Awakening

Chapter 5- Mari and The Professor's Coffee

Chapter 5- Mari and The Professor's Coffee

There was a very long silence.

What I had just told her was something that any normal person would have a hard time understanding. I didn’t even understand it myself- all I knew was that it has something to do with that article, and with my father.

Mari didn’t say anything. I half expected her to sigh again, but the silence in the room stayed there. Deafening, still silence.

The knot in my stomach twisted nervously. She doesn’t believe me, does she? She thinks I’m insane. She thinks that I’m even stranger than she originally thought.

“Five hundred and eleven years.”

I’m surprised by the sound of Mari’s voice. I looked up to meet her eyes, carefully, uncertainly. Unsure of what I’d see in them.

The wariness was still there, but the distrust was gone.  

She was actually smiling a little bit, a relieved smile. It was a smile tipped on the border of pity and sadness, mixed with relief. There were wrinkles creased around the corners of her mouth and eyes, I notice.

I blinked at her. “You believe me.” I said slowly. 

“I do. At least some of it.”

“Why?” I asked incredulously. “I thought you wouldn’t believe me. That you would think that I was joking or lying to you.” I blurted it out before I could stop myself.

“It’s a credible explanation, when you think about it.” She said. She didn’t look past me now. “I’ll tell you about the article, and what I know about Professor Levinata. And why it’s a credible explanation.”

I nodded eagerly. Maybe if she explained this to me, everything might finally click together. Those gears in my mind would stop turning, and fall into place like pieces of a puzzle.

“Your clothing was a telltale sign. Jaxon was even put off by it. He told me himself.” Mari said, “You looked like you were from some Old Era Fair. That’s why I gave you some of my clothes.”

“Old Era Fair?” I asked, slightly dazed by her acceptance of me.

“Oh. I guess you wouldn’t know what that is, would you? Historian organizations hold fairs to celebrate the past or something. The Old Era was a while ago, even before the hover car was invented, and roads were changed to fit them. It ended right after we ran out of oil.”

“Ran out of oil?” I exclaimed in alarm. We still had oil before I went to sleep, although it was very expensive. “We ran out of oil?”

Mari sighed. But it wasn’t an annoyed sigh, or an unhappy sigh. It sounded like a half-laughing sigh.

“Looks like we have a lot of catching up to do.” She said. “But we’ll focus on the history lesson later. There are other things to tell you first.”

I nodded.

“Professor Levinata.” She shook her head after a moment of thinking. “I don’t think that man is your father.”

I stared at her. 

“The current professor probably isn’t your father. There has been a long line of them, the Levinatas. They’ve lived in this little Landfill town for as long as anyone can remember, supposedly even before the trash and waste started spreading out from garbage dump and into the outside world. I’ll explain more about that later. Anyways, generation after generation, each Levinata has become a scientist, continuing on as their parents had.”