I'll think for a moment: "I brought them back!" And then realize: what hubris! What folly!
To think that a man should have such power as to affect the course of a single human life much less the raw power of nature that sweeps and scours the planet and esteems us for naught.
I don't have any real power. Not even over my own life much less anything or anyone else. I am not as smart as I once believed myself to be. And I have learned, to my great sorrow, the difference between being wise and being clever.
I did a simple, brutish thing. I lied to an evil, monstrous child. I convinced it after eons of soul-crushing loneliness and unbearable confinement that a power greater than itself cared for it and would make things right. And then I tricked it into putting itself right back into the box it was so close to finally escaping from.
Unlike me, the star beast was as good as its word.
However haphazard or fully intended, Cthulhu had hit the Rewind Button.
Time unspooled, the waters receded, New Orleans rose from the depths, reborn as a city and its population was restored to life.
Everywhere, everyone and everything was returned to its proper place with very few exceptions. What was undone was redone. Time uncoupled, backed into its boxcar past, recoupled, then reversed, gliding forward again on a new track. The last one-hundred-and-eighty days was an abandoned spur, fenced off and already obscured by weeds and long grass. Time's passengers—all of the participants in its hurdy-gurdy parade—rode along now, completely unmindful of the days they had spent bloated and softened in the sludgy green mix of saltwater and silt. And those of us who had been in intimate proximity with the vast alien intellect that had put a temporary backspin on the cosmic mandella stood beside the "tracks" as that train passed by, first in one direction and then the other. Re-knitting decomposing corpses, reconstructing hurricane-shattered buildings, un-crumpling smashed automobiles, even reigniting those sparks of life which had guttered out and vanished. Temporal physics reinstating everything to its former state in a brief bursr of kinetic convulsion.
As long as it was present and in place to be rewound.
We had many a discussion as to how we would confront our other selves as Irena took Samm and me up the Mississippi, the Red, and finally the Ouachita Rivers in the Cuttlefish to Northeast Louisiana and my old house in West Monroe.
The New Moon was gone, not yet purchased as my old house still looked out over the river from the elevated bluff. It stood, yet unburned, yet unvisited by the fire elemental that would pay a conflagratory visit in another eight weeks or so. Another opportunity to unwrite a once written tragedy.
The house was quiet: no one was home when we arrived.
Irena was anxious to be off so we returned to the dock as twilight fell and we said our goodbyes. There was that sense that we each stood upon our own little tectonic plate of here and now but the slow creep of continental drift was more like the tipping, turning separation of ice floes, slippery and turning us from each other and into a new distance even as we tried to hold on to a final moment together.
She climbed back into the launch and pulled the hatch closed and I instinctively knew that I would never see her again. Wing-like stabilizers extruded on the port and starboard planes of the craft rounding its bullet-like form to more of a saucer shape and the submersible's recessed turbines started up with a whine. Instead of slipping beneath the waters, however, it slipped away from the dock and began to pick up speed, skimming over the waves like a hydrofoil—or a flat stone, skipped across the water by a giant child. Then it was airborne and banking to the south in a graceful arc, heading into the soft sea-blue of the deepening night.
It appeared as if Lord Vishnu plagiarized Irwin Allen for one of his gifted "secrets" to Dakkar.
I offered to let Samm sleep over before confronting her alternate timeline self. She demurred, asking to borrow the motor boat we used for errands to the Monroe side of the river.
"Sure," I told her, pretending to ignore her discomfort that had arisen since refolding of events. "Just thought you might be able to pick up some conversational pointers from our head-on when the other me gets home."
But that didn't happen.
The other me didn't come home because he didn't exist. Neither did the other "Mama" Samm D'Arbonne.
Perhaps, we decided later, we had fallen through the temporal cracks because of our proximity to the "Outside" mind that set it all in motion. As I was in Cthulhu's thoughts, invoking the meld at one end and physically grounded aboard the submarine at the same time, it might have given us some kind of chrono-spatial exemption from the event horizon of the time-wave. We were "unstuck" in the fourth dimension as fixed events were rewound and reset.
Which still didn't answer a number of questions. Such as how our "former" selves "jumped the tracks" and went missing when their future wound back to that moment in time and deposited "us" at the temporal line of scrimmage.
And then there was the little problem of reintegrating with that rebooted timeline.
Me? I was largely unchanged. Maybe six months older now if anyone had the equipment to measure my cellular degradation. And the nanites are gone—burned out—apparently by some kind of EMP effect tied to the temporal distortion wave. So, no nanos, no pheromones. Theoretically it's no longer an issue but Samm acts as if I'm still "weaponized" and need to be avoided at all costs.
Her transformation was more of an issue at first: splicing Samm back into her own, personal timeline had the potential of greater inconsistencies.
And Irena Pantera would have to find a way to explain to her father how she was learning much more about oceanography aboard the Nautilus than in her classrooms back at the University of Louisiana or aboard the Spindrift.
Surprisingly, everyone around us seemed to absorb these hiccups in perception with little reaction. Either we were very much off other people's radar to begin with . . . or something about the re-integrative process was self-adjusting for those who had no jump-cuts in their own personal splices.
In any event, we weren't Albert Einstein, Stephen Hawking, or John Heywood to answer such questions. Or, as the latter wrote back in 1546: "No man ought to looke a gift hors in the mouthe."
So we didn't. We counted everything a blessing. Especially that, in knowing what we knew, we could act to prevent the doomsday cycle of history from repeating itself. And that we could appreciate this second chance: that lives lost had been regained, sacrifices made had been repaid, and the scales of the universe had been brought back into balance without bloodshed or pain or loss. At least none that was final and irretrievable.
