Time Travel Omnibus, page 1118
Sometimes I ask myself just how I’ve managed to do that, but that’s a dangerous line of thought. Very dangerous. I’ve killed enough people already.
August 29, 2001, 22:30
This is it. Today is the day. I took the record out of the attic, cleaned it, put a nice wrapping on it and added a silly greeting card. That’s it. The waiting is over. The little parasite will go, and Hanna and I will be left alone, to spend the rest of our lives together. Hanna complained that she has no money for a reasonable present, after the bloodsucker made her buy him that expensive computer last year. I wonder who gave him that idea. I gave her an idea of my own—this electronic journal. I won’t need it anyway, after the Nudnik is gone.
That’s it. We’re going to give him the presents. Goodbye, dear journal, and we shall never meet again.
—??, ??:??
I refuse to try to understand this universe, whichever one it may be. I want to die. Or maybe I’m already dead without knowing it. Or maybe it’s the universe that’s dead without knowing it.
We gave the Nudnik his presents. He tried to hide his satisfaction but couldn’t. We both know him too well. He took them back to his room without a word of thanks. For several minutes there was silence, and then he listened to some songs, at a disturbingly high volume. Hanna shouted at him to turn it down and he didn’t answer, though he did turn it down a bit, and I tried distracting her by talking about other things. Or maybe she was also was waiting for something, I don’t know what. Anyway, the brat reached track number five, that horrible, abominable, endlessly repeating song, and then after that it got quiet. Total silence.
“That’s it,” I said. “He’s gone.”
“Gone?” Hanna said. “What are you talking about, Haim?”
“I’m not Haim,” I said, and removed, for the first time in two years, the silly glasses. “Don’t you know me?”
“Of course I know you,” she said. “For two years I’ve been trying to figure out what you’re trying to achieve by playing this silly game. Not to mention the moustache.”
“It’s a long story,” I said.
“We’ve got all the time in the world,” she said. “The kid’s asleep.”
“Yeah,” I said, “we’ve got time. And he’s gone at last. He won’t bother us anymore.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Here, look for yourself,” I said, and led her to the parasite’s room. I opened the door—the key has been in my pocket for all these years—and entered.
The room was empty—except for the little fool, who was right there, sound asleep in his bed.
I looked at him for a long time.
And I understood.
All that time, all those years, I was organizing the history of the wrong fool. Of two fools, more alike than I feel comfortable admitting, but still different. I looked at Hanna who wasn’t my mother and at my son who wasn’t myself, and started to break the rules for the last and final time.
“I beg your pardon,” I told Hanna. “I guess I’ve reached the wrong universe.”
I got up, took the journal and the record, and went out.
SEARCHING FOR SLAVE LEIA
Sandra McDonald
A slip, slide, falling through icy coldness, white noise like TV static. A breeze of hot buttery popcorn. Giddy laughter, sweaty bodies, fanfare music over the intercom, and what’s this? A ten-foot-wide movie poster of young, pale, undernourished Carrie Fisher, posed seductively in a gold metal bikini with a collar and chain around her neck.
You’d bet she didn’t have her period the day they took that picture. No Kotex pad safety-pinned to her underwear, no feeling bloated and yucky down there. You wish you’d taken more aspirin this morning. You hope you don’t stain your shorts in front of the hundreds of fangeeks jammed in the lobby of the Charles Cinema here in the middle of Boston. This is 1983, that is Slave Leia, and through some supernatural stroke of luck you have become a time traveler, because last you checked it was 2013 and you were perimenopausal and you were having a fight with Trevor, again, on the set of your latest series.
Your best friend Karen sloshes her soda against your arm and says, “Shit, hell, sorry!”
You look down at your white knee socks, cut-off shorts, and baby blue Empire Strikes Back t-shirt. It’s amazing the fashion police ever let you out of your house. Karen’s wearing a yellow Han Solo shirt and white shorts and wooden sandals, the kind that are supposed to tone your calves. Her hair is teased up two inches. You have a mullet.
“Sheila?” she asks, face creasing. “You okay?”
