The Time Travel Chronicles (38 page)

They say the truth shall set you free, but usually the truth is worse than the lie.

I was born in 1960. My parents named me William Edward McIntyre. On September 1st, 1965, at just after midday on what was a sunny but cool afternoon, I ceased to exist. At least, that’s what I imagine must have happened, because at precisely the same time of day, on September 1st, 1975, a five-year-old boy who gave his name as William Edward McIntyre was found wandering a street that he insisted contained a house that was his home, looking for two people that had died eight years earlier in a car accident. No record existed of him being born, or having lived anywhere under that name at all. Like I appeared out of nowhere.

Five years later, on September 1st, 1980, just after midday, I ceased to exist for a second time. There was no flash, no blinding light or thunderous drama. No perfect sphere of swirling lightning. I just blinked and everything changed. If I remember it right, on September 1st, 1990, which is where I was when I next opened my eyes, it was raining.

It’s August 2009 now, and I’m either 19 or 49, depending on how much Jack Daniels I’m swimming in. I’ve jumped three times, the last one landing me in 2005. On September 1st, 2010, I guess there’ll be a fourth.

* * *

Zee’s not waiting for me in the car after the pickup. Instead, in the back, there’s another of T-Bone’s connected guys. I don’t remember his name. I hand over the backpack. He unzips it, looks inside, and nods.

“Go get your money,” he says.

I’m confused. “What do you mean?”

“You think it’s here? What are you, some kind of fucking mope?”

“Where is it?”

“Zee’s got it. Outside Pecorino’s on 110th.” They love Pecorino’s because there’s no surveillance camera coverage. There’s a little alley next door where shit goes down all the time. It’s about a block away.

I get out and start to walk. I know something’s off, but I can’t say what it is. Maybe if I weren’t so pumped, I might have sensed them, but I’m not paying attention. Same way I didn’t pay enough attention back in T-Bone’s place. Lazy.

Zee’s standing in the shadows of the alley, waiting for me. I nod to him and he nods back. He’s cold, Zee, always has been. Doesn’t speak much. He hands me an envelope and, like the dumb fuck I am, I look inside. It’s stuffed full of twenties. Payday.

Too late, I realize. I look up and Zee’s pointing his nine-mil at my face.

“T-Bone said to tell you, it ain’t never alright what you did,” he says. “Night-night, motherfucker.”

Time stretches and slows. I can hear every pulsing throb of my heart. The rush of my breath in my ears.

They’re here now. I can feel them.

Something punches into one side of Zee’s head and drags a slick mess of glistening black out the other. He hovers for a moment, eyes wide and confused, then crumples.

Them.

I don’t remember how old I was the first time I saw them. Maybe thirteen or fourteen. I was running from a police cruiser after a grift that went wrong—one street hustle too often on the same corner. Sound familiar? I took a blind alley full of dumpsters and stale urine and came up empty. Had to climb a chain-link fence to get away. I hardly noticed the tall figure wrapped in the shadows who didn’t belong. I can’t say how or why I knew, what it was about the vague shape in the darkness, but it was off.

I didn’t think much about it then with the police on my tail and all, but now, months later, there it was again. The same feeling, as though the air had been disturbed by something diseased and alien. Something that didn’t belong.

Because they
don’t
belong. It took me a while, but eventually I worked that out. They’re just like me. None of us belong. We’re shades, ghosts that shimmer on the fringes of reality.

But this is the first time they’ve interfered. They’ve
killed
someone. I don’t understand.

What does it matter? I can’t be here. Can’t stand and ask questions. So I turn and run.

Muggy rain hammers the warm asphalt as I huddle in the alley across from Amy’s diner. A Mercedes-Benz is parked a half-block down the street, away from the light thrown by the street lamps. The two vague silhouettes inside have been there for more than an hour. It doesn’t take a genius to work out they’re T-Bone’s guys. And they’re looking for me.

