Same architecture, but that was it. The furniture was different, ultra-modern but tasteful, and in different places. Pictures lined the mantel over the fireplace, and as Eric looked closer he saw himself and Valerie in these pictures, but they both looked different somehow.
They were older.
And in these photographs, they weren’t alone.
They were a family of four; a girl of perhaps eight or nine, a baby boy no older than 10 months.
And in that moment it all came back to him, the so-called tender talks that escalated into arguments and ended in silent resentment: We’re not financially stable enough yet for kids—Don’t pull out that old chestnut, Eric, not with me, not again, things are as good as they’re going to get—We’re not ready—Bullshit, what you mean to say is you’re not ready for the responsibility—What’s wrong with that? Tell me, Val, what’s wrong with not being ready to surrender the rest of your life to kids?—It’s selfish, that’s what’s wrong with it, and you know how much I want them….
He tossed the photos down onto the table, yelled for the young woman from the real estate office once again, and then ran up the stairs.
She was nowhere in the house, but she’d taken care to leave behind photographs she’d taken of every upstairs room, and in each photo the rooms were different, brighter, happier.
The master bedroom much more luxurious than it was now; the office had new computers and sleek, matching white works-stations, not the make-shift collection of disparate office furniture which now occupied its space; and then there was the guest room.
As it was now, the guest room, though comfortable and inviting enough, was nothing spectacular. But in the photographs taken by the young woman from the realtor’s office, it wasn’t a guest room at all.
It was the room of a teenaged girl fifteen years from now; cluttered, filled with clothes, a stereo and curved-screen HD television, posters of rock stars on the walls, books lying helter-skelter wherever there was an overlooked empty space...and it was all so bright.
And then it occurred to Eric.
These pictures showed the kind of happy home that he and Valerie had always dreamed of having when they’d be a family. It was a house full of life and activity, where each realized dream was quickly and joyfully replaced by another dream, a new goal, something the family could work toward together.
“This is one hell of a trick, young lady,” he whispered through clenched teeth.
He went through the entire house twice more, but he couldn’t find her.
How had she been able to leave without his hearing her?
* * *
He arrived at the restaurant in time to take care of business with the delivery man from Marciano’s. Carl then handed the case to the wine steward and said, “Anything happens to this, we kill your family, slowly, while you watch. But don’t feel pressured, okay?”
After the young man had left for the wine cellar—looking equal parts confused and terrified—Carl pulled Eric aside and said: “Don’t take this the wrong way—got nothing but love for you in my heart, partner—but from your appearance I’m guessing you feel like shit. No, wait, scratch that. You look as if you aspire to feel like shit.”
“You’re a real charmer.”
“Famous for it. Seriously, though—what’s wrong? Things still kind of cool between Val and you?”
Eric rubbed his eyes. “Let’s go to the formal bar and get some coffee, okay? I need more coffee.”
The formal bar wouldn’t be officially open for another three hours, so it was a good place to conduct meetings. Jenise, the bar manager, was already there, setting up for later. She poured Eric and Carl two cups of coffee (offering to add a shot of Irish whiskey, which Eric declined), then went about her duties.
For a moment both Eric and Carl watched her as she walked back into the small office beyond the swinging doors.
“That is one gorgeous woman,” Carl said.
“No arguments here,” replied Eric.
Jenise had been working here for the last two years, having decided to take a couple of years off between college and grad school. She was smart, funny, as pleasant an employee as you could hope for, and easily the sexiest woman Eric had met in ages.
He often felt guilty for thinking about Jenise in that way, but some women simply exude sexuality, and with her long, thick red hair, wonderful large breasts, and several sets of curves that no one could improve on, few men could watch her and not wonder what it would be like to ride those hips or slide their hand down the small of her back until you could grab—
—Eric took a sip of his coffee. It was delicious, and far too hot.
Kind of like Jenise herself.
“...I that riveting?”
Eric blinked, realized that he hadn’t been listening to Carl, and said, “What?”
“Man, you are out of it, aren’t you?”
“It’s been a rough...things have been...ah, hell!” He covered his face with his hands for a moment, exhaled loudly, then placed his hands flat on the bar as if to make sure it was real.
“I had a young woman stop by the house this morning,” he said to Carl.
“Hooker or nun? Oooh, wait—I’ll bet it was a hooker dressed as nun, trying to help you over that dormant catholic guilt thing, am I right?”
“What?”
“Just trying to get a rise out of you, partner. Who was she?”
“I’m not sure. Have you ever met someone who you know—and I mean right down to the marrow of your bones know—you recognize from somewhere, but you can’t place them?”
“Well, yeah, sure. I mean, we all run into people we’ve met before at some point in our lives.”
“I’m not talking a passing acquaintance here, Carl. It was a lot stronger than that.” There was something else about her that he thought he should mention, but for the life of him he couldn’t remember what it was.
