Last Year

by Robert Charles Wilson

  “What do you tell her?”

  “As much of the truth as I think a four-year-old can understand. But the worst of it? My last day at home, we were taking a walk around the neighborhood, the three of us, me and my mom and Gabby, and Gabby tripped over the curb and skinned her knee. The usual kid crisis, but the thing is, she ran crying to my mom. Not to her mother—to her grandmother.”

  “It was probably just—”

  “Oh, I ran through all the probably just excuses. Probably she isn’t used to me being around, is what it boils down to. And that’s exactly the problem. Rock and a hard place. I need this job to make a real home for Gabby, but I can’t make a real home for Gabby while I have this job.”

  Their meals arrived. Ground beef on a bun, fried potatoes, and salad, better than the fast-food equivalents Jesse had grown accustomed to at the City. The beef tasted like actual beef, for one thing.

  “It’s the last year,” Jesse said. “You’ll be back with her soon.”

  “But who’s to say another six months isn’t six months too many? How long does it take to lose that mother-daughter connection? Which is another reason why—”

  “What?”

  “Nothing. How’s your burger?”

  “Good,” he said. “Hearty. A little complicated, what with the avocado and onions and all.”

  “Best of both worlds, in a way—1877 American beef, grain fed and pharmaceutical free, butchered and stored to twenty-first-century standards. The hotel’s chef has an arrangement with a local slaughterhouse. Kobe beef’s got nothing on it, if you ask me.”

  “Why, are your cattle anemic?”

  “Two words: factory farm. Not that I have much experience with high-end beef. Half the time, at our house, we do McDonald’s like everybody else. My mom’s a Doritos-and-Coke kind of gal when she isn’t praying. But I try to make sure Gabby gets enough veggies.”

  “If she lacks for anything,” Jesse said, “it’s not a mother’s love.”

  Maybe it was the wrong thing to say. Elizabeth stared at him for an awkward moment. He hoped he hadn’t offended her. But she changed the subject: “I guess Kemp told you about San Francisco.”

  “Not much about it. That we’ll be hunting a runner. Maybe or maybe not the infamous letter-writer.”

  “Are you okay with San Francisco? Because I don’t know what happened to you there, but it was obviously bad enough to leave you traumatized.”

  “Do you want me to tell you about it?”

  She frowned. “I’m not asking you to.”

  “I know.”

  “I guess the question is, whatever happened, will it affect your work?”

  He had lied to Kemp when Kemp asked a less well-informed version of the same question. But this was Elizabeth. “I don’t know. It’s possible.”

  “You have enemies there?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. I appreciate the honesty. This is strictly between us. But if I need to know something, you’ll tell me, right?”

  “I give you my word.”

  An hour had passed, and their plates were as empty as they were going to get. Elizabeth said, “My room is on the third floor.”

  “The one they gave me is on the fourth.”

  “And I think we should keep it that way. Like I said, what happened at Futurity Station—”

  “When we shared a bed, you mean? Speaking bluntly, which you usually prefer to do.”

  He had not thought she was capable of blushing, that obligatory act of females in popular fiction. But she came close. “Okay, well, I don’t know if we should do it again. Not because I don’t want to, necessarily. But because there’s no future in it.”

  Future: How many meanings could such a simple word have?

  “The thing is,” Elizabeth went on, not meeting his eyes, “I thought about this a whole lot when I was back home. Told myself it was a mistake and unfair to both of us. Unprofessional conduct. Do you know what I’m saying?”

  “Yes.”

  “And we’ve been apart long enough that being with you now seems kind of overwhelming.”

  “All right.”

  “That’s it? Just, all right?”

  “I don’t know what else to say. I know I’m not entitled to expect anything. What happened at the depot is a memory I treasure, but I’m not so vain as to think it means I have a claim on you.”

  The waiter arrived to clear their table. The rattle of plates and cutlery was the sound of empires falling. They folded their napkins and signed for their meals and walked in silence to the elevators. Jesse got a wave and a wink from Amos Creagh at the reception desk, which he pretended not to see. The elevator door rolled open; they punched their respective destinations into the panel of illuminated numbers.

  The elevator rose to the third floor. The doors slid open. The doors slid closed.

  “You missed your stop,” Jesse said.

  “I changed my mind,” she said.

  10

  The Blackwell letters were a problem, but Kemp’s declaration to the press that he would publish the true story next December created enough ambiguity for the City to continue conducting its business more or less unmolested. Jesse supposed most folks thought of the visitors from the future as near-mythical beings—like the moon-men the New York Sun famously claimed to have discovered back in 1835—and mythical beings were expected to do shocking or unusual things. You’d be disappointed if they didn’t. The clergy and the columnists might disapprove, but that counted for little, barring further trouble.

  The City train laid over for a week at Futurity Station. Ordinarily it would have dropped off passengers from New York and picked up a new load of tourists bound for San Francisco, all within a span of hours, but Kemp needed more time than that to confer with his managers and make contingency plans. Which left Jesse and Elizabeth with very little to do, not altogether a bad thing. Kemp gave everyone on his personal security team passes to the live shows in both Towers, and on their first night back at the City Jesse had the pleasure of sitting next to Elizabeth for the final performance of a week-long concert series by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, who had been lured home from a European tour with the promise of a substantial donation to the Negro college they represented.

