The Time Traveler's Almanac (178 page)

Leila grimaces a moment. “He hit mum. Remember that? He hit mum.”

“She loved him. She waited for him all her life.”

“You’re both as bad as each other. Both of you. Look where it got her, Marek.”

“
You’re
the one calling to find out.”

“Fine. Listen, gotta go. Why don’t you come over for dinner?”

But I’m off the phone and I put Mozart on with the volume up. I close my eyes and lean back in the chair as the chorus comes in:
Requiem aeternam dona eis, Domine, et lux perpetua luceat eis.

*   *   *

I meet Dany again the following week up in the Towers. His makeup is gone, he is in the latest fashion – as far as I can tell – all straight sharp lines and black, of course. It’s always black.

“Have you seen this holographic porn?” he asks. “It’s amazing, really, I mean, God.”

I lean from one foot to the other, wondering what to say.

“God,” he says, “some of those girls. Some of those positions.” He shakes his head.

To change the subject I say, “Remember we used to play with little ships that flew around a toy planet?”

He cocks his head. “Do you still have those?”

I nod.

“Christ, I loved those little things,” he says.

“You can come to my place and see them if you want.”

“No, can’t. I’ve got to get ready.”

“What for?”

“We’re going back.”

“Back?”

“The machine. We’re supposed to examine the alien machine.”

“But there is no machine,” I say, calling his bluff.

He shakes his head for a second, then adds, “No, you’re right. There isn’t.” He walks into the bedroom and I am left shifting my balance from foot to foot. Then he’s back again: “Here, I have something for you: I brought it back for her, but now I want you to have it. It’s from Centauri.” He leans over and passes me a piece of strange, black swirling rock, attached to a chain, alien and beautiful.

“She died of cancer, you know. Even now cancer takes people.” I hold the rock in my hand, and now I want to cry again, but in a different way. I want to reach out to him.

“Wanna go to a strip show?”

“Uh, I don’t know.”

“I know! I know just the place: baths! That’s one thing you miss in space: real water to float in. Come on.”

So I follow him to the elevator, and we rise, past the eighteen hundreds, nineteen hundreds, and then at twenty-two hundred we’re off the elevator and into the cavernous deck of the shuttle-port. Shuttles taxi around like strange beetles threatening to burst into flight at any moment. Others line a far wall at an angle.

“What are we doing?”

“We’re going to Holsen’s Tower, north.”

“By shuttle?”

“Yep.”

There is a line of taxis along the walkway and Dany presses a button, there’s a quick sound as the pressurised door opens – shhht – and we hop in.

The shuttle is a lot smaller on the inside than I imagined, only one long seat facing forward, a series of panels across the back of the seat in front. A glass window so we can see the driver, who has great rolls of fat at the back of his head and neck. The taxi shuttles across the tarmac, turns left, and I can see the runway, which opens out into the clear blue of the sky. We sit for a moment and another shuttle emerges slightly in front of us, lines itself up with the runway, stops for a minute and then suddenly its burners are a deep red, the air behind it shimmers, and it is gone.

Our taxi starts to shudder and I take a gasp of breath: surely we’re not going to be able to fly. We’ll get to the end of the runway and plummet to our deaths. This taxi, I realise, will crash. This is the one, the one out of a million that will break down in mid-flight, lose power, send us to our deaths. The unbelievable shuddering as we power along the runway confirms this, and I close my eyes. Suddenly the shuddering stops and I open them again, afraid of what I might see, and sure enough, beneath us the great metropolis lies like a model of itself. I gasp. Good God, there’s nothing holding us up.

“You can let go of my hand now.” Dany laughs.

“This is the first time I’ve flown.”

“It’s all right. It’ll be all right.” He gives my hand a squeeze and I feel calmer.

“Look,” he says. “Look at the city off there in the distance. Isn’t it beautiful? Like a ruined civilisation.”

The little city does look like an ancient ruin. As if it has been through a storm that left some of the weaker buildings as rubble, or just a few walls surrounding a mess, while others it stripped of their outer layer, leaving their mottled undercoats visible.

“I have a son down there.”

“Really? What’s his name?”

“Max.”

“You didn’t want to give him a Czech name? Keep your mother’s tradition?”

“No. We’re not Czechs anymore. Would you like to meet him?”

He sits for a while in silence, and then says, “You know, I think I would.”

