Asimov's Science Fiction (19 page)

I pat his knee. It breaks my heart to see him like this, a deflated balloon attached to a sagging skeleton. "I'm sorry, Dale."

I sit out with him for a few minutes longer, then will myself to my feet. "Best get back to Soledad. She's probably scaling the walls by now."

My world is fuzzy around the edges as I negotiate the walkway and the decorative stones at the edge of our yard—Dale grows strong stuff in his basement—but things seem condensed now, more manageable.

When I come inside Soledad's on the phone again, her eyes wet. My timing is shit.

But she isn't sad or devastated—she seems to be smiling. I start to ask what's wrong, but she waves me off. "Yes, sweetie," she says. A pause: a voice comes over the line through the static, a child of about seven or eight. She goes on: "And you're sure you didn't forget where you parked it? No, honey, I'm fine.... I'll be there soon. I love you. Bye."

She hangs up, still smiling.

I move closer. "Was that... him?"

She nods. "He's okay. Somebody stole his bike from the rack at school. He's pretty upset." She shows me the time-stamp on the call; it reads eight years from now.

I look at my own phone—no messages.

Finally she goes to hug me, then sniffs at my head. "Have you been smoking weed again?"

"No," I say, blowing my skunky breath into her face.

"God, you're such a child," she says, and marches into the kitchen. Either way we're good—no fingernail tracks on the walls, for now.

11:35 P.M.

Over the next hour Soledad gets a series of calls: Oscar requires Yoohoo and some Oreos in order to live, and can she please pick them up on her way home; he will be home a half-hour later than his curfew because someone named Randy needs a ride; Teddy's mom will be giving him a ride home from soccer practice (Teddy is the eighteen-month-old four doors down). She puts the phone on speaker so I can hear. The voice is strangely similar each time, a bit garbled but clear, the time stamps ranging from eight to twelve years from now. Soledad smiles each time; the crisis is over, and he is clearly fine.

All I get is a voicemail from my mother asking me if I'm really,
really
sure I want to marry a Mexican. This was settled nine months ago when we gave her her first grandchild, so it does not bear a response.

Each time Soledad answers the phone her face is glowing and peaceful, as if she's entered some holy place and been blessed. Maybe Dale was right. This is a gift—for her, at least.

12:47 A.M.

Soledad has decided we should be taking notes based on these calls so that, when the various crises hit, we will be prepared for them. I try to make sense of them based on the time stamps, but I'm still a little high and it's confusing to keep it all in order. I'm arranging notecards on the coffee table when the house line rings again. She picks up, puts it on speaker so I can hear.

"Hey, Mom." His voice is deeper this time, a little crackly. "Coach says the first game will be on the twenty-first, if you want to come."

"Of course we're coming, sweetie," she says.

"I can hardly hear you," he says. "Is something wrong with your phone?"

"Just sunspots," she says. This is the excuse we've concocted.

"Okay. Well, can you promise me something?"

"Yes?"

"Can you and Dad not fight the whole time like you did last year?"

She seems a little surprised, since we rarely raise our voices. "Um, sure, sweetie."

"Okay. Because I'd rather you didn't come at all if you're gonna do that."

"I promise," she says. "We both do."

She hangs up after he does, looks up, glares at me. "Something you want to tell me?"

I shrug. "Not really." I go back to my notecards and don't think any further about it.

1:15 A.M.

We should both be sleeping, but there's no point in trying. The lights are still on in all the houses on our street, so no one else is either. Soledad has been quiet since the last call, glancing at me once in a while to see if I have anything to say to her. I don't.

Her cell phone rings.

"Hi Mom." Future-Oscar's voice is shaky and high, like something's happened. "Is something wrong with the line? I'm not getting a picture and the sound is terrible."

I remind her of the lie. "Sunspots," she says.

"Do you have a cold or something? Your voice sounds different." He is older now, his voice almost a man's.

She smiles, practically hugs the phone. "No, honey, everything's fine."

I hear him take a deep breath. "Okay. I didn't want to do this over the phone, but I thought you'd want to know. I already told Izzy, so please don't be mad at her."

