The Time Traveler's Almanac (177 page)

Tonight, for some reason, I’m agitated, disturbed even. It’s August twenty-eighth.

The phone buzzes. I press the button and my older sister Leila appears on the screen. Though she doesn’t really like me, we keep in touch. Even now her hair is sculpted, like a blonde helmet. Not a hair out of place.

“I can’t sleep,” she says.

“Yeah.”

“I don’t want to see Dany.”

“Right.”

“I don’t want anything to do with him.” Leila clenches her jaw (we both inherited that from mum) and crosses her arms emphatically.

“Do you think that Mum was happy in her last years?”

“Christ, Marek, you’ve always been introspective. That’s your problem.”

“I think she was. I think finally, after everything, she found some happiness.”

Leila brushes her hair back with her hand, but it bounces back to its perfect shape. “So if you talk to him, tell him I don’t want to see him.”

“Someone’s got to be there when he comes back.”

“Well it’s not going to be me. And Marek, what good is it going to do if you show up? Huh?”

“She wanted to hold on, didn’t she? Just another year, just one more year. But she couldn’t.”

Someone is crying behind Leila. Must be her kid, whose name I can’t, for the life of me, remember. Leila turns from the phone to look over her shoulder, then back. “Look Marek, I gotta go.”

“It’s been all over the news,” I say, but she’s gone.

*   *   *

August thirtieth arrives and I’m in McArthur Tower: the procession has finished, the speeches are over; there have been medals and descriptions and hologram footage and everything else. I saw him on stage with the others, in their uniforms, but I could barely make it out from up the back. Now I’m sitting at the exit to the conference centre and people in suits are milling about being official and I wonder if I should go in and look around for him, but no, I stay put. Secretly I don’t want to see him. I think of leaving, eyeing the lifts far away down the corridor, but something makes me stay. It must have been a hell of a thing, after all, out there in space. The government made a fuss of Dany and the rest of the crew, that’s for sure.

A soundscape full of triumphant brass and rolling drums plays in the background.

I notice the captain walk out, officials surrounding him, talking in hushed, respectful tones.

To my right, windows open out to the evening. The vast bulk of another Tower stands opposite, its own windows appearing tiny in the gigantic structure. I struggle to see if I can make out figures, but all I can see is flickering, and that’s probably just my eyes playing up.

I look away and suddenly Dany’s there, with another of the crew, and they’re coming past me. It hits me like a physical blow: he looks in his early twenties. His light hair is short and jagged, his eyes slightly too close together, spoiling his otherwise beautiful looks. It hits me again: he looks just like I once did.

“See you soon then, Dan,” the other one says.

He nods and grins like a little boy, runs his hands through his hair and then says, “Yep.”

He walks towards the lift as the other one turns back.

“Hey,” I say weakly, and then stronger, embarrassed by the strain in my voice, “Dany.”

He turns and looks at me and my breath is suddenly taken away. He cocks his head and frowns for a minute. Then says, “Yeah?”

“It’s me,” I say, and am struck by the banality of it, “Marek.”

He grins uncomfortably, cocks his head to the other side and raises his hands as if to say: well, imagine that.

I stand up from my chair, take a few steps and say again, “It’s me, Marek.”

“Where’s your mother?”

“She died.”

A look of confusion crosses his face and then passes. “Well, come on then,” he says.

I follow him. Neither of us speak as we make our way to the elevator and then wind through one of the prospects: a wide boulevard with ground cars and unicycles zipping along in a chaotic frenzy, the stall holders at the side of the road, with their designer tattoos, calling to us as we pass. Another elevator, spiralling through the Tower in odd directions, takes us up to the Hotel Sector in the fifteen hundreds where Dany has been given a room.

He has an amazing sense of direction amid the massive structure of the Tower, with its thousands of winding corridors. He finds his penthouse calmly and easily. When he arrives he says to me, the first words in some time, “I’m going to get ready. I have to see some of this.”

He retreats to the bathroom while I sit and wait.

The view from the giant windows is magnificent. Two Towers, one at an oblique angle, and then the lights of the suburbs, flickering like a thousand shining insects. The clarity of it strikes me.

