Personality
By Patrick Smith
How did I get started?
How does anyone get started?
I'd messed around before: pot, acid, even heroin once or twice, but nothing too heavy. I'd seen too many dead end losers for that, folk who could barely wipe themselves after a shit.
But it was Alice. It was always Alice.
She was skanky – she smoked too much, had bad teeth, didn't take care of herself and smelled a little funny, but God she was beautiful. Big blue eyes, pale white skin, hair black as darkness and she could fuck like a hurricane.
Maybe I should start at the beginning.
It was the fall of '98. I was an Art major in NYCU. The term project for Oils II was to do an impressionist piece, in the style of the masters, and it wasn't coming together. I just couldn't see the way they did.
I mentioned it to Alice one night at a party after she screwed some frat boy, long before we started sleeping together. She came out of the back room and said, “I can help you with that.”
Oh, brother, could she.
Three hours later I was in some guy's apartment in Soho, with my sleeve rolled up and a belt tying off my arm as he readied the needle. Alice held my hand and I could feel my heart pounding like a piston.
“Just relax and let it happen,” she said. I did.
The guy approached with a syringe filled with some green, pink and orange goo.
“What am I shooting?” I asked as he found a vein.
“Van Gogh,” she answered.
I felt like shit that night, like I was dead and my limbs were moved by wires. Still, I painted. I chewed on my brushes, and there was no joy, only color, but I painted. I finished two self portraits before finding a knife and scratching my head up badly. Then I passed out.
I spent the next two days in bed sweating and shaking. When I finally left my apartment, I went back to class and turned the paintings in.
I got an A for the term.
I was hooked.
I don't remember who I did next. I had to do a poly-sci paper, so Alice introduced me to John. John hooked me up with some Edward R Murrows. Or maybe it was a dose of Amy Tan for creative writing.
What I do know is it wasn't too long till I tried it for fun. Me and Alice scored some Moby before we went clubbing. I remember being all socially conscious but when the music started I didn't give a fuck.
The first time I dosed without her was when she was in Chicago and John called to say he was holding Jim Morrison, 25 bucks a hit. Man, I might have drunk myself to death that night if it wasn't for a pair of Swedish exchange students. The were just out of high school, and I managed to talk them into a threesome back at my apartment. Thank God I threw them out before I crashed. Hung over and strung out, the next day I couldn't even get out of bed to puke.
I functioned for a while. Coming down was always tough, but it got easier. I'd try to get high on Fridays, so I was usually okay for Monday class. I lost my job as a cook when I came into work buzzing on Dali and shit on a plate and sent it out.
Pretty soon I could barely handle my classes with out someone, and I kept pushing it further and further. Alice helped
The next semester I had to give a speech. I wanted some one like Martin Luther King or Reagan, but she said, “No, Hitler.”
“But my teacher's Jewish.”
“No problem, we'll chases it with a little Mother Teresa. It'll work.”
And it did, it did.
I actually got a standing ovation, and I basked in it like a little holy dictator, filled with shame.
Things weren't going good with Alice either. We couldn't stand each other. We'd get in these huge fights, throw shit, and she'd walk out.
Then two days later she'd show up on my door step with a needle and some vials. She'd shoot de Sade and I'd shoot Sacher-Masoch and she'd beat me senseless and then fuck me bloody.
I forgot the paperwork and lost my financial aid. I spent the last of money on Gandhi and fasted.
It gets to be a blur after that – I lost my apartment. I didn't have any friends let by that point, so I ended up on the streets. I lost touch with Alice – she jumped in the East River and froze, and I didn't hear about it for two weeks. When I did hear, my only thought was, “Where'd she score Houdini?”
I nearly died a couple of times. The worst was when I did Malcolm X and went walking in Harlem, a skinny little white boy. I spent two days in Emergency in NYU Downtown before I could slip out and get back on the streets.
The last one was completely different. I'd hustled together ten bucks and went to see John. He was getting $15 for shit like Carottop, but I begged and begged and finally he gave in.
