by Dan Simmons
Ignore it. Go now!
A sharp sound sends pigeons wheeling above the plaza.
Christ, one of those goddamn workers has fired off a railroad torpedo. He screams over these thoughts, trying to make himself recognize the threat. All those years of training and experience fucked by these two seconds of incomprehension. But it is not until he looks ahead again, sees Lancer’s arms rising in the unmistakable gesture of a gunshot victim, that the young agent moves.
The sprint across the gap that separates the two vehicles could not be faster. Robert is reaching for the metal grip just as the third shot strikes the President.
Jesus. The impact is a fraction of a second before I hear the sound. I’ve never noticed that before.
Kennedy’s head dissolves in a mist of pink blood and white matter.
Robert seizes the metal grip and leaps onto the step plate just as the heavy Lincoln roars ahead. Robert’s foot slips off the plate and he is being half-dragged behind the accelerating convertible.
Too late. Another two seconds. A second and a half. But I will never close it.
The woman in pink is crawling out onto the trunk in an hysterical effort to retrieve part of Lancer’s skull so that no one can see what she has just seen.
Inside himself, Robert unsuccessfully tries to close his eyes so that he does not have to see the next minute or two of horror.
Val was out and gone before breakfast. Over coffee, Carol found herself actually talking to her father for a change.
“Today’s your counseling session, isn’t it, Dad?”
Robert grunted.
“You’re going, aren’t you?” Carol heard the parental tone in her own voice but could do nothing about it. When is it, she wondered, that we become parents to our parents?
When they become senile or neurotic or helpless enough that we have to, came her answering thought.
“Have I ever missed one?” said her father, his voice a bit querulous.
“I don’t know,” said Carol, glancing at her watch.
Robert made a rude noise. “You’d know. The goddamn therapy program would call you, leave messages, and keep calling you until you got in touch in person. Just like the school truancy program…” The old man stopped quickly.
Carol looked up. “Has Val been ditching school again?”
Her father hesitated a second and then shrugged. “Does it matter? The schools haven’t been much more than holding pens since I was a kid…”
“Goddammit,” breathed Carol. She rinsed her coffee mug and slammed it into the dishwasher. “I’ll talk to him tonight.”
“Busy day?” asked her father, as if eager to change the subject.
“Hmmm,” said Carol, pulling on her cape. Dale Fritch’s lunchtime depo, she thought with a jolt. She had all but forgotten it after the night’s flashbacks. Perhaps after meeting him and his crazy informant for lunch she could score some more flashback in the Afric section of town before heading back to work. She was down to a single thirty-minute tube.
The Honda was down to a quarter charge. Enough to get her to work but there was no way she could get home without paying the higher charge rates at the Civic Center. And it would mean more expensive work in the shop.
“Fuck,” she said, kicking the dented side of the nine-year-old heap of junk. Great way to start the day.
She was pulling onto the guideway before she remembered that she had not said good-bye to her father.
“These tunnels are cool,” said Coyne. “Long bus ride to get here, but they’re definitely cool. How’d you say you found the entrance?”
“My mom showed me a few years ago when she started working at the Civic Center,” said Val. “Used to be a bunch of malls and shit down here. They used to bring prisoners through here before they shut it up after the Big One.”
Sully and Gene D. looked impressed and a bit nervous. Their footfalls echoed in the dripping corridors. There were no lights, but their VR shades amplified the slightest glow from the ventilation grills.
“You say it runs all the way from where your old lady works at the Civic Center to Pueblo Park on the other side of the One-Oh-One?” said Coyne.
“Yeah.” They stopped at a boarded up storefront to light up cigarettes and pass around a bottle of wine. The matches flared like incendiary explosions in VR amplification.
“I think that you should do a Jap,” said Coyne.
Val’s head snapped up. “A Jap?”
Coyne, Sully, and Gene D. were grinning, “Zap a Jap,” crooned Sully.
Val looked only at Coyne. “Why a Jap?”
