by Anthology
That’s another weird thing about déjà vu. Something that’s disgusting the first time is still disgusting the next. Marty made that palace of a suite so uncomfortable that we just went back to the floor and made a few million more. Of course, we knew we would.
As much as we did see, there were still things that we couldn’t. Like when I crashed out Sunday afternoon and woke up freaking out. I’d seen myself sit straight up, my t-shirt soaked, the late afternoon light creeping around the curtains. What I didn’t see before is what happened in my sleep. It’d been the same as the tank. I’d seen another week out. No, more than that, two maybe. The diatomic molecules were flop flipping all on their own.
I went to the suite’s bar, poured a tall glass of water, and guzzled it down.
“We don’t need another dose,” Marty said.
I spun around to find him standing at the end of the marble bar. “The diatomic molecules,” I said.
“You’ve got enough to last.”
“How long?”
“Don’t know.”
I misinterpreted the conversation the first time I saw it; often seeing is not processing. I thought it meant that I didn’t need—as in shouldn’t have—another dose. But he meant that I had enough diatomic quantum flop to last me a while. Perhaps a long while. Not from the dose we took the Friday before, or the next, or the next. It was the fifth trip to the tank that made the state permanent. I was there now, in the tank for the third, fourth, and fifth time. I was also at the bar of the suite. I felt a pressure push into the center of my forehead, an invisible thumb pressed up against my flesh, into my pineal. My hair ripped at my scalp, threatening an exodus. The room changed around me, the colors became brighter, the edges sharper.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” I said. “You’re not here.”
“But I am,” Marty said. And he was, but he wasn’t. I was talking to a future Marty.
“Quantum superimposed,” we chimed together. I didn’t know what that meant yet, but I did, because I would soon learn that since the past, present, and future were just different states of the same time; I could willfully traverse them. Absorbing those states into my present mind—the mind that was in the suite—a dizzying echo of the tanks, a flash of surreal.
A long, iridescent blue snake-like eel came up from behind Marty’s back and slithered down around his chest and up behind his arm.
“Do you see that?” I asked.
“Uh huh,” he said. “There’s one on your arm too.”
I looked down and sure enough, a long, thin eel was coiling around my forearm. “Hell!” I yelped, and then time slowed to a crawl. Simultaneously the blue eel slithered through the air and the water glass dropped. The glass exploded on contact with the floor and shattered into countless shards. But I could see each one twinkling, individually rising from the point of impact, blossoming out and away.
I must have seen that glass shatter a dozen times. More than that, I’m sure, because I want to put a number on it. A linear number. But all of those times were the same time and I was viewing it again in a constant, still frame loop. I just processed little snapshots, slow still frames of a grander movie. Is the cat dead or alive? It’s both until you open the box. My observation, my presence of mind, was no longer passive as it’d been a few days before. Observation had become an active process, a superposition of realities. I could see what was happening in the box.
“The riddle,” I said. “It’s a paradox, a mirror.”
“There is nothing that is not known,” Marty said.
“And you, you were the one that told yourself about the diatomic molecules.”
Marty appeared stunned; he was travelling. “I didn’t tell, exactly,” he said, staring off, most likely watching the event. “No. I gave myself the eureka moment.”
And it all made sense to me in a way beyond words. I experienced a new clarity of encompassing time, was aware of my immersion in it, as I never had been before and with all of the knowledge I was yet to learn accessible to me, I immediately possessed the benefits of living in the past, future, and now.
And then he said the most dangerous thing, “We’re gods among mortals.”
And in an epiphany—both physical and cerebral—as if spoken to by a god, there were further revelations.
Marty shared the experience.
He must’ve, because his face lost expression in synch with my realization that with all of the money and the power we could, would acquire, that would not be enough for him, that one day we would confront each other.
And that was the beginning of the chess match. For years, we played our roles politely, evenly matched in forecasting the outcome. Until our confrontation. Until his accident.
A freak accident I suppose he didn’t see coming.
***
Dave has always had the best handle on the flop. He went to Dharamsala to meditate with the Dalai Lama and learn the advanced tantric of Kalachakra. He shared some with us, then he went to Arizona and opened an Ashram.
Danny Wong used it to his advantage. I guess we all did, but he was creative. He expanded his parents’ restaurant business and turned Wong’s Wok into the national chain it is today. You know the jingle, You can’t go wrong with Wong. Everybody loves their crispy lo mein. I know, Chinese restaurant, that sounds cliché, but keep in mind he had a secondary study in business. You may be thinking he uses the flop for the fortune cookies, and I wouldn’t blame you.
But that’s not what he’s doing.
Ever wonder how they deliver so fast?
He precogs all of the delivery orders each day for the entire chain and has them ready to go when the customers call, actually set them up long ago. He told me that everything has been entered into a computer for years to come. We’re talking zero waste, bulk buying, and optimum staffing. When he goes public, we all make a killing. There’s a tip for you.
And Marty? Marty was bright and would have received his PhD regardless of the flop.
