Emma stole her sister’s ID and check book to check in. She didn’t actually think it would work, but the cute kid behind the desk didn’t seem much like he gave a crap one way or another, so suddenly there she was, trying to ignore the bellied up cockroach on the bathroom tile, not knowing what to do with herself next.
Going back was out of the question, for the safety of all involved.
So she called Noah, for better or worse.
In sickness and in health. Etcetera.
The truth is, she hadn’t even spoken to anyone else since her condition started so he was the only person she could talk to. And since she had to talk to someone, Noah would have to do.
She said, guess what I did, ran away from home.
And when he told her how cool he thought that was and asked where she was now, she told him.
Motel Americana? he asked.
That place on the turnpike next to the Asian Market, across from that massage parlor?
Which was a couple towns over, true, but really just a ten minute bike ride, and could he come over right away because she had something really important she needed to tell him and she could only tell it to him in person because she had it to show him too. Room twenty-four.
Having to wait for a plausible enough bedtime so he could sneak through the window without raising his parents’ suspicion, it took him long enough to get there, and when he finally did show up, he had to kick-knock on the door because his hands were full with a box of Mike and Ikes, a bag of Fritos, and a can of Vanilla Coke that he got out of the machines in the little room under the stairs. He couldn’t go anywhere without eating something, Noah. Always junky crap like that too.
Emma was all too aware they were the picture of absurdity. He was short and a hundred fifty pounds overweight, at least, with flopping breasts bigger than hers, not even close, and she was on the abnormal side of tall and so toothpick skinny that she had to be taken out of school for a few weeks for so-called health reasons. Everyone said they were concerned that she was maybe going to pass out in the hallway because of malnutrition, which was, of course, a severe over-reaction, to say the least, so she spent the better part of three weeks as an outpatient at Fresh Horizons.
But whatever.
Hey, Em, brought snacks, Noah said, Not that you want any, right? Ha, ha. What’s up? waltzing right into the room, oblivious as always, and sitting on the bed pointing the remote at the TV saying, This is so fucking cool, you’re a refugee, probably meaning fugitive, but who cares, opening the Fritos.
She said, I’m the center of the universe.
Just like that. That’s how sick of it she was, how bad it had gotten, how desperately she needed to get it out.
He looked at her. Then grinned. Yeah, me too, he said, Turning back to the TV. Cheers.
I mean it, Emma insisted, Everything depends on me, she said.
Uh-huh.
I know it sounds… whatever… but it’s true. Everything in the world… she trailed off, surprised to be choking back emotion. Noah didn’t notice but she looked away from him anyway, up and out into a corner of the box that contained them. It’s true, she said, the center of the universe.
Yeah, well, Noah said, We all are, snapping a hard curled snack into his mouth, It’s Ancient History. In class with Mr. Neats. Remember the Greek? What’s his name, he said that-
Not like that. It’s, like, killing me. She waited for a response. None came. She said, Urg, then sat heavily on the chair and buried her face into the crash pad she made of her hands on the table.
Fuck, she said, You asshole. I can’t take it anymore. Can’t you see that?
Between the chewed fingernails of her forefinger and thumb, she pinched a scintilla of skin from the inside of her wrist causing the power to surge, the light in the room flaring and Sam and Diane diminishing momentarily into a small bright dot in the center of the television screen before leaping back to life.
It made her feel better. A little.
You have no idea what it’s like, Emma said.
What what’s like?
Fuck, aren’t you listening, man?
Sure. I am.
The center of everything, she told him, The lynch pin. It’s all tied together, all of this, and I’m the, I don’t know. The hub of the wheel. The knot. The intersection. The train junction.
Noah had no basis from which to formulate a response. He said, The Tootsie roll center of the Tootsie Pop?
If she had something to throw at him she would have. Instead, she ignored him. I suspected it for a long time, she barked at him, Since I was born, but now I know it for sure.
Okay.
She could tell he had no fucking idea. She said, You have no fucking idea.
Then looked hard into his wide face, the mulberry blossoms blooming on his pinchable baby cheeks and the brown whatever it was he was eating pre-Fritos and Mike and Ikes, some sort of chocolate, smudged on the soft cleft under his lip.
You don’t believe me, she said.
It’s not that.
I can prove it.
Uh-huh.
Fine.
Okay.
