by Alan Seeger
Finally, Thanksgiving approached, and Nikki planned to take the entire week off from school to prepare for the holiday. On Sunday night, she walked into her father’s bedroom and pointed out that Thanksgiving was only four days away. He shrugged through his pounding headache and mumbled, “I got nothin’ to be thankful for.”
Nikki’s blue eyes flashed fire, like her mother’s had when she was angry. “You don’t have anything to be thankful for? What the hell do you mean? Daddy, I know you loved Mom. We all loved her. But you still have at least four other people who love you, and instead of living your life and dealing with things the way Mom would have wanted, you’re sitting here in your own stink, fucking off and doing nothing.”
Steven did a double take at the profanity, staring at his daughter with new eyes. Man, he thought, when did she grow up?
“Now, wait just a —” he began.
“No, I’m not waiting any longer,” Nikki hissed. “I’ve waited three weeks for you to pull yourself together. Three weeks. You’ve been in here, moping around, only coming out of this room when you need more beer, watching TV — and it’s not even good TV — and sleeping off your hangover every damned day. It’s time to get back to the real world. It’s what Mom would have wanted you to do.”
Steven looked at her for a moment as she stood defiantly, daring him to try to oppose her. He looked at the floor. “You’re right, Nikki. I’m sorry. I — I’m really sorry.”
He went to hug her, but she refused, saying he smelled like a garbage can. “I’m sorry, sweetheart. I’ll go get cleaned up,” he said, and went into the bathroom to take a shower.
Steven stood in front of the sink, staring at himself in the mirror. Taking a good look at his reflection, he realized just how far he had let himself slide. For God’s sake, he thought, you look like a homeless drifter or a resident of Skid Row, which made him wince. Nikki was right. How had he let himself get sucked into such a vortex of self-pity?
Sucked into a vortex. Something about that phrase struck a nerve. He had the most peculiar feeling of déjà vu.
He shaved the nearly three weeks of beard from his haggard face, feeling like he was fighting his way through the tangles of a tropical jungle. Finally he was at least semi-presentable; now for the shower.
He adjusted the water temperature, stripped off the rank polo shirt, stained sweat pants and soiled underwear he’d been wearing for days, and stepped into the stinging shower. The water felt incredibly good on his aching back. Why hadn’t he done this days ago? He began to scrub the sweat and grime from his weary body.
Suddenly he became aware of an intense amber glow that lit up the bathroom, shining through the Plexiglas shower doors, and of a presence. Somebody was in here with him; he was sure of it, although he hadn’t heard the door open. Besides, it was locked. He stood stock still as the shower beat against his skin, uncertain of what to do.
He heard the sound of a woman clucking her tongue. Tsk, tsk, tsk. His heart raced. It sounded like Lynne, but of course that couldn’t possibly…
“Hello?” he said, “Who’s there?”
The shower door suddenly slid open. There was a woman standing there, shaking her head at him, her hand on the door railing. She was surrounded in a halo of light, sparkling like a diamond, and was dressed in what seemed to be a champagne-colored silken robe. The hair color was a medium blonde, like Lynne’s, but the resemblance stopped there. This woman was most definitely not Lynne.
“Are you an angel?” he asked wide eyed, half expecting to find that a heavenly messenger had been dispatched to reunite him with Lynne, in some celestial realm. He wasn’t a religious man, by any means, but for some reason he had an odd feeling at this point that anything was possible.
“Naw, ‘fraid not,” she replied in a broad accent. “Believe me, I’m no angel. Ask anybody.”
He stared at her. “Who are you?”
“You don’t remember me, do you? No, of course you don’t. Technically, we’ve never met before,” she said, smiling. “You seem like you’re in need of a little guidance.”
Steven nodded. “God, ain’t that the gospel truth.”
She gave a crooked grin and said, “Oh, I know, honey. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”
He frowned, wondering who this person was, what she had up her silken sleeve, and how she got into his locked bathroom.
He heard Nikki’s voice in the hallway. “Daddy? Who are you talking to?”
