When I get home, my answering machine is blinking with new messages. The first is from Richard Yearns, the reporter who wrote the initial story:
Hey Sally, this is Richard Yearns from the Daily, I got your message about the dig. That was long ago and I don’t remember much, but I’m happy to answer any questions I can. Give me a call at the paper, I’m here most of the time.
The second is from Alexis Farns, the museum coordinator:
Sally, this is Alexis Farns, I’ve received your message and I’d really like to help you. Give me a call back when you get this.
I don’t feel like dealing with either of these and instead collapse onto the couch, grab my notebook, and start sketching.
I can’t get the idea of using a map as a key out of my head. After all, any map can just be a gigantic puzzle board, with pieces in a variety of places, all with different meanings.
I flip through my old maps, visualizing how each of them follows some familiar pattern. My own invented worlds, disorganized in my mind, but organized on paper. There’s this belief that if you just put the pieces in the right place, something can happen, and I’m starting to see how that’s possible. Or rather, I don’t believe it’s possible, but at least I understand it. I get that it’s an idea people get behind. Put five people on various points in a world and you have yourself a pentagram. Have them perform some kind of ritual and all the sudden you’re dealing with magic. I’m sure there’s more to it (maybe?).
It’s nonsense, I know. But I can’t unwrap my brain from this idea. I’ve never believed in magic. Nor in portals to other worlds. Or demons. Or angels. But there’s something about the Owl’s book that feels real to me. I feel like on the other side of this story, Gus and I are going to find a portal to a new world.
Or more likely, we’re going to waste a couple weeks on this before giving up and moving on.
Flipping through my old notebooks I eventually come across my maps for what I called “the Inside.” It’s a sort of science fiction world, where cities are built inside of planets, inverted, so like, the core of the planet is the sky. The buildings topple into each other, leaning at precarious angles that feels uneasy to look at. It’s a world just like ours, flipped inside out. I can connect so many points into dozens of naturally formed perfect triangles everywhere. I can connect them into a massive web of fractals, bending across the map like some type of ‘70s new age tapestry.
I pull back and close my books. All of this magic nonsense reminds me too much of my mom. When I was a kid, she’d always tell me I could bend and change the world to suit my needs. I could make it whatever I wanted to make it. To her, this was just a mind game. It took nothing more than thought to change the world. I remember one time in high school, after my first real relationship came crashing down and I—like any teen, felt like the world was absolutely over—was demolished, sitting on the couch with a book in my lap I couldn’t focus on long enough to read. She came up to me, recognized my anguish, and said, “everything always works out for us, Sally,” and she left the room. I don’t know what I wanted my mom to say in that moment. Or what would have possibly made me feel better. But I know that was the exact thing I didn’t want to hear.
I don’t talk to her much anymore, mostly because she’s impossible to reach. My dad didn’t keep in touch with her either, at least before he died. Always the logical one, when she left to join a commune in Idaho, he didn’t do much more than shrug it off and carry on with life as though nothing happened.
The very fact I find this Owl stuff interesting is alarming to me because it makes me feel more like my mom than I’m willing to admit. I’m about the age she was when she left, now, and I guess I can’t help but compare myself to the version of her I remember as a kid.
And yet, here I am, laying on the couch, mentally counting off my unused vacation days, deciding whether or not I should take the next week off work to pursue this further.
I have over 200 hours of vacation. I never use it, and it just rolls over and over every year, until I get yelled at by my boss and forced to take a week off. I never travel, I just stay at home and work on my maps. I have no major projects going on right now. I can leave. Nobody would care. Nobody would notice. Gus might be annoyed if I hang out at the bookstore too much, but I think I can keep myself busy. Sedona seems like a reasonable lead, and I could head down to Flagstaff. The drive shouldn’t be more than 12 or 13 hours. I just need to talk to Gus and come up with some sort of plan.
