“Adjusted for splits, you could have had Fosters at about two cents and LinkOn around a nickel,” she was explaining.
I listened, without really listening. What was it that so attracted me to this individual? I’d never been so bushwacked by my testosterone. I’d already learned she’d grown up in Richardson, a small city outside of Dallas, Texas. She’d lived there until she was sixteen when her family moved to the west coast. Okay, back on track. “So lets say a thousand bucks invested in these two ten years ago…”
I could see the calculator in her pretty head. “You’d be up a little over ten thousand times,” she finished for me.
I nearly choked on my fish. “Ten million dollars!”
“Michael, companies like that are extremely rare.” She laughed. “Too bad you can’t go back in time and make those trades.”
I grinned. “Yeah, that’d be sweet.” I’d stayed overnight in a cheap motel because I didn’t want to return to my DU and pop again today, though to be honest, I think I had begun to delude myself that the rules were only designed to scare poppers from bouncing back and forth too often, and not to be taken literally.
I walked her back to the office. We stopped on the steps. I felt her studying me.
“Mind if I ask you something?” She was so close, I could smell her shampoo. It was all I could do to hold my hands at my sides.
“Ask away, Mia.”
“You really seem interested in stocks and investing, but you haven’t opened an account. Why?”
Had me there. “Well…”
She smiled and grabbed my hand, joking, “Hey, I know what you’re thinking. I only had lunch with you because I was interested in your money.”
I feigned a frown. “Actually I don’t have much money.” Yet.
“Well…maybe I’ll make you some.” Then she leaned close and kissed me on the cheek. “Thanks for the mahi mahi.”
I watched her sweet apple bottom all the way back to her desk. Yes.
I already knew I would pop again.
“Michael, don’t ever do that again.” Dinjis’s eyes bore in to me like drill bits. “Poppers are not allowed to stay for extended periods of time in their AUs. Too risky.”
I pretended not to hear him. Ever since returning to my DU last week all I could think about was Mia. I was even dreaming about her. Stocks didn’t seem so interesting to me anymore. Mia’s smiling face and sensuous body did. Sure, I’d made the trades—invested five grand in FosterSys and a second five thousand in LinkOn. Ten thousand total. If Mia’s research was accurate, in ten years my portfolio would be worth over a hundred million dollars. I was financially set. I’d entered the “Bennett Club”. A genuine Popper success story. Yet, I still couldn’t rid myself of this empty sensation in my chest.
“Are you listening, Michael?”
I scratched at my cheek, the exact spot where Mia had placed her lips ten years into my future. Fuckin’ A. What the hell had I fallen into? “Yes,” I replied, distracted. My gaze settled on the big clock. “What would happen if I died?
Dinjis scowled. “What do you mean if you died? What kind of question is that?”
“No, I mean if I was in my AU and I died. Or was killed. What would happen?”
Dinjis tented his fingers together studying me. “You’re beginning to worry me, Michael.”
“Only a question. Just curious.”
Dinjis thought before answering. “We discussed this. The paradox. A popper can not technically die in his AU. Yes, you can ‘die or be killed,’ and that is a risk the longer you remain. However, if this occurs, you will instantly be returned to your DU—here—and your AU will cease to exist for you.”
“And if I die here, in my DU?”
“Then my friend, you are dead.” He hesitated a moment before adding, “The result is identical if while in your AU and you use up your DU life clock—zap, you no longer will exist in your future or AU. You will have no future.”
“And…”
“Simple—you return to your DU…and die.”
I’d decided. I needed to see Mia again. I rose. “I’m going back.”
Dinjis leaped from behind his desk. “Only a day, correct?”
I could sense an odd fear behind his dark eyes. “No.” I slipped the card from my pocket and entered my digital time warp.
Dinjis gaped at the clock. “Michael, no! Too much time. Too risky. Don’t do this!” He reached for me, barely missing my arm.
“See you ‘round, Dinjis.” I popped out on to Sepulvada.
I grinned, feeling the warmth of the October sun. I was alive and rich, really rich.
