“Your own people,” I venture. “Members of the grounded movement.”
Minnow shakes his head. “Not just them. People from the camps. I was one of the first sent back to help clear the way.”
“What do you mean, clear the way?”
“The people at the other end of the chute—the ones in Western Australia—they killed some of the 2071 survivors before the survivors began to fight back. Apparently they didn’t believe the survivors about the nuclear attack. Communication between the future and the past is difficult. The people in 1986 depend solely on the word of U.N.A. officials sent through the chute, and it was obvious to them that the 2071 survivors hadn’t gone through regular channels. And so there was a team of us—me and several others—sent through to deal with the people working at Lake Mackay.”
By ‘deal with’ he obviously means kill the people at the Australian end of the chute. How can we ever hope to save the world when everybody is still ready to kill each other to ensure their own survival?
There’s another problem, though. Somewhere along the way Minnow lost me; things don’t quite add up. Even if the warren could disrupt security on both ends of the chute for long enough to send several submarines filled with people through, defense forces on the Lake Nipigon side would soon kick in—more SecRos than the warren and its people would be able to fight. That means they did this for the sake of a few thousand people at most, and possibly many less, when they still had six more years to work out a way of saving a greater number.
“Now tell me what you know,” Minnow prompts. “You said everyone here from the U.N.A. not working for the director is wiped and covered, but you seem to remember everything.”
“I didn’t at first. It was Freya who started to remember. She saw me in Toronto by chance and wouldn’t leave things alone.” I explain that I only know the barest facts about the director’s operations—that a number of well-connected U.N.A. civilians were wiped and settled in Southern Ontario, the director’s people playing the parts of their friends and family members, while the larger operation is focused on the United States political scene in an attempt to stop global warming before it reaches a tipping point.
Isaac’s blank expression tells me I’m not revealing anything new. “Where are all the people from 2065 who came back with you?” I ask, squinting at him in the dark. If I can put the puzzle pieces together, will it help me find Freya?
“We scattered. I was with a smaller group and we got separated. It was mayhem in Australia. I’m hoping they’ll catch up with me here.” Isaac appears restless and unhappy as he says, “Come back to my hotel and I’ll tell you the rest. With what you’ve said about U.N.A. security forces operating in this area today, we’re not safe out here.”
From the sound of things, we’re not safe anywhere. No one is.
“I still haven’t told you about the results of the Toxo outbreak,” he adds. “Or do you already know the outcome?”
“I was sent back at the very start of the plague. I don’t know anything.” And I’ve gone from believing Minnow could be my enemy to swallowing his 2071 story and boomeranging back to suspicion within mere minutes. But I don’t have time to sift through all my doubts. “Look, if you’re not with them I need you to help me find Freya.”
“How?” he says.
I get up, motioning for Minnow to do the same. “Where are you staying?”
“Just a couple blocks from here. A hotel room in the Lower East Side.”
Walking through the Lower East Side is like taking a stroll through hell. It’s swarming with lost people and dangerous vibes. “Lead the way,” I tell him. The sooner we reach his place the sooner we can start formulating a plan. By now the director must know about Minnow and his people coming through the chute. They’d want him even more than they’d want Freya. In fact, they must think she’s somehow involved with the warren’s plan. I don’t know how they hope to contain the situation. They can’t possibly kill or wipe everyone who came through time with Minnow.
“This way,” Isaac says, hanging right. “It’s on East Hastings.” People are milling around us on the sidewalks—some of them wild-eyed, some dejected, and others simply without enough money to be anywhere better. “You know, I think I may have received some intelligence about Freya just before I went through the chute. One of our undercover people in high level security forces learned that an archivist had found a photograph of a girl in British Columbia that was causing quite a stir in the upper echelons. The info didn’t mean anything to anyone in the warren at the time, but now I wonder if they were talking about Freya.”
“They must have been.” There’ve been tons of press people and tourists snapping pictures at Expo. It just opened in May, which could explain why the director’s men didn’t find us earlier. Maybe Freya’s picture got in a newspaper or magazine without us realizing it and seventy-eight years from now a U.N.A. archivist finds it. “What else did they say?”