“Yes, fine,” you say, because the first rule of suddenly displaced time travelers is to fake it until you figure out what happened. It worked for Scott Bakula in every episode of Quantum Leap except the mental hospital episode—always one of your favorites; speaking of which, there’s an awful possibility: maybe you’re in the psych ward. Goosebumps ripple under your white bra, the one that always chafes your back. After twenty years of working together, Trevor has finally driven you into a complete nervous breakdown.
Behind you, someone argues about whether Biggs is the other hope that Yoda spoke of. Two guys speculate about how Han will be rescued from his carbonite prison. There’s no Facebook or Twitter in 1983, no websites full of Star Wars gossip, no clues except those printed in Starlog magazine. You and Karen both have a crush on Harrison Ford, and you listen to The Empire Strikes Back soundtrack on your turntable every day, and you write Han/Leia fanfic in your high school homeroom every morning, even though you don’t even know what fanfic is yet.
“You look pale,” Karen says. She juggles her soda and popcorn in order to dig into her pocket and produce a bar of brown taffy. “Eat some sugar.”
“I had a root canal last week,” you blurt out, forgetting the play-it-cool-rule. “Temporary crown.”
Karen’s frowny crease deepens. She’s not pretty, not yet, but she will be by the time you graduate high school. She’ll also have lost her virginity to John Marino in his car at Wonderland Race Track. You’ll be jealous but not for long, because by twenty she’ll have her first baby. You never have kids. You have cats.
“What’s a root canal?” she asks now, all braces and bushy eyebrows and that little dark beauty mark by the corner of her mouth.
Just then the ropes drop at the ticket stand and the noisy crowd surges forward, an ocean wave that’s been seeking dry land for three long years. Return of the Jedi! Return, return! You think, This is what I’m here for? Hardly seems worthwhile. You could be home watching the DVD on your big screen TV. Your cats Crichton and Moya would be curled up in your lap, and you’d be ignoring Trevor’s seventeen hundred messages in your voicemail.
Damn it, Jim, you’re a TV producer, not a time traveler.
“Come on,” Karen insists, dragging you by the sleeve.
Behind you, Slave Leia’s eyes are shrewd but kind. She understands your confusion. After all, she thought she was a hero of the Rebel Forces, a role model for young women who loved science fiction adventure. Then George Lucas took away her clothes, slicked her skin with oil, and chained her to Jabba the Hutt.
The script coordinator is crying. She’s crying because ten minutes ago, Trevor fired her for using gold paper instead of green for the latest script revisions.
“You’re not fired,” you tell her. “I’ll take care of it.”
Using the wrong color paper is a rookie mistake. If you’d caught it first, you’d have yelled at her too, but in that nice, nurturing, constructive-criticism way that people expect from you—the sane one. You respect everyone in the cast and crew, all the way from your B-list star to the assistant who walks his B-list dog and scoops up the soft little B-grade poops. You never scream or stomp your feet. Trevor is the showrunner but acts like a five-year-old child.
“He was really mad,” she says through tears.
“I’m sure it’s just the stress,” you reply, one of the standard excuses you give for Trevor, depending on the situation and audience. Others include: he isn’t feeling well, it’s the blood pressure medication, his wife just left him, his Narcotics Anonymous sponsor just died, it’s the narcissism. It’s who Trevor is. Like one of those big rolling machines that flatten asphalt on resurfaced freeways, a big diesel-belching monstrosity with a stinky cigar permanently jammed into the side of its mouth.
The assistant director pops her head in, says, “Sheila, Landon is looking for you,” and if the fact she’s size 2 and has shiny hair isn’t enough to hate her, you can see she still has that dreamy look in her eyes. It says I’m working on a network TV show and soon I will rule Hollywood. You’ll be secretly happy on the day that optimism is ripped out of her soul. How nasty is that? Your ex-friend Lena gave you this book once, about how women are cruel to one another—not just cruel but inhumane—and you’re sure it was supposed to be a pointed message because you’d fired her just a month earlier. Not for gold paper or green paper—not for being young and pretty (she wasn’t)—but because Trevor decided he hated her.
