Elvissey (10 page)

"When it rains here, does it rain there?" I said, posing
inquiry to none who could answer; keening to know, all the
same.

"Leverett assures me these conditions are perfect. He's
assured of all, except when he's not. Here, now," Judy said,
handing me a small green compact. She glanced roundabout before conversing anew, as if even here others' eyes
might peer onward. Her habit, I thought, but I waried as
well. "Additional backup," she said. "As personally requested by me. I'll not hazard you overmuch, however carefree he clads the danger."

"What is it?"

"Another Alekhine device. If the Window's unreachable
from wherever you wind up, how'11 you cross back?"

"The car's equipped. We were enlightened yesterday-"

"If the car's stolen? Crashed? Commandeered? Additional backup, as I say. Purse it, let it slip your mind unless
called for. Paint with it if desired; it's usable for that as well.
A button within, mirror-hid, must be pressed for ten seconds
to engage device."

"Timeover we're told that uncontained transferral is impossibled," I said, slipping her gift into my purse. "That if
we did, we'd freefloat between forever. As happened to Jake,
they said-"

"They know?" she said. "Situate yourself in something
beforehand, then. By all accounts their world's unfit for
brown people, however, white you show. The place inbe-
tween might be preferred, if perchance you're uncovered."
"It'll work for two or more?" I asked.

"For one, certain," Judy sighed; shrugged. "Who's to tell, Iz?" She paused to insert her teeth, as if prepping to greet
family members. "For the duration Leverett's hands will
steer you. His project is to be overseen by him as Seamus
wishes. Mayhap it'll work as proposed, but I'll not turn blue
waiting. After your return, my hands can reach you once
more, and if Leverett aims you or the company wrong thereafter, I'll hash him sure when the moment comes."

Unexpressed rage tightened her face's muscles; veins in
her temples throbbed as if to split. Only two years separated
us, truthed; the look she'd grown into aged her a dozen
more. "Such oldline thoughts bear regooding, I'd be told,"
I said.

"And I'd be telling. Do as said, not as done." She eyeshut,
and sighed; breathed deep as if to take the pipe. "This is a
house of the damned, undoubted, Iz. My time's forever
spent staring at shadows, seeing what moves. Cleaning others' messes, boiling others' stews. Stepping on razors, all the
while, and who's to help? Seamus is mindlost, and no longer
hears what needs hearing. I'm fit to spring."

`Judy, I--

She opened her eyes. "Excuse, Iz. You've concerns aplenty. Mine's an untempered tantrum, nothing more. All's not
overmuch, once faced and considered. The worst's longb-
ested, blood under the bridge. Look there." She aimed her
finger toward the fireplace's painting as if feigning aim.
"Reinstalled after twenty years. Distance enough at last regained."

"Who are they?"

"The Drydens," she said. "Bless their black hearts. Two
tries the artist took before pleasing, it's told. The Old Man
thumbed it, first time round. Demanded that he and his
blood be captured as they were, not as they wished."

"This pleased?"

"This captured." Three oiled Drydens posed in a woodpa-
neled room. Judy anecdoted as I vizzed each one in turn.
"Susie D." Mrs. Dryden lounged in a wingbacked chair, squeezed twixt her men fore and aft, glaring at her onlookers with eyes appearing borrowed for the occasion. Her
sky-gray gown was so haphazardly pleated as to resemble
amateur's origami. "Rewired Mona Lisa with a surgical
smile. Nasty bitch, she was. Sowdugged and flabby." Mrs.
Dryden's hand rested in semblance of blessing atop her
teenager's brow, who sprawled on the carpet before her, his
head brushing her knees. "Sonny." His leggings' shadows
revealed an untoward bulge, as if mother's touch comforted
more than was proper. "He liked to play the girl, and me
Mandingo,"Judy said. "I'd strap on a peacemaker, and work
him till he bled." Thatcher Dryden stood behind his wife as
if he'd crept up to surprise. "The Old Man. None like him."
His face appeared to blaze from within; blue fire lit his eyes.
In none living had I ever seen such unhealthy self-assurance.
He wore his hair long, and leaned upon a baseball bat as if
it were a cane. "His American pasttime," Judy said, laughing. "That was them, and this is now."

"No descendants to reclaim a grip?"

