Both Luanne and I know that’s a crock of shit.
There’s an old first aid kit in a cramped room at the back of the diner, so she leads me there. She sits me down in a familiar beat-up armchair. I know this place better than my own apartment. I’m guessing I’ve got two broken ribs, but there’s nothing she can do about that, so I don’t mention it. They’ll heal in time.
Time. Yeah, time heals all wounds.
“Will!” Her voice snaps me out of it.
“What?”
“Are you gonna help me do this or are you gonna stare at the wall? I gotta get back to work. I want you out of here when I’m done.”
Here comes the pitch. “I can’t go back to my place. The old lady wants her rent money. She sees me again without anything—”
“You’ll think of something.” Amy’s trying to be hard, but she’s not like that. That’s Luanne talking, right there.
“You’re right,” I say. “It’s not your problem. There’s a walk-in center in the Village. I can pitch up there and maybe pick up some cash from T-Bone tomorrow.” Her eyes widen and she shakes her head. I push on towards the home plate. Tie up the grift. “I gotta get some cash from somewhere, Amy.”
“By running drugs? That’s how you’re gonna do it?”
“I’m desperate.”
“You remember what happened last time? What he did to you?”
Sure I remember. He did it to me. The one and only time Amy ever took me to an ER. Cops leaned on me the whole time I was in there. First they played nice, like they usually do. Then they started in with the threats—they’d say they found this shit on me, they found that shit on me. I’d better help them out or do some time.
Whatever.
Time doesn’t matter to me. Time is the one thing I don’t have.
I checked myself out and stayed low until I could get T-Bone his money. We’re cool now, he and I. As cool as you can be with an OG. But he’s my only in. And he’s Amy’s open wound. She sat with me the whole time in the ER. Things were pretty good between us back then—maybe she even loved me for a while. But these things break and there’s no way to fix them once they do.
Amy looks away and I swear her eyes are wet. For a moment, I consider getting up and leaving. Doing something classy for a change. Leaning down and kissing her hair and then just walking out the door. Taking that terrible choice away from her, so she doesn’t have to get involved with me again. If I was any kind of guy, that’s what I’d do. But I’m not any kind of guy.
I wait until she gets up and slips a hand into her leather jacket and pulls out her keys. I love that jacket—it looks so damn good on her. She presses the keys into my hand, but she won’t look at me.
“I’ll sleep on the couch,” I offer, and she nods. Then she turns away from me and heads back into the diner. I slip out the back door. I’m not sure I can stomach Luanne again right now.
I dip into a Korean market and lift some flowers, then sling them in a vase when I get to her place. I tidy up a little and put the vase on the table so she’ll see them when she gets in. Then I fix some mac n’ cheese and leave enough in the fridge for her. When she gets home it’s maybe three in the morning. She eats and finds me in her bed. She curls up next to me, and of course we don’t go to sleep right away.
We stay in bed and sleep away the morning, rising well into the afternoon. Sometimes we do a little more than sleep. I cook for us again and we watch old black-and-whites on her laptop. She doesn’t have a shift tonight so suggests we do something together. I tell her that sounds good to me, because it does.
But when she drifts off again in the late afternoon, I leave her sleeping and go to find T-Bone. I know where he’ll be this time of day. One last run, I promise myself on the bus as I stare out over Manhattan’s star-spangled skyline. Some easy cash to front up a better hustle than three-card monte. T-Bone will see me right. I know how to play him. He uses kids to run the street deals, but he doesn’t like to use them for the bigger pick-ups. He doesn’t go himself, and he likes to keep his connected guys away if he can. So from time to time, he’ll use me. He says he likes my eyes, that he’s sure I can see things, feel the subtle shifts in the street better than anyone else. Maybe he’s right. I’ve never been arrested—God knows what would happen if I were. If they dug into my juvie records, they’d want to know where the hell I was before four years ago. Because before that, there isn’t a single record with my name on it. So I’ve learned to watch my back.
