Fixer

by Gene Doucette

  The man was sitting on one of the benches by himself, looking down at his own feet. He had a bald head and worn sneakers, and didn’t appear to be dressed well for the weather. The outfit he was wearing did indeed look a lot like a prison uniform, except it had no number or name insignia on it. Erica thought he looked eerily still—a poorly dressed statue.

  “Are you recording this?” Offey asked.

  “Yeah,” Kelsey said.

  “Hey, Saj,” Erica said, “can you see a guy out there in a bright orange jumpsuit?”

  Sajjan peered around the apparatus. “Where?”

  “Second bench on the left.”

  “There’s nobody there,” he said.

  “According to our device, there is,” Offey said.

  “Huh.”

  On the ATSV screen a woman holding a large coffee walked up to the where the bald man sat. She was about to sit right down on his lap, then changed her mind and picked a different bench instead.

  “Someone almost sat on him,” Erica said to Sajjan.

  “I’m telling you, there isn’t anybody there,” he insisted.

  “Well,” Doc Offey said, “we have a new problem. If this is showing imaginary people . . .” he trailed off, as there was really no adequate answer to what it was they were all witnessing.

  “Maybe he’s really not there,” Kelsey suggested. “And this is just some sort of crazy glitch.”

  “I can test for that,” Sajjan said.

  “Could this be showing us a possible future instead of the actual one?” Erica asked.

  “I don’t see how,” Eleanor, the other pure theoretician in the room, said. If such a thing were possible, it would probably be she and Erica who figured out how.

  The bald anomaly’s head jerked upward, which caused Erica to gasp involuntarily. There was something deeply creepy about the way he did that. Like a bird almost, but more fundamentally predatory. He was looking right at the window—and at them. She was holding her breath again, but this time excitement had nothing to do with it.

  “Why did he do that?” she asked quietly.

  “Hey!” Sajjan shouted out the window. A few of the people on the street looked up at the sound. “You in the orange outfit!”

  The man had a large, pointed nose, perfectly black eyes, a mouth that seemed to be much too big, and no eyebrows or other facial hair of any kind. His head tilted to one side, and an expression of commingled fear and curiosity passed across his face.

  “He’s looking at you, Saj,” Kelsey said.

  He looked up before Sajjan spoke, Erica realized. He heard the future.

  “Yeah,” Sajjan said, still shouting out the window. “Yeah, we can see you.”

  The man opened his mouth and seemed to articulate something none of them could hear. Erica was too busy staring at his teeth to read his lips because his teeth were huge and coated in a thin layer of reddish gore. Shark’s teeth.

  “What did he say?” Dina asked, sounding very small and scared.

  “Honestly?” Jamie said, “I thought I saw the word ‘kill’ in there.”

  “Guys,” Jimmy said, “I think we should turn off the ATSV. Now.”

  The bald thing had stopped speaking and had moved on to howling, his mouth open wide and head tilted upward like a baying hound.

  “Yeah,” Jamie said. “Kel, turn it off.”

  “But . . .”

  “Maybe you should,” Offey agreed. “Until we figure out what’s gone wrong with . . .”

  “Turn it off!” Eleanor screamed.

  “Okay, okay.” Kelsey threw the necessary switches, and the ATSV image went dead.

  At the window, Sajjan carefully lowered the optic piece to the floor, saying, “So what does this guy look like?”

  “Close the window, Saj,” Dina said. “Quickly.”

  “You afraid this boogeyman’s gonna climb the wall and slip in through the window?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Dina said, completely serious. “That is exactly what I’m afraid of.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Now

  Maggie sat back in her chair, still holding Erica’s hand and wondering whether anything she’d just heard was even remotely possible.

  “After the champagne wore off,” Erica continued, “we all just sort of convinced ourselves that none of that had happened. We started the work on our theses.”

  “This was what, twenty months ago?” Maggie asked. “Why didn’t you go public with the machine? I mean, imagine the press.”

