Time Travelers Strictly Cash

by Spider Robinson

  A lover, then. I was relieved, pleased with my sagacity, and irritated as hell. I didn’t know why. I chalked it up to my nose. It felt as though a large shark with rubber teeth was rhythmically biting it as hard as he could. I shoveled the papers back into the box, locked and replaced it, and went to the bathroom.

  Her medicine cabinet would have impressed a pharmacist. She had lots of allergies. It took me five minutes to find aspirin. I took four. I picked the largest shard of mirror out of the sink, propped it on the septic tank and sat down backward on the toilet. My nose was visibly displaced to the right, and the swelling was just hitting its stride. I removed the toilet tissue plug from my nostril, and it resumed bleeding. There was a box of Kleenex on the floor. I ripped it apart, took out all the tissues and stuffed them into my mouth. Then I grabbed my nose with my right hand and tugged out and to the left, simultaneously flushing the toilet with my left hand. The flushing coincided with the scream, and my front teeth met through the Kleenex. When I could see again the nose looked straight and my breathing was unimpaired. When the bleeding stopped again I gingerly washed my face and hands and left. A moment later I returned; something had caught my eye. It was the glass and toothbrush holder. There was only one toothbrush in it. I looked through the medicine chest again, and noticed this time that there was no shaving cream, no razor manual or electric, no masculine toiletries of any kind. All the prescriptions were in her name.

  I went thoughtfully to the kitchen, mixed myself a Preacher’s Downfall by moonlight and took it to her bedroom. The bedside clock said five. I lit a match, moved the footlocker in front of an armchair, sat down and put my feet up. I sipped my drink and listened to her snore and watched her breathe in the feeble light of the clock. I decided to run through all the possibilities, and as I was formulating the first one daylight smacked me hard in the nose.

  My hands went up reflexively and I poured my drink on my head and hurt my nose more. I wake up hard in the best of times. She was still snoring. I nearly threw the empty glass at her.

  It was just past noon, now; light came strongly through the heavy curtains, illuminating so much mess and disorder that I could not decide whether she had trashed her bedroom herself or it had been tossed by a pro. I finally settled on the former: the armchair I’d slept on was intact. Or had the pro found what he wanted before he got that far?

  I gave it up and went to make myself breakfast. The milk was bad, of course, but I found a tolerable egg and the makings of an omelet. I don’t care for black coffee, but Javanese brewed from refrigerated beans needs no augmentation. I drank three cups.

  It took me an hour or two to clean up and air out the living-room. The cord and transformer went down the oubliette, along with most of the perished items from the fridge. The dishes took three full cycles for each load, a couple of hours all told. I passed the time vacuuming and dusting and snooping, learning nothing more of significance. The phone rang. She had no answering program in circuit, of course. I energized the screen. It was a young man in a business tunic, wearing the doggedly amiable look of the stranger who wants you to accept the call anyway. After some thought I did accept, audio-only, and let him speak first. He wanted to sell us a marvelous building lot in Forest Acres, South Dakota. I was making up a shopping list about fifteen minutes later when I heard her moan. I reached her bedroom door in seconds, waited in the doorway with both hands in sight and said slowly and clearly, “My name is Joseph Templeton, Karen. I am a friend. You are all right now.”

  Her eyes were those of a small, tormented animal.

  “Please don’t try to get up. Your muscles won’t work properly and you may hurt yourself.”

  No answer.

  “Karen, are you hungry?”

  “Your voice is ugly,” she said despairingly, and her own voice was so hoarse I winced. “My voice is ugly.” She sobbed gently. “It’s all ugly.” She screwed her eyes shut.

  She was clearly incapable of movement. I told her I would be right back and went to the kitchen. I made up a tray of clear strong broth, unbuttered toast, tea with maltose and saltine crackers. She was staring at the ceiling when I got back, and apparently it was vile. It put the tray down, lifted her and made a backrest of pillows.

  “I want a drink.”

  “After you eat,” I said agreeably.

  “Who’re you?”

  “Mother Templeton. Eat.”

