Three Days to Never: A Novel

by Tim Powers

  The action reminded her of having waved at Daphne, possibly half an hour ago. What was that all about? she wondered again. Hello? Here I am? Daphne Marrity is not my younger self!

  Once inside, she switched to the point of view of the clerk behind the counter, without even having seen if it was a man or a woman. The clerk didn’t look at her wallet as the pack of Marlboros slid across the counter between the displays of Bic lighters and little cans of cold-sore balm, so she had to feel for two one-dollar bills—she kept ones folded into squares, to distinguish them from the fives that were folded twice lengthwise, the tens that were folded once lengthwise, and the twenties that were not folded at all. She could see the two quarters the clerk gave her in change, so she didn’t have to feel for the milled edges of the coins to know what they were.

  Outside again, she paused in the hot, smoggy breeze, scanning the nearby viewpoints for a view of herself; over the years she had become very good at picking herself out even in very crowded scenes. And after a few seconds she located herself in the view of a man—she could see the edges of a mustache at the bottom of the view field—at the roofed RTD bus-stop bench across Willoughby, and he obligingly watched her as she walked the dozen yards to the gate of her apartment building. He even kept her in view as she stepped along the grass-bordered pavement to the front door of her apartment, so she didn’t have to drag the fingers of one hand along the walls and windows of the other ground-floor apartments, as she sometimes did.

  By touch she fitted the key into the front-door lock, and bolted the door behind her once she was inside. Through the eyes of the man across the street, she could dimly see her silhouette inside the apartment through the always uncurtained windows, but that view was of no use, and she let it go.

  Her apartment was chilly with air-conditioning, and the faint smells of upholstery and damp plant soil were a relief after the aggressive exhaust-and-salsa smells of the street.

  She hung her keys on the hook by the door and took three strides forward across the carpet, and with the fourth step her left rubber-soled Rockport tapped the linoleum tiles of the kitchen floor.

  She peeled the cellophane off the pack of Marlboros and tapped one out. Several lighters were in the drawer under the counter, glasses in the cupboard above, the bottle of Wild Turkey on the Formica-top table, and in ten seconds she had sat down at the table and poured a couple of inches of bourbon into the glass and was waving the fingers of one hand over the lighter to be sure it had lit; then she slowly brought it toward the end of the cigarette, puffing until she could taste the smoke.

  She inhaled, then put the lighter down to take a sip of the bourbon; a moment later she exhaled smoke and bourbon fumes, and a lot of the tension in her shoulders went with them.

  But her heart was still going faster than usual, and she knew it was because of her brief vicarious experience of being outside the boundaries of one-second-at-a-time. It’s actually true, she thought cautiously, trying out the shape of the idea; you really can get into a higher dimension, from which the four dimensions we ordinarily live in can be viewed from outside. She had taken their word for it before, but now she’d actually seen what Rascasse and Golze had been talking about all along.

  If one of them’s got to kill the other, she thought, I hope it’s my poor old Rascasse who survives. Especially if he goes along with Golze’s evident decision that I no longer need to kill the young Frank Marrity. Obviously the situation’s changed since I was given that order. This crapped-out old Marrity, who has information we need to have, might just evaporate if I were to kill his younger self. Who knows? It all seems to be real, the old guy seems actually to be a visitor from the future.

  As I will be.

  She took another drag on the cigarette and another mouthful of the whiskey, and as she swallowed she let the shiver shake through her all the way to her fingertips, probably throwing the ash off her cigarette. And she realized that the nervousness she felt was relief and anticipation.

  This is going to work, she thought. I don’t have to kill Marrity, and this thing is going to work. I’ll be able to ditch this life, like a paper towel you cleaned up some nasty mess with. Throw it away and then wash every particle of memory off your hands.

  She recalled helping Golze lure a young man aboard the bus in Pasadena last night. Golze had used a stun gun on him once he was inside, and then had duct-taped his mouth, wrists, and ankles. She had been dropped off at the Arrowhead Pediatric Hospital in San Bernardino about half an hour later, and in all that time the young man had not moved. Perhaps Golze’s stun gun had killed him—Golze hadn’t referred to the incident today.

