Asimov's Science Fiction

by Penny Publications

  The pastor clasped his hands in prayer next to me, and I held my hands high and gave my benediction, then began doling out the Sacrament, starting with the blacksmith—who grinned with relief at the first snort—and working my way toward Wannakusket. When I got to the first kid—a boy of maybe twelve or fifteen—I took his spoon, set my hands on the crown of his head, blessed him, and moved on.

  “Don’t,” the pastor begged. I glanced back to see his eyes open, pooling. “Don’t punish the children for our,” he looked to the blacksmith and Native American again, “trespass.”

  I had no idea what to say, so I simply left this unacknowledged and moved down the row. When I got to Wannakusket the second row slid through the first and knelt, and I worked my way back to where I’d started. I finished with the pastor, who wept freely. Then I got them started with the group prayer and slipped back into the woods.

  Once I was back in the brush I glanced down at my thirty-minute glass and saw it had run out. I was late. I didn’t like the idea of that fiery doorway sitting there, open and unattended. Also, I didn’t like the idea of being in the past—in that past I was monkeying around with—one second longer than I had to be. I rushed, and because I was in a rush, I stumbled just a few feet from the portal and came down hard on my hands and knees.

  And that’s when I saw me.

  I was hung on a maple tree a few dozen feet farther into the woods. If I hadn’t stumbled, I never would have seen it; the shimmering portal was blocking my view.

  They’d strung me up by lashing my arms to the lowest two boughs on the tree, which put me—my corpse, that other me—in a posture less like Jesus and more like someone doing the “Y” during a dance floor bout of “YMCA.”

  But it wasn’t the hanging that had killed the other me. My throat was slit ear to ear. A line from A Christmas Carol—I’d played Mr. Fezziwig once—popped into my head: I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

  I carefully stood and stepped around the portal, so I could get a better look at Dead Me. The buzzing of flies was distinct from the staticky shushing of the doorway home. The breast of Dead Me’s cassock was stiff with dried blood. A little swarm of flies scattered like dust in the wind when I reached up to touch it, then resettled on my slit neck, rubbing their hands together as they said grace over the feast that was my body. I didn’t like looking at my face in that condition, so I looked at the cassock instead, and saw that all thirty-nine buttons were intact. I double checked the one I was wearing, which was still one button shy.

  Then I noticed Dead Me’s satchel; it had some heft to it. I carefully peeked in, and a big tankard—even more ornate than the ornate canns I’d just received—lay within. As I pulled it out I heard the snuffbox clink against it. I reached in, and wasn’t surprised to find that one empty. The one I’d brought with me, in my own satchel, still had almost half of that day’s ’teenth, which I’d declined to leave behind. I stowed this empty snuffbox in my own satchel, but the tankard wouldn’t fit, so I set it at my feet.

  And then... I can’t say why I did it, but I checked his pockets. My pockets. It was...

  It was an awfully weird thing to do. As I slid my hand into Dead Me’s pocket I got this weird series of flashes, first phantom pressure along my thigh, as though I was digging through my own pocket, and then this vivid sensory memory of slipping my hand into the pocket of my first boyfriend’s baggy jeans as we sat in the back of a crowded theater watching a midnight revival screening of Reservoir Dogs. And then I hit something. My mind snapped back to the here and now—which was really the then and there. The thing in Dead Me’s pocket was smooth and flat, and I couldn’t fathom what it might be. So I pulled it out to see.

  It was my iPhone. His iPhone. Our iPhone. It had the exact same crack running across the screen, just like mine—which I’d taken pains to leave in my car’s glovebox.

  But when I turned Dead Me’s phone over, the apple had a bite out of the wrong side, the left side instead of the right. My breath locked up in my chest, the forest went grey, then lurched hard to the left, and I thought I was going to puke.

  Dead Me wasn’t Future Me; he was Alternate Me. I thought about the smith’s insistence that I’d regularly arrived for morning prayers, even though I knew for a fact that I’d personally only stepped through that portal three times. I’d dismissed his claim as tweaker’s confusion. Time flies when you’re having fun, and all that. But the joke was on me, I guess, ’cause there was more than one me hopping through the forest.