Carl cleared his throat, peered over the bar to make sure Jenise wasn’t going to come back in, and said, “Maybe it’s just the old sex drive coming back. You mentioned a couple of times that you and Van have been having trouble for a while, ever since she started pressuring you about the old biological clock. Maybe this woman just sparked something in you that—”
Eric shook his head. “No, it was nothing like that at all. It wasn’t anything sexual. I was just stunned by this feeling that I knew this woman. Not just as someone I’d met in passing, a customer here or anything like that, but someone who’d I’d been very close to.”
“Did she recognize you?”
“No.” What was it about her that he couldn’t remember?
“You sure?”
“I think I’m bright enough to pick up on signals like that, Carl.”
“Maybe you knew her in a previous life,” said Jenise from the doorway.
Carl mouthed, “Oh, shit,” before turning to face Jenise, smiling. “How long you been standing there?”
“Just long enough to hear Eric say he was sure he’d known this woman. Sounds like a karmic thing to me.”
It was at moments like this that Eric was glad he hadn’t succumbed to temptation when Jenise had first started working at the restaurant. She had dropped hints that she found Eric attractive, had even once asked him out after work, but he had not let it go anywhere. Not that he wouldn’t have loved getting into bed with her, but the employee/employer minefield aside, he was a married man who loved his wife.
It was only after he’d gently rebuked her advances that Jenise had started letting her guard down enough, revealing herself to be a crystal-gazing, herb-taking, Gaia-worshipping, New-Age flake.
Still, she was a sweet young woman and a good employee, and Eric thought it might be rude to send her away at this point.
“Another life?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” replied Jenise, her mood brightening. “It happens all the time. You spend each life trying to make up for all the mistakes you made in the last one, and in each life you will encounter people that you knew i
n your previous existence. One of them will be the person you were destined to be with for all eternity.”
“And when do you meet this person?” asked Carl.
“When you have at last atoned for the mistakes of all your previous lives. That’s when your True Love will be made known to you. Your soul will be cleansed, then, and together the two of you can move onto the next plane of existence.”
“Uh-huh.”
Eric found himself staring at Jenise’s blouse. Instead of having only the top two buttons undone, she had the top three, giving him a good look at her perfect cleavage and incredible breasts.
“Eric?” she said.
“Your soul will be cleansed, I know, I was listening.”
Jenise smiled. “It would explain why you felt so drawn to her, why you believe so strongly that you’ve known her.”
But it wouldn’t explain what I can’t remember about the way she looked, or why.
“This is bullshit,” said Carl, but there was no anger or irritation in his tone. He was simply trying to get a rise out of Jenise.
“Maybe not,” whispered Eric.
“You mean you think she might be right?”
Eric reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the photographs. Tossing them onto the bar, he pointed at them and said, “You’ve seen the inside of my house, Carl. Take a look at those, will you? That woman from the realtor’s office took them this morning.”
“Polaroid Instants? Man, I didn’t even know they still made these kinds of cameras. I—” He stopped speaking as soon as he saw the first few photographs. He remained silent until he finished looking through all of them, then said: “You didn’t tell me you and Valerie had remodeled the place.”
“We didn’t.”
“But it’s your house, Eric. I’ve been in there enough to know the layout of the place—the downstairs, anyway.”
Eric pushed the stack of photographs over to Jenise. “Look at those, will you? The ones of the kitchen, in particular. Do you see that calendar on the wall?”
Jenise nodded. “Yeah...?”
“Can you see the date?”
Jenise looked at him, then Carl, then held the photograph under one of the bright lights behind the bar. “Omigod....”
“2025,” said Carl. Then, to Eric: “Yeah, I saw it, too.”
“This is amazing,” said Jenise.
“Then maybe one of you can explain it to me,” snapped Eric, signaling Jenise to add that Irish whiskey to his coffee, after all.
“Is that a good idea?” asked Carl. “You look terrible—and you’re driving.”
“Tell you what—answer that question to my satisfaction and I won’t drink this.”
Carl said nothing.
“I was afraid of that,” replied Eric, taking a deep swallow of the drink.
“Maybe it’s the house itself,” said Jenise.
Eric stared at her. “Go on.”
“Maybe the woman somehow took these pictures at a time when the fabric of reality was rippling, know what I mean?”
“Not in the least.”
Jenise sighed. “Okay, it’s like, if you write something down on the top sheet of a notebook and then tear out that page, the page underneath still holds the impression of what you wrote on the other page. If you, like, took a pencil or crayon and colored all over the second sheet, the message you had written on the first sheet would come through. I mean, it wouldn’t look exactly the same, but it’d still be basically the same message. Know what I mean?”
“Yes...?”
Jenise held up one of the pictures. “Well, maybe this woman took these pictures at a moment when one ‘sheet’ of reality was being torn away. The house you know now, the one you live in, the one that looks nothing like what’s in these pictures...maybe it’s the first sheet, and what these pictures are showing you is what’s on the second sheet.”
Eric took another drink, then shook his head. “You just lost me.”
“The past and the future, Eric, they’re always around us, we just can’t touch them. But that doesn’t mean they can’t touch us.”
