The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF

by Mike Ashley

  “Down Horace! Get down, Charlemagne! Down boys,” the man said as the dogs leapt around us, barking excitedly. “This here lady doesn’t feel too well.” Then he raised his voice to a shout: “Jo-aaannn-a!”

  A woman appeared in the doorway. Wearing an ankle-length denim dress and a string of beads. Centre-parted, waist-length hair. Brown, streaked with grey. “Who you got there, Mark?”

  “This lady’s sick. Help me get her inside the house.”

  She ran forward, and slid an arm around my back. I closed my eyes; I didn’t want to look at her face.

  “Oh my God, Mark,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know. Ain’t it the strangest thing?”

  I woke up with a dreadful case of sunburn; my face and arms were bright red. I raised my head and saw the woman who had introduced herself as Joanna Hansen standing in the bedroom doorway, holding a mug of coffee. Her salt-and-pepper hair was tied back in a long ponytail, and she was wearing sandals and a cotton kimono. I looked around for my clothes, and didn’t see them.

  “I put them in the wash,” she told me. “Borrow anything you want from that closet.”

  I pulled on a pair of jeans and a denim shirt, and went down to the kitchen. Mark was making hotcakes in honour of my visit. He was under the impression I was a long lost cousin of Joanna’s – at least that’s what I’d told him the night before.

  I’d known Mark Hansen back in 1967, when we were both art students in San Francisco. It was the Summer of Love, and he had long black hair and drove a VW van. So there actually was a universe where I’d said yes when he asked me to go and live with him in the desert. In his day, he was every bit as gorgeous as any twenty-two year-old male model. I wondered if there was a universe where he hadn’t ended up looking like Father Christmas.

  “I can’t get over it,” he said to Joanna. “All these years you had a cousin that’s your spitting image and you never even knew she existed!”

  “Yeah,” said Joanna, eyeing me suspiciously, “I can’t get over it, either.”

  I had told them both the most ridiculous pack of lies the night before, how I’d been on my way to visit Joanna and my rented car had broken down in the middle of the desert, and Mark, at least, seemed to believe it. I knew Joanna was waiting for the chance to get me alone; that’s what I would have done.

  Her chance came that afternoon, when Mark drove into town to get the shopping. We were sitting on the front step, sipping iced tea with slices of lemon, when she finally said it: “Isn’t it time you told me the truth?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I don’t have a cousin named Annabel.” (Annabel was the first name that popped into my head the night before; I don’t know why.) “Not even a long-lost one, like you claim to be. So who are you, and what were you doing out in the middle of nowhere, covered in plaster dust and broken glass? And how come you look so much like me? I’m warning you, I want the truth.”

  “You’ll never believe it.”

  “Try me.”

  “Okay.” I put down my glass of iced tea, and looked her right in the eye. “Do you ever wonder what your life would have been like if you’d made some different decisions along the way?”

  “I haven’t done acid since 1975,” she said when I was finished. “Don’t you think it’s time for you to give it up, too?”

  “I told you you’d never believe me. Maybe if we could contact Toni; she might be working on something similar in this world. Maybe she even got it right in this one.”

  Joanna Hansen shook her head. “Toni’s dead. She died a long time ago,” she said. “O.D.’d.”

  “What? She can’t be dead!”

  “Why not? If I’m supposed to believe you, then where you come from, my two kids were never even born!” Mark had shown me pictures of them the night before: two extremely dishy young men, one twenty-five years old, the other only twenty-one. Then I remembered whose children they were.

  “Oh yeah,” I said, “Joanna Callahan apparently had some kids as well.”

  “And she just up and left them.”

  “More than once,” I said. “I mean, more than one version of her left more than one version of them.”

  “How do you know I won’t steal your machine, so I can be rich and famous in New York?”

  “You don’t know where I left it.”

  “You think I couldn’t find it if I wanted to?” She laughed. “You ought to see your face; you’ve gone bright green. Well, you sit out here and worry yourself sick about whether I think being you is such an attractive prospect or not. Meanwhile, I’ve got work to do. Help yourself to anything you want from the fridge.”

