Science Fiction: The Best of 2001

by Robert Silverberg

  Someone put on music, too loud to hear her speak. No matter, Mr. Sunquist could tell by her rueful demeanor that she was making her story.

  What was it he and Melanie had decided? Yes, he remembered now—Melanie had gone down the T-line Highway to visit the iterations of her own childhood. The Feynman diagram in her glove compartment contained too many streets between there and here that had yet to be built. She’d gotten confused coming back.

  Mr. Sunquist spotted himself over by the kitchen door, watching. Melanie had asked Bill to stay away while she tried to explain things to her boyfriend. Of course there was no way Bill Sunquist would do that—let her explain things to her boyfriend? So that they might smooth things out? Melanie had been naïve to think that he would.

  It hardly mattered; Bobby Shelbourne saw him over Melanie’s head. Shelbourne smiled.

  “It’s you, isn’t it.” His eyes were luminous with anger.

  Bill made no attempt to deny it. He smiled his most irritating smirk, motioned to Shelbourne in that silent gesture every young man knows—hands out, fingers cupping palms in ironic invitation: Come on then. Come get some.

  Melanie pulled him back by the arm, and for one moment Bobby Shelbourne let her. The pause was so brief that Billy Sunquist had barely noticed. Twenty-five years older, Mr. Sunquist grinned: Look how he glances around for a way out!

  “You were never no street brawler, Bobby.” Slipping into a voice he had not spoken in since he was a vain young man. “You were never nothing like what I was.” Even now, Mr. Sunquist lived for these moments. Anymore, the stakes would be infinitely higher than a broken nose. But that desperate calculation remained eternal: Pride? Or survival?

  Melanie saw her chance to wedge between them. The two boys clenched each other tight against her. Mr. Sunquist remembered the collision between his belly and her skinny rib cage. He remembered the sound she made as the breath went out of her.

  Billy Sunquist might have reached for her. He always told himself that he would have, if only Bobby had not started in the way he did.

  “Look at her,” Bobby hissed. “Now you’ve done it. Now you’ve hurt her.” Nobody put Billy Sunquist on the defensive.

  Billy Sunquist took a hunk of genuine 100 percent Rayon bowling shirt and laughed in Bobby Shelbourne’s face. Nice try. All these years away, Mr. Sunquist still felt Bobby Shelbourne’s cheekbones beneath his knuckles. The two of them waltzed around till they fell back against the Formica tabletop, slamming the blender and liquor and ice onto the floor.

  Melanie wasn’t really so damaged. Mr. Sunquist found her, easing herself back against the refrigerator. Her shirt was soaked watery green from a half-bottle of Midori, but she seemed all right.

  Roger Swann had come over to help her up, but she had more than pity on her mind. She took his elbow and pointed toward the mess in the kitchen.

  Like any young man of experience, he knew the risks of stepping into someone else’s fight. He thumbed the side of his mouth in an expression of unease. But Melanie had this unassailable sense of mission when the chips were down. It animated her. It swept up everyone around her. Roger found his resolve; together, they waded in. Each grabbed an elbow, or a shoulder, and yanked backward.

  Bill Sunquist had Bobby Shelbourne’s face against the refrigerator. Mr. Sunquist dimly remembered the conversation between them, something about eating the refrigerator’s door handle. Oh well.

  The next moments came vivid, but in flashes, like snapshots: A hand on his arm. A face coming in at him. He remembered placating words, but his blood was up. He swung back his left hand and connected solidly with hard bone, right at somebody’s hairline. The face went away.

  Bill Sunquist turned back for Bobby Shelbourne only to find that Melanie had got between them. The fight was over.

  He called to her. He nodded toward the door, Let’s go. But Melanie was angry, she ignored him.

  Shelbourne fixed his eyes on her. Even as his friends moved him off to the far side of the kitchen, he spoke to her. Bobby asked if she’d been hurt, was there anything he could do?

  “You know I always took care of you,” Bobby Shelbourne called to her. “I may not be exciting, but I’m always there.”

  Oh, he was good. Anyone else would have blasphemed and threatened.

