“Oh Lord. Disco?” I roll my eyes, but set to work with the silver degravitizer, scanning it across the roller skate wheel like Mym taught me, removing the gravitite particles inside that enabled it to follow us through time. I consider objecting to the idea, but I have to be honest with myself, I’d probably follow her anywhere.
“So where does one go to roller disco in the seventies?”
“The beginning.” Mym rummages around and removes more items.
“And where is the beginning?”
“Brooklyn.” She’s intent on something in her hands. “I’m taking you to The Empire.”
She’s studying a photo of a shelf with an iron, a bowl of whisks, and a pair of purple suede roller skates on it.
“Is that at the roller rink?”
“No. We can’t make it to The Empire straight from here. It’s too far to jump with these chronometers. That’s okay, we need to stop and pick up my skates anyway.” She stands and adjusts her satchel, then sticks her hand out for the wheel. I toss it to her, and she sets it precariously on the railing. “Okay. Don’t shake the tower.”
I step cautiously toward her. “What’s the date?”
“May 18th, 1973. 1600 Zulu.”
I dial the time into my chronometer and reach for the top of the roller skate wheel. “We good on elevation?”
Mym extends a tape measure to the platform at our feet and checks the height of the railing. “Perfect.”
My right hand is poised atop my chronometer, the fingertips of my chronometer hand pressed to the wheel, keeping firm contact to our anchor in real time.
“Wait. Hang on.” Mym squints at the photo and then rotates the wheel 180 degrees. “We don’t want to end up in the floor.” She grins up at me. “Ready?”
“Ready as I’m going to be.” I eye the long drop from the platform, then quickly bring my attention back to the wheel. Once we’re gone, the wheel will likely tumble to the ground, but we’ll be years away.
“Three . . . two . . . one . . . push.”
I press the pin on the side of my chronometer and blink.
<><><>
The room smells like dust and potpourri. I take my fingers off the roller skate on the shelf in front of me and eye my surroundings. Old women are picking through clothing racks and bric-a-brac as dim light filters through dingy subterranean windows. In the corner, the cash register drawer dings as it shuts. The chime blends with the muffled sounds of car horns and traffic.
“You keep your skates in a thrift store?”
“It’s not easy to find purple suede skates in my size.” Mym picks up the skates and holds them to her cheek. “And they have rainbow laces. You have to snatch treasure up when you find it.”
“I guess so.” I smile and follow her toward the counter. I almost collide with her as she stops at a rack of sunglasses and plucks a pair of men’s aviators from among them. She turns and slips them on.
“What do you think?”
“Um, I think they’re a little big for your face.”
She considers me briefly. “I feel bad for you.”
“What? Why?”
“Because you’re going to have to keep looking at them. I love them.” She grins and spins back toward the counter. A bell rings as the door to the basement shop opens and a gust of wind follows a middle-aged woman inside. It brings the smell of truck exhaust and hot dogs. I step toward the door and grab it before it closes. Outside, the concrete steps lead upward to a sidewalk full of foot traffic, and beyond the road, a six-story apartment building. I glance back briefly at Mym paying for her skates and then climb upward into the urban noise.
Cabs and trucks clog the street as pedestrians stream past me, a fashionable mix of wide collars and ties, plaid bellbottoms, paisley shirts, and a smattering of turtlenecks and sweater vests. I stand on the top step of the thrift store entrance and breathe in 1973 New York. Despite the exhaust and a faint odor of trash, there is a tang of salt breeze in the air and a pleasant mix of ethnic foods. After a few moments, Mym joins me. “It’s great, right?”
“Sure is busy.”
“Well, it’s the middle of the day in Manhattan.”
“Where’s this place we’re going skating?”
“It’s in Brooklyn, but that’s not for a couple of years yet. Come on, you want to grab lunch?”
“Yeah, I could eat.”
“There’s this little Italian place called Angelina’s on Mulberry Street that has the most amazing calzones. It’s a bit of a walk, but it’s worth it.”
“I’m in.”