I mouth,
Who's Izzy?
at Soledad, but she just shrugs. Her grandmother's name is Isabella, but anyone who called her "Izzy" would get an earful. "What is it, honey?"

"I'm getting an apartment off-campus with Eric this summer. We've got jobs lined up, so I won't be coming home."

"I'm sorry to hear that," she says, and waits for more.

He laughs nervously, the way Soledad sometimes does. "Uhh, there's more. I don't really know how to say this, but, ummmm... Eric's not just my roommate."

My limbs go numb and it's hard to take a full breath. No one says anything for a while.

Soledad breaks the silence. "Are you saying you're..."

"Gay," he interrupts. "Yeah."

Another silence.

This time he's the one who breaks it. "Oh, Jesus, Mom. Say something."

She sinks into her chair like she's been kicked in the gut. "I don't know what to say, sweetie," she finally replies.

"You still love me, right?" The tone is joking, but his voice sounds as if he's about to cry. I'm guessing this is the moment when my heart is supposed to swell with love for my son no matter who he is, but I'm still just numb.

"Of course I do, baby." She's slumped across the cushions and holding in her breath. I hear sniffling on his end. "Don't you or Izzy tell Dad, okay?"

"Do you want to tell him now?" She starts to hand the phone to me, but I don't take it.

"Dad's there?" he says. "I thought he and Chloe were still in Costa Rica." I gesture madly for her to go along with it, but she looks at me with murder in her eyes.

"Uh, they are..." she says. "You're right. Why don't you call him when they get back?"

"Oh, shit," he says. "It's that wormhole you told me about, isn't it? Did I just out myself as a baby? I'm sorry—I shouldn't say any more." Then the line goes dead.

She grips the phone so tight I hear the battery cover crack, then flings it at the wall. The batteries fly out, but it's otherwise unharmed. She turns to me, eyes wide and sharp as stilettos, the skin on her face taut and pale. "Who the hell is Chloe?"

"No idea." This is a lie. Chloe is the new girls' gym teacher—cute and blond and a little busty, far too bubbly and cloying for my tastes. She might be interesting if life kicked her around a little.

Soledad continues to glare.

We go back and forth for a good twenty minutes: I spew the usual sci-fi platitudes about how she can't blame me for something I haven't done yet; because we know it now, it doesn't have to happen. But there's no point.

"I'm sorry, honey." I try to put my arms around her, but she pulls away.

"Don't touch me," she says, and disappears into the kitchen.

I go to check on Oscar—maybe my epiphany will happen when I see him as a baby. He's still asleep, still facedown, clutching his stuffed Clifford the Big Red Dog. It starts off well enough; my first impulse is to pick him up, hold him, rock him for a while. Then, maybe because I'm overtired, I start to wonder if this means there's time to fix it—toy trucks, weightlifting, sports.

I go outside for another ciggie on the front porch. Dale isn't there anymore. I peer through the gap in his living room curtains; he and Erma are crouched on the floor in each other's arms, the phone dangling from her hand. Tears are running from Erma's eyes. Then they turn a little and I see she's smiling. I turn away, finish my smoke in our driveway—this isn't for me to see.

2:53 A.M.

We don't even try to go to bed, even though the event is due to end any minute. Soledad and I are on opposite ends of the couch; we don't talk, don't even look at each other. I keep trying to say something that will fix this, but language has deserted me.

Finally she turns to me, no tears, no anger. "Are you unhappy with me?" she asks flatly.

"No, honey." I try to scoot closer, but she waves me back.

"I just don't know what would possess you."

"Neither do I."

Then it comes: a photo from Oscar's number on our cell phones, dated twenty-four years from now. It's heavily pixilated and blacked out in a few spots, but we see enough: a mocha-skinned baby girl not quite a year old, in pink jammies and a little purple bow around her forehead. There's a big crooked smile on her face, and she's clutching a worn, faded Clifford the Big Red Dog. She has Oscar's eyes and ears— they must have used a surrogate.

She's beautiful.

Soledad and I stare at the image on separate phones, from each end of the couch, running our fingers along the LED screen.

Then the pixels degrade and the LEDs go black.

"Wow," Soledad says. "Just... wow." I put my arm around her from behind and squeeze. She lets me.

