Black Pockets

by George Zebrowski

  I grew a beard and wore a hat to avoid being remembered in the neighborhood as anyone except the guy with the beard and hat. I took some care with this, thinking that I must never meet myself or anyone I knew. I had no idea what might happen, but I wasn’t taking any chances. At the very least, Gerard would not recognize me.

  One evening, Sarah’s sister, Gail, came in for a pickup. I had not taken that call, so the first I knew I was handing her the pie. She took the box from my hands and stared at me for a moment.

  “Have we met?” she asked in the musical tones I remembered. Sarah had some of that too, but Gail had more.

  I shook my head, not daring to speak, even though I was glad to meet someone who knew me, then stared morosely at the floor until she turned and left.

  At work I used my own name and social security number, and my area boss even cashed my checks for me. What could he think if he ran across my name elsewhere—oh, someone else with Gerry’s name. It was a pizza place. What was the worst that could happen? I wasn’t breaking any laws, and lived on a cash basis. All I had to do was lie low and wait.

  One late afternoon, on my way to work, I drove by the house and saw Sarah and Gerard coming outside. Spencer slipped out just before Gerard closed the door, and climbed up into a small tree on Mrs. Scheler’s front lawn, gazing at them. He was showing off. I knew the drill. When they turned away to leave, he hopped down and loped after them. I knew as I left the scene behind that Spencer would turn back and go home, after some waving and shouting by me, to wait by the back door until we returned.

  I counted the months toward the coming collision with myself. That’s what I told myself, anyway. Whether it would happen peacefully or not on that distant evening I had no idea.

  Today was the day!

  I had already given Karim notice that I was leaving my job. I shaved, then tried to relax in my room. Toward evening I took out the clean, carefully stored clothes I had worn on the day of my disappearance. I sat in my one big comfy chair and waited until the evening hour was close before dressing. I had told the building’s manager that I was moving out, and would leave the keys in the apartment. My rent was paid up for the month; the Gerry who lived here would simply vanish.

  I took my time dressing to be myself again, wondering whether the coming event would be more like a wedding or a funeral. My hands shook, and my throat was dry. I felt like a stalker.

  I wondered about the path that lay before me. What was it like up the line? Was there another time, running forward, in which Sarah wondered what had happened to me when I failed to come back with the fries? Or would my upcoming return simply cut off that future? Would it still leave a vague memory in her of something having gone wrong? Would I remember it?

  Soft, doughlike reasonings twisted in my mind, and baked into agonized pretzels in the heat of my imaginings. Horizons stood around me, over which I could not see. I would know the outcome this evening. Maybe not.

  Finally I was again in my brown corduroy pants, black walking shoes, blue shirt, and a flannel lumberjack overshirt. I had dressed casually at home, and there had been no reason to dress up to get some fast food on a warm evening. Yet the exactness of these clothes was suddenly very crucial to me, as if I had to observe a cosmic dress code. Get one detail wrong, and it would all fall apart.

  I walked the ten blocks to my house, checking my watch every few minutes, determined to give myself enough time to be there early in order to observe carefully.

  When I reached the Dairy Queen at the edge of the neighborhood, I decided to have a small vanilla cone to settle my stomach. I had the time, since I was now only five minutes away.

  I forced myself to eat the soft ice cream as I continued on my way. It was the same evening again, softly blue with starlight and a spring breeze, and memories crowding in on me.

  In the house ahead, Sarah and I were talking ourselves into French fries. I scarfed down the rest of the cone and stopped at the corner.

  I watched, waiting for the door of the brightly lit house to open.

  And I began to feel sick, as if something was terribly wrong; but it was just out of sight over my mental hills. A great beast was coming for me fast out of some dark vastness.

  Here I was, at the same moment.

  The door opened slightly.

  I heard muffled voices arguing as the inner door opened halfway. The words stopped as Gerard opened the storm door and hurried out onto the slate walkway. He paused, then went right back inside.

  My mind stopped and was rooted to the moment.

  The worst had happened, and could not be undone.

  Gerard had not vanished into that sudden autumn I remembered. It was still spring. Somehow my chance to return had passed me by.

  I stood there, shaking with fear and nausea. What had gone wrong?

  I looked at my watch.

  The time was right.

  But the date was wrong. The tiny calendar on my watch told me I was a day early! How had that happened? My mind had reached ahead anxiously, yearning to draw me forward to this day.

  I thought about all the other small variations that had been creeping into the sequence right from the start. Would some sort of accumulation of unnoticed, small differences keep me from coming home?

  I took a deep breath, then thrust my shaking hands into my pockets. My fingers found my key chain; I had forgotten to leave my keys in the apartment. Then I realized why I had messed up on the date. I had paid the next month’s rent a day early, making sure that there would be plenty of time for me to disappear into my previous life. Well, at least I would have a place to sleep for one more night.

  Feeling miserable, I walked back to my studio apartment. Tomorrow at this time I would be back for another throw of the cosmic dice.