  “The soup, maybe. Not the toast.” She got about half of it down, did nibble at the toast, accepted some tea. I didn’t want to overfill her. “My drink.”

  “Sure thing.” I took the tray back to the kitchen, finished my shopping list, put away the last of the dishes and put a frozen steak into the oven for my lunch. When I got back she was fast asleep.

  Emaciation was near total; except for breasts and bloated belly she was all bone and taut skin. Her pulse was steady. At her best she would not have been very attractive by conventional standards. Passable. Too much waist, not enough neck, upper legs a bit too thick for the rest of her. It’s hard to evaluate a starved and unconscious face, but her jaw was a bit too square, her nose a trifle hooked, her blue eyes just the least little bit too far apart. Animated, the face might have been beautiful—any set of features can support beauty—but even a superb makeup job could not have made her pretty. There was an old bruise on her chin, another on her left hip. Her hair was sandy blonde, long and thin; it had dried in snarls that would take an hour to comb out. Her breasts were magnificent, and that saddened me. In this world, a woman whose breasts are her best feature is in for a rough time.

  I was putting together a picture of a life that would have depressed anyone with the sensitivity of a rhino. Back when I had first seen her, when her features were alive, she had looked sensitive. Or had that been a trick of the juice? Impossible to say now.

  But damn it all to hell, I could find nothing to really explain the socket in her skull. You can hear worse life stories in any bar, on any street corner. I was prepared to match her scar for scar myself. Wireheads are usually addictive personalities, who decide at last to skip the small shit. There were no tracks on her anywhere, no nasal damage, no sign that she used any of the coke she sold. Her work history, pitiful and fragmented as it was, was too steady for any kind of serious jones; she had undeniably been hitting the sauce hard lately, but only lately. Tobacco seemed to be her only serious addiction.

  That left the hypothetical bastard lover. I worried at that for a while to see if I could make it fit. Assume a really creatively sadistic son of a bitch has gutted her like a trout, for the pure fun of it. You can’t do that to someone as a visitor or even a guest, you have to live with them. So he does a world-class job of crippling a lady who by her history is a tough little cookie, and when he has broken her he vanishes. Leaving not even so much as empty space in drawers, closets or medicine chest. Unlikely. So perhaps after he is gone she scrubs all traces of him out of the apartment—and then discovers that there is only one really good way to scrub memories. No, I couldn’t picture such a sloppy housekeeper being so efficient.

  Then I thought of my earlier feeling that the bedroom might have been tossed by a pro, and my blood turned to ice water. Suppose she wasn’t a sloppy housekeeper? The jolly sadist returns unexpectedly for one last nibble. And finds her in the living room, just like I did. And leaves her there. Carefully removes his spoor and leaves her there.

  After five minutes’ thought I relaxed. That didn’t parse either. True, this luxury co-op did inexplicably lack security cameras in the halls, relying on door-cameras—but for that very reason its rich tenants would be sure to take notice of comings and goings. If he had lived here for any time at all, his spoor was too diffuse to erase—so he would not have tried. Besides, a monster of that unique and rare kind thrives on the corruption of innocence. Tough little Karen was simply not toothsome enough.

  At that point I went to the bathroom, and that settled it. When I lifted the seat to urinate I found written on the underside with ma
gic marker: “It’s so nice to have a man around the house!” The handwriting was hers. She had lived alone.

  I was relieved, because I hadn’t relished thinking about my hypothetical monster or the necessity of tracking and killing him. But I was irritated as hell again.

  I wanted to understand.

  For something to do I took my steak and a mug of coffee to the study and heated up her terminal. I tried all the typical access codes, her birthdate and her name in numbers and such, but none of them would unlock it. Then on a hunch I tried the date of her parents’ death and that did it. I ordered the groceries she needed, instructed the lobby door to accept delivery, and tried everything I could think of to get a diary or a journal out of the damned thing, without success. So I punched up the public library and asked the catalog for Britannica on wireheading. It referred me to brain-reward, autostimulus of. I skipped over the history, from discovery by Olds and others in 1956 to emergence as a social problem in the late ’80s when surgery got simple; declined the offered diagrams, graphs and technical specs; finally found a brief section on motivations.

