The Time Traveler's Almanac (148 page)

We met at his office in the Tenderloin. He was a short man, barely reaching my shoulder, with thinning dark hair and a doughy nose that looked like a half-baked biscuit. A matte black Mitsubishi temp transport unit sat behind his desk. I stared at it uneasily.

“Want to look over the premises?” he asked. He gestured toward the unit.

“Uh, yes. Of course.” I took a deep breath and stepped over the threshold of the transport.

There was a sudden fragmentation of color, of sound. I was in a high white space, falling. I was stepping into an apartment on Potrero Hill, shaking my head in wonder.

Even before the shimmering transport effect had diminished, Jerry had launched into his sales pitch. “It’s a gem,” he said proudly. “I hardly ever get this kind of listing.” He flicked an invisible piece of lint from the shoulder of his green silk suit. “Once every five years.”

It was perfect. Big sunny rooms paneled in pine, full of light, ready for plants. Hardwood floors. There was even a little balcony off the bedroom where I could watch the fog drift in over Twin Peaks in the summer afternoons.

All wound up and oblivious to my rapture, Raskin rattled on. “You can install a transport unit in the closet for your morning and evening commute to realtime. It’s a steal. What’s your rail commute cost from Yuba City?”

I didn’t need much convincing. “I’ll take it.”

“Two year lease,” he said. “Sign here.” Then he brandished an additional piece of paper. “This too.”

“What is it?” I was Pallas Athena again, staring down suspiciously onto the sweaty center of his bald spot. “If this is a pet restriction clause, I’m going to protest. Your ad didn’t say anything about it. I’ve got a cat.” I didn’t bother to mention that I kept MacHeath at work – there was more room for him there than at home. But wherever – and whenever – I went, he went.

“Sure, sure,” Raskin said. “You can keep your kitty as long as you pay a deposit. This is just your standard noninterference contract.”

“Noninterference contract?”

He looked at me like I was stupid. It rarely happens. When it does, I don’t like it.

“You know,” he said, and recited in a sing-song voice: “Don’t change the past or the past will change you. The time laws. You lawyers understand this kind of thing. You, and you alone, are responsible for any dislocation of past events, persons or things, et cetera, et cetera. Read the small print and sign.”

*   *   *

A sudden chill teased my upper vertebrae. Noninterference? Well, why would I interfere with the past? The morning sunlight streamed in through the big window in the front room. High clouds scudded over the hillside. I shook off the shivers and signed.

A week later, I took up residence, hanging my tiny collection of photos, putting down rugs, and glorying in my privacy. MacHeath didn’t care much for the transport effect but he approved of his new improved situation. After sniffing every corner of the place, he made an appointment with the sun and spent the rest of the day following it from window to window.

Life’s pendulum swung me between work and home, uptime and downtime, in an easy arc. Thanks to the transport I could leave the house at any time of day and return a moment later. This made for a great deal of quality time, spent snuggled up with MacHeath on the red corduroy sofa, and on my own in the heart of a smaller, cozier city. I wandered gratefully along the waterfront, bought sourdough bread and lingered over coffee in North Beach jazz clubs. Everywhere was color and life and music: garish psychedelic posters printed in what I think were called Day-Glo inks, announcing musical groups with odd names like the Jackson’s Airplane. Shaggy-haired, brightly dressed, childishly friendly people piled in casual groups on the street, in buses, and in the old houses lining Haight Street and Ashbury. I fell in love with the past – at least with San Francisco’s past.

Uptime, at work, they asked me how I could stand to watch history go by without comment.

“Don’t you ever want to warn somebody?” said Bill Hawthorne, the senior partner. “Don’t you ever want to call up Martin Luther King or Robert Kennedy and say, ‘Stay away from hotel balconies,’ or ‘Don’t go in the kitchen’?”

“Shame on you, Bill,” I said. “You know that’s against the law.”

In fact, I watched, agog, as the alarming parade of assassinations and demonstrations took place. History on the hoof. I began to see why people got hooked on the past. It’s a much realer form of video.

And during the year I lived in 1968, Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, and Robert Kennedy in Los Angeles. And somebody moved into the downstairs apartment.

