“How can you bring him back if he’s dead?”
“Very good! You can spot a contradiction. What I’ve told you so far isn’t exactly true. This isn’t the same world I took him from. I recruited him from another version of history. I showed up in his garage just as he was about to turn on the ignition and gas himself. In your version, nobody stopped him. So see, I bring back my live Sturges to the home of your dying one. We arrive a half hour after your Sturges is defunct. You should have seen us trying to get the body out of the car and onto the boat. What a comedy of errors. This stray dog comes barking down the pier. Preston was already a madman, carrying around his own stillwarm corpse. The dog sniffs his crotch, Preston drops his end of the body. Pure slapstick.
“So we manhandle the ex-Sturges onto the boat and sail out past the breakwall. Dump the body overboard with window counterweights tied to its ankles, come back, and my Sturges takes his place, a few years older and a lot wiser. He’s had the benefit of some modern medicine; he’s kicked the booze and cigarettes and now he’s ready to step back into the place that he escaped earlier and try to straighten things out. He’s got a second chance.”
“You’re right. That’s a pretty good story.”
“You like it?”
“But if you’ve done your job, why are you still here?”
“How about this: I’m actually a scholar, and I’m taking the opportunity to study your culture. My dissertation is on the effects of your Second World War on hotel tipping habits. I can give you a lot of tips. How would you like to know who wins the Rose Bowl next year?”
“How’d you like to be trapped in 1949?”
Gruber sat down on one of the wrought-iron chairs. “I probably would come to regret it. But you’d be amazed at the things you have here that you can’t hardly get in twenty forty-three. T-bone steak. Cigarettes with real nicotine. Sex with guilt.”
“I still don’t understand how you can steal somebody out of your own past and not have it affect your present.”
“It’s not my past, it’s yours. This is a separate historical stream from my own. Every moment in time gives rise to a completely separate history. They’re like branches splitting off from the same tree trunk. If I come out to lop a twig off your branch, it doesn’t affect the branch I come from.”
“You’re not changing the future?”
“I’m changing your future. In my past, as a result of personal and professional failures, Preston Sturges committed suicide by carbon-monoxide poisoning on the evening of May 1, 1949. But now there are two other versions. In one, Sturges disappeared on the afternoon of May 1, never to be seen again. In yours, Sturges committed suicide that evening, but then I and the Sturges from that other universe showed up, dropped his body in the ocean off San Pedro, and set up this new Sturges in his place—if you go along.”
“Why should I?”
“For the game! It’s interesting, isn’t it? What will he do? How will it work out?”
“Will you come back to check on him?”
“I already have. I saved him from his suicide, showed him what a difference he’s made to this town, and now he’s going to have a wonderful life. All his friends are going to get together and give him enough money to pay his debts and start over again.”
“I saw that movie. Jimmy Stewart, Donna Reed.”
Gruber slapped his knee. “And they wonder why I delight in the twentieth century. You’re right, Detective. I lied again. I have no idea how it will work out. Once I visit a time stream, I can’t come back to the same one again. It’s burned. A quantum effect; one hundred thirty-seven point oh four Moment Universes are packed into every second. The probability of hitting the same M-U twice is vanishingly small.”
“Look, I don’t know how much of this is malarkey, but I know somebody’s been murdered.”
“No, no, there is no murder. The man I brought back really is Preston Sturges, with all the memories and experiences of the man who killed himself. He’s exactly the man Louise Sturges married, who made all those films, who fathered his son and screwed up his life. But he’s had the advantage of a couple of years in the twenty-first century, and he’s determined not to make the same mistakes again. For the sake of his son and family and all the others who’ve come to care about him, why not give him that chance?”
“If I drop this box, you’re stuck here. You don’t seem too worried.”
“Well, I wouldn’t be in this profession if I didn’t like risk. What is life but risk? We’ve got a nice transaction going here, who knows how it will play out? Who knows whether Preston will straighten out his life or dismantle it in some familiar way?”