“That was it. The woman we had on the inside only happened to overhear the scrap of information. She had no idea security were looking for someone in the past.”
I still have my hand on the zipper of my duffle bag and I see Minnow’s gaze flicker towards it. “You still don’t believe me?” he asks.
“Just being cautious. Trusting anyone right now would be a luxury. But if you help me find her, I’ll owe you.”
“You’ll owe me a few times over, then,” Minnow says. “This isn’t the first time I’ve helped you out.” He points down the street to a five-story building that resembles a cement bunker with windows. A woman with a shopping cart loiters out front, while two others stand idly by the doorway. A Vancouver Canucks towel flaps from a second story window, partially obscuring a sign that proclaims the ground floor venue ‘Vancouver’s Premiere Country Music Pub.’
The air between Minnow and I feels charged with static electricity and I slow my pace as we draw near his hotel. I can’t help thinking that if Freya were here, she’d be pulling us in a different direction. Without her I’m forced to rely on my own instincts and they’re warning me not to go inside with him. “What happens if I walk through that door with you?” I ask.
“Look, you either have to trust me and let me help work out how to get Freya back or go find her yourself. I’m not picky about which option you choose. I’ve already been through enough to last me another hundred years.” Minnow juts out his chin, his face dripping with rain.
In the last hour and a half or so I’ve lost everything; I need to have faith in someone. But doubt keeps trickling inside me like a leaky faucet that can’t be ignored.
“Tell me what happened with the Toxo,” I say. However this goes, I want to know what happened in 2063 and I’m still working the angles, searching for any overlooked pieces of information that could help me find Freya. “Did many survive?” My lashes blink in double time, fighting the onslaught of rainwater.
“We lost almost forty percent of the population before they cured it,” Minnow says. “CHC quadrupled their Ro production rate to make up for the extreme population drop. The U.N.A. is like an android nation now.” I hear the disgust vibrate in Isaac’s throat. “And the Cursed camps still aren’t empty, figure that out.”
Ros work cheaper and faster than humans and have no will to defy orders—we both know that.
“I guess some things never change,” I tell him, relieved that he sounds like the same old Minnow Seneval spoke so highly of, because, let’s face it, in the end I’m not going to walk away from the only person who might be able to help me because of a bad feeling.
I nod, shifting my hand away from the duffle’s zipper and taking a definitive step towards his hotel. Isaac smiles faintly and bows his head, graciously accepting my show of trust. Then a flash of lightning illuminates the night sky, catching us both by surprise. It’s almost funny that you can slide backwards through time by nearly a century and still be momentarily awed by a common act of nature.
Thunder crackles. A white van skid
s up behind us in the rain, the two men from my apartment building spilling out of its back door. Minnow’s reflexes kick into gear faster than mine. He sprints for the building. Seconds behind, so do I, the men’s arms closing around me and something sharp pricking my shoulder. East Hastings Street begins a slow fade to black, my legs disappearing with it and my head too heavy on my shoulders. What’s left of me can only watch as I’m dragged under, the sound of thunder the final thing to be swallowed up as I slide away from Vancouver and towards a darker place.
Eleven: 1986
Our first winter on the West Coast was pretty gloomy. Don’t get me wrong; we were happy to be alive. Sometimes so ecstatic that we were almost giddy with it, acting like kids half our age, throwing ice cubes down each other’s backs and tickling each other until we couldn’t breathe. But March and April were full of grey skies and rainy days and our apartment didn’t compare to the comfort the Resniks’ house had offered when we’d been in hiding in Toronto. In Vancouver we were afraid of own shadows, nervous that anyone who looked at us twice could be one of the director’s spies.
It took us about ten days to get up the courage to go out and look for jobs. The first one I scored was a landscaping position, under the table, and then Freya picked up housekeeping work at a nearby motel. Our employers worked us too hard, treated us lousy, and paid us even worse, until we were ready to take a risk and use the social insurance (the Canadian equivalent of social security) cards old Freya had scored us to land better jobs. We figured she wouldn’t have given them to us if they weren’t safe.
