Second Lives

by Scott K. Andrews

  'OK, Kaz, where now?' she asked.

  Beirut, Lebanon, 19 March 2010, 8:12 fl.M. - 26h 19m to car bomb detonation

  Peyvand Golshiri felt every one of her forty-five years as she dragged herself out of bed. Her stomach rumbled and she rubbed her belly, feeling a pang at how soft and flabby it was beneath her aching fingers. She was not a young woman any more, and although she had only given birth once, it had taken a toll. Her husband claimed to like her with a bit of fat on her bones but that wasn't the point - he might not mind it, but she did. For the four hundredth time she vowed to go to the gym more often, and drink less wine.

  She pulled on a shirt and walked barefoot to the kitchen, where she found Kaz already sitting at the kitchen table wolfing down cereal, his hair a thickety tangle, his eyes rimed with sleep. His cheeks were bed-warm red as he said good morning, inadvertently spitting Captain Crunch over the table.

  Peyvand ruffled his hair affectionately but got her fingers stuck in its complex web of knots, forcing her to stop and untangle them as Kaz groaned in protest. He was fourteen, which meant he was now, according to him, far too old for things like hair ruffles.

  'Mum! Ow!'

  Soggy Captain Crunch spattered on her thighs.

  She really needed a coffee.

  Kaz stopped squirming long enough for Peyvand to extricate herself and reach for the coffee maker. At this time of the morning she rarely functioned above the level of a trained chimpanzee and Kaz knew not to bother her until she'd had a good strong dose of caffeine. He kept his attention focused on the small portable TV on the counter, which was tuned to MTV Lebanon.

  Peyvand started the coffee pot percolating and set about making breakfast, which, unlike her choice of beverage, was one of the Persian traditions she maintained. The taste of lavash bread with feta and jam transported her to the home of her childhood, the smells and the warmth of her mother's kitchen. Kaz hated feta, and pulled a face every time she tried to get him to eat some. She wondered if, when she was gone, he'd become as sentimental about her as she was about her own mother. When he was forty-five, would he eat lavash bread with jam and cheese, and think of her? She doubted it. He'd probably associate her with sugar-rich cereal and the smell of burning coffee.

  She cursed and switched off the coffee pot, which was making an ugly gurgling noise as the reservoir burned dry.

  She sighed and mumbled, 'This is going to be a long day.'

  When her breakfast was prepared she sat beside Kaz and flicked through the day's news on her laptop. Rising tensions with Syria again, internecine conflict, infighting, religious intolerance. Same old same old. It got her down, this daily dose of gloom and misery. Not for the first time she questioned her profession, wondered whether journalism made a positive contribution to anything or whether it just kept people frightened and in their place. She had been mulling over a career change - well, not exactly a change, more a refocusing of her efforts away from interviews, breaking news and feature articles towards longer pieces, in-depth examinations of specific people and places, maybe even a book. She needed to choose a suitable topic, something original and surprising, something that hadn't been done to death.

  She shook her head and drained her coffee cup. Maybe later. Today she had to drop Kaz off at school, hit the UN building to collect her pass, then head out to cover a UNIFIL project building a sports centre. Zbigniew was going to be there and she was looking forward to seeing him, even if it would only be for an hour or so. Maybe the brevity of their reunion would prevent them fighting.

  She dragged Kaz away from the TV, hustling him to get ready as she flung a simple dress on, dragged a brush through her short hair and slapped a bit of colour on to her cheeks. She looked every bit the harassed mother, but there was nothing she could do about that, not without forty-five minutes alone time and a far better stocked bathroom.

  She bustled Kaz out the door, locked it behind them, got down the stairs to the building's front door, went back up the stairs so Kaz could retrieve the books he'd forgotten, came down the stairs again, irritable and late, and finally emerged on to a muggy street thick with steamy mist as the morning sun burned away the remnants of the thunderstorm that had woken her in the middle of the night.

  It was a short walk to Kaz's school and although she tried to kiss him goodbye, he wriggled from her grasp, embarrassed, and strolled through the gate without a backwards glance.