“In my experience, if a man is a foul ball, he’s a foul ball. Doesn’t matter how many chances you give him. His character tells.”
“That’s the other way to look at it. ‘The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.…’ But I’m skeptical. That’s why I like Preston. He talks as if he believes that character tells, but down deep he knows it’s all out of control. You could turn my time machine into futuristic scrap, or you could give it to me and let me go back. Up to you. Or the random collision of atoms in your brain. You don’t seem to me like an arbitrary man, Detective Kinlaw, but even if you are, basically I don’t give a fuck.”
Gruber sat back as cool as a Christian holding four aces. Kinlaw was tempted to drop the machine just to see how he would react. The whole story was too fantastic.
But what if it wasn’t? There was no way around those identical fingerprints. And if it were true—if a man could be saved and given a second chance—then Kinlaw was holding a miracle in his hand, with no better plan than to dash it to pieces on the courtyard below.
His mouth was dry. “Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll let you have your magic box back, but you have to do something for me first.”
“I aim to please, Detective. What is it?”
“I had a daughter. She died of polio three years ago. If this thing really is a time machine, I want you to take me back so I can get her before she dies.”
“Can’t do it.”
“What do you mean you can’t? You saved Sturges.”
“Not in this universe. His body ended up on the beach, remember? Your daughter gets polio and dies in all the branches.”
“Unless we get her before she gets sick.”
“Yes. But then the version of you in that other M-U has a kidnapped daughter who disappears and is never heard from again. Do you want to do that to a man who is essentially yourself? How is that any better than having her die?”
“At least I’d have her.”
“Plus, we can never come back to this M-U. After we leave, it’s burned. I’d have to take you to still a third branch, where you’d have to replace yet another version of yourself if you want to take up your life again. Only, since he won’t be conveniently dead, you’ll have to dispose of him.”
“Dispose of him?”
“Yes.”
Kinlaw’s shoulder ached. His head was spinning trying to keep up with all these possibilities. He pulled the case in and set it down on the terrace. He holstered his .38 and rubbed his shoulder. “Show me how it works, first. Send a piece of furniture into the future.”
Gruber watched him meditatively, then stepped forward and picked up the device. He went back into the living room, pushed aside the sofa, opened the case, and set it in the center of the room. He unpacked the woven cable from the top and ran it in a circle of about ten feet in diameter around an armchair, ends plugged into the base of the machine. He stepped outside the circle, crouched, and began typing a series of characters into the keyboard.
Kinlaw went into the bedroom, got the bottle of scotch and a glass from the bathroom, and poured himself a drink. When he got back Gruber was finishing up with the keyboard. “How much of all this gas you gave me is true?”
Gruber straightened. His face was open as a child’s. He smiled. “Some. A lot. Not all.” He touched a switch on the case
and stepped over the cable into the circle. He sat in the armchair.
The center of the room, in a sphere centered on Gruber and limited by the cable, grew brighter and brighter. Then the space inside suddenly collapsed, as if everything in it was shrinking from all directions toward the center. Gruber went from a man sitting in front of Kinlaw to a doll, to a speck, to nothing. The light grew very intense, then vanished.
When Kinlaw’s eyes adjusted, the room was empty.
* * *
Wednesday morning Kinlaw was sitting at his desk trying to figure out what to do with the case folder, when his phone rang. It was Preston Sturges.
“I haven’t slept all night,” Sturges said. “I expected to wake up in jail. Why haven’t you arrested me yet?”
“I still could. You assaulted a police officer.”
“If that were the worst of it I’d be there in ten minutes. Last night you were talking about murder.”
“Since then I had a conversation with a friend of yours at the Marmont.”
“You—What did he tell you?” Sturges sounded rattled.
“Enough for me to think this case will end up unsolved.”
Sturges was silent for a moment. “Thank you, Detective.”
“Why? Because a miracle happened? You just get back to making movies.”
“I have an interview with Larry Weingarten at MGM this afternoon. They want me to write a script for Clark Gable. I’m going to write them the best script they ever saw.”
“Good. Sell the restaurant.”
