21. dying, well or badly
John had just about decided it was too early in the day to get drunk. He had polished off two martinis in Sloppy Joe’s and then wandered uptown because the tourists were getting to him and a band was setting up, depressingly young and cheerful. He found a grubby bar he’d never noticed before, dark and smoky and hot. In the other universes it was a yuppie boutique. Three Social Security drunks were arguing politics almost loudly enough to drown out the game show on the television. It seemed to go well with the headache and sour stomach he’d reaped from the martinis and the walk in the sun. He got a beer and some peanuts and a couple of aspirin from the bartender, and sat in the farthest booth with a copy of the local classified ad newspaper. Somebody had obscurely carved fuck anarchy into the tabletop.
Nobody else in this world knows what anarchy is, John thought, and the helpless anomie came back, intensified somewhat by drunken sentimentality. What he would give to go back to the first universe and undo this all by just not ...
Would that be possible? The Hemingway was willing to take him back to 1921; why not back a few weeks? Where the hell was that son of a bitch when you needed him, it, whatever.
The Hemingway appeared in the booth opposite him, an Oak Park teenager smoking a cigarette. “I felt a kind of vibration from you. Ready to make your decision?”
“Can the people at the bar see you?”
“No. And don’t worry about appearing to be talking to yourself. A lot of that goes on around here.”
“Look. Why can’t you just take me back to a couple of weeks before we met on the train, back in the first universe? I’ll just ... “ The Hemingway was shaking its head slowly. “You can’t.”
“No. As I explained, you already exist there—”
“You said that you couldn’t be in the same place twice. How do you know I can’t?”
“How do you know you can’t swallow that piano? You just can’t.”
“You thought I couldn’t talk about you, either, you thought your stick would kill me. I’m not like normal people.”
“Except in that alcohol does nothing for your judgment.”
John ate a peanut thoughtfully. “Try this on for size. At 11:46 on June 3, a man named Sylvester Castlemaine sat down in Dos Hermosas and started talking with me about the lost manuscripts. The forgery would never have occurred to me if I hadn’t talked to him. Why don’t you go back and keep him from going into that cafe? Or just go back to 11:30 and kill him.”
The Hemingway smiled maliciously. “You don’t like him much.”
“It’s more fear than like or dislike.” He rubbed his face hard, remembering. “Funny how things shift around. He was kind of likable the first time I met him. Then you killed me on the train and in the subsequent universe, he became colder, more serious. Then you killed me in Pansy’s apartment and in this universe, he has turned mean. Dangerously mean, like a couple of men I knew in Vietnam. The ones who really love the killing. Like you, evidently.”
It blew a chain of smoke rings before answering. “I don’t ‘love’ killing, or anything else. I have a complex function and I fulfill it, because that is what I do. That sounds circular because of the limitations of human language.
“I can’t go killing people right and left just to see what happens. When a person dies at the wrong time it takes forever to clean things up. Not that it wouldn’t be worth it in your case. But I can tell you with certainty that killing Castlemaine would not affect the final outcome.”
“How can you say that? He’s responsible for the whole thing.” John finished off most of his beer and the Hemingway touched the mug and it refilled. “Not poison.”
“Wouldn’t work,” it said morosely. “I’d gladly kill Castlemaine any way you want—cancer of the penis is a possibility—if there was even a fighting chance that it would clear things up. The reason I know it wouldn’t is that I am not in the least attracted to that meeting. There’s no probability nexus associated with it, the way there was with your buying the Corona or starting the story on the train, or writing it down here. You may think that you would never have come up with the idea for the forgery on your own, but you’re wrong.”
“That’s preposterous.”
“Nope. There are universes in this bundle where Castle isn’t involved. You may find that hard to believe, but your beliefs aren’t important.”
John nodded noncommittally and got his faraway remembering look. “You know ... reviewing in my mind all the conversations we’ve had, all five of them, the only substantive reason you’ve given me not to write this pastiche, and I quote, is that ‘I or someone like me will have to kill you.’ Since that doesn’t seem to be possible, why don’t we try some other line of attack?”
It put out the cigarette by squeezing it between thumb and forefinger. There was a smell of burning flesh. “All right, try this: give it up or I’ll kill Pansy. Then Lena.”
“I’ve thought of that, and I’m gambling that you won’t, or can’t. You had a perfect opportunity a few days ago—maximum dramatic effect—and you didn’t do it. Now you say it’s an awfully complicated matter.”
“You’re willing to gamble with the lives of the people you love?”
“I’m gambling with a lot. Including them.” He leaned forward. “Take me into the future instead of the past. Show me what will happen if I succeed with the Hemingway hoax. If I agree that it’s terrible, I’ll give it all up and become a plumber.”
The old, wise Hemingway shook a shaggy head at him. “You’re asking me to please fix it so you can swallow a piano. I can’t. Even I can’t go straight to the future and look around; I’m pretty much tied to your present and past until this matter is cleared up.”
