“Honestly, it’s not that bad,” he insists. “I’m just not used to anything hurting. You know how it was back there.”
I do. We were surrounded by threats but cushioned by the Bio-net and gushi. In 2063 I never went a full day without disappearing into the gushi dreamworld. We were all specialists in emotionally anesthetizing ourselves and any physical pain was short-lived.
Anxiety curls under my skin as I realize all my old crutches are gone forever. I wonder, for a moment, how well someone from 1985 would adapt to life in 1907 if they were whisked seventy-eight years back in time without warning. Poor Victor Soto thinking he was insane with no one around to believe him or remind him of the world he was really from.
Garren and I return to the Oakville station where I buy our bus tickets and the guy behind the ticket counter tries to flirt with me by asking what’s so special about Hamilton that it’s coaxing someone like me over there. I can’t decide whether flirting back or shutting him down will make me more memorable so I don’t exactly do either and mumble something about my divorced dad living in Hamilton. Our parents (like countless others in Billings) must’ve believed they were bestowing an advantage on us when they had the scientists make sure Garren and I were highly attractive but it makes it more difficult to blend in now.
As I hand him his ticket, Garren, who was watching my encounter with the ticket guy from a spot about twenty-five feet away, says, “I’ve been thinking that you should keep a low profile while I get the motel room later. If the two of us walk in together we’re guaranteed more problems.”
I agree and find myself half hoping it’ll be a woman behind the motel check-in counter and that she’ll be so transfixed by the sight of Garren that she won’t care that he doesn’t have a credit card or that his only identification is a (fake) student card.
On the bus, I watch Oakville fade into the distance. I’ve never been here before and I’ll never be back. All I’ll ever really know of it is the guy with the Oilers hat and the discount shopping center.
Things will be different when we get out west, I tell myself. We won’t have to look over our shoulders every second. And if it still doesn’t feel far enough away from the director and his people, we’ll keep moving on until we find somewhere that does.
Winston Churchill said, “Sure I am of this, that you have only to endure to conquer. You have only to persevere to save yourselves.” I swear his words will be running around in my head for the next fifty years at least.
I didn’t have a solid plan for my life back in 2063. I’d had vague thoughts about going into arboriculture and I guess I would’ve opted for it as a career if it was one of three offered to me. Arborists were greatly in demand in 2063 and helping plants and things grow seemed like something tangible and positive. Eventually I’d probably have had children with whoever the Service paired me up with—that’s if some other major plague or nuclear attack didn’t come along.
Nothing was ever certain but any assumptions I made previously are out the window. Anything can happen now. It scares me and thrills me at the same time.
I don’t want to be captured. I don’t want to forget who am I or where I came from. I want to move on from this day with full knowledge behind me.
When we get off the bus in Hamilton a police car drives by us and I flinch at the sight. As much as I’ve lost so far there’s still more to lose. Garren sees my reaction, his eyes trailing mine to the police car. Then he looks away, strokes my hair, grabs my hand and pulls me closer. I start breathing again and rest my head against his shoulder. We’re okay. The cops didn’t notice us.
Garren goes into the station to ask about nearby motels. I stand outside watching people pass and wondering what their stories are. For all I know some of them could be wanted by the police too. One of them—although it’s less likely—might even be from 2063.
Shortly Garren returns with the news that there’s a budget hotel on Main Street, within walking distance. He has a small foldout map of Hamilton in his hands and we start trekking in the cold, talking about tomorrow’s bus trip to Parry Sound.
“There’s no point catching the early-morning bus up there,” Garren says. “The train from Toronto doesn’t get to Parry Sound until after midnight anyway. If we take the two o’clock bus we’ll still have hours to kill there.”
Parry Sound’s a really small town, from what I’ve heard, and we’ll have to work hard at not standing out. After that it will be four whole days on the train until we reach Vancouver. Since we don’t have the money to waste on a compartment there’ll be four days of sitting in place and we agree that we’ll have to construct background stories for ourselves in case anyone tries to make casual conversation. There, too, we’ll have to be careful not to call attention to ourselves but our other option, stealing a car, would add to our list of crimes and further interest the police.