By the beginning of June, Freya was at Il Baccaro, and two weeks later I landed bar work at Greasy Ryan’s. Suddenly we had money to do things like whale watching and kayaking, and we still read to each other at night sometimes, only we were branching out from the creepy stuff and on to the bestseller’s list, crime novels, and trashy romances that made us laugh out loud.
The first day it was nice enough to go to Kitsilano Beach, I couldn’t stop staring at Freya as we lay on the sand. Although I’d seen her in less, I’d never seen her in a swimsuit. Hers was red with white polka dots, and the bikini bottoms tied up at the sides so both the left and right were decorated with looping bows of string. I kept reaching out to poke my finger through the nearest loop; Freya humoured me and assigned me the job of applying sunscreen. Here and now most people still want a tan, but Freya knew better; she said she was going to stay pale.
She lathered me in lotion too, and we made out under the sunshine on and off for hours. In between we’d walk down to the waves and swim. The water was cold compared to what we were used to at home and every time we plunged in, our bodies registered the shock all over again. During our third dip, a boy and girl on floating lounge chairs drifted near us. They looked ten years old or so and the boy grinned brazenly and burst out with the question, “Are you two boyfriend and girlfriend?”
The girl, her hair in a wet ponytail, grimaced like she was mortified. “You don’t have to answer him,” she said quickly.
Freya, who’d been treading water with her arms slicing through the waves, smiled at the girl. “Is that your brother?”
“My cousin,” the girl replied, a scowl in her voice. “My completely immature cousin who still doesn’t know that he’s not supposed to ask strangers things like whether they’re boyfriend and girlfriend.”
The boy ignored his cousin’s dismissive comments and said, “So are you?”
Freya took a couple of strokes towards me so that our legs were touching underwater. “He’s my grandfather,” she replied playfully.
“Her great grandfather,” I corrected, skimming Freya’s thigh under the surface. “She’s my favourite great granddaughter.”
“Very funny,” the boy scoffed, beginning to steer away from us. “You two are such liars.”
We’d irritated the kid by not taking him seriously and before he could get far, Freya shouted after the boy, her tone light and teasing, “Okay, nosey, he is my boyfriend. Happy now?”
The girl cousin, who was still bobbing in her lounge chair nearby, stared at Freya. Emboldened by Freya’s response to her cousin’s question, she said, “I hope I’m tall like you when I grow up.”
“Thanks,” Freya said. “But how do you know I’m tall?”
The girl folded her hands across her midsection. “We saw you on the beach before he piggybacked you into the water. We have a Frisbee back there. If my cousin promises to be less annoying, do you want to throw it around with us after?”
Freya and I smiled quickly at each other. It was like we’d accidentally picked up two strays and for some reason neither of us wanted to disappoint them. “As long as it’s okay with your parents,” Freya said.
“Her father,” the boy offered. “And he won’t mind.”
A few minutes later we were tossing a Frisbee around Kitsilano Beach with two kids who’d been strangers to us moments earlier. Out of the water, the girl, Heather, was a bit clumsy, but the boy, Jeff, could catch and throw with ease. The father, an aging hippy, looked on from behind sunglasses, refusing our invitation to join in the fun. I did the math while I was watching Jeff race along the sand and figured out he and Heather would be about eighty-eight years old in 2063. That was something I tended to do a lot—calculate the ages of people when the future I’d experienced would come to pass again.
Eighty-eight doesn’t seem nearly as old in the future as it does in the 1980s. The kids could easily have lived that long and been around to go shopping at Wyldewood, have their own domestic Ro servants, and develop addictions to gushi. Or maybe they’d be grounded members dedicated to saving the world. Maybe in the future a younger, different version of me would meet Heather and Jeff and never know there’d been another me who’d encountered them before.
Anything could happen.
