by Eugen Bacon
His hand still cradled mine.
Five seconds.
***
“Abella? Bella!” It was Mamma. I was back to the present.
I glanced around. I was home, laying out plates for melon puff and vanilla lush. Three feet away, the rest of the family drank, ate, bustled . . . When melon puff crusts became bullets that Lennie shot, when it crescendoed into a fight and my thoughts darkened, I pressed the button.
***
This time I was in a room with a man, a naked man who had spring in his eyes. Fine lines on his face, features that brought out his beauty. I touched the back of his neck below the hairline.
“Silky,” I said. “Soft as Kleenex.”
I kissed the silk.
One second.
***
Dawn through a sway of curtains into a room dimmed with pain, such pain. It shot in splinters from toe to spine, and my insides collapsed.
“It’s a boy,” said the midwife.
“Aviva,” said the man with spring in his eyes.
Two seconds.
***
He dangled from a tree. I knew at once his name was Fergal. I was sad with the knowledge that he was a man in my future, and that was all I knew.
Should I? Could I? Would I?
In that terrible moment, I wondered whether and how I might lift those dead eyelids to see if the dangler was my man with spring in his eyes . . .
Three seconds.
***
A funeral, mine. God, I’m dead.
There was Amy, Jeanie, Dad, Lennie, Micky, me . . . Me! But where was Mamma?
Then I saw her behind a veil, her arms folded across her chest inside a mahogany coffin, her face gray ice. Flowers: wreaths of petunias, daffodils, jasmine. Smells: sodium, ammonium, formaldehyde. Mother no longer bustled and bossed and loved and hollered.
She was gone.
Four seconds.
***
Dad lay in bed, in a room dull with stillness. He gazed at tomb gray clouds out the window. The sky opened and it poured. The minute arm on a wall clock ticked. Purple leaves of a bougainvillea swayed with moisture above the windowsill. When drizzle stopped, and gray lifted from the cloud, a drop of rain glided down the window. Outside, a frog croaked. Then the birds: a rolling tweetie from a singing finch, a sparrow’s twinkling peal . . .
Kroo! Kroo! soon joined the merry chirp.
By the bedside, I watched Dad.
***
Later, when I came in with a meal tray, he was crouched by the bed, next to the lamp stand. He rocked, sang to himself. His voice was withered.
Suddenly, I felt tired. The space in Dad’s eyes, lackluster eyes with no curiosity, told me that wherever my father was, I could never reach it.
Five seconds.
***
Tap, tap. I was home. Right here. Now. Away from those dreadful years, that terrible future rolled inside five seconds. What had taken me there? The darkness in my thoughts on the button press? It didn’t matter, I was gone from that godforsaken world. I was back in the present.
“Got a minute?” Dad poked his head round the door. “What’s this?”
I pressed my wet face to his chest.
After he left, I looked at the dial of my watch. Five hours had passed since my mother pressed that goddamn button into my palm. Five! Was there time to undo that sordid future? In that instant I determined I would set out to find the man of river eyes who had cradled my hand.
Press.
***
As if reading my mind, the button faithfully delivered me to France. And there he was, right there, in the restaurant where wine flowed like a sea. He sat two tables away opposite the woman with a honey voice and the man with a thousand wrinkles.
I sat at a table.
A girl with big lashes, big shorts and braces in her teeth took my order of veal and house red. I looked at the older man’s shoulder, its honesty and straightness. The younger man, the one of river eyes, had the same honesty and straightness in his shoulder. He was watching me. When I caught his glance again, the puckering of a smile told me we had already met. I had arrived to the future a moment after he clattered my cutlery and cradled my hand.
How could I change this future now?
When I looked up, the older man and the woman, and the man with river eyes . . . they were gone. I signaled for the bill.
The girl bobbed over, a curious look on her face. She placed before me a saucer with a folded note.
“Your bill, Madame,” she said. “It has been paid.”
I opened his note, and read his lines:
This feeling of déjà vu—roaches, doves, or wolves? Perhaps two quails in the wild, soaring to the moon. Beau
And a telephone number.
***
Call up favors, use them wisely, Mamma had said. That night in a motel, I called up Dad’s birthday gift. The dream he gave me for my birthday:
I was in the garden, chasing rain with a man like my father—it was him, yet it wasn’t. Water pelted against our faces as we laughed and splashed about with bare feet. My father lifted me to his shoulder and swirled me around. A little boy about my age, two or three years old, waved from the distance. “Come,” I called out. Wind carried my words above the rain, chased by a stroke of lightning. The boy smiled. He spread fingers through his hair, pushed water from it. He ran toward us just as darkness swallowed him.
***
The next day, I lifted the receiver.
“I knew you would call,” he said.
“You don’t know my name.”
“But you will tell me.”
“Abella.”
“It mean breath in French.”
We dined at La Bonne Nourriture. His smile caused my heart to flutter, pounding harder every third beat.
We dined the following night and the next. The harmony in our togetherness, in our friendship, in our desire . . . it was more than chance. Was this a parallel universe?
Suddenly I had to know. I wanted to see our future—was it a wedding, kids, Beau and me growing old and stupid together? I slipped my hands under the table and pressed the button.
