It turned out that Lisa Buldene was staying at the same hotel as our heroes. They met her at the rooftop restaurant that evening when they sat in plastic garden chairs, watching people get flung through the sky from vaultapults as the clouds turned red with sunset. The tiny little bodies hurtled, catching the light for a few instants before the arc of their motion brought them back down upon another rooftop. Slowly, wearily, people migrated home from their jobs, briefcases flapping, to make dinner over their gas rings or cook-fires.
“What are you drinking?” Lisa Buldene asked Katie, sitting down beside her.
Katie looked at the label. “The state-sponsored cola. Yum. ‘Tyrant Splash.’” She took a big swig.
“Sure,” said Lisa Buldene, smiling. “I tried it earlier. But it’s actually not a cola. It’s the Delaware government’s brand of bottled water. Straight from the St. Jones River.”
“What do you mean?” said Katie. “It sure tastes like a cola. And it’s brown and bubbly. And fizzes. And… um… So it’s really…? ”
Lisa Buldene nodded.
Katie’s face kind of dropped. She ran for the railing of the balcony and began spitting up.
“So did you catch your van today?” Lisa Buldene asked Lily and Jasper. “I looked it up in my There and Back Again, and the only vanlike thing they had was a cart that carries the god of traffic through the major intersections of the city at noon on Fridays to pray for no gridlock.”
“That is not the van in question,” said Jasper. “This is a different van.”
“We have our own private van situation,” said Katie from the railing.
“Where are you off to next?” Lisa Buldene asked. “You decided?”
“Vbngoom, the Platter of Heaven,” said Katie. Jasper hissed in warning.
Lisa Buldene gasped. “Oh, break my heart! You’re not! You’re going to Vbngoom? I thought no one could find it! I haven’t even been able to find a postcard of it! My There and Back Again says it moves all the time.”
“It’s in the guidebook?” said Jasper.
“Yeah, sure. Everything’s in my There and Back Again. ” She opened her bag, ducked her head inside, and reemerged with a guidebook. She handed it to Jasper, who began flipping through it.
The New Yorker watched him, slouched in her seat. “Do you think you’ve seen the real Delaware yet?” she asked. “I mean, we all hear the stories—you know, the camels, the temples, the jewels, the snakes with women’s heads, the women with snakes’ heads, that whole thing—but I’m saying, sometimes I go to all the places it says to go in my There and Back Again, all the places where it says you can see the real, authentic Delaware, and then I get there, and there are just these fifteen other tourists standing there in the courtyard of that castle or that particular volcanic crater, looking around with their fingers stuck in their own copies of There and Back Again. ” Lisa Buldene looked very tense. “Then I get really worried I’m not actually seeing the real Delaware at all, and that maybe there isn’t a real Delaware anymore, because it’s all just set up for tourists now. We can’t see it because we know too much what to expect from the There and Back Again. No place is real anymore.”
Jasper read aloud, with interest—and then increasing disgust, “‘Vbngoom has been the most secret of the hidden mountain monasteries for centuries. Currently located on top of scenic Mount Tlmp, it offers great views, cheap meals, comfy lodging’—comfy lodging? —‘private bathrooms, and eternal life. When you’ve made it to Vbngoom, you know you’ve made it to someplace unique.’”
“See?” said Lisa Buldene. “That’s why I want to get to Vbngoom. Not because they have eternal life. But because I know it’s still real and untouched. Hardly any other tourists have been there. If I got there, I would know I was really living—you know, living. Myself.”
“But Vbngoom is in the guidebook too,” said Lily.
Lisa Buldene wasn’t listening. “A real place is the thing everyone searches for,” she continued, her voice full of yearning. “You can’t know yourself until you go someplace unknown. And what if there’s no place unknown left?” She stood up, clearly unhappy. “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go,” she said, close to tears. “My chakras are twingeing.”
“Are you okay?” asked Lily.
Lisa Buldene picked up Katie’s bottle of Tyrant Splash from the little glass-topped table. “You going to drink the rest of this?” she asked Katie. “Because if you aren’t, I am.” She declared tearfully, “This is the only way I can really get the state of Delaware inside of me.” She drank a big gulp of the fizzy waters of the St. Jones. “Delaware!” she whispered. “You’re on my tongue now!” With that, she walked off.
Jasper called after her, “Ma’am, your guidebook!” but she was gone.
Soon after dinner, the three went to their room to go to bed, since they had to get up early. They brushed their teeth and Katie washed out her mouth with every liquid they had brought with them: water, ginger ale, toothpaste, peroxide, and Jasper’s foot ointment. Then they got into their beds and lay there in the dark, waiting for sleep.
“Lisa Buldene is weird,” said Katie. “Of course stuff is real. You can knock it.” She knocked on the wall.
“I cannot believe,” Jasper complained bitterly, “that this guidebook just straight-up tells you the name of the mountain. Mount Tlmp. Like that!”
“I kind of know what Lisa Buldene is talking about, though,” said Lily quietly. “Once, when I was a little kid, I really wanted to go to Sloth Dent National Park. You know, out west. It’s that place where a giant sloth that lived in the Pleistocene era stopped moving for about three months. It, you know, fell asleep. So it left an impression in the mud. You can still see it today, one million years later. I really, really wanted to go. I looked at books about it and postcards, and I dreamed of lying there at night in the park, seeing this ancient sloth print under the stars. I thought all about fast-moving time and slow-moving sloths… and finally one year we went…”
“And what happened?” Katie asked.
“I don’t know. I didn’t really care once we got there. The park didn’t look surprising. It just looked like all the photos I’d seen a million times.”
“Which is like what?”
Lily shrugged. “A big sloth print.”
“Just a footprint?”
“Well, no, the sloth was hanging upside down from a tree the whole time. So it’s a back print.”
“A back print.”
“Yeah.”
“A big, really hairy sloth back print?”
Katie nodded. “Huh,” she said. She sucked in her lips. She kept nodding. “Yeah, I can see why that would be kind of a disappointment.”
“Not as much of a disappointment,” said Jasper, “as seeing that a secret monastery is listed in a travel guide as having ‘comfy lodging.’” He lay the guidebook beside him on the nightstand. “Well, good night, fellows.”
“Good night,” said Lily.
“Good night, Jasper,” said Katie.
“Good night, Katie,” said Jasper. “Good night, Lily.”
“Good night, Lily,” said Katie.
“Jasper,” said Lily, “did you just put that book down on the nightstand?”
“Yes, Lily. Do you want it?”
“No, Jasper. Um, I was just thinking: There isn’t any nightstand in this room.”
She was right. There was no nightstand.
Suddenly everyone’s feet got very cold.