Future Imperfect (24 page)

I’m in a daze, biting back my tongue. I nod.

Janice, stroking the back of my neck with her sharp nails, she says, “Your past catches up with you, Ade. All those concussions, all the damage, it has to go somewhere. To say you change is putting it lightly. The anger, the violence. You go a little nuts, frankly.”

She touches my face, runs her fingers with both hands through my hair just the same as her sister did and my skin tingles. My eyes roll back. Janice’s digging into my memory, cutting through the cloud of damage and mental scar tissue. It feels like she’s swimming inside my skull.

The vision comes up quickly. Me again in front of the mirror. I’m focused in and older and I’m sitting in a wheelchair. The reason I had trouble seeing this, the reason it was so fuzzy, is easily explained by the look in my eyes. It’s dull. It’s the look of a fish in an aquarium. The dead-eye stare of an insect. This future, it’s me as I’ve always worried I’d become. Me trapped in a failing brain. What’s worse, I’m clearly in a hospital. The walls are white and the floors are white and the ceiling tiles in this place are white. The reek of ammonia is strong. At first I’m sure I’m just watching myself in this mirror, but it quickly becomes clear it’s not actually a mirror, it’s a window. Not watching myself, I’m staring through me to the parking lot below where a man and a woman are leaning against a car kissing. The man is an older Jimi. The woman, gorgeous and bright, is an older Vauxhall. I scream so slowly that it hurts my jaw.

Janice takes her fingers from my head. The vision evaporates and I’m back in the car with my ears buzzing, my fingers bloodless from tension.

And Janice says, “Jimi’s under the impression that they do that, sit out in front of your special person’s home and make out, on a monthly basis. It’s cruel, but from what I hear Jimi’s kind of a vindictive person, so—”

“Impossible,” I interrupt. “What I see, it happens. Either Jimi dies or I change the future and I save him. But if I save him it won’t end up like that. It can’t end up like that.”

“Can’t win all the time, can we?”

I think I fly into a rage, but I’m not sure exactly how it happens or exactly what even takes place. I know that I kick my way out of the car. I don’t open the door first. I don’t roll down the window. I just kick and kick and kick until I somehow hit the lock and get out. In the street, I know that I swear up into the sky. What’s last is that I kick my car and then I tell Janice she needs to leave.

She asks me to drop her off back at the Lair. “Not my fault,” she says.

“You climbed in my car to ruin my life,” I say. “You can walk.”

She calls Katrina to pick her up and I leave her waiting on the side of the road. This little trail of rhinestones tinkling in the dark around her.

I drive to nowhere.

And as I move, the houses flashing past, the anger slowly subsides.

By the time I get to a park with picnic benches and a pond, I’m no longer churning. The rage has subsided. In its place, the sickening feeling of inevitability. I keep repeating to myself that old saying about how it’s better to have loved and lost rather than never loved in the first place, and I realize how much I hate the expression.

But this part of me, its defeatist and I hate it. I refuse to give in to it. Refuse to listen to it anymore.

I’m not going to let Jimi drown.

I will not kill him.

I will be fine.

SEVEN

The morning sun is just starting to spray the sky orange.

I park across the street from the park and I go for a walk over to an empty drainage ditch and sit on top of one of the dirt mounds nearby and watch the sun come up. I watch the sun bleach the dirt and gravel and weeds inch by inch by inch. When it hits my feet I call Vauxhall.

She answers on the third ring, her voice all warped from sleep.

“Hey, Vaux. Sorry to call so early.”

“Ade?”

“Yeah.”

“What’s going on? You okay?”

“I am.”

I listen to Vaux breathe in the static. The houses across from me are now hit by the sunlight. Their windows not see-through any longer, just blankets of yellow.

“Vaux, what if you fall in love with someone?”

“What do you mean?”

I can hear her rubbing her eyes. I can see her propping herself up on her bed.

