by Terri Favro
Worst of all was when I tried calling my parents in Shipman’s Corners. I had a moment of hope when I heard my mother’s voice agreeing to accept the charges.
“Debbie? How can this be true?” Her voice was shaking.
“It’s really me, Mom. I’m down in New York. I want to come home.”
She gave a sob, followed by the sound of muffled voices. I thought I could make out, Give me the goddamn phone.
Dad was on the line now. “Who the hell is this?” He sounded furious.
“It’s Debbie, Daddy.” I started to cry. Duff had said I never existed in Earth Standard Time, yet clearly they knew who I was.
“Is this some type of sick joke? What are trying to do to my poor wife?” shouted Dad just before he hung up the phone.
Discharged from Bellevue with a bag full of Medicaid antipsychotics, I was still weak and confused, not to mention flat broke. No credit cards. No identity of any kind. Even my university education had disappeared. Any records showing that BIONDI, D.R. had graduated summa cum laude from the University of Toronto with a bachelor of science had vanished, as if the hand of God had dabbed celestial Wite-Out on my official transcript.
I was a girl with no identity. No past. No family or friends. No husband. And no immunity to a long list of miserable diseases that I caught in succession over the space of six awful months — chicken pox, measles, mumps, whooping cough and repeated bouts of the flu. Shivering with fever for weeks on end, I began to wonder whether the flu was actually worse than radiation sickness.
I discovered that a lot of other things had changed, too. In Earth Standard Time, everything was a little out of sync with the timeline I had left behind. I was surprised to learn that Nixon was alive and well, writing his memoir in California, while two of the Kennedys had been assassinated back in the ’60s. Our longest-serving prime minister, Robert Stanfield, hadn’t won a single election, and that one-term leader, Pierre Trudeau, had been PM for twenty years. He hadn’t married Castro’s sister, but someone named Maggie, who’d left him to party at Studio 54, of all places. Protest songs by the likes of Bob Dylan and Marvin Gaye — marginal singers at best in Atomic Mean Time — were revered in Earth Standard Time. Instead of the annual Cuban Missile Crises of my childhood, Earth Standard Time had seen only one. And instead of flattening the Kremlin, or hurtling deeper into space, Skylab had crashed in Australia (the day after I’d met Gabriel the Twistie — sorry, Exceptional), killing a single cow. So much for the falling space junk starting World War Three.
Four months later, I was living at a women’s shelter in the Bronx. Viral infections had broken my body; being diagnosed as psychotic and delusional almost made me finish the job myself.
One evening, standing on the front stoop sharing a cigarette with another no-hoper, watching the nightly parade of hustlers and hookers, I saw a beautiful young man in a pair of gold boxing shorts and a tight T-shirt, obviously waiting for a trick. Bum Bum.
Staggering over to him, tears running down my cheeks, I put my arms around him. He embraced me back. “Do I know you?”
“Yes,” I sobbed. “We knew each other in another world. You were my friend.”
Bum Bum stood with me at arm’s-length, his dark eyes searching my face. “I remember you from my hometown. Shipman’s Corners, up in Canada,” he said slowly. “We were in middle school together.”
I almost shouted with joy. “Yes. St. Dismas, yes, you and I were both there.”
“Your name’s Debbie, right? I could swear the teachers told us you were . . .” He hesitated.
“I was what?”
He paused, then said: “That you were dead.”
Bum Bum’s hands tightened on my shoulders. Holding me up.
He could have left me there on the sidewalk or gently guided me back to the shelter. But he didn’t. Maybe it was the residual memory of our friendship in Atomic Mean Time. Or maybe it was something simpler: compassion. Bum Bum understood what it was like to hit rock bottom.
I clung to him so tightly that it was hard to get me into a taxi. He told me he’d left Shipman’s Corners for New York after dropping out of high school. When I mentioned Kendal, he shook his head and said the Kendals had moved away from his neighbourhood back in the ’60s.
“I lost contact with the guy after that. We hung out with different people. Kendal was always one of the smart ones.”
Bum Bum took me home to a tidy little bachelor pad where he had been living for years. He made soup, built me up, nursed me back to health, listened to my crazy stories about stopping a nuclear war. Most importantly, he believed me.
