The Gatespace Trilogy, Omnibus Edition

by Alan Seeger

  She rushed up to them and asked, “What’s going on? Is someone hurt?” Stefanie knew very well that an ambulance would come for the injured; the coroner’s van only came for the dead, but she didn’t want to think about what that meant.

  The technician’s response penetrated her heart like a knife.

  “We had a report that one of the street people passed away in his sleep,” he said, checking a clipboard. “An Arthur Harper?”

  Stefanie stood on the sidewalk, watching the two men wheel the gurney inside. Tears welled up in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks.

  ~~~~~

  Stefanie found Rose in the shelter office and let her know that she had to leave in order to let Rick know about his father. The other shelter employees had been thrilled to hear about the father and son reunion that had taken place just days before; now they were shocked and saddened to learn it had been so short-lived.

  She signed the paperwork authorizing the coroner’s crew to take Arthur’s body. Before they zipped him up in the body bag, she bent and kissed him on the forehead and said, “Goodbye, Artie. I barely got to know you.”

  As they loaded him into the coroner’s van, Stefanie hailed a cab and told the driver to take her to San Francisco General.

  ~~~~~

  It was barely after seven when Stefanie opened the door and stepped into Rick’s hospital room. He was sitting up on the side of his bed and greeted her with a huge smile.

  “Hi, diamond girl! I didn’t expect you until noonish. They just got done taking my IV out, and…” He saw the look of heartache on her face. “What’s the matter?”

  She hesitated, not knowing how to tell him the news. How do you tell your best friend and lover that the father he thought was gone from his life for more than thirty years, and who just came back into his life five days ago, is dead? There was nothing left to do but just break the news to him.

  “It’s Arthur, honey… it’s your dad.”

  Rick’s face fell. “What happened?”

  “Rick… your dad passed away sometime in the night.”

  His face went blank, and he was silent for a moment. Then he asked, “Did he suffer?”

  “They don’t think he did. The staff said he looked like he was sleeping peacefully when they went to wake him for breakfast, and found him.”

  Rick breathed deeply. “Well,” he said, “I’m glad for that.”

  Stefanie nodded.

  They were both silent for a minute or so. Then Rick said, “We need to go home, to 2016.”

  “I know,” Said Stefanie.

  “Get my clothes out of the closet.”

  “Rick,” she said, “you can’t just walk out of the hospital.”

  “Can’t I?” he said. “Watch me.”

  “But… you should at least have the doctor discharge you…”

  “Forget that. There’s no time, and he’ll try his damndest to get me to stay.”

  Stefanie knew that when Rick made up his mind about something, there was no deterring him, so she got his clothing from the closet and set it on the foot of his bed. For a moment Rick’s mind flashed back to his dream, the way his mother had done the same thing for him. He slipped his briefs on, then his jeans; he motioned for Stef to untie the hospital gown, and he shucked it off and slipped on his tee shirt.

  As he began putting his socks on, one of the nurses happened to walk in and saw that he was getting dressed.

  “Are we going somewhere?” she asked.

  “Yes, we are,” Rick said. “I’m checking out.”

  “Well, you’ll need to speak to the doctor to get authoriz—”

  “I don’t need to speak to anyone,” Rick said sternly. “I’m leaving, with or without his OK.”

  “We just got word that his father passed away,” explained Stefanie apologetically. “It was very sudden.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry,” said the nurse, suddenly sympathetic. “I’ll tell you what, you go ahead and finish getting ready, and I’ll page Dr. Geister and let him know the circumstances.”

  Rick grumbled assent as she walked out of the room.

  “Are you sure you can walk any sort of distance?” Stefanie asked. “You’ve been in bed for five days.”

  “We’ll steal a wheelchair, if we have to,” said Rick. “We’ve gotta get the hell out of here.”

