Future Imperfect

by K Ryer Breese

  “Like what?” Paige asks, looking around the store. She’s panicked. I’ve seen it before. She looks the same way she did when her parents walked in on us smoking pot the first time. Her face is registering that level of high-grade nervous tension.

  “Like I think I might explode. That’s the other thing I didn’t mention. Me, I’ve kind of started changing. You know how a guy slowly realizes he’s becoming a werewolf. Yeah. Like that.”

  Paige leans in, softly she asks, “You’re turning into a werewolf?”

  “Pretty much,” I say. “I’ve got this anger management problem that’s just come up out of nowhere. Before, when I had the vision of me killing Jimi-”

  “Wait? What?”

  “I didn’t tell you that?”

  “Uh, no.” Paige cocks her head to one side and looks at me with one eye the way a parrot would. “I think I’d remember you telling me about killing someone.”

  “I haven’t, though. That’s the thing. I’m trying to stop myself.”

  Paige grabs my mocha and takes a long, hearty swig of it. Then she wipes her upper lip with the little napkin my drink was sitting on and says, “Okay, you’re going to have to explain all that stuff at a later date. You know, like a time when I’m more awake and didn’t just have a really awkward conversation with the pediatrician I’ve seen since I was five about why I don’t have a boyfriend at the moment. But for right now, tell me again what you’re doing sitting here looking all stressed out?”

  “I sent Vauxhall over to Jimi’s house so she’ll have sex with him and read his memories.”

  “What? No you didn’t. Tell me you didn’t.”

  I nod. “She went like twenty three minutes ago.” Then I check my watch, “Actually, twenty-six minutes ago.”

  Paige grabs my face, both her hands biting into my cheeks, and she stares me down and says, “That is one of the worst things I think you’ve ever said. You need to leave. You need to find her. This is the most retarded thing you’ve done yet.”

  I say, through smushed-up lips, “You’re right. I should leave.”

  “I’ll keep your drink,” Paige says, letting me go. “Call me.”

  And I go running out, knocking over chairs, knocking down tables.

  FIVE

  Jimi’s house is maybe seven minutes away by car.

  I make it in three.

  I’m pretty sure I was going fifty-three on Colfax and weaving like a drunk. I do know that I went through six red lights. I’m worried I might have caused one accident, but it looked like a fender bender and both of the cars were SUVs, so I’m not that concerned.

  Maybe this is just the new me, but it was kind of, sort of, fun.

  Thing is, I’m here walking up to Jimi’s front door, my head pounding with my pulse, and I’m running through all the different scenarios, all the different positions I might find these two in. Inside my head I’m kicking myself for letting this go down. For setting this up. Me the prognostication pimp.

  I don’t pound on the door, it’s open.

  I barge in and don’t see Jimi but I do see Vauxhall lying on the couch. She’s there like she was tossed aside. All laid out like a car accident. Hair in her face.

  My chest lurches seeing her.

  It’s like seeing my own face hit with a sledgehammer.

  I run to Vauxhall. Grab her up off the couch and push the hair away. She’s okay. Makeup is smudged and her eyes are watery, but she’s okay. When she sees me, like really sees me, she smiles. Such a sweet smile. Her voice broken down, she says, “Nothing happened.”

  I just hold her to me tight. Collapse her to me.

  She says, over my shoulder, “I tried. It was horrible.”

  My throat all lumped up, I say, “You’re okay now.”

  She says, and I can feel my shoulder getting wet from her tears, “I tried and we kissed, he kissed me hard like he knew what might happen, and then I just got pulled into his past. It was like I lived it too. All the… all the horrible things, Ade.”

  And Vaux picks her head up, takes my head in her hands and, through smeared eyes, says, her voice jumping, “How can people be so cruel? What sort of world is this?”

  I tell her I don’t know. I tell her that whatever she saw happened a long time ago and that she’s okay now, that Jimi’s okay now. I say, “I’m so sorry I put you through that.”

