Temporally Out of Order

by Unknown

  What amount did she want? Ellie bit her lip. Two hundred pounds. That was her daily limit. She hit the number quickly and the money machine’s inner workings whirred.

  Lights flashed and the ATM offered her card back. The lower slot clacked open and neatly folded sheets of white paper came out. She felt weak kneed with relief. As she collected the old notes, she looked into the bank through the glass door. Someone else had joined the group at the Enquiry Desk. A man with a toolbox.

  Ellie shoved the white fivers deep into her coat pocket. The machine clicked and chuntered and offered up her receipt. She took it with trembling hands and headed for the coffee shop opposite. Not that caffeine would calm her nerves but she needed somewhere to sit down and collect her thoughts.

  “A latte, please, a small one.” She didn’t listen as the barista painstakingly explained the pretentious names they were trained to use instead of straight-forward sizes.

  “Do you want that to drink in or to take away?” the girl asked.

  “Drink in, thanks.” Ellie unzipped her wallet and found she just had enough change of her own to pay for it. She wasn’t about to break into the busking money they’d spent so long counting and bagging.

  She didn’t stop to find any sugar but headed straight for the back and the corner table near the loos. That put plenty of empty seats between her and the other customers. Emptying her pocket, Ellie unfolded and counted out the white sheets. Five pound notes from the 1930s. Forty of them.

  The crisp paper rattled as her hand shook. Could she really get two hundred and fifty pounds for each one?

  She realised she had no real idea how anyone went about selling old money to collectors. Eleanor decided she hardly wanted to risk trying to sell them herself through eBay. Through an auction house then, or maybe an antique dealer?

  She’d ask around, she concluded, looking for dealers who seemed honest and who asked fewest questions. She’d sell the notes a few at a time, so as not to be too noticeable. A legacy from a grandparent, that’s what she’d say they were.

  Ellie folded up the fivers carefully and opened the satchel to stow them safely in the inside zip pocket. Forty of them worth two hundred and fifty pounds each? Ten thousand pounds?

  She drank her coffee, wincing at the bitterness. Hardly. Whoever bought them off her to sell on would surely take some sort of commission. But even if their cut was twenty percent, she’d still make eight thousand pounds.

  More than enough to pay for a year doing that music course. Her parents couldn’t possibly argue if she wasn’t asking them to fund it or having to dip into her inheritance. That money could stay in the bank until she needed it for a deposit on a flat or something just like Gran had wanted.

  As long as these notes were genuine, never mind what bizarre circumstance had loaded them into the ATM. She had better find out, and fast. That two hundred pounds was Ellie’s food money for the last weeks of term until she went home for Christmas. If she needed to go back to the bank and get her bank balance corrected, the sooner she did that, the better.

  She checked her watch. Nearly ten o’clock. She’d better hurry if she didn’t want to miss Doctor Maund explaining the transition from Merovingian to Carolingian kings. She’d have to drag the heavy satchel of busking coins along with her too. There wasn’t any chance of taking that back to the flat first.

  After the lecture? Ellie drained her tall glass cup and remembered the antiquarian bookseller and print dealer whose shop was tucked away down the alley, a little way beyond the cabbies’ cafe. She’d only ever looked longingly at the framed maps of eighteenth century England and Ireland in the window, but surely that was as good a place as any to start asking questions.

  Right, that was the plan. She’d go there after her lecture. If the antiquarian said the notes were fakes, she’d go straight back to the bank and hand them in. While she was there, she’d pay in the busking money. Ellie rose to her feet and gathered up the black satchel and her backpack.

  She really, really hoped that those fivers would turn out to be genuine…

  TEMPORALLY OUT OF ODOR: A FRAGRANT FABLE

  by Jeremy Sim

  Philip Jackson shrugged uncomfortably in his fake lab coat, his stomach already churning with nerves. He checked his clipboard for the fourth time to make sure he had the right room—Ward 204—and the right patient—Walter Mukerjee, aged sixty-one, nasal. Then he steeled himself and knocked.

