“Riiiight,” Reli said.
“I’ll be right back,” said MacCleary. He eased his cowboy hat down over the bandages and sauntered to the bathroom, removing something shiny from his pocket as he did so.
The band onstage was singing a new song. It went:
If you think we’re losing our minds
If you think we’re fallin’ behind
If you think we’re none of a kind
Well, you’re right—it’s time to fight!
If you think we’re losing our hearts
If you think we’re falling apart
If you think it’s time we got smart
Well, you’re right—it’s time to fight!
If you’ve got a way with it, you’ve got to get away with it
If you’ve got a hand at it, you’ve got to take a stand
If you’ve got a way with it, you’ve got to get away with it
If you’ve got the swing of it, you’ve got to come out swinging
That’s the State of the Art, now
That’s the State of the Art, now
That’s the State of the Art, now
All right!!
They weren’t half bad, Reli figured. Maybe Crazy Devin was onto something.
She hoped he wasn’t doing coke in the bathroom. She preferred men who drank.
MacCleary reappeared in Costa Rica and took Beatrice by the hand.
“Awake, my dear? Care for a morning mimosa?”
“Where did you go?” Beatrice asked anxiously. “There was a cougar on the beach . . . I mean a jaguar . . . I mean . . . Devin, you’re bleeding . . .”
“No, no, I was bleeding, I’ll be fine. Let’s go have brunch in Russia.”
Later on, Beatrice couldn’t really recall what happened next—something to do with Catherine the Great’s court, and a lot of champagne. No one except the lower-class Russians spoke Russian, so everyone spoke French. MacCleary could communicate with them all just fine, anyway. Beatrice’s college French helped her follow half of the conversation . . . barely.
There was champagne everywhere, in bottles that appeared almost comically oversized and everywhere else. It was all Veuve Clicquot champagne. For some reason she remembered that Russia had purchased 70 percent of the Veuve Clicquot supply by the turn of the twentieth century.
A man was playing a piano that overflowed full of champagne. Dancing along the strings inside were a hundred live sardines.
They were in an opulent home’s library along with several other merchants from France and Russia, all of whom had something to do with champagne. They sang cheerfully at the gurgling, champagne-drenched piano.
And drank.
And drank.
And drank.
At one point, the men all focused on Beatrice. She smiled politely until the men began tossing her from one to another, after which she began shrieking. Maybe they invented crowd surfing?
Finally Devin caught her. Toasting the merchants with his free hand, he walked off, Beatrice slung over his shoulder.
He grabbed one sealed bottle of champagne from a silver stand before heading up the stairs—an 1811 Halley’s Comet–vintage bottle.
“Let’s play a trick on Reli,” MacCleary declared. “Hang on.”
Halfway up the stairs, MacCleary and his device sent them back to the present day and the dark, cool subbasement of Trooley’s, where he placed the priceless bottle on the back of a shelf in the darker of two walk-in beer coolers. Without even bothering to walk out of the cooler, Beatrice still slung over his shoulder, he returned them to the stairway in Russia, which he continued climbing.
Upstairs, in a room with a large claw-foot bathtub as well as a fireplace, Devin opened a window and pulled the biggest bottle of champagne Beatrice had ever seen from inside a drift of snow on the roof.
“This is what we in the trade call a Balthazar,” said MacCleary. “Twelve liters apiece. And I have six bottles.” He grinned wickedly. “Shall we have a champagne bubble bath?”
The band at Trooley’s was playing another song. It went:
Word to your crew:
I came to stage a coup
This revolution’s evolution’s
Never usin’ fools
Word to your agents:
Excess in moderation
Next dimension’s my intention
In visions, invasions!
Reli might . . . might . . . have been dancing behind the bar, just a little bit.
Beatrice awoke, still dreamily drunk in the champagne-filled claw-foot tub. Before opening her eyes, she wondered aloud, “When am I?”
