The Best of Subterranean

  “In the future, there’s a war,” Cameron said. “And I think you must be important to that war. Which is why people from the future—or people receiving guidance from the future—are trying to destroy your life now, before you can do…whatever you’re supposed to do.”

  It was my turn to roll my eyes. “Haven’t I seen this movie? A future menaced by killer robots, one man destined to lead humanity to victory?”

  “First off, it’s not robots—just people, doing the things people do, for the good and terrible reasons people do them. And I don’t think you’re destined to save humanity. If you were that important, there would be a lot more resources put into helping you than a simple troublesolver like me. I mean, I don’t even do violent solutions. But you must be important somehow, in some capacity, because you are being well and truly fucked with.”

  “Cameron, I’m an interior decorator. How can I possibly be important to a war in the future? Does some dictator really like my aesthetic sense?”

  “I admit it’s a puzzler,” Cameron said. “But I wonder…did you always want to be a decorator?”

  “Well, no. I don’t know a lot of kids who grow up dreaming of that as a career path.”

  “How’d you get into the business?”

  “My wife. Ex-wife. We met in college. She was taking a design class, so I signed up, too, figuring I’d flirt my way into her good graces. Worked pretty well. The weird thing was, I discovered a real talent for decorating, and Portia encouraged me, suggested we go into business after we graduated, and that’s exactly what we did.”

  Cameron leaned forward. “What were you studying before?”

  “I have double degrees in sociology and political science, actually. Not tremendously useful to a decorator, I admit, though the sociology helps in understanding trends and fads.” I frowned. “You know, I did have another job offer when I graduated, kind of an interesting one, but Portia was dead set against it…”

  “Let me guess,” she said. “You were approached by a government agency best known by a three-letter acronym.”

  “True,” I admitted. “Offered a gig as an intelligence analyst, with hints of possible field work…I was always good with sifting data, and I was athletic as hell back then, captain of the lacrosse team, at least until I wrecked my knee. I tripped on a roller skate at Portia’s apartment, of all things. That was the end of my jock days, though I get around fine after the knee surgery.”

  “You could have had a very different life, Stephen.”

  “I like my life fine. Or I did, until Portia left me. Everything went downhill after that. If you’re right, and I am being persecuted, do you think…they somehow turned Portia against me?”

  She frowned. “I suppose it’s possible.” Pretty diplomatic, I thought.

  I put the sheet of paper back on the desk. “So what’s this blacked-out bit? Did the time-cops censor you?”

  She shook her head. “I blotted out a couple of lines. They were… personal. Nothing you need to see.”

  I couldn’t decide if I believed her or not. Cameron was a hard person to read. I leaned back in my squeaking uncomfortable chair. “This war you’re talking about—what are they fighting over?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. It’s better if I don’t know too much. The same reason I don’t put too many details in these notes to myself—the bare minimum is really best.”

  “If you don’t know what the war’s about, how do you know you’re even on the right side?”

  “I’m on the side that doesn’t gangstalk you and try to destroy your life. Is that good enough for you?”

  I’m nothing if not pragmatic, so I nodded. “What happens next? No offense, but even though you’ve gone some way toward identifying my problems, you haven’t exactly solved them yet.”

  “I’ve got some leads I’m tracking down. Once we find the person running this operation against you, there are…methods we can use to dissuade them.”

  “Why didn’t you just, you know, jot down the solution to this little problem on that note from the future?”

  “Maybe I won’t know the solution by the time the safe opens. Maybe the answer will be written on the next note. Maybe—”

  “Maybe there won’t be a next note,” came a voice from behind me.

  Cameron was cool, just staring past me. I swiveled in my chair, and there—

  There was Harold, the overmuscled asshole who stole my wife away, standing in the doorway in a black track suit with silver trim. He was holding a pink handgun—a Charles Daly .45 in fuchsia. Portia’s gun. She’d bought it a few years back after a friend got mugged, because she wanted to feel safer, and it was pink because…well, because Portia thought it was hilarious that someone had a line of colorful “ladies’ guns,” something that struck her as unspeakably adorably kitsch.

