by Liz Harmer
“I think that stuff I said was—” Brandon paused. The heavy, expectant silence and flashing camera brought to mind a press conference. “Probably true. I thought those statements were true when I said them. I think they’re still true. But I’m glad to be away from PINA. I don’t trust the ports, and—”
“Great, great. Neither do we.”
“And what about the Testifiers,” Donnie said. “Actors, right?”
Brandon frowned. “I’m not sure. I think some of us acted prematurely on that front. People at PINA got carried away, and for awhile, Doors was kind of lost to his excitement.”
Donnie started flapping quickly through the album.
“You’ve seen what’s going on out there,” Steve said, arms crossed. “Is it safe?”
“Out there? Like out—you mean in the States?” Brandon said. “I think it’s safe. I didn’t explore much. Portland looks good. Things are pretty calm along the coast, north of the Bay. It’s not people but the ports you’ve got to beware of. They grab at you.”
“What?”
“The ports?” he said. “They seem to have figured out how to manipulate people. I think it’s the only explanation when you think of it for why port was so successful. They recalibrate for the desires of each person, and I think they’re getting better at it. Like a—well, it’s like they absorb information. Now that I’m saying it out loud, I’m not so sure—”
“They can manipulate more than one person simultaneously,” Marie said. She pointed at Rosa. “But some people are immune.”
“Is that what Doors thinks?” Steve said. “What is PINA saying? What is actually happening?”
“I think they are capable of thinking. Of luring people. You’re right.” Brandon swallowed. “Doors is a strange guy, and I’ve known him for a long time….” They were all staring at him. “Port was an accident. You know, we released things before the kinks were all worked out. That’s the sort of thing you can do with a phone, but I guess—”
“Maybe not the sort of thing you do with a death portal?” Donnie said. Then, shouting at Mo and Rosa who were trying to help him with his pile, “Hey, watch the scrapbooks near the fire. Fucking watch it!”
“Watch the language,” Steve said.
“Oh, like you never cuss.”
Marie left Brandon’s side, and Rosa followed her to the edge of the woods, where she waited for Gus with a plastic baggy in her hands. “Maybe we can dispense with these baggies now,” she said, bending to scoop it up. “We’re living in the fecal age.”
“Gross,” Rosa said. But she beamed at Marie expectantly.
“What?”
“Interesting that Brandon Dreyer went to you first.”
Marie shook her head. “No. He found me because of the sign on my door. I left a note. For Jason.”
“A note for Jason?”
“Never mind. It was obviously stupid.”
“And he found the sign on your door, because he was watching you.”
“I guess so, yeah.”
“He likes you,” Rosa said. “Do you think he’s trustworthy?”
“Gus likes him.” Marie tied up the bag. Gus ran off and back to Brandon, who rubbed him behind the ears as unconsciously as Marie would have. “Gus likes those chicks,” she said. “It’s all very sweet and adorable.”
“He’s totally cute,” Rosa said.
Brandon had his hands in Gus’s fur. He was speaking comfortably to the only people she had in the world. He saw her and smiled, and then he stood, saying something to wave off the group of questioners.
“He’s charming,” she said to Rosa, as Brandon climbed the small hill toward them. He was too long-limbed and had a crooked smile, but it was all appealing.
* * *
—
Bonita found a room for him to sleep in, found him blankets, and for a week he and Marie were inseparable. He came with her to the waterfalls, to the peach trees, to the lake. They watched stars together. They walked down to her store, to the billboard, and he helped her carry her supplies north, where quickly it seemed life would change. A new version would arrive directed toward the future with a different set of scenes. Maybe love would come. Now she would be painting and printmaking and drawing, wearing a series of sunhats and sunglasses she found in stores and dusted off. She could stop waiting and pretend that winter would not come.
Over them, the sign lingered sedately. The red S smacked of newness, but the rest of it was greyer, accelerating toward decrepitude. Layers of paper and glue peeling away just as all abandoned things did, just like the paint would in all the houses, peeling away in bits that might just rise into the air like snowflakes. By the end of winter, the sign would be all S, no port.
Brandon took her hand and the shock of it went through her. Soon he would kiss her on the neck, on the mouth. They could go upstairs right now to be together on her old mattress. The future would become as happy as a bustling city street.
Chapter
15
THE PHILOSOPHER
Someone had taken his binoculars. Interferences are to be expected, he wrote in the notebook he kept in his inside jacket pocket immediately after his last notation: Most things are irretrievable. You cannot return.
His old watch still beeped every ninety minutes, and each time he looked up, looked around, ascertained that he was dreaming. A dream had never lasted this long, though both he and the watch knew that time was a trickster. An hourly alarm might easily be a product of faulty perception. Maybe it was hourly, but he had no outside measure by which to confirm this belief.
Somewhere out in the real world were urgent things to be done, but he was under water. His wife and children needed him, were trapped somewhere, and here he was, asleep.
