Asimov's Science Fiction

by Penny Publications

  “That was a transporter.” I said. “This is different. It’s FDA-approved.”

  “I thought they only used time portals for really tiny industry things, testing how well rubber gaskets age and stuff like that.”

  “This is sorta... off the books. Under the table. Boston gangsters with a patriotic spoon fetish are bankrolling it.”

  James ruminated briefly, a lick of bacon held daintily between thumb and index finger.

  “I think you should drop this side job, Paul,” he said.

  I balked. “It’s a great role, James; a role I wrote myself—and not something I would normally do. Parson Mordecai Brown is a perfectly villainous bastard. It’s like a new and improved Richard III. This isn’t a goofy little one-off thing for a muffler place.”

  “But it’s not a role, Paul: You are really messing with people’s lives and abusing their faith—”

  “It’s just spoons!” I cried. “I’m not messing with their lives doing this any more than I’m messing with the lives of DUIs when Whiplash Bass convinces them to pay Mr. Attorney Man to argue their hopeless cases. Should a DUI even offer a defense? Those fuckers kill people all the time!”

  This was a low blow: James’s uncle Jimmy was killed a few years back pulling a drunk out of a ditch, when a second drunk blasted past the flares and mashed him into the side of his tow truck. Both drunks were fine, and Uncle Jimmy was closedcasket dead right there.

  But James’s gaze didn’t shift. He wasn’t looking at me, wasn’t studying my features; he was looking into me. “You don’t like this gig, Paul. And it doesn’t suit you. You should drop it.”

  “I don’t like it, James; I love it. I love the role, I love going through the portal. I don’t love the money, maybe, but I sure do like it a lot.”

  James nodded, but he wasn’t agreeing. He was still processing, still watching whatever it was he could see percolating inside me.

  “If you love it so much, then why didn’t you tell me about it a month ago, when you started? Why are you hiding it?” There wasn’t a trace of bitterness or point-scoring; he was just asking a perfectly fair question.

  A perfectly fair question for which I had no good answer.

  Hearing myself explain it out loud—even entirely omitting the meth part—the gig didn’t sound good; it sounded cheap and mean. I wasn’t okay with how this job was turning out. I wasn’t okay with the little girl holding up her spoon. More than anything—and you can call me a coward if you want, but I’m being honest with you here—I was terrified of what James would think of me if he ever found out that this is what I was doing for some extra dough that, when push came to shove, we didn’t really even need.

  So I agreed to quit.

  But as it turned out, I ended up having time to think it over: The number Chico had called me from was indeed Peggy’s, and always went to a full voicemail box. James assumed I’d quit—he had no reason to suspect otherwise—and I didn’t do anything to upset that. Besides, I really was planning on quitting, just as soon as I could actually talk to Chico.

  But when Chico finally called me two weeks later—from a blocked number—he wasn’t super receptive to my change of heart.

  “Pablo,” he cajoled, “Pablocito; this is a good gig, holmes. Good money, zero risk. You are a top-notch actor.” I could hear his greasy, wolfish grin. “I understand that someday you gonna go Hollywood on us—you, my friend, are a big fish. Big fish gotta swim out to the sea... Once they all done with they obligations here in the li’l pond.”

  I reiterated that I was quitting, effective immediately, and that I hoped there would be no hard feelings.

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Chico asked, his voice rising. “This isn’t some table-waiting gig. Giving me two weeks’ notice, or one week’s notice, or I-ain’tshowing-up-tonight-notice, that’s as fucking ridiculous as laying that shit on the chingada busboys.” He laughed bitterly, almost hysterically. “Listen: You, me, Peggy, we’re all in the same hole together. You don’t even fathom the monsters that’s standing up at the top edge of this hole, ready to step on our fingers every time we try to get a grip and pull our asses out.”

  “What if I just don’t show?” I asked. It was a lot easier to be a hard ass over the phone, where you could turn down the volume when someone yelled.

  But Chico didn’t get loud, he got quiet.

