Three Days to Never: A Novel

by Tim Powers

  He ran a word in his head, and then permitted himself to say it out loud: “Good.”

  “Better than the Catholics’ Confession, isn’t it? You just snip off the sinful yards of tape and start over. No repentance required.”

  “Nobodaddy,” said Marrity, to get past that subject. “Like in Blake?”

  “Who’s Blake?”

  “Poet. Late eighteenth century, mostly.”

  “Oh, William Blake, sure. He wrote a poem about somebody called Nobodaddy? I thought it was beatnik slang, like Daddy-O.”

  “It was Blake’s name for the demiurge, the crazy god who created the universe. Not the eternal God—that one’s too remote to have anything to do with the universe.”

  Golze’s sweaty face was expressionless, and his mouth opened and closed without speech. At last, “Rascasse,” he said hoarsely. “That’s who Rascasse kills?”

  Marrity remembered wondering, in the boat on the lake in Echo Park half an hour ago, if Golze aspired to be in all places and moments at once, and if achieving that would make the fat man God.

  Marrity shrugged, an action Golze couldn’t perform. “If it was the Nobodaddy that Blake was talking about. Where did you get that term?”

  “I think Rascasse was the first to use it.” Golze looked around at the street and the houses and the old eucalyptus trees along the curbs in the sunlight, and Marrity thought he seemed to be frightened of the whole landscape.

  “August of Never,” Golze said, weakly but defiantly. “He’s still…monitoring my vital signs, I can feel his attention inside my chest. It’s as if Mr. A. Square of Flatland had somebody leaning down over him with a flashlight, peering at his innards. Worse than being naked. How does it work?”

  Marrity thought it was a rhetorical question, but a moment later Golze shifted to peer at him irritably.

  “How does it work?” said Marrity. “I don’t know. I guess if he’s working in a bigger group of dimensions—”

  “Not Rascasse,” Golze said. “I know how that works, don’t I, Denis?” he added, addressing the headliner above him. “He can hear all of this. No, I meant how does the time machine work? Do you need to kill somebody, to get past the Aeons?”

  “Well, I hardly traveled aeons—”

  “I mean living things, living categories, called Aeons, didn’t you study this stuff? Didn’t you read the Pistis Sophia? All the old Gnostic and Kabbalist literature talks about the Aeons, time and space as demons. And they are demons, believe me.”

  Marrity blinked at him. “Well, I didn’t have to kill anybody,” he said.

  Golze shifted on his seat as he tried to peer down at his wound. “It’s gonna be a long drive to Palm Springs,” he said tightly. “Maybe you become one of the Aeons, when you can travel in time. Maybe I sacrificed a guy to you last night. August of Never. So how does it work?”

  “You—use up your accumulated mass energy, you spend it, to propel yourself right out of your predestined time line. Einstein said that gravitation and acceleration are the same thing—there’s no difference between us sitting in this car with gravity pulling us down against the seats, on the one hand, and being away from any gravitating body in a car that’s accelerating upward through space at thirty-two feet per second per second, on the other hand. Let go of a pencil, and it doesn’t make any difference whether you say it rushes down to the floor or the floor rushes up to it.”

  Golze made an impatient beckoning gesture with the blood-spotted fingers of his right hand.

  “So every person on earth,” said Marrity, “has been accelerating at thirty-two feet per second per second all his life. Before he was a year old he would have exceeded the speed of light, if that were possible; but of course he can’t quite do that, so he’s been accumulating mass energy instead. I spent all my accumulated momentum when I broke out of sequential time.”

  And it has left me feeling empty, he thought.

  For several seconds Golze didn’t speak, then, “I hope California still exists, nineteen years in the future,” he said slowly. “It sounds as if you might have blown it off the continent, releasing that kind of energy.”

  “It was a, a shaped charge, it all went outward, out of our four dimensions—strike a match on a painting and you haven’t really hurt the painting—with me riding it like a guy fired out of a cannon.” Marrity smiled nervously. “Switzerland still existed when Einstein came back to it, after having exited this way, in 1928.”