  She drained the remaining couple of ounces of bourbon in one swallow, and welcomed the depth-charge effect, the unfocusing warmth spreading through her whole body.

  She stood up and crossed to the sink, where she put down the empty glass and ran water over the cigarette, afterward dropping the soggy filter in the wastebasket.

  As she walked back across the living room carpet, she was remembering Ellis, her last boyfriend; he had said that Elizabeth Taylor didn’t seem attractive to him in old movies like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or Butterfield 8 because the image of her present-day self kept getting in the way.

  She stepped sideways onto the linoleum of the bathroom floor, into the faint smells of Lysol and rust. She opened the medicine cabinet and took down a hand-size plastic bottle of baby shampoo and squirted some into her palm and began washing her hands, rubbing her fingertips. Before the shampoo had been entirely washed from her fingers, she several times brushed warm water over her eyelashes, from the bridge of her nose outward.

  She had only seen the young Frank Marrity twice, briefly, both times through the eyes of his twelve-year-old daughter: yesterday at 1:00 p.m., when he had been sitting across from the daughter at the Italian restaurant, and five hours before that, when he had been sitting at his kitchen table next to the old version of himself. The old one had been drinking something brown, brandy or whiskey.

  Did the young Marrity imagine that the older man was his father, as Charlotte had? Would that be what the old man had told him?

  Charlotte called up young Marrity’s face—lean and kind and humorous under the disordered dark hair, very different from the defeated, pouchy face of the old guy. And the voices had nothing in common—young Marrity’s was a clear tenor, while the old guy’s was hoarse and raspy. She didn’t see them as the same guy—no perceptible Elizabeth Taylor effect.

  She lowered her chin as if to whistle a deep bass note, opening her eyelids wide; then drew her left forefinger along her lower eyelid until she could feel the bottom edge of the plastic scleral shell. And with a gently gouging push, she popped it right off the coral sphere implant and onto the palm of her hand.

  A moment later she had done the same with the right eye. She rinsed the prosthetic eye shells, rolling the flexible plastic between her still slick fingers.

  When they were clean, she dried them on a towel and carefully laid them in a silk-lined glasses case and snapped it shut and slid it onto the shelf above the toilet.

  She kept her eyelids open wide to let the coral spheres air out. Of her eyes are coral made, she thought.

  She was aware of a viewpoint not far away, and she focused on it. The young student in the next apartment was staring at his television screen, on which Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh were sitting on a veranda, watching a little girl riding a horse sidesaddle; and Charlotte had taken a step toward the living room, to turn on her own television set and get audio to go with the clairvoyant picture, but then she noticed that the lights were glowing on the student’s VCR, on top of the television set—Gone With the Wind wasn’t being shown on a TV channel, he had rented a tape of it.

  The student always watched the news on Channel 7 at 7:00 a.m., and sometimes Charlotte set her alarm so that she could watch it through his eyes, listening to the sound on her own set. Usually, though, she would rather sleep.

  Ellis had been good wit
h movies, generally paying pretty close attention. She had made a show of keeping her eyes pointed toward the screen to encourage him to do the same. And he had been a great reader, never skimming or skipping pages—often she had just sat beside him on the couch, her eyes closed, reading along through his eyes. He had liked John D. MacDonald and Dick Francis mysteries, which were fine, but she wished she could meet a man who liked the Brontë sisters. Charlotte had only read Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre before being blinded. Frank Marrity probably liked the Brontës.

  She sighed and picked up her purse and the towel and counted her steps into the bedroom. She sat down on the bed, spread out the towel across the bedspread, and then pulled her .357 Smith & Wesson revolver out of her purse.

  With her finger outside the trigger guard and the gun pointed into the corner of the room, she pushed the cylinder-release button and swung the cylinder out to the side. She tilted the gun up and pushed the ejector rod; one heavy cartridge fell into her palm, along with five empty brass shells.