His downfall was his hunger for power, over the world around him, over himself. He alienated everyone with his thirst to know what he couldn’t see and the compulsion to control what he could. In his aspiration to be a god he leveraged everything he saw, but you can’t know what you haven’t seen. Marty was ultimately rejected by the world as a recluse and a fool.
On numerous occasions I’ve caught myself thinking of Marty and wondering how often he visited his inevitable end, if he thought he could avoid it, overcome it, see past it. And then I’ve pondered if Marty’s gone at all. We’ve all seen our mortal end. He has no future or present but his past exists alongside mine. Like the hooded figure on the bridge, he could go forward and backward in time at will, whenever he wanted. Maybe he just traveled back to his youth, or some other time, and in that way is still alive. I would have liked to have asked him, but I never did, and I never do. I wonder if he’d know the answer.
By knowing past, present, and future, we are removed from our lives. We were all cursed, not blessed. We play walk-on roles in a moving picture. No surprises, no unknowns. There are no wives or children, just visitations with our past and future selves. I suppose that’s because life became less interesting. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Me, I don’t travel much anymore. Not physically anyway. There are too many tentacles. I rarely leave my brownstone. It’s in a part of Manhattan that will remain safe and undisturbed for some time. I play the market, if you can call it playing. I buy and sell things, commodities, stocks. While Marty may have dwelt near the end, I visit the beginning, that house and our youth in the student ghetto. And I eat a lot of crispy lo mein.
You can’t go wrong with Wong.
***
Tower(Short story)
by Daniel Arthur Smith
Originally published by Holt Smith ltd
Nate planned this day, this entrance, visualized it, plotted it. The escalator to the right would take him directly from the underground PATH station to his new job without him ever having to
step outside. But he wanted to go to the street. At least today. He wanted to see the building he’d be working in for himself—One World Trade. He cranked his neck back so he could take in the magnificent tower from base to spire. He was awestruck, as he imagined he’d be. The September sky reflected off the hundred and four floors of glass, steel, and…freedom. He’d come full circle in a way. Circle-like. He wasn’t a New Yorker. He was from Florida. But every step he’d taken over the last fourteen years had to do with the piece of land where he stood. He’d set out on a journey that took him halfway around the world, only to end up right back at the site of the catalyst—Ground Zero.
Nate had other ideas of what he was going to do when he returned. Jobs were scarce and what civilian training did he have? He’d spent his entire career in special operations, supporting tier one missions in both Iraq and Afghanistan, four deployments in all. Sure, he could’ve gotten a job with NYPD or the government, but neither paid well.
That was okay though.
Titan had called him looking for a few good men. Men like him.
He inspected the plaza, the fence to the memorial, the angle of the tower glass, and the cloud reflecting in it. He nodded his head and straightened the jacket he’d picked up at Men’s Wearhouse the day before.
A foot in the door was all he needed. This was day one. This was New York. If he could make it here…
***
When the lights went out, Nate figured New York was being hit.
He hunkered down.
He hunkered down the same way he had all those nights in the dark stony hills of Afghanistan. His first day on the job, the first day at Titan, and WHAM!
He hadn’t even finished filling out the stack of paperwork the woman from HR had given him.
Nate heard the whimpers in the blackness—a lot of them—confused pleas for help, the crying.
He heard the screams—on his floor, the floors above, below.
Nate was calm.
This was not the first time he’d heard these sounds, the cries of the helpless.
There’d been many firsts in his life since the building that stood here before this one fell.
That was a first, that morning, in his eleventh grade history class. When all of the girls began to wail, when the boys did too, as they watched the buildings burn in New York City. Burn and then fall. That was a first.
He did what he had to do, what he was compelled to do.
Nate signed up.
Four tours as a Ranger, one in Iraq and three in Afghanistan, and this happened before, in a different way, the cries in the dark, in the smoke. There was a first time, in a village, and then it was a past thing.
The inky blackness was something new, a first, was a thing.
He was calm.
The EMP, the tremor, he recognized those, the darkness that fell as a blanket, that brought blindness to himself and everyone on the floor. That was new. The way it soaked him to the bone, a first. A weapon he’d not seen before. Before now. Some nerve agent, perhaps.
He was calm.
This was not the first time he’d sat in the dark. He’d done that before. But not this inky blackness. Not in Afghanistan. The nights in Afghanistan were never this dark. Quite the contrary, on some nights visibility was as high as thirty percent. No, he sat in the dark, in the black, somewhere else. Somewhere that wasn’t on a map. A place that a passing ship might mistake for an oil rig, except it wasn’t an oil rig. It was a black site, a black site with a tight black box, a dark black box. He sat in there, in the tight box, for two days. They all did at some point. He thought of them, his brothers. He thought of those that were left, those that came home, and he bided the time, kept track of time the way he was trained, kept calm until his vision, until everyone’s vision, returned.
Nate calculated a day had passed.
When his vision came back, it was as if someone flicked a switch—dark, and then light. He slid himself out from under the desk where he bunked himself. He was alone in the high-walled cubicle, though he could hear others shuffling about, a woman still crying. The lights in the ceiling panels above were off, but a gray day glow lit the room. He lifted the black plastic receiver from the phone. There were a dozen little white buttons above the number pad and a blank digital screen. He could guess how to access an outside line, but it made no difference, no matter what he tapped, no tone. The phone was dead.
