Just before sunset, when vendors were packing up their merchandise and the store clerks were locking their doors, Jake took a final glance up and down the street and prepared to blow the whistle, thinking with mild disgust of the whistle in his desk drawer at school, used to bring order to chaos. He didn't know where this whistle would take him exactly, or what it would do, but he intended to be far away from Olympus when night came. It seemed the only wise course of action.
Jake lifted his little finger to his mouth, then lowered it in doubt. He could call Zeus, of course, if there was a phone, but Jake hadn't seen one. He knew better than to ask where he could find him—Zeus traveled in disguise for a reason. The old elementary standby, to find a policeman or a fireman or a nun in times of trouble, seemed laughable in this place, where no one seemed to be in charge of anything. He could make his way back to the courthouse, but no one there had seemed particularly helpful.
Surely…Jake looked at the whistle. Surely, it would be fine. Suddenly, staring at it, pulled in by its humble shine, he didn't care so much about trying to find another way. He wanted to know what would happen when he blew it. He wanted to know where it would take him.
He lifted the whistle to his mouth, and pausing, he drew a picture of his apartment in his mind, for good measure. Then he took a breath and blew long and loud. But before he was finished blowing, the air coming out of his mouth seemed to reverse itself, but he wasn't sucking in air, the whistle was sucking in air, and then he felt something he could only later describe as what it felt like to be snorted, as the whistle sucked him in entirely.
For the nth time in the past week, Jake fell on his back in an unfamiliar place. The benefit this time was that he was wearing shoes, he still had his clothes, and he was not in the presence of sadistic and powerful mythological beings. He was alone, and he was fairly sure that he was now in the desert, probably somewhere near Giza or near a mirage because he thought there were pyramids on the horizon.
The whistle was no longer on his finger. Jake kicked the sand around to see if it had fallen off, but for all he knew he was just hiding it better, unless, of course, he was inside the whistle. That would make things more complicated.
He dusted himself off as best he could and began walking toward Giza. "The most surprising thing about all this," he said out loud to himself as he trudged through the soft sand, "is that nothing at all about this is surprising."
After ten minutes, he was fairly sure he was more sunburned than he had ever been in his life.
After fifteen minutes, his legs ached with the effort of walking through the sand.
After half an hour, he was so thirsty that he began thinking about that passage in Coleridge where the sailor bites his flesh so he can drink his own blood. The thought had always disgusted Jake before, but now….
After an hour, Jake was sure that he was going to die. But he was so tired and thirsty that he was looking forward to it, if he wasn't dead already. If he was, that presented a whole new series of problems that he didn't want to think about. It wasn't until he stepped under the canopy of trees and stuck his head under the little spring that he believed he'd reached an oasis. He drank as much as he could, then stood up and mumbled the chorus to "Champagne Supernova," which he later took as a sign that he had obtained some brain damage from the sun, as he walked around in search of something to eat.
The oasis, probably no larger than his apartment, seemed to be devoid of stupid animals or those so unaccustomed to humans that were trusting and easily caught and eaten.
There was, however, a phone booth.
Jake stood and stared at the phone booth for quite awhile. Palm trees shaded it, and a little dune was piled up against one side, no doubt blown there by the desert winds. On the other side of the dune, still in the shade, a stack of palm leaves had been gathered to form a kind of bed, though any other sign of humanity, if there ever had been other signs, had been blown away. He drank more water and sat for a few minutes as he waited for the phone booth to disappear. The sun must have affected him more than he thought. The booth was impressively detailed for a hallucination, and if it was a manifestation of something in his subconscious, he thought it might have something to do with Christmas.
A family who lived a few houses down from his and Rachel's white brick house on Lime Street was fanatic about Christmas, the kind of people with forty plastic reindeer on every square foot of roof and lawn that appeared just after Thanksgiving every year. Jake deplored their tackiness, even more so because night and day the house glared so determinedly in the direction of the street that Jake couldn't ignore it. He tried staring straight ahead, staring in the other direction, and closing his eyes as he passed it. Somehow it was always there, smiting his eyes.
The third year, Jake developed an avoidance tactic. The least horrific aspect of Santa's Sweatshop was a real, glass-walled phone booth, like something pulled right out of an Audrey Hepburn movie, which stood in the middle of the lawn. The fact that it held a giant stuffed Santa was irrelevant. The phone booth was beautiful, like an ancient steam train or an antique car. Jake focused on the booth as he passed the house every day and thereby survived a whole holiday season without dreaming of dressing like an elf and strangling the family with tinsel.
Jake stood, futilely brushing the sand off his shorts, and approached the booth, sans Santa. He no longer thought that he must be in Egypt, or in any other part of the world he knew, which made the prospect of a phone booth on an oasis a little easier to cope with.
