FutureImperfect

by Stefan Petrucha

  He closed his eyes. What did it mean? What could it mean? The book was talking to him, directly to him.

  It wasn’t like the clown balloon or any of the mad A-Time images. This just felt real, in a sickly dizzying kind of way. Like he just couldn’t tell anymore, like he just couldn’t tell one world from another, or any world from a stray thought. He was lost and getting more lost, tumbling into a black abyss where he would be forever insane, where there’d be no way, anymore, ever, to tell what was real and what was not.

  This was crazy, oh yes. This was it: the final collapse of his mind, where he’d taken the plunge into eternal elsewhere.

  It felt worse than finding out Elijah wasn’t real. Worse than knowing Siara was at the mercy of Jeremy, because it felt like it was making all that and more totally unreal.

  Please God, no more, no more. No more hallucinations.

  And then, just as he thought he’d reached the limit of what his senses could bear, there came a titanic rumbling, the sound of mortar, rock, and wood straining under some greater power. He felt the vibrations run through his body as the walls began to shake. He opened his eyes in time to see the thick padding that covered the room tear, exposing the white fluffs of stuffing inside.

  The top half of the room lifted free. Above and beyond, Harry could see the sky and the clouds above Windfree Sanitarium. Where the world had just been the tiny room, now it headed off into forever.

  Most horrifying of all, the piece of building that had just been torn free from its foundation hovered in the air, held by a giant, white-gloved hand.

  And there, impossibly huge, stood the clown from the balloon, his hair an orange forest, his white face a vast, featureless desert, the red and blue of his eyes and mouth glowing brighter than any colors Harry had ever seen.

  And when it opened its mouth, showed its mountainous teeth and writhing, oceanic tongue, and spoke, the force of its deep voice felt as though it were ripping a hole in Harry’s head.

  I SAID, COME OUT AND PLAY WITH ME!

  Son of a bitch, Harry thought. Everything’s real.

  2.

  Her red eyes had black streaks around them, where a mask of Halloween greasepaint had been quickly wiped away. She smelled of soot and smoke. Her brunette hair, mussed, had gray bits of ash woven into it. She’d been in the fire that had almost wiped out Robert A. Wilson High School’s entire senior class. That was just last night, but here she was, in school, in Emeril Tippicks’s tiny office, sitting in a small blue plastic chair, her lean form folded fetally.

  Why? What had possessed her to come to school today? Moreover, what had possessed her, as Tippicks had been told, to run into the blazing warehouse and save Harry Keller’s life?

  Tippicks didn’t ask out loud, but he didn’t have to. She coughed, scrunched her face, swiped a dry, plumdyed clump of hair from her forehead, and said, “I have to talk to you about Harry.”

  Tippicks had been up since three because of the fire, fielding calls, filling out forms. Now he was in a death match with a vengeful headache. Sleepless and disheveled, he knew he looked more like a balding, gray-haired turkey than a role model, but he wanted to help.

  So he leaned forward and immediately knocked over a mug crammed with pens and pencils. Some flew into his lap, others rolled helter-skelter across the desk, while a few clattered to the linoleum floor. The thin plastic sounds echoed in his head like slamming doors.

  “It must be hard,” Tippicks said hoarsely as he scrambled to scoop up the rolling pens within his reach. He stuffed a handful back in the mug, leaving little blue and red marks on his palm. “We’re all very worried and disappointed about what happened to Harry. The trauma of the fire must have tipped him over the edge.”

  Not only that, but Tippicks knew he’d been personally stupid about the whole thing. He’d protected Keller too much, ignored obvious signs, made a mistake in helping him stay off the antipsychotic meds. He had actually covered for the boy as he hid in a locker in the girls’ gym.

  Why?

  An image of Tippicks’s father in a padded cell in Windfree flashed into his mind, making his head pound all the more. He tried to distract himself by scooping more pens into his hands.

  The girl crossed her arms and buried her hands between her knees. “It’s not that. Not just that, anyway.”