It had remained empty for so long that I’d begun to think of it as part of my domain. Oh, I knew that some uptime renter would probably appear one morning, strangely dressed, keeping to him or herself. I’d seen one or two folks in the neighborhood whom I suspected of being residential refugees from uptime like me, but I had avoided them, and they, me. We all played the game with discretion.

*   *   *

I was out of town, uptime, when the people downstairs moved in. The first sign I had of their presence was the primal beat of rock music reverberating through my lovingly stained floorboards, occasionally punctuated by the high manic whine of amplified electric guitars. Boom-boom-bah. Boom-boom-bah. For five hours I considered various legal strategies showing just cause for murder. Sorry, Your Honor, but it was self-defense. Their music made me psychotic and if I hadn’t stopped it, the entire neighborhood would have been at risk and all of history would have been changed so I had to do it, don’t you see?

About three in the morning, somebody turned off the music.

The next day, as I was blearily putting out my garbage, I met my neighbor. He was sitting in the backyard, smoking a sweet-smelling cigarette. The pungent smoke curled up above his head in lazy circles. Long wavy blond hair fell to the middle of his back. He was wearing jeans and a brown suede vest but aside from that his interest in clothing seemed minimal. His toenails were black with grime.

“Name’s Duffy,” he said. He jerked his head at a hefty woman in a long muslin skirt and peasant blouse who stood in the doorway, smiling spacily at me. “That’s Parvati.” Parvati’s strawberry-blond hair was gathered into two fat braids that fell past her knees. She was wearing metal-rimmed eyeglasses whose lenses flashed prismatic reflections on the grass. I stared, fascinated. I’d forgotten that in this era people used external devices to correct their vision.

The head jerked again, this time toward an urchin with a dirty face, stringy blond hair, and big blue eyes. “Our kid, Rainbow.”

Rainbow wiped her nose against the back of her hand and stared at me. All three of them stared at me, at my burr haircut, severe business suit, dark shoes, glossy briefcase. I realized that, to my new hippie neighbors, I must have looked like some kind of strange male impersonator.

“Hi,” I said. “Nice to meet you.” I began to climb the stairs to my apartment.

“Far out,” Duffy said. He was staring at my briefcase. “You some kind of secretary or actress or something?”

“Something.” I was through my door and had closed it behind me before he could ask anything else.

*   *   *

Weekends I took long walks through Golden Gate Park. It was green, beautiful, and filled with people who were probably Duffy’s relatives.

“Peace,” they said, and I nodded.

“Love.”

I smiled.

“Could you lay a little bread on me, please?”

I shook my head and walked away, confused – did I look like a baker?

For trips to the grocery store I bought a lime-green Volkswagen Beetle – the classic – with a dented purple fender, third-hand, and after some abrupt bucking rides down the block, mastered the quaint antique stick shift and clutch.

As for clothing, well, I found used jeans in the neighborhood Army-Navy store and a loose-fitting top of muslin tie-dyed pink and red. The shirt itched a bit when I wore it and turned my underwear gray-pink in the washer, but it was good camouflage. With a red bandana wrapped around my head to cover my short hair, I almost managed to look inconspicuous.

I quickly learned my neighbors’ schedule: they stayed up all night vibrating my apartment with their music and slept all day.

Apparently Rainbow didn’t go to school. Once, I glanced out my window to see her staring up hungrily at my place. I tried not to see her. I really tried.

One night, late, as the guitars whined and I was about to switch on my noise dampers, there was a knock at the door.

“Who is it?”

“Duffy.”

I opened the door a crack. “What’s up?”

Lids at half-mast, he peered at me and smiled muzzily. “Thought you might want to come to a party.” He smiled muzzily.

“No thanks. I need my sleep.”

“C’mon, don’t be such a hard lady,” he said. “Parvati’s gone to see her folks. Just you ’n me.”

I almost laughed. Men rarely looked at me the way he was looking at me now. While I might have welcomed it from one or two of the attorneys I knew in realtime, I was not interested in this dirty, lazy, antediluvian jerk.

“That’s too small a party for me. No thanks.”

“Hey, Parvati won’t mind. Whatever goes down is cool with her.”

