Mel? Probably short for Melissa or Melinda, but he didn’t know anybody by that name, especially not anybody that drove such a new pickup.
Licking his dry lips, he rattled off the address.
She grunted again, as if confused, and punched it into the GPS.
***
Jason finally managed to open his eyes when they reached the flat road. Dust blew across the road, billowing up into a great brown cloud that Mel just whipped through as if unconcerned. It wasn’t until they reached the outer edges of town that the wind settled.
He knew right away that something was off.
Little Nord was a small town, barely more than two thousand people, most living their entire lives in the town. When Jason was a kid, he had once planned to get away from Little Nord, maybe go up over to Bismarck. But then he grew up and he and Rachel settled in. She never had the family problems he knew growing up, never had the father that hit her until he drank himself to death, the mother that never managed to get the strength to fight back, the release of his death freeing her to fuck her way through town.
The only thing his family ever gave him was 200 acres of land outside town, handed down to him after his dad died, farmland that he was never particularly good at farming. The only thing he really loved was walking the land.
The edge of town seemed to have changed overnight. Chuck’s service station, the old Amoco, once marked the south end of town before it broke out onto County Road 5. A small line of storage units stood across the street. Small houses lined the streets on either side, leading toward Main Street. None of that was there.
Instead, a line of rickety wooden buildings—nothing more than shacks—abutted against each other in a haphazard line that stretched for as far as he could see. He saw women hanging laundry on lines, kids running and screaming, a few elderly folks sitting on makeshift chairs and staring out at the road.
Only then did he see that the road narrowed from four lanes somewhere just inside the edge of the shacks. County Road 5 had never been four lanes.
“Where are we?” he asked.
Mel glanced over at him, her brown eyes looking at him with a bemused expression. “Where do you think you are?” she asked.
Jason stared at faces watching the truck as they passed, most looking as dead as he had every right to be. The road tore straight through the shacks, the horizon almost perfectly flat, steady wind blowing up dust all around, and knew this wasn’t Little Nord. Might be North Dakota, but no place that he had ever visited.
Even though it was a four-lane highway, no other cars drove along the road. Heat rose off the pavement. A faded sign in the distance rose above the tops of the shacks, the first break in the horizon, but he saw it was just a shut-down service station, walls faded and crumbling, paint long since given up on. A few more of the wooden shacks, each bigger than the last, leaned against it before they finally ended.
“No idea,” he muttered.
Mel grunted again.
As they drove, the scenery started to change. Rough wooden shacks turned into ramshackle houses looking like palaces compared to the dumps they passed on the way in. Most were faded and run down, and in spite of the heavy rains they had been getting, grasses of the lawns burned and dry.
The stench of oil on the air grew thicker. In North Dakota it was something you got used to, especially with the new excitement up in the northern part of the state, but he didn’t remember it as often in Little Nord. As they turned off the main road, he saw a plume of smoke rising somewhere to the north. He wondered where she was taking him.
Mel made a few quick turns before something triggered in his head. She was trying to take him home. But there was no way this place was his home.
Then she stopped outside a house. The small rambler was faded, once yellow paint now seemed nearly white, the glass in the windows across the front of the house shattered, huge shards still lying in the dead lawn out front. The driveway sloped upward toward a pull-under garage, plastic roofing cracked and falling.
In spite of that, he recognized the house as his.
“What is this?” he asked.
Mel looked at him and snorted. “This is the address you gave me.”
Jason shook his head. This was and wasn’t his home. His home wasn’t new, but he kept it nice and neat, making sure the paint was clean and fresh for Rachel. The driveway hadn’t cracked and fallen into disrepair. Windows had been intact. Even his lawn was green, not burned and dead.
What had happened here? What was this?
What had happened to his home?
***
Mel smiled at him condescendingly. “This is Nord,” she said. “Not sure why you’d call it Little Nord. Don’t think it’s been called that in years. Probably not since the boom. Now it’s just Nord.” She shook her head. “Most of these houses were long abandoned, now taken over by squatters. Lucky ones live here.” She tipped her head slightly back toward where they came in. “You saw where the rest live. You go further on 5 and you get to Tarsten City, of course they sort of run into one another since the boom.”
Nothing she said made sense. “What boom?”
She laughed. “What boom. Christ, like you wouldn’t know!” Seeing his blank stare, she shook her head. “You don’t know?”
Jason looked up and down the street. Everything looked both familiar and yet foreign, as if time had run past him overnight, leaving his home tossed about in time.
Mel rested a hand on his arm. “First there were the Bakken fields to the north,” she said. “Damn near destroyed Williston, before it finally exploded.”
Jason nodded. Ever since oil had been found there, everyone else had it in their mind that they would find a similar find. People came from all over thinking to strike it rich, filling places like Williston and Watford City to the north, turning them from a comfortable farm town into something different, something few really wanted as the tankers and water trucks and the people filled the prairie, all with everyone trying to make a better life. Even Bismarck got in on it, letting the oil companies keep leasing the land, so that everyone thought they had the same chance as the big companies. Problem was, no one did.
