The Color of Paradox (2 page)

“I could just about do a cup of tea,” I said. “Be a love, will you?”

Willie affected not to have heard, opening a small journal and paging through the opening leaves.

“Why am I appointed your brother?”

“Because you’re a flirt, and I wish to avoid trouble.”

“You said you’d be nicer to me if I survived.”

“Who says you have?”

That took the wind out of my sails. “My strength is—I am recovering.”

“You might yet run mad and cut your throat,” she said, with no apparent interest. “Or need to be shot.”

“You’re not as cold as all that, are you?”

“Would you like to test me?”

I was too irked to tell her that I'd seen proof I was going to make it. “When do I receive my orders?”

She took up a pen, turned to a blank page in her journal, and spoke as she wrote: “February 7th, 1920. My brother Jules has arrived from England and met with a mishap: he’s been robbed of his luggage and caught a fever. I have been nursing him ’round the clock—”

“Ha!” said I.

“—and it begins to look as though he may pull through. Since I saw him last, six years ago, Julie has grown into a reasonably handsome fellow—”

“Faint praise.”

“He has blue eyes, like mine, and hair so dark it might be taken for black.”

“It’s not dark now.”

“It’ll grow in.” Willie continued to narrate: “He has had his appendix removed in childhood and—” She paused. “Other scars?”

“If you’d nursed me as attentively as you claim, you’d know.”

“The project must know which one you are if they’re to send proper identification.”

Which one you are.
It raised the hairs on my arms.

“Shall I be forced to describe your personality?” Withering tone there: whatever she said would be unflattering.

“It’s the bottom of my foot. I stepped on a fishing lure.”

She finished the sentence in silence and then added, “Though dear Julie isn’t out of danger yet—”

“I’m not wild about this pet name you’ve given me.”

“—he is restless and eager to be of use.” She looked across the table. “They’ll send something along presently.”

“Just like that?”

We could press things back, never forward. Willie would complete her girlish diary and shelve it somewhere safe: her notes would wait until they reached the project, twenty-six years on, for the Major to read about my arrival.

“What is it?” Willie said.

“I won’t see 1946 again until I’m in my forties.” The thought was staggering.

She frowned. “Your package will arrive downstairs. When you go, bring up the sheets.”

“Would you have me dust while I’m at it? Arrange some flowers?”

“I’m sure, Julie, that I don’t care what you do.” She jotted one last sentence, snapped the journal shut when I tried to see it, and left me tealess and suddenly chilled in the kitchen.

She told them I was insubordinate.
My stomach cramped and I was, all at once, brimming with fury. I had an urge to chase her out of the room, to smash her head against the banister until her blood ran between my knuckles. To lick, drink . . . I touched my tongue to the notch between my clenched index and middle fingers, imagining salt, and saw a flash of color . . .

It passed, leaving me dry-mouthed and appalled at myself.

You may yet run mad
.

“Maybe Julie isn’t out of the woods yet,” I conceded, and escaped downstairs.

The basement had a sour smell I associated with an animal’s den—my smell, I realized, from days of sickness—overlaid by lubricated machinery. I gathered the bedding, wadding everything into the top sheet, and walked it up to the room with the wardrobe. The stairs were easier the second time.

Between the sheets and the mattress was a stiff black tarpaulin. I folded that, too, finding the mattress beneath pristine, and carried it up.

Returning once more, I strained to tilt the mattress off the floor. There was no drain there yet. The message scratched into the floor, “16—Hungry,” seemed fainter than it had been, a week ago in the future, when I was climbing aboard the gurney.

I let the mattress fall back into position and paced the room. There was nothing down here but cool air, bare walls, soothing quiet. By my time, there would be a trapdoor under the staircase, access to a lower basement. For now, though, the floor was intact: this was the bottom of the hole.

I had never been monstrous. The flash of bloodlust was tied to what I’d seen, seven weeks into my future, at the end of the world. I’d been infected. Some rot was blooming within my mind or soul.

What could I do but fight it?

I should go out, take in a little air, feel the rain on my face. Or eat—Mrs. Farmer would fix me tea, I’d wager, even if Willie had no idea of proper female behavior. I could go upstairs and meet the convalescents.

