Three Days to Never (25 page)

“Right. A videocassette, labeled
Pee-wee's Big Adventure,
though that's not what the movie in the cassette was.”

“Had you watched the movie?”

“No. My daughter did. Practically put her in a coma.”

“I can imagine. And we asked you about the machine too?”

“Yes, but at that time I didn't know anything about it. This is the truth. I only learned about it years later, from hints you dropped about Einstein and my grandmother. I had to read up on quantum mechanics, and consult Ouija
boards and spiritualists, all sorts of screwy research. I still don't exactly know how it works.”

“But you figured out how to
work
it. You came back in time by means of it.”

Marrity smiled smugly. “Right.”

“Then we can use it to go back in time from here, and prevent the destruction of the movie.”

It seemed to Marrity that Golze was acting as if the movie was the important thing, and discounting what Marrity had to offer. “What do you even need the movie for?” Marrity asked. “The machine lets you go into the past and future, all by itself.”

“You sound like Rascasse,” said Golze. For a moment he was silent, staring out at the water. Then, “Yes,” he went on irritably, “the machine would let me go into the past and future—the past and future from wherever I
am,
from whatever specific little volume of cubic space the universe has permitted me to occupy. But I—we—want to be able to travel in
now.
”

“Now?” asked Marrity in bewilderment. “You can already travel in now. Anybody can.”

“I can be in one compressed, predestined point of it, not travel in it. My whole possible future is contained in a cone that expands into the future from here, this constricted now point. And my past is locked into a cone that extends backward in time from now. That's the Grail, those two cones, and Einstein's machine will let me travel in them. But all the time and space outside those cones is an extension of
now,
it's every place and time general relativity says I can't get to. Getting out there would be…moving
sideways
in the time-space hypercube; your grandmother did it, to get to Mount Shasta—she got there instantaneously.”

“But—obviously I've read up on this—the bits that are outside the cones right now will be included in the widening cone of your possible past, if you just wait. And anyway, the boundaries are expanding at the speed of light, and the entire earth can't be more than one light second from end to
end! What's the big deprivation, what are you afraid you'll be excluded from?”

Golze wasn't looking at him, and Marrity wondered if the fat man somehow aspired to eventually be in all places and moments at once. Would that, Marrity wondered, make him God?

If it did, he would always have been God—he would have been occupying every place in every moment since the beginning of time.

Marrity forced himself not to smile at the thought; then he remembered the twitching black head he had seen nineteen years ago, and the hateful woman little Daphne had grown up to be, and the babies he had seemed to see in the weeds two days ago; and he considered the nature of any God that could have created this world—“This dreary agitation of the dust, and all this strange mistake of mortal birth,” as Omar Khayyam had written—and the impulse to smile was gone.

Golze had been looking at the water, but now looked directly at Marrity. “So where is the machine now?”

Marrity sat back, to put as much distance as possible between their faces. “That's my merchandise, telling you that. But first you've got to pay me.”

“Okay.” The black steel oarlocks clanked as Golze pulled on one oar and pushed on the other, and the boat rocked on the jade water as the bow began to move to the left. “What payment do you want?”

Marrity took a deep breath and let it out, glad of the breeze in his sweaty hair. “Why are we doing this in a boat?” he asked. He looked around at the grassy banks and the arching red wooden footbridge. “This is where a scene in
Chinatown
was filmed, right?”

Golze frowned, either at the evasion or at the question itself; and at first it seemed he wouldn't reply. Then, “Yes, Jake Gittes was in a boat here, in that movie, photographing Hollis Mulwray and Mrs. Mulwray's daughter.”

Golze opened his mouth to go on, but Marrity impulsively said, “Jake didn't get the daughter away in the end, did he?”

“No,” said Golze with exaggerated patience, “the horrible old man took her away. But this is a relatively good spot for this particular confidential conversation. The jangling toys, and the fact that the boat keeps turning, make it difficult for anyone on the shore with a shotgun microphone to monitor our talk.”