  I was back ten minutes early. My clothes were a bit sweatier, but I didn’t care. They would be more like they had been when I had first gone outside, two and a half years ago now. I had found a spare set of apartment keys, which I had made some time ago. I brought them with me because I might need to go back again. The fear was a stone in my stomach.

  As I watched the door, I began to wonder whether I wanted to go back at all. Was this the same world, the same house, the same Sarah? I asked myself, recalling the shouting of the previous night. Maybe in this world-line I never came back, but lived apart, watching myself, avoiding his mistakes, counting myself lucky to have made the break. If the worlds varied, then there were perhaps an infinite number in which I had not come back. Sarah was forever lost to me.

  The inner door opened. I tensed. Gerard pushed at the storm door.

  Spencer rushed by him onto the bushy front lawn.

  Gerard ran after him.

  Spencer scampered across the street toward where I stood in shadows. Gerard was striding after him. It was the French fries, I thought. Without them, Gerard would not disappear.

  This was not my world, I realized, because Spencer was still alive.

  Gerard stopped and looked up at the sky, and seemed in no hurry to chase the cat. He stood there, and I wondered if he was suddenly seeing the autumn I had walked into.

  But I continued to see him. He was still here. Maybe he would always be here, as I had feared, shutting me out.

  Spencer padded down the street.

  Gerard winked out.

  For one second he was there, and in the next he was gone.

  “Yes!” I whispered to myself. A shiver of spooky triumph shot up my spine, driving all my doubts out into the starry evening. Then I looked around at the street, because it seemed to me I had heard an echo of my own voice.

  Spencer came up to me and stopped, and I knew with a sinking feeling that it was still not my world. Gerard’s disappearance had not been enough. I was not home. It would be wrong for me to go inside this house.

  Spencer looked up at me, and the confusion in the eyes of this Einstein among cats seemed to ask, “How the fuck did you get ahead of me?”

  Then he sat down and waited. />
  I reached down and picked him up. He let me hold him. I had always been able to catch him in the house. Outside, he would mock me and amble away, knowing that there was little or no chance that I could catch him; he’d come back when he felt like it. But now I had shown another ability, and this had shaken him up.

  I petted his head, scratched him under his chin, and he winked out in my arms. Relief and resignation tore through me. Once again, Spencer had died, even though something in me had hoped that he would remain alive and that I would also have my world back.

  It was my world again, I told myself, desperate to believe it. Something had finally made the correction.

  I stood there for a moment, empty handed, then approached the house.

  I opened the unlocked doors one by one, and stepped back into my living room. Sarah looked up at me and smiled.

  “Back so soon?” she asked.

  I sat down and stared at the credits on the evening news, realizing that I had been gone maybe twenty minutes.

  “How about the French fries?” Sarah asked, tucking her legs under her in the big recliner.

  “I can do without,” I said. “How about you? I’ll go if you still want me to.”

  “If you can do without,” she said smugly, “then so can I.”

  I looked over at her. She seemed unchanged.

  “You look a bit different somehow,” she said.

  “I washed these clothes yesterday,” I said.

  “Good for you.”

  “You won’t believe what happened to me,” I started to say, again feeling like the snail in the old joke, then felt fearful of saying anything more.

  Sarah looked at me strangely and said, “I know exactly what happened to you!”

  “How can you know?” I asked, startled. Then, “What do you know,” I said, thinking she was referring to something else.

  “I don’t know how I know, but suddenly I know—as if something slid it into my mind sideways. I know!” She sounded both awed and very frightened.

  I took a deep breath and said, “Tell me.”

  As she recounted what had happened to me, with uncanny detail, I remembered that a great writer had once written that there is no wall around time. You can have what you want of it, if you remember well enough. But it was worse than that. Suddenly I feared to remember, afraid that I would be thrown somewhere into time again, away from the frontline of my incoming future, back into a flow of varying instants that I could not change.

  The past lived as a hunger in all of us, waiting to swallow us when we lost sight of the future. This realization was the most urgent thing I had learned.

  “Stop!” I shouted and jumped up from my chair, half expecting Spencer to meow from the kitchen. He had gotten cranky whenever his people argued and made him feel unsafe.

  Sarah looked at me in surprise and said. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

  “Careful. Stop talking. Don’t think too much about the past!”

  “But why, what’s wrong? It’s so strange to suddenly know!”

  As I looked at her, my hand slipped into my pants pocket and closed around the spare keys. I took the key ring out and looked at it in shock, because this meant that I was still not quite in my own world; my beloved was only some sort of Sarah, but also slightly someone else, and I was something of an intruder.

  “What’s wrong?” Sarah asked again.

  I stared at the keys in my hand—

  —and was relieved to see them fade away. A little late. Maybe it had needed a push from me, so the choices among worlds would tend back to my own original. Something was still correcting.

  “We have to be careful, not think too much about it. Too much—and you’re there!” As I looked at her, I saw my fear in her eyes.

  “It—” I started to say, but my voice broke from the strangeness of our helplessness before it. What could I call it—a glitch of some kind? We were at the edge of our world, and something was trying to push us off into the abyss. No, it was trying to pull us in.

  But she knew it all, I realized. Somehow it had all piled into her. I didn’t have to say it.

  “It takes you back,” I blurted out.

  And sideways.

  Twisted sideways.

  “Yeah,” Sarah said. “You’re not the man who went out for French fries, and I’m not the woman you left behind.”

  “None of us ever are,” I said, “even when we are.”

  “You can’t step into the same river twice, Heraclitus said,” she added. “Everything flows.” She knew her Greek guys. “But I love you anyway,” she whispered.

  “Same here,” I said.

  Then she looked at me strangely, and we felt nameless gulfs widening between us. Images from our histories tumbled in that void as we bridged it, along with the figure of Spencer voyaging among the stars with my spare set of keys.

  Political Horrors

  overtake us as we grow up...

  I Walked With Fidel

  “Well, of course I don’t have any plans for dying.”

  —Fidel Castro, Playboy interview, August 1985

  HE CAME RIGHT UP TO THE FRONT GATE OF the naval base at Guantanamo Bay and stood there in the bright sunlight, empty-handed, staring at us. He seemed harmless enough, so I opened the gate and went out to meet him. “What do you want?” I asked. The corner of his mouth twitched as if he were trying to say something. “It’s him, isn’t it?” Kip shouted, coming out after me. “Sure looks like Old Inconvertible himself,” I said. Kip walked around the tall, white-bearded figure in army fatigues. “What do you want?” The old man mumbled something in Spanish. “Did you get that?” I asked. “I think he wants to come in,” Kip said. “I’ll watch him. Get the sergeant.” I took a better grip on my automatic rifle and faced the Cuban leader, wondering what had happened to him. He seemed glassy-eyed and stiff, without expression. Things hadn’t gone well with him after the Soviets cut him loose, leaving him with no cheap source of coal and oil. He had remained in power for a while because everyone was afraid of what might happen without him. The AIDS epidemic had destroyed tourism, and exports of sugar, nickel, and citrus fruits had declined substantially. Washington had simply let Fidel stew, then dealt with those who came to power after him, just as the Israelis had done with Arafat. The club of rivals just couldn’t bear to grant each other anything, especially vindication. Revenge and punishment were real satisfactions for them, to be savored in this life, not some later one. I had always felt the same way.

  The sergeant came out with Kip and laughed. “Well, well,” he said, “what do we have here? Looks like the old boy himself. Come to collect the rent personally?”

  “There’s something wrong with him, Sarge,” I said.

  “Looks like a zombie. It’s probably not him, but who cares? Take him somewhere and let him loose. And don’t be long about it, Corporal!”

  “Yes, Sarge,” I said, watching the old man, who seemed afraid of us. I had only a few days left in my hitch, and was looking forward to going back to college in Miami, my home town. But as Kip brought out the jeep, I realized that if this was Castro, then he had delivered himself into the hands of someone who had the background to know what to do with him. College could wait.

  I got him into the jeep and drove a few miles up the road, where I stopped and said, “My grandfather was with you in the hills when you started—and you locked him up for twenty years, you bastard.”

  The old man turned toward me, trembling; saliva glistened in his unkempt beard. His eyes seemed to register emotion, then dulled and remained fixed and bulging. The afternoon sun was hot, but I was the only one sweating as I demanded that he tell me why he had come to the gate.

  Slowly, haltingly, he told me what had happened to him, how he had always taken good care of his health, until one day he was diagnosed with colon cancer that had erupted quickly and was too far gone for treatment. So he went to the last of his crackpot researchers and ordered them to save his life. They were the ones who
had helped him try his crank genetic theories in costly breeding experiments for the improvement of cattle, and had produced climate-resistant stock that wasn’t much good for milk or meat. One of these men had also developed a strain of giant strawberries that were mostly water. The only Nobel laureate Castro had lured to the island had left in disgust after these failures. The cranks who stayed studied folk medicines, convincing Castro that vast secrets remained to be uncovered, medicines that would startle the world and make Cuba free of the dependency on foreign coal and oil.

  Fidel turned to these shamans to prolong his life, which they did, but their treatments had not given him the health and vigor he had wanted. By then he had already been retired from power, by a party congress intent on “democratization,” and was living at a small country estate, where he hoped to survive his opponents, whom he saw as corrupted by the illusions of democratic rule that had swept the world in the ’90s. As he saw it, the reformers had merely found a way to justify doing business with the United States, keeping themselves in power by serving neo-imperialist influences, and averting the American invasion of Cuba.

  He told me of his plight in snatches, then begged me to take him to the United States to find medical help for his condition, which enabled him to live, but with hardly a life to speak of. When I told him I would try, he grasped my arm and seemed about to weep, but what came out was a terrible wheezing, as if all the moisture in his lungs had turned to jelly and he was trying to expel it.

  I left him with a cousin for the few days remaining in my hitch, then called my brother Miguel, who owned a night club in Miami. Miguel made our travel arrangements, including getting “Fidel” a visa as an entertainer.