It Came from the North

by Carita Forsgren

  No one has yet found out how we, in the faster flow of time, could get help to the victims of back-vortexes. I once saw a rescue crew trying an idea which at first sounded simply brilliant: they pushed a long-handled hook into the back-vortex with the intention of yanking the shoppers out into the faster flow of time, one at a time. But just as the hook penetrated the border between time zones, the movement of the part that crossed it became just as slow as everything else inside the department store. Social welfare authorities have actually considered pushing family members left outside into the department store, so as to keep families together.

  Naturally, the authorities have tried to mark the invisible turbulences as clearly as possible with blinking lights, signboards, even fences. New bridges are being constructed over the observed turbulence sites all the time. Efforts to protect the city’s inhabitants from the turbulences are pretty hopeless, though. The time currents don’t stay in their channels very long, and forever keep finding new courses . . . and new victims. At their worst, the turbulences are completely invisible; often, however, you can notice them if you watch closely enough. Light, for instance, is refracted differently by time turbulence. Often a time turbulence also has a time of day that differs from its surroundings, sometimes even a different season—it’s presently summer in the city, I guess, but I know of several back-vortexes where it’s still last winter, or some winter before that. And similarly, in the time torrents it could already be a future winter.

  Tradesmen selling walking sticks have become rich. People happened to think of walking on the streets with an outstretched stick. The idea is simple but it works: when the stick hits a time deceleration, it suddenly seems to get stuck midair. Walking sticks have already prevented thousands of people from stepping into time decelerations.

  The turbulences have even intruded people’s homes, and a walking stick isn’t necessarily of much use then. How many of us have the patience to walk around our homes with an outstretched walking stick? Recently, there was a documentary on the TV about a family that had a strong time deceleration flowing into the bathroom from the toilet drain, just as the unlucky father sat down to relieve himself. The man still has no idea that something’s happened, but the family is getting frantic. The children don’t want to be separated from their schoolmates, so the proposal by social welfare authorities that the whole family should go into the turbulence to keep the father company is absolutely out of the question. The mother misses her husband very much but says she cannot leave her children before they’ve come of age.

  According to the dramatization in the documentary, the events as a whole will unfold probably along the following lines, from the man’s point of view: The father sits down on the toilet seat and starts to relieve himself, while he’s leafing through a magazine. In an instant of his time, the bathroom door is opened and closed thousands of times, but much too fast for him to notice in any way, while the relatives and camera crews swarm in and out of the room. After he’s sat there a while, he’ll see his wife come into the bathroom, ten subjective years older. The wife tells the astounded husband the shocking news: the bathroom was overcome by a back-vortex. They’ll quickly flee the bathroom. Besides encountering temporal psychologists, they’ll also find a group of weeping relatives, headed up by their grown-up children and excited grandchildren who will at last meet their legendary grandparents.

  After seeing the documentary I burst out laughing. I hoped the man would not tarry, wiping his arse and washing his hands, before making his way towards the bathroom door and normal time. At some stage I realized I was weeping, after all.

  The Time Research Institute perhaps might have been able to do something. Perhaps. The Institute’s officials, for quite a long time anyway, presented statements according to which the problems were temporary, and it was only a matter of time before they were solved. Unfortunately, the people of the city got sick of waiting, and one day, the Time Research Institute was blown up in violent riots.

  I understand the feelings of those people very well. In a sense, I participated in that Tuesday’s attack myself. Though I didn’t invade the Institute, or throw a single bottle or stone, I was just as guilty as the others in my hatred. If I’d been given something explosive, I would have no doubt thrown it at the building. For Alice’s sake. Her Tuesday’s fate was the fault of the Time Research Institute, and on the day of the riot there was black hate rattling inside my ribs.