"Sonny and his wife spawned a son, wet-eared and awful."
Her laugh decayed, and, at first seeming set to continue, she
instead tangented, or so I believed. "Lessen competition,
the Old Man told all timeover, lessen competition. He mottoed by that. Seamus and I, when time came right, we lessened." As Judy lingered her look over the Drydens, her
expression stilled; her eyes gleamed wet as if, against odds
and expectations, she missed her onetime owners. "You
want your husband, Iz?"

"Always," I said, contexting his word to my preference.

"I wanted this." She eyed the clock. Blue light bounced
off her windows. "The deadline's nearing. You'd best off.
Aim expectations low in all matters, Iz. Return, and all else
is clover. Just return."

"Why'd you hang them here?" I asked, reading the inscription brass-plated upon the Drydens' gilded frame: IN
LOCO PARENTIS.

"To remind of what I've faced, pasttime," she said. "All
else is minor, compared. And history demands honor, however dishonorable its participants."

"Money spins the world," Leverett told us during the drive
to Flushing; he, my husband and I rode backseated in our
company car. Our transport was trucked over following their
check, preliminarying our arrival, that all equipment might
be again reexamined at the departure point.

"Long-learned," said John. Rainsheets opaqued our windows; I pressed mine down, to clear air so well as sight.

"While tripping, meant," said Leverett. "I've funding
here, prepacked and document-accompanied." Giving John
a wallet, he handed me a billfold. In both were licenses, IDs
and three hundred paper dollars, green and gray crinkles
free of holo, strip or mark, and each bearing a century-old
date. My white gloves went unsmeared by their feel. Most
were ones; two were tens. "Copied from models returned
from Biggerstaff's visit. Excuse the unwieldy thicknesses."

"Usable to recover parents' deferments?" I asked, flashing
my new-printed Venezuelan resident card. Leverett grinned
without smiling.

"IDed names imprinted match your own," he answered.

"Pseudonyming's undesired, undercovering," said John.
My wad crowded my purse overmuch, but fit. "Attempts to
keep in character brainrattle, sans purpose."

"Be none but yourselves," said Leverett. "No advice betters. Suggestion, Isabel. Subtle your makeup."

Daily cosmeticking was my exception, not rule; accurate
colorization of my new skin still challenged, lending new
befuddlements each time. With tissue I softened my rouge,
slightened my lipstick; studying my redesigns in my green
compact's mirror I marveled, seeing yet another strange
face.

"American-fresh," said Leverett. "Remember image im pressions. With such a look as previous, prices might be
asked or offered, depending on who eyes the paint."

"What's meant?" John asked, forwarding as if setting to
avenge insult.

"Nada, nada," said Leverett. "Idle social commentary,
pertinent only to upcoming surroundings."

Our windows defogged, easing our vision. On the East
River a full-loaded garbarge hove toward Hell Gate and the
Sound's dump beyond, drifting through the flames. Yellow
scratches in the shipsides etched our corporate name above
the waterline. Boatworkers clad in protective suits appeared
through riversmoke as orange flecks sprinkled over foaming,
nut-brown wastes.

"Mind, John," Leverett said, "your hosts may phrase in
untoward, because unfamiliar, manner. Your subject, when
found, may especially do so. Ignore, unless harm appears
meant. Then react as able."

"Known," he said, sounding stringtaut. I'd watched him
dose himself that morning; if I hadn't, I would have believed
him slipping somehow into old mode, so tense and set to
blow he appeared without; yet so innerpeaced, and loving
toward me, all the same. "All ignorable, once understood."

"Isabel?" Leverett asked. "Expectant?"

"Rollable," I said; corrected. "Ready to roll."

Leaving Bronx behind, we pulled onto the Triborough
Bridge, unbombed throughout the Long Island vicissitudes;
the Home Army preserved the span that troop transferrals
might speed across with greater ease, to more immediate
result. The war was so long over that its memory returned,
ofttimes, as no more than dream, but if willed I recalled
nightlong cannonades, false dawns in the east; remembered
the look of my friends' older siblings departing, and their
look when and if they returned, demonstrating full a reversed regooding. Judy's two sisters and three brothers, all
older, all went willingly to serve their nation's masters; by
thirteen, Judy was an only child.

"Perfect weather," said Leverett, peering downriver, as if
to discern the gray overlap where cloud kissed water. "Overcasting sharpens the Window's apparency, illuminating the
route."

