Time Travel: Recent Trips Read online

  "He was so determined that we should fight, whatever the cost," the blue woman says. "And now he's gone."

  There's a gun not far from the fallen man's hand. Jenny reaches for it, then hesitates, waiting for permission. The blue woman doesn't say yes, doesn't say no, so Jenny touches it anyway. The metal is utterly cold. Jenny pulls her fingers away with a bitten-off yelp.

  "It's empty," the blue woman says. "Everything's empty."

  "I'm sorry," Jenny says. She doesn't know this man, but it's not about her.

  The blue woman watches as Jenny straightens, leaving the gun on the ground.

  "If I say no," Jenny says slowly, "is there anyone else?"

  The blue woman's eyes close for a moment. "No. You're the last. I would have spared you the choice if I could have."

  "How many of me were there?"

  "I lost count after a thousand or so," the blue woman says. "Most of them were more like me. Some of them were more like you."

  A thousand Jenny Changs, a thousand blue women. More. Gone, one by one, like a scatterfall of rain. "Did all of them say yes?" Jenny asks.

  The blue woman shakes her head.

  "And none of the ones who said yes survived."

  "None of them."

  "If that's the case," Jenny says, "what makes you special?"

  "I'm living on borrowed possibilities," she says. "When the battle ends, I'll be gone too, no matter which way it ends."

  Jenny looks around her, then squeezes her eyes shut, thinking. Two significant figures, she thinks inanely. "Who started the fight?" She's appalled that she sounds like her mom.

  "There's always an armageddon around the corner," the blue woman says. "This happens to be the one that he found."

  The dark-skinned man. Who was he, that he could persuade people to take a last stand like this? Maybe it's not so difficult when a last stand is the only thing left. That solution displeases her, though.

  Her heart is hammering. "I won't do it," Jenny says. "Take me home."

  The blue woman's eyes narrow. "You are the last," she says quietly. "I thought you would understand."

  Everything hinges on one thing: is the blue woman different enough from Jenny that Jenny can lie to her, and be believed?

  "I'm sorry," Jenny says.

  "Very well," the blue woman says.

  Jenny strains to keep her eyes open at the crucial moment. When the blue woman reaches for her hand, Jenny sees the portal, a shimmer of blue light. She grabs the blue woman and shoves her through. The last thing Jenny hears from the blue woman is a muffled protest.

  Whatever protection the blue woman's touch afforded her is gone. The rain drenches her shirt and runs in cold rivulets through her hair, into her eyes, down her back. Jenny reaches again for the fallen man's gun. It's cold, but she has a moment's warmth in her yet.

  She might not be able to save the world, but she can at least save herself.

  It's the end of the school day and you're waiting for Jenny's mother to pick you up. A man walks up to you. He wears a coat as gray as rain, and his eyes are pale against dark skin. "You have to come with me," he says, awkward and serious at once. You recognize him, of course. You remember when he first recruited you, in another timeline. You remember what he looked like fallen in the battle at the end of time, with a gun knocked out of his hand.

  "I can't," you say, kindly, because it will take him time to understand that you're not the blue woman anymore, that you won't do the things the blue woman did.

  "What?" he says. "Please. It's urgent." He knows better than to grab your arm. "There's a battle—"

  Once upon a time, you listened to his plea. Part of you is tempted to listen this time around, to abandon the life that Jenny left you and take up his banner. But you know how that story ends.

  "I'm not in your story anymore," you explain to him. "You're in mine."

  The man doesn't look like he belongs in a world of parking tickets and potted begonias and pencil sharpeners. But he can learn, the way you have.

  TWO SHOTS FROM FLY'S PHOTO GALLERY

  (Inspired by Somewhere in Time by Richard Matheson)

  John Shirley

  I tell myself I had no way of knowing Becky would kill herself that night. It was morning, really, when she did it. At about 3:30 in the morning, July 16th, 1975, Rebecca Clanton, the young woman I had married not so long before, threw herself off the roof of her sister's twelve-story high-rise apartment building. She'd come to see her sister Sandra on a visit—to stay overnight, supposedly just to spend time. But Sandra said that Becky hardly spoke that night—just smoked, and nodded, now and then, as Sandra talked about whatever came into her mind, whatever offered to fill the silence. Then Sandra went to bed. And in the dead hours of the morning, Becky got up from the sofa bed, went to the kitchen, wrote out a brief suicide note, and took the elevator to the roof. Had probably come there to do just that, leave a note where someone who mattered would find it. It was just too lonely to kill herself alone at home, somehow. With me out of town . . .

