Dominoes in Time

by Matthew Warner

  Looking into Uncle Luke’s eye, Tommy saw even more:

  Dropping out of school to join the circus as a fortune teller. Getting robbed and left for dead. Coming back to Daddy’s farm with his tail between his legs.

  Daddy sharing a drink with him for the first time and telling him about the curse of the third-born.

  Luke’s young wife, in a fit of postpartum depression, waiting till he got home one night to blow her head off with the twelve-gauge.

  All that and more. Adult things. Things Tommy didn’t understand.

  “Stop it! Stop!” Tommy punched Uncle Luke in the chest and squirmed away. He fell in a heap and burst into tears. “What’d you do to me?”

  Uncle Luke’s tongue flicked in and out. “Didn’t do nothing. You did it. You’re the one done the peeping. You’re third-born.”

  The room spun, and Tommy fought not to throw up. He was going to faint. His inhaler had fallen from his pocket—darnit, where was it? Then he did throw up, right there between his knees onto the chapel’s maroon carpeting. He began to sob.

  Uncle Luke approached the casket as if nothing had happened. Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew a bag of tobacco and rolling papers. He plopped it down on the closed lower half of the casket lid. He rolled a cigarette, lit it, and blew smoke at Grandpa Jared’s peaceful face.

  “Sorry I let you down, Daddy.”

  Tommy’s mind spun with what he’d seen inside his uncle’s head. It was as if someone had allowed him to peek into a secret room labeled Mysteries of Grownups. No, he didn’t understand it all—he couldn’t. Some of it he hoped soon to forget.

  Luke was still smoking and talking to his father’s corpse. “Sorry I didn’t see this coming. Sorry I can’t go on without you.”

  The dizziness cleared, and Tommy remembered more of what he’d seen: the shadows of Luke’s future. And how there were so few of them.

  Eyes brimming with tears, Luke glanced over at Tommy. “Just one thing to remember, boy. Don’t never peep into the eyes of the dead ’less you want to die yourself. What you’ll see of the spirit’s future was never meant for human sight.”

  Weeping now, Uncle Luke crushed out his cigarette on the casket. Then he leaned in and placed his eye over Grandpa Jared’s.

  Uncle Luke was silent for a moment as he peered inside. Then he started screaming.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The Peering. That’s what Tommy came to call it. It wasn’t his late Uncle Luke’s term but his own.

  In fact, all understanding of his ability came from himself because there was nobody willing to discuss it who didn’t have a preconceived notion he was crazy. The headshrink his parents took him to throughout grade school (to help him over his trauma, they said) was one such example. Mr. Eyebrows, Tommy called him, because he had bushy gray eyebrows that bobbed up and down whenever Tommy spoke. They reminded him of Uncle Luke’s gyrating tongue. He could judge the amount of medication he’d get based on how fast they twitched.

  It might have been different if they allowed him to Peer into their heads and tell what he saw. But they always refused. Afraid, most likely. Not even his older brother Gary (child number one; number two had died as a baby) would try, not even on a double-dog dare. Said he was too old for sissy games.

  So it was just easier to say yes, yes, he was lying to get attention. He’d never recovered from watching Uncle Luke keel over and die—although that was years ago—and he was just a messed-up kid. Asthma and allergies and brittle bones had given him an inferiority complex. Sorry, folks, I’ll be a good boy now.

  But secretly, he conducted experiments. In the Capersville Elementary School playground, he convinced the school’s fifth-grade bully to let him Peer into his eye. Jody Farrell loved to play keep-away with Tommy’s inhaler and taunt him when he contracted hives or just plain sock him in the stomach if he thought Tommy was coughing too much, which was most days. The beatings only intensified when Tommy made his special request. Took almost till summer vacation for Jody to stop with the little-faggot-just-wants-to-kiss-me taunts before he gave in.

  It happened next to the swing sets and spider gym.

  Pressing his eye against Jody’s, Tommy said, “I see how your daddy likes to play with your privates.”

  Jody tried to pull away. “What the… ?” But Tommy hung on with both hands.

