Alternatives

Geli couldn’t remember when she first had them—her “alternatives” as she would eventually call these visions that came to her. Now they happened only occasionally, but they happened almost every day in her preteens. Her mother called it an active imagination. Her father called it daydreaming. Parents find a rational or familiar explanation for everything, because anything away from normal makes them uneasy. Geli learned to keep quiet about it. To her parents, she’d grown out of a phase. Eventually, she almost believed that as well.

There were times though, when she would allow her faith to override her rational thought. When she absolutely needed the visions to be real, they could still come. Since Geli had become a teen, bringing the visions became harder. Now it always required a sustained and concentrated focus, usually on a found object of some sort. She knew that the big glass marble with the blue and pink swirls had no actual magic powers. The marble was just something she had found when she was digging a grave for Fluff Ball—her pet mouse—in the small park near her house.

The patterns of the color swirls moved about inside the clear globe as Geli twisted the marble between her thumb and index finger. The familiar childish feeling of pulling away from reality returned. Fuzzy images of the building behind the Slot came into focus as her peripheral vision of the street, and the sidewalk she was sitting on, became lost in the background.

Geli is walking in a courtyard—a familiar place—a small courtyard she’s certain she knows. It’s the rear courtyard belonging to the dental offices behind the Slot. There’s an old wood fence with several missing boards. The openings in the fence provide a way into the backyard of the hotel.

In the yard the neglected grass is high and thick. Half-hidden by these five-foot tall stalks of grass, is a door. It’s made of bars wrapped with thick wire mesh. The door is one she knows; she’s seen it many times from the other side. It’s in the basement, next to the bins where she’s had to take trash by hand, after one of her fellow tenants clogged the garbage chutes. Now, as her mind walks her up to it, she envisions the door’s tarnished brass lock. Without any real idea if it will work, Geli instinctively pulls her room key from her pocket and successfully uses it to unlock and open the door.

Once inside, she makes her way through the damp dark basement to the stairwell located at the far right end of the building. Quickly—she moves up the staircase to the third floor landing. The landing exits to a fire door at the end of the hallway—next to the common bathroom shared by the tenants on her floor. Geli runs down the hall to her room to find Parks. She busts in—frantically telling Parks something. Whatever she tells him makes Parks run out of her room and over to his own. Geli watches herself quickly throw her most precious items into a duffle bag, then dart out to the hall. Parks is there already, waiting for her. He’s wearing his backpack. His skateboard hangs from his left hand.

Her perspective changes to the empty lobby at the front of the hotel, but she‘s not actually there. Three shapes—covered head to toe in black—enter the empty lobby from the hotel’s front door. Each carries the sort of gun seen in Hong Kong gangster films—the kind with a bullet clip that pops out from the handle. They make their way past the vacant front desk and head up the main staircase. The old wood creaks under their feet.

Geli watches as the shadowy figures arrive at the door to Parks’ room. One of them reaches into a pocket, removing a key. The key slips gently and silently into the door lock. The door is pushed open. Two of the shapes move into the room, each using both hands to hold the guns that lead their way. After a minute, the shape that remained in the hall turns its head, whispering into the inside flap of its black jacket. Half a minute later, the other two return. One of them says something—just a few words—that Geli can‘t hear. The three split up; each heading in a different direction.

Her mind is back with Parks. They make their way down the fire stairs, all the way to the basement—to the door of bars and wire. They walk across the backyard, slip through the hole in the fence and step into the courtyard.

At the medical building on the street behind the Slot, she peeks around the corner. There’s a black Crown Vic parked at the curb. The two men seated inside look similar to the men she saw earlier, when she returned from her visit with the old lady. She thinks they see her. The men step out of the car, holding the same type of guns as the three in the hotel. They head toward the corner of the building where she and Parks are hiding.

Geli and Parks run toward the fence. Someone—from inside the hotel—is at the bar and wire door. The door opens just as she and Parks squeeze their way through the fence and into the backyard. Guns, held by black gloves, appear to float toward at them from both sides. Parks and Geli drop to the ground—huddle together in the tall thick grass—as three guns take aim at their bodies. Explosions—gunfire tears the night. Geli feels life slipping away.

“No,” Geli whispered, as the marble held between her thumb and finger returned into focus. “That is not how it happens.” Geli took a long breath, and then let her mind drift back to the courtyard.

Once again, she crosses the grass, opens the bar and wire door, and makes her way through the basement—to the stairs. She climbs them to her floor. As before, she and Parks pack their stuff and run to the stairs. But this time they don’t go to the basement. This time, they stop at the landing to the lobby.

Geli presses her ear to the fire door. They wait. She can hear the front door of the hotel as it opens. They wait longer. Finally they hear the creaking of the wood staircase as it’s climbed. It would be two or more minutes before they reached the room, discover that Parks is missing and split up to begin their search of the hotel. She waits. There needs to be enough time for the intruders to get past the first floor, to keep them from hearing Parks and Geli as they leave. She holds her finger in the air, indicating for Parks to hold. Then, after a minute, she waves for him to follow her; the two make their way as softly as possible out the front door.

