Time Travel Omnibus, page 1026
They both swiveled at a joyful cry. A man, still in dirty work clothes gathered up a woman and child into his arms. The woman was speaking fast, high, excited, and then was stopped by the man’s passionate kiss. A small wordless sound escaped Anthony’s lips, his mind filled with memories of his father returning from business trips.
Monica looked at Anthony, then at the family, and then at Anthony again. He felt the wetness in his eyes, a tear running down his left cheek. He watched her piece together the snippets of his story, shared over coffee and pillows during their engagement. Her eyes widened, mouth shaping into a small O.
“Your grandfather,” she said.
Anthony nodded, wiping away the tears from both cheeks. There were still a few people getting off the boat.
“The records say he was here. I haven’t seen him yet,” he said, gaze roving back across the faces. She punched his shoulder.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Monica stepped in front of him, pressing closer. The lavender of her perfume mixed with the lingering antiseptic scent. She grabbed his chin, forcing him to look at her. “Talk to me, husband.”
Anthony closed his eyes, listening to the waves, the seagulls. The crowd was thinning; he could pick out individual voices, words in different languages. He took a deep breath, willing the dark despair back down his throat before opening his eyes.
“Talk to me, baby,” she said. “Let me in your head.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Anthony looked past her face, past the sunlight in her hair to the ferry beyond.
“Bullshit.” Anthony’s attention snapped back to her. Her cheeks burned red, the light flashed in her eyes. “It does matter. You brought me here, you chose this for our honeymoon, and you didn’t tell me the real reason why.”
It sounded stupid as he said it. “I thought you would be mad.”
“Jesus,” she whispered, pulling away and turning to look back at the boat. “I want to hold you and slap you at the same time.”
The few immigrants who remained clutched multilingual handbills promising work while following better dressed men into the city. Anthony slowly reached out to her. When his hand brushed the soft hair on the side of her neck, she tensed, and then leaned back into him.
Her voice was soft. “This is your grandfather who had the stroke, right?”
“Yeah,” Anthony said. “I was an idiot, arguing with him over stupid things. Probably sent his blood pressure through the roof. Caused it.”
Monica slid under his arm until she was facing him again. “Good to know some things don’t change,” she said smiling, and kissed his cheek.
Anthony pulled her close and spoke into her hair. “They’re raising the ramp now. I missed him. I only know he was on this ferry, then in the mines two weeks later.” He sighed. “We only have a few hours left before we have to go.”
Monica kissed him again. “We can finish the tour. We can just go to that speakeasy, baby, and try to enjoy ourselves.”
Anthony tried to smile as they turned away from the dock. “This is the past, and I have to concentrate on the present, right?”
The alley outside the club stank of piss and nausea. Inside, it was clean and glittering. The jazz quartet’s jackets shone silky blue, and waiters brought gin in teacups to the tables. Cigarette smoke hung in a low cloud over the dancing crowd.
“Are you sure it’s safe?” Monica asked when the music paused.
“Relax,” Anthony said. “There’s no raid here tonight. They checked that when they made up the itinerary.”
With a musical slide of notes, the trumpet player led the band into another song. A young woman, hair bobbed and hose turned down, danced past their table. Her arms and legs flew in a frantic Charleston.
Monica drank the rest of her gin in a quick motion. “C’mon baby,” she said, grabbing his hand. “Let’s dance.”
Despite the month of lessons at home, Anthony’s limbs did not want to cooperate at first. A live band and a busy dance floor just seemed different from the living room floor and old recordings. But after a few missteps and one slightly mashed foot, he started to feel his body relax into the music. Monica’s mouth had broken into a huge grin as their hands flitted from knee to knee.
Then Anthony saw him.
The busboy was clearing a table, as awkward as Anthony had originally felt on the dance floor. Anthony stumbled, his limbs suddenly numb and unresponsive. The earliest pictures of his grandfather had not prepared him for how much the young immigrant would resemble the man he had grown up with. The wood floor banged into Anthony’s knee, a sharp spike of pain sweeping aside the rest of his confusion.
