Sputnik's Children

by Terri Favro

  Peppy had said she lived at this address in a railroad flat, by which I thought she meant she could see the elevated trains pass by. She had explained to me that it meant an apartment without a hallway: to get from one room to the next you had to walk through each room, one after the other, like the boxcars on a train. “You couldn’t have no privacy in a house like that. You wouldn’t believe what you’d catch people doing while you were just trying to get to the shitter at night, excuse my French.”

  I tried to imagine Nonna Peppy as a teenager, living in a place like this with her brother, sister-in-law and four nieces and nephews before returning to Italy to marry Nonno Zinio. It was only two rooms, a sink in one of them signalling its purpose. “Was this room the bathroom?”

  The caretaker coughed. “Whadya think this is, the Ritz? This is the kitchen. The john’s in the hall. One for every two flats. Hell, I remember my pop saying in the old days, before the city made the landlords put in indoor terlets, you had to go down them stairs and out the back to the privies to do your business. Day or night, winter or summer. Same thing to get water. Up, down, up, down. Stank like hell out there, too. Not that it was much better inside.”

  “You remember when there were people living here?” asked Kendal.

  The caretaker coughed again; I was starting to realize that was the sound of his laughter.

  “You kiddin’, I grew up here,” said the caretaker. “That’s how come I know my way ’round the place.”

  By the time we got back to the Excelsior, exhausted and starving, the honeymoon suite was ready for us.

  The elevator clunked and groaned its way to the top floor, operated by a dwarf in what looked like a Girl Scout uniform. I had a hard time not staring at her; she was a heavily made-up platinum blonde, hair scraped into a long ponytail, gilded shadow on her eyelids. For a moment I could have sworn I saw a third eye in the middle of her forehead winking at me. Must have been the heat.

  “You two look normal. Sweet enough ta eat,” she observed, her tiny catlike tongue darting out to lick her lips. “Where ya from?”

  “Canusa,” we answered together.

  “Explains it. Sixth floor. Watch yer step.”

  We tried to politely refuse the help of an elderly bellhop but he squeezed into the tiny creaking elevator with us anyway and grabbed our bags. Up on six, he unlocked the door and marched around the honeymoon suite, waving his hand at the amenities: a rusty tub in the dimly lit bathroom, a TV with a broken dial shoved onto the armoire and the red light that signalled an air-raid siren was a test, not “da real deal.” Finally, he shoved up the window to let in a blast of heat and smog. “Great voo of da Village, f’you like that type thing,” he wheezed. He stood, breathing hard, hands behind his back, until Kendal dug fifty cents out of his pocket.

  After the bellhop left, Kendal said, “Alone at last.”

  We pulled back the thin coverlet on the bed and I lay back on the pale yellow sheets, scratchy with bleach, and watched Kendal go down on me. I clearly remember coming that particular time, the racket of the city floating in through the open window like exotic music, the smell of an animal being barbecued drifting up from the street below.

  Kendal scooped me into his arms. “Are you happy, Debbie?”

  I put my arms around him. “Yes, of course.”

  “I love you,” he said.

  “I love you, too.”

  I wanted to be happy. I really did. I was happy with Kendal.

  And yet, a nameless worry chafed at me, as if something important had slipped my mind in the midst of all the monogrammed matchbook ordering and wedding planning. I felt as if I had lost my prime directive. As if I’d missed a boat on which I hadn’t even booked passage.

  Kendal got up and looked out the window, unselfconsciously naked. He was still lean and muscular and beautiful, his narrow sensitive face approaching pretty. The perfect man, as Sandy liked to remind me.

  Afterwards we got into the tub and let the showerhead intermittently spit cold water at us. I was just about to suggest that we reconsider my cousin’s offer to put us up in Brooklyn when the air-raid siren went off. I crouched down in the tub and covered my head, Kendal trying to reassure me. “Look, the red light’s on, it’s only a test.”

  Ever since that night eight years earlier, the sounds of sirens — ambulances, fire alarms — sent me into a panic, my heart racing like a sprinter’s crossing the finish line. Kendal coaxed me to my feet and into my clothes. Poured me a glass of water and handed me a Valium from my purse.

