by Avell Kro
Still smiling, #2 straightens up and turns around to see the package. “I wonder why she left it?” she
says, and picks up the envelope, hefting it. As though this’d tel her what the contents were.
I’ve never known what was in anything I’ve delivered.
Wel , actually, that’s not completely true, but it’s mostly true. Once I did see a kid open his package,
which contained a beautiful metal train set, the kind they don’t make anymore, the kind they didn’t
make anymore even back then.
But I’ve never told anyone about it. I’m sure neither the train set nor my having seen it altered the
course of anything, much less His-tory. But even if it did—what the hell. The fabric of events and
consequences is more flexible and much more difficult to disturb than the laws banning zeitreise
would imply. Than Sean’s long list of rules would imply.
“Lock it in the drawer and let’s go have breakfast. My treat.” Sean heads out, flipping over the sign
on the front door, the one that says we’re in the coffee shop across the way if anyone needs us.
In case Elizabeth comes back, which, since her package is here, odds are good she will.
I take the package from #2, gently put it in the desk’s center drawer, turn the old-fashioned key in the old-fashioned lock, and put the key in my pocket.
“Let’s go. I’m starving.” Never refuse a free meal: that’s one of my credos.
We troop down the stairs together—well, maybe #2 is more of a wafter than a trooper—and walk
out into the sticky, hazy, heavy, gray-as-always morning.
When we’re halfway across the street, I stop walking. I remember: I have a delivery to make this
morning.
Damn. That was the reason for my being here, for my coming in so early, even earlier than I’d
thought, as it turned out.
I’ve gotten distracted by the whole Elizabeth mess, which is bothering me more than it might. And
even though her presence—and absence—seem like something more than just a nervous client,
something bigger,well, they can’t be.
I mean, she’s just a client who got scared and left. I think. But there’s something strangely familiar
about her. Something—I don’t know. Something.
“Sean!” The three of them, including Spencer, who can’t possibly want breakfast, are half a block
ahead of me. When no one even pauses, I run after them, but they cross the street before I can
catch up.
The light changes. Now I have to wait. Damn. I hate waiting.
Chapter 6
“Eli! where are you going?”
Still sprinting, Eli turned slightly, waved halfheartedly at Flora, as though everything were suddenly
fine, and stared across the traffic to where the slim figure in the gray suit stood, holding his
package, waiting for the light to change, looking straight ahead.
The heat and ice exchanged locations. The fear became ice, and the sharp cold reassigned itself
into broiling steam. The sun was still completely wrong, pulsing a chill.
Eli kept moving, stopped only by the rush of vehicles. He waited at the curb, panting, more out of
breath than a brief sprint warranted.
He waved at the man in the median, trying to get his attention, but Eli was unseen not just by the
man but by everyone. No one looked at Eli or at anyone else.
“Hey!” If he called his name, he’d look over at Eli. He’d have to. Eli opened his mouth to say the
man’s name. “Wait!”
What was his name? Eli knew it, knew him, but there was no name in the place where names are
stored. A memory existed, the knowledge of that memory was certain, but when Eli opened the
weighty drawer of names, the letters dissolved into vapor before they could cohere.
My God. How could he not know this tremendously familiar man’s name?
But of course he’d remember it. He’d have to remember it. He’d know it as soon as he could talk
with him.
The light changed and the street became unexpectedly crowded, chaotic. People pushed against
one another, against Eli. They cut across his path, blocking his progress, blocking his view.
Eli kept his eyes on the man he was certain he knew. If he could get to this man, talk with him,
everything would fall into place. Nothing would seem wrong anymore—or the wrong-seeming
things would explain their wrongness.
Logic. Sense. That’s what was needed. And a familiarity that was in harmony with truth.
The surge of the crowd carried Eli across the street in its swarm. The tall, slim man crossed the
boulevard and broke into a trot. Had he seen Eli? Was he avoiding him? Running away from him?
“Wait!” But Eli’s voice couldn’t be heard through the crowd, even by the person next to him.
Eli waved his arms over his head, jumped up to look past everyone, all of them in his way. “Hey!”
Across the street, the man in the gray suit wedged his package under his arm, secured it. His trot
turned into a run.
Eli elbowed his way forward, pushing past as many people as possible. If he could only speak to this man, even for just a moment, everything would fall into place. Everything would be explained.
This sense of wrongness would shatter. He was sure of it.
The slim man ran down an alleyway, his gray suit merging into the dark corridor. Eli lunged
forward against the changed light as the crowd pulled him back.
“Hey!” He was talking to anyone now. It was impossible to step forward into the flowing mass of
vehicles, rushing, streaming past. His friend—the person who’d make everything seem fine—had
disappeared and taken familiarity with him.
