The Bible Repairman and Other Stories (10 page)

“It was a hallucination,” he said hoarsely, wondering if he was going to be sick. “There would have been cops, ambulances –”

“Yes,” said Evian, “if we hadn’t stepped in and asserted national security. Pre-emptive jurisdiction. Nerve gas, terrorists, plausible enough. We were in place around the building and had it cordoned off even before the first survivor came out.”

“That was me, I think,” said Felise with a visible shiver. “And I think you guys
did
stun-gun me, now that I think of it.” She gave Hollis a haunted look. “It’s only six months ago, for me.”

“What,” said Evian, leaning forward, “was it?”

“It was silver-and-black balls,” snapped Hollis, “and donut-shaped things, that busted the place up and killed people.”

“Silver and black,” whispered Felise, nodding.

“What did it say?”

Hollis’s chest was suddenly cold, and his hands were tingling, and he couldn’t take a deep breath. “Say? It didn’t
say
anything! Good God!”
Had
it
said
anything?

“It didn’t say anything,” said Felise, still whispering, “I swear.” “

What do you think you …
learned
from it?” “

Nothing,” said Hollis. “Stay out of pizza parlors.”

Evian smiled. “When’s the last time you’ve seen a doctor, got a, a check-up?”

“What, radiation? After thirty-one years?” When Evian just continued to smile at him, Hollis thought about it. “When I was in college, I guess.”

“That’s a long time.”

Hollis shrugged. “All I want to hear from a doctor is, ‘If you had come in six months ago we could have done something about this.’” “

You were going to college, but you never went again after that night.” “Sure. What’s the use of knowing anything?” “And you’ve never married.”

“I don’t know any women well enough to hate ‘em that much.”

Felise laughed with apparent delight. “Lyle says the same thing! It was redundant for that thing to crush people
physically.”

Evian went on, “I gather you share Felise’s opinion that it was one thing, that appeared as a lot of inconstant shapes?”

Hollis sighed deeply. “You guys actually know something about … all that?”

“We’ve been looking into it for thirty years,” said Evian. “Across thirty years, anyway,” said Felise.

Hollis rubbed his face. “Yes,” he said, then lowered his hands and looked down at them. “It was one thing. It … passed through our, our what, our space, like somebody diving into a pond through a carpet of water lilies. If the diver’s arms and legs were spread out, the water lilies might think it was lots of things diving through them.” He looked at Felise. “And how have you been, these last six months?”

“I sleep fourteen hours a day,” she said brightly. “Lyle’s dying of cancer, probably because he wants to. We all have low self of steam.”

“What made you come here today?” asked Evian quietly. “We’ve been monitoring you closely ever since that night. You never came back here before. In fact according to our schedule you weren’t supposed to come here today.”

Kokolo looked sharply at Evian. “You’re saying this is an anomaly? I don’t believe it.”

“I’ll query Chicago in the window, but I’m pretty sure.” Evian looked back at Hollis. “So – why?”

Hollis realized that he was drunk. Good enough for now, but he’d have to get them to fetch another bottle soon.

“Lately,” he began. He frowned at Evian, then went on, “Lately I’ve been dreaming that what happened here, after the part of that night that I could remember, was that – I met myself, finally. And that in fact there isn’t anybody else besides me. Like you’re all just things I’m imagining because I’m separated from myself now and trying to fill the absence. I – guess I came here today to see if I could meet myself again, somehow, so I can be me and stop being this, this flat roadkill.”

“Solipsism,” said Felise. “I thought that too, for a while, but it was so obvious that my cat didn’t think so, didn’t think I was the only thing in the universe, that I decided it wasn’t true.”

“That’s hardly an argument against solipsism!” said Hollis, smiling in spite of himself. “Especially to convince somebody else.”

“I could show you the cat,” she said.

Kokolo touched his ear and cocked his head. “Lyle’s here,” he said. “I know that was on the schedule, at least. We should go to the area of measurement.”

