Full Throttle

by Joe Hill

  Ralph said, “It’s how the library has always worked. People aren’t there to get the books you want them to read.”

  “What I wonder,” Terry Gallagher said, “is if there’s a movie theater somewhere that plays pictures that haven’t come out yet. Or if there’s a cable channel that plays TV shows that haven’t yet been released. For people who need to know. Maybe there is. Maybe the universe is kinder than we thought.”

  I said, “Mr. Gallagher, I see a lot of you. You’re one of my steadiest customers. You aren’t scared that one of these days you’ll climb up there and I’ll offer you something that hasn’t come out yet?”

  “I’m counting on it,” Gallagher said. “If that ever happens, I’ll know I have one good read left and to get my affairs in order.” He seemed quite calm at the thought.

  Ralph dealt a fresh hand. “And what book from the future are you hoping to read, Mr. Gallagher?”

  Gallagher lifted his chin and stared at the ceiling for a moment.

  “The Art of the Presidency: How I Won My Third Term by Donald J. Trump,” he announced.

  “That ever happens,” Hayes said, “it’ll prove the universe don’t actually give a fuck.”

  THE SECOND WEEK IN JANUARY, Lynn Dolan paid me another visit.

  She was through the door and across the library car before I had time to stand up. The sight of her gave me a nasty turn. She had lost ten pounds, and her neck and brow glowed with an oily film of sweat. I could feel the heat coming off her, even with the desk between us. I could smell blood, too, a faint rankness clinging to her woolen coat.

  “I want the rest,” she said. “I need the rest. Please. My son’s books.”

  The door creaked slowly shut behind her. In my time it was raining, a dismal, cold, January drizzle, turning the snow to slush, dirt to mud, and parking lots to shallow swimming pools. But for an instant I glimpsed big fat flakes of falling snow outside, and a black late-1950s car rolling by out on the street, and I had a wild moment of wondering if I could push by her and escape into the past.

  But she was leaning over me, feverish and weak, her pupils very small and her lips dry and cracked. I came around the desk and touched her arm.

  “Sit,” I said. “Please sit.”

  She tottered to my chair and eased herself down.

  “Should you be out of bed?” I asked.

  She wiped one hand over her damp cheek, then hugged herself. “I’m fine.”

  “The hell you are.”

  “All right, I’m not. I’m dying. You already know I’m dying. But I want my son’s books, and you can give them to me. You’re from the future. I want to read all my son’s stories.” Her eyes were bright and shiny and full of water, but she did not cry. The corner of her mouth twitched in something close to a smile. “He’s so funny. He was always so funny.” Then, after a pause, “He shouldn’t be over there. None of our boys should be. It’s a bad war. That book of his made me laugh, but it also made me sick.” Then she smiled again. “He got the clap, didn’t he? Is that why he’s not writing me?”

  We had swapped positions. She sat behind my desk as if she were the librarian, and I stood on the other side as if I were the one looking for a story.

  “I think it might be,” I said. “He wasn’t sure how to talk to you about what he was seeing there. He started writing the book to explain. In your time he’s probably just started.”

  “Yes,” she said, in a strange, stiff way. “Almost certainly.”

  I turned to the fiction shelf. We had his entire collection in stock. Because he was a local guy, there was always a steady demand. I ran my finger along the spines, then hesitated.

  Without looking at her, I said, “What are you going to do with them when you’re done?” My scalp was crawling strangely, the way it had when I met that first Late Return, Fred Mueller. I was troubled by her odd tone of voice when she agreed that yes, her son had almost certainly started writing his first novel over there on the other side of the world.

  She didn’t reply.

  When I looked at her, her chest was rising and falling and her damp eyes were shining with triumph.

  “What do you think I did with it?” she asked. “My boy needs a reason to go on.”

  I went all ice water inside.

  “You can’t send him his own books,” I told her. “The ones he hasn’t written yet.”

  “Maybe if I don’t,” she said, “he won’t write them. Have you ever thought that?”

  “No. No. If he just copies the books I send back in time with you, then who wrote them in the first place?”

