by E. Lily Yu
A bit of a racing shift, then back to Interstate 70. My hip twinged all the way across Illinois.
I had originally intended to work my way east to Buffalo, New York, but after the Oak Hill business I wanted to cut it short. If I stayed on the interstate I was sure to get caught; I had been lucky to get as far as I had. Just outside of Indianapolis I turned onto Route 37 north to Fort Wayne and Detroit.
I was not, however, entirely cowed. Twenty-five years in one time had given me the right instincts, and with the coming of the evening and the friendly insects to sing me along, the boredom of the road became a new recklessness. Hadn’t I already been seen by too many people in those twenty-five years? Thousands had looked into my honest face—and where were they? Ruth had reminded me that I was not stuck here. I would soon make an end to this latest adventure one way or another, and once I had done so, there would be no reason in God’s green world to suspect me.
And so: north of Fort Wayne, on Highway 6 east, a deserted country road (what was he doing there?), I pulled over to pick up a young hitchhiker. He wore a battered black leather jacket. His hair was short on the sides, stuck up in spikes on top, hung over his collar in back; one side was carrot-orange, the other brown with a white streak. His sign, pinned to a knapsack, said “?” He threw the pack into the backseat and climbed into the front.
“Thanks for picking me up.” He did not sound like he meant it. “Where you going?”
“Flint. How about you?”
“Flint’s as good as anywhere.”
“Suit yourself.” We got up to speed. I was completely calm. “You should fasten your seat belt,” I said.
“Why?”
The surly type. “It’s not just a good idea. It’s the law.”
He ignored me. He pulled a crossword puzzle book and a pencil from his jacket pocket. “How about turning on the light?”
I flicked on the dome light for him. “I like to see a young man improve himself,” I said.
His look was an almost audible sigh. “What’s a five-letter word for ‘the lowest point’?”
“Nadir,” I replied.
“That’s right. How about ‘widespread’; four letters?”
“Rife.”
“You’re pretty good.” He stared at the crossword for a minute, then rolled down his window and threw the book, and the pencil, out of the car. He rolled up the window and stared at his reflection in it. I couldn’t let him get off that easily. I turned off the interior light, and the darkness leapt inside.
“What’s your name, son? What are you so mad about?”
“Milo. Look, are you queer? If you are, it doesn’t matter to me but it will cost you . . . if you want to do anything about it.”
I smiled and adjusted the rearview mirror so I could watch him—and he could watch me. “No, I’m not queer. The name’s Loki.” I extended my right hand, keeping my eyes on the road.
He looked at the hand. “Loki?”
As good a name as any. “Yes. Same as the Norse god.”
He laughed. “Sure, Loki. Anything you like. Fuck you.”
Such a musical voice. “Now there you go. Seems to me, Milo—if you don’t mind my giving you my unsolicited opinion—that you have something of an attitude problem.” I punched the cigarette lighter, reached back and pulled a cigar from my jacket on the backseat, in the process weaving the car all over Highway 6. I bit the end off the cigar and spat it out the window, stoked it up. My insects wailed. I cannot explain to you how good I felt.
“Take, for instance, this crossword puzzle book. Why did you throw it out the window?”
I could see Milo watching me in the mirror, wondering whether he should take me seriously. The headlights fanned out ahead of us, the white lines at the center of the road pulsing by like a rapid heartbeat. Take a chance, Milo. What have you got to lose?
“I was pissed,” he said. “It’s a waste of time. I don’t care about stupid games.”
“Exactly. It’s just a game, a way to pass the time. Nobody ever really learns anything from a crossword puzzle. Corporation lawyers don’t get their Porsches by building their word power with crosswords, right?”
“I don’t care about Porsches.”
“Neither do I, Milo. I drive an Audi.”
Milo sighed.
“I know, Milo. That’s not the point. The point is that it’s all a game, crosswords or corporate law. Some people devote their lives to Jesus; some devote their lives to artwork. It all comes to pretty much the same thing. You get old. You die.”
“Tell me something I don’t already know.”
