by Tim Powers
After a while he became aware that someone up the street was yelling about something, and he stood up in relief, grateful for an excuse to get off the porch, away from the house. He shuffled down the two concrete steps, breathing the cold air that was scented with jasmine even in December.
Some distance up the block, half a dozen people in robes were walking down the sidewalk toward his house, carrying one of those real estate signs that looked like a miniature hangman’s gallows. No, only one of them was carrying it, and at the bottom end of it was a metal wheel that was skirling along the dry pavement.
Then he saw that it wasn’t a real estate sign, but a cross. The guy carrying it was apparently supposed to be Jesus, and two of the men behind him wore slatted skirts like Roman soldiers, and they had rope whips that they were snapping in the chilly air.
“Get along, King of the Jews!” one of the soldiers called, obviously not for the first time, and not very angrily. Behind the soldiers three women in togas trotted along, shaking their heads and waving their hands. Harrison supposed they must be Mary or somebody. The wheel at the bottom of the cross definitely needed a squirt of oil.
Harrison took a deep breath, and then forced jocularity into his voice as he called, “You guys missed the Golgotha off-ramp. Only thing south of here is the YMCA.”
A black couple was pushing a shopping cart up the sidewalk from the opposite direction, their shadows stark under the streetlight. They were slowing down to watch Jesus. All kinds of unoiled wheels were turning tonight.
The biblical procession stopped in front of his house, and Harrison walked down the path to the sidewalk. Jesus grinned at him, clearly glad for the chance to pause amid his travail and catch his breath.
One of the women handed Harrison a folded flier. “I’m Mary Magdalene,” she told him. “This is about a meeting we’re having at our church next week. We’re on Seventeenth, just past the 5 Freeway.”
The shopping cart had stopped too, and Harrison carried the flier over to the black man and woman. “Here,” he said, holding out the piece of paper. “Mary Magdalene wants you to check out her church. Take a right at the light, it’s just past the freeway.”
The black man had a bushy beard but didn’t seem to be older than thirty, and the woman was fairly fat, wearing a sweatsuit. The shopping cart was full of empty bottles and cans sitting on top of a trash bag half-full of clothes.
The black man grinned. “We’re homeless, and we’d sure like to get the dollar-ninety-nine breakfast at Norm’s. Could you help us out? We only need a little more.”
“Ask Jesus,” said Harrison nervously, waving at the robed people. “Hey Jesus, here’s a chance to do some actual thing tonight, not just march around the streets. This here is a genuine homeless couple, give ’em a couple of bucks.”
Jesus patted his robes with the hand that wasn’t holding the cross. “I don’t have anything on me,” he said apologetically.
Harrison turned to the Roman soldiers. “You guys got any money?”
“Just change would do,” put in the black man.
“Nah,” said one of the soldiers, “I left my money in my pants.”
“Girls?” said Harrison.
Mary Magdalene glanced at her companions, then turned back to Harrison and shook her head.
“Really?” said Harrison. “Out in this kind of neighborhood at night, and you don’t even have quarters for phone calls?”
“We weren’t going to go far,” explained Jesus.
“Weren’t going to go far.” Harrison nodded, then looked back to Mary Magdalene. “Can your church help these people out? Food, shelter, that kind of thing?”
The black woman had walked over to Jesus and was admiring his cross. She liked the wheel.
“They’d have to be married,” Mary Magdalene told Harrison. “In the church. If they’re just … living together, we can’t do anything for them.”
That’s great, thought Harrison, coming from Mary Magdalene. “So that’s it, I guess, huh?”
Apparently it was. “Drop by the church!” said Jesus cheerfully, resuming his burden and starting forward again.
“Get along, King of the Jews!” called one of the soldiers, snapping his length of rope in the air. The procession moved on down the sidewalk, the wheel at the bottom of the cross squeaking.
The black man looked at Harrison. “Sir, could we borrow a couple of bucks? You live here? Well pay you back.”