And then I discovered the codicil to Time's Bonus Round.
Dakkar, Irena, Samm, Suki, and myself were not the only "people" exempted from the temporal reset. The effect, I came to learn, did not extend into the realm of the Faerie.
Time has always run there differently.
I think about Lupé and Deirdre and Liban and wonder if my family thrives on some elven plane of existence. Or has some loophole in the space/time continuum consigned them to a nonexistent state, a temporal black hole? Have they fallen upward through the cracks that the Nautilus crew fell down, cancelled out like some sort of anti-temporal effect?
Has the same fate befallen those who stood with Fand? Did she port them out of the battle at the end? Did they take their leave thinking they had cheated death only to have missed the Resurrection? Are they now consigned to a Null-limbo between existences? Call it Newton's Law of Payment Due. For every action there is a reaction. Salvation demands sacrifice. The piper must be paid . . .
In the end I have gained the whole world at the price of the people I loved most.
Samm says I think too much.
She also says I drink too much so I figure she's just as wrong about the thinking.
Because August finally come round again.
It's just me all alone in a big two-story southern manse that I'd managed to keep from being incinerated this time around.
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br /> I sit around in the dark and I drink a little of this and a little of that and think about the broken, tormented mind that I lied to. I'd like to think the tumblers on its fragmented thoughts spun and aligned in such a way as to help it finally get off this planet and once again fall between the stars. I suspect, however, that it curses me from the lightless bottom of some deep sea trench, having lost this opportunity to return, courtesy of Captain Nemo. That it plots anew for some darker apocalypse in our hopefully distant future.
But that is not why I drink—and think—too much.
For the past two weeks—since August 24th—I've been watching TV pretty much around the clock. The images of Katrina burn my eyes and sear the back of my skull.
The universe is about balance and August has come round again.
When I was a child there was a well-known convention of board games—even chess—known as the "take back". Maybe the moving finger having writ moves on, but kids, for a time, have a that additional option to take back the ill-conceived move and substitute another as long as they can yell "Take back!" before their opponent completes his or hers.
Not so when we play adult games with adult opponents.
And not so when Fate is the one shuffling the deck, rolling the dice, moving the token, and spinning the wheel. Fate is like that uncle with the yellowed grin who may nod and say "All right . . ." but has already run the board seven different ways in the next twelve moves and you just don't know it, yet.
September crawls into the tiny room where I nest these days.
In terms of cosmic corrections we should consider that we got off easy. Maybe nineteen thousand deaths all totaled when it's done, Samm tells me over the phone.
Nineteen thousand deaths are supposed to be cause for rejoicing.
Most of the city was saved, she reminds me.
Sure, I say. I carefully hang up and go back to drinking.
Bureaucratic incompetence: federal, state, local. Years of malfeasance, generations really. And large helpings of folly and indifference.
What have we learned, boys and girls? That you can fight million-year-old monsters from the ass end of space but you can't fight city hall?
There are nights when I dream of my son, Will, and my daughter, Kirsten, growing up and at play among strange children with beautiful tilted eyes and musical voices in brightly colored meadows and darkly somber forests.
Other nights I am back in an Atlantean New Orleans with brightly colored fish darting in and out of the overturned streetcars on St. Charles Avenue. I awake from those strangely beautiful nightmares and wonder if New Orleans was saved at all. Did time fold back in upon itself and reboot reality? Or did we peel off on a secondary event-line and, somewhere in the multiverse, the Crescent City continues to host a new, aquatic citizenry beneath the waves in a separate timeline?
Maybe it all means nothing.
Maybe everything we do is pointless.
When we think of our fortunes told, divined, read forth, we often fall back on the image of the gypsy woman in a tent in a carnival sideshow. She takes our hand in hers and, gazing at our palm or into a dimly lit crystal, mutters vague warnings of an incomprehensible future.
But the universe is more machine than personality-based oracle. A better analogy might be those ancient and arcane platform scales that wobble as you step up. Your weight settles in for just that one moment in time, it spits out a card with a precise rendering of your weight and a crisp assessment of your part in The Cosmic Plan. And then, as you step off, the platform shifts beneath your uncertain feet; internal counterweights "clunk" as they elevator, seeking new levels, the needle swings back and forth like a pendulum before equalizing, before coming to rest, before settling back to the center, awaiting the next supplicant, the next pilgrim. The next mark.
Truth be told, we all prefer that image of the lady with the smoky dark tent, the scarves and the costume jewelry, holding our hand. We all want someone holding our hand in the dusk, in the dark, when our fate comes upon us and the pendulum swings back from mysterious trajectories. The anchor of others and the anchor of flesh as things spin out of control.
Because the universe is in motion. Always in motion. Even when you sleep.
I have a third dream when I'm not tossing and turning to the possibilities of my family in far off sylvan fields or a submarine city beneath the ever-shifting waves and currents.
I'm in a movie theater watching Walt Disney's Fantasia. Dancing alligators and hippos and ostriches . . .
And an elephant-headed boy with four arms who stomps like Michael Jackson, Gregory Hines, Mikhail Baryshnikov all rolled into one with killer disco moves.
"Hey," he says, from the screen, "listen up wallflower! Everything's a dance, my little lotus blossom! Everything's in motion! Everything has to stay in motion! Change happens! Get over it! Get on with it! It's a cosmic dance: it only stops when you die and maybe not even then! We'll talk more when you get your groove back!"
And then I awake to the Voice of Entropy calling through the rooms of my waking world like a distant funeral bell. "Bring out your dead!" it murmurs seductively, "bring out your dead!
And I whisper very softly beneath the sheet I've pulled up over my face against the morning sun:
"I'm not dead yet . . ."
THE END
Dead Easy Page 42