  CHAPTER 96

  As it turned out, they didn’t have to commit Grand Theft Wheelchair; the nurse, whose name was Rebecca, returned just a few minutes later with the news that Dr. Geister was making his rounds right then, and that he would be arriving within ten to fifteen minutes to discharge Rick.

  That was acceptable to Rick, so they sat and waited. Dr. Geister was as good as his word; he arrived just twelve minutes later.

  “Mr. Harper, I’m so terribly sorry to hear about your father,” Dr. Geister said. “Let me get you to sign a couple of forms for me, and we’ll get you on your way.”

  Rick scribbled an illegible signature on the forms, and Dr. Geister said, “I understand your situation, and I’m gonna expedite getting you out of here. I do want you to call my office for an appointment at your earliest opportunity.”

  I’ll do that, thought Rick. It just so happens that my earliest opportunity is going to be sometime in 2016.

  Instead, he said, “Sure, doc.”

  They insisted on putting Rick in a wheelchair for the trip downstairs, much to his consternation, but secretly he was relieved; he didn’t know if he could have made it all the way without sitting to rest.

  Before they got into the elevator, Rick called out to Dr. Geister, and handed him a small, folded piece of paper. “Here, doc,” he said to the doctor, “Put this in your wallet. I want you to always keep it there. Someday, years from now, somebody may ask you about it, and he’ll be really disappointed if you don’t still have it.”

  Dr. Geister looked at Rick like he was a little odd, but said, “All right,” and tucked it away into his billfold without looking at it.

  Later that day, he remembered it, and took it out. There, on a piece of hospital note paper, Rick had written a four-digit number: “2016.” He wondered what its significance was. A room number, perhaps?

  Dr. Geister shrugged and put it back in his wallet.

  ~~~~~

  Rick and Stefanie took a cab back to the shelter, where she began wrapping up her affairs, letting them know that she was leaving, supposedly to join Rick in some unspecified city in the Midwest. If she’d been asked, she was planning to say St. Louis, but no one asked her.

  Rick called the coroner’s office and identified himself as Arthur’s next of kin, saying that he was Artie’s brother — it would be difficult to explain how Rick could be his son, since Arthur wasn’t much older than Rick’s present age — and requested that they release the body to a local funeral home for cremation. Rick didn’t have any desire to see his father’s dead body, so arrangements were made to pick up the cremains the next morning.

  Stefanie took off the rest of the day, and she and Rick went back to her tiny apartment. He had to stop and rest a couple of times on the way up the stairs, but managed to get there without too much trouble. He told Stef that it was the best he’d felt in a week, which was mostly true.

  Stefanie went out and got Chinese at a place on the next block and brought it back to the apartment. It was overcast with grey clouds; it looked as though a drizzling rain might come in as a front moved into the city from over the Pacific.

  It was late afternoon as they sat in the dimly lit apartment, eating lo mein and egg rolls and sipping Diet Pepsi, watching the rain trickle down the small window, both of them hoping — no, expecting — that in less than 24 hours, they would be sixteen years in the future, back home in St. Louis.

  CHAPTER 97

  They awoke the next morning quite early. There was a gusting wind whistling through the eaves of the apartment building.

  Stefanie awoke first, and found herself wrapped in Rick’s arms; it was where she wanted to be
, and she never wanted to be apart from him again. The previous night had been gentle, tender; he wanted something a little more strenuous, she could tell, but she was a little afraid of sapping all his energy. After all, he had just spent five days in the hospital.

  In the end, however, it was good; very good. Gentle, and long-lasting, and quite satisfying indeed.

  Now, in the grey morning light, she lay in his arms and listened to the howling wind. She wondered how long it would go on, and for a moment she had the impulse to reach for the iPad that they kept by the bed in order to look at the Weather Channel’s radar; then she remembered that that was sixteen years away. She didn’t even have a TV to look at to see what the local meteorologist had to say about the weather.

  One way or another, they had to pick up Arthur’s cremains this morning, and then she knew that Rick was anxious to find that alley in the Marina District and, as he was so fond of saying, “get the fuck out of Dodge.” She just didn’t want him to go out into the chill and possibly add a cold or the flu to the other health issues he was already dealing with.

  By mid-morning, however, the wind had calmed down, leaving a city blown clean of much of its dust and trash. Stefanie toasted a couple of bagels and made some coffee, and they sat silently having their breakfast.

  Finally Rick blurted out, “I hope it’s still there.”

  “You hope what’s still there, Ricky?”

  “The Gate. What if…” he turned and looked into her eyes. “What if so much time has passed since I came back through to search for you that they’ve moved on, decided that neither of us is coming back, and they shut down the HOT6? When I came through to find you, three days had passed back home, but when I came through the gate, I discovered nine months had passed by. What if we get back to that alley, and find that the Gate is gone?”

  “Well, then,” she smiled at him. “If that happens, we’ll come back here to this little apartment, and you’ll get some rest; we’ll live here until we can get someplace better, and you’ll make that appointment with young Dr. Geister and get healthy, and we’ll live here in the Bay Area, and in fifteen years, we’ll fly to St. Louis, and you can find Randall and Terry, and kick their asses.”

  The tension dispelled, they held each other and laughed until tears streamed down their faces.

