by Tim Powers
But just as he was squeezing a dab of toothpaste onto his fingertip he heard a hoarse voice cry, “You better put all that trash back in them barrels, lady!” – and though it sounded as though the man who’d yelled was standing right beside him, the cry had an unconfined sound, as if it had occurred outdoors.
The sudden voice had startled Bondier, and the curl of toothpaste had wound up on the mirror. He swore under his breath and steeled himself against any further intrusions, and he managed to get a blob of toothpaste into his mouth in spite of an old woman’s voice snarling, “Screw yaself, I’m on public propitty,” as he lifted his hand.
He resolutely chewed the toothpaste, then spat it out and rinsed his mouth. It occurred to him that he ought to shave, and during the task he was subjected to no further phantom noises except a few bangs and clatters, which he ignored.
The doorbell rang just as he’d sat down and got a cigarette lit, which pleased him, for he thought he looked less like an invalid when he was smoking. “Come on in, Marge, it’s not locked.”
The door opened and Margie bustled inside. She was a bit older than Bondier, but her pale skin, wool skirt, eye-magnifying glasses and brown hair – pulled functionally back in a bun – made her seem younger, or at least made the question of her age somehow irrelevant. Her head and hands and feet were just perceptibly bigger than scale, and sometimes when he was in a bad mood he thought she looked like one of those human-body drawings that exaggerated the bits that had greater nerve sensitivity.
“Ready to go?” she asked, brightly cheerful as always.
Bondier could hardly hear her over the new hallucinatory noise, a measured series of sharp metallic crunchings, as if someone was methodically stomping a line of flimsy toy cars. “Sure,” he said, trying not to raise his voice. “But you just got here – sit down. Can I get you a cup of coffee?”
“Lady, you can’t flatten ’em here, my tenants gotta park here,” rasped the man’s voice again, and Bondier had missed Margie’s answer.
“What?”
“I said no thanks, let’s go before the rain starts.” Marge cocked her head and blinked at him. “You sure you’re all right?”
“Well,” said Bondier, unable to think of any other way to make her alight, “I did have one of my blackouts a few minutes ago. A couple of ’em, actually.”
He heard a car start up, sounding like it was right in the room with them, and he was wearily glad that Margie didn’t share his hallucinations, for the following gust of engine fumes would have driven her out of the apartment if she’d been able to smell them. He stubbed out his cigarette in a coffee cup.
“Oh, you poor thing,” Marge said with sudden concern, shutting the door and crossing to join him on the couch. “Did you fall?”
“Stupid old bitch,” the man’s voice growled.
“Just a … sort of tumble,” said Bondier. He draped an arm around her shoulder. “I’m still a little dizzy, though.” Start, rain, he thought. Start hard.
Trying not to seem either hesitant or hurried, he leaned over to kiss her.
A sharp but silent flash in the room made him jerk around involuntarily – and then it took all his control not to yell in surprise, for his kitchen was gone, and his living room now opened onto a brightly sunlit parking lot, and, standing only a few yards away from him, facing away toward the cars, was a fat old man in overalls who was meditatively scratching his rear end.
Oh, God, it’s bigger and vivider than my apartment, than I am, thought Bondier shrilly; but it’ll go away. I’m getting worse, but it will go away – if I ignore it, don’t acknowledge it, really act as if it’s not – intolerably! – there.
He turned back to Marge, squinting against the impossible glare and hoping his voice wouldn’t quaver when he apologized for having jumped, but she was leaning back against the couch-arm, with her eyes closed, and really didn’t seem to have noticed. Her lips were open and working, and at first he thought she was somewhat grotesquely inviting a kiss, but then he saw that her arms were extended to form a ring, as though she was in the process of kissing someone, someone invisible.
And a moment later he actually shrieked, for he had looked down and seen that there was a hole that extended across her belly and part of the couch, and through the hole he could clearly see a trash can full of old milk cartons and sour cream tubs and crumpled bags from some takeout restaurant he’d never heard of called McDonald’s.