4:30 A.M.

Soledad has gotten two more texts: one from her sister saying the surgery went fine and her father's awake (this was two years ago); the other from Oscar, asking if we can have pizza tonight. She says yes.

The event has passed, and the astronomer, bleary-eyed, is back on TV. Nobody died, the world didn't end, and NASA has enough data to keep them busy for a decade. He encourages everyone to take stories of strange occurrences with a grain of salt—it may take years to sort out exactly what's happened. After he says this he wipes a tear from his eye, at which point Soledad gets up off the couch and shouts, "Ha!" Then, embarrassed, she turns to me. "I think I need to go to bed."

6:35 A.M.

My eyes snap open as Oscar cries across the hall. Still in our clothes, we stumble in. He's sitting up in his crib, face scrunched in hunger. Soledad lifts him out and hugs him tight, her back turned to me. "It's okay," she says soothingly. "It's gonna be okay." I come up behind her and try to touch him, but he pulls his hand away and buries his face in her chest. I try to comfort myself by thinking he's probably wiping his nose on her, but it doesn't work. With nothing else to do, I start repeating after her, over and over, until I forget who I'm saying it to.

Steve Rasnic Tem's newest collections are
Celestial Inventories
(ChiZine) and
Twember
(NewCon Press), which includes several stories from
Asimov's.
His novel
Blood Kin
appears from Solaris in March. Steve's tales are often heartbreaking, but his latest is pretty amusing. Unless you're Carl!

The fact that Carl did not recognize himself as the man at his front door was no surprise. In Carl's mind he closely resembled Raymond Massey as the young Abe Lincoln in that 1940 film classic
Abe Lincoln in Illinois.
Whereas a less charitable observer might have insisted he resembled more Mary Todd Lincoln in her oft-repeated fantasy
Robert E. Lee is at the Door Where's My Perfume?

"Dad, what's
wrong?
You look terrible!" Carl said to himself at the front door.

The older Carl looked down at himself, or at least the self he had been thirty years previously, and replied, "You never were very quick on the uptake, were you, Carl? That was always your biggest problem." He barged past his younger, less decisive self and entered his old living room. It was every bit as shabby as he remembered—a sagging gold couch with a stain roughly the shape and taste of Italy, multi-colored patch rug guaranteed to camouflage the worst of a twenty-something's bodily fluid spills, Kiss poster on the wall, Gene Simmons' tongue a fleshy pennant of Pepto-Bismol pink. It was far, far worse than he remembered. How did he ever get dates? Oh, that's right—he didn't.

He could feel the younger Carl breathing noisily behind him. It would be another five years before he would get that deviated septum fixed. "What's the matter, Dad? Mom kick you out again?"

That sounded about right. In another year she
would
kick the old man out, permanently that/this time, after catching him in bed with a cat, a curling iron, and ten pounds of butter. Carl and his dad had been quite close. He'd once asked for a puppy and his dad brought home a badger in a dog collar.

The older Carl turned around and embraced the younger Carl, pulling him close, eye-to-eye, nose-to-nose. The younger Carl responded with, "Hey, not unless you buy me dinner first!"

"Shhh, you idiot. Remember that time in the eighth grade, when you caught yourself looking at yourself from the mirror, so you spent most of the day locked up in your bathroom with your face against the mirror, peering from different angles, daring yourself to try that again?"

"Whoa!" The younger Carl broke away. "No one knows about that!"

"Remember that book you had to read senior year, H.G. Wells'
The Time Machine?
And how for the next week you had several imaginary romantic interludes involving Annie Oakley and a mule named
Whoa Pardner?"

"Whoa! I mean—Gosh! How do you know this stuff?"

"It's
me,
or rather, I'm
you,
but in thirty years.
The Time Machine,
remember?"

"I read the comic book version."

"I know, I know you did. But it's the same basic story—guy travels through time. "

"You built a time machine?
I
built a time machine? How cool is that!"

"Are you kidding me?" The older Carl wondered if traveling back in time might have shaved a few IQ points off the younger Carl.
"You
couldn't pass ninth grade math. It was your friend,
our
friend Hector.
He
invented a time machine."