“C’mon, this is the best part,” I said, quite sincerely. “No matter how many times you do it, it’s never going to be this sweet again.” And I stepped into the portal gladly, thoughtless of whatever unpleasantness was to come.
And it was wonderful, that cascading staticky animal frisson of time or probability or the “tachyon emissions” washing over you, or whatever it was.
And then I was in Colonial Massachusetts. We were in Colonial Massachusetts. I turned back to see Chico and Peggy looking around with casual interest.
But not flushed with the journey. Not... high.
“How... how was it?” I asked.
“It was nice, I guess,” Peggy said politely. Chico shrugged and nodded. She took a deep breath. “The air smells great here, doesn’t it?”
Chico sniffed. “I guess.”
They hadn’t felt it, which at once made me feel sort of special—like someone of such refined tastes that he could really dig this symphony or that wine—and also lonely. I mean, I wanted to share it with someone. But maybe I couldn’t, and that was as sad as getting high all by yourself in your shitty little apartment.
The portal shrank and closed, and I saw, a few yards behind Peggy and Chico, where the other me was strung up in the tree—but this wasn’t the same other me as before; this guy’s throat was pristine, but he’d been terribly beaten. His head was a mashed purple lump with one dangling eye. I wondered what I’d find if I searched his pockets; a third identical one-of-a-kind snuffbox, licked clean? Yet another cracked iPhone, this one with a pear or banana or rising Chinese sun emblazoned on the back? For a moment I wondered why Ye Olde Tweakers kept killing me—because they were mad about what was happening to their community? Because they wanted all the Gospel to themselves? Because they wanted to themselves be the Lord’s mainline to His flock?
But I didn’t wonder for long, because I knew that at its heart it was Tweaker Logic: irresistible in the moment, unintelligible to the outsider, regretted in the aftermath, repeated at the next opportunity. Lather, rinse, repeat, ad nauseam, amen.
I tore my eyes away from Yet Another Dead Me before Chico and Peggy might wonder what I was staring at and turn around to see for themselves. Instead I led them a few steps away, toward the village, drawing their attention to my half-hour glass as I turned it, checked the sand, and strung it onto my belt.
“Okay,” I said, “Thirty minutes. Let’s go.” We hiked up our frocks and started picking our way downstream. Soon we came to the muddy, denuded outskirts of the village, which was shrouded in a low-hanging, noxious tannery miasma layered atop the B.O.-stank of people who only believed in bathing twice a year. In the gloom of his nearly collapsed lean-to, the blacksmith, Young Charles, toiled before a roaring fire, tongues of flame lapping out from his forge and threatening to finish off all that remained of his home.
“Jesus!” Chico coughed. “You was wrong, Peggy; the past stinks!”
Peggy snuffled and rubbed at her stinging eyes, but was still grinning like a fool. “This... is amazing!” she said.
“Better than digging through old ledger sheets and making suppositions,” I said. “Anyway, listen: I need to make a big entrance. You guys head out across the mud, toward Young Charles—he’s the blacksmith, and sorta my number-one helper— yelling ‘Hullo!’ and ‘Blessings!’ and tell him you’ve brought the ‘Manifest Gospel for Communion.’ He’ll bring everyone running and lined up. Play it priestly, with a prayer—”
Chico rolled his eyes at me. “Pablo, I was an altar boy; I know Communion.”
“Oh. Well, then just do that stuff.” I dug into my pocket and brought out a snuffbox—not the full one Chico had just given me, but the other box, the spare one I’d taken home after handing Dead Me’s empty snuffbox over to Chico the day before. That spare snuffbox had still been half full then, but I’d dumped its contents into the toilet before going to work, to eliminate any possibility that I might decide that maybe I needed a little Old-Time Religion to get me through that day.
I handed over the empty snuffbox.
“Here’s the Gospel. Start with Young Charles and work your way over; once you’ve done two or three folks I’ll make my big entrance.”
“Yeah,” Chico said, starting to sweat his big performance. “Okay. Peggy, you play altar-girl. Good.” She nodded, still watching the village, taking it all in.
