Ned’s Exit

By Clay Smith

Scamander was a dorm for science majors, and I fit right in. It smelled like boys who got good enough grades that their mothers didn’t mind cleaning up after them in high school. Odors of mildew and sweat added a sickening aftertaste to every bite of Top Ramen I shoveled into my face hole. Life was gross, but life was good, and Scamander felt like home.

I met others who shared my passion for theoretical physics. My roommate, McMillan, was a pocket-whiteboard-carrying ubergeek who sat around shotgunning Mountain Dew and sketching elaborate Theories Of Everything while our friend Dontay bragged about how he was inches from cracking time travel. Dontay’s roommate, Ned the Clerical Error, hung out with us too. A science-dumb Classics major, he was placed in Scamander by accident.

Ned had nothing in common with any of us, but he said he liked the science-y noises we made. He was kind of like our mascot. He carried an expired Trojan and a thumb-worn copy of The Iliad with him everywhere he went—just in case. Every weekend, he suggested that we all sit around and read the whole thing out loud, like John Keats. We refused. He warned us we’d never learn how to die like a hero. We called him an idiot but secretly liked him anyway.

This story is about him, and not really about time travel at all.

It starts on a morning in December, when I was awakened by a pink light and a sweltering heat uncharacteristic of the Midwest in winter. I threw the blankets off of my sweat-soaked bed and looked out the window. On the ground below me, stretched beyond the horizon, were the bivouacs of a leather-and-bronze clad army who had just woken, as I had, to the coming of the rosy-fingered dawn.

I flung open my door and shouted. Sleepy footsteps clopped down the hall, and people piled into my room, gathering around my window to stare down at the commotion.

Below us, men were sharpening swords and forging arrows. Blood streaming from the slit throats of farm animals stained the grass black. It was all very third world, but there weren’t any modern weapons, and there were way too many people for it to be some kind of LARPing club.

Ned crowded in beside me. “We’re in Ancient-effing-Greece,” he shouted.

Everyone got quiet.

“Turkey, actually. We’re just outside the walls of Troy during the Trojan War.”

Being scientists who’d just travelled through time and space in our sleep, we all had questions, but it seemed more urgent that the soldiers had noticed us. They stood in sweaty rows, staring silently upward. An important looking soldier stepped forward, called everyone’s attention with a sharp gesture, and yelled something guttural and warlike.

Ned punched me. “I love you guys,” he whispered. Without another word, he ran out of the room.

Immediately, the shock and awe of the confused primitives transformed to the shock and awe of an efficient war machine. Archers nocked their arrows and fired barrages up at the building. Most of them bounced off the steel and concrete of modern engineering, but one shattered my dorm room window before falling back to earth.

I screamed like a girl. Someone fainted.

The army below us, in perfect unison, shouted something angry and charged at the dorm with a wild passion to tear the building apart—

And we were in Nebraska, staring at the back of the student union through my broken window.

A good minute passed before anyone spoke, and actually, it was more of a whoop of triumph followed by maniacal laughter.

It was Dontay.

“I did it.” He pulled a minivan key fob out of his pocket and held it up in the air. “I needed more power, so I wired it into the dorm’s power grid”—he cackled like a very smart idiot—“and blasted the whole thing to Ancient Greece. Ned, buddy, that was for you.”

We all stared at him like an army of Greeks trying to figure out what a dormitory was. Another minute passed.

“Hey, where is Ned?” Dontay wondered aloud.

The government gave Dontay a lot of money to make sure no one found out about his discovery. No one ever saw Ned again, and we all knew why. There’s nowhere in time and space where he could have been happier. We never talked about the incident outside of our little group, but it somehow became a kind of school legend that no one really believed.

The next weekend, we started packing Ned’s stuff to send home. McMillan found his copy of The Iliad.

“Hey guys…”

We already knew what he had in mind.

The three of us handed it around, reading aloud to each other until we passed out, and then picked it up the next morning and read some more. It was the perfect tribute to our missing friend, or so we thought, until we discovered a better one. About a hundred lines into Book 24, it was my turn, and I read,

And Ned the Small, Scamander’s bastard son,
Among the Trojans called the Fleet of Mind,
The counselor of all, the swordless soldier
With foot of lead and arms like stalks of wheat,
Ran out to greet Achilles’ chariot.
With stony visage like the god of war
He stared into the hero’s burning eyes,
And shouting, “Spare brave Hector’s bloody corpse!”
Was trampled by Achilles’ team—

My voice broke suddenly as I realized what I had read. I just kind of crumbled and wept. We all did.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Clay Smith is an author, playwright, actor, director, photographer, trivia host, and all-around ne’er-do-well in Prescott, Arizona, USA, where he shares a house with his small family and three terrible cats. His first novel is currently making the rejection circuit, but will hopefully fail to complete it; his second play is in rehearsal.

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