  Vauxhall kisses me.

  “Where is Jimi?”

  I look around the house, my eyes darting. I want so badly to kick Jimi’s ass right now. I want so badly to just smash him into a thousand tiny specks. Just mash him down into the ground, where he’ll never touch Vauxhall again. Where he’ll never even see her again. My temples are pounding with adrenaline.

  “He left,” she says.

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know.” Then she says, “Nothing happened.”

  “What do you mean nothing happened?”

  Vaux, through these tear garden eyes, says, “After you and I were together. You know, after what happened last night, it all changed. Have you had a concussion yet today?”

  “No,” I say. “How come no one remembers I quit?”

  Vauxhall says, “The two of us coming together was like what happens when an unmovable object meets an irresistible force. Both get changed, though not on the outside. I didn’t need to sleep with Jimi to see his memories. No high.”

  “What?”

  “No high. No Buzz. Whole time I was there I was thinking about you. Needing you. And as soon as I was leaving, as soon as I said good-bye, I felt so free. I felt so unburdened, so light. Like what you feel after a massage. It was just being totally relaxed.” Then her face changes, her expression dips, and Vauxhall says, “Don’t go back to Grandpa Razor. You don’t need to go to him, you can change things without him.”

  “What did you see?”

  “The two of them are plotting. Grandpa Razor told Jimi at the diner that he would unravel what they’ve been working on for years if he wasn’t careful. He said it was a process. He said that Jimi couldn’t go soft now, that despite what happens next he couldn’t try and stop it.”

  “Why was Jimi so mad?”

  Vauxhall tells me that whatever this thing is, Jimi isn’t as into it now. She tells me that Jimi is getting cold feet and that he doesn’t want it nearly as badly as he used to. She says, “He wasn’t being his usual asshole self. He was worried about you.”

  “Did you find out what they’re planning? Couldn’t you read back further, see that in his memory? Get the rest of it?”

  Vaux shakes her head. “It was like he knew why I was there. Like he was blocking the rest of it. Almost, it was like he was letting me see just enough.”

  “I have to see Grandpa Razor. I have to go.”

  “But it’s a trap, Ade. They want to hurt you.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  For the first time ever I notice a twitch in my left cheek. It’s a flutter like a flap on your heart makes. Something just under my skin waving. I put my hand up to stop it and press down on it, but it vibrates under my fingers, trapped there. I turn to Vauxhall and ask her if she can see it. She says, “Yeah. Kind of cute.”

  We kiss and fall back into each other on the couch.

  Me on top of her, me kissing her ears and the nape of her neck and the place where the two wishbones come together on her chest, she giggles and then, sitting up, pulling me up with her, says, “I forgot something.”

  I sit back. Try to stop the twitch again.

  “It’s crazy,” Vauxhall says, “but I think Jimi has your mom tattooed on his left arm. And I think he has, yeah, he totally does, he has a dragonfly as well.”

  Pushing at the tremble in my cheek, I say, “I just hope this stops soon.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  ONE

  Dear Dad-

  No one ever gets letters anymore, so I’m kind of proud of the fact that I don’t really use e-mail. That I actually take the time to write out letters to people. />
  Lately, it’s been experts. Everyone from scientists to black magicians. What I’ve been asking them is this: Why can I do what I do? And sometimes: What can I do to change the future? You’d be amazed at the responses I’ve gotten. But what you wouldn’t be amazed by is the fact that most of the people I write to take me at face value. Most of them are more than happy to talk to me even if they think I’m totally bonkers.