  And then she left me, sitting alone on the step.

  I was still there when Mark came back, two hours later. The dogs leapt out of the truck and ran towards me, barking and wagging their tails. A second later, I was on my back, having my face licked. “I’ve never known those dogs to take to someone as quick as they’ve taken to you,” Mark said. “It’s like they’ve known you all their lives.”

  “I noticed,” I said, pushing them away.

  “Where’s Joanna?”

  “She said she had some work to do.”

  “Then she’ll be in her studio. Haven’t you been in there yet?”

  I shook my head.

  “I thought she’d have given you the grand tour by now,” he said. “Never mind. Help me get the groceries in, and I’ll take you around.”

  A short while later, he led me around the back of the house to the large building I’d assumed was a barn. “Please don’t think she’s being rude, abandoning you like that. It’s just that she’s got this big show coming up in a couple of months, and she reckons she’s nowhere near ready.”

  “Show? What kind of show?”

  “Joanna’s an artist; didn’t she tell you?”

  Of course, I thought, Mark and I had met in art school. So what was this Joanna’s art like? More puppies and flowers? No, I thought, this one’s an old hippie; I’ll bet she weaves native-style blankets and sells them at craft fairs. Then Mark opened the door and my mouth dropped open.

  This Joanna, like me, was a sculptor, and like me, she worked mostly in metal, and – this is a hard admission for me to make – she was every bit as good as me. Maybe even – this is an even harder admission – a little better.

  I touched the twisted trunk of a metal tree with shiny flat leaves. Tiny men hung like fruit from its branches, each with a noose around his neck, each with a completely different and individual expression of pain or horror on his face. I wished I’d done it. Though in a way, I had.

  “That one’s already sold,” Mark told me. “Some museum in Europe’s offered her a couple million for it, and she’s told ’em they can have it after the show.”

  At the sound of the words: “couple million”, my heart almost did a flip-flop. It was all I could do not to clutch at my chest. I took a few deep breaths, counting to ten on each inhalation.

  “So where is this show of hers?” I asked him, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “The Museum of Contemporary Art,” he told me, adding, “That’s in New York.” As if I didn’t know. And I’d been so worried this Joanna might want to trade places with me. “Didn’t you see that TV show they did about her?” he asked me. “It was on prime time, coast to coast.”

  “I’m afraid I missed it.”

  We found her at the far end of the building, working on a rather familiar arrangement of six black and white television sets called “Women on the Brink of a Cataclysm”. She couldn’t figure out why I thought that was funny.

  Then she switched it on, and I saw that unlike mine, each of her screens showed a different woman doing a different repetitious task: one scrubbing a floor, one doing dishes, one hanging laundry, one ironing shirts, one chopping vegetables, and one slashing her wrists, over and over again, in an endless loop.

  I wished I’d done mine like that – though of course I would, now. There was nothing in Jo
anna Hansen’s work I wouldn’t be proud to call my own. If I couldn’t get back to my own world – and I was beginning to doubt I ever would – then this one would suit me just fine. But making the switch might be difficult with Mark around; it would have to be done gradually.

  I offered to help Joanna in her studio, and learned exactly where she kept everything. I got her to tell me her complete history under the pretext of trying to figure out just where our paths had diverged. I got Mark to tell me everything I’d need to know about him under the pretext of finding him a fascinating conversationalist, which he never was, even when we were students. I went through every photo album and every scrap book, memorizing the details. I sat through slides and home movies. And I nagged Joanna about her hair, told her it made her look much older than she was, and reminded her of all the photographers that would be at her opening party in New York. “Just trim the ends a little,” I told her. “Just cover the grey.” I finally convinced her to let me cut it – a much quicker process than waiting for mine to grow – but I couldn’t get her to colour it; I had to let myself go grey.

  Within three weeks of my arrival, Joanna Hansen and I were indistinguishable.

