My Strange Journey inside Grandmother’s Oriental Carpet
I sit on grandmother’s oriental carpet a lot. That may not sound like much of a treat for a twelve-year-old boy, but I am not twelve-year-old-boys-in-general; I am Grant Danielson. And another thing: Grandmother’s oriental carpet isn’t oriental-carpets-in-general. It has a lot more treats in its designs than you’ll ever believe.
Grandmother’s oriental carpet belongs to me now, but I still think of it as Grandmother’s carpet because I sat on it every time I visited her house. When Grandmother died a couple of months ago, we found out she’d left it to me in her will. It still makes me laugh when I remember the expressions on the faces of my parents and uncles and aunts when they found out! They’ll never forgive me for inheriting something they wanted. Ditto for my brother, Ricky. Not that Ricky cares two specks of dirt about the carpet. He just thinks he should have inherited it because he’s older than me, and he only wants the carpet because I like it so much. My parents thought they should lay out the carpet in our living room or put it in storage until I was old enough to have a house of my own. I insisted on having the carpet in my own bedroom. My mom said that I wasn’t old enough to be responsible for such a valuable carpet. I reminded her that in the will Grandmother said she “bequeathed the oriental carpet to me because I am the one who has shown the greatest love for it, and I am the one best suited to take care of it.” End of discussion.
One of my favorite things in life is staring at the intriguing designs on Grandmother’s carpet. Every time I visited her house, I sat down in the middle of it and didn’t leave the spot until my parents dragged me away. It’s hard to describe how I feel about it, but I’ll try. The carpet’s design is relaxing. I think that’s because the figures on it make sense in the way they relate to each other. Almost everything is connected with something else. Sometimes thin blue lines connect one figure to another, but even when nothing connects two figures, I still feel like they belong together. The design helps me feel that something is holding all of life together. Grandmother told me once that these carpet makers believe the universe hangs together and the designs are supposed to illustrate what she called a cosmic unity. That sounds heavy, but my grandmother was always thinking about things like that. Now that some horrible things have happened to me, I hope she’s right about things holding together, because it’s hard for me to believe that sometimes. Grandmother’s carpet may be relaxing, but it isn’t boring. The figures go off on all sorts of tangents. One of my favorites are the fountains that spout off like firecrackers. Some figures make me dream of sliding down vanilla-colored curves. Others make me dream about running about inside the flowers or swimming in the fountains. All that dreaming makes me forget I can’t run around anywhere anymore. There’s another figure that kind of looks like a combination of sea monster and a live space ship. The monster has blue flaming fins, a dark red dot that looks like an eye, and a small, smiling mouth that makes it look like the sort of monster who would be nice enough to give me a ride to a secret land inside the carpet. So, even though my life has gone down the tubes, maybe some cosmic unity is still keeping everything anyway. That’s what Grandmother told me anyway before she died. Hopefully she’s up There like she said she would be to watch over me.
The reason I can’t run anywhere, or even walk anywhere, is because my legs no longer work and I have to use a wheelchair to get around. I sit on the floor as much as I can because I hate my wheelchair. When I sit on the floor with my back to the wheelchair, I almost feel like a normal boy again. When I’m in the wheelchair, I can’t forget for even a second that I’m a paraplegic freak because of the way people stare at me. I think that I scare them just by going around in a wheelchair. Well, I suppose they should be scared that I’ll run the wheels over their precious toes. But I won’t do that. Grandmother taught me to be nice to people, and if she really is looking down from Heaven just to make sure I am, then I’d better do it.
The reason I can’t walk anymore is because a car rammed into the car my brother was driving to take me to track practice. My brother walked away, but I got carried on a stretcher to an ambulance and rushed to the hospital. After getting poked about with all the newest toys doctors have for tormenting kids, the docs said that I’d gotten a spinal injury that paralyzes everything from my waist down. That means no walking, no feeling, no nothing. I don’t think my dad, who coaches the high school track team, has forgiven me for shattering his dreams of seeing his son break all the track records in the world. Never mind how I feel about having my own dreams shattered. Since I had outraced all the boys in a county-wide meet just a couple weeks before the accident, I was on track to break some records. (Sorry about the bad pun.) Dad seriously thought I had a good chance to make the US Olympic team in a few years. Now, he’s crushed because that won’t happen. My brother hasn’t forgiven me for making him feel guilty about what happened to me. I can see that in the way he looks away from me. My mom isn’t about to forgive me for making her drive me to therapists and doctors so many times that her career as a stock broker is in jeopardy. There’s something else my mom won’t forgive me for. I stole her den. We live in a two-story house. My room was the smallest one upstairs, like you would expect for the runt of the family, and mom had a den downstairs where she did most of her work as a stockbroker. Rolling a wheelchair up and down stairs isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do, so I got mom’s den and she got my room upstairs. Mom is always reminding me of what an unfair trade she had to make with me under duress. Now you know why I stayed at grandmother’s house as much as I could after the accident until she died. You also know why I spend all my time in my room and try to forget there’s a world out there beyond it. Now that I’ve indulged in all this self-pity, you can forget it. My story about Grandmother’s carpet is a lot better than the story about my accident.
Most of the time, I sit on Grandmother’s carpet with a stack of books on either side of me and my laptop in front. Before the accident, I was too busy practicing for track events to read all that much. Now my brains are all I’ve got left so I have them in overdrive all the time. I read lots of sci-fi novels. I’ve read everything I can find about flying carpets, which isn’t as much as you might think. The Tales of Arabian Nights don’t have flying carpets in spite of what everybody says. Before you get any wrong ideas, I’ll tell you right now that Grandmother’s carpet is not a flying carpet. It can’t even take me across the room, let alone fly me to China and back. But Grandmother’s carpet is magic all the same, as I found out, and you will, too, if you keep on reading. Besides sci-fi books, I read books and online articles about light refraction. Maybe I got interested that because light refraction causes patterns almost as neat as those on an oriental carpet. If the physics of light refraction doesn’t interest you the way it interests me, don’t worry. My story is about Grandmother’s carpet, not light refractions. While I read, I listen to heavy-duty blues. Eric Clapton and B.B. King are my favorites. I hadn’t listened to them much before the accident, either, but I started exploring all kinds of music on the Internet when there wasn’t much else to do and I got really hooked on blues. It’s a pretty good match for the way I feel about things, so I’ve spent lots of allowance money downloading the music. Listening to Eric Clapton goes well with staring at Grandmother’s carpet. The blues melodies go all over the place, but the bass and its beat keep them from flying off into outer space, just as the wild designs hang together in ways that is hard to explain..
Next to my laptop is the remote control for the TV. Having a TV in my room is another fringe benefit for being handicapped. I don’t watch it much, but once in a while, when I need a break from reading or homework, I punch the ON button to see what’s there. I skip over sports events. I used to watch them all the time, but now it’s too painful to watch guys doing what I used to do. I like to watch police dramas where people get rescued from the bad guys. They set me off on dreaming about saving kids who get kidnaped by terrorists. Might as well dream. I doubt if the police in real life want someone like me on their force to help them out. Sometimes I look at the news. If there’s a disaster going on, I want to know about it, and I start dreaming about how maybe I could help rescue people stranded in a flood or something. Only problem is: Kids in wheelchairs need not apply.
The story about me and Grandmother’s oriental carpet starts one afternoon after I’d worked through some math problems and wanted to rest my weary brain. I turned on the TV to look at the news. For a while, they just had some boring stuff, and I was about to click it off and get back to serious work when they announced the sudden disappearance of an English boy named Adrian. They showed a photo of a boy with dark hair who was wearing a fancy blazer. His square, solemn face gave him the confident look of a boy who was more apt to come to somebody else’s rescue than to need rescuing himself. The newscaster said he was practicing his violin in his own home when he disappeared, and Scotland Yard was assuming it was a home invasion and kidnaping. The camera probed the four corners of the parlor where Adrian did his practicing. I just about jumped off Grandmother’s carpet when I saw the oriental carpet in that room. I couldn’t get a good look at its design, of course, but I had a feeling it was almost as good a carpet as Grandmother’s, and I immediately felt a link between Adrian and me. Funny I should feel that way when I didn’t think Adrian and I had anything in common. After all, he wore a blazer and he played the violin of all things. Seeing his carpet made me wish I could qualify for being on the rescue team to free him from his kidnapers The newscaster said that there were no signs of foul play and no signs of breaking and entering. Most mysterious of all, Adrian’s violin was missing, too. It looked like a case of finding the boy with a violin in his pocket.
