Future Imperfect

by K Ryer Breese

  It’s fun to be out just the two of us like old times.

  I’ve made Paige a promise that I won’t hit my head and that I won’t try and find out what Jimi and Vauxhall are doing. “This is just us,” Paige says. “You need to take a break.”

  Of course, that doesn’t stop me from proceeding to spill everything that’s been going through my head for the past few days.

  She, of course, couldn’t be more happy to hear it all.

  “Wait a sec, you’ve got some nasty old man calling you about some beach and maybe you drowning and you’ve also been seeing some gnarly cat in a Santo mask, also on a beach, telling you some sort of existential nuttiness?”

  “Yeah, that’s basically it. And also, Vauxhall has powers too.”

  “Right and I’m actually not surprised, in the movie, the movie of your messed-up life, that is exactly what would happen,” Paige says, “But going back to the other stuff.”

  “Okay.”

  “Maybe it’s some sort of sign? You know, maybe it’s like-”

  “It’s someone screwing with me,” I say.

  “Who?”

  “Honestly, I don’t really care. I mean I do, but not really. This guy and the old man, they’re just symptoms of the same thing: looking too hard at what you don’t understand. You see that’s really why I haven’t gotten so upset about it. What I’ve learned from seeing the future is that you can’t interpret it until it happens. What I’m seeing is just a hint of something, just a tiny edge of something. You ever hear about the blind men and the elephant?”

  “What? Is this a sex joke or something?”

  “Don’t be nasty. It’s basically like this: Three blind men each put their hands on an elephant. One says, ‘This animal is like a snake,’ ’cause he’s touching the trunk. And another says, ‘This animal has wings,’ ’cause he’s touching the ears. And the last one says, ‘This animal is like a tree,’ because he’s touching the legs. Or something. Anyway, they all get it wrong because they can’t see the whole picture. Get it?”

  “Yeah, I get it. But that’s a lame excuse.”

  “No. It makes perfect sense. I’m not going to stress because-”

  “Why a luchador mask?” Paige interrupts.

  “Maybe he’s Latino? Maybe he just digs Santo?”

  Paige looks very serious. “Could be that he’s a time traveler.”

  I laugh. “No. Just supposed to look that way. Just supposed to look crazy.”

  “How? I mean maybe there’s someone else out there jumping in on your visions? Your future? That is like so Star Trek it’s sick.”

  “Nah. It’s just that I’m only seeing part of it.”

  “Maybe it’s just that you don’t recognize him ’cause he’s young now. Or maybe under that mask he just looks like a total freak. Maybe like a cat-man or a Neanderthal. You know, something totally otherworldly?”

  “Like you used to, Paige?” I laugh.

  She elbows me hard. I wheeze.

  “How about the old man calling you?”

  “Irritating is all,” I say. “Super irritating. Sometimes these freaks find me. Remember me telling you about that one woman who called-” And I want to say more, but Jimi and Vauxhall come strolling out onto the patio and strike up a conversation with a dude with a Mohawk I feel like I’ve seen before.

  I shoot Paige a look, mouth: I. Had. No idea. They’d. Be. Here. Seriously.

  She just shakes her head and rolls her eyes. “Like boomerangs,” she says.

  Vaux and Jimi don’t notice us, amazingly. They go over to the bar and somehow Jimi finagles them drinks, real drinks, and then they sit and talk and laugh with the Mohawk guy, who they also get drinks for, and then, when the Sisters of Mercy come on, they go out onto the dance floor. The way Jimi dances has me laughing in my soda. Actually, it’s so ridiculous I’ve got Coke bubbles coming out my nose.

  He’s spinning around in his big black sweater. He’s got high-top sneakers on to boot and he’s wearing mascara. The scene could have been edited out of some goth teen movie. The worst is that he’s mouthing along with every song. Every. Song.

  Paige, of course, reads his lips. “… sing this corrosion to me…”

  And he whirls all dervishly.

  “… you like an animal,” Paige says.