“Okay,” I said. “Go!” And I shouted the first big “Hullo!” myself. Young Charles jerked up from his work, locking on to Chico and Peggy as they stumbled out into the slick mud and began toddling toward the lean-to. Peggy and Chico, fixated on the forge, couldn’t see that their jubilant greetings were already drawing the townspeople, who came shambling out from among the log shanties like Romero zombies.
I quietly turned, ducked into the undergrowth, and walked back upstream. It really hadn’t been so hard; I didn’t even have to make a break for it. When I was almost back to the clearing I heard an outraged bellow. This was followed by a little hubbub—which I imagined was the townsfolk’s response to the revelation of Chico’s empty snuffbox—but it seemed to die down quickly. Whatever was happening back there, I put it out of my head.
Coming into the clearing, I was surprised to see the portal already open, even though the half-hour glass at my waist was still more than half full.
And then I saw me step out of the portal.
I couldn’t believe how young I looked, how happy and relaxed. Then, with a moment’s reflection, I couldn’t believe I’d aged so much in just a few months, and with so little to show for it. I couldn’t think of a single special thing I’d bought or done with Chico and Peggy’s money. It had mostly just evaporated: Getting Subway because I didn’t feel like cooking, buying clothes because I didn’t feel like doing laundry, calling in because I didn’t feel like working.
The New Me that had just stepped out of the portal marveled at the sights, seeing it all for the first time. We both heard his iPhone’s low-power eep. It was a small sound in the clear morning air, but it hit New Me like a 120-volt shock. He jolted like Kramer bursting into Jerry’s apartment, hiked up his cassock, fumbled the phone as he attempted to power it down and stash it in his satchel, then spastically turned out his pockets and patted himself down.
Half of me wanted to laugh, ’cause it was really top-notch buffoonery. And half of me was enraged, because this was the dumb asshole who’d gotten me into this mess. Or a version of him, anyway.
But that bemusement and outrage, it was all intellectual—I didn’t really feel anything. My emotions were jarred up in my head, like preserves I was saving in a cellar to sustain me through some disaster.
But isn’t that acting? Isn’t that art? Canning your emotions, and then doling them out a teaspoon at a time for pay, or when you need to con someone, or when you need to talk yourself into something? It’s not that different from buying your emotions from a Chinese grad student, or a Mexican and a historian, or a fake parson.
So I pulled down a jar of rage, spun off the lid, and scooped out a big dollop.
“Hey!” I shouted as I stomped into the clearing. “HEY! HEY, ASSHOLE!”
New Me, still panicking from his iPhone FUBAR, swung around, then shrank back on his heels.
“Oh Jesus!” he squeaked.
I closed on him and took up a double fistful of his cassock. He still had all thirtynine buttons.
“Is this your first time?” I demanded.
“Wha—?”
I’d never been in a fight. I’d never taken a karate class. Heck, I’d only ever done a single half-day stage-fighting workshop, and I spent most of that flirting with the guy I got paired up with. That guy turned out to have a very funny, very busty German wife, and I never learned how to throw a realistic punch.
But I’d worked in bars and restaurants since I was sixteen. I’d seen some brutal brawls. And I am an actor. So I hauled back and smashed my forehead into New Me’s nose. It crunched satisfyingly, his blood and snot spurting warmly
down my forehead.
“Onk!” he cried.
“I asked!” I bellowed, whipping him back and forth like a dog with a rag doll, “I fucking asked if this was your first time, asshole!” I charged into him, taking him off his feet and driving us both into the creek. We lost our footing on the smooth stones and came down hard in the shallow water.
I struggled to pin him, giving him a solid knee to the crotch in the process, knocking his breath out. Finally, I got a leg over and straddled him, pushing him under, my fists to his chest. The crisp, cold water poured over his face, pulling a streamer of blood from his nose as it went.
The water was cold and refreshing. Energizing.
I eased up, letting him thrust his head out of the water.
“Have. You. Been. Here. Before?” I asked.
“N-no!” he stuttered. “Ne-never!”