The camera zoomed in on Adrian’s frantic mother. In her British accent, she said she had begun to wonder what was up when the sound of Adrian’s violin suddenly stopped and didn’t start up again in a minute or two as it usually did. She went to the parlor to scold Adrian for goofing off, but found him missing. Then the announcer said that all the airports were being watched to keep anyone from trying to smuggle Adrian out of the country, and Scotland Yard was watching some suspected terrorist groups who were already being blamed for the crime. They showed more photos of Adrian to help people identify him and to make everybody feel sorry for him and hate the terrorists who had kidnaped him. In the first photo, Adrian was wearing a funny dress. It almost made me give up on him, but then the announcer said Adrian that was what Adrian wears when he sings in his cathedral choir. At least he had an excuse for wearing that dress, but if there was anything worse for a boy than playing the violin, it was singing in a church choir. Then they showed a picture of Adrian dressed in white clothes and holding a cricket bat. Playing cricket was more like it, even if it is a poor substitute for baseball, but it made me feel jealous I wouldn’t be able to play either that or baseball with him if I ever found him and rescued him. Then they played a clip of Adrian playing his violin on a concert stage. Man! He was good! It made me think of Eric Clapton, different as Adrian was from a blues guitarist. They followed that with a clip of Adrian singing a solo in the cathedral, but they faded that out after a few seconds. I had a few choice words for the news station for doing that. I’d never heard a sound like that before, and I was surprised with how much I liked it.
“I wish I knew how to find him for you,” I said out loud, but I had no more clue than the police did as to where he was or how he could be rescued.
When they moved on to other news items, I turned off the TV and stared at Grandmother’s carpet. I didn’t really think it had the power to help me find Adrian; it’s just that it relaxes me and that makes me feel less frustrated about things I can’t do. Like I said, the carpet’s design makes me feel that everything in life holds together, even when it doesn’t feel like it. Staring at the carpet is relaxing, but it also makes me feel fizzy, like a glass of soda. That sounds like a contradiction, but it doesn’t feel like one. I guess what I mean is that the order in the carpet’s carpet’s design is kind of topsy-turvy. There’s another contradiction for you that doesn’t feel like one.
When I stare at the carpet, I get fixated on one figure. One of my favorites is a design that kind of looks like a flower with petals made of bright red diamonds on fire. So what is it? Fire? A shower of diamonds? A flower? I think it’s a fiery diamond flower. One of those thin light blue lines that are all over the carpet leads up to the flower so that it looks like a stem that’s hardly strong enough to hold the flower up. Of course, on a carpet, all a stem really has to do is run along the carpet from one figure to another, so it’s strong enough for the job. At the center of the fiery diamond flower is a vanilla-colored field. I suppose you might not think vanilla is a color, but I like vanilla ice cream and the off-white color in Grandmother’s carpet looks like that. I’ve stared at the fiery diamond flower lots of times and dreamed of lots of strange journeys I could take inside it, like walking through diamond-walled caves and exploring the fields of tall vanilla grass where I could run about if. . . if . . . I shook my head to pull myself out of the funk that gets me feeling sorry for myself when I get this way.
But this time, the blurred shapes from the carpet in Adrian’s practice room that I’d only glimpsed flowed in and out of the designs of Grandmother’s carpet. Somehow, they made everything in the carpet come alive. The flames of the fiery diamond flower flickered and the blurred shapes zoomed around them. I thought that I was just seeing things from staring at Grandmother’s carpet too long. I shook my head hard to bring myself back to reality, but even then, I still saw the flower shooting up right before my eyes! Before I knew it, the flower towered above me so that my neck was getting stiff from looking up at it. The petals flickered exactly the way you would expect diamonds to flicker if they were filled with fire. Tall vanilla-colored grass blew in the wind at the center of the fiery diamond flower. Except there wasn’t any wind blowing inside a carpet. Or was there? I felt a stiff, if gentle, breeze on my cheek. The air smelled fresh, even though I was inside my house and inside the carpet. Or was I? When I looked down, I saw myself sitting astride the light blue stem, with my feet dangling down like I was sitting on a fence.
I wanted to climb up into the fiery diamond flower and run about in that field real bad, but it was too far up and, if I got there, I could hardly run around in the field anyway. Then I remembered that since the accident, I’ve really developed my upper body strength. I can pull myself along the ground a pretty good distance, but pulling myself up a flagpole’s worth of height was daunting. I was ready to give it a good try and I did. But not even after my exhausting efforts had made my arms ache, was I getting any closer to the flower, its petals, and the vanilla field in the middle of it. I had a sneaking suspicion the fiery diamond flower was moving away at the same rate I was pulling myself toward it. Finally, I gave up and slid back down the pole where I broke down and cried.
After I’d spent a few minutes feeling sorry for myself, I remembered the many times my grandmother told me that feeling sorry for oneself never makes a situation better. Once I asked her if she ever felt sorry for herself. After all, I knew she was having an awful time doing anything at all and she wasn’t feeling very well very often. She smiled and said she knew by lots of experience that feeling sorry for herself never helped, but looking out for small things that she could enjoy, like looking at the sunlight on a potted plant did help. As I remembered those words, I relaxed and looked up at the fiery diamond flower. Suddenly, I felt really lucky. How many kids get to look at diamond-shaped flames that make up the petals of a flower inside an oriental carpet? I looked up at the soft red sky where other figures in the carpet hung like large stars made of flames and diamonds and fountains. The figure that kind of looks like a cross between a prickly sea monster and a living space ship floated slowly overhead. It looked a lot bigger than it did when I was looking down at the carpet, but it still looked friendly. I could have sworn that it blinked at me with its ruby-red eye, even though it was not possible for figures in a carpet to be alive. I still wished I could climb up into the flower, but I was content to just look at it and enjoy it the way Grandmother learned to enjoy looking at the sunlight on her potted plant.
When I first felt a vibration in my chest, I thought I was just feeling good about looking at the fiery diamond flower at such close quarters. But then I noticed that the designs around me were moving and the fiery diamond flower was getting closer! That’s when I realized that the light blue stem was moving me right up to the flower like a conveyer belt. I would have felt the vibration in my butt and legs sooner if I had any feeling down there, but I don’t. I knew I had to be dreaming, but I wasn’t. Everything was too real.
When I reached the fiery diamond flower, one of the petals slid under me so that I was sitting on it! It was so soft to the touch, it was a wonder I didn’t fall through it to whatever was under the carpet’s design. I felt the vibrations in my fingers and chest more strongly than ever as the petal pulsated like a flame, but it wasn’t hot and it didn’t burn me. Instead, it felt like a vibrating flower on a cool spring day. Sitting on the petal gave me a great view of the vanilla field in the center of the flower. The blades of wheat, or whatever it was, looked so soft I could almost feel them as I watched them sway in the breeze. It seemed that as soon as I set my heart on getting into the vanilla field, the pulses on the flower moved me along until I tumbled gently into soft blades of vanilla wheat that did—Yes!—smell like vanilla!
The field wasn’t really made of vanilla grass of course; it was made of soft tassels that tickled my face and arms. I sank pretty deep into them until I exerted by upper-body strength and pulled myself to the surface with good strong swimming strokes. Once I’d gotten back up, I found I didn’t have to swim hard to stay up. The tassels moved like waves that were solid enough to feel like the water toys I use when I swim now that I can’t kick with my feet. A stroke here and a stroke there kept me comfortably afloat for quite a while. For the first time since the accident, I didn’t feel like a cripple. I was having the time of my life! Up in the carpet’s red sky, the blurry shapes swam around like flying shadow fish. I got my strokes into a rhythm, sort of like a good beat for a blues number. The vanilla tassel grass waved to the beat to the same rhythm of my arm strokes. That’s when I started to hear a melody in a syncopated rhythm that went with the beat I was swimming in. The flying shadow fish above me fell in line with the syncopated beat as well. For I while, I assumed I was hearing Eric Clapton’s guitar in my head, but I finally realized that the sound was too high-pitched for that. It was more like the sound of a violin. A violin? Inside Grandmother’s carpet? That made me think of Adrian. But how could Adrian be playing his violin inside Grandmother’s carpet? I thought about the frantic plea Adrian’s mother’s made on television to his kidnapers to give her son back to her. Was it really possible I could find and rescue Adrian? No kid in his right mind looks for a missing kid inside an oriental carpet. Come to think of it, no kid in his right mind crawls inside an oriental carpet and plays around in it. That got me thinking that Adrian wasn’t the only kid who was missing. What about me? What if my mom came into my room to tell me something and I wasn’t there? How much time had passed in the real world? Had I already missed dinner? I’d be in deep doo-doo if I had. “Grant, where were you?” “Oh, I was just playing around inside Grandmother’s carpet and I lost track of the time.” Yea, right.