  One morning when Mark had driven into town, I told Joanna it was time for me to leave. I put on the clothes I had arrived in, slung the blue canvas bag with the gun in it over my shoulder, and thanked her for everything. Then, as though it were an afterthought, I asked her if she’d like to see the time machine.

  I led her out into the desert, to the spot where Toni’s metal egg sat hidden behind a cactus plant. “That’s it,” I said.

  “It doesn’t look very comfortable.”

  “Why don’t you try it for yourself?” I said. “Get inside, see how it feels.”

  “No thanks.”

  I pointed the gun at her. “Get inside.”

  “You can’t shoot me,” she said.

  “I can and I will if you don’t do what I tell you.”

  “No, you can’t. That gun isn’t loaded; I took the bullets out ages ago.”

  I pointed the gun straight at her and pulled the trigger.

  Nothing happened. “You bitch! You’ve been through my things!”

  “Damn right. I did that the first night you turned up. You think I’m stupid or something? Now,” she reached into one of the pockets in her denim skirt, “this gun is loaded.” She was holding a little semi-automatic pistol. “As you were saying, Joanna, it’s time you went back to your own world.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “That was only a joke with the gun; I was never going to shoot you. What I was going to suggest is that we work together, sort of interchangeably. You could get twice as much done, and nobody would ever know.”

  “Good-bye, Joanna.”

  I got inside the machine, and the next thing I knew it was the 29th of April, 1994, a little after 6 p.m., and I was back in Joanna Callahan’s pantry, with swollen joints and a raging headache. As I struggled to pull myself up, I noticed another metal egg. This one not only had a padded interior, but a row of little flashing lights along the outside.

  Someone was coming. I ran through the kitchen and out the back door. I crouched down outside the open kitchen window and listened to the phone ringing, then my voice: “Toni! Thank God! How did you find me? How did you know what number to call?”

  I was about to go back inside and talk to this woman, when I heard a car pull into the front drive. I crept along the wall towards the front of the house and saw Bob Callahan put his key in the front door. “Honey! I’m home!”

  He’d head straight back to the kitchen and find the other me cowering in the pantry, where I’d left my only method of escape. I had to get back inside the house; I reached the door just before it swung completely closed, and crept into the hallway. I heard voices coming from the kitchen, then I heard Bobby say, “I think you’d better lie down.”

  I ran upstairs to the bedroom. It was different than I remembered. There was only one bed, a double. I looked out the window and saw a long-haired guy in black leather tinkering with his motorcycle, watched by a bunch of kids in baggy clothes and baseball caps worn backwards. I breathed a sigh of relief. This was more like the 1994 I knew. But it still wasn’t the right one; Bobby Callahan was leading one of the alternate me’s up the stairs.

  “If this was my house, do you really think I’d be hiding in the wardrobe?” I said a short while later. “And as to your second question: who do I look like?”

  “Like me, I guess. But older.”

  “Older?” I rushed over to the mirror. She was right. That grey hair put ten years on me, and my time in the desert hadn’t done my complexion any good; I noticed several new lines around my eyes and mouth. I opened a jar of Joanna Callahan’s moisturizer and spread it on my face.

  “You look a lot like that woman who was in my studio,” said the other Joanna – she was reaching for something inside a canvas bag just like mine, only hers was green. “Or at least I think it was my studio.”

  The downstairs door opened and slammed shut. Bobby couldn’t be back already. I whispered to the other Joanna to stay where she was and keep quiet, then I tiptoed into the hall. A teenage girl with blonde hair, black roots, and thick black eyeliner, stomped up the stairs in a pair of platform boots. She had four or five earrings on each ear, and one through her right nostril.

  “Fuck off, Mom. Don’t hassle me,” she said, opening one of the other doors and slamming it behind her. So this was Katie. A moment later, the walls were vibrating with music by some band I’d never heard of.

  I went downstairs and had another look at the house. There was a stack of videos next to the television, a microwave oven and food processor in the kitchen. All those “Bless This House” embroideries were gone, replaced by paintings of a grey-haired woman in varying states of depression. They weren’t bad. I flipped one over and read the neatly printed words: Number Three in a Series of Women on the Brink of a Cataclysm.