***
My head swirled. Time rolled ahead: One second. Five minutes. Ten. Three hours. Thursday night. And time stopped—not a lifetime or years ahead, just two nights away . . .
***
I opened my eyes in the future. We were at the restaurant.
“The haunting in your eyes,” he said in the glow of dimmed restaurant light. “It comes and goes.”
I reached for his hand.
One second.
***
“Even me,” he said. “Sometimes I was haunting.”
“What are you saying?”
“My mother, she go with my baby sister. Poof!”
“Where did they go?”
“Ma cherie, I was a boy,” he replied. “My father, he tell me they die.”
“Do you remember the funeral?”
“He protect me. My father.”
I squeezed his hand. “You sad boy.”
“My father, he marry, no more sad.”
I thought of the woman with silvery hair and the honey in her voice as she eased a forelock from his face with the intimacy of a mother’s touch.
“She loves you,” I said. “Very much.”
“She has enough love for two.” He held me in a searching gaze. “For three, yes?”
Two seconds.
***
Outside the restaurant, he kissed my throat.
“I like when you smile,” he whispered to my hair. “The light in your eyes.”
A clap of thunder sliced the air. Sheets of rain fell upon us, cold, hard rain. Droplets filled the space between us and the car. We ran holding ha
nds then shivered a few minutes as the car heater kicked off.
Three seconds.
***
Beau ran his fingers through his hair, pushing water from it. “I have a picture,” he said.
“Of what?”
“My mother, my sister.”
He pulled a box from the glovebox and took off its lid. He unwrapped a black and white photo from soft tissue. I looked at the sweetly posed mother and child, and my heart fluttered. I put my face in my hands.
“Mon dieu, what is this?”
“The woman in the picture, she’s your mother?”
“Yes—”
“She’s my mother, too!” I hiccupped in his chest.
Four seconds.
***
The boy in the dream . . . Fate had found us. The light in his father’s smile, the magnetism that drew me at a restaurant the first time I saw him, his was a countenance immortalized by a dream. Dad was not my real father.
My grief fed into a great and sudden anger.
Five seconds.
***
Beau squeezed my hand across the table, smiling at me.
“Abella?”
The present! God. I’m back in the present. His present.
My distant eyes hauled from the future. Softness of dimmed lights and a flickering lamp touched Beau’s face. I looked at him and saw him anew. Beau. How could Beau, this Beau, be my sibling? What did Dad know when he gave me a dream? What did Mamma know when she gave me the button for my birthday?
“Something you don’t like ma cherie? On my face?”
“Oh Beau, I’m sorry.”
“So deep you travel. What is this faraway place?”
“There’s no such place.”
Outside, he drew me into his arms. I nestled into his embrace.
“I like when you smile,” he whispered to my hair.
“Come,” I tugged his arm.”
Beau could never know. At any rate, he would never know. Not from me, he wouldn’t.
“Come on,” I said.
“To where?”
“Doesn’t matter.” Briefly, I wondered about my other world, the one of bustle with Amy, Jeanie, Dad, Lennie, Micky and Mamma. I shook the thought, caring for the moment, now was now, later I would ponder the rest. And a future that had changed.
I steered Beau away from his car and its glovebox. Rain came down like a monsoon. We ran.
“There,” I pointed. Tepid water raced down my lips. “See those lights? It’s a motel.”
And our feet splashed in the rain.
Away, away . . .
DIMINY: CONCEPTION,
ARTICULATION AND
SUBSEQUENT DEVELOPMENT
Londinium. 1905 AD.
“Better be good,” Professor John Bates thought aloud.
One hand rested on the brass clutch of his new Edwardian mobilis, open roofed and one of 250 automobiles of this brand in high Londinium society, and the entire universe. And though the “vanishing principle” of travel that the cosmic beings applied was faster, allowing a sweep of vast distances in half a pulse, the mobilis was fashionable this summer.
John Bates’s hand tapped a staccato on a stick handle that served both as a steer and propeller pump. A single-horse carriage aligned itself to his left. Automobile and stallion waited for a lollipop man herding a group of students three-boys thick along the school crossing.
Watching them, Bates recalled his own youth. From his mother’s worrisome eyes to his father’s speckled mustache. His Pa’s somber eyes could harden into cobalt icicles that promised nothing but a rod that lay at the top of a chiffonier; a polished cane with “John Varon Bates” engraved upon it. Bates smiled. A stick with a child’s name. “Each punishment executed,” his father said between strokes, “is an act of love.” When that act was due, Bates had to himself stand upon a stool, stretch and blindly pat until he touched and retrieved the very instrument of love. And, as his mother watched with broken eyes, he would take the gleaming cane to his father. A single nod would permit the pulling down of shorts, and a bending across a chair, desk or bed for chastisement. And so Bates had always wanted to be a mentor, the caliber of teacher his father wasn’t. Unlike Pa, Bates saw promise in young folk. But there was one young chap . . . !
As he chug-chugged along, Bates shook the troubling thought and instead considered wheels. He contemplated other advanced combustion engines already on advertisement but not distribution, and dismissed them. The mobilis was doing fine. He had neither intent nor purse to replace it.
