Points of Departure (8 page)

“I can’t change anything back there. I can’t make a difference,” she explained. “If I did I couldn’t travel.”

“How do you know taking the wine won’t change anything?” he protested. “Do you figure out all the possible repercussions of an action and…”

“I don’t figure things out. I do what feels right. It’s a different way of thinking.”

He leaned forward over the coffee table, watching her
closely. “You might be able to change all this.” He gestured to indicate the city, the smog, the garbage, the world in general. “Just by doing some small things. Stop Ford from inventing the car by …”

“No, I couldn’t.” She reached across the table and took his hand. “If I didn’t accept the world as it is, I couldn’t travel.”

“You won’t change things,” he said.

“I can’t. It doesn’t work that
way.” She squeezed his hand and said, “I’m sorry, Michael. That’s the way it is.”

They played chess and drank wine and he tried to teach her some of the strategy of the game. But she claimed she could not learn to look ahead any further than the next move. She shook her head when he explained traps that a good player could lay for his opponent—thinking several moves ahead.

She did not go home
that night. She stayed—and when he learned she was a virgin, he was surprised. She laughed.

“Who would I have slept with?” she asked him. “I started time-hopping when I was in high school. And back in time …” she hesitated. “I’m like a ghost back there. People look past me or through me. They don’t really notice me at all.” She shrugged. “And I’ve never told anyone else about time-hopping. I
don’t know why I told you, really.”

He made love to her gently. Afterward, as they lay in bed together, he asked, “How old are you, anyway?”

“I was a sophomore in high school three years back according to your time. But I’ve been traveling around quite a bit in those years. I’d figure I’m about twenty-three.”

“Your parents?”

“Killed in a gas line riot.” She fell silent. “I wasn’t close to
them anyway. I was different.”

Michael lay still, one arm around her shoulders. The lady who lay beside him could run away whenever she wanted. Run away from shortages, from smog, from plague.

“Can you take me with you?” he asked suddenly.

For a long moment, she lay silent and he almost thought that she had not heard him. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “You would want to make changes. You
would try to mess with the laws of the Universe.”

“You could try to take me.”

“I’ll try.” She pressed close to him in the narrow bed.

“Hold me. And try to come with me.” He hugged her tightly, willing himself to stay with her, wherever or whenever she went.

She vanished from his arms.

He lay alone in bed, listening to the man who lived in the apartment below coughing. The air that blew in
the apartment window carried the scents of the dying city.

She met him at the door with a handful of wild strawberries when he returned from his job at the bookstore.

“I’m sorry it didn’t work,” she said. “I didn’t think it would. You want to change the past and you can’t do that.”

“Yeah.” He felt dirty and tired. He had seen a mugger attack an old woman just a few blocks from the apartment.

Michael had arrived just as the young man had run away.

The old woman had been crying and clutching her arm where she had been slashed with his knife.

Michael had helped her to her house and called the police from her phone. The entry hall to her apartment had smelled of stale air and grease, and while he was on the phone he could hear the old woman whimpering to herself and coughing—a dry,
hacking sound that ripped at her throat and lungs and made her double over in pain.

He had waited with the old woman until the ambulance arrived.

Karen relaxed on his couch, leaning back and looking tanned and healthy. Michael’s throat felt scratchy and sore and his eyes ached from the smog.

“Where have you been?” he asked abruptly.

“Back to when Indians lived here,” she said. “Interesting
people. I tried to pick up a few words of their language while. I was watching the women grind acorns. I learned to grind acorns instead.” She grinned and pretended to be grinding acorns. “Every day, they get up—”

“How long were you there?” he asked, knowing that he sounded angry.

“About a week.” She did not try to tell him any more about Indians or acorns and he did not ask.

As he made tea,
he told her about the old woman. “The city is getting worse,” he said. “And it looks like this strike will go on for months.”

They played chess and Michael tried not to think about the city as he played. But he could not help thinking—this lady can leave anytime. “It doesn’t affect you at all, does it?” he said at last. “It doesn’t matter what happens to the city at all. You can always leave.”

