by Anthology
“What was so strange about his clothes?”
The Captain said, “Well, did you ever know anyone who wore a pair of pants with big black-and-white checks, cut very narrow, no cuffs, and pressed without a crease?
I had to think for a moment. “Yes,” I said then, “my father, when he was a very young man, before he was married; I’ve seen old photographs.”
“Sure,” said Captain Rihm, “and he probably wore a short sort of cutaway coat with two cloth-covered buttons at the back, a vest with lapels, a tall silk hat, and a big, black oversize bow tie on a turned-up stiff collar, and button shoes.”
“That’s how this man was dressed?”
“Like eighty years ago! And him no more than thirty years old. There was a label in his hat, a Twenty-third Street hat store that went out of business around the turn of the century. Now, what do you make out of a thing like that?
“Well,” I said carefully, “there’s nothing much you can make of it. Apparently someone went to a lot of trouble to dress up in an antique style; the coins and bills, I assume he could buy at a coin dealer’s; and then he got himself killed in a traffic accident.”
“Got himself killed is right. Eleven fifteen at night in Times Square—the theaters letting out; busiest time and place in the world—and this guy shows up in the middle of the street, gawking and looking around at the cars and up at the signs like he’d never seen them before. The cop on duty noticed him, so you can see how he must have been acting. The lights change, the traffic starts up, with him in the middle of the street, and instead of waiting, the damned fool, he turns and tries to make it back to the sidewalk. A cab got him and he was dead when he hit.”
For a moment Captain Rihm sat chewing his tobacco and staring angrily at a young woman pushing a baby carriage, though I’m sure he didn’t see her. The young mother looked at him in surprise as she passed, and the captain continued: “Nothing you can make out of a thing like that. We found out nothing. I started checking through our file of old phone books, just as routine, but without much hope because they only go back so far. But in the 1939 summer edition I found a Rudolph Fentz, Jr., somewhere on East Fifty-second Street. He’d moved away in ’forty-two, though, the building super told me, and was a man in his sixties besides, retired from business; used to work in a bank a few blocks away, the super thought. I found the bank where he’d worked, and they told me he’d retired in ’forty, and had been dead for five years; his widow was living in Florida with a sister.
“I wrote to the widow, but there was only one thing she could tell us, and that was no good. I never even reported it, not officially, anyway. Her husband’s father had disappeared when her husband was a boy maybe two years old. He went out for a walk around ten one night—his wife thought cigar smoke smelled up the curtains, so he used to take a little stroll before he went to bed, and smoke a cigar—and he didn’t come back, and was never seen or heard of again. The family spent a good deal of money trying to locate him, but they never did. This was in the middle eighteen seventies sometime; the old lady wasn’t sure of the exact date. Her husband hadn’t ever said too much about it.
“And that’s all,” said Captain Rihm. “Once I put in one of my afternoons off hunting through a bunch of old police records. And I finally found the Missing Persons file for 1876, and Rudolph Fentz was listed, all right. There wasn’t much of a description, and no fingerprints, of course. I’d give a year of my life, even now, and maybe sleep better nights, if they’d had his fingerprints. He was listed as twenty-nine years old, wearing full muttonchop whiskers, a tall silk hat, dark coat and checked pants. That’s about all it said. Didn’t say what kind of tie or vest or if his shoes were the button kind. His name was Rudolph Fentz and he lived at this address on Fifth Avenue; it must have been a residence then. Final disposition of case: not located.
“Now, I hate that case,” Captain Rihm said quietly. “I hate it and I wish I’d never heard of it. What do you think?” He demanded suddenly, angrily. “You think this guy walked off into thin air in eighteen seventy-six, and showed up again in nineteen fifty-five!”
I shrugged noncommittally, and the captain took it to mean no.
“No, of course not,” he said. “Of course not, but—give me some other explanation.”
I could go on. I could give you several hundred such cases. A sixteen-year-old girl walked out of her bedroom one morning, carrying her clothes in her hand because they were too big for her, and she was quite obviously eleven years old again. And there are other occurrences too horrible for print. All of them have happened in the New York City area alone, all within the last few years; and I suspect thousands more have occurred, and are occurring, all over the world. I could go on, but the point is this: What is happening and why? I believe that I know.
Haven’t you noticed, too, on the part of nearly everyone you know, a growing rebellion against the present? And an increasing longing for the past? I have. Never before in all my long life have I heard so many people wish that they lived “at the turn of the century,” or “when life was simpler,” or “worth living,” or “when you could bring children into the world and count on the future,” or simply “in the good old days.” People didn’t talk that way when I was young! The present was a glorious time! But they talk that way now.
For the first time in man’s history, man is desperate to escape the present. Our newsstands are jammed with escape literature, the very name of which is significant. Entire magazines are devoted to fantastic stories of escape—to other times, past and future, to other worlds and planets—escape to anywhere but here and now. Even our larger magazines, book publishers and Hollywood are beginning to meet the rising demand for this kind of escape. Yes, there is a craving in the world like a thirst, a terrible mass pressure that you can almost feel, of millions of minds struggling against the barriers of time. I am utterly convinced that this terrible mass pressure of millions of minds is already, slightly but definitely, affecting time itself. In the moments when this happens—when the almost universal longing to escape is greatest—my incidents occur. Man is disturbing the clock of time, and I am afraid it will break. When it does, I leave to your imagination the last few hours of madness that will be left to us; all the countless moments that now make up our lives suddenly ripped apart and chaotically tangled in time.