  “My son. He wrote them before, and he’ll write them again. So I can read them and then pass them on to him.”

  I’d had three glasses of bourbon that night with Terry Gallagher, Loren Hayes, and Ralph Tanner, but I felt more woozy standing there cold sober in the library car with the dead woman.

  “I don’t think that’s how time is supposed to work,” I said.

  She said, “It works however you say it works. His books exist. They exist now, whether I get to read them or I don’t. So that’s all you have to decide, mister. Do I get to have this last good thing in my life or not? Do I get to have another marvelous thing, or are you going to—”

  “What?” I said. “What did you say?” I was suddenly as sweaty as she was and felt maybe half as sick.

  “Do I get to go out on a good note?” she said patiently. “Or not? Because you decide, mister. I can have the last days of my life the way I want them, with my son at my side, in his stories if not in the flesh. Are you going to be the guy who says no?”

  I wasn’t going to be the guy who said no. I turned away, reached up onto the shelf, and lifted the whole stack down.

  BRAD DOLAN DEDICATED HIS LAST BOOK to his mother, too. The dedication reads:

  One more for my mother, without whom I would not ever have written a word

  You could go crazy trying to figure out what that means. But I don’t have to. Because in June, five months after the last time I saw Lynn Dolan, I received a letter from a dead man, a letter from the past.

  It had been mailed care of the Kingsward Public Library and addressed to “The Current Driver Of The Bookmobile.” A law firm that represented the estate of Brad Dolan had been sitting on it ever since Dolan’s suicide by handgun in 1997, shortly after the publication of his final book. His will had specified the date on which to place it in the post.

  Dear Sir,

  I have wondered about you for most of my adult life: who you are, how you managed to slip through time in the Kingsward Public Library’s Bookmobile, what your life has been like. I know nothing about you for certain except that you are kind. Maybe nothing else matters.

  That said, I am sure we have met. I am careful to visit every eighth-grade class at Kingsward Junior High, and I think it highly likely that I have gaped at you through my bifocals and you have gaped back, probably while picking your nose, from across your desk, wondering when I’ll stop talking so you can go to lunch.

  On the sunny fall morning on which I write this note—I can see fat chipmunks outside my window, frisking after one another, caught up in their torrid rodent romances—you are probably in your mid-teens. By the time you read it, however, you will be close to thirty. See, you are not the only one who can stretch the rubber band of time and shoot it in someone’s eye.

  It is possible you are anxious about my death. Perhaps you wonder if I killed myself after I wrote my last book because I had no more books from the future to copy. Did I copy them, line for line, over the years, spacing the publications for maximum commercial impact? Beginning with that first one, which I received in the Da Nang province in 1966, shortly before I received notice of my mother’s death? Did I come home and discover twelve more novels in a cardboard suitcase in the front closet? Did I study their titles and covers with a dry mouth and my heart beating tremulously and then burn them in my fireplace without reading them? Does it matter? I had my life. The books have
theirs. But when I put a pistol in my mouth, a few days or a few hours from now—I’m still making up my mind about it—it will not be because I ran out of things to write. It will be because I miss my mother, and because I broke my back in a motorcycle accident in 1975 and the pain is rotten, and because I shot an unarmed woman in the throat in Vietnam and have never forgiven myself for it. She was hiding under a blanket in a dark room, and when I poked the blanket, she rose, screaming, and I killed her. Upon seeing the body, my sergeant put a grenade in her hand and said he’d file papers to see I got a medal. I have been a war hero ever since. That is why I did not write to my mother for three months: not the clap, as I have said elsewhere. This is why I wrote fiction for thirty years: because I could not bear the truth.

  Or at least I could not bear most of the truth. Once my mother was dying and a man was kind to her. That is a truth that has kept me going well past my time.

  I have the gun, and I have tested the feel of the barrel in my mouth, but I haven’t pulled the trigger yet. I go for a walk every day. Sometimes I walk down to the park, where the Bookmobile stops on Thursday mornings. A little part of me is hanging on to see if we may yet have a word with each other. Also, I would like to know what Philip Roth is going to publish after my death. Isn’t that what keeps so many of us hanging on past our Return-By date? We can’t help wishing for one more lovely story.