The taller boy shrugged. “It’d be cool.”
“Jap’s are crazy about their security,” said Val. “They’ve got bodyguards coming out the ass.”
Coyne grinned. “Makes it cooler. We can all watch you, Val my man. We can all flash on this.”
Val felt his heart pounding. “No, I mean it,” he said, hoping that his voice did not sound as rattled and full of pleading as he felt. “Mom says that the Jap advisors who come to visit with the mayor or the D.A. are nuts about security. Always traveling around with bodyguards. She says that they shut off all the traffic near the Civic Center when Kasai, Morozumi, or Harada visit because…” Val stopped but not before he realized that he had said too much. Much too much.
Coyne leaned closer. The amplification made his lean face a blaze of light and shadows. “Because then no one can get close, right, Val my man?” He gestured toward the tunnel. “But we could get close, couldn’t we?”
“Nobody knows when the mayor and his tame Japs would visit,” said Val, hearing the whine in his own voice and hating it. “Really. I swear.”
“Don’t your old lady know?” asked Gene D. His voice echoed in the darkness. “She’s hot shit down here, ain’t she?”
Val made a fist, but Coyne grabbed him. “She doesn’t know,” said Val. “Ever. Honest.”
“Hey, cryo yourself, Val my man,” said Coyne, patting his arm. “We believe you. It’s all right. We got all the time in the world, Babe. No rush on nothing.” Coyne’s face looked demonic in amplified light. “We’re all friends here, yeah? And this is a mean place. Our own clubhouse, like without the gang trash, you know?” He patted Val’s arm a final time and smiled at the others. “A Jap would be cool, but it don’t matter who the bod is as long as we got someone to trash so’s you can flash. Am I right or am I right?”
They sat and smoked in the darkness.
Carol scored three vials of flashback from one of the clerks in the D.A.’s office to tide her over and spent the morning doing depositions on civil cases for several of the lawyers who used the offices there. She was always pleased to take depositions for the private firms because it meant extra money selling them copies of the transcripts.
Several of the other stenographers were out—which was usually the case—but she learned that one of them, a woman named Sally Carter whom Carol did not know too well, was home because word had just reached her that her husband had been killed in the fighting near Hong Kong. There was the usual clucking and muttering that America had no business fighting wars for Japan or the Chinese warlords, but in the end everyone admitted that the country needed the money and that there were precious few commodities other than American military technology and warm bodies that Japan or the EC would buy.
Sally Carter’s absence meant more work and deposition sales for Carol.
At 11:00 A.M. she looked in her desk drawer, ready to steal a muffin from her lunch bag, remembered that she had not packed a lunch today, and then remembered the reason. She smiled at the thought of her cloak-and-dagger rendezvous with the Assistant D.A.
At 11:15 A.M., Danny called.
The phone was obviously a poorly lighted pay phone in a bar somewhere and the video quality was poor: Danny was little more than a pale blur in the shadows. But it was a familiar blur. And his voice had not changed.
“Carol,” he said, “you’re looking great, kiddo. Really good.”
“Anyway,” he said, speaking quickly to fill her silence, “I was in L.A. for a couple of days… I live in Chicago now, you know…and I just thought… I mean I hoped… I mean, dammit, Carol, will you please have lunch with me today? Please? It’s very important to me.”
No, thought Carol. Absolutely not. You don’t just leave Val and me, no letter, no explanation, no child support, and then call me up eight years later and say you want to have lunch. Absolutely not. No.
“Yes,” she heard herself say, feeling as if she were in one of her flashbacks and wondering if she were flashing on this from some sad future. “Where? When?”
Danny told her the place. It was a downtown bar in which they had eaten when they first moved to L.A. fifteen years ago and used to steal lunchbreaks to be together. “Say…ten minutes from now?”
Carol knew that if she took the Honda it might not hold a charge and would leave her stranded in the shitty section of the city. She would have to take the bus. “Twenty minutes,” she said.