It’s almost too late when Geli sees the black Vic—parked right where she saw it the first time. She feels like an idiot. She’d made a stupid assumption that this car had moved to the back of the hotel. She didn’t consider the likelihood of other cars just like it. It’s obvious to her now that there could be any number of these cars watching—waiting around the neighborhood.

The lights on the street are bright enough to see two people seated inside the car. The glare from the Vic’s window prevents her from seeing any more detail than that. In contrast, the security flood on the front stoop of the Slot has Parks and Geli bathed in three hundred watts of light. Luckily, it seems the two inside the Crown Vic haven’t noticed them yet. Parks and Geli stand there, deer caught in a headlight, before finally thinking to dive out of sight behind the wall next door. There’s still no reaction from inside the parked Crown Vic.

The two kids keep their bodies pressed against the facade of the neighboring building. Another black Crown Vic parked down the street covers the one direction offering a hope of escape. Two streetlights in that half of the block provide the area with weak light, but it’s enough to see that this other Crown Vic is empty. Unfortunately, it’s also enough light for anyone watching the street to see Parks and Geli, if they were to run from the shadows to head for the next block.

Not knowing if it’s her own willed alternative or just dumb luck, Geli feels a surge of opportunity as a bright yellow cab turns the corner. It heads up the street in the direction of the occupied Crown Vic. As it hits a bump in the road, the bouncing headlights trigger the photo sensor on one of the streetlights—the one nearest to where Geli and Parks hide in the shadows. The center of the street goes dark.

Geli pulls Parks by the arm, and they run across the street as fast as they can to the opposite corner at the end of the block. It’s the same corner now soft-focused behind the marble, held pinched between Geli’s thumb and index finger.

She stood up, returned the marble to her pocket, and walked. She walked several blocks out of the way before finally turning back to head up to the street behind the slot—she wanted to make sure the Crown Vic parked at the corner didn’t see her again. She also wanted to see if the other cars were near. There was no way to know when all this was going to happen, but it felt soon to her. If she could confirm that the others weren’t there yet, she and Parks could still have time to escape. She walked also to calm her nerves. She’d just been through two escapes and one of them ended in her death. It wasn’t the first time she had died, but it always took a lot out of her when it happened.

Escape

Waiting for Geli to return, it had only just occurred to Parks that now she might be in danger too. The people trying to kill him might use Geli as a way to do it—to get to him. Trying to squelch this new fear, he reminded himself that Geli was smart, and she’d probably figured the risk of this before he had. Still, the other part of him—the one pushing his nerves—knew there was a chance that Geli hadn’t considered this possibility. The kind of smarts she had came from books; he saw her as seriously lacking street smarts.

Parks had been giving Geli’s old alarm clock a lot of attention; about every five minutes he’d check the time. The new paranoia—Geli kidnapped or something—raised the stakes for the next time check. “Nine o‘clock—crap!” He said. Parks decided to give Geli until nine-thirty to get back. This was a hollow deadline, since he had no idea what he’d do once the time expired. Somehow, he thought pushing the panic off for another half-hour might make him feel better—it didn’t.

If people could really jump out of their skin from fright, what happened next would have caused Parks to do just that. At the least, it felt to him like his heart was trying to make the jump. It seemed to slam against the back of his throat as Geli—in one fluid motion—unlocked, opened, and burst through the door.

“Sorry,” she said, to the chest-clutching ghost boy gasping on her bed. “But you need to hear me and act. We’re leaving right now—get a bag packed—we aren‘t coming back. Some very nasty people are on their way here to get you, and they’ll be here soon.”

“How soon?” Parks asked. She didn‘t answer, and there really wasn‘t a need; there was terror in her eyes, and it told him that it would be soon enough.

“Go!” Geli yelled at him, but he was already halfway out the room and into the hall. She continued barking instructions at his back. “Pack whatever you can in ten minutes. Then meet me in the hall—in front of your room. If you hear anyone on the stairs, don‘t wait—move down the hall and into the fire escape.”

Parks didn’t hear the last of what Geli said because he was in his room before she’d finished. Reacting to warning, that’s a thing Parks did well—he’d learned to. He didn’t wait when someone he trusted had his back; if they told him to go, he moved.

Within thirty seconds he’d unzipped his backpack, jammed in the contents of his closet, and everything from his drawers. The rest of what he owned lay strewn across the floor in little heaps. Working from one end of the floor to the other, the few things he considered worthwhile to take he grabbed and packed from the piles. He stuffed the cash from his nightstand quickly into his pockets, and then used an open hand to scoop everything else remaining on the nightstand into his backpack. He repeated this indiscriminate procedure with the junk on his dresser. He was packed.

Parks had no clue how long it had been—four, six, eight, or ten minutes—when he stepped into the hall with his backpack. He was there before Geli, so he waited. The wait wasn’t very long. Geli, her small frame overloaded by her own backpack and a fabric suitcase she was carrying, came running out of her room. Parks knew that books were the bulk of her problem. He tried to take the suitcase to help her, but she just ran past.

“Come on!” She barked.

