A Short Story from the “Wormhole Series”
Before the end of the world, I lived in a really small town high up in the mountains of North Carolina. It was so small, you’ve never heard of it. Not much there except for an inn, a gift shop, a couple of restaurants, and a church. Most outsiders who came to our town came because they wanted a mountain vacation, but I grew up surrounded by mountains and felt hemmed in by them. I wanted with all my soul to see what lay beyond the mountains, out there in the real world, and eventually I got my wish, though it wasn’t anything like I expected it to be, not by a long shot.
I was the only boy in a household of women once my grandpa passed on. My mama, granny, and aunts raised me, and all my cousins were girls. Before my grandpa passed away, he lamented loudly and often that the women of the family were fixing to sissify me—but I never saw it that way. Aside from the undefined shame I felt because he apparently thought I was missing some vital piece of manhood (which he never offered to give me himself), I was not aware of anything unusual in the arrangement. I never felt that my family doted on me, as you might expect they would; they merely treated me with an absent-minded, mostly benign tolerance, not seeming to know what to do with me other than leaving me to scramble up the best I could. I spend all my early years feeling that I had missed out on developments that were crucial to becoming a man. I was horribly shy and did not know how to turn to any of the men in our town who might have been willing to share what they knew of being a man. If I had, I’m not sure they would have been willing to help—the faint hostility I sensed told me I’d been written off as a lost cause.
You may be wondering where my father was in all this, and all I can say is that I never knew him. He took off to start a new life, running off with Preacher Sizemore’s daughter when I was just a baby. He was always spoken of in dismissive terms, as if the fact of his absconding was no particular cause for regret, but I had the sense I understood something of what motivated him. I, too, longed to make a break for the freedom I imagined down in the flatlands. I wanted to see cities and coastlines and maybe even foreign countries. I was a dreamy boy, they said, always with my nose in a book. It was the books that gave me those ideas, but no one seemed really worried about it. They must have known there wasn’t much to keep a young man in such an isolated place. Or maybe, what it really it was, they doubted I had the wherewithal to break free to begin with, rendering the whole thing moot. My lack of confidence in my own abilities was so profound that it almost amounted to a disability. I saw a program on HBO the other night in which a character kept talking about her anxiety disorder. Yep, that was me all right. Never knew there was a name for it, so that was good to find out, though it doesn’t matter that much anymore.
When I was 15, someone from outside the family finally did notice me, and that was Deacon Pilbro, an elder in our church. Despite the fact of my father’s running off with the Sizemore girl, two of my aunts still attended the church regularly, Sundays and Wednesdays both, usually insisting on taking me with them. The church was a half mile walk from our house, up a steep hill and through some trees. Deacon Pilbro at some point began asking me to stay behind to help with chores—chopping wood for the stove, shoveling snow in winter, and doing repairs to the roof. My aunts resented these occasions because they relied on me to escort them home, but because it was doing the Lord’s work, they felt unable to complain. The Deacon used to ask me questions about school and home while we worked and seemed genuinely interested, though he mostly talked about himself and how he never would have imagined being stuck in such a small parish, but when the Lord called you, you answered, until such time when you could go in for a better opportunity. He used the word “opportunity” a lot, and seemed struck by the idea that he was destined for better things. But when he asked about my plans, I just shrugged. I was shy about sharing my dreams with people—I had to keep something to myself just to make it day to day. If you had told me back then that those dreams wouldn’t come true, I don’t know that I wouldn’t have just hurled myself off the mountain.
The real trouble started (not the really bad trouble but my personal trouble, which ended up seeming like the same thing) when the Shrumfelds moved to the little house behind the Brookside Inn so that her parents could help run the place. Carlie Shrumfeld was my age and ended up in several of my classes at school. She came from New Bern, a place of unimaginable sophistication to me, and I thought she was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, with her clear blue eyes and long silky hair. We started spending time together after school, and although I was mostly content just to be with her and listen to her talk, watching the light in her eyes and admiring her graceful ways, she was well ahead of me in the courting and sparking department and soon let me know that she was willing to share what she knew with me. We had started finding places to be alone, and the most private place we had found was the little shed behind the graveyard where we kept the mowers and the shovels for yard work at the church. Carlie and I had already gone far enough for me to know this was something I wanted to do every chance we got, and on that spring afternoon when we finally went all the way, not once, but three times, we were found out by none other than Deacon Pilbro, who pushed open the door to find the two of us tangled in a heap on top of some coal sacks.