The sun incised its wrong-seeming light everywhere. When the crowd moved forward, Eli moved
with them, crossed two streets, and picked up speed as he got to the alleyway the familiar man had
disappeared into.
Eli broke into a run. Maybe he could catch up to him. Maybe he could find him. He’d remember his
name the second he spoke. He was certain of it.
The alleyway turned right, then left. Eli turned with it, gaining hope as he gained momentum, the
passage so narrow that even the wrong sun couldn’t penetrate it.
“Wait!” Eli said.
But there was no one to say it to, only the memory of a familiar-seeming man carrying a package.
That tall, slim figure, his posture, the blond hair, the gray suit—all of it more known, more right
than anything he’d seen so far that day, than anyone he worked with, than even himself.
The cavernous, dank alley opened up onto a wide, dry boulevard. Pale stone buildings rose against
the buff-colored pavement. Emptiness, unlike the masses on the streets in front of the glass
monstrosity that housed Sunbright Lifestyles and scores of other useless, pointless businesses.
Did the man go left, right, straight across? Was he in one of these pale buildings right now?
Eli ran faster, across the boulevard, down a street chosen at random, urged on by a sudden cloud
cover that obscured the hopeless sun, blotting out at least that wrong element.
It was deserted here. Easy to find someone on a deserted street, wasn’t it? He had to find this man.
Fifteen minutes of running full out yielded nothing. Not even another person, much less the
person he was looking for.
Panting, bent over, hands on his thighs. Gasping for breath, the fever spent, cool sweat on his
forehead, dripping dark onto the light pavement. Looking up at those cool, pale buildings, their
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br /> stone blocks, their smooth, unyielding façades.
How could this section of town be so deserted when on the other side of that alley there were
crowds, everything moving through noise, chaos? Where you were compelled to move with the
force and will of other people.
But here, this emptiness, the smooth stones, the beige pavement. Not even an open shop, if there were shops. The blank faces of building fronts, closed off, inscrutable.
Eli trudged back to the alleyway, wound hesitantly through its snaky turns, his breaths heaving. At
least here there was no sunlight. At least there was that.
A few more steps. His legs gave out. He sat on the ground and leaned back against the cool, damp
wall of black bricks, an antidote to the wrong sun, to the pale stone buildings.
How would he find this man? He had to find him. So much depended on it, he was sure.
“Eli! Thank God.”
Yes, thank God. Someone recognized him, at least.
“Flora.”
He looked up at her, standing over him.
“Flora.” She must have heard the disappointment in his voice.
“I was so scared for you. You’re sick. You shouldn’t be running around the city like this. Someone
with a fever, you know—”
“The fever broke.”
She reached down and felt his cheeks. “Yes.” Reluctant. “I guess you’re right.”
“Must get back to work.” Eli half stood but his legs wouldn’t cooperate. He sat back down.
“Eli, you’re still not well.”
“Give me a minute.” His breaths had calmed. It was better to be in this shaded alleyway. The wet
bricks had penetrated the back of his shirt. His shoulder blades and the wall seemed to merge.
In the distance, from the direction of the deserted boulevard, sirens screeched. As Eli turned
toward the sound his hand pressed down and brushed against something cool. He felt it before he
saw it. That familiar sensation.
“Let’s get back.” He laughed. Flora tried out a laugh as well.
He felt the metal under his hand. He recognized it without seeing it. Just the sensation was enough.
He picked up the token and as he stood, jammed it in his pocket before Flora could see what he
was doing.
His hand in his pocket, still grasping the cool metal. Something else wasn’t wrong. Something he
could hold on to.
Chapter 7
THE LIGHT ON this street takes for bloody ever. If this was done on purpose to make people
impatient, more impatient, to make people want to scream in frustration—it’s working. Nice to
know that something works so well.
While I’m standing there waiting waiting waiting, Sean, #2, and Spencer blithely enter the coffee
shop, never noticing my absence. They haven’t even turned back to see if I’m still there.
I’m hungry, but I have a delivery to make. And something about so-called Elizabeth is really
bothering me.
The light stil hasn’t changed. This is the universe telling me to go back to the office, take care of my delivery, and forget about breakfast.
Really, though, the universe is telling me to find Elizabeth. Because something isn’t right and I
know it. I have no clue how I know this, but I kind of know things that I can’t account for.
Since no one believes or understands this about me, I rarely say anything. Even I’m not sure I
believe it or understand it, although it happens a little too often.
Was it something she said or didn’t say? Was it the way she kept looking around the office, never
letting her eyes rest on anything or anyone?
Or maybe I was just concerned that she’d gone, taking the brochure with her, which was against
company policy although, really, it wasn’t like the brochure by itself could cause any problems.
It explained everything, but it’s not like it also had our address or contact information on it. It
didn’t. You could just as easily look at it and think it was a prank or a hoax. We deliver when no one
else can.
