Past Imperfect (Jerry eBooks) Read online

  Night was falling, and a smoky fire had been built at the center of the compound using tightly bound bundles of grass for fuel. Ahab commanded several men, who labored over clay pots and nursed the flames. The air smelled rich with surprising flavors, and my mouth watered.

  The Boss touched my shoulder and steered me toward a hut that was larger than the others. I marveled to find a long, low wooden table inside, and a dozen men already seated cross-legged on the grass-matted floor around it. The plates and cups, though all of the same clay color, were ornate with etchings and markings. I was directed to a place at the center along one side of the arrangement.

  Two men whose names were unknown to me rose to speak in whispers to the Boss. I was distracted as still another man moved around the room ladling water into the cups, but from the corner of my eye, I glimpsed one of the two passing a grass-woven bag into my host’s hands. He nodded and came to sit beside me while the two took other seats around the table.

  Ahab appeared through the entrance bearing a large flat bowl, which he placed on the nearest end of the table. It was quickly passed around the table, each man dipping into it with his hands and depositing a measure on his plate. Following the custom, I plunged my fingers into the warm, sticky mixture, an orange-colored substance that reminded me of a dish called manioc I’d once tasted. It smelled like sweet potatoes, and I assumed it was made from some root. I devoured it.

  Ahab delivered another bowl. This one contained a cold, washed vegetable that looked like radishes, but possessed a citruslike flavor. I looked around the hut, noting the more leisurely pace the others took with their food. “What about the rest of your camp?” I whispered to my host. “I thought I counted more than thirty when I arrived?”

  He leaned closer as he licked his fingers, and I felt his hand on my back. “They’re being fed, don’t worry. But the hut can only hold so many, and most of these are the Seniors—those who’ve been here longest.”

  Ahab entered the hut again. On each hand he balanced a large, round platter piled high and steaming. The sweet aroma nearly made me faint as one of the platters was placed between the Boss and myself.

  “Meat!” I exclaimed. The other platter passed from hand to hand. The Boss helped himself to a thick slice from our platter, and I did the same. It was so hot it burned my fingers, and I blew on it before popping a strip into my mouth. I chewed quickly, swallowed, and took another bite. “I thought there weren’t any animals left,” I said between mouthfuls. “This is delicious!”

  “Direct your thanks to them,” the Boss said, pointing to the two men who had intercepted him earlier. “Grampus and Rachel. They brought you a present, by the way.” He reached into the grass-woven bag on the floor beside him and placed my wristwatch on the table. I stared at it, dumbfounded.

  “They also brought this back.” He held up the keypad that controlled my time platform. “But I think I’ll keep it for now. I haven’t had a toy to play with in a long while.” I tried to snatch it. “That’s mine! I need it!” His face darkened, and a look of warning came into his eyes as he put the keypad back in the bag and thrust it under his leg. “I told you once, Samuel, I can’t abide thieves.”

  I returned his stare, stunned. He wasn’t going to let me go. I picked up my watch, looked at the still-ticking sweep hand without really seeing it, set the watch down again. What could I do? My heart hammered in my chest. I tried to calm myself, to think.

  I picked up another strip of meat, trying not to look at anyone, trying to slow my excited breathing, and I put it in my mouth.

  I looked at the watch again.

  My hand brushed the platter as I reached for my cup of water.

  Then, an uncontrollable shivering seized me. I dropped the cup, spilling the contents. “Oh, God!” I cried, leaping up. “Oh, my God!”

  The Boss tried to catch my hand, but I hit him in the face as hard as I could and leaped over his sprawling form. Someone tried to block my way I knocked them across the table.

  I was outside. Beside the fire, Ahab looked up sharply. A score of others were gathered around him, chewing and eating. I ran from them, ran past the last hut and up the hill past the spring and pool, and farther still. I ran until I fell from exhaustion. Then I rolled over and vomited.