I had to get back, but how? I had no idea of which direction to swim in. I floundered about for a while until my arms got so tired, I had to take a break. All I could do was think about my room and my house. But as I did that, the vanilla grass tassels moved me along, and I ended up on the shore of one of the fiery diamond petals. Then, the fiery diamond petal carried me across it with its pulses. I seemed that the more anxious I got about getting back to my room before I got in trouble, the stronger the pulses got and the faster I moved. Before long, the flaming diamond petal lowered me to the blue stem. I rode the stem and soon found myself sitting on Grandmother’s carpet in my room.
* * *
It turned out I’d been inside Grandmother’s carpet for about an hour. I was in time for dinner with a lot of time to spare. Nobody knew I’d been gone, so nobody pushed the panic button. But why was I afraid mom or anybody else might have come along to check on me? Nobody knocks on my door if they can help it.
The usual routine at dinner is that Dad asks Ricky about baseball practice and mom asks him how things went at school. Nobody asks me anything. To be honest, this is a flip-flop from the way things used to be. With my dad being a track coach, he was a little disappointed that Ricky went out for basketball and baseball instead of track. Maybe that’s why I went out for track. It gave give me an inside track with dad, if you’ll excuse the bad pun. It worked, and I was the one dad talked to at the dinner table until that driver rammed his car into my body. Now Ricky is the one dad cares about and nobody cares about my day. Well, who wants to know what I’d just learned about light refraction?
As soon as I could get away from the dinner table, I was back in my room, listening to B.B. King pouring out of my headset, and watching the continuing coverage of Adrian with captions on for the news so I could listen to the music while I watched the TV. They kept showing the same clips over and over again until I was pretty sure I was going to dream about them: Adrian the choirboy, Adrian the violinist, Adrian the cricketer, clips of the practice room with the oriental carpet where Adrian disappeared, clips of Adrian’s mother pleading for her son’s safe return, and clips of a spokesman for Scotland Yard assuring all law-abiding people that they were putting the screws on all terrorist groups and that whichever group had kidnaped Adrian was not going to get away with it. Every time they zeroed in on the carpet, I was all attention. I wished the newscast was a video where I could freeze the frames and get a better look at the carpet. Of course, why a boy with as logical and mathematical a brain as I’ve got would think that examining the carpet in Adrian’s house would help me locate Adrian is beyond me, except that my own experience of having just journeyed inside Grandmother’s carpet had suddenly made almost anything seem possible. I wanted to call the station and ask them to send me the carpet express delivery so I could solve the case for them. Yea, right. Still, one figure in Adrian’s carpet I did get a decent look at was in the shape of a large strawberry. Inside the strawberry shape was an active world of light blue streams and dark red caves, vanilla-colored fountains, and a dark blue lake in the middle. At least that’s what I thought I saw in the glimpses I got of it. I suppose this gives you an idea of how my imagination runs away from me when it comes to oriental carpets.
When the news program moved on to something else, my eyes remained fixated on the strawberry-shaped pattern on the carpet in Adrian’s house as if I’d frozen the frame just by wishing for it. The streams and caves in the design started to move in time with B.B. King’s wild guitar. And then some high-pitched wailing music that I first thought was a harmonica started to weave in and out of B.B. King’s music. Then I realized the high-pitched music was too smooth and bright to be a harmonica. It had to be Adrian’s violin! I looked down at Grandmother’s carpet and saw a vanilla-colored fountain shooting water like fireworks to the rhythm of the music. The bottom of my room dropped out and I plunged down at about the speed of light toward the exploding water. Jumping into a geyser looked safer than plunging into this, but there was no way to change course for Yellowstone National Park. I screamed louder than B.B. King’s electric guitar and braced myself for the shock of crashing into the water. But when I’d screamed myself out, I realized I hadn’t crashed and I wasn’t drowning. I hadn’t even made a splash like I did from cannonballing into water when I could do that. I’d landed in something that moved in waves, but wasn’t wet. Was I swimming in pure sound waves? Whatever the waves were, they gave me about the same amount of resistance as water does. When I opened my eyes, I saw vanilla-covered waves that looked like water but didn’t feel like it. Maybe I really was swimming in sound waves. My headset had slipped off my ears, but I could still hear B.B. King’s music and Adrian’s violin as clearly as I did when I still had the headset on. The sound seemed to be amplified inside the carpet in some way so that it could compete with B.B. King’s electric guitar. How weird is that? Don’t tell me; I know how weird that is.
When I looked up into the red sky, I saw the sea monster-living space ship with the blue flaming fins and the dark red eye flying or swimming overhead. I waved to it, hoping it would come down and give me a lift. As Grandmother told me many times, be careful what you wish for. I started to rise above the waves, as if the waves were propping me up in the sea-monster’s direction. At the same time, the sea monster changed course and started to head in my direction. From a distance, its smile had looked friendly, but as it came closer, I wasn’t so sure. I shrank back and the waves brought me under at the same time. I came spluttering in just a few seconds, which was odd, because I wasn’t really in any water and there wasn’t anything to splutter. Force of habit, I guess.
I made a few side strokes in the vanilla waves for a little while, slowed down, and then came to a stop. I hadn’t gotten to anywhere in particular, so I didn’t know why I should have stopped where I did. I had another brief panic attack that made me afraid I was going to be lost forever in the carpet just as Adrian was. By next morning, I would be breaking news all over the world. My picture would plastered on everybody’s TV, and my sobbing parents would show the world my empty wheel chair. I wondered if anybody would think Adrian and I had been kidnaped by the same guys. I was pretty sure nobody would think we’d both gotten lost in oriental carpets. That got me thinking that it would be really cool if I found Adrian in the carpet and then we found the way out of it together. As I started to think of that, the waves started to move along again. When I started to think harder about finding Adrian, the waves moved me faster. That’s when I began to catch on to something. I remembered that the carpet moved me into the fiery diamond flower when I really wanted to get there. Then, when I wanted to get back to my room (stupid choice!), the carpet moved me back there. That got me thinking and hoping that the carpet was moving me toward Adrian because I really wanted to find him. I also remembered how the flying sea monster came closer to me when I thought I wanted it to, but it moved away, or I moved away from it, when I got scared and didn’t want to get close to it after all. I put my theory to the test by thinking harder about Adrian and how I wanted to find him and rescue him and be a big hero. The only catch to that was that no newscaster could tell the world that I had dived into Grandmother’s carpet, found Adrian, and pulled him out. That’s the trouble with pulling off impossible rescues. But first things first. I had to find Adrian and rescue him and get both of us out of the carpet.
Sure enough, the waves moved me along faster as soon as I renewed my wish to find Adrian. The sound of the violin seemed to get louder, too, unless that was my imagination. The wave I was riding brought me to something like a light blue rope or string of some sort. I guess I’ll call it a stringy rope. The waves seemed to be putting the stringy rope in my hand, or putting my hand in the stringy rope, or both. Next thing I knew, I was riding the rope the way I rode the blue stem up to the flower with the fiery diamond petals. The rope vibrated to the music of B.B. King’s guitar and Adrian’s violin. But then the next thing I knew, the stringy rope had pulled me under the waves. I started to panic when the stringy rope kept up pulling me deeper into whatever it was I was in. I was afraid to let go for fear I’d be set adrift for the rest of what would be a short life. But I was just as afraid to hold on when there was no telling where I would end up. It was easier to hold on to the stringy rope then to let go, so I held on. At least I could breathe normally, so I didn’t have to worry about drowning, but it felt funny to breathe in something that wasn’t quite like water (fortunately) but wasn’t quite like normal air either. The further down the stringy rope took me, the louder the sound of Adrian’s violin got and the more the sound of B.B. King’s guitar faded away.