  I hope you are well. I wish you a lifetime of happy reading, free from guilt. See you around sometime?

  Best,

  Brad Dolan

  ON A DRY AFTERNOON in midsummer, with the insects producing a drowsy, throbbing hum in the trees, I opened the side door to the garage and then wrestled with the locks on the automatic door until at last I was finally able to set them free and roll the door up. The air that blew into the concrete-floored room smelled sweetly of fresh-cut grass and my mother’s roses, and I had a happy, quiet afternoon of sweeping and bagging up garbage. I connected my phone to a Bluetooth speaker and played Joan Baez. A strong, sweet, hopeful voice from the past kept me company in the garage, 1965 echoing into the twenty-first century. The past is always close, so close you can sing along with it, anytime you like.

  I found some boxes I thought I could send on to the library—a crate of my dad’s old Rolling Stones, a box of Danny Dunn young-adult novels I had loved as a boy—and it came to me I ought to grab my mother’s overdue Laurie Colwin and return that, too. Only when I went looking for it, I couldn’t find it. I tossed the whole house, hunting for it, but it’s not there. It has vanished to elsewhere.

  It made me think maybe my mother will return it sometime soon. I am ready to see her. I have a couple books I think she’d like. I have a couple Philip Roths set aside, too, just in case. You never know who will turn up at the Bookmobile. I’m always ready to see Another Marvelous Thing.

  Are you?

  All I Care About Is You

  Limitation makes for power. The strength of the genie comes of his being confined in a bottle.

  —RICHARD WILBUR

  1.

  She grabs the brake and power-drifts the Monowheel to a stop for a red light, just before the overpass that spans the distance between bad and worse.

  Iris doesn’t want to look up at the Spoke and can’t help herself. The habit of longing is hard to quit, and there’s a particularly good view of it from this corner. She knows by now that certain things are out of reach, but her blood doesn’t seem to know it. When she allows herself to remember the promises her father made a year ago, her blood seems to throb inside her with excitement. Pitiful.

  She finds herself staring up at it, that jagged scepter of steel and blued chrome lancing the dingy clouds, and hates herself a little. Let that go, she tells herself with a certain contempt, and forces herself to look away from the Spoke, to stare blindly ahead. Her idiot heart is beating too fast.

  Iris doesn’t notice the not-alive, not-dead boy watching her from the corner. She never notices him.

  He always notices her. He knows where she’s been and where she’s going. He knows better than she knows herself.

  2.

  “Got you something,” her father says. “Close your eyes.”

  Iris does as she’s told. She holds her breath, too. And there it is again, that thrill in the blood. Hope—stupid, childish hope—fills her like a trembling, fragile soap bubble, effervescent and weightless. It feels like it would be a terrible jinx to even allow herself to think the word: “Hideware.”

  She isn’t going to the top of the Spoke tonight, she knows that. She isn’t going to be drinking Sparklefroth with her friends on the top of the world. But maybe the old man has a trick up his sleeve. Maybe he had a couple tokens socked away for an important day. Maybe the former Resurrection Man has one more miracle to work. Her blood believes that all these things might be possible.

  He sets something heavy in her lap, something far too heavy to be Hideware. That fantastic bubble of hope pops and collapses inside her.

  “Okay,” he says. “You c-can look.”

  His stammer disturbs her. He didn’t stammer BEFORE, didn’t stammer when he was still with her mother and still in the Murdergame. She opens her eyes.

  He didn’t even wrap it. It’s something the size of a bowling ball, shoved in a crinkly bag. She peels the sack open and looks down at a cloudy emerald globe.

  “Crystal ball?” she asks. “Oh, Daddy, I always wanted to know my future.”

  What tripe. She doesn’t have a future—not one worth thinking about.

  The old man leans forward on his bench, hands clasped between his knees so they won’t tremble. They didn’t tremble BEFORE either. He sucks a liquid breath through the plastic tubing up his nose. The respirator pumps and hisses. “There’s a m-mermaid in there. You’ve wanted one since you were small.”