“This is new,” he said, slapping my arm to bring out a vein. “You can be my guinea pig.”
I looked at the vial, pearl with with little drops of red.
“Who is it?” I asked, as he jabbed the needle into me.
“Messiah,” he answered. “You want to save the world?”
You want to know what Hell is? Worse than all the shit I'd been through up till that point, Hell is when you see God every where: in the shadows of your dealer's face, in the beer and vomit stains on the carpet. When you hear God's voice in the hum of traffic on the street outside.
Hell is when you feel God's eyes upon you.
And you know He doesn't much like you right now.
I got out on the street some how . . . I must have run three or four blocks, though I don't remember it. Finally I collapsed. Some one called an ambulance. I was in bad shape – they tell me was clinically dead for three minutes.
By the time I came down I was in a locked ward on 24 hour suicide watch.
It wasn't easy, but I made it. I spent two weeks in the hospital, then six months in a half-way house, sharing a room with a crazy guy who didn't believe in dinosaurs.
I kept taking it one day at a time. I'd discovered religion, and that helped. The day they let me out I got on a bus to Chicago to be closer to my parents. I've stayed clean for four years.
I still hold on to the memory of Alice. I know no one else remembers her like I do. I can save that memory. Sometimes, when I'm in a weird mood, I tell myself if I pray hard enough I can save her.
The rest of the world I'll leave to the real thing.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
After History - posted Dec 6th, 2009
After History
by Patrick Smith
In the night, Mike woke to the cries of his baby.
“It's your turn,” he mumbled. His wife only nuzzled her face against his back.
“Alright, alright” he said, as he slide out from under the covers, “just be here when I get back.” She meeped in sleepy pleasure.
As he shuffled across the room, something was bothering him. He couldn't figure out what.
Even as it occurred to him why isn't it cold? he walked into a book shelf.
His eyes flared open and the frigid air hit him like a slap. Fully awake, he shook his head. Just a dream.
He rubbed his eyes in the cold and the dust, looked over at his tiny single bed. The streetlight penetrating the blinds cast salmon orange strips of light on the wall, enough that he could see the fridge and hot plate, the books in shelves and in stacks across the floor, the clear area in one corner where he would meditate and, sometimes, pray. The one room apartment was dark and cold. There was no baby, no wife. He had been sleep walking. Dreaming.
He crossed over and fell back into bed. At least the bed was warm.
Just a dream.
Michael Gladwell loved History.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say he hated it. His parents had always tried to push him to other pursuits - business, or technology, or a career in the military, or anything. They hadn't believed him when he told them he wished he could.
The History department had been dying when he entered the program. “Out of favor with the Ministry.” Now, a decade later, he was the head of the history department by virtue of the fact he was the only professor in it.
But he could not put it down.
His enclave, the Darrowtown Enclave, was one of a half dozen or so in the world. Something like half a million people, roads, offices and apartments and hot dog stands, huddled behind the Wall. Who built it? Why? That knowledge was lost.
That was before the War.
Most of the world was wasteland. Beyond the Wall, a million million miles of blasted urban ruins where nothing grew, and only the ghosts felt at home. Literally ... the “Ethereal Resonant Echoes Manifesting Collective Hallucinations,” in Ministry-speak. Hallucination. Hallucinations capable of murder.
Of course, you knew not to ask those questions. You knew what it would get you.
Mike knew what he would get. When he ignored the subtle hints: “Past is dead, let it rest.” When he ignored the relentlessly dwindling salary and budget cuts. He'd known what was happening.
But he couldn't stop.
He had found records - clear documentation - of things that had never happened. A moon shot. Olympics. Revolutions happening in countries on continents that weren't there on the maps. Like some one had made up whole continents ... or some one had taken them away.
And the War. The Last War. Of that, there was no mention. Not the weapons, not the causes ... not even the enemy. All these fragments, pages torn from magazines, shreds of ancient newspapers, not one even mentioned the War.
