Just North of Nowhere

by Lawrence Santoro

  The guy shivered and Bunch stood like a doofus.

  Finally, the guy eased off. In another slow minute, he unwrapped and slid down the bank and collapsed at Bunch’s feet. “Please,” he whispered to his toes, “just stay, stay very still. Please.”

  “Get on there, let me get you some grub!”

  The guy kept on so Bunch dragged him to his feet, shoved him toward the crackling fire, and folded him into his own damn chair! Bunch was pretty sure he didn’t want the guy hugging his ankles like that. “Cripes!” Bunch said. That about covered the matter.

  The grub could have been worse.

  The bacon crisped pretty good, the eggs bubbled brown in the drip and the spuds were sweet, even if sprouted. For once, Bunch’s coffee was better than Esther’s! Surprise, surprise. And there had been enough for the two of them, Bunch and Clifford – the guy’s name was Clifford and he was from around here but not for a long time. Bunch pieced that together from all the talk. That and it was coming on to the guy’s birthday. What the hell, night was long and listening was sometimes useful.

  As they ate, Clifford settled. Not to how a regular guy might be, but he wasn’t flopping and screaming whenever Bunch got up to stir the fire, or if the ice creaked out on the river or when some critter shouted doom from the fog in the woods across the way. When Bunch asked Clifford if he had the time, the guy nearly heart attacked, so okay, so much for being settled. And after some minutes of silent slobbers, the guy said the worst monster that ever was, was coming for him.

  “It’s taken everyone I ever knew; ground their bones to make its bread!” Clifford hugged himself and let out a shrill giggle. Then he grew serious again and squeezed his eyes shut till his face got small. “I watched it,” he said. “Will watch it.”

  “That the monster that comes when called?” Bunch asked, making conversation.

  “What?” Cliffy said.

  “Something you said. Something about sound calling it.”

  “Oh,” he said, finally, “It comes closer with everything, sound, movement. Every particle of the universe has a mass/energy quantum. Every move dissipates that, brings us nearer to the heat-death of the universe.” He giggled again. “What you might call an ancillary component of my personal bête noire!”

  The fire flickered his face. He sat like a landed fish gulping. Then his eye blazed. “You, whomever you are – and don’t tell me, because I don’t want to know – you are statistically dead. You know that?”

  “Huh,” Bunch said. He hadn’t known but wasn’t surprised.

  “Probability. Ninety-five point two-something percent of everyone who ever was born is now dead and dust! So...” he shrugged.

  Bunch’s butt puckered. He’d dug graves at the Lutherans, the Catholics, at Fatty Borgos’s. Dead folks were underfoot, for sure. And there he was, sitting on bone-heap mud while Clifford, ass warm and easy, squatted on Bunch’s own chair, the pretty good rocker Elton Holmgren had swapped him for rodding out his clogged sewer line – and what a lousy job that had been!

  “Almost everyone’s in the cold, cold ground. Why not you?” Clifford said.

  “Well, I’m on it anyway. See, now that’s my chair...” Bunch started.

  “Point is: mathematically, you are dead! Okay? But you’re not! You defy the universe just by breathing! Okay? That’s just background!”

  Bunch took a breath.

  “Hey! Tell me when I’m lying, won’t you?” Clifford shouted. “Don’t answer. Just do that thing. Okay?” The rocker squished mud. “Ever wonder why the good die young?” he asked.

  Before Bunch could say he hadn’t, Clifford shoved on.

  “Shakespeare, Mozart, Freddie Prinz. All young, all dead. Millions more! Why? Don’t say, I’ll tell you what I think: I think it’s us. We come. We take them. They populate our world, fill it with genius, worth, excitement.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Maybe. We fixed the problems, maybe. We maybe come back here to loot your world of genius,” he leaned toward Bunch, “of humanity, because: we flat-lined. Maybe.”

  “Bullshit!” Bunch called out.

  Clifford rocked back and blinked. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, maybe it is. But maybe not. Maybe they do fix the gadget. Maybe they do that! Or will do. Maybe not me or mine, but maybe because of me and my kind they will.” He sagged for a couple seconds, then perked up. “Maybe I’m alive backward! That’s possible, don’t you think?”

  Bunch drew another breath.

