I began to walk toward the ladder, my footsteps echoing, my legs unsteady, as if anticipating bobbing, rocking motions that weren’t there. At the base of the ladder, I noticed the metal rungs were flaked with rust. But they seemed strong enough to support me, so up I went.
On the lanai, I found the airlock door ajar. I pulled it further open, and noted its hinges stiff with disuse. I passed through, and out the second gasketed door.
The last time I had stood here—billions of years ago, or just hours ago, or some intermediary interval—the room on the far side of the airlock had held an array of PRPS gear. Now the racks were empty of suits, and in fact seemed disproportionate for any such gear. Discarded scraps of paper littered the floor.
Without much hope, I went to the locker where I had stored, as instructed, all my spark-producing metal gear: enigmatic charm bracelet, Nokia, car keys, etc.
Inside was a dusty gift box of Old Sandstone booze. I picked up the box: too light to hold a bottle, full or empty. Too bad; I could’ve really used a slug. I shook it. Several objects jostled about inside. I peeled back the box flaps, and emptied out my possessions, all seemingly none the worse for whatever passage of time they had experienced. I tossed the box to the floor.
I pocketed everything but the phone, then powered up my Nokia and it caught a signal right away. My fingers hesitated over the keypad. Who could I call in such a situation? No one, really. Best to get back to my office and see what developed from there. Size up the situation, do a recon, assess the evidence, try to figure out just what the hell had happened while I was passed out or time-traveling or space-traveling or hallucinating or whatever the Christ I had been doing since Matt Ponto pushed me off that platform.
Before I could put away my phone, a text arrived.
destroy aeota tomorrow everywhere.
This was followed by the same question my phone had asked me earlier:
PRINT TEXT Y/N?
Selecting Y produced another strip of paper out the magic printer slit in the top of the phone. Again, four emojis. Three were the same, but the first was different, a kind of firecracker bang.
I stuck the paper in my pants pocket, where I had stashed its earlier counterpart.
The rest of AEOTA HQ was just as unused, dusty, trashed, detritus-strewn, and empty of clues as the Vaalbara room had been. If I were to trust what I saw, the place had been untenanted for at least a couple of years, if not longer.
Had my time-jaunt been imprecise? Maybe I had been returned to some year in advance of when I had left. Or maybe I had slept, Rip Van Winkle style, beneath the surface of the artificial ocean after my plummet and invagination, miraculously preserved in some kind of shell of stasis, until the whole abandoned tank drained away and I awoke.
I figured that I would discover which answer best suited the reality once I got back to the city.
Exiting the building, I turned to look back at its façade.
A huge dilapidated sign on a metal framework atop the roof proclaimed:
AEOTA CANDY COMPANY
MAKERS OF FAMOUS HADES FIREBALLS
I had never heard of that candy, and I was pretty sure no such firm had shown up in my internet search.
My car was parked right near the exit. Unlike the building, it showed no sign of time’s passage, no coating of grime nor cloak of fallen leaves. The disparity was puzzling. It was as if when I had arrived, this building had already been in its current condition.
I laid my hand on the hood of my car. The engine was still warm.
I slung my ass into the driver’s seat, and my old beater started right up. The engine certainly did not sound as if it had been sitting here inactive for a year or more.
The trip back to the city revealed nothing amiss. There were no mutants or aliens or undead zombies roaming the landscape, no unprecedented skyscrapers connected by aerial bridges, no giant visor-helmeted robot standing watch beside a flying saucer. Just the usual traffic and mundane sights.
I went straight to my office, rather than to my crummy divorcee’s apartment. Everything normal, so far as I could tell. Seated, I dug out the bottle of tequila, its level unchanged from when I had last poured it “a few hours ago.” I downed a hit straight from the bottle, put my feet up, and tried to think out the implications of everything.