It wasn't the challenge that drove him. There was something lost. There was a hole in his world where something should be and there was nothing there and he had to look. He couldn't not. So Mike went back to the stacks, the books, the artifacts of a vanished world, searching history ... because he didn't know where else to look.
The University was on the edge of the Darrowtown Enclave, some of the buildings towering tall enough to provide a view of the wasteland over the wall. He assumed they did, anyway, but even as Head of the History Department he rarely got above street level.
His office . . . the whole department, which pretty much was his office, was in the basement of the the sagging three-story tall Humanities building. At least no one bothered him. Usually - usually no one bothered him.
When he walked into the building's mail room, Barb grabbed him.
“You've got a guest,” she said quietly, her restless eyes flickering towards Marty and then back. Marty was Campus Security, and kept his job mainly by informing on teachers. He was at his station by the door, and despite the familiar reek of vomit and urine, he seemed to be asleep. Marty must have scored last night. “He's waiting in your office.”
Christos, I can not afford this. “Thanks, Barb.” He reached in his pocket and fumbled for the right bill. Her pudgy hand came up and his was suddenly empty.
“Don't mention it.”
The heat and the pounding roar of the furnace was overwhelming before he even got to the bottom of the stairs. His office was in back of the stacks, and filled with more moldy, disintegrating manuscripts than the campus library. The door was open and lights were on, but he couldn't see anyone...
“Hello?” he shouted over the thundering rumble of the furnace.
“Hallo!”
Stepping out from behind a shelf emerged a stump of a man: shabby brown coat and a rotted tooth grin. He held a package in one hand, the other was inside his coat. Mike knew it was resting on a gun.
“Oh, hey Jim!” he shouted, “Come on in, and let me see what you've got! Coffee!?”
“Right you are, Professor.”
What Jim had, once the door sealed out some of the noise and pleasantries were done, was a 3rd printing of the the second edition of “Saving Time: The Story of Chronodymanics,” dug up from some book collection in some basement ruin in the wastes. The paper was cracking, and it had minor water damage, but it was in remarkable condition. It was also illegal - the Ministry would execute Mike for just holding it.
“I've already got a copy.”
“Ah, come on. You know what I had to go through to get that past the Wall? To say nothing of hunting the damn thing up . . . there was a 'haunt on our arses halfway across the . . .”
“Look, I'm sorry. I can't use University funds for this one, and even if I could, the well's running dry. I've got,“ he opened up the drawer and pulled out a jar - mostly coins, but with a few bills folded in, “that. Rainy day fund.”
Jim hesitated - it was barely enough for lunch and a couple of beers, and Jim could tell that at a glance. Mike could see the calculations in his eyes. Still, it was literally all the money he had. He wouldn't have let Jim see where he kept it otherwise.
“Alright, then.” The other hand reached out, if you could call the clicking, metal, grease-caked prosthetic a hand, and the jar disappeared under his coat. “Alright. Don't be expecting any more, though, seeing as how you can't pay me ... I guess henceforth I'll have to take my business elsewhere.” Jim paused. Contraband books were not in high demand.
“I'll see you, later Jim. I get paid in a week, come back if you find anything else.”
Jim snorted, “I know the way out.” Only after the door closed and he had counted to 100 under his breath did Professor Michael Gladwell relax, breath out, and with trembling hands reach for the text.
It was a week later, after the first day of the new semester, that Mike picked up his paycheck.
The light was fading and the lamps were coming on in places. He should have been home by now, but his plan to cut class short had hit a snag.
Avoiding the shadows (muggings produced a few corpses every week), he aimed for the Administration Building. It was the tallest of the Darrowtown University buildings, glass and chrome, and looked more like a corporate office than an educational facility. As he opened the door, he couldn't keep his mind from drifting a little.
One class canceled, 8 students in the other and 2 no shows. Of the 8 students tonight, 3 were engineering students looking for an easy elective, and 4 were half-baked idiots looking for “occult wisdom.” Half of those might make it to the final. The last one, though . . . an Asian girl in thick glasses . . . didn't fit the profile. Any profile.