  There was indeed one type of typical user I had overlooked. The terminally ill.

  Could that really be it? At her age? I went to the bathroom and checked the prescriptions. Nothing for heavy pain, nothing indicating anything more serious than allergies. Back before telephones had cameras I might have conned something out of her personal physician, but it would have been a chancy thing even then. There was no way to test the hypothesis.

  It was possible, even plausible—but it just wasn’t likely enough to satisfy the thing inside me that demanded an explanation. I dialed a game of four-wall squash, and made sure the computer would let me win. I was almost enjoying myself when she screamed.

  It wasn’t much of a scream; her throat was shot. But it fetched me at once. I saw the problem as I cleared the door. The topical anesthetic had worn off the large “bedsores” on her back and buttocks, and the pain had woken her. Now that I thought about it, it should have happened earlier; that spray was only supposed to be good for a few hours. I decided that her pleasure-pain system was weakened by overload.

  The sores were bad; she would have scars. I resprayed them, and her moans stopped nearly at once. I could devise no means of securing her on her belly that would not be nightmare-inducing, and decided it was unnecessary. I thought she was out again, and started to leave. Her voice, muffled by pillows, stopped me in my tracks.

  “I don’t know you. Maybe you’re not even real. I can tell you.”

  “Save your energy, Karen. You—”

  “Shut up. You wanted the karma, you got it.”

  I shut up.

  Her voice was flat, dead. “All my friends were dating at twelve. He made me wait until fourteen. Said I couldn’t be trusted. Tommy came to take me to the dance, and he gave Tommy a hard time. I was so embarrassed. The dance was nice for a couple of hours. Then Tommy started chasing after Jo Tompkins. He just left me and went off with her. I went into the ladies’ room and cried for a long time. A couple of girls got the story out of me, and one of them had a bottle of vodka in her purse. I never drank before. When I started tearing up cars in the parking lot, one of the girls got ahold of Tommy. She gave him shit and made him take me home. I don’t remember it, I found out later.”

  Her throat gave out and I got water. She accepted it without meeting my eyes, turned her face away and continued.

  “Tommy got me in the door somehow. I was out cold by then. He’d been fooling around with me a little in the car I think. He must have been too scared to try and get me upstairs. He left me on the couch and my underpants on the rug and went home. The next thing I knew I was on the floor and my face hurt. He was standing over me. Whore he said. I got up and tried to explain and he hit me a couple of times. I ran for the door but he hit me hard in the back. I went into the stairs and banged my head real hard.”

  Feeling began to come into her voice for the first time. The feeling was fear. I dared not move.

  “When I woke up it was day. Mama must have bandaged my head and put me to bed. My head hurt a lot. When I came out of the bathroom I heard him call me. Him and Mama were in bed. He started in on me. He wouldn’t let me talk, and he kept getting madder and madder. Finally I hollered back at him. He got up off the bed and started in hitting me again. My robe came off. He kept hitting me in the belly and tits, and his fists were like hammers. Slut, he kept saying. Whore. I thought he was going to kill me so I grabbed one arm and bit. He roared like a dragon and threw me across the room. Onto the bed; Mama jumped up. Then he pulled down his underpants and it was big and purple. I screamed and screamed and tore at his back and Mama just stood there. Her eyes were big and round, just like in cartoons. His breath stank and I screamed and screamed and—”

  She broke off short and her shoulders knotted. When she continued her voice was stone dead again. “I woke up in my own bed again. I took a real long shower and went downstairs. Mama was making pancakes. I sat down and she gave me one and I ate it, and then I threw it up right there on the table and ran out the door. She never said a word, never called me back. After school that day I found a Sanctuary and started the divorce proceedings. I never saw either of them again. I never told this to anybody before.”

  The pause was so long I thought she had fallen asleep. “Since that time I’ve tried it with men and women and boys and girls, in the dark and in the desert sun, with people I cared for and people I didn’t give a damn about, and I have never understood the pleasure in it. The best it’s ever been for me is not uncomfortable. God, how I’ve wondered…now I know.” She was starting to drift. “Only thing my whole life turned out better’n cracked up to be.” She snorted sleepily. “Even alone.”