  Down the stairwell, we descended to the hardened shelter of the Excelsior, the other guests ahead of and behind us. From the look of their slow hand-in-hand descent, it appeared that the morbidly fat man and the skeletal girl with the parrot blue hair were together. The other guests grumbled and burped their way down with weary acceptance; they did drills three times a week, someone said, and I began to realize that they weren’t so much guests as long-term residents of the Excelsior.

  The so-called hardened shelter looked like the basement kitchen of St. Dismas Community Hall: blue-tiled walls, pebble-grey linoleum floor, rows of cupboards and shelves where the hotel stored canned food. Instead of doing duck-and-cover, like the old days, the guests milled apathetically around the room, bickering quietly with the fish-eyed clerk, until the all-clear sounded.

  We climbed the stairs to our room while the rest of them stood in the basement smoking and waiting for the dwarf to summon the ancient elevator. I felt my knees jelly under me as I walked the six flights. My panic at the sound of sirens did not dissipate quickly. Our family doctor had prescribed the Valium to take the edge off, but the dosage needed to be higher and higher to have any effect.

  We dressed and went out onto Bleecker Street. Kendal looked so handsome. He told me I was beautiful. I searched my heart for happiness and when I didn’t find it, I decided to act happy until I felt happy.

  Next to the Excelsior, a café unconvincingly advertised cheap, good food. Dixie’s Diner. We stepped inside and took seats at a stained linoleum table for two in the flyspecked bay window. A waitress appeared and dropped shiny menus in front of us, then stood with her pencil poised over her notepad, waiting to take our order.

  As I weighed whether to order French onion soup or chicken pot pie, I heard the pad fall to the floor, followed by the pencil pinging off the table.

  “My God. My God. He said you’d be here today.”

  For the first time, I looked at the waitress’ face. Dark eyes and a curtain of long dark hair. Difficult to guess her age: young, I thought at first, although the lines around her eyes, the darkness and haggard thinness, suggested a hard-knock life. Otherwise, her face was strangely like my own.

  “Debbie,” she said, wiping tears.

  I recognized the waitress now: Linda.

  three

  Our Lady of the Algorithm

  Duff and Linda’s apartment in Alphabet City was carpeted with junk: valves, bolts, tools, copper piping, batteries. A welder’s helmet and torch sat on a titanium workbench. There was little else about the contents of their living room I could recognize beyond a battered love seat, one leg held up by the Encyclopedia Britannica, H to M, which Duff had stolen from the New York Public Library for its thickness. On what looked like a squat portable TV set — but I now realize was a hand-built PC — a strange scene was playing itself out: a headless, four-legged robot pranced like a horse, its multi-jointed legs leaping up and down tirelessly. After a few seconds, the horse was replaced by another giant metal animal, running in snow on canine legs.

  “Military robots. Duff says armies can’t march on mutated DNA,” explained Linda, sitting wearily at a battered table to remove a pack of cigarettes from her purse. She lit up with a shaking hand. “How’re Mom and Dad, Debbie? And Nonna Peppy?”

  “She died last year.”

  Linda looked grief-stricken. “Oh,
I’m so sorry.”

  Yeah, you’re sorry. Right, I thought bitterly.

  I said, “Mom and Dad basically spent their lives worrying themselves sick about you. Nonna Peppy even hired a detective. When that didn’t work out, she tried a psychic. Mom’s been hoping for divine intervention.”

  Linda put her face in her hands. “I couldn’t come back after Amchitka. They were looking for us.”

  I sat down across from her in a broken plastic chair. “They who?”

  “They everyone. CIA. Interpol. Those ShipCo goons. Probably the fucking KGB, for all I know. They may act all lovey-dovey with Greenpeace, but anyone actively involved with the movement is on a watch list.” Her eyes finally managed to meet mine. “It hasn’t been easy for me, either, Debbie. Duff’s been dropping in and out of my life for years. When I go to bed at night, I never know whether he’ll be there in the morning. Half the time, he’s on a time hop — either forward to the MIT lab in 2019 to do more research or backwards to Shipman’s Corners in the ’60s. Trying to help someone save the world, apparently.” She gave me a resentful glance through a pall of cigarette smoke.