The budget hotel looks a bit like a bunker from the street but I don’t care; I can’t wait to get inside. I give Garren some of Nancy’s money for the room, tell him I’m going to be at the medical building just down the road (because I realize I forgot to buy scissors at the Woolco) and ask him to come get me in the drugstore there once he’s checked in. Truthfully, the shooting and craziness at the Eaton Centre this afternoon has made me not want to let him out of my sight for a second but that’s impractical and once we’re on the train tomorrow we’ll be attached at the hip for four days solid.
So I go into the medical building and search out their drugstore to buy scissors like a normal person and not someone who almost had her mind butchered because she remembered that she was sent traveling through time. The director theorized that others who were intellectually ahead of their eras may have also come through chutes. If that’s true, which of the world’s geniuses are not geniuses after all but time travelers? Galileo? Albert Einstein? Marie Curie? Stephen Hawking? And if that really is the case, where are the other chutes? Are there any that send people forward rather than back?
It’s too much to think about and once Garren shows up I’m standing in the medical building lobby just biting my lip and staring at the Indian buffet restaurant across the street. “That wasn’t easy,” he says tiredly. “You should’ve heard the bullshit I had to feed the check-in lady about coming up from the States on the bus to visit my father in the hospital up north and then getting my wallet stolen. I told her I missed the connecting bus north while reporting the robbery to the police. She still made me give her an extra fifty for a deposit. What do you want to bet the deposit gets misplaced overnight?”
It’s worth it just to have some downtime. Garren tells me the room number, says he’ll go first and that I should knock when I get there. “We sound like middle-aged people having an affair,” I say.
Only if we were having an affair the first thing we’d do when I got to the room and closed the door behind me is tear off each other’s clothes and the first thing that happens once I’m inside our room is that I ask Garren to show me his gunshot wound. He unbuttons his shirt, carefully eases both arms out of their sleeves and unties the socks he’d looped around his right arm. The injury is the size of a poker chip and raw and bloody. His skin is completely missing where he was hit, damaged flesh exposed to the air. Ideally he needs stitches or whatever else they do for these things in 1985 … I don’t know. But that’s not going to happen and what we need to do now is make sure it doesn’t get infected.
“We should wash it again and cover it in that antiseptic ointment,” I tell him. I fill the bathroom sink with warm soapy water and get Garren to bend over the sink and dunk his arm in. He winces when it hits the water and that makes me wince too. The wound starts bleeding again a little, which I hope is normal.
When he pulls his arm out of the water I press one of the bandages firmly against the oozing red to halt the bleeding. “I’m starting to think this grounded shit is overrated,” he says through gritted teeth.
“I’m sorry. I’m just trying to get it to stop so we can put on the
antiseptic.”
“I know, I know.” He takes over for me, holding the bandage in place as he sits down on the side of the tub. “It’s fine.” But we both wince again when I smooth on the ointment a couple of minutes later. It’s been a hard day—my roughest in 1985 yet—and when Garren’s fresh bandage (a new, dry one) is in place and there’s nothing else I can do for him, I pull back the ugly red and orange patterned cover on my bed to expose the pillow underneath. It’s soft and welcoming, despite the bedspread it’d been hiding under. I sink wearily down onto it, Garren camped out on his own double bed across from me, shut my eyes and check temporarily out of 1985.
TWENTY-TWO
The darkness smells musty and feels stifling. Like it’s settling into my bones and changing me from the inside. My eyelids fight to remain open. They’re heavier than they should be—I’m not in control of them, not in control of anything. My body’s pinned to the bed by the weight of my fear. He shouldn’t be here but he is. Standing at the end of my bed in the gloomy blackness, his body writhing with hate. The sound of bone scraping against bone assaults my ears, his teeth crushing into each other with a ferocity that I can’t bear.
