Elsewhere: List 3

Betty points out the car window: a wooden boardwalk, gray with water and time, joins the red lighthouse tenuously to the land.

In the elevator, Liz stands next to a willowy blonde in a black shift dress.

The weeping woman nods curtly and checks her reflection in the attendant’s glass box.

You’re new, so I’ll give you my little spiel.

“Urmph uf rasket ace,” Alvy repeats with improved enunciation.
“Alvy, take the basket out of your mouth,” Liz’s father says. “No one can understand you.”

“No!” Zooey says adamantly. “I do not want to go!”

At first, Liz feels bad about listening in on her loved ones, but the feeling doesn’t last long. She rationalizes that she is really doing this for them. Liz imagines herself as a beautiful, benevolent, generous angel looking down on everyone from...from wherever she is.

A typical day follows: fifteen minutes watching her parents and her brother in the morning (three eternims), forty-five minutes at school with her friends and her classes (nine eternims), a half hour with Zooey after school (six eternims), and the remaining half hour (six eternims) at her discretion.

He justifies his rampant talk-show watching by telling Liz’s mother he is researching a book about why people like talk shows.

Despite ample evidence that no one is amused, Alvy continues trying to entertain the family with his unique brand of rebus-style prop humor.

In the distance, she sees the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty, both rendered as topiaries.

Given its location and construction, the shop looks like it could blow away at any moment. An incongruously sturdy metal sign hangs over the porch...

WISH YOU WERE HERE
KNICKKNACKS, BRIC-A-BRAC, BIBELOTS, TRINKETS, GEWGAWS, NOVELTIES, WHIMSIES, WHATNOTS,
 AND OTHER SUNDRIES FOR THE DISCRIMINATING BUYER

WISH YOU WERE HERE
KNICKKNACKS, BRIC-A-BRAC, BIBELOTS, TRINKETS, GEWGAWS, NOVELTIES, WHIMSIES, WHATNOTS,
 AND OTHER SUNDRIES FOR THE DISCRIMINATING BUYER

Suddenly Liz realizes that her grandmother may have better things to do than worry about a surly teenager.

“Like any binoculars, I suppose. A series of convex lenses in two cylindrical tubes combine to form one image—”

Liz raises the additional eternims by asking Betty for clothes money. Betty is happy to oblige her and doesn’t ask too many questions.

Despite his car’s dilapidated condition, he takes good care of it, vacuuming the seats each day.

Curtis was popular among people of Liz’s generation, and there were relatively few people from Liz’s generation on Elsewhere. So interest declined quickly. By Liz’s birthday, Curtis Jest had faded into total obscurity.

So Betty relents, although she is fairly certain Liz is lying about what happened to the last five hundred eternims.

It has been a year since Liz’s last dive on Earth. She wonders if she will have forgotten all the procedures in the intervening time.

She sees a harried woman with kind green eyes and a mass of frizzy red hair.

In the bathroom where Liz changes into the overalls, a medium-sized, rather rangy, blondish dog of indeterminate lineage (in other words, a mutt) is drinking from a toilet.

“Thanks. Now that I’m thinking about it, I think my two-leggers tried to tell me about the whole toilet thing before. My man, Billy he was called, was quite conscientious about shutting the lid.”

“Did I tell you that I was named for a Beatles song? My full name’s Sexy Sadie, actually, but you don’t have to call me Sexy unless you want to. I mean, it’s a little presumptuous, don’t you think?”

Despite her modest salary at the DDA, Liz quickly pays back all of Betty’s eternims.

She lives with Betty and pays a small amount for her room and board; she doesn’t need health insurance or car insurance (unfortunately) or renter’s insurance or any other sort of insurance; she doesn’t have to save for a down payment on a house or retirement or college or her children’s college or a lavish wedding or a rainy day or anything else.

When you aren’t preparing for old age, senility, sickness, death, or children, there is relatively little to spend on, Liz thinks with a sigh.

She was in that rare and enviable situation: she excelled at her work, and she loved doing it.

While Zooey had been comparing silk boxer shorts to buy for her boyfriend John on Valentine’s Day (tiny glow-in-the dark cupids? Pairs of polar bears locked in perpetual kisses?), Liz had spotted a sea green cashmere sweater that was the exact color of her father’s eyes.

The sweater cost $150, but it was absolutely perfect. Liz had the money saved from several months of babysitting. The logic part of her brain had begun to protest. It’s nowhere near your father’s birthday, it said. It’s a bit extravagant, it insisted.

She knows that Contact is illegal, yet she refuses to believe that getting one insignificant sweater to her father could really cause that much trouble. If anything, she is sure it will facilitate her father in the grieving process.

Occasionally, she discerns indistinct shapes or odd rustlings, lending her descent an eerie, almost haunted feeling.

Liz speaks into the Well. Her voice sounds garbled from being underwater. She knows she has to choose her words carefully, if she is to be understood.

Thrashing her arms and legs, Liz attempts to free herself. Her efforts are for naught. The more she struggles, the tighter the net seems to become.

Liz quickly realizes the futility of trying to escape. She sighs, accepting her momentary defeat gracefully.

Of course, no one had prepared her for the odd way one communicated from the Well: all the loud faucets, Liz’s disembodied voice like an irate teapot. Is this what it means to be a ghost?

This woman, girl really, freely admits that she has broken the law. Most people at least try to dissemble.

“A sweater?” Owen is incredulous.
“What’s wrong with a sweater?” Liz demands.
“No offense, but most people who bother to make the trip to the Well have more important things to do.”

“...For the next six weeks, you’re banned from any Observation Decks, and I have to confiscate your diving gear during that time.”
“Fine,” Liz says haughtily. “I can go, then?”