December 9

Pete was walking on a lonely path, through a farmer’s field.  He heard high-pitched squeaks.  He couldn’t see where they were coming from.  He turned his head this way and that, looking, and listening.  It sounded like a bird cheeping.  The path was bordered by a row of trees, evenly spaced at what looked like about four foot intervals; their branches were winter-bare.  There were no birds in the trees to account for the high-pitched squeaks.  Behind them, he could see the freshly tilled soil stretching out into the distance, and through the leafless branches: the blue sky.  No birds.  Maybe it was a chipmunk.  Sometimes chipmunks squeaked.  He took a step towards the tree.  The gray-brown branches were thin, and sparse.  No chipmunks.  But he still heard the high-pitched noise, and it was getting louder.  He turned around.  Was it behind him?  No.  He was alone.  He turned slowly three hundred and sixty degrees.  Completely alone.  And the noise was still getting louder. 

He looked straight overhead.  

A flock of birds – higher in the sky than he had been looking.  They were beautiful.  Black against vivid blue.  Flying in formation.  Three V’s stretching across the sky.

Then they dove. 

They dove straight for Pete.  There were dozens of them.  The squeaks got louder and deeper as they flew lower – more squawks than squeaks now.  The birds were thrilling and terrifying, but still beautiful.

Flying, and squawking.

First in the distance, low over the brown earth, and then flying at him, flying past him – still beautiful.  

They stayed in formation.  He could see their beaks, and their eyes, even the barbs of their individual feathers; they were that close!  He could have touched them, if he had wanted to, but he stood very still, his hands at his sides.   He had to concentrate, if he wanted to remember to breathe.  They were awe-inspiring.  There were so many of them, and the whoosh they made as they swooped past -- and they kept going past him, and past him, and past him.  So many of them.  

And then, just as they were all clear, they swung around and came by him again, as if trying to herd him somewhere.  Pete had to go with them.  He turned, to follow.  

And then he woke up.

*   *   *

Pete met Brittany on the bench before school on Monday.  They were both eager to read the next installment, but first she wanted to see his pictures. 

She really liked them.  She asked if he had had any dreams.  He laughed.  “Just a bunch of birds flying around me, why?  Are you into interpreting dreams now?”

         “Of course not.  It’s no big deal.  Let’s just read.”

         They read.

December 9, 2004

"Look at that log over there, Mom.  That's where the Blindmice live, isn't it?  This is right where we were when you said, 'I wish there was somebody who could help us,' and then we were, you know, at the pigs' house.”

Akelmeyer took the GPS out of his pouch.  "Magnetic north --where it would have been in the year 1690.  But look at the display, it's faded."

"The pole moves over time," explained Malchisedech to Fawn, who looked puzzled.  "It's called secular variation."

"Magnetic north, here and now, but one universe over.  This is where Fawn and Chloe are from.  And I'm sure we will find flightless reindeer and a drunken Santa nearby.  And, I hope -- that trough," said Fred.

"This is better than that Extreme Road Trip reality show!" said Martin.  And then suddenly, "Oy, Fred, look, there comes your trough now."

"Ha," Fred exclaimed triumphantly.  The trough was appearing, un-vanishing -- however you might like to describe it -- coming into being, before their very eyes, right next to the log.  Right under their noses.  Fred sniffed the trough cautiously.  Fawn took a long, deep swallow of the water.

"Wait!" barked Fred.  "What are you thinking?  That water's not safe!"

"I was thirsty," said Fawn simply.  "Whoah, I'm dizzy.  I feel so lightheaded.  I feel light all over."

"Well, too late now.  Akelmeyer, and Martin, you stay here and watch the trough, would you please?  I don't know what you'll do if it disappears again, but just keep an eye on it anyway.  Fawn and Chloe, could you take us to your Santa Claus?  And we should like to meet this head of the elf guild.  I'm sorry, I've forgotten his name."

"Manchester," said Chloe.

"Yes, him.  And show us some reindeer, as well.” 