  Melanie looked big-eyed and stricken. This was the moment she had chewed her knuckles over all the way from Kleege’s Beach. Bill Sunquist, too. By the look on his face, he might have swallowed an ice tray. He was a street kid, after all. Smooth talk was not where he excelled.

  Melanie wavered. She started to raise her hands the way she did when she was miserable and all out of words.

  But here was Roger Swann, leaning forward with his hand on his forehead. Blood was seeping through his fingers and plopping in the wet muck. He wobbled on his knees and Melanie took him. Bobby’s appeals to her conscience would have to wait.

  Bobby smiled, sure. “You’re doing the right thing,” he told her. “Take care of Roger. We’ll talk later. When you have a minute.”

  Mr. Sunquist had not seen this side of Melanie since they were married. She could be magnificent, couldn’t she? He marveled: Bobby Shelbourne is two months from buying up this whole block of apartments for his daddy’s marina project, look at how he stammers before her.

  His wife felt the weight of his consideration. For one moment, she was the girl she had been. Self-possessed and certain. Perhaps she knew what he was thinking. She would have said something to him, but Melanie Everett came this way. Roger Swann bumped along in her wake. Mr. and Mrs. Sunquist stood up to make room for him on the couch.

  She was saying something under her breath, half to Roger, half to herself. “Limo.” It was Bill Sunquist’s street name. “Limo, Limo, Limo,” she said—eventually winding up with, “Damn him.” Melanie tipped Roger’s head back. She squinted against the bad party light. The blood was starting to roll down his nose. She dipped a kitchen towel in the punch bowl and dabbed it off.

  “It was just a wild punch.” Roger’s hand came up, a gesture of indifference. “He hit me left-handed anyway. Probably doesn’t even know he did it.”

  “Him and those stupid rings he wears. He’s been dying to use them on someone.”

  Roger was silent for a few dabs. Mr. Sunquist could see him working his way up to something. “You really have to go with him?”

  For one moment, Melanie looked up at the Sunquists with this exasperated grimace—you explain it for him. Mr. Sunquist felt his wife’s fingers clutch his, stricken. But it was an illusion. Melanie’s look was intended for anyone within earshot—anyone who knew what it was to be the second-prettiest girl at every party. For one night, she had her pick between princes. How could she explain to the nicest kid in the room what this meant?

  “I’m going home with Limo.” She squeezed Roger’s blood into the punch bowl. “I really am.”

  Roger Swann shook his head, whatever. “We’ll see each other again,” he said.

  Mr. Sunquist nudged Mrs. Sunquist. He raised his chin at the boy. “Sonny’s Bar,” he whispered in her ear. “This is what he was thinking when he saw you alone in Sonny’s Bar.”

  He laughed so loud that both the people on the couch turned back in curiosity. He didn’t care. He waved them back to their conversation. “This is too good,” he hissed.

  Mrs. Sunquist was supposed to laugh along at times like this. She bit her lipand looked down at her shoes. “How do you do it?” She sounded breathless, she might have been amazed. “I see the time passing and it makes me so weary. And you just keep getting angrier. Don’t you ever feel any pity? Or regret?”

  He put out his hands, he smiled. He figured there had to be a joke in here somewhere. “We are what we’ve always been. Isn’t that enough?” It was the only explanation he could think of.

  “Poor Roger,” she said.

  To himself, he thought, Somebody has to lose.

  Did she know what he was thinking? Suddenly, she had this look on her fa
ce, still and deliberate and calm. It was the face he recognized from the taxi drivers who came to pick him up from bars. Whatever she saw in his eyes only made her sigh.

  “Time for us to go,” Mrs. Sunquist said.

  “We haven’t seen the end yet. Remember? I sweep out of the crowd and pick you up, and Bobby Shelbourne—”

  “You know what happens. You take me home with you. We spend the next twenty-five years coming back to see it all again. I have something I want to remember.”

  Here was a phrase Mr. Sunquist would think back on: I have something I want to remember.

  In all the years he had come back to La Jetée, Mr. Sunquist had never felt the need to remember anything. Memories were for people who didn’t come to La Jetée. Memories were for the ones Mr. Sunquist imagined in his audience.

  Evening was coming on as they pulled onto Ciriquite Street. The shutters on all the beach bungalows and flower kiosks had opened to the first breath of an evening breeze. The air was dense with the musk of orchids.

