That morning, I was speeding to work with one eye on my watch and one on the fuel gauge—nearly empty because I couldn’t afford gas.
I didn’t see the beer bottle in my lane. It exploded under my tire, and I lost control. Seconds later, I give Mrs. Katrina Gavitt—later the plaintiff in civil case 45901-C, Gavitt v. Horwitz (I’m Horwitz)—over a hundred grand in whiplash.
I’d already used the car wreck excuse for tardiness, and my boss didn’t harken well to the line that this time I was telling the truth. He said my final paycheck was in the mail. After that, not even the money Mom had left me could pay the rent for long. The economy was tanking, and the laid-off PhD-holders were consistently out-competing me for the hamburger-flipping jobs.
My assets melted like ice on a hot griddle. Eventually, I was homeless.
Have you ever realized that fatalism—the belief that “everything happens for a reason”—presupposes the great manipulator is a good and gracious God? That World War Two was actually meant to give rise to the benefits of nuclear energy? Such thinking is an act of faith.
I didn’t know it at the time, but my faith was sleeping on the park bench next to mine.
✽ ✽ ✽
To piss off my old boss, I moved into the park in front of the office building. Oh, there were homeless shelters, but the mattresses smelled like vomit, and since the weather was still warm some of the time, I preferred the park. Can’t say it was a bad life, though—still isn’t. Meals On Wheels drops by every night at eight. If I conserve my energy, I can get by on two sandwiches, a Coke, and bag of chips per day.
The only time Backwards Man ever seemed normal was when he was asleep on my nextdoor park bench. Otherwise he appeared as disturbed as the rest of my new peers. He walked everywhere backwards. I never did learn his real name.
Backwards Man had a thing for the written word—but not literature. Telephone books, bus schedules, baseball scores, and the TV Guide—anything in the garbage or gutter that revealed the biorhythms of society. He devoured the newspapers from the recycling bins. Usually they agitated him: “Chinese nuclears,” he’d say as he strolled backwards around the park, “nuclear Chinese. Summits and presidents; presidents thinking they’re on the summits. But no they’re not—no they’re not!”
As he walked, his eyes drank in the environment receding away from him, his gaze resting on the trees, the businessmen eating (or drinking) their lunches from brown bags, on the birds, on me. Sometimes he squirreled away a bottle cap or discarded fare card into his filthy trench coat.
“Hey,” I said one day as he walked past my bench. “Why do you go everywhere backwards?”
He stared at me, his face moving under a thick nest of a beard. “If I don’t, how will I know where I’m going?”
I didn’t understand what he meant until weeks later, when the falling temperatures blew wedges of birds across the sky.
Since he walked backwards, he noticed more than I did—spent more time studying his surroundings, whereas my horizon only extended to the next pedestrian who might give up a quarter. He saw where the birds would roost before they landed, and I mean this literally and figuratively.
“Don’t sleep under that tree tonight,” he said one day.
I raised my head from where I reclined against garbage bags of my clothes. “What?”
“You heard me.”
But I didn’t hear him, or I wasn’t listening, because when night fell, I moved from my park bench to the root-knot of my favorite tree.
Long about midnight, I dreamt I was in a rainstorm. I gasped awake to find that the water splattering my face was really birdshit. The roar of rainfall was really the sound of a thousand wings fluttering and shaking as the birds primped for the next leg of their migration.
As he watched me lug my guano-covered belongings out from under, Backwards Man laughed and laughed.
✽ ✽ ✽
Being homeless is a lot like being incarcerated, except you can go wherever you want. Like a convict, you have no hope of truly escaping your particular bowel of society. You also have lots of time to think about life—and that’s what I did the next day, aside from pondering why birds shit and piss through the same hole.
I wondered how many years Backwards Man must’ve been in the park to know the warning signs of a guano shower. I considered how experience had taught him to predict the future.
As I washed my face in a water fountain, I asked, “Hey, how did you know those birds were gonna land there?”