T-Bone’s at the steakhouse he owns up in Harlem. He loves to sit in the back room with his guys while the moneyed cliques get their kicks slumming it up there. He brings in the best Argentinian beef he can, and even dragged over a chef from some high-profile place in Philly. He loves it when restaurant critics from the papers give his place star ratings. It makes me laugh. There are four strip clubs within two hundred meters.
My face must look pretty bad because he laughs when he sees me. So do his guys. I let them laugh because it gives me time to check out the room; it’s different somehow, but I can’t say how. Something’s off. There are two girls in here—lean and tall and glittering with bling. I don’t know them, never seen them before. One catches me staring. She sneers, then looks away and murmurs something to her friend, who laughs.
“Fuck happened to you, Flipper?” T-Bone says. Flipper. Not Ace or Joker or something clever. I’d have even taken Jack. He went for Flipper because he knows I flip cards. Fucking great. At least he didn’t call me Snot-Boogie.
“I like it rough, you know,” I say, bobbing my head like some banger. Always the wiseass, but T-Bone digs it. He nods at the girls in the room and they turn to leave. I’ll admit to a little jump in my chest when I see them walk out. T-Bone likes good-looking girls.
“What can I do for you?” he asks as he relaxes back in his chair. Dark eyes watch me. The halogen light kicks off his smooth, dark skin and picks out his cornrow hair. A diamond stud glistens in each ear.
I run my tongue along my teeth. There’s something hard balling in my throat. “I need some quick green. You got anything you need picking up?”
“You remember what happened last time, Flipper?”
“That was a misunderstanding, T,” I protest, with the right amount of respect for the guy with a nickel-plated, ivory-handled nine-mil tucked into his pants. “You know that’s not going to happen again, right? You made your point.”
“True that—it won’t happen again, Flip,” he says, eyes tight, making him look just like the predator he is. “You ain’t getting no green until you deliver. You feel me? Zee’ll wait for you an’ drop the dollars when you come back.”
I don’t have a whole lot of options, so I say, “Of course.”
T-Bone holds out a hand to one of his guys, who passes him a cell phone. He tosses it to me. Catching it twists my ribs, but I think I manage to hide the pain.
“You call the number in there at eleven tomorrow night,” T-Bone says. “You be ready, you hear me?”
“You got it,” I say. “Eleven.”
“You can go now,” he says. I don’t wait around.
It wasn’t always like this, running smack for gangsters and pulling street hustles. But the truth is, I’ve always been different.
I was five years old when it first happened. I didn’t understand, of course, because I was just a kid and it had never happened before. I woke up in a garden that looked like the one outside my home, only it wasn’t. I was eventually found wandering a street that was very similar to the one I remembered, calling for my parents at the door of a house that wasn’t mine. The people who found me did the first thing they could think of when faced with a child so young, alone, and apparently delirious—they called the police.
I told the tall cop who knelt beside me my name, of course, and my address. I insisted that house, that one there, was mine. And that my parents would be in it. They knocked on the door, but the owners were away. Whoever they were, they weren’t my parents.
They
searched their records for any sign of the two people I told them I belonged to. They were in those records, and their faces sure looked like those of the people I had loved from the very first moment I was born. I screamed and pointed, defiant and triumphant. I tore the photographs from the page and held them. Nothing could have prepared me for the shock of being told they were dead. Killed years before in a car accident. The police made enquiries with friends, neighbors, and relatives. All agreed on one thing: the two people in those pictures I clutched in my hands had never had a child.
I refused to believe anything I was told, and eventually there was only one place they could send someone like me.
I cried the whole of that first night, until I learned there are people in institutions like that who prey on those who cry. Not all of them are kids, either. I never cried again after that. I learned to hit first and keep hitting until they went down. Kids stayed away from me, and the wardens gave me space when I was calm. They never took those photographs from me.