Harrison was staring after the robed procession. “Oh,” he said absently, “sure. Here.” He dug a wad of bills out of his pants pocket and peeled two ones away from the five and held them out.
The man took the bills. “God bless you. Could we have the five too? It’s Christmas Eve.”
Harrison found that he was insulted by the God bless you. The implication was that these two were devout Christians, and would assuredly spend the money on wholesome food, or medicine, and not go buy dope or wine.
“No,” he said sharply. “And I don’t care what you buy with the two bucks.” Once I’ve given it away, he thought, it shouldn’t be my business. Gone is gone.
The black man scowled at him and muttered something obviously offensive under his breath as the two of them turned away, not toward Norm’s and the dollar-ninety-nine breakfast, but down a side street toward the mini-mart.
Obscurely defeated, Harrison trudged back up to his porch and collapsed back into the chair.
He wished the train record was still playing inside – but even if it had been, it would still be a train that, realistically, had probably stopped rolling a long time ago. Listening to it over and over again wouldn’t make it move again.
He opened the door and walked back into the dim living room. Just as he closed the door he heard thunder boom across the night sky, and then he heard the hiss of sudden rain on the pavement outside. In a moment it was tapping at the windows.
He wondered if the rain gauge was still on the roof, maybe measuring what was happening to Jesus and the black couple out there. And he was glad that he had had the roof redone a year ago. He was okay in here – no wet carpets in store for him.
The vodka bottle was still on the table, but he could see tiny reflected flickers of light in the glassy depths of it – red and green and yellow and blue; and, though he knew that the arm of the phonograph was lifted and in its holder, he heard again, clearly now, Bing Crosby singing “We Three Kings.”
To hell with the vodka. He sat down in the leather chair and picked up the snow globe with trembling fingers. “What,” he said softly, “too far? Too long? I thought it was supposed to be forever.”
But rainy gusts boomed at the windows, and he realized that he had stood up. He pried at the base of the snow globe, and managed to free the plug.
Water and white plastic flecks bubbled and trickled out of it, onto the floor. In only a minute the globe had emptied out, and the two figures in the sleigh were exposed to the air of tonight, stopped. Without the refraction of the surrounding water the man and the woman looked smaller, and lifeless.
“Field and fountain, moor and mountain,” he whispered. “Journey’s done – finally. Sorry.”
He was alone in the dark living room. No lights gleamed in the vodka bottle, and there was no sound but his own breath and heartbeat.
Tomorrow he would open the door to anyone who might knock.
Where They Are Hid
WHEN HE STEPPED out of the doorway and sniffed the warm air, he had a feeling that he’d finally finished the reluctant, years-long, trial-and-error journey – and he was sure of it when, after squinting around for a couple of moments, he saw the woman pushing the baby carriage along the sidewalk. And though now that it was all over he felt like staring in horror, or crying, or just running away, he forced himself to do nothing more than pat the pockets of his coat and smile casually as he strolled up to her. He said good afternoon and peered into the carriage.
He remarked on what a nice-looking son she had, and the mother gave him a
smile, but then let it relax back into her habitual bored pout when it became clear that the man really had stopped only to admire the baby. The man pulled a pair of glasses out of his coat pocket, and when a wad of bills tumbled to the sidewalk the young mother darted around to the front of the carriage, recovered the money, and handed nearly all of it back to him.
He had been leaning over the carriage, doing something with the baby’s bottle, and when the mother handed him the bills he thanked her with as good a show of surprise and sincerity as he could muster.
The woman nodded and began pushing the carriage on down the sidewalk. Neither she, nor, probably, the baby, had noticed that the stranger had switched bottles. Certainly neither of them was aware of the paper he’d tucked under the blanket.
When the man turned away, his face stiff with grief and fear, he let his left hand fall out from under his coat, and he was gripping the snatched baby bottle so tightly that his knuckles were white.
Just from habit – for there was certainly no need to look sharp for the visitor he was expecting – the secret ruler of the world glanced at himself in the full-length closet door mirror, and then he leaned forward and pressed a lever on his desktop intercom.
