by Various
When we are finished, she rests on top of me and laughs. I can feel her laughter in my chest. It’s catching.
“Is this you or Crazy Ken?” she says.
“You can’t tell the difference?” I have to be careful here. “Great.”
“Crazy Ken is funnier.” She wriggles her hips. “You’re sexier.”
Someone up at 129 Grandview is shouting. “Lower, low.” It’s darker here than it was a few minutes ago. Maybe they have the fire under control. I’m wondering if I’m going to be able to find my shirt.
I hear something moving close by and to the left. A twig snaps, leaves rustle. “What was that?” I spread my fingers across her naked buttocks as if that might preserve her decency.
“Squirrels,” she says. “Or raccoons.” She props herself up and peers into the night. “Or wolves—grrrr.”
“We don’t have wolves here.”
“No,” she says. “At least, not yet.”
I got my B.S. in Biology from Ohio State and graduated magna cum laude from med school at the University of Cincinnati. I interned at Pennsylvania Presbyterian in Philadelphia and did my residency in ophthalmology at the University of Michigan’s W.K. Kellogg Eye Center. I am a doctor of medicine—a scientist. How do I explain what is happening here?
It is hopeless. But it’s not only me. The whole world seems to be flying apart.
“…Accuweather forecast calls for a hazy, hot, and humid day with highs this afternoon approaching the upper nineties.”
I reach across the bed, swat at the clock radio and miss. The weight of too much sleep skews my aim.
“Today’s Air Quality Index is expected to reach unhealthy levels, which has led the EPA to issue an advisory calling for people at risk to limit outdoor activities and refrain from strenuous…”
The next time I kill it. I raise my head to peer at the LED on the clock’s face; it reads 5:45. Something is wrong. The numbers go blurry; I blink in the darkness. 5:45 a.m.
Great. I have slept—what? Thirteen hours? Amisha will be furious; I’ve missed our date. She already thinks I take her for granted. I stumble to the bathroom, piss, wash my face, and brush my teeth. On my way to the kitchen, I check the answering machine in the front hall, dreading Amisha’s message.
The light is steady. Unblinking. Just to be sure, I hit play. “You have no new messages.”
Here’s a mystery that will have to wait for coffee. The time may be out of joint, but I have to keep my priorities straight.
While the coffee is brewing, I cross to the door to the garage.
“Hey.” I knock. “You in there?”
No answer.
I open the door. His space is dark except for the bright blue eye of the computer screen. I flick the light switch.
We have a single bay garage with no windows. It can be unbearable in the summer so he leaves the overhead door open a crack to let in air. The walls are sheet rock that I’d had taped and mudded but never bothered to paint; the floor is bare cement. There isn’t room for much furniture: a blue queen-sized futon that folds into a couch during the day, three filing cabinets crammed with who knows what craziness, a chest of drawers that used to be in our Grandpa Takumi’s bedroom at the cottage in Vermont, shelves filled with books that we’ll probably never read again. It’s all gathered around the oriental rug that we inherited from our ex-mother-in-law, Susan. Off to one side is the red formica kitchen table with steel trim that we bought at the yard sale down the street. There’s an open pizza box; crusts are scattered across the tabletop. Never eat the crispy edges of a slice; they look like too much like dog biscuits.
“Hello?” I take the three steps from the house down to the garage. There’s nobody here. The drumbeat in my chest is making me dizzy so I drop onto the chair in front of the computer. I must have jiggled the mouse because the angelfish in the aquarium screen saver freeze and then I’m looking at our Facebook page.
Our profile picture is of us standing on our dock with Ledge Lake in the background. We’re not smiling exactly, but we seem to be amused. I can’t remember who took that picture, him or me.
I discover that now we have 452 friends. I don’t pay much attention to Facebook, that’s his thing. Even though he tells me what he does while I’m gone, it’s all mist and murmurs. I’m supposed to remember his hobbies when I forget what I had for lunch yesterday or which patients I saw last week? As I scroll down the list, I realize that I know hardly any of our new friends. Who is Lurinda Lawrence, for example? George Drozen? Is that where he is now? Out with Cindy Orczowski, whoever she is?
No. I know exactly where he is. I just don’t want to think about it.
Idly I click the Inbox to remind myself what all our friends are saying to us. We get a lot of invitations to Greenpeace events. Several dozen people sent private messages for our birthday in May. And then I spot the note from Michele Haverney, only the face in the profile picture isn’t that of our Michele from 1984. It’s a woman our age, gray and pinched and disappointed. She writes:
An ophthalmologist, oh my! That means you’re a doctor, right? I get confused between ophthalmologist and optometrist. I know that optician is the guy who sells you the glasses. So what are you looking for after all these years, Dr. Ken Takumi? What do you see?
