The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (31 page)

“Why,
good evening, Your Honor. Looks like my twenty double eagles will come a-flyin’
back to my own little hands, won’t they, darlin’?”

His
honor’s mouth drops open. He wasn’t expecting to pay that much for his
evening’s pleasure. He also wasn’t expecting to run into Jessie Malone en route
to the third floor of the Poodle Dog. Well, he knows the price now, don’t he?

Jessie
climbs the stairs behind the happy couple, mightily pleased at Maisy’s swinging
hips. The unctuous old doorman greets them at the top of the stairs and ushers
them down a hushed hallway past a score of closed doors, to the next available
private suite.

“Is
this satisfactory, Miss Malone?” says the doorman with an arch look. He’s uncertain
what to make of her latest ménage a trois. Sure and she’s met the old fart at
the top of the stairs all the many long years she’s been escorting guests to
the third floor of the Poodle Dog. His arch look annoys her.

Jessie
surveys the suite—the red velvet carpet and plush chairs, a divan, the small
gilt dining tables, a silver bucket with champagne on melting ice. The
paintings have gone dull over the years. Seascapes and mountains. Hmph!

“It’ll
have to do.” She hands the doorman a measly tip. “Bring us Pierre’s frog legs
sauté
sec
, cracked crab, and a bottle of Pernod Fils with the works.”

“Yes,
madam.”

She
plumps down on the divan and pats the cushion beside her, smiling at Daniel. He
sits, his eyes glittering with anticipation, and Jessie sighs. He cares nothing
about their midnight tryst. Cares nothing for his mistress, if that’s what Zhu
has become. He only cares about partaking of Pernod Fils. Jessie seldom pities
any man, but she pities Daniel now.

“If
your mama could see you, Mr. Watkins.”

Daniel
regards her coolly. “Absinthe is my mother, Miss Malone. The mother of my
happiness. She is the Green Fairy. She is holy water, the sacred herb.”

“The
brain lesions will make you mad,” Zhu reminds them both, “if you don’t keel
over from a stroke first.”

“She
has green eyes, a cloak of forest green, and opalescent skin. She is
ma mere
.”
Daniel seizes Zhu’s wrist, pulls her down onto his lap. “She is the mistress I
love best. Her eyes are greener than yours. Jealous?”

Someone
knocks on the door, and Zhu leaps up, opens it. A waiter enters with a trolley
bearing the dark green bottle, its neck wrapped in silver foil, a carafe of
sparkling water, a dish of sugar cubes, and three bell-shaped glasses. There
are three absinthe spoons of polished silver, their flat bowls punched out in
lovely filigrees.

Jessie
sniffs disapprovingly, recalling how this little ceremony goes. She also
recalls why she never serves absinthe at the Mansion. Zhu’s protests ring only
too true. Madness, indeed. It’s a devilish drink. All the same, she’ll take a
taste. Just a wee taste.

Daniel
seizes the trolley and shoos the waiter out. His hands shake with excitement as
he sets out the bottle, the carafe, and the sugar cubes just so. He pours out
absinthe and places the spoons over the mouth of each glass. But before he
proceeds, he shoots Zhu a dark look. “First let’s have a closer look at the
knife of yours while I’m still sane and sober.”

“Yeah,
what did she call it? A mollie knife. I want to see it, too,” Jessie says.

“Sorry,
I can’t do that,” Zhu murmurs.

Daniel
seizes her, reaches in her tunic pocket, finds what he’s looking for. Zhu
staggers back, frowning, but makes no move to reclaim the knife. She shrugs
with a haughty, disdainful look.

“Say,
you don’t have to roughhouse her, mister,” Jessie says but she joins him,
peering down at the miraculous knife.

It’s
about the same size and shape as Daniel’s Congress knife, except for the
sapphire knob protruding from the hilt. Daniel takes a sugar cube, takes the
mollie knife, and cuts the cube in half. Then he pushes in the knob on the hilt,
imitating Zhu’s work on Duncan Ross’s skull, and guides the blade back over the
cut. The sugar cube mends itself whole.

“Jar
me,” Jessie exclaims. “Like I said, it’s a miracle!”

