by Tim Powers
But the air felt too cold, and the street was too normally wide, and the building was at once too detailed and too insignificant-looking for him to believe that this was a hallucination. He cowered behind a tree and watched while the young man paused and looked back.
Then he remembered the cat that had run out of his path … and with the irrational certainty of real nightmares he was sure he knew what the frightened young man was thinking at this moment: Too bad I don’t have a family, ought to go back, no, bit of a walk first, clear my head, and then maybe swing by Trader Joe’s for a beer and who’s that guy taking a piss behind the tree across the street there?
When the other Bondier had rounded the corner, Bondier stepped out from behind the tree. A crazy thought had come to him, so crazy that it was in itself pretty good evidence that he was in some kind of dream state.
That last convulsion of mine, he thought, when the trash-creature was about to choke me or rip out my entrails – which way did I jump? The thing wasn’t even around afterward. Could I have … jumped back?
In which corner of the compass is ago?
He glanced at his watch. Five minutes to eleven. He wondered if that other Bondier’s watch read about twenty of. He walked slowly back to the apartment and pushed open the door. Marge was still on the couch, and he was relieved to see that the kitchen was restored, but the very first thing he glanced at was the clock over the oven.
It read 10:41.
If it was right, he had gained fifteen minutes on the world.
“All along,” Marge said, evidently emphasizing some point she’d made in the minute or two when neither of him had been there. She was wrapped up in the tapestry he covered the threadbare couch with, and though her glasses were off she was staring at the chair he usually sat in. He crossed to it, stepping over her discarded skirt and blouse and underwear, and sat down.
Now she was staring right at him, and it was suddenly much harder to suppose that this scene was automatic, and would continue whether he stayed or not.
“Hi, Marge,” he said helplessly as he unbuttoned his blood-blotted shirt. “The universe or me – one of us is real sick.”
“Oh don’t tell me that,” she groaned, tossing her head. He noticed that without glasses her eyes were smaller and seemed to have too much white skin around them. “You don’t mean it,” she went on, “you’re just … throwing that to me, the way you’d throw a dog a bone to make it stop bothering you.”
He tossed the bloody shirt onto the floor, stood up and ducked into the narrow bathroom, and reappeared with a glass bottle of Bactine. He splashed some onto his reddening handkerchief-bandage and put the bottle down. “Listen, Marge,” he said, leaning forward and forcing his voice to come out in a reasonable tone, “can you hear me?”
She didn’t answer.
“Well,” he went on, picking up a comparatively clean shirt from the floor, “I saw a thing today, walking around like a human, but it was entirely … made out of trash, I swear, it – was just made out of trash.” He laughed hollowly as he buttoned the fresh shirt. “And this trash-thing could talk. It said I was – some kind of twin – of some guy they’re afraid of. I should have said it talks in lots of voices, shouldn’t I? I can’t tell this right. But these voices said that this twin is right now having lunch at Andre’s. That’s the posh place in the Corday.” He sat down again so that when she talked it would be toward him.
“You knew I wasn’t ready for this kind of thing,” said Marge unhappily. “Just friends, we agreed.”
“Jesus, Marge, I’ll tell you the truth, it’s hard for me to feel … to blame about whatever’s been going on here, you know? But listen, Marge, I did have a twin. I never told you about this, but I did. My mother pitched him off a pedestrian overpass onto the Pasadena Freeway in ‘54, when he and I were both a year old. She only wanted to keep me, though they took me away from her too. But – this just occurred to me, and you’re gonna think I’m really nuts – what if my one-year-old brother’s reaction to total terror was the same as what I right now suspect mine is? To jump backward in time? Then maybe he isn’t dead. Maybe in mid-fall he jumped back, maybe all the way to a time before the freeway was built, and wound up in a field somewhere, and was found alive. He’d never know he had a twin brother.”
Marge had been muttering for the last several seconds, and when he paused he heard her saying, “… as a free lunch, and there has to be commitment, and I frankly – (sniff) – don’t think you’re capable of that.”