He was on his feet, gagging and near panic.
The front end of his apartment, he noted numbly, not only still showed a gray day behind the blinds, but also wasn’t even a bit lighted by the – yes, it was all still there – bright sunlight on the other side of the room.
“I’m sorry, Marge,” he said in a constricted voice as he stared hard at the room’s normal half. “I think I took more of a knock than I realized. Let’s get some fresh air, okay?”
There was no answer, so he forced himself to turn around.
On the couch – between Bondier and the fat man in overalls, who was still scratching his rear end – Marge was now reclining on her back, making soft sounds of protest but still working her mouth and caressing empty air. As Bondier watched, her blouse rippled and the top button slowly undid itself.
“Marge,” he said loudly, fear putting a whining tone in his voice.
She didn’t hear him.
“Marge!” he shouted, suddenly so dizzy that he grabbed the arm of a chair in case he had another blackout.
The old man stopped scratching and turned around to stare unseeingly in Bondier’s direction. “Who’s that?” he called.
“Goddamn it, Marge, can’t you hear me?” screamed Bondier.
“Hey, keep it down, there,” said the old man. “Where are you, anyway?”
The old man started forward, and Bondier’s nerve broke; he whirled around, snatched open his front door and bolted down the walkway toward the street. A cat scampered out of his path and ran straight up a wooden fence.
He desperately wished there was someone he could talk to, someone who was close enough to him to listen without making judgements about his sanity. He had a few friends, but none of them would welcome this kind of confidence.
Family, he thought, that’s what I wish I had right now, people who would have known me since I was a baby. A brother to share this with, a mother on whose lap to tearfully dump it all. Of course I do have a mother – somewhere, if she hasn’t died by now.
He smiled bitterly at the thought. He’d never known his mother, hadn’t even seen her since the court took him away from her when he was still a baby, but she didn’t seem to have been the sort of woman who could be bothered with comforting an upset son. She almost certainly had thrown his twin brother off that overpass onto the Pasadena Freeway in 1954, as several witnesses had attested; and if the little corpse hadn’t evidently been carried right away by one of the passing vehicles, she’d have had to put up with the inconvenience of a murder trial … and she hadn’t made even a token protest when the authorities subsequently relieved her of the remaining member of the pair.
Sure, he told himself, trying desperately to be adult and jocularly independent about it. Look her up. That’d make you feel better. Jesus.
He’d slowed to a walk, and now stopped and turned to look at his apartment, two blocks back. It looked the same as it always did, a pair of windows in the long rust-streaked building, and Marge’s battered old Volkswagen sat as placidly as ever by the curb. A young man had ducked behind a tree across the street, probably – knowing this neighborhood – to take a piss.
It occurred to him that the cars in the hallucinated parking lot had all been models he’d never seen. They’d been littler, and rounder.
He took several deep breaths. It must have been an aftereffect of the two blackouts, he thought. This was the worst yet, but it seems to be over. I ought to head back.
But he decided to clear his head with some brisk walking and fresh air first, and let the chilly breeze br
ush even the memory of the garbage-reek out of his hair. He walked randomly for ten minutes, up this alley and down that street, and his heartbeat was nearly back to normal, his mouth beginning to lose the dry taste of unreasoning fear, when he turned onto Main Street, aiming to get a beer at Trader Joe’s, and to hell with the doctor’s warnings about drinking while on medication. Some medication it had turned out to be.
He heard brakes and a sudden metallic crunch a couple of blocks behind him, and when he turned he saw that a delivery van had backed into a parked car – several cardboard boxes toppled out and split open, and cigarette cartons spilled into the gutter. He started back, hoping to be first among the mob that would quickly be gathering to snatch them up, but then he saw the thing striding massively down the sidewalk toward him.
Keeping his face very stiff so as not to let his aides know that something was wrong, Stanwell walked steadily from the cab to the door of the Corday Hotel.