  “We only want the safe,” Harold said. “It gives you an unfair advantage.” He paused. “Which in this case means, any advantage.” He ignored me, gesturing at Cameron with the gun. “Move away from the desk, Cassavetes.”

  She didn’t shift. “Why? Are you afraid of me? I don’t do violence. You know that.”

  Harold laughed, a low slimy chuckle that seemed to drip sweat. “You don’t smack people around or shoot them, but you’ve done plenty of violence. We know all about you.”

  “Harold, you conniving shit,” I said. “You were behind this? You stole Portia away just to fuck with me?”

  “Shut up, Stephen. I’m not supposed to shoot either of you. Just make you irrelevant. But if I feel there’s no other way…” He shrugged. “You get a certain degree of autonomy when your bosses live a few decades away. Move away from the safe, lady.” He shooed her with the pink gun, and Cameron stood up and slid away from the desk. The whole situation should have been ridiculous, but mostly, it wasn’t.

  Cameron put her back to the wall, hands clasped before her. She didn’t look worried, exactly—but then, I guess she knew she’d survive this, at least long enough to write a note that inexplicably didn’t include the information that some guy would pull a gun on us. But that meant he wouldn’t succeed in stealing the safe, right? Unless he could change the past, which in this case was the future, except…my head started to hurt.

  “I’m going to take this,” Harold said, inching toward the safe. “And then…you two can back to your miserable little lives, I guess.”

  “I’m going to tell Portia what you are,” I said.

  He snorted. “You do that. ‘Portia, mean old Harold stole my new girlfriend’s time machine—’ Ha. The whole point is to make everybody think you’re crazy, ruin your life, destroy your credibility. Feel free to help us out.”

  I’d spent a lot of the past six months feeling like a victim. I decided I was done doing that. I put my feet against the desk, pushed with my legs, and rolled me and my chair backwards about three feet towards the door.

  “Fuck are you doing?” Harold swung the gun toward me.

  “Me? Nothing. Just making you look at me instead of her.” I had a feeling Cameron was the kind of person who could make use of an unguarded second, and at the very least, this put some space between Cameron and me, so Harold couldn’t hold the gun on both of us at once.

  He swung the gun back to Cameron, who was holding her cell phone. “Drop that!” he yelled.

  “911 is only three digits, idiot,” she said. “How long do you think it takes me to dial?” A voice from the phone said, tinnily, “911, what’s your emergency?”

  “No emergency!” Harold yelled. “Wrong number!” He scooped up the safe under one arm, took three steps toward the door, then stopped, frozen in place. I don’t really know how to describe what happened next, except that he—strobed, looking less like a man than a special effect, body transforming into a coruscation of blue and white light, until the light…just went out. Harold was gone. The safe thumped to the floor. I scooted the chair a little farther away from it.

  “Sorry to waste your time,” Cameron said, and f
lipped her phone closed.

  “Prank calling 911 is a misdemeanor, I think. Like filing a false police report.” I stared at the spot on the carpet where Harold should have been.

  “This cell phone’s been deactivated,” she said. “I always carry one like that, just in case. Even a cell phone with no calling plan can be used to call 911, did you know that? But it doesn’t show a callback number. Good for anonymous emergency calls. I have to make a few of those in my line of work.”

  “What happened to him?” I asked. “Whatever it is, he deserved it, but…”

  “The safe has security measures built in. If anybody touches it who doesn’t belong in this time, it sends them to whatever time period where they do belong. And don’t ask me how the safe knows, my old client said something about neutrinos and measuring the trace elements of contaminants in our bodies, but I’m not too clear.”

  “So Harold was from the future.”

  “Makes you despair about the state of the future, doesn’t it?”

  “But if he’s a time traveler, can’t he just…come back? Five minutes from now? Five minutes ago?”

  “In theory, but I get the impression that actually sending a whole person backward through time is incredibly energy-intensive, not something that either side of the conflict does lightly. If Harold’s proven himself a failure, compromised his cover…maybe they’ll just keep him. I hope so.”

  “If you knew he’d vanish when he touched the safe, why did you even call 911?”