But our Michele is fourteen and she is sitting next to us on a picnic table over on the other side of Ledge Lake at the state park campground and we’ve got Madonna claiming she’s like a virgin on the boombox and why not? Anything was possible back then. No one can see us but the chipmunks. It’s the freshman class picnic and it’s sunny and the breeze carries the warm promise of summer. We don’t know yet that Michele will be moving to Idaho in September. We’ve been wanting to kiss her since the march to Lincoln Square on Earth Day and there is not much time because soon a chaperone will come looking for us. She turns her face up toward us and closes her eyes and we can see the color rising in her pale cheeks and the lock of auburn hair that has strayed across her forehead and, no, we don’t want to close our eyes, we want to see it all so we can return to this moment forever, our first true love, and so I do kiss her but at the same time I am watching myself brush my lips against hers and down the side of her face and we are astounded at just how sweet life used to be.
There’s a crunching behind the futon.
“Hello?”
Silence.
“Someone there?”
A black nose, then beady eyes set in a bandit’s mask. The raccoon sticks its head out and assesses the situation. Then it emerges from behind the couch, snout brushing the floor and the cushion and the wall, as if it is surprised by the scent of its surroundings.
“Hey.”
It steps sideways and then goes up on its haunches, forepaws dangling. It glances around the room and then at its escape route beneath the garage door. It doesn’t seem particularly afraid.
“Get.”
The raccoon drops onto all fours again.
“Get out.”
It ambles behind the futon with an odd humping gait, then comes back out with a pizza crust in its mouth.
“Scoot!”
It considers for a moment and then scurries across the floor under the door and into the uncertain dawn.
Copyright © 2011 by James Patrick Kelly
Art copyright © 2011 by Jonathan Bartlett
Books by
James Patrick Kelly
Novels
Planet of Whispers (Bluejay, 1984)
Freedom Beach (with John Kessel) (Bluejay, 1985)
Look Into the Sun (Tor, 1989)
Wildlife (Tor, 1994)
Burn (Tachyon, 2005)
Story Collections
Think Like a Dinosaur and Other Stories (Golden Gryphon, 1997)
Strange But Not a Stranger (Golden Gryphon, 2002)
The Wreck of the Godspeed and Other Stories (Golden Gryphon, 2008)
Anthologies
Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology (editor, with John Kess
el) (Tachyon, 2006)
Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology (editor, with John Kessel) (Tachyon, 2007)
The Secret History of Science Fiction (editor, with John Kessel) (Tachycon, 2009)
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Eleanor Louise Jackson stood inside the plain steel box of the time machine. It was about the size of an outhouse, but without a bench or windows. She clutched her cane with one hand and her handbag with the other. It felt like the scan was taking far too long, but she was fairly certain that was her nerves talking.
Her corset made her ribs creak with every breath. She’d expected to hate wearing the thing, but there was a certain comfort from having something to support her back and give her a shape more like a woman than a sack of potatoes.
A gust of air puffed around her and the steel box was gone. She stood in a patch of tall grass under an October morning sky. The caravan of scientists, technicians and reporters had vanished from the field where they’d set up camp. Louise inhaled with wonder that the time machine had worked. Assuming that this was 1905, of course—the year of her birth and the bottom limit to her time-traveling range. Even with all the preparations for this trip, it baffled her sense of the order of things to be standing there.
The air tasted sweet and so pure that she could make out individual fragrances: the hard edge of oak mixed with the raw green of fresh mowed grass. Louise had thought her sense of smell had gotten worse because she’d gotten old.
She drew herself together and pulled the watch from the chain around her neck to check the time, as if it would reflect the local time instead of the time she’d left. 8:30 on the dot, which looked about right judging by the light. Now, she had six hours before they spun the machine back down and she got returned to her present. If the Board of Directors had thought she could do everything faster, they would have sent her back for less time because it was expensive to keep the machine spun up, but even with all the physical therapy, Louise was still well over a hundred.
With that in mind, she headed for the road. She’d been walking the route from the box to Huffman Prairie for the last week so they could get the timing on it. But this looked nothing like her present. There had been a housing development across the street from where she’d left and now there was a farm with a single tall white house sitting smack in the middle of the corn fields.
If she thought too much about it, she wasn’t sure she’d have the nerve to keep going. Down the road, a wagon drawn by a bay horse came towards her. Besides the fellow driving it, the back of the wagon was crammed full of pigs that were squealing loud enough to be heard from here. It made her think of her husband, dead these long years or two years old, depending on how you counted it. She shook her head to get rid of that thought.
Louise patted her wig, though the makeup fellow had done a lovely job fixing it to her head. She’d had short hair since the 1940s, and it felt strange to have that much weight on top of her head again. The white hair wound around her head in the style she remembered her own grandmother wearing. She checked to make sure her broad hat was settled and that the brooch masking the “hat-cam” was still pointing forward.
She hadn’t got far when the wagon pulled up alongside her.
“Pardon, ma’am.” The boy driving it couldn’t be more than thirteen with red hair like a snarl of yarn He had a heavy array of freckles and his two front teeth stuck out past his lip. He had a nice smile for all that. “Seeing as how we’re going the same way, might I offer you a ride?”