Amy’s inside, dropping a burger and fries in front of a customer. She looks pale, even in the dull light inside the diner. Her eyes are rimmed in red. Maybe she’s not sleeping. I flinch as I watch her, then pull out the phone and dial the only number in the contacts.

“Yeah?” T-Bone’s voice.

“Guess we’re not good then?” I say.

“You shot my boy,” he says. “That’s a problem for you.”

He sounds too calm. That terrifies me.

“I’m leaving the city, T-Bone. Tonight. I’m leaving New York.” I can’t keep the tension from my voice.

T-Bone is silent for a moment. Then he says, “I’ll find you.”

“No, you won’t. And I’m not worth the green, either. Shit, tell everyone you ended me. Shot me down in the street. Whatever. I’m not going to be here to say shit about it. You get your cred and you don’t have to see me again.”

He pauses again and the line hisses. “You come back here, and you know what you get.”

“I know.”

T-Bone’s a businessman as much as he is OG. It’ll stick in his throat that I’m gone, and he’ll call in a few favors to find me, but if he thinks I’m out of Manhattan, he’ll leave Amy alone. If he knows me at all, he gets that I’ll run out on her the moment I feel the heat coming. He’s not going to 187 her just to get at me—too much grief comes with that sort of recklessness. He’ll put some of his guys on her for a while to see if I come back, but he’s no fool.

No, the best thing I can do for Amy is to leave. Fifteen minutes later, I’m on a train at Grand Central and heading north out of the city.

* * *

I’m breathless, my lips and throat dry. The church is freezing. Outside, brown fall leaves are already strewn across chill Toronto streets. I’m sitting at the back, hidden by a wide stone plinth. A baby’s crying is the only noise I can hear; the murmur of the priest’s words has now all but faded into nothing. There’s an acid burn seeping into my skin and my chest is tightening.

It’s my son crying. I’m here, watching him, and I still can’t believe it.

James William Longden.

I’m overcome by a need to go to him, to hold him. It’s all I can do to stop myself from getting up. But I made a promise to myself that I would stay away—a promise I’ve already broken by being here. And broken promises are not strangers to me, more like old friends as familiar as worn slippers tucked beneath a bed.

“What are you doing here?”

I snap round to the voice next to me. It’s familiar, and I know who it is before I see her anguished face. There are tears in Amy’s red eyes. The lustre I used to love is missing. Her hair is pulled back tight and her face is pale.

“What did you expect?” I’m unable to keep the bitterness from my tone. “I find out I have a son, and you expect me to ignore that? He is my son, isn’t he?”

I found out through Facebook. It’s been almost a year since I left Manhattan. That small boy is three months old. The timing is perfect. He was conceived the same late-August day I went to run drugs for T-Bone—the last time Amy and I were together. It took some work, but I found out the christening would be with her family back in Toronto. And I came. If I needed more, seeing the look in her eyes now, there’s no doubt he’s my son.

“I have a life now,” she says, the words catching in her throat. “I have someone.”

I’ve seen him. The man holding my son at the altar. Smiling with Amy’s family. Luanne hasn’t seen me yet. I wonder what she’ll do when she does.

“He make you happy?”

“I can’t deal with this, Will. Not here. Not now.” She pauses, glances back nervously, then looks at me again. She sets her face. “Not ever.”

“I just wanted to see him,” I say. “I’m going away, Ame. I won’t come back. You won’t see me again. I just needed to see him before I went.”

“You’ve seen him now.” It’s not like her to be cruel. It comes from desperation. And I deserve it.

I want to tell her I’m sorry, but I can’t bring myself to do it. She has her new life, a son, and someone to love her. I should be happy for her, but all I can reach is hate and bitterness.

My eye catches Luanne’s when I get up and turn to go. She looks at the man holding my son, then back to me, and smiles. Yeah, she’s quite the gal.

Outside, among the gravestones surrounding the church, all laden with dead leaves, I find I am shaking.

They’re here. Watching me.

