THE HOUR OF BABEL
A gust of rainy wind wobbled the old 350 Honda as it made a right turn from Anaheim Boulevard into the empty parking lot, but the rider swerved a little wider to correct for it, and the green neutral-light shone under the water-beaded plastic window of the speedometer gauge as he coasted to a stop in one of the parking spaces in front of the anonymous office building.
He flipped down the kickstand and let the bike lean onto it without touching his shoe to the gleaming black pavement, and he unsnapped his helmet and pulled it off, shaking out his gray hair as he stared at the three-story building. In sunlight its white stucco walls were probably bright, but on this overcast noon it just looked ashen.
He shifted around on the plastic shopping bag he had draped over the section of black steel frame where the padded seat had once been, and squinted across the street. Past the wet cars hissing by in both directions he could see the bar, though it had a different name now. Probably the last person he knew from those days had quit going in there twenty years ago.
He looked back at the office building in front of him and tried to remember the Firehouse Pizza building that had stood there in 1975. It had sat further back, it seemed to him, with a wider parking lot in front.
The spot where he used to park his bike was somewhere inside this new building now.
He reached a gloved hand below the front of the gas tank and switched off the engine.
“Is he coming in?”
The bald man at the computer monitor stared at the red dot on the map-grid. “I don’t –”
“Look out the window,” said Hartford Evian with exaggerated clarity.
“Oh, right.” Scarbee got up from the computer and crossed to the tinted window that overlooked Anaheim Boulevard, and peered down. “He’s just sitting on his motorcycle, with his helmet off.” He rubbed his nose. “It’s raining.”
“Was this visit on the schedule?”
“I suppose so. Why should they show me the schedule? It must have been.”
Evian had flipped open a cell phone and begun awkwardly punching numbers into it, when Scarbee added, “Now Kokolo just drove in.”
Evian swore and quickly finished pushing the tiny buttons.
“Perry,” he said a moment later, “don’t look at the guy on the motorcycle to your right, it’s Hollis. Hollis. Yes, that one. It’s not on any schedule I ever saw. Just walk in, ignore him.” After listening for a moment, he went on, “Wait, wait! Felise is with you? Tell Felise not to get out of the car!”
Scarbee was still looking out the window. “Felise is already out of the car,” he said.
“Get in here, both of you, quick, don’t look around,” said Evian, and then he snapped the phone closed. “Did Hollis look at her?”
“Well,” said Scarbee, “he looked over at both of them.”
Evian opened his mouth as if to speak, hesitated, then said, “Call Hoag Hospital. We’ve got to get Lyle back here right now, not later today.”
Scarbee turned around to face the desk. “That’s earlier than we said. His doctors won’t –”
“Keep watching Hollis!” When Scarbee turned back to the window, Evian said, “They’ll go along if Lyle insists. I’m sure that’s what happens. Tell him we’ll give his family more money. Double.”
“I hope they’ve got an ambulance free, to drive all the way here from Newport. Now he’s putting his helmet back on. Hollis, down there.”
Evian hit a button on the intercom. “You guys see the biker out front?” he asked.
“We see him,” came a woman’s voice from the speaker.
Scarbee said, “I think he’s trying to start his motorcycle. It looks like he’s jumping on it.”
“Get him inside,” said Evian, “polite if possible.” He released the button.
A moment later Scarbee said, “Couple of security guys, running out. And – huh! I think they just stun-gunned him. Now they’re walking him back in, but I think he’s unconscious. His motorcycle fell over.”
“Not very polite.” Evian stood up and ran his fingers through his graying hair. “Now I guess we all talk to Hollis. I swear this wasn’t in the goddamn schedule! Get him into the conference room – and remind them to be sure the area of measurement is locked. And get somebody to prop his silly motorcycle up again.”
Kurt Hollis was still shaky and nauseated, but he sat back and sighed when the bald man slid a bowl of M&Ms across the table toward him. Hollis looked past the four people on the other side of the table at the windows high in the white cinder-block wall, then glanced at the two men standing by the door behind him.
At last he focused on the four people sitting across from him. Two of them he had seen a few minutes ago in the parking lot – the dark-haired young woman in a lumberjack shirt with the sleeves rolled back, and the blond man in a silver-fabric windbreaker. All the other men were in jackets and ties.
The bald man waved at the M&Ms. “The electric shock made your muscles go into rapid spasms,” he said. “All your blood sugar was converted to lactic acid.”
Hollis stared at him, and the bald man looked at the ceiling, apparently reconsidering what he had said. “You should eat these … candies,” he said finally.
