We did not bid the female messenger good-bye. One second she was there and the next she was gone. And a second after that, we, too, were gone.
There was a brick marker that read Theodore Roosevelt on a limestone banner and beneath it the words High School. I somehow knew we were in Iowa.
The same combination of red brick and limestone comprised the school itself. The central portion was three stories tall, three generous stories, so that the structure was taller and more impressive than the simple number of floors might indicate. The wings extended to left and right and were of just two floors each. There were architectural details rendered in stone—window framing, a stone railing across the roofline—that gave the school a slightly ornate look, an almost Old World look. It very nearly evoked Downton Abbey.
Just before the front door was a tall flagpole. The Stars and Stripes snapped in a breeze stiff enough to ruffle the mature hardwood and fir trees that flanked the entrance and which were dotted haphazardly across the lawn.
It looked like the very model of a high school—what a traditional high school ought to be.
As usual, I had questions. As usual, I didn’t ask. It’s not that Messenger will never answer a question, but he prefers not to, and for whatever reason, I don’t want to nag at him. He’s the master, I’m the apprentice. I’ve accepted that. More or less. And as the teacher he gets to choose how and when to tell me things.
Frustrating? Extremely.
We walked at a normal pace across the lawn. Kids were pouring from buses that had pulled up in the parking lot. At the same time freshmen and sophomores and juniors were piling from their parents’ cars, and the luckier seniors were pulling up in cars of their own.
The familiar morning rush. And we joined it, invisible to the crowd as it filled the main hallway. How did we squeeze through dense-packed bodies without touching anyone around us? I don’t know. It’s something I’ve now seen happen many times, and even when I pay the closest attention it’s hard to explain. It’s as if reality bends to get out of our way. Like we’re a force field that no one feels. Limbs and heads and torsos all seem to warp, like some kind of photo booth effect.
Testing it, I deliberately passed my arm through a girl. Her body appeared to split in two at the waist, upper half and lower half seemingly completely disconnected, yet she chatted glumly to a friend all the while and her legs kept moving her forward.
Messenger noticed my experiment, raised one eyebrow slightly and said nothing.
We walked in this way until we arrived at a narrower hallway leading into one of the wings. There Messenger’s focus seemed to settle on one particular group of three boys walking together in that bouncy, playfully shoving way that boys sometimes have. There was nothing particularly noteworthy, just three boys, probably sophomores or juniors, all three of them white, all three dressed in jeans and T-shirts with logos of bands or defiant slogans.
Here the crowd had thinned a bit and I took notice of a particular girl moving in the opposite direction from the boys. She was wearing an abaya of sky blue over her head and neck. Other than that she was dressed in jeans and a long-sleeved white blouse. I liked her shoes.
It was the abaya that one of the boys grabbed as she went by. Grabbed it from behind and yanked it back off her head.
“Hey!” the girl yelled, and tried to put the scarf back in place.
“See, she does have hair under there!” This from the smallest of the three boys, a short, cute kid with longish brown hair.
“Drop dead,” the girl snapped.
“Just playin’ with your towel, towel-head.” This was not said in a playful tone, and it came from the boy in the middle. He was tall, powerfully built, with short blond hair. He was wearing sunglasses so I could not see the color of his eyes.
A second girl, just arriving on the scene, saw what was going on and said, “It’s called an abaya, moron. And leave her alone, Trent.”
This second girl was not in Muslim dress. She was in the navy blue and white uniform of a cheerleader.
“Wasn’t me,” Trent said, faux innocent. “It was Pete. Wasn’t it, Pete? See, Pete thought maybe she had horns under there and that’s why she’s always wearing that towel.”
“Idiot,” the cheerleader said, and rolled her eyes.
The bell rang and everyone went hurrying away.
The Muslim girl looked shaken and angry, but she said nothing more and the incident appeared to be over.
Messenger and I now stood in an empty hallway, ringing with the muted sounds of lessons filtering through a long row of closed doors.
“This is connected to the dead boy, Aimal,” I said, careful not to give it a questioning inflection. But Messenger was not enticed into answering my non-question question.
I did not know where we were, exactly, nor where Aimal had been, but I was pretty sure there were thousands of miles separating the two locations. But in Messenger’s world, space and time are a bit . . . different.
I did not believe we were there because one jerk kid had harassed one girl in one school. The penalties Messenger imposes can be . . . Well, they are the fuel of my nightmares.
“Where should we follow the story next?” Messenger asked.
“What?” The question was so out of the blue I wasn’t sure how to answer. Since when did Messenger consult me? And, anyway, didn’t he already know all the answers? Didn’t he know exactly how this story—whatever it was really about—would end up?
But he was still waiting for an answer, so I had no real choice but to attempt one. “We either follow Trent—he’s the ringleader—or the girl.”
“As you wish.”
“Well . . . which one?”
“Both.”
And then something extraordinary happened. Extraordinary even by the standards of the extraordinary reality into which I have entered. The world around me split in two.
We stood, Messenger and I, in a void, blackness ahead and behind and above, and far more disturbing, black emptiness below as well. I saw no floor or ground beneath my feet, but I was not weightless, either.
But this void was as narrow as a footpath, and to either side of this void was the world. Two worlds. Or two iterations of the same world. The effect was as if we had been standing in a darkened room and two enormous movie screens had been set up, one to our left, the other to our right, each infinitely tall and long and wide.
Two real worlds. I had only to turn my head or even just move my eyes to see one, then the other. Both at once if I stared straight ahead.
But, as hard as it is to imagine, and despite my suggestion, you must not think these were movie screens. They each were real, each happening, each completely three-dimensional. I knew that I could step into either, so that they were less like screens than like living dioramas.
To our left, the girl. To our right, Trent. We could hear both. I could smell the lamb stew the girl was heating in the microwave of her kitchen.
The girl’s phone dinged an incoming text. Without thinking I stepped into her world, hoping to read it over her shoulder. Instantly a wall closed between me and Messenger. I saw neither him, nor Trent.
Frightened, I stepped back into the newly appeared wall, passed through it, and was with Messenger again.
This made me feel foolish. Obviously Messenger understood all this better than I, but that didn’t mean I wanted to seem like some kind of newbie.
That