Dominoes in Time

by Matthew Warner

  Selective perception, in other words—too eager to ignore small gestures like that because they made it harder to dismiss the fact that Sharon still loved him. He was always too eager to fight when all she’d ever tried to be was a good wife to him.

  Maybe I owe her an apology.

  “But I’m not crazy,” he whispered. “I’m not giving in on that.”

  He drowned a bowl in the wash water. Crazy was not having a dishwasher after forty years in this place.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  After he propped the last dish into the drying rack, Joe went upstairs and got back to work. He was starting to think that with all the confusion around here, there was a real possibility the house wouldn’t be packed on time. The mundanity of this concern surprised him, and he laughed. Here he was, just a few hours after experiencing a violent death for the third time in as many days, and he was worrying about bubble-wrapping all the pictures by Monday.

  “One bite at a time,” he said, and centered the stepladder under the attic access panel. Man, it’d feel good to get home to L.A. and back to his routine. He missed his gym and his students.

  The power drill sat by the ladder in its carrying case. He paused for a moment before he remembered putting it there this morning. It felt like it’d happened in another life. He’d planned to use it to break into the padlocked trunk.

  The trunk. Yep, that seemed like the perfect place to start his meal of this big ol’ elephant.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Opening the trunk proved easier said than done. Joe hunched over it in the light cast by the single bare bulb. He was already sweating in the stuffy air despite the freezing wind outside.

  He should’ve known that a drill was the wrong tool for this. There weren’t any exposed screws to loosen—a trunk built for security of course wouldn’t have them. And drilling holes into or around the metal hasps would likely be a waste of time, not to mention a surefire way to destroy a potentially valuable antique.

  Better to first ask for a key.

  As he climbed out of the attic, he felt a sickening wave of déjà vu. He paused at the head of the stairs and looked down to the first floor. It seemed longer somehow, and he felt a touch of the same panicky heart flutters of an aerophobia attack. Time to add acrophobia to his list of problems.

  This could be it, he realized. The actual accident that he’d foreseen last night. In a moment, he’d take a step, then another, and he’d trip and smash his nose on the stairs and—

  He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, then opened them. He imagined a phantom version of himself tumbling headfirst and crashing through the railing that now stood there undamaged. The memory of how hard that hallway floor had been made his neck hurt.

  “No, not this time.”

  He swallowed and strode downward—but he still clutched the railing and wall as he went.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  “Stay out of that trunk, Danny.”

  Mom glared at him from her easy chair. Danny was her dead brother’s name. Her expression was almost comical, the way it furrowed the skin between her eyebrows, making her appear more like a mummy than a person.

  Joe placed his hands on his hips, a mannerism he’d unconsciously picked up from Sharon, and blocked her view of the TV. Behind him, the theme music of The Price Is Right serenaded a contestant who’d been asked to “come on down!”, its melody scaling up up up before diving like someone tumbling down the staircase.

  “They’re my things, Danny. Mine. Butt out of them.”

  He saw fear there, as well, as if he’d been right in his initial suspicion of finding a hidden porn cache—except its owner was really Mom.

  “Look, I need to get in there. We’re moving you out next week, and I need to sort through everything.”

  “I’m not going anywhere. You can take your boxes and leave.”

  “Mom. The trunk.”

  “What trunk?”

  He huffed in exasperation. “The one in the attic. Where’s the key to it?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Mom crossed her arms and looked away. Her lips moved silently, and Joe realized she was staring at a picture of his father on the table.

  Damn.

  She could be faking this bit of senility, and he’d never know—a duck-and-fake like Carlton Maynard’s signature move in the hundred-sixty-pound weight class. Except here, there was no countermove. With Mom, there never had been.

  He stormed out of the room, disgusted with her and with himself. This was just a little thing—just some fucking trunk—and he couldn’t even do that right.

  He found himself standing in front of the roll-top desk in the den. The wooden slats of its cover protected the inside like a turtle shell. Its key sat on top, by the lamp.

  Screw this. I need a drink.