“Then the Remsan fields boomed in 2025. Probably all connected to Bakken really, but could never really get at the oil before then. We got laterals running from Tarsten almost all the way to Montana,” she said with a sense of pride. “As the workers moved in Nord became a migrant town and Tarsten exploded. Tried to keep Nord better cared for but….” She shook her head. “So if you’re from Nord, you should know that. Now tell me, Jason,” she said, turning toward him. “Where are you from and why are you fucking with me?”
So much of what Mel said didn’t make sense that Jason didn’t know where to start. “It’s only 2013,” he said. Somehow, looking down the street and seeing how rundown everything was, he knew it was not.
“I should have known better,” Mel said, slamming the truck back into drive. “Shouldn’t ever have given you a ride, but damn if I’d leave you wandering on my land.” She shook her head as she muttered to herself. “Find a guy with dried blood in his hair and probably been drinking and I don’t call the sheriff. Serves me right,” she said. “Well, now I’m taking you to the hospital.”
Jason sat back, staring out the window blurring by. A dust storm kicked up, blowing dirt though the streets, obscuring the confusion somewhat. Something else Mel had said stuck with him, nagging at him.
“Those were your lands?” he asked.
“What?”
She didn’t turn toward him as they headed back onto the wide road that had once been simple blacktop leading though Little Nord. Now it was four lanes and cracked. Signs dotted the road every so often, markers pointing toward Tarsten, a city that shouldn’t even exist. None of this should exist.
“Your lands?” he asked. The question felt important.
Mel nodded. “Everything along Muddy is my land. Why?”
Jason felt his stomach begin to flutter. �
�What did you say the oil fields were called?” he asked.
She glanced over, the look she was giving telling him that she couldn’t wait to just get him out of her truck. For some reason she wasn’t willing to leave him on the side of the road. “Christ. You’re full of strange questions. What were you drinking?”
Bourbon, but he didn’t say it. “You called the oil fields something.”
“Remsan fields?” she asked. “Used to be Remco rigs all over. Tarsten was pretty much built on Remco money. Now Remco just leases the land. Easier that way. Doesn’t change who owns it.”
Remsan fields? Jason felt his heart leap and pound in his chest. “Where am I?” he whispered. “When am I?”
Mel laughed nervously. She stepped harder on the gas. “Maybe you haven’t noticed, but it’s 2038.”
Jason felt the world seem to spin around him. Assuming Mel wasn’t crazy, that would mean he should be fifty-one. Rachel would be fifty.
If it didn’t seem so damn real, he would think this was just a dream.
Or maybe he had actually died when the lightning struck him, throwing him into the night. Maybe Rachel finally got the release from him she deserved.
***
“Jason Remsan died over twenty five years ago.”
Jason shivered hearing himself described that way as Mel looked at him with hard eyes tinged with hurt. She turned in her seat, angled in such a way to keep him in sight. Her left hand hovered on her thigh, ready to grab the door handle at any moment and leap out of the truck.
Jason had convinced her to pull off to the side of the road just as they crossed through what she called Nord and into the outskirts of Tarsten. The transition was sharp and marked by tall painted concrete walls, as if the planners of Tarsten had wanted to keep the people living in Nord out of their city.
On the Nord side, the walls were covered with graffiti, swirls of color the only bright and vibrant thing he had seen since coming into the town. Just past the border of Nord, on the Tarsten side, the high wall was painted differently, painted all along the wall to look like flowing prairie dotted occasionally with oil rigs, as if hiding Nord from the people living on the Tarsten side.
Everything on the Tarsten side looked completely different. Businesses lined the wide street, bright flashing signs that looked more like flatscreen televisions than store signs marked everything from groceries to liquor to home furnishings. There were stranger stores too, places that advertised Chipping and Augments. Even a huge sprawling building, each floor set off with darkly tinted windows, set off the road that looked like a hospital but had a sign for NanoCare. Beyond the main road, new houses stretched as far as he could see, green lawns well manicured, siding painted with blues and yellows and greens. On the road around him zipped cars that looked more like elongated bubbles. Few had logos that he recognized. He saw huge refineries in the distance.
“What do you mean dead?” he asked, staring out the window.
Mel moved her hand closer toward the door handle. “I mean, as in no longer living. Gone. Exploded in a lightning strike, nothing but the charred remains of his truck found. That was when the Remsan discovery was made, when he was found. First it was natural gas, but surveyors eventually found deeper deposits of oil trapped in shale beneath that.”
Jason shivered, thinking back to the storm, of the flames burning in spite of the rain. Had the lightning been attracted to the gas leak or had that simply been chance? Somehow, he had gotten his wish, had died in that storm as he had intended when setting out that night. And yet…he had not died.
“What happened to Rachel?” he asked.
“Rachel?”
Jason nodded and turned back to Mel. Her brown eyes looked suspicious and hard, but familiar too. “Rachel Remsan,” he asked.
Mel’s eyes narrowed. “Did you know her?”