Carlie screamed and scrambled for her clothes, holding them against her as she jumped up and ran, without ceremony, out the door. The Deacon just stood there staring at me, so red in the face that I thought he might have a heart attack right where he stood. All I could think to do was to cover myself, because otherwise I was frozen. I could no more have thought of anything to say than if I had been struck mute, so shocked I was to see him. After staring at me angrily for several long seconds, the Deacon did something I was not expecting: he started taking off his own belt and began yelling, somewhat incoherently, about sin and absolution, and at that moment, I found my limbs again, scrambling to my feet and pulling up my pants as I hopped toward the door. The Deacon tried to catch me, but I was a good runner, and I got away, shooting off through the woods any old way, my only thought to put as much distance as I could between myself and the wild man the Deacon had suddenly turned into. I could hear him crying and shouting for me to come back, yelling that he meant no harm, but I kept going, my feet barely seeming to touch the ground until I was at the top of the mountain. I paused in the little clearing where my grandfather’s grave was nestled along with the graves of several other deceased Jaspers who had been unwilling to be buried next to the church.
It was when I paused in the clearing to catch my breath that I saw it: the cloud that would change everything. It had exploded in the north, far off beyond the ranges of the mountains, which seemed to go on forever, except that there was now something beyond them all right, this enormous mushroom cloud, billowing with fire and ash and reminding me of the throne scene in The Wizard of Oz, which I had seen on the Inn’s television as a special Easter treat several times when I was small. But I knew this was not a thing of childhood imagining—this was the end of the world. Somewhere far off, a bomb had fallen. Even as I watched the specter climb higher and higher into the sky, three similar clouds blossomed to the north and west of me.
I stood and stared. Where could I run to get away from such a calamity? It would reach us in the mountains, too, and we would all be poisoned, sooner or later. I was trying to decide if I should run back to our house and warn everyone when two more clouds appeared, and then two more, and a sound like the explosion of a volcano reached my ears. Everyone would have heard it by now. Doubtless, it was already on the TV news at the Inn. I could go back down and wait for the end with my family, a terrible certainty coming over me that it would not be a long wait. I had half-turned to go back down the mountain when I suddenly noticed a door, standing between two tall elms at one end of the cemetery plot. While I was trying to process what I was seeing, the door, which was of plain oak with a brass knob, opened from the other side, and I saw two strangers, a man and a woman, beckoning to me. Without speaking any words aloud, they conveyed to me that there was nothing I could do, that the forest would be incinerated within a minute but that there was an escape if I wanted it. We will not harm you, they said. We are here to help, but you must decide. You will be dead as will everyone on this mountain before you even go 30 paces.
Like a sleepwalker, I stumbled through the doorway, which looked as if it led only to the forest behind it until I stepped though it and found myself at the bottom of a silver staircase with the vastness of space all around me. The door shut behind us, and I had left the world completely behind. All around us was a silence broken only by a faint crystalline sound of bells. A shooting star streaked by as we climbed the staircase, through a blue-black vastness studded with stars. Up above, perhaps a mile distant, was the moon. The serenity of the scene could not have been in greater contrast to the calamity we had left behind. The staircase was broad and zigzagged gently on its way up. When we reached the top, we were standing on a tiny platform in front of a small brick building. Through the windows, I could see what looked like an office. When we stepped inside, the staircase dissolved behind us, and I found myself in a smallish room with an office desk, a filing cabinet, and a water dispenser, along with a small sink, a mini refrigerator, and a microwave oven. There was a clock with black numbers on the wall. Inside the door to my left was a small washroom. A short staircase—an ordinary one, not made of starlight—led up into the moon itself.
The man and woman were very kind, fully understanding how bewildered I was. They sat down with me at the desk and explained that they were not actually humans, although that was the form they had taken. They said they had seen the disaster unfolding from afar and had tried to save anyone who happened to be near what they called “portals.” My family’s private plot happened to have an open portal while I was standing in it, although they also told me that sometimes things happened like that for a reason. They said I would not be the only survivor, although the chances of my seeing anyone I knew ever again were unknown and not to be counted upon. They said that there were ways of mitigating the disaster, and that they would do what they could to stop it from spreading any further than North America. I would be able to go back one day, they said, if they were successful in their efforts. In the meantime, I should wait here, where there was an endless supply of food and refreshments, a comfortable bed, board games, a stereo system, a flat screen TV, a fitness room, a music studio, hot showers, and a back porch with a view of the Milky Way.
They made it clear that it was up to me whether to stay or go. I could go back to Earth at any time, though they did not recommend it due to extremely unstable conditions that would likely last for quite a while.
