More Tomorrow: And Other Stories

by Michael Marshall Smith

  The second thing I noticed was less tangible. Something to do with atmosphere. While I’d been in the kitchen, it had changed. People were still laughing, and laughing hard, but they’d moved round, were sitting in different positions at the table. I guess I’d been in the kitchen longer than I thought. Becky and Jan were huddled at one end of the table, and I perched myself on a chair nearby. But they were talking seriously about something, and didn’t seem to want to involve me.

  There was another burst of laughter from the other end, and I looked blearily towards it. There was something harsh in the sound. Helena and Carol were leaned in tight together, their faces red and shiny. Howard was chortling with John and Julia. It was good to see them getting on together, but I hadn’t realised they were all so chummy. Howard had only been with the firm for a year before upping stakes and going with Carol back to her own country. John and I had been friends for twenty years. Still, I guess it showed the evening was going well.

  Then I saw something I couldn’t understand. Helena’s hand, reaching out and taking a cigarette from the packet lying on the table. I frowned vaguely, knowing something wasn’t right, but she stuck the cigarette in her mouth and lit it with her lighter.

  Then I remembered that she’d started a few months before, finally dragged into my habit. I felt guilty, wishing I’d been able to stop before she started. Too late now, I suppose.

  I reached for the bottle of beer I’d perched on the end of the table, and missed. Well, not quite missed: I made enough contact to knock it off the table. Janny rolled her eyes and started to lean down for it, but I beat her to it.

  ‘It’s okay, I’m not that drunk,’ I said, slightly stiffly. This wasn’t true, of course, because it took me longer than it should to find the bottle. In the end I had to completely lean over and look for where it had gone. This gave me a view of all the legs under the table, which was kind of neat, and I remained like that for a moment. Lots of shins, all standing together.

  Some more together than others, I realised. Helena’s foot was resting against John’s.

  I straightened up abruptly, cracking my head on the end of the table. Conversation around the table stopped, and I found myself with seven pairs of eyes looking at me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, and went back into the kitchen to get another beer.

  A couple later, really pretty drunk by then. Didn’t want to sit back down at the table, felt like walking around a bit. Besides, Janny and Becky were still in conference, Janny looking odd; Howard and Carol and Julia talking about something else. I didn’t feel like butting in.

  Headed off towards the tree, thinking I’d see what the kids were up to. Maybe they’d play with me for a while. Better make an effort to talk properly—didn’t want Jack to see daddy zonked. Usually it’s okay, as my voice stays pretty straight unless I’m completely loaded, and as I couldn’t score any coke that afternoon, that wasn’t the case.

  Coke? What the fuck was I talking about?

  I ground to a halt then, suddenly confused. I didn’t take coke, never had. Well, once, a few years back: it had been fun, but not worth the money—and an obvious slippery slope. Too easy to take until it was all gone, and then just buy some more. Plus Helena would have gone ballistic—she didn’t even like me smoking, for God’s sake.

  Then I remembered her taking a cigarette earlier, and felt cold. She hadn’t started smoking. That was nonsense.

  So why did I think she had?

  I started moving again, not because I felt I’d solved anything, but because I heard a sound. It wasn’t laughing. It was more like quiet tears.

  At the far end of the yard I found Jack’s camp, a little clearing that huddled up against the wisteria that clung to the fence. I pushed through the bushes, swearing quietly.

  Jack was sitting in the middle, tears rolling down his moon-like face. His check shirt was covered in dirt, the leg of his pants torn. Howard’s kids were standing around him, giggling and pointing. As I lumbered towards them the little girl hurled another clump of earth at Jack. It struck him in the face, just above the eye.

  For a moment I was totally unable to move, and then I lunged forward and grabbed her arm.

  ‘Piss off, you little bastards,’ I hissed, yanking them away from my son. They stared up at me, faces full of some thought I couldn’t read. Then the little boy pulled his arm free, and his sister did the same. They ran off laughing towards the house.

  I turned again to Jack, who was staring at the fence.