“Cigarettes,” said Hollis. It was the first time he had spoken in several days, and his voice was hoarse. He spread his hand, then slowly reached into his damp brown leather jacket and pulled out a crumpled pack of Camels and hooked a Bic lighter out of one side of it.
“Smoking!” said the bald man. “No, you can’t use those in here.” Hollis let go of the cigarette pack and the lighter. “You’ve mistaken me for somebody,” he said. “Check it out. Let me go and this whole thing is just my word against yours.”
The blond man in the silver windbreaker leaned forward. “You are Kurt Hollis,” he said, “fifty-one years old, apartment on 16th Street in Santa Ana.”
The gray-haired man beside him shifted in his chair and said, “We think you recognized Felise here.” He waved at the young lady. Hollis stared at her. Fluorescent lights in the ceiling were bright enough for him to see her clearly against the muted gray daylight from the windows.
“No,” he said. “And I don’t know anybody named Felise. I’m Kurt Hollis, but you’ve got crossed wires somewhere.” He rubbed his eyes, then dropped his hands to the tabletop and tucked the lighter back into the cigarette pack. “I’m going to walk out of here,” he said, shifting his chair back on the carpet. “Where’d you put my helmet?”
Felise reached out and took a handful of the M&Ms. “You can’t possibly eat all of them,” she said, and her voice was light and amused.
And Hollis recognized her.
“Liquor,” he said, and reached into his jacket again, to pull out a flat half-pint bottle of Wild Turkey bourbon. His hand was shaking now as he unscrewed the cap and tilted the bottle up for a mouthful.
Hollis looked down at the pans. Several triangular slices of pizza had been left uneaten, pepperoni in one pan and sausage and bell pepper in the other.
“We just throw ‘em out,” he said. “Hard luck on the starving children in China, but … that’s what we do.” “Oh,” she said. “I wondered.”
Hollis hesitated, then glanced to the bar and back to her. “Sometimes I leave them at the end of the bar,” he said. “Till I have time to take them to the back room, where the sinks are.”
After another pause, he nodded and carried the pans to the bar, and set them in front of one of the empty stools on the side of the cash register away from the kitchen. There were no customers at the bar, so he walked on into the kitchen, where two other young men in aprons and red-and-white-striped shirts were listlessly painting tomato sauce onto disks of dough. Hollis took the long-handled spatula from the top of the oven and pulled open the narrow top door – probably he had burned his forearm on the door-edge, as he often did – and turned the pizzas that sat on the flour-dusted iron floor inside.
When he looked through the doorway to the bar a few minutes later, he saw the girl sitting at the end of the bar, chewing. When he looked again, she was gone, and later when he went to pick up the pans he saw that they were empty.
Hollis and the girl never spoke again, though she had come in about once a week, always on a slow weekday night, and sat at the stool beyond the cash register, and Hollis had every time found an opportunity to leave a half-finished pizza or two near her.
And she had been there, he recalled now, on that last night, June 21, 1975; the night Firehouse Pizza closed down, and he had thus lost the last real job he’d ever had; the night that had been intruding so stress-fully into his dreams lately that he had actually ridden his bike over here today. The night of which he had no recollection past about 8 PM, though he had awakened the next day at noon in his apartment, his face stiff with dried tears and stinging with impossible sunburn.
You can’t possibly eat all of them.
He stared at her now as she sat chewing M&Ms across the table from him, stared at the corners of her eyes, the skin on her throat and the backs of her hands. It was all still smooth – she still looked to be about twenty years old.
“That,” he said carefully, “was thirty-one years ago. A bit more.”
“That’s recommended retail time,” she said. “We get it wholesale.”
“You do recognize her,” said the blond man.
“Who are these guys?” Hollis asked Felise. “Why is he wearing that Buck Rogers jacket?”
“It’s a uniform,” said Felise, “or will be. Could I – ?” she added, with a wave toward the bottle of Wild Turkey. When Hollis nodded she reached over and slid it to her side and took a sip from it. “But I’ve got to admit,” she said, exhaling around the whiskey, “that it makes him look like a baked potato that was taken too young from its mother.”
“My name is Perry Kokolo,” the blond man said, apparently unruffled. “The citizens beside me are Hartford Evian and Zip Scarbee. We employ Felise as a consultant. Do you remember a man named Don Lyle?”
“Yes!” Don had been working that night too, Hollis recalled now. The boss had left for the night, and he and Don had been drinking beers as they worked, pausing occasionally to sing old Dean Martin songs over the loudspeaker that was meant for calling out pick-up numbers.