“You’re probably right, Marge, though I’ll bet I wind up committed.” The joke, muffled by the stained carpet and drapes, sounded dead even to him. “You know what I get lately when I’m walking down the street? Claustrophobia. I feel like I’m in a diorama, you know, like the statues of Neanderthals in the museum, I’m afraid I’ll notice that the sun’s a light bulb, and my buddies are just painted statues, and the sky’s got corners.”
In spite of his efforts his voice had got whimpery, and he took a few deep breaths.
Suddenly Marge looked up, and he gathered that he’d been supposed to get to his feet. He stayed where he was.
“No, don’t touch me,” Marge cried, shoving herself backward across the couch and getting one bare foot caught in a hole in the fabric.
“I’m just sitting here, Marge,” he said, bleakly sure that no one in the universe could hear him.
“You do?” she quavered now, looking up toward the ceiling light. “Really, Keith? It isn’t just a … sop to my pride? You do love me?”
“I don’t know, Marge,” said Bondier unhappily, still in his chair. “I don’t know if I’m even – ”
“Oh, Keith, I love you too,” she whispered, and let the tapestry fall from her white shoulders.
He felt as though cold water had been splashed in his face. The breath caught in his throat, and all at once he was ashamed of himself; of course it had all been hallucinations – this was Margerie, not some figure from a nightmare, and he did love her.
He unbent himself out of the chair and fitted himself beside her on the couch, kissing her as he had always meant to, running his trembling, bloodstained hands over her bare breasts … but she was stiff, and though her lips were obviously responding, they weren’t responding to him, and when she made a cupping gesture in empty air and smiled seductively past him at the ceiling he broke free of the off-center embrace and stood up, panting with renewed fear.
She rocked over onto her back, and Bondier found himself almost able to gauge the actions of her invisible partner by her motions. What if he should begin to see a cloudy figure there – and what if it were to look up at him?
Again he ran out of the apartment, and again the pavements and buildings were too clear for him to believe that they weren’t real. He began walking, and the only destination he could think of was the restaurant where, maybe, his twin was. He didn’t want to think, so he walked faster instead, and when he sped up he discovered that he’d been correct when he’d thought the passersby couldn’t see him. Okay, that makes sense, he told himself desperately – keep the fear at arm’s length, boy. Of course they can’t see you, you’re out of your slot, you’re fifteen minutes away from where you’re supposed to be at this moment.
But even before I time-jumped, he thought, Margie couldn’t see or hear me. She was kissing the nonexistent me even before.
There were young women in the crowds on Main Street, office workers out for lunch, and he found himself looking at them speculatively. They couldn’t see him, he could do anything to them he wanted to, knock one of them down and take her clothes off right in the gutter. No one would know – not even her.
He paused and grinned, not accepting the idea but not necessarily discarding it either – until he remembered that the many-voiced garbage-giant might still be able to see him, and he couldn’t know which window or rooftop or trash can it might be peering at him from, preparing to rush at him again.
The thought started him moving again, and when he
tried to imagine what Marge might be up to by this time, all alone back in his shabby apartment, he began to hurry toward the Hotel Corday.
Moving through the blind, mechanical crowd required a specialized pace that seemed similar to both broken-field running and bullfighting cape-work; and just as Bondier was beginning to get accustomed to the lateral hops and quick backtracking and the occasional necessity of a close whirl around a straight-oncoming pedestrian, a flash of light blinded him.
The light stayed on, and he winced and braced himself for the first collision, determined at least not to fall under the inexorable feet – but nothing touched him, and the air was warmer suddenly, and smelled fresher, and after a few seconds he squintingly looked up.
It was a bright summer day with a few clouds sailing past unbelievably high overhead, and though the sidewalk wasn’t as crowded now, a number of people – all of whom seemed more three-dimensional than the people he’d been dodging moments ago – were staring at him in surprise.