  ‘Come on, big guy,’ I said, bending down to take him in my arms. ‘What was that all about?’

  His face slowly turned to mine, and my heart sank at what was always there to see. The slight glaze in the eyes, the slackness at one corner of his mouth.

  ‘Dada,’ he said. ‘They dirt me.’

  I fell down onto my knees beside him, wrapping my arms around his thin shoulders. I held him tight, but as always sensed his eyes looking over my shoulder, gazing off into the middle distance at something no-one else could see.

  Eventually I let go of him and rocked to my feet again, hand held down towards him. He took it and struggled to his feet. I led him out of the bushes and into the yard.

  As we came close to the tree I saw Helena and John were approaching out the darkness. I sensed some kind of rearrangement taking place as they saw us, but couldn’t work out what it might have been.

  ‘Oh shit, what’s happened now?’ Helena said, reading Jack’s state instantly and stepping towards us. John hung back, in the deep shadows.

  I couldn’t answer her. Partly just because I was drunk; I’d obviously over-compensated for my dealer’s coke famine by drinking way more than usual. But mainly because there was something wrong with her face. Not her face, which was as beautiful as ever. Her lipstick. It was smudged all round her face.

  ‘Christ you’re useless,’ she snapped, and grabbed Jack’s hand. I didn’t watch as she hauled him back towards the house. Instead I stared into the darkness under the tree, where a faint glow showed John was lighting a cigarette.

  ‘Having a good evening?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he said, laughing quietly. ‘You guys always throw such great parties.’

  We walked back to the trestle table, neither of us saying anything.

  I sat down next to the girls, glanced across at Becky. She looked a lot worse than the last time we’d seen her. The chemo obviously wasn’t working.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.

  She looked up at me, smiled tightly. ‘Fine, just fine,’ she said. She didn’t want my sympathy, and never had since the afternoon I’d called round at her place, looking for some company.

  Behind me I heard John getting up and going through into the kitchen. I’d never liked Julia, nor she me, and so it would be no comfort to look round and see her eyes following her husband into the house, where Helena would already have dispatched Jack up to bed with a slap on the behind, and would maybe be standing at the sink, washing something that didn’t need washing.

  Instead I watched Howard and Carol talking together. They at least looked happy.

  I stood at the front door, as the last set of taillights turned into the road and faded away. Helena stood behind me. When I turned to take her hand she smiled meaninglessly, her face hard and distant, and walked away. I lumbered into my study to turn the computer off.

  Instead I found myself waking it from sleep, and clicked into my mail program. I read the letter from my sister, who seemed to be doing fine. She was redecorating her new house with her new boyfriend. I nodded to myself; it was good that things were finally going her way.

  I turned at a sound behind me to find Helena standing there. She plonked a cup of coffee down on the desk beside me.

  ‘There you go, Mister Man,’ she said, and I smiled up at her. I didn’t need the coffee, because I hadn’t drunk very much. Sitting close to Helena all evening was still all the intoxication I needed. But it would be nice anyway.

  ‘Good
evening?’ she asked, running her fingers across the back of my neck.

  ‘Good evening,’ I said, looping my arm around her waist.

  ‘Well don’t stay down here too long,’ she winked, ‘Because we could make it even better.’

  After she’d gone I applied myself to the screen, but before I could start writing a reply to my little sis I heard Helena’s voice again. This time it was hard, and came as usual from outside the study.

  ‘Put your fucking son to bed,’ she said. ‘I can’t deal with him tonight.’

  I turned, but she was already gone. I sat with my head in my hands for a little while, then reached out for the coffee. It wasn’t there.

  Then something on the screen caught my eye. Something I’d dismissed earlier. ‘Read This!’ it said.

  As much to avoid going upstairs as anything, I double-clicked on the mail icon. A long text message burped up onto the screen, and I frowned. My kill file tests usually only ran a couple of lines. Blinking against the drunkenness slopping through my head I tried to focus on the first sentence.

  I managed to read it, in the end. And then the next, and as I read all the way through I felt as if my chair was sinking, dropping lower and lower into the ground.