“One of the first things you said to me was that you were from the future. And the past. And ‘other temporalities,’ whatever the hell that means. You were lying then?”
“Not really.” It sighed. “Let me force the analogy. Look at the piano.”
John twisted half around. “Okay.”
“You can’t eat it—but after a fashion, I can.” The piano suddenly transformed itself into a piano-shaped mountain of cold capsules, which immediately collapsed and rolled all over the floor. “Each capsule contains a pinch of sawdust or powdered ivory or metal, the whole piano in about a hundred thousand capsules. If I take one with each meal, I will indeed eat the piano, over the course of the next three hundred-some years. That’s not a long time for me.”
“That doesn’t prove anything.”
“It’s not a proof, it’s a demonstration.” It reached down and picked up a capsule that was rolling by, and popped it into its mouth. “One down, 99,999 to go. So how many ways could I eat this piano?”
“Ways?”
“I mean I could have swallowed any of the hundred thousand first. Next I can choose any of the remaining 99,999. How many ways can—”
“That’s easy. One hundred thousand factorial. A huge number.”
“Go to the head of the class. It’s ten to the godzillionth power. That represents the number of possible paths—the number of futures—leading to this one guaranteed, preordained event: my eating the piano. They are all different, but in terms of whether the piano gets eaten, their differences are trivial.
“On a larger scale, every possible trivial action that you or anybody else in this universe takes puts us into a slightly different future than would have otherwise existed. An overwhelming majority of actions, even seemingly significant ones, make no difference in the long run. All of the futures bend back to one central, unifying event—except for the ones that you’re screwing up!”
“So what is this big event?”
“It’s impossible for you to know. It’s not important, anyhow.” Actually, it would take a rather cosmic viewpoint to consider the event unimportant: the end of the world.
Or at least the end of life on Earth. Right now there were two earnest young politicians, in the
United States and Russia, who on 11 August 2006 would be President and Premier of their countries. On that day, one would insult the other beyond forgiveness, and a button would be pushed, and then another button, and by the time the sun set on Moscow, or rose on Washington, there would be nothing left alive on the planet at all—from the bottom of the ocean to the top of the atmosphere—not a cockroach, not a paramecium, not a virus, and all because there are some things a man just doesn’t have to take, not if he’s a real man.
Hemingway wasn’t the only writer who felt that way, but he was the one with the most influence on this generation. The apparition who wanted John dead or at least not typing didn’t know exactly what effect his pastiche was going to have on Hemingway’s influence, but it was going to be decisive and ultimately negative. It would prevent or at least delay the end of the world in a whole bundle of universes, which would put a zillion adjacent realities out of kilter, and there would be hell to pay all up and down the Omniverse. Many more people than six billion would die—and it’s even possible that all of Reality would unravel, and collapse back to the Primordial Hiccup from whence it came.
“If it’s not important, then why are you so hell-bent on keeping me from preventing it? I don’t believe you.”
“Don’t believe me, then!” At an imperious gesture, all the capsules rolled back into the corner and reassembled into a piano, with a huge crashing chord. None of the barflies heard it. “I should think you’d cooperate with me just to prevent the unpleasantness of dying over and over.”
John had the expression of a poker player whose opponent has inadvertently exposed his hole card. “You get used to it,” he said. “And it occurs to me that sooner or later I’ll wind up in a universe that I really like. This one doesn’t have a hell of a lot to recommend it.” His foot tapped twice and then twice again.
“No,” the Hemingway said. “It will get worse each time.”
“You can’t know that. This has never happened before.”
“True so far, isn’t it?”
John considered it for a moment. “Some ways. Some ways not.”
The Hemingway shrugged and stood up. “Well. Think about my offer.” The cane appeared. “Happy cancer.” It tapped him on the chest and disappeared.
The first sensation was utter tiredness, immobility. When he strained to move, pain slithered through his muscles and viscera, and stayed. He could hardly breathe, partly because his lungs weren’t working and partly because there was something in the way. In the mirror beside the booth he looked down his throat and saw a large white mass, veined, pulsing. He sank back into the cushion and waited. He remembered the young wounded Hemingway writing his parents from the hospital with ghastly cheerfulness: “If I should have died it would have been very easy for me. Quite the easiest thing I ever did.” I don’t know, Ernie; maybe it gets harder with practice. He felt something tear open inside and hot stinging fluid trickled through his abdominal cavity. He wiped his face and a patch of necrotic skin came off with a terrible smell. His clothes tightened as his body swelled.
“Hey buddy, you okay?” The bartender came around in front of him and jumped. “Christ, Harry, punch nine-one-one!”
John gave a slight ineffectual wave. “No rush,” he croaked.
The bartender cast his eyes to the ceiling. “Always on my shift?”
~ * ~
22. death in the afternoon
John woke up behind a Dumpster in an alley. It was high noon and the smell of fermenting garbage was revolting. He didn’t feel too well in any case; as if he’d drunk far too much and passed out behind a Dumpster, which was exactly what had happened in this universe.