  This was five years earlier, La Jetée was a strip of bungalows, caught between the highway and the beach. Mr. Sunquist remembered thin times. The tourists had bypassed La Jetée for the more developed resorts down the beach. The only money in the town came from the nurseries across the highway, and service jobs in the hotels south of Kleege’s Beach. Every evening, the street care would be full of people in half-undone housecleaning uniforms. Head waiters from the lesser restaurants would hang from the doors, swigging pilfered wine bottles and calling out insults as they passed each other.

  And everyone ended up in the tiny patio at Sonny’s.

  Here was the Sonny’s that the Sunquists never tired of Sonny’s Seafood Chowder Bar was an open courtyard, an old banyan tree, gnarled as knuckles, a cast concrete bar patterned with ridiculous wood grain. Sonny Himself was whip-thin these days. With ashy skin and freckles and a wide grin that seemed somehow more charming for its insincerity.

  He was not charming tonight. He was eating Spanish peanuts out of the bar dishes, which is what he did when he was nervous. His eyes were like black ice and he kept checking his watch.

  A door behind the bar led out into an alley that ran from the street to the beach. People passed in and out carrying guitars and tambales and a set of wide-mouthed clay jugs, each one painted with “Jug Breakers” on the side—Bobby Shelbourne’s band.

  Sonny glared at every kid who passed through that door. He pointed to his watch. They scuttled off to the stage like roaches caught in a kitchen light.

  Bobby Shelbourne had played here every Thursday night for most of the summer, but anyone could see the blow-up that was coming. Sonny Scorzy was a congenial host, but he was hell as an employer. He hated lateness, even when he was paying no money. Bobby Shelbourne had a star’s concept of time, even though he made no money. Sonny Scorzy hated that.

  On this night, only one person was exempt from Sonny’s evil eye. Even now, Mr. Sunquist lost his breath at the sight of her. That golden hair. Those exotic eyes. Sonny had saved her his own chair, right at the end of his beloved bar. She took it with this air of modest expectancy—she was gracious and patient as Sonny wiped off the peanut skins and beer. But it never occurred to her to sit elsewhere.

  Mr. Sunquist still loved the way she said things and then covered her mouth with her hand, as if surprised by her own sense of humor. He loved the careful, prim way she crossed her ankles. He loved her dubious smile as young Billy Lee Sunquist slid in next to her.

  Mr. Sunquist wondered how much it would take to impress a girl like Melanie Everett now. How much had he spent on that account rep from Loach & Widell? Not including lunch at that expensive bistro she had recommended? Billy Lee Sunquist had held his knowledge cheaply when he’d lived in La Jetée, and given it away for the asking.

  “Here,” Billy Lee said to the young woman struggling with the fruit that Sonny had put out for her. “You wanna know how to eat a mango, I’ll show you how to eat a mango.”

  “I’m with someone,” she said, and nodded toward a little door into the alley, where Bobby Shelbourne and his Jug Breakers were tuning up.

  Billy Lee Sunquist laughed at the caution on her face. He held up his hands. “I’m just showing you how to eat a mango.” He took the fruit from her hand, salted it, dusted it with cayenne pepper, and slipped it down his throat. He licked his fingers one by one and gave her a lascivious grin.

  Mrs. Sunquist gave her husband a secret smile. “You remember what you said to me?”

  Mr. Sunquist claimed he did not. Mrs. Sunquist said she did not believe he didn’t remember. Out on the patio, Billy Lee Sunquist whispered in Melanie Everett’s ear. She grew big-eyed and aghast. She gave Billy Lee a slap on the shoulder, and then said something under her breath that made him laugh and made her cover her mouth with her hand.

  Mr. Sunquist gripped his wife’s hand. This trip was already working changes on her. That sturdy quiet she had acquired over the lean years of their middle age, that had melted to the shyness he remembered so well. He would have shared this moment with the world.

  Bobby came out with his nickel-topped Dobro guitar. Roger Swann hunkered down next to him with some squat Caribbean drum between his knees. They were a team in those days, Bobby and Roger. If Bobby played guitar, Roger would be there with the drums.