The lever broke right off. “Damn it,” he muttered, glancing at his watch and pushing his chair back to stand up. The casters emitted a loud squeal, and his secretary was already looking up when he yanked the connecting door open.
“No calls or visitors for the next fifteen minutes,” he said distinctly.
The girl’s eyebrows went up. “But Mr. Stanwell, I thought you were having lunch with the Trotsky Youth rep.”
“That’s at eleven,” said Stanwell irritably. “It’s only a quarter after ten now.”
“So you want … what was it? A sno-cone and ribs, did you say? And – ”
“I said no calls or visitors. For the next fifteen minutes. For God’s sake. Now repeat that back to me.”
She managed to, despite the stutter that seemed to be fashionable or epidemic or something these days, and he went back into his office and crossed to the window.
“Good news about something,” he whispered, looking out across the Santa Ana business district and trying to notice the trucks zooming efficiently past on Main Street rather than the work crew that was somehow still finding something to fool with under the ripped-up pavement of Civic Center Drive. “The labor unions deciding to rejoin us at last, employment up,” he was whispering with his eyes shut now, “the colors getting brighter again, the hallucinations stop – bring me good news about something.”
When the familiar thump jarred him and rattled the window he opened his eyes and turned around.
There was a man standing on the other side of the desk now, and though the newcomer was dressed in blue jeans and a flannel shirt with a heavy coat over his arm, and kept alternately looking at and sucking on a cut thumb, he was otherwise an identical twin to Stanwell.
“Glad to see you,” said Stanwell. “We okay? What happened to the thumb?”
The other man waved impatiently. “Little cut,” he said. “I’d explain what I did, but you’d probably be tempted to fix it so it wouldn’t happen.”
Stanwell frowned. “You know I’m always careful to – ”
“Sure. Look, I’m not really in the mood to stay back here very long, you know? I’m damn busy, and of course I’ve been through this conversation once before.”
Stanwell looked hurt, but asked, “Anything you’d like me to change? Anything I should buy, anybody to – ”
“Nope,” said his double. “Just hang in there. We’re doing fine.”
Stanwell was frowning as he turned to the liquor cabinet and reached down a bottle of Stolichnaya. “I gather,” he said a little stiffly, “that something goes right, and you’re afraid that if I know about it in advance I’ll fumble the ball.” He tonged ice cubes into two glasses and poured vodka over them. “Well, if genuine spontaneity is absolutely necessary, I understand. But I’d like at least some answers.” He turned and held one glass out toward the visitor. “For example, in what direction do Poland and Mexico – ”
“No, thank you, we’ve given up drink. And I’ve got to go. Just wanted to show you we’re okay.”
“What, already?” asked Stanwell, disconcerted. “But usually we stay – ”
“Not this time, old buddy,” said the double, who was obviously not enjoying the conversation. He shut his eyes – then opened them and hesitantly held out his right hand. “I wish,” he said quietly as the mystified Stanwell took it, “that we could have got to know each other.”
Abruptly the visitor disappeared, and Stanwell stumbled forward, his ears ringing and his wrist almost sprained from the sudden, close implosion of air. He flexed his fingers ruefully.
“You okay, Mr. Stanwell?” came his secretary’s call from beyond the closed door.
“Yes,” he shouted. “Don’t interrupt.” Some soundproof door, he thought bitterly.
It was his turn now to reassure the next man back, but he sat down first and took a long sip of the vodka. What can I tell him? he wondered helplessly. Well of course I’ll tell him whatever it was that I heard a year ago; but the next-up man then sure looked more confident than I feel now.
He glanced at the neat stack of typed pages on the bookshelf, and he wished he could still read his unfinished autobiography and derive inspiration and that sense of high purpose from it; but during the last year it had seemed to him that the margins were wider than he remembered, and that the text had become a little murky and ambiguous, and that all the moving or funny or tragic anecdotes had had the pith leached out of them.