“I feel like I dreamed all the stuff you’re telling me,” he said. “It seems so familiar. When I saw you on the street, I felt like I knew you, as if everything that happened that day, happened before. What do they call that?”
“Déjà vu,” I told him.
But there was more to it than that. One night, when the two of us were companionably slumped on his couch sharing a doobie, eating popcorn and watching a movie on the Late Late Show, Bum Bum looked at me and said, “I kinda remember being at a party like this one with you.”
On a snowy black and white set that Bum Bum had liberated from someone’s trash can, Russian dancers, blonde starlets, a black woman in a French maid outfit and a baby elephant were dancing by a pool with Peter Sellers. Psychedelic sitar music played in the background. Nothing made sense. I didn’t know this version of the swinging ’60s. If anything, it looked more like the 1970s in Atomic Mean Time.
“It was a Halloween party,” I mumbled, my mouth full of popcorn. “Remember anything else?”
Bum Bum thought about it, his eyes on the movie. Now Peter Sellers and a starlet were romping in soapsuds. A woman in an evening gown fell headfirst over a balcony into the pool. The French maid did the Watusi.
“Some asshole dressed like the Playboy guy was coming on to you. You threw a drink in his face,” said Bum Bum.
“You and Rocco saved me.”
“Who?”
“Your boyfriend in Atomic Mean Time.”
Bum Bum laughed without meaning it. “I know who Rocco is, Debbie. We were together in Real Time, too.”
“Atomic Mean Time was also real,” I reminded him.
“I know, I know, but it’s not ‘real’ anymore, is it. Anyway, Rocco broke up with me and got married because his family couldn’t stand the idea of their oldest son being a fag. I’d rather erase the jerk from my memory.”
I reached over and took his hand. Sometimes I was so focused on my own problems, I forgot that Bum Bum had had heartbreaks, too. But knowing that he could remember something of the old past gave me hope. If he remembered me, maybe others would, too. By which I really meant Kendal.
* * *
Eventually, when I was strong enough, we went searching for Linda. Locating her turned out to be easier than I thought. I saw her face on a poster stuck to a telephone pole.
She lived in a lower Manhattan loft, paid for with royalties from a record she’d made with Dylan’s producer, same guy who discovered Springsteen. Under her stage name, Lindy Bond, she packed them in at CBGB’s every night. Thanks to my hop into Earth Standard Time, her personal history had changed for the better.
When she opened the door and saw Bum Bum and me standing there, I could tell by her shocked expression that she recognized me right away. Her dead sister, Debbie. I showed her the Lady of Lourdes medal.
“I thought Mom and Dad buried you with this,” she said, holding it in her hand. “How can it be possible that you’re alive?”
I tried to explain my time hop to her, as I had to Bum Bum, but the look in her eyes made me stop. She turned to Bum Bum and asked him to come into the kitchen to help her make tea.
I could hear them in there, whispering about me.
“What’s the matter with her? Is she psychotic? Schizophrenic?�
��
A short silence. “She’s been through some major shit,” mumbled Bum Bum. “I figured she was a runaway.”
“My parents must have sent her away. They did that to me once, but they let me come back. No wonder they kept the casket closed. My God.”
“Why’d they want to get rid of her?”
“Let’s just say she was a handful.”
“You should tell them.”
“No way. Mom’s health isn’t great. Heart trouble. I’d rather just let Debbie live here quietly, but I’m leaving on tour soon. I’ve already sublet the place.”
“I don’t mind if Debbie goes on living with me,” said Bum Bum.
A short silence as this good news sunk in; I could just imagine Linda’s relief at Bum Bum volunteering to take responsibility for me.
“Do you need money?” she asked.
“Wouldn’t hurt,” said Bum Bum.
In Earth Standard Time, Linda was the doting daughter, while I was the long-lost one. Why rock the boat? In the end, Mom died never knowing Linda and I had been reunited. Dad started losing his memory a few years later — dementia symptoms, the doctors said. I cried for days when Linda told me. Not only for Dad, but also for me: now there was no chance he’d remember me, in either time continuum.