  Golze seemed to have forgotten his gunshot wound. “You came back nineteen years. How far back could you have gone?”

  “I don’t know. Not farther back than my birth in 1952, I think, unless I could jump over to my mother’s lifeline.” His leg was aching, and he tried to shift to a more comfortable position in the passenger seat. “Certainly no farther back than whatever date it was when that configuration was assembled—the Chaplin slab and the maschinchen itself. I think Grammar put the machine together in 1931, and added the Chaplin slab in the 1950s.”

  The radio hummed, and then Rascasse’s unaccented and unechoing voice said, “How did you work it, the maschinchen thing?”

  Marrity reached for the microphone, but Golze shook his head. “Just talk,” the fat man said. “He’s just using the radio speaker now, he’s not actually on the air.”

  “It’s a—” Marrity sighed deeply, but he still felt empty. He took a deep breath and started again. “Among other things, it’s a very sensitive voltmeter,” he said, “and it amplifies tiny voltage differences. It’s ten rotating condensers set up in series, so that each beefs up the voltage into the next, up to where you can feel the current, if you’re standing barefoot on the two tiny gold posts that stick up through the bricks. They’re set flush with the bricks on the floor, no bigger than nail heads. This is in Grammar’s shed I’m talking about, and the condensers themselves are in a big dusty glass cylinder under the workbench—though I suppose those guys have it now! It was dusty in 2005, anyway, maybe Lieserl was Windexing it back here in 1987. And it looks fragile—the condenser plates apparently hang from a glass thread.”

  “And we could build this,” said the flat voice on the radio. “Not so difficult.”

  Marrity shook his head. “I said ‘among other things.’ Anyway, what you do is, you press your hands into the Chaplin handprints and then you send two astral projections of yourself to targets you’ve set up—one on a mountain, one at sea level or lower, while your body stays in the middle ground somewhere, standing barefoot on the gold electrodes. You guys know about astral projections, right? That way you’re existing in three time shells at once—they’re only slightly different, but the maschinchen amplifies tiny differences and imposes a combined-wave signal through the electrodes in the floor. You’re not in any one time shell anymore at this point, see, you’re smeared across three of them. And for your safety you need three of, of ‘you’—to spread out the recoil that’s coming up soon. Einstein only had two, in 1928: himself on a mountain in the Alps and a projection in the valley below him. It was enough to spread him across some time shells, but the recoil still nearly killed him.”

  Through the ragged hole in the windshield Marrity could see a sidewalk shaded by jacaranda trees. It all seemed a lot farther away than it could really be.

  ”‘Among other things,’” said the Rascasse voice. “What other things?”

  Marrity wished he could get out of the car. In spite of the fresh air blowing in through the torn windshield, the smell of burnt plastic was making him sick, and his bent leg ached all the way up to the hip.

  “In 2006 I wiped some of the dust off the glass cylinder the condensers are in,” he said hoarsely, “and looked in it with a flashlight. Einstein, or Lieserl, had painted Hebrew letters on the ten condensor plates. I couldn’t rotate them, or see the letters in toward the axis, but in several places I saw the Hebrew word Din, which is the name of one of the ten Sephirot, the ten world emanations of God. In his letters to Lieserl, Einstein seems to have equated Din with
determinism. Judgment with no mercy mixed in, I gather. No indeterminacy, no uncertainty. Anyway, I couldn’t have copied out all the letters on the plates without taking the thing apart.”

  “And now the Mossad has it,” said Golze. His voice was frail, and when Marrity looked at the fat man in the driver’s seat beside him, he wondered if Rascasse’s optimistic diagnosis was correct; Golze appeared to be dying. Perhaps Rascasse knew he was, and wanted him to die. Maybe Rascasse won’t need to have killed Nobodaddy, Marrity thought—maybe he can just prevent him.

  “And,” Marrity went on, “you couldn’t build the Chaplin slab.”

  “Are you close?” wheezed Golze irritably. “We’re sitting in a parked car with the windshield—fuck—broken out.”