  “Where you gonna be if you ain’t playing your part at the FDA Annex? You gonna be in your third floor apartment with the big window, at,” I heard him shuffling some paper before he read my address. I dropped to the floor and wriggled under my vintage, thrift-shop chrome-and-formica kitchen table. Chico was laughing in my ear. “Chill out, Pablocito; I ain’t got nobody watching you. Right now.” Despite his reassurances, I chose to stay in my formica-topped bunker.

  “Anyway, maybe you no-show, and maybe you no-home either. Might mean you at that restaurant,” more shuffling, “Stalk, all stalking among the tables with you waiter-tray held high. But maybe you ain’t there neither, ’cause instead you hanging out at the bar at Fond, where works the man of which you is quite fond. And if you fellas ain’t there, maybe you getting fond together back at—” flip, shuffle, crumple, and he read off James’ address, including the ZIP-plus-four.

  “You maybe probably thinking that you could maybe rat me out with the cops and turn CI and slide out scot-free. You maybe think that because you maybe don’t got a ton of experience with the chingada cerdos. But I do, so I want you to know two things: One, you are as tangled in this shit as anyone else; you are guilty as shit, and there ain’t nothing that can ever get pinned to me that’ll make it worth it to drop all the shit about you. If the cops get involved, you gonna wind up in a cage, too. So that’s one. Two is that even from in a cage, even from beyond the fucking grave, I can get you, Paul. Even if you was to shoot me in the back and cut off my head while I slept tonight, my peoples would fucking get you. There’s ‘standing orders,’ and that shit is fully funded. They will get you, and they will get your boyfriend. They will lock you up in rooms where you can hear each other scream, and they will fuck with you for twenty-one days. Then they will gut you and leave you to bleed out while that building burns. Do you hear me?”

  I mumbled that I did. Chico was not satisfied.

  “Repeat it back. Repeat back what I said.”

  And I did, quietly, my voice even, but the tears digging hot furrows down my face.

  “ ’at’s good!” Chico’s praise sounded legitimate, which made it all the more awful. “That is damn good, Pablocito. Most fuckers, I gotta coach them through the last part, the part where they tell me about how they are going to die if they fuck with me. But you got it in a single take. You learn your part quick, Paul.”

  “So that’s where we’re at, then?” I said flatly. I was pleased with how calm my voice sounded, how even and controlled. I was also a little disturbed to realize that I was listening to my own voice coming out of my own mouth as though I were an audience member, leaning back in his comfy chair in the dark, sinking into the solitary pleasure of watching some asshole wriggle on the hook.

  “Yup, that’s where we at, Pablo. Merrily we roll along until spoon mania has run its course.” His voice took a sympathetic turn. “Look, Paul, don’t get all your panties bunched up your ass about this. Someday this shit will all be a happy memory for you. And I promise on my mother’s blessed soul that when that day finally comes, all this,” I heard him rattle his little dossier, “it goes to the bottom of my parrots’ cage until it is terminally shit-caked. For reals. No one ever gonna know who you were, no one ’cept me and Peggy. And after this gig is done, we don’t fucking care. But until that day, I care a fucking lot. You will neither rock my boat nor rattle my cage, Pablocito, ¿claro? I see you tomorrow night without delay, ¿verdad?”

  “I work tomorrow night,” I said.

  “That’s damn straight,” Chico said, “You work serving canapés until two A.M., then you got an hour break, then you work
acting like Parson No-Shoes from three A.M. until three thirty A.M.—local time.”

  I felt numb, but I’d be lying if I said that numbness didn’t include an element of relief. It was a relief to know that I didn’t actually have a choice. None of this was really my fault.

  From the Journal of Pastor Ephraim Otis, Quansigamog Pond, Massachusetts, 1770

  My Lord, my Lord, my Lord, my Lord, my Lord, my Lord, my LORD—Blessed are You for accepting our tithes of silver vessels Blessed are You for sending among us your Unshod Parson bearing with him your Manifest Gospel Blessed are You for this Balm of Gilead

  Holy Holy Holy is this Lord of Hosts who casts out weariness who hushes all doubts who emboldens the blood with His all-consuming divine Love as we traverse this Vale of Tears

  Where once we cowered in darkness, now we crow at the sun, for we are overfull with all His Manifest Glory

  Amen

  Amen

  Amen

  Amen

  Amen

  {later}

  the noxious ache and malaise that follows the Manifest Communion is nigh unto intolerable

  my brains are venomous

  i pray for relief and to once again know the Light of the Lord’s Love shining upon us through His New Sacrament and soon amen

  My shift at Stalk was uneventful, save for a hundred dollar tip from a table full of Tarheel ladies’ soccer fans who were pumped up about something that, even after they explained it twice, was entirely inscrutable to me. Frankly, compared to spoon money, it was sort of hard to get excited about a single Benjamin.

