Wed, May 6, 1992
Queens, New York City, United States, Terra
“…so other worlds with magic are real, and supposedly my mom was a princess from one of them and they’re asking me to go there because I’m next in line for the throne.”
My best friend, Joel, was out of breath having just shared the craziest story — twice, since the first time around I’d had the presence of mind to reply only with “Huh? What?”
Less than an hour earlier, I’d been at home trying to beat Civilization at a higher difficulty level without cheesing out by using the Earth map and starting in the Americas… without much luck. The phone rang, and my younger brother Sammy yelled upstairs “Hey Mark! Joel is on the phone,” and all Joel had said was he’d had a really weird day and that he needed to talk to someone. Could we hang out?
So here we were at the BK near his house, and while the story was utterly unbelievable, there was just too much detail there. There had been three strangers sitting with his dad at home when he got home from band practice — the first two introduced themselves as coming from the US state department. The third, who Joel said looked young enough to be in college or newly out of it, introduced himself as a Count Dormer — and Joel hadn’t been able to tell whether that was his name, or where he was Count of.
After the introductions, his dad told him what he’d gone on to tell me — that his mom had been a princess from the same country as the Count and had somehow run away through something called the Gate Between Worlds when she was a teenager. As long as she’d been a younger daughter from a large family, the guardians of the gate — whoever they were — had protected her privacy but something “tragic” had happened to the rest of her family, and the guardians had reluctantly revealed that she’d gone to our world and let the royals send through the Count as their representative.
From what the two State Department officials said, the US had known about the Gate for some time and guarded its own side of it. Someone well above their pay grade had some record of his mother’s arrival, her family, and her passing and at least some idea that she was a VIP. So the Department of State had agreed to allow the Count to approach the family, but it was clear that there was a division of opinion between parts of the government — some folks wanting to open diplomatic relations further with the nations on the far side of the gate, while others were very concerned about the possible dangers to Joel or his family.
The choice, they made clear, was his.
The Count, meanwhile, seemed horrified that the Prince — he was refusing to refer to or address Joel by name, only as “the Prince” or “Highness” — had been raised in such common surroundings, and that there was even the possibility that he wouldn’t “return.”
Joel stammered out that he’d need to think about it and asked how he’d find out more about the country and other worlds. “We can give you a briefing about what we know, and perhaps the Count can present more about his world at that time.”
Dormer agreed, and the state department officials told Joel and his father to call their office when they were ready to talk further. And with that, they left. What followed was a far less calm conversation with his dad — followed by Joel storming out and calling me from the Burger King on Northern Boulevard where we now sat.
“That’s crazy. Your dad believed them?” I asked.
“Yeah. He’d said that he’d always known that she wasn’t from here. ‘Here,’” he shook his head, “since when do we have to qualify Earth as ‘here’? Not the princess part — just that she’d been getting away from her family, and that there was a ‘there.’”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
He gave a frustrated sigh. “I guess I’m going to go to their briefing. I can only spend so much time on video games” – he gave me a look here – “or at band practice. This feels like way too much effort for a hoax and even if I end up saying ‘no’ it does have me curious.”
“Man, you, a prince?”
Joel laughed. “Yeah, really. Or not really. Hey, do you want to come along for the briefing? If they’ll let you, when this all blows over, nobody is going to believe me if I don’t have a witness.”
“Sure. I probably can” – and I glared back at him – “spend that long in front of my computer, but what are friends for? And like you said, even if it’s a hoax, it’s an interesting one.”
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