I kept my eyes closed for quite a while, but when the feeling of whatever I was swimming in got weaker, I finally risked opening them. The light blue stringy rope was leading straight down to the strawberry-shaped figure I’d seen in the carpet in Adrian’s house on the newscast. Somehow, Grandmother’s carpet had taken me all the way to England to Adrian’s carpet! The giant strawberry pulsated like a Christmas tree gone mad. It was enough to spin my head in circles and loops just to look at the circles inside of loops inside more circles inside of more loops. In the middle of the strawberry gone on the fritz was a dark blue lake, and in the middle of the dark blue lake there was a ruby-colored island. I kept my fingers curled around the light blue stringy rope for dear life as it pulled me over the navy blue lake that looked as smooth as glass. By this time, I was hearing the music of Adrian’s violin clearly. B.B. King’s music was left behind. So was Grandmother’s carpet.
As I approached the ruby island, I saw a wide vanilla stream running through it. Next to the stream was a moving object that could have been a human being. When the light blue stingy rope brought me lower for a landing, I saw that the moving figure was a square-shouldered boy with black hair playing a violin. Thanks to the photos I’d seen on the newscast, I knew it was Adrian. He was playing his violin with so much confidence that you’d never think he needed rescuing unless you knew he was inside an oriental carpet and maybe didn’t know how to get out. I landed so gently on the ruby island that it took me a while to realize I was sitting on it, since I can’t feel anything on the seat of my pants. Adrian was too wrapped up in his music to notice I had landed, and he kept right on playing. I had no idea what Adrian was playing, but it was awesome. I guessed it was classical music of some sort and it was enough to make me think that maybe classical music wasn’t so bad after all. Maybe it was almost as good as blues. Adrian was all over his instrument just as much as Eric Clapton is all over his electric guitar. I was content to just listen to Adrian and contemplate the vanilla river running by us until he was finished what he was playing, but suddenly he broke off right in the middle of a wild riff and eked out a soft cry.
“Who are you?” he asked in a very British accent, “and what are you doing here?”
He looked none too pleased to see me. That dampened my spirits a bit.
“I’m Grant Danielson,” I answered uncertainly, “and I came to rescue you.”
Adrian’s face twisted into a withering look that made me feel very stupid. So much for being proud of myself for navigating from one oriental carpet to another.
“Rescue me? Do I look like need rescuing?”
“Well, it doesn’t look like you were kidnaped by terrorists, so maybe you don’t need rescuing after all. I guess all you needed was to be told to go home because your mom is all worried about you.”
Adrian made the kind of face all boys make when they think their moms are worrying too much about them.
“How did you get the idea my mum thought I’d been kidnaped by terrorists? You have an American accent.”
“I saw you on the news. You’ve been missing for several hours and there’s a world-wide search out for you. I saw your mother on the tv asking the terrorists who kidnaped you to return you unharmed.”
That got Adrian’s attention.
“Yikes!” he cried. “I’ve made the telly over this? My poor mum! Time must pass a lot differently here than there.” Adrian looked at his watch. “Hmm. My poor watch is going haywire. How about yours?”
I looked at my watch. The LED was flashing, so mine wasn’t working either.
“Not working. I guess watches don’t work inside of oriental carpets. The first news spot I saw of you was some five hours ago. You must have been missing for quite some time before that to make the news the way you did. “
Adrian sat down on the ruby grass next to me and placed his violin and bow gently on his lap.
“You said my mum was on the telly,” said Adrian. “How about my dad? Did he come on, too?”
The look on Adrian’s face told me this was an important question and I hated to give him bad news, but there was no escaping it.
“I didn’t see him on the news,” I replied.
Adrian’s face fell.
“I knew it,” he said. He took a moment to put himself together. “Well, I didn’t take a trip into this carpet just to see if it would get my father on the telly to tell the reporters how much he misses me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, not knowing what else I could say.
Even though my father didn’t pay any attention to me anymore, I didn’t see how I could stand it if he walked out on my family the way his did.
“How did you get here, anyway?” Adrian asked me.
“Probably the same you did,” I replied.
That shook Adrian up enough that he couldn’t hide it from me no matter how much he tried to.
“Then, should I infer from that . . . that you . . . that you have a carpet that you can . . . well, walk into?”
“Yea. When I was watching the news story about you, I started to wish I could somehow find you and rescue you. Then I saw the oriental carpet in the room where you were last seen. Well, I’ve got an oriental carpet in my room that I inherited from my Grandmother. I was sitting on it when I saw you on the news. When I wished I could find you and rescue you, I suddenly found myself inside Grandmother’s oriental carpet. That was quite a trip. But not only was I hearing the CD of B.B. King I was listening to, I also heard your violin loud and clear. I followed the sound. and somehow got into your carpet and here I am.”
Adrian broke into an uneasy smile.
“I’d gotten tired of practicing, and I stopped to stare at the design in the carpet in my practice room. Suddenly I found myself inside it. I had a jolly good trip through some amazing landscapes—I suppose I should say carpetscapes, and after a while, I ended up on this island. It’s been smashing, totally smashing.”
As Adrian spoke, I feasted my eyes on the diamonds hanging overhead, their lively little worlds blinking. Interwoven with the diamonds were flowers whose petals looked like windmills circling in the wind.
“Walking about inside a carpet should be impossible,” Adrian mused. “But since it’s happened, I guess it’s possible after all. But how?”
“I’ve been studying a lot about how atomic particles do funny things and even some impossible things,” I replied, “but the scientists who talk about that say that big things like human beings and carpets don’t do funny and impossible things the way atomic particles do.”
“That just shows what they know,” Adrian scoffed. “It would be fun to tell my science teacher a thing or two about science, but I suppose he wouldn’t believe me.”
“Same here.”
Even though we couldn’t tell our science teachers that their theories were wrong, it was kind of fun to sit inside an oriental carpet and mock teachers and scientists who thought they knew more than they did.
“It seems even more impossible that you could get from your carpet to mine,” said Adrian.
“Yea. I guess our carpets must be connected somehow. My Grandmother said these carpets are images of the order of the universe, or something like that.”
“Hmm, if there is principally one universe,” said Adrian thoughtfully, “then both carpets illustrate the order in the same universe. So perhaps in some way, the carpets are one, in which case it makes sense that they should connect. At least these two have done. I wonder why these two should connect and not others.”
“Maybe it’s because I wanted to find you after I saw you on the news,” I suggested.
“Well, jolly nice of you to come after me,” said Adrian. “If my mum is crying her eyes out for me on the worldwide telly, and terrorist groups are getting blamed for kidnaping me when they hadn’t done it, then I suppose I’d best get back. Come along and I’ll bring you to tea and surprise my mum.”
Adrian started to scamper off, leaving me behind in what would have been a cloud of dust, if there were any dust inside the carpet. I silently asked the carpet to move me along after him and it obliged by sliding me along the ruby grass and across the vanilla stream in his direction. When Adrian came to a rose-red path, he noticed I wasn’t right with him and he stopped and waited for me.
“Why are you slipping and sliding and crawling about like a two-year-old?” Adrian asked me. “Can’t you walk?”
My throat got stuck for a few seconds.
“No,” I finally choked. “I can’t walk.”
“You can’t?”
“I can’t. Every hear of people who get spinal injuries that make them paraplegic?” I yelled.
That shook Adrian up some. He deserved it.
“Well, of course I know these things happen,” he said, almost looking sorry. “Considering that, you move along pretty well. Come along. I won’t run ahead of you this time.”
I was still smouldering from what I saw was Adrian’s insensitivity, but I was still willing to visit his home. This time, the carpet moved me along at the pace Adrian set. As a result, we gradually got to moving at such a fast clip that my eyes couldn’t drink in the diamonds above me and their connecting lines as much as I wanted to. We moved along the rose-red path through a couple of curves, then switched to a navy-blue path that took us to a garden that took my breath away. The “grass” was navy blue, and in the center of the field was a riot of flowers that curled about like streamers put out for a wedding. Curling vanilla and red vines spouted flowers that flowed like wild fountains shooting out petals shaped like spades with diamonds at the center. These diamond centers pulsed with life as if they were made of fire and water at the same time.
