“Knock, knock!”
“Who’s there?”
“Stranger.”
“Stranger who?”
No answer, just ominous silence.
Buddy floated from the dining nook table toward the door, crouching out of sight, listening. “Who are you?” he demanded, doing his best to sound puzzled, not afraid.
“Nobody.”
Buddy waited.
“Nobody who?”
“A nobody you should know. So open up and let us in.”
“Should know, as in ‘it would be in my best interests’, or as in ‘I’ve met you before and should know who you are’?”
No answer. He peeped into the gathering gloom out the fogged, back door window, unable to resist. A shadowy figure, its eyes hooded under the brim of a battered fedora, peered up from the aluminium steps. A large bird, a white raven, perched on his left shoulder. The two of them emitted a faint incandescence, like the pulsing radiation emanating from a spent neon tube.
“I don’t want to know you,” Buddy said. “Go away!”
White Raven cocked her head, judging his defiance stupid. Steam Donkey John shrugged, as if to say, You figure it out. Then she swivelled her head, staring at her companion through obsidian eyes, and suddenly pecked his ear.
“Ow!” he complained. “It’s not my fault.”
You white men are always looking for someone to blame—someone other than yourselves.
“Don’t go getting all philosophical on me, now. Our friend here is confused enough as it is without your hocus-pocus.”
“Ow! Stop it!” he complained when she struck again. Looking up at Buddy, he said pleadingly. “Well, are you going to let us in, or am I going to have to stand out here getting raven-pecked for all eternity?”
Still, Buddy made no move to open the door. With a sigh of resignation, they began to fade. Buddy felt guilty, condemning the pair to oblivion. Why am I so afraid? he wondered. No! Not afraid, just reluctant, he tweaked his state of mind. If I let them, they become real, and I’ll become certifiable!
Only then did he notice a whisper of air tickling the hair on his forearm as the strangers vanished. Fear took hold again. The intensifying stream forced its way through the door’s rubber seal, a cool, steady flow of molecules rushing by which he imagined reassembling inside the Looner Module.
Panicked, he twisted round, and there they were, sitting in the dining nook.
“Sorry,” Steam Donkey John said. “But we none of us have a choice in the matter. It’s not only the rules of physics and nature being broken here. It’s all the rules you’ve ever lived by. And they’re not really being broken so much as reformulated from a different point of view, if you know what I’m getting at.”
“You’re not real!” Buddy shouted. “You’re an hallucination.”
“Well, yes and no.”
Buddy scowled, backing as far away from them as possible in the Looner Module’s cramped galley and folding his arms in a posture of denial.
“The walls,” Steam Donkey John explained. “They work both ways.”
“What walls? What do you mean?”
“Not the flimsy walls of this-here box you’re living in,” John sighed. “The walls of Chemainus: If you step into one of them murals, then the creatures inside can step out. You crossed a line, my friend. The moment you really believed in us, you crossed a line.”
“But Harry? He’s never said anything about this!”
Steam Donkey John shrugged. “Harry’s not one for talking when it doesn’t suit him. Probably didn’t want to scare you off.”
“You’re not real!” Buddy shouted again, huddled between the counter and the Looner Module’s door, as far away from the ghostly duo as possible. They couldn’t be real. No way! They’re figments of my imagination. But the fact that he could see them and talk to them as if they were real couldn’t be denied…
“So in a sense, you’re talking to yourself,” Steam Donkey John allowed. “Look at things that way if it makes you feel better. Nothing wrong with a man daydreaming and talking to himself in private, is there? Doesn’t really matter to us what you believe, as long as you do see us. Any way you cut it, we’re real… um… entities, eh?” He glanced at White Raven, and she assented with a barely perceptible nod. “Yes, real entities.”
Oh! It matters alright! Buddy insisted. As long as I know you’re not real, I can hang on to that slender thread that leads back to sanity; the moment I cut it, I’m well and truly lost.
You can talk out loud, you know, White Raven said. I don’t have a human larynx, so I can’t tell lies or speak my truth out loud. And John here, he can’t speak the truth or tell lies either, cause he’s only capable of babbling nonsense.
She clucked in a deep, resonant raven-way, apparently amused at her taunt; Steam Donkey John slapped his knee and laughed, too.
Your talking out loud won’t make us any more real…
“It will to me!” Buddy groaned.
Steam Donkey John laughed. White Raven clucked again. It’s okay, she said. There’s no one here but us listening, and we have no choice but to keep your secret.
As she spoke, the two of them faded. It felt to Buddy as if the air was being sucked out of the Looner Module, its walls about to buckle like a crushed pop-can. Then they were gone. And he was left alone, a part of him hankering after them.
Dispirited, he shuffled over and sat himself down on his side of the dining nook bench. “What the fuck?” he moaned, cradling his head in his hands, elbows planted on the table.
Next: Mixed Nuts