Future Imperfect

by K Ryer Breese

  “No.”

  “It was shaped like a C,” Katrina says. “Waxing crescent. If it happens this month, that’s in like next week.”

  “Okay. And if not?”

  “Then next month, maybe three weeks from now. But, to be honest with you, I think it’ll go down next week. Soon, huh? Last but not least, you saw the tattoos, right?”

  “What about them?”

  Katrina snorts, the same as her sister, and she says, “Silly, he’s got a picture of your mom tattooed on his left forearm. It’s freaking ridiculous you didn’t notice it. Big and she’s smiling. Kinda spooky, really.”

  “How about the masked guy? Any chance you saw him?”

  Katrina rolls her eyes. She says, “You got yourself a parasite, Ade.”

  “A what?”

  “Parasite. You know, like a tapeworm or something. Only this is the psychic kind. This guy, I’ve seen some like him before. They get into people’s dreams. People’s memories. Sometimes, like with you, it can be visions. He’s feeding off it most likely. Getting kicks from it. You want to really change what you’ve seen, and I’m not saying you can but if you really, really, super really wanted to, I’d find that parasite of yours. Then again, eventually, he’ll find you. Not easy to lose them once they’ve locked on.”

  When she says the word “locked” she makes a clicking sound with her tongue.

  My stomach turns.

  “Who do you think he is?”

  Katrina shrugs. “Could be anyone. You need to see someone else about that problem. Grandpa Razor will know.”

  I ask Katrina if she thinks I can change it. I ask if she knows anyone who’s ever been able to change the future. I say, “Even if I knew that one person did it once. That would mean a lot.”

  Katrina says, “I can’t think of anyone.”

  “You think I’m stupid for trying?”

  “You did try before. Didn’t work so well that time, did it?”

  “Don’t think it’s possible, do you?”

  Licking her lips, she says, “Not really. Grandpa Razor frowns on anyone trying to break the rules. Besides, as I’m sure you already know, bad things happen when you try and take control. Trust in Grandpa, Ade. He wouldn’t lie.”

  I’m getting very aggravated. I ask Katrina why she does this. Why she bothers.

  She says, “Money, mostly. We’re also famous. You seen the Web site? The photo spread? This is our life. Could be yours too, if you were willing to go with the flow. You know, not try to fuck up so much.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Of course.”

  I stand up, look back at them, point to Janice, the silent sister. “And what about you? Do you have any thoughts on this? Do you want to do a-”

  Janice, she just shrugs.

  I look over to the Diviners, and Gilberto stands up and walks over to me. He puts a hand on my shoulder and tells me that I really should consider just accepting the status quo. He tells me that even though deep in his heart he hates clichés and he hates corporate culture, he’s convinced that being able to really live means learning to accept certain truths. “Basically, Ade,” he says, “it means putting yourself in the driver’s seat.”

  Him, I flick off. The rest of them, I ignore.

  Charlie shows me the door, opening it and waving me out. Belle follows.

  In the hallways leading to the parking structure, Belle tries to talk me into coming back. Just to talk for a bit longer. She says, “Promise we’ll just talk casually. I so want you to be a part of this.”

  “I need a breather, Belle.”

  Belle blows me a kiss. Mouths, Sorry.

  And I leave.

  SIX

  I take back roads.

  Lose myself only a few blocks to the west of Paris.

  My frustration boils over. The Sisters, the Diviners, no one wants to change the future. No one wants to even try. I tried to save Harold and still, he died. Jimi will die and no one but me wants to lift a finger. I smash my steering wheel repeatedly with my fists.

  Then, still fuming, I pull over and slam on the breaks.

  Also I roll down the window and chuck CDs onto the street. This is the new really pissed-off me getting crazy. Just needing to act out. Mostly I toss old CDs. Mostly beat-up, scratched-all-over CDs that work about half the time. Dinosaur Jr., Minor Threat, and some mix from Paige titled Everyone About Everything go sailing into the night.

  And that’s when I notice the smell in my car.

  It’s like heavy perfume.