She could be a plant, but the Ministry hadn't run one through his class for a long time. Any way, they didn't employ 'ethnics,' never did. They might have changed that, but . . . she had been as snarky as any student, but she was listening. Really listening, and at the end she had asked when the War started. He stumbled something out, and none of the other students had noticed, but . . . no one ever asked that. No one.
The cashier's office was in the back, and Mike received the check with shaking hands - he hadn't eaten well for the past two days. The clerk looked at him with thinly veiled contempt, which he ignored. He turned to go.
There was a lady waiting, and she waved at him. “Professor Gladwell?”
“Yes?” he answered, out of habit.
“The Dean was hoping he could have a word with you.” She wore a smart business suit and had short blond hair and an open, infectious smile. Mike started to sweat. Would the building entrance be covered? His gaze flashed towards the door, and he suddenly found her hand on his wrist. He hadn't seen her move.
“You do have time, don't you?”
Although the bright smile never faltered, she was squeezing hard enough to grind his bones together.
“Of course.” He replied through gritted teeth. “Of course.”
The Dean's office was on the top floor - 40th or 50th or something. There was money here, and power. When the University actually admitted the existence of History, it was at best a memo from on high. He had never thought that they were written somewhere, and now that he was seeing it, his attention was else where.
The secretary (Ms. Maxie?) blathered on about the Dean and his office, and about the problems with the copiers. He had trouble focusing because she hadn't eased her grip, not in the elevator, or walking through the maze of halls and cubicles. In a lucid moment he remembered muscles were supposed to die from fatigue toxins if clenched too long, and then the pressure was gone.
They had arrived.
The Dean's office was dark - mostly dark, although a light shone down on the chair behind the desk. The high backed chair was facing the windows (a corner office looking out over the vast darkness of the wastelands) and a voice was speaking . . . reciting? No, not reciting . . . reading. Mike's blood went cold.
“Even without a technical understanding, the implications of the quantum 'Many World' theory seem clear: the future is not set. Broyle's model indicated something far more radical: neither is the past.
“The Ministry's Conflict Prevention Bureau restricts access to certain areas of knowledge, citing the laudable - I like that, 'laudable,' that's a good word - the laudable goal of preventing a recurrence of the technologies that led to the War. One cannot wonder at the assertion that not only must the technology be restricted, so to must knowledge of what those technologies are.
“Blah, blah . . .” the sound of pages being flipped, “Ah! Here we are . . . the possibility of not only defeating our enemies, but preventing them from ever having existed to challenge us! These 'Time Bombs' . . . heh, good one . . . would literally be an attack on time itself, and the consequences of . . . well, it goes on. Gets a bit dull. I couldn't figure out how the hell you wrote it, until... Well, here, this bit:
“Perhaps the most frightening thing about these weapons is that if they were used, we would never know. A historic general dies as a baby, and a nation disappears from our maps - from our present. We don't know it ever existed, because it never did.
“Now think if it wasn't a nation, but a friend, a brother, a wife. The events that created them never occurred. They disappear and you would not even know that your life had been changed.
“Hey, think about how they feel: You wake up Saturday morning with plans to spend the whole weekend existing, and then BAM! Now that's got to suck.”
The chair spun slowly around, and a sheaf of papers bound with strings was tossed onto the desk. The Dean flipped it open again, and Mike could see the tight, hand written scrawl. It had been in his desk when he left to teach class.
“You should be proud, Mike. Your first book.”
The Dean (never referred to by name, Mike wasn't even sure he had ever heard it) was young . . . too young, and somehow too beautiful - sharp bone structure, clear skin, perfect, white teeth, and pale blue eyes. There was a warmth in his voice - but even in the dim light, Mike could see that it never reached his eyes.
“Thank you, sir. And it's 'Professor Gladwell,' please.”