  I sat there for a long time without moving. My legs trembled when I got up, and my hands trembled while I made supper.

  That was the last time she was lucid for nearly forty-eight hours. I plied her with successively stronger soups every time she woke up, and once I got a couple of pieces of tea-soggy toast into her. Sometimes she called me by others’ names, and sometimes she didn’t know I was there, and everything she said was disjointed. I listened to her tapes, watched some of her video, charged some books and games to her computer account. I took a lot of her aspirin. And drank surprisingly little of her booze.

  It was a time of frustration for me. I still couldn’t make it all fit together, still could not quite understand. There was a large piece missing. The animal who sired and raised her had planted the charge, of course, and I perceived that it was big enough to blow her apart. But why had it taken eight years to go off? If his death four years ago had not triggered it, what had? I could not leave until I knew. I prowled her apartment like a caged bear, looking everywhere for something else to think about.

  Midway through the second day her plumbing started working again; I had to change the sheets. The next morning a noise woke me and I found her on the bathroom floor on her knees in a pool of urine. I got her clean and back to bed and just as I thought she was going to drift off she started yelling at me. “Lousy son of a bitch, it could have been over! I’ll never have the guts again now! How could you do that, you bastard, it was so nice!” She turned violently away from me and curled up. I had to make a hard choice then, and I gambled on what I knew of loneliness and sat on the edge of the bed and stroked her hair as gently and impersonally as I knew how. It was a good guess. She began to cry, in great racking heaves first, then the steady wail of total heartbreak. I had been praying for this, and did not begrudge the strength it cost her.

  She cried for so long that every muscle in my body ached from sitting still by the time she fell off the edge into sleep. She never felt me get up, stiff and clumsy as I was. There was something different about her sleeping face now. It was not slack but relaxed. I limped out in the closest thing to peace I had felt since I arrived, and as I was passing the living room on the way to the liquor I heard the phone.

  As I ha
d before, I looked over the caller. The picture was undercontrasted and snowy; it was a pay phone. He looked like an immigrant construction worker, massive and florid and neckless, almost brutish. And, at the moment, under great stress. He was crushing a hat in his hands, mortally embarrassed. I mentally shrugged and accepted.

  “Sharon, don’t hang up,” he was saying. “I gotta find out what this is all about.”

  Nothing could have made me hang up.

  “Sharon? Sharon, I know you’re there. Terry says you ain’t there, she says she called you every day for almost a week and banged on your door a few times. But I know you’re there, now anyway. I walked past your place an hour ago and I seen the bathroom light go on and off. Sharon, will you please tell me what the hell is going on? Are you listening to me? I know you’re listening to me. Look, you gotta understand, I thought it was all set, see? I mean I thought it was set. Arranged. I put it to Terry, cause she’s my regular, and she says not me, lover, but I know a gal. Look, was she lying to me or what? She told me for another bill you play them kind of games, sometimes.”

  Regular two hundred dollar bank deposits plus a cardboard box full of scales, vials, bags, razor and milk powder makes her a coke dealer, right, Travis McGee? Don’t be misled by the fact that the box was shoved in a corner, sealed with tape and covered with dust. After all, the only other illicit profession that pays regular sums at regular intervals is hooker, and two bills is too much for square-jawed, hook-nosed, wide-eyed little Karen, breasts or no breasts.

  For a garden variety hooker…

  “Dammit, she told me she called you and set it up, she gave me your apartment number.” He shook his head violently. “I can’t make no sense out of this. Dammit, she couldn’t be lying to me. It don’t figure. You let me in, didn’t even look first, it was all arranged. Then you screamed and I…done like we arranged, and I thought you was maybe overdoing it a bit but Terry said you was a terrific little actress. I was real careful not to really hurt you, I know I was. Then I put on my pants and I’m putting the envelope on the dresser and you bust that chair on me and come at me with that knife and I hadda bust you one. It just don’t make no sense, will you goddammit say something to me? I’m twisted up inside going on two weeks now. I can’t even eat.”