Yesterday (32 page)

The budget hotel looks a bit like a bunker from the street but I don’t care; I can’t wait to get inside. I give Garren some of Nancy’s money for the room, tell him I’m going to be at the medical building just down the road (because I realize I
forgot to buy scissors at the Woolco) and ask him to come get me in the drugstore there once he’s checked in. Truthfully, the shooting and craziness at the Eaton Centre this afternoon has made me not want to let him out of my sight for a second but that’s impractical and once we’re on the train tomorrow we’ll be attached at the hip for four days solid.

So I go into the medical building and search out their drugstore to buy scissors like a normal person and not someone who almost had her mind butchered because she remembered that she was sent traveling through time. The director theorized that others who were intellectually ahead of their eras may have also come through chutes. If that’s true, which of the world’s geniuses are not geniuses after all but time travelers? Galileo? Albert Einstein? Marie Curie? Stephen Hawking? And if that really is the case, where are the other chutes? Are there any that send people forward rather than back?

It’s too much to think about and once Garren shows up I’m standing in the medical building lobby just biting my lip and staring at the Indian buffet restaurant across the street. “That wasn’t easy,” he says tiredly. “You should’ve heard the bullshit I had to feed the check-in lady about coming up from the States on the bus to visit my father in the hospital up north and then getting my wallet stolen. I told her I missed the connecting bus north while reporting the robbery to the police. She still made me give her an extra fifty for a deposit. What do you want to bet the deposit gets
misplaced
overnight?”

It’s worth it just to have some downtime. Garren tells me the room number, says he’ll go first and that I should knock when I get there. “We sound like middle-aged people having an affair,” I say.

Only if we were having an affair the first thing we’d do when I got to the room and closed the door behind me is tear off each other’s clothes and the first thing that happens once I’m inside our room is that I ask Garren to show me his gunshot wound. He unbuttons his shirt, carefully eases both arms out of their sleeves and unties the socks he’d looped around his right arm. The injury is the size of a poker chip and raw and bloody. His skin is completely missing where he was hit, damaged flesh exposed to the air. Ideally he needs stitches or whatever else they do for these things in 1985 … I don’t know. But that’s not going to happen and what we need to do now is make sure it doesn’t get infected.

“We should wash it again and cover it in that antiseptic ointment,” I tell him. I fill the bathroom sink with warm soapy water and get Garren to bend over the sink and dunk his arm in. He winces when it hits the water and that makes me wince too. The wound starts bleeding again a little, which I hope is normal.

When he pulls his arm out of the water I press one of the bandages firmly against the oozing red to halt the bleeding. “I’m starting to think this grounded shit is overrated,” he says through gritted teeth.

“I’m sorry. I’m just trying to get it to stop so we can put on the antiseptic.”

“I know, I know.” He takes over for me, holding the bandage in place as he sits down on the side of the tub. “It’s fine.” But we both wince again when I smooth on the ointment a couple of minutes later. It’s been a hard day—my roughest in 1985 yet—and when Garren’s fresh bandage (a new, dry one) is in place and there’s nothing else I can do for him, I pull back the ugly red and orange patterned cover on my bed to expose the pillow underneath. It’s soft and welcoming, despite the bedspread it’d been hiding under. I sink wearily down onto it, Garren camped out on his own double bed across from me, shut my eyes and check temporarily out of 1985.

T
he darkness smells musty and feels stifling. Like it’s settling into my bones and changing me from the inside. My eyelids fight to remain open. They’re heavier than they should be—I’m not in control of them, not in control of anything. My body’s pinned to the bed by the weight of my fear. He shouldn’t be here but he is. Standing at the end of my bed in the gloomy blackness, his body writhing with hate. The sound of bone scraping against bone assaults my ears, his teeth crushing into each other with a ferocity that I can’t bear.

If I can’t find the strength to fight him, Latham will kill me. My brother’s foaming at the mouth, an inhuman noise twisting up through his rib cage and groaning into the air. The hair on my arms stands on end.