  He entered without waiting for a response, just like a real doctor would. Inside, a roundish Indian man looked up from the hospital bed, his spherical belly half-obscured by sheets. The man had a mean look about him, but the most striking thing about Walter Mukerjee were the bandages that sat triangularly in the middle of his face, creating a flat white void where his nose should have been. Even to Philip, who dealt regularly with prosthetics patients of all kinds, the effect was quite unsettling.

  Philip cleared his throat, a split-second late. “You must be Mr. Mukerjee.”

  “And you must be one of those imbecile doctors who can’t read a clipboard,” snapped Mukerjee. “Obviously I’m Mukerjee. What do you want?”

  “Uh,” said Philip. “Right. I’m Dr. Jackson, one of the prostheticists in charge of your case? I understand you’re having an issue with your new nose?”

  “Yes, I jolly well am.” Mukerjee had a pronounced Indian accent, which combined with the plaster over his nose made him sound like a New Delhi version of Donald Duck. “It’s the bloody prototypes.” Mukerjee frisbeed a sheaf of papers across the bed, making Philip flinch. It was a gallery of digitally-rendered nose prototypes, the standard set offered by Pfalzer-Grumman. Mukerjee’s face stared angrily up at him, nine per page, each with a different nose.

  “Uh, what seems to be the problem?”

  “There’s not a decent one in the whole stack! They make me look like a clown, or a squirrel. Have any of you plastic surgery freaks ever seen a real nose before?”

  Philip flipped through the proofs. There were around thirty noses on display: long, short, bulbous, upturned, et cetera. The techs had actually done a decent job with the skin tone this time. But it was true that none of the noses really seemed to fit Mukerjee. Some of the noses actually came out quite scary on him.

  Philip sighed. On normal days he sat in a small gray cubicle in a small gray corner answering calls on the Customer Satisfaction line. It was boring work—and he had limited power to actually help people—but at least it had the advantage of privacy. What he hated most were the personal visits: when a situation called for it, he visited customers while they were still in their hospital beds.

  What he was doing today was borderline unethical, really. Mukerjee was unhappy with his nose prototypes. Why? Because Pfalzer-Grumman had such a limited selection of noses. Demand for them was low. No sense spending extra development costs on it, especially at a time when the whole company was scrambling to port their old database into the latest modeling software. Philip’s job today was basically to con Mukerjee into being happy with a crappy nose.

  “What about this one?” said Philip cautiously. “Personally, I think it makes you look quite dashing. A little like James Bond. The Sean Connery version.”

  “Rubbish,” said Mukerjee.

  Philip put on his most charming, yet vulnerable smile. “Remember that these are only two-dimensional depictions of a sophisticated product. Our prostheticists are highly trained, and they’ve been satisfying customers for over twenty-two years.”

  Mukerjee’s face was like stone.

  Philip ran his hands through his prematurely thinning hair. He sat down. “You know, I’m pretty new at the company, and I haven’t actually seen the guys fab a nose prosthetic yet. But they do a pretty good job with everything else. Glass eyes, ears, nipples. Especially nipples. Give us a long weekend and we’ll pop out a nipple like nobody’s business.” He forced a smile. “Hey,” he said, as if noticing the third page of proofs for the first time. “Prototype 6D looks natural. I think it might act
ually come out well in final.”

  “No,” said Mukerjee. “That one is creepy as hell. I told you, I’ve been over them again and again. If some of them looked alright, I wouldn’t have called you in here. Do I look like a vain man? I just don’t want to look like an imbecile for the rest of my life.”

  Philip closed his eyes briefly. The sad part was that Mukerjee was right. Of course he should be entitled to a nose that he was pleased with. It was a pretty important part of his face, after all. And if he wasn’t happy with Pfalzer-Grumman’s noses, he should be able to take his business to a company with a wider selection. But that wasn’t how it worked. Mukerjee’s insurance was partnered with the hospital, who had an agreement with Pfalzer-Grumman. Part of Philip’s job was to make sure the customer never saw that.