“He’ll be joining us soon,” Kokolo went on. “He’s done some consulting for us too, on a more freelance basis. We’d like your help as well.” “They pay very nice,” said Felise. “I can afford my own pizzas now.” “Did they recruit you with a stun-gun?”
Felise said, “Probably,” as gray-haired Evian said, “Apologies, apologies! It was urgent, our people got carried away. And we do pay well.” “Help … with what?” asked Hollis.
“We simply want to find out what happened here on June 21, 1975.” “The night God vomited on Firehouse Pizza,” said Felise, nodding solemnly.
Hollis took a deep breath and let it out. “I don’t remember anything about that night after about eight.” He looked at the four people across from him. “Why is it important? Now?”
“You’re finally starting to remember, I think,” said Evian. “You drove your motorcycle here today, and you recognized Felise, eventually. As to why it’s important –”
“They can’t,” interrupted Felise, “we can’t, that is, time-travel to that night. They can’t get closer than a half hour on either side of it, and if they get there early and then try to walk in, they find they’re walking out. Without changing direction. Even me, and I’m already in there.”
The bald man, Scarbee, spoke up: “Cameras we leave in there disappear on that evening.”
“It’s like an island in the time stream,” agreed Evian. “We’re confined to the metaphorical water, and so we find we’ve gone by the incident, or we’re short of it, but we can’t get to it. And something important happened then. Then by there, I mean.” Felise said, “He means ‘then and there.’”
“Time-travel,” said Hollis flatly. He took the bourbon bottle and drank a mouthful, then glanced around at the featureless room.
“Congress approved a new super-collider in Dallas in 2012,” said the bald-headed man, “and the National Security Agency got Fermilab in Chicago. Charged tachyons in a mile-wide magnetic ring. It can project power fifth-dimensionally for a range of about fifty years back and twenty forward – there’s some kind of Lorentzian ether headwind. We get shut down in 2019.”
Hollis frowned and opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Felise said, “It’s true. Look at me.”
For several seconds none of them spoke.
“So,” said Hollis finally, with no expression, “you can change the past?”
“Apparently not,” said Evian. “But we can usually find out what it is. What happened that night?”
“Ask Felise,” said Hollis, “or Don. They were both there too, then. Thex.”
“I hid behind the bar,” said Felise, “after the devil’s hula-hoops and basketballs started spinning.”
Hollis’s forehead was suddenly cold with sweat. That’s right, he thought – hoops and balls.
The deteriorating scar wall he had built up around the memory had been severely shaken by seeing Felise again, still as young as she had been on that night, and now, with this prompt from her, it gave way at last.
He had been on the phone by the front cash register when his vision had begun to flicker – he had been looking out past the counter at the tables, but suddenly without shifting his head he had seen curled segments of the pinball machines at the back end of the dining room, and even of the dumpster out back.
And then the spheres and rings had appeared in the air, rapidly expanding and sending tables flying in a clatter, or shrinking down to nothing. They were zebra-patterned in black and silver, and the stripes shifted as rapidly as the size of the impossible things.
Probably the intrusion had lasted no more than ten seconds. Five.
There had never been any police investigation later, but people had died there. Hollis could remember seeing a man explosively crushed against one of the walls as an expanding ring punched most of his body right through into the alley.
How could I have forgotten this? he thought now; how could I not have forgotten it?
And then he seemed to recall that he had met it –
Only after he choked on warm bourbon did he realize that he had snatched up the bottle. He coughed, and then drank what remained in three heroic gulps.
“It was a hallucination,” he said hoarsely, wondering if he was going to be sick. “There would have been cops, ambulances –”
“Yes,” said Evian, “if we hadn’t stepped in and asserted national security. Pre-emptive jurisdiction. Nerve gas, terrorists, plausible enough. We were in place around the building and had it cordoned off even before the first survivor came out.”
“That was me, I think,” said Felise with a visible shiver. “And I think you guys did stun-gun me, now that I think of it.” She gave Hollis a haunted look. “It’s only six months ago, for me.”
“What,” said Evian, leaning forward, “was it?”
“It was silver-and-black balls,” snapped Hollis, “and donut-shaped things, that busted the place up and killed people.”
“Silver and black,” whispered Felise, nodding.
“What did it say?”
Hollis’s chest was suddenly cold, and his hands were tingling, and he couldn’t take a deep breath. “Say? It didn’t say anything! Good God!” Had it said anything?