He had a book in his lap, like he’d been reading as he was driving. The stink of the pigs billowed around them with the wind. One of the sows gave a particularly loud squeal and Louise glanced back involuntarily.
The boy looked over his shoulder. “My charges are garrulous this morning.” He patted the book in his lap and leaned toward her. “I’m pretending they’re Odysseus’s men and that helps some.”
Louise couldn’t help but chuckle at the boy’s elevated language. “My husband was a hog farmer. He always said a pig talked more sense than a politician.”
“Politicians or sailors. If you don’t mind sharing a ride with them I’ll be happy to offer it.”
“Well now, that’s kind of you. I’m on my way to Huffman Prairie.”
He slid over on the bench and stuck his hand out to offer her a boost up. “I’m Homer Van Loon.”
Well, that accounted for his taste in reading and vocabulary. Boys his age were more like to read the penny dreadfuls than anything else, but anyone whose parents saddled him with a name like Homer was bound to be a bit odd.
“Pleased to make your acquaintance. I’m Louise Jackson.” She passed him her cane and gripped his other hand. Holding that and the weathered wooden side of the wagon, she hauled herself aboard. Grunting in the sort of way that would have made her mama scold her, Louise dropped onto the wooden bench. Three months of physical therapy to get ready for this, and climbing into a wagon almost wore her out.
“You walk all the way out here from town?” Homer picked up the reins and sat next to her.
“Lands, no.” Louise settled her bag in her lap and told the lie the team of historians had prepared for her, in case someone asked. “I took the interurban rail out and then thought I’d walk the rest for a constitutional. The way was a bit longer than I thought, so I’m grateful to you.” The Lord would forgive her for the lie, given the circumstance.
“Are you headed out to the Wright Brothers’?”
“I am. I never thought I’d see such a thing.“
“That’s for a certai—” His voice cut off.
Louise slammed hard against pavement. The wagon was gone. Power lines hung over her head and the acrid smell of asphalt stung her nose.
And smoke.
Shouting, half a dozen people ran toward her. Louise rolled over to her knees and looked around for her cane. It had landed on the road to her side, and she grabbed it to lever herself back to her feet.
Mr. Barnes was near the front of the people running toward her. The poor thing looked as if his heart would give out with worry, though Louise wasn’t sure if he was worried about her or his invention.
The young fellow who did her wig got to her first, and helped her to her feet. It seemed as if everyone was chorusing questions about if she was all right. Louise nodded and kept repeating that she was fine until Mr. Barnes arrived, red-faced and blowing like a racehorse.
Louise drew herself up as tall as she could. “What happened?”
“We blew a transformer.” Mr. Barnes gestured at one of the telephone poles, which had smoke billowing up from it. “Are you all right?” Up close, it was clear he was worried about her, and Louise chided herself for doubting him. He hadn’t been a thing but kind to her since the Time Travel Society recruited her.
“I’m fine. More worried about the boy I was talking to than anything else.”
That stopped all the conversation flat. The program director, Dr. Connelly, pushed her way through the crowd, face pale. “Someone saw you vanish? You’re sure?”
“I was sitting in his wagon.” Louise settled her hat on her head. “Maybe, if you send me back a few seconds after I vanished, we can pretend that I fell out of the wagon.”
“Out of the question.” Dr. Connelly set her mouth into a hard line. With her dark hair drawn tight in a bun, she looked like a school marm with an unruly child.
“He’ll think he’s gone crazy.”
“And ha
ving you reappear will make things better?”
“At least I can explain what’s happening so he’s not left wondering for the rest of his life.”
“Explain what? That you are a time traveler?”
Louise gripped her cane and took a step closer to Dr. Connelly. When she was young, she would have been able to look down at the woman, and still felt like she ought to, even though their eyes were on level. “That’s exactly what I’ll tell him. He’s a twelve-year-old boy reading Homer on his free time. I don’t think he’ll have a bit of a problem believing me.”
A muscle pulsed in Dr. Connelly’s jaw, and she finally said, “There’s no point in arguing out here in the heat. We’ll take it to the rest of board and let them decide.”
That was as clear a “no” as if she’d actually said the word. Louise leaned forward on her cane. “I look forward to speaking with them.” She cut Dr. Connelly off before she could open her mouth. “As I’m the only one who’s met the boy, I trust you’ll want me to tell the Board about him.” People shouldn’t make the mistake of thinking that being old meant she was sweet.
* * *
Louise sat in her costume in a conference room with Dr. Connelly, Mr. Barnes, and two other members of the board, both white men who looked old but couldn’t be much past retirement age. The conference room had flat-panel screens set up with the other board members on them. They had been debating the issues for the past half hour, largely going into details of why it was too dangerous to try to make her reappear on the wagon on account of it being a moving vehicle.
Louise cleared her throat. “Pardon me, but may I ask a question?”
“Of course.” Mr. Barnes swiveled his chair to face her. The boy didn’t seem that much older than Homer Van Loon for all that he’d invented the time machine.