“We don’t wear makeup much anymore,” I say.

“Oh … What do you wear?”

“I don’t really know. I mean, I’m not really up with it. But there’s a fashion channel.”

Dany comes out, fully shaven. He looks even younger, though the dark makeup around the eyes makes him look like a thirty-year throwback. “Should I take it off?” He looks suddenly anxious.

“No, don’t worry. Some people still wear it.”

“I’ve got this card.” He says, “They gave me this card. It’ll get me clothes, all sorts of things.”

“Leila called me a couple of days ago.”

He walks across the room, presses a button and the fridge door slides up.

“Drink?” he asks, ignoring me.

“She’s doing well. All settled down: husband, kids, you know.”

Dany takes a big swig of something, throws back his head, and lets out a roar. Turns around, passes me a glass. “C’mon boy, this’ll put a glint back in your eye.” He grins his distinctive grin.

I sip the drink and try to stifle a cough. My throat is on fire, my eyes blurred. I hear a laugh off in the distance. “God,” I say.

*   *   *

Nightville, up in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds, is a complex of Middle-Eastern and African restaurants, hanging gardens filled with the scent of stone-fruit and dotted with indoor lakes, labyrinthine clubs climbing up through the Tower like ant-colonies so that after a few hours you don’t know what level you’re on. Nightville is a carefully planned planlessness, designed to give the sense of spontaneity, of a vast and sprawling confusion, imitating the red-light districts in the old cities. But nothing in the Towers is unplanned. So there’s always the element of irreality to it, a sense of the manufactured. Shambling through a club one might, lo and behold, stumble upon an Armenian restaurant run by the club’s owners, aimed at the very same patrons, in an expression of monopoly apparent only to those not doped up on rapture or blurred by alcohol. Nightville is one big franchise.

We’re in
Arabian Nights,
one of the popular clubs in the sector, a ramshackle series of levels where patrons surround hookahs in dark tent-like chambers, where everything is in the deep colours and intricate patterns of the Middle East, where belly dancers and pipe-players, tootling in exotic quarter-tones, make their way through the passageways, where camel-trains ridden by adventurers head for the mini-desert on the western side of the club.

Dany, dressed ridiculously in his space-suit and dark makeup (all blue shadow and grey undertones), is entertaining a small crowd in a side room. I’ve been edged out of the circle and have to crane my neck over a couple of skip-girls.

“Of course,” he says, “you’re unconscious during close-to-light-speed. A deep dark sleep filled with magnificent dreams. And then, suddenly, consciousness hits you like a blow, and you’re throwing up all over yourself, and you’re wondering who you are and what you’re doing there. And me,
I’m
thinking I could have bought this feeling for a hundred bucks at
Arabian Nights.
”

He pauses for the laughter and then continues in slightly more hushed tones.

“But then you look out and you see Centauri and everything is in a strange new light, filled with blues and greens that you’ve never seen before, as if you’ve been reborn into a world just slightly different from this one, and you know nothing will ever be the same again.”

Around him there is hushed silence, only the bass from dance music in the main rooms, audible behind his voice.

One of the skip-girls puts her hand on his thigh.

“Hey,” he says to me, “Come here.” He pulls me toward him and wraps an arm around my shoulder. “I want you to meet Marek. You have to look after him.”

Someone passes me a fluorescent blue drink,
Ottoman Ice,
and I down it in one hit.

He continues to tell his stories but his arm is around my neck and I keep thinking to myself: isn’t this what you came for, isn’t time with Dany what you wanted?

The
Ottoman Ice
has rapture in it, and before long everything has that tinge of silver, those floating motes of light dancing around the room like emblems of joy. I have another and the waves of heat begin to course up and down my body.

“Are you his brother? You look just like him,” one of the skip-girls asks me. They’re not that quick, skip-girls.

“What’s your name?” I say.

“Sandy.”

All the skip-girls have names like that: Sandy, Cherry, Peta, Ruby. Her lips are full and red and suddenly her little cherubic face sets off some reaction in my stomach. Skip-girls, I think, are gorgeous.

