current

Between Now and Trine

by Nels Hanson

Half hypnotized by the spectacle of two dimensions again and again becoming three, 19-year-old Liz Standard landed her sandaled feet on the unfolding metal stair. Below the skylight, the descending escalator spilled endlessly, like an angular waterfall, into a pool of pink and yellow tile.

Chrome and glass dividers at left and right coruscated with ricocheting double- and triple-exposed reflections, so Liz felt she moved multiplied and strobe-like through a series of invisible glowing boxes. The clear cubicles were minutely divisible, thin as specimen slides, and as Liz flashed from one slice to another she sensed that her true parents, Queen Fror and King Frome of the planet Trine, had sent two rescuers to retrieve their kidnapped daughter.

In orange tights and sparkling gem-studded belts, beautiful Smie and her handsome lover-comrade Zeef readied to grasp Liz by either pale arm and lift her though the slim hatch of light to her proper portion of the galaxy. Liz felt their shapely hands pulsing coolly with green blood as they slipped along her skinny, untanned wrists.

Too late! The section of light was exquisitely brief—Liz would not materialize in that sliver of space-time for another 23 Earth years.

“Liz!”

Marla Standard, Liz’s mother, waved a braceleted hand from 20 yards. She wore a sleeveless yellow sundress and leather thongs that displayed ten red toenails. Beside her, holding a Macy’s bag, Trish Gilbert touched a large hoop earring, thinking.

“Where’ve you been?” Marla Standard inquired with concern. She lifted a slender brown wrist to consult her gold watch. “It’s nearly two.”

“I stopped to look at a book,” Liz said.

“What book?” Marla asked her daughter with irritation.

“Something called Stargazer,” Liz said.

“Hi Liz,” said Trish. Her short frosted hair and earrings bracketed her narrow brown face. “How thin you are! What’s your secret?”

“Don’t start,” Marla said quickly. “I’ve been trying to get her to eat.”

“She looks great!” Trish said, surveying Liz from toes to bust.

“She’s skinny as a toothpick,” said Marla. “Did you have a snack before you came?”

Liz had turned, glancing back at the escalator where Smie and Zeef had muffed their chance. But then time was relative—for them 23 years might be five or six seconds.

“She’s just right,” Trish said. “What’re  you wearing?” She licked her lips with interest. “Size 2?”

Marla shook her head with fatigue. “We’ve been through it, haven’t we, Liz?”

“I don’t care,” Trish repeated. “She looks great.”

“Liz and her boyfriend broke up,” Marla said, looking at Liz. “It’s been tough.”

“I’m all right,” said Liz. She heard the escalator clicking behind her across the polished floor, the folding stairs gliding like skaters toward her bare ankles.

“Sure, you are,” Marla said. “You and I are partners, aren’t we?”

“Partners?” Liz said. In a fold of light, Smie and Zeef touched lips.

“Friends,” Marla said. “Buddies.”

Liz nodded, her head turning slightly to the right. In another dimension, the escalator continued under her feet, through the tile to a secret kingdom. The floor hummed, but that was on Trine, not Earth.

“Come on,” Marla said. “Trish and I want to walk through Tops and Bottoms, then have lunch. You need to eat.”

The two women turned and started down the mall past open shops of draped clothes and mannequins with empty faces and gesturing waxy wrists and hands. Liz followed five steps behind them, sensing the touch of the different fabrics against her skin, at her neck and shoulders.

“You want to go in?” Marla asked outside the store.

“I think I’m going to wait,” Liz said.

“Wait where?” Marla said.

“Right here.” Liz glanced to her right. “On that bench.”

“But you’ll be here, when we’re through?” Marla asked.

“I’ll be here,” Liz said, turning to the bench.

“Okay. We’ll only be a minute,” Marla said. She turned, then tilted her head toward Trish as they entered the store.

“It’s been awful …”

Relaxing, Liz tuned in. It was like a little green knob she could twist left and right, higher and lower. She’d become aware of the switch about two weeks ago.

“She looks okay,” Trish said.

“She was just devastated. When she got back from Berkeley she looked like something washed up from a wreck.”

“What happened?”

“Came on strong, then dropped her …”

At 30 yards they weren’t yet out of range. Anyway, Liz could extend it if she wanted, in theory indefinitely. Liz watched their bright backs diminish down the long aisle of clothes racks.

“Five years older.”

“He cute?” Trish asked.

Liz turned them off. She could do it without twisting the knob.

Liz peered down at her feet and saw her foot bones gleam among the fine tendrils of veins before her skin reappeared, clouding over the inner workings. What a world had opened up! Though it had always been there, waiting … Jeff had broken her heart so that the hidden door could unlock and she could step through.

Liz smiled. Like Alice, she thought, through the looking glass. Or Dorothy, walking out into Munchkinland.