How long had it been since he’d trusted his own mind? Time and its measures were irrelevant. He used the apparition of Marie to measure time. For her, day and night were not strictly separated. When she toggled the light switch—and even though electric light did not behave—her consciousness was confirmed. It was still unclear to him how she might be awake while he was sleeping, but her note had been his only life raft. Come find me.
He’d walked over highway bridges, just as he had done in dreams; the scale of the concrete apparatuses was enough to make him swoon. In one day and one night he’d walked all the way from the capital in that daze. He’d seen large packs of animals, wavering masses of rodents, dogs, though many were lap dogs scurrying on small paws, in numbers enough to make him wary. He’d woken once on a bench to find a raccoon clutching his knees and staring intently into his face. He felt the sun providing sweat and sunburn and saw that he would melt.
He’d found her.
These empty streets were like the elaborate set of an abandoned film production, but still Marie did not know that she was not real. She was standing in the street with the German shepherd at her side—the dog always at her side—and the wagon. His binoculars around her neck. He repeated this to himself—my binoculars, my binoculars—so that he could write it down later. A man stood there next to her, the same man he’d seen sneaking around in the galleries.
Sunlight was hot on his neck, his hands, and he drew himself further into shadows near what once had been a mall. He could not afford to be seen, and this fact was more urgent for its lack of clear reason.
He was an animal, guided by urges whose source lay deep within him; he was a cryptogram without a key. His mind so fogged he could not reason.
Marie pointed at the sign. He felt naked now.
“Three weeks,” she said to the stranger.
It had been three weeks by her measure since he’d painted that red letter, driven again by a need to be revealed as well as hidden, to send a message that could also be a clue. Here we are together, victims of a cosmic prank!
As though on cue, she laughed. Now he felt worse than naked, even more exposed than that, as though the laugh had been directed at him.
“What was that?” her companion said.
<
br /> “More raccoons.”
“No, not raccoons. There was a beeping.” The man looked down at his naked wrist. “It’s an alarm. Like on an old Timex.”
In those shadows, the philosopher looked at his own wrist, finally hearing from within his fog that familiar bleeping, the neon-green flash of panic.
“Am I awake or am I sleeping?” he said.
“You’re awake.” The man was next to him now. Speaking with authority on his mind’s condition.
“I’m afraid you aren’t qualified to make that call,” he said. His knees buckled, and he slid down the side of the wall. He flashed his eyes at the man, and then at Marie, who was coming toward them too. Marie, in whose face he’d soon see recognition.
“Oh my God.” As soon as she was close enough, she cuffed her hands tightly around his wrists. “I knew it. I knew it.” Her face against his face, flesh soft against his flesh, pulling his limp and heavy body away from the wall to put her arms around him. “I knew it.”
“Who is this guy?”
“It’s Jason,” she said. “Jason. My ex-husband.”
Brandon swallowed. “This is him?”
Jason’s gaze was blank, his jaw loose like someone hypnotized.
“Do you know what this means, Brandon?” They pulled him to his feet, where he teetered before finally standing firm, taking one slow step and then another like a person rehabbing a broken hip. “Jason came back. From, well, I don’t know from where! He’s been a traveller, a leaver, a quitter, whatever. Here he is.”
“Here I am,” Jason said groggily.
She put her hands on his head, where the fact of his hair, that it was thinning and therefore real, made her gasp. “You’re actually here.”
* * *
—
All of what had happened was like a movie whose dark theatre he’d just exited.
“I think I can remember it,” he said. “But I’m not sure if it all really happened this way.” His voice was quiet. His body would suddenly spasm like muscles before sleep.
“We appreciate your rigorous concern for the truth,” Marie teased.
Sunlight bathed the cross streets, but they remained in the cool shadow near the mall. Brandon did not like Marie’s voice to sound this way: too eager, like someone younger than she was, with a shrieking sweetness he could hardly stand. This guy? Jason was dishevelled and smelled of unwashed bedsheets and B.O. Vaguely this recalled Doors, whose odour, when strong, was a calculated gesture of hostility. Why did women go for this shit? He was a guy who might have looked okay twelve, fifteen years ago, when Kurt Cobain eyes and hair hanging too long and greasy might still have been, barely, in fashion.
Everything she said to him was a box locking Brandon out. She held his head and poured water from a plastic bottle into his mouth. Mary Magdalene fawning over her Lord. Next she’d be pouring perfume, washing his feet and drying them with her hair.
“Take your time,” she said. “Tell us everything.” Everything in her voice made her later heartbreak certain.
They helped him stand. “He’s in rough shape,” Brandon said, urging them to move. “We should get him to Bonita. He needs fluids.” In the wagon Brandon pulled, the chickens were beating their wings, squawking and preening. “I have a lot of information you’d find useful too,” Brandon said. “This might mean that Kate Generato really did come back. The same symptoms. I never met her but…”
“You know someone who came back?”
