Three Days to Never (22 page)

“Why the hell,” he asked her, “did you try to kill Frank Marrity—my younger self—this morning?” She wished she could see his expression.

“I think,” said Golze quickly, “that we've all been working under some misunderstandings.” He shifted his bulk to peer back around the headrest at the old Marrity.

From the constriction at the top of Marrity's vision, Charlotte guessed that he was frowning.

“Soon enough,” Golze said, “we'll all be able to ask and answer all the questions.” Golze's eyes were blinking be
hind his glasses, and Charlotte saw him glance to the far right side of the rear seat, toward the slumped figure of Rascasse. “I think Rascasse is dead,” he added. “Dying, anyway.” He turned and looked ahead again.

Charlotte tried switching to Rascasse's point of view—and found herself seeing Golze and Hinch head-on, and old Marrity in the rear seat behind them; apparently her viewpoint now was from the dashboard, looking backward. Faces and hands were unnaturally bright, as if this image were seen by infrared radiation. Rascasse was evidently out of his body, but not far out of it.

She switched back to the Marrity view. “I don't think so,” she said.

On her right, the old Frank Marrity cleared his throat, jiggling her vision. “Really, why did you kill him?”

“It was that Bradley guy,” said Golze, “he hit him on the head with a gun butt. Your brother-in-law, if you really are Frank Marrity.”

“I mean my father, in 1955. I—that doesn't make any sense.”

“How do you know it doesn't make any sense? You were what, three years old? Anyway, I don't know,
I
wasn't even
born
yet. Rascasse said your father was more useful to us dead than alive, whatever that might mean, if anything.” Golze hitched around in the seat again and smiled back at Marrity. “So give us a sample. What's some news from the future?”

“Are you
sure
you killed him, then?”

Golze shrugged. “Rascasse says we did. He seemed pretty sure. Why, did you hear from him after '55?”

“No—that's been my—we hated him for that, my sister and I. For leaving and not ever getting in touch with us.”

“Well,” said Golze, “any hate is good practice, even if it's baseless, as in this case. Better, in fact, more pure. So tell us something that happens in the future.”

Frank Marrity blinked several times. “Uh, the Soviet Union collapses in '91. The Berlin Wall comes down before that, in '89. No war, the whole Communist thing just collapsed from inside, like a rotten pumpkin.” He took a deep
breath, and after several seconds let it out again. “I want to make a deal with you people. Something I can do for you, something you can do for me. But first you need to buy me a bottle of vodka.”

“Vodka after talk,” said Golze.

“No,” said Marrity. “You people killed my father, and…and I don't know where that leaves me. I've hated him all my life for what he did, and now he's gone, and he
didn't
do it—and I'm afraid—”

He broke off and laughed weakly, and for a moment, before he blinked his eyes again, Charlotte could see the blur of tears around the edges of his vision. His voice was flat when he went on, “So I insist on a bottle of vodka before we proceed.”

Charlotte saw Golze shrug. “Okay,” he said. “Charlotte, the guy who's driving Rascasse's car will take you home in this one.” Knowing her ways, he stared straight into Marrity's eyes as he added, “You haven't slept in thirty hours, and I don't think we'll catch up with our fugitives within the next ten hours. Get a shower, get some sleep, eat something.”

You don't want me to hear you interview the Marrity guy, she thought. But in fact her eyelids and eye sockets were stinging, and she could smell her own sweat.

“Okay,” she said.

To her right, she could feel old Marrity relax. He's afraid of me, she thought, and she wondered whether to be amused or annoyed.

She leaned back in the seat, her left elbow on the door's armrest, and again she reached out mentally for the unconscious Rascasse's view—and then she smothered a gasp, though her fingernails reflexively scrabbled at the door and her right hand gripped Marrity's knee, doubtless to his alarm.

Rascasse was fifty feet above Colorado Boulevard—his astral projection was, anyway. Only after a bewildered moment did Charlotte realize that the motionless streamlined train in the lane below them was simply the car their bodies were in—it looked like an impossibly long limousine,
stretched from one block to another, right through an intersection—and at the intersection, other elongated vehicles were stuck perpendicularly right through it.

We're a bit outside our time slot, she told herself firmly. We're looking at several seconds at once. The black strings of pearls hanging in the air are probably flapping birds, crows.

