City of Ruins

by Mark London Williams

  That’s what weird about life. Half the time, you have no clue what’s really going on with people, grownups especially — what they’re really thinking or feeling or doing when you’re not around. The other half, things are exactly like they appear and yet no one believes that, either. Everyone looks for a catch, and no one can believe they might really be happy, even for a while, or really be sad. Everybody is always trying to explain things, but sometimes, a sunny afternoon is just a sunny afternoon.

  At least, according to my memory of sunny afternoons, since I’m sure not seeing any of them down here.

  I’ve had both things in my life — the unexplained secrets, and trying to hold on to what’s right in front of you. There was this seemingly normal family, once — mine — but there were also the time-travel experiments my parents were doing for DARPA, and they all went wrong, and changed history. My family’s history. Me.

  Changed my life from the way it was going to be. From that everything-turns-out-all right-life I thought I had when I was a little kid. To a life that includes a dinosaur for a friend, and a girlfriend who’s over a thousand years old.

  Wait. Did I just use the word girlfriend?

  “…your atomic map.”

  “What?” Sometimes I don’t really pay much attention to Thirty at all. I eat my sandwich and drink my hot chocolate and wait to go back to my room, where I have an old-fashioned Barnstormers game going with some paper and pencils, kind of like how they had to do it with boards and dice before there was electricity or whatever.

  “A map of your atomic structure. Some physical tests. We appreciate how cooperative you’ve been so far” — was she making a joke? — “but we also want to know how it is you’re able to do all this time-traveling without too many physical consequences.”

  “I get sick. I throw up.”

  “That’s nothing, compared to other people who have tried on your hat.”

  I remembered what happened the last time DARPA let some of its —workers? Troops? — try on the cap. The ones that came out of it alive, generally went crazy. Like Mr. Howe seems to have be.

  “You’re not still trying to make other people wear it?” I asked, letting the question hang there and letting my chocolate get cold. Like I said, wearing the hat creates some kind of impossible moment, opening up a type of rift in your own body. But not everyone’s body can take it — I don’t know if mine can because my atomic structure really is different from everyone else’s, or because maybe my brain is. Maybe some of the DARPA workers have gone crazy because they think the whole idea of time travel is crazy, to begin with.

  Thirty tried smiling at me again. “Like I said, we want to find out more about your molecular structure, your atoms, the electric charges in your body…to find out what makes you so…unique.”

  That was when she gave me a House of David replica jersey. With the name Bassett stitched in back, right over the “33.”

  “We just want you to be comfortable here.”

  I never did put on that jersey.

  At least not until a few minutes ago, when the alarm went off. And the Twenty-Fives came in and finished unstrapping me from the machine, though I don’t think they were happy that I’d already yanked out a lot of the wires myself.

  I only had my underpants on, in the mapping machine, so one of the Twenty-Five’s grabbed the House of David shirt and threw it at me and told me to get dressed.

  “Why?” I managed to ask.

  “We’re taking you to a more secure room.”

  “Why?”

  That’s when they threw my pants at me.

  And then they brought me here. To my mom’s old hotel room. Except, this time I didn’t have to time-travel to get here. This time, they brought the room to me.

  Or brought it to the DARPA tunnels, anyway, piece by piece, preserved like some kind of museum display so they could study every bit of it and try to figure out what was going wrong with all their plans. Apparently, the room had been boarded up for years, following some “incidents” back in the 1940s.

  After the time travel started, DARPA started to guess what some of those “incidents” might be, so while pretending to renovate part of the hotel, they dismantled the entire room and brought it here, trying to find clues.

  At least, that’s what I guessed after I asked one of the Twenty-Fives what my mom’s hotel was doing here in the first place.

  “It was scaring people, so we had to move it. Hotel guests started seeing things: ghosts, newspapers left in the hall that predicted the future. We don’t want people to be scared!”

  Except when he said it, he was looking up toward where the alarm noise was coming from and he looked pretty frightened himself.

  I bet they were really afraid the room had become one of those nexuses Clyne talked about — a place turned into a kind of time portal as a result of my mom’s work. I bet they’re wrong, but they aren’t taking any chances anymore.

  “Just stay in here, and don’t move!” Now both Twenty-Fives looked really scared.

  “What is it? What’s going on?”

  “This room should be safe enough. Don’t touch anything. We’ll be back.”

  That was a couple hours ago.

  I still half expect my mom to show up, and take me downstairs through the hotel lobby, past the actors doing that radio show — the one about families. One Man’s Family. Maybe it’s not just my family that’s in trouble now, though. Maybe it’s everybody’s.

  Everything here is exactly like I remember it. Even the pictures are here. The ones Mom drew, where she imagined how I would look as I grew up.

  She had to imagine it, she told me, because she wasn’t going to be there to see it herself.

  Here’s one of me as a teenager. I still don’t look like that yet.

  But I look older than in the first drawing she did. I’m not that little a kid anymore.

  I feel my face. It’s damp under my eyes.

  She’s already missed part of my growing. Already missed something she’ll never get back. I’ll never get back.