Before long we’re north of the city and then into another Tower and the flight is over. Down in the eleven hundreds is Japantown and I find myself lying in a steaming bath, a sparse garden surrounding me and a pot of green tea just out of arm’s reach so I have to lift myself out of the bath to pour it. The roof is camouflaged and gives the impression of being sky. Thankfully there is no view of the city whatsoever. There are no sounds at all. Just silence – the Japanese really know how to do it.

“The silence is funny,” I say. “The Towers are almost all soundscaped.”

“Really.”

“Yep. That’s what I do. Soundscaping.”

“I see.”

“Yeah, wanted to be a musician, but you know. Soundscaping’s a good job. Keeps me afloat.”

“So you compromised.”

“No. I just, you know, you have to be realistic.”

“Christ, Marek.”

“What’s so fucking bad about that?”

“That sort of realism isn’t for me.”

I pull myself out of the bath to pour more tea and wonder, annoyed: why didn’t I pull the pot closer last time?

We sit in silence for quite a while and I don’t know, perhaps it’s the silence, or the beauty of the garden, or the heat of the bath, but suddenly I begin to cry.

“Hey buddy, what’s wrong?”

I don’t say anything for a while, and then manage to get out between the sobs: “I’ve made some terrible mistakes, in my life, Dad. I’ve made some bad mistakes.”

*   *   *

Leila lives at the crest of a hill, and her husband, George, is a fitness fanatic with a shaven head. George invested in the Towers, or his parents did, and now they live in a mansion overlooking the aqua sea. They have two boats and three cars and a swimming pool in a basement underneath their house. “The sea,” George always says, “is for looking at, not swimming in.” At those times I want to break his teeth, but I always nod and smile and say, “Hey, who would swim in the sea nowadays? I mean, with all that pollution.” George works out and has huge muscles. He and Leila have one child, about three years old, whose name I can’t remember. George and Leila have everything.

The dinner is tiny and served on gigantic white plates: a piece of unidentified meat with two red slivers of what I take to be capsicum on one side.

“A work of art,” I say.

“Don’t be rude,” says Leila.

“He’s not,” says George, “He said it was a work of art.”

“A pure work of art,” I say to annoy Leila.

The kid starts crying at the end of the table.

“Here sweetie,” says Leila, and she reaches over to give him a drink. He keeps crying.

“Listen to ’im,” says George.

“I am,” I say.

“All day,” says George.

“Oh, shut up,” says Leila.

“What’s his name?” I say.

But Leila continues at George, “Like you’d know. I’m the one here all bloody day.”

“What’s his name?”

Leila turns to me. “Families,” she says, “take a lot of energy. You’ll know—”

But I cut her off, “That’s because you had him when you were too old.”

She looks as if she’s been slapped and I turn to my meal with satisfaction.

A moment later she says to me, “So did you. You had Max too old.”

Now it’s my turn to look shocked. No matter how hard I try, I know I look crestfallen. I look back to Leila and she meets my eye. The side of her mouth twitches and suddenly we’re both laughing at ourselves.

“You really should meet up with Dany, you know,” I say.

“I can’t. I just can’t.”

I reach over and place my hand over hers. “You should face him. You know. Say what should be said.”

“Is that what you’re going to do?”

“Yes. I think so. Yes.”

*   *   *

Before Mum died she looked an impossible colour, a kind of composite grey-orange. She was swollen, but in her inimitable way acted as if it was all some kind of joke.

“Look at me,” she said, “I’m a fish from the deep sea,” and she opened and closed her mouth and we all laughed.

I want to tell Dany something about Mum now, as we head to the city, but some part of me holds back. I know, somehow, that he’s not equipped to cope with it. He is, after all, in his early twenties. He’s young, I tell myself.

A minute later and we’re off the monorail together and Dany turns to me and says, “Jesus, look at this place. What have they done to the city?” I keep my eyes focused on the refuse: empty packages, indeterminate plastic things, toilet paper, but Dany, of course, doesn’t know about the street-sellers and suddenly there are three kids around us.

“
Bliss, bliss?
”

“It’s not really
bliss
though, is it?” Dany says.

“It is, swear brother, purest I eva had meself. Look mister, look at me eyes.”

“You can get your eyes wide like that with all sorts of poisons,” says Dany, enjoying the debate.