  “Yeah,” Clifford said, staring at the underside of the span. “From what I know about the Monster, that may be! Maybe everything goes backward. I could have aggregated out of parts, already aged beyond reckoning and now am grown young because I’m near my birth! Maybe life, just narrows the options, makes the universe palatable and we go into Forever wide-eyed, innocent, simple, and bawling.”

  He continued to stare at the bridge struts.

  “Bullshit!” Bunch called out in the silence. It had worked before!

  “Occam’s razor!” he shouted. “You’re right. Thanks. Simple’s best, maybe I just haven’t been born yet. I mean, I know I haven’t been. That’s later, but you know what I mean, right? Course you don’t.”

  Bunch debated: call ‘bullshit’ or nod in agreement?

  “Ever seen a ghost?” Clifford yelled before Bunch decided.

  Bunch pointed through the fog, “Engine Warm’s got...,” but Clifford kept right on.

  “No, that’s nonsense, ‘bullshit,’ you might say. I can’t be a ghost. That would negate the whole reality of what’s to come. Without my mind working as it does, as it did, as it will do...I couldn’t be here. None of this...” he waved at the night, “the whole of the last, what? How many millennia of human history would be pffft!”

  “Makes sense,” Bunch said.

  “How many years has it been?” Cliffy stopped.

  Bunch could almost hear gears turning in the silence.

  “Never mind, no, listen. Tomorrow a kid will be born. Maybe the kid will be an ordinary kid – bad at games, won’t get anything right, two left feet, can’t get a date – to save his life he can’t – but maybe, maybe he’ll be really good at one thing. Don’t ask I’ll tell you: What he’s good at – will be good at – will be numbers. His talent. He’ll know how to shove numbers around instinctively, before the kid even gets to school, a natural. Okay? Don’t answer!”

  Cliffy picked up the pace.

  “Okay, so the kid grew, went to school. Will go. Nothing unusual. He studies. He becomes what? A mathematician of course; shoves numbers around till the world makes sense! Then he goes to work. Okay, he just goes to school until school is work but he gets together with a bunch of other grown kids, people like he who are lousy at life but are the best in the world at this one thing. And they’ll all shove numbers until...” Clifford hit a wall. When he spoke again, he spoke like he was praying, “until the numbers became real. That happens, they change the world. Everything.”

  Bunch squinted.

  “Sh, sh, sh,” Clifford, said. “Now, he’ll be part of this group. There’ll be other groups, and they do other things, but this guy’s part of it – the guy I’m talking about – and finally somebody fits together all their individually shoved numbers and – see? – this beautifully, intricate jigsaw number they derived, becomes a machine. A machine that moves.” The guy’s eyes widened. “And the machine will move time. Okay?”

  Bunch nodded. “A clock,” he said.

  Clifford’s head vibrated negatively.

  “Like a truck?” Bunch suggested.

  “Like! Like, but not. I don’t know, it was a long time ago. Shhh!”

  “Okay, okay. It’s your story.”

  “A story it is. Yes! Smart. A story’s not true. Hasn’t happened!”

  “So these guys built a time truck?”

  “Will! Will build it. It will move in time. Or move time, I’m not sure. Both ways of looking at it have validity. Or will have. But see? There is a forward
and a backward component. I mean: what’s the point of going one way if you can’t go the other, right? That’s my contribution! Will be. Going home from the past. I made that part possible. WILL make.”

  “In the story?” Bunch asked.

  “Don’t stop me!” Cliffy yelled. “It’s nearly my birth day. Are you getting the picture?! Do not stop me but, yes, I found the way back! Not the way some might want to, but I’m almost there.”

  Cliffy’s giggle sent shivers up Bunch’s neck again. The stranger’s eyes flashed in the dying firelight and he shut them, hard and tight. “Fire moves,” he moaned. “See? I don’t want movement. Movement anticipates destination. Destination posits an endpoint. See? Don’t nod! Every movement is an idea that prefigures stasis. You go somewhere. The journey ends. That’s it! All she wrote! Tout fini! Period! End of story! That’s all folks...!” Clifford strung out a half dozen more like those. He suddenly froze. “A rocker?” he shouted. “You give me a rocking chair?” He jumped to his feet! “A death engine! Every backward, is a little stop, each forward, a little death! You see?”

  Bunch was off the ground and into the rocker like/that! “Yep,” he said.

  “Don’t! Don’t agree! Don’t disagree! Say nothing. And don’t rock!”