She did not look at him. She looked down at the chessboard where the world was ordered by lines and squares. “I’m here,” she said softly. “I always come back here. I watch the city where I was born decay and I cannot halt the process.” Her eyes were angry and sorrowful.

Michael reached out and touched her hand, but he did not respond. “I travel because I accept the world as it is. I watch and
I run away.” She fell silent.

“Hey, I’m sorry,” Michael started. “I didn’t mean to … I mean, you tried to take me with you, but …” He sat beside her on the couch. “Hey, let’s get out of this apartment tonight. We can go out to dinner. I know a restaurant that’s still open.”

At his insistence, they went out. The wine was good; he managed to ignore the canned flavor of the vegetables. On the third
glass of wine, he said, “You know what’s going to happen as well as I do.”

She stopped, with her glass halfway to her lips. “No, I don’t. I never can see the next move.”

“The city is dying—you know that. And those of us who live here will die with it. I’m dying with it. But you can leave.” He watched her and thought about how she had spent the afternoon picking wild strawberries. He suppressed
his anger and envy, and continued in a calm voice. “I resent that. And I’m going to resent that more and more. You’re going to have to leave eventually, so you might as well leave now.”

She sipped her wine, blue eyes considering him over the rim of the glass. “Would you leave me?”

His laughter scratched his sore throat and his face felt hot from the wine. “Don’t be silly, Karen. We hardly know
each other.”

“That doesn’t answer the question,” she said. He did not reply. She regarded him steadily. “I wouldn’t leave a friend to die alone,” she said.

“Don’t be silly,” Michael repeated. He was sweating and the chair did not feel solid beneath him. He reached across the table to touch Karen’s hand to assure himself that she was still there.

They walked back to the apartment complex, hand
in hand, after waiting half an hour for a bus that did not come. The driveway of the apartment court was blocked by an ambulance. The driver stood beside the vehicle, smoking a cigarette, and the spinning light above his head illuminated his face, flashing red, red, red.

Michael asked the driver what was happening. “A drunk living in that apartment died of the fever,” the driver said.

“Part
of the epidemic. They’re going to quarantine this part of the city, I hear.”

The news bulletin on the radio said that the quarantine was not just of one section of the city. The entire city was cut off, quarantined from the rest of the world.

Michael sat on the couch, his head cradled in his hands.

Karen laid an arm over his shoulders and he turned to face her. He was hot again, angry. He felt
suspended in a world that was disintegrating around him. “Don’t—” he started, and his words were interrupted by a racking cough. The world whirled.

“Michael, I’m sorry. I want you to come with me. But …”

Again, the coughing, the heat, and the pain deep in his chest. She was crying and he remembered, as if from a great, dim distance, another time that she had been crying and he had reached out
to her. He could not reach out.

“I wanted to change the world for you, I could not go away,” she said.

“Go away,” he said dully, repeating her last words. Then in an angry tone, “All right. Go away.”

She left, a quiet vanishing. The room was too hot and it kept spinning and shaking, and presently, he slept.

A cold hand on his forehead. The rim of a glass pressed to his lips. He tasted sour
juice on his tongue and felt it dribbling down his chin. “Orange juice,” said Karen’s husky voice. “It’ll help some.”

He opened his eyes and in the dim light of an early morning (not knowing which morning) saw her face. Large blue eyes in a face thinner than he remembered. “What morning?” he managed to ask.

She murmured, “Your time? The morning after, I think.”

Orange juice trickled down his
chin and the room whirled. Like a petulant child, he turned his head from the glass and tumbled down through the levels of fever and sleep.

A scent of flowers. He opened his eyes to her face in the afternoon light now, filtered through the layer of smog over the city. Gray light. Behind her, a bouquet of flowers rested by the chess set on the coffee table. The plastic pieces were set up as if
for a game, but the white queen was missing. Karen held it in her hand.

“Karen,” Michael said. “I want to come with you. I don’t want to care about the next move.” His tongue was dry and clumsy.

