John Gone (6 page)

Not many people coming over, I guess
,
John thought.
Or Ronika herself isn’t coming and going often.
Probably both, knowing her.

John read its message, written starkly in
black Helvetica:
There’s No Place Like 127.0.0.1.
The joke
made him laugh, and briefly, only briefly, he forgot the grim
circumstances that had brought him there. He closed his eyes and
knocked.

Within seconds, the apartment door flew open,
revealing Ronika standing wide-eyed in an A-shirt and pajama pants.
The girl’s body was almost inhumanly slender, leaning effortlessly
flush against the right side of the doorframe. As her body curled
around its border, John remembered how strangely captivating he’d
thought her movements had been during his first visit. Even in open
spaces, she’d always seemed to move and flow like an ermine
slipping deftly through a twisting maze or flexing through the
slightest crack beneath a doorway.

The girl’s hair was October-pumpkin-orange,
unique in its constancy, not changing even slightly in tone or hue
between strands. Its front was styled into rounded bangs cut
carefully in varying lengths to circle her pale face. The back
lifted slightly before draping down long and straight beneath her
shoulders.

Separating the two sections was a
headband--at least, John thought it was a headband--that supported
two orange, fuzzy fox ears with white tips on either side of her
head. With her thick, similarly colored hair covering up her human
ears, the fox ears seemed an almost natural addition to her face.
The ears were simply a part of her, and she was infrequently seen
without them.

Ronika slunk her way toward John’s body until
their faces were separated by an inch. She held her right hand out
flat and rested it on his head. From there, she tilted it
dramatically upward and brought it to the top of her own. She
smiled widely.

She’d always been a few inches taller than
John--even without the added height of her headband--and she liked
to remind him of it whenever possible. John had always considered
her height to be a temporary advantage, one he blamed solely on
their small difference in age. He hoped that someday she would
finally stop growing so he could catch up.

“John,” she said.

“You recognized me,” he replied, backing away
to widen the awkwardly small distance between them.

“What time is it?” she asked casually.

John looked at his watch. The sight of it
gave him a stomachache. “4:15 A.M,” he said.

“Almost bedtime.”

John’s expression was pained. “I’m
sorry.”

“Don’t be,” she answered smoothly. “You can
take the couch.” She turned and moved back into her apartment with
John following nervously.

The apartment was clean, but cluttered with
carefully organized collectibles, action figures, stuffed animals,
comic books, and novels. John looked over Ronika’s left shoulder
and noted a medieval battle-axe hanging on the wall next to what
could only be described as a pedestal holding some sort of
science-fiction space-marine helmet on top of it.

“Where’s your mom?” she asked.

“Oh,” John began, unsure if this was the best
part of the story with which to begin.

Ronika turned back toward him and smiled.
Whenever she smiled, she tilted her head to the right. This was a
habit, as she had explained to John years before, which stemmed
from the colon-and-open-parentheses smiley face she so often typed
online.

“I’m just kidding,” she said. “I figured she
wouldn’t be here, it being four in the morning and all. I was just
giving you a hard time. It’s nice to see you in person, though.
For, like, the first time in six years or something.”

“Ronika,” John said, “please let me explain
what I’m doing here so late.”

“It’s not late,” she answered. She scratched
the back of her head as she stretched her torso, putting her spine
at an almost ninety-degree angle backward. “For me, this is like
ten o’clock in normal-person time.”

“Okay, but I need to--”

“Give me a second, Popielarski; let me tell
my clan that I’m off for the night.” She turned away from him and
moved back toward the large desk in the corner of her living room.
After dropping lazily into the blue, fluffy recliner at its front,
she slipped on a headset.

She craned her neck toward the left monitor
of her dual-screen setup to read something too small for John to
see.

“Just a second,” she mumbled. She started
talking quietly to someone else through the microphone in her
headset.

John walked slowly around her apartment while
she finished, checking out the assorted treasures stashed around
her living room. Some he recognized from different animé series,
others from video games.