"Sure, follow me," said Fawn.  Fawn bounded off.  And up.  "Hey!"  Fawn's booted hooves were one, then five, then a full ten feet off the ground.  "Yikes!  Wow!"

"Fawn!  Oh my!  Oh, dear!"  Chloe exclaimed.

"It's the water.  There is magic in the water, I believe," said Fred.

"Be careful, Fawn!"  Malchisedech surprised himself with his level of concern.

"This is fun!"  Fawn was gaining her bearings, and zooming around overhead like one of Santa's reindeer during an ordinary year.

"What's this?  How is she doing that?"  Fawn had attracted a couple of the grounded reindeer with her antics.  Blitzen stared up incredulously.

"That's Ms. Chloe's girl.  She can't fly.  How come she can fly, and I can't fly?  What in the blizzard is going on here?"  Dasher seemed indignant. "Where did these dogs come from?  And a pig, too!  Who else is flying?  Get Santa!"

A chorus of high-pitched, soft, but surprisingly grating voices squeaked from the log. They all spoke at once.  

"What, what, what is all this ruckus?"

"Who goes there?"

"What's going on?  Hey, ouch!"

"Ouch you.  That was my tail!"

"Quiet!  Listen!"

"What's going on!  Yip, yip, yip.  Eeek!"

"I heard Fawn, the deer!"

"Who's there, what's going on?  What's all the noise?"

TO BE CONTINUED...

Mr. McAllister stopped at their bench on his way to school.  “Top of the morning to you fine young people,” he greeted them.

“Mr. McAllister, why do you sometimes sound more Irish than other times?”  Brittany asked.

“Because I sometimes feel more Irish than other times.  And what might you two fine young people be reading this beautiful morning?”

Pete and Brittany looked at each other, each wanting to check with the other before letting anyone else in on the wiener dogs.

“He did see the very first part,” Pete explained.  “In fact, he’s the one who gave the introduction to me.”

“Ah, and would this be the basketball playing, anthropomorphized dachshunds?”

“The very same,” Pete handed him the notebook with a smile.  “And they’re having a real adventure.”

Mr. McAllister took the notebook, and read it silently.  He smiled at some parts, and laughed out loud at others.  He read quickly, but intensely.  Pete and Brittany could tell that he was really interested in the story.

“As I suspected,” he said when he was through.  “Basketball is a mere hobby, not their true calling at all.”

“Their true calling?”  Brittany was confused.

“This first came to me in the guise of a paper about being called.”

“Well, that was some kind of mistake.”  Pete assured him.  “I wrote about Mother Teresa.  Have you read my paper, by the way?”

“Ah, yes, Mr. Meren.  A nice, safe topic.”  Mr. McAllister was nodding and smiling, as if that were a compliment, but Pete knew that “safe,” from Mr. McAllister, was usually not a compliment.  

In fact, the only person he knew who would compliment him for staying safe was his grandmother, who was always worried that he and Joey were going to catch pneumonia if they didn’t bundle up enough.

“Safe?  I wrote about Mother Teresa’s struggle with faith.  I wrote about how she felt called at first, and then didn’t feel the presence of God ever again.  How her spiritual life was nothing like people imagined, but how she persisted, and how she did so much good, despite the fact that she wasn’t getting the kind of spiritual encouragement she expected.”   Pete stopped for a deep breath.  When he got worried about schoolwork, he talked too fast, and his voice got higher and higher pitched, and he looked desperate.  He told himself that it was just one paper, and that Mr. McAllister hadn’t really even criticized it yet.  He took another deep breath, and continued more slowly, “But she stuck to what she thought was her calling, even while it didn’t feel like a calling anymore.  How is that safe?”

“You wrote about a woman who is a popular hero, and who has been beatified by the Catholic Church.  They are waiting only for one more miracle to surface before they canonize the good woman.  It was safe.”

“So I didn’t get an A.”

“Don’t misunderstand me, Peter Meren.  Your paper was a well-written exploration of the topic of divine calling.  I simply can’t help but wonder if you put much of yourself into it.”

“I was supposed to put myself into it?  Was that on the rubric?”