  Jesse enjoyed the music well enough, and the audience of mostly white twenty-first-century visitors rewarded the ensemble’s performance with a rapturous standing ovation. After that Kemp himself came onstage to present a bank draft for an implausibly large amount of money to one of the group’s bass singers, a man named Loudin—enough to sustain Fisk for decades, Jesse imagined. It seemed like a magnanimous gesture, though Elizabeth said sales of recordings of tonight’s performance would generate vastly larger sums for Kemp’s corporation, far in excess of what he had donated. As they filed out of the auditorium, Elizabeth said, “So you like gospel music?”

  “Is that what you call what we just heard? I guess I like it all right.”

  “I don’t know much about your taste in music.”

  “There isn’t much to know. I like to hear a brass band every once in a while. I don’t play an instrument, but I guess I can sing as well as the next man. What about you?”

  “I download all kinds of things,” she said obscurely.

  Jesse got a taste of twenty-first-century music at the Cirque du Soleil show in Tower Two the following night. But the show was primarily an acrobatic exhibition, and he was too dazzled by the leaping and the colored lights to pay attention to the score. Much of the music was generated electronically, Elizabeth said, and it sounded to Jesse as if it had been produced by an orchestra of enormous, enthusiastically buzzing insects.

  On their third night in the City they attended the much-anticipated Tower One event in which Thomas Edison spoke with a scientific celebrity of the future, whose name Jesse promptly forgot. Edison seemed intimidated by the stage lights and the audience’s enthusiasm, while the interviewer’s attempts to describe the devices that had evolved from Edison’s experiment
s left him looking bewildered and uncomfortable. But the inventor’s mood improved when Kemp came on stage with another bank draft, this one intended “to underwrite Mr. Edison’s further research.”

  No mention was made of any patents that might have been preempted by the publication of Advice for Engineers from the City of Futurity. That book and its companion, Advice for Physicians and Medical Practitioners from the City of Futurity, had been hurried into print by a Boston publisher just days ago, in the hope that the prospect of safer bridges and more effective anodynes would subdue any incipient moral panic. As a result Kemp convinced his advisors that an immediate evacuation was uncalled for and that the City’s tours could safely continue, at least for now. The journey to San Francisco would resume, though any setbacks might make it the last.

  On the day the train was due to leave Jesse took a pensive walk around Tower Two, through the ground-floor galleries and high tiled lobbies, the restaurants and theaters on the mezzanine level, the gymnasium and the heated swimming pool, the concrete pad where the Sikorsky airship squatted like a burnished steel damselfly. This was the labyrinth he had inhabited for four years, an illusion he had helped to create and sustain. Once Kemp closed the Mirror, ownership of all remaining City property would revert to the Union Pacific Railroad. The City would still be a tourist attraction. But its new proprietors would not be able to maintain these buildings indefinitely. The machines that made them habitable would wear out, irreplaceable parts would break. One day, Jesse thought, sooner rather than later, this whole vast palace would be a ruin. Barn owls would roost in the rafters of the Gallery of Manned Flight, and mice would nest under the chairs in the Theater of Tomorrow.

  These thoughts haunted him as he rode the coach through the main gates toward Futurity Station and the westbound train, looking back at the towers where they stabbed the twilight like alabaster knives. He wanted to fix the image in his memory, to possess it as his own.

  “Cheer up,” Elizabeth said. “I got you something.”

  He turned away from the window and stared at her in amazement. She held a small box in her hand. He said, “A gift?”

  “I’m a giving it to you, so yeah, you can call it a gift. Here.” She thrust the box at him as if it embarrassed her.

  “What is it?”

  “Nothing, really. It’s just an old iPod, plus a solar charger and some decent headphones. I loaded it with tunes from the Apple Store.”

  “Tunes?”

  “Music. Songs.”

  “Music from the twenty-first century?”

  “And the twentieth. I tried to be eclectic.”

  “You brought this with you from the future?”

  “Well, yeah. Once we have some privacy I can show you how it works.”

  “Elizabeth … I don’t know how to thank you.”

  “It’s not such a big deal.”

  “I think it is.”

  “Okay, I’m glad you like it.”

  I was on her mind, Jesse thought. Out there in her unimaginable shadow of a future, I was on her mind. Just as she had been on his. And that was both a good and a bad thing.

  * * *

  The City train was a special train, pulled by one of the special engines Kemp had brought from the future—a coal-burning steam engine constructed with materials and expertise far in advance of anything available at the Schenectady Locomotive Works. The engine’s blunt, rounded lines and glossy black finish attracted gawkers wherever it passed, and the passenger cars behind it were almost as astonishing: heated or cooled as the weather required, fully electrified. The sleeping cars were expansive, the dining cars served hot meals at all hours, and all the windows were fashioned of a special glass that would repel bullets in case of an attack. The threat of violence was small but real: The Sioux had ceased hostilities for the most part, and some of the Pawnee had even been hired to stage mock attacks at scheduled hours for the entertainment of tourists, but banditry was always possible, and labor troubles were commonplace. Just days ago a strike against the B&O Railroad in West Virginia had spread to Maryland, shutting down freight and passenger traffic through Cumberland. These same events had happened in Elizabeth’s history, but weeks later—an example of what the experts called historical drift.

