Time Travel Omnibus, page 930
She was silent for a while.
“Explain to me again about timelike loops,” she said at last. “Ev tried, but by then I was too upset to listen.”
“Well, I’m not so sure myself. But the way he explained it to me, they’re going to fix the problem by going back to the moment before the rupture occurred and preventing it from ever happening in the first place. When that happens, everything from the moment of rupture to the moment when they go back to apply the patch separates from the trunk timeline. It just sort of drifts away, and dissolves into nothingness—never was, never will be.”
“And what becomes of us?”
“We just go back to whatever we were doing when the accident happened. None the worse for wear.”
“But without memories.”
“How can you remember something that never happened?”
“So Ev and I—”
“No, dear,” Delia said gently.
“How much time do we have?”
“With a little luck, we have the rest of the summer,” Delia said. “The question is, how do you want to spend it?”
“What does it matter,” Gretta said bitterly, “if it’s all going to end?”
“Everything ends eventually. But after all is said and done, it’s what we do in the meantime that matters, isn’t it?”
The conversation went on for a while more. But that was the gist of it.
Eventually, Gretta got out her cell and called Everett. She had him on speed dial, I noticed. In her most corporate voice, she said, “Get your ass over here,” and snapped the phone shut without waiting for a response.
She didn’t say another word until Everett’s car pulled up in front of her place. Then she went out and confronted him. He put his hands on his hips. She grabbed him and kissed him. Then she took him by the hand and led him back into the house.
They didn’t bother to turn on the lights.
I stared at the silent house for a little bit. Then I realized that Delia wasn’t with me anymore, so I went looking for her.
She was out on the back porch. “Look,” she whispered.
There was a full moon and by its light we could see the Triceratops settling down to sleep in our backyard. Delia had managed to lure them all the way in at last. Their skin was all silvery in the moonlight; you couldn’t make out the patterns on their frills. The big trikes formed a kind of circle around the little ones. One by one, they closed their eyes and fell asleep.
Believe it or not, the big bull male snored.
It came to me then that we didn’t have much time left. One morning soon we’d wake up and it would be the end of spring and everything would be exactly as it was before the dinosaurs came. “We never did get to Paris or London or Rome or Marrakech,” I said sadly. “Or even Disneyworld.”
Without taking her eyes off the sleeping trikes, Delia put an arm around my waist. “Why are you so fixated on going places?” she asked. “We had a nice time here, didn’t we?”
“I just wanted to make you happy.”
“Oh, you idiot. You did that decades ago.”
So there we stood, in the late summer of our lives. Out of nowhere, we’d been given a vacation from our ordinary lives, and now it was almost over. A pessimist would have said that we were just waiting for oblivion. But Delia and I didn’t see it that way. Life is strange. Sometimes it’s hard, and other times it’s painful enough to break your heart. But sometimes it’s grotesque and beautiful. Sometimes it fills you with wonder, like a Triceratops sleeping in the moonlight.
DOXIES
Brandon Alspaugh
They were late to group. Angela blamed her mother, and her mother blamed Angela, but in the end, it was rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Group never started on time.
“For heaven’s sake Angela, don’t dawdle,” her mother said. “We can’t have them starting without us.”
“My feet hurt, Mom,” Angela said. “Can’t I . . .”
“Absolutely not.”
By the door was a raggedy sign that read Children of the Post-Contemporary—Thursday, 8 PM. Under that, someone had scrawled in purple marker ‘Doxies’.
Inside, the rest of the group were already seated. Angela’s mother found a chair for herself and a stool for Angela.
Andrea’s shadow waved hello. Andrea often sent her shadow to group. The church basement only had fluorescent lights, which meant there were no other shadows for it to bump into.
Angela had shoes that flashed red whenever she walked. When she sat down, Ms. Greer humphed. Ms. Greer had a nose like a tree root and a gold filigree chain that let her wear her glasses like a necklace. To Angela, she looked like the sort of sour rat a witch might own, if witches owned sour rats.
