by Anthology
“You don’t really put up much of a fight, do you?” she says and it might be an admonishment or it might be disappointment.
“About the suit?”
“About anything. I mean I didn’t have to try to convince you that I’m a time traveler or that I’m going to kill you.”
“Well, the first just seemed too outlandish not to be true. Besides, I’ll find out if you’re lying when the news comes on tonight.”
“Do you believe in God?”
“Er, well, I guess so . . .” She studied philosophy. This is not good at all.
“That’s good.” She smiles and winks. “And the second?”
“Second what?”
“You believed so easily that I’d kill you.”
“Well, what if I put up a fight?”
She laughs so long and hard that I think she’s trying to embarrass me and succeeding. “Oh, no,” she says. “I studied Judo for years. And anyway, if you try to hurt me one of the Bad Day guards will show up and beat the crap out of you. If I don’t first.”
“How do they know if I try to hurt you?”
She shrugs. “Do I look like an engineer? Let’s go to the arcade.”
She instructs me to drive to the nearest mall and I give her my coat because she didn’t dress for the weather. It’s colder than I thought it would be and when the sun rises the city only turns a brighter shade of gray. I’ve always liked days like this. When I can, I just stay inside and read or listen to music and jerk off and it’s a good day. All my ex-girlfriends said I was wasting my life, but I always enjoyed myself. Considering the current situation, I suppose they were right.
We arrive at the mall and cross the short walk covered in cigarette butts and crushed Coke containers to the entrance. As we walk up to the empty arcade I ask, “So, is there any chance I could convince you not to kill me?”
She shakes her head. “I’ve had a really bad day.”
“You seem pretty chipper to me.”
“I’ve had a really bad day.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“No. And anyway, there’s only so long you can talk your way out of death.”
“I suppose I should feel lucky that I’m even given the opportunity.”
“That’s the spirit.”
The time traveler buys a handful of tokens from the clerk who looks about our age. He has dark rings under his eyes and a five o’clock shadow. He looks like he’s about ready to crawl out of his skin just to get out of the stupid red-and-white striped uniform. The music is loud, repetitive techno. The air is stale popcorn and too sweet candy. If I had to work here everyday, I’d probably look like him too.
She forces me to play every game in the store, soundly defeating me each time, until she finally arrives at the first-person-shooter zombie games where she seems content to stay for a time. Within five minutes she proves herself an excellent marksman and I suppose I should be thankful for that. Still, my character dies about as often as the zombies.
“You’re not even trying,” she says, gunning the heads off of three zombies wielding crooked and rusted farming equipment.
“I think the gun is defective,” I say. The music and the popcorn stink are distracting me a little. My cell phone rings and I figure it’s my boss so I don’t answer.
“You’re not even trying,” she mutters, missing a head shot for the first time. The game laughs momentarily as an axe hits my side of the screen and I die again.
“Sorry,” I say. She shoves more tokens at me. “I just don’t really enjoy games.”
“What, didn’t you have a childhood?”
“Yes, and I didn’t like games then either.”
“Why?”
“Because I get bored with them too quickly.”
“Because you lose all the time,” she says, but not in a snarky tone, just as-a-matter-of-fact.
“I used to work at a video game store,” she says after another massacre and spending two dollars resurrecting me. “Thought it would be fun because I love video games. But it turns out a job is just a job.”
“I’ve never understood the appeal,” I say and die again. “It must be better when you win.”
“It’s not about winning, it’s about playing,” she explains and resurrects me. “The best games are the ones that go on forever and are always challenging. The best are the ones where you can see your progress toward an achievement and each one is better than the next. It would be wonderful if life were a video game. Wouldn’t that be magnificent if life had ‘Chapter Complete’ signs?”
“ ‘Chapter Complete’ signs?”
She sighs with great anguish and hands me more tokens. “It’s like if you do something really cool and after that moment your whole life is better. If every time that happened a little sign popped up that said ‘Good Job! Move on.’ ”
I try to think of a time when that would have been nice to have, an indication that I was getting somewhere, making progress. Graduation? That fits. Getting a car? Sure. But those are things that happen to pretty much everyone. Maybe the time I saw Tommy Flanagan in concert. That would have been nice, I suppose. But afterwards it would have felt kind of empty. What next?
The final boss dies quickly under an impressive barrage of fire from the time traveler. A maniacal laugh erupts from the arcade machine as the credits begin to role.
“Boring game,” the time traveler announces.
I glance at my watch and am surprised to see it’s nearly six. At this time of the day I’d be home by now and probably listening to music, making dinner, doing something. At least I would have been off work. That should be liberating, really. Should a chapter complete sign have popped up in front of me when I first saw the time traveler? Or should she see one when she finally kills me?
“So, did you get fired from the video game store?” I ask. “Is that why you’re having a bad day?”
She gives me the finger. “I quit that job years ago. And I said I didn’t want to talk about my day. Do we understand each other?”
“No, actually.”
She stares at me for a moment then laughs.