Bus 25-P went by, its brakes squealing so bad that I had to repeat the question.
He didn’t even look at me, so intent was he on the lawyer eating lunch on another park bench. “Seeds. Seed to tree, tree to seed. Backwards and forwards, know the whole process.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? I just want to know how to predict things.” Not just thinking about the birds, I added softly, “It could’ve saved me some trouble.”
He didn’t take his eyes off the lawyer. Seemed to be interested in the iced-T bottle by the man’s foot. “Predict? Don’t predict. Control. Seed to tree.”
“Still don’t get you.”
Baring his teeth in irritation, he pointed at my tree. “Know it. Know how it goes from seed to tree. Control the future.”
Ah, I thought. Now we’re getting somewhere.… If I only knew what the hell that meant.
But I did know what he meant—in my gut—and it took the metabolic boost of my eight o’clock peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches to bring it forth.
Like most people—like most smart people, I should say—Backwards Man learned from experience, only he was more past-oriented than most. His walking backwards was an extreme form of hindsight. All day long, he fixated on every rock and leaf and facial expression receding from him—and on every migrating bird. He always learned from the past so he could spot the seeds of the future in the present. And since he knew what seeds became what trees, he could dig them up or water them appropriately. He walked backwards to know where he was going, because unless he learned from the past, how would he control the future?
That’s a windbag way of putting something I should’ve learned intuitively in kindergarten, but you’d be surprised at how often I’ve planted the same seeds in the greenhouse of my life. Or maybe you wouldn’t.
Maybe you wouldn’t also be surprised to hear that a homeless man gets a mite bitter about things, especially when the nights get so cold that he sleeps on steam grates.
That maybe when he meets someone like Backwards Man, he gets goddamn suspicious. That the next time his heart sings a chorus of “Why me?” he starts thinking, “Why not?”
As in, “Why not? Maybe someone else is responsible.”
That maybe everything did happen for a reason, but it’s
Not
My
Fault!
My life, my mother, 1.3 million Africans: it all went to shit because someone—maybe the FBI, the CIA, the man behind the curtain, or Satan—knew so much about things that he saw the seeds of the future in his present, and arranged to have my kitchen window painted over.
Conspiracy. And if it was the last thing I ever did, I’d find out who was responsible.
That’s when the second glass bottle entered my life. Seeds have many forms.
✽ ✽ ✽
It was the last warm day of fall and about the same time I started steam grate shopping.
Backwards Man had memorized every newspaper article about the nuclear Chinese, reciting them to me—I swear to God—backwards, sounding like an audio book of Alice in Wonderland on random-track select. But when I pieced it together, I figured out there was a big whooptadoo meeting coming up between our president and the premier of China. Xing whatshisface was being such an asshole that although he’d flown all the way to Washington, DC, he was making our president come out to his embassy—several blocks from my park—just to see him. Said he wanted to “minimize” his time in contact with American soil. Our prez was so desperate
for Xing to disarm his nukes that he was going along with it.
Backwards Man produced the glass bottle. It was an iced-T empty he’d fished out of the trash after watching that lawyer I mentioned throw it away.
The lunch hour was still warm enough for people to eat outside, and the lawyer sat on the same bench everyday. He sat in exactly the same spot, wearing the same suits it seemed like, moving with the same on-time robotic predictability of any good businessman—a quality I lacked. The clock on the Bank of America building always read 12:05 when he showed his bald pate in my neighborhood.
At 12:04, Backwards Man, while making his slow backwards circuit around the sidewalks, pulled the iced-T bottle from the folds of his trench coat and placed it just-so under the park bench. A minute later, the lawyer walked up, brown bag lunch in hand, moving in the careless plod of bureaucratic cattle.
By accident, he toe-kicked the bottle before he sat down.
It flew across the sidewalk and into the street. Bus 25-P was going by at that instant, and like the other beer bottle and my car, it popped under the tire and sent the vehicle flying.