  “Hey,” a voice from behind me said carefully, like someone trying to wake a possibly violent sleepwalker. I put my hands up—I don’t know why—and slowly turned. It was Taylor, the Portal Guy, looking at me with a crooked, confused grin.

  “Don’t worry, Paul; I won’t shoot.” He looked past me, at the dead and crucified me, and then back at live me. “Chico is getting antsy. We should go.”

  “Go?” I dropped my arms.

  “Go.” He confirmed, then looked at my hand. “And you shouldn’t bring your phone along on things like this. I’m sure the roaming charges are insane.”

  “I’m on Verizon,” I said stupidly, pocketing the phone.

  Taylor nodded his approval. “Nationwide coverage with no roaming. I’ve seen the ads. You travel a lot, then?”

  “Never.”

  “Well, maybe you should consider traveling an option. You mess around with meth heads too long, you might end up like that guy.” He didn’t look at the Dead Me when he said that last part, just kept his eyes locked on mine. “But whatever. Let’s go. Looks like you’ve got lots of chips to cash in. Chico’s gonna have to go to the ATM.”

  Chico—who was ecstatic to see the tankard and two canns—didn’t end up having to go to the ATM.

  “You got a PayPal?” he asked, his eyes never leaving the fancy tankard, which he tipped back and forth, so the light slid along the complex engraving. I said yes and gave him the email address. He dug out his phone and briefly glanced away from the tankard to type something with one thumb, lightning fast. “Check you phone.”

  I almost pulled out Dead Me’s iPhone, and then caught myself. “I left it in my glovebox.” Taylor gave me a look, but didn’t contradict me.

  “Whatever. I just sent you the five hundred dollars for the spoons; I gotta talk to Peggy, but it’s pretty much for sure that you gonna start seeing money for these mugs by the time you wake up, and you’ll have your ten-point-five grand before dinnertime. You can go take you honey-man out somewhere nice for dinner—somewhere even nicer than the somewheres nice you guys work at.” Chico was looking at one of the canns now, but more clinically; he checked the mark, then held it up and shifted it in the light, looking for dings and dents. The spoons just got a cursory glance, checking for those all-important •REVEREs.

  He turned to Taylor. “You got some bubble-wrap or newspapers or something?”

  Taylor shrugged. “Sure, something.” Then trotted off.

  Chico turned his attention back to me: “FYI, if you transfer all that money out too quick, the Federales, they gonna nab you ass. I suggest you get you one of them PayPal debit cards and just sorta use it same as cash.”

  Taylor came back with an empty copier paper box, a loose piece of bubble wrap, and a sloppy stack of USA Todays. Chico lost all interest in me.

  I told them I was just gonna leave, if that was okay. No one responded, so I left the other snuffbox—the empty one I’d taken off of Dead Me—on the corner of the conference table where Chico was wrapping up his treasures and showed myself to the door.

  I dropped my keys twice trying to unlock my car. My hands were numb and I was trembling like a dog on Fourth of July. Everything was too loud—the buzzing of the parking lot lights, the grind of the crickets and cicadas, the creak of the peepers. My head ached with the racket.

  When I finally wrestled myself into my car and slammed the door, it was like being wrapped in a down quilt. I calmly got my phone out of the glovebox, then dug
the other phone out of my pocket. The cracks across the screens were absolutely identical, which is creepier than you’d think. There probably haven’t been two identical cracks in the history of the Universe, but these were twins, right down to those micro-scratches your phone gets jostling around in your pocket with spare change and keys.

  Identical twins, save for the logo reversed on Dead Me’s phone. In the fine print on the back, right under where it said “iPhone” and mine says “Designed by Apple in California Assembled in China,” Dead Me’s phone said, “Designed by Apple in California Assembled by the People in China.”

  I was tempted to power my phone back up—I felt disconnected from the Universe with it blank and cold like that—but I sort of dreaded what I would discover PayPal and Chico had done for me.

  So I drove home instead.

  James was waiting at my apartment when I got there. He was leaning against the bricks outside my building’s front door, even though he has keys to my place. His face was eerily lit by his own phone, which he poked at listlessly with the thumb of his cupped hand. His free hand held a cigarette that he seemed to have mostly forgotten; the ash was almost an inch long.