“Are you okay?” Monica asked as the band finished the song.
“He’s here,” he said, gesturing to the busboy. Monica glanced over while Anthony picked himself up. “I’m going to talk to the owner.”
A ten dollar bribe and ten minutes later, Anthony watched confusion ripple across his grandfather’s face. The stern man he expected was not there. The lines, the weariness from the mines, had not yet appeared. He was just a boy, alone in a new land, summoned away from his new job by a tip for more money than he would make in a week.
“How can I help you?” his grandfather said in his thick accent.
Anthony opened his mouth to speak, but his chest and throat tightened around the words. Monica spoke into his silence. “Are you Antonio Marinelli?”
His grandfather’s eyes widened. “I am he. Who are you?”
Anthony felt the vibration in his pocket. Monica looked at him a second later; her recall device had vibrated its five-minute warning to her, too. Their vacation was nearly over. Anthony took a large drink from the teacup.
“What are your plans, Mr. Marinelli?” he asked.
His grandfather took a long look at Anthony, and then laughed. “Plans? I have a room I share with five men, and they say we are lucky! The padroni get me a room, this job, but they want me to work more. They tell to get me to go work in the mines, but . . .” His grandfather sank back in the chair. “Is it worth it? Perhaps I return to Italy soon instead. America could be a mistake.”
The recall vibrated again. Three minutes. Anthony covered his grandfather’s left hand with his own. “It will be worth it, I swear. All of it.”
His grandfather’s eyes narrowed. “Do you know me?”
Anthony kept his eyes locked with his grandfather. He spoke fast, hoping the man’s English could keep up.
“It will be hard. After you leave the mine, when you think you are done with work and children, an ungrateful child will be in your home.”
His grandfather tried to pull back, crossing himself with his free hand. “Una maledizione!” he whispered.
Anthony held tight. “No curse. You will think this child is a failure. He will be too stupid to appreciate you. One day, though, he will be successful. He would have made you proud. He will realize how much you meant to him.” His grandfather stopped pulling his arm away, instead leaning toward Anthony. “But by then, it will be too late to tell you.”
His grandfather lapsed into muttered Italian again for a moment, and then said, “Are you an angel? A demon?”
“I am no demon, Nonno.” Anthony said. The room began to fade as his recall device pulled him back through the centuries. The music of the band faded, too, sounding less like a live band and more like a record played long ago.
Anthony threw himself on the bed, and then glared back at his grandfather through his bangs. The old man looked small next to the oversized black light posters, his starched white shirt and teeth glowing.
“You cannot go out with them, Anthony. You are grounded. They are bad boys, and you cannot go with them.”
The ancient jazz from his grandfather’s record player in the living room was yet another way the old man was behind the times.
“You don’t understand! You can’t understand. You’re not even from this country. You don’t get it!”
Anthony stared at his headboard, not wanting to even give his grandfather the satisfaction of eye contact. But out of the corner of his eye, Anthony saw the old man smile a little, his lips curving into the words, “You’re welcome.”
Anthony shook his grandfather’s hand one last time. “Thank you,” Anthony said.
And they were gone.
NO MAN’S LAND
Allister Timms
I crouch, hands clasped over my head. A whizbang explodes behind our stretch of trench fittingly named by the soldiers the Bish o’ Prick. The shell showers earth and shrapnel high into the air. This one looks to me like a dark etching Dürer might have engraved of an enormous tree uprooted by a twister.
But I’m blessed with such flights of fancy. Lieutenant Pritchard says that if I daydream anymore I might presage my own death. But he’s an Oxford man and tends to talk like that.
My feet are cold. There is about a foot of water and mud covering the duckboards. Rain is falling in steady streams. Even the elements, it seems, can’t help but imitate the war. If there is a sun, I don’t know it. And when I do catch a glimpse, it’s murky. Like it’s been doused in coal tar.
