FutureImperfect

by Stefan Petrucha

  Even more people began following him as he entered the town’s prize centerpiece, the Valis building, and headed for the stairs, but their efforts were similarly thwarted.

  Harry was touched. It was nice to know people cared so much about a stranger. But he also knew it was hopeless. The Quirk-shard was in total control of his steps, and the Fool was clearing the path.

  And you really can’t mess with a god.

  Up the stairs, doors mysteriously locked behind him. Sprinklers went off. Alarms misfired, distracting anyone else who might have followed. By the time he reached the observation deck above the tower clock, he was alone.

  Out on the street it had been cold. Up here it was freezing. Through the thin cloth on his feet, he soles felt numb, almost frostbitten. He felt a sick relief that soon it would be all over, that he wouldn’t feel cold again, or anything else. He marched to the low wall that surrounded the deck and stepped up.

  Standing there, on the brink, he felt the world as a rumbling rush above, below, and around him. Police cars screeched to a halt in the distant street. A nice ambulance was parked right in front of the building by a fire hydrant. All sorts of people in all sorts of uniforms rushed into the building. Even the doors to the observation deck flew open behind him.

  “Don’t do it!” a policeman screamed. He was an older man, white haired but fit, his face filled with genuine concern.

  Ignore him! a voice inside him said. Don’t fear death, Harry! It’ll be just like it was before you were born. And nothing hurt then, either, did it?

  The Quirk-shard made sense in a way, only there was one problem. Harry didn’t really want to know what he felt like before he was born. Much as things had hurt, much as things had been frustrating, literally to the point of madness, he was still fond of living, still fond of the present. Besides which, Siara was out there somewhere, in the clutches of a major psycho, and Harry was the only one who knew.

  Well, Mr. Tippicks knew, too, now, but who knew when he’d be back?

  The clown balloon, having followed loyally all this time, rolled up the side of his leg and floated up in front of him. Harry wondered if anyone else could see it.

  “It’s okay, Harry,” the clown on the balloon said. “You can jump.”

  Harry raised a single eyebrow, the way he’d seen Siara do a hundred times. It was the first time he’d ever managed it himself. “Easy for you to say. Balloons float.”

  The clown chuckled. “True, but you can float, too. Really. You just have to admit things don’t make sense. Make the leap of faith your father never could and you’ll fly! Points of entry are arbitrary. Let reason go, pick a partner, and dance.”

  It sounded good, so Harry raised a foot.

  “Please!” the white-haired cop said. “Don’t do it. The negotiator will be here in just a second and she’ll know just what to say. Just wait a little while…please!”

  No! We’ve waited so long! Just jump!

  Tough choice. Who to believe?

  Harry looked out at the world, at the tops of the buildings, the little people down below, connected by so many things, disconnected by so few. Subject to disease and war, one hand reaching for the stars, the other slinking back to the darkest cave. And all this time, he’d thought it had somehow all made sense, that he could figure it out.

  But he was wrong.

  “When you’re right, you’re right,” he said to himself, to the Fool. “It doesn’t make any sense. Not one bit.”

  He turned to look at the cop. “I’m really sorry about this,” he said.

  The cop lunged forward to grab him, but Harry smiled, shrugged, and let the Quirk-shard move his feet over the ledge.

  Briefly, Harry felt weightless, just like he had so many years ago, trapped in his father’s arms at the top of an amusement-park ride. There’d be no parachute this time, though. His stomach lurched. Everything spun. He was expecting to fly, but the Fool had lied. He wasn’t flying. He was falling. It would all be over in seconds.

  Thanks so, so much! the Quirk-shard said.

  “Don’t mention it,” Harry answered, falling faster and faster.

  Until he stopped.

  Ow!

  Ow? Ow? Just ow? Shouldn’t I be squished or something?

  Nope. He seemed to be floating. No parachute had opened above him, but the sidewalk loomed far below him and came no closer. He noticed a terrible pain in his crotch. Something hard and metal had caught the back of his pants and given him a humongous wedgie. A loud, hollow tick registered in his ears. He twisted to see the source.