  There was this trombone player that neither of the Sunquists remembered. He nudged Bobby Shelbourne. He motioned toward his girl and the young man sitting next to her.

  Perhaps he had a look of mischief. If so, he would be disappointed. Bobby Shelbourne saw Bill Sunquist leaning close to Melanie. He grinned and shook his finger, school-marm style. Billy laughed. Melanie gave him a girl-slug and nodded toward her boyfriend on the stage—See? I told you.

  Everybody knew each other at Sonny’s. Everything was easy.

  The music started. Jug hand blues, simple and irresistible. Everybody on the patio pushed forward under the gnarled banyan tree. They sang along to the songs they knew. They shoulder-danced to the songs they didn’t know. They ate mangoes and papayas, and drank fermented cidra from terra-cotta jugs.

  Then it came time for this walking blues, “Limousine Blues.” Billy Lee Sunquist liked this song. He wasn’t sure yet, but he was thinking about incorporating it as his personal theme.

  He threw back his head at the first note. His face split into a wide grin. “My song!” he cried. “Bobby remembered my song!”

  Melanie was still wiping mango pulp from her fingers as he took her hand. “Ohh no,” she was saying as he led her out in front of the band. “Ohh no.”

  There, in front of God and her boyfriend and everybody they knew, Billy Lee Sunquist and Melanie Everett danced some imaginary swing that they knew only from watching Tex Avery cartoons.

  Mr. Sunquist felt his wife draw near. She asked him if he knew why they were here. He put his arm around her; he knew. “This is a cute moment together. Look at us there.” He laughed at his younger iteration. Billy Lee Sunquist was barely more than a slouch and a lazy smile. “We were so poor;” he said.

  “You might have been a billionaire for the way you acted. I was so impressed with you.” She looked so long and hard at the young couple that she might have been trying to imprint this scene forever in her mind. “This is the moment I fell in love,” she said.

  Mr. Sunquist tried to remember the moment, what he was thinking. He couldn’t. Maybe he too had been in love. Mr. Sunquist laughed as he realized it.

  As they walked out to the car, he offered to take her to see Pieczyzoski, the chess master. But something had gone out of the mood. Perhaps this last moment had been a miscalculation? Mr. Sunquist decided they’d seen enough for their first day of vacation. He turned the car back up the highway for their hotel.

  Mrs. Sunquist asked him about Roger Swann—back in that first iteration of Sonny’s, he should have recognized them. It had been just a few years since they’d all seen each other, had they changed so much?

  They fell
into a foolish argument about Roger Swann, and why hadn’t he recognized them? Mr. Sunquist wanted to laugh, except that underneath it all, the argument wasn’t foolish. And somehow it wasn’t really about Roger Swann.

  Arguing, they missed the Hotel Mozambique. They drove south, beyond even the present iteration of La Jetée. Mr. Sunquist looked around to realize they had gone down the road, on to South Beach—into the future. They became quiet as they realized that nothing around them looked familiar.

  No one ever came out to this end of the T-Line highway. Like one of these weighty popular art novels, South Beach was a place on every tongue, but rarely experienced in person. Everybody knew someone who had risked all to catch some glimpse of themselves in a new and unimagined place in their own lives. Always some friend, some relative. Never the person telling the story. Always the tale had some ghastly, amusing outcome.

  They were well and truly lost when they reached the first town south of the Present Iteration. Mrs. Sunquist hesitated, but they were running low on power, and she had to use the bathroom again.

  “Let’s do it,” cried Mr. Sunquist, his middle-aged timbre catching some of that old devilish tone. “Let’s take a chance and see what we run into down here in The Future.”

  Mrs. Sunquist looked uneasy. But she would not be outdone by her husband. Laughing together, they swung off the T-Line to get directions from the future back to the present.

  Another building cycle was coming to La Jetée. All of the old orchid stands that had been on Noon Street and then replanted on Meridian Street were being uprooted again for a tract of old-style bungalow rows. The artists’ conception reminded Mr. Sunquist of places he had lived. He wondered if this would be one of his investments.

  No mention of the temporal anomaly. Was that no longer considered a draw? The only connection of the town they had left back in the gloom of fog and quantum wave-functions was a tag at the bottom of the sign: