Anomaly (2 page)

“Hey, get a shot of this,” said Cathy, pointing at the coke can. Already, the lip of the circular slab had risen higher than the can. “This thing's still moving. It's not over yet.”

Finch bent down, getting a long shot of the torn concrete edge. From there, he zoomed slowly across the intersection and down East 45
^th
street where the tilt caused the slab to dip well below the road level.

“What do you make of the flags?” asked Cathy, forgetting for a second that she was still reporting through her back-up mike, a wireless lapel microphone clipped on her blouse.

Finch turned back to film the flag poles just twenty or so feet behind them. Several of the severed flagpoles had drifted higher, suspended in midair, separated from the lower section of the flagpoles by over a foot.

“That is some weird shit,” said Finch, not thinking about the broadcast.

“Why don't they fall?” asked Cathy.

“And how did they get sliced up like that?” asked Finch. “It's a clean-cut. It's as though they've been hit with a buzz-saw.”

The police finally caught up with them, herding them away from the intersection to the northern cordon. The fire department cleared the intersection, moving the vehicles and people off the unstable slab.

From a distance, Finch zoomed back in. The eastern edge of the slab was now almost four feet above the coke can, but that wasn't the strangest thing. The flags were still floating in mid-air, suspended some four or five feet above the severed flagpoles they once joined, and they were moving higher still. On the other side of the intersection, the shattered building fragments were on the move as well, but they were moving down. They were jutting out of their original plane and sliding toward the ground, but they didn't fall. The whole area was twisting and rotating slowly to the west, following the afternoon sun.

“So much for Thank God It's Friday,” said Cathy, sarcastically, looking over at Finch. She knew her weekend had been ruined.

The East Side Village Community School had been started by a bunch of parents worried about the future of their children. Crime and drugs were rampant in the area, and the government seemed unable or unwilling to address the issues in the local public school. To make sure the kids got a decent start in life, the community started its own school. With a mixture of Black, Hispanic and Asian children, Americans of European descent were in the minority.

David Teller taught physics and chemistry to all ages, which was unusual in New York. Normally, these topics weren't taught as separate subjects until high school, but, like the parents that founded the East Side Community school, Teller believed in the power of education to awaken young minds.

Teller had an unusual academic past. Originally, he'd started out studying for a bachelor of science, majoring in astronomy. Stargazing had been his passion since childhood. As a young boy, he'd once thought the full moon was following him as he walked across an open field with his dad, collecting fireflies in a jar. His dad had assured him it was an illusion of distance. The moon, he said, appeared to follow everyone, but it never did.

The speed of light fascinated Teller. His father explained that light took about eight minutes to travel from the sun to the moon. It would then reflect off the moon and, roughly a second later, young David would see it. The idea of light bouncing around like a cosmic pinball seemed at odds with the instantaneous impression his young mind had of light, and his interest in astronomy grew from there. Young Teller would try to see how fast light was when he switched on his bedside lamp, or when he shone a laser pointer in the bathroom mirror, try as he may, he was never quick enough to see it move.

Teller's bedroom walls were covered with posters of astronauts floating in space or walking on the moon, images of galaxies and nebulae. As a teen, he saved up and bought his own telescope. It was more suited to bird watching than staring at the night sky, but he could make out the faint smudge that marked the Andromeda galaxy, and he could see the blurred gold and blue sparkle of the space station as it orbited the Earth. For Teller, it was a view like that of the Hubble Space Telescope.

College, though, seemed to bring out the worst in Teller. Astronomy was no longer fun. With time on his hands, his interests wandered. After his first year he switched to major in biology. His father thought he was on drugs, but it was a girl that swayed his thinking. Lisa was bright and bubbly. The world of Charles Darwin, the voyage of the Beagle, the realization of Natural Selection – Lisa made all these subjects come alive for him. They had dreams. They would travel the world together, fight to protect the rain-forests of South America, journey to Indonesia to raise orangutans, move on to Thailand to protect tigers and elephants in the wild, before heading to Australia to protest against Japanese whaling in the southern ocean. Then, one day, Lisa didn't show up for class, she missed her lectures.