“We think it was an alien,” said Evian as he pushed his chair back and stood up. “Not just a, some creature from another planet, you know, but something that ordinarily exists in more dimensions than the four we live in. Or the five we move in when we travel through time.”

Felise had paused to listen to him, and she nodded. “We need more liquor,” she said. “Lyle can’t drink anymore, but it’d mean a lot to him to see other people still fighting the good fight.”

One of the two silent men who had stood by the door now opened it and led the way down a carpeted hall to the right; Kokolo and Evian and Scarbee were right behind him, and Hollis and Felise followed more slowly, with the second door-guard coming along last.

The men ahead stopped beside a steel door, and Kokolo pressed his thumb against a tiny glass square above the lever handle.

“This might be disorienting,” he said over his shoulder to Hollis, and then he pushed the lever down and opened the door. A puff of chilly air-conditioning ruffled his blond hair.

“It still freaks me,” Felise said.

Hollis glimpsed the pool-cue racks mounted on the red-painted walls while the men ahead of him were shuffling into the big room, so he knew what this place was; and when he had stepped through and was standing on the green linoleum floor again for the first time in thirty-one years, he was able to look around at the counters and the bar and the restroom doors in the far wall without any expression of surprise. The lights were all on, and the pinball machines glowed.

“We had the place eminent-domained before you even got outside,” said Evian.

The picnic tables and pool tables were still scattered and broken across the floor, and black smears on the linoleum were certainly decades-old blood. The holes in the plaster walls were still raw white against the red paint, though there seemed to be a lighted hallway on the other side now, instead of the alley he remembered. The jagged glass of the front window now had white drywall behind it.

Still dizzy from the stun-gun shock – or freshly drunk – Hollis walked carefully across the littered floor, past the spot at the bar where Felise had always sat when he didn’t know her name, and stepped behind the bar to the cash register. He punched in “No Sale,” and tore off the receipt. The date on it was June 21, 1975.

On the shelf below the register was the paperback copy of J. P. Donleavy’s
The Ginger Man
that Hollis had been reading at the time. He had never bothered to pick up another copy of the book.

Felise had followed Hollis, and now set up one of the fallen barstools and sat down at what used to be her customary place.

Hollis sniffed. The bar, the whole big room, had no smells at all anymore, just a faint chilly whiff of metal.

There was a stack of black bakelite ashtrays on the bar, and he lifted the top one off and pulled the cigarette pack out of his pocket and shook a cigarette onto his lip.

“It’s 1975 in here,” he called to Scarbee, “check the register tape. Smoking’s allowed.”

“Five people died here that night,” said Evian, who still stood with the others near the door. “Nine survived, though five of them were unresponsively catatonic afterward. And we did try to get responses! The four that survived sane – relatively so – were you, Felise, Lyle, and a four-year-old male child. He died three years ago at the age of thirty-two, in a misadventure during a sadomasochistic orgy.”

Felise snickered. “Strangled himself. Can I bum a smoke?”

Hollis slid the pack across to her, then clicked his lighter, but apparently rain had got into it. He picked a Firehouse matchbook out of a box on the shelf and struck one of the matches for her, then held it to his own cigarette.

“Where’s Lyle?” he asked as he puffed it alight.

“They’re bringing him in,” said Evian. “Nurses, IV poles.”

“You can’t cure him in the future?”

Evian shrugged and widened his eyes. “The past is unalterable! Or we thought so, before you showed up just now where you shouldn’t be. Lyle is supposed to die a week from hex. But we’ve debriefed him very thoroughly, many times, over the years, everything he can give us.”

Evian, Kokolo, and Scarbee had begun cautiously stepping out into the room.

“We debriefed
you,”
Evian went on, “with narcohypnosis, right after getting you and your motorcycle back to your apartment, and several times thereafter – you were encouraged to think these interview periods were alcoholic blackouts – and you appeared to remember nothing. But now that you
have
begun to remember what happened, we may as well see if any input from you can manage to prompt something more from Lyle.”