“And what, exactly, does a girl like you need shoes like that for?” Ms. Greer asked.
Angela ignored her. Ms. Greer didn’t really want an answer. So they got along fine.
The room was almost full. Angela never had any trouble remembering anyone in the group. At the beginning of a new school year, she knew every one of her classmates by lunchtime.
Besides Andrea and Ms. Greer, there was Yvonne, who had never eaten food. There was a girl who looked like a kitten but cringed like a bunny. There was Gary, whose smile looked like a smashed cockroach, and there was Oliver, who had a warm furry voice that was shiny green in the right light. He reached over and mussed her hair.
“Hey kid,” he said. “Great shoes.”
Angela grinned, and kicked her shoes against the stool leg to show them off.
Ms. Greer humphed again, tapped her pencil on the badly-stained card table in the center of the room.
It was time for group.
Gary stood up. Gary had one normal arm. The other was not normal. It was fine until it got to the tricep, then it corkscrewed in on itself. His hand was a shiny knobby mass with no nails and a thumb as wide as a matchbook.
“Last Monday I realized my girlfriend was cheating on me,” he said. Angela heard her mother snicker, inside.
“All in all, it was a typical day. I was at the south-side Denny’s eating breakfast. Sent the meal back three times. Eggs too runny, too dry . . . and by the time they’d gotten the eggs right, the pancakes were cold. When no one was watching, I unscrewed the syrup caps at other tables. I did over half the restaurant before the manager came out. He had the picture of me from the north-side Denny’s, with a long list of reasons why I had been labeled a problem customer there. He threw me out. I didn’t even get to finish my eggs.”
“Real nice, Gary,” muttered Oliver.
Smirking like a child who pulls the wings off baby birds, Gary continued. “Anyway, my girlfriend. That little slut. My antennae had been up for weeks. And I could smell the stink of the lawn boy in her hair. I had to open the windows to let it out. She’s allergic to bees, and our yard is full of them. So she would never have gone out to him. He had to come to her. I don’t blame her. She’s only human.”
“That doesn’t bug you?” Oliver asked.
“Hush, Mr. Spare,” snapped Ms. Grier. “This is a support group.”
Angela caught a waspish flare of anger from Gary, but he didn’t show it. “I wouldn’t blame any of you for being jealous. By any measure—population, adaptability, territories occupied—insects already control the world. I’m living proof that one day, hardy Coleopteroids like my father will take over. After the next war, it’s either us or Twinkies.”
“On the drive to my bookstore, I took the route with as many right-turn-only lanes as possible. At the last moment, I’d cut from them to the left-most lane. Let me tell you, the horns are better than any early-morning radio show. I made sure they could all see me on my cell phone, ordering a dozen daisies for my girlfriend.”
The group was a yellow muddle of confusion. Angela blinked—it hurt her eyes.
“That was very positive of you,” said Ms. Grier.
“Hmm? Oh. Well, you see, bees love daisies,” said Gary. “And with all those open windows . . . well.”
Angela wasn’t sure why, but the group’s yellow muddle slurred away as if someone had spilt icy white paint into it.
“When I got to the bookstore, I let Fenton out. He hurried out to wherever he goes during the day. As usual, he’d done a great job on the shelves, and made a beautiful pyramid of the new Caitlin R. Kiernan books. I don’t know how I got along before I started locking in an obsessive-compulsive at night.”
Through the yellow and white and ice, a crack in her mother’s mind, light from under a door, a seam in a folded-up memory. Angela tiptoed up to its edge, very slowly, and peeked inside . . .
Every so often, someone in the hotel ballroom would notice Bella. Most looked confused, but content to ignore her. A few crossed to her corner to peek at the canvas.
“That’s wild,” one of the men said to her, almost tipping his Diet Coke over with the gesture towards the painting.
Bella peered at him as if trying to make him out through binoculars. “Thanks.” Curls of honey blonde hair framed her painter’s squint. She pushed them away with blue-stained fingers.