It’s cool in the shade of the buildings, and I relish the brief moments of sun on my bare arms as we traverse the corner crosswalk. I dodge pedestrians while trying to keep up with Mym’s brisk pace as she plunges into the shadow of the next building. She moves with the confidence of someone at home in her surroundings, flitting among the foot traffic with fluid ease, her purple skates hung casually over one shoulder. I narrowly miss being run down by a bicycle and stuff my hands into my jeans pockets to make myself a little thinner. As I skirt past a pair of rabbis, I find Mym waiting for me near a streetlight.
“Come on, pokey. I want to beat the lunch rush.”
“Hey, I take up a lot more space than you do. I think these people treat that as a sin.”
“People here live fast.” She observes me over the rim of her new sunglasses. “Better learn to keep up.” She winks before leading the way on. I appreciate her figure as she walks away, watching the curves that my hands have yet to touch. I entertain the thought for just a moment, then jog to catch up.
“You come to New York a lot?” I fall into step beside her.
“I try to. There are some great people here.”
“There’s certainly enough to choose from.”
Mym slows to look at me. “You’ve never been to New York?”
“I passed through once as a kid with my parents, but I’ve never explored it as an adult.”
“Then today is your lucky day. After lunch I can give you the tour.”
“You going to show me the constructing of the Empire State Building?”
“Hmm, that would be a long way back,” she muses. “Although I’ve always wanted to get a picture of me like one of those guys eating lunch up on the girders over the city. We might have to add that to the extended tour.”
“Ha. You’ll have to have one of the workers snap that shot. No way you’re getting me out there on one of those.”
“You just wait, Ben. A few weeks of traveling with me, and we’ll have those heights issues vanquished.”
My heartbeat quickens. I haven’t asked how long she plans on traveling around with me. The idea of getting weeks with her makes me feel happy enough that I imagine I might be coaxed onto a few girders after all. I try not to show the eagerness on my face. “I guess we’ll see.”
An opening shop door halts me in my tracks as a group of women spills out onto the sidewalk from a boutique. A pretty young mother snags a wheel of her stroller on the doorstop, bringing the ladies behind her to a halt. I grab the door handle and open the door farther to help her extricate it.
“Thanks so much.” The woman smiles, and another half dozen ladies thank me as I hold the door for their exit. The press of women moves onward along the sidewalk and I stretch to peer over their heads.
Mym is three shops down, shaking her head, but smiling. As I close the door behind the last straggler, another figure lurches up from the next shop entrance. In a tattered corduroy coat and porous straw fedora, he ricochets off a planter near the doorway and staggers toward the women. The group parts like a flock of swallows, reconvening beyond him with titters of consternation and a few hands held to noses.
The vagrant ignores the slight and tips his fedora in delayed cordiality, but stays his stumbling course toward me. I step to the side, but he sways with me, reaching out to my arms, raised to avert our collision. His right hand wraps around my wrist and clamps it with a near painful strength.
>
“Whoa, buddy. You doing okay?” I plant my other hand against his chest, to keep him at a distance and prop him up. His lean face is lined and dirty, but his stark, gray eyes have a sharp clarity despite his unbalanced state. I recoil from the scent of stale beer and halitosis, but before I can free my wrist from his grasp, he teeters and falls, dragging my arm across my body and down to the ground. Pain shoots up my wrist as my palm strikes the concrete and my vision suddenly goes dark. I’ve landed partially atop the vagrant, my other hand outstretched to the sidewalk beyond his head. I jerk my left arm out of his grip and jolt back to my feet. The world is changed.
Shaded sunlight has been replaced with an ink black sky. Streetlights illuminate sidewalks only populated by a few restaurant patrons retreating into the night. Mym is gone. I spin around and search the way I’ve come. I’ve been displaced. I check my chronometer. It still reads the settings I had from my last jump. How is that possible? Shouldn’t I have ended up on this sidewalk in daylight?
The vagrant is struggling to get back to his feet. His left hand is crushing his straw hat as he tries to get his legs under him. He stretches a hand out to me for assistance. I sigh and grab his wrist, pulling a little more firmly than necessary. On his feet, the man gives me a scowl. “You didn’t have to knock me down!” This is followed by a jerk as he pulls his arm from my grip and staggers toward the wall, a trail of slurred curses in his wake.