  Tippicks lowered more pens into the mug. “Well, what then?”

  Disdain wrinkled her young face. “Don’t you want to ask if I knew whether or not he was taking any drugs?”

  Tippicks clamped his eyes shut. As if he wasn’t feeling guilty enough, he remembered he’d rifled through this girl’s book-bag yesterday, found a stash of K, then doubted her story—which turned out to be true—that it had been planted on her.

  He shrugged. “No. I just want to know whatever it is you want to tell me.”

  “Well, he wasn’t. Harry never used any drugs. Not one. Do you believe me?”

  Tippicks’s brow furrowed. “Yes.”

  She fell into a troubled silence, so he reached for his phone.

  “You might find it easier talking to another counselor.”

  “No,” she said. “It has to be you. Harry trusted you.”

  “But clearly you don’t. I understand. It’s okay, but—”

  “I…I have to try.”

  Tippicks withdrew his hand from the phone and leaned back in his chair. It creaked as it tilted back, and a pencil on his lap rolled off onto the floor. When he winced, Siara stifled a snicker.

  He smiled. He opened up his hands. “I’m all ears.”

  “You won’t tell his doctors? Is anything I say here…you know, private?”

  “I won’t tell anyone,” Tippicks said. “As long as it doesn’t involve murder.”

  “And if it does?”

  His smile faded. Out of the corner of his eye he saw another pencil rolling. He could have caught it easily, but let it drop.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Harry thought someone was trying to drive him crazy or kill him,” she said. She looked around nervously, like she was betraying a trust, but eventually locked eyes with Tippicks. “He thought they started the fire at the warehouse just to get to him.”

  Tippicks felt his body tense. Something gurgled in his stomach. Perhaps it was his long-dormant acid reflux coming back for a visit. He tried not to let the pain show.

  “Harry’s mind works quickly. Too quickly for his own good. They say he’s been delusional…,” he began.

  But she cut him off with a shake of her head that said simply, No. You don’t get it.

  “It works faster than that,” she said. “Faster than anything. It works so fast you can break it just by giving it a little shove. Remember the shooting? Harry thought someone was trying to make Todd Penderwhistle kill Jeremy Gronson, then kill himself. He thought somebody was trying to turn Melody Glissando into a murderer….”

  She was talking too fast, so Tippicks raised his hand to try to slow her down, make her think more rationally.

  But her words came out in a flood.

  “And he stopped them. He did the right things at the right time, and he stopped them. Then he figured out that whoever it was who did all this was after him now. He had a new girlfriend, Elijah. I thought it was her, but it turns out no one at school ever even saw her except Harry. I’m starting to think he just hallucinated her, or someone made him hallucinate her, just to drive him crazy.”

  Tippicks pressed his fingers into his temples and rubbed. The poor girl was tired, upset. Keller could be persuasive. He’d probably talked her into sharing his delusions, and now she didn’t know which end was up anymore.

  He tried to make his crackly voice sound gentle: “He’s your friend, so naturally you believed him when he told you these things, yes?”

  She gave him that derisive, impatient head shake again. “Hell no, I thought he was nuts. But then he showed me. In the auditorium, when Todd fired at Jeremy, Jeremy tripped on some chairs and the bullet
missed him. Harry arranged those chairs.”

  Tippicks kept rubbing. “I remember. It was in the security report.”

  “He can see the future and rearrange it.”

  The burning stomach acid lapped up into his throat. “Excuse me?”

  As if gesticulating would make things clearer, she flared and waved her fingers as she spoke. “He can make it so that things that were going to happen, don’t. Or sometimes he can make it so that things that were never going to happen, do.”

  The image of his father in Windfree, babbling nonsense, again flashed in Tippicks’s head.

  “How…how does Harry change the future?” he said. His voice was weak, his eyes closed.

  Her voice was tinged with regret. “You just think he’s crazy, and now you think I’m crazy, too, don’t you?”