  I scan the rearview and see nothing.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I say loud. Just in case.

  “No.” The voice comes from right behind my seat. A girl’s voice. Brittle. I know the voice immediately. It’s Janice Zinc, the lesser of the Metal Sisters.

  I ask, “Janice?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Any chance you’d crawl out from back there? Almost scared the living crap-”

  She climbs up and settles down in the passenger seat. All slumped over into herself. Janice looks worn down. She pulls out a beat-up purse that’s losing rhinestones by the second and from it she pulls out a cigarette. “You mind?” she asks.

  I wave an okay and she lights up. Her white dress, it suddenly doesn’t looks so nice. The ice sculpture’s quickly melting away.

  After two long drags she says, “Katrina didn’t tell you everything. We’re connected, you know? I can see what she can see.”

  “You said that.”

  “She’s the best at the readings, knows how to navigate, but I’m there for the ride too. I see everything she sees. Know everything she knows.”

  Another drag and a deep cough and Janice informs me that she and her sister saw just about everything I’ve seen over the past few months. “Just because Katrina went in to see that drowning, it doesn’t mean she didn’t see more. When she’s in your head, she can read it like a book. Just flip the pages back. When we’re in your head, Ade, nothing’s sacred.”

  She tells me that she knows about Vauxhall. She tells me that she feels bad about my home life. The slumped-over psychic next to me says, “You’re much more messed up than anyone could even imagine.”

  “Why were you really in the backseat of my car?”

  Janice rolls down her window and chucks the cigarette. “Your new girl.”

  “Tell me.”

  Janice smiles. “I know what you really think of me, Ade. I repulse you. You think I’m stupid. The dumb sister.”

  “I’ve never even met you before tonight! This is crazy, you’ve got me confu-”

  “Don’t bother, Ade,” Janice interrupts. “Won’t matter. Here’s the thing: I’m a spiteful person and, honestly, I’d very much like to hurt you.”

  “I’m sorry, but seriously, I think you-”

  “Won’t matter, Ade. You were in Boulder just a few-”

  “Yeah. I party. I… I was… What is this about?”

  Janice puts a finger to my lips to shush me. Her nails sparkle. She says, “At Roger’s party. You’d banged your head up something pretty bad earlier and when I saw you, you were all dazed. Drunk and all out of it like from the concussion. Didn’t stop you from being incredibly sweet. I think you said something about having seen me before, about how you saw me in a vision years ago. Very poetic. Very sweet, Ade.”

  “Really, Janice, I don’t think… It wasn’t about you, it was…”

  Looking at Janice, her sinking into the seat next to me, I can’t recall a single image, not a moment, from the scene she’s describing. No recollection of spending time with her.

  She says, “We kissed a lot.”

  “Who?”

  “You and me, silly.”

  “Nothing more, though, right?”

  “Depends how you define more.”

  I groan and feel bad doing it, but it just escapes. “It’s not you,” I say. “Just that I don’t remember any of this. I think I was confused and… Please, Janice, tell me about Vaux
hall. Tell me what you know.”

  “Horrible,” Janice coos. “You have no memory at all of it, do you? The things you told me, you would never believe how sweet they were.”

  “I’m sorry, Janice. Please. Tell me about Vauxhall.”

  Janice starts with, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you’ve forgotten most of your life. I wonder just how much of what you think you see is real. These visions of the future, how do you even know they’re yours? Just ’cause you see yourself, how do you know that’s you? Amazing what the mind will come up with. Even more amazing what the mind can will itself to forget. Jimi Ministry was with you at that party, Ade. He talked to me. Asked me to look at something inside his head. Something, well, very bad for you and Vauxhall.”

  My heart tumbles. My mind is electric with anger. All the things I’m thinking are so ugly. So many of them brutal. The churning is breaking me apart.

  “What is it, Janice?”

  She laughs. “You sure you want this?”

  I’m not, but I’m having trouble breathing.

  Janice is like, “It’s really sad stuff.”

  Bracing myself, I say, “I need to know.”

