Strange Itineraries

by Tim Powers

  “Do these people stay erased? Don’t you worry that maybe you’ve stretched the fabric so tight with your alterations that … I don’t know … it starts to crack and split a little, here and there, faster than you can scramble with your needle and thread?”

  “That’s nonsense, of course they stay erased, what are you – ”

  “Have you … have you ever seen a thing made of animated trash that walks around and talks with a lot of voices?”

  “I think he’s got a point, sir,” piped up the man beside Stanwell. Both twins looked at him, but the man was still oblivious of them.

  Stanwell had turned pale. “How can you know about that thing? You look like you’re from absolutely no later than ’72 or so, and I only first saw it last year – and I’ve never heard it,” he shuddered, “speak.”

  “Maybe you can’t erase people,” said Bondier, smiling nervously as he shifted back and forth on the unyielding seat cushion. “Maybe you can eliminate the bodies they would have got, cut their lifelines out of the four-dimensional hypercube, but their minds hang around anyway … faded and imbecilic let’s say, and malevolent as nasty children, but present … and if they get together, enough of them, maybe they can animate lightweight stuff and come looking for the guy who evicted them from the story.” He shook his head and reached for Gribbin’s glass of tequila, but it stuck to the table as if bolted there. “I don’t think you’ve rerouted history. I think the real world, the original version, is still going on, independent of this. You’ve just engineered a … an interesting short circuit.

  “I guess it’s pretty clear what I’ve got to do,” he said, and as Stanwell opened his mouth to say something further, Bondier closed his eyes and, finally, let himself realize that his identity – the whole neurally-coded accumulation of memories, prejudices, fears and ambitions that was himself – was about to wink out of existence along with the fake world that had collaborated in their creation.

  His twin brother was speaking, but Bondier had opened his eyes and looked down at his lap, and instead of his hands he saw a wire basket full of dirty T-shirts and jeans – he was even now falling out of the world, and he convulsed in icy vertigo at the realization. And the whole world imploded.

  Bondier looked back over his shoulder and though he was still squinting in the sunlight he could see the young mother and the baby carriage moving steadily away. I wonder, he thought, what she’s planning to buy with the five dollar bill she palmed from the roll I let fall? A drink to steady her nerves afterward? A new dress? How far does a fiver go in ‘54, anyway?

  But you’ll never get to spend it, Mom. This time they’ll find the little corpse.

  Reaching into his flannel shirt, he touched his side and felt the scar he would now never acquire. It hadn’t healed quickly; for the entire first year of this clumsy, backward-jumping journey it had been inflamed and infected … and even now, after years of searching and time-jumping and searching some more, it still sometimes woke him up with a sudden twinge.

  He walked away, looking around at the buildings and the bulbous, incongruously shiny cars. What have I got, he wondered, ten minutes? It’ll take her about that long to wheel that thing to the freeway overpass, and by then my poor brother will have consumed enough of that codeine-laced milk to have rendered himself unconscious, and unable to feel any fear when the moment comes.

  He remembered something his brother had said – Have you tried to jump forward again from earlier than 1953? I can’t do it …

  Of course he couldn’t do it, Bondier thought now. Before 1953 we weren’t born yet – he couldn’t jump back up from before then, because I was his overdrive time-jumping engine, and before 1953 I didn’t exist.

  I could still stop her.

  Sure, he thought with a fragile grin, I could let him live and then have my own try at rewriting history, use his mind as my overdrive engine for the time-jumps, let him be the invalid with the blackouts this time, as I was in his version. But my version would certainly run down and stop too.

  He hoped the police would find the epitaph he had written on a piece of paper and tucked into his infant brother’s blanket. It was from A.E. Housman:

  But I will go where they are hid

  That never were begot,

  To my inheritance amid

  The nation that is not.

  I wonder, he thought, what Keith Bondier’s life is like in the real world. I hope I don’t get involved with Margie. I hope I still like Beethoven and Hemingway and Monet and Housman. I hope the real world isn’t as bad off as my poor doomed brother thought it was. At least it’ll be the real one.