  I tell her that, unlike before, I can actually hear the music. I tell her that I’m not deaf. I say, “Paige, it’s not like reading his lips when the song is actually playing really loud is impressive. If he were wearing headphones, then maybe.”

  Paige grumbles a bit and then asks me why I’m not over there with them.

  I watch Vauxhall dance. She moves like she’s in water. Her limbs and her hair in perfect motion, her face sliding in and out of the light and the expression, her eyes closed, is ethereal like a photo on an album cover.

  “Aren’t you like the Three Mouseketeers now?”

  I shake my head. “Just to be near her is all.”

  “Nah, you’re having fun.”

  “Maybe I am.”

  “So?”

  “So, that.” And I point over at the dance floor where under a steady throb of green and blue and yellow lights Jimi and Vauxhall are kissing. It’s more Jimi kissing Vaux. Her eyes are still closed and she doesn’t look that into it. But it’s happening regardless. They’re making out on the dance floor right in front of me.

  Paige says, “How much does it suck that apparently there’s only a few places to go in this city? I mean, it’s like, I dunno, fate or something.”

  I tell Paige that she isn’t helping. I tell her that maybe this would be a really great time for her to just shut up and go dance or get drunk or something. I say, getting out of my chair, “Ooh, look at the time. You know what I need to do.”

  Paige gets super pissed. Yells something nasty.

  I don’t want to hear it.

  As I push my way through a crowd that’s pretty much materialized out of nowhere, up the stairs to the larger dance floor where two girls in neon with crazy dreads are dancing spastically on a stage, I run into Belle. She’s with some old dude and she waves to me and the old dude, this dude with a graying goatee and a shaved head, just nods over his super-thick-framed black glasses. What a dipshit.

  Belle says, “What are the odds?”

  I say, “I’m obviously in hell.”

  “Life of a scryer, huh?” Belle retorts.

  “What the fuck does that even mean?”

  And I push past her and her beau.

  I find two East football guys near the back of the club. Both of them wearing jerseys. Both of them big guys. I walk over to them, say, “You guys need to step outside with me.”

  One of them, a black guy with a mustache, asks, “What is this?”

  I say, “I need to talk to you both.”

  The black guy laughs. “Fucker’s high.”

  Paige finds me, pulls me aside, says, “Don’t. Really.”

  She has this horrible depressed puppy look. “Seriously, let me just give you a ride home. I’ll just drop you off and that will be that. Cool?”

  I shake my head and walk back over to the East dudes.

  To the other guy, the white guy with two different-colored eyes, I say, “I’ve heard of women like your mom. Pretty rare, huh?”

  “What’d you say?” He gets in my face.

  Behind me, Paige shouts, “Don’t answer!”

  Again, the big guy says, “What the fuck’d you say?”

  The BPM of my pulse ratchets up.

  I can taste the anger on this dude’s breath.

  “Just ignore him!” Paige yells.

  A circle of gawkers is forming around us.

  “Yeah,” I say to the white guy, my eyes narrowing, face preparing. “Takes a lot of acrobatic skill to take two dudes at once. I mean, how else do you explain those jacked-up eyes, you-”

  And he plugs me right there.

  Fat fist slams into the left side of my face. Zygomatic bone. I hear somethi
ng snap and then black. The resulting concussion is swift and furious. Precious black. The vision sweeps and I’m back spinning down the passageway to my future.

  The Buzz is glorious.

  I’m free.

  Where I am is back on the sunny beach. The surfing beach in maybe California. Thing is, the sun isn’t shining now. I still have my surfboard and I’m still wearing a wet suit and my eyes are still crackly with sea salt, but now the sky is completely clouded over and the lightning is close. The boom of thunder even closer.

  I feel the first drops of rain on my skin when the man in the Mexican wrestler mask lays a hand on my shoulder. He squeezes. I turn around to get a good look and he’s there in all his wrestler glory, his mask all purple and shiny.

  “What is your deal?” I ask him, sounding much older.

  This is surely the future.

  “You’re still not ready, Ade. Wires are still crossed. Still foggy.”