And I was falling in love.
The eleven months I lived in my AU were the most invigorating, happy, satisfying months of my entire life—past and future. I loved living in my alternate universe. So much so, if something hadn’t happened I probably never would have returned.
But something did happen.
Our first date didn’t pan out so fabulous, though. I’d picked Mia up in my jet black Ferrari (not red, but I still considered myself a full fledged Bennett Club member) and we dined at the Five Crowns in Corona Del Mar. Holy shit was all I could think when I saw how dazzling she looked in her long body-fitting dress. Her hair was down and draped over one shoulder. Mia Lingo looked like the fucking Queen of Exotic.
“Nice wheels,” was her first comment as I held open the door.
I grinned and replied, “I outgrew my Tundra,” but she didn’t get it.
We talked so freely and comfortably I felt like I’d known Mia for years. She never once asked about my obvious wealth and I got the impression she really didn’t care. In an odd way, I was a little disappointed, but in the end it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I was so tempted to tell her that her recommendations had panned out beautifully, but that wouldn’t work either. FostersSys and LinkOn were my secrets.
She told me about growing up in Texas. She’d loved cheerleading for the varsity football team, until she was forced to quit her junior year.
“Why?” I asked.
The date turned south at that point. If I could’ve kicked myself in the ass, I would have.
She sipped her wine a long moment. “Can we talk about something else?”
This was when I should have kept my mouth shut. But ever since sitting down at our secluded table, I saw how the ambient light gave the thin, linear scar on her face a raised glossy sheen. I was studying her and she caught me.
“What are you staring at, Michael?” she asked pointedly.
I briefly looked away awkwardly. “Is that why you quit cheerleading in high school?”
She dabbed her lips with her napkin. “By that, you mean this?” She canted her head just right so the scar really showed. Just by her doing this I realized she must have repeated this same maneuver a thousand times in front of a mirror trying to figure out the best angles to conceal the fault.
To me the scar was nothing, but I gathered from her reaction, to Mia it must have seemed the Grand Canyon of ugliness.
I wanted to know. So I asked, “What happened?”
She met my gaze straight on, really direct. “I was attacked by a psycho at my brother’s high school football game. Knifed—”
She abruptly stopped and the way she was staring at me now gave me the shivers. I experienced a sharp pain in my chest so acute I actually coughed. Her expression cut right through me—skin, muscle, bone—and then passed out my back like an invisible laser. I’d never experienced such an unnatural feeling before, but before I could consider that I might be having a heart attack, it was gone. I was me again.
“Knifed?” I repeated.
She continued watching, but it wasn’t the same as moments ago. “My brother was an all state running back and he was supposed to rush for over two hundred yards that night. Johnny Lingo rushed for three hundred and one. Just before the game, a sketcher high on speed ambushed me—Michael, are you sure we haven’t met before?”
I shoo
k my head. “Last week,” I replied lightly, though something heavy had just occurred I was unable to put a finger on. All I knew was I wanted to get this conversation behind us. “I’m sorry I asked.”
Her smile and her hand on mine told me everything was still cool.
For the next three months I spent as much time as I could with Mia. Once when she caught sight of my cell phone—still didn’t work here—she laughed and called me a young successful dinosaur. “Your phone is out of the dark ages.” I’d laughed and promptly tossed the antiquated gizmo in the trash. By then I’d decided I’d seen the last of Dinjis and his clock-strewn office. I loved it here. I was everything I wasn’t back there—successful with stocks (I’d kept my account at EasyTrade deciding this was more prudent than opening an account with Mia’s firm, and hired a financial wiz to square my taxes with the IRS), rich, driving a luxury sports car, and best of all, in love with a fabulously beautiful girl who loved me back. Every time Dinjis’s poppers’ rules bounced in my head, I popped them out of my mind like yesterday’s news.
For Christmas I gave her a two-carat friendship ring—I didn’t wish to scare her off because I knew how she enjoyed her independence—but I needn’t have worried. That night I moved in with her, and the following week we planted an ornamental pear tree in her front yard. Our tree. We tied a cerulean ribbon—her favorite color—around the trunk. We’d watch the tree grow old together.