  He looked back toward the freeway again, but he couldn’t see them anymore. So long, Mom and brother, he thought. Though I’ll see you one more time, brother. It’ll only take me a couple of jumps to get up to that July first where you’re waiting for that progress report. The last one – when, according to you, I’ll be “unpardonably rude and abrupt” and not tell you anything. I suppose I’ll seem that way. What could I say, though?

  In his tight-clutching hand the baby bottle broke, spattering the dusty pavement with milk. Bondier absently dropped the pieces, and after a few moments he noticed that his thumb was bleeding. He sucked on it.

  And then, having no reason to delay here any longer, he disappeared, and this time there was no sound to mark his passage, nor any slightest ripple in the dust.

  The Better Boy

  James P. Blaylock & Tim Powers

  KNOCK KNOCK.

  Bernard Wilkins twisted the scratched restaurant butter-knife in his pudgy hand to catch the eastern sun.

  There was a subtle magic in the morning. He felt it most at breakfast – the smells of bacon and coffee, the sound of birds outside, the arrangement of clouds in the deep summer sky, and the day laid out before him like a roadmap unfolded on a dashboard.

  This morning he could surely allow himself to forget about the worms and the ether bunnies.

  It was Saturday, and he was going to take it easy today, go home and do the crossword puzzle, maybe get the ball game on the radio late in the afternoon while he put in a couple of hours in the garage. The Angels were a half game out and were playing Oakland at two o’clock. In last night’s game Downing had slammed a home run into the outfield scoreboard, knocking out the Scoreboard’s electrical system, and the crowd had gone flat-out crazy, cheering for six solid minutes, stomping and clapping and hooting until the stands were vibrating so badly that they had to stop the game to let everybody calm down.

  In his living room Wilkins had been stomping right along with the rest of them, till he was nearly worn out with it.

  He grinned now to think about it. Baseball – there was magic in baseball, too … even in your living room you could imagine it, beer and hot dogs, those frozen malts, the smell of cut grass, the summer evenings.

  He could remember the smell of baseball leather from his childhood, grass-stained hardballs and new gloves. Chiefly it was the dill pickles and black licorice and Cokes in paper cups that he remembered from back then, when he had played little league ball. They had sold the stuff out of a plywood shack behind the major league diamond.

  It was just after eight o’clock in the morning, and Norm’s coffee shop was getting crowded with people knocking back coffee and orange juice.

  There was nothing like a good meal. Time stopped while you were eating. Troubles abdicated. It was like a holiday. Wilkins sopped up the last of the egg yolk with a scrap of toast, salted it, and put it into his mouth, chewing contentedly. Annie, the waitress, laid his check on the counter, winked at him, and then went off to deal with a wild-eyed woman who wore a half dozen tattered sweaters all at once and was carefully emptying the ketchup bottle onto soda crackers she’d pick out of a basket, afterward dropping them one by one into her ice water, mixing up a sort of poverty-style gazpacho.

  Wilkins sighed, wiped his mouth, left a twenty percent tip, heaved himself off the stool and headed for the cash register near th
e door.

  “A good meal,” he said to himself comfortably, as if it were an occult phrase. He paid up, then rolled a toothpick out of the dispenser and poked it between his teeth. He pushed open the glass door with a lordly sweep, and strode outside onto the sidewalk.

  The morning was fine and warm. He walked to the parking lot edge of the pavement, letting the sun wash over him as he hitched up his pants and tucked his thumbs through his belt loops. What he needed was a pair of suspenders. Belts weren’t worth much to a fat man. He rolled the toothpick back and forth in his mouth, working it expertly with his tongue.

  …

  He was wearing his inventor’s pants. That’s what he had come to call them. He’d had them how many years? Fifteen, anyway. Last winter he had tried to order another pair through a catalogue company back in Wisconsin, but hadn’t had any luck. They were khaki work pants with eight separate pockets and oversized, reinforced belt loops. He wore a heavy key chain on one of the loops, with a retractable ring holding a dozen assorted keys – all the more reason for the suspenders.