Parks followed, as she led the way down the hall to—and through—the fire door. They ran as fast as they could down the fire escape steps—exactly in the way people are not supposed to do in an emergency—until they reached the first floor landing. Geli turned toward Parks and pressed her finger to her lips. But the gesture for him to stay quiet was pointless. Parks was scared—enough that he doubted he had any voice worth silencing.

As they sat on the landing, Geli’s ear pressed to the lobby door—listening, Parks had a chance to reflect a little on Geli’s strange attitude. She was certain that someone was coming for him, but Parks didn‘t understand how she could be that certain. He considered that maybe it came as a warning from the old lady—but the details seemed too exact for that. For example, whatever the reason Geli thought this would happen, she expected them to come in through the front entrance of the Slot—in fact, she seemed to know it.

“I don’t understand,” Geli whispered. “They should be here by now.”

It also seemed odd to Parks that she was acting as if she had a printed schedule of killer arrival times—one to which she fully demanded them to keep. He’d have thought about this a little more, if a sudden panic hadn’t came over him when his hand dropped to his side.

“My board!”

“You don’t have it?” Geli asked in surprise.

“I’ll be right back,” Parks promised as he stood up.

“No!” Geli’s voice was firm. “It’s too late—they’ll be here any minute.”

Parks headed up the stairs, avoiding Geli’s attempt to grab his arm as he took off. “I’m not leaving my skateboard behind,” he whispered back to her from the darkness.

Enforcement

Department of Internal Security - Enforcement Action Number 200: The official document associated with resolution of the Dissimulant issue. It granted extraordinary measures. Without need for a legal warrant, or any other court authority, DIS-EA200 allowed for surveillance, pursuit, and elimination of enemies operating within the United States of America. A copy of this document had held Parks’ name for a month. The EA200 declared him as a national security threat, and live custody was unlikely—but then, in the brief history of the department, no live capture had ever occurred. The DIS was not really an arresting authority—it was enforcement.

Two days ago, under the open surveillance policies granted by the EA 200, the DIS had someone from the Management of Undercover Setups office position a motion sensor in the hotel where Parks was living. The MoUS specialist, unable to find a suitable placement in the room next to the target, was forced to locate it in the room itself—behind the cover of a power outlet next to the bed. This device was not a bug—although DE200 authorized the use of one. The concern for the DIS was only when and where the target was in his room, they weren‘t looking for evidence—the DE200 didn‘t require any—and the existence of any identifiable audio recordings would just leave the door open for possible legal questions.

It was Agents Adams and Carey monitoring the device that evening—the evening of the planned enforcement action. Their log showed Parks moving around the room at twenty hundred hours, and then frantically moving around his room almost an hour later, and then suddenly he stopped. This was within minutes of Poppers and the balance of the crew arriving on the scene. It was reasonable for them to consider a situation where Parks, having suspected something, was now attempting to leave the hotel—and may have already fled from his room. Poppers, forced to reconsider her plan, adjusted for the possibility this intelligence suggested.

The enforcement crew—Poppers and her two agents Lehr and Freelyn—took position along the wall, just outside the hotel’s main entrance. They would wait five more minutes for the sensor to detect movement in the room. Then, if there were no movements detected, they would begin to sweep the property from the first floor to the top. The team at the rear—agents Sterling and Atkins—would leave their car and begin a clean-up sweep at the back, from the basement to the roof. Adams and Carey, staying with the original plan, would remain in their cruiser—watching and reporting on activity outside the hotel.

A minute before the deadline expired and the new plan of action was to go into effect, the motion sensor came alive. Parks was alone, and moving about in his room. Acting on the signal from Carey—three paced flashes of the cruiser’s headlights—Poppers opened the door to the hotel. The misaligned headlights from a passing yellow cab, splashed enough light on the hotel that anyone watching from the street would have seen the three armed figures—dressed foot to face in black—as they entered. Except for Adams and Carey, no one was watching.

The enforcement crew walked as softly as possible up the ancient staircase leading to the hotel rooms. Nevertheless, the age and condition of the wooden stairs made them impossible to keep quiet. Of course, noise would only be an issue if Parks were on the alert—if he was expecting the visit. Poppers restrained from breaking radio silence. She would’ve liked to confirm one last time that Parks was still in his room, but they were now on the third floor—too close to their target to risk any communication.

Doubt

Geli felt certain that the situation wasn’t right. She absolutely remembered that Parks had brought his skateboard along in both her alternative memories. In them, he never went back to his room, and they didn’t wait very long for the guys with guns to show up. If these details were wrong, Geli reasonably worried that other parts of the visions might’ve been wrong.

“He is such a jerk,” she thought to herself.

Geli knew the truth though: she could‘ve stopped him if she’d really tried. Her initial shock at not noticing the missing skateboard compounded with the other messed-up details from her memories. Nervousness and confusion affected the lack of serious effort she gave to keeping Parks from going back to his room. Now, she was unsure of the escape plan.

A noise broke into her self-analysis. The hotel door was opening—it was happening. They’d arrived. Geli realized she had no way to be sure how many there actually were. She could see them when she’d been in the alternatives. In reality though, there was a solid door between her and them. Even if there were still three of them, this time one might remain outside. When Parks and she ran from the building, it would be over before they had a chance. Her doubts about her alternative memories were affecting her judgment. They had limited options; she saw no choice but to go for it.