“What do you want from me?” I whisper. When no answer comes but a cold wind, I say, louder this time, “What do you want from me?” I say it over and over until I’m screaming. I’m on my knees, the ache in my heart bleeding into every word.

But of course, they don’t answer. They never do.

Two days later, I’m gone.

* * *

Something’s wrong. Sure, this is only the fourth time I’ve jumped in my life, so it’s not like I’m an expert, but instantly I feel something’s off. It should be 2020. That’s the way it works—ten years. That’s the way it’s always worked.

But this can’t be ten years. I’ve realized, during the course of my fractured life, that there’s a pattern to the world’s advance. A certain symmetry to the way things develop over the course of a decade—the way buildings appear in a cityscape, the subtle changes in technology, the curious revolutions in fashion. There are sometimes abrupt advances, but even those have roots.

There’s no way this is 2020.

The first thing I notice is the rain. I’m lying in the street on wet, muddied concrete. Rain sluices over me and runs down my face and back, soaks my hair. It’s night, but smears of color shimmer in shallow pools on the saturated pavement. I look up to see a big screen, tall as the entire side of a building, tossing a vivid luminescence into a black sky. The air is thin, almost choking. Despite the rain, it’s warm.

The buildings seem taller than before; I can’t see where they end and the sky begins. There seem to be more of them, clustered and crowded as though every morsel of space has been filled by concrete. Neon signs buzz intermittently in grimy shop windows. People walk around me, all of them draped in long, slick coats. Others perch on stools outside some kind of street food place.

But the real clincher is the car—or what looks like a car—that roars over the street. Nearly thirty meters above it. The lights burning around its body give it a strange orange halo. I watch it open-mouthed for a few seconds, but then it’s gone. Farther above, there are more of them, weaving in between buildings. The flickering light from yet more billboard screens glistens on their wet bodywork.

I pull myself off the ground and start searching for the old movie cliché—something that will tell me the year. A newspaper is the usual starting point, at street corner vendors or dumpsters, or wherever else I can find one. But there’s nothing like that here. Instead I see people on the stools staring at flickering holographic images—silent, slightly hazy when seen from a distance, but more vivid and clear up close.

“You want something, buddy?”

I didn’t realize it, but I’m almost standing next to a guy, watching the holographic projection depicting what might be a newscast or a TV show. If TV even exists.

I mumble an apology and back away. The guy mutters something I don’t catch and goes back to his food. I lean against a window, the fizzing neon resonating through my skin. I can hardly breathe. My heart is beating so hard it’s starting to hurt.

Through the crowd, I catch sight of a face. At first, I’m too stunned by my surroundings to notice it, but instinct takes over. A woman, hidden beneath the folds of a hood so only vague feathers of the light on her wet skin are visible. Yet she seems familiar to me, and I can’t stop myself from staring. The feeling is there now, I realize too slowly. That familiar, distant sensation of not belonging. When she stares back at me, I recognize her.

One of T-Bone’s girls. It’s her face, I know it. I catch that same sneer she gave me back in his steakhouse.

But it’s not possible. The cars in the sky above me, the holographic projector the guy was watching, the buildings—all of it tells me this is further in the future than I have ever been. A longer jump. A big fistful of decades instead of the usual one.

She can’t be here. Not like this.

She’s already reaching into her coat as my brain staggers to this conclusion. I catch the glint of rain on metal in her hand. My body is heavy, sluggish. I can hardly move.

She reaches out. I manage to turn away and push through the crowd. There are startled shouts behind me, but I don’t stop. I just run. I keep running, filtering between the angry faces, pushing aside coats slick with rain. I jostle people in the street, but keep going. Steam hisses up from the sidewalks, billowing around me.

I don’t know how long I run like that, but I can’t breathe when I stop. I’m doubled over, hands on my knees, searching faces in the crowd for any sign of her. For a second, I see someone I think might be her and make to run again, but it isn’t.