  She threw herself off the roof in a way that carried her right down into the empty swimming pool, which was being repaired, out behind the building. Figured Sandra wouldn't have the shock of finding her there—maybe she thought the repairmen would find her first, and they did.

  I didn't see her body there, in person, but Sandra told me about it. And somehow I still see it in my mind's eye, as if looking down from the roof. I picture Becky's splayed, broken, blood-laced body centered in the blue rectangle of the pool as if in a picture frame.

  Me, I was out of town when she died. I was in Albuquerque, for a conference on Billy the Kid. I write westerns—well, I've published only one novel, but a good many nonfiction books about the Old West. Henry McCarty AKA William Bonney AKA Billy The Kid was one of mine, from the University of New Mexico Press; The Murder of Morgan Earp was another. My day job was teaching American history at a minor college, but I spent so much time on research trips to ghost towns and pioneer cemeteries covered with weeds, I was always on the verge of losing the job.

  I took Becky on a research trip to a particular cemetery in Cobalt Dust, Arizona. She affected to be interested, but when she saw the skeletons, pulled partly out of the yellow dirt by the tree roots muscled into the forgotten old cemetery, she got a faraway look in her eyes, and went back to the motel. And that night she said, "I have to wonder why you want to spend so much of your time with the dead."

  They weren't dead to me, I told her. It was like I traveled in time, when I did the research. Like I had one foot in the Old West.

  She shook her head then, and muttered something about arrested adolescence and macho fixations and wouldn't say anymore.

  The night she died I was in an Albuquerque bar arguing about whether or not Billy the Kid would really have gotten that amnesty from governor Lew Wallace if he'd been more cooperative. I remember realizing it was almost midnight, and I had promised to call Becky at her sister's that night. So I called, piling a double handful of quarters in the pay phone, and her sister answered, her every syllable iced with passive aggressive reproach:

  "She's gone to bed. Naturally."

  "I see. Are you sure she's asleep, Sandra? I got caught up in an academic discussion . . . "

  Just then the noise level in the bar peaked. Someone giggled and someone else dropped a glass and everyone applauded as it broke.

  "Yes, I can hear the academic discussion going on," Sandra said. "Becky's gone to bed. I'm not going to get her up. She's been feeling down and she needs her rest. Goodbye." And she hung up.

  She's been feeling down . . .

  She'd talked about suicide more than once. Becky was a pale woman with curly black hair, full lips, a face that showed the angularity, a hint of the Native American planes of many from the Southwest—she'd grown up in Arizona. She had a wistful smile, an air of nonchalant resignation. She wore long dark old-fashioned dresses, and black-spangled old lady's feathered hats she found in second-hand stores.


  I first found Becky in Bisbee, where her mother owned a souvenir shop for tourists hunting remnants of the Old West. She sat behind the counter, using the same resigned expression for attending to a customer as just staring out the dusty, fly-blown window. A small record player set up behind the cash register was playing "Oh! Sweet Nothin' " by the Velvet Underground, not very loud. It was only later that I learned the name of the song.

  "Afternoon," I said. "You're Miss Rebecca Clanton?"

  She nodded. "You're that guy from the university?"

  "College. North San Diego College of the Humanities."

  "I got your postcard. Researching a book on the Clanton gang, you said?" She shook her head apologetically. "I don't know anything about my ancestors. I meant to write you back about that. Sorry you made the trip to glorious Bisbee, if you came to talk to me."

  She gave out with that wistful smile. Immediately, I wanted to take her in my arms and comfort her. And kiss those large soft lips.

  "Lots of times, people know more about their family than they realize. Or they remember that an aunt has some old letters or . . . Could I take you to dinner and just see if anything comes to mind?"

  She looked at me doubtfully. "What's your name?" she asked.

  "It's Bill Washoe."