I punched him, but chickened out at the last second, and it became a weird, hooking fist-slap that glanced off his left cheek. So I punched him again, right in the eye. Then again, in his smashed nose. He honked a terrible pained cry, and I thrust his head back under water.
Held it.
“You ruined our life,” I quietly told us, even though I knew he couldn’t hear anything. But it didn’t really matter; I was in character.
I was in character playing me.
And that seemed like it was probably the worst part.
I tore New Me back up out of the water, then stood, dragging him to his feet.
“Don’t ever come back.”
“What—” he gasped for breath. “What will I tell Chico?”
That struck me as a reasonable question, but Character Me still treated it as a piddling little detail, almost unworthy of his consideration.
“Tell him you got jumped,” I heard myself say dismissively. “Tell him they were on to you from the start, and you were almost burned as a witch.”
“Hanged!” New Me gasped. “The Portal Guy said witches got hanged, or crush—”
“Whatever!” I shook him, snapping his head back and forth. “Whatever!” I shoved him up the bank and frog-marched him back to his portal. “Whatever you do, don’t ever come back!” New Me stood next to his dappled portal, doubled-over, breathing in thick pants. Snot and blood and pristine spring water dripped from his face, pattering onto his bare feet. He nodded his head quickly, placatingly, and I realized those thick panting breaths were actually him repeating “okay” over and over and over again.
And then he looked up and finally recognized me.
“Who...?” But he was too scared to finish.
“I’m the ghost of Mistakes Yet to Come. Go home, Paulie Boy,” I sneered. “Get married. Settle down. Don’t ever do any of this shit again.”
He nodded. Actor Me—the calm little me deep in my head, pulling the levers and tweaking the knobs that made Character Me strut and fret his hour upon the stage—clinically noted the lack of surprise on New Me’s face when I said “get married and settle down.” I wondered why it was that I seemed to be from the only timeline where James and I couldn’t just tie the knot and settle down, the only reality where things were so consistently and arbitrarily unfair.
What a stupid, petty little world I was stuck in.
For a second, it dawned on me that maybe the solution was to steal New Me’s portal, to go out into his America, where James and I could just go down to the County Clerk and fill out a form, and then get back to choosing a cake-topper and being overcharged for white folding chairs with broad satin ribbons tied to them—just like every other glowing young couple.
Clean slate. New leaf. First day of the rest of my life. Blah blah blah.
I turned. I had every intention in the world of popping through New Me’s portal, stealing his happy little life, and ditching him in Colonial Meth-burgh to sort it all out on his own while his James and I lived happily ever after as Mr. and Mr. MillerCointero.
But Wannakusket was there, standing next to the maple with Dead Me strung up on it, watching us. Wannakusket was pale as a dead man himself, with a bright spray of red spattered across his nose and cheeks like Morgan Freeman’s freckles.
He held Chico’s broad-brimmed hat. There was blood staining the straw. He looked at me, then at New Me. Dead Me’s satchel swayed at Wannakusket’s hip, rocking like a pendulum weighed down by that heavy little snuffbox of meth. A sixteenth of an ounce doesn’t seem like much. That’s not even the weight of a couple paperclips. But it can be the whole goddamn Universe, a champagne fountain of stars shooting right up your spine.
Wannakusket was eyeballing my satchel, then New Me’s. I could see him measuring us up, calculating how much fight was left in us, how fast we could run, how far we could leap.
New Me finally looked up at me, and then past me to Wannakusket and Dead Me.
“That Native guy next to the scarecrow’s got a tomahawk,” he said flatly. His words were mushy. A little runner of bloody drool ran out the corner of his mouth at tomahawk.
“No,” I said carefully, soothingly, they way you’d talk if you looked up and saw the bull was on your side of the fence. “That’s not a tomahawk; that’s a hammer.” It was a short-handled maul. I could picture it in its former life, hanging at the side of Young Charles’s anvil, one tool among many. But since those days it seemed that this maul had become Special, in that dangerous nonsense way that little objects did when you ran on meth for days upon days upon days, unblinking and manic and convinced that you and you alone were finally seeing What It All Really Means. Many painstaking, crystal-fueled hours had gone into carving an ornate filigree of illuminated crosses into the wooden handle. Wannakusket held the maul formally, like a Templar holding his two-handed claymore. He raised the maul to his forehead, lightly touching it to a point between his eyes, then lowered it to his navel, then raised it to his heart, then brought it across his chest to rest it against the other nipple.
