In War Times (47 page)

“Actually, there is,” she said. “But I’m not going to tell you.”

“Let me guess. It’s for my own safety, right?”

“And mine. And our children’s.”

“Where were you? Can you tell me that?”

“Germany.”

“Where in Germany?”

“This is a fun game. Oberammergau.”

“Oberammergau. Hmmm. That sounds really strange to me. What for?”

“I had to pick up an airplane and bring it back to the States.”

“So why is that upsetting you?”

She lit a cigarette. “This is upsetting me, now. That’s all I’m going to say.”

Sam finished his entry, and closed his composition book.

It was two o’clock in the morning—not an unusual hour for him on a weekend. He was sitting on the screened-in porch. Two guys on the radio were talking about Red Rodney and his contribution to jazz. A tall glass of iced tea sat in a pool of condensation on a saucer next to him.

He smelled cigarette smoke.

Pushing his chair back, he went out the door and down the wooden stairs to the bamboo grotto near the creek. Sam had recently laid flagstone and erected three walls of lattice, then added a tin roof so they could use it in the rain. Vines now hid the lattice, and kept it cool on hot days.

The creek rushed past; it was a lovely, starry night. Winston, who lay on the ground, thumped his tail when he saw Sam but did not get up. As he had expected, Bette was there, her chin resting on her knees, one arm holding her legs close to her body as she sat in a wicker chair, smoking.

“I didn’t know you were out here,” Sam said. “Worried about something?” He sat down himself and put his feet on a hassock.

Bette didn’t answer, just smoked absently while Sam enjoyed the immense, pulsing whirr of the cicadas. He reached over and rubbed Bette’s neck. She turned her head so that her cheek rested on her knees and looked at him.

“Yes.”

“What is it?”

She finished her cigarette and wrapped both arms around her knees. “I am in possession of something that could be…very dangerous.”

“What’s new about that?”

“This isn’t a joking matter.”

“I’m not joking.”

“For the first time, I’m afraid for us. Really afraid.”

“Can you give me any details?”

She shook her head. “Absolutely not. They grilled me from here to kingdom come last week. It’s…wearying. All the more so because we’re supposed to be on the same side. And I guess I’m not on their side anymore. The only trouble is, there’s really no particular side that looks good. No other side I’d rather be on.” She smiled then, and took Sam’s hand. “Except yours, Dance.”

And then, the matter was closed.

I
T WAS A
rainy Sunday afternoon in late January 1970. Sam knocked on Jill’s door. He heard blaring rock and roll music. Jimi Hendrix, he guessed. She was nineteen now, and had a show on a local underground radio station. It was just a few hours a week, but she got a lot of free records out of it, and free tickets to concerts. She was attending American University and had a heavy course load as well.

He knocked again, harder, and was rewarded with a cross “What?”

“Can I come in?”

“I guess.”

Sam cautiously opened the door.

Jill’s tower room was filled with houseplants. They twined on windowsills, crowded together on an old table, hulked elephantine in huge pots set on the floor, and fogged the windows with humidity. He tried to imagine how she’d gotten all this dirt up to the third floor. Next to an antique bed and dresser, her closet overflowed onto the floor, and an old oriental rug was almost invisible beneath stalagmites of books. She’d taken over his collection of science fiction, and those books covered one of the narrow back walls. He glanced at some of her other titles.
The Pill versus the Springhill Mining Disaster. Trout Fishing in America. Tropic of Cancer. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
. Several thin volumes by someone named Denise Levertov next to her Chinese poets, Li Po and Wang Wei. Underground comix—
Zap
and the
East Village Other
—were strewn across the floor. He thought he smelled a faint whiff of marijuana in the room and hoped that the neighbors never did.

Jill, on a tall stool, hunched over her drafting table. She wore jeans with holes in them, Mexican haurachis, and a T-shirt that ordered
UP AGAINST THE WALL
. On her left upper arm was the black armband she always wore since joining the SDS.

“Can I look?” he asked, shouting over the music.

She shrugged. She didn’t stop drawing, but swayed to the right on her stool so he could look over her left shoulder.

“What is this?” he shouted.

She reached over and switched off her stereo. “My comic book.
Gypsy Myra
.”

“Your comic book?”

“That’s right. Elmore and I are going to publish it.” Elmore was Jill’s latest boyfriend, a thin, intelligent guy who was also in the SDS. Sam had spent many evenings chatting with him about politics. “This is the second issue. We already published the first with the SDS mimeograph.”

“No color.”

“Too expensive.”

“This looks pretty interesting. Can I see issue number one?”

She looked at him in disbelief, left her nibbed pen in the jar of black ink, and tugged a copy out from beneath a pile of books. The thin, wrinkled tome was stapled on the left side. A little box in the corner read 15¢.

“You’re getting paid for this?”

“What’s so strange about that? I’m donating the money to the cause.”

“The cause?”

“The antiwar movement.”

“Sounds like a good cause.” He opened it up to the first page.

He felt as if he had been punched in the chest. He looked around and collapsed onto what he thought was a chair, obscured beneath piles of clothing.

“Dad, are you all right?”

“I just—yeah.”

He caught his breath. The woman wore an unlikely costume: swirling Gypsy skirt, white blouse. But her face was uncannily, undeniably, the face of Hadntz.

And, come to think of it, this was what she had worn when he saw her, briefly, at the halfway house in Muchengladbach, where he, Wink, and the Gypsy refugee had created a marvelous fusion of jazz and gypsy violin music.

“She’s, like, a superhero,” said Jill.

“Oh?”

