Ch 15: The Weather Bell

The Futureness Part Two

Feb 19, 2025

“Stay put. Don’t go anywhere. Just stay there.”

It’s always Xavier’s answer. Stay there. Hold while I think. It’s almost understandable to Methyl, given that his oldest friend and the ship he’s been working to build ascended seven months ago without a trace. No trace but for the hundreds of millions who insist that Xavier’s lying and is secretly keeping The Francesca on Earth, and that only they can see it.

Eric’s shipwrecked captain figurine stands alone on the table by the aquarium. After he and his ship and the dead figurines spontaneously floated up, Methyl took him out and set him dripping wet to watch over the aquarium. Inside, his ship and the dead float on the surface of water Eric won’t clean and won’t let anyone touch. The water has greened.

“They were superglued to the bottom,” Eric says.

“I know, but not anymore,” Methyl says. “As I’ve said a hundred times.”

She knows the twelve-year-old is trying to work out the miracle by talking about it, but it has gone on for so long, and none of their attempts to repeat the experiment with the radio have produced anything more than sparks and static.

“It’s a sign.”

“Probably.”

“Underwater.”

“Dinner,” Eric’s mother, Hannah, calls from the hallway.

“It happened when you changed the radio with your spark.”

“I know.”

“Are you bored?”

“Can you tell?”

“Do you want to play two-square?”

“Again? No. I want Xavier to call back from here in Dayton, not from up there where he can’t help us. There’s somebody here who wants to stop me from… whatever. I don’t know. Listen, I got nearly murdered in the desert by them, so I don’t have a great handle on things.”

“Then I doubt that you want to hear my dream,” Eric, forlorn, says.

“Eric, I hate when you do that. Yes, I do. Some of the things you dream about, it could be important.”

“It starts in a field, and you say you’re hungry and you’re going to cook some meat,” Eric says.

“Eric, Methyl—dinner,” his mother, Hannah, calls out.

“Tell me it at the table.”

It’s Eric’s habit of being shy and reticent and then, upon getting some attention, springing into a hyperactivity that rankles Methyl. She’s the youngest—she was, she reminds herself, the runaway—in her family. Now it’s nearly Christmas, and for the past six months she’s been like Eric’s older sister, and it feels strange still. Hannah works long hours at the Dayton hospital, leaving Methyl and Eric to their own devices. School for Eric, Hannah told Methyl on her second day there, was not quite possible right now. He was still too delicate, too different from his peers. School for Methyl? Well, Hannah would leave that up to her. Methyl’s sixteenth birthday was coming in a month, and that was the age Hannah dropped out, so, given the situation, she told Methyl, she’d rather her be home with Eric than a lackadaisical sitter.

The table is set for spaghetti. She moonlights at a walk-in clinic, so Eric’s mother is a ghost except during the dinners she insists on their having, when she’s off shift. Nearly always zoned out from exhaustion, Hannah looks at Methyl over the dining room table in a way Methyl’s not familiar with—it’s almost as if she were measuring Methyl up as a potential match for Eric, yet not in an intimate way, more in a sad way, thinks Methyl, as though Hannah knows that she doesn’t have time enough left to take care of Eric.

Over the past six months, Methyl’s gone from sleeping hard through Eric’s nightmares about angels to waking to them along with Hannah. Methyl sees now how she could have exhausted her own family after the wall but can’t understand how it was them who became unlivable, them who made her run because they wouldn’t believe her. Hannah believes, and this feels important, too.

“We’re in this field in my dream,” Eric says with a mouth full of pasta. “But now there’s a campfire, and you’re turning a meat on a fork over the fire, and the fire gets all over you—”

“More of the same thing,” Methyl says. The contents of Eric’s bad dreams have frequently involved Methyl’s traces from the event at the wall, fire’s attraction to her, the sparks at the radio that coaxed out those boys’ voices. His fascination with what makes her feel alien is grating.

It’s strange, being in a real home again. Methyl thought she’d caught nostalgia for home from being inside Angela’s room after spending so many months as a runaway, but having dinner cooked, or just warmed up, is a strange displacement and the feeling of home combined.

Hannah told Methyl about the day at the wall, when Eric showed up at the hospital where she’s a nurse, brought by a neighbor who found him wandering outside their home with his eyes glassy, hair in a rat’s nest, and babbling about angels made out of crystals. Methyl knew the next part because she lived it, too: the horror on her parents’ faces when she told them what had happened at the wall: the forty kids lining up and listlessly, as if in a collective trance and walking with their balloons to the spot where their heads were opened by balls of light falling from the sky.

Methyl remembers the frenzy among the parents, police, the ambulances dispatched across Dayton take the dazed kids to the hospital. Then came the worldwide rejection of the event as an elaborate hoax, a twisted plot cooked up by some bored kids in New Mexico, a little cult of pre-teens who wanted the world to believe them.