He bent to fetch up the dog again, and he squinted at Marrity as he slowly ratcheted the spring tight. At last he put it down and scratched at the black ribbon choker around his neck. “And the lake's got associations with Charlie Chaplin. In certain ways it's a deflection, for any psychic trying to track us. What payment do you want?”

That was a short delay, Marrity thought forlornly.

“Three things,” he said at last. “First, you leave Frank Marrity, the younger one, alone. No more shooting at him, no more anything at all, ever. You just forget about him and let him live to a ripe, untroubled old age.”

“Okay. I don't know how we can prove we've done that until he
has
died of old age, but I can tell you that I don't know why we bothered to try to kill him in the first place. And I suppose if we killed him, your younger self,
you
might just disappear! I'm not sure of the physics on that.” He tugged at one oar, and the boat jostled around to the right, swaying in the water. “What's the second thing?”

“You let me use the…time-travel procedure to return to 2006, where I can resume my life. Oh, and there's a house you've got to buy.”

“A house? Okay, after we put you through a very thorough series of interviews, probably under narcohypnosis. What's the third thing?”

There was a long pause before Marrity answered, and Golze shifted the boat again.

“I could tell you in three words,” Marrity said finally. “Two. And I certainly don't care what you think of me. But I want to explain what it
is,
anyway.”

“Fine. What is it?”

“It's the way the universe originally played out, the way my real life played out. I had a life, and I want it back.”

“What took it from you?”

“The damned Harmonic Convergence took it from me. An incident in this year, here in 1987,
changed,
even though it was in my past—imagine having something in your past change on you, so for instance you and some friends were shooting a gun when you were seventeen, and nothing went wrong, and you've grown up to happy middle age—but now suddenly you find yourself in a life in which you've been a quadriplegic since the age of seventeen because one of your friends accidentally shot you in the neck, way back then!” He mopped his face with the sleeve of his windbreaker. “And you still remember the original happy life! You'd want to go back, right?—and tell your seventeen-year-old self not to go shooting with those friends.”

“How did the Harmonic Convergence do this?”

“All these zombies—blanking their minds on the mountaintops—pressure drop—they've made a crack in the space-time continuity. Things resume on the future side of the crack, but not quite the same, a bit of quantum randomness has seeped in, like groundwater into a cracked foundation. Hell,
you
might soon get a visit from
your
future self, trying to put
your
life back on its original track.”

“You're not a quadriplegic. What
is
it you want us to prevent from happening?”

“Well, it already happened. Yesterday. And I want you people to undo the change, undo the
error,
put my life back into its original…configuration.”

“Okay. What happened yesterday that shouldn't have happened?”

For a few seconds the only sound was of some children playing around the snow-cone vendors on the north shore. Marrity stared out across the lake surface, with its patches of tiny, fine-hatched ripples among the glassy low swells.

“My younger self…Frank Marrity…” Marrity was dizzy, and wondered if he was going to vomit. “He saved my daughter's life, at that restaurant, yesterday. He did a tracheotomy on her. She was supposed to choke to death, she
died
there, in my original lifeline. In the
real
world.”

Golze's eyes were wide behind his steamy glasses and a smile was baring his yellow teeth and pulling his beard up on the sides. The choker ribbon was fully visible around his fat neck.

“You want us to kill your daughter?” he said. “What is she, twelve?”

“Yes, she's twelve. But by the time she's thirty, she's a monster. And no wonder—she's unnatural, living past yesterday; like a dead body walking around and talking.”

“But you told her to run, this afternoon. We'd have her now, maybe, if you hadn't told her to run.”

“I wasn't telling
her,
I was telling my younger self! This morning you people tried to
kill
him! Which…obviously isn't what I want.”

Golze bent down to pick up the red ant. “You get the ape,” he said. And when the toys were buzzing and clattering away again, he slouched back on his seat and said, “So you want us to kill your daughter.”

M
arrity felt hollow, a frail shell around a vacuum, as if he might implode into himself. Why did the fat man have to ask for a yes or no answer? he thought. I can't say
yes
to him.

The horrible old man took her away.

But all I want is justice! My real life, not the nightmare life that grew out of the crack in reality, like a weed, like a nest of scorpions. What I'm saying
yes
to is reality!

