Temporally Out of Order

by Unknown

  “Were you ever going to tell me?”

  “Tell you what? Come on, stop playing games.”

  “I’m not the one playing games, Harry.” She bit off each word as if it were a finger on his hand. “You’re the one keeping secrets. Anything you want to tell me about us making a baby?”

  Now he knew why she was angry. This had been the beginning of their end.

  “How did you find out?” He’d never asked that in real life. In the past.

  “That doesn’t matter. You didn’t tell me for almost three weeks. Were you afraid I’d stop screwing you if we couldn’t have a baby?”

  “That’s not fair,” he said. “I knew it would disappoint you, so I was waiting for the right time. This isn’t easy for me either, you know? I’m the one who’s sterile.”

  “You must not have been hurting too bad, since you never saw fit to tell me. I would have understood, but you didn’t give me the chance. You just kept pretending so I’d keep doing you.”

  “You really think this is about the sex? It was never about that. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

  Static trampled her reply.

  “You’re breaking up. Say that again.”

  She repeated herself, but it wasn’t any clearer. The static blasted his ear over everything. He pulled the phone away. Behind him, Celeste cleared her throat. She stood in the doorway, fists on her hips, her eyes blue lasers aimed at him.

  “Who is she?” Her voice crackled with ice.

  Harry stammered. “It’s … well … it’s no one. How long have you been standing there?”

  She leaned against the door frame, crossing her arms. Harry felt a tightness, a life-threatening constriction inside his chest. The strangulation of hope.

  “Long enough to hear you tell some woman you’re sterile, that it’s not about the sex, and that you didn’t want to hurt her.”

  “Celeste, it’s not what it seems.”

  “Really? It seems obvious to me.”

  He shifted in his chair, suddenly unable to sit still. What could he tell her? What possible explanation could make her believe he’d been talking to her in the past?

  Nothing. But he had to try.

  “It was you, honey.” She narrowed her eyes. “Since the solar storm started, these old cell phones have come to life. Every day a different one has rung. And each day I talk to an old version of you. First it was ten years ago, when we met. Then it was when we got married. Then five years back, now two on this phone.”

  He held up the old smart phone, but it had gone dead, its screen gravestone gray. He pushed the power button, but nothing happened.

  Still, Celeste’s expression softened. She lowered her arms and stood, taking a step closer to him.

  “Oh God, Harry. What’s happened to you? You’re talking on dead cell phones to old versions of me?”

  He started to reply, but she cut him off with a wave of her hand.

  “I was wrong. We’re pressing ahead with the divorce. The old you never would’ve pulled something like this.”

  As she swept from the room, Harry put his head in his hands. His chest felt like it would cave inward. He put the smart phone in the box and tossed the box in the trash.

  oOo

  Harry knew something was wrong the minute he stepped in the front door. The quiet of the house seemed unnatural, more like that of a crypt than a home. He eased the door closed, trying to make as little noise as possible, but the plastic bag in his left hand crinkled and announced his arrival.

  With a sigh, he trudged the few feet into the kitchen.

  Celeste sat at the table, the five cell phones lined up before her. The box of chardonnay sat beside the phones, and a clear plastic cup rested in her hand, half-full of the silver fluid. Her hair looked like she’d walked through a hurricane, and the make up around her eyes had smudged just enough to tell him she’d been crying. In the living room, the TV showed the local news, muted.

  He placed the bag on the counter, and started unloading it. He needed time to think. She didn’t give him the chance.

  “One of them rang.”

  His head snapped around and he looked her in the eye.

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded, took a gulp of wine, and smacked the cup down on the table.

  “I went to answer it, but I couldn’t. I actually held it in my hand, felt it vibrate, but I couldn’t push talk.”

  He sat across from her, patted her on the knee, and flinched as she jerked away.

  “Don’t touch me! I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing, Harry, but I didn’t answer the phone and I’m not going to.”