“Uh… no one, baby. I was just… uh… singing in the shower,” he answered.
He stood staring at the unknown woman until she handed him a bath towel and said, “Here, maybe you better cover yourself up, big guy.”
He suddenly realized that he was standing naked in the shower; he turned off the water and wrapped the towel around his waist, his face flushing.
“Don’t worry about it. Where I come from, a naked body ain’t no big deal.”
“Where exactly do you come from?”
“Well, it’s a long story,” she answered. “Easy answer: the future.” She pronounced it fyoocha. “Long answer: way in the future. Your future. And Lynne’s, too.”
Steven froze, his face suddenly stony. “Lynne’s dead.” All the emotions he’d held back for the last three weeks, the feelings he’d drowned in gallons of alcohol and anesthetized with untold hours of mindless television, came rushing out like flood waters bursting through a collapsing dam. He found himself weeping, the crushing weight of Lynne’s death bearing down on him once more.
“I know,” she said with a sad smile. “That’s why I came to see you the last time.”
“The last time?” Steven frowned.
“I know you don’t remember, but I was here before… except I wasn’t, now, because you… hmm, do you remember somebody showing up pretending to be one of the Muses? Oh, never mind, you don’t even remember what it was that you did that made you forget.” He looked at her, clearly bewildered. “Let me explain,” she said.
Her name was Callie, she said, and she had traveled back from the distant future, where apparently everyone wore silky robes and glowed like fireflies, because something that Steven had done, or more importantly, failed to do — it kind of depended on your point of view, she explained — was threatening to erase her and her entire family tree from ever having existed.
Steven stared at her. “Something I did?”
“It’s —” she stopped and looked away, unwilling to meet his gaze.
“What is it?” Steven asked.
Callie was silent for a moment and then said, “You really don’t remember anything… odd that happened recently? Or perhaps I should say, something that it seems like you ought to remember, but can’t quite recall?”
Steven frowned, thinking to himself. He remembered the odd sense of déjà vu he’d had minutes before, but now that he thought about it, he couldn’t seem to pinpoint what had triggered it.
“The last few weeks have been crazy,” Steven finally said. “My wife…” the tears welled up again. “My wife was killed in a car accident earlier this month.”
“I know that,” Callie said, “and that’s why I’m here.”
Steven stared at her. “What are you talking about?”
“I can’t… oh, for God’s sake, the timeline is screwed up enough as it is, I don’t guess it matters now if you know this,” Callie said. She hesitated just a moment and then continued. “Lynne wasn’t supposed to die in that accident. In my timeline, she lives to be a little old lady knitting afghans. You and Lynne are supposed to have another child, and…” she stopped in mid-sentence.
“And what?” Steven asked.
“The baby you are supposed to have… grows up to be my great-great-great, I don’t know exactly how many times great, grandmother,” Callie said, “and if Lynne dies before you have her, she’s never born, and if that’s the case… well, then… neither am I.”
Chapter 67
“You’re my granddaughter?” Steven said.
; “Well, great-great-great — about eighteen times or so.”
Steven’s knees suddenly felt rubbery. “I think I need to sit down. Can we go in the other room?”
“Sure. I’ll be in there after you get dressed.” She suddenly became as transparent as saran wrap and walked through the wall in the direction of his bedroom. Steven stared after her, certain that he would wake up any moment. Sure, that’s it. This is a dream. Maybe this whole three weeks has been a dream and when I wake up Lynne will be lying next to me and I’ll tell her about it and she’ll hold me and tell me how silly it was, that she’s not going anywhere.
But he didn’t wake up. He shook his head as if to clear the cobwebs and began to get dressed.
Chapter 68
Steven had to admit, getting cleaned up and into fresh clothes did make him feel much better physically, but his heart still ached. He went into the kitchen and opened the fridge, reaching for a beer, then thought better of it and selected a Diet Coke instead. Nicolette, who was in the process of cleaning the kitchen after the other kids had finished dinner, looked at him and said, “Hi, Daddy. Good choice.”
