The Color of Paradox (3 page)

I was across the room before I knew it, grabbing at her, tipping the rocking chair. We ended on the floor, my hand wrapped around her jaw, and again that red desire swam up. To smash, to smash, to taste of her blood on my knuckles.

“You’re. Not. Dead,” I snarled. “It’s been years and you’re not dead.”

A little flicker. Fear? I am ashamed to admit I hoped so. I needed to see something beyond pity or contempt in her.

“Go ahead, then,” she said, and I realized my other hand was resting atop—was squeezing—one of her strangely firm breasts.

Trying to buy her life? Well, she’d all but opened her legs now: I gave her blouse a swift tear as my defeated sanity—the despairing, quashed part of me that knew better—protested.

I found: a padded bodice, formed like a woman’s body.

I pushed it aside, exposing her belly...

...and found nothing but scars.

The slices had been pulled up and then stitched tight. Everything below her collarbones was purple and red, twisting lines of hashed-together tissue.

“About a week after I finished my mission.” Her words were distorted by the grip I had on her—she couldn’t really move her jaw. “I woke up with a terrible feeling. It wasn’t physical—I’d never felt so well.”

“Feeling?” I was staring at her torn-up body; I couldn’t look away.

“Panic, pure and simple. I went to a surgeon and paid him to cut away everything that made me a woman.”

I gagged, released her, and pushed myself back, back, until I was almost in the fireplace. I got entangled with her knitting bag and it came with me, my slippers trailing a half-knit Christmas stocking and strands of red and green wool.

Willie sat up. “This city is full of sweet, bright, talented boys, Jules.”

“But the future won’t have anyone, bright or otherwise, unless I fulfill my mission. Is that what you’re saying?”

She struggled to anchor her bodice over the ruin of flesh under her throat. Those empty scoops. Then she hunted on the carpet for the buttons I’d torn off her dress. She got to her feet, righted the chair, and peered out before creeping off into the house, holding her blouse shut.

I disentangled my feet from the red and green yarn, spilling Willie’s journal in the process. Snatching it up, I fled the house.

The Major had recommended a particular neighborhood speakeasy to me and it was there, with a whiskey in front of me, that I opened up the journal.

I suppose I expected to find an account, cleverly couched, of Willie’s earliest days. Or that first mission of hers.

Who did you ruin, spoil, or kill, Willie?

But that first journal was long since filled, I’m sure, filled and locked away, waiting for the project to discover its secrets. This one had only been on the go for a month or so.

It began with a brief account of the death of one of the gents upstairs, and a note to the effect that she was glad he’d got to see the Great Pyramid on ‘his recent business trip to Egypt.’

They had briefed me on that mission: Smitty had interfered with the mail in the Middle East, stealing correspondence and replacing it with false letters to a number of gentlemen in Jerusalem. This had eased tensions there and thereby delayed the onset of the second Great War until 1936.

All the sick men upstairs in the bedrooms. They’re not tenants, they’re time agents. They’ve served their purpose and now . . .

“What’re you doing, Mac?” A drunk nudged me, apparently hoping I’d stand him a round.

“Reading my sister’s diary,” I said, which got a general laugh.

Ruin, spoil, or kill
. The thought crept in, despite my resolve to refuse the mission. Peter Rupert, the reporter, had terrible problems with drink.

I paged ahead, past an account of some Boeing engineer and his odd friendship with Rufus. Beyond that was the account of my arrival Willie had written, just days before. I checked that last line, the one I’d believed was her tale-telling about my intransigence.

She had written: “What’s best about him, so far, is that he’s stubborn.”

There was more about the engineer, and an entry saying someone named Valois had written with an address in France and a request that she forward his mail. He was settling down with a girl in Paris, for ‘however long he had.’

She’d got back to me in her final entry: “Julie has survived his first week in America. His spirits are in turmoil. Homesickness, I expect. Nothing out of the ordinary. He’s wonderfully strong. Father expects rather a lot from him, and he is mulling over how to make the family proud.”

I had one more shot of the bathtub whiskey, then paid for a flask to take away.

On the way back, I passed a school. It was late in the day; the children were gone.