Devin lay opposite her in the tub, head thrown back, snoring soundly. The fire was nothing but embers, and the wind was whipping in from the open window. Beatrice got up and shut it.
She stoked the fire a bit to get it going again. It was still very cold in the room, and the champagne made her feel sticky on her skin and woozy in her head. She splashed some water on her face from a nearby basin to fix this. The water was frigid.
MacCleary’s nice suit was draped over a chair. Beatrice stared at the jacket for a good thirty seconds before going to it and pulling the device from the pocket.
She slid her finger over the screen and the device lit up immediately. She touched the middle pyramid in the opening picture and a menu appeared.
Under MUSIC there were thousands of tracks, regular studio recordings and live shows, everything from Mozart (recorded live in Austria) to underground Clash bootlegs, plus a few famous speeches MacCleary must have seen firsthand, nestled amidst a crowd in his space-time scenesterdom. Beatrice would have to hear all those speeches eventually.
Beatrice touched PHOTOGRAPHS. Instantly pictures montaged across the screen—shots of glaciers and volcanoes, Civil War battles and Indian chiefs, famous artists holding up paintings of politicians looking official and unofficial, even a fetching portrait of MacCleary riding a horse on a mountain trail. The MOST RECENTLY CREATED file was chock full of pictures of a tanned blonde girl and a very black girl, nude and coyly posing wearing MacCleary’s cowboy hat. The date-stamp for the photo read 1869.
He not only met them before he met you, Beatrice realized, he met them before you were even alive.
But the photos got her thinking. There was an historical question she had to answer—for the sake of curiosity and her college thesis . . . and she needed to do it alone.
Would he care if she borrowed his device and indulged in a single trip by herself?
One trip would be okay, she decided. She’d be right back . . .
A mild July 11 on the New Jersey shore at dawn. Beatrice watched the boats rowing across the Hudson River from New York. The duelers had to meet in Jersey, since in New York duelers were prosecuted. Dueling in New Jersey was also illegal, but the laws were not strictly enforced.
She could see the stern-faced Alexander Hamilton even from afar. He was as striking as all the statues and ten-dollar bills portrayed him. Yet he looked sad.
Beatrice skulked behind her stand of trees. Why was she scared? She wasn’t about to fight in a fatal duel.
The better question was why she was here. How would watching the lethal spectacle improve her thesis? She couldn’t source her observations with written documents. All she’d have was her word that she’d been there. Still there was no way she was missing this, fearful or otherwise. Her thesis and her research were, in her opinion, dead, irrelevant, without meaning. She believed in her soul that observing the event firsthand would jump-start her commitment, giving her writing hard-won authenticity.
She also wanted to know what really happened.
The fact she’d never seen anyone shot, that she’d never even held a gun anywhere, anytime, however, was starting to get to her. She wasn’t sure how she’d hold up.
As the boats docked, Beatrice tried to take in the significance of Hamilton’s life and what was happening.
Founding Father. Early economist. Political philosopher, constitutional lawyer,
author of the Federalist Papers. Hamilton would never turn fifty, and he’d already had a bigger life than modern men twice his age.
Bank founder. Continental congressman. George Washington’s own aide-de-camp.
They were climbing up the banks of Weehawken now, heading for the woods. Beatrice wondered if Hamilton was taking stock of his life in the same way she was, but if he was, she couldn’t tell.
Hamilton’s son had been shot in a similar duel over honor not long ago, and by all historical accounts Hamilton was inconsolable after his death. His son had fought a duel of honor with a man named Eacker who had found young Philip Hamilton’s behavior in his theater box seats “hooliganish,” and Philip had fought to regain his honor. And lost.
Today, it was former vice president Aaron Burr who was fighting for his perceived honor. After his decade-plus rivalry with Burr that had made its way from the Senate floor to the White House to the press, Burr had had enough of Hamilton’s meddlesome critiques and issued the challenge.