Well, I have lived most of my life; I can be robbed of only a few more years. But it seems too bad—this universal craving to escape what could be a rich, productive, happy world. We live on a planet well able to provide a decent life for every soul on it, which is all ninety-nine of a hundred human beings ask. Why in the world can’t we have it?
“IN THE BEGINNING, NOTHING LASTS . . .”
Michael A. Stackpole
“In the beginning, nothing lasts . . .”
Mike Strahan
April 7, 1936
Beulah Irene wept as the workers pulled up shovels of rust red dirt from her son’s grave. She covered her dark face with her hands, not wanting the men to see her. Thick bandages wrapped her arms from fingers to elbows; the skin underneath burned and itched.
The four gravediggers gave her odd glances between pulls. They were all grim men, with dirty faces and hands. Patches of sweat and red mud stained their denim trousers and cotton shirts.
Irene removed her hands from her face and focused her eyes on the men, wanting to watch until they finished. It was important to her, even though her son would not die until yesterday.
His headstone was a pitiful thing, a small square of concrete embedded in the grass and lined with dead leaves. A tall, worn, bent-back tree cast little shade. Her husband’s old grave was a few feet away, empty for decades.
She closed her eyes again, and remembered her son. He had always been a pleasant child, and clever.
His first word had been coffee.
He took his first step when he was eleven months old.
His secret tickle spot was on the back of his thigh.
He was
three years old when he died.
The memories had stuffed Irene’s brain since her resurrection. On the surface, they were pleasant thoughts, but time played funny tricks on her these days. Old memories would crop up, pop in her head like long forgotten debts. They treated her all the same, no matter where she was, what she was doing; she would often turn to tears.
“We’re done for the day, ma’am.” One of the men interrupted her thoughts. Despite the dust covering his face, his eyes and smile were bright. Behind him, his friends were collecting their shovels and brooms, their jackets and lunch refuse.
“Thank you.” Her mouth was dry. She turned around to look toward the eastern horizon and was surprised to see the sun a hand or so from setting. The morning was clear and hot, with a strong breeze tugging at the dry Oklahoma yellow grass. Where has the time gone? She wondered.
“You okay, ma’am?” He asked.
Irene shook her head and shrugged, “Just nervous.” Her bandages itched; they were dirty again. Red dirt rimmed the frayed edges of the white gauze covering her arms. It looked like dried blood.
“Reckon so. It’s hard sometimes.” The laborer turned and raised a hand in goodbye to his departing friends. A spare denim coat and a dusty lunch pail remained. “Don’t know if you recall, but I was one of the fellas that worked on your husband.” His mouth creased, as though he wanted to say more.
Irene looked closely at him and shook her head, “I’m sorry, I don’t remember you.” Irene had a hard time remembering. Like most people, the future was a harsh muddle; she remembered senses better than events. Colors, smells, textures. Sounds. It surprised her when someone remembered something so far ahead.
“No offense taken, ma’am.” He held up his hands. “I was blessed with a good memory, must’ve been forty years.”
“It’s been that long?” She asked.
“Sure has. Easier then. Job like this would’ve taken an hour, back when we had machines.” He scratched at his ear again and looked over Irene’s shoulder to the East. His eyes fell on her and for a moment, he held her gaze. “Should head home, ma’am. I’ll see you.”
He stepped toward the edge of the open grave and crouched down to pick up his jacket and pail. Without giving Irene another glance, he walked away with his coat flung over his shoulder.
“Thank you! For today!” Irene remembered.
He turned, walked backwards, smiled. “It’s never easy, ma’am.”
Irene nodded and looked down at the open grave. She was alone with her son.
Sparing a shudder, she walked home. The road into town was straight, wide enough for two autos to squeeze past each other. Most of the houses and farms she passed were empty, the families having left for the West, to work healthier land. There had been no rain in months.
The sun was almost beyond the horizon when she reached town. The buildings lining the street sagged against each other, their wooden siding faded the color of driftwood. The town’s main street was a packed dirt road of choked, blood red dust.
A group of children rushed by her on the sidewalk, chasing a mongrel with an aluminum can tied to its neck. Irene gave them a sad smile as they passed.
The young were always so full of life, the first time because they thought they were immortal, the second time because they knew exactly when their end would come. Irene found it hard to watch children. They reminded her of her son.
There were other people on the street, walking dogs or riding horses, and a few older automobiles. Most of the machines from the future were artifacts now, their metal skeletons wired together in museums, the leather and rubber and plastic all rotted away.
Others had tried to rebuild things, piece back together what little the future had left them. The results were nothing but showpieces, sad monuments to a time they would never see again.