  “Pons and Fleischmann.”

  “I don’t know who they are.”

  “You’ve heard of cold fusion? They thought they’d discovered a chemical process that could initiate a controlled fusion reaction on their tabletop. Rather than write it up and submit it for peer review, they went public right away; the problem being they were mistaken. We knew we had something, but we didn’t want to lose the scientific community right off the bat by not following the established channels. Plus, each of us had a doctorate on the line that was just as important to us as fame and fortune . . .”

  At first Maggie thought she’d just become too tired to continue, so she let her be and quietly contemplated the cost-benefit relationship of a smoked cigarette in the middle of a hospital ward room.

  “And then,” Erica said. “People started dying.”

  * * *

  Corrigan tried to understand the point Ames was making, but it wasn’t registering. Of course the messages came from elsewhere, be it the universe or God or . . . whatever. How could Ames think otherwise? Likewise, he had no more control over the ghosts than he did the messages. If he could control them, he would.

  “Let me ask you something,” Ames said, trying to drive home his point. “What is it you fear the most?”

  “Screwing up,” he said immediately. “Not saving someone when I could have.”

  “No! That is a symptom of the fear, not the fear itself.”

  “Um, okay.”

  “Why is Harvey here right now?”

  Harvey answered, “Because you need my help. You can’t do this alone. We need each other.”

  “He says we need each other,” Corrigan said. “Something about my not being able to do it alone.”

  “And he said something very similar to you before, didn’t he?” Ames asked.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Corrigan, Harvey Nilsson was insane. He saw things that weren’t there. And now here you are complaining about ghosts, and Harvey himself has come back to visit you. You are looking down the maw at the one thing, above all other things, that truly frightens you.”

  Corrigan Bain is going insane.

  “I’m not Harvey Nilsson,” Corrigan said automatically.

  “Yes! But deep down, you fear that that is exactly what you’re becoming.”

  “Going crazy,” Corrigan said. “Sure, I’ve always been afraid of that. That doesn’t explain anything.”

  “It had a trigger. What happened to you nine days ago?”

  “I didn’t save someone. Something—” He stopped.

  “Yes?”

  “I thought it was new. But this happened before. At McClaren.”

  “Now we’re getting somewhere. What was it?”

  “The future split in two.”

  “So you’ve said. But why did that affect you so?”

  Corrigan said, “Because Harvey used to be able to do that, too.”

  Ames looked down, and it occurred to Corrigan he’d hit on a tough subject for Dr. Ames. Ames had been Harvey’s doctor, and while it took Corrigan more than a year to convince Ames that he could see the future, the doctor did eventually come to accept it. But he had never believed Harvey.

  The moment passed, and Ames continued. “I don’t know what it’s like for you when you see what you see, but I imagine it must be very jarring to not see what’s coming, like the rest of us do every day. Your reaction was to block the messages you’ve only been getting because Harvey told you to get them
. It all comes back to him.”

  “Because I was right!” Harvey said.

  “I . . .” He couldn’t bring himself to take the next step.

  “Go on, tell him the truth,” Harvey yelled. “He deserves to know.”

  “Harvey says you’re wrong,” Corrigan said.

  “Well.” Ames smiled. “Harvey said that a lot in his day. Where might I have strayed? Does he say?”

  Corrigan took a deep, calming breath. “Okay. The thing is; the messages Harvey told me to expect . . . that wasn’t the only thing he got right. I never really wanted to admit it, which is maybe why I’m still a mess after all those years of therapy, but . . . those monsters only Harvey could see? They’re real.”

  * * *

  “At first, I figured the same thing everyone else did,” Erica said. “Accidents and suicides. It wasn’t until Doc Decaf that I really started to wonder if it had something to do with our project, specifically. El and I, we started talking, trying to figure out how someone could appear only in the ATSV and not in the real world. We were working out the math on it, until . . .”

  “Until she fell off a bridge,” Maggie finished.

