by Alon Preiss
“What about using the wormhole to escape from the universe before it collapses in on itself?”
The professor laughed. “As I said before, I wouldn’t try it if I were you.”
The professor began to explain that, when one refers to the universe collapsing, that’s what is known as the “big crunch,” which was a mostly discredited theory. But the anchorman said they were out of time, and, with a bit of surliness, the segment ended.
Of course, had Susan known all this, had she ever attended a lecture by the renowned Harvard physicist or even paid more attention in college, she would have recognized the difference between the possible and the impossible, and then she might never have slipped through a hole in space and in time.
Katherine and Emmett were huddled together in bed, watching the Harvard professor’s interview. “Scientists don’t like perceived paradoxes,” Emmett said. “They don’t like to prove that you can travel back in time, so they invent little theorems to show that it’s actually impossible. I don’t believe in ‘impossible.’ If it’s not possible in this universe, we’ll invent a new universe with new rules of physics. You know, someone will invent it in a test tube, let it loose and ... ” He smiled. “I don’t know what would happen if it got loose.”
She rolled over into his arms, rested her head on his chest.
“I exercised today while you were at work,” he said. “Still fat, though.”
“Not too fat,” she said. “Just right.”
“You know Samantha’s sister-in-law’s fiancé?” he asked, then added, without waiting for a response, “Dropped dead of a heart attack. Thirtyish, mildly overweight guy, just like me. Kind of squishy, Pillsbury kind of guy with a stomach.”
“Too bad,” Katherine said, her eyes shut, seeming unworried and completely secure in his arms.
“It’s something to think about,” Emmett said. “What would you do without me?”
“I’d always find you again.” She smiled, eyes still tightly shut. “I would find a wormhole through time, and if it was too small for me I would hit it with a pick-ax until it was big enough for me to fit through, and if the passage was all filled with anti-matter I’d bring along my heaviest winter coat and a scuba helmet, and I’d find you and live with you again. And if there are no wormholes in our apartment, then I’d tinker around in our kitchen, mixing ingredients together, heating them to different temperatures, until I’d created a new universe. I’d open up the lid of the pot and dive in, and I’d find you somewhere in there. And we’d live together forever.” She kissed his neck and whispered, breathily, “You’ll never be rid of me, Emmett, never .... ”
The next day, Katherine whispered goodbye to her still-slumbering husband, who kissed her in his sleep. She took Paulette by the hand and left the apartment with what might seem to be a light bounce in her step. When Emmett awoke an hour later, he made himself a cup of coffee and sat in the middle of his living room in his easy chair, just breathing the atmosphere for the last time. The phone rang. “I am in room 354,” Irina whispered. “You have not changed your mind.” It was not a question, but more a hypnotic command. Emmett packed one bag with a suit and a few days change of clothes, went downstairs. In the street, the doorman hailed a taxicab, Emmett hopped in and swept across town to Irina’s hotel.
When she hung up the phone, Irina heard a knock at the door. “Who?” she called, and a man’s voice called back, “Flowers from Emmett.”
The accent was flawless, but it was too perfect, and Irina knew the truth before she peered through the peep-hole.
Standing before her was a forty-year-old man, dressed-down in a sweat suit, with a neat, newly shorn haircut and a trim, athletic appearance. His features were jagged and threatening.
“You’re mafia,” she said. “I won’t open the door.”
“Timur sent me,” he said.
“Timur is dead. Rostislavsky sent you.”
“He’s a bumbling idiot, and he can’t hurt you, Irina. Timur may be dead, but he has more power than Rostislavsky ever will. Timur will protect you.”
She opened the door a crack, not unbolting the chain lock. “What do you want?” she whispered. “I’m not afraid to call police,” she lied.
“Timur never forgot you. He forgave you for leaving him.”
“I don’t want to be forgiven for that,” she said quickly.
“Be that as it may. He arranged for a special goodbye present.”
“What is it?”
“Come out in the hallway,” he said. “I will whisper it to you. Something only you and Timur knew.”
She opened the door and stepped quickly out into the hallway. About ten doors away, a maid stood beside a large laundry cart filled with sheets. Irina felt safer with the maid there.
The man leaned over very close, and he whispered very quietly in her ear: “Senator Stephen Solomon gives a press conference in Washington D.C. tomorrow night. We can kill him then, if you still want to. A jet is waiting for us, if you want to leave tonight.”
In this carpeted hallway, this clean world, momentarily safe in the bosom of rich America, Irina suddenly shot back years to the dirty soot and angry raw emotions of that night in Pattaya. “Timur did send you,” she whispered back.
“I couldn’t find you until now. You were anonymous, then you were highly monitored. Finally, you’re alone.”
“Come in,” she said, and she ushered him into her hotel room and shut the door. He sat down on the bed.
“What is your name?” she asked.
“Авраам,” he said. “As in ‘Honest Abe.’ Anyone here will tell you I’m someone to trust. I think that’s why my momma named me Авраам. Even then, she knew.”