  “I couldn’t be sure he was from the future.” Cameron picked up the safe and put it back on her desk, gently, like it was fragile. “The other side has local agents, too. Besides, you were so clever with your little rolling-chair distraction move, very lateral and lo-fi, I liked it. I didn’t want to disappoint you.”

  I just laughed. “So it’s over now? Harold is gone, and the gangstalking is over? We cut off the head?”

  “Absolutely.” Cameron wrote something on a piece of paper, then held it up. It read:

  Absolutely NOT. Watch what you say. They’re listening.

  “That’s a relief.” I tried to keep my voice weird-inflection-free.

  “Anything bad that happens to you now is just life. What do you say we go out and get some brunch? Unless you have Christmas Eve plans?” While she spoke, she kept scribbling, furiously, and I was impressed at her ability to talk and write at the same time.

  “Is it Christmas Eve already? I guess it is. Holiday planning hasn’t been at the top of my to-do list lately. Sure, something to eat would be great.”

  “Just let me straighten up a few things here. Hostage situations make such a mess.”

  Cameron passed me the new note. It said:

  How did Harold know about the safe? I sweep my office for bugs every day. There must be a listening device on you.

  She looked at me pointedly, and I shrugged, not sure where I would look for such a thing, or how it could have been planted. She rolled her eyes, came close to me—closer than she’d ever been, closer than any woman had been in a long time, except my ex-wife, who didn’t count in any way that really counted. Cameron patted me down thoroughly, slipped her hands into the pockets of my pants, then reached into the pockets of my jacket.

  And withdrew a glittering needle, wrapped with brass wire, a blue light pulsing gently at its head. “This is it,” she mouthed silently. “Play along.” Then, aloud, “All right, let’s go. Oh, your jacket’s pretty thin, and with that hailstorm—here, I’ve got an extra coat, it’s not very fashionable, but…”

  I took the long dark trench coat from the tree by the door and put it on, feeling like an extra in a detective movie from the 1940s. “Nonsense, trenchcoats are classic.” Cameron put on her own sand-colored coat, and we slipped out the front door, leaving my jacket and the listening device behind. Cameron hooked her arm into mine when we hit the street, and subtly tugged me in the direction of an alleyway. “Let’s cut through to the next block, there’s a good brunch place there,” she said.

  When we were well down the alley, which had a couple of zig-zags and narrowed so much we had to go single file, she stopped. “Okay, we should be out of sight of any watchers here. How did that device get in your jacket?”

  “I don’t know, maybe the guys who broke into my place planted it? But, no, I was wearing it when I met you…” I shook my head.

  “I think there’s a good chance Harold wasn’t working alone,” Cameron said. “At least, we can’t be sure. But we’ve just let anybody listening know that we’re going out, and leaving my time machine undefended, so…let’s see if anyone takes the bait.” She beckoned and led me to a concealed side door, hidden behind a dumpster, which took three different keys from her ring to open. The door slid into the wall silently, and she shooed me in, then closed up after herself. The space was small and dark, barely closet-sized, with a few TV screens on the wall and one chair. Cameron sat, and I stood by a door that presumably led inside. The monitors showed the street outside her front door, and the alley we’d just passed through, and her office.

  We watched silently for a few moments, until a woman appeared on the street view. Unlike the other passers-by, she hesitated by the entrance, and when no one else was around, she did something to the doorknob, and the door swung open.

  “Gotcha,” Cameron said. “Do you recognize her?”

  I nodded. I didn’t want to, but I did. “Portia,” I said. “My ex-wife. I saw her last night, I was wearing that jacket, she gave me a hug… She could have planted the bug on me.”

  “I’m so sorry, Stephen.” She sounded like she meant it.

  “Not as sorry as she’ll be.” When in doubt, try bravado. But being stunned and furious and hurt were at least different from being numb and sad and resigned.

  On the monitor showing the office, Portia circled the desk, looking at the safe warily. She pulled on a pair of strange heavy gloves, like something you’d see a guy using in an iron foundry to handle unspeakably hot materials. She flexed her fingers, and the gloves sparked blue.

  “What do you want to do?” Cameron asked. “I can’t let her run off with my safe, so we need to do make a move.”