She
and Daniel exchange astonished glances. She turns to Zhu, but the chit sits
wearily on the divan, shaking her head. She plucks the knife from Daniel’s
fingers.

“Don’t
look so sour,” Jessie tells her. “Mr. Edison would give his right arm for
that.”

“By
God, how true,” Daniel says, that glitter in his eye brighter. “I would give my
right arm for that. How is it done?”

Ah,
well. The gentleman does care for something other than pickling his brain.
Jessie turns to Zhu expectantly. “How is the trick done?”

“Matter
is made up of molecules. Molecules are made up of atoms connected together by
bonds. When you cut something, you break the bonds. The mollie knife merely
rearranges the electrons, forming ions. The ions are attracted to each other
and reform the bonds. Molecular recombination, like I said. It’s not so
difficult, really.”

“Then
let us drink to molecular recombination, ladies,” Daniel says. He balances a
sugar cube in the bowl of an absinthe spoon, drizzles water over the cube. The
cube dissolves and sugar water drips into the glass, turning the green liquor
murky. “After the first glass of the Green Fairy, you see things as you wish
they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. And after the
third, you see things as they really are, which is the most terrible thing in
the world.” Daniel sips, and his eyes turn as murky as the liquor. “Oscar Wilde
said that. Something like that. Cheers.”

Jessie
pours water over her own sugar cube and baptizes Zhu’s cube, too. “To your
health, missy.”

“I’ll
pass,” Zhu says.

Jessie
sips. Gah, what a taste! Like chewing on the forbidden herbs in her painting of
a celestial mountaintop, the goat-footed satyrs taking liberties with winged
nymphs. She peers at the green liquid in her glass, evil and pungent. They say
mad monks brew the stuff. Absinthe careens into her blood, and the gaslight
glows like molten gold. The eyes of her companions deepen, and their faces take
on a strange nobility.

“Re-form
the bonds,” Jessie says. “That’s downright romantic, missy. Ain’t that
romantic, Mr. Watkins?’

But
Daniel’s mood has shifted again, and now he glares at Zhu over his glass.
“You’re lying again. You’re making up stories like Mr. Wells and his time
machine.”

“I
don’t lie,” Zhu says. “That’s one thing I never do, Daniel.”

The
waiter knocks and brings in another trolley with covered dishes, shell
crackers, long-stemmed forks, bowls of melted butter. He whips the covers off
the dishes, revealing steaming scarlet crabs and lovely slender frog’s legs
drowning in a pool of white sauce.

Jessie
assembles a plate for Daniel, hoping to appease him. Drink ought to cheer a
man, not make him violent and mean, though so often that is the result. “Now,
Mr. Watkins. Our Zhu did a wonderful thing tonight. She saved a man’s life.”

“We
don’t know what the hell she did. Perhaps Duncan Ross will wind up a lunatic
with blood on his brain.” He pours himself another round. “If the mollie knife
is real, where can I purchase one?”

“You
can’t,” Zhu says with a wistful smile and pushes her glass away.

“What
about the Montgomery Ward catalog?” Jessie says, taking another tiny sip. The
walls of the suite soften into lovely pink clouds, and she notices a moth swirling
and circling in the glow of the gaslight. Like a little angel it is, a tiny
woman with golden wings. She jolts with alarm. Champagne never makes her see visions!
“Montgomery Ward’s got everything.”

“I’ve
never seen a mollie knife in the Montgomery Ward catalog,” Daniel says. “Or in
Sears, Roebuck.”

“Not
even Sears, Roebuck stocks a mollie knife,” Zhu says with a laugh.

“Then
where did you steal yours?” he demands.

“See
here, Daniel,” Zhu says, flushing, her words spilling out in a rush. “I don’t
lie and I don’t steal. The Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications gave
me the knife for the Gilded Age Project. I am a Daughter of Compassion, and
I’ve had just about enough of both of you today. Columbus Day, red wine, and
man’s conquest.” She glares back at him. “You should be grateful I agreed to
t-port to this spacetime.”

“Spacetime,”
Daniel says. “You said that word before. What the devil do you mean?”