If I can’t find the strength to fight him, Latham will kill me. My brother’s foaming at the mouth, an inhuman noise twisting up through his rib cage and groaning into the air. The hair on my arms stands on end.
Even if I could move, I’ll never get away clean. He’ll infect me. Drag me with him into a deeper darkness, strip my sanity from me and leave me with infinite rage that exists only to spread. This is what the U.N.A. will be reduced to. A devouring hate.
Garren shouts my name in the dark. I’d forgotten he was here with me. How could I have forgotten?
I have to move, have to save him. And when he yells my name a second time I skyrocket up from dreamland and blink into the daylight.
It’s not night after all. There’s no Latham. No plague. Not in this place.
It’s February 26, 1985, and I’m lying on a hotel bed, catching my breath and gazing blearily over at Garren on the next bed over. The room’s kitschy but reasonably clean—composed of two double beds (a nightstand between them), a medium-sized TV, which I notice Garren has turned on, and a small rectangular table with chairs on either side of it. The maroon curtains are closed but daylight’s streaming through them and every light fixture in the room is on; there’s no shortage of light.
“Bad dream?” Garren asks. “You were whimpering in your sleep. I thought I better wake you up.”
“Thanks.” I sit up in bed, then pad over to the window and peel back the curtains to stare into the winter sun. “It’s still early. I must not have been out long.”
“About thirty minutes.” Garren studies me. “You okay?”
“I will be. I just have to shake it off.” I don’t want to remember Latham like that. The thing I saw in my dream wasn’t my brother, just my subconscious torturing me.
Garren’s still looking at me, but the last thing I want to do is talk about my nightmare. “I think I’ll go cut and dye my hair,” I tell him. “Might as well get it over with.”
I take the scissors and box of medium-brown hair dye that I bought at Woolco into the bathroom with me. My hands haven’t stopped shaking yet and when I stare into the mirror memories of how savage Latham was at the end pierce my brain. He would’ve torn me apart with his bare hands if it weren’t for the force field restricting him to his bedroom.
I grab the scissors and ruthlessly begin lopping off my raven hair. I hack away at it until it’s chin-length all round. It’s still my face in the mirror but I’ll be tougher to recognize at a distance. I go for the hair dye next, rubbing it liberally into what’s left of my hair. My eyes burn the same as they did when Christine colored my hair for me. For a minute or two I let my tears spill behind the locked bathroom door, giving in to the terror from my dream, the tension of our close call today and the intensity with which I miss my brother. Then I stop and pull myself together like Latham would want and like I need to do to get through this.
Because of my brand-new haircut there’s plenty of dye left over and I open the bathroom door and ask Garren if he wants me to color his hair too. “Good idea,” he says.
Since his hair’s already so short I have his head coated with dye in no time, which is a good thing because I feel strange running my hands through his hair. It was different when I hugged him earlier—instinctual joy at our survival—and different with the bandaging job because I was worried that I’d hurt him. Now I have nothing but a pair of rubber gloves to distract me from the awareness that I’m essentially massaging Garren’s head. It feels pretty intimate—like a connection back to last night in the Resniks’ spare room—and I push away the feeling by making small talk. “Did they cut your hair when they sent you back or was that your idea?” I ask.
“I had it done about a week after we moved up here,” he says. “It was driving me crazy—always falling in my eyes.”
I liked it longer but you can see Garren’s eyes better with it short like this. It seems as though there’s no way to hide from them. Whenever he looks my way I feel like there’s a spotlight shining on me.
We go back into the other room to wait out the thirty minutes it’ll take the dye to set. On the TV a repeat of Mork & Mindy gives way to a commercial for the upcoming news. “Gunshots fired at Toronto’s Eaton Centre,” the newscaster announces. “We’ll have the full story at six o’clock.”