  “Yeah. She was on her way to my place when that happened. As terrible as that was, it put the pieces together for me. I knew for sure then that the thing we saw that day was killing us one by one.”

  Maggie gripped her hand tighter. “There’s still time,” she said. “We can stop him.”

  “No, you can’t,” Erica said.

  She started crying once more, and Maggie didn’t think she knew her quite well enough to provide a shoulder, so she offered a tissue instead and waited. After a minute or so, Erica got herself under control enough to answer questions again.

  “Erica,” Maggie said. “Did you ever figure it out? What it is?”

  “I don’t know what it is,” she said quietly. “But I know when.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “The laws of physics don’t really care about things like the present and the past and the future. Mathematically—believe me, I worked it out—the present has no objective value. And his present is different than ours. The reason we can’t see him, Agent Trent, is that he lives five seconds in the future. He can affect our future, but we can’t ever affect his present. And that’s why you can’t stop him. If he wants to kill me, he will. He might even be in this room right now.”

  * * *

  Ames was confused. Initially he thought his young friend was reaching for some sort of metaphorical or otherwise non-literal definition of the word real. Because one of the first things Corrigan Bain had said to him in therapy was, “I know Mr. Nilsson was seeing imaginary things. I don’t want to see them. Can you help me?” It was the cornerstone of their ten years of work together.

  “You mean ‘real,’ as in emotionally impactful, or . . .”

  “No. ‘Real’ as in real,” Corrigan said.

  Corrigan’s eyes were darting around the room, a clear indication he was still seeing the ghosts and perhaps also still “hearing” Harvey talk to him. That couldn’t possibly help. All those figments did was feed him back what he already had in his head. The Harvey that was sitting in his chair could no more impart new information than the chair itself could. “Corrigan, we spent a lot of time on this,” he said. “Harvey lost his grip on reality, and you know that.”

  “He did,” Corrigan agreed. “But that doesn’t mean he was wrong. I saw it, too.”

  “Saw?”

  “The invisible monster. Or whatever it was.”

  “When? In the hospital?”

  “Yes. But I didn’t want to admit it to myself.” He looked away to the chair.

  “What does Harvey have to say?” Ames asked.

  “He’s talking about the day in the public room. He wounded it. I think he even killed it. That was why he lowered the gun. He’d finished what he’d set out to do.”

  “He shot the gun at you and missed.”

  “No,” Corrigan said. “He was never shooting it at me.”

  Ames sighed heavily. “We’re not going to get anywhere if you opt out of reality. This is exactly the problem you and I—”

  “I saw it dying. And I was so terrified, I asked you to help me convince myself I hadn’t. That is what I’ve been repressing all this time.”

  Corrigan seemed upbeat and lively for the first time since Ames had walked into the room, like a burden had been lifted. And that was certainly the reaction one hoped for after a therapy session. But the conclusion he was drawing was definitely not healthy. “All right,” Ames said. “Let’s work this through. I’m going to pretend for a moment that you are right, that thirty years ago Harvey Nilsson terrorized an entire hospital in order to kill an invisible monster. You saw it and tried to bury the truth in your own head, and now that truth has resurfaced and mucked up your whole life. What was the trigger? Was it still the anomalous event of nine days ago?”

  “Yes, but it started before that. I was approached by . . . hang on.”

  Corrigan reached across the coffee table for a small black device with a panoply of buttons on it that Ames only gradually realized was the remote for the television set. The television had been on—muted—for the entire time he had been there. He glanced up. The image on the screen showed a young, pretty blonde woman in what looked like a close-up of a class photograph. It was a news teaser. Corrigan took the television off mute.

  “. . . what hospital officials are calling a miracle. Graduate student Erica Smalls, attacked nine days ago in her own apartment, has taken a turn for the better. We’ll have a full report at eleven.”

  “Oh my God,” Corrigan said.

  “Is this . . . important?” Ames asked. This was all very confusing.