Five years later, when I was ten, it happened again. I didn’t realize at the time—it would only become clear to me later—but it was precisely the same time and date, to the second. I can’t say it surprised me any less. I had come to believe that the photographs I carried were totems—memories I had somehow created for myself. That’s what years of psychiatrists and psychologists poking around inside your head will do to you, washing away every genuine thought and replacing them with pre-packaged, mass-produced notions of truth. Of course, I didn’t have a clue what was happening.
But when I woke again in a new place, I was streetwise enough to keep my mouth shut and get to know the area first. It was then that I knew the photographs I still carried—now faded and torn, yellowed with age and touch—really were of my parents. That everything I had been forced to believe about myself, every lie I had been fed about my sanity, was in fact utter bullshit.
They say the truth shall set you free, but usually the truth is worse than the lie.
I was born in 1960. My parents named me William Edward McIntyre. On September 1st, 1965, at just after midday on what was a sunny but cool afternoon, I ceased to exist. At least, that’s what I imagine must have happened, because at precisely the same time of day, on September 1st, 1975, a five-year-old boy who gave his name as William Edward McIntyre was found wandering a street that he insisted contained a house that was his home, looking for two people that had died eight years earlier in a car accident. No record existed of him being born, or having lived anywhere under that name at all. Like I appeared out of nowhere.
Five years later, on September 1st, 1980, just after midday, I ceased to exist for a second time. There was no flash, no blinding light or thunderous drama. No perfect sphere of swirling lightning. I just blinked and everything changed. If I remember it right, on September 1st, 1990, which is where I was when I next opened my eyes, it was raining.
It’s August 2009 now, and I’m either 19 or 49, depending on how much Jack Daniels I’m swimming in. I’ve jumped three times, the last one landing me in 2005. On September 1st, 2010, I guess there’ll be a fourth.
* * *
Zee’s not waiting for me in the car after the pickup. Instead, in the back, there’s another of T-Bone’s connected guys. I don’t remember his name. I hand over the backpack. He unzips it, looks inside, and nods.
“Go get your money,” he says.
I’m confused. “What do you mean?”
“You think it’s here? What are you, some kind of fucking mope?”
“Where is it?”
“Zee’s got it. Outside Pecorino’s on 110th.” They love Pecorino’s because there’s no surveillance camera coverage. There’s a little alley next door where shit goes down all the time. It’s about a block away.
I get out and start to walk. I know something’s off, but I can’t say what it is. Maybe if I weren’t so pumped, I might have sensed them, but I’m not paying attention. Same way I didn’t pay enough attention back in T-Bone’s place. Lazy.
Zee’s standing in the shadows of the alley, waiting for me. I nod to him and he nods back. He’s cold, Zee, always has been. Doesn’t speak much. He hands me an envelope and, like the dumb fuck I am, I look inside. It’s stuffed full of twenties. Payday.
Too late, I realize. I look up and Zee’s pointing his nine-mil at my face.
“T-Bone said to tell you, it ain’t never alright what you did,” he says. “Night-night, motherfucker.”
Time stretches and slows. I can hear every pulsing throb of my heart. The rush of my breath in my ears.
They’re here now. I can feel them.
Something punches into one side of Zee’s head and drags a slick mess of glistening black out the other. He hovers for a moment, eyes wide and confused, then crumples.
Them.
I don’t remember how old I was the first time I saw them. Maybe thirteen or fourteen. I was running from a police cruiser after a grift that went wrong—one street hustle too often on the same corner. Sound familiar? I took a blind alley full of dumpsters and stale urine and came up empty. Had to climb a chain-link fence to get away. I hardly noticed the tall figure wrapped in the shadows who didn’t belong. I can’t say how or why I knew, what it was about the vague shape in the darkness, but it was off.
I didn’t think much about it then with the police on my tail and all, but now, months later, there it was again. The same feeling, as though the air had been disturbed by something diseased and alien. Something that didn’t belong.