“Set up a query transmission to the Chicago window,” said Kokolo. “We need to find out for sure that Hollis’s visit today isn’t an anomaly – the schedule signals aren’t always complete, but Chicago can check it against the big chronology. I’m sure he is scheduled to be here – that’s probably why we summon Lyle.”

“We don’t have much bandwidth left in their allotment for hex, it’ll have to be a very tight frequency,” said Scarbee, edging hesitantly across the linoleum and looking around wide-eyed. Perhaps he had never been in here before. To Hollis he said, “Time may be infinite, but the time-window of our control of the Fermilab accelerator isn’t. It uses up a long piece of that duration to negotiate a transmission. They allot us segments of it. And it’s not cheap.”

“You guys talk pretty freely to strangers,” Hollis said.

Kokolo laughed, for the first time. “Like you might tell somebody, call the
L.A. Times?
We know you don’t.” To Evian he went on, “Check his resonance, then, you can do that with just the carrier-wave link itself, no need for a message. If his resonance is the same as what we’ve got recorded, we can be pretty sure he hasn’t deviated from his plotted time-line.”

Evian nodded to Scarbee. “Get a link-station,” he said, and Scarbee hurried, with evident relief, out of the preserved pizza parlor.

Hollis stepped through the doorway onto the cement floor of the kitchen. There wasn’t much dust on the counter surfaces – higher air-pressure maintained in this whole place, he thought – and the two disks of dough on the work table were clean, though clearly dry as chalk.

Kokolo stepped up on the other side of the counter, and Hollis stopped himself from reflexively reaching for the order pad, which was still right below the telephone.

“We’re going to look at your life-line resonance,” said Kokolo. “It’s a jab in your finger, just enough to hurt.”

“You’re supposed to die in March of 2008,” called Felise cheerfully. “Suicide, while you’re on Prozac. At first I thought they said it would be while you had
Kojak
on.” She had stepped around behind the bar and was walking toward the kitchen. “I die at forty-eight, but nobody’s looked up what year it’ll happen in.”

“What takes
you
so long?” asked Hollis, turning toward her.

“We both survive it by about thirty years. Subjective years.” She smiled at him. “I call that pretty good.”

Scarbee had shuffled back into the room, wheeling a cart with something on it that looked like a fax machine. He steered it around the pieces of broken wood.

“We think you survived,” said Evian, “weathered the encounter, because you had referents that let you partly roll with the blow; fragment it, deflect it. In your debriefing you talked about Escher prints and Ivan Albright paintings, and William Burroughs, and Ligeti’s music. Ionesco, Lovecraft. You were babbling, throwing these things out like cancelled credit cards or phony IDs.”

“And I’m still here,” said Felise as she lifted one of the hardened dough-disks and let it drop with a clack, “according to these guys, because I was a street girl and a doper. It wasn’t a
big
step to get stomped right out of the world.” She hiccuped. “Into the cold void between the stars. I wish you still served beer here.”

Hollis thought now that he remembered that cold void too. “And Lyle?” said Hollis.

“Lyle was a Christian,” Evian said. “Though he stopped being, after that night.”

“They figure the four-year-old was abused,” said Felise. She rapped the center of one disk with a knuckle, and it broke in a star pattern.

Scarbee had wheeled the device up beside Evian on the other side of the counter. “Give me your hand,” he said to Hollis.

Hollis looked at Felise, who nodded. “We’ve all done it,” she said. “It’s just a jab, to plug into your nervous system for a second.”

“The machine,” said Evian, “has a gate in it that’s always connected to Fermilab in Chicago in 2015. The time-line of your nervous system is like a long hallway with a mirror at each end – this will tachyonically ring the whole length of it, birth to death, and the resulting, uh, ‘note’ will show up as a series of lines on a print-out. Interference fringes.”