  He unlocked the cover and threw it open, ignoring the splintering sound that came from somewhere inside. The amber bottle of Dewar’s stood half full. He decided to finish it. He unscrewed the top and tipped it into the tumbler glass, still stained from that morning.

  As he guzzled his first drink, he wondered if Sharon was right about his sanity. A sane person wouldn’t get so upset about this. He slammed the glass onto the desk.

  Then, as he reached again for the bottle, his gaze snagged on the key ring.

  Two keys. Different sizes. The larger one, which looked like a skeleton key, unlocked the desk cover. And the other one…

  He took them and darted upstairs.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The second key turned in the hole easily, as if the padlock had been worked frequently. Not for the first time, Joe wondered why he’d never seen this antique trunk before. Of course Mom could have bought it after he moved out twenty-some years ago, but it had the vibe of an heirloom. The only explanation he could think of was that she’d kept it a secret—a secret from people like Danny.

  He felt as excited as a kid digging for buried treasure. Squinting in the light of the bare bulb, he flipped it open.

  “Holy shit.”

  Scrapbooks filled it to the brim, carefully arranged like the blocks of a kid’s computer game. Imprinted onto the underside of the lid were the initials M.R.J., probably of his great-grandfather Markus Robert Jones. He took out a scrapbook at random.

  It contained newspaper clippings. TORNADO TOUCHES DOWN SOUTH OF KANSAS CITY, 44 DEAD, read one. It was dated May 21, 1957, just a year before he was born. Mom had clipped a Kansas City map to it. A red arrow crossed the map from west to east, showing the path of the devastation. Well, that wasn’t unusual; his parents had been living in Kansas City at the time, working at a dead-end diner before moving east in search of better jobs.

  Except, why had she also drawn a green arrow? It branched northward off the red, directly into Kansas City and over the X labeled “our house.”

  Next to it, she’d written in pencil: “AVERTED.”

  The rest of the scrapbook had more articles like this. Natural disasters, manmade disasters, even a couple murders. All of them took place near where Mom had been at the time—and all of them, however horrible they’d been, could have conceivably been much, much worse, just as if that tornado had vacuumed along the green arrow instead of the red one.

  Here was a report about the September 11, 2001 crash of Flight 93 into a Pennsylvania field. Just remembering that event gave Joe shudders, as it had then. Mom had highlighted a paragraph speculating the plane had been headed to Washington—where she and Dad had been sightseeing that day—when it crashed. Next to it, she’d written, “Whew.”

  From October a year later, there were clippings about the D.C. Sniper attacks. Mom had highlighted a sidebar showing the locations of the thirteen shootings. In the margin, she’d written, “Burke, Va.”—and crossed it out.

  Joe frowned. This made no sense.

  He dug to the bottom of the trunk and pulled out another scrapbook. This one was old—damn old—probably from Markus Robert Jones himself. It contained World War
One memorabilia: uniform patches, a medal, letters from home. Joe smiled as his family history came back to him (a history, he realized with some sadness, that only he would remember now that his mother’s memory was fading): Markus Jones had just been an eighteen-year-old farm hand from Missouri when he’d left behind his wife and child to be a doughboy with the Second Division American Expeditionary Force in Europe.

  The scrapbook also contained a page from a history book, inserted some years later, judging by the whiter color of the paper. It chronicled the Second Battle of the Marne. Joe had flunked his way through high school history, so he was glad when the book page informed him that this battle was a turning point of the war, when the Germans had been driven back from their attempt to capture Paris. Holy shit, had his great-grandfather been there?

  On the paper, in fading brown ink that had once been black, Markus had written, “Thank God for His grace. The Death was not in vain.”

  The Death.

  Joe heard something click in his throat. It sounded a lot like the splintering sound of the roll-top desk when he’d thrown it open.

  He went back to the first scrapbook and found a minor article from the Burke Connection, dated a year ago. It was just a three-inch blurb headlined, “Car Hits Shopping Center Wall.”