“Why do you think I picked you up, Milo? I saw your question mark and it spoke to me. You probably think I’m some pervert out to take advantage of you. I have a funny name. I don’t talk like your average middle-aged businessman. Forget about that.” The old excitement was upon me; I was talking louder and louder, leaning on the accelerator. The car sped along. “I think you’re as troubled by the materialism and cant of life in America as I am. Young people like you, with orange hair, are trying to find some values in a world that offers them nothing but crap for ideas. But too many of you are turning to extremes in response. Drugs, violence, religious fanaticism, hedonism. Some, like you I suspect, to suicide. Don’t do it, Milo. Your life is too valuable.” The speedometer touched eighty, eighty-five. Milo fumbled for his seat belt but couldn’t find it.
I waved my hand, holding the cigar, at him. “What’s the matter, Milo? Can’t find the belt?” Ninety now. A pickup went by us going the other way, the wind of its passing beating at my head and shoulder. Ninety-five.
“Think, Milo! If you’re upset with the present, with your parents and the schools, think about the future. What will the future be like if this trend toward valuelessness continues in the next hundred years? Think of the impact of the new technologies! Gene splicing, gerontology, artificial intelligence, space exploration, biological weapons, nuclear proliferation! All accelerating this process! Think of the violent reactionary movements that could arise—are arising already, Milo, as we speak—from people’s desire to find something to hold on to. Paint yourself a picture, Milo, of the kind of man or woman another hundred years of this process might produce!”
“What are you talking about?” He was terrified.
“I’m talking about the survival of values in America! Simply that.” Cigar smoke swirled in front of the dashboard lights, and my voice had reached a shout. Milo was gripping the sides of his seat. The speedometer read 105. “And you, Milo, are at the heart of this process! If people continue to think the way you do, Milo, throwing their crossword puzzle books out the windows of their Audis all across America, the future will be full of absolutely valueless people! Right, MILO?” I leaned over, taking my eyes off the road, and blew smoke into his face, screaming, “ARE YOU LISTENING, MILO? MARK MY WORDS!”
“Y-yes.”
“GOO, GOO, GA-GA-GAA!”
I put my foot all the way to the floor. The wind howled through the window, the gray highway flew beneath us,
“Mark my words, Milo,” I whispered. He never heard me. “Twenty-five across. Eight letters. N-i-h-i-l—”
My pulse roared in my ears, there joining the drowned choir of the fields and the roar of the engine. Body slimy with sweat, fingers clenched through the cigar, fists clamped on the wheel, smoke stinging my eyes. I slammed on the brakes, downshifting immediately, sending the transmission into a painful whine as the car slewed and skidded off the pavement, clipping a reflecting marker and throwing Milo against the windshield. The car stopped with a jerk in the gravel at the side of the road, just shy of a sign announcing, WELCOME TO OHIO.
There were no other lights on the road, I shut off my own and sat behind the wheel, trembling, the night air cool on my skin. The insects wailed. The boy was slumped against the dashboard. There was a star fracture in the glass above his head, and warm blood came away on my fingers when I touched his hair. I got out of the car, circled around to the pass
enger’s side, and dragged him from the seat into the field adjoining the road. He was surprisingly light. I left him there, in a field of Ohio soybeans on the evening of a summer’s day.
The city of Detroit was founded by the French adventurer Antoine de la Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, a supporter of Comte de Pontchartrain, minister of state to the Sun King, Louis XIV. All of these men worshiped the Roman Catholic god, protected their political positions, and let the future go hang. Cadillac, after whom an American automobile was named, was seeking a favorable location to advance his own economic interests. He came ashore on July 24,1701, with fifty soldiers, an equal number of settlers, and about one hundred friendly Indians near the present site of the Veterans Memorial Building, within easy walking distance of the Greyhound Bus Terminal.
The car did not run well after the accident, developing a reluctance to go into fourth, but I didn’t care. The encounter with Milo had gone exactly as such things should go, and was especially pleasing because it had been totally unplanned. An accident—no order, one would guess—but exactly as if I had laid it all out beforehand. I came into Detroit late at night via Route 12, which eventually turned into Michigan Avenue. The air was hot and sticky. I remember driving past the Cadillac plant; multitudes of red, yellow, and green lights glinting off dull masonry and the smell of auto exhaust along the city streets. I found the sort of neighborhood I wanted not far from Tiger Stadium: pawnshops, an all-night deli, laundromats, dimly lit bars with red Stroh’s signs in the windows. Men on street corners walked casually from noplace to noplace.