  “This is just a waste of my future.”

  My hands curl into fists and I’m about to knock him on his back when he says, “Storm’s here, Ade. Right on top of us. You still haven’t woken up. Going to take a lot to turn this around. Only you can deny the past and stop the future.”

  What happens next is crazy.

  What happens next hasn’t ever happened before: I skip ahead, leap over decades, and see myself as I’ll be when I’m old enough to have a kid just about my age. I’m in front of a mirror and I look down and I see something really upsetting, something that makes me want to scream, but it’s hazy.

  The image, it just gets all warped and dark.

  Blacker than black.

  THREE

  I come to in an ambulance, just Paige at my side.

  The EMTs have oxygen on me and one of them is prepping a saline IV and just about ready to put it in my arm. I hate needles and ask him not to. I mention to him that I’ve been in enough ambulances to know it’s not necessary, but he just tells me to lie back and does it anyway. The whole rest of the ride I’m puking my guts up. And I hear howling, but Paige doesn’t hear it. The EMTs don’t hear it.

  And I black out again, but this time, nothing.

  Just matte black and silence.

  At the hospital, it takes me two hours to wake up. But I do. And I’m woozy but okay. My mom shows up shaking, hanging her head, her eyes all wide and bruised looking. She’s brought the Revelation Book and she dutifully records the college vision. I add a little side note that in the trees, I saw a mourning dove. When she’s finished, Mom closes the book and puts it in her lap and smiles through her tears, says, “We’re getting closer all the time, baby.”

  My voice all scratched out, I ask, “To what?”

  “The end,” Mom says so quiet I can barely hear it.

  Paige leaves in the morning. All night she sleeps on the couch next to my mom and anytime a nurse comes in, she jumps up and listens intently. Before she goes she cries on my chest and tells me that I’m breaking her heart. She tells me that I’m really the most selfish person she’s ever met. She whispers, “This is the last time.”

  The doctor, she tells me I’ll need physical therapy. She tells me I’ll need some serious medications. She shakes her finger at me and says, “You should be locked up.”

  I ask her why she has to blame the victim.

  The doctor, she says, “’Cause we’ve seen you in here eight times this year.”

  I wish I could say I remember those eight visions, but I’m sure my mom’s got them charted out on her wall. Each of them embellished just for her. The ones I do remember were the ones I squeezed the most Buzz out of. The one with me paragliding over Detroit at night. The one with me crashing a Ferrari into the back of a semi truck. And the one with me tightrope walking over Times Square. All of them meaningless outside of the adrenaline. What’s funny is that lying in a hospital bed right now I’m kind of wondering what else I could have seen. Why only the action? It’s like a child skipping through his favorite movie. What about the other parts? Why haven’t I ever thought of this before? Where else has the guy in the mask appeared?

  When my shrink show up he asks to be alone with me and my mom bows out. Sitting on the edge of my bed, Dr. Borgo asks me if I knew how bad things got.

  I ask, “Worse than any other time?”

  I am of course talking about the bowling alley incident. The time Borgo and I first met. My very first really really bad head injury.

  It was last summer when the shit officially hit the fan and the Buzz dependence started. If I went a week without a concussion my skin would be crawling. I was sure, convinced, that if I went a month without hitting my head and riding the high, I’d die.

  Mom was happy with every vision.

  I pretty much walked the whole city and wore out three pairs of shoes. The whole time just looking for fights or jumping in front of cars or stealing candy from kids with big dads, big bodybuilder dads. I’m not an aggressive person, not a violent or angry guy, and most of the time I’d just throw out verbal abuse to get someone to throw a fist.

  People I knew, people like Paige, all got summer jobs. They worked the cash register at the Hungry Elephant at the zoo. They were lifeguards at the JCC. Mowed lawns in Cherry Hills. Had internships they thought would get them into that one special college far away from their parents.

  Not me.

  Every day Paige would call or visit me at the hospital or bring cookies over to my house. Every day Paige would say, “Next time you’re going to die” or “Next time you’ll be in a coma.”