  Five shots! she thought with a shiver. And apparently all I did was break a window. She was glad now that she had not killed him.

  If Marrity had looked at her, she had planned to see herself facing him squarely and pointing the gun a bit below his eyes, so that she would not quite be able to see down the barrel. That ought to have had the gun aimed at his chest. And then squeeze the trigger. She had wondered if he would look down at the wound in himself or keep staring at her.

  In spite of her intimacy with Ellis, her recollections of him were nearly all of his profile at restaurants, as people at other tables had glanced over at him and Charlotte.

  When they had made love he had hardly ever looked at himself—not surprisingly, she thought; he wasn’t a narcissist—and so all her recollections of their passion were views of her own naked body. And of his hands.

  She had had perhaps half a dozen lovers during the nine years since the exploding battery had blinded her in the missile silo in the Mojave Desert; and her memory of every one of them was of her own body and a pair of hands.

  It still seemed odd to her that she and Denis Rascasse had never been lovers, not even when he had first recruited her three years ago.

  Involuntarily she found herself recalling old Robert Jerome, the Fuld Hall custodian at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, in New Jersey. She had seduced the amiable old man in order to get access to the restricted Einstein archives—and then had convinced him that she loved him, to get his help in robbing the extra-sensitive files still kept in the basement of Einstein’s old house on Mercer Street.

  Even with Robert Jerome, all she could remember was her own face and body, and his wrinkled, spotty hands.

  The pebbled-plastic gun-cleaning kit was in the bedside table drawer, and she lifted it out carefully and opened it on the blanket, by touch separating the rods and brushes and sharp-smelling bottles of solvent and oil.

  Was she a narcissist? If so, it was by default. She couldn’t help but always wind up looking at herself, through someone else’s eyes.

  But no, that wasn’t the way it was—she didn’t care about this blinded body, nor even about the twenty-eight-year-old woman who animated it.

  If I’m a narcissist, she thought, it’s in the same way that the crapped-out old-man Marrity probably is. We want to go back and rescue our younger, more innocent selves from some bad thing that threatens them. I have done nothing but in care of thee. We’re willing to throw ourselves away—make ourselves into things that ought to be thrown away—if by doing so we can save that one precious person who by our disgraceful actions will be spared our disgraces.

  She looks like I used to.

  According to Rascasse, it’s possible to leave now and go back and change your past, then return in Newtonian recoil to now again, with your memories intact—with, in effect, two sets of recollections: memories of the original-issue life and memories of the revised one too. Einstein apparently did that in 1928, and Lieserl Marity probably did it in 1933. But I won’t do it that way, Charlotte thought. I won’t come back.

  Throw it away and then wash every particle of memory off your hands.

  Robert Jerome had used those old hands she remembered to make a noose out of his own shirt, not very long after Charlotte had impatiently explained to him that she had never loved him, that she had only seduced him to get the papers she had stolen. He had been in jail for being an accessory to burglary, his job and pension lost, when he had killed himself.

  He had also been guilty of perjury, in absolving Charlotte of all blame; through a Vespers decoy address she had eventually received a letter that he had written to her from the jail, but she had never asked anybody to read it for her.

  I won’t impose these memories on the redeemed Charlotte Sinclair, she thought as she began screwing the .38-caliber brush onto one of the rods. I’ll save her and then just go away, with all my sins unshared.

  Nymph, she thought, reflexively misquoting Hamlet, in your orisons be all my sins forgotten.

  Bennett and Moira had walked ahead as the four of them made their way up the steep curves of Hollyridge Drive, with Marrity and Daphne trudging along behind, all of them crowding against a fence or garage door whenever a car slowly moved up or down the narrow lane. Marrity couldn’t imagine what happened when two cars needed to pass each other.