The time traveler asked me to pick my favorite restaurant and I told her that I usually cook all my meals myself. She didn’t seem so much surprised as exasperated and instructed me to drive recklessly for a good ten minutes before ordering me to stop at a tiny cinder block establishment called the Deadwood.
“You told me to drive recklessly,” I tell her. She’s sitting in the passenger’s seat holding onto the door and dashboard as if she never intends to let go.
“How are you still alive?” she asks very slowly.
The parking lot is half full and so is the bar. It is smaller on the inside than it looked from without. We sit down at an empty table and she orders us a large vegetarian pizza and a round of beer.
“Do you always drive like that?”
“Usually only when no one else is in the car with me.”
Our beers arrive first. The bar smells like a carpet warehouse and hard alcohol. After a few minutes of sipping I begin to wonder.
“So, if you know that never in my life will I affect anything at all, how do you know that you’ll affect anything either? Or anyone else, for that matter?”
“I know I’ll affect something,” the time traveler says hesitantly.
“What?” I ask.
“They never tell you specifically . . . .”
“Who’s they?”
“The guys who know all about this time travel bullshit,” she snaps. “As I was saying . . . they never tell you specifically, but if you know the right people you can usually get a clue. A hint at destiny. Most people go through life content with the fact that it’s just you who doesn’t matter.”
“Isn’t that some purpose then?” I ask, suddenly hopeful.
“Only indirectly,” she mutters.
Better than nothing. “So why are you so important?”
She begins to speak then stops. Instead she flags
down the one waitress, an exhausted-looking young woman with orange dreadlocks. The time traveler orders another beer, looks at me, laughs, and then orders shots of tequila.
We both get drunk faster than we intend. Very soon it is well past nine, the pizza is gone and the drinks keep mysteriously appearing.
“My last boyfriend,” she says and struggles to put salt on her left hand for the next shot. “My last boyfriend used to say ‘I like tequila. I just don’t like all of the friends he brings with him to the party.’ ”
“Everyone has a tequila story,” I say. The distance to the bathroom seems suddenly insurmountable. I try to plot the most efficient route there in case I have to make a quick dash for the toilet.
“Yeah?” she asks and downs a shot. She settles back into her chair, assuming a quiet, thoughtful expression. Evidently she is a shrink-drunk. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
I briefly consider not taking the shot in front of me, but decide that it’s probably necessary to conclude the evening. Besides, I won’t have to endure a hangover tomorrow. She waits patiently as I salt my hand, take up the lime and down the tequila. The crowd at the bar is a little louder now and the jukebox is on full blast so the time traveler brings her chair around next to mine to listen.
“This was a few years ago. My girlfriend at the time, Lydia, forced me to go out to this house party. I don’t like house parties, but Lydia said I was going and I was going to have a good time whether I liked it or not.
“We got there and Lydia dragged me into the kitchen to meet the host. His name was Timothy and they went way back, evidently. This man was a giant, six-and-a-half feet tall and he was wearing business casual, like he’d just gotten back from the office. We shook hands and he offered Lydia and me tumblers of expensive tequila from Mexico. Lydia told me earlier that he travels a lot for business, that he made a good living and that he nearly went to the Olympics for chess. I don’t know exactly what he does, but he’s some sort of freelance worker. Maybe he was a journalist or a consultant.
“After Lydia went to the dance floor, Timothy took me aside in the kitchen. He asked me how long we had been together. ‘About a year,’ I told him. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘That’s about how long we were together.’ I didn’t know that they were old lovers, but I guess it made sense. We had a few more rounds of the tequila before he disappeared to entertain more guests.
“I don’t really remember much after that except that Lydia passed out on a spare bed and Timothy slurred that I could sleep on the couch. In the middle of the night I woke up feeling warm and wet and it sounded like it was raining inside. There was Timothy, standing over me, pissing on my chest. He was too drunk to even realize what he was doing and passed out on the floor. I cleaned myself up in the shower and the next morning Lydia and I left. She dumped me a week later and I never told either of them about the pissing incident.”
Instead of laughing, like most people do when they hear that story, the time traveler says nothing. She gestures toward the shot in front of me, vodka this time, and we make a silent toast. The bar is getting more crowded and the music is slowly drifting down the timeline into the sixties.
“Yeah,” the time traveler says. “People like that are always pissing on us.”
“What about you?” I ask. Telling the story took a lot out of me. I don’t feel drunk so much as tired, exhausted even, but not in the way that I’d like to sleep. The music, the cracking laughter, the crashing pool balls and the roar are giving me a migraine.
“What’s your story?” I ask.
The time traveler shrugs. “Not much to tell, really. It was a New Year’s party over at my friend Amber’s, the one who works at Bad Day. She helped develop the company doing the time-investigating shit to make sure you were the guy that doesn’t matter. She knows stuff, see.
“Anyway, we all had too much tequila—for this is a tequila story. Everyone else was passed out except for me and Amber. I’ve known Amber for a long time and between the alcohol and the blackmail material I have on her I managed to weasel out what I wanted.”