“It didn’t say anything,” said Felise, still whispering, “I swear.” “
What do you think you … learned from it?” “
Nothing,” said Hollis. “Stay out of pizza parlors.”
Evian smiled. “When’s the last time you’ve seen a doctor, got a, a check-up?”
“What, radiation? After thirty-one years?” When Evian just continued to smile at him, Hollis thought about it. “When I was in college, I guess.”
“That’s a long time.”
Hollis shrugged. “All I want to hear from a doctor is, ‘If you had come in six months ago we could have done something about this.’” “
You were going to college, but you never went again after that night.” “Sure. What’s the use of knowing anything?” “And you’ve never married.”
“I don’t know any women well enough to hate ‘em that much.”
Felise laughed with apparent delight. “Lyle says the same thing! It was redundant for that thing to crush people physically.”
Evian went on, “I gather you share Felise’s opinion that it was one thing, that appeared as a lot of inconstant shapes?”
Hollis sighed deeply. “You guys actually know something about … all that?”
“We’ve been looking into it for thirty years,” said Evian. “Across thirty years, anyway,” said Felise.
Hollis rubbed his face. “Yes,” he said, then lowered his hands and looked down at them. “It was one thing. It … passed through our, our what, our space, like somebody diving into a pond through a carpet of water lilies. If the diver’s arms and legs were spread out, the water lilies might think it was lots of things diving through them.” He looked at Felise. “And how have you been, these last six months?”
“I sleep fourteen hours a day,” she said brightly. “Lyle’s dying of cancer, probably because he wants to. We all have low self of steam.”
“What made you come here today?” asked Evian quietly. “We’ve been monitoring you closely ever since that night. You never came back here before. In fact according to our schedule you weren’t supposed to come here today.”
Kokolo looked sharply at Evian. “You’re saying this is an anomaly? I don’t believe it.”
“I’ll query Chicago in the window, but I’m pretty sure.” Evian looked back at Hollis. “So – why?”
Hollis realized that he was drunk. Good enough for now, but he’d have to get them to fetch another bottle soon.
“Lately,” he began. He frowned at Evian, then went on, “Lately I’ve been dreaming that what happened here, after the part of that night that I could remember, was that – I met myself, finally. And that in fact there isn’t anybody else besides me. Like you’re all just things I’m imagining because I’m separated from myself now and trying to fill the absence. I – guess I came here today to see if I could meet myself again, somehow, so I can be me and stop being this, this flat roadkill.”
“Solipsism,” said Felise. “I thought that too, for a while, but it was so obvious that my cat didn’t think so, didn’t think I was the only thing in the universe, that I decided it wasn’t true.”
“That’s hardly an argument against solipsism!” said Hollis, smiling in spite of himself. “Especially to convince somebody else.”
“I could show you the cat,” she said.
Kokolo touched his ear and cocked his head. “Lyle’s here,” he said. “I know that was on the schedule, at least. We should go to the area of measurement.”
“We think it was an alien,” said Evian as he pushed his chair back and stood up. “Not just a, some creature from another planet, you know, but something that ordinarily exists in more dimensions than the four we live in. Or the five we move in when we travel through time.”
Felise had paused to listen to him, and she nodded. “We need more liquor,” she said. “Lyle can’t drink anymore, but it’d mean a lot to him to see other people still fighting the good fight.”
One of the two silent men who had stood by the door now opened it and led the way down a carpeted hall to the right; Kokolo and Evian and Scarbee were right behind him, and Hollis and Felise followed more slowly, with the second door-guard coming along last.
The men ahead stopped beside a steel door, and Kokolo pressed his thumb against a tiny glass square above the lever handle.
“This might be disorienting,” he said over his shoulder to Hollis, and then he pushed the lever down and opened the door. A puff of chilly air-conditioning ruffled his blond hair.
“It still freaks me,” Felise said.
Hollis glimpsed the pool-cue racks mounted on the red-painted walls while the men ahead of him were shuffling into the big room, so he knew what this place was; and when he had stepped through and was standing on the green linoleum floor again for the first time in thirty-one years, he was able to look around at the counters and the bar and the restroom doors in the far wall without any expression of surprise. The lights were all on, and the pinball machines glowed.
“We had the place eminent-domained before you even got outside,” said Evian.
The picnic tables and pool tables were still scattered and broken across the floor, and black smears on the linoleum were certainly decades-old blood. The holes in the plaster walls were still raw white against the red paint, though there seemed to be a lighted hallway on the other side now, instead of the alley he remembered. The jagged glass of the front window now had white drywall behind it.