A sound from outside—tires squealing on the street—delivered a crushing realization. Geli knew immediately that it was the taxi from her last vision. The taxi that was to kill the streetlight and darken their escape route had come too early. No—they were too late, and it was a matter of time before the streetlight timer would kick the lights back on. Geli hadn’t a clue as to how long that might be. Once it did happen, the light flooding the street would eliminate their only escape route. Unless another taxi with cockeyed headlights came along—unlikely really—doom seemed inevitable.

Geli heard the first squeak of someone climbing the lobby stairs. Parks was not back yet, and she worried that maybe he was still in his room. She briefly considered going back up to get him, but by the time she could’ve made it to the third floor, it would be too late. She made the only decision she could: stay where she was. Unless she heard something—gunfire—from upstairs, she’d wait for Parks to return.

She flinched at the sudden sound—footsteps—from the stairwell behind. It had to be Parks. She was sure it was Parks. But she couldn’t shake her fear that maybe it was one of the intruders, doubling back to check the fire escape. The footsteps moved slowly—or seemed to at least—and Geli thought that maybe she should run. She was too afraid though—not for herself, but for Parks. If they separated now, there’d be no way to save him. There was a ninety-nine percent chance—she told herself—that it was Parks coming down the stairs with his skateboard. She took a breath, and waited to see if she was right.

Geli softly released her breath as she saw Parks move into the light at the top of the next landing. Relief at his return replaced her anger over his leaving in the first place—relief, and a sense of urgency to get them both out onto the street before the streetlights reactivated. She picked up her bag, and cracked open the door to peek into the lobby—it was empty.

From the darkness, Parks saw Geli motion for him to follow. Skateboard in his right hand, he used his left to grab his backpack from the floor. Putting it on as he followed Geli into the lobby—to the front door of the hotel.

“When I open the door,” Geli whispered, “we run down to the end of the block and across the street—head toward the Castro.” She paused to make sure Parks was listening. “Right now, the street lights should be off, and we should be okay. If they come back on, stop running and go flat against whatever building we’re in front of.” Geli waited for Parks to nod his head and then continued, “There are two of these guys sitting just out front, in their car. If the lights come on and they’re looking up the street, they’ll be able to see us running on the street—so stay in the shadows.”

Geli didn’t wait for his response. She pulled the door open, plunged through the bright light filling the hotel entry, and dropped into the darkness of the sidewalk just beyond. She didn’t look back. She ran as fast as she could toward the end of the street. Within seconds, the streetlights above her head began to buzz. Instinctively, she jumped to her left. Several small flickers of blue-white light broke in the air above. The middle of the street lit as the streetlights came up full.

Pressing her body against the wall of a building, and doing her best to hold her suitcase suspended next to her, Geli turned her head to look for Parks. Four feet away, pressed against the same building, Parks turned his head toward Geli. The two were shaded, but there was enough light for Geli to see the fear in Parks’ face.

Turning from the left corner, a Crown Vic moving at high speed—squealed onto the street in front of them. From the direction it came, Geli realized that it could be the car from her alternative—the one that was parked behind the Slot. Unbelievably, although they passed by within twenty feet, the two men inside hadn’t noticed Parks and Geli pressed against the wall. The car was speeding toward its twin parked in front of the Slot—working the brakes only as it pulled up alongside.

The men jumped from their car. One of them was speaking into the microphone of a two-way radio he held. They raced to opposite sides of the parked car, and pulled at all four handles on the doors. They yelled at the windows, pounded at them hard, but there was no response from inside.

Geli realized this was an opportunity. She looked over at Parks, but the scene down the street was holding his focus. She pulled him by the arm and took off in a run across the street toward the corner as planned.

“Look!” A man’s voice yelled from behind.

Neither Parks nor Geli knew that the man yelled, not because he had seen them running, but because he had seen something else that—a second later—created a massive explosion. The explosion scattered the pieces of both cars over the street and sidewalk. Even the Slot suffered a broken window as the hood from one of the Vics tore into the second floor. Everything was in flames. It was impossible to know what was human and what was machine. The area where the two cars had been was now a ten-foot wide pothole.

Instinct pulled the two away from the horrible scene. Staying behind to help would’ve resulted in bullets from the others when they came out of the hotel to investigate the explosion. The people killed were the people trying to kill Parks—they had to remember that. Geli and Parks turned away, and ran. They kept running for some time.

Reflections

From behind, as Parks and Geli ran, siren screams moved through the streets, converging on the explosion turned fire that burned in front of the Slot. Parks and Geli didn’t talk—they just ran.

Of the neighborhood Municipal Railway stations, the Muni station at Castro was the busiest. There were only six underground train routes in the Muni system; half came through Castro. The route for the L Taraval ended at the westernmost end of San Francisco—Ocean Beach. This was where Geli was taking Parks to meet the old lady.

Geli slipped her Fast Pass through the scanner, pushed past the turnstile, and into the station. Parks mostly traveled by skateboard—and when he took public transit, jumped the turnstile—so he never bought the monthly Fast Pass. The problem with the Castro station was that there was only one entrance—no chance to find the unmanned booth—it was impossible to avoid the fare. He just dug into his pocket for the quarters to pay the fare.

