Only then did he realise that the woman had never answered his question about how far back the recording went.
He heard a single, polite ding! from the bell on the counter. The screen showed the girl from the record store waiting at the register from three different angles and then his own back, as transfixed as a dog watching a light beam play over a wall.
“Sorry, sorry,” he said, hurrying over to wait on her. She had two of the old restaurant-style creamers, one with a blurry pink floral pattern, the other with two thin austere green lines around the base.
“I see you’ve got them, too, now.”
He paused with his fingers on the register buttons. “Pardon?”
She pointed at the camera behind her, nodded at the other two.
“For the insurance company,” he said with a nervous laugh. “Don’t ask me, I just work here. You know?”
“Yeah. I heard some places just have dummy cameras. They print up stickers with a company name that sounds authentic but it’s fake.”
“Good luck to them, I hope their insurance company never finds out.” Dov wrapped each small pitcher in a sheet from the financial section, then discovered he was all out of bags, except for the ones he used for Kitty’s prints. He hesitated, then searched the shelves under the counter more thoroughly. Still nothing, probably plenty back in the office –
The girl was eyeing the cameras with an odd, wary expression.
“They’re all real,” he told her. “Personally, I try to avoid looking directly at them.”
Her eyebrows disappeared under her bangs. “You do?”
“Yeah. You know, like Ghostbusters. Don’t look directly at the streams.”
Her puzzlement intensified. “I thought it was don’t cross the streams.”
The idea bloomed all at once and fully-formed in his mind. “Maybe you’re right and I’m thinking of something else,” he said, and gave her an extra twenty-five cents with her change.
The ladder was old but solid; he used it hundreds of times to change lights, put up shelves and take them down again but he hadn’t ever needed to do anything up near the ceiling before. And he didn’t need to now, either, insisted the still, small voice of his common sense. Ignoring it was – dared he even think it? – fun. Weird, silly fun, which would probably end right sharpish when he got a call from OnWatch asking him why he was tampering with the cameras.
He could tell them he’d thought the angle looked wrong, like maybe they’d slipped a little.
Oh, good, claim Fabiola had done shoddy work, get the poor woman in trouble – was he a mensch or what?
He decided to compromise – he wouldn’t touch the office camera or the one pointed at the counter, just the other two. If they’d even move – for all he knew, they were nailed, screwed, and glued in one position.
But they weren’t. The range of movement was limited but just enough that he was sure each camera could see the other two. He adjusted them, readjusted them, paused to ring up a Coney Island plastic tumbler and a black and brown serving tray with an only slightly scratched bamboo pattern, and re-readjusted them before finally allowing himself to check the results on the monitor.
He stared for a while, then tried again, changing the positions as much as he could without tearing the cameras out of the brackets. Then he changed the third camera so it was pointed at the other two.
The result was the same. Which was to say, the displays were at less-than-optimum angles to view the store but showed the areas on the walls up near the ceiling perfectly. The feeds were as clear as ever and still changing every five seconds. They just didn’t show any cameras. The cameras saw everything except each other.
Dov left them that way for an hour. OnWatch did not phone demanding to know what he was up to. Finally, he put them all back the way they had been, or as near to it as he could remember, checking the display for each one. When he was satisfied, he found an old sweater on a coat-hook and threw it over the monitor till McTeer came in.
It wasn’t until he was almost home that he realised he hadn’t seen Kitty even once.
She came the next day before he had even opened, materialising on the sidewalk just as he put up the trestle table.
“Early for you, isn’t it?” he said with a broad grin.
“You, too.” Kitty looked at the watch pinned to her scrubs. Pale blue floral today, over darker blue trousers; they didn’t quite match.
“I woke up at five-thirty and didn’t feel like going back to sleep.” He glanced at his wristwatch, did a double-take, and held it to his ear.
“A ticking watch?” Kitty’s eyes twinkled with amusement. “How retro.”
He saw she had the same time he did: 8:15. “I’m an old-fashioned boy. I like a watch I can wind.” He gave the tiny knob an extra twist before he went in to get the prints. To his surprise, there were only about half as many in the box as there had been yesterday. There was always a little variation in the number of prints beyond what he sold but never anything this large.
Kitty had never mentioned coming back to buy prints when he wasn’t there but he supposed she did, and if so, she was under no obligation to report in to him about it. Nor was it impossible that other people also bought them from McTeer or whoever took over for him at six. For all he knew, the store had a whole different life after he left, with regular customers unfamiliar to him buying inventory he wouldn’t recognise. Maybe the night staff kept the place open past ten till two or three in the morning or held raves on Sundays when it was supposed to be closed. Then they cleaned up after themselves and by the time he came in the next morning, he saw only what he expected to see. There was no way of knowing –
Yes, there was.
He stood in the doorway with his arms folded, looking at each of the cameras in turn. Possibly for five seconds each but he wasn’t counting.
Kitty’s quiet voice broke his rhythm. “You seem very serious today.”
Dov’s smile was perfunctory. “Why didn’t you come yesterday?”
