The Stranger's Woes (76 page)

Well
,
it didn’t exactly take me back
.
I was all my fault
.
I—

Hold it right there
.
The last thing I want is to listen to your crazy theories
.
And it’s for your own good
.
The only thing you should keep in mind is this: your World took you back
,
no matter what you think about it
.
It ain’t that simple
.
It breaks down like this
.
There’s a few hundred people in your World who know that you’re living among them
.
I can’t say they’re really concerned about you
,
but you are a part of their lives
.
They’re sure you’re going to show up at work tonight
.
If you don’t
,
they’ll call you at home and you’ll pick up the phone
.
If not tonight
,
then maybe tomorrow
,
or in a couple of years
.
Sooner or later you’ll resurface
,
and for your acquaintances this is as obvious as the sky above
.
They don’t even think about it
.
They
know
it
.
It ain’t easy to just up and disappear
.
Their memories of you are what bind you to their reality
,
the World you were born in—the place you’re supposed to be living until the day you die
.
That’s how your mighty compatriots think about it
,
without even realizing their own mightiness
.
Too bad we can’t put their powers to good use
.
But I digress. Get a load of this, Max
.
It ain’t that difficult for you to return
.
You’ll manage
.
You’ll figure it out
.
Your kind always does
.
But remember
,
someday your World will take you back again
.
And again
,
and again
.
Until you
’
re able to convince it that you don
’
t exist anymore
.
Got it?

No
,
not really
.
Mackie
,
it’s really hard for me to talk to you
.
Well
,
you know that already
.
Maybe you could just tell me what to do?

I just did
.
You need to convince your World that you don’t exist
.
Convince everyone concerned
,
and do it in dead earnest
.
Your idea about the streetcar is a mighty good one
.
Keep working on it
.
But be prepared for a surprise
.
I reckon you forgot about the coachman
.
Whatever you call him
.
Is there a special word for what he does?

It’s okay
,
I understand what you mean
.
He’s called a driver
.
Sir Maba Kalox called him a Tipfinger
.
He told me something about him
,
but I didn’t understand
.

I can just imagine Maba’s
“
explanations
.”
Of course you didn
’
t understand a lick of what he said
.
But that don’t matter
.
Just remember that you shouldn’t be afraid of him
.
Beating him is as easy as Chakatta Pie
.
Especially for you
.
But don’t kill him—ask him a few questions first
.
He’s your chance
,
Max
.
Be careful with him
,
though
.
The Tipfinger is the most cunning creature in the Universe
.
Or one of
’em
. . .

His words were beginning to trail away. The weight was becoming unbearable. It was a miracle that I had managed to sustain the conversation for so long. Silent Speech had never been my strongest point.

Thanks
,
Mackie
. These were the last words I could squeeze out. I decided not to postpone the words of gratitude for another time since I wasn’t even sure that “other time” would ever come.

Happy to oblige
.
Don’t fret
.
You’ll pull it off
.
Just remember—

What I was supposed to remember would remain unknown because the invisible steamroller had smashed me against the kitchen wall. For some time I didn’t exist in any World at all, but then I came to. My clothes were soaked with perspiration. I knew, however, that I had gotten off easy.

I went to the bathroom, took a shower, and put my wet clothes in the trash. I didn’t think I’d be needing them anymore. No matter how hard it was to talk to the old sheriff of Kettari, talking with him had removed a huge weight from my shoulders.

Mackie doesn’t speak idly, I thought. If he says I’ll be all right, then I’ll be all right. He approves of my idea to take the streetcar back to Echo, so that’s great. If he says it will be easy for me to beat that creature in the driver’s cabin, then it will be. He even says it will help me somehow. Perfect. If Mackie says so.

Now I felt like someone who had just bought a plane ticket or won the trip of a lifetime. I was counting the hours before my plane would take off, and I thought I should probably start packing.

Well, that was, of course, a metaphor. I didn’t really have to pack anything to take back to Echo. I was taking no souvenirs. I doubted I’d want to keep a memento of this trip home and look at it during long winter nights. If anything, it would become a recurring theme of my future nightmares. But never mind, I’ll get over it somehow, I thought. I didn’t even want to take a packet of coffee with me. To the Magicians with it, I thought. Next time I go to Kettari to thank Sir Mackie Ainti, I’ll get some at his expense. After all, I’m already used to kamra. It’s a great thing, so I think I’ll stick to it.

There was, however, one thing that I wanted to take back to Echo with me—not so much for myself as for Juffin and my other colleagues. I had been wanting to show them a good movie. I had been dying to see the expression of otherworldly curiosity on Sir Juffin Hully’s face when the “Columbia Pictures Presents” credits appear on the TV screen.

Thank goodness there were VCRs, TVs, and cute, fat videotapes in my homeland. And thank goodness I had learned a nice, useful trick: I could easily take with me just about anything I wanted. Even the Statue of Liberty. All I needed to do was to shrink it down to almost nothing and place it between my left thumb and index finger. That was a piece of cake for me. Then again, what would I do with that Mother of All Exiles when I was back in Echo?