“Hi, sweetheart. Thank you for playing the hardass a little bit ago. I feel a hundred percent better.”
“I knew you would,” she smiled, and went back to scrubbing dishes. Steven made a sandwich out of some chicken patties that were left from dinner and headed back to his room.
He walked in to discover Callie sitting crosslegged in the middle of his unmade bed. He had almost dismissed her as a hallucination, but there she was, still shimmering and smiling like the Cheshire Cat. He stopped, staring at her, and closed the door behind him.
“Okay… you’re still here,” he said to her. “I kinda thought…”
“You imagined me? No such luck, Grandpa. I’m not the Ghost of Christmas Past or Present, but you might call me the Ghost of the Denver Family’s Future if you don’t listen to what I’m telling you.”
“All right,” Steven said. “Let me put on some music so that the kids don’t hear us talking and come in to check on me.” He plugged his mp3 player into the speakers and set it on random. The Greg Kihn Band kicked things off with (Our Love’s In) Jeopardy. He thought to himself how appropriate that seemed.
Steven looked at Callie and heaved a sigh, realizing that this was really happening. He sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her. “You mind if I have dinner while we talk? I haven’t exactly been eating right lately.”
“No, not at all. Go right ahead,” Callie said.
“You want something? Chicken sandwich? Diet Coke?”
“Fried foods… yeah, I remember reading about those. Tempting, but no thanks. And we figured out in the 22 century that artificial sweeteners… well, let’s just say that you really don’t wanna know what that’s doing to your insides. You help yourself, though. I’m good.”
Steven dug in while Callie produced a tiny silver device from her pocket. “I brought this ‘cause I figured you’d need a little convincing,” she said. It resembled a cell phone but turned out to have all the functions of a laptop, plus the ability to project its display image as a holographic image in midair.
She pressed a button on the device and set it down on Steven’s desk. A halo of rainbow-colored light appeared in midair in the middle of the room. It swirled like a tiny globe spinning for two or three seconds, and then resolved to a rainbow-shaded cascade of text that made Steven smile.
Welcome to
Portal
©2799 Microsoft, Inc.
So Microsoft is still around after 800 years, Steven thought, and they’ve moved on from Windows to Portals. He laughed softly to himself, but then stopped as he had another intense bout of déjà vu.
“Something the matter?” Callie asked.
“No, I just… er, the copyright date on that kind of shocked me,” Steven said. “Are you actually from the 27 century?”
“Not quite yet,” she said. “This is a brand new software release, just came out this year. Technically, the 27 century doesn’t begin until 2801, still a couple of years away… for me, I mean.”
Steven felt his head spinning. That seems to have been happening a lot lately, he thought, and then wondered why he’d thought that. Déjà vu all over again.
Callie tapped another button and the display resolved into what seemed to be a three dimensional PowerPoint-style presentation.
She spent the next twenty minutes or so explaining that the child Steven and Lynne were supposed to have in 2014 would grow up to be a teacher like Lynne, and give birth to three children between 2036 and 2044. Those three children produced seven grandchildren — “Actually, great-grandchildren to you,” she pointed out to Steven — between 2058 and 2077.
The music segued to Billy Joel’s jazzy piano flourishes that were the intro to New York State of Mind. Steven sat quietly, soaking in the peaceful music, his mind trying in vain to process what Callie was telling him. He thought to himself that she must have rehearsed this quite a few times, because she had it down cold. Her presentation was as smooth as the one he’d heard from an Amway exec one night when he and Lynne had been invited by a friend to see a “business opportunity” in Bozeman.
Since Steven and Lynne’s fifth child had been born, Callie explained, the descendants of that single offspring multiplied down through time to amount to — she indicated a figure displayed in the holographic display — 1,347,982 people.
Steven’s mouth fell open. “1.3 million people are descended from this one baby that Lynne and I were supposed to have had?” He was stunned. He’d never thought about how families multiplied.