The pale blob that was Danny nodded. She thought she could see a smile.
Carol hung up but kept her finger on the button for a minute, as if caressing it. Then she hurried to reapply her makeup and get downstairs to the bus.
“Halfback to Base. Five minutes to destination.”
Oh, fuck it. Fuck it all to hell. Robert is disgusted. After years of this, he knows what will not happen. It is like self-abuse without a climax.
He keeps his eyes closed…or tries to. One cannot shut out flashback visuals without a tremendous effort of will. People are shouting and waving on the green grass to his left.
Robert tried to escape, to return to another time, another memory…but once begun, there is no escape from a flashback episode. They glide toward the railroad bridge overpass.
There is a sound. Pigeons wheel into the canyon above the plaza.
No use. Empty. Useless.
Three seconds later he leaps from the chase car and sprints toward the blue Lincoln.
Useless. No exercise of will can make him move more quickly. Time and memory are immutable.
Not even my fucking memory. I am crazy. Kay, I miss you.
The second shot. He dives for the footplate and metal grip. The third shot.
Robert tries not to see, but the image of the President’s head exploding is not to be denied.
Twenty years later, fifty percent of Americans polled remembered seeing this live on television. It was never on television. It was almost two years until censored parts of the Zapruder film were released…and then only to Life magazine. Before flashback, memories lied…we edited them at will. Shit, Kennedy was elected with only forty-some percent of the vote, but ten years after his death seventy-two percent of the people polled said they had voted for him.
Memory lies.
He pushes the President’s wife back into the vehicle, noticing the insanity in her wide eyes but understanding the urgency in her single-minded ambition to retrieve the bit of skull. To make everything all right again.
I’m going to find Val. Make sure he doesn’t do anything stupid.
He shoves the woman back down in the seat and guards her and Lancer’s body all the way to Parkland Hospital. The hopelessness flows over him like a rising tide.
Val and his friends watched the I-5 guideway from their perch on the roof of a building abandoned after the Big One. Val was holding the .32, bracing it with both hands along the edge of the roof. The traffic glided by silently except for the rush of tires on wet pavement. It had rained in the past hour.
“I could wait until a Lexus comes along and blast it,” said Val.
Coyne gave him a disgusted look. “With that popgun? It’s thirty yards to the VIP lane. You couldn’t even hit the fucking car, much less the Jap in the backseat. If there is a Jap in the backseat.”
“Besides,” said Gene D., “their cars have the best armorplating there is. A fucking ought-six wouldn’t go through one of their fucking windshields.”
“Yeah,” said Sully.
“A fucking needlegun wouldn’t hurt a Jap Lexus from here,” said Gene D.
Val lowered the pistol. “I thought that it was the best if the…if it was a random thing you did to flash on.”
Coyne rubbed Val’s short hair with his knuckles. “It was the best, Val my man. Now a Jap’s the thing.”
Val sat back, leaving the .32 on the ledge. Water pooled on the sagging asphalt roof. “But it might take days…weeks…”
Coyne grinned, swept the pistol off the ledge, and offered it to Val. “Hey, we got time, don’t we, my men?”
Sully and Gene D. made noises.
Val hesitated a second and then took the pistol. It started raining again and the boys hurried for shelter. Val did not see his grandfather watching them from across the street. When they left the building a few minutes later, none of the boys noticed the old man following them toward the river.
It was raining by the time Carol got to the bar on San Julian. She hustled in, holding a newspaper over her hair, and stood a minute blinking in the dark. When the heavyset man approached her, she actually took a step backward before she recognized him.
“Danny.”
He took her hands and set the wet newspaper on a table. “Carol. Christ, you look good.” He hugged her clumsily.
She could not say the same about her ex-husband. Danny had put on weight—at least a hundred pounds—and his features and familiar body seemed lost in the excess. Much of his blond hair was gone and his scalp was freckled with brown spots like her father’s. His skin was sallow, his eyes were dark and sunken over heavy pouches, and he was wheezing softly. What she had assumed were bad lighting and poor video quality on the phone were actually shadows and distortions of Danny himself.