“Neat-Oh!” I whispered.
“Uh—Yes, it is that,” said Adrian with a deflating lack of interest.
When I saw how pale, even scared, Adrian looked, I looked at the flowers again, wondering if they were more menacing than I thought, but they still looked as beautiful and friendly to me as they did before.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
Adrian looked about desperately, as if he were looking for something.
“I haven’t seen this place,” he confessed. “I must be lost.”
That was a relief. This problem had a simple solution.
“That’s nothing to worry about,” I assured Adrian. “I find that the carpet knows where to take me when I need to get somewhere.”
Adrian gave me a puzzled, irritated look.
“What does that mean?”
“All you have to do is stand where you are and think about your home and about the practice room where your carpet is, and the carpet should take you for a ride until you get there. Works with me, anyway.”
Adrian rolled his eyes and scowled at me.
“Pure rubbish!” he scoffed. “The only reason you crawl about inside the carpet is because you’re a cripple. God gave me a pair of legs that work and I will jolly well use them!”
Those words lit a fuse under my butt that sent me shooting sky-high like a rocket. I didn’t even get a chance to tell Adrian what I thought of him for saying what he’d said. Neither did I know what was happening until I landed on the floor in my room on Grandmother’s carpet with a hard enough jolt that I felt it in my chest. It was a good time not to have feeling in my butt and legs. I would have a big bruise or two to explain to my physical therapist. On second thought, I wouldn’t have to explain anything, because I’m always getting cuts and bruises that I didn’t know about when they happened.
* * *
I was so furious with Adrian I couldn’t even think of sleeping. I had gone to all that trouble to rescue him only to find out he was too much of a jerk to be worth rescuing. He could wander about in his carpet for the rest of his life for all I cared. Being called a cripple, especially in that tone of voice was more than I could take. The way Adrian had just treated me was pretty typical of the way kids at school treated me. Pity and fear. Not a good combination. The other kids make me feel guilty for spoiling their party. Not that they invite me to their parties anymore. Take the boys on my track team. I mean, what used to be my track team. You’d think that being paraplegic was contagious to judge by the way they keep their distance from me. I feel like I’m some sort of leper or moral degenerate just because some idiot driver plowed his car into the middle of my body that I am fed up to here and a lot higher than that. And then Adrian pooped on my advice just because I couldn’t run around inside the carpet the way he could. Sorry about that rant. I’m so tired of self-pity I could scream.
I was also too upset with my parents to sleep. As usual, neither of them stopped by to look in on me at bedtime. When I had first gotten home from the hospital after my accident, either my father or mother, or both, came by every night to wish me goodnight. They even did this when they hadn’t said “boo!” to me all day. But then one night, neither of them came to see me. I waited and waited, and when I heard the doors close upstairs, I cried and waited all night. After that, I stopped waiting for them, and now I’m used to their not dropping by. The good thing about their policy of ignoring me is that I didn’t have to worry about their dropping in and not finding me because I was still inside Grandmother’s carpet. The bad thing about this policy is that it makes me feel lost and abandoned in the world.
After stewing about all this for a few hours, I got so mad I tried to raise my fist and pound it into my pillow, one of my favorite temper tantrum tricks. But I could n’t. For a few seconds of panic, I thought I’d just gotten paralyzed between the neck and the waist, too. Nothing like suddenly turning quadriplegic to brighten my day. I looked down at my chest to see what was wrong and saw the problem. A dimly glowing light brown-colored rope was wrapped all around me. How could somebody have sneaked into my room and tied me up when I’d been awake all this time? But then I turned my head and saw that the rope was snaking up from Grandmother’s carpet. I took that to mean that the carpet was mad at me for my bad attitude with Adrian and was calling me to account. I had gone into Grandmother’s carpet to rescue Adrian, but then I went off in a huff as soon as Adrian acted like a jerk. How stupid is that? (Don’t tell me; I know.) The words that Grandmother said to me one day when I cried about the way kids treated me in school came back to me. “Grant, you’ve got to realize that remarks like that aren’t personal. They aren’t about you. They’re about them, and about the things they fear.” Those words helped a lot. Thanks to what Grandmother said, I started to feel more sorry for the other kids than I did for myself. I figured that if they’re afraid of something I live with every second of every day, then they are really pitiful. Those words also gave me the sneaking suspicion that if some other kid on my track team had suffered the same fate I had, I wouldn’t have given up any running time to go visit him. As I recalled Grandmother’s words, I relaxed, and the ropes from the carpet loosened. By the time I’d finally stopped being furious with Adrian, and was starting to worry again about whether or not he got home, the ropes had slipped back into the carpet and I could move as freely as a boy in my condition can move.
I reached for my remote and switched on the TV with muted sound and captions. The first news station showed the dust clearing from the latest bombing in Iraq. The next showed a house surrounded by yellow police tape. A couple of channels later, I found a shot of Adrian singing in his choir When a distraught middle-aged came on, I thought maybe it was Adrian’s father, but the captions were all about what a great singer Adrian was, and how he is head chorister with great responsibility, so I decided the man had to be his choirmaster. Then the newscaster said that Scotland Yard was rounding up suspected terrorists to interview them. I didn’t like the sound of that. It made me wonder if one reason this news story from England was getting so much attention in America was to get people more afraid of terrorists than ever. Apparently Adrian hadn’t found his way back home and still needed rescuing. More to the point, I seemed to be the only person in the world who had a chance of doing it. I switched off the TV and prepared myself for another journey into Grandmother’s carpet.
Getting down from my bed to the carpet is a real project. The bad news is that it takes some time. The good news is I have it down pat. Step One: pull myself over to my wheelchair that is always parked right next to my bed. Step Two: maneuver myself from the wheelchair down to the carpet. But this time, I didn’t have to go through all that. As soon as I started to pull myself over to the wheelchair, a strange creature floated up to the side of my bed. I was about to yelp when I recognized it as the sea monster/living space ship in Grandmother’s carpet. Good thing I didn’t yelp, or maybe my dad would have come running to make sure his crippled son was okay. Then again, maybe he would have heard me cry out from upstairs. The monster’s fins shot up and out like flames of water. The gray and dark blue streaks on its body swirled about in circles. Its ruby eye looked very friendly at close quarters. Its tiny mouth was turned up in a short smile. That was good. There was no way it could swallow me for a bedtime snack with a mouth that size. I felt foolish about getting scared of it when it started to approach me inside of Grandmother’s carpet. The friendly sea monster/living space ship conveniently pressed itself right against my bed so that, with the help of my great upper-body strength, I could push myself off my bed on to its back. For simplicity’s sake, I’ll just call it a sea monster, now that you know it isn’t just a sea monster. I carefully closed my hands around the fins to keep from getting pricked by them. To my surprise, they felt like silky water. As soon as I had a good grip, the monster zoomed off like a space ship late for a date in the next galaxy.
It was just like a roller-coaster ride! The carpet designs whizzed by me in a blur. In my condition, I can’t ride roller coasters anymore, so this was ride was a special treat even though I was worried about Adrian. It was strange, not having any feeling on the seat of my pants. I would have felt I felt like I was flying in thin except for my knuckle-whitening grip on those fins. It would have been frightening if I didn’t have a pretty strong trust in Grandmother’s carpet by this time. But to tell the truth, it was still pretty scary. If it had gone on much longer than it did, I would have suffocated from holding my breath too long.
But when the sea monster slowed down, the ride got bumpier. I suppose it’s something like an airplane feels like when attacked by wind shear. It didn’t seem possible for me to stay on the sea monster, but I did. Looking down, I got quite a shock. The landscape looked like a horror film where evil vegetation takes over the planet and chokes everybody to death and the vanilla-colored rivers fight back against the vegetation. Snake-like vines were choking out the rivers and the rivers were drowning out the vines. So far, the war was a standoff with no end in sight. From the low-flying sea monster, I looked anxiously for Adrian among the tangle of flowers and their vines and rivers. I tried listening for the sound of Adrian’s violin, but didn’t hear it. The more twisted the vines and flowers and rivers got, the more I worried about what I would find if I found Adrian, or if I would find him at all, or if I really wanted to find him after all. I wasn’t about to blame the carpet for the horror I was seeing and feeling. It had to be Adrian’s fault. Since the carpet had punished me briefly for my bad attitude, Adrian must have a humongous bad attitude to cause all this. All of the anger I’d felt when Adrian first insulted me rose up in my gorge with lots of interest.
