City of Ruins (5 page)

That’s when they realized I was listening and
they shut up and went back to sipping their vending machine coffee,
waiting for Thirty to show up for one of her
question-and-hardly-any-answer sessions with me.

That’s what “going out to eat” was in the
DARPA tunnels — me picking food from the same vending machines
Thirty and the Twenty-Fives used. I’d sip a hot chocolate while she
talked. But sometimes, I’d ask her questions first, the way Thea
did. Like, when am I gonna get to see my dad? I can’t believe he
wouldn’t have tried to get in touch with me by now. Somehow.

It’s been so long since I’ve seen him. I’ve
seen King Arthur, and Lewis and Clark, and Thomas Jefferson, and
all kinds of people since I last spoke to my dad. I know he’s
around somewhere. He can’t have disappeared, too.

I can’t possibly be an orphan. Time travel
couldn’t be that unfair. At least not to a thirteen-year-old.

Could it?

But whenever I asked about Dad, Thirty would
always change the subject. So I don’t even know if he’s okay or
not, and of course she doesn’t tell me anything about my mother,
and yet I’m supposed to answer all her questions about history and
what it feels like to go through time, and then she slips in
something like, “Did you ever want to just destroy the whole world
because you were so mad at your parents?” questions that always
seem weird to me, though I’ve come to the conclusion it’s kind of a
psychology thing, because she thinks I’m keeping big secrets from
her. Like some plan Thea and Clyne and I have to change history and
rule the world.

That’s what weird about life. Half the time,
you have no clue what’s really going on with people, grownups
especially — what they’re really thinking or feeling or doing when
you’re not around. The other half, things are exactly like they
appear and yet no one believes that, either. Everyone looks for a
catch, and no one can believe they might really be happy, even for
a while, or really be sad. Everybody is always trying to explain
things, but sometimes, a sunny afternoon is just a sunny
afternoon.

At least, according to my memory of sunny
afternoons, since I’m sure not seeing any of them down here.

I’ve had both things in my life — the
unexplained secrets, and trying to hold on to what’s right in front
of you. There was this seemingly normal family, once — mine — but
there were also the time-travel experiments my parents were doing
for DARPA, and they all went wrong, and changed history. My
family’s history. Me.

Changed my life from the way it was going to
be. From that everything-turns-out-all right-life I thought I had
when I was a little kid. To a life that includes a dinosaur for a
friend, and a girlfriend who’s over a thousand years old.

Wait. Did I just use the word
girlfriend
?

“…your atomic map.”

“What?” Sometimes I don’t really pay much
attention to Thirty at all. I eat my sandwich and drink my hot
chocolate and wait to go back to my room, where I have an
old-fashioned Barnstormers game going with some paper and pencils,
kind of like how they had to do it with boards and dice before
there was electricity or whatever.

“A map of your atomic structure. Some
physical tests. We appreciate how cooperative you’ve been so far” —
was she making a joke? — “but we also want to know how it is you’re
able to
do
all this time-traveling without too many physical
consequences.”

“I get sick. I throw up.”

“That’s nothing, compared to other people who
have tried on your hat.”

I remembered what happened the last time
DARPA let some of its —workers? Troops? — try on the cap. The ones
that came out of it alive, generally went crazy. Like Mr. Howe
seems to have be.

“You’re not still trying to make other people
wear it?” I asked, letting the question hang there and letting my
chocolate get cold. Like I said, wearing the hat creates some kind
of impossible moment, opening up a type of rift in your own body.
But not everyone’s body can take it — I don’t know if mine can
because my atomic structure really is different from everyone
else’s, or because maybe my brain is. Maybe some of the DARPA
workers have gone crazy because they think the whole idea of time
travel is crazy, to begin with.

Thirty tried smiling at me again. “Like I
said, we want to find out more about your molecular structure, your
atoms, the electric charges in your body…to find out what makes you
so…
unique
.”

That was when she gave me a House of David
replica jersey. With the name Bassett stitched in back, right over
the “33.”