  Bunch sat.

  “The gadget – our machine – will be built. Even if we weren’t going to build it forty-two years from now, it’d get built anyway! You see? Once the idea of a machine is in the air, there it is! You get that? It exists except for the thingness of it! It’s the idea that makes it so. Building is just tinkering! So, there it is! Was. Will be.”

  The guy sagged but didn’t collapse.

  “Okay, okay, okay. The thing did not look like... God, I barely remember what it does. It didn’t look like what the man we’re talking about—that boy we’re going to imagine will be born tomorrow—the machine he’ll help build will not look like what he would have expected a time machine to look like when he was a boy a dozen years from now and thinking about numbers and the future. Fact was,” Clifford leaned closer to Bunch, “Fact is – or will be – the guy will have a suspicion that the thing doesn’t really exist...”

  “Like for a while my bike didn’t?” Bunch shouted.

  Clifford dashed ahead: “It didn’t exist. Not in a conventional sense. It was the elegant reality of a number, a solution, a balance! Can you imagine a number that real here in the world? Don’t answer, don’t even try. Okay, the gadget. It’s ready. They test it. They will. It goes into the future. Not far, couple of seconds. Disappeared. Bling. Not that it made a sound. Okay. Then it winked back to being because they caught up with it! The world, everything, caught up with it. Will catch up, see? Okay? So, okay. The machine’s okay. They send a clock—no, no, no, no, no, no! Not a clock, not like you know. A tick, tock, tick, tock, tick-tock clock, no. This clock had no hands or... Never mind: they sent a clock and it came back and it recorded...”

  Clifford’s face twisted like a guy trying to remember where he left his keys. “It recorded odd things. I won’t tell you what it recor...what it will record. It would only make sense if you were one of those number people. Okay?”

  Bunch opened his mouth but the guy hissed like a cornered raccoon. “Don’t!” He took a second. Stood stock still in the frozen mud. “So they’ll send an animal. And when the machine winks back, the animal... Well, there will be no animal. Animal will be gone.

  “They’ll agonize, calculate, measure. Someone – maybe a janitor – will suggest, maybe the animal ran off! Simple. Elegant. Maybe the gadget arrived up there, the animal got loose and...”

  The guy’s chuckle was a little nuttier.

  “’Janitor!” he laughed. “There won’t be janitors. I just said that. It was some solder gun tech but anyway, our guy, the one we’re talking about, remember? He gets the short end or he wins second place. Anyway, he’s the second human to ride the thing. The first guy, he went forward. They expected him to show up where and when they sent it. He didn’t. It didn’t. They won’t. No one will know why. I think I do. Now. I think he was tossed. Never mind where, okay?”

  Bunch didn’t answer.

  “Okay. The guy we’re talking about, the second place winner – me – he’ll go back. A few minutes, a bump, a nothing. One hundred and twenty-two point yada, yada, yada seconds. Don’t ask why a hundred and twenty-two point whatever...it had to be, it’s the numbers. Forget it. You wouldn’t understand!” His face froze. “Something’ll happen,” he said finally. “He’ll start the trip, this guy, me, he’ll go a hundred and twenty-two point whatever seconds into the past and the machine stops. He keeps going. Like he...” Cliffy was stuck.

  “Like falling off his bike and the bike keeps going?” Bunch offered?

  “NO,” Clifford screamed, “Like the bike’s going a billion miles a second and, BANG, stops like/that and he... He keeps going! See, here’s the problem – I’ve had a long time to work this out – the numbers suggest that an animal, a person can’t go into a time in which they already exist. People, animals, the machine itself, couldn’t stop and interact with themselves. That would set a paradox. ‘Paradox! A paradox! A most ingenious paradox!’ – I wrote that line, did you know that? You didn’t. I did. Ask Sir William! Oh, okay, he’s dead, too bad, never mind.

  “But, you know what it is? A paradox? Never mind. I think – and I should know – I believe that any movement in time faster or slower than time itself sets up so many implicit paradoxes that inertia sets in. Look!” Clifford eyes burned. “Okay? You’re in a hallway. There are mirrors on both sides. You see an endless succession of you going farther and farther away, deeper and deeper into the walls.” He held out his arms. “As they recede, the images grow darker and darker.” He looked at Bunch. “Mirrors aren’t a hundred percent reflective, see? Each image looses something and you get darker and darker until...poof...the Big Black! Okay? Okay, never mind. See?

