Нил Шустерман: The Eyes Of Kid Midas

What Kevin could see of the town below was not a pretty sight. It was still there, but it looked distorted, as if it had been squeezed through a fun-house mirror. It was not daytime, nor nighttime, but both at once. Through dense clouds of many colors, Kevin swore he made out not one but three different sources of light, as if the sun had multiplied itself.

And nothing was moving.

As once before, the silence that filled the air around him was unnatural.

"Josh?" he called, hoping beyond hope that he would be there. He wasn't.

Fragments of the shattered glasses were strewn everywhere, the powerful lenses useless at last. Kevin listened for a sound, any sound that would break the stillness, but there was nothing.

And then it occurred to him what his last command to the glasses had been.

Oh no! Of all the stupid, moronic, idiotic things I could wish for, this was the worst

Just before the glasses had exploded from his face, Kevin had yelled, "Stop!" and they had obeyed their final order. The glasses had put the emergency brakes on, stopping time in its tracks, and freezing everything forever like a snapshot.

Everything, that is, except for Kevin Midas.

Nothing moved.

Leaves and bits of paper that had been spinning in the wind now hung in the air, and gravity was too lazy to pull them down. They stirred slightly as Kevin brushed past, but otherwise they had no more reason to move than all those clocks frozen at forty-two minutes past the hour.

The air was scentless and flavorless as Kevin toured his neighborhood. The people he came across were fixed in their places like mannequins, with eyes open but unseeing, hearts frozen between beats.

All this belonged to Kevin now: a kingdom stretching out in all directions, with no one to threaten Kevin's dominion. Yet as he strolled through the wealthiest mansions in town, he knew there was nothing to be found here that he really wanted. It had been that way ever since his first experiments with the glasses. It seemed the more he had, the more he felt was missing, and now that he had everything, he felt as if he had nothing. An overwhelming sense of emptiness cried out from inside him. I need . . . I need ..., but he didn't know what he needed anymore.

The sickness had already begun to come on—that sickness of need that always took over when the glasses were off his face.

By the time he reached his house, it was already turning him inside out. His head pounded like never before, his temperature was climbing, his teeth already ached from chattering, and if anything had been in his stomach, it wouldn't have stayed there very long. Kevin lay down upon his bed, and as he did, a vision came to him like a mirage in a parched desert.

The glasses were already healing.

They had exploded, but the pieces were already drawing themselves together on the top of that hill—for they could be disabled, but never, never destroyed. Even as he thought it, Kevin knew it to be true.

If you went back up the hill, Kevin told himself, and held the shattered fragments in your hand, they would come together right there before your eyes, and then you could put them on. Perhaps they couldn't set time back in motion again, undoing what Kevin had done, but they could do many more wonderful things that would ease Kevin's lonely existence. Most of all, they would take away the sickness. They would take away the need.

But Kevin clamped down his chattering teeth and uttered a single word to his empty room.

"No!" he said.

He would honor Josh's memory. He would resist the powerful pull.

No!

This time he would suffer through whatever awaited him here at the end of time, and he would face it without the glasses.

Kevin closed his eyes and lay like that, in the midst of the sickness, barely able to think or move, until, in the timeless silence, he heard someone knocking on a door.

Kevin thought it was some sort of hallucination. His droopy eyelids lifted part way, and he waited until he heard it again. Knock-knock-knock! It came from somewhere inside his house.

Kevin hauled himself out of his bed and into the hallway of many doors. Knock-knock-knock!

It came from the second door to the right—a heavy whitewashed oak door that rattled each time it was rapped upon.

Kevin had sparked out quite a few entrances to many places, and he had no idea where this particular door led.

Knock-knock-knock!

If Kevin was the last soul on earth, then who was knocking on the door? The terror of the thought did battle with Kevin's curiosity.

Knock-knock-knock!

His curiosity won. Kevin grabbed the brass knob and turned until the mechanism clicked.

A breeze pushed its way through as the door opened, smelling sweetly of spring grass and trees. A man stood at the threshold. He was lean and good-looking, with a face not unlike Kevin's father's, only younger—he was twenty-three or twenty-four at the most. He wore a bathrobe.

Kevin thought he knew who this was, although he never expected Him to look like this. Under normal circumstances, Kevin would have felt awe and amazement—but then, under normal circumstances, he wouldn't have come face to face with God in a bathrobe. Now, as things stood, Kevin was simply too sick and too exhausted to feel anything at all.

The visitor at his threshold, on the other hand, seemed awed enough for both of them. He looked around at the walls and at the hole where the bathroom had been with childlike wonder. "Wow," he said.

"I'm sorry," said Kevin. "I'm sorry I screwed up so bad."

"You look like crap," said his guest. "You should be in bed." Then he took Kevin in his arms and brought him back to his bedroom, where he laid Kevin down and covered him with a blanket. The man introduced himself as "Brian," and said he had come a long way. "I'm sorry," croaked Kevin again.

"Save it," said Brian. He went to wet a towel and then used it to blot Kevin's head. "You'll be sick for a while," said Brian. "It'll get worse before it gets better, but I'll stay here with you."

"I'm sorry for what I did," begged Kevin.

"Just shut up and get some rest."

Kevin drifted in and out of consciousness as the sickness got worse, but Brian never left his side. Kevin thought he would die a thousand times over, but after what seemed like an eternity, it began to get a little bit better, as Brian had promised.

Kevin opened his eyes to find Brian sitting at his desk, building an elaborate Lego castle.

"Amazing things," said Brian. "I haven't played with these in years."

"What time is it?" asked Kevin.

"Nine-forty-two."

"Oh, right," said Kevin. "Duh!"

Brian sighed. "I'd better get back." He got up from Kevin's desk. "It's been surreal, but I've got places to go and people to see."

He took one last look around and laughed. "What a scream," he said. "I hope I remember this."

Kevin followed him to the hallway, his legs feeling stronger by the minute.

"Wait, you're just gonna leave me here?"

"That's the general idea."

"But you can't go!" cried Kevin. "Everything's still screwed up—and what about the glasses?"

"The glasses!" said Brian with an amazed grin, as if remembering something he had completely forgotten.

"I can't get myself out of this," said Kevin. "Even if I had the glasses, I can't undo the things I've done—I've tried every which way...."

Brian shrugged. "Did you let someone else try? Maybe someone else could use the glasses to fix the things you can't."

The thought robbed the very air from Kevin's lungs, making him dizzy and speechless. As he thought about it, Kevin realized that Brian had the answer. How selfish and short-sighted Kevin had been! Why couldn't he have seen that it would take someone else to "re-imagine" the mess he created? Teri, Josh—anybody could have done it if Kevin had let them try. It had always been in his power to fix things—by the simple act of letting it be in someone else's power. But there were not others left—only Kevin and Brian.