“Get the transfer,” Geli reminded him. She pointed her finger at the transfer card as it popped out from the turnstile. “Always get the transfer.”

Parks saw the transfer as a golden ticket for the unwheeled San Franciscan. They were bus-dependent people who lived without a bike, or skateboard. Transfers were good for ninety minutes, up to two hours. The expiration times varied for transfers issued by drivers, depending on the driver’s whim. The turnstile-generated transfers were ink-stamped with the date and a time—exactly 90 minutes from when you dropped your fare.

Their route was direct, they wouldn’t be transferring to another bus or train, and they’d be out at Ocean Beach longer than an hour and a half. Nevertheless, Parks grabbed the transfer and stuffed it into his pocket. He wasn’t up for an argument with Geli over the issue.

Even late in the evening the Castro station wasn’t empty—it never was until it closed. At night, most of the crowd was on one side of the track, it was the platform for trains heading inbound—toward downtown. Parks and Geli waited in silence, along with only three other people on the outbound side, for the next L train in the tube. Neither of them knew how to talk about what they’d seen, or been through that night.

Parks dropped his gaze to scan the tracks, look at the trash and count the various items dropped by commuters throughout the day. Geli pretended to read the advertising plastered along the wall, but her attention was really somewhere else—on a guy she caught watching them from the moment they’d walked down to the platform. He didn’t stare—but she saw him.

He was a good-looking guy, in his twenties—very dark skin. Dressed neatly, but not in anything that would stand out, he looked more like a graduate student to Geli than a threat. In fact, the more she tried to catch him looking again, the more she realized that she was probably just being paranoid. He was clearly more interested in what was playing through his earbuds than he was in anyone on the platform.

It was about a five-minute wait before the train pulled in and everyone on the platform boarded. As usual on public transit, the passengers spread themselves evenly among the empty seats—maintaining as much personal space buffering as possible. The man who had so interested Geli on the platform, now seemed entirely disinterested in them. He took a seat at the other end of the train and stared blankly across the aisle. Whatever it was that had aroused her suspicions, she couldn’t see it now. Geli looked over at Parks to see if he’d noticed the man, but she could see he was too absorbed in other thoughts.

Parks had done dangerous things in his life, with dangerous people—he’d always thought so anyway. He’d been scared before, even really scared. But fighting to save his life was different than risking it; this was scary at a new level. The fear made him nauseous. It occupied his mind to the point that he honestly didn’t know if he could continue—if he could take any more. Turning to look out the window, he stared into the empty blackness of the tunnel, hoping to hide the moisture in his eyes.

Parks always considered running—the getaway—as pure instinct. When there’s a chance to stop and think, then fear takes over—it sabotages the brain. He’d once seen something on TV, an interview with a guy who survived a shark attack while surfing. The man never feared sharks, not before the attack, as it happened, or immediately after the attack. It was only after a minute—on the beach, when his friends were pulling him to safety—that his fear started. The further they got him up the shore—the safer he was—the more his fear grew. He knew rationally that the water line stopped the shark; it wasn’t coming after him on land. Still, the idea that it was out there—determined to get its meal back—stayed in the surfer’s head for years.

Parks wondered if the people who were after him would keep coming until they successfully finished him off. It seemed obvious now that it wasn’t only a few people after him; it was some sort of organized group. He felt sure they would keep coming—and coming—until they killed him. He wasn’t sure how an old lady was going to help that.

The questions were running through his head. He didn’t even know what Geli was trying to do with him. What relevant information could the old lady have about him? Geli said she’d only met this lady recently, and Parks had never met her. How safe was she? Then a thought crept into Parks’ mind, an unpleasant one—unthinkable—which he attempted to ignore. Because if it were true—if the old lady was just a trap—they had no safe place to run, and it was already over for them. It was certainly possible. They could all be working together to get Parks and Geli out to a desolate spot, to kill them.

He was creeping himself out now—looking around the train with a nervous eye—worrying that maybe they were being followed. In some way, everyone on the train looked to Parks as if they might be trouble. The two women seated three rows up—short hair, good shape—could be cops. The older guy standing in the middle of a train with so many empty seats—why was he standing? The couple in the next section—they were definitely looking toward Parks and Geli, but they were too old for cops. Then there was the black guy seated at the far end, chewing gum and paying absolutely no attention to anyone in the train—the sort of behavior that always made Parks suspicious. Was this guy a tail to see that they made it to the trap?

Parks fought his paranoid thoughts, wanting to push them away. The old lady being a trap made no sense, not with how it all went down. If someone were luring them to the old lady’s house, blowing up the cars back at the Slot was a pointless diversion. They—whoever they were—could’ve just let Parks and Geli escape as they were trying to do. They were running already, they didn‘t need the explosion effects to scare them along.