  The cotton fabric of the trousers was web-thin in places. His wife had patched the knees six different times and had resewn the inseam twice. She wasn’t happy about the idea of him wearing the pants out in public. Some day, Molly was certain of it, he would sit down on the counter stool at Norm’s and the entire rear end would rip right out of them.

  Well, that was something Wilkins would face when the time came. He was certain, in his heart, that there would always be a way to patch the pants one more time, which meant infinitely. A stitch in time. Everything was patchable.

  “Son of a bitch!” came a shout behind him. He jumped and turned around.

  It was the raggedy woman who had been mixing ketchup and crackers into her ice water. She had apparently abandoned her makeshift breakfast.

  “What if I am a whore?” she demanded of some long-gone debating partner. “Did he ever give me a dollar?”

  Moved somehow by the sunny morning, Wilkins impulsively tugged a dollar bill out of his trousers. “Here,” he said, holding it out to her.

  She flounced past him unseeing, and shouted, at no one visibly present, a word that it grieved him to hear. He waved the dollar after her halfheartedly, but she was walking purposefully toward a cluster of disadvantaged-looking people crouched around the dumpster behind the restaurant’s service door.

  He wondered for a moment about everything being, in fact, patchable.

  But perhaps she had some friends among them. Magic after all was like the bottles on the shelves of a dubious-neighborhood liquor store – it was available in different proofs and labels, and at different prices, for anyone who cared to walk in.

  And sometimes it helped them. Perhaps obscurely.

  He wasn’t keen on revealing any of this business about magic to anyone who wouldn’t understand; but, in his own case, when he was out in the garage working, he never felt quite right wearing anything else except his inventor’s pants.

  Somewhere he had read that Fred Astaire had worn a favorite pair of dancing shoes for years after they had worn out, going so far as to pad the interior with newspaper in between re-solings.

  Well, Bernard Wilkins had his inventor’s trousers, didn’t he? And by damn he didn’t care what the world thought about them. He scratched at a spot of egg yolk on a pocket and sucked at his teeth, clamping the toothpick against his lip.

  Wilkins is the name, he thought with self-indulgent pomposity – invention’s the game.

  What he was inventing now was a way to eliminate garden pests. There was a subsonic device already on the market to discourage gophers, sure, and another patented machine to chase off mosquitoes.

  Neither of them worked worth a damn, really.

  The thing that really worked on gophers was a wooden propeller nailed to a stick that was driven into the ground. The propeller whirled in the wind, sending vibrations down the stick into the dirt. He had built three of them, big ones, and as a result he had no gopher trouble.

  The tomato worms were working him over hard, though, scouring the tomato vines clean of leaves and tomatoes in the night. He sometimes found the creatures in the morning, heavy and long, glowing bright green with pirated chlorophyll and wearing a face that was far too mammalian, almost human.

  The sight of one of them bursting under a tramping shoe was too horrible for any sane person to want to do it twice.

  Usually what he did was gingerly pick them off the stems and throw them over the fence into his neighbor’s yard, but they crawled back through again in the night, further decimating the leaves of his plants. He had replanted three times this season.

  What he was working on was a scientific means to get rid of the things. He thought about the nets in his garage, and the boxes of crystal-growing kits he had bought.

  Behind him, a car motor revved. A dusty old Ford Torino shot toward him from the back of the parking lot, burning rubber from the rear tires in a cloud of white smoke, the windshield an opaque glare of reflected sunlight. In sudden panic Wilkins scuffed his shoes on the asphalt, trying to reverse his direction, to hop back out of the way before he was run down. The front tire nearly ran over his foot as he yelled and pounded on the hood, and right then the hooked post from the broken-off passenger-side mirror caught him by the keychain and yanked his legs out from under him.

  He fell heavily to the pavement and slid.

  For one instant it was a contest between his inventor’s pants and the car – then the waistband gave way and the inseam ripped out, and he was watching his popped-off shoes bounce away across the parking lot and his pants disappear as the car made a fast right onto Main.