  “Maggie, how could you not tell me?” Corrigan asked. Ames wondered which of the ghosts was this Maggie.

  “Doctor, you’ve been a great help.” Corrigan stood up, wobbly. “I have to go now.”

  “Go? Where?”

  “There,” he said, pointing to the television. “The girl is in danger.”

  “You’re in no condition to go anywhere,” Ames pointed out as his host proceeded to tiptoe through the living room, dodging phantoms. Ames pulled himself to his feet after multiple attempts—the couch appeared to have its own gravitational field—and followed Corrigan down the hall, into a room with a computer and a large wall map. Corrigan was rifling through his desk.

  “Listen to me, please,” the doctor said. “You are in no condition to go out in public much less attempt to save some girl you happen to think is in peril.”

  Corrigan pulled a lock box out of the bottom drawer and put it up on the desktop. “It’d take too long to explain,” he said. “But I know what I’m doing. Honestly.” He started working the combination.

  “You haven’t slept soundly for almost nine days. At least get one night of sleep behind you.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out a pill bottle.

  “What are those?” Corrigan asked, without looking.

  “Sleeping pills. They’re mine, but I have plenty. Use them tonight, get some rest.”

  “I will, but not right now.” He swung the box open and reached inside for something, pulled it out, and then closed the box again.

  “Corrigan, please! You can’t just declare some sort of deeper understanding and then expect it to all be better. It doesn’t work like that. You are in crisis.”

  “I know,” Corrigan said with a half-laugh. He walked to the doorway and shoved what turned out to be a large wad of money in Ames’s hand. “But I have to try and help. I’m the only one who can.”

  “At least—”

  “I’ll try the pills. But not until after this is over. And don’t argue about the money. I don’t need to see the future to know that’s the next thing out of your mouth. You’ve helped more than you realize.”

  “Really?” Ames said. “It seems as if I’ve made matters much, much worse.”

  * * *

&n
bsp; Corrigan and Dr. Ames rode the elevator down together ten minutes later, after the former had changed into more appropriate outdoor clothing and called the front desk for two cabs.

  Ames spent the entire ten minutes, including the ride down, talking about transference. It seemed he felt that was what Corrigan was doing with Erica. Specifically, the doctor thought that by creating an imaginary emergency, he was avoiding having to deal with his very real problems. Corrigan wanted to explain to Ames what was really going on, but he didn’t think he had it in him. It was too hard just keeping reality in check long enough to make it to the lobby.

  The doors opened, opened, opened. There were a dozen people in the entryway, dressed nicely and apparently waiting for a limo, and there was the concierge, and beyond that, the ghosts.

  “Do you still see them?” Ames asked quietly. It was obvious something was wrong, as Corrigan had neglected to step off the elevator.

  “I told them to stay upstairs, but—”

  “You can’t possibly expect to go anywhere like this.”

  “I have to,” he repeated, taking one shaky step toward the lobby. Ghosts have no future, he reminded himself, that’s how you can tell. But that was only nominally helpful, as the real people not only had futures, they were showing off those futures in their entirety. He couldn’t focus on the present at all.

  He walked to the front desk, Ames crutching along beside him.

  “The cabs are here,” Corrigan said to the concierge, who was about to say, “The cabs are here, Mr. Bain.”

  “Eh, yes,” said the man at the desk, his future blinking out temporarily. “Will there—”

  “Nothing else, thanks,” Corrigan snapped.

  He turned around and assessed the lobby. Tuxedos and evening gowns stretched out in curls of forward-movement. Caterpillars, he thought. That was what he always thought they looked like when he was a kid. Multi-legged beasts that got longer when they ran. But even as a child he coped better.

  And the noise. Everyone was talking all at once, entire paragraphs of dialogue pouring out of their mouths. How was he going to do this?

  Harvey, now sitting in one of the lobby chairs, said, “Make me proud, my little fixer.”