With Linda’s money, Bum Bum paid the first and last months’ rent on a little railroad flat not far from Orchard Street, where Nonna Peppy had lived. He continued to bus at Studio 54, among other places, but he was tired of sleeping with rich clients for tips. It was getting too risky because of a new retrovirus emerging in New York. Back in our apartment, I spent most of my time sleeping, reading, watching soap operas, familiarizing myself with the twisted history of Earth Standard Time, trying to let my mind and body heal, wondering what the hell I would do without an identity.
Bum Bum did well in New York. He turned out to be a smart guy with cool ideas and the instincts of an entrepreneur; within a couple of years, he’d started running a bookstore and print shop in the Village. One day, he brought home a copy of an underground comic that he’d printed called Raw.
“We’re selling it at the front cash. You’ll like it,” Bum Bum told me, handing me an issue called the “Graphix Coffee Table Book for your Bomb Shelter.” I sat and read one visceral story after another, including one about a family of mice during the Holocaust. In a radio interview, I heard the creator say it was a way to work out painful family stories, to deal with a horrific legacy in a way that he could manage.
I can do that too, I thought. Then: I must do that. For my own sanity.
Comic books are one of the places where you can turn what a psychiatrist at Saint Clare’s Hospital called “delusions” into alternate realities that readers desperately want to live in. A medically acceptable way to turn fantasy into truth. I’ve met hundreds of people eager to do just that at comic book fan festivals.
Bum Bum saw a want ad in the Village Voice for a graphic designer/art director for a pulp magazine called Psychics of Fortune based out of Fort Lee, New Jersey. He convinced me to let him take me out there, even borrowed a car for the trip across the George Washington Bridge to a tumbledown industrial park to meet my future boss, Madame Gina. She asked me if I had a portfolio, and of course the answer was no, so I demonstrated my drawing skills on the spot. She was impressed by the realism of my horses, but she still wasn’t sure I had the right stuff for a fast-paced career with the number one psychics’ magazine in America.
“Let’s consult the experts,” Madame Gina said, and took out her tarot cards.
When Death, the Devil, the Tower, the Ten of Swords and the Hanged Man turned up in succession, Madame Gina’s face went grey.
“Destiny brought you here. The cards don’t lie. You are from the old doomed time. You are the Tagger, destroyer of an evil world, saviour of humanity.”
“Does that mean I’m hired?”
By way of answer, Madame Gina shook my hand so hard that her heavy rings left deep purple bruises on my fingers that I have to this day.
Turns out, she was part of a group of Exceptionals who were living in Atomic Mean Time 1979.
“We were looking for respite from our mutations by hopping into the past. Of course, it didn’t work,” said Madame Gina, sighing over shots of a clear, pungent liquor that reminded me of Mr. Capitalismo’s homemade onion vodka. “When you collapsed Atomic Mean Time, we couldn’t believe our luck. We all tagged along with you into this time. Our physical mutations vanished, leaving only our psychic abilities.” She leaned toward me and touched the side of her nose conspiratorially. “That’s how we get by in this timeline without identities. Craps tables, lotteries, playing the ponies. That gave us the do-re-mi to start the magazine. We can enjoy life as long as we observe the rules: no big weight changes, no children, no formal property ownership. Cash on the barrelhead.”
“How come you remember being tagged when no one else does?” I asked.
Madame Gina waved one ringed hand dismissively. “More do than you think. Remembering the old time requires spiritual insight. Most Normals are too distracted to notice anything except the boob tube,” she told me, then patted Bum Bum’s hand. “Present company excepted, of course.”
Bum Bum stood up, suddenly uncomfortable. “I’m going to buy some smokes.”
As he slid through the beaded curtain of Madame Gina’s office, she nodded at his disappearing back. “Your friend could remember everything about the old time, if he let himself. For a Normal, he is an exceptional man in many ways.”
“He’s very kind, if that’s what you mean,” I said.
“He saved you,” said Madame Gina. “And you saved everyone else. He is an exception even among Exceptionals. Accept him as your guardian and advisor. He may know more about your past and future than you do.”