  The Departed

  After the Time Flood it was dangerous to be out and about in the city, but of course I couldn’t persuade Alice to stay home in any day of the week—she one day announced that she’d knock me unconscious if I so much as tried to prevent her from going to her beloved books. She said it with a playful smile, but I knew her well enough to understand she meant it in earnest. I had to admit she had a point. The bureaucrats were just waiting for a suitable excuse to close down the Library they considered so old-fashioned, and my ever-vigilant Lady Librarian’s absence would have provided them with the perfect opportunity to do so.

  On the morning of the Tuesday that later came to be remembered as Riot Day, I decided to accompany Alice to the Library. Ominous forebodings were darkening my mind. Sunday’s version of Starback had recently died and been buried. The cat still living in the other days had later refused to move from the place we’d buried him in Sunday. Moreover, Starback refused to eat and drink and do anything but mourn its own death. We were getting a feeling we’d soon have seven dead cats on our hands, altogether. Finally we got the idea of taking cockleshells to the grave place each day of the week, and that seemed to satisfy some peculiar need of the cat—when we had thus noted the departure of its Sunday version, it meowed, had a good stretch, and departed to live its remaining lives.

  Giselle wondered very much about her cat’s behavior and even more about our cockleshell ritual. But, of course, we hadn’t the heart to tell her that her darling cat had lost one of its nine lives. Perhaps she guessed it, nevertheless, the smart girl. Be that as it may, our family had for the first time encountered death, and the incident left me feeling uneasy, even if the victim this time had been just a cat.

  We’d found an extremely competent, multidiurnal chauffeur who knew every back-vortex and time torrent in the neighborhood. We paid him a top salary for his services, and he indeed deserved every penny. The chauffeur took better care of us than we ourselves would even have known how to ask for. To stay up-to-date with the road network’s conditions required constant background work. To serve us as best as possible, he used part of his salary to maintain an army of assistants he’d collected for each day of the week. The task of this army was to personally check beforehand all the routes we were about to use. The man worked for us in all the days except Wednesday, that day which never seemed to open up to me. I once tried to squeeze him for information about that day, but he insisted that in Wednesdays he lived in a little village on the other side of the country, and only rarely came to the city to visit his second cousin. “Have you ever met me and my wife in Wednesday?” I asked him once.

  “I haven’t had the honor,” the chauffeur said. He glanced at me oddly in the rearview mirror.

  “Have you been to the seaside in Wednesday, where our house is in all the other weekdays?”

  “I guess there’s some big white house in the same place in Wednesday, too, but I really haven’t been to take a closer look. And frankly, I don’t even remember Wednesday all that clearly. It’s a kind of in-between-day for me, separate from all the others. It’s so different, you see.”

  The chauffeur knew more than he let on. I could see it in him. However, I didn’t want to pressure him. In the first place, we couldn’t afford to lose a master driver like him, and he knew his own value well enough. He might very well work for us and call us sir and madam, but if we started thinking too much of ourselves, he’d find himself another job in no time. Men like him said exactly what they wanted to, and nothing more.

  On the other hand, I was a
bit scared finding out about Wednesday; otherwise I’d have hired some other multidiurnal ages ago to find out more about our fates in that day. As a matter of fact, I actually started avoiding opportunities to find out the truth about Wednesday. I asked the chauffeur about the matter, yes, but only because I trusted him to tell me nothing that was bad for me to know.

  That fatal Tuesday the chauffeur was driving us to the Library, as usual. He apologized for having to drive through a couple of time torrents on the way, but they actually just speeded up the trip—the main thing was to stay far away from the dangerous back-vortexes and time-freezes. When we arrived at the Library, Alice suddenly cried out and dashed from the car. Looking up, I saw thick black smoke billowing out the Library door.

  The Library was on fire! Alice rushed towards the flames, with me charging after her. I estimated I’d catch her in good time before she got inside. I yelled her name, ordered her to stop, but of course she didn’t listen. The books were in danger, and the dedicated fool that was my Lady Librarian intended to save what she could, never caring about her own life. Did she imagine she could carry all her beloved books out by herself?

  “Alice,” I shouted. “Wait for the fire brigade! You can’t do anything alone! Alice!”