Eric slid his coffee cup forward. “I’m going to need another before hearing any more of this.”
Jenise fixed him another Irish coffee. Carl looked on, not bothering to hide his disapproval.
“What I’m saying,” Jenise continued, “is that everyone knows how…tense things have been between you and Valerie for the last year or so. A house can sense these things, too. So maybe, when that woman took these pictures, the house didn’t so much tear away one sheet as lift it for a few moments, and allowed her to take pictures of how things are going to be.
“Maybe the house was sending you a message that everything is going to get better.”
“Here’s what I think,” said Carl, gathering up the photographs, taking care to make sure all of them were face-down. “I think that you’re tired, and you’re upset; I think that you maybe need more rest than you’ve been getting, and your eyes are playing tricks on you.”
“That still doesn’t explain the pictures.”
“What pictures?” said Carl, dumping the photos into a trash can behind the bar.
Eric stared at the trash can for a moment. “If only it were that easy.”
“It is—it can be, anyway, if you just put it out of your mind and think about something else.”
“Think about something else,” repeated Eric. “Christ, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve said that to myself or had someone else say it to me these past six months, I could retire to the South of fucking France. Damn, Carl…don’t you ever just wish that you could…I don’t know…put it all on hold for a few weeks? I mean, just freeze everything in your life, all the family and friends and business responsibilities, just push the ‘Pause’ button and hold it all in place while you took off somewhere to re-group for a while? Go somewhere and act like you could when you were twenty-two and didn’t have all this shit to contend with every minute of every day?”
“Who doesn’t, partner? Sounds to me like maybe you’re just getting bogged down in the have-to, know what I mean?”
“Some days it feels like me whole life is ‘have to’, you know?”
“You just need to relax for the next day and forget about all of this; trust me. I’ve turned it into an art. It’s the only way you can get through life, sometimes.”
“This is so wrong,” said Jenise. “You’re telling him to just...ignore a message the universe is trying to send to him. You can’t do that. You don’t mess around with the Infinite.”
“No, but you’re going to mess around with your Infinity.”
“Huh?”
“Your car, Jenise. You’re going to get in your car and follow me. I’m driving Eric and his car back to his house, and then you’re going to bring me back here and we’re going to get back to work and forget all about this.”
“But it’s wrong!”
“Jenise….” There was a tone in Carl’s voice that made it clear he would tolerate no argument on this. Jenise threw her hands up in surrender and went to get her purse and car keys.
“Come on, partner,” said Carl, helping Eric to his feet. “I’m driving you home.”
“I’m not drunk.”
“Maybe not—but then again, maybe the whiskey will hit you five minutes after you leave here and you’ll plow into the back of tractor-trailer. I’m not taking any chances.”
“But—”
“No ‘buts,’ partner. Come on, let’s get you home so you can rest.”
* * *
Eric said good-bye to Carl and Jenise, let himself back into the house, and was starting upstairs to take a nap when he saw another photograph lying face-down near the entrance to the living room.
Must have dropped this on the way out, he thought, reaching down for it.
That’s when he noticed the other photographs, all of them face-down, that were scattered along various points up the stairs.
Okay, I wasn’t that out of
it; I would have noticed if I’d dropped that many.
Not looking at them, he followed the trail up the stairs and through the hallway, retrieving each one along the way.
He was picking up the last of them when he heard a woman gasp from behind the door to his and Val’s bedroom. It wasn’t a gasp of surprise or shock, but one of pleasure that soon became a deep moan that broke into a series of ecstatic squeals, growing louder and more intense.
The first thought to cross his mind was: She’s been fucking someone else behind my back. She doesn’t care who gives her a baby, just that she gets one.
He grabbed the doorknob and was about to throw it open—the wronged husband making the dramatic discovery—when a second thought came to him: Why would she bring him back here, to our bed, on a day when she knows I’m home?
Answer: It wasn’t Val.
Then who…?
He opened the door and stepped inside.
The girl from this morning was sitting at the foot of his and Val’s bed, staring at the TV/VCR unit in the corner that was turned on. She was watching a pornographic tape of a couple fucking with such ferocity you’d think their very lives depended on how much sweat they produced and how much noise they made—and they were both loud, moaning and squealing and screaming like animals.
Eric was so stunned by all of this—the girl’s presence, the porno tape (neither he nor Val owned any), and his reaction to the tape (the couple’s sexual acrobatics were arousing him)—that it took a moment for him to realize that he recognized the woman on the tape: it was Jenise, her thick red hair plastered across her back, her marvelous breasts lacquered in sweat, and she was grinding down, thrashing, tossing her head back to reveal her lover’s face—
—as Eric’s own.
The girl from the realtor’s office pressed a button on the remote, freezing the tape.
Eric stared at the image, and realized that the man on the tape, the man who was fucking Jenise like he was twenty-five again, was at least ten years older than Eric was right now; the gray hair—in several places other than his head—was proof of that.
“Couldn’t even take her to a motel, no. He had to fuck his whore here in the same bed where he slept beside Mom.”
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