“And where do you plan to go with this?”  Mr. McAllister waved the Weiner Dog notebook at them.

“Go with it?”  Pete was confused.  Mr. McAllister was changing the subject, and Pete was having trouble keeping up, just as he sometimes did in religion class.  “We’re supposed to take it somewhere?”

“What are you learning?”

Brittany was ready with an answer on this one.  “There’s so much we didn’t really understand.  I mean the story seems simple, like a fairy tale for children, about talking animals, but then you start looking closely at parts of it, and you realize that there’s so much going on beneath the surface.  Like about the stock market.  Mrs. Meren explained all about the stock market to us, and the dot com bubble in the nineties, and I think the author might have had some trouble with that.  And we’re learning about wiener dogs, and espresso con panna.  We keep asking questions, and then finding all these connections.”

Mr. McAllister got up.  “Sounds like you’re on the right track.  Questions are the important thing in life.  When you stop asking questions, you stop living.  Questions, and connections.  That’s the way to discover the true nature of short-legged doggies.”

With a wave, he was on his way, up the hill, towards the high school.  Looking at his watch, Pete realized that they had been so wrapped up in the story, and in their conversation, that they hadn’t noticed all the busses pulling up, and all the students walking by.  If they didn’t run, they would be late to class.

*   *   *

Ilo Senza was leaning against the wall when Pete left Geometry.  Pete didn’t have anything to say to Ilo Senza, and Ilo Senza had never had anything to say to Pete, and Pete was happy about that.  He tried to ignore the large, scowling upper classman.  He tried to walk right past him, like he had probably done dozens of times without even thinking about it since school had started in September.  But this time, Ilo separated himself from the wall, and fell into step beside Pete.  Pete noticed that his classmates seemed to have evaporated, like bubbles escaping from a shaken soda bottle, vanishing like carbonated gas into the air.  George hadn’t left the classroom at all.  Great.  George had picked a great day to wake up, and decide to be responsible, and stay behind to talk to a teacher.  Pete turned the corner toward the computer lab, thinking that he might as well go straight to his next class, even though they had a fifteen-minute break.  There was no harm in getting near an adult, and away from Ilo, as fast as possible.  Then Ilo took one big step that maneuvered himself around Pete, and he stood there, in the middle of the hallway, like a small but hulking mountain, impeding Pete’s progress.

“I heard about your friend.”

His voice was softer than Pete had expected, but not exactly friendly.  It was just a flat kind of announcement.  I heard about your friend.  What was that supposed to mean?  Had there really been some kind of altercation between George and Ilo, like George had claimed?  Had George really beaten Ilo up?  Pete would have guessed no, based on everything he knew about life, the universe, and being a teenager in Hong Kong, but he didn’t know how to negotiate this conversation.

“What did you hear?” he asked.  It was a good response, he thought.  Neutral.  He wasn’t letting on that his reactions to Ilo Senza hovered somewhere in the unchartered gray area between terror and scorn. 

“I heard he went psycho in class on Friday in front of everybody.” 

“Well, maybe not psycho, exactly.”  Psycho described school shooters, and crazed lunatics, not his friend George.

“Freaked out,” Ilo amended.  “Lost it.”

“Yeah.  Pretty much.”

Ilo just stood there, fiddling with one of his rings.

“So?”  Pete prodded him.  It wasn’t like he really wanted to hear what Ilo Senza had to say, although he had to admit to a sluggishly budding curiosity.  It was mostly that he wanted to move the interaction along to a conclusion before he got hit.

“So, look,” Ilo said, “I just hope he doesn’t say anything about that night on the beach.”

“Night on the beach?”  Pete repeated, hoping to nudge the story ahead in a neutral, non-threatening kind of way.  If he didn’t know better, he would think that Ilo sounded nervous, but he did know better.  Ilo Senza didn’t get nervous.  Ilo Senza squashed people for fun.

Pete waited for more.

