The memory made Alistair even woozier than he already was, and when he regained his senses, he found himself alone in the cafetorium with the Weeble girl.
“Taking a standing nap?” she asked. “I do those.”
“What were you saying again?” he asked. “About where he went?”
“The toilet,” she said. “He comes and goes through the crapper. Figured you would know that. That’s how all the greats travel.”
“Which toilet? Which way?”
The girl couldn’t point, so she tried to lean in the right direction, but it sent her body wobbling back and forth. Amusing, but hardly useful, so Alistair consulted his atlas. The gateway to Macrotopia was in a second-floor bathroom. That had to be it.
He gauged a route and followed it through the hallway and up a flight of stairs. The bathroom was clearly marked by a model toilet hanging from a chain above the door. Must be fancy, he thought as he pushed his way in.
Stained sinks, mirrors smudged with fingerprints, urinals with small puddles underneath—it was exactly like a school bathroom back home. There were even a couple of oddballs in the corner, huddled over, trying to spark a cigarette. Only these oddballs were truly odd.
They lifted their heads. A lighter hit the floor. They put their hands up like they were being arrested. “Oh, it’s only you,” a kid that looked like a sock puppet said. “You’re too late, alien. The Maestro came and went. The groupies have moved on. But the throne is all yours if you want it.”
The other one, who was entirely pixelated, pointed to a stall that was so covered in graffiti that it looked like a printing press had exploded.
Flush, flush, flush yourself, gently down the drain.
Here you stoop, fat and weird, came to poop but disappeared.
Bon voyage, alien!
It was a tiny fraction of the messages—there were much stranger and cruder ones—but the overall point was clear. This stall marked an exit, a gateway.
The toilet that sat in the center of the stall was nothing special. White, porcelain, round. Was he supposed to sit on it? Was he supposed to do what everyone does on a toilet? How could he even attempt such a thing with others watching? As it was, there was no door on the stall.
Alistair turned around and faced the two delinquents. There was nothing to do but shrug.
“Well, get on with it,” the pixelated kid said. “If you want the big suck, then step right up.”
Alistair checked the toilet, checked the kid. “Step in it?” he asked.
“He’s no Maestro,” the sock puppet kid said. “That’s for damn sure.”
Alistair took that as a yes and, bracing himself on the tank, he brought one foot up and placed it in the bowl. His body was still damp from the pool, and he hardly noticed his moccasined foot entering the water.
“Flush, flush, flush,” the sock puppet started to chant, not without a fair dose of sarcasm.
Trusting the bowl’s sturdiness, Alistair eased the other foot up and in.
“Flush. Flush. Flush.” The pixelated kid joined in the chant.
When he felt steady, he straightened his legs, let go of the tank, and stood.
“Flush! Flush! Flush!” Alistair could feel the chant now, pulsing through his ribs. One last time he checked over his shoulder. The two had managed to light their cigarettes, which dangled loosely from their lips. They pumped their fists and blew smoke as they chanted.
The handle was too low to reach with his hand, so Alistair wedged the atlas in an armpit, placed his palms against the wall behind the toilet, and carefully lifted his left foot.
Here we go.
As he pressed the handle down with the tips of his toes, the atlas slipped out, hit the porcelain rim, and fell on the floor.
Flush.
* * *
There were days and nights and days and nights. For months the chase went on, Charlie always a step ahead of Alistair.
It started in Macrotopia, a world where everything was large, or maybe it was that Alistair was especially small. Insects and woodland creatures towered over him, and they all spoke in rhyme. He described Charlie Dwyer to them, and a salamander said, “His acquaintance I made in a fair summer glade, though he did not give me his name. I thought it unwise to spar with death flies, but he entered their cave just the same.”
The salamander led Alistair through a forest of grass to a hole in the ground full of wasps. Any reluctance Alistair had about entering the hole was overshadowed by the giant gopher that tried to eat him. It was a cipher for sure, and it may have been an out-of-the-frying-pan-into-the-fire situation, but Alistair chose wasp stings over stomach acid and dove headfirst into the hole, landing in a dewdrop that rested on the giant hive.
From the bottom of the wasp hole in Macrotopia, Alistair emerged at the top of a mound of strawberries. He could have sat there, bemoaning the loss of his atlas, but instead he channeled that anger. He slid down the mound of strawberries until he reached a moat of cream that he swam across to a land made of shortcake, where he asked a girl in a bonnet if she saw a boy sneak by, and she giggled and showed him a bathtub cut from peppermint candy, which Alistair sat down in and turned on the tap and transported himself to another world.
For eight days after that, Alistair traveled through a nearly empty desert, sleeping in a tent, drinking mango juice, and eating dried meat sold to him by a camel that asked for payment in a song. He sang “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” which delighted the camel enough to tell him of an oasis many miles in the distance, but not enough to offer Alistair a ride. So Alistair made his way by foot and dove into the oasis’s pool at the first chance he got.
A world made exclusively of letters and numerals tested Alistair’s mettle, as did the number 666, a cipher that hounded him across a landscape of college-ruled paper, until Alistair realized that if he convinced an H, a 2, and an O to huddle together, they would become water and offer him a way to escape.
From world to world he traveled, hoping instinct would guide him. He trusted no one by trusting everyone. Without the atlas, he had no idea where he was going, and whether someone lied to him or not made little difference. His life became one of momentum. Find a gateway. Move on.
He visited a land where babies rode on the backs of whales and cast spells by flapping their oversize ears. He lived in a mountain town for a few days, where mountain men were gruff but welcoming so long as he helped them gut the furry snakes they turned into garments for the rich figments that lived in a glittering city in the valley below. He saw versions of America in the 1950s, China in the 1670s, France in the 1340s, and Africa in a year before years. He steered clear of any obvious ciphers, though there seemed to be one lurking in nearly every world he visited. He chose to run rather than fight, and when he wasn’t running, he was describing Charlie Dwyer to locals.
Some knew him as the Maestro. Others knew him by different names: the Chief, Dr. Wondrous, even Captain Catpoop. “He went thattaway,” they’d all tell Alistair, pointing to the most treacherous paths imaginable.
The memories, sparked by images and encounters, kept coming, mostly when Alistair slept, but they were less frequent with each day. He remembered other incidents at school and in the neighborhood, other moments with his family, with Charlie.
With Charlie. Almost always with Charlie.
He had no control over them and wished that Fiona were more prominent in them, but beggars can’t be choosers and soon he was simply begging to have more memories, any memories, to connect him to home. He had longed for home during those first few weeks, but he was missing it less and less. He was forgetting what it was like there.
When it got to the point that he hadn’t been visited by a memory in over a week, he worried that he might have no memories at all. There’s evil in you, Dot had said, and Alistair wondered if that was true, if losing his link to home was punishment, or if it was part of an inevitable transformation into something dark, disconnected, truly lost.
Resting on a puffy batch of cumulonimbus in a land made of clouds, he prayed.
“One more memory. All that I ask. Whoever is in charge. The Whisper, the Riverman, Charlie, whoever. Please.”
Sometimes prayers are answered.