by Jean Rabe
“Thanks, little buddy.”
A waitress came by with another beer. Bruck disconsolately handed her his empty. Looking across the room, he saw the braided-haired girl feeling the Marquis’ muscles, giggling.
He didn’t have the heart to tell the Marquis. Bruck wasn’t sure exactly what he knew or remembered anymore, but one thing he was pretty sure of was Nestor would not be coming back soon.
Bruck took a long, slow drink of his beer, nearly draining the tall glass, still straining to remember. He patted his pocket—something valuable in there, he dimly recalled. His thoughts were cloudier and cloudier. He signaled for another beer. He drank too much these days, always drinking when he wasn’t fighting.
Staring across the room he thought he caught a glimpse of a man with curly red hair and a bristly beard, but then people shifted around and the man melted into the crowd. Or was he imagining things?
The waitress brought him another foaming beer. He looked around for the Marquis, but his friend too had melted into the loud, smelly, shouting, dancing crowd.
At night he dreamed of playing double knuckles with the tall barrel-chested stranger against the two brothers, one younger with narrow eyes and a pockmarked face, the older one with curly red hair and a bristly red beard.
The game had been going on for hours. It was long after midnight, and the tavern had all but emptied. The only people left were the four players, the proprietor who sat on a stool behind them watching stoically, a groggy serving girl with her arm stretched around the proprietor, and two or three die- hard regulars who stared with goggle eyes as the pile of coins rose higher than ever before at the Bull’s Bullocks.
There were hundreds and hundreds of coins in the pot. Bruck had wagered more of his earnings than was wise, and several times he had been tempted to fold his cards and walk away. But he was still enjoying himself, and each time he had been tempted to quit, the tall barrel-chested stranger had winked at him and he had stayed.
He was a fighter, not a gamesman, but the tall, barrel-chested stranger proved very, very good at double knuckles, and the brothers were losing and falling farther and farther behind. The young brother grew even more silent and peevish, while the red-haired and -bearded one glowered nastily as, finally, he emptied his pockets and pushed his last few coins into the center of the table.
The tall barrel-chested stranger seemed to savor the drama of it all. He hesitated before he reached into his purse and found the right number of coins, flipping them carelessly onto the pile before reaching for his final card.
Bruck and the younger brother played their hands. The unremarkable result made the serving girl yawn. The two looked to their partners for the climax.
The red-haired bristly-bearded brother defiantly slapped his cards down, a smirk on his face. For a moment the tall barrel-chested stranger looked surprised, then winking at Bruck, he gracefully spread his cards to show a hand that vanquished his opponent’s.
Even before the grin on Bruck’s face had started to widen, the place exploded. The younger brother shouted an epithet and stretched a long arm across the table toward the coins. Bruck reacted in a blur, reaching down and grabbing a long knife from his cache of weapons on the floor and bringing the blade up and down in one fluid whirl, plunging it hard into the table and cleanly slicing off the man’s outstretch hand.
The hand appeared to scuttle away and slide off the table as the younger brother screamed and fell back from the table. But then, with a sick feeling, Bruck realized the brother’s screams were mixing with the loud groans of the tall barrel-chested stranger, who had been knocked back in his chair by a thick dirk hurled by the older brother. The blade was stuck in the broad target of his barrel chest. Bruck quickly found his sword and stood, waving his weapon in the air, anxious to avenge his partner.
There was no more opportunity for violence, however. The red-haired bristly-bearded brother had draped his arms around his shrieking brother and, with a baleful look over his shoulders, dragged him and his bloody stump away. The proprietor and handful of observers shrank into the shadows. From somewhere in the room, Bruck could hear the servant girl sobbing. Perhaps, he thought, she’d been sweet on the pockmarked loser, who was now bleeding grievously.