“Look, Dylan Moran is going away to military school.  He’s not even waiting for Christmas.  He didn’t get kicked out.  He’s happy about it.  It’s what he wanted.  But he would have been kicked out.  He was this close, you know.”  Ilo held his thumb and forefinger about a centimeter apart, probably trying to indicate a narrow escape.  Any dramatic sympathy he might have hoped to gain by the gesture was mitigated, however, by the way he shook the narrowly separated thumb and forefinger in Pete’s face. 

Pete took a step backwards, and Ilo quickly dropped his hand. 

“If his parents hadn’t given in and pulled him out at the last minute, he would of been expelled.  It wasn’t that bad – what happened that night, and I don’t know if your buddy said anything or not, but it could be one of those last straw kind of things, and I want to stay, and he could make it hard for me, if he wanted to.  ‘Cause he’s a teacher’s kid and all.  Because I want to stay.  So I’m just, telling him not to.”

Pete must have look confused, because Ilo tried to clarify. 

“Not to say anything.”

“You mean you’re telling me.”

“I don’t want to talk to him.  The guy’s freaky.”

Pete opened his mouth to reply, and then realized that he had nothing to say to that.  George, freaky?  OK, so he hadn’t exactly been Mr. Personality lately, and the scene in English class on Friday had been bizarre, and yeah, a little scary, but it only scared Pete because George was his friend, right?  Because he cared about George’s mental well-being, and knew what he was usually like, and what a contrast his outburst was.  It hadn’t been enough to scare somebody like Ilo Senza, had it?

Pete opened his mouth again, hoping that words would come out, but nothing did.  Great.   He had become mute.  How would Ilo handle that?  Would he think that was freaky too?

No, Ilo seemed to be used to getting this kind of reaction.  It seemed to restore some sense of normalcy for him, because he looked a little more comfortable, stood up a little bit straighter, pounded his fist into his palm, and said “Just give him the message.”  Then he pivoted on his heel, which Pete thought was a little bit weird, and walked off down the hall.

*   *   *

When Pete got home from school, he thought about what Mr. McAllister had said about questions.  He had been so focused on (read: freaked out about) the big question of how and why the story was appearing day after day, that he hadn’t really bothered paying much attention to Brittany’s dogged consideration of what seemed to him to be trivial oddities within the text itself.  He decided that he shouldn’t let Brittany be the one to ask all the questions, and make all the discoveries, if questions and discoveries really were what life was all about.  He noticed that when the wiener dogs and their pig friend went to Fawn and Chloe’s universe they had landed where the magnetic North Pole would have been in the year 1690.  Then the year 1690 wasn’t mentioned again.  That was weird, wasn’t it?  It was the kind of thing Brittany was questioning, right?  Things that didn’t have to be there.  Things that didn’t seem to advance the plot.  Things that they understood on one level (1690 was obviously a year) but that might function on another level as well.  Maybe they were meant to just glide right by it, but maybe it meant something.  He Googled the year 1690, but was disappointed when he didn’t find anything that seemed like it could possibly be relevant. 

Some stuff had happened with astronomy.  Somebody saw Uranus for the first time, but he had made a mistake, and said it was a star.  Some other astronomer recorded “differential rotation” in Jupiter’s atmosphere, whatever that meant.  The clarinet was invented in Nuremberg, Germany.  That was kind of cool.  There had been some natural disasters – an earthquake in Italy, and some island had disappeared in a flood.   And then, a bunch of painters, and composers, and statesmen (which he assumed meant politicians) he had never heard of had been born, or died.  The trouble was, he didn’t see how any of that had anything to do with anything, except maybe for the island disappearing.   Maybe it had somehow been transported to the North Pole to become Santa’s workshop?

Or maybe he wasn’t any good at this question and connection thing.  Mr. McAllister said questions and connections were what life was all about.  Did that mean he wasn’t any good at life?  It would be an easy thing to get depressed about, if it were true.  Pete worried about it for a minute, then decided that George was depressed enough for all of them.  There must be something he was missing – either about the year 1690, or about how to go about asking questions and making connections.  He decided to think about it later.