I’m getting a little rest and time to think. Part of my company was out all night in No-Man’s-Land, gathering information on the strength and number of machine guns Fritz has in place. The appearance of a sagging moon made our task harder and cost the life of Private Richards. I had joked with Corporal Jennings that the moon sagged on account of all the heat from the mortars both sides had flung at each another. He had laughed. And then he wept when Richards got it in the head. Richards was only eighteen. A buckshee private from Llandudno. Jennings closed his eyes. Another flare went up, burst, and cascaded down in a drizzle of dying lights. We scrambled out of the crater, leaving Richards behind in the waterlogged hole.
I try to sleep in my billet until the stand to order comes down the line. I listen to our artillery pound away at the fortified German positions and they in turn pound us. It’s like a game of tennis that titans might play.
I look at my watch. It’s July 30. Time’s against me and I know it. Another day and the Battle of Passchendaele will be in full offensive and 300,000 men will die. It’s recorded in all the history books. And now I could be one of them. The battalion has been given its orders. As an officer, I’m privy to what the other men only sense and fear. Who would have known that the uniform I purchased over the Internet would have turned out to be an officer’s uniform. And a lieutenant’s at that.
No wonder I can’t sleep. Not after what’s happened. Like the comforting words a madman repeats to himself to prove that he’s sane, I remove the flat, iPhone-like Speed of Light device that Timeshares provided for this journey and type in the numbers. Over and over I punch them in. Turning numbers into a prayer.
Nothing. Like it’s been for a month. Nothing but the image of an hourglass and sifting sand. I want to toss the device over the trench and watch as a German sniper blasts to smithereens my only connection to my existence in the twenty-first century. But I can’t bring myself to do it.
It was something the boy said. “Sir, Private Hawkes is dead.”
Five little words. That’s all it took.
They’d screwed up. Timeshares had blundered. I gave the tech the exact year of 1917 and the exact location of Passchendaele. And, most importantly, the precise date: July 28. That was the last diary entry of Toby Hawkes, my great-grandfather.
I should have guessed from the layers of white-gold bling-bling the young tech wore around his neck and the lazy chew of his slack jaw that I should have rescheduled.
“You’ve got that time figured precisely, right?” I’d asked. I know it sounds paranoid, but time traveling, even for recreational purposes, isn’t anything to treat lightly. One wrong digit, and I could have ended up in 1717 in a field of grazing cows.
“I could do this with my eyes closed,” the tech replied, stabbing the keypad of the slim electronic device with Passchendaele’s degrees of longitude and latitude.
“It’s just I scheduled my appointment with Dr. Arundel, that’s all,” I remarked.
“No worries. The doc is out with the flu. He just gives the briefing. It’s me who flicks the switch.”
Flicks the switch. This secular description of a complex and highly specialized field of molecular transference and time travel should have clued me in. But I shrugged and stepped inside the tubular contraption that looked like a frosted shower stall.
Thank God I’d been shrewd enough to ask about the briefing.
“Okay, the briefing,” grinned the tech. “You’ll need this.” He shoved the small electronic device he’d been holding into my hand. “That gizmo is your ticket home, so don’t lose it. What you do is . . .” and he perfunctorily explained about the numbers to dial that would connect me to Timeshares and scramble my atoms to bring me back to the current time. “Any questions?”
I looked at the Speed of Light device in my hand and watched the emblem of Timeshares, an ancient hourglass with sifting gold sand, blink across the screen. I secured the device in my trench coat.
The tech fastened the door on the Time Sequencing Modulator. I clutched my army haversack stuffed with gear: my great-grandfather’s diary, gas mask, helmet, shovel, dried rations, candles, water canister, extra pair of puttees, eating tin, packs of Woodbines, laces, three pairs of extra socks (I wasn’t taking any chances here), ammunition pouch, and an officer-issued revolver. It had taken me a good two weeks to locate all this paraphernalia, except for the diary, on eBay. I hadn’t realized Timeshares would have provided a costume for me, included with the price of my “vacation.”