“Busy day,” she said, not looking up from the box. “The ER’s part organised chaos, part systematic crisis, part random lightning strikes, running on coffee, adrenalin, and the triage nurse’s last nerve.” She paused at one of the prints, hesitated, then flipped past it. He waited for her to say something about there not being as many in the box as usual but she didn’t seem to notice.
“What happens when the triage nurse’s last nerve goes?” he asked.
Her eyes twinkled as she glanced up at him. “By then they’ve all grown back.”
“That’s amazing.”
“It’s a gift.” She slipped two prints out of the box and held them out to him. “I’ll take these.”
Number 82 and number 11 were both black-and-white photographs. The former showed an enormous cloud of thick, dark smoke and, at the bottom in the centre, a lone firefighter seen from behind, spraying a stream of water into it. The latter showed a gigantic Ferris wheel caught either by the shutter or in fact at a forty-five degree angle between the white sky above and the city below. Dov fetched a bag for her, trying to remember the last time Kitty had bought even one photo and couldn’t. If there’d been a camera out here, he’d be able to keep track.
As if she had caught a sense of his thoughts, Kitty said, “So can Big Brother see me from in there?”
“Only partly – the door jamb’s in the way. Were you worried?”
“Just curious.” She traded him a couple of crumpled bills for the bag.
“Well, for what it’s worth, you haven’t shown up on the monitor at all yet,” he said, laughing a little. “Whereas I’m the star of the sh –” he cut off, remembering the glimpse he’d had of himself behind the counter. It had to have been a recording, of course. “Star of the show,” he finished.
Instead of hurrying away, she lingered, watching him put out the photos and the postcards along with some novelty bookends and a tray of assorted picture frames. He was about to make a joke about her breaking routi
ne and buying something other than a print when she said, “I bet the last thing Orwell ever imagined was that we’d make Big Brother into a game show.”
He had to think for a moment. “Oh, right. Is that still on?”
“No one ever went broke underestimating etc, etc,” Kitty said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Dov said. “If that isn’t rock bottom, it’s close. The novelty’s bound to wear off pretty soon.”
“It’s no-cost entertainment. All you need is a camera and pretty soon, you won’t even need that because you’ll always be in sight of at least one lens.”
Dov’s chuckle was uneasy. “Not getting paranoid on me now, are you? Or is it just that your nerves haven’t grown back yet?”
She was silent for a moment. Then: “Do you remember when you asked me about the difference between wave functions that hadn’t collapsed and those you didn’t know had already collapsed?”
He nodded.
“I thought you would.” And then she was hurrying away toward the hospital while he stared after her.
Customer traffic was brisk throughout the morning into the lunch-hour, with everyone apparently in the mood to spend money – retail therapy, they called it now – but the day went at a crawl. Dov stepped into the office whenever he could to check the monitor but there was no time for more than a quick glance. Sometimes he would have sworn that the system was actually looping the same ten minutes over and over again. It was just that he was busy, he thought. Plus, he was getting a double dose of the store now, with his own eyes and on the monitor, so of course he was coming down with a case of déjà-vu all over again.
He tried an assortment of busy-work to keep himself from haunting the office every few minutes, rearranging the window, rotating stock, even taking a quick-and-dirty inventory of the tacky souvenirs. There were half a dozen new snow-globes, albeit with glitter rather than fake snow. Most of the globes had glitter these days. Maybe the fake-snow globe was becoming an endangered species, he thought, as he picked up one of the larger ones and gave it a shake. Glitter swirled around an Empire State Building being scaled by a giant blonde woman in a pink evening gown, with a tiny gorilla tucked under one arm. He hadn’t thought there’d be that much wit in the tacky souvenir industry. He stashed it under the counter and made a mental note to ask the owners where it had come from and if there were any more around.
But nothing he did would make the day pass any more quickly. It was hard to believe he had seen Kitty only that morning – he felt as if it had been at least a whole day. He told himself he ought to try to appreciate it, it was better than feeling as if time were pouring away like fast-running water.
In his mind’s eye, he saw the photos Kitty bought, the firefighter and the Ferris wheel, then glanced at his watch: it was two minutes later than the last time he’d looked. Irritated, he took it off and put it in the register, in the always-empty slot meant for fifties and hundreds.
As always, the customers thinned out after lunch-time. He was serving the last few customers when a teenaged boy dropped off a brown paper bag containing lox on a bagel with a perfectly-applied schmear, an assortment of carrot and cucumber sticks, and a can of cream soda. The boy was long gone by the time Dov opened the bag. He was about to call the deli and tell them their delivery boy had made a mistake when he saw the note on the bag – Nosh! xx Kitty.
He spread a napkin out on the counter then paused, looking up at the camera. The owners probably wouldn’t approve. Gathering everything up, he started toward the office, then stopped. The idea of eating while that eye blinked at him every five seconds threatened to kill his appetite. Knowing that every fifteen seconds, he’d be treated to the sight of himself eating lunch gave him indigestion before he’d even taken a bite. Or he could hide in the lav.
He sat at the register with the bag in his lap.