  ~~~~~

  They went downstairs and out onto the street to hail a cab, but immediately noticed that there seemed to be something strange going on. Stefanie noticed groups of people all up and down the street; some were gathered in groups and seemed to be in intense discussions. One man was standing by the open passenger door of his car, his radio blaring what seemed to be some kind of news program. The vehicle was far enough down the street and the fidelity poor enough that it wasn’t possible to make out what was being said.

  Further down the street, she saw two policemen standing on the sidewalk by their parked police cruiser; for some odd reason, they seemed to be watching the sky. Rick and Stefanie looked up, wondering what was going on, but saw nothing in the sky but the grey clouds.

  Still, something weird was happening. They could feel it in the air, like electricity.

  Just then, Mrs. Moskowitz, a retired lady in her 70s who lived down the hall from Stefanie, came bursting out of the front door of the apartment building, leaning on her cane but moving as fast as her elderly legs would carry her. She was still wearing her nightgown and robe, under the ratty faux-leopard fur coat that she wore almost everywhere, and a worn pair of houseshoes.

  She saw Stefanie and Rick standing on the sidewalk as she toddled by, and looked at Stefanie with a frantic gleam in her eyes. “Oh, isn’t it awful? I’ve got to get to the store and stock up on groceries before they clean the place out! It’s just terrible!”

  Stefanie looked at her, concerned. “What is? What’s happened?”

  “Oh, you didn’t hear?” the old lady exclaimed. “It’s war! It’s terrible! They’re flying airplanes into buildings! It started in New York! They’ll probably be here next! Oh!” She shuffled off down the sidewalk toward a small, inner city grocer on the next block.

  Rick and Stef looked at each other, and the light dawned when they realized what day it was.

  September 11, 2001.

  They were likely the only people in San Francisco that passed the rest of the day without a single worry as to whether the terrorist attacks that had resulted in hijacked planes striking the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, DC, as well as bringing another airliner down in a field in rural Pennsylvania, would spread to the West Coast. They knew that the nation was in for a decade of war, but at least for now, they knew the citizens of San Francisco, as well as St. Louis, were safe.

  Suddenly Stefanie turned to Rick with a look of shock on her face and said, “You were in New York on this day, weren’t you?”

  Rick looked at the ground for a moment, as if thinking of something unpleasant.