Like Reli and her family before her, Hamilton had been in the whiskey business, fighting alongside George Washington and General Henry “Light Horse Harry” Lee over the whiskey tax, until its repeal the previous year, 1803. Hamilton had charged six cents a gallon to small batch-whiskey distillers and a whopping nine cents a gallon to large distillers to get a piece of the action on one of America’s most popular goods—corn whiskey. Distillers had literally taken up arms against this in the Whiskey Rebellion.
The lots drawn by the opponents’ seconds gave Hamilton choice of weapon and position. Save Hamilton and Burr, all backs were turned when, from a portmanteau bag, appeared a box with the Wogdon & Barton pistols. They’d had to carry them covertly so that all others present had plausible deniability—no one had technically seen any pistols in the boat when they’d left New York. Hamilton chose his gun—the same pistol that had shot his son—and took his position. Burr did the same. Their seconds, the rowers, and the doctor present all remained facing away into the woods. Beatrice cowered a little lower, her mind racing.
Hamilton wrote in his journal last night that he’s going to delope—French for “throw away”—his fire. Burr will later call the statement “contemptible, if true.” Burr will aim for Hamilton’s heart.
The men, standing proudly in position, ceremonially raised their weapons. Hamilton’s sad but steely gaze met Burr’s icy sneer. The count was given, and two cracks like thunderbolts rang out. From over Burr’s head, a tree branch shattered.
Hamilton had been hit over the right hip, instantly causing him to stagger and fall. Burr moved toward him, flashing a look of what might have been regret, but then quickly steeled himself and walked away.
Everything else happened in fast-forward, it seemed. All present had turned to view the results of the spectacle. The doctor was tending to Hamilton as best he could, and then they rushed him back down to the boat. Burr, striding arrogantly back through the trees with his second and rowers, also headed for the banks of the Hudson. One of the men shielded Burr behind an umbrella, as if this event could somehow have been kept a secret.
Beatrice knew only too well what would happen from there. In the boat, the wounded Hamilton would tell his doctor to be careful, that the gun still had a shot left in it that he hadn’t used. He’d die the very next day. Burr would survive relatively unscathed, eventually dodging indictments for murder in New York and New Jersey. And that was history.
She waited breathlessly until everyone had departed. The smell of gunpowder still hung in the morning air. She crept up to the site of the duel and counted the paces. They’d been about thirteen feet from each other, when Hamilton’s gunshot had smashed into a branch.
Had he deloped out of honor? Had he shot wide because he’d been hit? Had he committed suicide by duel? Had he fired off the round by accident due to the pistol’s unreliable hair trigger? Or had he just simply lost?
Beatrice had just watched the event unfold, and she still couldn’t tell what had happened anymore than the other participants and reporters on the scene who would later agree on the facts. So what was history? A lie invented by those who were never there, spun by unreliable witnesses whose recollections contradicted those of other witnesses? History was not even the inevitable polemic of the victor. Few historians took the side of Aaron Burr, the duel’s winner.
What was the meaning of history, then, if historical facts were unverifiable and truth was unattainable? That nobody knew anything . . . not even the individuals who’d been there?
Had she cracked history’s conundrum?
Had she finally solved the mystery of history?
Beatrice knew this much: Instead of certitude and hard-won authenticity, her time trip to New Jersey had infused her thesis with . . . doubt.
She would not return to the History Department.
Maybe instead she should study under Reli, who had once told her, “There is more to life than the life of the mind.”
All at once, Beatrice wanted to get the hell out of 1804.
The device buzzed. Its battery bar said 5% REMAINING.
But Beatrice was oblivious.
She was clicking to SETTINGS and returning to Russia three seconds after she’d left.
She grabbed the still-snoozing MacCleary’s suit, then his wrist as he lay in the tub, and hit the DEFAULT icon.
Suddenly, the pair fell through the doorway of Trooley’s Tourist Tavern, just as the Universal Truth Machine was packing up their instruments, and Reli was counting out the cash in the till.