  " 'Lonesome Cowboy Bill.' " She smiled. Sort of smiled. It was only later, too, that I found out that "Lonesome Cowboy Bill" was a song from the same Velvet Underground album. "Okay, Lonesome. Let's go, as soon as I ring this lady up . . . "

  I was right, there was Clanton history to be gleaned from Becky. Turned out that her great-grandmother had been shacked up with Billy Clanton— the same Billy Clanton, cowboy and sometime rustler, who'd been shot to death, along with Frank and Tom McClaury, by the Earps and Doc Holliday in a small vacant lot near the OK Corral on October 26, 1881. Ike Clanton's younger brother, Old Man Clanton's youngest kid, Billy had fallen for a mixed-race dance hall girl named Isabella Chavez, a girl whom some called "Issy" or "Easy"; she was said to be a quarter French, a quarter black, a quarter Indian, a quarter Chinese—but no one knew for sure. Billy had gotten Issy knocked up, and had promised he'd marry her, but hadn't made good on it, and it was said that just before the gunfight Ike had been trying to talk him out of the marriage. Then they'd gotten on the wrong side of the Earp brothers, in Tombstone, and Billy'd been shot down. Isabella had her child, and had given the boy, William Jose, Billy Clanton's surname; the local registrar, some said in exchange for a sexual favor, had stretched a point and made the name official, though she'd never been married to Billy Clanton. That much I'd known. Consulting County records, I also learned that William Jose Clanton, the semiofficial Billy Clanton Jr., had married one Dolores Plainville, who'd borne a boy, James Isaac Clanton, who'd married Rebecca's mother Louella. Rebecca revealed that William Clanton the Second had deserted Dolores early on, and "Jimmy Ike," as Becky's dad had been called, had deserted Becky and her Mom when she was three.

  "We don't have any papers going all the way back to Billy," said Becky, over a steak salad, which was the only kind of salad they had in that Bisbee restaurant. The Happy Widow, the restaurant was called. She picked at the lettuce around the beef, leaving the meat alone on her plate when she'd done. "So a lot of these gunfighter history guys, they don't take my family name too seriously. Mom tried to get them interested, so we could sell some stuff. She got an old pistol and said it was Billy's. She actually bought it in a pawn shop."

  "You think your mom would talk to me?"

  "If you can get her out of the bars long enough. And offer her money. But she'll just make stuff up. I'm pretty sure the Clanton thing is real, though. I look at a picture of him, of Billy Clanton, and he looks like us. And . . . he was shot down. That's almost like saying he was in my family. We're all shot down one way or another. Not always by guns. He was shot down young. My granddad ran off to avoid the draft—and maybe to get away from the family—and he was killed when they tried to arrest him. And my dad, we haven't heard from him since he left, but I heard he's in prison over in Texas. They just run off and get shot or put in jail somewhere."

  "Do they? You've had some bad luck with your family. Maybe you should . . . make another one."

  I felt my face redden, when I said that. A blurted stupid clumsy thing to say. It just came out. But understand: I'm not a good-looking guy, I'm shaped like a salt shaker, I'm short, I've got a bald spot, a nose like a tuber. Not a lot of experience. And I had been thinking about going to bed with her since I saw her sitting behind the counter, gazing sadly out the dirty window . . .

  She gave her almost-smile, then, and looked at me with something close to real interest. Finally she said, "My sister's the one who's done the best— she got out of Bisbee. She's in San Diego, she teaches school."

  "San Diego!"

  "I know—that's where you're from. Well, she got divorced. But she's dating a guy. And she likes teaching, I guess. Do you like rock music?"

  I pretended to be a lot more interested in rock music than I was and expressed a liking for Janis Joplin.

  "There's a concert up in Phoenix I'd like to go to this weekend," she said, with a somewhat theatrical wistfulness. "The Cactus Ridge Festival, but I can't really afford to get there and back."

  "In fact," I lied, without hesitation, "I'm planning to go to that same concert . . . So, uh, if . . . "

  I remember walking in the desert dusk, hand in hand with Becky.

  It was yet another cemetery. This one she didn't mind—it was Boot Hill, in Tombstone, Arizona, carefully preserved: the town lived on entirely through tourism.

  At this hour the wooden tombstones were darkening to silhouettes, seemed like something grown from the sandy dun earth like the cacti, the small twisted desert trees. We saw Les Moore's grave: no Les, no more. We had to look close, in the fading light, to see the grave marker of Billy Clanton.