The hardest part was to keep from alternately narrowing and unnarrowing his eyes as the hallucination of a bright, sunny day flashed on and off every few seconds. It was easier when he’d got inside Andre’s, the ground-floor restaurant, and been shown to a table, for though the room kept changing from an elegant restaurant to a shabby laundromat and back again, as abruptly as if the restaurant scene was a photograph someone kept shoving in his face and then yanking away, he could lean back and shut his eyes. At least the feel of his chair, and the tablecloth under his hands, were steady.
“You’re certain you’re all right, sir?”
Stanwell nodded without opening his eyes. “Gribbin be here soon?”
“That’s what his man said on the phone, sir. Of course you know how the subways are. But if you feel at all bad, it’d be easy to – ”
“I’m fine, damn it,” Stanwell snapped, his eyes still shut. “Tired, is all.”
He thought, if only that son-of-a-bitch, year-older version of me could have said whether or not these damned hallucinations have let up by his time! Or if only I could circumvent him, break the now-barrier: travel farther into the future than the somehow-constant now-line, which moves forward only at the agonizingly slow rate of a day per day.
He sighed, opened his eyes long enough for the restaurant to appear, and grabbed his water glass.
I suppose, he thought as he took a sip and replaced the glass by touch, that if an ordinary person, condemned, as each of them is, to be a steadily moving point on the time chart, unable to edge even one second further ahead or back than the instant of now – if one of them could know of my capabilities, he’d probably think I had incalculable freedom … the fool.
I guess I can see why there is the now-barrier – it’s the freshly woven edge of the fabric, beyond which is only emptiness and God’s moving shuttle – or uncollapsed probability waves – but what’s the problem with the other direction? Why in hell can’t I jump forward again from any point further back than 1953?
Thank God, he thought with a shiver, I didn’t have to jump any further back than 1943 to learn that. That was a horrible decade for me, unable to jump and concluding that the talent had been lost; having to get jobs and apartments, and simply live my way ploddingly up the years, until mid-1953 finally rolled around again, and I found the talent had been restored, and I could jump up to now, which had been … what, 1975 then.
And why in hell should it be the case that I can only do it if I’m in – of all places – downtown Santa Ana, California? It’s as if there’s some kind of psychic power-station locally.
“Ah, I see Gribbin coming up the steps now, sir,” said one of his aides, and Stanwell ventured to open his eyes.
The hallucinatory tug-of-war seemed to have been settled in favor of the restaurant, he noted with relief, and he beckoned to the drink steward. Being from New York, Stanwell reasoned, Gribbin might like to take the opportunity to try some tequila – just as whenever I’m back east I always make it a point to get hold of some real Scotch.
A few moments after Stanwell had placed the drinks order, Gribbin’s driver walked up to the table and pulled out a chair, and then after a pause pushed it in again.
“Where’s Mr. Gribbin?” Stanwell asked him.
The man didn’t answer.
“Excuse me, I asked you where Mr. Gribbin is.”
The man on Stanwell’s right leaned forward and shook hands with the empty air over the ashtray. “And I’m Bob Atkins, Mr. Gribbin,” he said respectfully
The drink steward returned and set down two glasses of tequila, one in front of Stanwell and one at the empty place across the table. “I trust you’ll enjoy that, sir,” said the steward to the empty chair.
The thing was no taller than Bondier, but it was so broad – from its shopping-cart shoulders to its fringed, elephantine feet – that it seemed to loom over him as it advanced up the street, filling the sidewalk and spinning heedless pedestrians out of its way. Its mouth was a wide square hole, studded with bits of jagged metal, and its eyes were two big tin pie-plates, with riddlings of tiny holes at their centers like the holes boys punch into jar lids to let captive insects breathe; but the eyes were spinning back and forth on the front of the rubbish head, and a harsh roaring was echoing out of the mouth.
It was rushing at him fast, and the pure, idiot ferocity that glared like tropical sunlight off of the blunt face made Bondier cry out in shock and cringe back against the wall.
