The Time Traveller's Almanac

by Ann VanderMeer

  Did she survive to adulthood? Or did she overdose in some gas station bathroom near Reseda when she was twelve? Did I break every time law on the books merely to postpone her fate? I don’t know – but I do know one thing. I sleep better now.

  The rhythms of routine distracted me. My cuts healed. My memories receded to a comfortable distance.

  About three days ago, I got a call from a real estate agent in the Castro.

  “Christine? I got your name from Jerry Raskin.”

  “I’m not interested in downtime apartments.”

  She laughed a breathy laugh. “Oh, I only deal in realtime estate. And I’ve got two places I want to show you. The first is a beauty: a three-bedroom apartment in the Potrero Hill area. Upstairs and down. Used to be a two-family unit. You’ve got to see it to believe it.”

  Everything inside me stilled to a whisper. I could see the window again, that window with its small dirty fingerprints.

  “Hello? Hello?”

  Somehow I found my voice. “I’ve seen it.”

  “But that’s impossible. This apartment just came on the market.”

  “Believe me, I’ve seen it. In fact, you might say that I’ve spent way too much time on it already.” And then I hung up.

  TWENTY-ONE, COUNTING UP

  Harry Turtledove

  Harry Turtledove is an American writer and editor best known for his work in science fiction, alternate histories, and historical fiction. With well over twenty novels and hundreds of short stories, his work has been nominated for just about every award in the industry. He has won the Hugo, The Sidewise and the Prometheus awards. “Twenty-one, Counting Up” was first published in Analog in 1999. It is a companion piece to his other story in this anthology, “Forty, Counting Down,” which features the same main character, Justin Kloster.

  Justin Kloster looked from his blue book to his watch and back again. He muttered under his breath. Around him, a hundred more people in the American history class were looking at their watches, too. Fifteen minutes left. After that, another breadth requirement behind him. His junior year behind him, too. Three down, one to go.

  At precisely four o’clock, the professor said, “Time! Bring your blue books up to the front of the lecture hall.”

  Like everybody else, Justin squeezed out another couple of sentences before doing as he was told. He wrung his hand to show writer’s cramp, then stuck the pen in the pocket of his jeans and headed for the door.

  “How do you think you did?” somebody asked him.

  “I’m pretty sure I got a B, anyhow,” he answered. “That’s all I really need. It’s not like it’s my major or anything.” The prof could hear him, but he didn’t much care. This wasn’t a course for history majors, not that Cal State Northridge had many of those. It was a school for training computer people like him, business types, and teachers. After a moment, he thought to ask, “How about you?”

  “Probably about the same,” the other fellow said. “Well, have a good summer.”

  “Yeah, you, too.” Justin opened the door and stepped from air conditioning and pale fluorescent light into the brassy sun and heat of the San Fernando Valley. He blinked a couple of times as his eyes adapted. Sweat started pouring off him. He hurried across campus to the parking lot where his Toyota waited. He was very blond and very fair, and sunburned if you looked at him sideways. He was also a little – only a little – on the round side, which made him sweat even more.

  When he unlocked the car, he fanned the door back and forth a couple of times to get rid of the furnacelike air inside. He cranked the AC as soon as he started the motor. After he’d gone a couple of blocks, it started doing some good. He’d just got comfortable when he pulled into the gated driveway of his apartment building.

  The Acapulco was like a million others in Los Angeles, with a below-ground parking lot and two stories of apartments built above it around a courtyard that held a swimming pool, a rec room, and a couple of flower beds whose plants kept dying.

  The key that opened the security gate also opened the door between the lot and the lobby. Justin checked his snailmail and found, as he’d hoped, a check from his father and another from his mother. His lip curled as he scooped the envelopes from his little mailbox. His folks had gone through a messy divorce his senior year in high school. These days, his father was living with a redheaded woman only a couple of years older than he was – and his mother was living with a dark-haired woman only a couple of years older than he was. They both sent money to help keep him in his apartment... and so they wouldn’t have to have anything more to do with him. That suited him fine. He didn’t want to have anything to do with them these days, either.