Marrity opened his mouth—but he was sure that if he said
yes
here, now, he would not ever be able to go back to being the man who had not said it.

But I want the life the universe originally gave me. It's mine.

He took a deep breath.

Y
es,” Marrity said hoarsely. The boat seemed very unsteady, and he gripped the hot orange-painted wood of the gunwales.

Golze was staring at him curiously. “Not just—kidnap her, sell her to Arab slave traders in Cairo? Get the duck.”

“No, I think there's a…a Law of Conservation of Reality, that would bring her back.” Marrity was sweating—drops were running down his forehead and he could feel them crawling over his ribs under his shirt as he obediently bent over and picked up the toy duck. “We'd still wind up in that twenty-four-foot trailer, and she'd still back the Ford over me in 2002. I can't risk her coming back. And killing her would be”—he was panting with the effort of trying to believe what he was saying—“would be more merciful.”

“Okay, we'll do it. So where's the machine?”

“You don't have her. She's escaped from you. And as far
as I can tell, your blind woman still means to kill Frank Marrity.”

Golze jerked the oars in opposite directions, splashing drops of water into the air and jarring the boat. “Where is the machine?”

“I'd need some assurances—”

“We'll give you what you want if you tell me now. If you don't tell me now, we'll give you what you don't want, abundantly. Where is the machine?”

Marrity's shoulders slumped and he shook his head. “It's at my grandmother's house. In her backyard shed.”

“Can we move it? Get it into the car?”

“No!” Marrity involuntarily looked at his hands, to be sure they were still solid enough to twist the key in the duck. “If you
move
it, how will I use it in 2006?”

“We'll move it back later, don't worry. We need you to have come back to tell us all this, after all. We don't want to screw up your time line. But we need to move it
now,
because
other
people are going to try to take it, and they
won't
care if it interferes with you or not.”

“Okay, right.” I've lost all control, Marrity thought. “No, you can't get it in the car. Part of it is the cement slab from the Chinese Theater, with Charlie Chaplin's footprints and handprints on it.”

“Good lord. That's part of it? But she didn't have that in 1933, did she?”

“No, the slab was still out in front of the theater then. My grandmother had Chaplin himself, in '33, and he wound up getting temporally dislocated too, at least an accidental astral projection of him did, though he meant to just be a, a nonparticipating observer. It scared the daylights out of him—well, there was the earthquake too—and that summer he burned all but one of the prints of
A Woman of the Sea.”

“And we'll get that back,” Golze said. “Burned up by a twelve-year-old girl! But we'll get it back.” He had begun rowing strongly toward the dock. “Got to get to a radio,” he
panted. His glasses were opaque white, reflecting the sun. “We're going to need some help, and a truck.”

T
he elderly Frank Marrity gripped the edges of the car seat and wondered if he was going to be sick. Golze was driving Rascasse's car, too fast around corners, and the car reeked of melted plastic. What had been the stereo was a blackened crater in the middle of the dashboard.

They were nearly at Grammar's house, and Golze had driven up the 110 to get here, so they were approaching from the south, and Marrity's excursions during these last three days had been by way of California Street, to the north; he hadn't seen these streets for many years, and there was more of his childhood than of his adulthood clinging to these old trees and pavements.

Moira and I rode our bicycles up and down Marengo Avenue, he thought, in the 1950s and '60s. The old bungalow houses were rushing past in a blur now, but he remembered each one; there's where we used to jump from roof to roof with the Edgerly boys, he thought, and there's where Moira fell off her bike and cracked her head and I had to carry her all the way home, three blocks.

Golze made a leaning right turn onto Batsford Street, and Marrity could see Grammar's house ahead on the left—and he remembered riding his bicycle up the sidewalk here on many late afternoons in the winter rain, his canvas newspaper bags empty and slapping wetly against the front wheel fork, and the olive oil taste of Brylcreem in his mouth from the rain running down his face.

It was tears he tasted now, and he quickly cuffed them away.

Grammar's old gray wood-frame house was on the northwest corner of Batsford and Euclid, and Golze turned left onto Euclid—but he drove straight on past Grammar's back fence and garage.

