by Michael Hale
He leaned forward again, his hands flat on the desk this time; the moisture from his skin made Kirlian arcs of misted glass around each finger. “Look at it this way. Here we are sitting here, right? Talking. Let’s suppose you decide to stand up right now and—I don’t know; you’re pissed off for some reason—punch me in the face.” His thumbs came up. “Or, you just sit there and we carry on like we are now; you get steamed but we talk things through, work things out. Now think about it. What’s the difference in the long run? Nothing really. You take a swing at me, I’m pissed with you for a while; you feel bad about it—quit maybe; I have to get a tooth capped or something—so what? Minor stuff as far as the big picture’s concerned.”
He leaned back and ran both hands gently over his hair—Jeff liked his hair; it was one of his proud possessions: the thickness of it, the texture. Peter didn’t know if this was unconscious fussing or ostentatious preening. Jeff yawned and put his hands behind his head. “We just make sure you go far enough back in time so it really doesn’t affect anything. The universe’ll get over it.” He smiled as if he had made some sort of wise observation about things in general; after the meeting was over Peter figured he would probably jot it down somewhere to use in a meeting with the theory guys, or the board of directors.
Peter remembered what Eli used to say about “corporeal manifestation in the past,” that it was a tear in the fabric of things; how a ripple could grow into a tidal wave of consequence—part of him remembered it—the part connected to the strand of his past life with Pam, the part of him that couldn’t remember the ants in the Dalí painting. A tear in the fabric of things—he wondered how Simon perceived all this—his take on it—in light of all the shit he was responsible for.
He remembered too how Ron Koch had broken the rule about not interfering with your own time line and gone back to a point in his own life and—Ron Koch. The name seemed wrong—as if his powers of even recognizing that his memory was bad had failed him too.
I have been there already; I know how much damage can be done, he wanted to tell Jeff. Many times, sixty-three times, to be exact—or was it a hundred and twenty-seven? Two to the power of how many changes? He wondered again how much of it had actually happened, how much of it was delusion. But even the word “happen” didn’t seem to have much substance anymore. It’s all in your head; nothing out there has any meaning.
Jenny had decided that his delusions were a side effect of his prolonged exposure to the ether. He had sat her down in his apartment one evening with a fresh cup of mint tea—they had spent the day hiking through the ribbon of woodland that followed the Buffalo River—and tried to tell her about the parallel strands of experience that wound through his mind; but as the words left his lips he found himself dissembling, and trivializing what had been the bane of his every waking moment. The confession had diffused it all somehow and reduced it to a clinical anomaly that could be treated with an ounce of skepticism and a pound of distraction.
Traveling back in time (not just as an observing presence but actually going there, physically): he knew it could be done. There was no doubt in his mind. He knew it had been done, and who had been doing it. And what the consequences were. And now PsiberTech wanted him to do it too.
“What about the side effects?”
“A few—little green men.”
“Pardon?”
“‘Elves,’ they call them.” Jeff was looking in his desk for something now. He came up with another file. “Hallucinations involving contact with small multidimensional creatures, friendly elf-like beings—something like that.”
“In the ether? Or in the mind of the operative?”
“We don’t know—the test subjects weren’t like you. None of them are psychic—no RV experience. In fact, that’s why we used them. We wanted a control group.”
“Is that what it’s really all about? The spirit world? Tracking down these elf creatures?”
Jeff waved him off and shook his head. He slid the new file over to Peter. “Here, take a look at this.”
Inside was an old photograph of a group of men standing—some sitting—along what looked like a fence or a couple of sawhorses end-to-end; there was a rug draped over the top of whatever the wooden structure was. From the style of the clothes: morning coats and high collars, a few top hats—Peter figured it was probably taken some time in the last century. A man sitting on the extreme left was studying a large open book. The whole thing looked posed but it had a freshness you don’t see in many pictures of the same era. It looked familiar, but these days everything looked familiar to Peter.