“Yeah, one person. One single person. And she was sick, too, and then she disappeared.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“You know why I didn’t,” he said. “What good would that have been?”
Her body tensed and she turned to box him out. “Just start from the beginning,” she said, Jason’s hand in hers. “We need to know everything.”
* * *
—
“What day was it?”
“It was sunny that day, but cold. Maybe autumn.”
“I came to see you in the fall, and your house was already empty. It must have been earlier.”
“Maybe September.”
“Had the grid gone down yet?”
“No.”
“It doesn’t matter. Did you all go through? How did it feel?”
“Maria had become obsessed. At first I thought she was just interested in an academic way. Those were my feelings about it. Whatever these ports happened to be, whether they interacted with other universes, or could give us insight into quantum behaviour, or whether or not they were really time-travelling devices, they would have an enormous impact on my career. We were talking about a paradigm shift, the most exciting thing that could happen in my career. In my lifetime.”
“Did you think they were time machines?”
“If they were time machines, then it was possible that everything fundamental to mathematics and logic was incorrect. If a paradoxical thing could exist in reality. Anyway, none of that matters now.”
“You were writing a paper?”
“I wanted badly to know what these things were doing. We all did at that time. I’d talked to some people in other departments, and I knew a few people at Berkeley who wanted to host a conference just about port. Interdisciplinary.”
“But you didn’t want to go through?”
“No. I didn’t want one in my house. PINA had flown through the approval process. But after school one day Micah told me that two of his classmates had gotten ports, and I had him give me their names so that I could contact them. I wanted to be able to reach basically anybody I heard of so that I could keep tabs. I wanted to research the things, but I also wanted nothing to do with them.”
“Why were you afraid of them?”
“I was not alone in thinking that PINA had been irresponsible in releasing technology like this. Especially given Doors’ reputation.”
“Oh, really. And what was that?”
“Brandon. Let me ask the questions, okay?”
“We knew that Doors liked to release products before the bugs were worked out. We all knew what happened with the first PINAphone prototype.”
“None of that was proven! Anyone can make an accusation!”
“Brandon.”
“Where was I?”
“You wanted to research the ports. There was going to be a conference.”
“Yes. Of course, we never got that far. Maria had several friends who’d already bought one. People were just buying them up. If you suddenly found out that space travel was available, and not only that, affordable, you’d go. If I could have afforded it, I’d have gone to Mars. Wouldn’t you? I told her we could get one only if there was no risk. There’s never no risk, she said. And this is far more mind-blowing than going to Mars. The possibilities were infinite, she said. I told her time travel was a dangerous fantasy. We argued like this for weeks.”
“Did you argue often? Never mind. Forget I said that.”
“We were both trained to argue. I think around that time I came to see you for a few days.”
“But then this must have been more like springtime.”
“It went on for months, it seemed. But one day I got home, and there was a portician in a yellow shirt bent over some equipment in my living room. Maria was in the kitchen pouring us wine. Daisy was upstairs trying to stretch so that she could get better at doing the splits, but Micah was on the couch while the guy put it together. The portician never touched the pieces of it himself but puzzled it together with big tweezers. Like the ones you used to use in your dark room. It was incredible. He seemed to be miming. I can still feel the way the hair on my arms raised. I refused the glass of wine. How do we keep the kids from going through? I said to Maria. They’re smart kids, she said. But they’re little kids, I said, and if we go anywhere, we need to go together. You shouldn’t have gone behind my back, I said. She gave me a strange look, which I guess I deserved. I wasn’t careful. We weren’t careful.”
“It’s good you came back.�
��
“Where are you taking me?”
“We have a group of people. Good people. Almost everyone else left.”
“That’s one possibility.”
“What do you mean? That’s how it is.”
“You are the strongest woman I know. A hard-headed woman. You didn’t go through?”
“None of us has. You’re the first person to return.”
“Let’s not get carried away. He’s not the only one.”
“Who is this guy?”
“This is my friend Brandon.”
“Maybe we could go somewhere to talk privately.”
“You can trust him. We can trust you, right, Brandon?”
“You can.”
“But just tell us this: did the port take you to some other place and time?”
“Yes. It seemed so.”
“Seemed is the best you can do?”
“Seemed is the best anyone can do.”
“There goes your watch again.”
“It goes every hour and a half. Am I awake, or am I asleep?”
“You’re awake. Port happened. This all happened. Oh, don’t look at me like that. I promise you that this happened.”
“Let whosoever will deceive me. Am I awake, or am I asleep?”
* * *
—
They stopped in front of the old city hall to rest. The three of them sat on a concrete ledge like construction workers on a lunch break. Marie helped Jason pull off his wool suit jacket and gave him a package of raisins, as though he were a man down on his luck and she a benevolent stranger. He fished a raisin out of the box and put it in his mouth. Then he did this again, very slowly, while Brandon glared at him from a few feet away, willing him to move more quickly, willing him to disappear.