  He used the security key again to get from the lobby to the courtyard behind it, then walked back to his apartment, which wasn’t far from the rec room. That had worried him when he first rented the place, but hardly anybody played table tennis or shot pool or lifted weights, so noise wasn’t a problem.

  His apartment was no neater than it had to be. His history text and lecture notes covered the kitchen table. He chuckled as he shoved them aside. “No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks,” he chanted – and how long had people escaping from school been singing that song? He grabbed a Coke from the refrigerator and started to sit down in front of the space he’d cleared. Then he shook his head and carried the soda back into the bedroom instead.

  He really lived there. His iMac sat on a desk in a corner by the closet. Justin grinned when he booted it up. It didn’t look like all the boring beige boxes other companies made. As soon as the desktop came up, he logged onto Earthlink to check his e-mail and see what was going on in some of the newsgroups he read.

  None of the e-mail was urgent, or even very interesting. The newsgroups... “How about that?” he said a couple of minutes later. Dave and Tabitha, who’d both been posting in the Trash Can Sinatras newsgroup for as long as he’d been reading it, announced they were getting married. Justin sent congratulations. He hoped they’d get on better than his own folks had. His girlfriend’s parents were still together, and still seemed to like each other pretty well.

  Thinking of Megan made him want to talk to her. He logged off Earthlink – having only one line in the apartment was a pain – and went over to the phone on the nightstand. He dialed and listened to it ring, once, twice... “Hello?” she said.

  “What’s the story, morning glory?” Justin said – Megan was wild for Oasis. He liked British pop, too, though he preferred Pulp, as someone of his parents’ generation might have liked the Stones more than the Beatles.

  “Oh. Hiya, Justin.” He heard the smile in her voice once she recognized his. He smiled, too. With exams over for another semester, with his girlfriend glad to hear from him, the world looked like a pretty good place. Megan asked, “How’d your final go?”

  “Whatever,” he answered. “I don’t think it’s an A, but I’m pretty sure it’s a B, and that’s good enough. Want to go out tonight and party?”

  “I can’t,” Megan told him. “I’ve got my English lit final tomorrow, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s right.” Justin hadn’t remembered till she reminded him. “I bet you’re glad to get through with most of that lower-division stuff.” She was a year behind him.

  “This wasn’t so bad.” Megan spoke as if telling a dark, shameful secret: “I kind of like Shakespeare.”

  “Whatever,” Justin said again. All he remembered from his literature course was that he’d been damn lucky to escape with a B-minus. “I’ll take you to Sierra’s. We can get margaritas. How’s that?”

  “The bomb,” Megan said solemnly. “What time?”

  “How about six-thirty? I start at CompUSA tomorrow, and I’ll get off a little past five.”

  “Okay, see you then,” Megan said. “I’ve got to get back to Macbeth. ’Bye.” She hung up.

  Justin put This Is Hardcore, his favorite Pulp album, in the CD player and pulled dinner out of the f
reezer at random. When he saw what he had, he put it back and got another one: if he was going to Sierra’s tomorrow night, he didn’t want Mexican food tonight, too. Plain old fried chicken would do the job well enough. He nuked it, washed it down with another Coke, then threw the tray and the can in the trash and the silverware into the dishwasher. When he started running out of forks, he’d get everything clean at once.

  He went back into the bedroom, surfed the Net without much aim for a while, and then went over to bungie.com and got into a multiplayer game of Myth II. His side took gas; one of the guys didn’t want to follow their captain’s orders, even though his own ideas were a long way from brilliant. Justin logged off in disgust. He fired up his Carmageddon CD-ROM and happily ran down little old ladies in walkers till he noticed in some surprise that it was after eleven. “Work tomorrow,” he sighed, and shut down and went to bed.

  Freshly showered, freshly shaved, a gold stud in his left ear, he drove over to Megan’s parents’ house to pick her up. Her mother let him in. “How are you, Justin?” she said. “How do you like your new job?”