  “You’re the troublesolver. You tell me.”

  “I can call the cops for real this time, have her arrested for breaking and entering. But if she’s working for the other side, she’ll have a get-out-of-jailfree card or two. They have serious connections. Warmongers always do.”

  I thought about that. Arrest, especially temporary arrest, wouldn’t scratch the itch of vengeance. “How about I do this instead,” I said, and pushed open the inner door.

  I stepped into the office, silently, behind Portia. I could have grabbed her by the neck, hit her in the back of the head, kicked out her knee and stepped on her throat, and all those things appealed. Instead, I just said, “Why did you do it, Portia?”

  She turned to face me, all innocent surprise, trying to hide her ridiculously gauntleted hands behind her back. “Stephen, what are you doing here? Harold was acting so strangely today, he ran off and took my handgun, and I heard the woman who worked here was a sort of therapist, or private detective, or something, and thought she could help—”

  “Those are some pretty crazy gloves, Portia. The new style? That how they’re wearing them in Paris this year?”

  She sighed and sat down in Cameron’s comfortable chair. I couldn’t help but notice Cameron hadn’t emerged from her little batcave, and in fact, the door had slid shut behind me. I hoped she was doing something useful in there.

  “It was a good run,” Portia said. “And I think we accomplished enough, even if we didn’t manage to get you committed to a mental institution. The point was to drive you crazy, take you out of society all together. That’s what you deserve, for the things you’ve done, will do, would have done. But I think we succeeded in making you harmless. It’s good enough.”

  I took the crappy chair, my insides trembling like an earthquake, like the long-awaited Big One
in my gut. “Portia. When did they get to you?”

  She laughed, that bubbling contagious laugh I’d once found so endearing. “Nobody got to me. I came here for you in the first place. We found you in college—though details about your life are pretty well concealed in my time, we knew where you went to school. I insinuated myself. Made sure to steer you away from dangerous territory, as gently as I could. Letting you make the decisions, gradually, to keep there from being any…noticeable waves. I’m famous, you know, among my people. The woman who turned Stephen Blaine into a decorator.”

  “But we were married. We were happy. If the point was just to distract me, to keep me from doing…whatever I was supposed to do…why spend all those years? Why the charade?” I wanted her to say I’d started as an assignment, but that she’d grown to love me, that I was—

  “To hurt you more,” she said, and there was a nastiness I’d never sensed in Portia, not even during our darkest direst fights. “To build you up higher so the crashing down would be more complete. I’m disappointed it didn’t end better. But I’ll take away this time machine, put an end to that woman’s ‘troublesolving,’ and leave you to yourself. Who knows. Maybe the bitterness and loneliness and worry and doubt and grief will break you anyway. A girl can hope.” She put her gloved hands on the safe, gingerly, and I half expected—half hoped—she’d vanish, but nothing happened, except more blue sparks, and she visibly relaxed. “I’ll be going now.”

  “No you won’t,” I said, standing up. “Not with that.”

  “How do you propose to stop me?”

  “He won’t have to.” Cameron stepped out of her office, sliding closed something that looked like a cell phone, but bulkier, and emanating the same blue light the time machine and Portia’s gloves had. “I called some colleagues. They’ll do the stopping.” She nodded toward the back wall, where a blue and white pulsation appeared in the air, and Portia looked behind her, comically alarmed, as a man and a woman stepped out of the rift and put their hands on her shoulders. Portia snarled and leapt up, but the man simply grabbed her in a bear hug and pulled her inside the rift, vanishing. The woman—who looked a little like Cameron, actually, but taller, and with somewhat heavier features, but the same brown-hair-browneyes—paused. “We’ve been trying to get her for a very long…well, ‘a long time’ is the wrong thing to say, sort of, but…you see what I mean.” She looked at me, then looked away, and said, “It’s an honor to meet you, finally, sir. I’m sorry I never had a chance to in…ah…” She shook her head, and her expression was all mixed-up and rapidly shifting, maybe grief, maybe restraint, maybe other things. I couldn’t parse it all. She said, “Goodbye.” Then turned and ducked into the rift, which disappeared after her.