Mike didn't know what he was expecting - anger, surprise? - but what he got was a pure delight of laughter.
“That is right! Mike, what the hell was I thinking? Oh, lordy lordy lordy.” The Dean took a breath and shook his head.
“I am so glad to have met you. 'What do we need a history department when we don't even have a history?' That's what they said, Mike. I convinced them you'd turn up stuff - odd chants, weird bits of rituals we've lost - but this, “ he indicated the book, “this is beyond anything I'd ever hoped for. You, Mike, you have . . . potential.”
Mike was a bit taken aback. He had expected to be taken out back and executed. Not . . . complimented?
“Tell you what: an explanation. You like that crap, right?
“Here, look... cause and effect, action and reaction, all that causality shit, right? But what does it look like, a present without a past? What happens to the effect when the cause is blown to a shit pile of quantum vomit? Great wide blast craters stretching across centuries of human history, what then?”
The chair revolved again, and the lights went down. The two walls were floor to ceiling windows, and the view of the wastes, rolling out to the horizons and lit here and there by an burst of fire or a flicker of light - it was spectacular. Out there scavengers where searching and dying, half-real nightmares haunting sleeping minds and occasionally devouring unwary flesh.
“I'm glad we had this little chat, Mike. We're done.”
What happened next was confused. He remembered thinking of Ms. Maxie and starting to turn when there was the howl and burn of a constrained plasma field weapon and he was somehow on the floor in the corner and something horrible and chittering and metal was flying through the air and a searing arc of light burned the air and a wind rushed in and he had not even heard any glass break and he stared out into the night were the dark rubble had been skyscrapers reached to the heavens and their windows glowed brightly and he could see them, clearly see the people inside talking and eating and sleeping and they looked . . . warm.
Mike started speaking - there was a whisper in his ear, and he spoke. A translation of the Key of Solomon, a litany and prayer he had read a hundred times, but now he ignored the flashes and screams behind him and did not just recite the words. He closed his eyes and prayed.
When he finished, it was quiet. He rolled away from the jagged shards of what was left of the window, distantly wondering if anyone had been walking below. In the darkness of the office, he couldn't see much, but a figure emerged, highlighted against the sky. She lifted him up, threw his arm over her shoulder, and together they lurched forward.
“I can walk,” he protested.
“Not with a broken leg,” she replied. “Buddha on a stick, I hope we don't have to work together.” Past a sparking pile with the acrid stink of burnt metal. Out the door. “Nice one with the banish, thou.”
“Well, it was Solomon - a prayer for extending dominion over demons. My wife helped. Demons, of course, only makes sense. Never thought . . . I'm going to have to change the sylabus.”
He didn't see the small Asian girl smirk, and suddenly remembered . . . “There were towers.” He said. “They were . . . they weren't right. Or . . . we aren't right. We aren't right. It's not . . . it shouldn't be so cold.” The elevator arrived with a cheerful Bing! and they went in.
“So let's go fix it.” She jabbed the a button and the doors started sliding closed. He nodded in agreement.
“What broken leg?”
by Patrick Smith
In the night, Mike woke to the cries of his baby.
“It's your turn,” he mumbled. His wife only nuzzled her face against his back.
“Alright, alright” he said, as he slide out from under the covers, “just be here when I get back.” She meeped in sleepy pleasure.
As he shuffled across the room, something was bothering him. He couldn't figure out what.
Even as it occurred to him why isn't it cold? he walked into a book shelf.
His eyes flared open and the frigid air hit him like a slap. Fully awake, he shook his head. Just a dream.
He rubbed his eyes in the cold and the dust, looked over at his tiny single bed. The streetlight penetrating the blinds cast salmon orange strips of light on the wall, enough that he could see the fridge and hot plate, the books in shelves and in stacks across the floor, the clear area in one corner where he would meditate and, sometimes, pray. The one room apartment was dark and cold. There was no baby, no wife. He had been sleep walking. Dreaming.
He crossed over and fell back into bed. At least the bed was warm.