I was looking forward to exercising the tricks of my trade. I imagined with relish how I would carry off the entire stock of a video store in my mystical fist. Then it occurred to me that there was no need to rob a store. There was a video collection in this city that, until recently, I had considered mine. And what a fabulous collection it was, in spite of my humble income. One day, about a year before my departure to Echo, I had lost the entire collection along with my girlfriend. My former girlfriend, that is.

I poured the rest of the coffee into my cup, lit up, and pondered the breakup. It was a fairly nasty story. Nothing that stretched the limits of the imagination—just a regular nasty thing that regularly happened to regular people. The present-day me couldn’t care less about that stupid page in the history of poor Max. I’d seen worse things happen to him. But the possibility of restoring justice intrigued me. That was my favorite pastime. If I could have my way, I’d be restoring justice every hour on the hour.

I looked at the clock, then at the calendar. Saturday, six p.m. Perfect. Just what I needed. At this hour Julia was usually home studying French. She would definitely run off somewhere later, but not before eight. Praise be the Magicians, her habits were absolutely invariable. It was habits like hers that kept the world going. I had had the opportunity to study her habits well for about two years. Two very good years. It’s too bad the finale turned out so ugly. It fell far short of what would make a good soap opera.

When we first started seeing each other, I couldn’t believe my eyes: could there still be such wonderful girls roaming the surface of this planet? She got almost all of my jokes, even those that were more risqué. Frankly, the risqué jokes were the ones she got best. Back then we laughed like crazy every day. She was always overjoyed to see me, and didn’t get too upset when I disappeared for several days. That—combined with a clever face, beautiful eyes, and an independent spirit—was worth a great deal to me.

Everything was great. Life seemed not just tolerable but wonderful. I warmed up, relaxed, was tame enough to be hand-fed, and even purred occasionally. Would the two of us be able to turn human existence into a wondrous event? I wondered. If the relationship had lasted any longer, I probably would have learned to answer that question with a short and unequivocal “yes” rather than indecisive mumbling.

Then one day, my girlfriend told me that, sure, we were having a great time together, but . . . That ellipsis, as it turned out, meant that I had to learn a great deal about human nature, and I had to learn it the hard way. I learned that my beloved would soon be sharing her life with a so-called real husband. Free love, mind you, was all well and good, but a woman’s got to think about a family and children. My constant presence hindered the realization of her matrimonial plans. So, I was told, we could keep seeing each other, but not as often. My one true love needed time to prepare for her happily-ever-after.

I’m afraid my reaction to the news was like that of an extraterrestrial. You might have thought I had never heard anything like it before. I felt I had been betrayed. The woman I trusted more that I trusted myself had swapped me for some abstract family happiness and the “maternal instinct.” That’s what I told her. Not the nicest thing to say, I realized, but all the other things that were on my mind then were even worse, and I never knew how to keep my mouth shut. In hindsight, now I know that it wasn’t the worst breakup in my life. I’ve had worse. Much worse. But back then it all looked very different to me.

Long story short, I left and slammed the door. I disconnected the phone and tried to get myself back in shape for a couple of months. All of my love affairs had ended in a similar fashion. I should have gotten used to it by then. Everything has its price, and if you resolutely refuse to accept certain fundamental principles of human existence, don’t be surprised when, sooner or later, people stop accepting you. They will extricate you gently from their lives, like a healthy organism rejects a foreign body, in the interests of survival.

But Julia was more than just another cute girl in a long line of short love affairs. I thought she was my good friend, and a wonderful exception to all possible and impossible rules. To hear from her the exact words I had heard from the others was a hit below the belt. And what a hit it was. I had always been an incorrigible idealist. It was even surprising that I could forgive representatives of the human race their daily trips to the bathroom.

For two months I was in a homemade hell, replete with crushed plans and childish resentments. Then I slowly began to pull out of it. Usually, I rehabilitate much faster. As Sir Mackie Ainti said, I am a survivor. Two months of high-quality agony was my absolute record. My affair with Julia had been worth it. At least I thought it was.

When I returned to life, I began missing my movie collection.

I should say that before I met Julia I hadn’t had any movie collection to speak of because I had never had any decent equipment to watch movies on. I had never made much money and was a poor saver. In this regard, I had to agree wholeheartedly with Sir Anday Pu, that descendant of Ukumbian pirates, who often complained that “those little round metal objects” kept disappearing.

Julia had a top-of-the-line VCR and just a few lousy videos: her mom’s favorite soap operas, a few action flicks, and her French lessons. She studied the damn language constantly, with all kinds of multimedia aids. I had never heard her put her knowledge to any use, though.

In a sense, Julia and I had achieved a kind of harmony: every time I went over to her place I bought a new movie. Over time, she even had to buy a special storage rack for them because the tapes tended to crawl around the house like cockroaches. I was absolutely sure that I was buying the movies for myself. One day, I thought, I’d buy my own VCR, but for the time being, I can relax and watch my favorite movies at my girlfriend’s. What could be better?