If you only ever had one call to make….
Jake checked his pockets. No change. He stepped inside the booth, closing the door behind him for no good reason. It was cooler inside than he'd expected.
If you only ever….
He would call his father, of course. It was the sensible thing to do. No one else would be able to save him. No one else would be able to help at all. He took a deep breath in and sighed it out. The booth smelled like peppermint. Jake picked up the phone and put it to his ear. A dial tone. He would call his father, of course. Zeus might not be answering, or the number might not work, or there might not be any way for Zeus to find him or help him.
If you only ever have one call to make….
His fingers punched another number, one that had been his for so long that it seemed to say something about him, it seemed to mean "Jake and Rachel Foster," more a part of his own identity than his birthday or his social security number or #37, the vegetable moo shoo he always ordered when he and E. E. ordered in.
Rachel picked up the phone.
"Hey, it's Jake," he said, feeling that if he gave her the time to ask who was calling, and she did, he might truly fall apart. "Is Lily around?"
Rachel was silent.
"I just wanted to ask her about her day. I'm not calling to slander you or undermine your authority or—"
"Just a second," she huffed.
Jake stood with the phone in his hand, looking out at the shining desert from the shaded booth. He couldn't believe it had worked. He had been sure that it wouldn't.
A full minute later, Lily's voice came through the receiver like sunshine and weekends and sand castles on the beach, and not for the first time since Rachel had asked him to move out, Jake felt a little like crying. What if he never got home? It was hell enough to lose his wife, but to imagine Lily growing up without him—
"Hey, how was your day?" he said
"Boring!" she said with excitement. "I watched six episodes of Fairly OddParents and got a haircut and went to the store for gross-shries and ate french fries."
"French fries?"
"Yeah. Mom called me a…a…Mom, what did you call me?...a addict."
Jake laughed. "Your mom's a pretty funny lady. What was The Fairly OddParents about today?"
He listened as she chattered about Timmy and Vicky and dinosaurs, and he focused entirely on her words and the sound of her voice. Jake let his knees give in, and he fell, a little harder than he'd intended to, onto the dusty black skid-resistant floor of the phone booth. An incredible pressure seemed to be building between his eyes, and as he listened, it spread to encompass his whole head and trickled down his throat and into his stomach. His entire nervous and digestive systems were in pain. He couldn't breathe. All he could do was press the receiver harder against his ear and rest his forehead on his knees.
"There was a plane, too, over our house. I said it was a alien, but Mom said it was just a plane. Just a plain ol' plane."
I don't know what I'm doing anymore.
"But I think it was really a alien. Do you think there are aliens?"
"Yeah," he said with a snort of manic laughter. "Yeah, I do. But don't tell your mom I said so, okay?"
"Okay," Lily whispered, then in her regular voice again, "Mom says I have to come eat dinner. When can I come see you again?"
Jake shook his head and made himself say, "Soon. Eat your vegetables."
"Oka-ay," she sighed. "Loveyoubye." And she was gone.
Jake stood, hung up the receiver and immediately picked it up again, but there was no dial tone. Somehow he knew there wouldn't be.
He slept cramped on the floor of the phone booth that night, mostly protected from the icy night wind, though he couldn't say how many hours of sleep he actually got. As soon as he was no longer thirsty, after repeated trips to the spring, hunger flamed up in him as ferociously as thirst had hours before. But there was nothing he could do.
Every time Jake woke up, he checked the phone for a dial tone.
Sleep finally came in a rush after dawn, when Jake was finally warm enough to leave the phone booth and stretch out on a stack of palm leaves on the ground. Finally comfortable, he slept.
The sun was hanging in a late afternoon sky when Jake woke up. For a few minutes, he lay staring at the palm tree tops, wondering how such tall plants were able to fit in his low-ceilinged bedroom, how they were able to put roots into the carpet.
When the reality of the desert beat its way into his brain, another panicked thought surfaced. The box. The hidden box in the top of his closet that no one was supposed to touch or know about. If he were stuck here, E. E. would eventually notice he wasn't around. He would go into Jake's room, maybe looking for some clue – a missing suitcase, a suicide note, a flight number jotted on a scrap of paper. If he didn't find the box, someone would, whoever came to clear out his room when everyone was pretty sure that he was dead. They would be right, of course. Jake wouldn't last here.
But visions of what could happen when the box was passed around the homicide department of the Bee Caves Police Department like Captain Trips motivated him to try not to die for a few days. He groaned and pulled himself to the spring, where he drank a meal's worth of water and hoped that his stomach would think it was receiving pancakes with cherry topping and hot butter and a fried egg or seven. For no reason other than boredom, Jake straightened his clothes, finger-combed his hair, and dusted his sand-blasted skin. He tried the phone six or seven times, but there was still no dial tone. He dialed anyway, as he had the night before, but nothing happened.