  “I’m fine, Mrs. Tricoupis,” he answered. “The job’s – okay, I guess.” One day had been plenty to convince him his supervisor was a doofus. The guy didn’t know much about computers, and, because he was pushing thirty, he thought he could lord it over Justin and the other younger people at the store.

  Megan’s mom caught Justin’s tone. Laughing, she said, “Welcome to the real world.” She turned and called toward the back of the house: “Sweetie! Justin’s here!”

  “I’m coming,” Megan said. She hurried into the living room. She was a slim, almost skinny brunette with more energy than she sometimes knew what to do with. “Hiya,” she told Justin. The way she looked at him, she might have invented him.

  “Hi.” Justin felt the same way about her. He wanted to grab her right then and there. If her mother hadn’t been standing three feet away, he would have done it.

  Mrs. Tricoupis laughed again, on a different note. It didn’t occur to Justin that she could see through Megan and him. She said, “Go on, kids. Have fun. Drive carefully, Justin.”

  “Whatever,” Justin said, which made Megan’s mom roll her eyes up to the heavens. But he’d been in only one wreck since getting his license, and that one hadn’t quite been his fault, so he couldn’t see why she was ragging on him.

  He didn’t grab Megan when they got into the car, either. At the first red light, though, they leaned toward each other and into a long, wet kiss that lasted till the light turned green and even longer – till, in fact, the old fart in the SUV behind them leaned on his horn and made them both jump.

  Sierra’s had stood at the corner of Vanowen and Canoga for more than forty years, which made it a Valley institution. They both ordered margaritas as they were seated, Megan’s strawberry, Justin’s plain. The waiter nodded to her but told Justin, “I’m sorry, señor, but I’ll need some ID.”

  “Okay.” Justin displayed his driver’s license, which showed he’d been born in April 1978, and so had been legal for a couple of months.

  “Gracias, señor,” the waiter said. “I’ll get you both your drinks.” Justin and Megan didn’t start quietly giggling till he was gone. Megan was only twenty, but people always carded Justin.

  The margaritas were good. After a couple of sips of hers, Megan said, “You didn’t even ask me how I did on my final.”

  “Duh!” Justin hit himself in the forehead with the heel of his hand. “How did you do?”

  “Great,” she said happily. “I think I might even have gotten an A.”

  “That rocks.” Justin made silent clapping motions. Megan took a seated bow. He went on, “How do you feel like celebrating?”

  “Well, we probably ought to save club-hopping for the weekend, since you’ve got to go to work in the morning.” Megan stuck out her tongue at him. “See? I think about what’s going on with you.” Justin started to get chuffed, but didn’t let it show. A couple of seconds later, he was glad he didn’t, because Megan went on, “So why don’t we just go back to your place after dinner?”

  “Okay,” he said, and hoped he didn’t sound slaveringly eager. Maybe he did; Megan started laughing at him. But it wasn’t mean laughter, and she didn’t change what she’d said. He raised his margarita to his lips. At twenty-one, it’s easy to think you’ve got the world by the tail.

  He hardly noticed what he ordered. When the waiter brought it, he ate it. It was good; the food at Sierra’s always was. Afterwards, he had to remember to stay somewhere close to the speed limit as he drove up Canoga toward the Acapulco. Getting a ticket would interrupt everything else he had in mind.

  When he opened the door to let Megan into his apartment, she said, “You’re so lucky to have a place of your own.”

  “I guess so,” Justin answered. He thought she was pretty lucky to have parents who cared enough about her to want her to stay at home while she went through college. As far as he was concerned, the checks his father and mother sent counted for a lot less than some real affection would have. He’d tried explaining that, but he’d seen it made no sense to her.

  She bent down and went pawing through his CDs and put on I’ve Seen Everything, the Trash Can Sinatras’ second album. As “Easy Road” started coming out of the stereo, she sighed. “They were such a good band. I wish they’d made more than three records before they broke up.”

  “Yeah,” Justin said. However much he liked the Sinatras, though, he didn’t pay that much attention to the music. Instead, he watched her straighten and get to her feet. He stepped forward to slip an arm around her waist.