  I want to tell you a story: I read about this guy who lived something like eighty years ago. He was German or maybe Austrian and he was a farmer. A really simple dude. He was also mentally ill and tried to assault a girl. That got him put in jail and then, eventually, he was put in an asylum. This simple farmer guy, he starts writing in prison. It’s collages and hand-made paper, and he’s writing these long stories about another world. He’s writing these stories about people in this other world and he just never stops. Writing, writing, writing. And then drawing. All these little illustrations cramming every corner of the pages. Not a single inch that’s not filled in with tiny pictures of birds and people and buildings. The stories that he writes about this other world, they’re very basic. Just descriptions of the place, of the habits of the people, of the religion, the army, the navy. And the interesting thing is that the more he writes, the more this guy, the farmer, becomes part of the story. At first he’s like the king of this world, but soon he becomes the pope and after something like thirty years of being locked up in the asylum, just writing and drawing in his notebooks, this guy, he becomes the God of his imaginary world. When the man dies and they clean out his tiny room, this one tiny room where he spent most of his life, they find just stacks and stacks of these journals. This whole history of another world so detailed there are even reams of tax information. What’s amazing, what I want you to get from this, is that even though this poor bastard was locked up in one room his whole life, had only one view of the world, he was able to escape to a place where he had complete control. This guy with nothing became a God.

  What this guy did was not limit himself.

  What this guy did was to say fuck it to the boundaries and embrace the one thing he really owned: himself.

  That dude died as happy as anyone. As content as anyone.

  I don’t really know why I want to tell you that story, but that guy reminds me of you sometimes. Not that you’re schizoid, just that you’re trapped in a room with one view. You need a way out, but can’t see the door that’s right there inside you.

  Love,

  Ade

  TWO

  As expected, Dr. Borgo is not at all down.

  Grandpa Razor’s got it set up like this: A bedsheet’s laid out over most of the massive table at the center of his sleazy penthouse apartment and there is an IV-drip thing standing, waiting. There are syringes and there are little glass bottles labeled with things like FLUNITRAZEPAM and ZOLPIDEM.

  Fact is: This place looks like a mad scientist’s laboratory.

  Dr. Borgo is really not happy about any of it.

  “None of this is kosher, Ade,” he says, picking up one of the little glass bottles and turning it over in the light. He shakes his head. “None of it.”

  Getting Borgo to come here wasn’t easy.

  I stopped by his office unannounced and kind of barged in on one of his sessions. He was sitting in his leather chair, legs crossed, looking very professional like a psychiatrist in a movie, and talking to a redheaded fat woman about how bad her marriage was. When I busted in, Borgo jumped up and waved a finger at me to leave. I said, “Sorry, Doc, but we need to talk now.”

  He excused himself and pushed me into his other office, the little one just off his bigger one. First thing I told him was how I’d gone clean. I told him that I felt like I’d just woken up in a new body and I thanked him. And then I said, “But…”

  He knew it was coming. Sighed hard.

  I said, “I need your help something awful.”

  Long story short, he cleared his afternoon and here we are. Still, he’s not at all psyched. And when he sees Grandpa Razor shuffling in like an old Sasquatch, he really makes it clear this in not a good idea. All raspy in my ear, Dr. Borgo’s like, “This is not the place to be doing something like this. This is totally unhygienic and unsafe.”

  “Besides,” he says, “there is no evidence whatsoever this will work.”

  Grandpa Razor overhears, moves his head side to side like a robot, and then says, “It might not work, you’re right. I’ve done this three times and there was one time where the lady didn’t wake up for a week. She got something out of it, but it wasn’t like I’d planned. Not really.”

  Dr. Borgo gives me this look that suggests we leave immediately.

  I tell Borgo to just relax a little. I tell him that, and this is just yet another reminder, I have never seen myself in a coma in the future, so the odds are that even if this doesn’t work it won’t have any serious, lasting effects. I say, “Everything I know points to nothing really bad happening here. Future looks hunky-dory, Doc.”

  But Grandpa Razor clears his junky throat. He looks at me, tilts his head disapprovingly. He says, “Janice seems to think that what she and Katrina saw of your future, well, what you saw of your future, is getting not so good. Sure, no coma. But they said the future isn’t nearly as bright as you’re suggesting. I think we can both agree that being in a wheelchair, being a lifetime member of the neurotic club, has a few drawbacks.”