  She stood for a moment, watching him run away from her, and felt a sentimental pang of loss, a small down payment on the way she'd feel when he finally ran away from her for good. Not long now, surely. He was a teenager, a taciturn jumble of acne, bad hair and sexual frustration that she could still not quite bring herself to stop thinking of as an unusually tall ten-year-old. How long before he packed his bags and took off in pursuit of whatever dream would possess him?

  Blaming her maudlin musings on lack of sleep, she turned and hurried away.

  The Beirut streets were noisy and crowded. Peyvand still felt drowsy, so she took a detour through a local street market that had a stall selling the most wonderful pastries. She exchanged pleasantries with the stall keeper, a thick matronly woman who always made jokes about how skinny Peyvand was and tried to force more sweets on her, and walked off with two boxes of treats. Ten minutes later, buoyed by the sugar hit from inhaling most of one box, she gave the other to one of the receptionists at the UN and was rewarded with a torrent of office gossip, the most salacious of which she filed away for future use; sweets and pastries weren't the only way of getting people to help her with stories.

  Twenty minutes later she finally hit the small cupboard she laughingly called her office. She wasn't a UN official and had no official standing in the press, but her husband had pulled some strings, and she was useful for planting stories, so she was tolerated, even welcomed in some quarters. Nonetheless, the room was only a tiny bit wider than her desk, forcing her to sit with her back to the door, and it became oppressive on particularly hot days, so although she swung by daily she rarely stayed long. It was basically a glorified filing cabinet.

  The desk was piled high with papers and notebooks, magazines, photographs, newspaper cuttings and printouts. Her laptop looked slightly forlorn sitting on a bed of Time and Newsweek in the middle of this towering monument to dead- tree journalism. Peyvand ignored it, instead rummaging out a battered Moleskine exercise book and grabbing a biro, the end of which had been bitten into a stippled mess of jagged peaks and troughs. She flicked through the book until she found the notes she had made last week; possible avenues of enquiry in her attempt to construct a profile of the new head of Lebanon's security services, a man whose public persona was wrell cultivated but whose private life remained opaque. She'd had a thought last night, as she was dropping off, and she bit the pen as she tried to excavate it from her memory - some connection she'd recalled and had decided to pursue.

  She was beginning to get a sense of a memory bubbling up to the surface when she heard a voice behind her.

  'Mrs Cecka?'

  It was a girl's voice, young but confident, American. Surprised, Peyvand swung round in her chair.

  'I don't go by my married name,' she said firmly. 'It's Ms Golshiri or Peyvand, I don't mind which.'

  The girl smiled. Tall and skinny, about seventeen, she was dark-skinned but South Asian, not Arab. She was dressed simply in jeans and white shirt but looked dishevelled, as though she'd been soaked and had dried out crumpled. She needed a good ironing.

  'Peyvand, then,' said the girl. 'You're a journalist, right?'

  'Among other things.'

  The girl stepped inside and closed the door. There was no other chair so she sat cross-legged on the floor with her back to the door, looking up at Peyvand.

  'My name's Jana,' said the girl. 'I've got a story for you. The biggest story of your career. It's an exclusive, and it'll be a prize-winner.'

  Peyvand considered her visitor for a second, feeling last night's elusive memory sliding away from he
r again. She sighed and put down her pen, taken aback by the girl's confidence, sceptical of her claim. She leaned back in her chair and folded her arms.

  'How did you get in here?' she asked. 'You're someone's daughter right? Did Jerry in Press put you up to this?'

  Jana smiled again. 'I'm nobody's daughter,' she said. 'And Jerry didn't put me up to anything. I have a story for you, that's all. But it's not something I can tell you. You'd never believe me. It's something I have to show you.'

  Peyvand was immediately on her guard. If this girl was trying to lure her somewhere, this could be a kidnap attempt, albeit a very unusual one. It wouldn't be the first time a journalist had been targeted, and Peyvand's ties to the UN made her unique. When she had first begun travelling with Zbigniew she had been required to attend a training course on how to avoid being kidnapped, and how to behave if you were unable to. At the time she had thought it an overdramatic lesson in simple common sense. Now she tried very hard indeed to remember everything they had said, which was impossible because she hadn't really been paying attention.