“Where’d you drop from, son?” one man wonderingly inquired, and Bondier had just opened his mouth to stammer a reply when the sunlight went out again and a fat lady rammed him broadside and propelled him against the wall of the Corday Hotel.
He glanced around wildly, wondering for the first time if this whole world might be the hallucination, and the sunlit world the real one. In comparison, this one seemed so … dark and gray and depthless.
A bright blue dot flared in the sky, then slowly became a line like a luminous jet trail. The first crack, he thought.
He edged his way to the entrance of Andre’s and shoved against the glass door, and then pulled, but it didn’t open, didn’t even rattle against a bolt – it was as if he’d grabbed a section of brickwork.
What is this, he thought, they can’t be closed, it isn’t even noon yet, and I can see people inside.
He saw a portly, toothpick-chewing man striding up the hall toward the entrance, and he took a step back in case the glass should break when the man hit the immovable door, but to Bondier’s surprise the door swung open easily at the man’s push. Bondier sprang forward and caught the edge of the door as the man joined the street throng – but the door swung shut, no faster or slower than normal, despite Bondier’s straining, heel-dragging effort to hold it open, and finally he had to let go in order to save his fingers.
I’m not a member of this world at all anymore, he thought. Maybe I was never more than half-connected, but now all these things are as impervious to me as objects in a newspaper photograph would be to a fly crawling over the paper. A tossed bottle-cap might knock me down – or punch right through me. Christ, is this world’s oxygen still willing to combine with the hemoglobin in my blood, or whatever it is it’s supposed to do?
He glanced desperately at the sky. The bright blue line was longer now, and branched at one end. Hurry, he thought.
Another patron, a woman, left the restaurant, and this time Bondier scuttled in around her and rolled inside before the irresistible door closed.
Every table in the elegant dining room was occupied, but the talking and the clatter of cutlery was muffled. There were no smells – and as Bondier walked in and looked around for someone who looked like himself, he noted that the carpeting under his feet seemed to be frozen, or shellacked; and then he realized that it simply wasn’t yielding under him. I’d probably break a tooth if I tried to eat a forkful of mashed potatoes, he thought.
He heard a crash out on Main Street, and he knew it was the delivery truck bumping the car and spilling the cigarette cartons, right on schedule. He glanced toward the noise.
When he turned back to the dining room he saw him, the man he knew must be his twin, sitting with a couple of other men at a table by the window. The man was older, his hair gray at the temples, but the eyes, nose and chin were the same ones Bondier saw every morning in the mirror. The twin was talking angrily – and, it seemed to Bondier, a little fearfully – to a man who’d just walked up to the table; but the new arrival, and the others at the table too, were ignoring him and talking cheerfully among themselves.
I do believe, thought Bondier, that my brother is also beginning to notice a bit of dislocation. Bondier had just opened his mouth to call out a greeting when his twin abruptly went limp and collapsed face down on the tablecloth.
Alarmed, Bondier hurried forward. The other men at the table were now quiet, and were looking attentively at a point over the inert twin’s head, and then at an empty chair on the other side of the table, and then over the twin’s head again, and Bondier guessed that, according to the universe’s script, a dialogue was going on.
Bondier hoisted up his unconscious brother and let him slump back in the chair. He was breathing, at least.
“Uh, that was last Tuesday, sir,” put in the man by the window.
“Who asked you, clown,” said Bondier absently. He took one of the slack wrists. The pulse was steady and strong.
It’s just like one of my blackout fits, he reflected. In fact it’s probably the same malady, something that runs in the family. I wonder if his doctors have been able to diagnose it. He looks like he could afford private practice ones. Well, if that’s what it is he ought to be coming out of it in a minute or two.
Bondier glanced at his watch. Exactly eleven. Right about now, he thought, a block or two south of here, that trash-thing is jumping on the fifteen-minutes-younger me, and I’m disappearing.
“That’s correct, sir,” said the window-seat man.