Soon, he brought his attention to a worktable
in the far corner of the room. Its surface was littered with wires,
clamps, bits of plastic, screws, tools, a microscope, solder, solar
cells, and numerous half-built devices, the practical purposes of
which were difficult to guess. It was the sort of table one usually
saw in the lab of a mad scientist on television, even without the
bubbling beakers and Bunsen burners.

John knew that Ronika had been offered an
unsolicited scholarship to M.I.T. last year, and again this year,
but had never really understood why until seeing the intricacies of
the gadgets she’d presumably been working on in her spare time. He
had no idea what good combining a blender with vacuum cleaner would
do, but thought it was darned impressive all the same. Ronika had
told John during one of their many online chats that she’d declined
the scholarships, and decided against going to college at all,
M.I.T. or otherwise. She’d said it was because of “people.” Ronika
was convinced that she’d never learned how to interact with them
properly and the thought of being isolated with a large group of
them terrified her.

John heard a ticking noise that drew his eyes
upward to a clock hanging on the wall above the table. It was large
and analog, but without numerals circling its face. An assortment
of math problems was printed in their stead.
630 divided by
126
for the 5 and -
8=2-X
for the 10.

“Weird clock, right?” Ronika asked from
behind him.

“I’ve seen weirder,” John answered.

The next day John woke from a dream involving
a zombie apocalypse, his mother doing laundry, and a secret
steering wheel deep within the Earth that let him pilot the planet
out from the solar system. He sat straight up, still wrapped in the
feathery pink blanket Ronika had thrown at him, and wondered if the
dream had any arcane wisdom to offer his current situation. He drew
a blank.

John flicked at a piece of hardened sleep in
his left eye and reacclimated to the wakened world. It was strange
waking up somewhere other than his short, blue house on the shore.
This was the first time he’d ever done it. He and his mother had
never gone on vacation, and during the age when sleepovers are
common, he hadn’t any friends other than Ronika, whom, at the time,
he’d known only as a screen name online.

The night before, John had told Ronika
everything. He’d told her about the glare on the beach, the
embarrassing job at America Offline, and about how Virgil had died
in front of him on an office floor. He told her about his
experience in Tallahassee, the bus that was supposed to take him
back home, and the thirteen deaths for which he felt responsible.
He even told her about the note he’d scribbled to his mother on a
tissue in eyeliner pencil.

To his great surprise, Ronika hadn’t
second-guessed any part of it. She hadn’t said he was crazy and she
hadn’t complained about, or even approached, his unexplained
absence from her life for the past six months. She hadn’t asked if
he was “sure he was remembering everything correctly,” or worse, if
he’d been “abusing any substances.” She simply believed him, or at
the very least seemed to, without reservation.

Ronika had just sat there for the remainder
of their time awake last night, letting him speak, listening to the
facts and his feeling about the facts, while holding his arm and
gazing into the humming wires of the watch stuck to his wrist. They
hadn’t gotten to sleep until the sun was first starting to shine
through the vertical venetian blinds adorning her living room
window.

John considered just how late they’d stayed
awake the night before and quickly covered the face of his watch
from view. He closed his eyes.
Please, let it be later than
3:14
, he thought.
If it’s later than 3:14 and I’m still here
...

He removed his hand from over his wrist and
looked at the time. It read 2:55 P.M. John paled. His mind swam,
fast muddling with thoughts of appearing back in Tallahassee with
Adam. He also imagined himself in the warehouse again, being found
by the police or the old, snooping women who’d betray him to
them.

John ran in a flustered panic across the room
to the back hallway of Ronika’s apartment. There were two doors at
its end. John banged on the one to his right with his fists and did
the same to the one on his left.

“Ronika,” he spoke loudly, “we don’t have a
lot of time!” He turned back to the right door to bang on it again
just as Ronika opened the left. She stood there in front of him,
rolled into a large white comforter and wearing her fox ears. John
whirled around to face her.