  “When did you start smoking?” I asked.

  She exhaled and pushed the pack of Merits in my direction; I shook my head. “Everyone smokes in Alaska. I quit a couple of years ago when I started singing in bars, but a few weeks ago I started up again. Stress.” She left the explanation at that. “What does it matter? The world is coming to an end.”

  “Who says?” demanded Kendal. “You still buying Duff’s bullshit, Linda?”

  Ash dropped off the end of her cigarette onto a huge stack of magazines: The New Yorker, Swingin’ Bachelor Pad, Paranoid Mechanics, TIME, LIFE, LOOK, Rolling Rock, The Economist, Citizens of Science.

  “Open your eyes, Kendal. The press keeps writing about how we’re on the brink of all-out war. Mutual assured destruction. Or haven’t you had the pleasure of a full anti-radiation suit drill in New York yet?”

  “We were in a drill at the Excelsior,” I said. “No anti-radiation suits, though.”

  “The Excelsior? That’s freak central. A hotel for Twisties. What’re you doing there?” said Linda.

  Kendal wandered restlessly around the apartment, picking his way over bits of machinery. From the bathroom, he called, “Debbie, you’ve got to see this.”

  I left Linda smoking at the table to join Kendal. The bathtub was piled full of solenoids, copper pigtails just like the one I remembered Duff pawning in Cressie’s.

  “Duff’s stash of secret weapons,” murmured Kendal.

  “They’re not weapons. They’re tools,” said a voice behind us.

  We turned to see Duff in the doorway. He looked like he’d been hit by a train, his skin a patchwork of pits, scabs and sores. Gaunt and emaciated, he seemed to have aged twenty years in the last eight. He leaned heavily on a wooden cane.

  There was no hello, no exclamations of surprise, no hugs of greeting. I knew why, too. We had been expected.

  “Solenoids aren’t a weapon, kids, just the interface between the mechanical devices of your time and the digital systems of mine. Handy, when you’re trying to make do with archaic technology. That’s how I kept the air-raid siren going so long. Programmed it.”

  “Why all the secrecy, then?” asked Kendal.

  Duff grunted as he dropped heavily onto a rolling desk chair, resting his cane on his knees. His skin was so degraded, it looked like it was sliding off his face.

  “Because solenoids are only allowed in the hands of the military and the industrial complex that works for them. I was under the radar in Shipman’s Corners until some bright bulb connected me with a missing solenoid from Bell Labs. Early use of a cross-border license plate matching database. They were trying to catch cigarette and booze smugglers and came up with me. Gotta be one for the history books. Hope you thought to ditch my car.”

  “Don’t worry, we figured out that much,” said Kendal.

  Linda was standing behind Duff now, hands on his shoulders. The two of them were ground down, sick, exhausted. Linda looked as if she’d been stretched on a rack, her arms stick thin. The prettiness of her face had sunken into the hollow-cheeked gauntness of a woman who smokes and drinks too much.

  “So much for saving the planet,” I said bitterly. “I guess scaring the shit out of everyone and breaking our parents’ hearts was all for nothing.”

  “It’s not over yet,” said Duff. “The solenoids aren’t the key to stopping World War Three. You are, Debbie.”

  He pressed a button on the PC and the robot animal warriors faded to grey. “MIT wanted me to design military robots. Boots on the ground that never wear out. Believe it or not, they’re still fighting land wars in the future. But I wanted to focus on reversing the negative effects of nuclear fallout. Environmental degradation. Starvation. All the disgusting mutations replicating themselves in the general population like fungi. How’d you like to have a baby who starts out looking healthy and normal, then turns into a yeast culture one night in its crib? It’s no picnic living in a nuked world, kids. Only solution seemed to be: leave this fucked-up time behind and hop into one marginally safer. But first, we had to find an Ion Tagger.”

  “What the hell’s that mean?” demanded Kendal. “And what makes you think my wife is one?”

  I glanced at Kendal. His habit of referring to me as “my wife” was getting on my nerves.