  The clock. His pants had somehow snagged on the minute hand of the tower clock. He was dangling from its center.

  No! Not fair! the Quirk-shard whined.

  The balloon floated up to his face and thupped him on the nose.

  “Ha! Fooled you!” the Fool said.

  “Yeah,” Harry said. “Good one.”

  “So how you doing?”

  Harry stared at it. “My gods are hallucinations, my faith insanity. You?”

  The Fool shrugged. “Not so bad, really.”

  Harry’s pants started to rip some more.

  “This is only a reprieve, you know. Believe me, I’ve given you every possible chance. Think you can do it this time?”

  “Uh…no. I’d really have to know what it is I’m supposed to do to do it.”

  Yay! the Quirk-shard thought.

  The Fool shook its head. “Dummy. The rule of the Quirk is that you have to fall, right? But rules are meant to be bent. They’re only masks, like everything else. See if you can figure out the rest.”

  The balloon thupped Harry one last time on the nose. The clown image smiled widely and vanished bit by bit, until only the twinkle in its eyes remained. Then that floated off among the clouds.

  “Can I have another hint?” Harry called after it. It didn’t answer. Nothing answered, save for the slight tearing sound as the thin cloth of his pants continued to give.

  He felt the Quirk-shard in him, thrilled beyond belief, begging him to shred the last few inches of fabric himself and be done with it. He heard the giant clock behind him, droning out his last few seconds, tick, tick, tick, like Siara’s poem about Sisyphus.

  He looked again at the small city, the clouds, the sky, the buildings. Down below, the little people moved out in trails, ahead to their futures, back to their pasts. He even saw his own trail roll out in front of him, down to the ground, where his future body would go splat.

  Funny, this was the first time he’d seen his own future. Maybe because it was so easy to see—after all, it only headed down. But it was still an A-Time vision, which meant the wacky side of his brain was coming back. Sort of. This was a halfway view. He saw the trails, but he saw the present, too, and they were superimposed on each other, looking like what they were, just masks. And masks were made to be removed.

  He saw just where he would fall, what he would hit on the way down, and how he would die. He stared at the patterns for a while, sort of enjoying them, the way someone might appreciate a great painting; then he furrowed his brow one last time and said, “Oh. I get it.”

  He reached down, ripped his pants…

  …and fell.

  As the world rushed around him, faster and faster, he thought he heard someone screaming. At first he thought it might be him, but the voice was too high-pitched, too pained.

  Siara. It sounded like Siara. Was she here? Was she watching? It didn’t matter, really. It was all too late.

  10.

  Siara and Jeremy drove to within a few blocks of the Valis building before the traffic forced them to park. Siara worried Jeremy might lose her on foot, but as they ran, adrenaline enabled her to keep pace with the high school football star. They raced along the sidewalk, but when that became too thick with people, they hit the street and sped between stopped cars.

  Siara’s heart hammered as she neared the police cordon and approached the mob gathered at its perimeter. She tried to push her way through, but
couldn’t. The mass formed a solid wall. With startling aggressiveness, Jeremy actually yanked some people out of the way, but even his efforts brought them only a few yards closer.

  As more curiosity-seekers pressed in to fill the void behind them, Siara found herself wedged so tightly in the crowd she couldn’t breathe. Arms pinned, she noticed everyone was looking up, so she looked up, too. High up on the building, a half-naked figure was snagged on the minute hand of the massive clock, dangling from the seat of his pants like a stuffed toy or rag doll, a thing of cloth and stuffing instead of flesh and blood. The sight was so totally ridiculous, a pained laugh burst from her throat. It was Harry. At least he was alive; at least there was a chance someone would reach him.

  But her strange smile soon vanished as she saw him tug at his pants, pull at the only thing keeping him alive, as if trying to tear himself free.