Her house was two blocks off the center of town, on the wrong side of the railroad tracks. It was a Sears’s kit home, an ugly square of faded white stucco walls and sticky brown shingles. It had three rooms: a den, a kitchen, a bedroom.
She pushed open their crooked screen door. Her husband was in the den, sitting in an old easy chair, a hulk of a radio mirroring him across the room. He sighed when she entered and set yesterday’s paper across his lap.
Irene ignored him. She could sense her anger from earlier in the afternoon, but the memory of their argument had faded.
He folded his arms hard across his chest and said nothing, but kept his eyes on her, his mouth set in a scowl.
Irene stepped over to the sink, and unwound her dirty bandages. She bit her lip as the heavy gauze separated from her arms and fingers, leaving behind ugly purple flesh. The doctor had been surprised that she could do anything with her hands. Her body was remembering the accident that had killed her son and scarred her for life.
The doctor had said that the resurrected body was like a book; whether you read it backward or forward, the words were always the same. If you broke a bone, or suffered a cut in your first life, your body would suffer the hurt again in the second.
Our son will suffer his hurts again, too, she reminded herself for the thousandth time.
Irene dipped her arms into a stainless steel bowl of water. The muscles in her back relaxed as the cool water took some of the edge off her pain. She pulled her bandages off the wood counter and ran them under. She had to grit her teeth as she rubbed out the dirt between her thumb and forefinger. The pain was getting worse.
Nothing lasts forever. Things will get better, easier. The thought was a salve, calming.
She tried to reapply the bandages herself, but only grew frustrated as the gauze clung awkwardly to her tender flesh.
“Can you help me?” She finally asked, her back to her husband. Her voice was raw, cracked.
Her husband pushed himself up from his chair. He was a big man; strong, with wide set shoulders and large hands. He was getting younger, and had just gotten his full head of black hair back. He had another twenty-five years until his birthday, until he returned to his mother, giving himself up to her pregnant embrace. Irene doubted that was what he wanted, but it would be his mother’s decision.
Resurrection always led back to the beginning: death, life, birth. She had already decided that when her son’s birth came, she would take him back into her, because she couldn’t bear the thought of burying him again.
She hissed as her husband took her right arm into his rough hands and coiled the first bandage around her forearm and between her fingers. The cool, clean cloth comforted her skin.
He dipped the second bandage into the metal basin. It was one of their few prized possessions, an artifact from the future. Metal and stone and wood from older trees were the only things that could survive their own creation; everything else rotted away at the anniversary of its making.
Irene looked up at him, then away. “He’s our son,” she said, recalling their argument. She closed her eyes. How could I forget?
“I know.” His voice was quiet and firm.
“Our baby,” she added.
“I know.”
“Then show it!” Irene turned her head up again, the muscles in her arms tensed. She wanted to lash out. “Why don’t you want this?”
“It’s a hard world,” he sighed. His eyes shifted right, then closed, “The pain isn’t worth it. Not for us to lose him again in three years.”
“That’s not an excuse! I’ve been waiting seventy years for this.” Irene’s words choked in her throat. “I need him. I need to see him again, even if it’s only three years.”
Her husband shook his head and crossed his arms, “He never had a first chance at life. With only three years, he won’t have a second.”
“No. No. No!” Irene wanted to hit something, to strike out at his indifference. “You don’t want him back because you resent me, you resent what God has given us. You wish you had never been resurrected!”
“I do not . . .”
“You do,” Irene continued, the heat building i
n her throat. “You’ve been miserable ever since you came back. You’ve been mad at me ever since I let them pull you from the ground!”
“No, I—”
“You—” Irene interrupted.
“Let me finish.” Her husband jutted a finger in her face. He towered over her, his cheeks flushed red. “I don’t think any such thing. I love you. I love our son.” His breath was heavy; his words were even.
“Say his name,” she ordered.
“What?”
“Say his name. It’s been forty years and you have called him your kid, your boy, your son.” Irene held up a fist and jutted out her fingers, counting the strikes. “You have never called him by his name. His Christian name that we gave him the day he was born. You have never said that name in this house. You’ve been back for forty years and you have never said his name. Not once.”
“Stop it,” her husband turned away from her and clenched his fists. “I don’t need this.”
“What’s his name?!” Irene cried.
“I don’t need this.” He stalked away. He grabbed his coat off a peg next to the stove and slammed the screen behind him, rattling the door’s wooden frame.
Run away! Irene thought. That’s all you do is run!
Irene stumbled toward the table and pulled out a chair. She collapsed on it and laid her head on their red and white checkered tablecloth. Great racking sobs constricted her lungs as she wept. He resents me, she thought.
Do you blame him? she chided.
Her husband had suffered through black depression since he had returned to the living. The doctor thought there was a problem when his body was regenerating, as if the brain had not wired itself back together properly.
But that wasn’t the answer. Her husband had not been happy before his death, living a life of failure and depression until he passed away in 1978. When he was reborn, it came as a shock, like a sick joke that he would have to relive his miserable life again as punishment. If anyone had wanted to remain in the ground, absent from the second chance God had given them, it was her husband, even if that meant waking up from death buried, suffocating, and dying again.