  Murdered in the Streets of Tombstone.

  I'd brought her to get a Kodak of her with the marker of her ancestor, for inclusion in my book. And because I thought it was my best shot for getting her into bed. She'd been pretty warm during the concert, and afterward, she squeezed my hand before rushing into the house. The trip to Arizona meant two rooms in the motel, but the rest of the time we were together, and now, gazing down at Billy's grave, she let me take her hand and keep holding it.

  She seemed almost happy. With its constant references to her ancestor— her martyred ancestor, in the view of anti-Earp historians—Tombstone made her feel important. When I introduced her as Billy's great-granddaughter, much was made of her. She was interviewed and photographed for the local paper.

  "It's funny," she said, gazing down at the grave. A prickly pear cactus, beginning to bud, was sprouting from the spot corresponding to Billy Clanton's heart. "I feel almost happy—because I'm part of a famous tragedy . . . "

  "Some say it was a tragedy, some say it was Earp and Holliday heroics . . . "

  "I can't go with heroics. And if Billy'd lived he might've married Isabella, and then . . . maybe things would've been better in my family."

  That planted the seed of what was to come. It started me thinking about her psychotherapeutically. It occurred to me that if I helped her, made her feel better about herself, she'd feel more attachment to me.

  As if reading my thoughts, Becky turned to me, as the cemetery caretaker shouted at us that they were closing for the night; she turned her face to me—tilting it down, because she was a little taller. She leaned closer, and she let me kiss her.

  Then she put her arms around me, and whispered in my ear, "You give me hope."

  That night in bed she gave me hope, too.

  Nine days later, Becky's mother was dead. Out on a drunk, the old woman had stumbled into the street, and had been run over by a Ford pickup truck with beer kegs in the back.

  Becky hadn't been close to her mother, but the death seemed to backhand her emotionally; it sent her reeling. "She wasn't much good, but she loved me the best she knew
how," Becky said at the funeral. Becky and I were the only ones attending that cut-rate event. "She was all I had. Every Sunday morning, hangover or not, she made me breakfast . . . "

  I told her, "I'll make breakfast for you on Sunday." And that seemed to help. We got closer, then, Becky and I. We went to more concerts, we went on trips—I fought with the college administration to get the time. She came out to visit San Diego . . . and when I popped the question, she said yes. She only thought about it for an hour or two.

  We got married in San Diego. And at the wedding, which we held at the Hotel del Coronado, one of the guests was my Uncle Roger who brought his "partner"—a rather taciturn man, a doctor named Crosswell. While we were waiting for the bride to come out, we started talking about the Coronado, a landmark built in 1888, and about old hotels, and I said how visiting old places, for me, could feel like time travel, and the doctor stared at me—and asked, rather suspiciously, what had prompted the remark.

  Roger looked at him and said, "He doesn't know about Collier. Almost no one does. Forget it."

  But when my uncle wandered off to get a drink, I pressed Crosswell, my journalistic instinct piqued, and he muttered something rather grumpily about having a transcription of certain tape recordings by a Richard Collier who'd stayed at this hotel, and allegations of Collier's experiments in time travel. References to Collier's obsession with one Elise McKenna.

  Then out came Becky in her wedding dress, really smiling for once, and drove away all thoughts of my being anywhere, anytime, but right there.

  We were happy for as long as Becky was capable of being happy, which was a week or so, and then we were happy sporadically for a time . . . and then only I was happy. And after a while, when I realized I was alone in that gladness, neither of us were.

  It all came down to the implicit tragedy of Becky's life—of life itself, in Becky's view. If we went on a walk, Becky was sure to notice a dead bird in the gutter; if we went to the beach she saw the trash on the sand and a bird pecking out the eyes of a dead fish, and didn't seem to notice anything else; if we went to Disneyland she pointed out the wasteland of parking lot and the high prices and the long lines; she speculated on the exhaustion and resentment of the people dressed as Goofy and Mickey. At home, she listened to a great deal of Tim Buckley and the Velvet Underground and she re-read The Bell Jar. Reading The Bell Jar more than once should be in some clinical psychology book as a warning sign.