  She shook her head and said, 'I'm not going anywhere with you, young lady.'

  The girl smiled. 'No, I can show you here, but I need to prepare you first. I have to tell you three things and ask you a question.'

  'I'm listening,' said Peyvand cautiously.

  'Your son, Kazic . . .'

  Peyvand knew what was going to happen: the girl was going to pull out a mobile and show her live footage of Kaz. This was a kidnap attempt!

  '. . . I know him,' said the girl. 'First, he wanted me to tell you that he still has the scar on his knee from when he fell off his scooter in the park in Guatemala. Second, that he hopes you're taking very good care of Bun Bun.' The girl smirked at this point but Peyvand barely noticed because she was fixed to the chair in horror. They must have snatched him the second her back was turned, from inside school. Her mind raced as she tried to think of a way to take control of the situation.

  'Third,' the girl went on, 'he says he remembers the fight on Christmas Day and he thinks you were right and his dad was being a dick.'

  'What have you done with my son?' asked Peyvand, drawing on all her reserves of self-control but unable to hide the slight tremor of fear in her voice.

  The girl's slightly smug air evaporated. She looked uncertain, and something about her made Peyvand sure that uncertainty was not a common emotion for her.

  'Nothing,' said the girl, seemingly anxious to reassure her. 'Honestly. I only have to ask you a question, and then everything will make sense, I promise.'

  Peyvand nodded slowly, indicating that the girl should continue.

  'The question is: can you explain Wyndham's law to me?'

  Peyvand was very, very confused. It took a moment for her to recall a conversation she'd had with Kaz a week or so ago about a film he'd watched. It had been about time travel and Kaz had explained to her afterwards, in the patient way that a fourteen-year-old will explain things to a parent they secretly think is stupid, that time travel was impossible because of this law he'd read about on Wikipedia. She had only been half listening; if she paid full attention every time his enthusiasm caused him to explain something pointless in ridiculous detail, she'd have a head full of nothing but Halo hacks.

  'Um, something about time travel being impossible because if it was there'd be people from the future all over the place,' said Peyvand.

  Jana clapped her hands once and smiled again. 'Great,' she said brightly. 'Right, wait here a moment.'

  The girl rose to her feet, opened the door and stepped outside. Peyvand sat, still scared, but now confused as well; this bizarre situation wasn't proceeding the way she'd feared it would.

  A moment later a young man stepped into the doorway, also simply dressed in jeans and T-shirt. He was tall and skinny, the gangly, angular boniness of an older teenager. His hair was cut very short and he had the remains of a suntan. He stood there in the doorway, not saying anything, looking at Peyvand, and she looked back at him, her confusion growing. There was something familiar about him . . .

  'Hi Mum,' said the stranger. And then Peyvand did something she prided herself on never, ever, ever doing - she screamed. It wasn't a full-throated I've-seen-a-monster-about- to-eat-me kind of scream, more a brief, strangled yelp of alarm.

  The boy stepped hurriedly inside and closed the door behind him.

  Peyvand was literally speechless. Her mouth moved but no words came out. Her thoughts were jumbled and chaotic, but within seconds she'd formed a hypothesis that Zbigniew had a child he'd never told her about and that little sod was playing a very, very nasty practical joke on her and oh my God, was her husband going to get it in the ear.

  The young man was grinning so hard it looked a little painful.

  'Mum, it's me, Kaz,' he said. 'Honestly. Look!' He pulled up his right jeans leg and showed her his knee, which had the exact scar her son had got two summers ago when he fell off his bike.

  'Half the boys in the world have scars on their knees from falling off bikes,' hissed Peyvand, but her anger lacked conviction because her awareness that this was her son was strong and, try as she might, it was increasingly hard to ignore. It wasn't the face or the body language exactly, although they were both right; it was something else, something intangible. The smell of him, perhaps?

  'OK, fair point,' said the boy, apparently taken aback by her anger. 'Jana told you the three things, yeah? The ones only I could know?'

  'All that proves is that you've got my son,' said Peyvand, putting as much menace into her voice as she could.