  “I thought you were quitting,” I said weakly, faking a smile. James looked up with an arched brow. He didn’t have to say I thought you were, too.

  I burst into tears.

  James ground his smoke out on the bricks and wrapped his arms around me, gently rocking me through the worst of my sobs. God, we must have been a sight: A handsome bartender in black vest and bow tie hugging a sobbing Colonial preacher. But it was three A.M.; we were a living tableau with no audience.

  After a little bit I realized James was talking, repeating “It’s okay, Paul. C’mon. Let’s go in,” the way you might say it to an injured dog you’re trying to get into a car. I let James lead me up to my apartment. He sat me on my sofa and went to the kitchenette.

  I finally turned on my phone, and it immediately started chiming with alerts, the PayPal app informing me of $1.99 payments as fast as the little banner notifications could scroll by. I peeked at my email, and amid the mounting pile of receipts from PayPal users with unlikely handles like “fish@lozenge.cx” and “łasça@rrrrr.cc.ch” and “empty_string_EXIT_0@boo.bs” there was one from “Vox Celeste, LLC” for $500. The little memo line listed “For Spoons-Revere Colonial Choir backing vocals, rights and distribution buyout.”

  There was also a message from IndieMusicMeNOW.com, congratulating me on opening an account, adding my payment information, and uploading my first track. Apparently “A Very Whiplash Bass Xmas” was pretty popular, ’cause that’s what the payments were all for.

  I muted it. But even muted, the sound of the vibrations as the notifications came in was driving me nuts, so I shut the phone down and put it on the coffee table.

  When James returned with a glass of water for me, I showed him the other snuffbox, the one I hadn’t given back to Chico, which still had a few bumps of meth in it. I showed him Dead Me’s iPhone from another dimension. I told him everything—like, everything-everything: the meth and the village, the money and Chico’s Google Maps print-outs, Dead Me strung up in a maple tree, my strong suspicion that scores of meth-muling multiverse Mes were hitting that poor little village day after day after day.

  The entire time I spoke, my eyes never left Dead Me’s iPhone, the alternate iPhone. James was watching me watch the phone.

  “Go ahead and turn it on,” James said gently. “It won’t be anything crazy. Probably won’t even be anything interesting. Either it won’t work with the system here, or it will and it’ll just be a clone of your phone—backward apple notwithstanding. Most stuff on your phone is out in the cloud or whatever, not stored on the phone.”

  I picked it up off the coffee table and powered it up. The apple popped onto the screen, still backward. Then the phone loaded to the lock-screen wallpaper. On my phone that’s a picture of me and James standing to either side of a well-muscled, shirtless, kilted man playing a bagpipe and billing himself as the “Southernmost Bagpiper in the United States.” We’d taken it when we’d been down to Key West for New Year’s last year. On Dead Me’s phone the picture was a professional black-andwhite close-up of me and James, grinning like fools, freshly shaved and coiffed, our beaming faces framing a wedding-cake topper with two tuxedoed grooms on it.

  Then the phone gave us the “Reserve Battery Power” pop-up, then it croaked. I wanted to plug it in and poke around more, but one look at the port on the bottom of the phone made it pretty obvious that it wouldn’t fit any power chord Apple had ever shipped in this reality.

  “Okay,” James said, taking the phone out of my hand and placing it on the coffee table reverentially, as though it were the sort of ancient holy book you feared might bite your fingers off. “You’re taking a nice hot shower, and we’re gonna get some shut eye. Up at eight o’clock, a hearty breakfast, and then we’re going down to this FDA Annex D and sorting everything out. Okay?”

  I nodded, and James helped me to the bathroom, where he got me undressed and into the shower. When I got back out, I found that he’d ironed and hung up my vestments, and even replaced the missing button. I immediately flashed on the image of Dead Me lashed to the maple tree, no gaps in his cassock’s thirty-nine-button placket. Without a second thought I plucked the new button off mine, threw it in the toilet, and flushed. Better safe than sorry.

  The next morning we left the dishes to soak and drove to FDA Annex D. It was disorienting to be there during business hours, when the parking lot was full and the office park bustling. The space next to the Annex was a little tortilla factory, the double doors chocked open. It breathed out warm puffs of frying corn chips as it hummed along to the tinny roar of that new Beyoncé album.