Then either Rascasse descended, or he narrowed his focus; she could see Golze in the front passenger seat head-on, nearly level with her and only a foot or so away, and his blurred head became clear, frozen, grinning in a candid moment.

Then she could see inside Golze, by God knew what light; she could see his ribs, the slabs of his lungs, and the veiny sack that was his motionless heart; somehow in this impossible light it appeared to be black.

Then Rascasse's gaze entered the heart, with such a tight focus that the motionless valves were mouths caught pursed or stopped in midsyllable.

Charlotte switched back to Marrity's view, and involuntarily let out a sharp sigh of relief to see the back of Golze's head rocking in the passenger seat in front of her, and brake lights flashing through the windshield.

Golze turned around again to look at her, his eyebrows raised.

“I'm going to sleep right here,” Charlotte said, speaking too loudly. “You know the way you think you're falling, right as you go to sleep?”

“Jactitations,” said Golze, returning his attention to the traffic ahead. “Common in alcoholics.”

Oh yeah? thought Charlotte, genuinely too tired to take offense. But I bet my heart will outlast yours.

W
hen the taciturn young man dropped her off at the corner of Fairfax and Willoughby, Charlotte waited until she heard him drive away and then, since no one was looking at her, she listened to the traffic. Vehicles were growling from left to right in front of her, so she waited until that noise stopped and engines were accelerating back and forth to her right. She stepped confidently off the curb, and used the engine volume to keep herself from slanting out of the crosswalk that she couldn't see.

Stepping off the curb,
she thought. I did that, all right. That experience with Rascasse's viewpoint in the car might not have been all the way out to what those boys call
the freeway,
but it was…pretty far up an on-ramp, at least! A good distance above the surface streets I live in.

Her hands were shaking, and she clenched them into fists.

There was bourbon in her apartment, but she wasn't sure about cigarettes, and right now she needed a cigarette. Up
the far curb, she shuffled tentatively across the 7-Eleven parking lot, listening for cars suddenly turning in or backing out of parking spaces, and finally someone was looking at her.

She saw herself from a viewpoint inside the store, through the tinted window, but it was clear enough for her to walk briskly. She smiled and waved toward the viewpoint, just to keep the person looking at her until she reached the doors.

The action reminded her of having waved at Daphne, possibly half an hour ago. What was that all about? she wondered again. Hello? Here I am? Daphne Marrity is
not
my younger self!

Once inside, she switched to the point of view of the clerk behind the counter, without even having seen if it was a man or a woman. The clerk didn't look at her wallet as the pack of Marlboros slid across the counter between the displays of Bic lighters and little cans of cold-sore balm, so she had to feel for two one-dollar bills—she kept ones folded into squares, to distinguish them from the fives that were folded twice lengthwise, the tens that were folded once lengthwise, and the twenties that were not folded at all. She could see the two quarters the clerk gave her in change, so she didn't have to feel for the milled edges of the coins to know what they were.

Outside again, she paused in the hot, smoggy breeze, scanning the nearby viewpoints for a view of herself; over the years she had become very good at picking herself out even in very crowded scenes. And after a few seconds she located herself in the view of a man—she could see the edges of a mustache at the bottom of the view field—at the roofed RTD bus-stop bench across Willoughby, and he obligingly watched her as she walked the dozen yards to the gate of her apartment building. He even kept her in view as she stepped along the grass-bordered pavement to the front door of her apartment, so she didn't have to drag the fingers of one hand along the walls and windows of the other ground-floor apartments, as she sometimes did.

By touch she fitted the key into the front-door lock, and bolted the door behind her once she was inside. Through the
eyes of the man across the street, she could dimly see her silhouette inside the apartment through the always uncurtained windows, but that view was of no use, and she let it go.

Her apartment was chilly with air-conditioning, and the faint smells of upholstery and damp plant soil were a relief after the aggressive exhaust-and-salsa smells of the street.

She hung her keys on the hook by the door and took three strides forward across the carpet, and with the fourth step her left rubber-soled Rockport tapped the linoleum tiles of the kitchen floor.