When we arrive at the building I turn to the kid and say, “Okay, you can fuck off now.”

“Aw mister, it’s good stuff,” one of the little kids says but they leave us alone as we scale the stairs. Three sets of stairs, four doors along the walkway. I knock. Again there is shuffling behind the door and then it opens quicker than I expected. Genie stands there, disappointment written on her face.

“Oh, it’s you, hi.” She says, then notices Dany and quietly adds, as if he’s not there, “My God, Marek, he looks just like you when we met. My god, he’s so beautiful.”

“Can we come in?”

She opens the door.

“Where’s Rick?”

“That bastard.”

Dany sweeps Max up from the corner and says, “Hello grubby-chubby.” Max grins, revealing a little tooth and letting out another big dribble to join the one connecting his chin and chest.

“I’m moving out of this place soon,” says Genie, sweeping back her limp mousy hair, only to have it fall back across her forehead, another symbol of the world’s resistance to her desires.

“I’m amazed you stayed so long,” I say, looking over to Dany and Max, who are playing with a toy that hovers in the air but avoids being caught when you reach out to it. Both have child-like expressions on their faces.

Genie looks over and says again, quietly, “amazing.”

“I’m thinking of going back and being a musician,” I say.

“Oh yeah.”

“No, really.”

Genie looks away from Dany and Max to me. “God, Marek. It would have been alright if you had really wanted to play music, but you always sat in that grey zone your whole life. You didn’t really try music, you always held onto it so you wouldn’t try anything else.”

“The openings were never there; you have to be lucky.”

“You were never ready, never good enough. You never wanted to work at it.”

“Jesus, Genie, you don’t understand how hard it is.”

She reaches over and takes my hand, and just looks at me.

After a moment I say, “I’ll try to come more often.”

“You won’t though, you know you won’t.”

There’s nothing else for me to say, standing there looking back and forth at the one real love of my life and the thin blond hair of my son, as he sits comfortably on Dany’s lap. Her hand feels soft in mine.

*   *   *

On Dany’s last day, before he shoots off to Centauri, I arrive at his penthouse and Christy the skip-girl is wandering about, topless, with a skirt that sits high enough to show her knickers underneath. “Where’s that top?” she asks no one in particular.

Dany is still in the shower and I can hear the running water above the soft sound of the ocean soundscape, carefully designed for relaxation but actually infuriating. Relaxation soundscapes make me want to smash something.

“Here it is.” Christy pulls the top out from under a couch, puts it straight on and then holds her stomach, looking down at it with curiosity.

Oh no, I think, not again.

Christy looks over at me, smiles, grabs her bag and heads for the door.

“Hey Christy?”

She turns.

“You…” My voice trails off with my confidence.

“Yeah?”

“Oh, it’s okay.”

She waits for a second to see if I have anything else to add, decides I don’t and then lets herself out.

A few moments later Dany comes in, drying his hair with a towel. “Turn that fucking sea-sound off would you?” he says. “It’s annoying.”

I smile, head to the panel and turn all the soundscapes off.

He throws the towel on the floor, sits down, and raises his eyebrows as if to say, well, there you go.

So I hit him with it: “So, you’re going to leave, just like that?”

A look of confusion crosses his face and he says, “Don’t.”

He gets up, walks across to the windows and looks over to the opposite Tower. “This place is so strange,” he adds.

I look at him, and he looks small and young and out of place. I know now, that it is time to let him go. I know who he is: He’s Dany; he’s my father.

“I came to say goodbye,” I say.

“Okay,” he says and continues to look out over to the mammoth structure, with its thousands of floors containing whole social ecosystems. Whole worlds even. And beyond that the suburbs: filled with people who fell short of their aims and now settle in the grey zone of their life, their quiet desperation muffled. And even further, beyond that, the tiny speck of the ruined city, the dead heart of things, where lights once flashed and people once gathered before everything slipped off track so subtly, so we didn’t notice and found ourselves in a world new and strange and hard to bear. That’s how I leave him, staring over the geographies of our lives, a man who should have looked older than me, but could have been my own son. He is gone the next day, back out to the stars where he belongs and a few days after that, as I sit in my chair at home, Mozart’s requiem surrounding me and filling me.
Lord grant them eternal rest,
the chorus sings,
and let the perpetual light shine upon them.
I know it’s time to call Leila. She is, after all, my sister.