McTeer was a no-show at six. At six-thirty, the owners’ secretary phoned to say he should close up and go home. She was cordial but offered no explanation. Apparently there was no one to plug this evening’s personnel gap, Dov thought. Maybe McTeer had run off to the Bahamas, leaving them shorthanded. He started to turn off the lights and then, on impulse, called back and offered to stay on until ten.
The secretary’s cordial tone had a hint of steel in it as she told him that wouldn’t be necessary and he should have a good evening.
“Well, okay,” he said to the phone receiver, although the woman had already hung up. “Don’t ask me, I just work here. Till six.” Again, he went to turn out the lights and then remembered the table was still outside.
He brought everything in, folded the table legs down and left it behind the display window where he always found it in the mornings and put the box of prints on the floor nearby. Then he went back to the office for a final look around to make sure everything was all right, even though he’d already done that at least half a dozen times already.
There was nothing to see on the monitor now, except for the office feed. Because he still had the light on. He flipped it off and watched the screen as it blinked through a series of vague shadows. It seemed like a big waste to keep them on all night when they had no night-vision utility.
Not his problem. He should go home and have a good evening, he thought as he sat down and pushed the keyboard aside so he could put his feet up on the desk.
He had no idea how long he’d actually heard the sharp sound of metal rapping on glass but he thought it must have been a while. Awareness flooded in accompanied by aches and pains in every part of his body. He lifted his head and gasped slightly at the flare of sharp pain in his neck. His shoulders and back chimed in as he straightened up.
The rapping sound went on, someone knocking urgently on the window with a coin or a key. He ignored it while he pushed himself to his feet, groaning as his knees cracked and popped. How the hell had he fallen asleep here? With his head on the desk, no less. Why hadn’t he gone home? His head didn’t want to turn. He’d probably have to put some chiropractor’s kids through college before he’d be able to look both ways crossing the street.
The knocking was getting louder and more urgent now. Someone wasn’t going to take no for an answer, although they’d have had to if he’d gone home instead of trying to cripple himself. He couldn’t imagine who would have come knocking now anyway, nobody knew there was anyone in here –
His gaze fell on the monitor, blinking every five seconds. No, somebody knew. Somewhere somebody knew where he was and they knew that he had seen what the cameras had seen.
Rubbing his shoulder with one hand and his lower back with the other, he shuffled out to see who was scratching up the window.
Kitty’s wide eyes met his. “Uh,” he said. “What time is it?”
“Late,” she said.
He looked at his watch then remembered it was in the register. “Uh,” he said again and leaned his head against the jamb. “I did the stupidest thing.” He was about to elaborate when his head exploded.
It might have been minutes later before his vision cleared and he realised he had both arms around Kitty in a clumsy hug, while she held him up. The sound of the explosion seemed to resound in his ears and he had the impression that the whole building and a good part of the street had shaken under him.
Horrified, he pulled away from her. “I did the stupidest thing,” he said again. “I – I did the stupidest thing –” He tried to tell her the rest of it but his voice refused to come. For several moments, he floundered while every siren and alarm in Manhattan went off at once, almost drowning out the shriek of human voices. Overhead, there was something dark in the sky and the air brought the smell of oil and metal and other things burning.
“I didn’t mean to know,” he told Kitty desperately. “I didn’t mean to!”
“I know,” she said.
A man in a wrinkled grey suit ran past holding a cell phone to his ear shouting, “Holy fucking shit!” into it over and over. The street began to fill with people all talking at once, to cell p
hones, to each other, to anyone who could hear and everyone they saw.
The man in the grey suit came back, still holding the cell phone. “I swear to Christ,” he told the cell phone. He stopped, looking around as if he didn’t know where he was, then noticed Dov and Kitty. “I thought a gas main blew up or a gas truck. An airplane crashed into one of the Twin Towers. A fucking plane! I swear to Christ you never know in this city, you never fucking know!”
Kitty put a finger to Dov’s lips; not really necessary since his voice had deserted him again. “And you never can tell.”
The second explosion came a little over fifteen minutes later. Then she went back to St. Vincent’s. When he couldn’t find his way home he went there as well, although amid all the crowds and the noise and the panic, he couldn’t find her either.
The second explosion came a little over fifteen minutes later. Kitty went back to St. Vincent’s. Dov went back into the office and watched. Sometimes he saw Kitty looking through the prints. A few times he saw himself behind the counter, but he always saw himself in the office and, when he realised he always would, he locked up and went home.
YESTERMORROW
RICHARD SALTER
Richard Salter is the editor of the anthology Short Trips: Transmissions, and the author of over a dozen short stories that have been published and plenty more that haven’t been yet. ‘Yestermorrow’ was born from his love of all things time travel, from Doctor Who to Slaughterhouse Five.
Monday June 5th, 2017
The man runs because his life depends on it. He does not want to be late – the fate of the universe hangs on him being in the right place at the right time. Or rather the wrong place at the wrong time. The streets of Brighton are pretty much deserted at this time of night. The only vehicles that pass are taxis or buses. He dashes across the road, not waiting for the lights to change. He doesn’t even bother looking as he runs – the accident doesn’t happen here.
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