He wasn’t done. “It’s got some great color. Like it’s moving across the painting.” He glanced around, complete in his awkwardness, finally setting his drink down and wiping his hand before thrusting it at her like a yardstick. “I’m Jim,” he said.
Bella had already turned back to her canvas, but took two of his fingers in her left hand and waggled them. “Bella Dunleavy.”
“Get you a drink, Bella?”
“No thanks, um, John,” Bella said, pursing her lips and narrowing her eyes as she arced a snatch of blue back onto itself. “I paint better with a clear head.”
The wedding had everything she was looking for: high energy and emotion, a large group of people she did not know, and an open bar to keep things interesting. The hotel manager had promised that if she stayed out of the way, Bella could paint it. So Bella stayed out of the way. She didn’t even laugh when the fat Italian uncle fell dead drunk into the piano.
The people that caught her eye she painted with slashes of color. The bride was three royal blue lines, looking like a slanting backwards E missing its middle stroke, waved in the center, while a curvier triple-helix of red burnt to her left, representing the groom.
Each person was a tiny live wire of color. Bella ignored the furniture and floor, penciling in only the barest rudiments of ballroom geography to keep the perspective straight in her own head.
Bella looked over to her left. Jim was still standing there, picking at the pocket flaps of his suit.
She sighed.
“You’re a friend of the groom’s?” she said, daubing the words with fake interest before saying them.
Jim nodded, and his eyes perked. “Yeah. Yeah, Todd and I were in the same frat. I was telling that videographer guy walking around earlier . . . we actually met when he was going crazy at 2 AM on a Sunday morning, looking for some baby spinach . . .”
Bella let Jim’s voice fade into the vague susurrus of the ballroom’s background chatter. Across the room, she saw the photographer. When their eyes met, he glared at her like a cougar at the edge of his territory.
“. . . so anyway, I’m always getting dinged for under-utilizing my decorating expense account, and love the use of color. Really juice up the whole brokerage. Do you have a dealer you work through, or . . .?” He left the question hanging.
Bella turned back to him and blinked. “I’m sorry?”
Jim already had out a gold-embossed checkbook. “Look, I’d hate to lose this to someone who just picks it out of a gallery. I mean, I was here for the birth, right?” He flashed her what she took to be his deal-closing smile. “I think that ought to earn me a few brownie points. Say four thousand?”
Bella understood the words he was using but could not assemble them in her mind. The binoculars had reversed themselves; now he was too close, and the ballroom moving further away, growing darker as it receded to a point.
He was beautiful. Not man-beautiful, the way too many men were, in a way that made them pretty but completely unattractive. Waif beautiful. He had the soft green eyes of a newborn angel, and the drawn cheeks of too many smiles.
Jim must have taken her confusion for reticence. “Sorry, sorry,” he said with a smile, while scratching numbers into his checkbook. “It’s hard to overcome the habit of low-balling a first offer. Here. Six thousand.” He tore a staid green check from the checkbook and fluttered it onto her lap.
Her eyes traveled to the check, while her paintbrush hand went wild, leaving a bright green streak in the upper right corner of the canvas.
Jim tapped a business card he had laid on top of the check. “That’s my card. Can you drop the painting off at the Carrington Hotel? Room 1014? It’s where I’m staying the next few days.”
Bella tried to say yes. Her mouth had forgotten how. She squeaked something, coughed, and tried again. The second attempt was more squawk than squeak.
Jim snatched a glass of champagne from a nearby table and offered it to Bella. She downed it in a single gulp.
“I won’t allow it,” Bella’s mother said. Her loose heel clacked for every pace she took around Bella’s studio. “It’s too close to mattering.” She was a squat gargoyle of a woman, with sulfurous stubs for teeth and a chisel-deep frown.
Bella’s eyes stung. They did not sting when she opened a can of turpentine but they stung now.