Jason kept his face neutral and nodded. “I know her.”
Mel looked down. “Well, she had a hard time after he was gone. Had to learn how to manage the gas fields, geologists and surveyors and even guys from Bakken all trying to convince her to sell.” Mel looked up and her eyes had changed, softened.
Jason recognized the expression.
“She was smart, though, had a business background. Got herself a good lawyer. Secured her rights and only leased them out when she was ready. Started Remco from the ground up.” Mel pulled herself up as she spoke, her eyes brightening.
Jason sighed. Rachel finally got to put her business background to use, finally had a chance to do something for herself. Better than that, she finally got away from him. It was like the lightning storm gave them both a gift.
After he sat there silently for a while, Mel fidgeting with the steering wheel, he managed to get the nerve to ask, “Did she remarry?”
Mel looked down. “Always said she didn’t want anyone that just wanted the land, not her, so she waited. I always thought she just never found anyone she could love as much as…Jason.” Her voice caught as she said the name.
Jason looked over at Mel and saw her as if for the first time. He saw the same dark hair, the same sharp cheekbones, the same eager brown eyes. This was Rachel’s daughter.
“How old are you, Mel?” he asked.
She tilted the hat on her head and her mouth tightened. “In case you didn’t notice, oil towns are mostly men. I get my pick and you’re not my type,” she answered. “I don’t go for the drunk and the crazy.”
“How old?” he pressed.
“Twenty four.”
Suddenly he understood why Rachel had been so angry that night—only last night to him. Not because she wanted to fight, but because she had something to tell him, something important. And he was too damn thick to listen.
“And those were your lands?” he asked.
“Damn…you really are messed in the head. Didn’t I already say that?” She shifted in the leather seat and looked to shift the truck back into drive. “Time to get you to the hospital.”
Jason reached across and held her arm back from grabbing the shifter. Her skin seemed to tingle when he touched it. “No. I’ll get out here.”
“Here?” she asked. “There’s nothing here but shops. Listen, Jason, I think you need some help. Besides, it’s supposed to finally rain today. You’ve got no place to go and you don’t want to get stranded out there.”
He tried to speak, but his voice caught in his throat, suddenly raw. Rachel had done it all without him—raised a daughter, started a company, hell, probably even helped build this city. Rachel had managed to have a life without him.
It hurt knowing that he had been right. She had been better off without him.
Seeing Mel, seeing the confident woman who was so much like her mother, made that even clearer.
Jason smiled sadly, suddenly knowing what he had to do. The lightning strike had given him a gift, but not the one he thought at first. Maybe he could finally manage to do what Rachel had been asking him to do for years.
“You’ve given me plenty.”
As he climbed out of the truck, she looked back at him with eyes that were so much like Rachel’s. “Where are you going to go?”
Jason looked over the horizon, staring back down the road at what used to be simple County Road 5 and was now something more. The shacks of Nord stretched out like a wound across the land. Beyond that was the river, his land, where flames and a lightning strike had sent him here. There was a heaviness to the air, a hint of coming rain. Lightning flickered in the clouds rolling in. Thunder boomed, distantly.
Jason Remsan was dead. There was no reason to change that now.
“Somewhere out there,” he finally answered, nodding away from town, only now able to do what Rachel had asked for years. Only now able to get unstuck.
Introduction to “Your Permanent Record”
Ray Vukcevich is one of my favorite writers. His quirky short fiction has appeared in almost everything I’ve edited, including, most recently, Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds.
He’s writing a series set in the future about augmented multi-people. In fact, Clarice LeBlue and Lilly the dragon also appear in “The Go-Between” published in Bibliotecha Fantastica.
“I’m playing with my hunches and intuitions about the nature of time,” he writes. “You probably won’t be able to travel in time by following my instructions, but if you do manage it, you already have managed it. Maybe you can tell us about it at a later date.”
Your Permanent Record
Ray Vukcevich
Introduction
Things might have turned out differently if I had discovered the nature of time earlier in life. I might be a lot richer than I am. However, regrets are totally pointless. Things are as they have always been, and that’s that.
In this report, I will describe my limited travels in time. I will also tell you how time works and how you can travel in time yourself. Let me say up front that it isn’t easy, and if you are going to be able to do it, you have already done it. If you haven’t done it, you never will. I will explain why you might not know if you have done it or not.
Oh, I’ll tell you the bad news and the good news about free will, too.
My name is Lewis. Today is my birthday. I’m ninety-three years old. I’m looking forward to my cake. Most of me is out doing other things. I’ll have more to say about them later. Everything I know about Time I learned from a dragon name Lilly.
Looking Forward
The Lewis part of him had been married to the Sharon part of her for more than 70 years. The other parts of them both had lives of their own, and were not present for this conversation.
Looking at her over the remains of breakfast, Lewis realized that the secret he always suspected she kept from him was part of his plan to get rich with time travel.
“What?” she asked. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
“I think it’s time for you to tell me the secret, Sharon,” he said.
Time Streams - Fiction River Smashwords Edition Page 7