“This was taken in 1843 by a man named Carl Ferdinand Stelzner, one of the first men in Germany to use the daguerreotype process. He was a painter before he became a photographer. ‘An itinerant miniaturist,’ I think it says here—anyway, we know exactly when he took it and where. It’s known as The Hamburg Art Club’s Outing. Fifteen men—artists, writers, a few hangers-on. We even know the names of some of them.” He leaned over and rested his index finger on the back row. “See this space here? We want you right there. Next to this guy.” He was pointing to a man facing right; his hand was on the shoulder of the man sitting before the open book. “Just for a minute or so,” Jeff said. “You’re going to be number sixteen.”
Peter remembered something and then it was gone—something to do with Eli again. Eli Thornquist. A meeting with Eli, something to do with an old photograph—and then it was gone past him, like a speeding train, or buried under the multiplying layers of conflicting recollections. His head began to ache again. He needed a glass of water.
What Jeff hadn’t told him the day he agreed to be part of the time travel experiment was that the drug would have to be taken in a series of increasing dosages; an intramuscular injection every eight hours for a week leading up to liftoff—that’s what they called it: “liftoff.”
The first thing he noticed after the first one was the voices, the steady background drone that filled his head like a loud air conditioner, a roar of white noise that started to fragment into discrete sounds—laughter and whispers. He would wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat with the lips of someone he had never met next to his ear—that’s how it felt; as if the person behind the lips were in bed with him instead of Jenny. Filling his head with whispers and gasps and squeaking incoherencies.
There was another meeting about a week later around a conference table in a boardroom on the top floor of the building. With an urn of coffee this time, and a tray of pastry—muffins and cheese Danish. The launch date was two days away. In two days he’d be in Hamburg, Germany; on May 28, 1843, around five o’clock in the evening.
A blowup of the photograph Jeff had shown Peter was sitting on an easel at the head of the long table.
“All we want from you, Peter, is your image, basically.” Jeff turned around to face the others. “All Peter has to do is appear at the spot where the photograph was taken just long enough to leave his likeness on the photographic plate right between those two men on the left.” Jeff was speaking with that careful diplomatic precision Peter remembered from when he was a kid; it was the kind of voice his sixth-grade teacher used when the principal was sitting in the back of the classroom.
He was only there for show, Peter realized then, at a press conference of sorts, for an audience of one. Three other people were at the meeting: the technician who had been giving him his shots, one of the theory people, and a man in a dark business suit Peter had never seen before. “Graves,” his name was—one of PsiberTech’s board members. He kept looking at his watch and when Jeff asked him if he had any questions he shook his head, smiled, and turned his whole body around to get a good look at Peter. He glanced at the photograph, then back at Peter as if he were trying to fit him into the picture here and now without the inconvenience and expense of actually going through with the experiment—as if there were some cost-effective shortcut no one had thought of that could get Peter’s likeness to suddenly appear in the s
pace between the two figures in the photograph.
Peter started wearing gloves whenever he was out in a public place—thin cotton gloves he’d bought in a drugstore. Touching anything now triggered a cascade of images and voices, a dithering flux of babble and head-reeling images: the stone steps up to the old library building—sometimes he could feel echoes of all the people who had ever trodden them pass up through his shoes, his legs, and into the pit of his stomach.
The injections of the experimental drug were amplifying every aspect of his psychic ability. He could hear voices all the time now, the incessant chatter of people. And animals: the neighing, braying cacophony of creatures long dead. The long walks through the countryside with Jenny were a thing of the past. They were too emotionally draining. Each football on uncharted ground tripped a land mine of images and smells and snuffling grunts—the squeal of slaughter and the mewling, plangent yelp of the newborn.
He would buy a paper at a 7-Eleven and hear the drowsy thoughts of the clerk, his or her rage and anger at everything and nothing sometimes—he would see himself through the store clerk’s eyes and wonder how the man (it was usually the men who glowed with hostility; the women seemed more at ease with themselves most of the time) could keep from lashing out.