  When we asked the receptionist for Taylor, she replied, “Taylor who?” and my heart stopped. It had never dawned on me that the Portal Guy might not be legitimately employed at the FDA Annex. My mouth worked silently, and the receptionist’s face lit up. “Hey!” she said, snapping her fingers. “I thought you sounded familiar; you’re Whiplash Bass!” She swiveled in her chair to call back through the doorway into cubicle country: “Ohmygod, Taylor! Whiplash Bass to see you!”

  A skinny middle-aged black guy in a tie came to the doorway, coffee cup in hand, looked at us, and then looked at the receptionist, annoyed. “Why the hell would Whiplash Bass and his boyfriend wanna talk to me?” He looked back at me and James, and then said dismissively: “They must want White Taylor.” As if on cue, the Portal Guy popped through the doorway, out of breath, a folded USA Today in hand. “Yeah!” he said, “Sorry! They’re for me.”

  “White Taylor knows Whiplash Bass!” the receptionist gushed. Her tone was congratulatory, as though this was almost a little better than getting a new car or a really great haircut.

  Black Taylor—who was also Clearly-in-Charge Taylor—shifted his ire to our Taylor, and especially Taylor’s folded newspaper. “When do you get anything done?”

  “I work late,” the Portal Guy blurted.

  Clearly-in-Charge Taylor, as it turned out, was also Clearly-Not-Impressed Taylor: “You are on your break now. I’m going to assume,” he eyed the USA Today, where a mostly finished sudoku was visible, “that you already took ten minutes of your break. You’ve got five to talk to your compadres, and then I want to see your ass back in your cubicle.” As if to punctuate this, Clearly-in-Charge Taylor made a point of looking at his wristwatch and pushing a button on the side three times. “I’ll check your cube in exactly five minutes.”

  “Yes, Mr. Panke. Totally. I’ll be there in under four-and-a-half.” Taylor said this to Clearly-In-Charge-and-Not-Impressed Taylor’s back, because the man was already walking away.

  I’d finally caught my breath. “I wanna quit my job,” I said in a rush.

  Portal Guy Taylor turned back to me and sighed. “Everyone wants to quit their job, Paul. But this isn’t the place to talk about it.” I looked over his shoulder to t
he receptionist unabashedly watching, as though we were the latest episode of her favorite reality show.

  “And that convo will take,” he glanced at his own digital watch, “More than four minutes and twenty-something seconds. Listen: I’ve got my lunch break in a little over an hour. You know that Chili’s by the mall?” James pulled a face, and I must have too, because Taylor rolled his eyes. “Jeez, guys, get a grip; their blossom is awesome. And they’re the only bar close by that serves at 11 A.M. I’ll be there. If I happen to run into you guys, then we’ll talk.” He glanced at his watch again. “And I’m gonna go back to work now. Not all of us have an acting career to fall back on.”

  He turned on his heel and left without further quips, leaving us with the embarrassingly enthusiastic receptionist. She squealed and clapped, then asked us to reenact the ad so she could record it on her phone. I declined, and she settled for a selfie with me and James. “You look great!” she gushed at James—which was an odd thing to say, until she continued “My friends are never gonna believe that Whiplash Bass and Mr. Attorney Man are a couple!” She was already busily poking at Instagram, and thus didn’t see James pantomime his theatrical distress at being mistaken for Sully Green, attorney-at-law—who actually did look kinda like James, if you squished James vertically and added a mustache. I couldn’t believe I’d never noticed the resemblance. It’s a funny little world, isn’t it?

  We had time to kill, so we went to the mall. Things are always normal in the mall. If you’re in the throes of an existential crisis, I strongly recommend going to the mall: Get a big cookie, walk around, look at pants, poke at the new iPads, test out absurdly pricey headphones. It’s better than a spa day.

  When we got to Chili’s, Taylor was already there at one of the high round tables clustered near the bar. He was sitting with a slouchy, doughy looking guy, also in cube-monkey khakis and polo shirt. They had some Dos Equis and a basket of deepfried monstrosities that looked nothing like an onion.