How I loved making love to Mia’s body and mind. At times I felt like we’d fuse and become one; the sensation was like being wrapped in soft silk while a hundred titillating fingers sensuously massaged every inch of our warm skin. I couldn’t have walked away from this if a gun had been placed against my head. I’d become so enthralled in my love I failed to understand that in fact, that’s exactly what had happened.
A loaded gun was pressed into my skull.
One afternoon in the spring—our pear tree was blooming—I came home from a day of trading. I was actually getting pretty good at this stock game on my own. As soon as I stepped through the front door, a powerful sense of foreboding struck. I found Mia upstairs in our bedroom. She jumped, startled and embarrassed, when I came in and said her name. When she turned I could see she’d been crying.
“What’s wrong, baby?” I asked.
She looked up at me with her huge pony-brown eyes and said, “I don’t know, Michael. I came in our bedroom and felt this overpowering sensation that we aren’t going to end well. I mean…oh hell, I don’t know what I mean.” She began to wipe a tear that had gotten caught up in the thin mound of scarring on her cheek, but my thumb beat her to it. She caught my wrist. “I don’t want to lose you, Michael. And I’m so afraid I—”
“You aren’t going to lose me, Mia. I love you. I’ve loved you since the first time I saw you.”
“I love you, Michael Jenks. Don’t leave me.”
Tendrils of cold crept from dark recesses inside my chest. “Mia, why would you say that? Leave you? Never, baby.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
My promise would remain unbroken for only four months.
My account had continued to appreciate to the comfortable sum of one-hundred-ten million dollars. But even on my good trading days, I couldn’t shake the cold within me. I’d stand in the sun, with my face to the sky, willing, begging the warmth from above to warm my insides. Nothing worked—except for making love to Mia. Damn, how I fed off that vibrant woman I’d come to cherish. Late at night I would sometimes stand alone and study my reflection in the mirror and wonder what had happened to that loser kid from my DU. The kid who’d stocked shelves at Home Depot and drove a clunker Tundra. The kid who couldn’t get a decent date. “That was ten years ago,” I’d mouth to the mirror with a confident, brash grin. Then I’d fist bump my reflection. Yeah, I had changed.
Two weeks before my reckoning, I drove down to a big office on Wilshire, hired an expensive three-piece-suit attorney and drew up a will. I named my parents each for five million if I passed first—you come from good stock—and left the rest to Mia. She’d be set for life and this made me feel like a million bucks.
Honestly, I’d had no intention of ever returning to my former life. Dinjis could take that huge clock with the six hands and digital windows, hell, he could take all his fucking clocks, pack them in an iron safe and sink them in the cold blue Pacific. My popping days were long over.
That conviction solidified to granite the evening Mia declared, “I missed my period.”
“You’re pregnant?”
She beamed. “Yes!” But I didn’t miss the wisp of fear in her beautiful face.
She needn’t have doubted anything, at least involving my feelings.
“God Mia, I love you.”
We planned to marry before the baby was born.
But the fabric of time can be a fickle friend…or deceitful enemy.
That night we made love like we were the last two humans on earth. Everyone else had vanished from the planet because of a love-eating plague, but we’d wrapped ourselves so tightly in each others arms and our love was so strong and wide and big that no plague could destroy us. So we survived.
For long hours after she drifted off to sleep I watched her—really watched her—her rhythmic inhalations, the rise of her chest, her peaceful angelic expression, the manner in which her hair lay on the pillow spread out like some exotic fan. I traced my finger less than a millimeter above her skin following the thin, thin scar that ran from just below the corner of her eye to her ear. The plastic surgeons had done an exemplary repair but I realized even if the scar had been red and ugly and raised I still would have loved Mia Lingo. I was the happiest man alive.
Finally sleep overtook me and my last conscious thought was Mia would be with me in the morning.