  Tippicks shrugged and shook his head. He opened his eyes and offered a weary smile. “No. I think we’re all tired. As for crazy, some of my favorite people are crazy. I only asked a question: How? How does Harry change the future?”

  He saw the girl swallow hard.

  “He thinks the part of his brain that organizes reality into linear time was damaged by the trauma of losing his father.”

  Tippicks’s brow didn’t just furrow; it knotted. Something old and dark was dragged out from inside of him, and he was too weak to stop it.

  “Go on.”

  “His brain takes him to this place where he can see the past, the present, and the future all at the same time in, like, these trails. The past is hard, but the future is like clay, and he can change it. He calls it A-Time.”

  Tippicks couldn’t keep himself from asking, “And you say you’ve seen it?”

  She stared at him, seeing something new in his face that made her speak more confidently. “Yes. He took me there. I’m not sure how. He did it just by talking to me. I was dizzy the whole time, but I saw these…these beasts there.”

  “That try to become part of the trails. That try to…happen,” Tippicks said numbly.

  It was Siara’s turn to scrunch her brow. “Yeah. Exactly. Did Harry already tell you?”

  Tippicks blank expression ruffled to life. “No, no. I…I just guessed.”

  He was lying, and it was clear from the single eyebrow she raised that she didn’t buy it. After a pause, she continued, probably figuring in for a penny, in for a pound.

  “Harry thinks there’s someone else in A-Time, too. He called him the Daemon. And now Harry’s…now he’s really crazy and he’s locked up and all alone, and I’m afraid something even worse is going to happen to him. I thought maybe you could help him, tell someone who might give him a chance to prove what he’s saying is true.”

  Tippicks stared at her, unable to move. He saw her shrink, fold back into her near-fetal position. After a too-long silence, a disheartened Siara Warner, eyes downcast, stood to leave.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t have come.”

  “No,” Tippicks said. “Please. I just need some time to think. I want to help, but I’m not sure…I’m not sure where to begin. Give me some time. I’ll try to live up to your trust.”

  She scanned him, exhaled through her nose, and slipped out of his office into the noise-filled hall.

  As he saw the rush of student bodies file past his open door, Tippicks mulled her words and the guileless sincerity of her tone.

  A broken brain that saw through time. Monsters that ate fate. A place of infinite possibility that could be molded with your hands. It was almost exactly, word for word, what his father had talked about when they locked him up forever.

  Tippicks rose and closed the office door. He massaged his brow long and hard, squeezed the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, all the while remembering how his father had begged him to believe, and how he couldn’t.

  It was then that Emeril Tippicks decided he would do yet another stupid thing. He would pay a visit to Harry Keller in his padded cell just as soon as possible.

  But first, he had to find some aspirin and clean up the rest of these pens.

  3.

  Mother’s voice, sweet as honey, came floating down the hall all the way into Jeremy’s room.

  “Jeremy, is our tea ready yet?”

  Jeremy Gronson shook his head, even though he knew she couldn’t see him.

  “It’s steeping. I’ve got the timer on,” he called.

  “Exactly four and a half minutes?” his father chimed in distractedly. He could hear the old man ruffle the pages of the Wall Street Journal as he spoke.

  “Exactly, Dad,” he answered. “Four and a half minutes.”

  He shut the door, even though he knew most of the sound would still carry.

  Shirtless, Jeremy felt the cool air in his room, the warm carpet beneath his bare feet. He bent forward, exhaling, pushing his palms to the floor, legs straight, knees not locked, back flat. A few bones in his spine loosened and clicked into place. His taut muscles burned deliciously. He inhaled slowly, exhaled even slower.

  After rolling up out of the stretch, one vertebra at a time, he turned toward a hand-carved ivory chess set on the table next to his desk and stared at the pieces. They were set up to reproduce a game he’d played with Harry Keller the other day, a game Keller would have won if the idiot had bothered staying to finish.