Which is when she killed the TV and the lights and parted the curtains. She told him come stand next to her and there they stood darkened before the window looking out, two more dissimilar human contours never before seen.
Out past the motel sign, the highway, and the massage parlor across the way, the moon sat low in the sky forcing thinnish clouds to glow nuclear yellow. The clouds were moving quickly on the wind though so Emma only had to wait a minute for them to clear and reveal the nearly full face of the moon, at which point she said, Now watch this, and stuck the proximal pharynx of her ring finger inside her lips.
A shadow appeared on the southeast corner of the moon, then crept slowly across its surface, washing it in the color of a carrot just pulled from the dirt.
Just as the eclipse became total, Emma pulled the finger out of her mouth causing the shadow to recede in the direction from whence it came.
Noah said, What the fuck.
Emma, for the first time in maybe year, smiled.
Do it again.
And with the infectious levity of a debutante performing a parlor trick for a gaggle of suitors, Emma stuck the actuating segment of the finger back into her mouth. The shadow again encroached on the heavenly body.
Jesus Christ, holy shit, said Noah. Then, in complete transgression of every unspoken human law of personal space, he plucked Emma’s finger out of her mouth and drew it nearer to him in order to inspect it. The moon returned to normal again.
Careful, you idiot, Emma said, You can really fuck something up.
It looked like a perfectly normal finger to him. He turned on the lamp and held it up to the bulb. Slightly skeletal, presently slick with saliva, but otherwise normal.
That is so fucking cool, he said, What else does it do?
It’s not just my finger. That’s the problem. Listen to me. It’s everything.
She moved to the bed and flopped onto it twisting mid-flop. Staring up into the infinite crevices of the popcorn ceiling she said, And everyone.
She built up steam in silence for a minute, then said, I don’t know why this is happening to me, if that’s what you’re gonna ask. My best guess, I’m cursed. Some kind of punishment for not appreciating the things that I didn’t deserve to begin with when I was born. I didn’t deserve that, not I don’t deserve this. Now everyone suffers.
And I walk around and I don’t see things, plural, anymore. You know that? I see one big thing.
I have this sensation, all the time, that I am being dreamt by the world and the world is being dreamt by me. I cancel myself out. You understand? I’m a figment of my own imagination. And it’s just watching me, this fucking everything.
She waved a hand at the room and, presumably, the universe that was holding it.
She said, It’s all just waiting for me to really fuck something up. Scrutinizing my every move. That little trick with the moon? Who knows, probably threw the menstruation cycle of an entire village off kilter. Or sent a school of fish in the South pacific bat shit crazy. The point is, I walk around on egg shells. Not touching any thing. Not touching everything, this goddamn everything, ridiculously glued together by some joker pretending to be God.
Noah said, What?
Emma wasn’t sure exactly what he was questioning, so she said, It doesn’t matter what. All of it. Skyscrapers and frogs, lucky charms cereal, all the idiots in school, traffic patterns, bunnies. What bunnies eat, what bunnies poop, what bunnies see, bunny feet and eyes and ears, and bunny dreams. Get it? You and me and everything we can touch or imagine is real. It’s all haphazardly sewn together to create this… illusion… and I see the little threads at the shoddy seams sticking out everywhere and sometimes, fuck, Noah, sometimes I’m afraid because sometimes I just want to pull the threads and see the whole fucking quilt unravel, just to prove that I don’t give a fuck what it thinks of me, or maybe to say fuck you for putting this fucking burden on me.
She told Noah about the rift she’d caused in her house, which he more or less knew about already anyway. The great divide she called it. All the things she had unwittingly done to her body, mind, and soul, writ catastrophic on her family unit.
Finally, she took a deep breath. Six blocks away a screen door slammed against its frame, disturbing the sleep of its inhabitants.
You can’t tell anyone, okay? Promise me you can’t tell anyone.
She sobbed softly, quietly, causing the suicidal unemployed administrative secretary holed up in the room down the hall to break into a cold sweat. The secretary thinking, I must be coming down with something, so walked the half block north to the gas station convenience store to get some cold and sinus pills.
Noah, meanwhile, stood over Emma and held out the box of Mike and Ikes as consolation. He said, I think you’re beautiful.
Emma sat up and held out a cup she made of her hand. Noah shook the box and a half dozen capsules, red, green, and a color that almost passed for yellow, tumbled into Emma’s hand.
Noah sat next to her on the bed. They chewed on the candies together for a long time. They tasted good to Emma.