Later, when Heather’s father told them it was time to go, Jeff gave me what he called an ‘Indian sunburn,’ grabbing hold of my right arm and twisting the skin in opposite directions while Heather shook her head, embarrassed afresh by his behavior. “I told you he was immature,” she said.
Freya and I waved goodbye to them the way we’d seen people do to departing relatives in TV shows. Freya’s arm was around my waist and as Heather and Jeff walked away, she said, “Do you think that’s what we’d be like if we were growing up in 1985?”
“We are growing up in 1985,” I reminded her.
“I mean if we were natives of the time like they are. They seem so young for their age.”
That was what it was like before the world went to rot—innocent, at least in places. “I guess we probably would be a lot like them,” I agreed. “Would that be so bad?”
“At their age, no. But the entire place seems so clueless about the things they’re doing and where they’re being led.” To long-term disaster.
“Maybe the directors and their people will smarten them up,” I said dryly. We were in the bizarre situation of hanging our hopes for the world on people we didn’t trust. It was impossible to think about the directors and what they represented without feeling a complex mix of gratitude and fear.
We strolled over to our towels and lay next to each other with our hands linked, too tired from running around after the Frisbee to do much else. In the distance, under the sound of the waves and people’s voices, I could hear a drumbeat pumping out from a boom box, and intermittent dog barks and seagull cries. Under the warmth of the June sun, and surrounded by people that had no reason to want to hurt me or Freya, I felt safer than was prudent. No one can be on guard all the time, and I’d only slept for three hours the night before.
I drifted off right there on the beach, holding Freya’s hand. When I woke up my forehead smarted and I sat up to reach for the sunscreen, knowing I was singeing. Freya’s towel was empty and I scanned the horizon, looking for her polka dot bikini and tall form. The temperature seemed to have risen while I was asleep, and I uncapped the sunscreen and coated my face, arms, and chest while my eyes searche
d her out.
In the beginning I wasn’t worried. Her flip-flops were missing but the plastic bag with our street clothes in it lay in the spot beneath our towels where we’d left it. Freya had probably just gone to the bathroom or to get a drink. But five minutes later there was still no sign of her and I started to get restless. On my left sat a couple who hadn’t been there when I’d closed my eyes earlier. The girl, olive-skinned with straight black hair, was wearing a striped T-shirt over her swimsuit and caught me looking at her. “Excuse me,” I said. “Did you happen to see the girl I was with?”
“We just got here,” the guy next to her replied, crossing his legs at the ankles. “You were the only one here when we sat down five minutes ago.” The guy had beefy arms and a face you wanted to trust; I remember noticing both those things right away. “I’m sure she’ll be back in a minute.”
“Sure,” I echoed. “Thanks.” I remained on the towel three more minutes, reminding myself they wouldn’t have taken her without taking me. When the three minutes were up, my mind began to allow in other alarming possibilities, and I stood up and shoved my feet into my flip-flops. “If she shows up could you tell her I’ll be back in a minute?” I asked the couple.
“No problem, man,” the guy said.
“We’ll watch your things for you,” the girl added.
“Thanks.” I stalked off to find Freya, my eyes darting in three hundred different directions. The beach was so crowded that day, I probably could’ve walked right by her and missed her, so I went slowly, my head stinging where the sun had gotten to me. A woman in a tube top and racoon eye makeup collided with my shoulder and then glared into my face, expecting me to apologize. Paused by the crash, I heard a new sound on the wind, one that bounced me back to the summer of 2063: Arlette Courtemanche inciting the crowd.
I muttered an insincere “sorry” as I turned to the right, following the music to a guy with a mullet sitting with his back against one of the long pieces of driftwood scattered across the beach, his arms cradling a battered acoustic guitar. The tune was the very one I’d heard Arlette sing on Du Monde Day but the lyrics were different—Canadianized. Where Arlette had sung about the Redwood Forest and Gulf Stream waters, this guy crooned about the Arctic Circle and Great Lake waters. The variations didn’t dampen the power of the song and I stopped about fifteen feet from the man, a chill running through me as the tune pulled me simultaneously forwards and backwards in time.
Tomorrow Page 12