  It read: A portion of a Safeway grocery store closed down Tuesday when a Springfield man lost control of his car and collided with a brick wall.

  The article quoted his mother: Ruthie Merrill was walking to her hairdresser when the red Lexus spun out in front of her. “I’m glad I studied ballroom dance when I was younger,” said Merrill, 70. “I danced out of its way, just as pretty as you please.”

  The article went on to report that there were no injuries.

  No, this didn’t make sense at all.

  He was about to pull out another scrapbook when the phone rang.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  He considered whether to yell for Mom to answer it, but decided against it. He couldn’t trust her to take a message anymore. Besides, it might be Sharon, and he needed to hear her voice.

  Joe scrambled down the ladder, positive the phone would stop ringing before he reached it. Again he cursed his parents for never having an answering machine or voicemail.

  Along the way, he considered what he’d found in the trunk. Three images stuck together like staticky gym socks fresh out of the dryer: his mother’s “AVERTED” note, the car advertisement for the red Lexus, and his own presumably false memories of violent accidents. There was something about them, tying them together. If he could just…

  The phone was still ringing when he reached the bedroom.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, this is Officer Heager of the Fairfax County police. Is Mr. Merrill there?”

  “This is his son. Mr. Merrill passed away a month ago.”

  “Do you have a wife, sir? Named Sharon?”

  Uh oh.

  Sharon, Officer Heager said, had been in a car accident.

  She’d misjudged a turn in front of an oncoming truck. She hadn’t been wearing her seatbelt (another habit Joe often complained about in addition to her aggressive driving). A slip of paper in her purse contained the phone number and address of the Merrill home in Burke, so the officer had called it. He couldn’t or wouldn’t say more about her condition, only that she’d been taken to Fairfax Hospital.

  Joe might have stumbled as he flew down the staircase, but he hardly noticed.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  The crowded waiting area of the Fairfax County Hospital Emergency Department contained a TV set, vending machines, and lots of chairs. There was even a table stacked with children’s books and toys.

  Joe and his mother ignored it all and stared at the locked sliding glass doors that separated them from the main emergency ward. Next to the doors and behind a banker’s grille, two nurses laughed about something. Joe had announced himself to them when he arrived, and they had told him to take a seat. That was fifteen minutes ago.

  Sitting next to him, Mom clutched his arm in one hand and her purse in the other. She leaned close and whispered, “I hope they’ll let us go home soon.”

  Joe kept his arms crossed so tightly that it was a wonder he didn’t pinch off her fingers. He watched a man speak his name through the grille and the nurses admit him inside. Joe debated ducking in behind him before the doors could shut again.

  But a male nurse in blue surgical scrubs came the other way and saved him the trouble. “Joe Merrill, are you here?”

  Joe leapt to his feet, pulling Mom with him. “Here.”

  “Come with me, please.”

  They followed him through the glass doors and down a hallway crowded with rolling IV stands. They passed an operations center that was a controlled hell of hospital personnel, clipboards, and jangling phones. A dry-erase board on the wall displayed a grid that listed patients, doctors, and room numbers. They passed it before Joe could locate his wife’s name.

  He found the nurse’s impassive expression disturbing, so he took comfort in the fact that the man wasn’t covered in Sharon’s blood.

  “How’s my wife doing?”

  “I didn’t work on her. A doctor will come talk to you, if you’ll wait in here.” He showed them into an empty room and walked off.

  This was odd. He’d taken them to somebody’s office, stacked with paperwork. A couch was pushed against a wall that showed a mural of a window. In front of the couch, a box of tissues and a phone rested on a coffee table. Joe and his mother sat down to wait. For once, Mom appeared lucid. She regarded their surroundings with wide, frightened eyes.

  Eventually, a white-coated female doctor and another male nurse came in and closed the door. Stethoscopes hung around their necks.

  The doctor introduced herself and said she had some bad news.

  Moments later, Joe found himself lying on the floor. The doctor was kneeling over him, rubbing his arm and calling his name. Mom sat on the couch, gawking down at him.