  “No, Harry! Don’t! Harry!” she cried. She hopped, still unable to move her arms. For a moment, he stopped his busywork. She thought he’d somehow heard her, but then he just fell.

  Siara twisted her frail form against the thick, unyielding bodies that braced her, crazily thinking she might somehow catch him. As she struggled, all she said was, “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God…”

  The body of the strange boy Siara loved and sometimes thought she might be in love with plunged down the side of the building, turning in the air. Harry knocked against the stone siding hard and crashed into a flagpole, looking like a broken puppet. The pole flung him across the building’s corner, where she just couldn’t see him anymore.

  As she stared at the empty spot where she’d seen him last, her hands reached out and squeezed Jeremy’s arm so hard she was sure she must be hurting him.

  “It wasn’t his fault,” she said, voice cracking. The Daemon got him.

  “I know,” Jeremy answered.

  After that, she just kept screaming. The shocked but fascinated crowd rushed around the corner, hungry to see where the body landed. As the crowd thinned, she found she could move her arms again and breathe.

  But she didn’t want to.

  So that was death, the consequence of time, as Harry had called it long ago. It wasn’t anywhere near as magic or mythic as she’d once imagined, based on poems by Emily Dickinson (“Because I could not stop for Death, he kindly stopped for me”). It was too real, too gross, and too horribly, horribly ugly.

  She found herself imagining the details, wondering if he’d broken his neck when he hit the building, if he’d suffocated on the way down, or if he’d still been alive for a moment after he’d hit bottom, living in a broken-up body. She wondered if it had hurt for long. She wondered if he’d been thinking of her.

  Picturing Harry’s body crushed from the fall, she thought of the two gerbils she had as a young girl for some reason, Beckett and Joyce, a mated pair. She always thought it was sweet, romantic that gerbils mated for life. But then Joyce grew sick and died and Beckett, rather than mourn her loss, ate her corpse. When Siara tried to stop him, Beckett, for the first time in his life, bit her, latching on to her index finger, burying his teeth deep inside her flesh, holding on so tightly she had to pry him off. Even now, years later, her finger tingled at the site the wound. She later read it was another gerbil instinct to eat their dead, to prevent predators from smelling the rotting body and attacking the nest.

  So much for sentimentality. So much for gerbils.

  Before Harry, that was the closest she’d come to death. Now he was dead. And her stomach twisted tighter than a gerbil’s bite.

  She vaguely felt Jeremy pull her through the police cordon. She heard him try to talk to the police, to explain who they were, how they knew Harry. They still weren’t allowed any closer, not while the police recovered the body, which, they assured him, they didn’t want to see anyway. She heard them say the remains would be at the hospital within an hour. If they really wanted to, Siara and Jeremy could talk to the doctors there.

  Another hospital. Poor Harry was always in and out of hospitals, Siara thought; then she started to cry. Jeremy protectively wrapped himself around her, as if he were still her boyfriend, and walked them away from what remained of the crowd. They kept walking awhile, away from the Valis building. People still rushed by them, on their way to see what all the fuss was about, not realizing they’d missed it all.

  A few blocks away, near where they’d parked, Jeremy found an old-style diner. It was nearly empty because of all the excitement outside, so he took her in. She slumped into a booth, felt a crack in the upholstery beneath her, and vaguely heard Jeremy ask a waitress for a cup of hot water.

  The diner had chrome everywhere, and even where it wasn’t chrome, it was shiny and silver: the counters, the tables, the knives and forks. It looked nothing like the dull little Formica diner back in Brenton, where she and Harry had had their only “date.” Nothing at all. But it reminded her of it just the same. And it made her cry more.

  The waitress brought a cup of hot water. Jeremy pulled a little packet from his pocket and sprinkled its contents into the cup. Siara watched as the tiny grains of something floated, tinting the water with tan swirls.

  Tempests in a teacup.

  “What’s that?” Siara asked dully. She wiped her face with her arm. Realizing that wasn’t enough to sop up the tears, she grabbed a napkin and blew her nose.