  She turned and smiled at him from a range of about six inches, as if she’d forgotten he was there and was glad to be reminded. “Hiya,” she said brightly, and put her arms around him. Who kissed whom first was a matter of opinion. They went back into the bedroom together.

  They’d been lovers for only a couple of months. Justin was still learning what Megan liked. He didn’t quite get her where she was going before he rather suddenly arrived himself. “Sorry,” he said as his heartrate slowed toward normal. “Wait a few minutes and we’ll try it again.” It was only a few minutes, too. At his age, he could – and did – take that for granted. After the second time, he asked, “Better?”

  “Yeah,” Megan answered in a breathy voice that meant it was quite a bit better. Or maybe that breathy voice meant something else altogether, for she was still using it as she went on, “Get up, will you? You’re squashing me.”

  “Oh.” Justin slid his weight – too much weight, he thought, not for the first time – off her. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “A gentleman,” she said darkly, “takes his weight on his elbows.” But she laughed as she said it, so she couldn’t have been really mad.

  Justin scratched his stomach, which gave him an excuse to feel how too much of it there was. He wasn’t really tubby. He’d never been really tubby. But he would never have six-pack abs, either. Twelve-pack or maybe a whole case, yeah. Six-pack? Real live muscles? Fuhgeddaboutit. Unlike some other girls he’d known, Megan had never given him a hard time about it.

  “Shall we go down to the Probe Friday night?” he said. “They don’t have me working Saturday, so we can close the place and see what kind of after-hours stuff we can dig up.”

  “All right,” Megan said. She slid off the bed and went into the bathroom. When she came back, she started dressing. Justin had half hoped for a third round, but it wasn’t urgent. He put his clothes on again, too.

  The drive back to Megan’s house passed in happy silence. Justin kept glancing over at her every so often. I’m a pretty lucky fellow, he thought, finding a girl I can... Then he clicked his tongue between his teeth. He didn’t even want to think the word love. After he’d watched his parents’ messy breakup, that word scared the hell out of him. But it kept coming back whether he wanted it to or not. He told himself that was a good sign, and came close to believing it.

  The P
robe lay a couple of blocks off Melrose, the heart of the L.A. scene. Justin snagged a parking space in front of a house not far away. Megan gave him a hand. “I thought we’d have to hike for, like, miles,” she said.

  “Well, we’ve got the shoes for it,” Justin said, which made her grin. They both wore knockoffs of Army boots, big and black and massive, with soles that looked as if they’d been cut from tractor tire treads. Justin made sure he put the Club on the steering wheel before he got out of the car. Things in this neighborhood had a way of walking with Jesus if you weren’t careful.

  He and Megan had no trouble snagging a table when they got inside the Probe. “Guard it with your life,” he told her, and went over to the bar to buy a beer. He got carded again, and had to haul out his license. He brought the brew back to Megan, who couldn’t pass the ID test, then got another one for himself.

  They both eyed the deejay’s booth, which was as yet uninhabited. “Who’s it supposed to be tonight?” Megan asked. Before Justin could answer, she went on, “I hope it’s Helen. She plays the best mix of anybody, and she’s not afraid to spin things you don’t hear every day.”

  “I dunno,” Justin said. “I like Douglas better, I think. He won’t scramble tempos the way Helen does sometimes. You can really dance when he’s playing things.”

  Megan snorted. “Give me a break. I have to drag you out there half the time.”

  “Proves my point,” Justin said. “I need all the help I can get.”

  “Well, maybe,” Megan said: no small concession. She and Justin analyzed and second-guessed deejays the way football fans played Monday-morning quarterback. Their arguments got just as abstruse and sometimes just as heated, too. Megan didn’t drop it cold here: she said, “As long as it’s not Michael.”

  Justin crossed his forefingers, as if warding off a vampire. “Anybody but Michael,” he agreed. “I don’t know how they can keep using him. His list is so lame – my father would like most of it.” He could find no stronger condemnation.