  Thunk!

  Sskkaa sskkaa sskkaa…

  Now what? A scratching noise, a loud mouse maybe. But I can’t believe, with all their security precautions, that even a mouse could get in here if it wasn’t allowed.

  Maybe the mouse is a spy. Or maybe the mouse used to be some other kid that wasn’t cooperating, and they decided not just to study his molecules and atoms, but to “rearrange” them.

  Well, either way, I could certainly use the company.

  Sskkaa sskkaa sskkaa…

  The noise is coming from the bathroom.

  Sskaaa sskkaaa sskkaa!

  I open the door.

  “Aaaahhhhh!”

  I yell. My visitor yells. We surprise each other.

  It’s not a mouse.

  “Friend Eli!”

  It’s Clyne.

  Clyne!

  “Clyne! What —? How did you get in the bathroom? It doesn’t matter — you’re way better than a mouse!”

  He’s scrunched up under the sink, like a kid playing hide-and-seek. His eyes widen when he sees me and he smiles, with all those dinosaur teeth.

  “A good time to meet, friend Eli!”

  Now he’s starting to sound like Thea.

  “A good time to meet!” I tell him in return. And with that, he rolls out from under the cabinet, and I can see he’s in some kind of handcuffs.

  “You will pardon me if I do not wave, in the custom of your species.”

  “Clyne, how did you get here? What have they done to—?”

  Wheenk! Wheenk! Wheenk!

  The alarms are still ringing in the distance, but now it sounds like more of them are going off.

  “I mean, Clyne, it’s great to see you. I’ve just been so alone here.”

  “The waters of happiness are under your eyes, friend Eli, and I am thus snkkkt! honored!”

  “But…what’s happening?”

  “I was hoping you could illu
minate for me.”

  “How did you get in here? Especially dressed like that?”

  “A long tale, or a short one, depending how much empirical evidence you require.” He holds up the shackles around his arms. “Perhaps we can unfetter me, and I can tell you more. And then” — Clyne brightens up, as if all the world’s problems were only small ones — “we can go find Thea and all become outlaws together!”

  Chapter Four

  Clyne: A Gerk-drive in Winter

  February 2020 C.E.

  Now that I had allowed myself to be taken captive, was I still considered an outlaw? And was it perhaps true that when time travel is outlawed, only outlaws would time travel?

  I pondered these questions whenever my interrogators asked me what I did to “hijack history,” or what I’d done “to the children,” by which I infer they mean my good friends Eli and Thea.

  “What precisely are you using time travel for?” they asked me, again and again.

  “Homework, originally.”

  They didn’t like that answer, glare-stamping me with their eyes and immediately conferring with each other.

  “But by now,” I continued, “I expect I have registered several ‘incompletes’ on my transcripts.”

  I was hoping this information might help them realize I have suffered, too, from my unexpected lateral detour to Earth Orange, but I was only met with more glare-stamps.

  “We will find out who you really are, Mr. ‘Klein’.” It was the one called Thirty speaking to me. I greeted her with “A good time to meet!” since I had last seen her when Thea rescued me from the holding zoo, where Thirty initially asked me similar questions, only to be similarly disappointed with my answers.

  But perhaps she didn’t want to be reminded of that particular parting of company.

  As I had then, I was trying to fully grasp the apprehension these mammals have toward Saurians. Perhaps it has to do with the buried collective fears stemming from the “dragons” of King Arthur and Merlin’s era, who were driven to extinction.

  It may have to do with the fact that still being such a young species, the Homo sapiens mammals of Eli’s earth struggle with the idea that Saurians existed for millions of years before they did, keeping the planet, I might add, in basic equilibrium while they did so. Except for events like the Great Sky Hammer, a nearly mythical meteor event on Saurius Prime that apparently actually occurred here on Earth Orange, and drove most of those early Saurians — except for the few dragon forebears that were to survive — into extinction, as well.

  I tried to explain some of this to my captors, along with the idea of this entire planet — indeed, perhaps its entire history — being a prime nexus, a critical node in the history of this whole galaxy, and perhaps, of the whole universe that exists on this plane. There is, I am coming to believe, something for both Saurian and mammal alike to learn here.

  “By ‘prime nexus,’ do you mean something like a beachhead, for your planet’s invasion of our earth?” Thirty asked me.

  “Saurians do not think of beaches as having body parts,” I told her.

  “We could use far less pleasant methods on you if you won’t cooperate,” she said, apparently unsure whether to break into a grimace, or attempt another smile. Instead, she asked a different question. “When you say ‘prime nexus,’ you mean a place on your cosmological map that you consider to be of critical importance? Worthy of conquest?”

  “No. This is not like one of your endless mammal wars over resources.”

  I tried to explain to them that a prime nexus was the point in a timeline where maximum possibilities and outcomes lurked. Using the spot where the unknown slave Brassy had been buried in New Orleans as an example, I told them that we had been drawn there to the era of Clark and Lewis and North Wind Comes because had Brassy lived, all history that came after her would have somehow been altered.