She looked at him and he noticed wrinkles in the skin around her eyes. The skin of the hand that held the white queen was translucent, parchmentlike. “When you were young you figured out the chess moves.
I didn’t care about them. It’s a different way of thinking and I can’t change you, Michael.” She twisted the chess piece restlessly in her hand.

“I’m getting better,” he started. “Much better.” He tried to lift his hand to wipe away the tears that trickled from her weary looking eyes. But his arms seemed so heavy and the room whirled around him. He closed his eyes against the gray light of afternoon
and whirled down, listening to Karen’s husky voice—huskier with age—saying:

“I won’t lie to you, Michael. You aren’t getting better. The fever is fatal …” Then the voice faded in the distance.

Again, the touch of a hand—feather light and cool. “Tell me about the Indians, Karen,” he whispered through a dry throat. She had never told him about the Indians because he had not wanted to hear. And
she told him about the taste of acorn stew and the warmth of the sun and the drink they made with manzanita berries and the way the little children played and laughed. And he whispered, “Tell me about the nicest time you’ve been to. Tell me.”

The husky voice said, “When the orange trees are in bloom. Orange blossom time.” Michael opened his eyes to his love’s old face. Wrinkled. Weary-eyed. The
hair that was piled on her head was gray. “I’m with you, love,” she said. “I’ve been away many times, but I’ve always come back.”

She lay beside him on the bed and he felt as light and as pale as the dawn light that filtered through the window.

“Take me there,” he said, knowing that he would never change the world—not the past, not the future. He felt her thin arms around him and felt soft grass
beneath him and with his last breath he tasted orange blossoms on the breeze.

T
HOUGH THE SUN
was nearly set, Morris wore dark glasses when he met Nick at the tiny dirt runway that served as the Bay Islands’ only airport. Nick was flying in from Los Angeles by way of San Pedro Sula in Honduras He peered through the cracked window of the old DC-3 as the plane bumped to a stop.

Morris stood with adolescent awkwardness by the one room wooden building that housed
customs for the islands.

Morris: dark, curly hair; red baseball cap pulled low over mirrored sunglasses; long-sleeved shirt with torn-out elbows; jeans with ragged cuffs.

A laughing horde of young boys ran out to the plane and grabbed dive bags and suitcases to carry to customs. With the exception of Nick, the passengers were scuba-divers, bound for Anthony’s Cay resort on the far side of Roatan,
the main island in the group.

Nick met Morris halfway to the customs building, handed him a magazine, and said only, “Take a look at age fifty.”

The article was titled “The Physiology and Ecology of a New Species of Flashlight Fish,” by Nicholas C. Rand and Morris Morgan.

Morris studied the article for a moment, flipping through the pages and ignoring the young boys who swarmed past, carrying
suitcases almost too large for them to handle.

Morris looked up at Nick and grinned—a flash of white teeth in a thin, tanned face. “Looks good,” he said. His voice was a little hoarser than Nick had remembered.

“For your first publication, it’s remarkable.” Nick patted Morris’s shoulder awkwardly. Nick looked and acted older than his thirty-five years. At the university, he treated his colleagues
with distant courtesy and had no real friends.

He was more comfortable with Morris than with anyone else he knew.

“Come on,” Morris said. “We got to get your gear and go.” He tried to sound matter-of-fact, but he betrayed his excitement by slipping into the dialect of the islands—an archaic English spoken with a strange lilt and governed by rules all its own.

Nick tipped the youngster who had
hauled his bags to customs and waited behind the crowd of divers. The inspector looked at Nick, stamped his passport, and said, “Go on. Have a good stay.” Customs inspections on the islands tended to be perfunctory. Though the Bay Islands were governed by Honduras, the Islanders tended to follow their own rules. The Bay Islands lay off the coast of Honduras in the area of the Caribbean that had
once been called the Spanish Main. The population was an odd mix: native Indians, relocated slaves called Caribs, and descendants of the English pirates who had used the islands as home base.

The airport’s runway stretched along the shore and the narrow, sandy beach formed one of its edges. Morris had beached his skiff at one end of the landing strip.

“I got a new skiff, a better one,” Morris
said. “If the currents be with us, we’ll be in East Harbor in two hours, I bet.”