She peeled the cellophane off the pack of Marlboros and tapped one out. Several lighters were in the drawer under the counter, glasses in the cupboard above, the bottle of Wild Turkey on the Formica-top table, and in ten seconds she had sat down at the table and poured a couple of inches of bourbon into the glass and was waving the fingers of one hand over the lighter to be sure it had lit; then she slowly brought it toward the end of the cigarette, puffing until she could taste the smoke.

She inhaled, then put the lighter down to take a sip of the bourbon; a moment later she exhaled smoke and bourbon fumes, and a lot of the tension in her shoulders went with them.

But her heart was still going faster than usual, and she knew it was because of her brief vicarious experience of being outside the boundaries of one-second-at-a-time. It's actually true, she thought cautiously, trying out the shape of the idea; you really can get into a higher dimension, from which the four dimensions we ordinarily live in can be viewed from outside. She had taken their word for it before, but now she'd actually seen what Rascasse and Golze had been talking about all along.

If one of them's got to kill the other, she thought, I hope it's my poor old Rascasse who survives. Especially if he goes along with Golze's evident decision that I no longer need to kill the young Frank Marrity. Obviously the situation's changed since I was given that order. This crapped-out old Marrity,
who has information we need to have, might just evaporate if I were to kill his younger self. Who knows? It all seems to be real, the old guy seems actually to be a visitor from the future.

As I will be.

She took another drag on the cigarette and another mouthful of the whiskey, and as she swallowed she let the shiver shake through her all the way to her fingertips, probably throwing the ash off her cigarette. And she realized that the nervousness she felt was relief and anticipation.

This is going to work, she thought. I don't have to kill Marrity, and this thing is going to work. I'll be able to ditch this life, like a paper towel you cleaned up some nasty mess with. Throw it away and then wash every particle of memory off your hands.

She recalled helping Golze lure a young man aboard the bus in Pasadena last night. Golze had used a stun gun on him once he was inside, and then had duct-taped his mouth, wrists, and ankles. She had been dropped off at the Arrowhead Pediatric Hospital in San Bernardino about half an hour later, and in all that time the young man had not moved. Perhaps Golze's stun gun had killed him—Golze hadn't referred to the incident today.

She drained the remaining couple of ounces of bourbon in one swallow, and welcomed the depth-charge effect, the unfocusing warmth spreading through her whole body.

She stood up and crossed to the sink, where she put down the empty glass and ran water over the cigarette, afterward dropping the soggy filter in the wastebasket.

As she walked back across the living room carpet, she was remembering Ellis, her last boyfriend; he had said that Elizabeth Taylor didn't seem attractive to him in old movies like
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
or
Butterfield 8
because the image of her present-day self kept getting in the way.

She stepped sideways onto the linoleum of the bathroom floor, into the faint smells of Lysol and rust. She opened the medicine cabinet and took down a hand-size plastic bottle of baby shampoo and squirted some into her palm and be
gan washing her hands, rubbing her fingertips. Before the shampoo had been entirely washed from her fingers, she several times brushed warm water over her eyelashes, from the bridge of her nose outward.

She had only
seen
the young Frank Marrity twice, briefly, both times through the eyes of his twelve-year-old daughter: yesterday at 1:00 p.m., when he had been sitting across from the daughter at the Italian restaurant, and five hours before that, when he had been sitting at his kitchen table next to the old version of himself. The old one had been drinking something brown, brandy or whiskey.

Did the young Marrity imagine that the older man was his father, as Charlotte had? Would that be what the old man had told him?

Charlotte called up young Marrity's face—lean and kind and humorous under the disordered dark hair, very different from the defeated, pouchy face of the old guy. And the voices had nothing in common—young Marrity's was a clear tenor, while the old guy's was hoarse and raspy. She didn't see them as the same guy—no perceptible Elizabeth Taylor effect.

She lowered her chin as if to whistle a deep bass note, opening her eyelids wide; then drew her left forefinger along her lower eyelid until she could feel the bottom edge of the plastic scleral shell. And with a gently gouging push, she popped it right off the coral sphere implant and onto the palm of her hand.

A moment later she had done the same with the right eye. She rinsed the prosthetic eye shells, rolling the flexible plastic between her still slick fingers.

When they were clean, she dried them on a towel and carefully laid them in a silk-lined glasses case and snapped it shut and slid it onto the shelf above the toilet.