* * *
Working for Psychics of Fortune helped rekindle some long-dead creative spark, the one the Famous American Artists Correspondence School had talked about in their ads. Madame Gina showed me how to capitalize on the limited psychic ability I had acquired during my time hop to make a nice nest egg at craps and roulette in Jersey City. An unintended pleasant consequence of being the Ion Tagger, and one I feel that I richly deserve.
A couple of years later, inspired by Raw comics and the crash of Challenger, I had the confidence to draw the first issue of Sputnik Chick: Girl With No Past. At first I churned out my little underground comic on Bum Bum’s Xerox machine and sold it in his bookstore, but after the obscenity charge, the series turned into a worldwide phenomenon and Grey Wizard became my publisher. I’ve even sold the film rights, although I’m still waiting to see the project greenlit by a studio. They’re such unreliable fuckers in the movies. They either let the concept wallow until it dies a natural death or suck all the juice out of it in an attempt to reach the broadest possible market.
Despite my successes, a question continued to eat at me every day: what had happened to Kendal? I wouldn’t know for sure until the dawn of the internet age. In 1995, sitting in front of my PC, I learned that he was in Toronto. I was able to follow the trajectory of his career as he went from lawyer, to head of an environmental organization, to deputy mayor of the city, to leader of a federal political party. So, he had been destined for law school, all along.
In 1986, Kendal had married a woman identified in the archives of the Star’s Society pages as Alexandra “Alex” Holub, Sandy’s name in Earth Standard Time. Inspired by her father’s mission to popularize ethnic food, she went on to launch a chain of Eastern European–themed fast food restaurants, Mr. Yumchuck’s.
I cried when I learned about Kendal and Sandy. I tried to deal with my anger and sorrow by developing a storyline in which Sputnik Chick stalks her ex-lover Johnny the K, shadowing him to the house of his fiancée, CC the waitress. Sputnik Chick spies on the two of them through a window as they make love. Then she goes home, gets drunk
and finds some Twisties to beat up.
At least I was living in New York City, far, far away from the CBC national news. In Canada, Kendal was everywhere — on TV, radio, in the newspapers. Living in the States, I could pretend he didn’t exist. That all changed six years later when my spidey sense sent me to the window of our condo in lower Manhattan and I saw the first plane hit the tower — a disaster rushing in to fill the void. I leaned my head against the superheating glass of the window and prayed to no one in particular.
As borders closed and identity requirements tightened, it became obvious that Bum Bum’s lack of a green card — and my lack of an identity — would be a problem. Even my cleverly forged passport wouldn’t cut it much longer. And so, in 2002, we returned together to Canada — Toronto, to be exact. A place big enough to lose ourselves in.
I never really settled down in one neighbourhood, just went from hotel to hotel, a lifestyle I liked well enough. Bum Bum set himself up in a nice loft apartment where I crash whenever I need someone to split a bottle of pinot noir, watch TV and experience normal life. If you can call Bum Bum’s life normal.
When I felt ready, Bum Bum drove me to Shipman’s Corners. I wanted to see for myself whether every shred of my past had truly vanished without a trace.
My childhood home on Fermi Road was covered in aluminum siding. The grapevines had been ripped out for a swimming pool.
The wreck of the candy store had been torn down to make room for a Valvoline oil-change shop. As we drove past the Holub house, I noticed two young girls in hijabs in the tiny front yard, kicking a soccer ball back and forth. Like everywhere else, newcomers to the neighbourhood were replacing the older postwar immigrant communities.
In King George Park — what I had known as Plutonium Park — the Atomic Bomb memorial engraved with the names of the Radiant Dead had vanished; only the statue of the soldier fainting into the arms of an angel remained, chiselled with a list of all the conflicts where Shipman’s Cornersians had laid down their lives: World Wars One and Two, Korea, Afghanistan. The Atomic War of Deterrence had never taken place, apparently, although I read in a history book that a similar idea had been floated by Churchill. Cresswell’s Collectibles had been replaced by a tattoo parlour and the old Royal Bank building had been subdivided into the offices of mortgage brokers and collection agencies. Déjà vu tingling, I asked Bum Bum to park out front.