The night Methyl came, it took Hannah hours to place her as one of the other children who came in that day and one of the three including Eric who you heard whispers around Dayton about: unrecognizable, unrecoverable, lost. You were there with Eric, she told Methyl, so you can stay as long as you need to.

They’ve talked in low voices about the radio, the taxi that attempted to kidnap Methyl, The Francesca, and Eric’s connection to her through the wall at the Golden Apple. Xavier, Hannah told Methyl, had told them to sit tight.

“We just have to wait for Xavier to call again,” Hannah says. “Nothing like that is going to happen to Methyl. We’ve got you.” Hannah’s smile is warm but unconvincing, and Methyl knows that a call back from the man is the least likely scenario right now. Maybe noticing Methyl’s expression, Hannah changes the subject.

“There was a line at the Survivor’s Bell today,” Hannah says.

“How many,” Eric says.

“I counted five people,” she says. “And there were two yesterday, four last week.”

“What’s that?” Methyl says.

“It’s a bell on the cancer ward people ring when they are cured,” Eric says. “Or just don’t have cancer anymore.”

“It was like a fire alarm going off in oncology. I’ve never heard it ring twice in one day. There are empty beds, it’s, there’s something—ring, ring, ring, all day, like a tornado warning. No one knows what’s going on, but these people are just walking out completely healthy. Some of them were stage four. There’s something in the air.”

“They found a cure?” Eric says.

Hannah laughs and continues laughing a little longer than Methyl thinks is normal. Her laughter chokes off into stuttering.

“I don’t know, we’re not, there’s nothing different, nothing, no new treatments, there’s nothing.”

Xavier, Methyl thinks. Xavier you did it. She looks at the glass of water sitting in front of her, next to her plate of spaghetti. Normal. Same taste as ever. At that moment, Hannah drinks from her own glass and Methyl watches that, too.

“There’s a hole in the ground,” Eric says. “In the dream. And there’s a rope ladder that goes down into the hole. You’re on fire, and you climb down the rope ladder and tell me to follow you.”

Hannah’s phone makes an emergency news alert. She takes it out of her pocket and plays the audio.

“Gathered at the base of the walls surrounding Gregor’s headquarters in British Columbia, thousands of protestors call for the immediate release of information about The Francesca.”

The news audio cuts to rhythmic chanting of a crowd: “Show us, show us, show us.”

The report of gunshots followed by screams. Hannah turns off the sound.

“Xavier’s HQ,” Methyl says.

“Why don’t you hit the backyard and play for a while,” Hannah says. “I’ll clean up the dishes.”

“I’ve been thinking,” Eric says once they’ve gone out back. It’s near the winter solstice and dark. “You’re holding back on something with the radio. You iced Xavier’s best bot, so I bet you can do more.”

Methyl’s sitting on a rope swing hanging from a tree branch as Eric handles a toy rocket that looks like it has been outside longer than in.

“Do more with what? I’m doing everything I can.”

“With fire—”

“No, Eric.”

“No—you’ve been telling me you’re afraid of fire, but fire isn’t afraid of you.”

“That’s one way of saying it. Another way is to say that fire likes me too much. I have to be careful, Eric.”

“What if you didn’t?”

“I want to make it to my sixteenth. Thanks, though.”

“Just one finger,” Eric says.

“For what?”

“You carry a lighter. I saw you hiding it.”

“Little sneak. So what?”

“Why do you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“Hold it under one finger.”

“Are you crazy?”

The idea doesn’t even disturb Methyl; it’s inconceivable.

“Just one finger, come on. I bet you won’t even feel it.”

“Is this from that dream? There’s no holes with ladders around here.”

“I think there are,” Eric says in a way that shifts something inside Methyl.

Eric’s dreams aren’t prophetic, at least as far as Methyl can tell, but his insistence that he sees around the future, sees events just before and following some speculative future tense, stops her. If Eric isn’t afraid of Methyl turning to ash, maybe there’s some reason to try? They’ve tried everything else. The radio is dead.

“Just one finger.”

Richard is missing his left pinky finger, Methyl remembers noticing, but she never asked him about it. It didn’t seem to slow him down. He never mentioned it. Methyl looks down at her hands and feels nostalgic again, but now for herself, for her body. She takes out her lighter.

“You have to hold it,” she says. “I can’t do it.”

Eric happily takes the little black and silver lighter from her and flicks it once. Spark and a candle’s tongue of flame pop out.

“I can’t,” Methyl says. She puts her left hand behind her back.

“Do it for The Francesca,” Eric says.

It’s the final shift she needs. If Eric’s right that playing with her lighter will help them contact Richard and Francesca, she’s willing, now, to face it.