The tall barrel-chested stranger was still alive and strong enough to reach down and yank the dirk out of his chest and toss it on the floor contemptuously. The effort took a lot out of him, though. He gestured weakly to Bruck, who swept the mountain of coins into a sack and then scurried around the table to catch his partner just as he began to slump to the ground. The tall, barrel-chested stranger whose name was Nestor—yes, Nestor, Bruck recalled—pointed to a narrow stairway at the rear of the room, and Bruck half walked, half carried Nestor upstairs, blood wetting both their clothes.
Inside a small sparse room was a pallet, a wooden chair, and a dressing table with a mirror. Bruck helped Nestor to the pallet. Nestor refused to lie down, instead sitting with his legs outstretched, his head propped against the wall, still winking and chuckling despite his wound and shallow breathing.
“I’ve seen worse,” grunted Bruck, after examining the wound, and it was true—he had. But this wound was bad enough that it might kill Nestor if not treated. Bruck would make sure Nestor was settled and comfortable, he wanted to check the winnings, and then he would go and bring a doctor.
Spotting a small flask on the dressing table, Bruck took a sip of foul liquor and handed it over to Nestor, who drank from it several times until it was emptied and he tossed it on the floor, laughing. First things first: As Nestor watched him with glittering eyes, Bruck dumped out the coins and counted them, dividing the haul into two piles.
Whether because of how much he had drank or the shock of his wound, Nestor was beginning to babble. Bruck, almost done, wasn’t listening closely, and Nestor, still laughing, raised his voice insistently. Clutching his bleeding wound with one hand Nestor dug through his pockets with the other and, after arduous effort, produced a rolled parchment and a polished triangle of stone that he thrust at Bruck, urging him to pay attention.
Rising from the floor, Bruck deposited his share of the coins in his sack and put Nestor’s in his purse, which he tossed onto the pallet next to the wounded man. He then sat down at the dressing table, staring at the two items he held in his hand and listening to Nestor’s babble.
The stone triangle had a row of numbers along one edge that changed as Bruck rotated them with his thumb. As Nestor called out numbers in a precise order, Bruck rotated the numbers one by one into the sequence being urgently dictated by his wounded partner.
Slumped against the wall, his bleeding still copious, Nestor talked nonsense about fighting good fights and traveling through time. Yes, fighting and traveling through time—that was the strange thing that he kept saying.
This was the best trip ever, Nestor said.
Bruck listened more carefully now, fingering the numbers on the stone triangle, following the sequence dictated by Nestor, even as he wondered if Nestor was dazed and hysterical or crazy or dying.
“The best trip ever . . .”
Bruck had not closed the door to the room, and he had been listening very intently to what Nestor was saying. Otherwise, he would have noticed the pairs of feral eyes lurking in the dark shadows outside the door. Too late, he realized that the red-haired bristly-bearded older brother had crept up the stairs and was standing there, listening, with a handful of savage looking men behind him, waiting.
Bruck felt a pang of regret as the red- haired red-bearded brother dashed into the room with a terrible cry and plunged a long sword into the heart of the helpless wounded Nestor.
Nestor slumped over lifeless, the grin on his face permanent now.
Bruck had just rotated the last number into place. But he dropped the rolled parchment on the floor and it skittered away as he ran out of time.
Even as the killer pulled his sword out of Nestor’s dead body and gleefully turned to Bruck, the killer’s blade drip
ping with blood and his confederates surging behind him, Bruck had begun to shimmer and vanish.
The red-haired bristly-bearded brother was too slow, reaching for Bruck but grabbing nothing, reaching, stretching, grasping futilely with hate-filled eyes.
That was always the last thing Bruck remembered before waking up, the reaching, stretching, grasping hands and the hate-filled eyes of the red-haired bristly-bearded brother.
The line shuffled forward. It was a long line, and there were many other lines inside the building. After each man received his orders he moved outside where there were vast treeless spaces, and grouped areas of machines and equipment, and hundreds if not thousands of men, all attired for imminent battle.
Today Bruck’s weapons included a bow and arrow and several long curved swords tucked into his sash. He carried a shield and wore a winged helmet. Pads of armor were fitted over black pants, a black shirt, and a burgundy vest, everything edged in gilt.