However, it could’ve been something else—the explosion could, instead, have been a diversion for their benefit—protection to help them escape. If that was the situation, then who was the protector? An old lady? They idea of her sitting on a porch, soldiering detonator wires to bombs—scores of adopted cats rubbing up against her legs—was a funny image, but doubtful as likely. Somebody made a bomb though—two exploded cruisers were the proof of that. Parks looked down the aisle, to the guy at the end of the train; he didn’t look the type either. In fact, Parks decided that he was just letting himself get psyched out by fear. The guy looked more or less like any normal college dude. He was in his own world, listening privately to tunes and blowing the occasional bubble. He barely looked up at all; but when he did—it just seemed to Parks that he had more interest in them than he did the others on the train. But he didn’t look like a cop; Parks was confident that he could tell the difference.

Geli tried to distract her mind from thoughts and questions she just didn’t have the experience to deal with yet. But the events—what went wrong back there—wouldn‘t stay out of her head. She must’ve missed something, one or more details she felt she needed to find. Nothing about the visions felt wrong—different from any others—but there were some holes in them. Parks forgetting his skateboard was odd. Could that have changed the timing? The people, who came for Parks, entered the hotel several minutes late. Why was that? She realized it was good they did. If they came when they should’ve, they’d have run right into him when he went back to get his skateboard. Everything worked out for the best, but that wasn’t the point. Things didn’t go according to the way she’d seen them happen—Geli wanted to know why. She was compelled to find some connections.

One of Geli’s lessons, gained from walks with the old lady, was the notion that events and actions all relate to one another; this was something they talked about several times. Going back far enough, a common link—even for seemingly unrelated events—always exists: A man moves a chair in Sydney; a man stubs his toe in New York; somewhere in time, the two realities converge—at several points actually. As branches stemming from a common point in time, they affect each other—past and future. Geli wasn’t looking for some abstract in time or space; she felt some immediate connections exist to the circumstances of this incident. She didn’t think she’d have to go back too far to find them.

The missing skateboard, the late arrival of the people in black, the taxi coming too soon—were all wrong in her visions. Geli wasn’t as sure about the explosion. She cut her vision short once she and Parks escaped around the corner to safety. If she’d waited—kept the vision going—the explosion might‘ve occurred in the same way. There was no way to know about that.

The skateboard seemed to be a key; it was the constant—tied to all the alternatives. Parks always had his skateboard with him when the bad guys entered the hotel. The obvious idea, that they had a tracking device planted on Parks skateboard, seemed unlikely. When he brought the board with him into the fire escape, they didn’t follow it—they went straight for his room. That was the same in every one of the alternatives; they always went to his room. Whatever the reason was, Geli felt that the skateboard played some part in the timing change; it was the first thing that was different from how it should’ve happened. Everything changed after Parks forgot his skateboard.

Geli knew that she didn’t have the skills necessary to filter through the information on her own. She needed help analyzing the differences between what actually happened and what she experienced in the alternatives. Understanding exactly what that was, needed to wait until she could consult with the old lady. It was useful to know that her visions could be wrong. This was something she’d never experienced before. To play it safe, for now she’d limit the level of trust she gave her alternate realities.

Parks hated feeling scared. He could feel Geli constantly glancing over—worried about him, like an older sister. That wasn’t the look he wanted from her. He wanted her to think of him as tough, street—whatever it was that wasn’t shaking and fighting back tears. He needed to fight the fear—get angry. It’s the way he’d learned survival.

The first big lesson came from a bike chain—the night Rob threatened him with it. It wasn’t the first time, but Rob was drunk—more than usual—he looked like he might follow through on the threat. That night, Parks didn’t care—he‘d had enough of being pushed around. He was scared, but he stood firm. Staring threateningly into Rob’s eyes, he made the decision he wouldn’t back down. He made it clear; if Rob held the threat, it would have to go all the way. And he meant it—Parks knew he would fight Rob if he had to; he didn‘t even care how it would end. He wanted that message sent to his foster dad. It was obvious that Rob got it.

The standoff worked. It was the last threat Rob ever tried on Parks. After that, the two simply coexisted—tolerated each other—but each stayed out of the other’s way. It was a revelation for Parks. Life bullied the scared and weak, but those who seemed dangerous, angry, a threat—were left alone. And Parks just wanted everyone to leave him alone. At that moment, starting with his foster dad, Parks knew he’d put an end to the threats and the attempts of others to bully him. Going forward, personal control had shifted.

Now, when he got scared, Parks didn’t let the feelings linger. He had gained the ability to channel pain and fear into strength and action. But was that only for childhood threats? He wasn‘t in any way sure he had the strength to turn his fear around in this situation. This all was very different—very real—they meant to kill him. Shaking off this fear was harder.

The train was passing through the last tunnel, into West Portal station. The remainder of the route would continue outside, along the street. The ten minutes since leaving Castro—only a third of their trip—seemed to have taken an hour. Parks and Geli still hadn’t spoken a word.

To take her mind away from the seemingly hopeless search for connections, Geli focused her thoughts on home. She’d been away for a week already; she needed to get back. Once she brought Parks safely to the old lady, she’d go back home for the night. There was nothing for her to do after that, she’d made her decision; now it was up to Parks. After he learned about the Reveal, it would be for him to take the next step on his own. She might as well wait out his decision in the comfort of home.