  But at least for now, all these threats seemed a world away. For two days the train sped across the western prairies (fast as a bullet, Jesse thought, though Elizabeth seemed to find it quaintly slow), and Kemp summoned them each morning for a brief conference but made no other demands on their time. Jesse and Elizabeth had been assigned separate sleeping compartments but they spent their nights in Elizabeth’s room, where there was a sort of folding bed attached to the wall: hardly big enough even for one, but they found ways to make it accommodate two as the train rocked through the western darkness.

  They talked, when they weren’t otherwise entangled. It seemed to Jesse that their talk became a kind of ethereal lovemaking, a subtler and more complex way of undressing each other. He tried to tell her—on the third night of the trip, rattling through Wyoming under stars as bright as pirate treasure—that the talk meant as much to him as what she casually called “the fucking.” But it was hard to explain. He said, “When I was younger—”

  “Back in the whorehouse, you mean?”

  The light came from an electrical fixture turned to its dimmest setting. Elizabeth sat cross-legged at the far end of the bed, dressed in nothing but the cotton shorts she called “panties” and a white cotton T-shirt. Jesse was down to his City-issue briefs, the kind with a loose flap in front, where his lax manhood was even now threatening to make a reappearance. “Back at Madame Chao’s,” he said, “I saw more of women’s bodies than most boys my age. I got to know cooch the way a farm boy knows chickens.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “The girls at Madame Chao’s had a captive boy to scandalize, and they scandalized me until I couldn’t be scandalized any longer. The female body held no mysteries for me. The men who came to the door, I knew what they paid for, and I knew how much they paid for it. My father made sure I understood how the business worked, on the grounds that ignorance would be more dangerous to me than knowledge. But there were still mysteries.”

  Elizabeth nodded, waiting for him to go on. The train ticked and muttered against the tracks. Between the rounds of their lovemaking Jesse had lost all sense of time. It was long past midnight, certainly. A sky like ink behind the bulletproof glass of the window. He said, “Those girls, none of them was born in China. Lots of Chinamen were brought over to work the mines and railroads, hardly any women. Madame Chao was born in Pekin, or so she told us, and she came to California by way of New Zealand, but most of her girls were native to the Tenderloin, born to white whores in the houses that served the Six Companies. Madame Chao dressed them up in cheap silks and gave them music-hall names and taught them the kind of Chinatown patois that impressed the customers, but they mostly spoke English on their own time. Some of them weren’t even partly Chinese. We had one girl who was some kind of mestiza from Churubusco, passing herself off under the name Lotus Blossom. Sunday afternoons, or any time the house wasn’t open for business, I might walk past an open door and see Lotus and Mei-Ling in nothing but their underclothes, darning socks or playing cards—laughing at some joke, talking the way they never talked during business hours. Times like that, they never invited me in. I think it was because those moments were all they really owned. They didn’t own what they had between their legs—they’d show that to a curious twelve-year-old if he asked nicely and didn’t take liberties, because it wasn’t intimate to them and showing it off wasn’t an intimacy—do you understand?”

  “I guess so.”

  “What they wouldn’t share were those private moments. And it was the very thing they refused to share that I began to crave—I craved it the way some men crave the fucking. I didn’t just want what those women sold, though it would be a lie to say I didn’t want it. I wanted the kind of intimacy a woman can’t be paid or forced
to give.”

  Elizabeth’s face had grown somber. “And did you get it?”

  “No. Nor did I expect to. But I think it’s why—”

  “Why what?”

  “Why all this”—the darkened train compartment, the frankness of their bodies—“feels like such a gift.”

  Elizabeth was silent, and Jesse was afraid he had embarrassed or insulted her. It was the first time he had tried to talk about these things, and he had done it clumsily. But the women he had known best were all whores or widows or working girls. Apart from his aunt Abbie, who lived on Nob Hill, there had been no Boston matrons in his social circle. He was about to apologize when she said, “Those girls—”

  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have talked about them.”

  “No, it’s the way you talk about them. Jesse … are any of those girls still alive?”

  Elizabeth had a disconcerting talent for hearing all the words he was careful not to speak. He said, “A few of them survived.”

  “We should talk about that.”

  Maybe so. It was a subject Jesse wasn’t eager to discuss—Roscoe Candy and Madame Chao’s whores and what had happened to his sister—in part because he could hardly bear the thought of dragging Elizabeth into the sordid history of San Francisco’s Tenderloin. But there were things she needed to know, and maybe this was the best place to discuss them, here on a sleek train barreling through a desert night.

  But the window had turned more blue than black, a horizon had begun to emerge from the darkness. The high Laramie plains. Purple mountains ahead, fruited plains behind. And before Jesse could frame a word, their pagers, buried under mounds of hastily discarded clothing, began to chime, and the train began to slow, and Elizabeth scrambled to dress herself.

  11