Even if I could move, I’ll never get away clean. He’ll infect me. Drag me with him into a deeper darkness, strip my sanity from me and leave me with infinite rage that exists
only to spread. This is what the U.N.A. will be reduced to. A devouring hate.

Garren shouts my name in the dark. I’d forgotten he was here with me. How could I have forgotten?

I have to move, have to save him. And when he yells my name a second time I skyrocket up from dreamland and blink into the daylight.

It’s not night after all. There’s no Latham. No plague. Not in this place.

It’s February 26, 1985, and I’m lying on a hotel bed, catching my breath and gazing blearily over at Garren on the next bed over. The room’s kitschy but reasonably clean—composed of two double beds (a nightstand between them), a medium-sized TV, which I notice Garren has turned on, and a small rectangular table with chairs on either side of it. The maroon curtains are closed but daylight’s streaming through them and every light fixture in the room is on; there’s no shortage of light.

“Bad dream?” Garren asks. “You were whimpering in your sleep. I thought I better wake you up.”

“Thanks.” I sit up in bed, then pad over to the window and peel back the curtains to stare into the winter sun. “It’s still early. I must not have been out long.”

“About thirty minutes.” Garren studies me. “You okay?”

“I will be. I just have to shake it off.” I don’t want to remember Latham like that. The thing I saw in my dream wasn’t my brother, just my subconscious torturing me.

Garren’s still looking at me, but the last thing I want to
do is talk about my nightmare. “I think I’ll go cut and dye my hair,” I tell him. “Might as well get it over with.”

I take the scissors and box of medium-brown hair dye that I bought at Woolco into the bathroom with me. My hands haven’t stopped shaking yet and when I stare into the mirror memories of how savage Latham was at the end pierce my brain. He would’ve torn me apart with his bare hands if it weren’t for the force field restricting him to his bedroom.

I grab the scissors and ruthlessly begin lopping off my raven hair. I hack away at it until it’s chin-length all round. It’s still my face in the mirror but I’ll be tougher to recognize at a distance. I go for the hair dye next, rubbing it liberally into what’s left of my hair. My eyes burn the same as they did when Christine colored my hair for me. For a minute or two I let my tears spill behind the locked bathroom door, giving in to the terror from my dream, the tension of our close call today and the intensity with which I miss my brother. Then I stop and pull myself together like Latham would want and like I need to do to get through this.

Because of my brand-new haircut there’s plenty of dye left over and I open the bathroom door and ask Garren if he wants me to color his hair too. “Good idea,” he says.

Since his hair’s already so short I have his head coated with dye in no time, which is a good thing because I feel strange running my hands through his hair. It was different when I hugged him earlier—instinctual joy at our survival—and different with the bandaging job because I was worried that
I’d hurt him. Now I have nothing but a pair of rubber gloves to distract me from the awareness that I’m essentially massaging Garren’s head. It feels pretty intimate—like a connection back to last night in the Resniks’ spare room—and I push away the feeling by making small talk. “Did they cut your hair when they sent you back or was that your idea?” I ask.

“I had it done about a week after we moved up here,” he says. “It was driving me crazy—always falling in my eyes.”

I liked it longer but you can see Garren’s eyes better with it short like this. It seems as though there’s no way to hide from them. Whenever he looks my way I feel like there’s a spotlight shining on me.

We go back into the other room to wait out the thirty minutes it’ll take the dye to set. On the TV a repeat of
Mork & Mindy
gives way to a commercial for the upcoming news. “Gunshots fired at Toronto’s Eaton Centre,” the newscaster announces. “We’ll have the full story at six o’clock.”

Garren and I lock eyes. We knew this was coming but it feels like a surprise anyway. There’s just over forty minutes until the news and we both have our hair rinsed out in time for the report. There’s no footage of the actual incident, just a police officer explaining what witnesses recounted seeing—several people running in the direction of the north end of the shopping center on the upper level, exchanging gunfire. Various witnesses said that at least two men, possibly three, were shot, and that a young woman was spotted committing multiple physical assaults. None of the parties
involved remained on the scene when police arrived. Because of this, there’s suspected organized crime involvement.