“Why are you banging on my spare bedroom’s
door? No one’s in there,” she said though a yawn.

John turned back to the other door and opened
it. There was a mostly empty room behind it, save a large,
queen-sized bed and a small television set on a barstool.

“If you had another bedroom, why did you make
me sleep on the couch?” he asked. The question had no anger in it,
just confusion.

“Sometimes I switch beds in the middle of the
night,” she answered casually. “Or the morning.” She took him by
the shoulders and gave him a light shove back to the living
room.

“I have to get dressed,” she informed him.
“We don’t have a lot of time.”

“I know we don’t have a lot of time,” John
grumbled.

“And no more shouting or banging, jeez,” she
called out to him before closing her door.

John walked back into the living room and
paced. He looked at the watch. Three o’clock. He checked the clock
on Ronika’s wall to make sure.
198 divided by 66
o’clock. He
was running out of time.

Ronika reappeared a moment later and leapt
onto the couch in the living room. She grabbed the pink blanket
John had used the night before and curled up into a ball. “So now
what happens is you disappear, and if things go like they did on
the bus, I pass out, or something. Right? I’m getting comfy.”

“This is serious,” John answered back, still
walking back and forth across the room.

“I know that,” she said defensively. “Would
you prefer I’m holding a knife or something when I go
unconscious?”

“What? No. Sorry,” he said quickly. “I’m
nervous.”

“I know,” Ronika said warmly. “But, hey! I
just had an idea. Hold on.” She slid out from under the blanket and
bounced to her feet. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of this last
night.”

She ran to her desk and leaned behind it to
the back of her monstrous computer tower. Her head reappeared a few
seconds later with an enormous grin slapped across the front of
it.

“Check this out,” she said smugly. In her
hand she held a small, boxy, humanoid machine. It was a robot.

“Mouse,” Ronika said.

“What?”

“This is Mouse. M-O-U-S-E. Multi-Option
Universal Service Entity. I built him ... sort of,” she explained,
handing it to John. “The casing, bipedal function, and so forth
were already there when I bought the little guy.
But
I’ve
made some significant modifications.” She tilted her head and
smiled.

“Are you going to try and use it to remove
the watch from my arm?” John asked excitedly.

“No!” Ronika reeled, shocked at the question.
She took Mouse from John’s hands and held it defensively against
her chest. “Not after what you told me happened to the last dude
who tried it. Are you crazy?”

“No?” John replied, more a question than an
answer.

Ronika reservedly handed him back the
robot.

“Okay, check it.” Ronika bounced back to her
desk and pulled out a pair of seemingly ordinary arm-length gloves
that had been deliberately hand-marked in a rainbow of colors. She
slid them over her hands and sat in front of a large, modified
webcam sitting between her twin monitors. After a few clicks of her
computer’s mouse, she held the gloves up to the camera. As she
moved her arms to the left, John was surprised to find Mouse’s arms
mimic the action precisely. Ronika grabbed the headset from next to
her on the desk and put it over her head. She unhooked it from her
computer and plugged it into the front of her webcam. Mouse
continued to replicate her movements.

“Nice to meet you. I’m Mouse,” Ronika said
into the headset’s microphone. Her voice played simultaneously out
of a tiny speaker in the robot. She extended her hand toward the
camera, as if to shake its hand. Mouse extended his pincher-style
hand to John in tandem. John took it gingerly between his left
pointer-finger and thumb. He shook it in introduction.

“This is amazing,” John said.

Ronika beamed at the comment. “You really
think so?” she asked.

“I really do,” John answered. “But, Ronika,
how is this going to help?”

“Well, I can talk to you and stuff. Maybe
help? Plus, I can see what Mouse sees, too. Look.”

John looked toward her monitor and saw
himself from the robot’s perspective. He looked into the metal
visor where Mouse’s eyes would be if it were human. He waved his
hands in front of it and watched the live video of him doing so on
Ronika’s monitor.