“We will come to visit you,” they said. “There are others of our kind, and you’ll probably meet them, too. Eventually, we hope to reestablish some form of stability on the Earth, but you must be patient. You are safe here, if you decide to wait, which we strongly suggest that you do. Any questions?”
It was strange how calmly my mind accepted what they were saying. I wondered what they really looked like but decided that I’d rather not know as that was altogether too much to chew on just then (later, it began to seem like the least important thing about them). I wondered if they were space aliens, or angels, or creatures from myth, and although they never actually cleared this point up for me, I eventually decided that the precise truth, if any, was another distinction that had no meaning.
They showed me into the moon itself, which they gave me to understand was just a simulation moon, built with all the comforts of a small house: a bedroom, a balcony with a view, and what they called an en-suite bathroom with a rainfall shower head and a sunken tub. I had never seen anything like it, even at the Inn, which was my previous gauge for fancy living. After we had talked for a couple of hours more, with their constant reassurances and quiet explanations that they were prepared to deal with just such a situation as was now taking place, and that they had long been concerned it would happen, they asked if I was tired and would like to sleep. I was about as bone-weary as I had ever been, and when they left me, with promises of seeing me again soon, I sank back on the bed, which was the softest I had ever slept in, almost like sleeping on a cloud. The soft lights dimmed even further, to a pale white that made the violet and blue of the wall coverings and bedding glow like twilight over the western mountains.
I wondered if I would ever see that sight again; the thought that I would not was overwhelming. When I thought back over the day, it seemed incredible that the first time I’d ever had sex coincided with the end of the world. It would have seemed almost funny except for the thought that I had no idea where Carlie was or if she had even survived. The space people had told me before they left that there were likely few survivors in our part of the country but not to give up hope entirely. They also reassured me that my having had sex was in no way connected to the calamity itself, even though they knew it might seem that way to me. “Unfortunate timing,” is how they described it.
So I settled into what was now my new home, with a view of the universe outside the large picture window in my bedroom. I wondered why I had been spared. Although there was never really an answer to that question, all of the space people who visited from time to time seemed to hint that despite the terrible thing that had happened, there was always an underlying order and a reason for things. It was their assurance of this that helped give me a reason to go on: I wanted to see what would happen next and how I might fit into the future that was unfolding. I had wanted to see the wider world, and now I had found the universe was vaster than I had ever realized.
Whenever I opened my refrigerator, there was always a new store of food that replenished itself by some means unknown to me. I could make things on the cooktop, since I had a whole pantry of raw ingredients, or I could take ready-made dishes out of the fridge and put them in the microwave; they were always delicious. I could make hot chocolate or coffee, which I’d always drunk at home. There was a screen behind the sunken tub that changed scenes periodically, sometimes looking like a misty forest, sometimes like a pool on the edge of a cliff with an awesome view of the ocean, sometimes like a nook at the base of a waterfall. It had sound effects, too: the singing of tropical birds and the splash of cascading water, or sometimes the sound of rain dripping off leaves.
After a couple of days, the streaming service began to work on the stereo system. I never had to change the station, because it always seemed to anticipate what I might like to hear next. There was no news at all from Earth, an omission the space people said was for the best, but I could get Netflix, VUDU, Redbox, and Amazon Prime as well as TCM. They were all re-runs, but I had never seen any of them anyway. I shot baskets on my mini-basketball court and used the weight equipment and treadmill to get in shape. I could go out on my balcony any time and watch the shooting stars and the constellations wax and wane, as if they were on a giant scroll unwinding above my head.
The only real problem was the not knowing, the uncertainty of whether it would be months or years before anything changed. I had so many questions, and so few answers. I had felt my crippling shyness fall away, as if the shock of my new existence had suddenly revealed another much less anxious person who had always been inside me. I enjoyed talking to the space people; I learned to cook lasagna; I listened endlessly to the Putumayo World Music Hour (syndicated); I taught myself to play the electric guitar. I was rarely bored.
But sometimes in the evening (there was no real difference in space between morning and evening, but evening was when I went to bed), I would find myself thinking of my family and of Carlie, and in the moments before I went to sleep, about how much nicer it would have been to have her there with me. It seemed sort of a shame that I had to be deprived of sex right after I had learned how to do it, with the first girl who had ever told me I was a knockout. (I never knew that, and I still like to think about it, even though there is no one here now to think about it but me. God will probably strike me dead for vanity one day.) It’s a comfortable life but a lonely one. In my head, I can hear my aunts chastising me for being selfish and vain and any number of other things. But the truth is, I know: I’m a very lucky boy, and I really can’t complain. My fondest hope is that Carlie made it through somehow, and that I might see her again one day.