I parked on a side street just around the corner from a 7-Eleven. I left the motor running. In the store I dawdled over a magazine rack until at last I heard the racing of an engine and saw the Audi flash by the window. I bought a copy of Time and caught a downtown bus at the corner. At the Greyhound station I purchased a ticket for the next bus to Toronto and sat reading my magazine until departure time.
We got onto the bus. Across the river we stopped at customs and got off again. “Name?” they asked me.
“Gerald Spotsworth.”
“Place of birth?”
“Calgary.” I gave them my credentials. The passport photo showed me with hair. They looked me over. They let me go.
I work in the library of the University of Toronto. I am well-read, a student of history, a solid Canadian citizen. There I lead a sedentary life. The subways are clean, the people are friendly, the restaurants are excellent. The sky is blue. The cat is on the mat.
We got back on the bus. There were few other passengers, and most of them were soon asleep; the only light in the darkened interior was that which shone above my head. I was very tired, but I did not want to sleep. Then I remembered that I had Ruth’s pills in my jacket pocket. I smiled, thinking of the customs people. All that was left in the box were a couple of tiny pink tabs. I did not know what they were, but I broke one down the middle with my fingernail and took it anyway. It perked me up immediately. Everything I could see seemed sharply defined. The dark green plastic of the seats. The rubber mat in the aisle. My fingernails. All details were separate and distinct, all interdependent. I must have been focused on the threads in the weave of my pants leg for ten minutes when I was surprised by someone sitting down next to me. It was Ruth. “You’re back!” I exclaimed.
“We’re all back,” she said. I looked around and it was true: on the opposite side of the aisle, two seats ahead, Milo sat watching me over his shoulder, a trickle of blood running down his forehead. One corner of his mouth pulled tighter in a rueful smile. Mr. Graves came back from the front seat and shook my hand. I saw the fat singer from the country club, still naked. The locker-room boy. A flickering light from the back of the bus: when I turned around there stood the burning man, his eye sockets two dark hollows behind the wavering flames. The shopping-mall guard. Hector from the hardware store. They all looked at me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked Ruth.
“We couldn’t let you go on thinking like you do. You act like I’m some monster. I’m just a person.”
“A rather nice-looking young lady,” Graves added.
“People are monsters,” I said.
“Like you, huh?” Ruth said. “But they can be saints, too.”
That made me laugh. “Don’t feed me platitudes. You can’t even read.”
“You make such a big deal out of reading. Yeah, well, times change. I get along fine, don’t I?”
The mall guard broke in. “Actually, miss, the reason we caught on to you is that someone saw you walk into the men’s room.” He looked embarrassed.
“But you didn’t catch me, did you?” Ruth snapped back. She turned to me. “You’re afraid of change. No wonder you live back here.”
“This is all in my imagination,” I said. “It’s because of your drugs.”
“It is all in your imagination,” the burning man repeated. His voice was a whisper. “What you see in the future is what you are able to see. You have no faith in God or your fellow man.”
“He’s right,” said Ruth.
“Bull. Psychobabble.”
“Speaking of babble,” Milo said, “I figured out where you got that goo-goo-goo stuff. Talk—”
“Never mind that,” Ruth broke in. “Here’s the truth. The future is just a place. The people there are just people. They live differently. So what? People make what they want of the world. You can’t escape human failings by running into the past.” She rested her hand on my leg. “I’ll tell you what you’ll find when you get to Toronto,” she said. “Another city full of human beings.”
This was crazy. I knew it was crazy. I knew it was all unreal, but somehow I was getting more and more afraid. “So the future is just the present writ large,” I said bitterly. “More bull.”
“You tell her, pal,” the locker-room boy said.
Hector, who had been listening quietly, broke in. “For a man from the future, you talk a lot like a native.”
“You’re the king of bullshit, man,” Milo said. “ ‘Some people devote themselves to artwork’! Jesus!”
I felt dizzy. “Scut down, Milo. That means ‘Fuck you too.’ ” I shook my head to try to make them go away. That was a mistake: the bus began to pitch like a sailboat. I grabbed for Ruth’s arm but missed. “Who’s driving this thing?” I asked, trying to get out of the seat.