Lisa had driven to Virginia to visit her folks over a long weekend, but she hadn't returned. It took the local police three agonizing days to find her. When they dragged her car from a lake barely four miles from her home they found her body trapped inside, still wearing a seatbelt. It had rained that weekend. Perhaps she was driving too fast, perhaps the road was slick, perhaps she'd been distracted as she approached the corner, perhaps she had swerved to avoid a stray dog or a deer. Teller would never know.

Teller was devastated.

He drove to the spot where she'd lost control and was shocked to see how little there was revealing the tragedy. There weren't any obvious skid marks. She'd missed the safety barrier leading into the corner by less than a foot. A fraction of a second had made the difference between life and death. The lowlying shrubs and trees along the bank had some bark scraped off them and a couple of broken twigs, but nothing more than that. There was a slight indentation where the wheels had crossed the shoulder of the road, just a couple of errant tire tracks in the soft clay. The drop to the water was no more than fifteen feet, but the lake was deep. The police said her car would have gone under in seconds. They were kind and professional. They told him there was a mark on the side of her head where she'd hit the pillar of the door as the car twisted on impact with the water. This, they said, would have knocked her unconscious. She wouldn't have felt anything, no pain, no fear.

Teller struggled with the senseless loss. The swiftness with which a beautiful life had been lost left him in shock. He blamed himself. He could have gone with her, he should have gone with her. He should have been driving. Things would have been different, he was sure of it. But there were no second chances in life, no re-runs, and all Teller had left was a sense of guilt and loss.

Teller dropped out of college. He worked as a waiter for a few months, and tried to find solace in a bottle but that only made his despair worse. It was his sister who came to the rescue. She was a preschool teacher. She dragged him along on a couple of field trips to help out with the kids. Teller was surprised by how much he enjoyed himself. The kids were little horrors, but that didn't seem to matter. He found a sense of joy in their inquiring minds.

Teller returned to college determined to become a teacher and excelled where once he had floundered. The East Side Village Community School was his second teaching position, and he loved it.

It was Monday morning.

The anomaly had dominated the news over the weekend.

The kids from his fifth grade class poured into the classroom in an avalanche of noise and confusion, yelling and laughing, pushing and jostling with each other. They came from a kaleidoscope of social backgrounds, and he loved their diversity. The world should be more childlike, he thought, the kids didn't care about the color of someone's skin or the style of clothing they wore. All they cared about was playing ball. In their innocence, they hadn't learned to separate into religious or social cliques. And the reason was clear, they all had one thing in common, their excitement for life.

Teller sat on the edge of his desk at the front of the classroom. He flicked a switch as the commotion died down and the overhead projector hummed, showing an image of the United Nations building just a few miles north of them. The kids reacted immediately, pointing at the screen and talking over the top of each other, their eyes lighting up.

The slab of concrete that previously formed the middle of the intersection lay on a steep angle over against East 45
^th
Avenue, tilting toward the morning sun rising slowly over the river. Twelve floors carved out of the State Department building were suspended in the sky, hundreds of meters above a gaping hole in the ground. The flags were just a foot or so above the road, but they were slowly moving toward their severed flagpoles still standing inert beside the UN building. They fluttered in the breeze, apparently unaware of how remarkable it was for them to be disembodied and levitating.

Several trailers had been set up around the roads approaching the intersection, portable site offices established for the engineers and scientists who had gathered from around the country, but the largest contingent was just outside the barricade. It was the media. All the major networks were present. The park adjacent to the UN building had become a sea of tents and trailers.

“OK,” said David Teller. “I'm guessing from your excitement you all saw the news over the weekend. So, who knows what this is?”

