Page 26 of The Otherworld

That night, I can’t sleep. I lie awake, my gaze drifting lifelessly over Adam’s empty bed. Finally, I push back my sheets and cross the moonlit room, stopping in front of the bookshelf. It’s loaded with his books, boring stuff like philosophy and business. Propped up in the gaps are a few pictures Mom put there forever ago. The basketball team photo from my junior year. Dad with Adam at the 1979 all-star baseball game in Seattle back when he was ten years old, grinning from ear to ear.

And then, me and Adam—the day I got my wings.

We’re standing on the dock in front of his Beaver, squinting into the sunlight. I was fifteen, on top of the world—literally. He was my hero. So high above me, even if it looked like only two inches to everyone else. His arm around my shoulders, his aviator shades clipped to his bomber jacket. He laughed as Mom held up her camera and told us to smile. Jack can’t stop smiling, he said. I shoved him. But he was right.

“God, Adam,” I whisper now, alone in the darkness. “Where are you?”

I slide out one of his philosophy books, just to flip through the pages and look at his annotations. Highlights, underlines, ideas scribbled in the margins. His handwriting.

Eventually I climb back into bed and watch the moonlight slide down the wall. It makes the dark less black and more blue.

Indigo.

I shut my eyes and think about how I would describe Orca to Adam if he were here right now.

“She’s, like, the purest person in the world,” I murmur to the empty space where my brother should be. “She’s innocent and naive, but she’s also funny and smart and way stronger than she thinks. She makes me laugh when I feel like I’m falling through the bottomless pit of hell.” I pull in a shaky breath and let it rush back out. “And with any luck, you’ll meet her before I do.”

7

Tenens Infinitum

ORCA

I overestimated my ability to sleep.

The house is so terribly quiet. Every gust of wind seems to howl louder than usual. Every crash of the tide on the rocks could be construed as distant thunder. Every occasional snore from Lucius startles me. Was that a knock on the door?

I’m fidgety and restless, tossing and turning in the moonlight until I finally realize that I might as well turn on a light. Somehow, insomnia in the dark is much more unsettling than insomnia in the golden glow of a bedside lamp.

My body is sore from trekking around the island, but my mind is still racing. I know it’s Papa’s absence setting my nerves on edge, but there are reasons beyond that. Reasons to do with Jack Stevenson. I succeeded in taking his mind off his troubles—in getting him to laugh, even—but I have not succeeded in the task I undertook so boldly: to find his brother.

The failure eats away at my conscience like a receding tide eroding the shoreline.

I must try harder tomorrow. I must overturn every stone in search of evidence. Jack is right; I do have extrasensory perception. I can sense that I’m not alone on my island.

Adam’s notebook lies on my nightstand, untouched since I first picked it up and read that rather strange notation on trust and mistrust.

I wonder what else he wrote in here.

Unable to resist my curiosity, I open the journal to a random page and begin to read.

01/14/96

The butterfly effect

Butterflies and hurricanes: what do they have in common? We’re always asking ourselves that, but about “real-world problems.” And it seems there is no urgency to connect the dots—to understand how our infinitesimal decisions might impact the world in massive ways. Good and bad. Innocent or intentional. Even the butterfly cannot turn back time.

Tenens Infinitum

And speaking of time…

Does it even exist? Humans look for patterns in order to make sense of chaos (even chaos must have a THEORY—see the butterfly effect). Thus, we find patterns in the seasons, which repeat themselves. On and on, ad infinitum, with no contextual numbering system to record the PASSAGE of time—humans invented that. So time, then, is infinite and immeasurable without our computations.

But theorists would argue that time must progress because there are such things as the past, the present, and the future. The past is gone, and the future isn’t here yet, which means you can only live in the present, correct? Maybe not. When we go back to the past and vividly remember something or speak about that memory with someone else, we relive it. We even say, “Don’t relive it,” for negative memories. Most people think that is just a figure of speech, and maybe that’s how everyone uses it. But on an anatomical level, it’s literal. If you go back (in your mind) and vividly remember an event, the same mental and emotional reactions are occurring in your brain… the same neurons firing and wiring together, creating the same physiological responses in your body. So on a cellular level, we ARE “reliving it.”

Or perhaps we’re returning to that moment in time, LITERALLY, transcending the human-made constructs of Time and Space to access something beyond the third dimension.

At this point, I am lost. Still, the words draw me in like a spell, releasing my mind from the grip of anxiety and pulling me into a world beyond the mainland—the world of Adam Stevenson’s mind.

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