  As I left work I texted James, saying I thought I’d maybe started to come down with a stomach bug, and he shouldn’t come by my place after he’d closed out at Fond. I’d call him tomorrow morning and tell him how I felt.

  My phone buzzed almost immediately, showing four of those cartoony little emoji icons: A frowny face, a wide-eyed pile of poop, a goofy ghost sticking out his tongue, and a big red heart, rendered a little crooked because it coincided with the crack in my screen. I replied *SMOOOOCHES!*, shut my phone down, put it in my glovebox, and drove straight to FDA Annex D.

  As I changed into costume in the buzzing men’s room, carefully perched on a newspaper so my bare feet wouldn’t touch the small white tiles, I noticed I was missing a button from my cassock’s thirty-nine-button Chesterfield front. Annoying, but far from a mission-critical wardrobe malfunction.

  Taylor already had the portal fired up when I stepped into the conference room, and Chico was standing next to it, convivially tapping his watch. He tossed me the loaded snuffbox, and I slipped it into my satchel. Then I stepped through the portal without a word, because that seemed like the professional thing to do.

  It was beautiful morning in eastern Massachusetts: The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the brook was babbling, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. I flipped my half-hour glass over, strapped it on, and strolled downstream, whistling a jolly tune. I heard the portal snap closed behind me.

  I’ve had a lot of time to think since then, and I’ve been wondering: If I’d happened to glance over my shoulder just then, would that have saved me misery down the road? I sorta doubt it—the past is past—but... but you’ve gotta wonder, right?

  I hardly recognized the village when I came out of the thick brush. It was in a shambles. The blacksmith’s cabin was a charred ruin with just one wall still standing, the stone one supporting his forge and awning. In the two weeks since I’d last been there they’d cleared an astounding number of trees; what had been a fairly wooded lot separating the blacksmith from what I imagined was the rest of the village was now a barren, muddy expanse, churned by ox hooves and deeply furrowed by the logs being dragged off. The slick mud squelched between my toes. It was like standing in a tub of cold whipped squash.

  There was a hunched woman between me and the remains of the smithy, tending a big iron pot simmering over an open fire. It smelled terrible, even from fifty feet away. Maybe some sort of leather-tanning preparation? Or dye? I don’t know; I never took the Horne Creek Living Historical Farm field trip as a kid. When she heard my bare feet farting around in the mud, she glanced up and then did a comical double take. On the second look, her face was split by an awful, beaming grin.

  “Parson Brown!” she screamed, elated. “Parson Brown!”

  Despite the light that joy brought to her features, this woman looked absolutely ghastly—ten times worse than Tina. She was gaunt and frail, like an old crone, but pretty obviously hardly even twenty years old. Her face was pocked with little scabs where she’d picked and picked at the skin, and her mouth was an awful brown picket fence, almost more gap than tooth.

  Pocks and scabs and jack-o-lantern maw notwithstanding, she sprang up from her cauldron and sprinted toward the other buildings of the village, yelling, “The Lord’s courier has come! The Lord’s courier has come!” all the while.

  And then they came streaming in. Oh, Jesus, it was like kids rushing in on a busted piñata, but with the cast of Night of the Living Dead instead of The Little Rascals. There were thirty of them, if not more—men, boys, women, children, the old, the tired, the huddled masses yearning to be free of the drudgery of back-breaking labor in some Massachusetts scrub woods even God had abandoned. The blacksmith rushed from his lean-to, waving his arms. “Respect!” He shouted, “Respect! Queue for the sacrament! Await the pastor! Await Pastor Otis!” All the while he kept glancing back at me, his face twisted with outright terror.