Still dizzy from the stun-gun shock – or freshly drunk – Hollis walked carefully across the littered floor, past the spot at the bar where Felise had always sat when he didn’t know her name, and stepped behind the bar to the cash register. He punched in “No Sale,” and tore off the receipt. The date on it was June 21, 1975.
On the shelf below the register was the paperback copy of J. P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man that Hollis had been reading at the time. He had never bothered to pick up another copy of the book.
Felise had followed Hollis, and now set up one of the fallen barstools and sat down at what used to be her customary place.
Hollis sniffed. The bar, the whole big room, had no smells at all anymore, just a faint chilly whiff of metal.
There was a stack of black bakelite ashtrays on the bar, and he lifted the top one off and pulled the cigarette pack out of his pocket and shook a cigarette onto his lip.
“It’s 1975 in here,” he called to Scarbee, “check the register tape. Smoking’s allowed.”
“Five people died here that night,” said Evian, who still stood with the others near the door. “Nine survived, though five of them were unresponsively catatonic afterward. And we did try to get responses! The four that survived sane – relatively so – were you, Felise, Lyle, and a four-year-old male child. He died three years ago at the age of thirty-two, in a misadventure during a sadomasochistic orgy.”
Felise snickered. “Strangled himself. Can I bum a smoke?”
Hollis slid the pack across to her, then clicked his lighter, but apparently rain had got into it. He picked a Firehouse matchbook out of a box on the shelf and struck one of the matches for her, then held it to his own cigarette.
“Where’s Lyle?” he asked as he puffed it alight.
“They’re bringing him in,” said Evian. “Nurses, IV poles.”
“You can’t cure him in the future?”
Evian shrugged and widened his eyes. “The past is unalterable! Or we thought so, before you showed up just now where you shouldn’t be. Lyle is supposed to die a week from hex. But we’ve debriefed him very thoroughly, many times, over the years, everything he can give us.”
Evian, Kokolo, and Scarbee had begun cautiously stepping out into the room.
“We debriefed you,” Evian went on, “with narcohypnosis, right after getting you and your motorcycle back to your apartment, and several times thereafter – you were encouraged to think these interview periods were alcoholic blackouts – and you appeared to remember nothing. But now that you have begun to remember what happened, we may as well see if any input from you can manage to prompt something more from Lyle.”
“Set up a query transmission to the Chicago window,” said Kokolo. “We need to find out for sure that Hollis’s visit today isn’t an anomaly – the schedule signals aren’t always complete, but Chicago can check it against the big chronology. I’m sure he is scheduled to be here – that’s probably why we summon Lyle.”
“We don’t have much bandwidth left in their allotment for hex, it’ll have to be a very tight frequency,” said Scarbee, edging hesitantly across the linoleum and looking around wide-eyed. Perhaps he had never been in here before. To Hollis he said, “Time may be infinite, but the time-window of our control of the Fermilab accelerator isn’t. It uses up a long piece of that duration to negotiate a transmission. They allot us segments of it. And it’s not cheap.”
“You guys talk pretty freely to strangers,” Hollis said.
Kokolo laughed, for the first time. “Like you might tell somebody, call the L.A. Times? We know you don’t.” To Evian he went on, “Check his resonance, then, you can do that with just the carrier-wave link itself, no need for a message. If his resonance is the same as what we’ve got recorded, we can be pretty sure he hasn’t deviated from his plotted time-line.”
Evian nodded to Scarbee. “Get a link-station,” he said, and Scarbee hurried, with evident relief, out of the preserved pizza parlor.
Hollis stepped through the doorway onto the cement floor of the kitchen. There wasn’t much dust on the counter surfaces – higher air-pressure maintained in this whole place, he thought – and the two disks of dough on the work table were clean, though clearly dry as chalk.
Kokolo stepped up on the other side of the counter, and Hollis stopped himself from reflexively reaching for the order pad, which was still right below the telephone.
“We’re going to look at your life-line resonance,” said Kokolo. “It’s a jab in your finger, just enough to hurt.”
“You’re supposed to die in March of 2008,” called Felise cheerfully. “Suicide, while you’re on Prozac. At first I thought they said it would be while you had Kojak on.” She had stepped around behind the bar and was walking toward the kitchen. “I die at forty-eight, but nobody’s looked up what year it’ll happen in.”
“What takes you so long?” asked Hollis, turning toward her.
“We both survive it by about thirty years. Subjective years.” She smiled at him. “I call that pretty good.”