  “Aren’t you curious who’s on the other end?”

  She shook her head with a little too much emphasis. “It’s you, Harry. Trying to trick me!”

  Harry stood, paced for a moment, then returned to the chair.

  On the living room television, a headline read, “One Last Large Flare.”

  “Were getting this divorce,” she said. “No electronic tricks will change my mind.”

  He leaned on his elbows, looked her in the eye. “Listen, Celeste. I’m not playing any tricks. If that phone rang, one of us was supposed to answer. Someone is trying to tell us something.”

  She opened her mouth to respond, but the second of the brick-sized phones rang, its electronic beeps echoing through the kitchen at least ten times louder than normal. Celeste jumped, then slid back in her chair, putting space between herself and the cell phone. Her hands came up in front of her and she shook her head.

  “No, I can’t!”

  “Okay, Celeste,” Harry said. He picked up the phone, extended the antenna. “I’ll answer.”

  He pushed the talk button, and held the phone to his ear.

  “Hello?”

  After a pause, a man said, “Who is this? Why do you have my wife’s phone?”

  He almost didn’t recognize the voice without the vibrations he normally felt when talking. The slight change in pitch due to the electronics didn’t help either, but an instant later he realized the voice was his own.

  His heart thudded in his chest, the rhythm of hope’s drum.

  “Um, hold on a second,” he said. “She’s right here.”

  He extended the phone to Celeste with a gentle, sympathetic smile. Her eyes were as wide as the plastic cup.

  “It’s for you.” He placed the cell phone on the table beside her, pushed the speaker button, and turned to go. “You’re right: we can’t change the past. But we can listen to it.”

  As he strode to the office, Harry smiled.

  TEMPORALLY FULL

  by Stephen Leigh

  Everything around him was oddly familiar and yet strange.

  Tom Finnigan hadn’t been to Cincinnati in over two decades, not since the day he’d stormed out of his father’s house for the last time. In that time, the landscape of the city had undergone a slow alteration. As he drove down the steep incline of Vine Street from the gaslight district in Clifton near the university toward the tall but compact core of downtown Cincinnati, he found himself saying, over and over, “Well, that’s new …” or “That wasn’t here before …” or “There used to be another building there, but it’s gone now.”

  His wife, Cynthia, from the passenger seat, nodded with each remark. “Things change, Tom, especially when you’ve been away so long. That’s what happens when you don’t come back.”

  The mild rebuke in her voice didn’t escape him. For over a decade, she’d been gently trying to have him to reconcile with his father, to attempt to heal the rift that had long loomed between them, but he had always resisted.

  And now it was too late. His father was dead, would be buried tomorrow, and he hadn’t been there for the final illness, when he might have had a chance to talk to the man from whom he’d fled at nineteen years of age. Tom tightened his grip on the steering wheel of their Prius, tightening his lips at the same time.

  Too late for regrets. Too late for anything.
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  He blinked hard, blaming the sun for the moisture that had gathered there.

  “This area’s called Over The Rhine,” he said to Cynthia. “Way back when, Central Parkway–that big intersection up ahead—used to be a canal. The poor German emigrants largely settled on the north side of the canal. So it became ‘Over the Rhine.’” Cynthia lifted her head in acknowledgment, staring out the window at the passing storefronts. She had wanted to see his home town, and he had promised that he’d take her downtown to see Fountain Square and the river area before they went to his father’s old house to help his sister Shawna pack up things. They passed Central Parkway and moved into the downtown section of the city and its maze of busy one-way streets.

  “Dad used to work in that building there,” he said, pointing to one of the high-rises ahead of them: an anonymous glass-and-steel edifice like a dozen others they could see. He flipped on the turn signal. “And he always parked in this garage.”

  He started to pull into the open-sided facility, just a half-dozen slabs of concrete stacked on rusting steel pillars. A large sign sagged against the pillar between the entrance and exit lanes, facing them. TEMPORALLY FULL, it declared in large block letters printed on the smeared poster board. He heard Cynthia laugh at the misspelling. “One of your students?” she asked.