Everywhere around him similarly dressed samurai awaited the signal.
Bruck felt a little foolish.
If only he could remember.
The worst thing was not the fighting all the time. He loved fighting, though he sometimes had to remind himself of that fact. The worst thing was not not knowing what he was fighting for—most of the time. Sometimes he knew the cause, though usually they didn’t tell him and it didn’t really matter.
The worst thing was how false and foolish and pretend it all felt.
The Marquis came by and pointed at Bruck, laughing. Bruck laughed back, pointing at the Marquis, and in a way that cheered him up a little, even though the Marquis quickly moved on to another part of the field, where today he had been picked to ride on horseback.
Bruck was an expert rider. He could have ridden circles around the Marquis and most of the others, but he didn’t care if he was running and carrying a spear or riding a horse. He didn’t care if he was dressed in blue or gray or samurai armor or the uniform he wore several times, with variations, when fighting in something the people in charge insisted on calling World War II. They numbered everything in this place, even wars.
If only he could remember.
Holding the triangle of stone in his hand, he rotated the numbers around into sequence again and again. And although he had been doing the same thing for days and weeks, each time the numbers locked into a new configuration, he waited expectantly for the shimmer and the rocketing, dizzying, nauseating sensation that might send him home again, though that never happened.
Seven numbers.
Bruck had about ten thousand probable sequences to work through, provided he could keep track of all the numbers he had tried before, the Marquis had told him with a laugh.
“Just wait till Nestor gets back . . .”
Bruck looked up, shading his eyes against the hot sun, and there—he spotted him again. A man with curly red hair and a gnarly reddish beard, huddled with another group of samurai, dressed slightly differently, over there on a small rise. Was the man staring at Bruck?
Was he the same man Bruck had glimpsed at Bar None?
The man in the dream?
Bruck felt a sudden excitement, a renewal, hope and expectation. The bile rose in his throat as he pocketed the stone and tightly gripped his sword. Around him others were stirring, standing.
A man came by with a bullhorn shouting instructions.
Bruck felt real again, for the first time in weeks, ready for a real fight.
“Action!”
Memories of Light and Sound
Steven Saus
Steven Saus injects people with radioactivity as his day job, but only to serve the forces of good. His work has appeared in Seed magazine and Andromeda Spaceways inflight magazine. He also has several flash fiction works in the online magazines 365 Tomorrows, Everyday Weirdness, and Quantum Muse. You can keep up with him at www.stevensaus.com.
“At least I get to wear a nice hat,” Monica laughed. She held its floofy rim down as a gust of fall wind threatened to pull it off her bobbed hair. “You know, baby, when I said I wanted to visit Manhattan someday, this isn’t quite what I meant.”
Anthony adjusted his bowler, shielding his dark eyes from a stray beam of late afternoon sunlight. “It’s an important time period,” he said. “The Roaring Twenties. Flappers, speakeasies, all that jazz. Besides, the Statue of Liberty isn’t wading in seawater like it would be if we came here in our time.”
Anthony grabbed the leather handle of the suitcase the Timeshares agent had provided for them. They had managed to buy one of the first unaccompanied tours. They wore period clothes for the trip and had an automatic recall trigger. Timeshares had arranged for a native to provide a packed suitcase, an itinerary, and lodgings. The reduced traveling mass and short length of their vacation reduced the price enough to let regular people like them afford the trip.
“The hotel is right across the street. Good for one night only.” The traffic only justified checking the street once, but the back part of Anthony’s brain twitched so he checked for cars again.
The hotel’s foyer spread out before them as Monica handed her fur coat to a doorman. Anthony pointed to the marble pillars along the walls. “See? I got you Roman columns.”
She giggled, and Anthony wrapped his arms around her, the soft cotton of her dress thin under his arms.
“It’s our honeymoon,” she whispered in his ear, her pale fingers playing with the trace of gray at his temple. “I’m more interested in another kind of column.”