Scarbee had shuffled back into the room, wheeling a cart with something on it that looked like a fax machine. He steered it around the pieces of broken wood.
“We think you survived,” said Evian, “weathered the encounter, because you had referents that let you partly roll with the blow; fragment it, deflect it. In your debriefing you talked about Escher prints and Ivan Albright paintings, and William Burroughs, and Ligeti’s music. Ionesco, Lovecraft. You were babbling, throwing these things out like cancelled credit cards or phony IDs.”
“And I’m still here,” said Felise as she lifted one of the hardened dough-disks and let it drop with a clack, “according to these guys, because I was a street girl and a doper. It wasn’t a big step to get stomped right out of the world.” She hiccuped. “Into the cold void between the stars. I wish you still served beer here.”
Hollis thought now that he remembered that cold void too. “And Lyle?” said Hollis.
“Lyle was a Christian,” Evian said. “Though he stopped being, after that night.”
“They figure the four-year-old was abused,” said Felise. She rapped the center of one disk with a knuckle, and it broke in a star pattern.
Scarbee had wheeled the device up beside Evian on the other side of the counter. “Give me your hand,” he said to Hollis.
Hollis looked at Felise, who nodded. “We’ve all done it,” she said. “It’s just a jab, to plug into your nervous system for a second.”
“The machine,” said Evian, “has a gate in it that’s always connected to Fermilab in Chicago in 2015. The time-line of your nervous system is like a long hallway with a mirror at each end – this will tachyonically ring the whole length of it, birth to death, and the resulting, uh, ‘note’ will show up as a series of lines on a print-out. Interference fringes.”
“It’s got special cranberry glass rods in it,” said Felise helpfully.
“They’re colloidal photonic crystals,” agreed Scarbee as Hollis reluctantly laid his hand across the order-pickup counter. “Expensive to make. They act as a half-silvered mirror hex, and the machine measures the Cherenkov radiation the tachyons produce as they hit the glass.”
He jabbed a needle into Hollis’s fingertip. Hollis recoiled and stepped back, blood dripping rapidly from his finger. Felise slid the unbroken dough-disk onto the counter below his hand to catch the drops.
The machine buzzed as a sheet of paper slid out from the front of it, and Scarbee held it up and compared it to a sheet he had brought in.
“They don’t match,” he said flatly. “His time-line has changed.”
“Do I die sooner or later than you thought, now?” asked Hollis, idly drawing a question mark in blood on the dough-disk. But he was aware that his heartbeat had speeded up. The faint metal smell of the room had taken on an oily tang, like ozone.
“Let me see those,” snapped Kokolo, stepping over and snatching the papers from Scarbee.
“Can’t tell from this,” said Scarbee quietly to Hollis, though his eyes were on Kokolo. “Just that it’s changed.”
“Okay,” said Kokolo, dropping the papers, “okay, this seems to be an anomaly. Get Chicago on the line, even if you have to use up all the bandwidth we’ve got left.”
Hollis looked past them at several figures who had entered the room. One was in a wheelchair, and another was pushing a wheeled IV stand beside it.
Hollis squinted at the wasted, bald, skeletal figure in the wheelchair. Presumably it was Don Lyle, but there was apparently nothing left of the cheerful young man Hollis had known.
Scarbee finished pushing a series of buttons on the machine, and paused and then pushed them again. “No connection with Chicago,” he said. His voice was hoarse.
Kokolo glanced around quickly with no expression, then reached into his silver jacket and yanked out what looked like a black rubber handlebar-grip.
“You can’t leave us hex!” shouted Evian even as Kokolo seemed to squeeze the thing.
Nothing happened. Kokolo stared at his own gripping hand – blood had begun to drip from it – and Evian and Scarbee and Felise stared at him with their mouths open, and Lyle’s wheelchair continued to roll forward across the floor.
“Your ejection seat didn’t fire,” said Felise merrily. “The gate’s down – no connection with Chicago at all.”
Hollis leaned against the counter, nauseated by the sight of his blood and the taste of the bourbon, and he thought he heard faint voices singing “Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime” over the speakers mounted above the take-out counter.
He looked at Felise beside him, but saw curls of color rippling across the room, passing over her face: quick views of the broken pool tables, and the corridors outside the room, and even a night-time parking lot lit by sodium lights – the parking lot that was no longer out front.
His face and hands felt hot.
“Get Lyle out of here!” screamed Kokolo. “It’s too similar!”