  I almost reached her. My hands even touched the collar of her coat. Then something strange happened. Alice sped up, became a series of sequential, translucent images that led inside the burning Library, and presumably up the smoke-filled stairs. I blinked. The images started to dissipate, and I noticed a fire engine appearing from nowhere in front of the Library. Super-fast red-clad ghosts flickered around the fire engine; it was impossible to focus on them. I stumbled, the strange visions making me dizzy. “Alice!”

  “Mr. Morrow,” a man’s voice said.

  A fireman’s feet were standing in front of me. Lifting my eyes, I saw at the upper end of the feet a stocky body and a sad face black with soot. I was helped up. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Morrow. We weren’t able to save her, she had already suffocated by the time we got here. Could you please come and identify her?”

  “Whom?”

  “Your wife. The chauffeur notified us of the fire. He tried to go after your missus, but the flames were too high already.”

  “My wife ran into the burning Library just now. Go save her, before we talk about anything else.”

  “It all happened this morning. You . . . ”

  “What about me?”

  “You stepped in a time puddle. Be careful, it’s still there behind you. See there, the light’s refracted peculiarly in that place. Listen, this must be damned confusing for you. You’d better go and talk to our psychologist, she’ll know better what to say. These cases are always bloody shit.”

  I looked around. The fire had been extinguished; the firemen were spraying down the last hotbeds with hoses. The sun was actually shining from a different direction than just before; during a few of my heartbeats, the morning had become evening.

  “Where’s Alice?” I asked, as if I hadn’t registered a thing the fireman just said. He saw in my eyes, however, that he didn’t have to explain the matter to me again.

  I went to the hospital morgue to identify the body of my Lady Librarian. She was still pressing a burned book to her breast. I couldn’t read its name, the cover was much too blackened. When I left the morgue, the chauffeur met me outside. He’d gone to have his burns tended. His hands and face were bandaged. Clearly he’d gone after Alice as best as humanly possible.

  “I’m very sorry, Mr. Morrow,” the chauffeur said when we drove out of the hospital’s parking lot. He swung the steering wheel and we barely evaded a back-vortex shimmering in the middle of the road, with snow swirling inside it. We’d almost collided with last winter. “I saw you freeze mid-step, and I realized at once that you’d hit a time deceleration. I tried to catch up with her, but there was too much smoke, and the fire beat against me with a blinding heat. I tried, but I couldn’t get ahead. I ought to have been able to do something. Something at least. Madam was up there, amongst the burning books.”

  “I know you did your best,” I said. “You’d be dead yourself if you’d gone any further.”

  “You’ll meet her again,” the chauffeur said. “You know that, don’t you? On Thursday. You may not feel like that now, but you are a very lucky man!”

  He was right—our multidiurnality was now a greater consolation than I ever understood before. But I didn’t want to seize upon that consolation just yet. In Tuesday, Alice was irreversibly dead. Nothing could change that. She was a multidiurnal and she had seven lives, unlike many others, but in spite of all that she was dead today, to me. I’d have to grieve her first death as much as I would grieve the last one.

  I was thinking about what I’d tell Thursday’s Alice about Tuesday’s events. How can you tactfully convey to a person the news of her own death?

  The chauffeur switched on the radio. They were talking about riots. There’d been an attack against the Time Research Institute. A black thought began to pulse in my mind: Without the time turbulences I’d have reached Alice in time. I touched the chauffeur’s shoulder. “Let’s drive there,” I said.

  “Would that be quite prudent, now? The routes have not been secured yet.”

  But then the chauffeur saw my expression in the mirror, and said no more.

  The Chain Breaks

  As I already confessed, I was also there to destroy the Time Research Institute. I can only blame myself for the events following the Institute’s destruction.