“I mean what if you love someone, you’d stop, then—”

I don’t need to finish. Vaux, jumping in to fill any silence, says, “Yes.”

“Really?”

“I don’t … I haven’t ever been in love, Ade. Not like what you mean.”

“But if you were. If it was love like that, could you stop? Replace it with me.”

Vaux is only a whisper on the other end. Just her breathing in electronic haze. The sun has fully risen and the shadows are so long. My shadow from the top of the dirt hill soars over the construction site to the houses so far away. My stretched-out head almost touching them.

“I think so,” Vaux says.

She says, “For you, I will.”

I sigh into the phone and all the way back to Denver I hear Vauxhall sigh as well.

“Are you happy?” I ask her.

“Very, very happy,” she says. “What’s funny is that for the longest time I thought I was so strong. Powerful the way people in control are. Me and these guys, I don’t know what I really believed I was doing for them, but I felt like I was wanted. Like I was needed. Really needed. But, it wasn’t power at all. It wasn’t strength. I can see it now. Feel it now. You and me, for the first time in my life, this is real. And it feels so beautiful.”

“I know. It does. It really does. Look, there are a few more things I need to do. But I can stop this, Vaux. I can make it so I don’t kill Jimi, so the future doesn’t happen. I’ll come to you soon.”

I think she blows me a kiss, but it’s hard to hear, might just be static.

Just as I’m hanging up, Belle calls on the other line.

“Can you come pick me up? I’m not cool to drive.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Pretty please.” And she even blows a kiss.

EIGHT

I make my way back over to Paris and find Belle sitting in the parking structure just outside the door to the Diviners’ danceteria.

She’s sitting cross-legged, smoking a cigarette, and blinking furiously.

I pull up, open the door, she hops in. Asks me to drop her off at a friend’s place in Arvada.

I say, “And you can’t drive because…?”

“It’s not obvious?”

It is. She’s super messed up.

Being with Belle in my car again is oddly comforting.

Only, she’s not the Belle I dated. Not anymore. Now she’s part of some psychic underground. This girl, the drunk, the stoner, she’s like me.

I’ve got all the windows down, the wind’s rushing in, and Belle’s hair’s swirling around like a messy halo.

We’ve been talking about what just happened. Mostly I’ve been trying to get to what the Diviners want. I ask, “If they don’t think I can change what I’ve already seen, then why would they want to meet with me? Have the Metal Sisters dig in my head?”

“To help you, of course.”

“But they can’t help me. They told me they can’t help me.”

“Well, they probably can’t,” Belle says. “But they’ll throw you a few bones, send you in the right direction because they see something special in you. They think you’re going to make them a ton of money.”

I screw up my face. “That’s just stupid.”

“Seeing the future the way you do, Ade, that’s a gift. Seeing the future so clean, so clearly, maybe you can see lottery ticket numbers. Maybe who wins the Super Bowl next year.”

“But I can’t control what I see, Belle. Why didn’t you tell them that?”

“And ruin all the fun? Whole time we were together, I knew you were kind of disgusted by me. I thought about explaining it, but you wouldn’t have listened. You were just too into your own thing to care. Me, I just liked you enough to hang around and I hoped you actually might be someone. Like really someone.”

“Like Gilberto?”

She doesn’t respond.

I apologize to her, but most of it is lost in the onrushing air.

Somewhere near Lakeside, Belle turns to me and says, “You wanting to change the future is sweet. I like that you’ve got that fight in you. But, if you really want to try this, really want to dig down into the heart of it, you’re going to have to let me take you some places you’re not going to want to go.”

“Like where?”

“You remember that time I took you over to my friend Colin’s place? You know, Colin with the one lazy eye? Wait, no, of course you don’t…”

And I don’t. I can’t recall anyone with a lazy eye.

“Well, let’s just say he and his buddies freaked you out.”

“I can deal with freaky. If it’ll help, I can deal with it.”

She asks me if I ever worry about getting my memory back.