“I see.”
“Listen to me,” Авраам said. “Tonight, Solomon will be answering all these new financial allegations, things so convoluted that not even the Times can figure them out. He’ll be in a press building in downtown Washington before an open group of reporters. He’ll make a statement about his innocence, and Irina, you know he really is innocent of these charges, because no one can understand them, and Solomon is definitely not so smart that he can commit a crime too complicated for anyone to understand.”
“All he knows,” Irina said, “is how to kill a million Cambodians. But that’s not illegal in America.”
“Predictably,” Авраам went on without a pause, “after a few minutes the reporters will start asking about his affair. And he will leave, once it has been dark outside for one hour. He has figured out a route starting in the back of the press building, through a basement tunnel into a neighboring building that exits out onto a dark, deserted alley a few blocks away, where he hops into his car and speeds off, leaving the press confused, waiting for him at all the building’s exits. This time the alley will not be deserted.”
“Won’t he be with bodyguards?”
Авраам shook his head. “No. He doesn’t have any bodyguards. Who would want to kill a senator?”
Walking through the front doors of the hotel, sinking into the plush carpeting. Emmett took the elevator up to room 354, rang the buzzer, waited for a minute. No sounds of movement came from inside the hotel room. He pounded on the door, then pounded more loudly. Finally he took the elevator to the lobby, waited in line at the front desk, then asked about Irina.
“I thought she was in room 354, but maybe I’m wrong,” he said.
“What’s your name?” the clerk asked.
“Emmett.”
The young man smiled solicitously. “She has checked out, and she asked me to give you this note.”
He handed Emmett an envelope.
“I just spoke to her forty-five minutes ago,” Emmett said.
The clerk nodded.
Emmett walked across the floor of the lobby, sat down at a table by the wall. On the outside of the envelope was written, in Irina’s unsteady hand: “Emmett” He ripped open the envelope.
Inside, there was nothing.
He
went to the pay phone, but he couldn’t think whom to call. He just stood in the hotel lobby, staring at the phone in his hand. (“This was before email, before cell phones, before texting,” Emmett said when telling this story years later. “Remember? It was once possible to lose a person. And for a person to get lost.”) “Goodbye,” he said into the telephone, to the empty air. He hung up the telephone, and his romance with Irina ended. He returned to his apartment, unpacked his bag, hung up his suit, put away his underwear and socks, and sat back down on his couch.
The little black car careened through the rainy afternoon the next evening, on the opposite coast.
“Have you killed before?” Авраам asked.
“Once,” Irina replied casually. “One time, I killed many people. I don’t even know how many. Then all the years since, nothing.”
“And why do you want to kill Solomon?”
“I can’t ever forget meeting him, him touching me, listening to his voice. He is not some little monster, Авраам, like you, who might kill three or four times, or even ten or twenty. He is much, much worse. I knew back then, just from meeting him for a few minutes, that controlling and hurting people, many people, just in the abstract, makes him powerful in his own mind.” Like a goblin, she recalled, in a story my father told me when I was a little girl and couldn’t sleep.
Авраам hesitated.
“He really deserves to die,” she added. “The people who die a terrible death never deserve it. Bystanders, children, villagers in some faraway country, civilians. Even crazy murderers executed for urges they can’t help. People who deserve to die never die.”
“We all die, Irina.”
“Not me,” she said, laughing. “I will live forever on, you know, the Golden Screen.”
“So will he.”
She paused for effect. “I want to kill someone who deserves it, so others will live. I want him to suffer pain. I will make sure that he becomes as afraid as the little children he’s killed, whose faces he’s never seen,” she said. “As my gift to the world.”
“You can’t wipe out all memory of this man, this senator,” Авраам told her. “Maybe the game isn’t worth the candle, Irina. Because it will be worse for you right after he dies, if you hate him. He will be praised by everyone, even his enemies. Even people who think as you do, who want him dead, even they will praise him and condemn your vicious act. It will be very strange; you’ll see. He will be a martyr to the fight against crime. Everyone will say: How ironic that he should die in this way, because all the wonderful senator cared about was making everyone else safe, he should have for once thought about himself, how selfless, and just so further on and in similar way.”
“I could sneeze at his martyrdom from a tall bell tower,” Irina said. “Because, martyr or not, he will be gone. And eventually – maybe it will take many years – people will stop praising him. People will hate him and even admit that it’s good that he died when he did, before he could kill anyone else. Like Stalin. Like Hitler.”
Авраам handed her his gun. “You know how to use this?”
“No,” she said. “And I will learn very slowly. I will have to practice and practice.”
Parked in the alley, one hour after it grew dark, right next to Senator Solomon’s car. Авраам was listening to the press conference on his radio. Solomon was trying to answer the financial allegations, but he wound up pleading ignorance, which sounded as though he were hiding something.