“Why,
all of space and time, which are a whole. One doesn’t exist without the other.”

“You
see, Miss Malone?” Daniel says to her, smirking. “You women are all confused.
There is space. Then there is time. The one has nothing to do with the other.”

“Each
is
the other, Daniel,” Zhu insists. “There is only One Day that exists
always.”

“Yet
you keep talking about ‘our Now’ and ‘your Now,’” Daniel points out.

“That’s
right,” Jessie chimes in. “She mentioned ‘her Now’ to me, too.”

Zhu
sighs. “They told me I’m not supposed to do that, either.”

Jessie
loves a good spoof, but the sip of absinthe and all this strange talk are
spinning her head around. Still, she saw the mollie knife work with her own
eyes. And what about that little voice, that spirit she hears talking to Zhu? “All
right, then, why
did
you agree to. . . .t-port to our Now?” She laughs
at herself. How quickly she picks up trade talk. “To this spacetime?”

Zhu
sighs again. “I’m not so sure myself, anymore.”

“Oh,
come now, miss,” Daniel says. “You were doing so well. Surely you can dream
something up.”

Zhu
turns to him angrily. “The girl I’m supposed to rescue is in jeopardy. More
jeopardy than anyone knew. I must get her to the safety of the mission. I must.”
She takes off her fedora and her spectacles, runs her hand over her brow,
smoothing back stray hair. “Look. It’s like this. I’m not supposed to reveal my
true identity under Tenet Five of the Grandmother Principle.”

“Ah,”
Jessie says with a wink at Daniel. “And what is your true identity?”

“I’m
Zhu Wong, all right, but I’m from 2495,” she answers somberly.

“Are
you sure?” Jessie teases. “You’re not from, say, a million years in the future
like the girl in Mr. Wells’s
Time Machine
?”

“Miss
Malone, I’m not making this up. I’m really from six hundred years in your
future. So is the mollie knife, if you must know.”

“Well,
that’s settled,” Jessie says, cracking open a crab claw and picking out the
delicate meat. “You’ll have to wait a wee while to purchase your mollie knife,
Mr. Watkins.”

But
Daniel is more taken with the chit’s story than he ought to be. “How,” he says,
furrowing his brow, “can you really be from six hundred years in the future?
The future doesn’t exist yet.”

“But
it does,” she says. “Look, I’m no expert on this. But, as I understand it,
spacetime isn’t a line, it’s a whole. For every moment in the past, there is a
future. The future always is, just as the past always is. Then it gets more complicated.”
She sips water right out of the carafe. “What cosmicist theory has always
suggested, and what the technology of t-porting has proven, is that reality
doesn’t always exist the
same
. That the probable nature of reality on
the quantum level applies to everything. So that each moment has probabilities
that collapse into or out of the timeline.”

“That’s
quite a tall tale,” Daniel says. But his smirk has vanished.

“I
know,” Zhu says miserably. “The fact that I’m here in your Now is constantly
affecting what happens. What happens in the past affects the future and, ever
since tachyportation got invented in the future, the future also affects the
past.”

Daniel
is shaking his head, but suddenly Jessie stops teasing. Something in Zhu’s
words strikes a chord in her heart. “I do believe I see what you mean, missy.
It’s like when you remember something, and then you learn something new about
what happened or you feel something new, understand something new about it, and
suddenly the memory ain’t the same anymore. It’s as if the whole world, the
whole past, has changed because of what you thought of today.”

Zhu
gazes at her. “I’ll remember you said that, Miss Malone.”

“Like
me and Rachael,” Jessie rambles on. “My sweet innocent Rachael, long ago.”
Sorrow wells in her heart, and she dabs at the tears welling in her eyes. “I
thought she was wicked, but now I understand she was just young. Young and
innocent.” No more of the Green Fairy for the Queen of the Underworld. She
checks her pocket watch. Lordy! It’s after midnight. She’s got to make her
appearance at the Parisian Mansion. “If only I could see things as I wish they
were.”

“I
think I’m starting to see things as they are not,” Daniel says.

Zhu
frowns. “Me, too.”

November
2, 1895

El Dia de los Muertos

7

Nine
Twenty Sacramento Street