She kept her eyelids open wide to let the coral spheres air out.
Of her eyes are coral made,
she thought.

She was aware of a viewpoint not far away, and she focused on it. The young student in the next apartment was staring at his television screen, on which Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh were sitting on a veranda, watching a little girl
riding a horse sidesaddle; and Charlotte had taken a step toward the living room, to turn on her own television set and get audio to go with the clairvoyant picture, but then she noticed that the lights were glowing on the student's VCR, on top of the television set—
Gone With the Wind
wasn't being shown on a TV channel, he had rented a tape of it.

The student always watched the news on Channel 7 at 7:00 a.m., and sometimes Charlotte set her alarm so that she could watch it through his eyes, listening to the sound on her own set. Usually, though, she would rather sleep.

Ellis had been good with movies, generally paying pretty close attention. She had made a show of keeping her eyes pointed toward the screen to encourage him to do the same. And he had been a great reader, never skimming or skipping pages—often she had just sat beside him on the couch, her eyes closed, reading along through his eyes. He had liked John D. MacDonald and Dick Francis mysteries, which were fine, but she wished she could meet a man who liked the Brontë sisters. Charlotte had only read
Wuthering Heights
and
Jane Eyre
before being blinded. Frank Marrity probably liked the Brontës.

She sighed and picked up her purse and the towel and counted her steps into the bedroom. She sat down on the bed, spread out the towel across the bedspread, and then pulled her .357 Smith & Wesson revolver out of her purse.

With her finger outside the trigger guard and the gun pointed into the corner of the room, she pushed the cylinder-release button and swung the cylinder out to the side. She tilted the gun up and pushed the ejector rod; one heavy cartridge fell into her palm, along with five empty brass shells.

Five shots! she thought with a shiver. And apparently all I did was break a window. She was glad now that she had not killed him.

If Marrity had looked at her, she had planned to see herself facing him squarely and pointing the gun a bit below his eyes, so that she would not quite be able to see down the barrel. That ought to have had the gun aimed at his chest. And then squeeze the trigger. She had wondered if he would
look down at the wound in himself or keep staring at her.

In spite of her intimacy with Ellis, her recollections of him were nearly all of his profile at restaurants, as people at other tables had glanced over at him and Charlotte.

When they had made love he had hardly ever looked at himself—not surprisingly, she thought; he wasn't a narcissist—and so all her recollections of their passion were views of her own naked body. And of his hands.

She had had perhaps half a dozen lovers during the nine years since the exploding battery had blinded her in the missile silo in the Mojave Desert; and her memory of every one of them was of her own body and a pair of hands.

It still seemed odd to her that she and Denis Rascasse had never been lovers, not even when he had first recruited her three years ago.

Involuntarily she found herself recalling old Robert Jerome, the Fuld Hall custodian at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, in New Jersey. She had seduced the amiable old man in order to get access to the restricted Einstein archives—and then had convinced him that she loved him, to get his help in robbing the extra-sensitive files still kept in the basement of Einstein's old house on Mercer Street.

Even with Robert Jerome, all she could remember was her own face and body, and his wrinkled, spotty hands.

The pebbled-plastic gun-cleaning kit was in the bedside table drawer, and she lifted it out carefully and opened it on the blanket, by touch separating the rods and brushes and sharp-smelling bottles of solvent and oil.

Was
she
a narcissist? If so, it was by default. She couldn't help but always wind up looking at herself, through someone else's eyes.

But no, that wasn't the way it was—she didn't care about this blinded body, nor even about the twenty-eight-year-old woman who animated it.

If I'm a narcissist, she thought, it's in the same way that the crapped-out old-man Marrity probably is. We want to go back and rescue our younger, more innocent selves from some bad thing that threatens them.
I have done nothing but
in care of thee.
We're willing to throw ourselves away—make ourselves into things that
ought
to be thrown away—if by doing so we can save that one precious person who by our disgraceful actions will be spared our disgraces.

She looks like I used to.

According to Rascasse, it's possible to leave
now
and go back and change your past, then return in Newtonian recoil to
now
again, with your memories intact—with, in effect, two sets of recollections: memories of the original-issue life and memories of the revised one too. Einstein apparently did that in 1928, and Lieserl Marity probably did it in 1933. But I won't do it that way, Charlotte thought. I won't come back.