“That’s right,” said Callie. “And I was selected by my family — my parents and grandparents — to come back and guide you away from choices that would cause that child not to be born. I am the fifth child of my family, and so they selected me to come back and ensure that the fifth child in your family — the ancestor of all these people I’m talking about — is born. The existence of all 1.3 million of those people depends on you listening to what I have to say and letting me help you fix this situation.”
“But… it’s too late. Lynne is gone,” Steven said. “It’s all over.” He looked at Callie with a puzzled expression. “If Lynne is dead, then that means we never have another baby, so… how come you still exist?”
Callie smiled at him with the patient expression of a teacher tutoring a slow student. “By my time, we have certain methods of holding the timeline together, at least temporarily. Think of it as temporal duct tape.” She explained. “It doesn’t mean we can change things forever, but it does mean that I didn’t just blink out of existence when Lynne was killed.” Steven flinched at the word. “I’m sorry, Steven. I know the wound is still fresh. But if you do what I ask, you may be surprised at how things come out.”
Steven gazed at her. “What do I have to do?”
Chapter 69
Lianne Denver drove her battered blue Ford Escort down one of the side streets of Three Forks. She had just picked up a baggie containing a hundred tiny purple tablets of the sort known as “Haze.” She was already beginning to feel the effects of the Haze she’d dry-swallowed when she got back into her car after coming out of her connection’s apartment. It produced a massive euphoric rush and a feeling that things were solidly under control and everything was going perfectly for her.
Lianne pulled up in front of the old house that had been her parents’ home. The paint was peeling and weatherbeaten; there was a rusting pickup truck in the yard, all four tires flat. It had belonged to her brother Samuel, before he had been sentenced to 25-to-life for the beating death of a man in a bar three years before.
She walked into the house. “Hey, baby,” she said. Her sometime boyfriend Brent Laramie was lying on the sofa, sneering at an ancient Gilligan’s Island episode on the TV. He was clad only in a pair of soiled boxers and a ragged Wolfmother tee shirt. There were empty beer cans covering the coffee table, along with empty chip bags, a crusty half-emp
ty Ramen cup, and a half dozen crumpled adult magazines. A cheap acoustic guitar, missing its G string, leaned against the wall by the television.
“Did you get ‘em?” he growled, scratching himself. “Man… Gilligan is such a dick.”
Lianne rolled her eyes at him. “Of course I did. They’re in my purse. But Zero made me give him ten dollars more than what he told you.”
“Fucker.”
“I know, right?”
Brent took the bag from her, downed two Hazes, and lay back with his eyes closed.
Chapter 70
Dakota Denver stood on the shoreline a mile from her flat in Steinhatchee, Florida and looked out over Deadman Bay. She often came out to these bluffs, overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, to think about her life. More often than not, her thoughts turned to her father, evoked by the name of this place. For seventeen years she’d mourned him, her life swallowed up by something that most people would describe as an obsession. She had been only 16 when he had given up on attempting to cope with the grief of her mother’s death. She was the one who got home from school early after one of those annoying pep assemblies and had discovered, first the note, written on yellow legal paper, tented on the kitchen table, and then, after a frantic search, her father’s body hanging from a branch of one of the apple trees outside.
Her sister Nikki had insisted that they use some of the remaining money from their mother’s insurance to send her to art school in Tallahassee, but she quit after three semesters, claiming that she lacked both the motivation to finish school and the inspiration to draw. Instead, she found the Steinhatchee flat for a pittance per month and supported herself by drawing caricatures of tourists wherever she could set up her chair and easel, often hitchhiking to places like Daytona Beach and Key West.
She’d wrestled for years with the idea of submitting ideas for a comic strip to some of the companies that published the kind of stuff she really enjoyed drawing. She kept coming back to the idea of someone traveling through a rip in the fabric of space-time, in a title that she called Dimejanpā, short for Dimension Jumper in Japanese. She had a sketchbook with pages of drawings that detailed her concepts — swirling green vortexes that led to a strange void, the mysterious disappearance of one of the lead characters… and she had no idea where the idea had come from.