An hour later, Jake lay back down on the palm leaves, thinking that a nap would help pass the time until he died. Whatever came out of that box at least had to be better than this. It was a long while before he managed to quiet his mind enough to sleep again, but the palm mat was comfortable, and there was nothing else he could do.
He felt that he couldn't have been asleep more than an hour when he jerked suddenly awake, sitting straight up and staring out over the desert. There was a pale, moving spot on a sand dune over a mile away. Jake didn't know whether to call out or hide. He had no illusions about how he would do in a fight, nor was he certain that a hungry desert wanderer would retain an aversion to cannibalism. After a few more days, Jake might start to sympathize.
He had a fleeting thought that it had probably been more than two hours since he'd checked the phone last, but if he moved, the distant spot might notice him. He stayed on his palm mat. While he waited to see if the spot would approach, he tried chewing on the palm leaves and on the sparse grass and occasional bush within reach of the mat. Everything tasted like potent brussel sprouts, only raw and without butter or seasoning. He couldn't make himself eat it yet.
Another hour passed. The dot was larger, and Jake was fairly sure by this time that it was a man. He caught himself once falling asleep. The desert heat made his lungs ache. The third time he snapped awake, the man was stepping under the cover of the trees, close enough that Jake wouldn't have needed to raise his voice to speak to him.
Jake absorbed the information his eyes were trying to send to his brain. He observed the tennis outfit, the man's incredible thirst, and his bewilderment over the existence of a phone booth in the middle of a desert oasis. But it wasn't until the man entered the phone booth and closed the door behind him that he understood that he was truly seeing himself, seeing himself arrive at the oasis in the same way, at about the same time, as he had yesterday.
Other Jake had looked around thoroughly, in search of food, Jake remembered. He had passed near the palm mat, had looked at the palm mat, but hadn't seen Jake.
And now! Now Other Jake was lifting the phone's receiver and speaking to Lily. Jake stared, his heart racing. We're definitely not in Egypt, Toto.
Then another incredibly horrific thought invaded his mind. How many invisible Jakes were there in this oasis? How many sitting, watching, for how many days? Was this an illusion, or was he just one echo of Jake, one of millions of Jakes in millions of worlds in millions of dimensions?
Jake curled up like a child on his mat and tried not to think. Eventually, long after Other Jake had hung up the phone and arranged himself on the floor of the phone booth, Jake slept again, trying to keep his thoughts away from the now painful hunger, praying that something would change in the night.
Other Jake began to snore loudly not long past noon, waking Jake, who stood immediately and ran to the phone booth, shutting himself in despite the heat and taking his post by the phone. Just as Jake had, Other Jake had abandoned the phone booth hours ago and made himself a palm mat in a shady place.
Jake lifted the receiver. Still no dial tone. He replaced it and waited. A cluster of trees blocked his view of the direction from whence Other Jake had approached the day before, but he could see Other Jake and knew that in an hour or two, he would wake up and notice the spot on a distant dune. Jake had no doubt that Other Jake would see it, just as yesterday, and that Other Jake 2 would soon come stumbling into the oasis.
Jake checked the phone every few minutes and watched Other Jake like a lioness tracking a herd of giraffes, except that neither of them was moving. His sleepiness of the day before had evaporated. He would do something, even if it was futile.
Sooner than he expected, Other Jake 2 arrived, drank deeply from the spring, scouted for food, and stared in bewilderment at the phone booth. Eventually, Other Jake 2 approached the door. Jake sat on the floor, braced himself against the opposite wall, and propped his feet against the door, holding it tightly closed.
Other Jake 2 pushed on the door for several minutes, then paused and stared around in confusion as though…had he expected the door to open for him easily, as it had for the others? For the first time, Jake was sure that this was nothing but an illusion, maybe just the universe's most elaborate mirage. Other Jake 2 tried harder, throwing his whole wait against the door.
He had been too afraid the day before to speak out to Other Jake, sure that if Other Jake noticed him, it would cause a rip in the space-time continuum or universe would implode or some other nonsensical Star Trekkian tragedy would occur. Now Jake bellowed from within the phone booth, "Push harder, you wimp! Yeah, lean into it. Keep slamming into that door until your shoulder comes out of socket. Loser! Sucker! Pansy!"
You've gone crazy, his mind told him. Totally bonkers.
He kept yelling and taunting, unsure of what response he was looking for until it happened. Other Jake 2 punched the door with his fist, and yelled, "Shut up!"
The wind rustled the leaves overhead, but there was no other sound. Other Jake stared blankly at Other Jake 2. Other Jake 2 seemed to have realized his mistake, but was trying to find his poker face again. Jake sat, close to tears and close to laughing out loud, in triumph.