Golze was saying, “Fuck fuck fuck,” in a quiet monotone.

“You passed it,” Marrity said.

“I know,” snapped Golze, peering into the rearview mirror. “There's a U-Haul truck parked at the curb.” He was biting his lip. “Our truck won't be here for another couple of minutes, at least.”

“You think these guys are here to take the stuff out of her shed?”

“Maybe.” Golze drove past half a dozen houses, then slowly turned into an old two-strip driveway and backed out again, facing south now. He pulled in to the curb and put the engine in park, but didn't turn it off. Fifty yards ahead they could see the truck and the cars by Grammar's back fence.

“They may just be family,” Golze said, “getting furniture out of the house. But we can't go in while they're there. Give me the binoculars from the glove compartment.”

Marrity opened the glove compartment and handed Golze a pair of heavy olive-green binoculars. “They don't look like my family,” Marrity said. They must not take the machine away, he thought.

“Hired movers, maybe.” Golze lifted the binoculars. “Shut up.”

The gate in the fence opened, and two men in overalls walked out holding faded lawn chairs. Behind them several men were carrying a flat tarpaulin-draped square with table legs visible under it.

Marrity noticed that the men with the draped table took short steps, planting their feet carefully, and that the table didn't swing at all.

“Stop them,” he said, leaning forward, “they
are
taking the machine.”

Golze lowered the binoculars to squint at him. “It's chairs and a table.”

“They've got the Chaplin slab on a table, dammit! If they set it down, the legs would collapse—look how heavy it is!”

The radio was mounted below the dashboard, and had apparently survived the fire that had wrecked the stereo above it. Golze lifted the microphone.

“Seconde,” he said.

“Tierce,” came the reply from the speaker.

“Come north on Euclid, and when you're just past the house, I want you to park on the wrong side of the street, north of a U-Haul truck you'll see there. Kix.” He adjusted the setting of a dial on the radio, then went on, “Let the guys out to run alongside, and then I want you to drive south, in reverse, and ram the U-Haul truck as hard as you can, Wheaties.”

“No,” said Marrity loudly, “part of it's glass! They'll break it!”

“Frosted Flakes.” Golze changed the frequency again. “Never mind that, do not ram them,” Golze said into the microphone. “Do not ram the truck, understand?”

“We won't ram it. Just park where you said? Special K.”

The men down the street had carried the tarpaulin-covered object to the rear of their U-Haul truck, and had laid it on its side on the hydraulic lift.

Golze changed the frequency again. “Right. Guns ready. I'll be right behind you. How soon?”

“I'm just passing Dodger Stadium,” came the reply. “Five minutes if I crank.”

“Crank.”

Golze hung up the microphone.

“I guess these guys will run if they see guns,” ventured Marrity. He clasped his hands between his knees; he wasn't shivering, but all his muscles felt poised to start.

“If they're Mossad,” said Golze, “they'll have guns of their own. Our only chance would be to surprise them.”

“I hope they realize there were some gunshots fired here just a couple of hours ago,” Marrity went on. His mouth was dry. “The cops are likely to respond extra quick if there's any more.”

“If they're Mossad, they know and don't care.” Golze was staring through the soot-smeared windshield at the men down the street. He exhaled and hitched around on the seat as if to reach into his pocket for his wallet; but what he pulled out was a heavy stainless-steel .45 automatic, and with his thumb he clicked down a little lever on the side of it. “Busy day,” he said.

Marrity was just narrowly glad that he was still able to see, and clasp his hands, and make a dent in the car seat. Can I continue to exist, he wondered, if these people make it impossible for me to use the machine in 2006?

T
he hydraulic lift at the back of the U-Haul truck had risen to the level of the truck bed, and the four men were now wrestling the tarpaulin-covered square into the shaded interior. Another man, dark haired and wearing a blue sweatsuit, closed the gate to the old woman's yard and trudged toward the passenger side of the truck cab.