  I want to smash this fat guy’s face, but hold back.

  Instead, I say, “Tell me how this is going to work.”

  Grandpa Razor takes a seat at the head of the table; the chair groans. “You are going to go sleepy and I will be right here, my hands”-and he wave them in the air-“at your temples. I will be eating, this…” He pulls a tin of what looks like canned fish from out of his left pant pocket. “This is something Icelandic, it’s specially prepared shark meat, and I’ll be enjoying it, chewing it very slowly, while you do your thing. Think of this as a human electrical grid. I will boost your abilities, allow you to interact directly with a future. Not sure whose or which one yet.”

  “And Jimi’s dad?”

  “He, being the psychic troublemaker he is, will, of course, be instantly attracted. You just hanging out in some quasi-liminal space and him just… Look, the details of the procedure don’t really matter, right? What matters is you getting in there and trying to figure out whatever it is you’re trying to figure out.”

  “Changing the future.”

  Grandpa laughs. Really, it’s more of a burp. He says, “Sure, of course.”

  Then he pats at the table with a pudgy paw, says, “Hop on up.”

  I do.

  It’s now, of course, that Borgo gets really vocal. His hands up, head shaking, he says, nearly shouting, “This isn’t going to work. No. No. No. Not like this, Ade.” And then, turning to me, leaning down, getting close, he says, “Ade, these medications, this setup, it’s not going to get you where you want. I mean, you need a concussion. Just putting you into some drug-induced coma isn’t going to do it. That makes sense, right?”

  Grandpa Razor laughs all hearty. “Oh, that won’t be a problem.”

  He holds up a billy club. “I’m actually pretty good at this,” Razor says. “Just a quick flick of the wrist and we can knock you down plenty fast and, well, kind of gently.”

  I lie down on the table and Dr. Borgo stands over me. He puts in the IV line. He loads up the meds, measuring the doses extra carefully. The needles go in, the needles come out. Almost immediately I feel drowsy. Doubt it works that instantly, but it might. And then Borgo backs up, anxious to the end, and Grandpa Razor appears hovering over me, his face a bearded blimp.

  “’Night,” Grandpa says.

  And then he whacks me in the temple with his billy club.

  THREE

  Again with the beach.

  Back at Cherry Creek Reservoir.

  Looking at the sand, it being night and the place desolate, I tell myself that
I’ll never willingly come back here again. I tell myself that not even for a million dollars will I have my feet in this sand another time. Out loud, to the bugs and the lamps hovering over the tennis courts and the sickly lap of water, I say, “I’m thinking this place could really use a massive parking lot.”

  And from behind me comes a response. “Wouldn’t help,” the voice says.

  Per usual I’m not at all shocked to see Jimi’s dad in his Mexican wrestling mask. He’s standing behind me, hands in the pockets of his white suit pants, and his mask is gold. He says, “What happened here, it’s going to keep happening. Asphalt or not.”

  Poppa Ministry’s close. If I slip off my shoe and throw it at him, at this distance, I’d probably get him right in the face. That’s good to know.

  I say, “So lay it on me. What do you want?”

  Poppa says, “I want to help you.”

  “And why couldn’t you help me before? You know, when we were on the beach. The other beach, I mean. The future one.”

  “You weren’t ready. Your mind wasn’t.”

  “And how’s that?”

  “You needed to be clean. Totally clean. I want you to understand, Ade. To see through all the fog, to make sense of this.”

  “One of those conversations, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’re not a parasite? Some sort of psychic junkie that’s like-”

  “Not at all, Ade.”

  And Poppa Ministry takes off his mask. There’s a zipper in the back and the sound of it is long and loud. Like a train getting nearer. I brace myself for anything. At this point, I’m expecting him to be melted like a monster or to be a woman. I’m expecting anything but what I actually see.