  Good, he thought. I had a break in awareness, so it’s just like before. It means that Sharon isn’t really dead.

  But as they talked, he learned that she was. Still. Dead.

  Joe hadn’t experienced one of his skips after all. He’d fainted. And they hadn’t been able to save Sharon.

  He didn’t have the strength to get up. The aura of a cackling Grim Reaper still pinned him to the floor like a heavyweight wrestler.

  Over him, Mom sputtered, “You could have prevented this. You could’ve gone with her and died for her—and then you’d both be alive now.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Averted.

  It was a good word. It made him think of a lightning rod, which averted fires by shunting electricity into the ground, that strong “V” sound evocative of “voltage.” Also, the letter V was shaped like the jagged spike of an electrical current—or like the path of a tornado suddenly changing course.

  “Vah, vah,” Joe said, tasting the sound as he relaxed in his airliner coach seat. He knew he sounded a bit like his mother just before her death a few months ago, but he didn’t care. Besides, no one was staring at him except for the baby across the aisle. He was glad to see the little tyke. Now that Joe was here, the kid might live to see another day.

  Maybe that’s what he’d call himself in the memoir he was planning: the Averter. The Converter of Death. The next person to carry on the family responsibility (and he knew now that he would have to sire a child) might appreciate the label. In any case, the next Averter would certainly find a memoir easier to understand than a dusty old trunk of scrapbooks.

  “Hello, sir. Can I interest you in a drink before takeoff?”

  Joe tried to smile at the steward who showed him a tray full of sample bottles of Jack Daniels, Dewar’s, and Absolut Vodka—but failed miserably. He’d hoped that the perks of first class would cheer him up. (Not that he could easily afford first class, but considering his reason for being here, why not?)

  “No, thank you. I’ve sworn it off.�
��

  The steward nodded and proceeded down the aisle. The baby giggled at Joe. “Vah vah,” Joe said, but the baby was too young to imitate him. The kid’s chubby, unblemished cheeks sent a stab of grief through him. Having children would have been fun.

  No, correction: will be fun. He would have kids one day. He was required to.

  It was hard not to think about Sharon. Nearly a year had passed, and the pain was as fresh as the day she’d died. He’d told himself this morning that today wasn’t the time for grief—that this was a day of celebration, the day of his first voluntary wrestling bout with Death—but the human heart had its own agenda.

  The plane screamed down the runway and took off. Joe’s pulse hammered in his head. He was afraid—but only a little—his heartbeat more of excitement than fear, and at last, the day’s thoughts of Sharon washed from his system. They would still be there for him tomorrow, but at the moment…

  He gazed at the tilting horizon, his heart beating faster. This was his first test of his newfound ability, the first time he had ever left his house in the morning with his head held high in defiance of death. Perhaps there was madness there as well—he knew that, just as he knew this roundtrip from Los Angeles to Portland was the ultimate test of his sanity.

  Because if he was wrong about this, then in two hours he would land safely at his destination but even farther from his sense of reality. He would have to consider that he’d seen what he’d wanted to see when he opened the trunk—perhaps even imagined it—and that his mind was as deteriorated as his mother’s.

  But if he was right (and he was struck by the perversity of wishing so), then he at last knew the secret of the trunk and of his many experiences of dying: he was a lightning rod of death, an Averter just like Mom and her father and Markus Robert Jones before them. If he was right, then on the night he’d gotten lost while stargazing, he’d been closer to the truth than he’d realized.

  The truth, which he’d slowly come to understand during many more months of dying and being reborn in realities where the circumstances of those deaths had been Averted, was that the tree of life, with its many branching potential quantum realities, each bristling with more potential realities, was as prone to the lightning of death as any regular tree was to the lightning of the sky. It was his job—as it might be the job of Averters the world over—to unconsciously attract those strikes with his presence and shunt them safely away. This meant that he, and he alone, would experience “the Death,” as Markus Jones had called it, suffering horrible agony so that others wouldn’t have to. You’re the only one who can see it, Joey.