  Philip’s stomach gurgled. He often got stomach pains on the job, especially when he had to deal with tense situations like these. His psychiatrist said it was a byproduct of his social anxiety, a holdover from a traumatic childhood. Philip suspected that if this continued much longer, he would need to pay an urgent visit to the restroom.

  He could only think of one way of helping Mukerjee, a kind of corporate loophole. It meant long explanations to all his supervisors and a lot of extra paperwork, but his stomach was aching now, and he didn’t want to be in this room any longer with this old, disfigured man who hated him. If he wrapped things with Mukerjee up now, he wouldn’t have to come back after his toilet trip.

  “You know what?” said Philip. “I just had a conversation with a researcher at a partner firm of ours, and he was telling me all about this new technology they’re developing for custom nasal prostheses, using a quantum scanning procedure. They use your DNA to reconstruct your nose from scratch. 101% of your old nose back, they say.”

  That was literally what it said on the cheap-looking pamphlet Philip had received that morning, stuck in his company mailbox under a pile of memos and a take-out menu for the local Thai place. It was for a company called Nasex, obviously one of those biotech popups that sprung up around the area like weeds. Guys who thought they could rule the world with two technicians, a 3D printer, and a pirated copy of AutoCAD. But the companies had their uses. If Pfalzer-Grumman outsourced a job to them, they could almost certainly get it done for cheap. And obviously the Nasex guys had no corporate leverage: they had to offer some kind of foolproof guarantee to stay in business. If Mukerjee wasn’t happy, Pfalzer-Grumman could make them sweat for it.

  Mukerjee was mumbling something about incompetence and rotting in hell. Philip cut him off. “So what do you say we give the new technology a shot? It’s got promise, likely going to be the new thing in our field. If you end up hating the prototype, contact us and we’ll take it back. You won’t be locked down to anything. At the very least it’ll give you more options to choose from.”

  Mukerjee seemed to be assembling a response.

  “I’ll have the nurse come in for a blood sample. That’s all they need for the prototype. Kind of amazing, when you think about it.” Philip stood suddenly, clutching the clipboard in front of his chest like a shield. “I’ll touch base with you in a couple weeks. It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Mr. Mukerjee.”

  He needed the bathroom, fast. He was glad when the heavy door to Mukerjee’s room stood between him and that awful, noseless gaze.

  oOo

  Three weeks later Walter Mukerjee sat alone in an empty visiting room, waiting for the nurse to return. His palms were sweating.

  How had he let it come this far? Just a week ago they had mailed a sample to his house, a crude hunk of plastic that came with a disclaimer saying that it was only a low-res approximation of the final product. A final product they would apparently create from his DNA, using some sort of “quantum” wizardry. Whatever that meant. It was frightening, technology these days.

  But the nose had looked alright. Better than any in the first batch. It actually reminded him of his old nose: before the car accident, before everything.

  “Ana, what do you think?” he had asked the ceiling that evening, the sample nose lying on his chest like a tiny mammal. Would she approve of him getting a new nose? Or would she dislike the falseness of it? Surely she would have wanted him to look like his old self again. But would she be sad, feel like he was moving on without her?

  He knew such thoughts were silly. But they had been married for forty years, and the nose was his first major decision without Ana’s input. It felt wrong. He’d lost a nose and a wife in the crash, and apparently only the nose could be replaced with a prosthetic. He was surprised by the smile at his own joke, the pinpricks of tears in his eyes.

  But in the end he had said yes to the prosthetics company. The irreversible yes: it meant his new nose would enter production, and except for a little fine-tuning and adjustment it was his new nose for life.

  He hadn’t been ready for that level of finality. But he was getting tired: of the isolation, the stares from strangers, the pointing, the laughter.

  He shifted uncomfortably on the wax paper.

  A gentle knock sounded at the door and the nurse entered. She had a tiny cardboard box with her, much smaller than Walter had anticipated.

  “Here it is!” she said, in the tones of someone introducing a two-year-old to a new teddy. She fumbled with the box and pulled open the lid.

  Inside the box, resting on a velvet-lined mold, was his nose.