Garren and I lock eyes. We knew this was coming but it feels like a surprise anyway. There’s just over forty minutes until the news and we both have our hair rinsed out in time for the report. There’s no footage of the actual incident, just a police officer explaining what witnesses recounted seeing—several people running in the direction of the north end of the shopping center on the upper level, exchanging gunfire. Various witnesses said that at least two men, possibly three, were shot, and that a young woman was spotted committing multiple physical assaults. None of the parties involved remained on the scene when police arrived. Because of this, there’s suspected organized crime involvement.
After the police officer is finished with his statement a reporter interviews a succession of Eaton Centre shoppers, asking them for their reaction to the incident. Most people are shocked that an outbreak of such violence would occur in a public place and worried that innocent bystanders could easily have been hurt.
Garren and I continue watching the news right to the end, in case there’s anything about the robbery at Janette’s house. There’s not (it must not be a big enough story) and we discuss the gun again and decide to abandon it somewhere in Hamilton before we leave for Parry Sound tomorrow afternoon. Checkout time is noon and the next beds we sleep in will be somewhere in Vancouver, days from now. That’s if we arrive as planned, nothing slowing us down or altering our strategy. But the future’s a blank slate. Hard as I try I can’t tune in to any visions. It’s as though even the universe doesn’t know what will become of us yet.
The sun’s finished setting and our hair has dried an identical shade of brown that at first glance makes us look like fraternal twins, though the rest of our features are very different. Neither of us has eaten a bite since this morning’s spaghetti and we’re both starving. I suggest the Indian buffet restaurant just down the street. It looks like an obscure enough place that no one would think to look for us there.
Garren swallows another three aspirin and says he’s good to go. As he’s slipping on his coat I notice he’s sewn up the tear in the right sleeve where the bullet punctured his coat. He must’ve done it while I was asleep. But it’s his hair that I can’t stop starting at because I’m not sure what I think of it.
“What?” Garren asks, picking up on my attention.
“Just … shouldn’t you put on your hat too? Otherwise you could make the woman at the check-in desk suspicious. You know, a guy checks in without a credit card and the first thing he does is dye his hair.”
“Right.” Gar
ren nods like he can’t believe he didn’t think of that himself. He fishes Mr. Resnik’s black wool hat out of his coat pocket and tugs it over his head. “I can go first, if you want. Wait for you at the lights?”
“Okay. See you at the lights.” I watch Garren close the door behind him and wait another two minutes before leaving the room. Down in the lobby I pass an elderly woman with long hair the color of freshly fallen snow. I’ve seen lots of old people since we’ve been back here (outside of the welfare camps, few people in the U.N.A. truly looked like senior citizens) but she’s the oldest one yet. Her skin’s a delicate shade of pink and deeply wrinkled but her eyes are sharp and she smells like satsuma. It’s the nicest thing I’ve smelled all day and I automatically smile at her, which makes her smile back.
There’s a warmth in her face that I didn’t expect but that shouldn’t surprise me. The first person who helped me and Garren was a complete stranger, the blind woman whose house we’d charged into when Henry was chasing us. I don’t think the people in 2063 were any worse, deep down, than the people here but we were more distant from each other and more frightened, even when we didn’t realize it.
I keep thinking of 2063 as the past but it’s still out there, still happening. It’s a difficult thing to comprehend.
Outside the hotel I swing right and walk towards the traffic lights. A lone figure who must be Garren is standing there in the distance and I feel relief well up inside me at the sight of him, although we’ve only been apart a couple of minutes. Before the events of the past few days I never would’ve imagined that it’d be possible to experience such a range of emotions in one day. I keep zooming back and forth between anxiety at what comes next and elation that we’re alive and have made it this far.
At the restaurant we consume outrageous amounts of aloo gobi, sweet rice, tandoori chicken and lamb curry. The place has a homey cheerfulness about it that makes me feel safe, especially the music and the smells. The stress falls away from me as I allow the room to work its magic. Garren seems more at ease too and after we’ve invented our cover story for the train journey, we begin to talk about our 1985 experiences and our old 2063 lives.
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