Chapter 9: The Tailgate

On Wednesday at 6:00 a.m. the first gate in Florida opened in Milander Park, and before breakfast the county had a form for it.

I was there because the Registry had told me where, and because my grandmother had decided that a gate was a crowd.

She loaded the van at four with two urns of coffee, six hundred croquetas and a folding table.

She said the gate would want feeding, and she did not mean the gate.

Milander Park is on Palm Avenue, nine blocks north of the bakery.

It is a county park with ball fields, a small stadium and a canal along one edge.

The gate was in the northeast corner, past the batting cages.

The Gate Watch had found the seep at 2 a.m., a pinprick tear in the air above a patch of ring salt.

They had stood around it in lawn chairs for four hours.

Then, right on the Registry's time, the pinprick stretched, and I watched it do so from behind the van.

It was not a breach.

A breach hums, and it drips, and it is open for twenty minutes.

This was a vertical oval of gray light, eight feet tall and four wide, with a steady edge and no sound at all.

It stood in the air two feet above the grass.

A threshold of white salt lay on the grass in front of it.

Through it I could see a park.

It was Milander Park, or a copy of it, with the same ball fields under a sky without a sun.

I thought the word Appraise, and the Registry gave me the card.

[Gate. Milander Park. Class I.]

[Anchor: Class II. Break: 5 days 23 hours 58 minutes.]

Then I opened the Terms to page 44, which I had found on Monday night.

It was the glossary, and I read it slowly.

A breach is a tear in open air that releases a wave and closes when the wave is spent.

A gate is a persistent opening that remains until its Anchor is killed.

A gate has an Inside, which is a place you can walk into.

It has an Anchor, which is the creature at its center.

And it has a Break timer.

If the Anchor lives past the timer, the gate Breaks, and the Inside comes out into the street.

That was the whole system in six lines.

I stood in the dark of a baseball field at dawn and understood it as clearly as I have understood anything.

The gate would not close itself.

Somebody had to go in and kill the thing at its center, or in six days the park would be in Hialeah.

Soon after, a county employee set up a pop-up tent at the entrance with a folding table and a card reader.

The sign on the tent said GATE PERMIT, and under it, in smaller letters, $85.

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