Ch 3: Wall Ghosting
The Futureness Part Two
Outside Dayton Regional Airport, Methyl feels dry heat on the air again. She squints against the fresh angles the sunrays take. It’s strange: she feels at home and far from home all at once.
Need a taxi?
A car is calling to her from the curb.
Because it doesn’t have seals, tags, any official clearance stickers given to real taxis, Methyl gets in.
“Dayton,” Methyl tells the car. “Get me to someone named Angela Perez. She’s about fifteen years old. She went to school with me.”
Woah, woah. Where’s your credentials
“I’m here on behalf of Xavier Enterprises.”
Yeah, right. Credentials, please
“You know the man,” Methyl said—the insipid, narcissistic passphrase Xavier gave her before she left for New Mexico on the wing. It would open ninety-five percent of Dayton to her, he said. He told her she just had to keep it a secret and stop laughing at him.
Oh! Excuse me.
The cab seems to accelerate.
Which school did you and she go to?
“Dayton Elementary. Ms. Hayley’s class.”
If she still lives at the same place as she did then, I’ll take you there
“Thank you. That’s cool. Let’s go.”
A real taxi would know for certain where Angela is, for a fee. Methyl likes the idea that it would be harder for Xavier to track her around town if she takes a gypsy cab instead. It has the added benefit of probably being the wrong track to take, which is fine; Methyl is not currently in the mood to meet Angela.
Neither of the kids has socials anymore. Permanent left behinds, Methyl thinks of them, like herself. Methyl is less sure of how to find Eric and hopes Angela might know where he is. In any case, Methyl tells herself, if she gets extraordinarily lucky one of them is enough for one day’s worries.
As the car merges onto the 10, she sends another message from Richard’s phone.
“I’m in Dayton,” she says aloud, as though her voice could push the message into the heavens to The Francesca. She continues to flip around on the phone and finds a voice stuck inside the system.
Please excuse the danger
It is Francesca, disembodied, frozen in time from before she ascended.
Please excuse the danger, her dialogue entry repeats over Richard’s phone.
“What’s the danger,” Methyl asks the voice. No answer comes. She tries everything she knows about Richard’s phone, but it’s not like hers used to be, before she stopped carrying anything with a charge inside it.
Yeah, what’s the danger, kid, says the cab.
“Cone of silence,” Methyl says.
The cab says no more until it is off the freeway and has been combing a neighborhood of great wealth for ten minutes. Homes stand four stories and ramble in and out of wooded areas.
Is that her over there, to the left, the jogging kid?
Without a doubt, Meredith knows this girl, despite not having seen her other than at the wall that day, in four years. She has the same curly blond hair and runs the same way she ran as a kid. Angela Perez. But as the cab slows to a stop and Angela jogs nearer, Methyl becomes less certain. Angela is about five feet four inches tall, less than a hundred pounds. Her tights hang off her as she run by them and turns to see the stopped car and her elementary school classmate peering from an open window.
Methyl sees the recognition in her eyes and shouts, “Angela, it’s Sophia!”
“You have to keep up!” Angela shouts back, not stopping.
“Follow that girl,” Methyl tells the cab. “Pull up next to her.”
She lowers the window on the other side of the car.
“Hey, what’s up? Going for a run?” Methyl nearly feints with embarrassment. She has no idea what to say. But could she have started with, I’m here for freaks like you because I’m looking for a spaceship?
“Yep. One mile a minute.”
Methyl checks the dash. They’re rolling at four miles per hour.
Gaunt, Angela with the curly blond hair is alien to Methyl up close. She seems to be tortured by this run.
“Want a lift? We can catch up.”
“Follow me home. One mile a minute.”
*
Five miles later, Angela breaks her stride at a gate overtaken by vines. The car stops, and Methyl dashes out into the heat again. The cab, thankfully, simply pulls away. Xavier’s humiliating little passphrase works.
Angela is taking pained breaths. Methyl watches her whisper a password into the gate’s lock, then comes in with her as they part. The mansion’s entry opens onto an empty reception hall. The space feels abandoned, it’s tomb quiet, and all the wall art has vanished.
“I’m alone,” Angela says, still catching her breath. “My dad and sisters left after the Golden Apple.”
Angela gestures at the empty frames and says, “They were originals, so he downloaded them when they left.”
“Where’d they go?” Methyl asks.
Angela shrugs, and when she does her skin stretches taut over her collarbones, leaving deep hollows around her neck. She is so painfully thin Methyl has some trouble not staring at her minimal muscle and bones.
“Come on up. My room still works.”
Upstairs, Methyl is reminded of her own room. Though Angela’s is filled with nicer things, she feels a sense of home, something she’s not had in seven months, since that afternoon at the wall.
“Did your mom go with them, too?”
“When I was a baby my mom went, yeah,” Angela says. “Listen, I need you to go find someplace else in this house to be for fifteen minutes. I have to sleep now. You found me at a bad moment, but I’ll be back with you, like, in fifteen minutes, please, I have a short time frame for this.”
“Okay, no problem,” Methyl says. On her way to the door to the hall, she asks, “How far did you run, by the way?”
“Fifteen miles. I ran fifteen miles this morning and now I need to sleep.”
“A mile a minute,” Methyl says.
“You got it.”
*
Methyl passes the time sitting on the floor in the hall of downloaded paintings, trying to get Francesca’s voice back on the phone. What’s the danger, kid?
Rich should be here, not anywhere the hell, with Francesca. Anywhere. It only depended, she knew, on the questions she asked it, this voice that claimed to stand for her friend but can’t account for their location in the universe, and she thinks she might be toast.
Somewhere outdoors, a dog lets out a string of angry barks and growls.
Methyl gets to her feet and pushes open Angela’s bedroom door. Angela is standing by a sheet of windows over a line of treetops.
“There’s a dog loose in the woods. Who were you talking to?”
Methyl says, “What?” but knows Angela is asking who Methyl was talking to when she was talking pointlessly into Richard’s phone in the hall.
“You didn’t have to live with someone who didn’t sleep and talked nonstop. I think my dad wanted out anyway. He’s opening another e-waste field in Wisconsin, so they must have gone there.”
“I can’t imagine, you know, your mother leaving you when you were only a baby.”
“Most of that art in the hall was of her. I’ve probably seen her face a billion more times than she ever saw mine. She died in a car wreck.”
“That sucks. You don’t seem so bad.”
“Yeah, right now, I don’t know why. Maybe because I know you’re screwed up, too. I just don’t know how to be normal anymore. It got me across my hip and up my ribs, you can see some of the speckles of whatever. It doesn’t hurt. Where did it get you?”
“My neck. It’s under the skin but you can feel it. It feels weird. I’m screwed up. I catch on fire easily.”
Please excuse the danger
Francesca’s voice
“That,” Angela says. “What is that?”
“Oh, my car, Francesca,” Methyl says in a sing-song tone of voice she recognizes as her mother’s voice steering clear of anything difficult to talk about.
“Let me hear that again.”
“I can’t, I—that’s the problem: I can’t hear her again. This weird, old phone.”
“Francesca. Like The Francesca?”
Methyl feels squeezed in a conversational vise. It’s not coming out the way she’d wanted it to, so she throws out her fear of sounding crazy, standing here before a girl who trades miles for sleep.
“I guess? I mean, my friend stole her, like fifteen years ago, so who knows.”
“And did your friend, did they steal her after an accident?”
Angela takes a step toward Methyl that flash frames Gabbyella into Methyl’s mind. If Angela goes crazy, she knows what she could do to her, if she went crazy, that is, and if she had to.
“That’s my mom’s car,” Angela says.
Loving it