“Got to follow them,” snapped Golze, “can't wait for our guys. The slab was obviously the last of it.” He jerked the gearshift lever into drive, but slammed it back into park again when the man by the truck fifty yards ahead scattered a couple of handfuls of glittering objects across the asphalt of the street behind the truck.

“Ach!” exclaimed Golze.

He opened the driver's-side door and crouched behind it, bracing his right forearm in the V between the door and the slanting doorpost. Sunlight gleamed on the .45 in his chubby fist.

The bang of the gunshot was stunning, and the ejected shell spun across the empty driver's seat and landed in Marrity's lap; it was very hot, and he brushed it away with a shudder.

Golze fired three more shots, hammering the air inside the car, and Marrity batted away the hot brass shells as they spun toward him—then Golze paused, and only then did Marrity think to look through the windshield toward the truck.

The man who had been walking toward the truck was lying down now, mostly on the grass but with one arm draped over the curb onto the street. All Marrity could see inside the truck's back compartment was the square tarpaulin-draped bulk that must be the Chaplin slab. On the other side of the street, across from the truck, a man had stepped out of a white Honda that had been parked at the curb.

Then the car Marrity was sitting in was thumping and quivering as flashes winked around the edges of the draped square in the truck and a staccato popping echoed between the old bungalows on either side of the street. The loudest noise was a sharp smack as tiny bits of glass stung Marrity's cheek and the windshield was suddenly a glowing white grid, and as he ducked he heard Golze tumble back into the driver's seat.

There was bright red blood spattered on the fat man's hand as he shoved the gearshift lever into reverse, and then Marrity was flung forward against the diagonal constriction of the seat belt as the car accelerated backward, the engine roaring. Golze was twisted around to look out the back windshield, which was still clear. Marrity managed to raise his head, and he saw that the left shoulder of Golze's jacket had a pencil-size hole in it; the white shirt underneath was already blotting with red.

Something crunched under the back wheels and thumped under the car, and Marrity saw a section of chrome handlebar with a green rubber grip on the end spin away to the curb as the car's front end jumped briefly—then they were on past, and Golze had backed the car to the far curb and slammed the gearshift lever into drive, and after punching out a section of the opaque windshield with his right fist, he was driving rapidly north up Euclid. Marrity was as stunned as if he'd been shot himself, and he could not shake the idea that Golze had run over a phantom of Marrity's childhood, preserved and projected by these unchanged streets until now. He clasped his hands together more tightly.

“Caltrops,” said Golze, speaking loudly to be heard over the head-wind that was blowing his beard around his ears. His face behind the beard was so pale that it seemed almost green. “This hurts—a lot.”

“I—beg your pardon?” Marrity said.

“My shoulder hurts!”
With his right hand Golze slapped the wheel around in a right turn onto California Boulevard.

“I meant—‘caltrops'?”

“What that guy scattered on the street. Like jacks that
little girls play with—but bigger and with pointed ends. They don't brush aside, they dig in, you gotta pick 'em up one at a time—I
couldn't
follow—not on flat tires.” He was breathing fast, almost whistling with each exhalation. “They got the machine—we gotta get the Chaplin movie.”

But it's burned up, thought Marrity, and you can't go back in time to rescue it, now that those guys took the machine. He was feeling nauseated himself; it was just beginning to dawn on him that Golze had probably run over a child a few moments ago.

“The movie isn't burned up,” said Golze, “if Daphne Marrity never existed.”

W
ith conscious care and deliberation, Oren Lepidopt reversed into a driveway and followed the U-Haul truck as it lumbered south on Euclid Street. It would be his job to divert any further attempts to interfere, whether they came from this rival crowd or from the police.

His ears were ringing. Ernie Bozzaris was dead.

Lepidopt had been standing in the street, still holding his little .22 automatic, when he had caught the eye of one of the
sayanim
who had picked up Bozzaris's body from the curb; and just before sliding the body into the back of the truck and climbing in to pull down the sliding door, the man had given Lepidopt a thumbs-down.

Lepidopt watched the traffic in all directions as he drove. There didn't seem to be any cars, police or otherwise, speeding up toward the truck from ahead or from side streets, and Lepidopt let his aching fingers relax on the steering wheel.