She stops. Over her shoulder I can see the muted TV on CNN. Images of unimaginable destruction flash one after the other with a “San Francisco” subtitle below.
A few minutes pass and I ask, “So what did she say? Why is your life meaningful?”
The time traveler looks up and smiles then looks back down at the table again. “She said . . . well, it doesn’t matter.”
“It doesn’t?”
“Not to you.”
“Well,” I say, “I suppose very little will matter to me soon.”
“That’s right,” she says. “That’s the attitude. Let’s get out of here. We’re going to take a taxi.”
“I can drive.”
“We’re going to take a taxi.”
We arrive at my apartment close to midnight and the time traveler rushes into my bathroom to vomit. We’re both drenched from a sudden and torrential downpour that I can still hear banging and splattering against my windows. While the time traveler is away I inspect my door, realizing suddenly that I didn’t have to use my key to get in. The lock is broken.
I do a quick circuit around my apartment, double checking each room—except the bathroom where I can hear my murderess violently retching—to see if anything was stolen. All my records are still there, the TV, the radio, the bed, my clothes, my kitchen utensils, all my books, and my couch are still there.
When the time traveler emerges from the bathroom, I’m still in the living room going over lists in my head. She seems remarkably cognizant and composed, though her eyes are a little red. She’s still wearing her muddy sneakers, but I don’t bother to tell her as she collapses onto my couch.
“You have a lot of painkillers in the bathroom,” she tells me, propping herself up on the couch.
“I get headaches,” I say.
“Three bottles of aspirin? You do realize you’re suicidal, right?”
“Someone broke into my apartment,” I say.
“Oh? Is anything missing?”
“No.”
What would someone want to take from my apartment? Furthermore, what could he or she have taken that I couldn’t have easily replaced? The records would’ve taken some effort, but I didn’t have anything priceless or one-of-a-kind.
When I turn my attention back to the time traveler, her coat is on the floor and her shirt sleeves are rolled up as far as they’ll go, revealing again the sleeve of tattoos on her right arm. She sits exactly as I found her that morning, except now she’s holding a gun in her left hand.
“What did you want to do with your life?” she asks me in the analytical tone she used at the bar, but now there is a slight softness to her voice. Tenderness, maybe. That might be too strong of a word.
The gun is not as distracting as I thought it would be. Maybe the zombie first-person shooter softened me up, but I really hope that she’s as good of an aim drunk as she is sober. Still, it’s the way she asked the question that makes it hard to answer.
I shrug and try to think back a few years. “I kind of wanted to open my own music store. Used records and CDs, vintage material and all. But nobody really wants to buy that stuff anymore.”
She nods slowly. The time traveler runs her hand over the leather. “It’s a good couch,” she says, “You know, I really wanted to be a psychiatrist, but life got in the way and I could never pass the exams. So I work as a manager at a pizza place and weekends at a local library. Funny, huh?”
“Rent’s expensive in the future,” I say.
“Rent’s expensive in the future,” she says.
The rain is still coming down hard. I can hear it drumming on the windows. We both sway slightly.
I have to ask, “What did your friend, Amber, tell you yesterday?”
The time traveler looks at me suspiciously. “How do you know it was yesterday?”
“You had a bad day.”
She looks at the gun, then back at me, then begins t
o laugh. In between her laughter and her gasping she manages to say, “I . . . you’re going to love this . . . so I . . . I have to kill you . . . and then I . . . have a break down . . . bang some guy . . . have a kid . . . who’s supposed to be a great . . . musician . . .!”
She slowly regains control of herself. Eventually she murmurs, “It’s better than nothing, I guess,” but I can barely hear her over the rain.
It’s a shitty apartment. The walls are paper-thin and the rent is unpardonable. People get robbed all the time, but no one ever has their apartment broken into and has nothing stolen, not that I’ve heard of anyway. And I didn’t have to take the couch apart to get it through the door; two people could manage it easily.
“Do you mind if we do this on the balcony?” I ask slowly.
Eventually she says, “You don’t even try, do you?”
“Do you mind if we go out on the balcony?” I repeat, because I’m not sure if I can stay in this room, by this couch, among this worthless shit much longer.
She follows me out to the tiny concrete veranda that doubles as an exit on to the fire-escape. The rain falls on us like a hurricane. She says, “You and I, we could’ve done better, you know.”
“You could’ve done better,” I say.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I mean that you could’ve done better and I couldn’t have,” I say. The rain is cold, the wind is freezing, but I feel so warm.
“I could always decide not to kill you,” the time traveler says.
“Sure you could. But I’ve still been killed a couple thousand times and I’ll be killed again and again until god knows when.”
She says, “But I could decide not to kill you. That would be something, right?”
“Oh, sure,” I say, “the failure-cow who’s supposed to give birth to the next Kurt Cobain decides not to kill me. Good for me.”
There is a faint metallic click over the storm. The rain is warm like a morning shower before a day of work. Like routine. Like someone is pissing on me.
“I never wanted to do this,” she says and I look at her. She is pointing the gun at me and her voice is stony, analytical, acquiescent. “You seemed like a nice guy.”