Then the heavy identity was present again like a subsonic roar and they were all subsumed in its perspective like confetti in a fire.
And rings and spheres appeared in the lamplit air and expanded rapidly, seeming to rush toward Hollis as they grew and rush away from him as they shrank back down to nothing, and more burst into swelling existence everywhere, so that he seemed to be standing in the lanes of some metaphysical freeway.
He had not remembered the noise of it. Tables snapped into pieces and clattered against the walls, masonry broke with booms like cannon shots, and the chilly air whistled around the instantly changing shapes.
The counter he was leaning on crashed backward into the kitchen in a spray of splinters, tumbling him against the base of the oven.
But his frail consciousness was engulfed by the personality that overwhelmed and became his own through its sheer power and age – a person that existed in darkness and infinite emptiness because it had renounced light and everything and everyone that was not itself.
As Hollis’s mind imploded it threw up remembered fragments of surrealist paintings, and images from symbolist poems and fairy tales.
This time, though, Hollis’s identity wasn’t completely assimilated into the thing – he was aware of himself remembering that this had happened before, and so he was able to see it as something separate from himself, though he was sure that his self must at any moment be crushed to oblivion under the infinite psychic weight of the other.
(The cement floor shook under him, and he was remotely aware of screams and crashing.)
This time he was able to perceive that the other was static, unaware of him – rushing through space-time but frozen in one subjective moment of hard-won ruin. And he was aware that it was rushing away from, being powerfully repelled by, something that was its opposite.
Then it was gone and space sprang back into the gap and Hollis was retching and sobbing against the steel foot of the oven, peripherally convinced that the room must be dotted with smoldering fires like a blackened field after a wildfire has passed across it.
A hand was shaking his shoulder, and when he rolled over and looked up at the cracked ceiling he managed to tighten his focus enough to see that someone was bending over him – it was the girl, Felise. Blood was dripping from her nose.
“Out of here,” she said. “Lyle too.”
Still partly in the perspective of the other, Hollis despised her for her physical presence and the vulgarity of communicating, especially communicating by causing organic membranes to vibrate in air-clotted space – but he struggled to his feet, bracing himself against the oven because he was viscerally aware that he himself was a body standing on a planet that was spinning as it fell through an empty void.
The two of them stumbled out of the kitchen. The bar had been flattened, and they dizzily stepped over the ripped boards and brass strips onto the floor of the dining area. It was difficult for Hollis, and for Felise too, to judge by her hunched posture and short steps, to resist the impulse to crawl on hands and knees.
Evian lay across one of the wrecked picnic tables, his body from the chest down crushed into a new crater in the floor. Scarbee was nowhere to be seen, and Kokolo was standing against the far wall, his lips compressed and his eyes clenched shut.
Lyle’s wheelchair was gone, but he lay on his back by the door, and Hollis saw him raise one bloody hand to brush his forehead, chest and shoulders in the sign of the cross before the last of his blood jetted from the stump where his left leg had been.
Hollis’s ears were shrilling as if someone had fired a gun in front of his face.
Supporting each other, Hollis and Felise limped out of the pizza parlor into the unlit corridor, and Hollis noticed that she was carrying the link-station machine Scarbee had brought in.
The lights were all out. Part of the wall had been blown in plaster chunks across the corridor, and in the dimness Hollis saw three motionless bodies on the carpet, two of which might have been alive.
“Front door,” said Felise hoarsely, stumbling over the pieces of plaster as she led Hollis toward relative brightness ahead.
“My bike,” said Hollis. “Away from here.”
Felise shook her head. “They’ll be out front.” She coughed and spat. “Again. Cordoned off again. Stun-guns.”
But they both continued toward the gray daylight of the front door, and when Hollis had pushed it open they were both panting as they stepped out onto the breezy pavement, as if they had been holding their breaths.
The parking lot under the overcast sky was empty except for Kokolo’s car and Hollis’s motorcycle. Cars rushed past on Anaheim Boulevard, but none turned into the lot.
“A bigger area,” said Felise, “this time. They’ll be closing in any moment.”
But Hollis crossed to his motorcycle and swung one leg over it. The key was still in the ignition. He switched it on and tromped on the kick-starter, and the engine sputtered into life. He pushed the kickstand up with his foot and wheeled the bike around to face the street.
“Come on,” he called, and Felise, still carrying the steel box, shrugged and walked carefully over to the bike.
“There’s no passenger footpegs,” she said.
“They fell off,” he panted, “a long time ago. Hook your feet over my legs.”