All Reli could think of, seeing Beatrice and the naked, champagne-drenched friend, was how much fun she’d missed.
“I’ll see you later,” Beatrice said. Then she vanished.
The sound of boisterous jazz music filled the bar as amply as the cigarette smoke and bodies did. Short-haired women in short-fringed dresses and men in sharp suits danced on every available bit of floor.
Other than the fashion and lack of some wall decor and visible booze bottles, it was the exact same Trooley’s Tourist Tavern that Beatrice had always walked into.
All around, people were sipping from brown-bagged bottles and large teacups. Prohibition had done little to deter the bar’s main business. It masqueraded as a high-profile jazz club, but everyone around knew the real deal.
Beatrice had seen photographs of evenings just such as this on the walls of the Trooley’s she frequented. It was every bit as much fun as she’d hoped. The element of danger concerning what she knew the immediate future would hold made it even more exciting. But she had to work fast.
Behind the bar was a man Beatrice recognized as Michael Trooley, Reli’s grandfather. His picture would later be hung over the pool table along with all the other Trooleys who’d run the place. He’d hired some flapper girls to actually sling the drinks, so he stood there in an impeccable pin-striped suit, watching the action. Every so often he would meander over to the door to keep an eye on who was arriving and departing, and how.
Beatrice wasted no time. She approached Trooley at the door and held out her hand.
“Mr. Trooley, pleased to meet you. My name is Beatrice Baxter.”
“Good evening, Miss Baxter, pleasure to meet you.”
“Thank you. Sir, I don’t mean to alarm you, but I am an avid patron of your establishment and I need to tell you this: I have it on good information that in the near future you’re going to be raided.”
Trooley lit a cigarette and chuckled robustly. He had the exact same sonorous laugh as Reli—confident, bemused, carefree. “I think not, my dear. Every policeman in the precinct does business here.”
“It’s not the police . . . one of your competitors hates you for your superior whiskey and will pay the cops to take you down. The Pussycat Palace Club down the street.”
Trooley shrugged. “Let me buy you a drink, Miss Baxter.”
Navigating their way through Charleston-dancing couples, Trooley and Beatrice sat at the bar. Beatrice noted in passing that it was
the exact same seat she’d been reading in when her evening began.
The jazz was jumping—it’d be a nice track to play back for Reli. Beatrice touched the RECORD icon on the screen of the device in her pocket as Trooley hailed a bartender. Two teacups of red wine were placed in front of them.
“I know about bootleg whiskey, and the snake heads as the secret whiskey ingredient. You have to hide it, all of it, tonight, or you might lose everything. What you have is almost priceless to your family.”
“Valuable, maybe,” Trooley said, mulling over her words. “Nothing is priceless.”
“This information is. And your bar could prosper for another century with a treasure trove like what you’ve got.”
“And why are you telling me this, may I ask?”
“Let’s just say I’ve invested quite a bit in the future of your bar.” She wordlessly handed Trooley the matchbook she’d had in her pocket since the start of the evening. It commemorated the 140th anniversary of the bar, reading “1866–2006.”
Trooley sipped from his teacup solemnly amidst the melee. It was almost too loud to think properly.
Definitely too loud to hear the device in Beatrice’s pocket beep urgently.
Repeatedly.
And then go silent.
Devin MacCleary woke up still drunk, which was understandable considering he’d been half-submerged in a bathtub full of some of the best champagne in history, and had drunk a considerable quantity of it both awake and asleep.
History. The future. He didn’t know why he bothered with any of it. He should have just taken Beatrice to Costa Rica 0007 and thrown the device into the ocean. They should go back right now. He’d left the device’s charger back there, anyway.
He was very cold. He opened his eyes.
Reli had thrown Devin’s suit over him and propped him upright in a booth. He was still naked.
“I can’t figure if this is the best or worst night of your life, bro,” she told him seriously.
More Stories from the Twilight Zone Page 22