“Congratulations. Hope she knows a good lawyer when things start to warm up.” I shut the door.

The apartment was blissfully quiet after that – in fact, I didn’t hear Duffy’s music for at least a week. Didn’t see him or Rainbow, or any of their friends except for once, when I was putting out the garbage, Rainbow appeared at the front window, pressed her little hands against the pane, and stared out at me. I smiled. She didn’t smile back. When she turned to walk away, I saw that her hands had left dirty smudges on the glass.

*   *   *

I spent a week in realtime on an important case, and when I got back, discovered that I had new neighbors.

Duffy and his family were gone. In their place were two skinny guys in their twenties with long dark hair, beards, and the same interest in the same kind of loud guitar music. They barely acknowledged my presence, which was fine.

One night, late, after my noise dampers had cycled and shut down, I heard a child crying. It was the high, keening, hopeless sound of one who doesn’t expect to be comforted. The kind of sound no child should ever have to make, any time or place.

I got out of bed, listened, heard it again, opened the front door. Then I couldn’t hear it any more. The night was silent save for the creaking floorboards under my feet. Was I imagining things?

MacHeath yawned elaborately as I got back into bed and made a sleepy inquisitive sound.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Bad dream.”

The next night I heard it again – the sound of a child crying hopelessly, long after everybody else in the world was asleep.

Two days later, I saw her.

Rainbow was standing in the backyard, weaving back and forth.

Her eyes were half-closed as though she were stoned.

I took a step toward her. “Honey, are you all right?”

She opened her eyes. The pupils were massive, almost engulfing the blue irises.

“Rainbow, where’s your mommy?”

“Mommy?” She looked at me, her face crumpled into tears, and she ran into the house.

I didn’t hear the crying again after that.

But I did meet one of Rainbow’s babysitters. He was waiting outside one morning as I brought out the garbage.

“Hey, sister.”

I ignored him, thinking about torts, about deed restrictions. About Rainbow.

Suddenly there was a hand on my shoulder. “Hey. You deaf?” Another hand attached itself to my ass.

I leaned toward him. He came closer. I grabbed his arm and, ducking, pulled hard. He landed headfirst, sprawled among the garbage cans. For a moment, I thought that I’d killed him. Then he groaned and rolled over onto his side. He lay there, stunned, peering up at me.

“Hands off,” I said, enunciating carefully. “I don’t know you. I don’t want to.” I kicked the can beside his head to emphasize the point. He winced and nodded.

After that, he left me alone. But I came home one night to find that the door to my apartment had been vandalized: somebody had tried to force the lock. Good thing I’d brought a security sealer from uptime and installed it. Whoever had attempted the deed had contented themselves with carving the word “bitch” into the wood just above the doorknob.

Don’t you forget it.

I left the graffito exactly where it was.

The crying at night resumed. I began to wonder if I should call somebody. But who? Where were Duffy and Parvati? Were they really even her parents? And what kind of child welfare agencies were available in the 1960s in San Francisco? Could Rainbow hope for anything better than what she had right now? Besides, the time laws were explicit: No interference.

I didn’t know what to do, so I waited. She who hesitates, loses.

*   *   *

I transported home one night at eleven o’clock into a dark smoke-filled apartment. Fire. Where? I couldn’t find the source. I felt the floor – hot, too hot. No time to waste. I called the fire department, grabbed MacHeath, and was halfway out the door before I remembered the transport unit. Cursing, I disconnected it, threw it into my briefcase, and ran down the stairs, arms full of squirming orange cat.

By the time I got to the pavement, the lower apartment was completely engulfed, the flames roaring. As the upper story caught I watched the flames dance up the curtains and part my front window. Imagined them licking and consuming my rugs, quilts, clothing. My life. I could hear the deafening screams of sirens as fire trucks raced down the street.

Lights came on in houses up and down the block and sleepy faces peered through windows, through open doors. Tears – from smoke or fear, I don’t know which – ran down my face to soak MacHeath’s fur. He struggled furiously, trying to get away from the strange sounds, the people, the dark. Finally I stowed him in my Beetle.

Firemen kicked in the door downstairs and played water from a rubber hose into the inferno. It might have all been interestingly antique if it hadn’t been happening to me.