“Yeah. She has superpowers that can stop the war.”

“How does that work?”

“Well, it’s a secret.”

“Do
you
know how it works?”

“No. She’s from another planet—”

“Like Superman.”

“Not exactly. She’s from another planet just like this. Only better.”

“How did you…how did you happen to think her up?”

Jill smiled. “Oh, I just did.”

“Look, Jill, have you kids…” He paused. Have you kids what?
Have you kids found anything strange in the attic
?

“What?”

“Nothing. Who are these people here?” He pointed to an old sepia photograph that obviously came from the attic, stuck on her bulletin board. Maybe he could lead into it that way.

“Oh. That’s the family who used to live here. And that’s Evvie.”

“Evvie?”

She walked over to a bulletin board and tapped another picture, of a girl in a white dress. “Evvie. She’s from the attic. Here’s her mother, Fern”—she tapped another picture of a woman wearing an ankle-length dress—“and her father, an exiled Russian count.”

“Really?”

“No, not really,” she said impatiently. “We just made those stories up about the family who used to live here. When we found the pictures. They did all kinds of things. They had balls in the living room.”

“Small ones.”

“But grand. The cream of Washington came to them. Evvie was sickly, and had to spend a lot of time in bed. Her grandfather, who was also Russian, gave her a special game to play. A thinking game—a board with beautiful colors. It changes.”

“Can I see this thinking game?”

“Uh, I don’t know where it is right now.”

“Well, can you tell me more about this Gypsy Myra?”

“Oh.” She shrugged. “There are just a lot of stories. Lots and lots of stories in…”

“In what?”

“Oh, just everywhere. Look, Dad, I have to get back to work, okay?”

A few hours later, while Sam was laying a fire in the fireplace, the phone rang.

He ran down the hall to the kitchen, picked it up, and watched Bette through the kitchen window. She was pulling back the tarp over the woodpile and going through the logs, picking one up, tossing another down.

“Hello?”

“Dance!”

The unexpected connection, carrying Wink’s voice, was clear and pure.

“Well,” said Wink. “Cat got your tongue? What are you up to?”

“Contemplating a career in philosophy. You know, ivory tower, all that.”

“Coward.”

“Easy for you to say.”

A pause.

“Where are you?” asked Sam.

“You have to mean, when am I.”

“I’ll bite.” Bette had selected a few logs as satisfactory, handed some to Brian, and then took an armload herself. They slogged up the hill through the rain.

“Beijing, 2010, the Book Mart.”

“Of course. Doing what?”

“Hawking my biocube. Life story. You know, ‘Technology From Another Dimension,’ all that.”

“This isn’t a collect call, is it?”

Huge Wink-style laugh.

“Will I get an advance copy?”

For an instant, he seemed elsewhere:
Wink’s eyes, gleaming, as he laid out his understanding of time interwoven with undanceable bebop at Monroe’s, Parker and Dizzy dazzling their brains, rearranging electrons instant by instant by instant, sliding infinite landscapes into their ears
.

Wink’s worried voice on the phone brought him back to his own kitchen. “Some of that stuff you put everywhere is going to be activated.”

Sam opened the door for Brian and Bette. They wiped their feet and trudged down the hall to the living room.

“I think that some of it already is.”

Wink didn’t say anything for a moment. “This is going to be everywhere. If it all works out.” He laughed. “It’s going to go to all the kids. Free favors and things like that.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“It’s the only one,” said Wink, his voice bleak. “Out of all the possibilities. It’s the only one that will work. Our worlds are like…DNA. It’s organic, a genetic link. The two helixes have to be able to read each other. They have to match up. Otherwise…”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I don’t either. Not really. Not deeply. But I do believe it’s true. And in the process, things will be lost.”

“Things?”

“People. It’s a war.”

“Which people?”

“No way to know for sure.”

Sam was quiet. A war. Watching Brian as he took off his coat down the hall, Sam realized how tall he’d become. He’d be eighteen in a month, and subject to the draft.

“We have to have a reunion,” Wink said.

“When?”

“You mean where.”

“Spacetime coordinates, please,” said Sam.

“Your town. End of April. The Sheraton. I’ll handle the invitations.”

“Great idea. Say, sport, what gives you the impression that we’re heading for this dire situation?”

“It’s a nexus. It just shows up as a nexus.”

“Fine. A nexus. That’s informative.”

“All of these emerging patterns are shown as topology. And at some point, this particular nexus, they all become too dense, too interconnected, to decipher. That’s all we know at this point.”

“What if you’re wrong? That would be wonderful, wouldn’t it?” He had more than half a mind to ignore all of this, pretend it wasn’t happening. He did not like Wink’s portents of death and loss.

“I’m right.” His voice tightened, darkened. “You might have to—”

The line went dead. “
Damn it
!” Sam yelled, and slammed the phone down.

Bette came into the kitchen, pulling off her gloves. “What’s wrong? Who was that?”

“Wink,” he said. “Of course, the conversation was over before I had a chance to ask any questions.”

Brian came into the kitchen. “Who wants hot chocolate?”

Many hours later, the kids had wandered up to their rooms. Sam shut the French doors to the living room and told Bette about Jill’s comic book, and Wink’s call.

“What do you think, Bette?”

They were drinking the last of some very good brandy that they’d been saving. Winston lay in front of the fire, and Bette’s hair gleamed in the firelight. It might be a perfect evening except for the fact that his daughter seemed to have met Dr. Hadntz, who lived in otherwhen, and his old war buddy Wink had told him that not just
this
world, but
all
worlds, might end soon.