“Adrian, if you did this,” I said through my teeth, “I’m really going to get you.”
Those were the magic words. The wrong magic words. As soon as I’d said them, I tumbled off the sea monster and landed in a tangle of thorny vines and vanilla streams. Black, putrid flowers grew on the vines and I’d rather not say what the rivers smelled like.
“What are you doing here?”
That was Adrian. I’d landed just a few feet away from him. He was so entangled in vines and streams, he could hardly move. No wonder he wasn’t playing his violin.
“I came back to rescue you, you little piece of . . . “
I didn’t get to finish what I’d started to say. Just as well. What I was about to say doesn’t bear repeating. In a matter of seconds, several vines had tied me up as ruthlessly and efficiently as any terrorist could have. The rotten flowers pushed themselves at my nose so hard I was drowning in their stench. And speaking of drowning, the vanilla streams were running over my face, making it hard to breathe. The rivers didn’t quite feel like liquid, but whatever they were, the effect was suffocating.
“Some rescuer you are!” Adrian yelled at me. “What kind of stew are you going to put me in next?”
He was blaming me for what had happened to him!
“You put yourself in this stew you little . . .”
I won’t tell you what I called him. I’m pretty ashamed of it now. At the time, Adrian and I were pretty far gone in blaming each other for our predicament. We exchanged escalating insults until we were too hoarse to speak and the putrid flowers had stuffed themselves so deeply into our mouths, we couldn’t even scream any more. My mind kept on boiling in a stream of insults for quite some time. Up above me, the sea monster hovered, looking down with its friendly ruby eye, but it wasn’t doing anything to help me out of this predicament. Fiery diamonds were flying about in the red sky above and around the sea monster and threatening to attack me. I struggled against the vines and wished I had a knife on me to cut them away. I didn’t, of course, and I’d gotten wound so tight, I don’t think I could have gotten anything out of my pocket if I had anything useful there. I might as well admit that, considering how fierce the shapes in the carpet had gotten just from angry thoughts and words from me and Adrian, I hate now to think what would have happened to us if I had turned a knife on anything.
Finally, the vines had made me so helpless I couldn’t do anything but stop and think. For the second time I had lost my temper at Adrian at the drop of a hat, and I didn’t even have a hat to drop. When I looked over at Adrian, I could see what a scared kid he was. He didn’t have a clue in the world as to how to get out of his predicament. I did. The first thing to do was to calm down. Not easy if you’re as angry and scared as I was then, but the sea monster helped me out in its own way. Maybe it wasn’t coming down to push the vines away or anything, but it was still looking at me with the friendly eye and its small mouth still had the same curl of a smile. That had a calming effect on me. I started to understand that my fits of temper were childish. Adrian had pushed a couple of buttons that I always put on display for people to push them. Maybe Adrian was stuck up and didn’t deserve to be rescued, but I remembered Grandma saying once that crummy people need help just as much as nice people do when they get into trouble. By the time I’d thought through all that, I noticed that the vines wrapped about me were loosening a bit. I took this as a confirmation of my train of thought. If the figures in an oriental carpet illustrate the order of the universe, then it follows that you shouldn’t try to boss an oriental carpet around. Might as well argue with the universe. Better still, the flowers closest to me started to come back to life. The petals turned white and they curled around a light red field in the middle. Now they smelled as sweet as they were sour just minutes before. The vanilla-colored stream started to smell like vanilla again and it ebbed back just a little to help give me breathing room.
That also gave me some more thinking room. I remembered the newscast saying that Adrian was a head chorister. Sounded like being the top dog among the boys. Top dogs don’t like needing to be rescued by cripples like me. A spurt of anger turned a few flowers dark until I calmed down again. Top dogs are used to being in charge. I should know. When I was captain of my kids’ soccer team, I hated it when I twisted an ankle and couldn’t play for a few games. I felt the captain should be the most fit to play, not the least. It would help if Adrian did the rescuing, but how? Head chorister. The answer was obvious.
“Adrian.”
He made a muffled reply.
“Can you sing something?”
My question was answered by another muffled reply that sounded angrier. What was Adrian’s problem? The vines around me tightened up again and the flowers turned a light brown and wilted before my eyes. Obviously it was Adrian’s anger that was making the vines act this way. The vines got tighter, the flowers turned black and stank, and the vanilla stream felt stickier and stank as it trickled across my face. The fiery diamonds in the sky closed in with zig-zagging movements that didn’t make me think they wished us well, either. It was enough to make me want to strangle Adrian, but I didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to realize that we were both in the same carpet if not the same boat. If I kept on wanting to strangle Adrian, my wish might be granted, but I’d get strangled, too. I suppose Grandmother would have called that poetic justice, but I know she wouldn’t want any poetic justice that got anybody strangled. So, I started to relax one more time as best I could. Looking at the sea monster helped once more as it continued to float above me like the most unperturbable monster in the world.
When I relaxed, I felt some tremors of anger that didn’t feel like my own. Anger at a father who never called or invited me to spend time with him. Not totally different from the anger I felt against my own father, but not the same thing. Then there was anger against some boys who taunted me for singing in a church choir. That wasn’t my problem, but it probably was Adrian’s. Then I felt angry at the snotty kid who thought he knew all about the carpet world and used his knowledge to make me a prisoner of it. I knew that wasn’t my problem. Was I feeling Adrian’s emotions? That was a spooky thought. Worse, was Adrian feeling some of my emotions? Spookier still. All the more reason to calm things down between us in a hurry. I did some thinking of what would be a better approach and until I understood what to do.
“Adrian? I heard a clip on the newscast of you singing a solo. You sounded good. I’ll bet you all the oriental carpets in the world that if you think of singing something, the vines will loosen enough for you to sing it, and when you sing it, the vines will loosen some more and the flowers on the vines will come back to life, and then you’ll be able to find your way home, and you will be free to go back home. As a bonus, I’ll get to hear some really good singing.”
There was no angry-sounding muffle in reply this time. Instead, everything in the carpet became still. The fiery diamonds became much gentler in their movements. The vines loosed again and—Yes!—the flowers were blooming better than they ever had before. That gave me hope that I had gotten through to Adrian this time. Then I heard his voice. I’ll tell you right now, hearing Adrian sing inside an oriental carpet is a thousand times better than hearing a clip on a newscast on TV. The words were pretty old-fashioned and I didn’t understand them very well. It sounded like a religious song. Duh! Adrian sings in a church choir, so it stands to reason that he sings religious stuff. The gist of the words seemed to be about calling on God for help and moaning about messing up. I hadn’t heard anything like what Adrian was singing. It sounded mournful, even stodgy, but it I also thought it was almost as good as blues for hitting my own feelings just then. As Adrian sang, the vines moved away us and flowers spread all over them like wildfire. The vanilla-colored streams withdrew and flowed back into the original river. The flowery vines and the diamond figures in the sky swayed gently to the graceful rhythm of Adrian’s song. (Later he told me it was an anthem, but not a national anthem.) By the time Adrian had finished singing, he also was completely free of the vines and he was standing free and clear with his violin cradled in his arms.
“Sounds good, Adrian.”
“Thanks,” was Adrian’s clipped reply.
Adrian seemed to be having trouble looking at me. I could feel that he was embarrassed and didn’t want to admit it. Feeling his embarrassment scotched any temptation to gloat. That’s not surprising considering that I don’t like being wrong, and I especially hate being wrong in front of other people. Surely a talented boy like Adrian wasn’t used to being wrong about anything. I wished for the carpet to gently slide me over to Adrian and it obliged.
“I’m sorry I lost my cool like that,” I apologized.
I was eating some humble pie by making the first apology, but I’d just remembered Grandmother telling my brother and me a few times that as long as we both think the other guy started it and should apologize first, we’ll fight for the rest of our lives. The look Adrian gave me made it worth it. I seemed to have humbled him a lot more by apologizing than any taunting of moral superiority could have done. He sat down to put himself at my level, which I appreciated.