  “You’re gonna go to jail for sexin’ with little girls.” Tommy started to laugh. “Oh, you’re gonna get it—”

  “Get away from me!” Jody boxed him across the ear to make him let go. Tears streamed down his cheeks. “You fuckin’ liar!”

  “Uh uhhh,” Tommy singsonged. His ear and jaw ached where Jody had punched him, but he was having too much fun to care. “And after you die, you know what? Your grandchildren are gonna be just like you: big ol’ losers. They’ll have stupid jobs and go to jail, and nobody will remember it all started with you—”

  “Shut up, you faggot!” Jody screamed—but instead of making Tommy shut up, for the first time ever, he simply ran off.

  Grinning, Tommy crossed his arms and watched him go.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Years later, Tommy was proven right. Jody Farrell was caught fondling a young girl in the men’s room of the Capersville Exxon, where he worked as an attendant. He went to prison for ten years.

  By that time, though, Tommy had sworn off the Peering as a curse. What use was the ability if it only scared people or made him see things he regretted? He caused his parents’ divorce, after all, by Peering into his mother’s eye when she was passed out on Valium and wine. Her affair never would have been discovered otherwise.

  The same for his break-up with his fiancée, Gillian. He would have never learned about her first marriage and child if he didn’t Peer into her eye—but after he did, it became impossible to trust her anymore. Would’ve been better—life would’ve been just fine—if he never found out.

  This is why, when Tommy finally did get married at age twenty-nine, he resisted the temptation to Peer into his wife’s eye as she slept. He never told Christine about his curse, either, and since he’d moved from Capersville to Lewisville, she never learned about it secondhand.

  The future, for once, was a clean slate.

  Within two years, Tommy let go of the past as well. Finally, he stopped dwelling on old wrongs and regrets—threw away his crazy pills, diaries, and pictures—and started over. He bought some barbells from Walmart and started putting flesh onto his skinny bones. A new doctor helped him get his allergies under control so he could sleep and function on a normal schedule. He even earned his GED and landed a job as a high school crisis counselor. Just think of it: him as a counselor. If only the boss knew about his past, but no one not in Heaven (thank Jesus) except Tommy could Peer into somebody’s spirit.

  Jesus could, however. Jesus always could. Tommy pictured Him as looking like Grandpa—Bible in one hand, condemnation in the other—but even that specter didn’t unsettle him. Whenever Tommy encountered it in his prayers or dreams, he said, “Tell me, oh Lord, tell me what I must do. I’m trying—I really am—to be a good man. And if I’m meant to use this ability for a good purpose, then please give me a sign.”

  To his relief, the Lord stayed silent.

  The Lord kept His counsel even when Christine, petite and blonde and her eyes shining like rainbows, announced she was pregnant with their first child (the first of at least three, she hoped, but Tommy ignored that remark). The ability to Peer was only an aberration, it seemed, not a curse. It was just a quirk of Tommy’s makeup, like his weak immune system or the cowlick his barber chuckled over.

  Then, one month after Tommy Junior was born, the Lord spoke.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Grandpa had always said Jesus steals into your heart like a thief in the night (or some such), and when Tommy felt it happen, he was leaning into his newborn son’s crib at two in the morning.

  He and Christine alternated getting up in response to Junior’s wails, and now it was his turn to
stumble bleary-eyed into the nursery. When he arrived, though, the baby was quietly asleep. Tommy leaned in and sniffed for poop and vomit, trying to judge what to do, if anything. He was still learning how to care for the kid, who hadn’t had the courtesy to arrive with an instruction manual.

  The posture put him near Junior’s face, close enough to see the crust on the baby’s eyelashes. For the hundredth time, Tommy wondered what the future held—and for the hundredth time, he fought the temptation to find out.

  Tonight, however, a voice spoke from his heart: Just do it, already.

  So Tommy did it. Sticky baby tears squished against his. Junior whimpered, then his eye flew open. And Tommy saw:

  Death. Corpses stacked in city gutters, waiting for snow plows to push them toward mass graves. Blue, ring-shaped welts covered their skin.

  Those still alive watched the plows from their apartment windows. With welt-covered hands, they used tissues to wipe away the blood seeping from their noses and eyes.