On a whim, I went in and wandered the halls, waiting for someone to challenge me. Nobody did; nobody took notice of me at all.

I stepped into a classroom and found myself contemplating a long ruler and a piece of chalk. The smell of the chalk was like the bare cement walls of the project basement: dust and bone, calm, a scent of earth and eternity.

“Are you here to fill in for our art teacher?"

I turned. The man who’d addressed me was cut from the same pattern as my father: round, pink, affable. He had green eyes, emerald chips, bright and long of lash. His wedding ring was plain and a little too tight for his finger; the valise he clutched was well-worn.

“Veteran?” he said, and I nodded.

“There aren’t enough thanks in all the world, sir, for what you’ve done.”

“I accept pound notes,” I said.

His laugh was like Dad’s, too, a boom that came from the soles of his feet. “Principal’s at the end of the hall, on the left.”

I found Willie tucking her heavy tarpaulin back into place on the mattress in the basement. There was an ugly bruise around her mouth, but when she saw me, her lips twitched. Trying not to laugh?

“Sorry.” What else could I say?

“It’s nothing.”

I lifted the edge of the mattress so she could smooth the tarpaulin under. “What are you doing?”

“Preparing for the next one.” She handed me the sheet.

That should have been my cue to tell her it wouldn’t be necessary to send another man, that I’d take on the mission. But there would be someone else, wouldn’t there?

“Have you got my book, Julie?”

I passed the journal to her. “Lots about Boeing.”

“The airfield’s one reason we’re in Washington. A hint to an engineer here, a line on a blueprint there . . . the planes make an immense difference to how it all plays out.”

“Is that what you did—help make planes?”

“Rufus is the engineer,” she said. “Who would take plane-building notes from a dotty old widow?”

“So your mission: was it ‘ruin, spoil, or kill’ too?”

“Well.” Her voice was dry. “We are siblings.”

I took that as a yes.

She said: “You’ve thought it out, haven’t you?”

I showed her the flask. “Peter Rupert has a compulsion. If I start him drinking early, especially given the poisons they’re putting in alcohol right now . . .”

Willie nodded. “Might be kinder to shoot him.”

“Kinder for him? Or me?”

“You, of course.”

If he became a drunk as a youth, he might yet pull a less illustrious life together later. “It shouldn’t be easy.”

“That’s simply masochism.”

“You’re afraid it won’t work? That I’ll die before he’s—”

She gestured at the mattress. Meaning: if I failed, someone else would come and finish the job.

I took up my ruler and walked to the wall, drawing the line I’d seen there. Working slowly, I made notches at one-inch intervals, and wrote 1900, 1914, and 1916 at the appropriate heights. They looked just as I’d remembered. There’s an odd curl to my nines I never managed, quite, to amend.

I counted forward to 1937, the year they pressed Willie, and wrote an encircled “1” beside it.

“The first Souring?” she said.

“Yes.” I counted forward through the nine years she’d bought us, to my own time, and noted the second.

“They’re learning more with every press,” she said. “Rufus has been doing quite well.”

I nodded, but I wasn’t paying attention. The scent of the chalk had caught me again, along with the odd little miracle of the bright yellow line it made, here on the rough grey wall, and the residue left on my hand. It was the same feeling I’d had when talking to the old teacher, an almost painful awareness of . . . was it beauty?

“Sorry, what?” I said.

She wore, to my shock, a smile. “One of the effects of having been—what was your word? —skinned,” she said. “Little things shine out like that. It’s never the things that are meant to be attractive, I find, but—”

I gave in to the urge to put the chalk under my nose, like a cigar, and inhale. “It’s just that it’s so different. Different from the end.”

“Yes. Solid, somehow. Real. Food’s better too, once you can handle it.”

“Tonight, maybe,” I said, pocketing the chalk and leaving the ruler leaned up against the short stretch of the twentieth century, the scratched out record of the precious years we’d bought so far. “So, Willie, do you want to know my name yet?”

“When you’ve lived, Julie,” she said, and she meant something different by it this time. And what did it matter? I bent to help her with the sheet, smoothing out the mattress to catch the next wretched one of us, whenever he or she might land.