Instead I sat on the steps in the blessed dim and quiet, trying to still my thoughts.

After about an hour a satchel appeared in mid-air, at waist-height—the height of the gurney. It was scorched. A scrap of strung hide was burning into its bottom.

It flopped onto the mattress, just as I had, and lay there, smoking. I thought of horse droppings, suddenly, steaming on frosty lawns.

Inside the satchel I found bundles of letters and a paper-wrapped package, tied in string and all neatly labelled, like an odd Christmas parcel. Names: mine, hers, someone named Robert Chambers and Kenneth Smith.

I opened a package with “Jules Wills III” on it, and found a wallet containing thirty dollars in American bills. A small fortune.

The brown paper the wallet came in had been inked with facts and figures I was meant to memorize: my birthday in 1898, Willie’s in 1895, our parents’ names. There were notes outlining a sketchy little cover story about growing up on an estate in the West Dorset countryside, and the circumstances that had brought us to America.

The tale was Willie had married a man who’d brought her here. He’d died in the Great War and so she’d set up the convalescent home. Our parents had sent me out to check on her.

“Is the post in?” Her voice at the top of the stair made me jump. “I smell smoke.”

I coughed, stood, passed it up. Her eyes travelled over the basement—she saw the soot-mark from the bag on her virginal mattress and I realized I wasn’t meant to have brought up the tarpaulin.

“You put the mattress there?” I asked suddenly. “You’d have fallen onto—”

I gestured at the floor and wondered if she’d broken anything when she hit the concrete.

She extracted the bundle with her name on it and passed me a bunch of letters. “From Father,” she said. I could sense she was debating her answer.

“Please, Willie. I don’t mean to be beastly. None of this is what I expected.”

She shook her head. “There was no mattress. How could there be?”

“It’s only a yard, I suppose. Were you hurt?”

“Grady and Biggs broke my fall.”

“Who?”

“Agents fourteen and fifteen. What remained of them, anyway.”

I’d have expected her to leave after that grisly revelation—Willie seemed to love a good exit line—but instead she gave my shoulder an absent pat and started opening her letters. “The brown sheets speak plainly—they’re meant to be burned. The letters we can keep. They don’t say anything revealing.”

“Aren’t they afraid we’ll miss one of the brown sheets—fail to burn it?”

“They don’t last. The ink fades and the paper tatters within a month or two.”

The letters from my false parents ordered me to mind my sister, mind my health, and remember the considerable spiritual benefits of prayer and clean living. In other words: obey my C.O., stay physically fit, and try to avoid going mad.

The note from ‘Father’ was written in the Major’s hand. He wanted me to set up a bank account and asked me to make some modest but specific investments. Cash would be provided for further deposits. There was also an allowance: this much for clothes and kit, that much for expenses as I ‘made myself useful.’

Useful. The letter hinted that I might indulge a bit of a carousing and gambling habit, by way of ingratiating myself with local gossips and crooks. This would be funded as long as I wrote home about whatever they told me.

A license to drink and gamble. There were worse things.

“Mother,” whose handwriting I didn’t recognize, said I should see Willie’s doctor and take iodine pills—these they’d enclosed. I was to refrain from smoking while I recovered.

The final wrapped lump with my name on it felt like a book.

I untied the string and then, in the process of extracting the biography of a reporter I’d long admired, I tore the brown paper in half.

My eyes drifted to the mattress in the middle of the floor and I pictured Willie suddenly: young, sick . . .

(helpless, bleeding, delicious)

. . . and dropped on concrete, onto the corpses of two previous agents. Using something—who knew what?—to scratch those words into the floor.

“16—Hungry.” Begging the future for food, because she was too weak to fetch any for herself.

I shook the image away and held two sides of the page together to see what it was I’d been sent back to do.

“Bloody hell!”

Willie looked down, offering an especially masterful performance of her incurious stare. I passed her the torn pages.

She held them up and scanned. “Paperboy with the
Seattle Union Record
. Name of Peter Rupert, lives near Jackson Street. Ruin, spoil, or if necessary kill.”