A time travel delivery service didn’t really exist. It couldn’t. Time travel itself didn’t exist. Besides
that, it’s against the law. That’s just one of the many paradoxes inherent in zeitreise, which
officially doesn’t exist and anyway has been thoroughly debunked and discredited—yet it’s
nevertheless illegal.
How something that doesn’t exist and couldn’t exist is illegal just shows you how essentially insane
rules and laws are.
Yet banned, debunked, or otherwise discredited, we exist and we provide the exact service we
described. Your package delivered to the past. Within limits, of course.
Almost everything we deliver is completely innocuous, not affecting or noticed by the galactic
coherence of matter, disturbing nothing.
We do a brisk business in love letters, often delivered by #2, the very personification of Love, even
though the recipient never sees her, although I’m convinced that something about her essential
being leaves its traces on everything she touches. Maybe this is true of everyone. But I’m sure it’s the case with #2.
And of course the usual bunch of forgotten birthday and anniversary presents, which probably
account for at least 50 percent of our business.
A couple of artists have sent their work (one piece only—those are the rules) into other times.
Hopeful, I guess, trying to build a reputation before themselves—or just ego.
I have a theory that if your work’s not of its time, then anything you’ve made is also not of its time,
so no matter where it goes, it’ll always be out of sync, since it’s eternally itself. Merely removing
something to another time doesn’t change its innate nature, which is helpless against its own
emanations. Of course that’s just a theory.
You get only the one delivery, then never again. Too bad, really, since repeat customers would
certainly boost our profits. Sean’s profits, I mean.
I’d like to send a note to my past self, warning me. When I finally complete the list of things I’m
going to warn myself about, I’ll probably do it, even though that’s against the rules, which there
are too many of.
My own shop operates with only one rule: you must wear the protective goggles. Other than that,
you’re on your own. If I could get rid of that one rule, I would, but the near miss I myself had
prevents me from being so devil-may-care.
Sean once told me that his father created Origin Phase’s rules and that he just fol ows them, since
they’ve worked out so far. Yet I get the feeling that he’s bullshitting me, blaming the rules on his
father so no one will argue with him about them.
Did his father even exist? He’s just someone we hear about, but there are no photographs, even.
Of course, I’ve never been upstairs in the sanctum sanctorum.
Here in the building’s corridor it’s quiet. No sounds echoing off the mosaic tile floor, no footsteps on
the marble staircase. Just me, looking for someone who’s gone.
“Elizabeth?”
Nothing. Silence.
I go back upstairs to the office, sit at the desk, and look around, the same way Elizabeth did.
Perhaps there’s something in this very room that I’m missing—something I should see more
easily than Elizabeth could since I’ve been here so many times.
Although familiarity can just as easily create a kind of disappearance of anything. Something
you’ve seen to
o many times becoming visibly invisible.
I change places, sitting in the client seat. Maybe I can see whatever it is that needs to be seen from
here. Maybe this is the optimal viewpoint even if the wood chair isn’t very comfortable, which
perhaps Sean arranged on purpose, so no one will want to sit here for too long.
I scan the room, but it looks like the same place as ever to me. The same wide-plank floors that look like they could use shining or buffing, except that Sean likes them this way.
I examine the old-fashioned wainscoting around the room’s perimeter, interrupted only by the
door to the inner office, where Sean and #2 spend so much of their time.
Spending time. What a ludicrous idiom.
My own ideas about time used to be dead wrong—I’d been certain I knew what was what. That
the universe measured out time in definite parcels. That time had its own immutable motion.
Changeless.
I’d been sure that the only direction you could travel through time was forward, and that progress
was made at some predetermined speed, a speed that went faster when you were enjoying
yourself and seemed to stop when things were unbearable. Also that stuff about clocks on a
speeding train. I was so wrong.
I trade seats again, take the key out of my pocket, and open the desk drawer. There’s Elizabeth’s
package. As I’m pulling it out of the drawer, I hear someone in the hallway. Elizabeth’s come back!
I’m anxious to see her. I feel like hugging her. She’s come back and now I can make up for the terse
answers I gave her. Offer her something to eat along with her tea. Make sure she feels that she can
totally rely on me to deliver her package safely.
It’s odd. I seem to like this person I’d barely tolerated twenty minutes ago. Merely because she’s
returned, because she didn’t run off, because she isn’t missing. Because I sat in the chair she just
sat in and absorbed some of her energy.
I have to unlock the door for her.
I get up, pushing my thighs into the drawer, closing it. The soft click of the front door as it opens.
I’d forgotten to lock it behind me.
“Elizabeth!” I jump up, the wound-up part of my anticipation springing me forward. I’ll be getting
her something to eat, a new cup of tea, fresh reassurances. I’ll be the person I should’ve been