He fished out his smart phone from his new Men’s Wearhouse sport coat on the back of the office chair. That too, dead.
There was an EMP over the city, of that he was sure.
He’d rolled his cuffs up to the top of his forearms during the time the lights were out and contemplated now if he wanted anyone to see the mass of Polynesian ink that ran down his left wrist. He decided not, and rolled the sleeves down. Then he tightened his tie and grabbed his jacket, but he didn’t put it on.
Nate made his way out of the little maze of high cubicle walls to the main aisle that ran the ring of the office. Private glassed offices and suites lined the outer wall. The one in front of him was empty. A bright mist hung beyond the window.
The next office was occupied. Behind the desk, facing him, was Deidra, the HR woman that had welcomed him to Titan the day before. She was resting her chin on her thumbs. Her elbows were propped up on her desk, the fist of one hand tightly closed in the other, her fingers forming a steeple. The ink of her mascara was smudged in thick raccoon lines around glassy vein-laden eyes that had cried in their blindness. Her yellow curls were loose and away from her scalp, unfurled. And her thousand-mile stare was aimed toward the desktop, sixteen inches away.
“Deidra,” Nate said.
She didn’t respond.
The tension of the last twenty-four hours—he thought. She might be in shock. “Deidra,” he said again, this time leaning through the threshold of the office door. Her eyes rolled up at him. She sniffled and forced a smile.
Nate stepped in, tore a peach tissue from the embroidered cube at the side of her desk and offered it to her. She pinched it between her fingers, peered into his eyes, sniffled again, and then dabbed herself with the paper cloth. The action must’ve grounded her because she lashed out for two more tissues—thip, thip—and made quick work of bringing herself back around.
Nate waited. Deidra needed a purpose. He’d give her one.
She tossed the used tissue into the basket beneath her desk and with her fingertips spread wide, she pressed her white blouse into place, from her shoulder to her waist, smoothing out the wrinkle that had begun to form near her arms and at her midline. Then she gave Nate her bravest face.
“Nathan Farthen,” she said. “Right?”
He made sure to keep his voice leveled, kind, “Nate is fine,” he said.
“Yes, yes. Nate.” Her pupils darted past him and to the sides of the office.
“We had an event,” he said.
“We did.” Deidra nodded, concerned.
“The power is out, which means the elevator is most likely out, and we’re on the eighty-fifth floor.”
“The power is out?”
“Focus, Deidra. Is there a protocol? You’re Human Resources, you must know if there’s a protocol. What are you supposed to do if there’s a power outage? If there’s an…” He stopped himself. Those words. An attack. Those words wouldn’t help the situation, wouldn’t put Deidra’s head where he needed her to be. The way to control the situation was to keep her calm, to keep everyone calm.
“A power outage?”
“Yes,” Nate said, “a power outage.”
“We have a protocol.”
“Great. I thought so. I mean, you seem very organized. What is it?”
“We stay here.”
“Stay here?”
“In the event of a power outage. We stay on the floor until someone notifies us or someone comes.”
“So we sit tight? That’s it?”
Nate was aware of the finer details of what happened to the last building that
occupied this block, what had happened to those that were told to stay on their floors and wait. It was also the right thing to do.
“First we do a head count,” Deidra said, “so we can call…” Her eyes shifted to the black phone on her desk. She was already aware it didn’t work.
Nate didn’t want her to ponder. “A head count. And who does that?”
Deidra’s eyes went wide. “I do,” she said. “I’m the floor warden.” She spun to the side and then rose from her chair. She swung up the door to the compartment overhanging her desk unit and from between a stack of stapled papers and a dried out plant, removed a shiny yellow plastic construction helmet. She plopped it on her head, forcing her curls to sprout out sideways around the rim, and then straightened the front of her skirt as she had her blouse. She opened a cabinet drawer just below the desktop, removed a flashlight and clipboard, and then flicked the switch of the light to check it.
Nate bit his lip when the light didn’t go on.
“I just bought batteries,” she said. She set the flashlight down and went to work filling out the paper attached to the clipboard line by line.
“Today is the twenty-sec—”
“The twenty-third,” Nate corrected.
Deidra’s lips went tight across her face. “The twenty-third.”
The top of the pen bobbed rapidly as she checked two of a series of boxes. “Occupied?” she mumbled. “Obviously…Time?” She looked at the tiny sparkling watch on her wrist. “My watch stopped.”
Nate flipped his wrist over. EMP, all right. “Did it stop at 12:23?”
“Yeah, 12:23.” Deidra grinned and cocked an eyebrow. “How did you know?”
“I keep exact time,” Nate said.
“Me too.” She scrawled the time down on the clipboard and then glanced up at Nate. “But how is it your watch stopped at the same time?”
“The outage. It’s that kind of outage. Anything electric. That why the phones and the flashlight don’t work.”