After a length of time, she said, It’s not all bad though.
Which is when things got interesting.
Emma pulled from her knapsack the instruments of control she had collected over the past months, an array of miscellanea that could have been the spoils of shopping spree executed by a blind man.
They then commenced to experiment on Emma’s body, a process that continued throughout the night. It was harmless stuff at first, shenanigans, benign mischief that amounted to nothing more than teen pranks.
Baby oil massaged into the inside of her elbow, the cubital fossa, for example, threw a local reporter into uncontrollable hysterical fits of laughter in the middle of a live broadcast as Emma and Noah tee-hee-ed.
After an emergency cut to commercial break, Noah rubbed Vick’s Vaporub in Emma’s suprasternal notch drawing a sudden, fierce cold front to blow in from the north.
They made it rain up and down the entire northeast corridor with sugar water drops gently falling on her half smiling lips.
And with a feather gently applied to the longitudinal arch of her foot, they watched with unchecked glee the gas station attendant across the street break out into a Russian dance of joy, something likes of which was performed by cousin Balki weekly on Perfect Strangers.
Of course, these were the events they witnessed firsthand. Emma’s agency over her own body was still nascent at best, and so some of the inevitable hyjinx they conjured had gone unnoticed by them. It would only be in the following days when she read about it in the papers, for instance, that she’d realize that the slathering of honey behind her right ear lobe had caused grape jelly to flow from faucets in Sydney, Australia and its surrounding suburbs. That the lambs wool they had rubbed across her lower back washed over a dinner party at the Old Winter Palace Hotel in Egypt causing a spontaneous orgy to break out among the erstwhile chaste French and otherwise international dignitaries and their respective spouses.
Still, they were careful to keep the experiments mild so not to cause outcomes too extreme in nature, whatever they might be.
But that tact changed at some point near 3 AM and Emma didn’t know how or why exactly. One thing led to another. A darkness passed over Noah’s face. It got a little strange.
Soft swathes of fabrics, soothing balms, food ingredients and home remedies gave way to pins, lighters, and razors, and by the time the sky grayed dawn, a veritable calamity had engulfed the area surrounding the motel.
Traffic lights controlling perpendicular flows of traffic fell in sync with another causing horrific accidents. The river flooded. Husbands turned on their wives, wives on their husbands, children on their parents. Fires broke out in pockets throughout the town.
The police forces was taken completely off-guard. Sirens screamed everywhere. The hospitals were thrown into chaos.
When the earthquake happened, the effect of an act Emma would try mightily to forget in the coming days, Noah ran outside in complete disregard to his personal safety in order to immerse himself in his doings. He was gone for nearly two hours and Emma, thoroughly rattled and physically spent, eventually drifted off to sleep.
She woke to the morning clawing around the edges of the curtains, the continuing sounds of calamity outside, and the first pangs of remorse.
Noah had returned and she could easily see that he was losing his shit. He was pacing back and forth on the already threadbare carpet, sputtering insane diatribes the likes of which she’d never have guessed could come out of his mouth.
She’d made a big mistake bringing him into it. She knew that now. It was too much for him to handle.
His words raced to keep up with his thoughts, trampling over every grammatical speed bump in their way. He’s acquired a fresh cache snacks and in between popping skittles, he spit out at Emma things like, Do your realize what this can do for us, and How this will change our lives, peppered with words like finally respected, and attain peace by fear, and rise to power, and immortality.
As far as Emma could gather, the gist of the scheme that was developing was that he be an an agent of sorts for her. He’d keep her well hidden and go out into the world do their bidding. If the demands weren’t met, he’d return to her.
Why not here? he said, At least to start, cracking open a sweating can of Dr. Pepper and taking it half of it down in one continuous guzzle. This motel is good a place as any, he said, It’s perfect actually. No one would suspect the most dangerous weapon in the world would be holed up in a place like this.
Emma knew what she had to do. She told him, Sounds good Noah. I have to go to the bathroom where she performed a complex maneuver involving a pair of tweezers, scalding hot water, and umbilicus, colloquially known as the belly button.
After wandering for three or four days, the authorities picked Noah in Grove Park sitting under the netless basketball hoop, grinning vacantly, and bereft of any memory of what had happened to him since freshman year. He’d eventually regain his faculties, but not the memories.
Emma chalked it up as collateral damage. She was free.
