II.
Common Presence
"They slept standing, breaking their slumbers to shift from place to place."
– Miguel Cervantes, Don Quixote

It was Teddy who first noticed, but he saw it through adoration's eye, tipped that way, as it had been for fifty years. Had he not been in love, never would it have been noticed. It would have slipped by, perhaps unfelt, unseen, indistinguishable from every other piece, from dust bunnies beneath curios and statues. Undoubtedly, it would've flown by, had Teddy Roosevelt not been in love with Sacajawea.

They had given her a door to the rotten world wherein Lewis and Clark argued over a disputed course. At least there was a door into the glass world, her diorama with mountains in a misty backdrop, expertly painted by some man long since dead. She had foliage and a boat, wherein slept a baby that never woke, mon petit Jean Baptiste, she sometimes called him. Clark called him Pompy, if Clark spoke at all. He and Lewis were often so engrossed in a half-century argument that they rarely noticed the door. Or perhaps it was Teddy Roosevelt's common presence, nearly every night at sundown for the last two years, that kept the famous explorers from exploring the realm of New York City's Museum of Natural History.

The museum had closed for the night. The people had gone. Work was done. Rather willingly, Sacajawea let Teddy help her through the glass door, to the unbreakable, unfading woodsy place. Even if unreal, he still smelled pine needles in her braids and a puff of air carried a perfume of some faraway, invisible lake. He took her hand, lowered to kiss it, and saw her do what she hadn't done in years: she looked into the matte painting.

'What is it, my dear?'

'Nothing, but I thought I heard… I thought…' Sacajawea faced Teddy, and remembered that unpleasant things were scarce, and remembered that life could be like this, magical and liveable. The fingers in hers were squeezed. In a few minutes, the first glint of sunshine gold would transform warmth to wax. 'It isn't important.'

'Anything you see is important to me. Anything you think is what I would like to know.'

She smiled, his lines delivered by honesty, as though stars spoke them, or—she didn't know yet what it was—as though Teddy gathered them from a field of Beautiful Things to Say and gave the field to her. Again, though, the rattle from behind split the surface of her peace. She looked to Lewis, to Clark, but they were arguing. She looked into the matte painting, every brushstroke known to her. A mountain, she knew its name, but its name varied day to day.

Teddy pressed her hand, hailing her back from forgotten places, nameless lands. 'Hello, Princess? Where are we? I'm sure it is lovely in your world. You will have to show it to me sometime.'

It wasn't fair, that statement. He had already been. He thought he had, with vague images of trees high, where leaves never fell and spring never died. Something in the air made him real. But light in his world flushed against the windows. Prettily, though hurriedly, Sacajawea's hand was kissed.

'Whatever troubles you,' he started, paused, seemingly forming his ending, 'it will not seem so dreadful in the morning.'

She laughed in that speculative way of hers, afraid that if she laughed outright the moon would run away and tomorrow night would never come.

He closed the door, waved, and she rolled her eyes at the ceaseless antics of her cell companions.

Beside Texas, already on the wooden dais where they spent their days, Teddy whistled through his teeth. The horse showed no reaction, but it was the night guard that interested him. Larry jumped at the noise, whipping out the flashlight though its beam was too weak against the strengthening dawn.

'What's the matter with you, Lawrence? Ants in your pants?' He was on Texas, grasping the souvenir cutlass, when Larry Daley reached him. He had seen that same expression on Sacajawea moments before. What had he missed? Something in the moon, maybe, a shift in the stars and the moon. The whole cosmos. The galaxy. Those things he contemplated but didn't wish to look into.

'Yeah, no, Teddy, I'm fine. Free of ants, anyway.'

'But?' Teddy could coax it from him. If it was insipid, he didn't want to hear it. If it was troublesome, too provoking, he didn't want to hear it. Not at the start of the day and the end of his day.

'But—I don't know.' Larry angled his head about. Rexie, the playful Tyrannosaurus Rex, contorted his structure of bone and wire into Standard Position. All around him, the hush of that first daylight hour crept across him, and still the hum and rattle failed to dissolve. 'I've had this weird feeling all night, you know? Like—like I'm waiting for a giant beetle to jump out at me. Man,' he sighed, 'if Dr McPhee ordered a giant beetle to be on display, I'm going to be pretty mad about that, I can tell you. How would I keep Jedediah from riding a giant beetle?'

'Lawrence.'

'Yeah, Teddy? What?'

'There is no giant beetle. I feel very strongly about this. Is there a full moon? Solar flares? Is the cosmic atmosphere upsetting you in any way? Even Sacajawea had her sorts out of place.' He drew the cutlass, swerved his arm to Standard Position. Any second, that One Second, would come, and he would forget, fall into the Lost Pit.

'Sacajawea?' was all Larry could say before sunlight filled the sky, filtered through the smoky glass, and froze all of his friends for another eleven hours, thirty minutes. Larry let out a long breath, extending it until his lungs shrivelled and ached, then drew in everything fresh. He made three more rounds, snooping, scoping, looking for the giant beetle, the proverbial beast.

Everything slept soundly. Everything was as it should be.

Though, when he walked by Sacajawea a final time, he thought her head a little tilted to the south, towards the trees, towards the nameless mountain. She'd smiled kindly when he asked about the mountain, the trees, whether it was Montana or Oregon. 'It is both,' she said, 'and it is probably more than Montana and Oregon.'

Yeah, her head was definitely tilted. No one would notice. But he knew. The admonitory phrase paraded across his weakened, fatigued mind once again, whether said by Teddy, by Jed, by Octavius, by an odd, misshapen meld of all three, Larry heard it as a sombre chorus. Something about the moon, the universe, a shift in the cosmos.

He went home to browse history books until his eyes wouldn't stay open. When history failed, geography failed him in a new and different way.

The mountain behind her didn't exist. The mountain went on having no name.

And the moon was waning gibbous, nowhere near full. It frightened him so terribly for a moment that he drew a frozen breath, held it, and let it slip away.

Nick had given him a Magic 8 Ball for Christmas. What do you get the father who has everything, who's so happy that presents are tomorrows and memories of yesterday? You gave him magic—or a conduit of magic's allure. Larry grabbed it from the dresser and shook it, repeating his question aloud.

'Is the world going to end? Is the world going to end? Is the world going to end?'

He opened one eye, too afraid of the Magic 8 Ball's answer to see it with two eyes. Behind the eerie blue liquid, the text clarified.

Reply hazy, try again.

He set the toy down. He didn't want to try again.

Before climbing between sheets, he checked the dark corners for signs of a beetle waiting to start a massacre. Nothing was there, only shapeless, featureless things that drifted in and out and sometimes over Larry's contorted thoughts, so he saw but wisps of them, like remainders of a spider's abandoned web.