After the police officer is finished with his statement a reporter interviews a succession of Eaton Centre shoppers, asking them for their reaction to the incident. Most people are shocked that an outbreak of such violence would occur in a public place and worried that innocent bystanders could easily have been hurt.

Garren and I continue watching the news right to the end, in case there’s anything about the robbery at Janette’s house. There’s not (it must not be a big enough story) and we discuss the gun again and decide to abandon it somewhere in Hamilton before we leave for Parry Sound tomorrow afternoon. Checkout time is noon and the next beds we sleep in will be somewhere in Vancouver, days from now. That’s if we arrive as planned, nothing slowing us down or altering our strategy. But the future’s a blank slate. Hard as I try I can’t tune in to any visions. It’s as though even the universe doesn’t know what will become of us yet.

The sun’s finished setting and our hair has dried an identical shade of brown that at first glance makes us look like fraternal twins, though the rest of our features are very different. Neither of us has eaten a bite since this morning’s spaghetti and we’re both starving. I suggest the Indian buffet restaurant just down the street. It looks like an obscure enough place that no one would think to look for us there.

Garren swallows another three aspirin and says he’s good to go. As he’s slipping on his coat I notice he’s sewn
up the tear in the right sleeve where the bullet punctured his coat. He must’ve done it while I was asleep. But it’s his hair that I can’t stop starting at because I’m not sure what I think of it.

“What?” Garren asks, picking up on my attention.

“Just … shouldn’t you put on your hat too? Otherwise you could make the woman at the check-in desk suspicious. You know, a guy checks in without a credit card and the first thing he does is dye his hair.”

“Right.” Garren nods like he can’t believe he didn’t think of that himself. He fishes Mr. Resnik’s black wool hat out of his coat pocket and tugs it over his head. “I can go first, if you want. Wait for you at the lights?”

“Okay. See you at the lights.” I watch Garren close the door behind him and wait another two minutes before leaving the room. Down in the lobby I pass an elderly woman with long hair the color of freshly fallen snow. I’ve seen lots of old people since we’ve been back here (outside of the welfare camps, few people in the U.N.A. truly looked like senior citizens) but she’s the oldest one yet. Her skin’s a delicate shade of pink and deeply wrinkled but her eyes are sharp and she smells like satsuma. It’s the nicest thing I’ve smelled all day and I automatically smile at her, which makes her smile back.

There’s a warmth in her face that I didn’t expect but that shouldn’t surprise me. The first person who helped me and Garren was a complete stranger, the blind woman whose house we’d charged into when Henry was chasing us. I don’t
think the people in 2063 were any worse, deep down, than the people here but we were more distant from each other and more frightened, even when we didn’t realize it.

I keep thinking of 2063 as the past but it’s still out there, still happening. It’s a difficult thing to comprehend.

Outside the hotel I swing right and walk towards the traffic lights. A lone figure who must be Garren is standing there in the distance and I feel relief well up inside me at the sight of him, although we’ve only been apart a couple of minutes. Before the events of the past few days I never would’ve imagined that it’d be possible to experience such a range of emotions in one day. I keep zooming back and forth between anxiety at what comes next and elation that we’re alive and have made it this far.

At the restaurant we consume outrageous amounts of aloo gobi, sweet rice, tandoori chicken and lamb curry. The place has a homey cheerfulness about it that makes me feel safe, especially the music and the smells. The stress falls away from me as I allow the room to work its magic. Garren seems more at ease too and after we’ve invented our cover story for the train journey, we begin to talk about our 1985 experiences and our old 2063 lives.

I know Garren had been planning to become a lawyer in the U.N.A.—the kind who would concentrate on helping the illegals and the Cursed. It would be tricky for him to do something like that now, considering our status, and I ask him what he wants to do in the present.

“I haven’t had much of a chance to think about it,” he
says. “I think I have to really get to know the times firsthand before I make up my mind. If I was older and knew what the directors were plotting I probably would’ve wanted to get involved and help them rewrite history.” He scoops rice into his mouth, chews and swallows. “What they want to do to us is wrong but I respect their larger aims. The West has done too much damage to the planet. If we can change it, I think we have a responsibility to try.”