“Sorry about being such an ass,” Adrian replied.
Now I was the one having trouble looking at Adrian.
“I’m sorry for the same thing,” I said.
“I didn’t know being crippled was as hard as that,” said Adrian.
“How do you know?”
But I knew how he knew.
“I seemed to have gotten pushed into your shoes, somehow,” said Adrian.
“Same here.”
That startled him some.
“So you know all my secrets?”
“No, just how you feel about a couple of things.”
“Oh.”
“Are you ready to go home now?” I asked him.
“I suppose it would be an understatement to say I wish it,” Adrian replied.
“The last news cast I saw before I came back said they were rounding up suspected terrorists for questioning.”
Adrian made a face as if he’d just taken a dose of bad-tasting medicine.
“My mum won’t like that. She’s always fighting for human rights and things like that.”
“Uh—do you remember what I said before about getting back?”
Adrian frowned and hung his head just a little.
“You said all I had to do is think about my place, and the carpet would take me there—like a moving escalator, I suppose.”
“I’m pretty sure now that the reason I found you the first time was because I wanted to find you and rescue you after I saw you on the news, and that’s why the carpet took me right to you.”
“I see,” said Adrian in a soft voice. “I really want to get home. I feel horrible about my mum, and I’m sure my DOM will be frantic if I’m not back from holiday next Monday. I’m one of the best singers he’s got.”
“What’s a DOM?” I asked.
“Director of Music.”
“Oh, I saw him on the news, saying how much he wanted you back.”
“At least he wants me.”
I winced for Adrian’s sake as I knew he was thinking of his father who still hadn’t appeared on the news to plead for his son’s return.
“So, I start wishing to get back to the parlor where I do my practicing?” Adrian asked.
“Yea. I suggest picturing it in your mind as best you can.”
As Adrian concentrated, I pictured the room I’d seen on the newscast. Before long, the vanilla path started to move us at a brisk pace through a navy blue field with light red globes dangling over us, just like a moving escalator. The friendly sea-monster floated along just above us. Adrian’s face lit up with the wonder of it all, making me really glad I’d come back into the carpet to rescue him.
“This carpet does have a mind of its own, doesn’t it?” said Adrian.
“Yes, it does,” I agreed.
“And your carpet seems to have the same mind mine does.”
“Either that, or our carpets both think alike.”
“Hmm. I like that. Maybe there’s a Carpet with a capital C that connects all of the carpets.”
“Adrian, I’m not used to thinking like this. I’m a scientist.”
That was the first time I’d so consciously considered myself a scientist instead of a washed-up track star. It made me feel strong inside. I needed that.
“Sorry about that,” said Adrian. “My teachers say I think too much.”
“My Grandmother talked like, too. She said these carpets are designed to illustrate the order of the universe.”
“Hmm. Maybe that’s why these carpets keep us in line if we get a bad attitude.”
“I guess.”
“If both of us got inside our carpets, do you think any other people could have done?” asked Adrian.
“Good question. There weren’t any other newscasts about missing people. It might be interesting to watch the news and see how many missing people turn up inside our carpets.”
As if to put our words into effect, the carpet changed directions. Adrian and I looked at each other, wondering what we had just gotten ourselves in to for saying what we’d just said. Some large flower-like designs in gentle colors of light blue and soft pink came into view. Two downwards slants at the tops of these flowers and a large opening lower down made then look like friendly faces.
“I don’t think we’re getting back to Kansas just yet,” I commented.
“What do you mean?”
“Having you seen The Wizard of Oz?”
“Oh, that. Do you think we can get the carpet to change back to bringing me back home now?”
“Probably, but maybe the carpet wants us to meet somebody else first.”
“I don’t know. My mum must be so worried, and I hate to think of guys getting hauled into the station for questioning for kidnaping me when they haven’t done it.”
“Some people are suspected of being terrorists for a reason.”
“And my mum says some people are suspected of being terrorists because the government wants to make people more afraid of terrorists.”
“I have a feeling we’re both curious about who else fell into the carpet world,” I suggested.
“Well, there is that,” said Adrian.
The carpet took us through another turn where the friendly flowers were joined by dark-blue squiggly designs lined with tiny white circles. These designs moved gently as if a breeze were moving them, but there was no wind. Suddenly a loud, high-pitched cry startled us. Turning our heads in the direction of the sound, we saw a young dark-skinned girl dressed in rags sitting among the dark-blue designs and some soft red curling shapes. I guessed she was probably only eight or nine, and she looked like she came from somewhere in the Middle East.
“Who are you? Don’t make me go back!” she cried.
At least, that’s what I think she said. She wasn’t speaking in English, and I only understood her, or thought I understood her, because the carpet was sending some of her thoughts and feelings to me. She was afraid of Adrian and me, and afraid of the carpet, but she was a lot more afraid of somebody else.
“I am Grant. This is Adrian. We won’t hurt you,” I assured her.
I think she got the gist of what I was saying, but she still looked fearful.
“I am Tara,” the girl replied as she tried to hide her face behind the red curling shapes.
I was close enough to see that she hadn’t washed herself much. Worse, her fingers were bleeding.
“How did you hurt yourself like that?” I asked her.
The string of words that followed gave me only a jumbled idea of what her problem was. I had fleeting visions of a whole army of girls working at looms twice their size. That seemed to explain why her fingers were bleeding so badly. With so much dirt on her hands, I was afraid she was going to get some pretty bad infections if she didn’t have them already.
“Are you hurting from working on carpets all day?” Adrian asked.
The anguished reply from the girl suggested that she worked very long hours, something like ten or twelve, or more, to help feed a large family.
“I don’t think that working you like that is what the order of the universe pictured on our carpets is supposed to be,” I said.
“Nothing like violating the order of the universe to make images of the order of the universe,” Adrian muttered.
“I wish we had some antiseptic to treat your fingers,” I said.
Those turned out to be magic words with dramatic results. The dark blue squiggles started to look an awful lot like octopus tentacles and they closed in on Tara. She screamed and tried to push them off but they were relentless and she could not stop them.
“Hey! I thought you were going to help her!” I cried out at the figures.
Adrian touched my arm with a spare finger.
“Maybe they will help her, if this carpet is as good as you think it is,” he suggested.
“Relax!” I told the girl. “They will help you. I promise.”
It was pretty rash of me to say that, but the world inside the carpets had been good so far and I had a very strong feeling that the tentacles were not attacking Tara, but were trying to fulfill the wish I’d just made. Tara continued to struggle, but she was losing. The sound of Adrian’s violin started up. It sounded oriental, very different from any music I’d ever heard. Adrian’s eyes seemed to pop out, as if he didn’t expect to be playing what he was playing, but he kept on playing. The music seemed to mean something to tara and I think it helped relax her. That was the main thing. If blues or English church music would have sounded as strange to her as the music Adrian was playing sounded to me, it’s probably a good thing the carpet was making Adrian play her music. At least that’s what I assumed was happening. Tara’s eyes stayed wide open, but I sensed her feelings shifting from fear to amazement. The octopus-like designs moved away from her, showing her hands to be much cleaner and all the bleeding had stopped. Adrian stopped playing his violin. Tara smiled shyly at us.
“Did you fall inside a carpet while you were making it?” I asked her.
“I think so. It is so strange. I work so hard. I look hard at the figures. I start to think they are alive. They are friendly animals who will take me away from the shop. Then they came alive. I thought I was dreaming, because I had fallen asleep from working too hard. But I think I am not dreaming. I think maybe I am awake.”
“You aren’t dreaming any more than we are,” I assured Tara.
“But what if you are dreaming?” Tara asked with a teasing smile. “If you are dreaming, and I am dreaming as much as you are, we are all dreaming.”
I suppose we could have talked in circles like that for hours, but we were interrupted by what I can only call a carpet-quake.
“There she is!” cried somebody in a voice that sounded like a teen-age boy. “Get her!”
Tara, Adrian and I all sort of fell into one another. The navy-blue tentacles wrapped themselves about us and the dark red shapes darted about like fish spying out an enemy. A boy with a rod in his hand came running with three girls as ragged and dirty as Tara was.
“Get away from me!” Tara yelled.