  “For the better?” Thirty asked me.

  “Well, are you earth mammals fond of the way history has turned out since?” I asked.

  I thought that illumination on the prime nexus question would be helpful, and might perhaps slake their endless thirst for “information,” most of which, I must confess, they appear to have a hard time understanding even when they get it.

  Usually, they would grow frustrated and send me back to one of their holding rooms, each with various guardians who came and went on their shifts, each assigned to watch me, to make sure I didn’t escape again.

  Such an escape would certainly be the outlaw thing to do, of course. But I wouldn’t have Thea’s help. She’d been taken captive, too.

  We were all taken captive when we time-ported back to Eli’s present, landing under the very bridge where Thea and I once tried to rescue our friend: “The Golden Gate.”

  And it’s orange!

  And while the locals probably imagine “Golden Gate” refers to the inlet from the ocean to their bay, I wonder if it’s not a signal — for those who know such signs — that the “gate” may be a place where such a nexus occurs.

  There must be some reason we keep being drawn back to it. And from my brief studies of Earth history, it would seem certain structures — the pyramids, a place called “Stonehenge” near where King Arthur and Merlin lived, to use but two examples — were built with the idea of some kind of nexus in mind, a place to channel and control the convergence of past and future and the fissures between dimensions.

  I couldn’t tell, after we’d arrived, whether the soaking, chanting humans on the shore near us considered themselves in the presence of such a nexus, and were celebrating — mammal dancing, at last. They were certainly performing some kind of ritual, one that reminded me of the fervor that comes in a Cacklaw Culmination — the end ceremonies after one of the game’s long rounds concludes — where Saurians, usually circumspect in their spiritual leanings, all pray to the Great Makers for bounty, blessing, and of course, better score tabulations to come.

  When these human celebrants saw us appear, or more specifically, when they saw me, a great cry and moan went up.

  “There it is!” yelled a man with rumpled clothing and bushy eye hair. “Proof that heaven is torn apart and time is running in all directions at once! And it is now in our own hands to send time and history in a new direction!”

  There were more screams, and people started running — away from me, toward me. Some of them had signs, which they dropped in the sand:

  NOT END TIME — OUR TIME!

  And:

  STOP STEALING OUR TOMORROWS!

  More evidence that these sand celebrants must have been thinking about nexuses and the general elasticity of time.

  And, perhaps, so was Mr. Howe, who surprised us all by shouting “Yes!” and running toward the yelling man, whose eyes glittered with an almost Saurian-like focus under his bushy brows.

  One of us might have retrieved Mr. Howe, except that armed military personnel were already there, as if prepared for our very return.

  Their weapons were leveled at us.

  “Perhaps one of the not-so-good times to meet,” I ventured, looking at the guns.

  “You. Don’t. Move,” one of the squadron members said to me, as he and his two companions waved their weapons for extra emphasis.

  He seemed extremely nervous. I could have skttle-tngd right out of there, but as I watched Eli and Thea being snatched and taken immediately into rough custody, it occurred to me that my skttle-tnging back to outlaw mode — in spite of the plethora of food scraps, high-end garbage, and old copies of the National Weekly Truth that could sustain me — might make it harder on my friends. The consortium of police and military agencies that always seems to pursue time voyagers on this planet might be further panicked by my absence, and take out their fears on my friends. I didn’t want them to come to any additional harm on my account.

  So I decided, for the moment, to allow my capture, and hoped we would all be taken to the same facility. From there, we could decide where the three of us could go next.r />
  Or, perhaps, when the three of us could go next.

  “Later, a better now!” I yelled to my friends, using a Saurian phrase I hadn’t thought of in many time cycles. But I am dubious they heard me before their vehicle door slammed shut.

  I have since remained in captivity here at the DARPA facility, without seeing my companions, or knowing how they are faring. Left to myself, however, some insights have come to me. Perhaps not as grand as those that occurred to the Saurian philosopher Melonokus, briefly arrested in the early reign of King Temm, where he wrote “Meat and Silence — Jail Notes Of a Bad Lizard.” It was a treatise that would eventually change how everyone felt about our own Bloody Tendon wars, then raging between carnivores and herbivores. But still, insights nonetheless. The fear of Saurians, so prevalent in mammals here on Earth Orange, at least the walking talking ones like Eli and Thea’s species, is a common staple of their popular entertainments.

  Fear seems to get them zbblly inside, all wound up, perhaps even shunt-crkked, but in a way they enjoy, which oddly, makes them feel better, too.

  I was able to watch such entertainments through the spaces in the containment bars which held me, while the guardians, on their shifts, would sit outside my cage and often watch these “shows” on their Comnet screens. There were various pantomimes and entertainments, everything from attempts at humor to startling displays of mating behavior, to long visual stories, which, I gather, used to be called “films” or “movies.”

  One such guard always watched films about Saurians: Valley of the Gwangi, One Million Years B.C., Jurassic Park, — a few of them seemed to have this title —something called Godzilla which featured an outlandishly large Saurian, and another, a “Comnet original” titled Slaversaur!