She’d left Marionville for San Francisco right after finishing her report on rationing during World War II. It all seemed so much longer than a week ago. She barely remembered it now. Once she stepped back, it would return to her—it always did—just as the events here would fade until she returned. Then at least, the battle dwelling in her brain to find connections would be over until Parks’ decision brought her back.

Crossing between realities was definitely getting easier, or she was getting better at it; she consistently hit her target time within a half-hour. The problem last time was her leaving so late. Completing the history report had taken longer than she planned, forcing her to leave home very close to dinnertime. If her mom came up to get her for dinner, Geli didn’t want to be missing from her room—or worse—have her mom in the room when she completed the crossover and suddenly materialized in front of her. It would be ridiculously hard for anyone to explain living two lives at the same time to a parent. They just weren’t any good understanding things outside of their own experience—it was a parent thing.

Now, bothered by the worry of poor timing and imagining having to explain things to her parents, Geli pressed her mind back to the moment and the events at the Slot. It was beginning to occur to her that something Parks did in the room, when he went back for his skateboard, might have been the trigger. If these people were watching his window from the outside, his turning on his lights when he returned to get his skateboard could’ve been the signal for them to enter the building. The problem with the theory was that his room was toward the back of the hotel. Unlike her room, the windows—and therefore the lights—in Parks’ room weren’t visible from the street. And the dental offices blocked the view of the windows from the street behind the slot.

She looked over at Parks, thought about asking him what exactly he did after he left the fire escape, but decided against it—he looked far more shook-up than even she was. He didn’t know what was happening. As far as Geli knew, he didn’t even suspect what he was. She thought that if she could just take his mind off things for a bit, maybe get him to laugh, then she could casually ask him some questions. She liked his laugh. He snorted when he really lost it.

Banana Story

Geli thought of a story to distract Parks for a while. He liked to hear about her family, probably because it was such a contrast to his own experience. As if he was a visiting alien, he asked about the most mundane stuff: games they played, cooking, arguments—really boring sometimes. She didn’t mind that he’d poke fun at her stereotypical middle-American upbringing. For all the jokes, she could see that he clung to the image her stories created. Geli decided to use that to break the silence.

“Did I ever tell you about the time my dad tried to break the world record for banana eating?” She asked him.

Parks was grateful for the chance to break away from the thoughts that kept creeping into his head. He answered her with a well-intentioned insult. “No, but your family sounds nuts enough to try something like that.”

“I said my dad tried to break the record.”

“Uh huh,” Parks nodded.

“Okay,” Geli admitted, “we all did try it—eventually, but it was his idea first. We just got into the family spirit.”

He wished he could meet Geli’s dad, who sounded like a lot of fun—despite Parks calling him a “fascist father” because he insisted on curfews, restricted online access and made everyone in the family cook dinner together. Still, her parents sounded goofy enough in her stories and he thought it would be cool to meet them someday.

“The official record was six bananas in ninety-five seconds,” she explained.

“No way,” Parks said. “Anyone could eat six bananas in a minute and a half—probably in a minute.”

“I know, right? That‘s what we figured—at least one of us could eat seven or eight in ninety-five seconds.”

This was the sort of thing Parks loved—the way Geli described her family. Weird little things they decided they just had to test. It was always something stupid, but the story sucked Parks in.

“Dad went to the store and bought the bananas—twenty-eight of them—even though Benny was only nine and nobody figured he’d really be able to eat his seven.”

“I wonder what they thought at the store with your dad buying all those bananas.”

“Dad said he told them we found an orphan monkey on our doorstep; we were going to use the monkey to start a neighborhood zoo.” Then, as if she couldn’t help herself, Geli pointed out that although monkeys would eat a banana if you gave them one, banana trees weren’t native to where monkeys live.

“Okay, thanks for the lesson,” Parks said dismissively. “So what happened? Did anyone break the record?”

“No. My dad ate five in the first minute, and then couldn’t choke down even half of one in the last thirty seconds. It was really much harder then you’d think. My mom stopped at three, but I think she was just playing along and not really trying to beat the record”

“What about you, and Benny?”

“I made it to five, but used up the whole minute and a half. Benny—he ate six and a half. Then, all of a sudden, his face went pale. We could see he was going to get sick but there was nothing we could do.”

Parks realized what was coming. Since the time he’d once told Geli that nothing grossed him out, she’d tried to disprove the claim several different times. It had become a personal challenge for her—a game of stealthily bringing him to a point where he‘d gag. It never worked, but for her own reasons she kept trying.

“It was gross,” she said. “It came out of his mouth like a fountain; the spaghetti we had for dinner and chunks of barely-chewed banana poured out into a puddle across the kitchen table.”

Parks, who had an amazing sense of when someone was telling the truth and when they weren’t, was helpless when it came to Geli. The banana story was ridiculous, unlikely, but just possible for the picture of her family that Parks had painted in his head—nothing in her face gave it away as a made up anecdote. She’d led him along until she brought him to the punch line. It didn’t make him nauseous; it made him want to laugh. In that sense, her diversion had worked.