  As they sickened with the blue-ring disease, their internal organs liquefied. And when they died, they expelled bloody, virus-laden slag from their bodily orifices—“crashing and bleeding out,” the doctors called it. The oily pools infected anybody who came into contact.

  Sophisticated vector-tracking algorithms traced the global blue-ring pandemic back to one person: Tommy Junior.

  Tommy gasped and reeled away from the crib. The baby, Tommy Junior, started crying.

  “Oh Lord, what have I done?”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The next week was an agony of indecision, and despite his careful self-maintenance, Tommy became as sick as he ever had as a child. He was scared he’d contracted some exotic new disease—one with blue-ring welts, maybe—until the doc assured him it was just the flu.

  The flu he could handle. He’d had the flu every year since he was four. He could even handle the increasingly frequent asthma attacks that came with it this time. But he couldn’t handle his dilemma.

  “What’s with you?” Christine said from the foot of their bed, where Tommy sat up reading on a weekday morning. Her face was gaunt with lack of sleep from single-handedly doing the baby-rearing all week.

  “I’m sick. Reckon you haven’t noticed.”

  “No, it’s more than that.” Frowning, she retied her do-rag around her hair, which she hadn’t had time to wash. Baby spitup from breakfast stained her shoulder. “You don’t talk no more. All you do is read that stupid thing.”

  Tommy looked at the Bible on his lap. He’d dog-eared two passages. Revelations 16:2, said, “The first angel went and poured out his bowl on the land, and ugly and painful sores broke out on the people.” And in Genesis chapter 22, God said to Abraham, “Take your son, your only son… Sacrifice him.”

  “I ain’t had a day off all week,” Christine said. “Been a full-time mommy while you been lying around, not even holding Junior once in a while. You’re not contagious no more. Pick him up and give a rockabye—or ain’t you his daddy?”

  Tommy looked up from the Bible. His right eye itched and itched. “Fine, then. Go shopping. I’ll… take care of him.”

  “Oh, you will, will you?” Christine balled up the bandanna she’d been using to wipe spittle off the baby’s chin. She threw it at Tommy’s chest. “You better.”

  She grabbed her car keys and left.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The itching in his right eye soon flared beyond irritation into burning pain. It felt like the devil had jammed it with a red-hot poker. And yet he endured it, embraced it.

  Why not? He deserved it.

  His infant son hung from his hand, suspended by the bandanna garroting his neck. Finally, his tiny limbs stopped moving.

  There was nothing left to do but follow Tommy Junior into death. He didn’t expect to follow him into Heaven, however.

  Hardly able to see through his tears, Tommy cradled his murdered son in his arms, then raised the baby’s face to his own. Don’t never peep into the eyes of the dead ’less you want to die yourself, Uncle Luke had said. His uncle had committed suicide by doing so. It seemed like a fitting end for him as well.

  Except when he pushed his right eye against Junior’s…

  Pain! Oh God, oh Jesus… the pain became unbearable. Piercing, stabbing…

  His body took over, dropping the baby into the crib and propelling him into the bathroom. He searched his reflection for the plank that God had hammered there. But instead of a plank, he saw—

  A blue, ring-shaped welt around his eye.

  “Oh, no. Oh God, no.…”

  His knees folded, and Tommy collapsed in front of the sink. His stomach clenched, and he heaved bloody puke all over the bathroom rug.

  The Peering, of course. Always the Peering. He’d contracted the blue-ring disease from the baby when he first pressed their eyes together. Maybe all babies were carriers, but nobody had reason to bring their eyes into contact like that. Nobody except him. And even if they did, perhaps nobody would develop the disease except for someone with a weakened immune system.

  Someone like him.

  Tommy writhed on the bathroom floor, struggling to breathe through his constricted throat but only managing to smear puke across his face. Something came loose in his gut and sloshed as it resettled. The smell of feces and blood rose from his pajama bottoms.

  As the world grew dark, he heard Christine’s car pull into the driveway. She called out for him as she entered through the front door.