I clenched my fists as the Time Sequencing Modulator screened my genetic makeup with a soothing blue pattern of lights. The small space began to heat up. Comfortable at first, like a hot tub, but then it got hotter. I pulled at my stiff collar. Fidgeted as the temperature rose.
I grabbed at my great-grandfather’s diary to calm myself. I recited over and over his last entry: “Hobbs and I have come to blows over the money again. I knew he’d turn out to be a power-hungry bastard. I had me bleedin doubts about him right off. Should have followed me gut and never taken him under me wings. I swear to bloody god, he’s going to kill me. So I’m writing this down in case I don’t make it home to dear Old Blighty.”
A blinding white light suddenly enveloped the inside of the modulator and I felt like a Rubik’s Cube of flesh, twisting and turning, turning and twisting. And then I felt nothing but a lingering taste of cottonmouth, like I’d eaten rhubarb for an eternity.
It’s unwise to travel the trenches by day. The enemy’s snipers are always looking for new targets. And they are good. Better marksmen than our boys. Pritchard tells me it’s on account of their grand Teutonic past that favored arms to art. I respond it was probably because they drank less rum and got better training.
I pass NCOs issuing the day’s orders. Soldiers filling sandbags. Others dumping creosol and chloride of lime. Still more men pumping the brackish water out of the trench while singing hymns. The British Tommy loves to sing, even when he is about to die. Maybe he knows it could happen anytime. Perhaps it’s his way of preparing his immortal soul even as he pumps putrid water.
I walk by a couple of big brown rats. Hefty buggers who, despite their bulk, are ever so nimble on the parapet. The one at the end of this little expeditionary force stops and inspects me. I try to remember a refrain or a bar from Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite. I think even though he’s a rat, he would have made a lovely king of mice commanding his soldiers. But he doesn’t stay long enough for me to remember a note. So I schlep on, keeping my head down.
I find William Blake in his “coffin.” It’s his morose way of describing his pillbox crafted out of sandbags.
And, yes, it’s that Blake. The eighteenth-century painter, engraver, visionary poet, and patriarch of English Romanticism. Turns out Timeshares isn’t restricted to my own century. They’ve been busy capitalizing on Faulkner’s famous dictum that “the past is not dead. It’s not even past,” and adding their own consumer slant with, “And now it can be anything you want it to be!”
Blake wears a frown as he says, “War on Earth is energy enslav’d.”
I slump down on an overturned barrel and stare. Even after a month, I still find it hard to reason—which Blake keeps telling me is man’s greatest folly—that I’m sharing the trenches of World War I with the eccentric poet who was considered mad during his lifetime and a genius in modern times.
I have the itch to ask him if it’s true that he and Mrs. Blake recited Milton in the nude in their garden in South Molton. But I just can’t bring myself to do it.
I tap the last Woodbine from the package, pack it on the butt of my revolver, and toss it into my mouth. I only cough a couple of times now when I take a long drag. It was a lot harder in the beginning. I felt like I was coughing my lungs up, and there is mustard gas for that.
A rowdy bout of mortars rain down.
“So, what shall we discuss today?” asks Blake.
He asks me this every time. And I answer it with the same reply: “Timeshares.”
It’s what binds us together and sets us apart from the other soldiers. But with this broken homing device, God knows I’m stuck here now just like the rest of the infantrymen. And I shouldn’t be. It’s a fucking mistake. The soldiers, they know they might die here in France. I was one hundred percent certain I couldn’t. So my fate now seems more sealed than the men around me. They’ve got hope, whereas I don’t even have that. Even if I do survive the coming battle, this time isn’t mine. I don’t have a family to go home to. Shit, I’m not even born for another ninety-five years!
Blake knew I was relieved when I found him. And I might have just passed him by like I did so many of the other men. I only stopped because he was vandalizing military equipment.
I stepped closer for a better look. I had to cough to get his attention.
Right away I sensed something different about him. He looked me square in the eyes with sad, innocent ones, like the eyes of a seer. They were so at odds with his fierce-jowled face.