Finally, the questions turned: was the relationship over, was this the first time he’d committed adultery, how did his new status as infamous adulterer affect his chances of becoming the first Jewish vice president?
“You can think for yourself,” Solomon snapped. “Quite obviously, my chances of becoming vice president have in recent weeks diminished somewhat. Feel free to disagree.”
He paused for a moment, as more questions rang out.
“Thank you,” Solomon said, without answering anything else.
“Okay,” Авраам said. “It takes him five minutes to get here. Assume a one-minute radio time delay, just to be safe.” He got out of the car and stood by the building exit, hand firmly inside of his jacket. Four minutes later, right on schedule, Solomon ran out of the building, and Авраам pushed a gun into the senator’s side. “Get in the car and you won’t get hurt,” he said, grabbing Solomon by the hair and shoving him into the back seat, where he came face-to-face with the young woman who stood him up more than half a decade ago in Pattaya.
“Irina?” Solomon said, and she relished the surprise in his eyes.
“You remember?” Irina asked.
“My God,” he said, awed by Hollywood glamour and almost oblivious to the danger. “I just read about you in ... where was it? Entertainment Weekly? Oh, I just don’t ....” His voice trailed off. “It was like some weird dream.”
“I thought you might have forgotten.”
“I won’t ever forget you,” he said. “I waited for you.”
The wheels spun and the car jerked forward into the night. She held her gun to his head. “Get down,” she said. “Get down on the floor.” Solomon crouched down on the floor of the back seat, the gun barrel at an angle to his temple.
“Where are you taking me?” he asked.
“I don’t know.” Irina turned to Авраам, in the driver’s seat. “Where are we going?”
“To a special place to kill him,” Авраам replied. “A special killing place.” He laughed. “A social club at your old Congressional district, senator, where we once raised money to reelect you. Funny coincidence, that.”
Now the senator fell silent. In spite of the presence of the guns, he did not seem to have realized that he might die.
“I hate you,” Irina said, by way of explanation.
“I thought you said I wouldn’t be hurt if I got in the car,” Solomon protested in the direction of the front seat.
“I meant not right away,” Авраам said.
The car splashed through a puddle on an entrance ramp to the interstate, and mud coated its dark shine.
“Why do you hate me?” the senator asked.
“I just do.”
The senator seemed hurt, not afraid, and a strange look came into his eyes. Then he bent his head down, staring at Irina’s feet, cringing at the icy headache the gun was giving him.
“If I could have just kissed you,” he said softly. “In that crazy dark, with all the noises of the ocean, the night birds. That’s all I wanted.”
Irina smiled. “Then I will let you kiss me before you die,” she said.
Emmett never learned why Irina had left Los Angeles so suddenly, and he never found out whether the envelope had been intended to convey any message other than Goodbye. Shooting wrapped on Death’s Whisper, its release awaiting the Christmas 1993 season. Irina immediately began work on Promises, Promises, the romantic comedy, and by September the wig-clad actress was seen on the arm of the up-and-coming comedian with whom she would star. “There’s your starlet with her new boyfriend,” Katherine said, teasing him. By the time Death’s Whisper finally opened on November 26, it had been retitled Angry Whisper, which didn’t seem to clarify things one bit. Early reports had centered on Irina’s muffed lines and the subsequent revision of the script. As a result of unfavorable test screenings, critics did not see the film until opening weekend. Reaction was unusually hostile towards Irina, but Emmett was startled to find himself attacked as well. Irina, wrote The Washington Post’s critic, “was compared to Greta Garbo by an over-enthusiastic freelance writer in the pages of the usually restrained New York Times. It makes me wonder if he’s even seen a Garbo film.” Emmett’s standard answer to this query was: Ninotchka is my favorite, but, in reality, the closest he’d ever come to a Garbo screening was the multi-hour Masterpiece Theater remake of Anna Karenina, of which he’d watched a scattered few minutes as a boy. The review added, cuttingly, that perhaps Irina’s charm was “more readily apparent in
the romantic, candle-lit dinners to which she subsequently treated the star-struck young critic.” Katherine, not a regular Post reader, missed this particular review. The Village Voice was even more abrasive, naming names and noting that Emmett “must think with his left hand.”
Angry Whisper made fifteen million dollars on its opening weekend, unquestionably aided by protests against the film by an advocacy group for Russian women, who claimed defamation. The following week, after the initial splash of publicity, the protest died out and grosses dropped fifty percent. By the third week its profits were negligible. Asked to comment, Irina said, “I think it’s a result of the racism of the film’s director.” The director blamed Irina for her inability to give “an honest, unstereotyped performance,” remarking, “when I discovered her own self-hatred, I should have fired her or canned the picture, but the studio was in love with her P.R.” To make amends, he announced plans to film a multigenerational saga about one Moscow family, “shot in beautiful black and white, in the beautiful Russian language.” The spokeswoman for the Russians applauded the director’s “sensitivity.” Several weeks later, facing mounting cost estimates, plans for the film were quietly scrapped.