  Since then, Jeremy had played the moves over and over, dozens of times, on the board, on the computer, in his head, trying to figure out where he went wrong. But he couldn’t. Keller’s moves were stupid, ridiculous. They seemed to defy logic. But they worked.

  Since they worked, all that meant was that they were somehow logical, but that Jeremy didn’t see the logic yet. In the end, everything made sense, everything had some kind of order. Everything. It just had to. And Jeremy Gronson just had to understand everything.

  Seeing a different tack, he lifted the rook. The small ebon tower caught bits of light from the recessed bulbs in the ceiling. He held it awhile, pondering, then set it down in a new spot. Now the patterns of the pieces looked familiar, ordered. Everything was in its place again. Everything perfect. He knew just what to do next.

  He imagined the game playing out, saw his pieces as if they were his football teammates: moving across the field, pushing through the frail defense, passing him the ball, so he could run and run until…

  “Argh!”

  Jeremy swatted at the pieces, sweeping as many as he could into the air. The black king shattered a water glass. A white pawn made a small indentation in the wall.

  He still lost. Through some insane accident, he still lost.

  But then again, there were no accidents.

  “Jeremy?” Mother said, her voice muffled by the door. “Everything all right in there?”

  “Yes. Fine.”

  “Are you still thinking about that girl?” Father asked loudly. Even through the door and the wall, Father had heard the tension in his voice. Father was always hearing things in his voice. He just never understood what they were about. Of course he was thinking about the girl, but not for the stupid hormonal reasons Father suspected.

  He shook his head. “No, Dad. I’m not thinking about the girl.”

  He imagined the board again in his mind, piece by piece, move by move. Then he imagined himself swatting that away as well.

  It was a trick, it had to be—just a trick. Maybe it was one of the tricks the Obscure Masters would reveal when he finished his initiation. Just as soon as he won the last game.

  Far off, a timer beeped.

  “Jeremy! Our tea’s ready!”

  “I know, Dad. I know.”

  “Can’t have servants every day, Jay.”

  Jeremy winced. He hated when father called him Jay.

  “You scare the crap out me, Siara,” her dad said as the evening sky, visible through the window behind him, swelled over the city.

  Reality bites, she thought. They sat in the barely-eat-in kitchen at a table that had been too small for the three of them for years, she steadily meeting his
totally glaring eyes.

  She tried to get through to him one more time. “I had to go into the fire to save Harry. And Jeremy, the boyfriend you were pushing me to stay with, took me to that party in the first place. As for the riot, well…the charges were dropped.”

  Forget it. It was useless. She didn’t believe any of it herself. She blasted some air through her curled lower lip, up at the plum-red strands on her forehead. They weren’t in her eyes; she just did it out of nervousness and because she was kind of hoping it might look cute enough to lower the Dad Anger Quotient.

  It didn’t.

  “The charges were dropped,” he repeated slowly. “How’d we get here, exactly?”

  She gave him a sheepish grin. “Take a left at adolescence?”

  Even her most humble, self-deprecating humor didn’t break through. He didn’t laugh.

  “You’re grounded for a month. Really, not like last time. I’m putting locks on your windows so there’ll be no more sneaking out via the fire escape.”

  “But—”

  “You go to school, you come home. You do your homework, you go to bed, you wake up, you go to school. Repeat for thirty days. On weekends maybe we’ll walk you around the block a few times for exercise, but that’s it.”

  “Can I…can I go see Harry?”

  “No.”

  Siara’s indignation rose with her voice. “He’s all alone. He doesn’t have much family. He’s my…friend. Shouldn’t I stick by him? Aren’t you the one who told me I should always do what I think is right?”

  Her father shook his head. “I misspoke. What I meant to say was that you should always do what I think is right.”

  He was so pissed.

  This is why it’s so hard to trust your parents with the secrets of time and space.

  Feeling like a rat grasping at straws, she asked, “Does Mom know you’re doing this?”

  He blinked and sighed. “Don’t go complaining to her, Siara. Just don’t. She’s got enough on her mind. The demo’s tomorrow night.”