Well, not flying, but close enough. It wasn’t going as fast as my car had been, but do you know how hard it is to stop thirty tons of bus?
Another woman got a hundred grand of whiplash that afternoon, plus fifty grand of windshield glass stuck in her brain, and I’m only sorry it wasn’t that Katrina Gavitt bitch, or that the lawyer in question wasn’t my old boss. Now those would’ve been nice coincidences.
Seeing the wreck, the lawyer suddenly looked like he’d never bloodsucked anyone in his career, so pale was his face, although I’m sure if he hadn’t been responsible he would’ve been right there handing out his business card. As it was, the coward turned tail and ran inside. I made sure to point the police investigators in the right direction.
It didn’t occur to me until the next day that Backwards Man had engineered the whole affair.
The front page of the Washington Post facing out of the newspaper dispenser had this headline and subhead:
CHINESE LEADER GOES HOME BECAUSE PRESIDENT LATE TO SUMMIT
Car Accident on K St. Created Delay
My balls falling into my shoes, I read what I could of the article without buying the newspaper. The presidential motorcade had been cutting through on the way to the Chinese embassy when the bus accident snarled traffic. Xing-face, already a class-A asshole, like I said, was just looking for an excuse to go home in a huff. The disarmament talks were therefore suspended, and our bigmouth talking heads were saying this had brought us closer to war.
Backwards Man, goddammit, I should’ve known. The glass bottle trick gave him away.
He was obviously the one responsible for ruining my life and for killing those Africans—I was sure he’d planted the bottle in my lane that day—and now he was gonna cause us to go to nuclear war. The man was evil; he saw the seeds of the future, and he controlled everything from a peeling green park bench in Washington, DC.
I decided to kill him.
✽ ✽ ✽
I’m not capricious, you know. I don’t fly off the handle despite what Lauren may tell you. That’s why I looked for corroboration in Backwards Man’s belongings while he was off pissing behind the big statue. It’s odd how quickly you can find things when you know what you’re looking for, and right there at the top of his army duffel bag was a bus schedule for 25-P. There was also a corporate biography—I don’t know where the hell he got it—on the lawyer. Plus a map of China.
So that night, I said to him, “It’s getting cold. Let’s go to the shelter.”
He looked at me oddly, but nodded and picked up his things. Soon we were headed up the avenue, him walking backwards, me facing front. I pretended to be his friend; I put my hand on his shoulder to guide him along. I also acted like I was paranoid, saying, “Anyone following us?”
“No, I’m looking back,” he said. “No muggers or cops.”
“Anyone looking at us? I don’t like the way they stare.”
“No one watching.”
“Good,” I said, satisfied no one would see.
I curled my hand on his shoulder into a claw and yanked him into an alley.
“Ow, watch it!” he said. “You fuckin’—”
Clipped him across the mouth. Blood flew onto a brick wall.
Before he could recover, I picked up a metal shank I’d stashed there and rammed it into his left lung.
As I dragged him out of sight behind a dumpster, I said, “You’re not gonna cause any more wars. No more epidemics. You killed my mom.”
“No no no!” he said, his face crumpling with pain. “You got it wrong! I stopped war.”
“You fucked up the disarmament talks. The Chinese are gonna nuke us because of you.”
“No, I averted!” he said, and grasped weakly at my shoulder. “If the U.S. and China had allied, it would have disrupted the balance of power. Russia and India would’ve felt threatened, starting a causality chain towards armageddon!”
My resolve slipped. “What? What are you babbling about, old man?”
And that’s when he told me about the Opposer: someone like him, who can spot the seeds of events before they happen. Someone who can control the future—and whose evil must always be countered in a neverending chess game of manipulative causality.
But then I said, “No, you were responsible. You caused Lauren and me to break up, which killed all those Africans.”