His eyes never left us.
“I think it’s time to go,” I told New Me, likewise keeping my eyes glued on this dedicated adherent to the Manifest Gospel.
New Me took one wordless step toward his portal. Wannakusket violently jerked, his eyes locking on to New Me and that fresh satchel with its heavy little snuffbox of Sacrament.
“But gimme your bag first.” I held out a hand blindly, and an unseen hand thrust a strap into it. Wannakusket’s eyes followed the satchel. I heard a single wracking sob—which I guess must have been from New Me—but it faded fast, washed out by a quiet crackle of portal static. Then there was a snap, and I couldn’t hear the portal any longer.
The forest was quiet. A bird sang, and then stopped, and then began again.
Wannakusket extended a hand in a gesture of unmistakable supplication.
“Communion,” he said huskily. “Communion.” His skin was pale and sweat greased, his eyes weepy.
I shook my head. “No. I think... I think I’m just gonna take these with me. You all need to take a break.” I stepped back, and he took two quick steps forward. I stepped back again, clumsily stumbling into the brisk creek, and he shook his head violently.
“No no no! Communion!” he begged, “God!” He begged, “God, God, God, God, God.”
“There is no God,” I croaked. “Just chemicals.”
I doubt he understood that, but his face darkened in a way that made it pretty clear he’d gotten the gist: Sorry, ladies and gents: No Communion today. He released Chico’s bloodstained hat, which landed on edge, rolled into the brook, and was whisked away toward the sea. It had a leatherette band stamped MADE IN CHINA. I wondered what history would make of that. Maybe nothing. Maybe the hat would sink and rot before anyone could find it and puzzle over how the hell the damn thing was made, the stitches so even, the weave so tight—all the perfectly regular detail work we ignore, because machines did it in faraway countries at the hands of people we couldn’t be bothered to imagine.
Wannakusket curled his lip and brought back his maul, choking up on the grip like a big l
eaguer. He coiled down through his hips, ready to pounce.
And then, true as dramatic irony and deus ex machina, a portal blossomed next to me, like fire pouring out into the air. I glimpsed down at the hourglass tied at my waist and saw it had run out. This was my ride.
Wannakusket’s face fell, not with slack-jawed shock, but with disappointment: Apparently the Good Lord did not mean for him to take by force what I refused to grant; He’d sent me a chariot of fire, and really did intend to abandon them and take back the Manifest Gospel He’d granted. I understood—because it really is a stupid, petty little world often enough. But that didn’t mean I was going to leave the meth with him. The buck has to stop somewhere.
I took one big step back up onto the muddy bank, and the next step put me through the portal. The shimmering temporal effervescence bubbled over me for the last time. It was, as ever, absolutely wonderful.
Even before the light cleared out of my eyes I knew something wasn’t right: We’d left Taylor standing in the conference room alone, but there were many voices now, chatting amiably. One was a touch clearer above the rest, asking “Well, who the fuck is that?”
“Oh, that’s just Paul.” Taylor answered, “Chico and Peggy will be behind him.”
“No,” I said, trying to knuckle the light from my eyes, “They won’t. I ditched them in the village.”
That stopped the conversation.
“Fuck, Paul, why’d you do that?!” Taylor said.
My eyes had finally cleared. The conference room was crowded with a half-dozen guys holding Starbucks cups. They all wore bulky blue jackets with DEA printed in yellow over their hearts and across their backs. Two happened to be facing me, and so I saw that the windbreakers looked bulky not because they were heavy, but because they covered Kevlar vests. The guys all had guns at their hips, but none were drawn—the holsters weren’t even unclipped.
Asimov's Science Fiction Page 7