Anthony’s face grew hot. He only had a few years on her, but her forwardness still took him by surprise. “We’ll do something about that after I check in,” he said with a smile.
He walked to the counter and rang the bell while Monica examined the oil paintings on the wall. The other men in the lobby looked at her. Anthony’s smile got bigger as he leaned on the counter, watching the men watch her. It didn’t matter how much they looked. She had chosen him, the loser boy who had finally been successful. Now, on his honeymoon, he could finally make things right with—
The clerk’s rough voice stopped his daydreaming. “You a wop?”
The blunt question punched through Timeshare’s historical briefing. Their warnings echoed his grandfather’s stories of a time when his family was not considered white. Anthony’s heart beat faster as he turned to face the desk clerk, fingers pressed into the polished wood of the counter.
“What the hell did you say?”
Monica was at his side, her words cutting into the clerk’s reply. “We’re from Cleveland. Ohio. It’s our honeymoon!”
The clerk nodded to Anthony. “Sorry. Didn’t figure, but the owner doesn’t want no dagos staying here. Drives off real business, you know how it is. Gotta be careful with all the boats coming in.”
Monica tapped the counter. “We don’t have much of that in Cleveland, thank goodness. Husband, dear, why don’t you sign us in and pay the man?”
“Of course,” Anthony forced out, fumbling with the strange paper money.
He signed his name as Michael.
Anthony relaxed on the bed, pleasantly surprised at the comforting sensation of the thick quilt against his bare skin. He fluffed the pillow, pressing his head into the soft, real feathers. After years with bland foam, he found the prick of an occasional quill fascinating. The sweat from their lovemaking slowly dried on his skin while Monica rinsed off in the extravagant claw foot bathtub. Both of them had paid more attention to each other than the room, which was now littered with their clothes. He let his attention wander as she splashed, taking in the ornate gilded wallpaper, the swirled plaster ceiling, the gas lights and radiator. Eventually it rested on his trousers. On the small bulge of folded papers in the pocket.
The muscles in his stomach clenched. Anthony closed his eyes. “Monica, there’s something I need to tell you.”
“What, that racism is annoying? Or that you’ve rested enough?” She had gotten out of the tub and leaned against the doorway, dripping
and naked. Monica grabbed her hat and plopped it on her head. “You like?”
“I wouldn’t have married you if I didn’t.”
Her gaze slid down his body, one corner of her mouth rising higher in a wicked grin. “Doesn’t look like you like it quite enough,” she said.
Anthony rolled his eyes. “I am older than you.”
Monica snorted. “It must be the hat.” She tossed it onto the bedpost, then jumped onto the bed in a slick wet heap.
“Even medical marvels have their limits, you know.”
“Modern medical marvels,” she said after kissing him. She rose up on one elbow. “You can’t worry about this stuff, baby. You’ve got to be practical about the past. You know how this all turns out, history. You can’t change it now, so let it go.” She ran a finger across the short hairs on his chest. “Maybe you should concentrate on right now.”
He sighed, feeling the topic get away from him. “But I need to—”
“Husband of mine,” she said, inching her way down the bed, “we can only afford one honeymoon. Get your mind off the past and on the present.”
And for a little while, he did.
The next morning, Monica snored softly as Anthony picked his trousers up from the floor and pulled the papers from his pocket. Golden light from the early sunrise shone through the window. The soft clank of the radiator echoed in the cool autumn morning. The folded sheets were bound with a scrap of string. One ragged edge showed where Anthony had removed them from the binding. He untied the string and unfolded the yellowed paper, smoothing the wrinkles against the floor. He put aside the copied record from Ellis Island and began to read.
Anthony skimmed over the handwritten Italian of his grandfather’s diary. He remembered the translation, merely using the sheets as sentimental cues. The earliest entries began a few weeks from now, in the coalfields. His grandfather had stopped keeping the diary the day Anthony’s parents had died. The day Anthony began to live with the old man.