Feeding on their joint laughter, they each took turns embellishing the story, and topping the other’s description of the puke; calling it “a banana spit,” or “Benny’s extra-chunky spaghetti sauce.” It was nonsense, but it let Parks and Geli forget about Crown Vics, guys with guns and even the explosion—for a bit.

Parks and Geli hadn’t even noticed that except for the college guy at the end, everyone had gotten off the train. Now that guy was standing to leave too. Neither Parks nor Geli had said anything about their original suspicions of the man. Since he was exiting—going his own way—mentioning it now seemed pointless. It was obvious that he wasn’t following them to the end. The man blew one last enormous orange bubble as he stepped down from the train; then with a pop, sucked the gum back into his mouth. The door closed behind him. The train moved on.

“Final stop coming up,” the Muni driver announced. “All passengers must exit the train.”

Just as they were the only two passengers remaining to step off the train, they were also the only two people around once they stepped onto the street. Not many people had reason to be out at the end of Sloat Boulevard so late. People did live out here—in brightly painted houses—but no one that lived here was walking around at ten o’clock. No one else in the city had reason either. The area’s main attraction: the zoo, closed hours earlier. There were no clubs, no stores, and except for a delivery-only pizza joint, none of the area’s restaurants stayed open at night. This far end of the Sunset District was down for the night. Even the ocean seemed closed, hid from sight by a thick cover of San Francisco fog. The roar and salty wind-whipped spray in the air was the only evidence that—only three hundred feet to the west—the Pacific Ocean was churning away in the darkness.

The heavy fog made it a damp three-block walk from the train platform to the old lady’s house. In the rush to get out of the Slot, neither had thrown on enough layers of clothing. The chill quickly worked its way through to their skin. Nevertheless, the walk gave Geli a chance to prepare Parks—in some small way—for what he was about to experience. He’d be skeptical if she gave him too much detail, she knew that, but his mind needed to be open in order to accept what he would see and hear in the next few hours.

“Even the house,” she said, “and the property it’s on, will be like nothing you’ve ever experienced Parks.”

The weirdness of the old lady’s house didn’t worry Parks; Geli tended to dramatize her descriptions. It would have to be very unusual to raise an eye on anyone living in San Francisco. A floating house or a dungeon would impress him. Unless underground, or hovering a few inches over the land, he doubted this house was anything but one of the tens of thousands of wildly painted houses in the city. Some were cool, but nothing was mind-blowing. No, it wasn’t likely to be the old lady’s house to impress or worry Parks. But the warnings Geli gave about the old lady did rattle him. Instead of convincing Parks that they were doing the right thing in coming here, the words she was saying were making him want to back out. If he didn’t know that she’d stop him from trying to turn around and leave, Parks would’ve just looked for another plan.

She told him the chances were likely that the things he learned from the old lady would scare him—not just about the people trying to kill him, but other dangers he‘d never knew existed. Her comments about these crazy things the old lady would say included a caution that she had a tendency to fall asleep—drift away—in mid-conversation, usually only for seconds at a time. Geli said that he’d eventually learn what that was all about, but for now, he should just ignore it, and wait for the old lady to come back.

The speed at which she was talking, and the fact that everything she said sounded like a puzzle, made it seem to Parks that Geli was simultaneously trying to avoid telling him too much, but trying to cram as much of it into the walk as she could. The last thing she said—just before they turned the last corner—made Parks wonder if Geli was bringing him into some sort of cult.

“Here’s what it boils down to tonight, Parks.” Her eyes were grave and penetrated deep into his as she spoke. There was a very different way about her at that moment—somber—as if she’d blocked any shred of humor in order to impress Parks of the seriousness in her words. “You’re going to learn about something amazing and surreal. You will have the choice to believe it, or not; ignore it, or not; accept it, or not. This will be the most important decision you will ever make in your life, and I can’t tell you what to do.”

It was hard for Parks to understand his own feelings at this moment. The night’s events had already given an eerie dream-like quality to everything that was happening. What he was hearing from Geli—although it seemed bizarre—made sense in this place—a way that the strange places and bizarre events of a dream somehow make sense. It made him nervous too.

Then, as suddenly as it had gone serious seconds earlier, Geli’s face changed again. A childlike sense of joy and excitement seemed to take it over. She took Parks by the hand, and they turned the corner. And—as if the world wanted to show Parks that there were still things that could blow his mind—he got his first look at the old lady’s property.

It stood out from all the neighboring houses. For one thing, the other houses—built toward the front of their lots—had less than ten feet separating them from the street. This house was set back more than halfway into the property. Then, there was the fact that every other house around was almost exactly the same height. In fact, they all had pretty much the same appearance in general. But the old lady’s house was no taller than a garage. In no way did it look anything like the other buildings on the street. It seemed now to Parks that Geli might not have over-exaggerated her description of the lady—not if what he was looking at was any indication of her personality—she certainly hadn’t over-exaggerated the house.

It was strange. The old lady’s house was strange; the front yard was stranger still. It would have been an eyesore in any neighborhood except the beach, and probably even here. In any city other than San Francisco, it would have been infamous— the sort of place inhabited by a crazy lady who shoots trespassers with rock salt. Parks had lived in some weird neighborhoods, been to some crazy-ass places, but he’d never seen anything like this.