Touching his hand as he made the change was even worse: he would get flashes of the guy’s private life—a messy marriage full of unruly kids and bad debts. Or a wave of possible futures would roll through his mind: one after the other like cards on a Rolodex, or all at once like fanned-out playing cards—images overlapping each other in a staccato rattle of variation. Like the sound of a fingernail along a comb.
Precognition—he’d never been very good at it before; maybe he wasn’t now and he was just hallucinating.
So he bought a pair of gloves and stayed away from crowds; but even so, he was still overwhelmed with sensations and stray images. In some ways it was nostalgic. It was as if the drug had taken years off his life. It took him back to the early years of his childhood when the textures and smells and the palpable essence of his every waking moment would assault him, wrap around him like a swirling dust devil. He remembered the days (relived them in some ways) when his father would take him to the park in Cleveland and send him off into the crowd to play the “Go-find-your-mother” game. He caught flashes of certain women he had met back then—their smiles, the perfume they wore, the texture of their rough, warm overcoats and cool raincoats against his cheek.
Along with the voices and the heightened tactile sensitivity—if that weren’t enough—the drug made him nauseous. About an hour after each shot he would find himself doubled over with stomach cramps—and the only thing he could keep down was fresh fruit. Citrus fruit mostly: oranges, grapefruit—the occasional banana.
When he held an orange in his bare hand the scent of the peel would take him by the scruff of the neck and drag him back to the beach in St. Martin; to the sound of the surf and Pam skipping ahead of him in her bare feet, then running back to him with the clump of orange peel in her hand, filling the air with its perfume as she reached up to touch his cheek.
And then he would be undone by sadness, and remorse. Why? The big question again: Why me left behind and Pam and the others taken away? Survivor’s guilt they called it, didn’t they? People who had endured Auschwitz or Belsen or Nagasaki—I don’t deserve to be the only one left.
His private detective had yet to come up with a trace of any of the other members of the original group of Calliope psychics. That in itself seemed relevant now—the absolute void of information. None of them had ever walked the earth—except for poor Gordon. He, at least, had left a trace of his existence behind: a small grave marker in a suburban Memphis cemetery. He had lasted six weeks. Something had done him in—or someone. The death certificate put the blame on “crib death.”
Peter knew it was Simon, but there was no way of proving it. He could go back and watch him do it—try and stop him if he could, re-edit the course of history—but he couldn’t get back there without a “lodestone,” a psychometric link.
The death certificate itself might be useful. Or something that Gordon had been in contact with during his brief lifetime—his baby clothes or toys—but what was the point? There would be nothing to keep Simon from coming back over and over again, targeting Gordon at a different point in his short life—till he got the job done.
What he really should do was send his private detective on the trail of Simon Hayward. Track him down here and now, in real time. Go see him and confront him. And then what? Where would he go from there?
“Hang out with Germans,” Jeff said a few days after his first injection. “Go to a social club or something. Listen to Wagner, whatever—immerse yourself. The drug should help you with that, by the way—help you learn the language. You’re going to need it.” He slapped him on the back and Peter came away with an image of Jeff naked on a large bed—naked except for a pair of black socks—and the smell of cigar smoke.
47
. . . the “there” there is where it isn’t—right where it ends at the edge of the ocean
Saint Christopher had brought him here—to Saint Augustine’s mother: Santa Monica.
And curiosity, of course. He wanted to see what Peter’s parents were like. Maybe meeting them would help him understand why he detested the guy so much. (Oh yeah. The conscience thing. Goofy with wings and a halo.)
Here the ocean was a boundary that promised boundlessness. The Santa Monica pier like a nerve ending. Probing.
Simon dove out of the ether (with a date and a specific place to aim for; RV stuff was as easy as saying “abracadabra” now) . . . down through the bright blue sky into the heat and breeze of a California summer. To the beach just north of the pier at the foot of Colorado Avenue.