“Shut up,” Bondier told him. As a matter of fact, he thought, my time-jump and his blackout were, as far as I can tell, simultaneous. I wonder if my time-jump – only a few seconds ago by every watch but mine – could be the cause of this blackout.
And has that all along been the cause of mine? That he’s been jumping? If so, why the hell does he every year make two jumps on the morning of July first?
Like someone trying to deduce the reason behind a puzzling chess move, Bondier mentally put himself in his twin’s place – and he was beginning to get a glimmer of an answer to his question, when Stanwell inhaled sharply, stiffened, opened his eyes and glanced around.
“I seem to have passed out,” he said uncertainly to the man by the window, who happened to be looking at him.
“They can’t hear you,” said Bondier quietly, crouched beside Stanwell’s chair.
Stanwell jumped, then turned on Bondier a glare with more than a little fear in it. “And just who the hell are –” he began, then his eyes widened and he reached down and gripped Bondier’s shoulder. “My God,” he said softly, “is this a … a trick? Is your hair dyed? But it’s thicker, too … and no facelift could have restored my youth so perfectly … My God, boy, you’ve broken the barrier, you jumped forward past your local now! Tell me how you did it – and then we can all get together, and dispense with this business of the once-a-year backward relay of reassurance messages.”
“It was getting tiresome,” hazarded Bondier, pretty sure of his guess now, “every July first.”
Stanwell’s face had lost its look of reined-in panic, and he laughed jovially. “You don’t know how tiresome, my boy,” he said. “I wish you’d been in my office earlier today and seen the me – the us, I should say – from next year. Unpardonably rude, abrupt, wouldn’t tell me anything … hah! But now we can cross the barrier and go have some fun with him, pretend we won’t tell him how – but wait a minute! Have you tried – you might not have – have you tried to jump forward again from earlier than 1953? I can’t do it, though I don’t know why. Maybe …”
Stanwell’s voice drifted off and he glanced around the restaurant uneasily. “This is lasting a little long,” he said. “Maybe you’ve already noticed instances of it back when you’re from, times when people can’t see or hear you … sometimes if you shout they can, but then if you can get them to answer, it’s just stuttering, as if you’re forcing a machine … But this has been several minutes now, it’s bound to click in again soon. Why don�
��t you stand back by the hall there, so no one will see you just appear out of nowhere, and then I’ll introduce you as my younger brother.”
“I don’t think we’ll show up for a while yet,” said Bondier gently. He stood up and stepped around to the empty chair that was Gribbin’s, and sat down in it. “This guy’s just plain gone,” he observed, patting the arms of the chair. “Has that ever happened before? One of the actors just doesn’t show up, but everyone else carries on as if he were present and following the script?”
“Well, no,” Stanwell admitted. “I think we ought to jump ahead and make sure everything’s – ”
“I need some filling in,” said Bondier. “You’ve been fooling with history?”
“Well, certainly,” said Stanwell. “How young are you, anyway? That’s my – our – purpose. That’s why God put us in that tree.”
Bondier blinked at him. “Tree? Wait, wait a minute, I’ve got it – in a place now occupied by the Pasadena Freeway, right?”
“Of course. You knew that. We knew that when we were seven.”
Another guess confirmed. “Just wanted to be sure.”
There was a conclusion implicit in all this, and he knew it was going to be terrifying, and he knew too that he’d suffer it whether he learned its nature or not – but he found that he couldn’t back away from it and, even for the little time he might have left, never know. “Have you killed many people?”
Stanwell stared at him. “When are you from? You look like about 1970, and we were jumping pretty frequently by the late sixties; it only took a couple of jumps to learn how to do it without having to be scared to death in order to provoke it. We’d done plenty by your time, hadn’t we? Or hadn’t we started facing it yet? I hadn’t thought we were so cowardly. Yes, we’ve shortened some world-lines, and probably eliminated some altogether, but always for the world’s good. Christ, you must remember the original version more clearly than I do – Vietnam, Nixon – ”