  “Five minutes since we left from Echo Park,” said Rascasse’s voice, which seemed to be just shaking the air now, independent of the radio’s speaker. “We’re on the 101 now, soon to hit the Pasadena freeway junction. Just a few more minutes. What’s the Chaplin slab? Why wouldn’t…Shirley Temple’s do as well?”

  Marrity realized what had been nagging him about the way Rascasse was speaking—it was all in iambic pentameter.

  “The slab,” he said, “is a sort of kink in time—in conjunction with the machine, it works like a catalyst, it makes it easier to get out of the time stream. My sister, Moira, took out a restraining order against me, in 2003—claimed I was a dangerous drunk!—but one day when she wasn’t home, I broke into her stupid house and found some letters from Chaplin to Grammar, written in 1933 and ’34.” He smirked, distracted by the memory. “They may have been romantically involved! Grammar would only have been thirty-one in ’33, and Chaplin—”

  “Goddammit,” said Rascasse’s voice, “how’s the slab a kink in time?”

  “Right, right.” Marrity frowned but went on, “Well, Chaplin was with Grammar in ’33, when she jumped back in time, and he got dislocated too, for a moment. He found himself occupying his 1928 body, kneeling next to Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in the Chinese Theater forecourt, pressing his hands into wet cement. A moment later he was back in the Kaleidoscope Shed and it was 1933 again, but”—Marrity shrugged—“it was the 1933 Chaplin who made those handprints in 1928. The slab, just by existing, is a violation of sequential time.”

  “We’re on the Pasadena freeway now,” said Rascasse’s disembodied voice.

  Still in iambic pentameter, Marrity noted. His hands were trembling, and he clasped them together as if in prayer.

  Twenty-one

  After the bus had pulled up alongside the battered car and Marrity had helped Golze climb aboard, Rascasse’s voice from the bus radio had told the driver to go back to Hollywood and pick up Charlotte Sinclair; and again Marrity had noticed that Rascasse spoke in iambic pentameter.

  Now the bus was parked in streaky palm-tree shade in a remote corner of the Alpha Beta parking lot at Pico and La Cienega, idling with the air-conditioning running, and Charlotte was sprawled across the left-side seats just behind the Baphomet head’s cabinet, blinking sleepily and seeing through old Marrity’s eyes on the other side of the aisle. Golze was slumped next to Marrity, against the window frame, and when Marrity glanced at him she saw that the fat man’s face was deadly pale behind his sparse beard. She assumed that Rascasse’s body was still lying on a bunk in the back of the bus, but nobody had looked there and she hadn’t the energy to ask.

  She was about to feel in her purse for the half-pint of Wild Turkey when, through old Marrity’s eyes, she saw the pointer on the electronic Ouija board swoop up to the letter T in the upper-right corner. Nobody remarked on it.

  Rascasse’s voice rang out of the empty air behind the driver. “Paul’s right. We need to take the Daphne girl.”

  Charlotte had jumped in surprise and now she wished someone would look around. Take it easy, she told herself—if Rascasse can project his awareness, it should be no trick for him to project his voice. She took a deep breath and let it out.

  Today the bus smelled like a slum restroom: bleach and excrement. She didn’t let herself think about the young man she had helped lure aboard, last night; instead she recalled what the bodiless voice had just said.

  “Why the child?” she asked.

  Nobody answered her, and then Marrity’s view swiveled around to her. She couldn’t tell if she needed lipstick—nobody had looked squarely at her when they’d picked her up, and now her head was just a silhouette against the bright window at her back.

  “Daphne,” Marrity said, “burned up the Chaplin movie.” His voice was a hollow monotone, and she wished Golze would look at him.

  But Golze was just staring at his curled hands in his lap. “We need the damn movie,” he said. “We need sideways too, not just up and down.”

  “These two are going to take her to Palm Springs,” Marrity went on, “and somehow cause her never to have existed. I won’t remember her, or any of this, after.”

  Charlotte just said, “Ah.” And neither will I, she thought. I suppose that’s another thing that’s actually possible—deleting people from the universe.

  She looks like I used to.

  Charlotte recalled the stories she’d heard about the anomaly Einstein had supposedly left in a tower in Palm Springs—an anomaly that could short out a person’s lifeline, so that person had never existed.