She climbed on and folded her legs around him with her feet on the gas tank, clutching him with her hands linked over his chest and the box between his back and her stomach.
He clicked the bike into gear and let the clutch out, and it surged forward into a right turn onto the street.
“How far?” he called over his shoulder as the cold wind ruffled his wet hair.
“Another block or two,” she said, and when the bike had roared and bounced through two green-light intersections, she called, “Pull over somewhere.”
Hollis downshifted and leaned the bike into a wide supermarket parking lot, and when he had braked it to a halt Felise pushed herself off over the back, hopping on the blacktop to keep her balance while holding the metal box.
“They don’t have a cordon,” she said. “They’re not hex – not here, now.” When Hollis got off the bike too and stretched, she laid the box on the frame plate where the seat should have been and pushed buttons on it. “Nothing,” she said. “No link to Chicago hex either.”
“Maybe the battery’s dead,” said Hollis.
“The battery is Fermilab in 2015. That battery’s dead. I better call the New York office.” She pulled an ordinary cell phone out of her shirt pocket and tapped in a number. After a moment she said, “Felise, from the field team in Anaheim. I can’t raise Chicago. The gate in the link-station seems to be dead.” For several seconds she listened, then said, “Right,” and closed the phone.
She was frowning. “They say they’ve lost the link too. But they weren’t in this locus, for sure.” She blinked at Hollis. “No contact here or in New York, not even the carrier-wave signal, no team from the future to move in on the disaster at the Anaheim office – the whole thing’s broken down.”
For several seconds neither of them spoke, and people parked cars and got out of them to walk toward the supermarket.
Hollis touched his face, and it stung. “Sunburn again,” he said.
“Yeah,” she said absently, staring at the inert link-station box, “me too.”
“The thing,” Hollis said, “that passed through – I could perceive more about it this time.”
She nodded. “They never were able to change the past, though it’s changed now – they had no notes on their charts of anything like this. God knows when you and I die, now. I bet they can’t jump at all anymore – I bet we’re all left high and dry where we are, now. Some of us in interrupted segments, out of sequence.”
She looked around the parking lot as if still hoping a team from the future might come rushing up to debrief them. None did.
“It wasn’t … objective,” Hollis went on awkwardly. “This time I could tell that I wasn’t it, and what it let us see was its own chosen situation, not – maybe not – reality. God help us.”
“They pushed it too hard,” she said sadly, “drilling five-dimensional paths through the solid continuum to jump from point to point of our four-dimensions. Something too heavy rolled over it and it all fell down, like the Tower of Babel. The hour of Babel.”
“The thing,” he said, “was an opposite of something else, something that’s apparently stronger than it, and expelled it.”
Felise finally looked at him in exasperation. “Yes, it was a fallen angel, falling at some speed-of-light through space-time, in dimensions that make all this –” She waved at the store and the street and the sky, “– look like figures on a comic-book page. It tore right through our pages, punching one hole that showed up twice in our continuity. Looks like more than one, but it’s one.”
“Could it have been … wrong?“ He gave her a twitchy, uncertain smile. “It can’t have been wrong, can it? After all this time?”
“I don’t know. I’ve spent six months – you’ve spent thirty-one years! – carrying its perspective.” She blinked at him. “What do you suppose the world is really like?”
“I – have no idea.”
She shivered. “We thought it was true, didn’t we?”
“Or attractive.” He climbed back on the idling bike and raised his eyebrows, though it made his forehead sting. “It’s still attractive.” With his right hand he twisted the throttle, gunning the engine. “Should we get moving?”
“Sure. I think the rain’s passed.” She carelessly pushed the link-station box off onto the asphalt and climbed on behind him again. “Where to?”
He rubbed his left hand carefully over his face and sighed. Then he laughed weakly. “I think I’d like to see your cat.”
When I was working at a place called Firehouse Pizza in the mid-’70s, there was a homeless-looking girl who would come in on slow nights and sit at thefar end of the bar, where I would, as-if-by-accident, set trays of half-finishedpizzas on their way to the trash cans and sinks in the back room, and eventually she would be gone and the trays would be empty. I don’t think she andI ever spoke, beyond her first question about what became of the pizzas left unfinished by customers, and I’ve wanted to use her in a story ever since.
Firehouse Pizza was exactly how and where I describe it here, and, as in the story, the place where it once stood is now some sort of office building. So for the story I resurrected the old motorcycle I was riding in those days and went back to see what had become of the place, and of that girl. I wound up wrecking the place, but at least I got to talk to her, finally.
–T. P.