Galaxy's Edge Magazine: Issue 7: March 2014 (20 page)

Until the door swung open, and there she stood.
Living and breathing.

“Yes,” she said, “Can I help you?”

“So sorry to trouble you, Mrs. Kawcak.
My name is Doctor Clayburn. I used to be with the university. Could you come out and speak with me for a moment? It’s very important.”

She looked at me, then at the driver next to the retirement home’s van, then up and down the street.

“What’s this about?”

“I’d like to ask you a few questions, Mrs. Kawcak.
About someone who visited you perhaps a couple or more years ago.”

“You’re a physician?”

“No, a physicist.
But I’m … doing some post-retirement research as part of a program they’re starting at the university cancer center. Do you mind?”

“
Honey?
”

A man’s voice, from within the house.

She turned and shouted back, “I’ve got it, John.
Just a survey.
Be back with you in a minute.”

She closed the door quietly, her eyes suddenly wide and worried. She leaned over, bent at the waist so that she could be eye-level with me in my wheelchair.

“How did you know about my … the … the visitor?”

“I’m not able to discuss that, exactly,” I said. “I simply need to confirm whether or not you were, in fact, visited by someone claiming to be yourself.”

Janice stood up and took a second glance up and down the street, making sure there were no neighbors in any yards, then leaned back down and said, “Yes.”

“She claimed to be you?”

“Yes, she did.”

“Did you believe her?”

“She … She looked like me, only … God, it was so
gross.
”

“Like a corpse,” I said.

“But she walked and she talked and she … showed me things.”

“She wanted you to go see an oncologist, right?”

“Yes!”

“Did you?”

“I didn’t want to. But like I said, she showed me …
things
. I had to run back in the house and throw up.”

“She confronted you here?
On your porch?”

“Yes.”

“Did anyone else see her?”

“No. She said she knew exactly what time of day to come, when the kids would be at school and John would be at work. She didn’t want anyone else to know.”

“And did you do what she told you to do?”

Janice Kawcak looked like she almost couldn’t hear me. She had stuffed her hands in the pockets of her capris and her arms quivered slightly, as if shivering.

I could feel myself blushing at the temerity of my intrusion.

“I’m so sorry, ma’am. I have to know.
Did you do what the dead woman told you to do?
”

“Yes. I went to my doctor the next day, and he referred me. I was in treatment by the end of the month. I thought the night sweats were just menopause or something. But she was right. It was a lot worse than that.”

I looked at her full head of hair. Not a wig.

“Remission, then?”

“I’m in year two. They tell me I’ll be in the clear if I hit year five.”

“And the dead woman who claimed to be you?”

“I never saw her again.”

I stared intently at Janice Kawcak as she stood on her porch, eyes become far away and her mouth in a frown.

“Are you a religious woman?” I asked.

“I didn’t used to be. But … John and I go every Sunday now.”

“How old are you?”

“I turn fifty-two in November.”

“And your family?
How have they been since the … visitor … came?”

“Fine.”

“No problems with drugs or alcohol?”

“Doctor Clayburn, what kind of question is that?
No, of course not.”

“Yes ma’am. I think I have everything I came for.
So terribly sorry to have troubled you.”

***

The reek of embalming chemicals and ozone slapped me awake.

I’d dozed. My ability to stay up past dusk isn’t what it used to be.

Christopher was standing over me when I looked up.

“Did you see her?”

“I did.”

“Is she healthy?”

“Remission.
And five years older than she was when she died.”

“Excellent,” he said, and began walking away from me down to where the western corridor branched.

I wheeled quickly after him.

“How many, old friend?”

“Only ten so far.
But there are others.”

“I’d imagine they’re lined up to infinity.”

“Not that far.”

“And He doesn’t care, eh?”

The Nechronomator stopped short.

“As I said last night, God’s got nothing to do with this.”

“What about … the other guy.”

“Lucifer Morningstar?
Can’t say I’ve made his acquaintance.”

“So you’re doing all of this under the noses of both the Lord and the Devil? That’s a neat trick, Chri
s
topher. Tell me, why are you the first? Surely Einstein and numerous others could have—should have—figured it out, too.”

“I asked the same question. To hear it told in the After, Einstein and the rest never had the notion. They were too puzzled, fearful, or awestruck by the
After
to care. And then, once they’d moved on from Limbo, it was too late for them to change their minds.”

“So the Catholics are right?”

“Not exactly.
Limbo isn’t anything like what they might have thought it was.
Mostly because
everybody
goes there first.
It’s when you’re in Limbo that they sort you out. Like a gargantuan class of freshmen, being funneled through a registrar. It’s in Limbo where my people came and found me, and asked me to start the experiment.”

“Which was successful,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. He was grinning—an appalling expression on a dead man.

He began walking again until he reached the seal on another crypt.

“Robert Davis Maynard,” he said. “Bob will be next. Heart attack got him.”

“You’re talking to him now, aren’t you?
In the After.”

“Very perceptive, Matt.
Many things become possible in the
After
. You’d be amazed at how easy mu
l
titasking becomes once your intellect is freed from the confines of your brain.”

“What’s Bob’s plan?”