I look back to my surroundings and rub my wrist. My pulse throbs against the band of my chronometer. I gingerly remove it and hold it in my hand. This is the second time I’ve injured my wrist in a week. It was only just beginning to heal from the first fall. On that occasion, I plummeted out a window trying to save my friend. I considered myself lucky to have walked away with just a sprain. Getting knocked down by a random homeless man seems far less worthwhile.
I recheck my chronometer settings. Still set to 1600 Zulu. So how is it nighttime? Did the jolt from the fall break it? I study the different concentric rings, seeing if anything is amiss. Nothing is wrong externally. I give it a shake and listen for anything loose inside. Nothing.
Shit. What am I supposed to do now? I look around, hoping that at any moment Mym will suddenly appear to scold me for being careless and take us along our way. There is no one except a cab driver sitting outside a bar at the end of the block, his hazard lights pulsing their warning to the night. At a loss for what to do, I walk back the way I’ve come. The streets are less inviting in the darkness. The towering buildings no longer look inspiring, but loom overhead on the fringe of night, lifeless hulks obliterating the stars.
I slip my chronometer onto my other wrist and fidget with the dials. I consider trying to jump back to the time I left. Will it still work? I don’t even know how far I’ve gone. Will I have enough power to get back? My mind goes back to Dr. Quickly’s lessons, and the varied tales he told of ways time travelers could meet their demise. They involved everything from fusing into walls to flinging yourself off the planet into the void of space. Those were things that could happen with a working chronometer. What about if it’s broken? Am I going to blink myself out of existence? I’ve heard stories of time travelers not anchoring themselves properly for a jump and vanishing completely. Some say there is a place you go that exists outside of time, but there the line between science and urban legend starts to blur. Every time traveler learns early on to avoid that scenario.
Those lessons feel as though they’re a long time ago, though for me it’s only been a matter of weeks. History would say it hasn’t happened yet. It will be nearly a decade till I’m even born, farther still when I’ll first be sent through time. But this is time travel. Middles can come before beginnings, and it’s anyone’s guess where the end might be.
As I cross to the next block, I glance down the side street and note a cluster of young men loitering on the stoop of an apartment building. A dozen eyes follow my progress. Without my usual method of escape, I feel suddenly vulnerable under their gaze. I check myself to keep from walking faster. I continue with feigned ease for another half block until I’m well out of sight, and then stop.
Get yourself together, Ben. You’re fine. You’re just in New York . . . in 1973. I glance back at the vacant street behind me and then force myself to think. What now? I do a mental inventory of my belongings. Besides a possibly broken chronometer, my possessions are down to a wallet, pen, Swiss Army knife, and Mym’s degravitizer that I forgot to put back in her backpack. I also have Dr. Quickly’s worn leather journal stuck in my back pants pocket. I pull that out and walk a few steps toward the nearest streetlamp to read it. I flip through the handwritten scribbles and drawings, searching for the section on the workings of the chronometer. The book had been a gift, but a utilitarian one, filled with the carefully depicted details of a lifetime of research.
I stop on a page showing a partially disassembled chronometer. Staring at the drawing of the component parts, I immediately realize I’m out of my depth. Even if I had the tools, there’s no way I would even be able to recognize what was broken. I slap the journal shut. A murmur alerts me that the men from the stoop have moved to the corner behind me. The tallest of the bunch is eyeing me from under a disheveled mop of hair, one hand conspicuously lingering in the pocket of his sweatshirt. The expressions on the young men’s faces range from frigid to glacial. I break my eyes away and continue walking. A subtle shuffling indicates that I won’t be alone.
They’ve just got somewhere to go this direction. Nothing to worry about.
A bus rumbles past but doesn’t slow. A single old man is staring into the night from the illuminated interior, lost in a daydream or his own reflection. I’m nearly at the corner and, other than my skulking shadows, all pedestrians seem to have evaporated. Isn’t this supposed to be the city that never sleeps?