Mia came out of the bathroom and gazed at me. Instantly, a snowball formed in my gut though the morning sun’s rays through the bedroom window warmed the mattress where I lay. She wore this odd, almost perplexed look that made me wonder if she was ill. Morning sickness didn’t start this early, did it? Then I realized what was so strange. She wasn’t exactly gazing at me.
“Mia?” I said.
She kept studying my side of the bed, the wrinkled sheets, as if a piece of her favorite puzzle had gone missing. I waved my hand at her, trying to be funny, and again she didn’t respond. Oh fuck. That snowball had suddenly become a blizzard. “Mia!” I shouted. My head suddenly felt as if a nest of ravenous, crawling centipedes had hatched in my brain. “Mia!” I screamed again, leaping toward her, overwhelming panic coursing through my bones.
I reached clean through her!
And I knew.
“Michael?” she called, fearfully.
“I’m here, baby.”
But I wasn’t.
“Michael, Michael!”
I could feel myself inexorably being pulled away, back to my DU. “Dinjis!” I screamed in terror. “Don’t do this to me—to us, please!”
I gazed down at my fingers and watched them vanish in thin air. “Dinjis!”
Then my arms, then my feet. A stabbing pain exploded in my chest and I had one last second to see her, God how I wanted to touch her, “I’ll always love you, Mia Lingo,” I said, before popping back from where I came.
“How could you be so fucking stupid?”
I refused to meet Dinjis’s steely gaze, instead choosing to watch the big clock. I’d been gone exactly eleven months, two days, eight hours, fourteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds. My Default Universe elapsed time was around ten minutes because that’s how long I’d been back in Dinjis’s office after popping back.
He wouldn’t let up. “You do realize what this means, don’t you, Michael?”
I shrugged, glancing at my wrinkled pants, the same clothes I’d been wearing when I popped that last time—a little over ten minutes ago—into my AU.
“Yes.” But strangely I didn’t give a shit. I’d left my heart ten years in my
future.
“You do recall what I told you would happen if you died in your AU?”
I rubbed my neck. Fuck, I was depressed but for all the wrong reasons. “I would pop back into my DU.”
“Exactly.”
Something wasn’t right. Actually it was awfully wrong. “But I didn’t die in my AU.”
Dinjis shook his head. “Sadly, no Michael.” He stood abruptly. “You ran out of time. You used too much of your future. Michael, you’re going to die today!”
I simply nodded weakly. Life expectancies are as fickle as time. So much for living until eighty. Like I said, depressed for all the wrong reasons. I didn’t move, I didn’t breathe. God, I wanted to see her one last time. Needed to.
Then Dinjis got it. “Oh, don’t tell me you didn’t. Please tell me you are smarter than that. You had almost a year to make so much money. Tell me you didn’t, Michael.”
I refused to look at him. All I could see was that last image of Mia staring confused at my empty, messed up side of her bed.
“Damn, Michael, you did.” Dinjis slapped a fist against his desktop. “You fell in fuckdamn love!”
I wanted to cry. “She was twenty-five, she was beautiful, I didn’t care about the money after I met her…”
“And?”
“She was pregnant.”
Dinjis jolted to his feet. “You what? You impregnated some girl from your future? Son of a bitch, Michael, tell me this is all a grave misunderstanding. Tell me this ain’t so, dammit. Say it!”
I stood. “I have to see her again.”
“You can’t return to your AU. The Paradox, Michael. Once you’re about to die in your DU, your AU no longer exists. It never did.”
“I was there. She was there.” I swallowed, giving me a second to build my resolve. “And I’m not talking about my AU.”
Dinjis glanced worriedly at the time warp stamp. “It’s been ten years.”
“I don’t care.” I dropped the plastic time card on his desk. “Guess I won’t be needing this anymore.” I stared at where the door to my AU had been. Only a wall now.
“Michael, where will you go?”
I didn’t answer, the reality of what was about to happen to me finally settling in. “When will I…?” I couldn’t complete the question.
Dinjis averted his gaze—very un-Dinjis-like. “Even I can’t tell you that. But you will die today.”
The Eclective: Time Collection Page 7