The river hightided: shorelapped Long Island, crept
along its sidestreets; flooded ground floors and scattered
vehicles' shells wherever water broke against land. Manhattan's faraway towers appeared as afterimages in the wet fog,
scars left unerased by regooding's surgeons, that present
would not forget past's pox. Our car downramped, clattering across patches of metal; turning onto a cratered expressway, we passed kilometer after kilometer of charred walls
and dry sockets, the places where houses were pulled. My
mother grew up in Queens; from the look of the borough's
leftovers, its remaining children could as well have grown up
on the moon.

"Expectations heightening?" Leverett asked, slapping his
own knees.

I nodded; new-experienced nausea's leavings roiled my
belly. "Heightened enough," said John.

We approached Flushing Meadows. On our left the old
stadium's manglings lay oceaned round by shattered asphalt; brownleafed trees with anorectic limbs erupted between girders. All nearby was woodland or desert; the
onetime park overgrew wherever prolonged shelling hadn't
barrened the land. The red ribs of the Unisphere perched
axised on a concrete dot, its continents disarrayed; North
America, drifting far, lay crumpled beneath Antarctica.
Army guards slowed us as we neared; we transversed their
barricade beneath a razorwired roof. Some distance beyond,
the sky ripped apart, fluttering and flapping independent of
windwrack.

"Behold," Leverett said. "The eighth wonder."

The Window wasn't so much a window as a tear in the
atmosphere's curtain. Behind its folds lay a blizzard's white;
until we drew closer it appeared as a cloud attached at base to earth, and pinned at apex to a star. We stopped several
hundred meters short of the Window, parking alongside our
purple-and-yellow transport. We'd been shown photos and
vids; nothing forewarned of the Window's immensity, nor of
its awfulness.

"Step clear," said Leverett, throwing himself coatless into
gale's midst, hopping out bareheaded; his hair held its hold
on his head. "Something, yes?"

A dozen smock-and-uniform-clad officials waited near,
sheltering themselves with wind-imploded umbrellas.
Ozone perfumed the air; breathing in, I dizzied, and my
stomach churned anew. Steadying myself, I noticed my hair,
everyone's hair, uplifting as if staticked. Tingles shivered
through my neck's nape; I uncertained if they quivered with
electric's buzz, or with fear's. Birds of indeterminate species
flew around the Window, their cries calling over rain and
thunder; stragglers drawing too near its flaps vanished in
midflight.

"Their birds or ours?" I asked, flattening my hair with a
scarf.

"It matters?" Leverett answered. Deadeyeing the Window,
staring straight in, I saw nothing; the whiteness blanked all
beyond. Our world horizoned plain on either side as if
naught interrupted its line. Red and gold light-blobs floated
from the opening's edges, skittering skyways, bobbing
groundward; appearing and reappearing with the unpredictability of soap-bubbles.

"Plasmas?"

"Plasmaesque, undoubted," said Leverett. "Magnetic apparitions. Specters of the cosmos, looking for tables to tap
against. Harmless, probably."

A lightning-bolt flashed, rebounding along the Window's
line; shot back into the overhead, new-streaked in blue and
pink. When the lightning struck its birthplace a thunderpeal
rang out to bleed all ears in hearshot, and my own drums felt
set to pop, not with sound, but pressure. The Window had its own voice, I discerned, a headaching blend of hiss and
sizzle, so lowpitched as to come through sole as subliminal
throb.

"Bizarreness overwrought," said John, his hair shining
beneath rain's cascade. "It's unreal."

"Real enough," said Leverett. "Invitation to adventure."

"What stays it in place?"

"Unceasing operation of the othersided Tesla coil that
split it open, the lab says. Something about field fluctuation.
They're mute to detail more, if they know. Science's socalled wondersense leaves my mind forever desiring. Mis-
sionways, all's unmattering, however it's put."

"People," a smocked woman said, shouting over thunder.
"Proceed apace, please." I recognized her; she once addressed our physics class, and I'd not understood a word.

"Timeframe's moving as planned," Leverett said. "What's
problemed?"

"We're rainsoaked," she said. "Please proceed."

"Delays unnerve," said John. "Let's lookingglass."

Climbing into the Hudson, fronting myself beside my
husband, I marveled that a full meter nonetheless separated
us, so spacious was the interior. Leverett and the scientist
fingertapped the driver's window; John fumbled for a moment before finding the necessary opening knob. When he
rolled down the glass the scientist thrust in her head, showering us as she shook herself dry.