“Why?”

“You probably don’t remember half the stuff you did last year. Doesn’t that make you kind of crazy? What if you got someone pregnant or you were shooting up dope? That sort of black-out thing, whatever it is that’s wrong, that would just make me so anxious I could barely stand it.”

Being clean, despite whatever this nearly uncontrollable anger thing is, I’m looking at Belle differently. Not in some sexual way, it’s more comfortable, lived-in.

Looking at Belle, I can only think of how much I want to be with Vauxhall.

On the Wadsworth exit ramp, Belle looks over at me, puts her hand on my thigh, squeezes, says, “This Vauxhall girl is totally not for you.”

“No?”

“You’re moving up, okay. Even though they acted all high and mighty, the Diviners are enthralled by you. This is a whole new world. You need someone who can understand that. Who speaks your language.”

“Like you?”

“Sure.”

“What’s all this drug stuff? You seem to be doing even more, uh, dabbling than usual.”

“Already I’ve had like two lucid experiences that Gilberto is convinced are the first stirrings, you know. The first suggestions of me developing powers.”

“You’re crazy, Belle.”

“Why’s it crazy to want to be special? To be amazing?”

“You’re already amazing how you are. You don’t need that Gilberto idiot giving you drugs to make you any more special. Besides, what I have, what they have, it’s a curse, not a gift. You’re going to end up—”

She cuts me off with a finger to my lips. Smiles.

Belle switches gears abruptly and tells me that lately she’s been trying to touch as many things as she can. She tells me she took E a few weeks back, not her first time, and she really just wanted to cling to that touching sensation thing. She says, “Do you ever think about how instant the sense of touch is? I mean the only time you really ever feel something that way is when you’re in direct contact with it. Scary how fleeting that is, isn’t it?”

“I guess.”

She squeezes my thigh again.

“Sometimes touching is so beautiful. You want that feeling to last forever. You want to just wrap yourself in that feeling and always be in contact with it. Thing is, as soon as you move your hand away, it’s gone. As if it was never there.”

Belle takes her hand away.

“Do you even remember what my hand felt like there? The weight of it? The warmth?”

I shake my head. Shift into third.

Belle says, “Our brains just don’t store that info. It’s pretty much only the other senses. Visual mostly. Sometimes smells. Also sounds. But sounds can be so tweaked with memory.”

I ask Belle where she’s going with this.

“It’s all about what comes next, okay,” Belle says. “Nothing else really matters, does it? Moving on is real life. Possibilities. Excitement. And I want to kiss you again.”

“I knew that’s where you were going.”

“This Vauxhall girl,” Belle says, “she’s not your type.”

“How’s that?”

“She’s an actress. A fake.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Totally. The things I’ve heard about her, well, you’ve heard them too. It’s almost like she’s desperate. It makes me worry about you. You don’t want this girl to break your heart, do you? Take advantage?”

“Like you’re not?”

Belle snorts. “Okay. Funny. That’s not what I’m doing at all.”

Looking straight ahead, my eyes narrowed down to nothing, I say, “Belle, I love Vauxhall. Nothing, not a single thing, will change that.”

I turn off Wadsworth and take many turns onto many side streets before we wind up in a residential area where there are twigs for trees and the grass is yellow having only just been planted.

Belle says, “In Polynesia there’s this ritual where a young kid, a teenager, as part of his becoming a man, has to keep his hand on the first woman he sees. Has to keep it there for as long as possible. And then, when either the woman is just too sick of the guy standing there or the guy just gives up, he needs to go back to the village shaman and describe exactly how the woman’s skin felt. Describe it in detail. Later, after a few more rituals, he’s blindfolded and taken to a hut where there’s like five women. He’s supposed to touch just the shoulder of each of the women and tell the shaman which one was the one he has his hand on for two days or whatever. If he can do it, he’s passed the test. If not, he’s still a boy. Most teenage guys don’t pass. Takes them years.”