  Later, under the cold light of the stars and that ghastly pale ring, I crept back, pausing only long enough by the pool to find a sharp-edged rock. A few men still sat around the dying fire, but they were easy to avoid. I was as much a wolf now as they.

  For a long time I listened at the rear wall of the Boss’ hut, hearing nothing. On hands and knees, I crawled silently around to the entrance and inside. It was dark, and I could barely see him where he slept naked on the same grass pallet where I had earlier lain.

  I didn’t give him a chance to wake and raise an alarm. I slammed the pointed stone into his throat, leaned on it, pushed it deep. He emitted one soft sigh, and nothing more.

  With bloody hands, I searched the hut for my keypad, my ticket home and back to sanity. There was no trace of the grass bag. I found it, instead, wrapped in the white loincloth he’d set aside. Clutching it to my chest, I sneaked out again, made my way out of the valley, back to the escarpment, and in the dawning light, back down to the beach. There, I sat down in the sand at the edge of the water, and as I unwrapped the cloth from around the keypad, something caught my eye.

  A faded label still attached to that scrap of white cloth. A label that matched the shirt I was wearing. I think I screamed. I don’t remember.

  My name is Samuel Enderby. I am the Director and Chief Researcher of the Enderby Institute for Temporal Studies. I am a Chrononaut. And I am a murderer.

  I think also that I am quite insane. I try to forget and I cannot, not in sleep, not in alcohol. So I look for meaning, and I can’t find that, not in prayer, nor in this volume of Melville upon which I have become quite fixated. I try to forget, but I cannot, and I think that I must go back, because I know who I am now.

  I am Leviathan, and I churn the boiling seas.

  Only those salt waters at the end of the world will ever wash the taste of Sanders out of my mouth.

  PALIMPSEST DAY

  by Gary A. Braunbeck

  Gary A. Braunbeck is the author of the acclaimed collection Things Left Behind, as well as the collections Escaping Purgatory (in collaboration with Alan M. Clark) and the CD-ROM Sorties, Cathexes, and Personal Effects. His first solo novel, The Indifference of Heaven, was recently released, as was his Dark Matter novel, In Hollow Houses. He lives in Dayton, Ohio and has, to date, sold nearly two hundred short stories. His fiction, to quote Publishers Weekly, “. . . stirs the mind as it chills the marrow.”

  1. Teach Your Children

  Toward the end of her life my mother developed a fervent belief in reincarnation. During our last conversation in the hospital (in which she confessed something that stunned me), she asked about the state of my life, nodded her head in sympathy when I told her I was having trouble dealing with my sister’s care and had briefly considered putting her in a group home, and then said the single most amazing thing that she’d ever said to me: “You know what you need to do, hon? You need to walk out of here today and live your life as if you were already living it for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.”

  I remember the way the sheets formed a perfect outline of her cancer-ravaged body. I imagined that the mattress had adapted itself into the shape of her underside. Then an odd image crossed my mind: Mom’s body had been taken away, but the sheets still held the impression of Mom-front, while the bed had the shape of Mom-back, and in between was this space cast in her form where sheets and bed thought she still existed.

  It wasn’t until later—weeks after her funeral, she and my father side by side in Cedar Hill Cemetery—that the full weight of her words hit me. She was trying to tell me that it was possible for a person to turn the present into the past, and that the past may yet be changed a
nd amended. Each moment of which life consists is itself dying as it’s being experienced, and will never recur (or, at least, it’s not supposed to)—but it’s that very transitoriness that challenges us to make the best possible use of each moment. Live your life as if you were already living for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now.

  Those words, and their unspoken subtext that second chances exist simultaneously within first ones, were my mother’s last and greatest gift to me, a blessing to live without fear of further regrets.

  Then Laura came back into my life and I discovered they were a warning, as well.