It slid to a halt, dust and smoke bursting from its substance and whirling away in spirals, and then it turned its terrible head toward him, and for the first time he realized that it was composed of trash. Bags and cans and old bits of cloth heaved as it flexed itself, and then a long, shapeless limb had lashed out and a paw made of coat hangers and branches had grabbed Bondier under the chin and was crushing him against the wall.
Bondier managed to force out a choked scream, but the people on the sidewalk were oblivious of both the monster and him; even as he sobbed and tore uselessly at the garbage cable that had him pinned, several pedestrians at once collided with the trash-creature’s back, then expressionlessly righted themselves and resumed their walking.
The thing’s steady roaring became recognizable as many voices only when all of them began to speak in unison; suddenly it was a senilely shrill babble that came rasping out of the big hole in the face, and Bondier was able to catch words: “… see who pays the piper now, Stanwell, you can dish it out, all right, but now we’ll see … throat out, rip his balls off, right here in front of God’n’everybody … but wait a minute, any of you remember, we saw him, just a minute ago, at that restaurant, that Andre’s fency-shmency … back the street … yeah … this ain’t him, this is got no gray hair – young, too young, this boy.”
For a moment the wires and branches pressed a little less tightly against Bondier’s larynx, and he got his legs braced for a breakaway and mad sprint, but before he could choose his moment the inhuman grip tightened again, so tight this time that his breath whistled in his throat and his vision started to darken.
“It’s the twin, then, we knew there was a twin … maybe if we kill the twin, Stanwell will die – and then we can have our real lives!”
And then, without releasing his throat, it had crowded up to the wall and was embracing him, hugging him to its greasy, crumbling chest, and when he opened his mouth to scream again an oil-soaked rag wormed in between his jaws; cigarette butts and old straws had found his nostrils and were burrowing up into his head, and cords and lengths of cloth looped around his arms and legs and began pulling them upward and inward. Pressed rib-crackingly hard against the wall, he was simultaneously being folded up into a fetal position and smothered.
More bits of trash were forcing their way into his nose and mouth – he coughed gaggingly, but only wound up letting them get further in; they were well down his throat by now, with more packing themselves in every second. Then there was a sharp pain in his side, and instantly afterward a feeling of heat and running wetness, and he realized that s
ome jagged component of the thing had stabbed him, and that the garbagey member was about to begin probing the interior of his abdomen.
It galvanized him. He gave one last, mighty convulsion – but it wasn’t a physical one, and he felt the whole world jump with him.
In an instant the thing was gone, every bit of it, and he had fallen forward hard onto his hands and knees, and he was retching and coughing up all kinds of litter onto the sidewalk. After a few moments he was able to breathe, and when he stopped whooping he sat up and pulled up his shirt – the cut in his side wasn’t bleeding too badly, and didn’t look nearly as deep as it had felt. He folded his handkerchief into a pad and unlooped his belt to rebuckle it across his stomach, pressing the handkerchief against the cut, and then he tucked in his shirt. Finally he stood up, shakily, grinning in embarrassment at the people near him, but they weren’t looking at him, just as they hadn’t seemed to be able to see the trash-thing.
He hurried away, and all he permitted himself to think about on the way back to his apartment was how he was going to crawl into bed and pull the covers over his head … and then see the doctor tomorrow morning and request, demand, some vastly more potent medication. He assured himself that the trash monster had just been one more hallucination … and that probably the bruise on his throat and the cut in his side were imaginary too.
He was even beginning to relax as he rounded the last corner and saw his apartment – and Marge’s car, still! Bless her – ahead. But then he saw his front door yanked open, and a young man came running out, scaring a cat out of his path, and Bondier realized he wasn’t clear of it yet, for the obviously terrified young man sprinting up the sidewalk on the other side of the street was himself.
Okay, he told himself tensely, you’re still in it, it’s the same hallucination. It’s even got a certain consistency – that’s probably the twin that that monster referred to. See? It’s just one of your fits, not even several. You’re probably still on the couch, actually. Don’t start crying.