“No no no,” he coughed. “Had nothing to do with Africa. Saved China, I said. Africa—that was the Opposer’s fault.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Proof! I’ll give you proof. You said the break-up with your girlfriend killed your mother—then killed the Africans?”
“Yep.”
“You had a final argument, no?”
“Uh huh.”
“How many triggers to the argument? How many causes?”
I thought of the painted window and Mr. Thompson. “Two, I think.”
“Ah! I can only control one at a time.” He coughed blood onto his chin, and his breathing grew more labored. He still gripped the bloody handle of the shank embedded in his side. “Synchronicity—that’s the Opposer.”
Synchronicity. It was one of many things Backwards Man talked about in his remaining time. Most importantly, I learned what a horrible crime I’d just committed. This is what I meant when I said the similarity of the two glass bottles was misleading; it had caused me to blame the wrong party. Misfortune—or the Opposer—had struck again.
Backwards Man was the Opposer’s counter. The force of good in the world. He’d been saving the planet from man-made disasters for decades, perhaps centuries. Not every tragedy, such as the African plague, could be stopped, but the ones he did manage to prevent, such as the nuclear war with Russia, at least got the world through another day.
And now I’d just killed him.
✽ ✽ ✽
“Everything happens for a reason.”
Those were his last words before his eyes rolled back into his head—still looking behind him in a way, although there was no future to plan for anymore.
If each event in time is meaningful, like a single domino falling over in a long chain of dominoes, then I have to believe meeting Backwards Man was also predestined. It’s possible the Opposer engineered that as well—if so, then I’m fucked—but I think there would’ve been easier ways for the Opposer to knock off his rival than by step-by-step ruining my life and thereby teaching me how to control the future.
That’s why, as I walked out of that cold alley, bidding goodbye to its cooling cargo, I felt myself taking up a new reason for living even as I picked up my first bottle cap, my first discarded playing card, and my first trampled bus schedule.
Walking backwards, I returned to my park bench and opened my eyes to the growing future.
Bummers
Life in Uncle Billy’s army weren’t no roll on a feather-filled mattress. We marched fifteen
miles a day toward Savannah, foraging and pillaging, lest we stay in one place too long and starve. I had holes in my shoes and a chill shaking me clean through my blue uniform coat. But you know what? I was the best damn soldier in the Union.
Too bad I couldn’t tell my fellow bummers I was really a woman. That would’ve gotten their goat for sure.
My foraging squad today consisted of fourteen privates and a corporal. We wore clothes confiscated from Georgian homes since leaving Atlanta three weeks ago. Private Charles, marching beside me, wore a striped vest and dandy bowler with a feather in the brim. He moved his rifle to his other shoulder so he could address me from the corner of his mouth: “Still have that pitcher?”
I pretended not to hear. “That cotton plantation, we’ll be there by nightfall.”
“Francis,” he said, louder. “The pitcher. You have it?”
Francis, with an “i-s,” was my male name. Charles had no idea my given name was Frances, with an “e-s.” He also thought I was just a slender twenty-year-old who didn’t need to shave yet.
“Francis!”
The others glanced over their shoulders at us. One man cursed as he tripped into a wheel rut and splashed through a puddle. Georgia might be in the balmy South, sure, but a December puddle weren’t no dip in a hot spring.
“Yes, I have the picture,” I said. “Now will you hush?”
“I want it tonight.”
“But it’s mine.”
He leaned close so only I could hear. “Let me have it, or I’ll tell General William T. Sherman himself you got a nekkid-woman pitcher in a frame.”
“Hell, you tell Uncle Billy that, and he’ll give me a ribbon.”
Charles shrugged. “All right, then.” He held tight to the blanket tied bandolier-style across his shoulder and hip, and made as if to hurry to the front of the line. “Say, Jessie. You’ll never guess what old Francis here has—”
I grabbed his shoulder and hauled him back. “Confound you. It’s a picture of my girl.”
“I doubt it.”
“You ain’t got no right to it.”
Dominoes in Time Page 15