  Electrons would have to be 1022 times more massive for the electric and gravitational pull between two of them to be equal. To produce such a heavy particle would take 1019 gigaelectron volts (GeV) or energy, a quantity known as Planck energy. Coupled with this is the Planck lengthy a tiny 10-35 meter. Quantum physicists now believe, with the advent of such miracles as the Large Hadron Collider, it might very well be possible to circumvent Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and measure spacetime’s most staggeringly small quantities without collapsing the wave/particle duality. Using Planck time—10-45 of a second—it’s theoretically possible to measure a spacetime quantity as small as 1.62 x 10-33. The trick is to make sure it goes smoothly, because at that size, space and time come apart.

  Lately, I’ve been thinking about this. A lot.

  If something were to happen during that period of measurement, then something else, and if the two events were separated by only 1022 of a second, then, when the measuring is over, it would be impossible to tell which came first, space or time.

  So what would happen then? And how would we know?

  2. Lucky In the Morning/Roll With the Changes

  There was a time when Ayds (spelled with a “y”) was a popular and surprisingly tasty dietetic candy that came in plastic bags containing individually-wrapped pieces. You could easily find it on store shelves right alongside Sweathog coffee mugs, The Wit and Wisdom of Archie Bunker, Kiss comic books, and Chico and the Man lunch boxes. The manufacturer stopped making it when the Center for Disease Control concluded that the so-called “gay flu” was a much more virulent and less discriminating strain of virus than was first suspected, because AIDS (definitely not spelled with a “y”) was spreading beyond the partners of the nameless “Mr. X” and into the general population. The bags that were still on store shelves were slowly and quietly recalled, and by the end of July 1982, it was nowhere to be found.

  On the morning when all of this shifted into a higher gear—some twenty-plus years after Ayds had ceased being manufactured—I awoke to find three pounds of it in my refrigerator.

  It happened like this:

  The previous night I was awakened by Blair bumping around in the hallway. My sister tends to get up at least once every night to use the bathroom, but there’s a catch: She likes to lie in bed and wait until the last possible moment before making a beeline for the john, just to see if she’ll make it in time. She enjoys the hell out of it . . . probably because she’s not the one who has to deal with the various paraphernalia when she loses her little game.

  Because she’d lately started bumping into things, I put a small night light in the hall which I turn on before going to bed. I heard her stumbling around and starting to cry, so I cleared my throat and called out, “Wait for your eyes to adjust to the light, honey.”

  When there was no further noise, I took it to mean she’d found her way all right, and went back to sleep.

  I woke up around 8:30 a.m., got dressed, and was starting downstairs when my foot caught on something at the edge of the landing and I almost fell.

  There used to be a section of old carpeting at the top of the stairs that had come loose and was sticking up just enough that you could easily slide your foot right under it if you weren’t paying attention, lose your balance, and fall face-first down the stairs.

  I had repmved the carpeting from the house about a year ago, after both Blair and myself had experienced one near-miss too many. (The house was now polished hardwood floors top to bottom, courtesy of Yours Truly’s efforts.) I looked down at my feet and saw absolutely nothing that could have tripped me, but I swear it felt as if I’d caught my foot in that old piece of carpeting.

  “Sharp as ever, aren’t you, Danny?” I whispered to myself. I went downstairs, made a pot of coffee, then went outside to retrieve the paper.

  I was just turning to go back inside when a voice shouted, “Looks like your paint job ain’t holding up so good!”

  I turned and saw our neighbor from across the street, Mr. Finney, working in his garden. I waved to him as he rose from his rhododendrons and started walking over. I met him at the curb, and we shook hands.

  “What’s wrong with the paint job?” I asked. I had painted the house about a year ago with an all-weather brand that cost more than I could probably afford, but I’d figured it was better to shell out the cash once and not have to worry about it again for several years.

  “Take a look,” he said, and pointed.