“You too? If I have to, I will.”
After he hung up, Kinlaw rolled the cinematographer’s monocle across his desktop. He thought of the body down in the morgue cooler, bound for an anonymous grave. If Gruber was telling the truth, the determined man he’d just spoken with was the same man who had killed himself in the garage on Ivar Avenue. Today he was eager to go forward; Kinlaw wondered how long that would last. He could easily fall back into his old ways, alienate whatever friends he had left. Or a stroke of bad luck like the Carole Landis suicide could sink him.
But it had to be something Sturges knew already. His movies were full of it. That absurd universe, the characters’ futile attempts to control it. At the end of Morgan’s Creek the bemused Norval is hauled out of jail, thrust into a national guard officer’s uniform, and rushed to the hospital to meet his wife and children for the first time—a wife he isn’t married to, children that aren’t even his. He deliriously protests this miracle, a product of the hypocrisy of the town that a day earlier wanted to lock him up and throw away the key.
Then again, Norval had never given up hope, had done his best throughout to make things come out right. His character was stronger than anyone had ever given him credit for.
Kinlaw remembered the first time he’d seen his daughter, when they called him into the room after Emily had given birth. She was so tiny, swaddled tightly in a blanket: her little face, eyes clamped shut, the tiniest of eyelashes, mouth set in a soft line. How tentatively he had held her. How he’d grinned like an idiot at the doctor, at the nurse, at Emily. Emily, exhausted, face pale, had smiled back. None of them had realized they were as much at the mercy of fate as Sturges’s manic grotesques.
He looked up at the calendar, got the pencil out, and crossed off Monday and Tuesday. He got the telephone and dialed Emily’s number. She answered the phone, voice clouded with sleep. “Hello?”
“Emily,” he said. “I have the photo album. I’ve had it all along. I keep it on a shelf in the closet, take it out and look at the pictures, and cry. I don’t know what to do with it. Come help me, please.”
THE LAST HOMOSEXUAL
Paul Park
Paul Park is one of the most critically acclaimed writers of his literary generation, having received rave reviews and wide acceptance for novels such as Soldiers of Paradise, Sugar Rain, The Cult of Loving Kindness, and Celestis. His most recent novel, which takes an alternate look at the life of Jesus Christ, is The Gospel of Corax. He lives with his family in North Adams, Massachusetts.
Here, in one of his relatively rare forays into the short story, he takes us to a nightmarish but all-too-possible future society where bogus “science” in the service of corrupt politicians and religious extremists has made people afraid that almost everything is “catching”—and where the most contagious things of all are fear and intolerance and hatred.
At my tenth high school reunion at the Fairmont Hotel, I ran into Steve Daigrepont and my life changed.
That was three years ago. Now I am living by myself in a motel room, in the southeast corner of the Republic of California. But in those days I was Jimmy Brothers, and my wife and I owned a house uptown off Audubon Park, in New Orleans. Our telephone number was (504) EXodus-5671. I could call her now. It would be early evening.
I think she still lives there because it was her house, bought with her money. She was the most beautiful woman I ever met, and rich too. In those days she was teaching at Tulane Christian University, and I worked for the Times-Picayune. That was why Steve wanted to talk to me.
“Listen,” he said. “I want you to do a story about us.”
We had been on the baseball team together at Jesuit. Now he worked for the Board of Health. He was divorced. “I work too hard,” he said as he took me away from the bar and made me sit down in a corner of the Sazerac Room, under the gold mural. “Especially now.”
He had gotten the idea I had an influence over what got printed in the paper. In fact I was just a copy editor. But at Jesuit I had been the starting pitcher on a championship team, and I could tell Steve still looked up to me. “I want you to do a feature,” he said. “I want you to come visit us at Carville.”
He was talking about the old Gillis W. Long Center, on River Road between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. Formerly the United States national leprosarium, now it was a research foundation.
“You know they’re threatening to shut us down,” he said.