For an instant, behind her eyes that inspected the twisting trunk of a potted weeping fig, Liz could see Judy Garland’s emaciated fingers reach through cigarette smoke for an amber drink.

“Miss?”

Liz looked up at the middle-aged black man’s friendly, waiting face.

A salt and pepper beard stood out in bright spears from his smooth cheek. His brown eyes were pretty, but smudged-looking and edged with red. He wore a wrinkled gray sport coat and blue t-shirt, and baggy green slacks with black high-top canvas tennis shoes.

“How’re you today?”

“I’m okay,” Liz said. “I don’t usually come to malls.”

“But you’re having a good time?” the man asked, smiling.

“It’s interesting,” Liz said.

“Interesting, yes,” the man nodded. “Yes, it is.”

“At first, I didn’t think it would be,” Liz said. “It’s sort of surprising, when you remember everything’s interesting, if you look at it a certain way.”

The man’s brown, alert eyes observed Liz.

“Are you in school?” he asked. “You a student?”

“I was,” Liz answered. “I don’t know yet if I’m going back.”

“Education,” the man said quickly. “That’s the key to success.”

“There’s different kinds of education,” Liz said. “There’s different kinds of knowledge.”

“Yes, there is, that’s the Lord’s truth,” the man said, smiling wider. “I can tell you about that.”

“Can you?’ Liz said. She looked deeply into the man’s smoky eyes.

“You waiting for somebody?” the man asked, leaning closer.

“I’m waiting for my mother and her friend Trish,” Liz said. “There’s time to talk.”

“Well, that’s nice, that’s neighborly of you,” the man said. “I was in school once, in the Merchant Marine, before I transferred.” He waited.

“You transferred?” Liz asked politely, though the man had strayed from the subject: alternate forms of knowledge.

“Sure did. Got my diploma too. From the school of hard knocks.” He laughed, his eyes dancing. “What’s your name?”

“Liz.”

“I’m Maurice.”

“Glad to meet you, Maurice.”

As she took his rough, cracked palm she sensed a salty, beery taste on her tongue.

“I saw you over here and thought I’d come and say hello.”

“It’s nice to meet you,” Liz said. She opened her purse.

“What’s you doing, Miss?”

“Liz,” said Liz. “I thought you’d like to get a sandwich or something.”

“You know, Liz—” He smiled. He touched his stomach, patting his blue t-shirt with a large hand. “I am a little hungry.”

“Here,” Liz said.

Maurice took the bills, then lowered his head, staring.

“These’re 20s. Don’t you—”

“That’s okay,” Liz said. “Don’t you want to rest?”

“Rest?”

“You know, take it easy. Sort of let things wash over you.”

Maurice stared at her, waiting.

“So you can look at things without wanting or not wanting them. You know?”

“I know a full stomach changes your angle on things. Thank you, Liz.”

Maurice pocketed the bills, then looked over his shoulder. “I want to thank you a whole lot. You know, I think I’m going to be going now. Get something to eat.”

“It was nice talking to you,” Liz said.

“You too,” he said. “You too.” He reached down and shook her hand. Liz tasted the saltiness again, Corn Nuts, and the dated fizz of beer, about eight last night.

Now Maurice turned, moving quickly, glancing back once at Liz and smiling widely, waving a hand. There was a bounding spring to his step and Liz meditated briefly on the nature of time and emotion.

Maurice was, this instant, genuinely happy, relieved, as hopeful and eager about the immediate future as he had been when he’d attended seaman’s college and walked that autumn day in clicking, gleaming shoes down the wide corridor of the main brick building in Norfolk, Virginia.

And later, out on Chesapeake Bay, when the wind and blowing spray had stung his shaven cheek and he lifted the friendly collar of his new pea coat on the rolling deck of the practice sloop, hands at the wheel, before the navigation exam, the part about triangulation, had tripped him up …

A half-hour of tutoring and he would have passed with flying colors, Liz could see that, looking over his shoulder in the dim-lit dorm room as Maurice prepared, working diligently at the page of penciled figures. It was just one thing, one glitch, that hung him up.

But Maurice was, for the moment, young again, as he left the mall and entered the bright hot sunlight of the parking lot.

“Liz! Who was that man?”

Liz’s mother stared with an alarmed expression that caused her blue eyes to protrude under the trimmed, shaped eyebrows.

“Maurice.”

“Maurice? He was a bum! Did you see how he was dressed?”

“He was hungry,” Liz said. “He used to be in the Merchant Marine. I gave him some money.”

Her mother frowned, glaring at her. “See what I mean,” her mother said to Trish. She reached for Liz’s hand.

“Come on. We’re going to have lunch.”

In the Salad Bowl, Liz ordered a soy sandwich on granola bread. With her first bite she thought Kansas, tasting the cracked wheat kernels from the rolling fields of gold. “We’re not in Kansas anymore,” she remembered Dorothy saying. At that instant, forgetting the hot lights, had Judy Garland been happy, like Maurice, the yellow bricks’ unrolling spiral at her feet?