  “It will change everything.”

  “Tell me.”

  “You will never forget again.”

  I nod. I need to know this, but as soon as Janice starts speaking, I want to plug my ears. I need to know what she’s going to tell me, but I don’t want to hear it. Not from her and not like this.

  Janice says, “You’re here because Jimi wants you here. All of this, it’s his little game. You’re the pawn, Ade. He’s been planning it, well, I can’t even begin to imagine how long. And the thing is, you’re just so messed up that he’s made it work. Whatever I tell you it’s already too late. Vauxhall is his. I’ve looked into his head. Jimi’s been to Grandpa Razor, he’s gotten the future. His future and, not surprisingly, you’re not in it. Vauxhall and Jimi have a great little family. A nice home. Jimi one, Ade zero.”

  I’m biting my lower lip so hard it’s ballooning out.

  “Doesn’t make any sense-”

  Janice chuckles to herself. “That’s just the thing, Ade. You have no idea what you’ve actually seen. You’ve forgotten us getting, well, cuddly, just a few weeks ago. Can you imagine the other stuff you’ve forgotten? Can you imagine the visions that maybe you’ve forgotten?”

  “Everything I’ve seen I’ve remembered.”

  She laughs loud. “Not at all,” Janice says. “Remember, I’ve been in there.” And she taps my forehead with a cold finger. “The time you went to the ER, got hospitalized, surgery, you had a vision. You remember what you saw?”

  I try. “Jimi’s dad.”

  “And after?”

  “Something really far out. Me looking in a mirror. And, I couldn’t see-”

  “You could see, though, Ade. You could see just fine. Only you forgot. Want me to show you what you saw?”

  I’m in a daze, biting back my tongue. I nod.

  Janice, stroking the back of my neck with her sharp nails, she says, “Your past catches up with you, Ade. All those concussions, all the damage, it has to go somewhere. To say you change is putting it lightly. The anger, the violence. You go a little nuts, frankly.”

  She touches my face, runs her fingers with both hands through my hair just the same as her sister did and my skin tingles. My eyes roll back. Janice’s digging into my memory, cutting through the cloud of damage and mental scar tissue. It feels like she’s swimming inside my skull.

  The vision comes up quickly. Me again in front of the mirror. I’m focused in and older and I’m sitting in a wheelchair. The reason I had trouble seeing this, the reason it was so fuzzy, is easily explained by the look in my eyes. It’s dull. It’s the look of a fish in an aquarium. The dead-eye stare of an insect. This future, it’s me as I’ve always worried I’d become. Me trapped in a failing brain. What’s worse, I’m clearly in a hospital. The walls are white and the floors are white and the ceiling tiles in this place are white. The reek of ammonia is strong. At first I’m sure I’m just watching myself in this mirror, but it quickly becomes clear it’s not actually a mirror, it’s a window. Not watching myself, I’m staring through me to the parking lot below where a man and a woman are leaning against a car kissing. The man is an older Jimi. The woman, gorgeous and bright, is an older Vauxhall. I scream so slowly that it hurts my jaw.

  Janice takes her fingers from my head. The vision evaporates and I’m back in the car with my ears buzzing, my fingers bloodless from tension.

  And Janice says, “Jimi’s under the impression that they do that, sit out in front of your special person’s home and make out, on a monthly basis. It’s cruel, but from what I hear Jimi’s kind of a vindictive person, so-”

  “Impossible,” I interrupt. “What I see, it happens. Either Jimi dies or I change the future and I save him. But if I save him it won’t end up like that. It can’t end up like that.”

  “Can’t win all the time, can we?”

  I think I fly into a rage, but I’m not sure exactly how it happens or exactly what even takes place. I know that I kick my way out of the car. I don’t open the door first. I don’t roll down the window. I just kick and kick and kick until I somehow hit the lock and get out. In the street, I know that I swear up into the sky. What’s last is that I kick my car and then I tell Janice she needs to leave.

  She asks me to drop her off back at the Lair. “Not my fault,” she says.