I had heard something about it. The New Baptist Democrats had taken over the statehouse again, and as usual they were sharpening the axe. Carville was one of the last big virology centers left in the state. Doctors from all over Louisiana came there to study social ailments. But Senator Rasmussen wanted the buildings for a new penitentiary.
“She’s always talking about the risks of some terrible outbreak,” said Steve. “But it’s never happened. It can’t happen. In the meantime, there’s so much we still don’t know. And to destroy the stocks, it’s murder.”
Steve’s ex-wife was pregnant, and she came in and stood next to the entrance to the lobby, talking to some friends. Steve hunched his shoulders over the table and leaned toward me.
“These patients are human beings,” he said, sipping his Orange Crush. “That’s what they don’t understand.” And then he went on to tell a story about one of the staff, an accountant named Dan who had worked at Carville for years. Then someone discovered Dan had embezzled two hundred and fifty thousand dollars from the contingency fund, and he was admitted as a patient. “Now I’ll never leave you. Now I’m home,” he said when he stepped into the ward.
“Sort of like Father Damien,” I murmured. While I wasn’t sure why my old friend wanted this story in the newspaper, still I admired his passion, his urgency. When we said good-bye, he pressed my hand in both of his, as if he really thought I could help him. It was enough to make me mention the problems at Carville to my boss a few days later, who looked at me doubtfully and suggested I go up there and take a look around on my day off.
“People have different opinions about that place,” he said. “Although these days it would be hard for us to question the judgment of a Louisiana state senator.”
* * *
I didn’t tell Melissa where I was going. I drove up alone through the abandoned suburbs and the swamps. Once past the city, I drove with the river on my left, behind the new levee. I went through small towns filled with old people, their trailers and cabins in sad contrast to th
e towers of the petrochemical and agricultural concerns, which lined the Mississippi between Destrehan and Lutcher.
Carville lay inside an elbow of the river, surrounded by swamps and graveyards and overgrown fields. In the old days, people had grown sugar cane. Now I drove up along a line of beautiful live oaks covered with moss and ferns. At the end of it, a thirty-foot concrete statue of Christ the Redeemer, and then I turned in at the gate beside the mansion, a plantation house before the Civil War, and the administration building since the time of the original leprosarium.
At the guardhouse, they examined my medical records and took some blood. They scanned me with the lie detector and asked some questions. Then they called in to Steve, and I had to sign a lot of forms in case I had to be quarantined. Finally they let me past the barricade and into the first of many wire enclosures. Soldiers leaned against the Corinthian columns of the main house.
I don’t want to drag this out with a lot of description. Carville was a big place. Once you were inside, past the staff offices, it was laid out in sections, and some were quite pleasant. The security was not oppressive. When he met me at the inner gate, Steve was smiling. “Welcome to our Inferno,” he said, when no one else could hear. Then he led me down a series of complicated covered walkways, past the hospital, the Catholic and Protestant chapels, the cafeteria. Sometimes he stopped and introduced me to doctors and administrators, who seemed eager to answer questions. Then there were others who hovered at a respectful distance: patients, smiling and polite, dressed in street clothes. They did not shake hands, and when they coughed or sneezed, they turned their faces away.
“Depression,” murmured Steve, and later, “alcoholism. Theft.”
It had been around the time I was born that Drs. Fargas and Watanabe, working at what had been LSU, discovered the viral nature of our most difficult human problems. I mean the diseases that even Christ can’t heal. They had been working with the quarantined HIV-2 population a few years after independence, during the old Christian Coalition days. Nothing much had changed since then in most of the world, where New Baptist doctrine didn’t have the same clout as in Louisiana. But those former states that had been willing to isolate the carriers and stop the dreadful cycle of contagion had been transformed. Per capita income rates showed a steady rise, and crime was almost nonexistent. Even so, thirty years later there was still much to learn about susceptibility, about immunization, and the actual process of transmission. As is so often the case, political theory had outstripped science, and though it was hard to argue with the results, still, as Steve Daigrepont explained it, there was a need for places like Carville, where important research was being done.
The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fourteenth Annual Collection Page 35