Teenagers baked in a pre-carcinoma sunshine. Ozone to spare here—our planet’s natural sun block. Coconut oil deep-fried slick young thighs, Annette Funicello puppy-fat arms, into a hot dog mahogany. Beach towels, acres of them. Buttocks under checkered cotton. Breasts contained by the idea of John Glenn in his nose cone. Teased hair and sunglasses that did nothing but make you look like you were wearing sunglasses.
And portable transistor radios. Boxes the size of lunch buckets with “Ten Transistor” spelled out in metallic italic on fabric grill-work. The hits just keep on coming: Roy Orbison singing “Dream Baby,” then Neil Sedaka’s multitracked whine: “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do.”
Someone was actually swimming. She stood up above the roll of the sea and shook her hair back from her face. There she was. Peter’s mom (soon-to-be-mom) stumbling knee high through the undertow back to shore. In a nice, ruby-red, almost-bikini, two-piece. Laughing and fending off indifference from the boy watching her. She was pretending to be unconscious of her new toy: a woman’s body. The latest model.
Simon hovered, back behind the sunshine, invisibly visiting.
Santa Monica, California. July 15, 1962. He knew he had found his target. He could tune in and out of her thoughts about the guy if he wanted to—Peter’s father; soon-to-be-father. The tanned kid with his dark hair slicked back like the car hop, Cookie, in that TV show 77 Sunset Strip. A magnetic field of public lust was swinging them into a close elliptical orbit about each other. The parry and thrust—he didn’t have to be a mind reader to see what was happening. Where it was heading: first base and beyond.
It occurred to Simon that Sharon Tate would be nineteen right about this time. Just like little “Gidgit Gets Laid” over there. The hair the same, he noticed then, as she tipped her head to one side, drying it like the sign language gesture for going to sleep—two hands praying beside the head. Patting it down to bring it back to the natural blond. She was blond like Sharon Tate, the woman whose life he had saved. His Charlie’s Angel. No one knew that of course—which suddenly seemed all wrong. I want to be remembered for something—saving her life would be a start: “Simon Hayward—the man who saved Sharon Tate’s life.”
The lips not t
he same, though. Thinner; and the nose was slightly larger, more Streisandesque than he liked, but passable. Nice body too—if you took into account how out of shape chicks were back in the sixties, their asses hanging down to match the cheekless girdle line in all those idealized Vargus pinup girls. Girdles were still the thing back then, he remembered, along with crinolines and bullet-nosed, poke-your-eye-out bras. Even in the early sixties. (It was ostensibly the fifties: anything pre-Beatles was still the fifties as far as he was concerned.)
The Beach Boys in the air now: “Surfin’ Safari.”
The guy with the slicked-back hair picked up the radio from beside the purse of Pete’s mom-to-be’s best, “Plain-Jane” friend. (She was a little chunky and hadn’t crossed over into the universe of the two-piece yet.) She looked up from her magazine, took off her sunglasses, and yelled something as Pete’s dad-to-be danced his way off toward the pier.
He was taking possession of the song; his long toes were in the sand now, shuffling, digging in as he did the bobbing, bird head mating-dance thing with his arms out, faking the “Swim” or “Watusi” or whatever it was—his tongue coming out over the bottom lip to show he was really concentrating, but letting them know it was tongue in cheek—a parody, and if he wanted to, in the right circumstances with really neat clothes on, not just his tight satin Jantzen “Nylastic” swimsuit, he could dance up a storm.
Peter’s mother dropped her towel and followed him, the guy with her friend’s brand-new portable transistor radio. He can’t just take Tina’s radio like that—what a character. Who does he think he is?
He worked his way through islands of towels and red metal Coca-Cola coolers, clusters of itsy-bitsy pink and pastel yellow and polka dot; and tiny kids spidering across the sand to the water—through all that toward the pier, the music still with him, as if it were his own personal soundtrack.