He shut down the computer, and drew a quick picture of frantic mice, before he settled down to his homework: writing a description of his favorite meal, in French.  You could tell that the mice were frantic, because their whiskers and tails were wavy; to show that they were quivering, and their eyes were unnaturally large.

*    *   *

When Brittany got home from school it was later than usual.  It was later than usual because she had made a detour by the high school first – a detour to Mr. McAllister’s classroom.

“You read the story this morning, right?”  She wanted to get right to the point before anyone came in and interrupted them with a question that a high school teacher might consider more important.  Like something that was actually about high school.

Most people would have been surprised by the sudden interruption, but Brittany had never seen Mr. McAllister look surprised.  He just smiled, and nodded, as if middle schoolers burst in on him all the time, asking for his literary opinion. 

“Charming story,” was all he said.

“But is it OK?”

Mr. McAllister didn’t answer.  He looked at Brittany, tilted his chin a little, raised an eyebrow, and fiddled with his pencil.

“I mean, it’s just a story, right?” Brittany prodded.

He leaned his elbow on his desk, and rested his chin in his hand.  “And what is a story?”

“A story.  You know.  A story.”

“And what is your story?”

“I’m not a writer.  I don’t have a story.”

“Oh but you are a writer.”  Mr. McAllister’s finger alternated between waggling at her, and tapping his own chin, but his eyes never left hers.  “You are writing the story of your life.  And your story has become entangled with a delightful story about anthropomorphized mystery-solving canines.”

“So is it real, or not?”

“Oh, it’s very real,” he assured her.

“How do you know?”

“I believe you asked for my opinion, not for scientific proof.”

She swallowed, and nodded.  He was right.  She had asked for his opinion.  She tried to remember why she had thought he was the one to ask. 

Obviously, because he was the only one she could ask.  He was the only adult who had read the story, and only an adult could give real reassurance.  She plunged ahead.  “So the fabric of the universe is really in danger?”

“The fabric of the universe is always in danger.”

“But that’s bad!”

“It depends on how you look at it, doesn’t it?”

“How many ways can you look at the fabric of the universe being in danger?”

“Many people ignore it completely.”

“Ignore it?”

“Others do what they can, as they are called to do.”

She exhaled; the tension that had been building since the conversation began flowed out of her body.  “That’s right, you teach religion.”

“I’m afraid you will never get away from that basic fact.  I see the world through a lens slightly different than most.”

“So what am I supposed to do?”  Brittany wailed.

“Brittany Weaver, my dear young lady, I’m not at all sure why you and your friend Peter Meren are receiving this story.  Perhaps you have minds open enough to believe that which should be impossible.  Still, that should not be enough.”  He thought for a moment, lightly massaging his chin with the tips of his fingers.  “Just remember that there are many ways in which things may be real.”

“You mean, like in the stories?”

“We are writing our own stories.”

“You said that before.  I’m afraid I just don’t get it.”

“What I’m trying to say is that the fox was right.  ‘Your actions have grave consequence.’”

“So everything’s not OK?”

“Of course everything’s OK.  Why wouldn’t it be?”

“The tear in the fabric of the universe?  The grave consequences?”

“Ah, I see the problem.”  His smile deepened.  “We differ only on the definition of the term 'OK'.  To me, things would not be OK if our actions had no consequence – if events unfolded despite what choices we may make.  The very fact that your actions have consequence opens up the beautiful possibilities of connections.”

“And if things are connected --” Brittany could almost see it.  Almost understand it.

Mr. McAllister tried putting it another way.  “If the fabric is connected --” 

“Then the tear gets sewn up!”

“An imprecise metaphor, but helpful, I think.”

“And that’s why the questions are important!”

“Questions are very important.”

“I think I get it!”  Brittany gathered up her backpack, and skipped out of the room.  But she turned, just as she got to the door.  “Thank you, Mr. McAllister.  I think I get it now.  I’ll try not to let the nightmares bother me anymore.”

“There’s not much point if it’s no fun at all, now is there?”

           Brittany smiled, and left, wondering why Mr. McAllister always seemed to get the last word, and why it was always thought provoking.  How did he do that?  Was it something you practiced?