  “Hah,” he said drily. “Very funny.”

  She laughed again. “Well, I guess we should back out,” Cynthia said.

  Tom hesitated, looking in his rearview mirror at the constant stream of passing traffic. He shook his head. “Nah, they’ll have an open space somewhere. Someone’s had to have left since they put the sign up. We can walk down to Fountain Square from here; it’s only a block.” Cynthia raised her eyebrows but otherwise made no reply. Tom eased the car forward up to the gate. He pressed the button and took the paper tongue that the machine stuck out at him, then went through into the garage as the gate lifted.

  The first level of the garage was indeed full, every space taken, and Tom eased the car around the level, then up the ramp to the next. “Doesn’t anyone in Cincinnati buy new cars?” Cynthia asked as they circled again.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Just look around.”

  He hadn’t been paying much attention to the vehicles themselves, only searching for an open space between them. Now that his attention had been drawn to them, he saw what Cynthia had noticed. The cars on this level all seemed to be at least several model years old. In fact—as they circled higher in the garage—the cars appeared to be getting increasingly older. “I wonder if there’s some kind of antique car show in town,” Tom mused. “You’re right, there’s not a car in here that looks to be newer than the 90s. Look, that’s got to be a vintage early 90’s Volvo, and, my God, that’s a Ford Escort which could have just come off the lot, and there’s—”

  Tom hit the brakes hard, the Prius coming to a halt. Tom stared at the car outside his side window. He knew exactly what it was: a 1973 Corvette Stingray coupe, fire engine red and pristine, chrome rear bumper, but with that huge protruding nose and the cowl induction domed hood. But what he stared at most was the license plate: 251 GHU, with blue numerals and letters on reflective white and an outline of Ohio used as separator between the two, the motto “The Heart Of It All” in script letters underneath the state name.

  “Tom?”

  An old plate. Nothing like the ones he’d seen on the cars out on the street, most of which sported an “Ohio Pride” word cloud under a red triangle, and had four numbers, not three. And that plate number …

  “Tom?”

  A red 1973 Corvette Stingray coupe had been his father’s pride and joy. “1973 was the year I met your mother. I always wanted one of those cars, but we couldn’t afford it back then. Now, I finally can …” His father had bought a used 1973 Corvette six months after the death of Tom’s mother in 1984, and it seemed—to Tom, anyway—that his father lavished whatever love and attention he had on the car rather than on his equally grief-stricken son and daughter. On his 18th birthday in late 1992, Tom convinced his father to let him borrow the ‘Vette; he managed to total it when—with a regrettable lack of attention and too heavy an accelerator foot—he ran a stop light and T-boned a pickup truck in the intersection. His fault entirely, which his father never failed to mention whenever the wreck came up. It had been most telling to Tom that when he called his father to inform him that he’d just been in an accident, the very first thing his father said was “Oh God, how’s the car?”

  That incident had precipitated one of the too-frequent firestorms between himself and his father. The sad remains of the Corvette had still been sitting in his father’s garage, mangled and broken, on the day Tom left, a silent monument to his failure as a son. His father, after his wife’s death, always lived from paycheck to paycheck and could only afford liability insurance on a car as expensive as a ‘Vette; since the accident was Tom’s fault, insurance wasn’t going to pay for the extensive necessary repairs.

  “Tom!”

  Cynthia’s half-shout combined with her touch on his shoulder tore him from his reverie. He started. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s just—” He shook his head. “I think you’re right; it was a mistake to come in here. We’ll go park in the Fountain Square garage …”

  With a final glare at the Corvette, he put his foot on the accelerator, turning right into the descending ramp toward the waiting exit.