  “Apparently, you’ve forgotten what I told you back when we first met. An Ion Tagger is someone who has the ability to bring history to an end game and drag everyone in it to another continuum. Like a global game of tag, with the Tagger as It. Think of it as tagging every human being on Earth at once. Taking them out of the game, so to speak. Their timeline collapses and everyone in it merges with their alternate selves in a parallel world. They barely realize anything has happened to them. Then the game starts again in another continuum, with everyone carrying on as if they’d been living their lives there all along.”

  “But how do you know I’m ‘it’?” I asked.

  “We worked out an algorithm, modelling for certain mutations at the cellular level that I found on your cheek swab back at Plutonium Park. And there’s something else.” Duff hesitated, as if he didn’t want to go on.

  “Tell her, Duff,” urged Linda.

  I shivered at the touch of the cold shawl of destiny draping over my shoulders.

  Duff sighed. “The Tagger can’t exist in the target timeline. Because if she did, her very presence would disrupt the flow of time in the new continuum. Who knows where that could lead. While others achieve a singularity with their alternate selves, the Tagger remains as she was in her original timeline.”

  “Are you saying I won’t exist anymore because I was never born in the other continuum?”

  Duff and Linda exchanged looks; I had the feeling that there was more she wanted him to tell me.

  “Something like that,” mumbled Duff. “Tell you the truth, I’m not really sure what tagging would do to you.”

  “But what exactly do you expect me to do?”

  Kendal looked alarmed that his wife was taking Duff seriously. “Deb . . .”

  Duff said, “Come with me to 254 West 54th Street. Midnight. We’ll meet up with my colleague, Gabriel. If Debbie follows his instructions, we’ll all wake up tomorrow in a better world.”

  Kendal laughed sarcastically. “Let’s get this over with now. I want Debbie to see what a crap artist you are, so we can go back to our honeymoon.”

  Duff shook his head. “We can’t get in ’til midnight. And we’ll never get in looking like this.”

  “What do we do ’til then?” I asked.

  Duff said gravely, “We go shopping.”

  four

  Beautiful Nobodies

  We suited up at an open-air storefront on Canal Street. I found a skin-tight gold lamé jump
suit, feather boa and pair of thigh-high gold boots. Linda picked out a shiny pink plastic dress and purple platform shoes. She told Kendal he needed to choose from two extremes: a three-piece suit — preferably white — or glitter-spangled gym shorts, tube socks, running shoes and nothing else. Kendal opted for the suit. We found Duff’s outfit at a Salvation Army Thrift Store: checkerboard flares and a shiny silver shirt. He’d lost so much weight over the past eight years, the wet-look fabric stuck ghoulishly to his protruding ribs. Linda told me it was a symptom of a disease of the immune system called timesickness, caused by staying in the past too long.

  We disposed of our original clothes in a Salvation Army bin and killed a couple of hours at a diner, nibbling on pie and drinking coffee while Linda chain-smoked and gently urged Duff to eat. Kendal picked unhappily at a club sandwich.

  At a quarter to twelve, we headed for the rendezvous with the mysterious Gabriel. The Hotwire Hum was louder than I’d heard it before. The farther we walked, the more intense the sound became, as if we were moving toward its source point.

  As Duff and Linda walked ahead of us, hand in hand, Kendal whispered to me, “This is how it’s going to be, Deb? Letting this asshole hijack our honeymoon?”

  “God, Kendal — my sister is a basket case. I can’t abandon her now. I have to convince her to leave Duff and go back to Shipman’s Corners.”

  Kendal said nothing, just looked straight ahead at the glittering dung heap of midtown Manhattan on a Saturday night.

  At 254 West 54th Street, the line-up wrapped around the block. As we joined the end of the queue, a bare-chested man dressed in satin jogging shorts, tube socks and silver basketball shoes walked toward us. Bum Bum.

  “Hey, why didn’t you guys tell me you were coming to 54? I work here when I’m in the city. Under the table. You don’t have to wait in line if you’re with me.”

  The four of us followed Bum Bum as he pushed his way to the front of the line, curses and a few smashed bottles following in our wake. At the entrance, a bouncer in a tux stood sentinel in front of a purple velvet rope. When he saw Bum Bum, he shook his head.