  That Tuesday a mob gathered at the Institute. At first people were content with angry shouting, but gradually the hate and bitterness condensed past a critical point, and stones, walking sticks, and bottles started flying through the air. The last straw had been a school bus plunging into a time freeze on the north side of the city that same morning. A group of little school children were now preserved to the end of eternity inside a time glacier. Thanks to the Time Research Institute.

  Finally, the berserk vanguard kicked down the Institute’s doors and invaded the building. The researchers tried to escape through side doors, but the crowd cornered them. The researchers were made to suffer the consequences of people’s long smoldering rage. I don’t think any of them survived more than a few seconds.

  The explosion came as a surprise to everybody. Suddenly, fire, smoke, and burning matter burst from all the doorways and windows of the Time Research Institute. Ears were deafened. People screamed and ran. A stench of blood hung in the air, mixed with a heavy electric smell. I rushed toward the car, and my chauffeur didn’t wait for an order to move. From somewhere afar came the sound of sirens. I felt dizzy.

  At home I stood on the terrace, numb, looking out at the darkening sea, until I could stay awake no longer. I went to bed. I took a sleeping pill and again wondered what I’d tell Alice when I woke up. It’d be Thursday; I’d have to tell Alice the news without seeing her, without even being able to run after her should she get hysterical. After all, it was the day in which I was a blind, paralyzed man, using a wheelchair.

  When I opened my eyes, it was morning. I stared at the light surface of the ceiling and got up from the bed. There was a blue sea beyond the window. Alice wasn’t in the bed. That’s when I realized I was neither blind nor paralyzed. I ran out into the yard, and began kicking at the door of the rear building until the chauffeur opened up.

  “What day is it today?” I yelled.

  He rubbed his neck, looked at the sky, looked at me.

  “Today’s Tuesday,” he finally said with a strange expression. “It’s Tuesday today, again.”

  We stared at each other.

  “Mr. Morrow . . . Oswald. I’m very sorry.”

  I could see he was. Wordlessly I turned away from him and slowly walked back to the white house. I took a tranquillizer and went back to bed, to wait for some understanding to hit me full force.

  Tuesday’s Prisoner

  The chain had broken. And not only for me. The chau
ffeur also said he lost contact with the other days of the week. It didn’t mean so much for him as it did for me. I didn’t have to ask any other multidiurnals to know that Tuesday had come loose from the other timelines. Neither was there any doubt about the cause, it being the destruction of the Time Research Institute. It couldn’t have been a mere coincidence. Something vital had been destroyed inside the building, and as a consequence of the explosion, I was shipwrecked in Tuesday.

  I couldn’t even reach beyond Tuesday in my dreams any more. I tried in vain to repair the contact, using the technique we once described in our book Is Every Day Indeed A Tuesday?

  The other days of the week still exist, somewhere. I still live with Alice in them, and in Mondays we, of course, have Giselle with us. At least I hope so. I do hope the Library fire never occurred in Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday, but at the same time I’m afraid that Tuesday’s events have similarly repeated themselves in the other weekdays, finally culminating in the explosion of the Time Research Institute.

  I’ve lived a lonely life in our house by the seaside. Sometimes I go for a ride with the chauffeur; nowadays we’re more like friends than employer and employee. I’ve had to cut his salary, but he hasn’t complained. Old age has taken my strength, and I’ve barely got enough money left to hire a personal nurse to take care of me.

  I think a lot about Alice and all my lives with her. I wanted to tell our story to the whole world. I’m an old man, however, now lacking the energy for strenuous writing. So I’ve decided to let a comp take care of it. The chauffeur found it in some bookshop sale; it was programmed with the personality of an author who lived at the end of the 1900’s, rather unknown in his own time, but later proclaimed a genius. It’s easy to use: I switch the apparatus on autobiographical mode and start talking about these memories of mine to its microphone, which is designed to look like a gramophone. It doesn’t matter if I jump from one thing to another, and talk incoherently every now and then, the comp’s been programmed to solve such problems. It takes care of the narrative succession of events for me, and also the forming of sentences, punctuation, and all the other things I can’t manage to care about any longer.