I’m just considering breaking into a run when a smoke-black Cadillac materializes from the side street. It oozes to the curb at the corner ahead of me and, as I approach, hearty chuckles trickle from the darkness of the open rear window. “Benjamin, Benjamin, Benjamin. We’ve been looking all over for you. You had us worried, my friend.”
The door swings open and the dome light illuminates the plush interior and the lounging figure of a substantial, well-dressed man in his forties. His glossy hair matches his Burt Reynolds mustache. I’ve never seen him before. “You shouldn’t just go wandering off around here, Ben. The locals can get territorial in the wee hours.”
I stoop to peer into the car. The driver is a hulk in a suit coat. The man in the back pats the seat next to him. “Get in.”
“I don’t know you.”
The man’s eyes narrow, but then his face lightens and he gives me a cheek-stretching grin. “I forget how young you still are, Ben. Of course! This is your first time meeting me.” He extends a hand. “Gioachino Amadeus. But call me Geo.” I let his hand linger in midair. Finally, he pats the seat next to him. “Come on. We’ll get you out of here.”
I glance back down the sidewalk. My flock of followers has stalled out mid-block and is idling near a barred grocer’s shop. A few of them are involved in subtle conversation, but the tall one is still just staring at me.
“How did you know where to find me?”
Geo stretches his arm along the back of the seat with a knowing smile. “We time travelers have to stick together, Benjamin.”
“Mym sent you?”
“You don’t think she’d just leave you out here on your own do you? You can trust me, Ben. We’re destined to be great friends.”
“Most of my friends drive themselves.”
“Well then, it looks like you’re moving up in the world. Now hop in. We’ve got places to be.”
I take one last look at the city skyline, blending vaguely into a motor oil sky, and climb in. The Cadillac ebbs back into the street, and as the dome light fades, we are swallowed by the ocean of night.
“To time travel, you will need: a body and clothing embedded with gravitites, a ch
ronometer, a suitable anchor, and a willingness to change everything about your life as you know it. The last item tends to be the stickler.”–Journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 1998
Chapter 2
Past the bulging veins in the driver’s neck, the clock on the dash reads 03:28. I settle into my seat and find the seatbelt. Geo is watching me with an amused, crooked smile.
“What’s the date today?” I ask.
“It’s May 19th. But not for much longer.”
“Are we headed back to yesterday? I’m supposed to be going to lunch.”
“And that is exactly where we’ll take you, but we have a stop to make first.”
“Where’s Mym?”
“She’s waiting right where you left her. Why did you leave her, by the way? What’re you doing on the streets in the middle of the night?”
“I don’t know. I got knocked down and just ended up here. I think there may be an issue with my chronometer.”
“That sounds serious. You should probably let me have someone look at that for you.” Geo’s eyes stay fixed on my chronometer until I slip my arm to my side. “I have some great people for that sort of thing.”
The car makes a series of turns and suddenly plunges down an alley. The driver veers past a set of dumpsters, and the headlights wash over a pair of men with shoulder holsters standing sentry near a metal service door. The car continues past without slowing, and I twist in my seat to take another look at the guards out the back window.
“They’re with me,” Geo says. “We take security very seriously.”
As we near the end of the alley, the way is blocked by a shipping container that occupies the entire space between the buildings. Two more sentries are standing at its doors with automatic weapons. A third guard appears on the left and the driver rolls his window down and slows for him. The guard nods in recognition and signals to the other two. We are close enough to hear the clank of the handle being thrown on the cargo container doors, and they swing wide ahead of us. The driver accelerates and aims the Cadillac up two wheel-width ramps, plunging us into the blackness of the container. I clamp down on the door handle when I realize he isn’t braking, and tense my muscles, expecting any second to crash into the back of the container. Instead, the car is suddenly bathed in daylight as we exit the other side. A rat darts out of the way as we descend the ramps. I bounce once as the rear wheels hit the pavement. I pivot in my seat and see two more guards swinging the container doors shut behind us.
In Times Like These: eBook Boxed Set: Books 1-3 Page 44