“I’ve got our old booth,” he said. Without letting go of her hands, he led her to a corner near the rear. She did not remember having a special booth here, and she had never replayed this particular memory.
A glass of Scotch sat half-finished on the table. From the way Danny smelled when he kissed her, he’d had more than one.
They sat looking at each other across the table. For a minute neither spoke. The bar was almost empty this time of day, but the bartender and a man in a tattered raincoat near the front were having an argument with a sportscaster persona on an old HDTV above a line of bottles. Carol looked down and realized that Danny was still holding both of her hands in one of his. She felt strange, anaesthetized, as if the nerves in her hands conveyed no tactile information.
“Well, Jesus, Carol,” Danny said at last, “you really look great. You really do.”
Carol nodded and waited.
Danny swallowed the last of the Scotch, waved the bartender over for a refill, gestured to Carol, and took the slight shaking of her head as a no. Only after a full glass of whiskey was delivered did he speak again. The rush of words flowed over Carol, relieving her of any necessity to speak.
“Well, God, Carol, here I was on a…well, a sort of business trip actually…and I realized, well, I wondered… Does she still work down at the Hall of Justice?…and there you were, right on the answering persona’s list of options. Anyway, I thought…you know, why not? So… Christ, did I tell you how great you look? Beautiful, actually. Not that you weren’t always a knockout. I always thought you were a knockout. But, hey, you know that.
“Anyway, you probably want to know what I’m up to, huh? Been what? Four or five years since that time…anyway, I’m in Chicago now. Not with Caldwell Banker anymore. Sold luxury electrics for a while, but…you know…the market’s really gone to shit on those. Got out just at the right time. So, where was I? I’m in Chicago… I’m into some deep pattern counseling…thought you might be interested in me getting into some counseling.”
Danny laughed. It was an oddly abrasive sound and the two men at the front of the
bar glanced back and then went back to their argument with the sportscaster persona. Danny touched her fingers, lifted her hands in his again as if they were a pair of gloves he had forgotten he had, and then set them down on the scarred table. He took a drink.
“So anyway, this deep pattern counseling…you’ve heard of it? No? Jesus, I thought everyone in California would…anyway, there’s this brilliant guy in Chicago, he’s a doctor…you know, a Ph.D. in therapeutic flashback use…and he had sort of, well, ashram is the word. People with serious things to work out sort of live there and tithe to him…well, actually it’s a bit more than tithe since it involves power of attorney…but what it is, is, that it’s not a one-shot-a-week type of thing. We live there and the counseling…deep pattern counseling, it’s called…the counseling is sort of our job like. It’s an all day thing…”
“Using flashback,” said Carol.
Danny grinned as if terrifically relieved and impressed by her depth of understanding. “You got it. Right. Perfect. You probably know all about it…there’s a million deep pattern type counseling centers out here in sunny California. But, yeah, we’re in counseling with it for eight to ten hours a day…under the strict supervision of Dr. Singh, of course. Or his appointed therapist-counselors. It’s not like, you know, how I used to use the stuff when we were together…” He rubbed his cheeks and Carol heard the rasp of his palm on the stubble there. “I know I was fucking around with it then, Carol. I mean, I hardly flash on the teenage sex stuff now. It’s just…you know…it’s just not important given the totality of the therapeutic experience, y’know?”
Carol brushed a strand of wet hair off her forehead. “What is important?” she asked.
“What?” Danny had finished his Scotch and was trying to get the bartender’s attention. “I’m sorry, Babe. What?”
“What is important, Danny?”
He waited for the refill and then smiled almost beatifically. “I’ve got a chance for a real breakthrough here, Babe. Dr. Singh himself says that I’ve reached the point where I can turn things around. But…”
Carol knew the tone well. She said nothing.