Hands shot up in the air as the kids responded to his well-rehearsed routine. They all wanted to be the first one to blurt out the answer. Several kids were calling out over the top but Teller ignored them, picking out Johnny, a young black child sitting in the middle of the class. Johnny stood and spoke proudly.

“It's the anom-ma-la-ly. At least, that's what they're calling it on TV.”

Teller smiled.

“It's a funny word, isn't it?” he said. “It's a bit hard to get your tongue around. Why do you think they're calling this an anomaly? Does anyone know what the word anomaly means?”

Susan Parker sat in the front row. She was an exceptionally bright student from a Hispanic background. Her father was a drunk. Her mother worked nights, trying desperately to raise her family out of poverty. Teller had high hopes for Susan. She had the potential to go far, far beyond the East Village. He picked Susan. She stood up, feeling proud.

“An anomaly is something strange or unusual, something that is not normal.”

“Very good. Do you think this is an anomaly?” he asked.

Her face beamed. She enjoyed being asked her opinion. She responded with an emphatic “Yes.”

“Why is it an anomaly?” Teller asked, trying not to trip over his own words. The phrase an-anomaly was a tongue twister.

“Because this isn't natural,” one of the more impulsive students blurted out.

Teller smiled, saying, “No, it's not. Is it?”

Teller moved his computer mouse and brought up a time-lapse video clip that condensed the motion of the anomaly over 24 hours down to 60 seconds. The students watched in awe as the slab of concrete, the flags and the building fragments shifted effortlessly through the air. Spotlights lit up the motion of the slab over the course of the night.

Despite some reports to the contrary, the concrete slab within the intersection never turned completely upside-down. At its peak, it tilted down on a wildly unexpected angle, moving in a smooth arc as it swung through the air over toward East 45
^th
Street. The anomaly was moving off-center as it turned over on itself.

Watching its daily motion compressed into a minute, the arc reminded Teller of being at the circus as a child, watching a motorcycle warm up inside the wheel of death. The name had been so dramatic – no one ever died. But the steel cage, in the shape of a large ball some thirty feet in height, was impressive. As the motorcycle inside the cage got up to speed, it would start with small loops that didn't cross directly overhead. The bike would go faster and faster until it went upside-down over the inside of the cage as the crowd roared with excitement. To Teller, the anomaly seemed stuck in those warm up loops. It moved effortlessly through the air, twisting and turning upside down, but never making it entirely upside down before twisting back toward the ground.

By midnight, the slab was over a hundred meters above the road, tilting down at the ground on an acute angle. The concrete intersection faced north, looking down along 1
^st
Avenue as it floated above the gaping, concave hole in the ground. The traffic lights and the tree on the levitating slab pointed down at the road below at a sharp angle.

As dawn broke, the slab had twisted sideways over by East 45
^th
, slowly sliding down into the hole in the road as the sun rose in the sky. By noon, all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle appeared to have moved back in place before they set off again on another circuit.

The clip looped, repeating every minute, always showing the unnatural sight of the flags, the dismembered floors from several buildings and the intersection rotating freely through the air.

“Do you know what it is, Mr Teller?” asked Susan.

“Oh, I know what it is,” said Teller, raising his eyebrows slightly as he leaned forward toward his students.

The class went silent as he continued.

“I know exactly what it is.”

He paused slightly, enjoying their rapt attention. For Teller, this is what teaching was all about, inspiring young minds.

“It's interesting.”

The kids looked perplexed.

“It's fascinating.”

“No,” cried one of the children from the back. “What is it really?”

“It really is interesting,” repeated Teller smiling.

A couple of the kids sighed, they were clearly hoping for more from their science teacher.

“You see, science isn't about having answers,” Teller began. “It's about having questions. That is what makes the anomaly so fascinating. We don't know what it is. We don't know how it moves the pavement around or why those flags don't fall to the ground or how those sections of the buildings are suspended in mid-air, all rotating around some invisible, imaginary point in the middle of some giant imaginary orb. We have no idea how this could happen and that makes it exciting. Scientists love questions.”