  License number! He scrabbled to his feet, lunging substantially naked toward the parking lot exit. There the car went, zigging away through traffic, cutting off a pickup truck at the corner. He caught just the first letter of the license, a G, or maybe a Q. From the mirror support, flapping and dancing and billowing out at the end of the snagged keychain, his inventor’s pants flailed themselves to ribbons against the street, looking for all the world as if the pant legs were running furiously, trying to keep up with the car. In a moment the car was gone, and his pants with it.

  The sight of the departing pants sent him jogging for his own car. Appallingly, the summer breeze was ruffling the hair on his bare legs, and he looked back at the restaurant in horror, wondering if he had been seen.

  Sure enough, a line of faces stared at him from inside Norm’s, a crowd of people leaning over the tables along the parking lot window. Nearly every recognizable human emotion seemed to play across the faces: surprise, worry, hilarity, joy, disgust, fear – everything but envy. He could hear the whoop of someone’s laughter, muffled by the window glass.

  One of his pennyloafers lay in the weeds of a flowerbed, and he paused long enough to grab it, then hurried on again in his stocking feet and baggy undershorts, realizing that the seat of his shorts had mostly been abraded away against the asphalt when he had gone down.

  Son of a bitch, he thought, unconsciously echoing the raggedy woman’s evaluation.

  His car was locked, and instinctively he reached for his key chain, which of course was to hell and gone down Seventeenth Street by now. “Shit!” he said, hearing someone stepping up behind him. He angled around toward the front of the car, so as to be at least half-hidden from the crowd in Norm’s,

  Most of the faces were laughing now. People were pointing. He was all right. He hadn’t been hurt after all. They could laugh like zoo apes and their consciences would be clear. Look at him run! A fat man in joke shorts! Look at that butt!

  It was an old man who had come up behind him. He stood there now in the parking lot, shaking his head seriously.

  “It was hit and run,” the old man said. “I saw the whole thing. I was right there in the window, and I’m prepared to go to court. Bastard didn’t even look.”

  He stood on the other side of the car, between Wilkins and the window full of star
ing people. Someone hooted from a car driving past on Sixteenth, and Wilkins flinched, dropping down to his hands and knees and groping for the hide-a-key under the front bumper. He pawed the dirty underside of the bumper frantically, but couldn’t find the little magnetic box. Maybe it was on the rear bumper. He damned well wasn’t going to go crawling around after it, providing an easy laugh …

  A wolf-whistle rang out from somewhere above, from an open window across Sixteenth. He stood up hurriedly.

  “Did you get the license?” the old man said.

  “What? No, I didn’t.” Wilkins took a deep breath to calm himself.

  The goddamn magnetic hide-a-key. It had probably dropped off down the highway somewhere. Wouldn’t you know it! Betrayed by the very thing …

  His heart still raced, but it didn’t pound so hard. He concentrated on simmering down, clutching his chest with his hand. “Easy, boy,” he muttered to himself, his eyes nearly shut. That was better. He could take stock now.

  It was a miracle he wasn’t hurt. If he were a skinny man the physical forces of the encounter would probably have torn him in half. As it was, his knee was scraped pretty good, but nothing worse than ten million such scrapes he had suffered as a kid. His palms were raw, and the skin on his rear-end stung pretty well. He felt stiff, too.

  He flexed his leg muscles and rotated his arms. The wolf-whistle sounded again, but he ignored it.

  Miraculously, he had come through nearly unharmed. No broken bones. Nothing a tube of Bengay wouldn’t fix, maybe some Bactine on the scrapes.

  He realized then that he still had the toothpick in his mouth. Unsteadily, he poked at his teeth with it, hoping that it would help restore the world to normalcy. It was soft and splintered, though, and no good for anything, so he threw it away into the juniper plants.

  “You should have got his license. That’s the first thing. But I should talk. I didn’t get it either.” The old man looked back toward the window, insulted on Wilkins’s behalf, scowling at the crowd, which had dwindled now. “Damned bunch of assholes …” A few people still stood and gaped, waiting to get another look at Wilkins, hoping for a few more details to flesh out the story they would be telling everyone they met for the next six weeks. Six months, more likely. It was probably the only story they had, the morons. They’d make it last forever. “Got your car keys, didn’t they?”