  And I waved at her, this afternoon, because she looked like my…my “little daughter”: my uncorrupted younger self. Two little girls—one to disappear, literally without a trace, the other to finally get a life.

  “Now, Mr. Marrity,” said the disembodied voice from the air, “if you would please just open up the cabinet you see in front of you.” Rascasse’s voice didn’t really sound organic—it was like someone using a violin bow to play a xylophone. “Go on, it isn’t locked.”

  “Damn head never knows anything,” muttered Golze from beside Marrity. “How many times did we ask it to find Einstein’s daughter?”

  Marrity’s viewpoint ascended jerkily as he got to his feet and focused on the pairs of opposed brass cones that were the cabinet’s handles.

  “Last time I was here,” Marrity said, sounding shaky, “nineteen years ago by my watch, this is where you kept that black head.”

  “It still is,” said Charlotte, and she shifted her perspective to the driver, who was metronomically switching his gaze back and forth between the rearview mirrors and the empty pavement in front of the parked bus. It was much more restful than seeing the damned head.

  But the cabinet behind the driver was still right in front of her, and she heard the latch snap and the doors creak open, and she caught the shellac and spice and old shoes smell of the thing.

  “Thank you,” said Rascasse’s ringing voice. “And would you now say ‘Find me,’ please.”

  “Find me,” said Marrity in a baffled tone.

  And Charlotte could hear the head whispering again. It was only one voice this time: “Two days I sat beside my body, staring at the holes in my chest.”

  It had said this before, she recalled.

  “Thank you for letting us know where they are,” said Rascasse’s voice. Charlotte frowned in puzzlement, then remembered that ghosts existed backward; presumably Rascasse was trying to get an answer to a question before asking it.

  She sighed and switched to Marrity’s perspective.

  Through it she could see the afternoon sunlight glinting on the polished black brows, and on the silver plates tacked to the cheek and jaw. From the height of Marrity’s vision she could tell that he was still standing.

  Surreptitiously she felt in her purse for the bottle.

  Marrity took solace in the faith that he would soon forget all of this. No, not forget it—never have experienced it.

  “I went to my grandfather,” came the whisper from the forever slightly parted coal lips, “to find out who I am, where I came from.”

  “Thank you for telling us where they are now,” said Rascasse again. If he was impatient, his hi
gh-pitched inorganic voice didn’t reflect it.

  “But I have no mother, really,” came the whisper, more faintly now. “Only children.”

  “You’ve told us where your children are,” said Rascasse, like a hypnotist. “Where are your children now? Thank you for telling us.”

  Your children? thought Marrity; but he had to strain to hear the whisper now: “My mother will hide them,” it said, “or try to. Everyone who dwells here is safe.”

  Everyone who dwells here is safe.

  Marrity’s breath had stopped. That was the sign over Grammar’s back door. What else had the thing said? I went to find my grandfather…holes in my chest…children…my mother will hide them…

  Abruptly the skin on his arms tingled and his vision narrowed to include only the glittering black-and-silver head, as his body understood before his mind permitted itself to.

  A moment later he was out of his seat and halfway down the aisle, gripping the bar on the back of one of the seats, gasping for breath and ready to vomit.

  “That’s my father!” he yelled hoarsely. He was facing the back of the bus and blinking rapidly. “That’s—what am I—that’s my father’s head.”

  “Shit!” muttered Golze at the front of the bus.

  “Turn it off!” Marrity shouted. “Can he see me?”

  Rascasse’s voice seemed to come from right in front of Marrity. “The ghost is gone. The imbecilic thing gave us no clue to where to find your self—your younger self. I’d hoped that when you asked, it might tell us—I guess it doesn’t know.”

  “It did tell us,” came Golze’s weak voice. “The Ouija board pointer moved before Marrity said, ‘Find me.’ Before is after, for ghosts. Hinch, back the truck around to face south.”

  “It pointed to the letter T,” said the woman in sunglasses, whose real name was apparently Charlotte.

  “No,” grated Golze, “it pointed in a direction.”