  Running from the eaves of the house to nearly the floor of the front porch was a streak of white paint. Mr. Finney accompanied me as I went for a closer look. Last year, when I’d spent the better part of a week painting the house myself, Mr. Finney—a seventy-eight-year-old widower who likes to keep himself occupied with gardening and neighborhood gossip—had loaned me his extension ladder to save me the cost Of renting one. Then he’d spent several hours each afternoon sitting on his porch watching me work, always offering a cold glass of lemonade when I’d finished for the day.

  “That’s a damn shame,” he said. “I mean, after you did all that work.”

  The streak was about the width of a standard seven-inch paint brush, and formed a nice straight line down the front of the house.

  “How long’s it been this way?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I mean, it sure as hell wasn’t this way yesterday. I’d’ve noticed something like this when I came home.”

  “You sure about that?”

  “Yes. Look at it!”

  Finney shook his head. “Maybe we got ourselves some practical jokers running around the neighborhood.”

  “I don’t think so.” I pointed up toward the eaves. “They would’ve needed a ladder to get up there, and if they did this in the middle of the night, I would have heard them. My bedroom window’s right there.” I stepped forward and looked at it more closely.

  It looked like hell. It was too thick in places, cracked, and several chunks of it had fallen off to reveal the old wood underneath.

  “Huh,” I muttered to myself.

  “See something?”

  I reached out and scraped some of the paint into my hand. It flaked off easily, almost turning to dust instantly.

  “This is the old paint,” I said.

  “But I thought you scraped everything before you started to—”

  “I did. My hands were sore for a month.” I looked up to the eaves, then followed the streak all the way back down. “I was particularly sure to get all the paint here on the porch—and I mean all of it. You know, so the front of the house’d look good when visitors showed up. Dad always used to say that you could get a little sloppy with the sides and back if you had to, but make damn sure the front looks good.”

  “Sounds like your dad. I sure miss seeing him and your mom around.”

  “That makes two of us.”

  “But at least they ain’t suffering no more. They’re in a better place.”

  “I know.” Truth was, I didn’t know. Twelve years of Catholic school had left me a devout Agnostic, and many nights when I thought of my parents, I so wanted to believe there was something more after this life, but I just . . . couldn’t.

  I sighed and slipped the paper under my arm. “Looks like I’m gonna have to trouble you for a ladder loan again.”

  “You know where it is. Come get it any time. I can e
ven whip up a pitcher of lemonade. The recipe’s Ethel’s, you know. Lord, that woman could whip up some tasty treats!”

  “I know. I remember the birthday cakes she used to make for me when I was a kid. She’d always cover it with foil, leave in front of the door, then ring the bell and hurry away before I saw it was her.”

  “That was my wife—Ethel Finney, the Birthday Cake Fairy.”

  “She never copped to it with me, you know.”

  He smiled. “I know. She liked doing stuff like that.” A wistful shadow crossed his face for a moment, then was gone. “Get whatever you need from my garage, then we’ll have some lemonade.”

  “Thank you.” Now it was my turn to shake my head. “I’m positive I scraped all the paint off before applying the new coats. And why would someone do something like this in the first place? As practical jokes go, it’s kind of lame—not to mention rude.”

  “Takes all sorts to make a world, I guess.”

  We exchanged a few more trivial pleasantries, shook hands again, and he started back to his garden. I was just opening the door when he called my name again and came up to the front steps.

  “Don’t tell me you saw another spot like this one?” I said.

  “No, no, it ain’t that at all. Something just occurred to me. Back about fourteen, fifteen years ago when your dad was still alive, he wanted to paint this house ’cause he couldn’t stand the way the white always showed every bit of dirt?”

  “. . . yeah . . .?”

  “Well, I was out here one morning when he come out, and there was . . .” He stopped himself, then waved it away. “Never mind. You’d think I was getting senile.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I wish I had half as sharp a memory as yours.” Which was true. Mom always used to say that Mr. Finney was the man to ask if there was something about the history of this neighborhood that you’d forgotten.