  Well, Joanna, I thought, meaning both of them – the one I’d left upstairs, and the one who’d be home any minute now – you’re on your own. I opened the pantry door and sank down inside a padded machine with a row of lovely flashing lights. The machine was a joy. I didn’t feel a thing. No stiffness, no swelling, no dizziness. I opened the door and found myself back in the desert. April 29, 1994, just after 6 p.m. New York time – the middle of a scorching afternoon out west. I had been given a second chance. And this time I would do it right. I wouldn’t let Mark see me; I’d get Joanna on her own and do the switch immediately. Then I’d have my exhibition, collect my millions, and give poor Mark an amicable divorce settlement – in this world, I could afford to be generous.

  I climbed the little hill that hid the house from view and saw a shack. A dilapidated little house, like something out of Ma and Pa Kettle. I’m in the wrong place, I thought; I made a wrong turn somewhere out in the desert. Then two large dogs ran towards me, leaping and barking. One was black and one was brown. A man chased after them, shouting, “Charlemagne! Horace! Get back here!”

  He looked at me and stopped dead in his tracks. “Joanna! Come outside!”

  She appeared in the doorway, dressed in jeans and a transparent gauze top. “Wow!” she said.

  They offered me a glass of home brew and a joint. Joanna told me she made native-style blankets and sold them at craft fairs.

  I left after dinner.

  I pushed the capsule door open, and breathed a huge sigh of relief. I was back in New York, surrounded by noise and dirt and traffic. I was home, though for some reason I wasn’t in my studio. I had landed in an alley, surrounded by overflowing metal garbage cans and stacks of cardboard boxes.

  I heard a rustling sound coming from one of the cardboard boxes – the closest one. Rats, I thought, cringing. I hate rats.

  I leaned forward to pull myself up, and came face to face with a pair of bloodshot eyes, staring through a little hole in the nearest box. My own eyes watered at the pungent, combined aromas of al
cohol and stale perspiration.

  “So you’ve come for me, at last.”

  Oh no, I thought. There was something horribly familiar about that voice. “Maybe,” I said. “That depends on who you think I am.”

  “You’re the angel of death, aren’t you?”

  “Your name isn’t Joanna, by any chance?”

  “You are the angel of death!” The box lid flew open and a woman rose before me. Toothless. Matted grey hair crawling with insects. Dressed in layer upon layer of dirty, ragged clothing: a winter coat over a man’s shirt over a sweater over a dress over a pair of trousers. Eyes shining with madness, hands clutching a pair of heavily laden shopping bags. “I’m ready. Take me to a better world than this one.”

  I slammed down the lid and pressed every button. I knew I must have arrived someplace else, but I couldn’t bring myself to look. I just sat there, curled up inside my padded metal egg, and shook.

  How could I have ended up like that? Me, Joanna Krenski. Talented, attractive, intelligent. Whatever could have happened to bring me down to that level? Homeless. Penniless. Living in a box. And then I realized why I couldn’t stop shaking. I, Joanna Krenski – the Joanna Krenski – was in exactly the same position. Homeless and penniless, living inside a box – it’s just that mine was made of metal instead of cardboard. Joanna the bag lady had lost her mind; how long would it be before I lost mine? If I dared to think about it, I knew I was already on the way.

  All my life I’d thought of myself as an essentially good person, but all I’d been was comfortable. The moment I realized I’d lost my place in my world, meaning my material security (not the so-called friends I’d chosen on the basis of what they could do for me, not the young lover I only regarded as a trophy), I’d been ready to lie, steal, and even kill. I had almost murdered the only alternate Joanna to treat me with any kindness. Now I thanked God the gun hadn’t been loaded. I felt disgusted and ashamed. I hated myself. Over and over again.

  I didn’t care where I had landed this time – the desert, the suburbs, my studio, a sewer – it didn’t matter. I would stay curled inside my egg; I was never coming out again. And I wouldn’t have come out, if someone else hadn’t pulled the capsule door open.