  Mockingbirds made sneering calls from the aromatic eucalyptus trees overhanging the embankment to their right, and the one resident who noticed the four of them—a blond woman who was hovering with a watering can over a row of tomato plants in red clay pots—stared at them with evident unease. Pedestrians who weren’t jogging or walking dogs were apparently unusual. Marrity wasn’t surprised—the noon sun was a weight on his shoulders, and this hike would have been strenuous even if he were not carrying his jacket and his briefcase and Rumbold’s shoe box. Bennett was holding a paper bag that had a bottle of scotch whisky in it—he’d bought it at the Mayfair Market on Franklin, one block north of Hollywood Boulevard.

  Moira had finally driven into the market parking lot about an hour after Bennett had called her. They had all got into another taxi then, while Bennett and Marrity both tried at once to explain to Moira why they were all fugitives, even she; and then, when they had driven no more than half a mile up through the narrow, twisting lanes that curled like shaded streams down the Hollywood Hills, Bennett had told the driver to stop.

  Now Moira halted and kicked off her shoes, so Bennett stopped too, and they waited for Marrity and Daphne to catch up.

  “So are these spies, Frank?” Moira asked, standing on one foot to rub the sole of the other. “Soviets, KGB?”

  “I don’t know,” Marrity said, pausing to switch his briefcase to his left hand and cradle his jacket and Rumbold in his right arm. “I guess if the NSA’s after them, they probably are.”

  “Bennett says they…shot at you and Daphne?”

  “Shot at me, aimed a gun at me and Daph. Serious both times.” He lifted his briefcase to wipe his forehead on his shirtsleeve. “This is all true, Moira.”

  “Bennett says you told him Grammar’s father was Albert Einstein.” She smiled at him. “I could lose my job over this, not going back after lunch.”

  Marrity was tempted to open his briefcase and show her the Einstein letters; but he still didn’t trust Bennett with knowing about them. “The NSA man we met last night said her father was Einstein,” Marrity told her. “So did our father, yesterday morning.”

  Beside him Daphne nodded solemnly.

  Moira’s smile had disappeared. “Our father? Who do you mean?”

  Marrity looked at Bennett, who shrugged and rolled his eyes. Clearly he had not told Moira about seeing their father.

  “My father. Your father. He’s back. He—”

  “Our father?” Her shoes fell out of her hands and clattered on the asphalt.

  “Yes, Moira,” said Marrity patiently, “he came back because he heard Grammar died, and he wants to make
a deal with these—”

  “You’ve talked to him? Where is he?”

  Daphne crouched to pick up Moira’s shoes.

  “He’s with these people who are after us,” said Marrity, “who shot at me. He—”

  “Where?” She swayed on the narrow black pavement, and Marrity and Bennett each reached out to grab one of her arms. Marrity dropped his jacket.

  “I don’t know where he is now!” said Marrity. “He was standing on Grammar’s lawn when we drove away, an hour and a half ago. We wanted him to come with us, but he waved us off, said, ‘Go!’ We couldn’t wait.”

  “He had amnesia,” said Moira, “all these years. I’m sure of it.” Very slowly, supported by Marrity and Bennett, she sat down on the asphalt. The skirt of her brown linen suit was knee length, and she had to sit with her legs stretched out in front of her. Daphne frowned and crouched again to press her palm against the street surface, and Marrity knew she was checking to see if the tar was sticky.

  “You can’t just sit here,” said Bennett anxiously. “Get up, it’s only a few steps to this key I have the, house I have the key to.”

  “Come on, Moira,” said Marrity.

  Daphne was crouched beside Moira, her face level with the woman’s. “We should get in out of the sun,” Daphne said. “We’ll all get skin cancer.”

  Moira blinked at her. “Of course, dear,” she said, and let Marrity and her husband help her back onto her feet.

  Daphne picked up her father’s jacket and carried it and Moira’s shoes the rest of the way. They were nearly at the top of the hill, where Hollyridge made a hairpin turn to the left to become Beachwood, and the street was narrow and steep between the eucalyptus trees.

  Bennett waved at a shaded one-story house that was crowded up to the street pavement on their left. Red bougainvillea blossoms clustered over the door and two windows. “This is it,” he said tiredly, pulling a set of keys from the pocket of his slacks.