he could always go the direction of raisins or wine if he wanted, you know? But he always gives me this look, you know? I can't figure them out. Out in the fields all day. Can't figure out which I married. Sometimes the plants talk more than him."
Jenny flipped her helmet visor up, "I think I know what you mean, I was just talking with Mathew yesterday and he was shrugging like I was speaking Swalish or like he was a little kid in a frump, I mean what am I supposed to do? You can't carry on a conversation by yourself."
"What I usually do," the lady said, "is, because I don't think their really listening, I cover up the sides of my shoulders with…" meanwhile the line at that stand was getting long enough to disrupt the lines at other booths.
Laurie and the boy were sitting on top of the dining room table with steaming cups of tea all over the tabletop. In the kitchen there were boxes and bags and strainers and filters and steepers covering the counter. Every cup and mug in the kitchen must have been employed. The boy was carving a stick with a kitchen knife as he sat, launching slivers of wood onto the carpet and sometimes as far as the doorway to the lounge, and there was much rejoicing. Laurie sat thinking about her parents, listening to every other word the boy said about a dog with brown fur. Then the boy put down the stick and looked at Laurie and said, "Oh, can I show you my friend Jessie?" And without waiting for a response he jumped off the table and ran out the door. She ran after him taking a cup with her and spilling most of it all over the floor as she rushed to keep up. After two blocks the boy slowed down and started talking really really quickly, and with grand hand gestures, about putting a potato in the microwave and then finding out there wasn't any butter.
Then they stopped in front of a house that Jenny realized was actually a large two-dimensional facade. He walked her around to the back where there were a slew of farm animals and a young man sitting on a sofa with a large espresso machine on the sofa next to him. The boy ran after a goat and began to tie ribbons onto its tail as it tried to flee. "Would you like to see Jessy?" the young man said.
"Sure," said Laurie.
"Ok," he said. And he reached over a long finger and pulled a little leaver on the side of the espresso machine. There was a rolling sound and two wrought iron doors swung up from under the bed of hay and pine needles on the ground behind the sofa. A chicken pecking up seeds and kernels walked right into the hole in the ground and squawked a little as it fell. The young man stood and held out his hand, and Laurie gave him her gloved one, and he led her to the hole and down some hardwood steps that shone with polish.
Once under ground there was light from torches and they traveled down a long hallway to either side of which were museum type displays of tables set for dinner behind glass. The floor was made of large smooth pieces of different kinds of stone. Laurie looked at the tables as she walked from window to window. Some were very low to the ground and some were very tall, with ladder-chairs set around them. One was just a giant piece of rectangular stone. Some were almost paper thin with round holes in the surface. Some were held up by finely carved thick wooden legs, others by thin aluminum rods, and others by fiberglass tent poles. Some had hand thrown ceramic plates and bowls atop, others had glass or plastic or metal. Some had paper napkins, others cloth. Some napkins were simply indistinguishable. Some bowls were filled with steaming soup. Some plates had obviously wax fruit and roughly hewn wooden vegetables. Some saltshakers had only a piece of rolled paper baring a picture of salt. Some bore the same baring only the word "salt." But the pepper, that was always real. The hall took many turns. A few were rather predicable. At some of the tables she saw, as she walked further, there were people sitting and eating. Some of them looked like they were from the past, some looked current. At other tables, people from the past and people from the present were all eating together. Then the young man stopped and held out his hand to stop Laurie from going any further. They were in the middle of a stretch of hall, and he knelt down to the ground and pointed to the floor and said. "Here he is."
Laurie leaned over, resting her hands on her knees, and saw what looked like a small green grass hopper. She then got down onto the ground and pulled out a large magnifying glass from her leg pouch. Upon inspection she found it to be a cricket with only one jumping-leg. The cricket was made largely of metal that was engraved so finely that were he larger he would have been as rich in detail as the vaulted ceiling of a cathedral that was covered with frescos. Jessie walked with a wooden cane and had nearly human hands at the ends of two pairs of his arms. His nose was smooth and lined with inlaid stones. He had more than the usual number of antennae, and they seemed to be moving all about collecting information. His eyes were faceted like kaleidoscopes, and each panel seemed to be a window looking into a different building of bustling workers, a movie screen, a large engine, people making love, boiling water, stars and star charts, countless games of every type and skill level whether played on boards or in the woods or over a whole planet or more, a glass of orange juice, a pair of shoes, people building a castle overlooking a wine dark sea, people weaving and unweaving rugs and shirts and tapestries on looms or by hand, insects weaving webs of species, a girl picking blueberries, a women getting into a car, a cat in a library, an omni-bus stopping at a corner and letting people in for the fare of a writing implement, a watch maker, a bread baker, a farmer, a trash collector, a glass of water, a tree seed, a couple holding hands, a rainy night, crystalline caverns, windshield wipers, and a match book were only a few of the things her eyes lit upon as he looked at her and then looked away. Jessie did not appear old. His limbs were smooth, and his joints adorned with minute unchipped gargoyles. Then he spread his wings, at which she gasped a little, and fluttered off down the hall and out of sight. Laurie looked at the young man, who shrugged and pulled a tin of licorice blobs out of his pocket and offered her one. But before she'd even decided whether to take one or not, the boy clamored down the hall behind her, grabbed her hand, and pulled her away from the young man with the tin saying excitedly that he found the tree he'd thought he'd lost.
Meanwhile, Oliver was putting down yet another load of papers, and was talking to the head of marketing about how close desks should be to the walls and how many times a month the windows were cleaned from outside. Mr. Jenkins patted him on the shoulder and rubbed a smudge off of Oliver's domey windshield with a handkerchief. "Do you think, that you might be able to pick out a bicycle for my kid." He said, "You see he's turning eleven this Friday. Little Tyke."