Because they don’t belong. It took me a while, but eventually I worked that out. They’re just like me. None of us belong. We’re shades, ghosts that shimmer on the fringes of reality.
But this is the first time they’ve interfered. They’ve killed someone. I don’t understand.
What does it matter? I can’t be here. Can’t stand and ask questions. So I turn and run.
Muggy rain hammers the warm asphalt as I huddle in the alley across from Amy’s diner. A Mercedes-Benz is parked a half-block down the street, away from the light thrown by the street lamps. The two vague silhouettes inside have been there for more than an hour. It doesn’t take a genius to work out they’re T-Bone’s guys. And they’re looking for me.
Amy’s inside, dropping a burger and fries in front of a customer. She looks pale, even in the dull light inside the diner. Her eyes are rimmed in red. Maybe she’s not sleeping. I flinch as I watch her, then pull out the phone and dial the only number in the contacts.
“Yeah?” T-Bone’s voice.
“Guess we’re not good then?” I say.
“You shot my boy,” he says. “That’s a problem for you.”
He sounds too calm. That terrifies me.
“I’m leaving the city, T-Bone. Tonight. I’m leaving New York.” I can’t keep the tension from my voice.
T-Bone is silent for a moment. Then he says, “I’ll find you.”
“No, you won’t. And I’m not worth the green, either. Shit, tell everyone you ended me. Shot me down in the street. Whatever. I’m not going to be here to say shit about it. You get your cred and you don’t have to see me again.”
He pauses again and the line hisses. “You come back here, and you know what you get.”
“I know.”
T-Bone’s a businessman as much as he is OG. It’ll stick in his throat that I’m gone, and he’ll call in a few favors to find me, but if he thinks I’m out of Manhattan, he’ll leave Amy alone. If he knows me at all, he gets that I’ll run out on her the moment I feel the heat coming. He’s not going to 187 her just to get at me—too much grief comes with that sort of recklessness. He’ll put some of his guys on her for a while to see if I come back, but he’s no fool.
No, the best thing I can do for Amy is to leave. Fifteen minutes later, I’m on a train at Grand Central and heading north out of the city.
* * *
I’m breathless, my lips and throat dry. The church is freezing. Outside, brown fall leaves are already strewn acr
oss chill Toronto streets. I’m sitting at the back, hidden by a wide stone plinth. A baby’s crying is the only noise I can hear; the murmur of the priest’s words has now all but faded into nothing. There’s an acid burn seeping into my skin and my chest is tightening.
It’s my son crying. I’m here, watching him, and I still can’t believe it.
James William Longden.
I’m overcome by a need to go to him, to hold him. It’s all I can do to stop myself from getting up. But I made a promise to myself that I would stay away—a promise I’ve already broken by being here. And broken promises are not strangers to me, more like old friends as familiar as worn slippers tucked beneath a bed.
“What are you doing here?”
I snap round to the voice next to me. It’s familiar, and I know who it is before I see her anguished face. There are tears in Amy’s red eyes. The lustre I used to love is missing. Her hair is pulled back tight and her face is pale.
“What did you expect?” I’m unable to keep the bitterness from my tone. “I find out I have a son, and you expect me to ignore that? He is my son, isn’t he?”
I found out through Facebook. It’s been almost a year since I left Manhattan. That small boy is three months old. The timing is perfect. He was conceived the same late-August day I went to run drugs for T-Bone—the last time Amy and I were together. It took some work, but I found out the christening would be with her family back in Toronto. And I came. If I needed more, seeing the look in her eyes now, there’s no doubt he’s my son.
“I have a life now,” she says, the words catching in her throat. “I have someone.”
I’ve seen him. The man holding my son at the altar. Smiling with Amy’s family. Luanne hasn’t seen me yet. I wonder what she’ll do when she does.
The Time Travel Chronicles Page 27