Was I really going to endorse the spiels that “Aelita” and “Tinidril” had tried to sell me in my dreams? The call to action, to be some kind of Chosen One who would save the world? Was I going to become a warrior in the battle to save the timeline from invasion from the future? Or was I just going to focus on my current assignment, trying to find Holger Holtzclaw, and maybe get into Juniper Holtzclaw’s pants? And who was issuing my marching orders? LUCA? Was LUCA identical to AEOTA? Was DUCA the Dark Archon?
Several shots later, nothing seemed any clearer to me, and I had drawn no solid conclusions, nor made any solid plans.
My Nokia rang. It was Marty Quartz, my ebullient tech guy.
“Vern, how’s it hanging? Listen, you got me interested in this aeota business. I noodled around on the web some more and found something interesting. Why don’t you come over and see what I turned up? It should be quick, because Burning Man’s just around the corner.”
“Sure. Tomorrow around noon okay?”
“You bet. I’m busy today anyhow. LARPing.”
“Lopping?”
“No, man. LARPing. Live-action role playing. Me and the crew are doing a few hours of Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s mostly an excuse to wear tweed and bar-hop and get drunk and talk about sex.”
“Okay then. Have an extra stout for me.” I thanked Marty in advance for his help tomorrow, cut off the call and got up to leave. The tequila had had as much effect on my shattered brain as if it had been so much water.
The Nokia signaled another call, this time from Yulia. I hoped she wasn’t still freaking out about that absurd ransom note.
Her voice was uncommonly, frighteningly affectionate. She sounded almost like the early days of our marriage.
“Hi, Vern. How’s your day going?”
“Um—okay, I guess.”
“I’m glad. Listen, on your way home, could you grab something for supper. Nothing hard to cook, maybe hot dogs or a pound of hamburger. Hell, maybe you’d better just make it sushi or a frozen pizza. And don’t forget—you promised to buy Aelita the new issue of that comic she likes.”
12. HOMECOMING
My involuntary-bachelor digs consisted of a studio apartment at the Palmer Old Ditch Arms, a rundown barf-colored stucco complex, built around the time Norma Jeane Mortenson was first contemplating changing her name, hard by the festering former nineteenth-century canal that loaned its moniker to the place, in a neighborhood where stripped bicycle carcasses chained to telephone poles were deemed elegant street furniture.
When I got to the place after fumfumming an answer and hanging up on Yulia, I stopped at the front door. The nameplate next to my accustomed bell-push read jack bolan. I took out my key ring, and discovered that the key to the outer door was missing, along with the inner one.
The place boasted no super, so I rang the bell for the apartment next to mine. Never a guy famous for neighborliness, I knew that resident by sight anyhow, if not by name: an elderly retired Jewish guy who seldom left his rooms.
I saw his heel-trodden slippers first, coming down the staircase visible through the dirty beveled glass of the front door. Then the rest of his inglorious figure came into view, all warts and gristle, watery eyes and a combover, animating a food-stained bathrobe.
He did not move to unlock the door. “Yes? What do you want? If you are selling the usual dreck und kipple, you should gai feifen ahfen yam, why don’t you, please?”
I didn’t even bother to respond. It was plain as the bribes sticking out of a politician’s pocket that Mr. Neighbor Man had never seen me before.
Back in my car, I drove slowly away, trying to rationalize this turn of events.
My tenure in th
e Archean era and on Venus had somehow sent me back to a changed world. An entirely different continuum to my point of origin? Or my unique natal timeline somehow reconfigured? In the first case, I might hold out hopes for returning to the status quo ante by somehow slipping sidewise across the multiverse. But in the second scenario, all bets were off. And either alternative presented me with no easy visible exit.
So I figured I had to make the best of things for the time being, until something new developed.
So I was still married to Yulia. And with a daughter to boot. Who’da thunk it? It took me a while to wrap my mind around the notion. After a while, it didn’t seem like such a horrible fate. So long as my Ukrainian hellcat had not yet learned her argument-winning tactic of smashing one of the Trypillya ceramic animal figurines from her collection atop my noggin. Not that she had ever done so without justifiable provocation.