Just a dream.
Michael Gladwell loved History.
Actually, it would be more accurate to say he hated it. His parents had always tried to push him to other pursuits - business, or technology, or a career in the military, or anything. They hadn't believed him when he told them he wished he could.
The History department had been dying when he entered the program. “Out of favor with the Ministry.” Now, a decade later, he was the head of the history department by virtue of the fact he was the only professor in it.
But he could not put it down.
His enclave, the Darrowtown Enclave, was one of a half dozen or so in the world. Something like half a million people, roads, offices and apartments and hot dog stands, huddled behind the Wall. Who built it? Why? That knowledge was lost.
That was before the War.
Most of the world was wasteland. Beyond the Wall, a million million miles of blasted urban ruins where nothing grew, and only the ghosts felt at home. Literally ... the “Ethereal Resonant Echoes Manifesting Collective Hallucinations,” in Ministry-speak. Hallucination. Hallucinations capable of murder.
Of course, you knew not to ask those questions. You knew what it would get you.
Mike knew what he would get. When he ignored the subtle hints: “Past is dead, let it rest.” When he ignored the relentlessly dwindling salary and budget cuts. He'd known what was happening.
But he couldn't stop.
He had found records - clear documentation - of things that had never happened. A moon shot. Olympics. Revolutions happening in countries on continents that weren't there on the maps. Like some one had made up whole continents ... or some one had taken them away.
And the War. The Last War. Of that, there was no mention. Not the weapons, not the causes ... not even the enemy. All these fragments, pages torn from magazines, shreds of ancient newspapers, not one even mentioned the War.
It wasn't the challenge that drove him. There was something lost. There was a hole in his world where something should be and there was nothing there and he had to look. He couldn't not. So Mike went back to the stacks, the books, the artifacts of a vanished world, searching history ... because he didn't know where else to look.
The University was on the edge of the Darrowtown Enclave, some of the buildings towering tall enough to provide a view of the wasteland over the wall. He assumed they did, anyway, but even as Head of the History Department he rarely got above street level.
His office . . . the whole department, which pretty much was his office, was in the basement of the the sagging three-story tall Humanities building. At least no one bothered him. Usually - usually no one bothered him.
When he walked into the building's mail room, Barb grabbed him.
“You've got a guest,” she said quietly, her restless eyes flickering towards Marty and then back. Marty was Campus Security, and kept his job mainly by informing on teachers. He was at his station by the door, and despite the familiar reek of vomit and urine, he seemed to be asleep. Marty must have scored last night. “He's waiting in your office.”
Christos, I can not afford this. “Thanks, Barb.” He reached in his pocket and fumbled for the right bill. Her pudgy hand came up and his was suddenly empty.
“Don't mention it.”
The heat and the pounding roar of the furnace was overwhelming before he even got to the bottom of the stairs. His office was in back of the stacks, and filled with more moldy, disintegrating manuscripts than the campus library. The door was open and lights were on, but he couldn't see anyone...
“Hello?” he shouted over the thundering rumble of the furnace.
“Hallo!”
Stepping out from behind a shelf emerged a stump of a man: shabby brown coat and a rotted tooth grin. He held a package in one hand, the other was inside his coat. Mike knew it was resting on a gun.
“Oh, hey Jim!” he shouted, “Come on in, and let me see what you've got! Coffee!?”
“Right you are, Professor.”
What Jim had, once the door sealed out some of the noise and pleasantries were done, was a 3rd printing of the the second edition of “Saving Time: The Story of Chronodymanics,” dug up from some book collection in some basement ruin in the wastes. The paper was cracking, and it had minor water damage, but it was in remarkable condition. It was also illegal - the Ministry would execute Mike for just holding it.
“I've already got a copy.”
“Ah, come on. You know what I had to go through to get that past the Wall? To say nothing of hunting the damn thing up . . . there was a 'haunt on our arses halfway across the . . .”