  'OK, right.' The boy looked momentarily lost for words. 'OK, um, ask me anything. Go on. Anything only Kaz would know.'

  'Think I'm a dummy, do you?' said Peyvand, jumping to her feet. She grabbed the boy's head and peered into both his ears in turn, looking for earpieces. She was slightly taken aback when she didn't find any. And there was that subconscious tug again, even stronger when she touched the boy, the feeling that yes, this was her son; how could she ignore the evidence of her senses?

  She stepped back and folded her arms. 'All right,' she said. 'Who was Kaz's best friend in Croatia?'

  'Slobodan, whose hair was never combed,' said the boy, smiling.

  'Where were we when I gave you the PS3 you nagged me about for a year?'

  'Guatemala,' said Kaz. 'It was wrapped in red paper and had Prince of Persia preloaded, like I'd asked for.'

  Peyvand stopped, unsure what to do. Her heart seemed to stop; her stomach twisted. It was impossible. This boy knew stuff he couldn't know, and her every instinct told her to hug him. She took a step backwards and felt the backs of her thighs press against the desktop.

  'Je-egareto bokhoram,' she told him.

  'Jeegare man-ee,' he replied, as her son always did.

  'OK, I'll play along,' she said. 'So you're my son from, what . . .' she considered his appearance, 'four years in the future?'

  The boy nodded. 'Yes,' he said.

  'Right. And you've got a time machine parked outside?'

  Kaz laughed and the sound of it tugged at her.

  'It's very, very complicated,' he said. 'Really. I don't fully understand it myself yet. I can take you to someone who can explain it all to you. But first, we have to go and get Dad.'

  Peyvand shook her head. 'I'm not going anywhere with you.' But her objection was half-hearted; the logical, reasonable part of her brain was giving up its objections one by one as the proximity of the boy overwhelmed her and her every cell felt the instinctive pull of maternal love.

  'You can travel in time,' she said, in a last-ditch effort to apply logic. 'And you choose to show up on a muggy Thursday in Beirut. Why aren't you off saving JFK or killing Hitler or something? You really expect me to believe that you would choose to come freak me out in my office? And how did you get in here anyway? This is ridiculous.'

  She sat back on the desk, knocking her laptop over and triggering a small avalanche of paper.

  The bo
y knelt before her, reached up and took her hands in his. She looked down into his big browrn eyes, so familiar but so different. Peyvand was taken aback to see tears welling in them.

  T came because there's something I need to do,' he said. 'Something I need your help with. And there isn't much time, so explanations will have to wait. You have to trust me.'

  'Was that your girlfriend a moment ago?' asked Peyvand, surprising herself.

  The boy laughed.

  'No,' he said. 'No she's not.'

  'Oh, are you gay?'

  'Mum!'

  And in that moment, with the embarrassed whine of a teenage boy forced to discuss sexuality with a parent, the last of her resistance crumbled and she finally felt certain that this was her son.

  'Doesn't matter if you are,' she said, smiling. 'When you were four you went through a phase of dressing up as Cinderella. Your dad and I used to joke about it.'

  'God, Mum, stop,' he said, but he was smiling again, relieved that she had finally accepted him.

  Peyvand cupped his face in her hands and looked in wonder. 'My beautiful boy. How is this possible?'

  He held her gaze for a moment, blinking back tears, then he reached up and gently removed her hands.

  'Later,' he said. 'I know you must be full of questions but it might be dangerous for us to stay here too long. We need to go and get Dad.'

  Peyvand nodded. 'OK,' she said, rising to her feet.

  As Kaz turned to go she grabbed the last pastry from the box on her desk and shoved it in her mouth before following him out the door. Today was going to require lots and lots of sugar.

  'Wait,' she said as she hit the corridor. 'Dangerous how?'

  Kaz's emotions were all over the place.

  He was face to face with his mother for the first time in four years. The mother he had lost and mourned, whose violent death had defined his life for so long. As he'd prepared for the meeting he'd been unsure what he would say to her. Would he even be able to speak at all? He had thought it quite likely he'd burst into tears and bury his head in her chest, which, given that she wouldn't know who he was, was likely to earn him a knee in the groin and a right hook.