  And it was his nose; there was no mistaking it. Flaws and all, down to the pores. A perfect replica: the mottled skin, the slight asymmetry, the color, everything. It couldn’t have been done any better. Over the last couple weeks he had almost gotten used to the skull-like slits in his face. Now he knew what he had been missing.

  Walter’s throat tightened. He felt his face go hot. He looked at the nose for a moment, taking in every detail, relief washing over him like a wave.

  “Let’s try it on, shall we?” said the nurse. She was compassionately tactful, touching him on the shoulder to turn him toward the light. For an instant, Walter was glad that she was treating him like a two-year-old.

  She took out a small, brown bottle. “This is the non-toxic adhesive you’ll be using to affix your nose,” she said, brushing a cold liquid onto his face. “You can think of it as face glue. It lasts about three days; you’ll be able to take your nose on and off for showers and such without reapplying. And it’s completely safe. If you notice the adhesive getting a little weak, just dab a little more on.”

  With the air of an enthusiast tacking on the final part of a model airplane, she pressed the nose straight onto his face. She held his chin and tilted to look at him from several angles.

  “It looks fantastic. Honestly. We usually recommend that new prosthetics patients consider wearing eyeglasses to give their face a more unified look—kind of hides the falseness, you know? But I don’t think that’ll be necessary for you. Have a look.”

  She held up a hand-mirror and Walter looked.

  The nurse was right. It was extraordinary. It was miraculously, magically, perfect.

  It was as if the accident had never happened at all.

  oOo

  “What do you mean it doesn’t smell right?” asked Philip Jackson two days later. He held the phone cradled to his ear, and he was struggling to hear Walter Mukerjee’s voice over the bustle of the office. “You mean it smells like plastic? That’s a common issue with new prosthetics, I’m afraid. The smell goes away after a couple of days. I’d suggest rinsing it with soap and warm water and letting it air dry for an afternoon.” He listened intently to Mukerjee’s reply, scrunching his face to make out the thickly-accented words. “I’m sorry, could you repeat that?” Someone had started the copy machine, which stood ten feet from Philip’s desk. “Ah, Christ,” he muttered. “Listen, Mr. Mukerjee. Let me come pay you a home visit. Yes. I’ve got your address right here. I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  He hung up. Today was just one thing after another. That morning, the boss had called them al
l into the conference room for a meeting, where he’d announced that Pfalzer-Grumman had just concluded negotiations and would be merging with Oppenthorp Medical at the end of the month. The resulting company would be called Pfalzer-Grumman-Oppenthorp. A buzz of constant chatter inundated the office today, and nobody was getting anything done. It put Philip seriously on edge.

  Just as well that old man called, Philip thought, as he grabbed his coat.

  “So let me get this straight,” he said an hour later, seated in one of Mukerjee’s faded armchairs. Mukerjee had gruffly presented him with a cup of tea, which now sat steaming on the coffee table between them. Philip had taken a sip and immediately regretted it. It was black as ink, and tasted like Mukerjee had gone about five scoops overboard with the Ceylon. “You, uhh, experience strange smells when you’re wearing the nose?”

  “Yes,” said Mukerjee. Without the bandages covering his nose, the duck-like-quality of his voice had disappeared. His new nose looked natural, almost frighteningly real. “I smell things that aren’t present. I’ll be getting dressed in the walk-in-closet and I’ll smell curry. I’ll be taking out the garbage and I’ll smell perfume. And it’s not just once or twice. It happens all the time, fifty times a day. It just doesn’t make sense.”

  “I see,” said Philip, eyeing Mukerjee carefully. He instantly knew that it wasn’t an issue with the prosthetic. Mukerjee had a neurological problem. His brain was associating smells as a way of dealing with emotional trauma. He had heard of cases like this, like when soldiers relived the smells and sounds of mortar shells.

  “It’s not in my head,” said Mukerjee scathingly, as if he had heard Philip’s thoughts. “Do you think I didn’t think of that? I went for a day without the prosthetic. No weird smells. The instant I put it on again, I smelled Christmas trees. I took it off again—the smell disappeared. Does that sound neurological to you?”