  The message was from me, it was about Same Again, and finally I remembered.

  Before I’d come home that afternoon, I’d gone to their offices in the business district. It was the second time I’d visited, the first being when I signed up for the service and had a preliminary backup done a year before. When I’d got up that morning, woken by Jack’s cheerful chatter and feeling the warmth of Helena’s buttocks against mine under the sheets, I’d suddenly realised that if there were any day on which to make a backup of my life, today was surely that day.

  I’d driven over to their offices, sat in the chair and they’d done their thing, archiving the current state of affairs into a data file. A file which, as their blurb promised, I could access at any time life had gone wrong and I needed to return to the saved version.

  I heard a noise out in the hallway, the sound of a small person bumping into a piece of furniture. Jack. In a minute I should go out and help him, put him to bed. Maybe read to him a little, see if I could get a few more words into his head. If not, then just hold him a while, as he slipped off into a sleep furnished with a vagueness I could never understand.

  All it takes is one little sequence of DNA out of place, one infinitesimal chemical reaction going wrong. That’s all the difference there is between the child he was, and could have been. Becky would understand that. One of her cells had misbehaved too, like a 1 or 0 out of place in some computer program.

  Wet towels. Heavy rain. A leaking ceiling.

  Suddenly, somehow, I remembered going to a dark office on Montague in the wet small hours of some future morning. The strange way the man standing outside with the towel had reacted (would react) when I said I needed to do a restore from a backup they held there. And I knew what had happened.

  There’d been an accident. Or there was going to be. The same rain which would total the car which for the moment still sat out in the drive, was going to corrupt the data I’d spent so much money to save.

  At the bottom of the mail message was a number. I called it. Same Again’s 24-hour switchboard was unobtainable. I listened to a recorded voice for a while, and then replaced the handset.

  Maybe they’d gone out of business, in this differing reality. Backing up was, after all, illegal. Too easy for criminals to leap backwards before their mistakes, for politicians to run experiments. Wide scale, it would have caused chaos. So long as not many people knew, you could get away with it. The disturbance was undetectable.

  But now I knew, and this disturbance was far too great.

  I could feel, like a heavy weight, the aura of the woman lying in the bed above my head. Could predict the firmness with which her back would be turned towards me, the way John and I would dance around each other at work the next day, and the endless drudgery of the phone calls required to score enough coke to make it all go away for a while.

  ‘Hi dad—you still up?’

  Jack stood in the doorway. He’d taken three apples from the kitchen, and was attempting to juggle them. He couldn’t quite do it yet, but I thought it wouldn’t be too long now. Perhaps I would learn then, and we could do that stuff where you swap balls with one another. That might be kind of cool.

  ‘Yep,’ I smiled, ‘But not for much longer. How about you go up, get your teeth brushed, and I’ll read you a story?’

  But he’d corrupted again by then, and the apples fell one by one, to bruise on the hardwood floor. His eyes stared, slightly out of kilter, at my dusty bookcase, his fingers struggling at a button on his shirt. I reached forward and wiped away the thin dribble of saliva that ran from the bad corner of his mouth.

  ‘Come on, little guy,’ I said, and hoisted him up.

  As I carried him upstairs into the darkness, his head lolling against my shoulder, I wondered how much had changed, whether in nine months the crash would still come as we drove back from a happy evening in Gainesville.

  And I wondered, if it did, whether I would do anything to avoid it.

  Or if I would steer the car even harder this time.

  The Handover

  Nobody moved much when he came into the bar. From the way Jack shut the door behind him—quietly, like the door of a cupboard containing old things seldom needed but neatly stacked—we could tell he didn’t have any news we’d be in a hurry to hear. There were three guys sipping beer up at the counter. One of them glanced up, gave him a brief nod. That was it.