You’ve given Trevor the same book every Christmas for as long as you’ve known him: Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun. He always laughs. He’s the Attila who makes money; he’s the Attila who always has something on TV; he’s the Attila you’ve never had enough smarts or strength to leave.
“Where is Landon looking for me?” you ask the AD. “I’m right here.”
She smiles, all perfect white teeth. “In his dressing room.”
For a special snowflake who can’t really act, Landon Oaks can put the drama in even the most minor inconvenience: not the right bottled water, his dressing room’s too small, his make-up girl snaps her gum. But Trevor didn’t cast him for his temperament. He’s here because he looks good in a tight uniform, and he has high Q score thanks to his last show on the CW, and once in a while, like a comet blazing across the sky, he can pull off a scene that makes you stand up and admire him for more than that chiseled chin and pretty green eyes.
“Should I tell him you’re on the way?” the perky assistant director asks.
“Yes, I’m coming,” you say.
But first you send the script coordinator back to work and phone Steven, your network executive, who’s been calling all morning. He’s a good guy, decent, hard-working, has your back except when maybe he doesn’t. It’s not his fault he’s an aging dinosaur surrounded by his own sleek, hungry competition. The truth is that you trust him more than most women trust their ex-husbands.
“Say something good,” Steven says over your ear piece.
“Something good,” you parrot back, leaving your office for the corridor and the soundstage, along the way dodging assistants and a gaffer swinging a metal pole. Above you, grips are lighting the steampunk-ish bridge of the lost starship Edge of Infinity. Edge of Infinity is also the name of your series. An ethnically diverse crew of pretty twenty-somethings stranded on the other side of the galaxy. After years of Canadian television or direct-to-syndication, Trevor finally landed a big network show. It premieres tomorrow night. It’s the biggest budget you’ve ever had, big gamble for the network; is that a shooting pain in your left arm? Maybe you’ll have a heart attack today.
You say, “Steven, I’ve got more good news than you have messages on your call list. Good news streaming out the wazoo.”
“You only say wazoo when you’re freaking out,” Steven says. “Otherwise you say hoo-haa.”
You step over some cables. “Girls from Boston never say hoo-haa.”
“Maybe it was va-jay-jay,” he says. “How’s the latest script?”
“Awesome.”
“You’re lying.”
“Rewrote it myself until three o’clock this morning,” you tell him, total truth, which explains why your eyeballs ache and your head’s pounding and why you’ve downed two double espressos so far today.
“You’re the best genre writer I know,” he says. Does he mean it as an insult? You have thirty-five script credits to your name on IMDB but none for any show that’s ever won an Emmy. “Get some sleep, Sheila. You can’t do this thing all by yourself.”
“Gotcha,” you say, which is a pretentious way of saying goodbye but it’s your trademark these days, just as Trevor is known for his noxious cigars. On your last series, at the wrap party, the crew got him an expensive humidor. They got you a mug and T-shirt with “Gotcha” in big pink glitter. Thanks a lot.
The mammoth doors of the soundstage have been opened to move in some heavy equipment. Beyond them are the clean, orderly streets of this lot in Studio City. You prefer Bridge Studios, up in Vancouver, where you’ve spent most of your career, but Radford makes you tingle—this is where all of your favorite old shows filmed, like The Wild Wild West and Moonlighting and Will & Grace, and just down the street they currently shoot CSI: NY. All your dreams have come true, more or less.
Hard work is how you get anything, your dad used to say. It’s not rocket science. And then he’d always chuckle, because he was in fact a rocket scientist, how funny.
But what if hard work is killing you? No time to worry about that now. You knock on Landon’s dressing room door.
“Entre!” he calls out, because he thinks he can speak French.
You enter, wincing at the bright light . . .
It’s kind of cool, sitting here with hundreds of people as they watch the movie unfold for the first time. The music in Jabba’s palace is cheesy but that kiss between Han and Leia is everything you’ve been waiting for. You wish you’d had more kisses like that in own your life. That someone in your life looked at you the way they look at each other. Luke’s victory over the Rancor has the crowd cheering, but you’ve always felt bad for the monster. Chained up in a dark pit, forced to do Jabba’s bidding all your life—you can relate.