  There was no one in the attendant’s booth at the exit, and the gate was lifted. Tom was still shaking his head as he drove through.

  oOo

  Going into the old house on Nansen Street dredged up too many memories, too many of them bitter. The neighborhood had deteriorated over the years, and his father’s house was no exception. It evidently hadn’t been painted in a decade or more, blisters of the old blue-gray curling away from the wooden siding, revealing yet older coats and even bare wood. He was glad that he and Cynthia had decided to stay at a hotel rather than the old place.

  Shawna’s car was parked in the drive, and the front door stood open. He wondered how many of the neighbors he remembered still lived here; not many, he guessed. He and Cynthia walked up the cracked sidewalk with grass growing from every crack, up the crumbling cement steps, and into the house. Inside, the house was more cluttered and dirty than it had ever been. Mom would have been so appalled at this. The thought arose, unbidden.

  “Did you two have a good morning?” Tom’s younger sister Shawna Clawson—Clawson was her married name, which she’d kept even though she’d divorced her husband a decade ago—asked as they entered. She looked up from a cardboard box into which she was placing books, DVDs, and old videotapes from the shelving in the living room.

  Shawna still lived in Cincinnati. It had been Shawna who had called Tom two days ago. “I know you and Dad haven’t spoken for, well, far too long. I understand. God knows I’ve fought with the man enough over the years myself. But the cancer’s everywhere inside him now, and the doctors say the end could come any time. I thought … well, I thought you might want to get down here, if only to say goodbye.”

  So he’d come, filled with contradictory feelings roiling inside him: guilt and remorse mingling with residual anger and irritation, all tinged with the memories of the near fist-fights he and his father had had in those last days before he’d left, with his hatred of his father’s conservatism, bigotry, and fundamentalist religious views. These hitherto unsuspected beliefs seemed to come boiling to the surface—a volcano of grief-fueled bile—after Tom’s mother had died.

  Tom was ten. The next nine years of his life were ones he’d tried hard to forget.

  But he’d come back too late anyway. His father, as if to spite him for making the effort, died before they even started the drive down from Chicago.

  “I enjoyed the tour of the city,” Cynthia told Shawna. “Cincinnati’s beautiful. All the hills, and the river. And such interesting buildings—Tom took me to see Union Terminal. I just love those old Ar
t Deco buildings …”

  “Hey, Shawna, is all Dad’s stuff still out in the garage?” Tom broke in. The two women looked at each other, and a look passed between them. He saw Cynthia give a small shrug to his sister.

  “I haven’t had a chance to clean anything out of there yet,” Shawna said. “It’s all still the way he left it, I’m afraid. Like the house.”

  “I’m going to take a look. I’ll be back in a bit.”

  He turned and went out the front door again. Behind him, he heard the conversation start again. “Here, let me give you a hand with all this, Shawna …”

  The garage was in much the same shape as the house. Hinges protested as Tom pulled open one of the two wide, wooden doors. He blinked into the shadows lurking inside, feeling relief as he saw that the ruin of the Corvette no longer sat there. The knot inside his gut eased, even though he’d known from Shawna that his father had finally given up his dream of restoring the wreck and had the Corvette towed to a junk yard just a year ago, when he’d been told that the cancer was terminal.

  The garage looked as if no one had used it in years anyway: cobwebs laced the workbench and scattered tools and hung in shabby curtains from the roof beams. Tom had to brush them aside as he searched for the light switch alongside the door. He flicked the switch; a dim overhead bulb flickered into life in response. The place looked no better in the light, but he could see what he’d come to see. For as long as Tom could remember, his father had kept all his old license plates: they were nailed to the support beams of the garage like trophies, a barrage of letters and numbers, all the varying styles of plates that had come and gone over the years. He scanned them now, the interior fist clenching his stomach again.

  And twisting hard as he saw it: 251 GHU. It was a rear plate only, bent and scraped, and the decal sticker in the lower right had the date 1992 on it: the year he’d crashed the car. The year before he’d left.