“We just want you to be comfortable
here.”

I never did put on that jersey.

At least not until a few minutes ago, when
the alarm went off. And the Twenty-Fives came in and finished
unstrapping me from the machine, though I don’t think they were
happy that I’d already yanked out a lot of the wires myself.

I only had my underpants on, in the mapping
machine, so one of the Twenty-Five’s grabbed the House of David
shirt and threw it at me and told me to get dressed.

“Why?” I managed to ask.

“We’re taking you to a more secure room.”

“Why?”

That’s when they threw my pants at me.

And then they brought me here. To my mom’s
old hotel room. Except, this time I didn’t have to time-travel to
get here. This time, they brought the room to me.

Or brought it to the DARPA tunnels, anyway,
piece by piece, preserved like some kind of museum display so they
could study every bit of it and try to figure out what was going
wrong with all their plans. Apparently, the room had been boarded
up for years, following some “incidents” back in the 1940s.

After the time travel started, DARPA started
to guess what some of those “incidents” might be, so while
pretending to renovate part of the hotel, they dismantled the
entire room and brought it here, trying to find clues.

At least, that’s what I guessed after I asked
one of the Twenty-Fives what my mom’s hotel was doing here in the
first place.

“It was scaring people, so we had to move it.
Hotel guests started seeing things: ghosts, newspapers left in the
hall that predicted the future. We don’t want people to be
scared!”

Except when he said it, he was looking up
toward where the alarm noise was coming from and he looked pretty
frightened himself.

I bet they were really afraid the room had
become one of those nexuses Clyne talked about — a place turned
into a kind of time portal as a result of my mom’s work. I bet
they’re wrong, but they aren’t taking any chances anymore.

“Just stay in here, and don’t move!” Now both
Twenty-Fives looked really scared.

“What is it? What’s going on?”

“This room should be safe enough. Don’t touch
anything. We’ll be back.”

That was a couple hours ago.

I still half expect my mom to show up, and
take me downstairs through the hotel lobby, past the actors doing
that radio show — the one about families.
One Man’s Family
.
Maybe it’s not just my family that’s in trouble now, though. Maybe
it’s everybody’s.

Everything here is exactly like I remember
it. Even the pictures are here. The ones Mom drew, where she
imagined how I would look as I grew up.

She had to imagine it, she told me, because
she wasn’t going to be there to see it herself.

Here’s one of me as a teenager. I still don’t
look like that yet.

But I look older than in the first drawing
she did. I’m not that little a kid anymore.

I feel my face. It’s damp under my eyes.

She’s already missed part of my growing.
Already missed something she’ll never get back. I’ll never get
back.

Thunk!

Sskkaa sskkaa sskkaa…

Now what? A scratching noise, a loud mouse
maybe. But I can’t believe, with all their security precautions,
that even a mouse could get in here if it wasn’t allowed.

Maybe the mouse is a spy. Or maybe the mouse
used to be some other kid that wasn’t cooperating, and they decided
not just to study his molecules and atoms, but to “rearrange”
them.

Well, either way, I could certainly use the
company.

Sskkaa sskkaa sskkaa…

The noise is coming from the bathroom.

Sskaaa sskkaaa sskkaa!

I open the door.

“
Aaaahhhhh!”

I yell. My visitor yells. We surprise each
other.

It’s not a mouse.

“Friend Eli!”

It’s Clyne.

Clyne!

“Clyne! What —? How did you get in the
bathroom? It doesn’t matter — you’re way better than a mouse!”

He’s scrunched up under the sink, like a kid
playing hide-and-seek. His eyes widen when he sees me and he
smiles, with all those dinosaur teeth.

“A good time to meet, friend Eli!”

Now he’s starting to sound like Thea.

“A good time to meet!” I tell him in return.
And with that, he rolls out from under the cabinet, and I can see
he’s in some kind of handcuffs.

“You will pardon me if I do not wave, in the
custom of your species.”

“Clyne, how did you get here? What have they
done to—?”

Wheenk! Wheenk! Wheenk!