“Don’t worry,” said Graves. “He knows what he’s doing.”
“He’s brain-dead,” Milo said.
“You couldn’t do any better,” said Ruth, pulling me back down.
“No one is driving,” said the burning man.
“We’ll crash!” I was so dizzy now that I could hardly keep from being sick. I closed my eyes and swallowed. That seemed to help. A long time passed; eventually I must have fallen asleep.
When I woke it was late morning and we were entering the city, cruising down Eglinton Avenue. The bus had a driver after all—a slender black man with neatly trimmed sideburns who wore his uniform hat at a rakish angle. A sign above the windshield said, YOUR DRIVER—SAFE, COURTEOUS, and below that, on the slide-in nameplate, WILBERT CAUL. I felt like I was coming out of a nightmare. I felt happy. I stretched some of the knots out of my back. A young soldier seated across the aisle from me looked my way; I smiled, and he returned it briefly.
“You were mumbling to yourself in your sleep last night,” he said.
“Sorry. Sometimes I have bad dreams.”
“It’s okay. I do too, sometimes.” He had a round open face, an apologetic grin. He was twenty, maybe. Who knew where his dreams came from? We chatted until the bus reached the station; he shook my hand and said he was pleased to meet me. He called me “sir.”
I was not due back at the library until Monday, so I walked over to Yonge Street. The stores were busy, the tourists were out in droves, the adult theaters were doing a brisk business. Policemen in sharply creased trousers, white gloves, sauntered along among the pedestrians. It was a bright, cloudless day, but the
breeze coming up the street from the lake was cool. I stood on the sidewalk outside one of the strip joints and watched the videotaped come-on over the closed circuit. The Princess Laya. Sondra Nieve, the Human Operator. Technology replaces the traditional barker, but the bodies are more or less the same. The persistence of your faith in sex and machines is evidence of your capacity to hope.
Francis Bacon, in his masterwork The New Atlantis, foresaw the utopian world that would arise through the application of experimental science to social problems. Bacon, however, could not solve the problems of his own time and was eventually accused of accepting bribes, fined £40,000, and imprisoned in the Tower of London. He made no appeal to God, but instead applied himself to the development of the virtues of patience and acceptance. Eventually he was freed. Soon after, on a freezing day in late March, we were driving near Highgate when I suggested to him that cold might delay the process of decay. He was excited by the idea. On impulse he stopped the carriage, purchased a hen, wrung its neck, and stuffed it with snow. He eagerly looked forward to the results of his experiment. Unfortunately, in haggling with the street vendor he had exposed himself thoroughly to the cold and was seized by a chill that rapidly led to pneumonia, of which he died on April 9, 1626.
There’s no way to predict these things.
When the videotape started repeating itself I got bored, crossed the street, and lost myself in the crowd.
First published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, March 1986.
About the Author
Born in Buffalo, New York, John Kessel now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he is a professor of American Literature and the director of the Creative Writing program at North Carolina State University. Kessel made his first sale in 1975. His first solo novel, Good News From Outer Space, was released in 1988 to wide critical acclaim, but before that he had made his mark on the genre primarily as a writer of highly-imaginative, finely-crafted short stories, many of which have were assembled in his collection Meeting in Infinity. He won a Nebula Award in 1983 for his novella “Another Orphan,” which was also a Hugo finalist that year, and has been released as an individual book. His story “Buffalo” won the Theodore Sturgeon Award in 1991, and his novella “Stories for Men” won the prestigious James Tiptree Jr. Memorial Award in 2003. His other books include the novel Freedom Beach, written in collaboration with James Patrick Kelly, and an anthology of stories from the famous Sycamore Hill Writers Workshop (which he also helps to run), called Intersections, co-edited by Mark L. Van Name and Richard Butner. His most recent books are a major novel, Corrupting Dr. Nice, and a two new collections, The Pure Product and The Collected Kessel, as well as a series of anthologies co-edited with James Patrick Kelly: Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology, The Secret History of Science Fiction, Digital Rapture: The Singularity Anthology, Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, and Nebula Awards Showcase 2012.