  “I was at work at Stony Brook that day… today, I mean.” He took a deep breath. “It was quite a ways from what happened at the Twin Towers, though. Stony Brook is a good forty miles northeast of Manhattan.” His face clouded with the memories of the events that had happened, and knowing that, for them, it was happening this very morning. “We basically watched it all happen on television, like the rest of the country.”

  ~~~~~

  Tuesday morning. Rick’s day had started early: the alarm had gone off at 5:30 AM. He had slammed the snooze button immediately, as he was wont to do, but as usual, after lying there in his bed for two or three minutes, he opened his eyes, sighed and realized that he needed to go ahead and get up in order to arrive at work by 7 AM.

  He sat up, scratched his head, and thought about the voice mail he’d received the previous morning. He had heard the phone ringing just as his alarm had woke him up; he’d gone into the main room of his small apartment and picked up the phone. He heard the intermittent dial tone that indicated he had waiting voice mail and dialed the code to retrieve it.

  He listened to the message that indicated that he had one new message, and then heard a man’s voice say, “Hey, man. We haven’t met, but I just wanted to tell you that there’s rumors that Dr. Randall Orwell is gonna put together a project in a few years that’ll knock the scientific world on its ass. If and when you get a chance to be in on it, don’t miss out.”

  The voice seemed familiar, yet he couldn’t place who it might have been, and the man didn’t leave his name. He listened to it again and decided to save it for future reference. Randall Orwell? He recalled the name from his days at CalTech. He filed the information away in his head and went on about his day.

  Now he sat on the edge of his bed, thinking about that voice. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he should know whose voice it was. It was going to be one of those irritating things that would pester him until he figured it out, he knew.

  An hour later he arrived at Stony Brook University’s West Campus. He liked his life here on Long Island; after his gut-wrenching divorce a year ago, his apartment was distinct enough from the places he had lived with his ex-wife — Connecticut, Chicago, and the Long Island condo that her parents had insisted on buying them — that he had finally found what he felt was his own sense of identity.

  He had been at work for a little over two hours when one of his colleagues came rushing into the room and said, “Something’s happened in Manhattan, man. Something bad. Real bad.”

  Rick stopped his experiment at the next safe point and went out into the break room. Practically everyone in the place was clustered around the 25” TV set, which Rick saw was showing images of the World Trade Center’s twin towers, with both buildings ablaze.

  “What the hell happened?” Rick exclaimed.

  “A plane hit one of the towers about half an hour ago,” said a man named Ethan, who normally kept to himself and rarely spoke. Rick knew this must be an incredibly emotional thing for him to speak up so readily. “A couple of us we
re in here having coffee. Some of the newscasters thought it might have been a pilot who had a heart attack or something… they were discussing it and debating what other scenarios might explain something like that happening, when all of a sudden, right there on live TV, another plane came zooming in and hit the other tower.”

  “Jesus.” Rick’s mouth was dry.

  “Yeah.”

  “This was no accident.”

  “Terrorists?”

  “It’d just about have to be,” Rick said. “What are the chances of two different planes hitting two adjacent skyscrapers within twenty minutes of each other and it not being on purpose?”

  It wasn’t too much later that they heard that another plane had hit the Pentagon in Washington, and then that another plane had been flown into the ground in Pennsylvania. There was some speculation that the fourth plane had also been bound for Washington, possibly for the White House or the Capitol.

  Rick and all of his colleagues didn’t feel as if going back to work was the appropriate thing to do, so they shut up the shop for the day and went home to be with their families.

  Rick and three of the other guys who were single and had no family in the area drove around until they found a bar that was open early and sat drinking beer and watching the tragic news play out on CNN. It would be weeks before the final casualty figures were tallied.

  ~~~~~

  In the end, it was almost anticlimactic. Rick and Stefanie took a cab to the funeral home that had handled the cremation of Arthur’s body and picked up what remained. Far from the brass or ceramic urns that are so often seen in movies that involve bodies being cremated, what they received was a cube-shaped cardboard box, about eight inches on each side, sealed quite well with some sort of transparent tape all over its surface. On the top side was a computer printed label which read ARTHUR HARPER. The funeral director placed the box in Rick’s hands with a kindly smile that expressed simulated sympathy.