“Bloody Peter Rupert.” I waved the biography at her.

“You know him?”

“Don’t you?”

She shook her head. “He wasn’t—in my 1937, he must not have had any significance.”

“Well in
my
1937 he’s a bloody hero. Cottoned onto an attack Japan was planning on Hawaii, on the U.S. Fleet. He broke the story and stopped the whole—”

“You have to forget about that,” she said. “It’s going to change. Whatever you remember is already gone. It will all unfold differently after you—”

“Ruin a nine-year-old boy?”

“Or kill him.”

“What kind of a monster are you?”

“If you are so certain that ruining someone is better than killing them outright, you’ve had something of a soft go at life.”

“I’m not killing a child.”

“All right.” She ignored my distress, looking over the book but far off, deep in thought. “If he were disfigured, people mightn’t talk to him. Or if his voice were damaged—did he file dispatches by telephone?”

“Disfigure or cripple a nine-year-old,” I said. “A hero. He reported on the Russian counter-revolution. I dreamed about being like him.”

“No doubt that’s why you were sent. Know thy—”

“Enemy?”

“Target.”

“I have no intention of doing my target the slightest harm,” I said.

She shrugged, passed the book back, and left me in the basement to fume.

Anger drove me out of the house. I went and set up the bank account and investments, paying lip service to the idea of military obedience. I bought myself a new suit and an umbrella. Everyone looked young and hopeful. They were dressed in clothes that reminded me of my childhood. There were almost no automobiles on the streets: trolleys, carts, and pedestrians were everywhere.

In the basement, at Willie’s, I might still have been in 1946. Now it sank in: I was living in my own past.

Up ahead, just decades away, the world was turning to something far worse than ash. Peter Rupert would do something to bring that day closer.

But it was probably one action of his, wasn’t it? Probably the Japan scoop. One single story of the hundreds he filed.

I found myself a street corner that smelled of washed earth—not of horse, not of smoke or fuel. I stood there, snug under my umbrella, and watched the rain pour down as I formulated a plan.

“What if I got close to him?” I said to Willie that night. “The Project must know more about whatever Peter does to . . .”

“To bring on the Souring?” She sat in a rocking chair in the parlor, knitting in front of the fire, playing at being an ordinary woman.

My mouth went dry. “The—”

“Sorry—that’s what I call
it
. What we saw.”

I swallowed. “It’s apt.”

“It’s useful,” she said. “I use it in the journals. I’ve cultivated a conceit that losing my husband made me a bit odd.”

“Ramblings of a daft young widow?”

She nodded. “Just in case someone unauthorized gets a look.”

“Whatever Peter does to bring on your Souring,” I said, “it’s bound to be one story. They chose him because he’s key, am I right? Because he’s a simple target?”

“So?”

“The Project must tell me which story. If he sees me as a friend, an older brother, or even a father figure—his own father died in the flu epidemic—”

She flinched, for some reason.

“It’s why he’s working as a paperboy, to support his mother. In any case, I’ll keep him off that one story.”

“You’re proposing to chum around with him for years?”

“Why not? I’ll make myself useful meanwhile: keep investing money, reporting gossip, maybe help dig out the next basement . . .”

“Jules.”

“. . . I’d need someone to explain the engineering to me, obviously. How
does
one secretly dig a second basement in a house that already exists?”

“Jules.”

“I needn’t live here in the house if you don’t want me underfoot.”

She pulled herself upright in her chair, sitting as prim and proper as a schoolteacher. I imagined I heard her sleeve tearing, and thought about running my tongue over the freckles on her arm: how far did they go? She folded her hands, seemed to fight an urge to wring them, and waited for me to run down.

“What is it?”

She said. “The timepress uses a radiant form of energy. It’s what makes us so sick. They told you that, didn’t they?”

“I’m not going to relapse on you. I live, I know it.”

She didn’t smile. “Chances are you will die of cancer within the year.”

“Chances?”

“Rufus has survived almost fifteen months, but...”

She meant the sickly Negro man.

“You have no great span of time in which to befriend Peter Rupert. You can’t jolly him along for a decade and hope to break his leg before he leaves for Japan. You—”