“I’ve got to get some weight on her,” Marla Standard was saying.

“God, I wish you could trade fat,” Trish said. She searched her greens with a fork, then herded a black olive to the edge of the plate.

“What were you saying to that man?” Liz’s mother asked.

“We were talking about school,” Liz said.

“School?” Marla leaned forward. “About going back?”

“No,” Liz said. “Education.” She looked down at her sandwich and the tails of soybeans dangling from the thick edge of crust.

“You know, different kinds of knowledge. Maurice said he’d graduated.”

“Graduated?”

“From the school of hard knocks.”

Trish giggled but Marla dashed down her glass so the ice water spilled over the rim. “I feel I can’t leave you alone for a second,” Marla said. “You make me crazy.”

“Don’t worry,” Liz said, inspecting the texture of the brown rough bread. “I’m all right now.”

“Sure you are,” Trish said. “It takes a while, to get over the hump, huh, Marla?”

“Some hump,” Marla said. She lifted her coffee.

Now the soybeans tasted noisy, they’d absorbed the low-geared roar of the diesel transporting them to the packaging plant and the whir of the conveyor like a flattened, rubber-coated escalator. Liz wondered if Smie and Zeef had returned through a pane of light to Trine, or lingered together deliciously before materializing years from now to try again to snatch Liz and lift her back to Queen Fror and King Frome.

The young lovers on a mission and the worried royal parents existed somewhere, Liz thought, if only in the elegant blue spark, the bright synapse jumping the gray cells in her cerebellum. Smie and Zeef were energy, as real as blood or fire.

“Is that all you’re going to eat?”

“It’s very nutritious,” Liz said. “Energy efficient.”

“I bet it is,” Trish said. “I’ll have to get you to write out a list.”

“Trish, she doesn’t need any encouragement.”

“I need some encouragement,” Trish said. ”Down you go. And stay there, damn you,” she said, pressing her fork lengthwise on a lettuce leaf.

“Come on,” said Marla. “I want to walk through Grear’s.”

Except for her mother and Trish and a boy in a uniform with a broom and a box on a stick that opened as he swept in debris, the nave-like plaza was deserted, like a Mediterranean village square at midday. A clerk in a white shirt smoked outside See’s Candy.

At the fountain, under the wagon wheel skylight, Mrs. Standard asked Liz if she’d like to look in Grear’s for a pair of jeans that fit her.

“No thanks,” Liz said. She looked down at the still water near the fountain’s low parapet.

“I want you to come with us.”

“I’ll be right here,” Liz said. “I won’t go anywhere.”

“Sure,” Trish said. “Give the kid some space.”

Liz felt no urge to twist the green knob as the two started off this time. A checkered red and white cotton blazer with a sash at the waist waited on its rack for her mother’s hand, that would transfer the esters of the BLT and coffee to the fresh fabric.

Liz stared down at the water, at her reflection and beyond to the bright shine of pennies. About half, 53%—it was funny, until recently she’d never been that good at numbers, before now she wouldn’t have been able to tutor Maurice in trig—were turned tails, the others showing Lincoln’s humane profile. “Four score and seven …”

She reached down and touched the tepid water, her face breaking up, rearranging and becoming half Jeff’s, then Zeef’s, then a new face, a smart kind handsome prince’s whose heart pumped strong and loving with the green blood of Trine—and then her own pale face again.

The pennies flickered and shone, then darkened. Wishes—she could hear the murmuring requests, like roosting birds. Liz looked up as a cloud crossed the skylight.

“It looks great,” Trish said.

“Think so?” said Liz’s mother. “You don’t think it looks like a tablecloth?”

“Get it,” Trish said, “before I do.”

Now the cloud passed, no longer blocking the invisible planets and stars, eclipsing Trine and its dozen pink and aqua moons.

But other weather was approaching from the Coast Range, a fleet of bulging cumulus like Michelangelo’s.

Liz looked away from the sun which washed like water across her face, warming the architecture of bone underneath. From her purse she took a 20 and dropped it in the water. The bill floated like a raft, the face of the Indian killer Andrew Jackson staring back at her as he ordered the Trail of Tears.

She closed her eyes tight.

“Please, come get me, take me to Trine.”

Then, feeling the emerald rays from her home planet’s sun bathing the white crown of bone under her brown hair—

—now the cool, azure light from Spape at her left ear, its twin moon Fladrell’s scarlet glow at her  right—

—Liz turned, drifting toward Grear’s.

Nels Hanson grew up on a small farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California, graduated from UC Santa Cruz and the University of Montana, and has worked as a farmer, teacher and editor. His fiction won the James D. Phelan Award from the San Francisco Foundation and his short stories have appeared in a number of literary journals. Stories are currently running online at the Offcourse Literary Journal, the Green Hills Literary Lantern, and the Sixers Review.