  My summer job was getting my ass kicked.

  Kicked from Broadway to Wazee. From Speer to I-70. There was a fight with five bums in the parking garage just off Paris on the Platte. A full-fledged mêleé with skaters on the Auraria campus. A hospital visit after a smackdown with gang-bangers near City Park. Fights with factory workers. With Air Force cadets. With bar backs. With strippers. With drunks. And with football players in a bowling alley.

  It was last July, I’d spent the day all jacked up downtown and had taken the bus home but decided to stop at Monaco Lanes Bowling Alley for a soda. It was freakin’ hot out and I was exhausted. Maybe a little confused.

  I got a Coke at the bar and sat and watched people bowl. Didn’t take long before I was itching for the Buzz again. Like really frantic. Started a fight with these football players from TJ, they kicked my ass all over the place and the fracas ended with me getting conked on the dome with a bowling ball. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t focused. Smash. Crash.

  What I saw in the darkness didn’t seem far off at all. Maybe only days. I was standing in the middle of a street watching the aftermath of a car accident near my house. This guy from school, a guy I’d only recently met, Harold Vienna, was lying in front of a red car. He looked like he was asleep, only one of his legs was bent backward the wrong way, the way it shouldn’t bend. There were people getting out of their cars and covering their mouths to stop from crying or screaming or both. I couldn’t move. My heart had slowed to just this hollow thud, like when you hit the side of an empty can. Just metal in my chest.

  And I woke up in the hospital.

  The Buzz was pitiful.

  Mom was bummed the vision wasn’t focused, wasn’t far out, but she was sympathetic. She said to me, “Isaiah 40:26: ‘Lift up your eyes on high, and behold who hath created these things, that bringeth out their host by number: he calleth them all by names by the greatness of his might, for that he is strong in power; not one falleth.’” Paige didn’t quote any Bible, she cussed me out.

  Dr. Borgo came to see me the second day I was there.

  Still in my hospital gown, still in bed, feeling sick still from the vision. Back then Borgo had a goatee to go with his black-framed glasses. He’s a black guy and with the goatee he totally looked like Malcolm X. I told him that and he shrugged. He looked me over, asked some questions, and then leaned in and whispered, “You see anything?”

  “Like what?” I asked him.

  “
Like things that haven’t happened yet.”

  I wasn’t sure if he was for real, so I said, “Maybe.”

  “Thought so. How far out can you see?”

  “Mostly years. Decades.”

  “But you can see sooner?”

  “Yeah. Sometimes weeks. Hours one time.”

  Dr. Borgo put his head on his fist, like how a shrink should look thinking, and said, “And you prefer one over the other, right? The further-out visions, right?”

  I nodded. Face just blank, splotchy with bruises.

  “You get a certain, well, feeling?”

  “Feeling?”

  “You get high from the visions, Ade?”

  I nodded again. Mouth so dry.

  “And the further out in time you see, the greater the high is, the stronger the high? I’m guessing that you control how far out you see by focusing. Pushing down, the ciliary body changing the shape of the lens. That’s how you do it. Just the same as normal seeing.”

  I sat myself up in the hospital bed, asked, “How come you know all this, Doc?”

  “I’ve seen people like you before. Only a few. It’s considered dodgy to research psychic phenomena, but there’s a group in Toronto studying it. Another in Omaha. Ten years ago I met a man who could see a couple weeks into the future if he held his breath and passed out. He was the best of the bunch, but there are others, some of them very young. Most of them can’t really see, they just get impressions, like random-”

  “I see everything. Crystal clear, like in a movie.”

  “I believe you.”

  “What about these others, are there any here? That would be amazing to meet someone else who could do it. That would just be-”

  “I don’t know. The ones I’ve met, and it’s only been a handful in a dozen years, had real problems. They weren’t what we’d normally consider well people. A lot of them go crazy. A lot wind up on the street. Ranting and raving like-”

  “How come I’ve never heard of anyone else before? How come I’ve never heard of you before? I’ve been in this ER like twenty-three times.”