  “You climbed in my car to ruin my life,” I say. “You can walk.”

  She calls Katrina to pick her up and I leave her waiting on the side of the road. This little trail of rhinestones tinkling in the dark around her.

  I drive to nowhere.

  And as I move, the houses flashing past, the anger slowly subsides.

  By the time I get to a park with picnic benches and a pond, I’m no longer churning. The rage has subsided. In its place, the sickening feeling of inevitability. I keep repeating to myself that old saying about how it’s better to have loved and lost rather than never loved in the first place, and I realize how much I hate the expression.

  But this part of me, its defeatist and I hate it. I refuse to give in to it. Refuse to listen to it anymore.

  I’m not going to let Jimi drown.

  I will not kill him.

  I will be fine.

  SEVEN

  The morning sun is just starting to spray the sky orange.

  I park across the street from the park and I go for a walk over to an empty drainage ditch and sit on top of one of the dirt mounds nearby and watch the sun come up. I watch the sun bleach the dirt and gravel and weeds inch by inch by inch. When it hits my feet I call Vauxhall.

  She answers on the third ring, her voice all warped from sleep.

  “Hey, Vaux. Sorry to call so early.”

  “Ade?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What’s going on? You okay?”

  “I am.”

  I listen to Vaux breathe in the static. The houses across from me are now hit by the sunlight. Their windows not see-through any longer, just blankets of yellow.

  “Vaux, what if you fall in love with someone?”

  “What do you mean?”

  I can hear her rubbing her eyes. I can see her propping herself up on her bed.

  “I mean what if you love someone, you’d stop, then-”

  I don’t need to finish. Vaux, jumping in to fill any silence, says, “Yes.”

  “Really?”

  “I don’t… I haven’t ever been in love, Ade. Not like what you mean.”

  “But if you were. If it was love like that, could you stop? Replace it with me.”

  Vaux is only a whisper on the other end. Just her breathing in electronic haze. The sun has fully risen and the shadows are so long. My shadow from the top of the dirt hill soars over the construction site to the houses so far away. My stretched-out head almost touching them.

  “I think so,” Vaux says
.

  She says, “For you, I will.”

  I sigh into the phone and all the way back to Denver I hear Vauxhall sigh as well.

  “Are you happy?” I ask her.

  “Very, very happy,” she says. “What’s funny is that for the longest time I thought I was so strong. Powerful the way people in control are. Me and these guys, I don’t know what I really believed I was doing for them, but I felt like I was wanted. Like I was needed. Really needed. But, it wasn’t power at all. It wasn’t strength. I can see it now. Feel it now. You and me, for the first time in my life, this is real. And it feels so beautiful.”

  “I know. It does. It really does. Look, there are a few more things I need to do. But I can stop this, Vaux. I can make it so I don’t kill Jimi, so the future doesn’t happen. I’ll come to you soon.”

  I think she blows me a kiss, but it’s hard to hear, might just be static.

  Just as I’m hanging up, Belle calls on the other line.

  “Can you come pick me up? I’m not cool to drive.”

  “You’re kidding, right?”

  “Pretty please.” And she even blows a kiss.

  EIGHT

  I make my way back over to Paris and find Belle sitting in the parking structure just outside the door to the Diviners’ danceteria.

  She’s sitting cross-legged, smoking a cigarette, and blinking furiously.

  I pull up, open the door, she hops in. Asks me to drop her off at a friend’s place in Arvada.

  I say, “And you can’t drive because…?”

  “It’s not obvious?”

  It is. She’s super messed up.

  Being with Belle in my car again is oddly comforting.

  Only, she’s not the Belle I dated. Not anymore. Now she’s part of some psychic underground. This girl, the drunk, the stoner, she’s like me.

  I’ve got all the windows down, the wind’s rushing in, and Belle’s hair’s swirling around like a messy halo.

  We’ve been talking about what just happened. Mostly I’ve been trying to get to what the Diviners want. I ask, “If they don’t think I can change what I’ve already seen, then why would they want to meet with me? Have the Metal Sisters dig in my head?”