“Same as most of the others.
He’s going to try and convince his younger self to change. Give up the daily quarter pounders with fries. Get an exercise regimen together.”

“And if he’s successful—like Janice—what happens to his body?”

“Since Janice didn’t actually die, her corpse then ceases to exist. Only the knowledge that it once existed, remains.”

“And you don’t care a whit about how this is affecting the timeline?”

My friend ran a skeletal finger along his now-pronounced jaw line.

“I did at first. But then I thought, why not? Why isn’t He letting everybody
go
back and have a second chance, anyway? I got pissed. For Him to have the power and not use it … He’s a bastard, you know.
A regal, timeless, limitless bastard.
Who doesn’t use His power when He
should.
”

“Aren’t you afraid you’ll get caught? Get sent to Hell?”

He laughed.

“You of all people, Matt!
A Sunday school lecture?”

“A matter of practical concern,” I said. “Every person who successfully alters the flow of their lives through the
timeline,
alters the present away from its original course. How far back are you going to go, and how many will you let go back? Do it enough and things will get very, very
messy.
”

“Don’t worry, Matt. I can’t send people back if I can’t physically touch them. So far the only ones I’ve done have been in this cemetery.
All ordinary people.
I seriously doubt allowing them to have another shot will disrupt things too much. Especially since their living selves won’t have any memory of the
After
, nor me, because they never died in the first place.”

“Then how about sending me,” I said.

The Nechronomator considered.

“Haven’t tried it on a living person.
No idea what it might do to
you.
For all I know it might strip your soul out and scatter you insensate across the ether. Do you want to take that chance? Remoting in from the
After
provides me—us—with a degree of insulation I can’t guarantee if I try it on you.”

I looked down at my legs.
Useless for the last forty years.

“You think I care about that now? Send me back, Chris.”

“Let me guess.
To before the climbing accident.”

“Yes. You were there. You remember.”

“Yes, I do. I helped carry you to the ambulance.”

“Then do me one more favor and let me go back and fix the one fucking mistake that has haunted me worse than all the rest. Please, Chris.”

“What if your current self continues to exist alongside your young self?”

“You really think that’s a possibility?”

“I don’t know, to be honest.”

“Fine, then. I’ll deal with that when the time comes.”

***

I didn’t feel a thing when the Nechronomator touched my forehead.

One moment his stink threatened to overpower me, the next I was sitting alone, still in the mausoleum. Only this time the smell of cigarette smoke was much more pronounced, and there was a new smell. Like recently-poured concrete.

My tires squeaked on the brand new tiles and I stared at the seals to the crypts—most of which were blank—where there had been placards before.

I remembered how Janice’s corpse had flinched when she’d been sent back.

Signal disruption?

For me, it’d been effortless.

I wheeled myself through the dark to the mausoleum doors, which opened easily. Outside, the late summer night air was humid and palpable, like a potter’s damp room. Crickets hummed pleasantly in the distance, and the other side of the street across from the cemetery was an empty field, not apartment buildings.

I smiled in spite of myself.

Not bothering to close the door behind me, I wheeled out of the mausoleum, only coming to a halt when I realized that the ramp which had existed in 2019 didn’t exist in not-so-disabled-friendly 1979.

Shit. Even in my younger days I’d not have risked a ride down the mausoleum’s front steps.

I sat there in the portico and fumed quietly for a long time.

Then a skeletal child presented herself, quiet as a ghost.

I nearly fell over.

“Did Christopher send you?” I asked, heart hammering.

“Yes. He wanted me to see if you’d made it OK. I just told him you did.”

“And what will you do now?”

“I’ve got to go home and keep Daddy from backing over me with the station wagon. But first, I’m going to help you down the stairs.”

“I’m afraid I’m too heavy,” I said.

“Not when I’ve got power from the
After
.”

She was right. It was like being manhandled by a pint-sized wrestler.

I was wheezing by the time she got me back into my chair down at the bottom of the stairs. And I’d almost thrown up from that damned smell. They all had it, apparently.

She didn’t bother to say goodbye before she loped off into the moonlight, pursuing an objective I myself also intended to pursue.

In my head I knew exactly how far I had to go. I patted the lump in my jacket where I’d put my wallet. I’d have been screwed if not for the collection of vintage bills my late wife had kept under glass on the wall of our bedroom. Nancy had admired the artistry, and collected them. Now they were my meal ticket across the country.

Roll down to the
street,
keep going until I found a pay phone.

Call for a cab. Hope the cabbie didn’t have an issue with gimps.

Cab to the airport.
Flight to Colorado.

The rest I’d have to figure out by the time I got there.

***

Even after all these years, I still remembered the address.

442 Pinewood, unit 15.

A ground floor condo.
Fortunately for me.

I arrived via cab late into the evening, with the sun just setting. It’d been an exhausting day, and I’d almost convinced myself to get a motel for the night and tackle things in the morning.
But then again, no.
There was too much of a chance things could still go wrong. If I got my point across, I could rest afterward. Or not at all, depending on how temporal elasticity worked. Chris had said that Janice Kawcak’s dead self had ceased to exist the moment she went to see the doctor. What would happen to me?