My first stop was a liquor store for a bottle of Yulia’s favorite Ukrainian bison grass vodka. A lot pricier than Old Sandstone, but sure to be received happily.
Next I hit up a supermarket on the edge of the city as I headed toward the old doublewide. (I had just assumed Yulia and Aelita and I were still living in the trailer park. But a sudden worry jumped up at me: What if, in this world, we weren’t? Awfully awkward to call home and ask for the address.) I ravaged the prepared-food steam tables like Cortez looking for silver tchotchkes, and soon had a dozen Styrofoam clamshells filled with edible goodies. I added some orange juice for the vodka and some soda for the kid, and felt golden.
Back on the highway, I suddenly remembered Yulia’s closing injunction: “And don’t forget—you promised to buy Aelita the new issue of that comic she likes.”
What the hell would that be? And where did one find comics in this day and age? Conditions had changed, I knew, since I was a kid, when every drugstore carried them.
A few miles from home, conveniently on the same side of the road, I spotted the sign for midichlorian comics. Whether the place was newly established with the birth of this alternate universe, or had always been present even in my old timeline, I couldn’t say. Who has every evanescent shop along their commute memorized?
The windowless door bore the legend “The right to buy comics is the right to be free.” To announce my entry, the door emitted a raygun noise as I opened it. No other customers were about.
From the back emerged a trim young woman, kinda goth-nerd with pink-streaked hair. Her outfit featured more buckles and leather straps than those of all Four Musketeers combined. I had been expecting a fat middle-aged guy, so I uncomfortably hemmed and hawed for a minute with my question. I was also disconcerted by not knowing exactly how old my own daughter was. She couldn’t be more than five, so I settled for that.
Trying to sound for the first time ever like a real Concerned Dad, I asked, “What kind of comics do you have that are suitable for a little girl in the first grade or thereabouts?”
Disconcertingly, the woman smelled like fresh-cut grass. “Well, there’s a lot of franchise characters, Scooby-Doo and such. But I really like this indie one by Pris Cohen.”
From a rack she reached down an issue of Aeota. The colorful cover depicted a pastoral scene full of whimsical monsters and one Alice / Pollyanna / Anne of Green Gables / Pippi Longstocking avatar.
“What this creator has done is really unique. She’s taken an antique character from a forgotten newspaper strip, a weird little girl herself, and brought her into the twenty-first century. Made her modern without losing the nostalgic charm.”
A memory of my online research from—was it possible?—just earlier today returned to me. “You’re talking about Herbert Crowley’s The Wigglemuch.”
The woman’s eyes lit up. The tip of her tongue popped out innocently to wet just one corner of her lips, and she stepped closer to me. If I hadn’t been heading home to Yulia, I knew I could have been heading home with her.
“You know the Wigglemuch! Cool beans!?”
“I get around. Is this the newest issue?”
“Just out this week.”
“I’ll take it. Oh, do you have any back issues too?”
“Sure, the whole run. The book’s only up to number five.”
“Toss ’em in.”
I left the store with blue balls that ached too much for someone who had just been banging a hot Venusian broad only a couple of hours ago.
The trailer park where I had ensconced my brood upon the fortuitous acquisition of our Fleetwood Homes Hopewell model doublewide—two beds, one bath, eight-hundred-and-forty square feet, on sale for $35K!—was named Owl in Daylight Courts and featured on its signboard an image of a rather stunned-looking bird. I drove through the estate to our tiny lot. The Hopewell looked impossibly improved from when I had visited Yulia just a few subjective hours ago: flowers around the temporary foundation, curtains in the windows, a kid’s tricycle near the steps.
I got out of the car, climbed the stairs, turned the unlocked door-knob, pushed inward, and called out, “Honey, I’m home!”
13. BEDTIME STORY
When I saw Yulia standing just inside the trailer, I remembered why I had originally fallen in love with her. Her thick dark hair, plaited and pinned up, gleamed. Her self-assured posture spoke somehow of a strong indifference to any unfair blows, such as exile from her native land, that fate might have dealt or yet have in store. The genetically forced yet subtle show of her two front teeth framed by those “incompetent lips” was very sexy. And her figure was aces too.