Perhaps, with accolades for his next article, “Arousal and Instruction of Infantile Minds toward a Path of Greatness,” funding would accompany universal acknowledgment of his intellect, and Bates might allow a trifle indulgence on a newer car. As for now, rather grave matters in the West End commanded his utmost attention.
Unfortunately, those matters pertained to Freudo Brio: the young man who worried him. Bates should have known the student was trouble the moment he stepped into King’s College clasping papers that flew from his hands, armpits, teeth. Jungle eyes, flustered hair and matchstick legs under handmade trousers. Students snickered when he approached, called him “Gawk,” “Gangly” or “Clod.” They booed—until he started asking questions. His arguments left fellow students astounded to silence, and lecturers floundering for words. He graduated seemingly in months (or was it days?) and set about stunning the scientific world with his novel, usually irrevocable findings.
Not only had Freudo’s latest experiments proved Bates’s theorem of Cognitive Antecedent wrong (and how skillfully done!): the batty young man had now summoned him for a trifle display. Demonstration or not, today Bates had it measured. He was going to wrap up the young enthusiast and package him to his rightful place.
He parked off New Oxford Street, near its intersection with Charing Cross, about the same time that a young female in a summer dress climbed out of a carriage. He stepped out of the mobilis and pulled a monocle from his side pocket. He surveyed a mold of dress that mocked the tiers, drapes, frills and trains of the time. Ocean green in color, a pattern of water swirls hugged close a nipped-in waist without corset, the element of style both flattering and youthful.
The garment was a true headliner if not a scandal. Not that Bates thought so; to the contrary. But many a citizen would raise more than a brow contemplating it.
The woman looked exquisite and chic in that ankle-length piece; a rather ostentatious number that set his mind roaming. He felt a melt in his mouth as all exclamation evaporated and he could nought but gawp. The simplicity of that dress, the sophistication of its outcome . . . Minimal drapery; silver buttoned shoes, three inch; a choker of pearls on her neck, and the creamiest ankles he had ever seen—the sight was enough to stall a war. The female was almost ethereal, something delicate made in the stars. Behold! Here she was now, recreating the very beginning of him.
Camellias, hellebores and cyclamens invaded his nostrils.
Crack! Crack! heels down the pavement. Hips drawn back, bosom thrust forward, she switched away under a sapphire sky and a tease of breeze. Crack! Crack! Swagger. Sway. Must have diamonds in those soles, Bates was sure. He stood by the roadside, much distracted, until the hourglass vanished round the corner, parasol, plumed hat and all.
Inside the Science Clinic tucked in an offshoot of Tottenham Court Road, in a laboratory that was the largest in Londinium, young Freudo was bent at his desk, poring over paper and a fast-moving pen.
“I’m a busy man,” said Bates.
“What?” Freudo Brio. “Ah, yes! Professor! Marvelous, marvelous!”
Bates determined that Freudo’s madness was twice grown compared to last they met. He untangled himself from Freudo’s embrace, uncoiled the younger man’s hands from his waist and retrieved his fallen hat.
“You have an experiment to dem
onstrate?” He brushed his lapels.
“Course! Of course. Yes, Professor, I understand your commitments. But this . . . !” Freudo moved to clasp Bates’s hand and found space, for Professor had without hesitation tucked it into his waistcoat pocket.
“I would rather you expounded the idea to me first, Freudo.”
“Oh, my, yes. Good, good. I can’t wait to show you my findings.”
“Being . . . ?”
“Relating to your motivation theorem.”
“I wrote a few papers. Which, pray, do you refer to now?”
“Eh? Ah yes. Persistent Behavior, sir. A gem for sure.”
“And you have come up with an opposing theorem.” Bates stated, not queried.
“Inverted Motivation, good sir. You made a supposition that response to persistent stimuli, complex or otherwise, is proportional to operant conditioning. Good, good. But an episode, yes, a little trouble, that’s all, in the laboratory, questioned this analogous principle of ecological or other influences—”
“Show me.”
“What’s that? Ah, yes. The experiment. Come with me, Professor. Do.”
***
The laboratory, as Bates remembered it from a visit before his retirement, had contained a practical tally of gadgets. Now, chamber after chamber bespoke psychosis, spilled with equipment Freudo referred to as transmitters, transponders (or was it transgressors?). Wildness, not control, ruled the lab. Rooms held human subjects exposed to various stimulants: alternation of volcanic roar to distant purrs that slipped away; bold wealth in the form of modular furnishings in gold or velvet to bone-hard scarcity; tropical rain, lightning and thunder to blanched sand under blistering heart; amputee trees with gnarled waists alongside fat, healthy ones pregnant with fruit . . . something in a glass compartment wobbled like consommé jelly.
One experiment fed to another, rooms large as stadiums. Bates was not eager to ask how the earthlings were got; more than a rumor indicated human snatchings from Earth. The developing cells of humanoids made them adequate if not perfect candidates for trialing new concepts.
Bates pointed at two females in what looked like a field. One girl warmed up on the track, as if readying for a race. The other huddled to the ground with pulled knees.