He stood and swung open the door, wrapping his hands around Other Jake 2's throat. "Who are you?"
"Jake Foster," the man wheezed.
Jake took one hand away and punched Other Jake 2 in the nose, thinking how odd this must appear to Other Jake, who sat on his palm mat looking confused and a little scared. If he honestly couldn't see Jake, it must seem that, after flailing himself at the phone booth and screaming "Shut up" to no one, Other Jake 2 began having trouble breathing, then said his own name, then suddenly jerked his head backward and began bleeding from the nose.
Jake was so frustrated and famished, so on the edge and losing balance, that he laughed loudly before tightening his grip on Other Jake 2's throat again.
"No! Tell me what the hell you are and what I'm doing here." Jake shook the man a little to encourage a quick response.
The man gagged on the blood streaming down his throat.
"You're a quick one, Jakey," a voice said.
Jake turned, his hands still lightly throttling Other Jake 2. Other Jake still reclined on his palm mat, but he was smiling now, like a kid at the movies.
"But you're not hurting anyone but yourself," Other Jake continued.
"Get me out of here," Jake said, trying not to plead. "I know you can. Let me go home."
Other Jake pouted. "But we're lonely. We're hungry for some fun, something to distract us from this awful heat."
Jake immediately let go of Other Jake 2's throat. "You're not going to have any fun with me. I'm through entertaining you." He went into the phone booth. The sun was setting, and it would be uncomfortably cold in an hour.
Jake closed the phone booth door and sat on the ground, staring straight ahead. He was still miserable and hungry and his every crevasse was caked with sand, but he had a small victory. Something had changed. He was taking control.
The phone rang.
Jake's insides leapt and twisted with surprise and then with hope. He jumped to his feet before he stopped to think, and his hand was on the receiver when he saw the Other Jakes watching with matching grins. He sat back down, and their grins drooped.
No. Everything is a trick. Everything is a joke.
The phone kept ringing long into the night. Jake became so tired that he would fall asleep in the pauses between rings, only to be jolted awake again an instant later, the shrill bell jangling in a panicked voice.
He couldn't remember the last time he'd been to the fountain, and his throat seemed to have caved in. He would die out here while his mirrors stood feet away giggling like middle school girls at a football game.
Once, the ringing stopped, and Jake was so thankful that he almost cried, but the pause lasted ten seconds, like someone hanging up and redialing to make sure he had the right number. Then it came again, sound waves rolling in and breaking against the crumbling rock of his brain.
Sometime near morning, a strawberry milkshake and a porterhouse steak and a bowl of potato soup, all on fine china, appeared just outside the phone booth door. The moon and stars seemed to focus all their light on that beautiful feast. It hurt Jake to even look away, but the steak would probably taste like sand, the soup like tree bark, and the milkshake like pureed palm leaves. Jake closed his eyes so he didn't have to see it. Every cell in his body was crying out for food, for drink, for a bath, for any symbol of civilization that wasn't a phone booth.
He almost broke and opened the door when he thought about the spring, how the water had tasted like real water, not the best water ever, but not the chlorine that came out of the tap, either. Whether that steak was real or not, it might taste real. It might alleviate the psychological part of his hunger. But he squeezed his eyes more tightly closed and braced his feet against the door.
Jake almost broke a second time when the smell invaded the phone booth, stealing in through the cracks, overpowering even the faint plastic smell of the booth and the smell of Jake's three-days-in-the-sun body. He held his breath until he couldn't anymore, then breathed out and in through his mouth and held it again.
Someone knocked on the door. Jake kept his eyes closed. It would be a lie. Whatever it was, it would just be a lie. They're just having fun with you, the way you would always tell the freshmen in college that the pool was on the roof, and laugh when they'd get in their trunks with their towels draped over their shoulders, their shades on and their flip-flops, and head up to the roof, where the door inevitably locked behind them. It's just a game, just a—
"Daddy?"
Jake's eyes opened. He couldn't have stopped it even if he'd known what to expect. Lily stood, leaning against the phone booth door, shivering in the pre-dawn chill. She was holding the soup and drinking it, but she still seemed cold.
"Daddy, can I come inside?"
Jake stared at her. Her perfect blonde hair, a little blonder in places than it had been at the beginning of the summer, was tied back like Rachel wore it, in a low ponytail with some wispy parts loose. She was wearing an outfit he'd seen her in a million times, shorts and a shirt with little strawberries on it.
"Daddy?"
What if it's really her? He didn't have to think that twice. Jake moved his foot and let her in, motioning for her to sit by him as he closed the door with his foot.
The telephone rang on, and Lily or Not Lily snuggled next to him and leaned her head on his arm.
"I—" she began, but he shook his head and put a finger to his lips.
Somewhere out of sight, they were watching.