When she smiled widely at my arrival, instead of frowning and hurling fishwife abuse at me, I felt a sharp pang of guilt and regret that I had ever helped in any way to sour and undo our first affections, thanks to my tomcatting and general lackluster vocational efforts and reluctance to procreate.
I had no idea where this whole Aeota affair was leading, whether I was embarked on a mission to save the universe, or merely falling down a rabbit hole of insanity; whether I would follow up on all of the things that had happened to me in just one day, or completely ignore them. But whatever eventuated, I sensed and believed that this reunion or renewal—if you could apply such terms to a state of affairs that had paradoxically never ended in the first place on this timeline—was something good and desirable.
I set my groceries down on the dining room table—a beat-up piece from the local salvage merchandise depot—and embraced Yulia like a drowning sailor clutching a handy dolphin. She seemed surprised for a moment, but then reciprocated just as heartily. The slight accent to her next words only added to her charms.
“Hey, rough customer, don’t crumple the merchandise!”
Yulia’s grasp of idioms had never matched her intelligence nor facility with standard syntax.
I released her and stepped back. “Guess I just missed you, kiddo.”
“You’ve only been gone since ten this morning.”
“Yeah, well, it felt like half a billion years.”
Yulia turned and began unpacking the containers of food. Three place settings—paper plates, paper napkins, plastic utensils— already suggested a warm family dinnertime. Two spots featured wine glasses, and the third hosted a worn plastic tumbler from Mickey D’s featuring an all-but-obliterated Lilo & Stitch.
“You went wild, Vern. There’s enough here for three meals!?”
“I haven’t eaten in a very long time.”
“You should never shop when you’re hungry. My mother told me that.”
Yulia had arranged the containers on the tabletop to her esthetic and practical satisfaction. I mixed two vodka-and-OJs. “Lita! Your daddy’s home and it’s time to eat!”
Out from one of the two bedrooms scampered a miniature Yulia, dressed in a green fleece top and pants. This was not the exact child I had met in the Archean, but scarily close enough. I thought to see some of my legacy in her stocky build. But thankfully she was all Yulia elsewhere, right down to the dentally indiscreet lips. Kid would break hearts someday.
Halfway to me
, she screamed, “Catch me, Daddy!” and hurled herself impossibly through the air as if launched from an invisible diving board. I reacted pretty well, almost as if I had done this kind of thing before.
In my arms, half-smothering me with her squirmy embrace, which smelled of child musk, spilled apple juice, and Play-Doh, Aelita planted a bevy of kisses atop my head. Eventually I managed to unwrap her anaconda coils and set her down.
“Did you bring me a comic, Daddy?”
I had folded the several comics in half lengthwise and stuck the whole bag in a back pocket of my pants. “Yeah, sure, here they are.”
“Dad-dy! You folded them! Now they’re not in mint condition!”
“Lita! Tell your father thank you!”
“Oh, right! Thanks, Daddy. You couldn’t help that you just didn’t know any better.”
“Agreed.” My daughter’s criticism didn’t seem bratty to me or overwrought, but rather charming. Maybe I was just a sucker for anyone who lavished kisses on my poor benighted head.
Aelita took the comics out of the bag. “Why’d you buy these old ones? We have them already.”
“Guess I forgot.”
She shuffled the new one out of the pack and studied the cover intently.
“You know the rules, Lita. No reading at the table.”
Obediently she set the comic aside and climbed into her chair. She stared hungrily at the array of food, and I wondered what she would pick first. I hoped I wouldn’t be asked to dole out her favorite food.
Yulia had clasped her hands together prayerfully. This had not been a feature of our childless mealtimes back in the old contentious universe. But I guessed having a kid had reactivated Yulia’s own childhood religious customs.
“The hungry shall eat and be satisfied and those who seek the Lord shall praise Him, their hearts shall live forever. Amen.”
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