The alarms are still ringing in the distance,
but now it sounds like more of them are going off.

“I mean, Clyne, it’s great to see you. I’ve
just been so alone here.”

“The waters of happiness are under your eyes,
friend Eli, and I am thus
snkkkt!
honored!”

“But…what’s happening?”

“I was hoping you could illuminate for
me.”

“How did you get in here? Especially dressed
like that?”

“A long tale, or a short one, depending how
much empirical evidence you require.” He holds up the shackles
around his arms. “Perhaps we can unfetter me, and I can tell you
more. And then” — Clyne brightens up, as if all the world’s
problems were only small ones — “we can go find Thea and all become
outlaws together!”

Chapter Four

Clyne: A
Gerk
-drive in
Winter

February 2020 C.E.

Now that I had allowed myself to be taken
captive, was I still considered an outlaw? And was it perhaps true
that when time travel is outlawed, only outlaws would time
travel?

I pondered these questions whenever my
interrogators asked me what I did to “hijack history,” or what I’d
done “to the children,” by which I infer they mean my good friends
Eli and Thea.

“What precisely are you using time travel
for
?” they asked me, again and again.

“Homework, originally.”

They didn’t like that answer, glare-stamping
me with their eyes and immediately conferring with each other.

“But by now,” I continued, “I expect I have
registered several ‘incompletes’ on my transcripts.”

I was hoping this information might help them
realize I have suffered, too, from my unexpected lateral detour to
Earth Orange, but I was only met with more glare-stamps.

“We will find out who you really are, Mr.
‘Klein’.” It was the one called Thirty speaking to me. I greeted
her with “A good time to meet!” since I had last seen her when Thea
rescued me from the holding zoo, where Thirty initially asked me
similar questions, only to be similarly disappointed with my
answers.

But perhaps she didn’t want to be reminded of
that particular parting of company.

As I had then, I was trying to fully grasp
the apprehension these mammals have toward Saurians. Perhaps it has
to do with the buried collective fears stemming from the “dragons”
of King Arthur and Merlin’s era, who were driven to extinction.

It may have to do with the fact that still
being such a young species, the
Homo sapiens
mammals of
Eli’s earth struggle with the idea that Saurians existed for
millions of years before they did, keeping the planet, I might add,
in basic equilibrium while they did so. Except for events like the
Great Sky Hammer, a nearly mythical meteor event on Saurius Prime
that apparently actually occurred here on Earth Orange, and drove
most of those early Saurians — except for the few dragon forebears
that were to survive — into extinction, as well.

I tried to explain some of this to my
captors, along with the idea of this entire planet — indeed,
perhaps its entire history — being a prime nexus, a critical node
in the history of this whole galaxy, and perhaps, of the whole
universe that exists on this plane. There is, I am coming to
believe, something for both Saurian and mammal alike to learn
here.

“By ‘prime nexus,’ do you mean something like
a beachhead, for your planet’s invasion of our earth?” Thirty asked
me.

“Saurians do not think of beaches as having
body parts,” I told her.

“We could use far less pleasant methods on
you if you won’t cooperate,” she said, apparently unsure whether to
break into a grimace, or attempt another smile. Instead, she asked
a different question. “When you say ‘prime nexus,’ you mean a place
on your cosmological map that you consider to be of critical
importance? Worthy of conquest?”

“No. This is not like one of your endless
mammal wars over resources.”

I tried to explain to them that a prime nexus
was the point in a timeline where maximum possibilities and
outcomes lurked. Using the spot where the unknown slave Brassy had
been buried in New Orleans as an example, I told them that we had
been drawn there to the era of Clark and Lewis and North Wind Comes
because had Brassy lived, all history that came after her would
have somehow been altered.

“For the better?” Thirty asked me.

“Well, are you earth mammals fond of the way
history has turned out since?” I asked.

I thought that illumination on the prime
nexus question would be helpful, and might perhaps slake their
endless thirst for “information,” most of which, I must confess,
they appear to have a hard time understanding even when they get
it.