In this universe. He stood slowly to a quiet chorus of creaks and pops, brushed himself off, and staggered away from the malefic odor. Staggered, but not limping—he had both feet again, in this present. There was a hand-sized numb spot at the top of his left leg where a .51 caliber machine gun bullet had missed his balls by an inch and ended his career as a soldier.
And started it as a writer. He got to the sidewalk and stopped dead. This was the first universe where he wasn’t a college professor. He taught occasionally—sometimes creative writing; sometimes Hemingway—but it was only a hobby now, and a nod toward respectability.
He rubbed his fringe of salt-and-pepper beard. It covered the bullet scar there on his chin. He ran his tongue along the metal teeth the army had installed thirty years ago. Jesus. Maybe it does get worse every time. Which was worse, losing a foot or getting your dick sprayed with shrapnel, numb from severed nerves, plus bullets in the leg and face and arm? If you knew there was a Pansy in your future, you would probably trade a foot for a whole dick. Though she had done wonders with what was left.
Remembering furiously, not watching where he was going, he let his feet guide him back to the oldster’s bar where the Hemingway had showed him how to swallow a piano. He pushed through the door and the shock of air-conditioning brought him back to the present.
Ferns. Perfume. Lacy underthings. An epicene sales clerk sashayed toward him, managing to look worried and determined at the same time. His nose was pierced, decorated with a single diamond button. “Si-i-r,” he said in a surprisingly deep voice, “may I help you?”
Crotchless panties. Marital aids. The bar had become a store called The French Connection. “Guess I took a wrong turn. Sorry.” He started to back out.
The clerk smiled. “Don’t be shy. Everybody needs something here.”
The heat was almost pleasant in its heavy familiarity. John stopped at a convenience store for a six-pack of greenies and walked back home.
An interesting universe; much more of a divergence than the other had been. Reagan had survived the Hinckley assassination and actually went on to a second term. Bush was elected rather than succeeding to the presidency, and the country had not gone to war in Nicaragua: The Iran/Contra scandal nipped it in the bud.
The United States was actually cooperating with the Soviet Union in a flight to Mars. There were no DeSotos. Could there be a connection?
And in this universe he had actually met Ernest Hemingway.
Havana, 1952. John was eight years old. His father, a doctor in this universe, had taken a break from the New England winter to treat his family to a week in the tropics. John got a nice sunburn the first day, playing on the beach while his parents tried the casinos. The next day they made him stay indoors, which meant tagging along with his parents, looking at things that didn’t fascinate eight-year-olds.
For lunch they went to La Florida, on the off chance that they might meet the famous Ernest Hemingway, who supposedly held court there when he was in Havana.
To John it was a huge dark cavern of a place, full of adult smells. Cigar smoke, rum, beer, stale urine. But Hemingway was indeed there, at the end of the long dark wood bar, laughing heartily with a table full of Cubans.
John was vaguely aware that his mother resembled some movie actress, but he couldn’t have guessed that that would change his life. Hemingway glimpsed her and then stood up and was suddenly silent, mouth open. Then he laughed and waved a huge arm. “Come on over here, daughter.”
The three of them rather timidly approached the table, John acutely aware of the careful inspection his mother was receiving from the silent Cubans. “Take a look, Mary,” he said to the small blond woman knitting at the table. “The Kraut.”
The woman nodded, smiling, and agreed that John’s mother looked just like Marlene Dietrich ten years before. Hemingway invited them to sit down and have a drink, and they accepted with an air of genuine astonishment. He gravely shook John’s hand, and spoke to him as he would to an adult. Then he shouted to the bartender in fast Spanish, and in a couple of minutes his parents had huge daiquiris and he had a Coke with a wedge of lime in it, tropical and grown-up. The waiter also brought a tray of boiled shrimp. Hemingway even ate the heads and tails, crunching loudly, which impressed John more than any Nobel Prize. Hemingway mi
ght have agreed, since he hadn’t yet received one, and Faulkner had.
For more than an hour, two Cokes, John watched as his parents sat hypnotized in the aura of Hemingway’s famous charm. He put them at ease with jokes and stories and questions—for the rest of his life John’s father would relate how impressed he was with the sophistication of Hemingway’s queries about cardiac medicine—but it was obvious even to a child that they were in awe, electrified by the man’s presence.
Later that night John’s father asked him what he thought of Mr. Hemingway. Forty-four years later, John of course remembered his exact reply. “He has fun all the time. I never saw a grown-up who plays like that”
Interesting. That meeting was where his eidetic memory started. He could remember a couple of days before it pretty well, because they had still been close to the surface. In other universes, he could remember back well before grade school. It gave him a strange feeling. All of the universes were different, but this was the first one where the differentness was so tightly connected to Hemingway.
The Best of Joe Haldeman Page 38