He opened the door to the microwave, trying to see it through Stanley’s eyes: a metal box with a window with a grid pattern in the door and a circular glass tray that turned on little rubber wheels.
“A microwave?” asked Stanley, peering at it. “What does it do?”
“Well, it’s mostly good for heating things up. Like an oven. You have ovens, right?”
Devon waited for Stanley to nod, though he didn’t really need the confirmation; ovens had been around since forever, he just wanted to be sure that Stanley was following what he was saying. He thought, in the back of his mind, that this was Stanley’s own attempt to distract himself from the bigger problem that neither of them had brought up. Which was, if time had pulled Stanley to the present at a whim, as it seemed, could it then yank Stanley back to the past any time it wanted to?
This troubling thought was not what Devon wanted to be focusing on right now, so he grabbed a glass, filled it with water at the sink, and held it out to Stanley.
“Take a sip, cold water, right?”
“Yes,” said Stanley. “Tastes metallic.”
“That’s because it’s from a well, and then is filtered, here—watch this.”
Devon put the glass in the microwave and turned it on for a minute, then when it beeped, pulled the door open.
“Now taste, but be careful, it’s hot.”
As Stanley took a sip, his eyes widened, and while Devon had thought that Stanley might freak out, instead, he seemed pleased.
“How does it work?” Stanley asked as he put the glass down to peer into the microwave. He stuck his hand inside and felt around, then pulled it out. “It’s cool to the touch. How did itdothat?”
“Microwaves,” said Devon, waving his hands in little circles as if that would explain it. “They move really fast, and get hot, and so heat up things around them? Something like that. It’s not much good except to heat; we used to think we could cook with it, but you can’t make the same crisp outside, you see? You can melt cheese, heat up cold coffee, melt butter, and stuff like that. Oh, and hot dogs, it’s really good for cooking hot dogs.”
“Hot dogs?” asked Stanley.
“I think it was called a frankfurter in your day,” said Devon with a smile. Almost instantly, he remembered the faded photograph of soldiers just returned from the war enjoying hot dogs at Coney Island. Stanley could have fit so easily into that photograph—but it was wrong to let himself be drawn into a mere image when Stanley was standing right in front of him. Rightnow.
“I’ve had those,” said Stanley, smiling back.
“We can also cook hot dogs by boiling them in water or grilling in a pan on the stove, which I’m sure you recognize.”
Devon demonstrated how quickly the gas could be turned on and how big the oven was, thinking how different this must be for Stanley, how sleek everything was, how much of everything there was. As heshowed Stanley the rest of the cottage, Stanley stuck right to his side, interested and focused on everything that Devon pointed out, the lights, the radiators, the doorbell, the porch light.
The fun really started when he showed Stanley his phone.
“That’s not a telephone,” said Stanley. “Telephones are tall with a little cone that you put to your ear.” He gripped an imaginary phone that Devon realized must have been one of the old-fashioned candlestick types, and put the invisible receiver to his ear.
“Yes, they used to be,” said Devon. “But over time, they changed.”
It occurred to him that he could pull up YouTube on his laptop and find a video about the evolution of phones, but would that be too much? Wasn’t everything too much? Stanley didn’t seem very interested in the phone, but then, why would he be when it looked like a slim metal box, so small and thin that there didn’t seem to be anything you could do with it.
“Maybe we’ll take pictures with it tomorrow,” said Devon. “Like pics of you in your uniform that I can send to my professor for extra credit.” This joke made him laugh to think of it. Stanley only cocked his head to the side, and it was easy to see that he didn’t get it. Which stopped Devon from laughing.
“Okay, how about this? It’s a laptop, a portable machine. There are different kinds, of course, but here.” Devon opened the laptop, which sprang into life, the window instantly displaying a large mountain, sheared in half on one side. “I’m not up to date because I don’t have time for updates, but what you could do on it—”
“What is it?” asked Stanley. His fingers twitched as though he wanted to touch it, so Devon pushed it toward him and watched Stanley trace the edge of it with his fingers.
“It’s a computer—never mind. You type on it like a typewriter, and you can send messages with it, you can do research on it—”
It occurred to Devon that he could pull up all the pages he’d bookmarked about World War I and show Stanley how it had all turned out. Then he could show him sepia-toned photographs of soldiers in the trenches, in bunkers, standing in a row, beaming at the camera before they got shipped out. But that might overload Stanley’s brainand his ability to get used to the present, not to mention some pretty graphic images could also come up, so Devon sat down at the table, and patted the chair next to him.
When Stanley sat down, Devon pulled up Google and enteredcute kittens.Within seconds, ten webpages were displayed. He clicked onImages, and hundreds of images of the cutest kittens anybody had ever seen showed up.
“Voila,” said Devon with a wave. “Cute kittens, some of which are wearing spectacles.” He typedwith spectacles, and in an instant, all of the kittens were wearing glasses.
Fully drawn into the moment, Stanley smiled. He reached out to touch the screen, his fingers gripping the edges as though he was judging the width.