The seat doesn’t rock or recline. You’re antsy, restless. You wrote three time travel scripts for Forever Viking, Trevor’s show about immortal Norse warriors fighting crime in Vancouver. There’s something important you should be doing here in the past. Surely your mission—there’s always a mission, that’s the A-plot or backbone of the episode—is to do more than revisit the horror of dancing and singing Ewoks.
When you stand up, Karen whispers, “Where are you going?”
You tell her, “Trust me. It’s all downhill once they get to Endor.”
The lobby is cool and spacious now that it’s empty. You remember the way home: Walk to the Tremont Street subway station, ride the Blue Line through the blue-collar neighborhood of East Boston to Beachmont, walk up the hill to your parents’ house overlooking the Atlantic. In this strange world of 1983 young teens can wander at will, untethered by cell phones or helicopter parents. People on the train will have their attention buried in newspapers or books, not tablets or smartphones. Maybe someone will have a tape cassette Walkman. There’s a subway in L.A., but who rides it? No one you know.
You hope you have money in your little vinyl purse. Yes, there’s some shiny quarters, and a few loose dollar bills, and your inhaler, too, because this was the year you got diagnosed with asthma. But when you push open the lobby doors to the sunlit parking lot, Charles Street washes away to a slip, a slide, whiteness.
Now you’re dressed for winter, standing on a curb, your father’s blue 1978 Buick LeSabre idling in front of you. Around you is a rest stop on the westbound side of the Massachusetts Turnpike. The wind smells like pine needles and car exhaust. Your dad is in the passenger seat, looking at a map. He’s letting you drive. This is 1986 and you’re on your way to inspect colleges in upstate New York.
A drop of sleet falls out of the gray sky. The clouds above the pine trees churn with expectation.
You realize you’re not traveling in time at all. This is a different subgenre of drama: the limbo plot. Which means you’re in a coma somewhere, hooked up to machines, suspended between life and death while your soul meets old friends and family and decides whether or not to go into the goddamned light.
You know this must somehow be Trevor’s fault.
You hope someone’s feeding your cats, because limbo plots can take a while.
If you were twenty years younger, you might find Landon Oaks attractive. Dark hair, perfect skin, slim build with a nice ass—okay, forget the younger part, you do find him sexually attractive, but you’d never admit it. To admit is to show weakness. But if you were the type of Hollywood producer who would sexually harass an actor, he’d be your target. When he’s annoyed, the tips of his ears turn bright pink. He’s annoyed now because the newly distributed script revisions (which should have been green paper, not gold), have cut him out of two scenes.
“We had to cut those scenes because Jill called in sick,” you remind him.
“You could shoot just my half,” he says, pouting beautifully. “Do her half tomorrow.”
Which would totally work if you had all the time in the world, and if your lead actress actually shows up tomorrow, and if it wouldn’t put the episode even more over budget. Before you can explain, someone knocks on the door: it’s that AD again, bright smile and chirping headset. She has a beauty mark on her face, in the same place as your old friend Karen. She says, “Landon, the people from People are here.”
He panics and turns to the mirror. “Tell them to wait! I’m not ready!”
You take the opportunity to slip back to your office, where the phone list has grown longer and your assistant, geeky but smart Gay Tom (as opposed to your head writer, Sort-of-Straight Tom), has delivered your noontime frappuccino, along with a veggie wrap and French fries. There’s also a basket of gourmet muffins from one of your old friends at the Writer’s Guild with a good-luck note for tomorrow’s premiere. Gourmet dark chocolate pecan muffins, smelling so delicious they could bottle up and sell just the aroma.
You cram down two muffins and the French fries, everything washed down with frappuccino, and stare at the whiteboard on the wall that outlines the story arc for the first twelve episodes in your own secret shorthand: which characters live, who falls out an airlock, when Landon and Jill will first kiss. To get the female viewers, you’re going to need some kissing.