  It was nine-thirty by then. There were five other men in the place, each sitting at a different table, nobody talking. Some had books in front of them, but I hadn’t heard a page turn in a while. I was sitting near the fire and working steadily through a bowl of chili, mitigating it with plenty of crackers. I’d like to say Maggie’s chili is the best in the West, but, to be frank, it isn’t. It’s probably not even the best in town: even this town, even now. I wasn’t even very hungry, merely eating for something to do. Only alternative would have been drinking, but a couple will go to my head these days, and I didn’t want to be drunk. Being drunk has a tendency to make everything run into one long dirge, like being stoned, or living in Iowa. I haven’t ever taken a drink on important days, on Thanksgiving, anniversaries or my birthday. Not a one. This evening wasn’t any kind of celebration, not by a long shot, but I didn’t want to be drunk on it either.

  Jack walked up to the bar, water dripping from his coat and onto the floor. He wasn’t moving fast, and he looked old and cold and worn through. It was bitter outside, and the afternoon had brought a fresh fall of snow. Only a couple of inches, but it was beginning to mount up. Maggie poured a cup of coffee without being asked, and set it in front of him. Her coffee isn’t too bad, once you’ve grown accustomed to it. Jack methodically poured about five spoons of sugar into the brew, which is one of the ways of getting accustomed to it, then stirred it slowly. The skin on his hand looked delicate and thin, like blue-white tissue paper that had been scrunched into a ball and absently flattened out again. Sixty-eight isn’t so old, not these days, not in the general scheme of things. But some nights it can seem ancient, if you’re living inside it. Some nights it can feel as if you’re still trying to run long after the race is finished. At sixty-four, and the second youngest in the place, I personally felt older than God.

  Jack stood for a moment, looking around the place as if memorising it. The counter itself was battered with generations of use, as was the rest of the room. The edges of the chairs and tables were worn smooth, the pictures on the walls so varnished with smoke you’d had to have known them for forty years to guess what they showed. We all knew what they showed. The bulbs in the wall fixings were weak and dusty, giving the room a dark and gloomy cast. The one area of brightness was in the corner, where the jukebox sat. Was a big thing when Pete, my old friend and Maggie’s late husband, b
ought it. But only the lights work these days, and not all of them, and none of us are too bothered. Nobody comes into the bar who wouldn’t rather sit in peace than hear someone else’s choice of music, played much too loud. I guess this comes with age, and anyway the 45s in the machine are too old to evoke much more than sadness. The floor was clean, and the bar only smelt slightly of old beer. You want it to smell that way a little, otherwise it would be like drinking in a church.

  Maggie waited until Jack had caught his breath, then asked. Someone had to, I guess, and it was always going to be her. She said: ‘No change?’

  Jack raised his head, looked at her. ‘Course there’s a change,’ he muttered. ‘No-one said she weren’t going to change.’

  He picked up his coffee and came to sit on the other side of my table. He didn’t catch my eye, so I let him be, and cleared up the rest of my food, rejecting the raw onion garnish in deference to my innards. They won’t stand for that kind of thing any more. It wasn’t going to be long before a cost-benefit analysis of the chili itself consigned it to history alongside them.

  When I was done I pushed the bowl to one side, burped as quietly as I could, and lit up a Camel. I left the pack on the table, so Jack could take one if he had a mind to. He would, sooner or later. The rest of the world may have decided that cigarettes are more dangerous than a nuclear war, but in Eldorado, Montana, a man’s still allowed to smoke after his meal if he wants to. What are they going to do: come and bust us? The people who make the rules live a long ways from here, and the folk in this town have never been much for caring what State ordinances say.

  One of the guys at the bar finished his beer, asked for another. Maggie gave him one, but didn’t wait for any money. Outside, the wind picked up a little, and a door started banging, the sound like an unwelcome visitor knocking to be let out of the cellar. But it was a ways up the street, and you stopped noticing it after a while. It’s not an uncommon sound in Eldorado.

  Other than that, everyone just held their positions, and eventually Jack reached forward and helped himself to a cigarette. I struck a match for him, as his fingers still seemed numb and awkward. He still hadn’t taken his coat off, though with the fire it was pretty warm in the room.