“It’s just one painting. He thinks it’s very good. And we could use the money—”
“He thinks it’s good? What do you care what he thinks? You’re a special child, Bella. You shouldn’t care what any of these people think of you. Lord, the whole reason I let you paint up here is that it kept you out of trouble. So much of your father in you. Every person I see out on the street, I wonder. They look just like us you know. You’d never see them coming. Your father—”
“Isn’t here!” Bella shouted. “Mother, this won’t hurt anything. The painting will sit in his office for a year till he hires a new interior decorator, and then it will all be replaced with a Southwestern motif or some nonsense.”
Bella’s mother stalked across the room and snatched Bella’s chin. The nails cut into Bella’s cheek. “Listen to me, Bella. You’re not like other people. The least little change can affect the entire future. Do you want to just disappear, to never have existed?”
“I might as well not,” Bella whispered. Fat tears rolled down her pale cheeks. “You never let me go to college or date. You don’t love me. You just want me to be a failure like you.”
The hard line around her mother’s eyes softened. “Why would you say that? Are you trying to hurt me? Is that it?”
Bella shook her head and sniffled. “No. But Mom, it really is just the one painting. And look at it, it’s really good . . .” Bella turned the easel so her mother could see it. “I call it Wedding Party.”
Her mother straightened up, released Bella’s chin, let out a loud sigh.
“You haven’t learned anything,” her mother said, in her matter-of-fact tone. She reached over and snatched the box cutter from the workbench. Before Bella could react, she had sliced the canvas once, twice, three times.
Bella hung there, in the place between desperation and crying. She reached out with her fingers, touched one of the flapping edges of the canvas. Bits of bright purple paint flaked off its edges, fluttering to the floor of the studio.
Her mother’s eyes caught Bella’s, hard.
“I should have had the abortion,” she said.
Bella sat there for an hour, two, occasionally pulling one of the shredded flaps back up, holding it to the light, watching it flutter across the colors like a searchlight over a fairy sea.
Bella’s eyes snapped open. Cold scratchy sheets, a mounted television, anonymous brown drawers, a Bible. She turned over, and there was Jim, breathing, with the streetlight shining through the window onto his unkempt hair. His arms piped around his head, tiny goosebumps making the hairs stand on end.
He must have felt her eyes on him. He turned over and said, in a sleepy murmur, “Hey. You alright?”
She hugged his chilled arm and tucked it under the covers. “I just wish you could have seen the finished painting,” she said. “I mean, you are out six thousand dollars.”
Jim gave her a wide puppy grin. “Did that impress you?”
“The money? Absolutely.”
“Really?”
“Only reason I’m here is to personally verify what kind of shortcomings leave a man spending that kind of money,” said Bella. Jim stuck his tongue out at her.
“You can show me the next one. You’re too young to have peaked.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I guess so . . . brr! Are you cold?”
Jim looked down at himself. “I guess I am.” He stood and shuffled naked over to the thermostat, flicking its switches back and forth til the hum of the air conditioner gurgled to silence. Two long scratches ran down his back, almost symmetrical, like patterns cut from red construction paper.
“Did I do that?” Bella asked, embarrassed.
Jim turned around and glanced down his back. “Hmm? Oh. I guess you did. Hey! What happened to the soap? And coffee?”
Bella smiled, let her eyes travel to her purse.
“You got all the good stuff!”
“I left you the shampoo/conditioner,” said Bella.
“I’d rather beat my hair against a rock,” said Jim, crinkling his nose.
“No need to be snarky just because I got best pick.”
Jim shrugged, sighed, shuffled back to bed and pulled the covers up. Bella wrapped her legs around him.
“I didn’t come here planning this,” she said.
“I know.”
“My mother would be furious.”
“Most mothers are.”
“Not this kind of furious. It’s a scared kind of furious.”
“Why?”
Bella sat up and took a deep breath of still-chilly air. “It will sound nuts.”
Jim sat up too. He smiled. He had pretty teeth. “Try me.”