Though he modestly intended that the book should be published after his death, he had put together a selection of accompanying photographs, and had even commissioned a painting for the cover. He swivelled his chair around now so that he faced the big canvas that occupied most of one wall.
It he still liked. It was an impressionist view of a tree, with an infant – looking almost embarrassingly Christ-childlike – perched in the high branches. Years ago Stanwell had tried to locate the very tree in which he’d been mysteriously found in 1950, but he learned that they’d built the Pasadena Freeway right over the field in which the tree had stood. He’d considered going back and making them build the damn freeway along a different route, in case subsequent generations might want to make a shrine or something around the tree, but he’d decided that such a move would be a needlessly egotistical strain on the fabric – and besides, the real tree probably hadn’t looked half so imposing as this painted one.
He drained the drink and stood up. Hell, he thought, take the long view. What if we haven’t made a lot of progress this year? The man ahead had seemed busy, if rude, and things have been getting steadily better ever since I engineered Roosevelt’s death to occur in ‘44 instead of ‘45, so that it was Henry Wallace, not Harry Truman, who inherited the presidency. Stanwell smiled out the window at the multitudes below. Hardly any of you know who I am, he thought, and not one of you knows my real function, but I prevented the bomb and Korea and Vietnam and Nixon for you. I don’t look for thanks – how could you thank me for deflecting calamities you never heard of? – I do it only so that we may all have a better world to live in. Mine is a … where did I once read this phrase? … a high and lonely destiny.
Feeling confident enough now to go and give encouragement to the next man back, he stepped into the middle of the room, frowned for a moment in concentration, and then disappeared.
The implosion of air cracked the window and snatched the top few pages of his autobiography off the stack; they whirled to the floor, and one of them hid the impression his shoes had left in the carpet.
The telephone was still ringing when Keith Bondier blinked back into awareness of his surroundings.
Should have known better than to try and answer it, he thought groggily as he rolled over on the kitchen floor. You knew today was the day you can count on the fainting fits –
every July first, at exactly fifteen minutes after ten, and then another one a while later. Usually, though, the second fit happens at least half an hour after the first one. I really thought I could get to the phone and then back to bed before it hit.
His kneecaps were resonating with pain and his shoulder throbbed, but his head only stung a little above one ear, so it couldn’t have been a bad fall.
The phone was still ringing, though, so he struggled wincingly to his feet and fumbled the receiver off the hook. “Ah. Yeah?”
“Keith? You okay?”
“Yeah yeah, fine. Hi Margie. What’s up?”
“Shopping. Errands. You want to come along?”
He smiled, his aches forgotten. “Sure, and I just got my disability check, so I can buy us lunch.”
“Oh, I’ll pay my half.”
“No, Marge, you always have to drive.”
“Keith, as soon as they get you on the right medication you’ll be able to get a license – then I’ll make you drive all the time. Today well go Dutch.”
“Nah, I’ll get it,” he said hastily. “Let me, while I’ve got a fresh check.” He figured that paying for her lunch would make it a real date, rather than just two friends out wandering around. “When can you get here?”
“Hm? Oh, five minutes. I’m ready to go.”
“Great. See you soon.”
After he hung up the phone he sat down and rubbed his knees as he looked around his apartment. The place looks neat enough, he thought. Only a few clothes on the floor. If I straighten it up, she’d be able to tell, and it’d put her on guard. Right. Got to strive to make it look spontaneous. I’d better eat some toothpaste, though, for the old breath’s sake.
Halfway to the bathroom he stopped, a pained expression on his face, for once again he had caught a tart-sweet whiff of garbage. He was sure it was just another olfactory hallucination, that visitors couldn’t smell it, but it was hardly the sort of thing to get him in the mood to try and seduce Margie; and while the smell was – just barely! – tolerable, he couldn’t say the same for the sort of auditory and visual hallucinations that occasionally followed. He fervently hoped this wasn’t going to be one of his bad days.