  Maybe Monitored

  When she heard the voice through the baby monitor, Susan thought it was Rick in the nursery, changing a diaper. Then she touched her husband’s thigh beside her in bed. She snapped awake.

  “What a cute little boy,” said the voice, a woman’s.

  Susan fumbled for her light and knocked over her pills. The alarm clock said it was 6 a.m.

  “Rick!”

  But he didn’t rouse.

  Screw it. She swung her legs out of bed. Rick kept his gun in the closet, but she didn’t want to waste time digging it out. She pounded down the hallway. Already breathing raggedly, she bunched her fists and threw open the nursery room door.

  Dark. Quiet. No intruder.

  Christopher lay sleeping in his crib, tiny arms propped behind his head like he was relaxing at the beach. The green light of the baby monitor shone off the basket of dirty clothes by the door.

  But from their master bedroom, the babble of conversation continued from the audio receiver. She relaxed. It was just picking up Mary’s baby monitor next door. Good thing Rick hadn’t woken up, or he would have accused her of not taking her meds.

  She returned to bed. Maybe she could snooze for another half hour.

  “Old MacDonald had a farm…” sang the woman in the monitor.

  Susan smiled as she drifted off. “Old MacDonald” was part of the nighttime ritual ever since she married Rick and started taking care of Christopher. How cute that Mary would sing the same—

  Her eyes flew open.

  “Eee-eye-eee-eye-oh…”

  That’s me. That my own voice.

  “Rick. Rick, wake up. Damn it, wake up.”

  She shook him and finally resorted to punching his leg. He didn’t stir until the Susan in the monitor finished singing about all the places where cows moo.

  “Ow. What?”

  “The baby monitor,” she began, “it’s…”

  But the monitor fell silent.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  She didn’t tell Rick what happened but spent all day grousing while he went to work at City Hall. I know what I heard. But he would never believe me.

  She sat at her desk in the basement, laptop open to an online course for her pre-med degree. It was totally ignored as she stared at the video monitor atop her file cabinet. The miniature TV showed a black-and-white feed of Christopher taking his nap.

  It was 4 p.m. now. Rick would be home soon. Then Christopher would wake up for the final two hours of the day. She would spend it feeding hi
m rice cereal and formula before he settled in for the night—after a rendition of “Old MacDonald,” of course.

  The front door opened upstairs. “I’m home,” Rick called.

  “Okay.”

  His footsteps creaked overhead. “You feed Christopher yet?”

  After a pause, she said, “No, dear. I haven’t fed your ex-wife’s child. Do you want to do it?”

  His footsteps approached the head of the stairs. “Sorry, didn’t hear you.”

  “I said the baby’s still asleep.”

  He walked away without a word.

  Typical attitude. Some days, it wasn’t the big-picture stuff that made it hard to stay on the wagon. It was the little things, like his indifference. Rick would retire to the den now to read the newspaper until she announced dinner was ready.

  She glanced at the baby monitor’s screen. A hand reached into the crib and caressed the baby’s head. Okay, so maybe I’m overreacting. See there? He’s paying attention to Christopher, acting like a dad for once.

  The hand suddenly smacked the baby across the face.

  Christopher stared upward for a few seconds, mouth open in shock. Susan gasped and rose to her feet. The baby finally began to wail. His screams came in short little bursts, like when he got his shots. It was the worst sound in the world.

  Susan flew up the stairs. “You son of a bitch!”

  But Rick was sitting in the recliner, newspaper spread across his stomach. He gaped. “What did I do now?”

  She continued down the hall to the nursery. She burst through the door.

  And stopped short.

  Again, no intruder. The baby was fine. Christopher blinked sleepily at her and began to gurgle.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Singing “Old MacDonald” to Christopher that night proved to be the only highlight of the day. Afterward, she and Mr. Son of a Bitch faced off over the dinner table.

  Rick popped a bite of pork chop into his mouth and chewed while he spoke. “I bet it’s Mary next door, playing a joke.”

  “I don’t call home invasion a joke.”

  “No, I mean, what if Mary used her monitor—on the same frequency—to make a tape recording of you one night? Then she played it back through her transmitter to freak you out?”