“Get her!” the boy ordered.
The girls hesitated, but three quick strokes of the rod sent them in our direction. Instant chaos struck our little carpet world. Everything was a scramble of screaming and carpet shapes twisting around each other like worms and wrapping themselves around all the humans. The shapes with slanted eyes and wide-open mouths closed in on us. Light blue stars pushed us to and fro among the tentacles and red shapes zooming in all directions. The fear and anger of the girls and the teen-age boy felt exactly like the roiling figures in the carpet and it was their fear and anger that threatened to drown me. The little suction cups on the tentacles leeched onto me and I felt they were sucking out all my blood. How I could get so lost in another carpet storm after what Adrian and I had just been through is beyond me, but that’s what happened. I think a lot of it was the anger and fear of the girls and the teen-age boy, but my outrage over how they’d all been treated also overwhelmed me.
“These carpet creatures will protect us.”
I didn’t quite hear those words, but they got through to me somehow. They came from Tara. For a girl who had looked pretty scared of everything just a few minutes before, she was a little pillar of strength for the three girls who had been driven into the carpet by the boy. And—I have to admit it—Tara was the first the calm things down.
“We don’t have to be afraid of anything in this carpet.”
I don’t know if I said that out loud or merely thought it, or Adrian said them out loud or merely thought them, but those words calmed me down a lot more in a hurry. Adrian started playing the oriental melody he’d already played for Tara and the figures in the carpet danced to that instead of to anybody’s fear or anger. The only one still rocking the carpet was the boy. He yelled out a string of fear and hate-filled words that I didn’t want to understand. He tried to run after Tara and the other girls who were hiding behind the tentacles with her, but the fish-like red shapes attacked him so hard every time he took a step in their direction that he had to stagger back. Adrian and I could feel his own fear of being beaten for letting Tara get away. Once the girls could see that Tara was right, that the carpet creatures were protecting them from the boy who I assumed was their overseer, they made faces and flung some taunts at him that don’t bear repeating. Adrian stopped playing his violin and stepped up to the boy, heedless of the rod the boy was raising at Adrian’s head.
“You have to choices,” Adrian said to the boy in a voice that rang with the authority of a real leader. “You can stay here and help these girls escape the lives they’ve been living and escape the life you’ve been living yourself, or you can go back to your shop by yourself.”
The boy’s face was so filled with hate of the girls and of the men who beat him that I almost felt sorry for him, but when he swung his rod at Adrian, I lost all sympathy for him. I would willingly have stopped the rod with my own arm, but I didn’t have to do it. The sea monster nosed its way in between the boy and Adrian. The rod fell from the boy’s hand as he turned and ran. I’ve never seen a rabbit in a cartoon disappear faster than that boy did as the waves in the carpet pushed him fast than he could run. That left Adrian and Tara and me with three more seriously scared girls.
Adrian walked over to tara and the other girls who shrank back a little from the strange boy who was dressed so much better than they were.
“Show me your hands,” Adrian ordered them.
The girls shrank back against Tara a little more.
“Don’t bother. I can see well enough that they’re bleeding as much as Tara’s hands were. Fortunately, there is something that can be done about it.”
Tara took over and explained to the girls what the tentacles had done for her. When the girls hesitantly let the tentacles wrap themselves around their hands, I remembered just in time that I’d better wish for the tentacles to cure their bleeding as they had for Tara. It was overwhelming in a really good way to see the expressions on their faces when they realized they, too, were being healed of their bleeding fingers.
“Well,” said Adrian, “I assume none of you girls want to go back to the shop where you were working.” They all shook their heads. “You can’t just live inside the carpet all their lives because there isn’t any food as far as we know.”
“We are always hungry,” said Tara. It sounded like a sad fact of her life. I couldn’t imagine working all day at looms that wrecked my fingers for so little that I was always hungry. In spite of all I’d been through, I was feeling a lot sorrier for Tara than I was for myself.
“I know my mum will help you out,” said Adrian. “She’s always doing things for refugees and she will know what to do for you. However, I can’t take you to her right away because I’ve been away from her and the police are all in a dither because they think I got kidnaped when I didn’t. Grant, can you get these girls some food to hold them over while I straighten things out with my mum and the news people?”
One side of me felt I should resent Adrian’s taking over the way he did, but my better side felt that Adrian was doing a great job of putting a frightening situation under control and working out a sticky situation.
“I can raid our kitchen,” I said. “It should still be the middle of the night at our house. If you girls want me to find you, I will.”
“We will be waiting,” said Tara. “We want you to find me again. You promised you will find me.”
To make this long part of the story short, I hopped the sea monster to hitch a quick, hectic ride home. I dragged myself off my bed and into my wheelchair and wheeled into the kitchen where I took so much stuff it was a good thing my mom thinks that growing boys have infinite appetites (which we do) and that it is natural for shelves of food to disappear from the refrigerator overnight. Then I had really nice little party with Tara and the other girls. I also learned a few things I wish nobody had to learn about concerning how some people in the world have to live. I wished I could have stayed longer, but I didn’t want to take a chance on my parents checking in on me if I didn’t come to breakfast and not finding me.
I got back to my room in time to watch the news stories about Adrian’s safe return, complete with a clip of Adrian hugging his jubilant mom. The newscaster made some vague comments about Adrian having gone off with a friend, thinking he had told his mom, when he hadn’t. I felt kind of sad that there was still nothing of Adrian’s father on the news. Also, they said nothing about the suspected terrorists who had been called in for questioning. I guess they were conveniently forgotten until there was another chance to make scapegoats of them.
What the news crew didn’t know was that Adrian told his mom the truth as soon as the cameras were turned away. Her response was that seeing was believing, so Adrian took her on a tour inside the carpet where he introduced her to Tara and the other girls. As Adrian had said, his mom is very active in giving aid to refugees in Britain and she had no trouble slotting the girls into a refugee center in London without anybody knowing they had gotten there via a Persian carpet they were making in a sweatshop. Adrian’s mom then used her connections to look up the rest of the girls’ families and get them flown to England to give them the chance for a new start in life. Needless to say, I’ve had “a spot of tea” in lots of interesting places in the carpet with Adrian, his mom, and the girls. I’m so glad Adrian and I took the time to meet Tara in the carpet and help her out. It turned out we hadn’t just rescued three girls from a horrible situation. Adrian’s mom got an investigation going in the whole sweatshop that had enslaved them. Thanks to that, Adrian and I have more cute girl friends than we’ll ever know what to do with. I suppose you’re wondering how many other people I’ve met in the carpet by now. You will just have to wonder about it. As my grandmother said when she was in danger of getting derailed from the story she was telling: That is another tale and it will be told at another time. As for Adrian’s father, he still hasn’t really gotten back into his son’s life, but he was on the phone with Adrian within minutes of his return. Turns out he’d been terribly worried, but he was shy of the news cameras.
* * *
Back to my own family.
The atmosphere at the dinner table the night after this adventure looked about the same as it had ever since my accident, but it didn’t feel the same. The difference was that I felt the thin lines of Grandmother’s carpet connecting the four of us. Even if my parents and brother still ignored me, I kept thinking of the incredible adventure I’d just had and I felt kind of sorry for all the things they were missing out on. I still felt horrible about the things I was missing out on, like track meets, but it helped that my handicap helped make some other things possible. I had the feeling that even if my parents and brother wouldn’t connect with me, I could still connect with them. That’s one of the things Grandmother’s carpet was teaching me.
“Ricky,” said mother. “Is there any chance you could drive Grant to the therapist tomorrow afternoon? I have an important appointment I really can’t afford to miss.”
Ricky did not look pleased. I didn’t blame him.
“Uh—I was going to go to the library after school.”
“Is it that important that you go to the library right at that time?” Mom asked.
Ricky hemmed and hawed. We all knew the real problem wasn’t that Ricky absolutely had to go the library right after school. Since I was the one who was feeling connected, I knew I had to take the little bull by the horns.
“Ricky,” I said. “I trust your driving.”
Those were simple words, but they changed the atmosphere in the room. Ricky looked straight at me for what I suddenly realized was the first time since the accident.
“Thanks.”
Just for the record, Ricky got me to the therapist and back safe and sound. When he helped me out of the car after getting back home, I could see a heavy monkey climbing off his back.