  “The machine knows this, that elegant machine of numbers compensates for this inertia, this inefficiency, recognizes the drag, the machine realizes things are slowing and compensates for it, it pumps more energy into the subject. Tries to keep it moving.”

  Clifford slowed, came to a rolling stop. Stood their idling.

  “You could turn on a couple lights?” Bunch suggested as Clifford vibrated.

  “Yes!” Clifford shouted, “more light! The machine makes the subject brighter! Ah, but where’s the energy from, you ask? The world. The sky. Stars. Space. Everywhere around. From heaven! Problem is, the proximate world gets darker and darker because of it. And the machine keeps turning up the light, it pours more and more energy into the traveler, him, it...” Clifford’s hands, explaining, had become a flickering blur. “Me,” he said.

  “Like spinning your wheels on an icy patch?” Bunch shouted.

  Clifford’s eyes widened. “Yes!” he shouted, “then the machine stops and...”

  “...and you grab road!”

  “Yes!” Clifford shouted. “and the traveler’s got so much energy pumped into him overcoming paradox inertia, he’s just squirted...will be squirted...I was squirted BANG straight down the road!” Clifford spit words so fast Bunch could barely grab them. “All that energy shoots the traveler – shot me – right past my time here on earth and slung me into forever...forever ago!”

  Vibrating, Clifford had become a blur against the fog.

  “See? I try to go my simple hundred and twenty-two point something, something, seconds back. But the machine can’t, you see? It can’t stop there. Why? Because I exist there, it exists there. It can’t stop where either of us exists. So it keeps going. Back and back, shoving more and more and more energy into me, us, and somewhere back right around, well, now, when I was born, the machine pops into reality and stops, like/that, but, me? Ah. All that energy in me, I’m through the windshield! Wham! I fly. Where? Don’t remember. When? Can’t say. I am moving at trans-rational velocity, you get it? Relativistic figures! And finally, I stop. And I am stuck. Ho
w far? Don’t know. Way far. Alive way before my time.”

  Clifford looked at Bunch.

  Bunch said nothing.

  “So, Okay. I figure, I’m stuck, I’ll live my life, then I’ll die. Simple. Right?

  “The first fifty thousand years are kind of amorphous. Wasn’t until something came around to talk to that time sorted itself out. Went by quicker then.

  Clifford shut his eyes.

  “See? I don’t die. He doesn’t die. I couldn’t. Not before I was born. A paradox without even the machine to balance the equation. On his own, he lives and lives. Never ages. A hundred years, another, a thousand. Another. On and on. Never hurt, never ailing.” He went silent. He continued to shake but said nothing for a long time.

  “You have to understand,” he said finally. He raised his eyes and looked at Bunch. “You can’t understand loneliness like that. No friends. No people. No...no women!

  “There were animals. As I said. Animals that looked like men... You see? They worked for a while.”

  He stopped again, his head dropped.

  “Animals. So for centuries he wished, ‘I wish I could die. Get rid of it, life. Ah, the world was just beasts and beasts that wanted to look like men, but...”

  “Animals?” Bunch said.

  Clifford’s head stayed down.

  Disgusted, Bunch thought, and he oughta be! Having to do with animals!

  When Clifford finally raised his head, though, the look of disgust was mixed with something else.

  “Horrible,” Clifford said after a moment, “I’ve done horrible things but a man can wait only so long. I was the same man...the same one who couldn’t get a date to save his life. Well, the creatures at the dawn of the mammalian age were less discriminate about partnerships. In a hundred thousand years, one becomes, well, accustomed to everything. Not almost. Every thing!”

  He’s proud of it, Bunch suddenly realized. The look in Clifford’s face was Karl Dorbler’s look when he figured he’d put a good one over on someone! Sunnuvabitch is proud of his...

  “So here’s a thing,” Clifford said, “at some point, somewhere between jumpstarting the human race with my seed and now, I found I didn’t want to die. Not for my sins, not out of boredom, not for anything. Came a point – five, ten thousand years ago – where life became...” he blinked twice, thinking, “precious,” he decided, “truly precious. Yes. Somewhere along the way our trusty traveler became able to sire offspring from those proto-human creatures. He’d seen his sons and daughters struggle, fail, watched them pick themselves up, learn.”