  I had no idea what that look was about—I’d sorta thought Young Charles and I were buddies—but didn’t really dwell on it in the moment, because I was twisted up inside like wet bedsheets tangled in the washer: I hadn’t left any meth with them on my last visit, two weeks earlier, but here they were, more tweaked out than ever. I’m no chemist, but it was absolutely inconceivable that they’d come up with some way to cook their own, right? You need matchbooks and paint thinner and Sudafed; they didn’t even have coffee and cigarettes.

  Nonetheless, the congregation had grown, they were all jonesing, and just a glimpse at their village strongly hinted at an uninterrupted run of meth-head thinking: Meticulously sorted piles of useless crap, projects well-begun then abandoned half-finished, the clear-cutting of their wood lot.

  I couldn’t fathom what had happened. I repeat: Counting that trip, I’d brought back maybe four grams, total. Back when I was rolling, that would have lasted me and a pal a weekend, with a little left to even out the crash.

  Watching that crowd gather—a school of carpet sharks closing in on the chum still locked in my little bone-and-silver snuffbox—was maybe the first time it dawned on me that I’d probably had kind of a serious habit back in the day.

  The blacksmith broke the townspeople into two rows of a dozen each. The first row immediately dropped to their knees, eyes clenched hard, hands clasped in prayer, spoons presented. A shout drew my eyes away from the ranks of spoons, and I saw Wannakusket and a black clad figure in a broad-brimmed hat come streaking around the side of one of the log cabins at the other end of the muddy expanse. The figure in black was short and a little dumpy, but he was cooking across that slick mud, quickly outpacing Wannakusket. He looked to be carrying two big half-liter cans of Asahi beer, one in each fist, pumping them as he ran like a jogger with fivepound weights. His broad hat flipped off his head and was trod into the mud by Mr. Mohawk’s pistoning moccasins. Wannakusket joined the end of the first row, dropping to his knees with a single, large black-and-white feather protruding from his clasped hands.

  The man in black—their pastor, I imagined—hooked around the other end of the double row, forcing himself to slow, laboring to rein in his ragged breath. I was worried about the pastor’s heart. He looked worse than tweaked out, almost as bad as the blacksmith: His skin was dead white and sweaty, his eyes wide at the sight of me.

  “Parson Brown,” he said breathlessly. “Such is the leniency of Our Lord that He returns you to us, despite...” his mouth wo
rked like a fish out of water, and finally the word he got out was “all... all that... transpired.” He dropped to his knees on the mud, but not in prayer; his arms dangled abjectly, his head bowed with shame. His fading, sandy hair was thin on top, and the crown of his head sunburned and peeling. Must have forgotten his hat the other day—not that it would do him any good ever again; I doubted he’d even be able to find it out in the mud.

  “We are blessed, blessed, blessed with your return, with the Lord’s forbearance, with His unbounded mercy. Should He have scraped this place from the earth and cast it into the Void, such would have been right and just punishment for our...” He exchanged a look with the miserable smith, then glanced at the kneeling Native American, lost in prayer. “... Our transgression.”

  But I wasn’t really following him because I’d realized what he was holding: Not big Japanese beers, but a pair of those quart-sized, round-bellied mugs Peggy had called “canns.”

  “These vessels,” I asked, dry-mouthed. “These are from the hand of Our Lord’s servant Paul Revere?”

  The pastor lifted his head, uncomprehending. “Of course, Parson Brown, of course; as the Lord demands, so it is our pleasure to fulfill.” He lifted the canns high, offering them. “Should the Lord require vessels made from the cupped hands of our own children, we would fetch the saw.”

  And he meant it—but my brain couldn’t keep hold of that little nugget of colonial charm, not with those two mugs glowing in the sunshine. One was plain, but the other was engraved with a fine, intertwined tracery, an endless Celtic knot that flashed and flowed like quicksilver. I took one, then the other, rotating them admiringly before slipping them into my satchel; both were stamped •REVERE

  One hundred thousand dollars—not counting the spoons. One hundred thousand dollars to Peggy and Chico, who knew how to connect with the right people. Seven thousand dollars in my pocket before sunrise back home.