  Jeremy shrugged. “Herbal tea. To help you relax.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t want to relax. I want to be upset. Harry’s…”

  He pushed the cup toward her. “Take a sip. You’ve still got your mother’s demo tonight.”

  She raised an eyebrow at him.

  “I can’t go there now,” Siara said. “My mother wouldn’t expect me to.”

  The steam from the tea rolled up into her nostrils. It had a spicy odor, like nutmeg. Jeremy gently lifted the cup and guided it up to her lips, like he was her dad or her big brother or something, and he wasn’t going to take no for an answer. She didn’t feel like fighting, so she took a sip.

  The liquid, not too hot, slid down her throat. She could feel it warm her all the way down into her knotted stomach. She realized that, logically, the warm feeling should stop there, at the bottom of her stomach, but it didn’t. It kept going down her legs into her toes; then it floated up her back, into her arms, even her fingers.

  Everything started tingling. The knot loosened. Even the tingling where her pet had bit her finger vanished.

  She blinked. She wasn’t crying anymore.

  “Finish it,” Jeremy said. “It will help.”

  So she did. In a few moments, while the pain over Harry’s death didn’t stop exactly, it felt like it was floating away.

  “What’s in this?” she asked as she put the empty cup down. “Valerian root?”

  “Something like that,” Jeremy said. His face looked so serious as it scanned her, so concerned, it made her smile. Why was she smiling? How could she smile when Harry was dead?

  Something strong and warm tugged against her fingers. It took her a moment to realize Jeremy had taken her hands in his, cupped them, and pulled them toward the center of the table. She looked up into his steady blue eyes.

  “It’s important you keep busy now,” he said in a funny sort of monotone. What a weird thing to say; again, like he was her dad or something, only her own dad would never say anything that dadlike. Shouldn’t he talk about how awful it was to watch someone plunge to his death? How sorry he was? How he never really hated Harry, even though, of course, he did?

  She tried to raise an eyebrow at him again but couldn’t find the strength. Instead, she just said, “Yeah.”

  “So I think it’s important that you still go to the demo tonight.”

  She hesitated, but his eyes and his voice were so much stronger than she was. Their certainty invaded her, like a poem, like the tea.

  It made sense, in a way. Keep distracted, keep busy.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Your mother’s been working
so hard, there’s no reason to upset her, not on her big night. So you really shouldn’t mention what happened, right?”

  That seemed a little funny, too, like it was dishonoring Harry. And how did Jeremy know how important the demo was to her mom?

  But he seemed so sure, so she nodded. “Right.”

  He slipped a black iPod out of his pocket and put it in her hands. The plastic felt smooth and cool.

  “What’s this?” she asked. “A present? You know I can’t see you anymore.”

  Her tongue felt sticky. Her voice drawled.

  Jeremy smiled sweetly. “Just a distraction,” he said. He placed its two earbuds in her ears. In a second, music filled her head, washing her, pounding her brain like it was the ocean and she was the sand. She didn’t know the band, but she liked them. She looked at the box she held.

  “Infinity in the palm of my hands,” she said, quoting the Blake poem.

  “Yes,” Jeremy answered. “You might say that. But I liked the one you wrote about Sisyphus better. Remember that?”

  Siara nodded, touched that he knew her little poem.

  “I want you to listen to it, and keep listening to it.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  “Great,” Jeremy said. “I’ll drive you back to school then.”

  “Thanks,” Siara answered. Her voice sounded dull and hollow, even to herself. So much so that she felt like she should apologize to Jeremy for not sounding more enthusiastic. She hoped he would understand, what with Harry being dead.

  But death wasn’t the only consequence of time.

  As Harry Keller fell on purpose, he felt a pang, as if he were betraying his father by embracing a last-minute wildness. But he’d had not so much an idea as an intuition: The Quirk says I have to fall, but it doesn’t say how I have to fall.

  It was a crazy thought, logically impossible given the height of the building, but because Harry could see what would happen before it did, he also knew it could work.