The Stairs, Chapter 22
Indignity Vol. 6, No. 33
THE STAIRS
© Tom Scocca, 2025
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual people, places, and events is entirely coincidental, with the exception of the events in Chapters One and Two, which happened more or less as written, on the line between Cambridge and Somerville, Massachusetts, on Memorial Day weekend in 1999.
22.
"So here we are again," Maxine said. She was sitting on her rolled-up sleeping bag, which she'd just dropped on the floor along with her backpack. She'd buzzed her two shorts and one long; Mom and Emily had more or less gone through the same conversation they'd had on the other 1st of July, two days ago; Mom had left.
"They didn't even notice," I said.
"I think adults are pretty used to doing the same thing over and over again," Maxine said. "They don't pay attention. Emily seemed a little confused at first, but she got over it. Good morning," she added, as Pythia poked her head out of the bathroom.
"Are you going to the lab, or what?" Pythia said.
"How do we get there?" I said. "Do we take the stairs?"
"Won't Emily worry if we're gone that long?" Theo said.
"No idea," said Pythia. "About this Emily. The lab? It's—it was—on what I believe you call Harken Street."
Harken Street? That was where—"The school!" Maxine said. "We know it used to be a lab."
"Let's go!" said Theo.
"When, though?" I said. "Now? Or then?"
"What's the difference," Pythia said.
"It is all the same, isn't it?" Maxine said. "Although..." She paused. "When we break the machine, we do want to be in our own time, don't we?"
"Oh, time might not slip out of phase all at once," Pythia said. "You could be able to get back. For a little while. If you knew the way."
"A little while?" I said. This was not reassuring. "How much of a little while would we have?"
Pythia swished her tail dismissively. "Your people are the theorists," she said. "We're more technicians, really."
Even less reassuring. "We'll go out the front door," I said. "Into today, and we'll go to the school."
"We can tell Emily we need to go walk over and pick up something for our Summer Learning Without Boundaries," Maxine said. That's a College Community School thing, Summer Learning Without Boundaries. Every summer, students are supposed to come up with an enrichment project on their own—arts and crafts, a book report, a collection of tree bark, anything.
"School's what, five blocks from here?" she said. "She can't say no. We're supposed to be developing our independence, after all."
Maxine dug around in her backpack. "Here," she said, pulling out a pair of wire cutters, followed by needlenose pliers and a wrench. "I wasn't sure how we'd disable the resonator, whatever it is, but I figured these might help. Can you carry them in your bag? I've got all my overnight stuff in here."
I got my school backpack and put the tools into it. "Bring my rock hammer, too," Theo said, emerging from the closet with it in his hand. He jabbed the air with the pick end. "We might need to just smash something."
I added it to the bag. Things clanked around when I lifted it up. Maxine eyed its sagging profile. "Put a notebook in there too, so it looks like schoolwork," she said.
Pythia hopped up on the windowsill. "We'll meet you outside," she said.
"'We' will?" Milton said.
Her eyes narrowed. "Oh, no," she said. "Don't think we're going to leave you alone. Move it!"
Milton moved.
"Why did you agree to build the machine, anyway?" I asked. We were walking down Carter Street, toward the school. Maxine, Theo, and I were on the sidewalk, and the squirrels were in the lower branches of the trees along the street—old, shady trees, their crowns so full the squirrels could pass from one to the next without breaking stride.
"Now, it wouldn't be fair to say we built it," Milton said. Pythia snorted. "More accurate to say we helped hook it up," he continued. "Or helped tune it."
"Hartstock built the thing on his own," Pythia said. "But he couldn't make it work. So some parties agreed to help him with the resonator."
"He could only be with it at one end, you see," Milton said. "There was no link to another time."
"How did you make the link?" Maxine said. "How can we un-link it?"
"Well," Milton said. "It's not like we plugged it in. It does plug in, but that's just to keep the mechanicals spinning."
"It blacked out twenty blocks of Old Marble when Hartstock did plug it in, if I recall," Pythia said.
"Not my fault," Milton said. "Electricals? Not our job. Our job was—have you heard of the Ship of Theseus?"
Theseus, we'd read about in English Language Arts. "He's the one who killed the Minotaur," I said, "but I don't remember a ship."
"He came home on the ship," Milton said. "The story goes. The Greeks saved it, the story goes. They admired it. Whenever a part of it got too old and rotted away, they replaced it with a new part. Eventually, after years and years of this, there were no longer any of the original parts of the ship in place. But there was still a ship."
"So it wasn't the same ship," Theo said.
"Or it was," Milton said. "There's considerable disagreement about that. For Hartstock's purposes, what mattered is that it's uncertain."
We reached the corner of Carter and Harken, where the streets met the north side of the Marble College campus green. To the right, along the edge of the green, Harken became East 36th Street in West Marble, running straight into the street grid.
We turned left, at a slight angle, toward the narrower and skewed streets of Old Marble.
"So he told us what parts he needed," Milton said, "and we rebuilt it, or relocated it, piece by piece. We brought extra pieces or replacement ones back and forth, between now and then, until it was impossible to say where the older version of the machine ended and the newer one began. And then—it started to work." He sounded less shifty than before, almost proud.
"And now you people are going to stop it from working," Pythia said. "If you can. Here's the lab." Here was the school, on a summer day. I grabbed the heavy, familiar door handle and heaved it open.
Find previous chapters of The Stairs here.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, April 8, 2026
★★ The blue of the sky was even bluer, at the cost of the air being even colder. This was why the potted plants were stuck indoors. The reflection of the blooming pear tree glowed in the glass of the art above the piano. An attempt to bargain with the cold—corduroy shirt, heavy hoodie, with a knit hat thrown in—was unsuccessful. Other people had winter coats on or hoods up or both. Dog turds lay shrunken and cracking in the desiccating wind. Dogs still chased balls across the sun-swept lawns, unbothered.
New York City, April 9, 2026
★★★ "New season," said a woman sweeping tree detritus off the sidewalk, by way of greeting. A few petals fell slowly from the cherry trees and there was green showing in among the white. Gradually the office got colder and the cardigan changed from accessory to necessity. The jacket that had been carried in went on for the ride home. Contrails had spread out to form a see-through film of cloud, leaving the colors in the west bleached and glaring even as the colors in the east grew full and radiant.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!
TOM SCOCCA
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS for the assembly of sandwiches selected from Choice Recipes, by Order of Eastern Star, published circa 192o and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
SNAPPY SANDWICHES
Small jar of peanut butter
One green pepper (chopped fine)
Six slices of crisply-fried and cooled bacon (chopped fine)
Mix these ingredients with sufficient mayonnaise so that it will spread easily.
This will make thirty sandwiches.
SANDWICH FILLING
(Maud Dezell Bradley)
One tablespoon butter
One tablespoon flour
One beaten egg
One-half cup cream
Cook the above in double boiler until it thickens.
Add:
Two hard-boiled eggs
Six pimentos or one small can
One Neufchatel cheese
One tablespoon onion juice
One-half teaspoon salt
Dash cayenne pepper.
CLUB CHEESE SANDWICH FILLING
One pound Eastern cream cheese
Four tablespoons Worcestershire sauce
Three tablespoons dry mustard
Three tablespoons vinegar
A piece of butter size of an egg
A dash of red pepper
Salt to taste.
Cream together well. Especially good on rye bread. Sufficient for one loaf of bread.
If you are inspired to prepare a sandwich inspired by these offerings, be sure to send your experience and a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
SELF-SERVING SELF-PROMOTION DEP'T.