  She wanted a lot of things when she was small. She wanted Microwing shoes so she could run six inches off the ground. She wanted gills for swimming in the underground lagoons. She wanted whatever Amy Pasquale and Joyce Brilliant got for their birthdays, and her parents always saw that it was so, but that was BEFORE.

  Something swishes, takes a slow turn in the center of the spinach-colored sludge, then drifts to the glass to gaze up at her. She is so repulsed by the sight she almost shoves the sphere out of her lap.

  “Wow,” she says. “Wow. I love it. I really did always want one.”

  He bows his head and squeezes his eyes shut. A tingle of shock prickles across her chest. He’s about to cry.

  “I know it isn’t what you wanted. What we t-t-talked about,” he says.

  She reaches across the table and clasps his hand, feels like she might start to cry herself. “It’s perfect.”

  Only she’s wrong. He wasn’t struggling against tears. He was fighting a yawn. He surrenders to it, covers his mouth with the back of his free hand. He doesn’t seem to have heard her.

  “I wish we could’ve done all the things we talked about. The S-Sp-Spuh-Spoke. R-Ride in a big buh-b-bubble together. These fuckin’ medical Clockworks, kid. They’re like hyenas pulling apart the corpse for the last goodies. The medical Clockworks ate your b-birthday c-cake this year, kiddo. We’ll see if I can’t do a little better for you next year.” He shakes his head in a good humored way. “I have to c-c-crap out for a while. A man c-can only take so much excitement when he’s g-got half a working heart.” He opens his eyes to a sleepy squint. “You know about m-mermaids. When they fall in love, they sing. Which I understand. Same thing happened to me.”

  “It did?” she asks.

  “After you were b-born”—he turns sideways, stretches himself out on the bench, struggles with another yawn—“I sang to you every night. Sang until I was all sung out.” He shuts his eyes, head pillowed on a pile of grubby laundry. “Happy birthday to you. Happy b-birthday to you. Happy b-b-b-buh-birthday, sweet Iris. Hap-p-puh-p-p—” He inhales, a wet, clogged, struggling sound, and begins to cough. He thumps his chest a few times, turns his face away from
her, shrugs, and sighs.

  He is asleep by the time Iris reaches the top of the ladder, climbing out of his pod and leaving him behind.

  She shuts the hatch, one of eight thousand in the great, dim, clammy, cavernous hive. The air smells of old pipes and urine.

  Iris left her Monowheel next to her father’s pod on a mag-lock, because here in the Hives anything that isn’t bolted down will vanish the moment you take your eyes off it. She climbs up onto the big red leather seat of her ’wheel and flips the ignition four or five times before realizing it isn’t going to start. Her first thought is that somehow the battery has gone dead. But it hasn’t gone dead. It’s just gone. Someone yanked it out of the vapor-drive and strolled off with it.

  “Happy birthday to me,” she sings, a little off-key.

  3.

  A cannon-train approaches, making that cannon-train sound, a whispery whistle that builds and builds until suddenly it passes below her with a concussive blast. Iris loves the way it hits her, loves to be struck through by the shriek and boom, so all the breath is slammed from her body. Not for the first time, she wonders what would be left of her if she jumped off the stone balustrade. Iris fantasizes about being pulverized into a fine, warm spray and raining gently upon her rotten, selfish mother and sorry, hopeless father, wetting their faces in red tears.

  She sits on the balustrade, swinging her feet over the drop, the smooth green ball of sludge resting in her lap. There’ll be another train in a few minutes.

  When she looks into her poisoned crystal ball, it isn’t the future she sees but the past. This time last year, she was fifteen, with fifteen of her best friends, fifteen hundred feet underground in the Furnace Club. Magma bubbled beneath the BluDiamond floor. They all traipsed barefoot to feel the warmth of it, guttering streams of liquid gold not half an inch from their heels. The waiter was a floating Clockwork named Bub, a polished copper globe who hovered here and there, opening the bright lid of his head to offer each new course. In the throbbing red light, the faces of the other girls glowed with sweat and excitement, and their laughter echoed off the warm rock walls. They looked as roasted as the piglets they were served for the main course.