The
Ottoman Ice
no longer burns in my throat. Now it’s just a soft warmth, as if my throat is adjusting itself to the heat emanating from my body. Through a window on my left the mini-desert stretches out and in the distance I can see a little oasis.

“Can you see that?” I say, but there’s no one beside me. Everyone is at a table about ten feet away. When did we arrive at the observation deck? I wonder. I join them at the table. Dany is still entertaining: he’s charismatic, just as I imagined.

“And there, on the asteroid,” he says, “was what looked like a complex machine or engine, too structured to be natural, I swear. But how much fuel did we have? Who knew? Let’s go down, I said. I mean, here we were, how many light years from home, and there, within arm’s reach is evidence of alien civilisation. Let’s go, I said. Take it now, seize our chance. No, said the captain. Yes, said I. No, he said. When else will we get this chance? I said. We can’t risk it, said the captain. So that was that.” He grins his childlike grin.

Breaths of amazement. I look out over the desert again, not believing a word of it and suddenly we’re in the Turkish steam baths and soaking everything up and my body is on fire. All I can do is lie there, head back as the steam invades my body and I feel like I’m somehow dissolving and becoming the water and the water is me and I’m suddenly aware of Dany above me leaning down and he says, “Look, I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry.” He touches my shoulder and then walks off quickly and Sandy is looking at me from the sofa as I look over to the Towers from Dany’s penthouse while Christy and Dany are in the bedroom next door.

“You skip-girls,” I say. “You’re so full of life.” I notice her lips again, and this time the freckles on her little round cheeks. She must be in her early twenties, like most skip-girls employed to advertise the Tower, to give it a sense of glamour and sex. She looks out over the city and yawns.

“Do you and Christy work tandem?”

She ignores me and walks to the window. She looks across at the opposite Tower. “It’s amazing, isn’t it? That over there, there’s a whole ’nother city, and that people don’t ever have to leave if they don’t want to. A whole world.”

I walk up behind her, and there are little muscles outlined just so on her back, perfect, as if sculpted from marble.

“I’ve been to all of them,” I say, “every Tower.”

“Wow.”

From the bedroom, I can hear a high-pitched whining, and then I think I hear Christy say, “Oh, yes, that.”

“Each one has my own little mark,” I say. “Soundscape Design. I’m part of the Soundscape Design Team.”

“Really?” Her eyes flicker with interest for a moment.

“Well, you know, part of the team.”

I’m looking down at her and have an urge to lean forward and touch her hair, metallic green and artificial, a typical mark of a skip-girl.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” she says, and she walks swiftly across to the bedroom and is gone. I wait for five minutes and then let myself out.

*   *   *

The next day I spend at home, occasionally staring at my computers and synths, turning them on, pretending I’m going to compose. But it’s too hard and my head feels like it’s been squeezed like a lemon. Oh no, I think, I’m getting old. Once I would have been fine on a day like today, but now my body has perfected the art of sabotage. I wander around distracted, moving from thing to thing, unable to settle. The synths sit in the corner of the room accusingly.

In the afternoon the phone rings and I shuffle towards it, press the button.

“So, what’s he like?” I can see Leila leaning forward, so she can see my expression more clearly on the screen.

“I don’t know.”

“Oh, come on, what’s he like?”

“He’s a great storyteller, I guess. I mean, he had a fan-club all around. You know, charismatic, I guess, kept everyone mesmerised.” I think of Sandy the skip-girl and her full lips, her cherubic face, her metallic hair. Some feeling washes over me that I’d prefer not to acknowledge.

“Is he immature? I bet he’s immature.”

“I don’t know.”

“Christ, Marek, listen to you. It’s always the same with you. You’re still under his spell.”

“I guess he’s young.”

“He must be. He left when he was young.”

“It’s like looking at me, only fifteen years ago … really, like looking back in time. I am, you know, older than him.”

“Yeah: the bastard.” Leila spits the words with satisfaction.

“He’s okay.”

“You were too young when he left. I was what, eight? You, though, you were too young. That’s your problem. That’s why you can’t see.”

“He used to play with us though, remember? He used to build things with us, little ships that flew through the air, orbited that old planet we had hanging in our room. Remember that?”