“Look, I'm sorry. I can't use University funds for this one, and even if I could, the well's running dry. I've got,“ he opened up the drawer and pulled out a jar - mostly coins, but with a few bills folded in, “that. Rainy day fund.”
Jim hesitated - it was barely enough for lunch and a couple of beers, and Jim could tell that at a glance. Mike could see the calculations in his eyes. Still, it was literally all the money he had. He wouldn't have let Jim see where he kept it otherwise.
“Alright, then.” The other hand reached out, if you could call the clicking, metal, grease-caked prosthetic a hand, and the jar disappeared under his coat. “Alright. Don't be expecting any more, though, seeing as how you can't pay me ... I guess henceforth I'll have to take my business elsewhere.” Jim paused. Contraband books were not in high demand.
“I'll see you, later Jim. I get paid in a week, come back if you find anything else.”
Jim snorted, “I know the way out.” Only after the door closed and he had counted to 100 under his breath did Professor Michael Gladwell relax, breath out, and with trembling hands reach for the text.
It was a week later, after the first day of the new semester, that Mike picked up his paycheck.
The light was fading and the lamps were coming on in places. He should have been home by now, but his plan to cut class short had hit a snag.
Avoiding the shadows (muggings produced a few corpses every week), he aimed for the Administration Building. It was the tallest of the Darrowtown University buildings, glass and chrome, and looked more like a corporate office than an educational facility. As he opened the door, he couldn't keep his mind from drifting a little.
One class canceled, 8 students in the other and 2 no shows. Of the 8 students tonight, 3 were engineering students looking for an easy elective, and 4 were half-baked idiots looking for “occult wisdom.” Half of those might make it to the final. The last one, though . . . an Asian girl in thick glasses . . . didn't fit the profile. Any profile.
She could be a plant, but the Ministry hadn't run one through his class for a long time. Any way, they didn't employ 'ethnics,' never did. They might have changed that, but . . . she had been as snarky as any student, but she was listening. Really listening, and at the end she had asked when the War started. He stumbled something out, and none of the other students had noticed, but . . . no one ever asked that. No one.
The cashier's office was in the back, and Mike received the check with shaking hands - he hadn't eaten well for the past two days. The clerk looked at him with thinly veiled contempt, which he ignored. He turned to go.
There was a lady waiting, and she waved at him. “Professor Gladwell?”
“Yes?” he answered, out of habit.
“The Dean was hoping he could have a word with you.” She wore a smart business suit and had short blond hair and an open, infectious smile. Mike started to sweat. Would the building entrance be covered? His gaze flashed towards the door, and he suddenly found her hand on his wrist. He hadn't seen her move.
“You do have time, don't you?”
Although the bright smile never faltered, she was squeezing hard enough to grind his bones together.
“Of course.” He replied through gritted teeth. “Of course.”
The Dean's office was on the top floor - 40th or 50th or something. There was money here, and power. When the University actually admitted the existence of History, it was at best a memo from on high. He had never thought that they were written somewhere, and now that he was seeing it, his attention was else where.
The secretary (Ms. Maxie?) blathered on about the Dean and his office, and about the problems with the copiers. He had trouble focusing because she hadn't eased her grip, not in the elevator, or walking through the maze of halls and cubicles. In a lucid moment he remembered muscles were supposed to die from fatigue toxins if clenched too long, and then the pressure was gone.
They had arrived.
The Dean's office was dark - mostly dark, although a light shone down on the chair behind the desk. The high backed chair was facing the windows (a corner office looking out over the vast darkness of the wastelands) and a voice was speaking . . . reciting? No, not reciting . . . reading. Mike's blood went cold.
“Even without a technical understanding, the implications of the quantum 'Many World' theory seem clear: the future is not set. Broyle's model indicated something far more radical: neither is the past.
“The Ministry's Conflict Prevention Bureau restricts access to certain areas of knowledge, citing the laudable - I like that, 'laudable,' that's a good word - the laudable goal of preventing a recurrence of the technologies that led to the War. One cannot wonder at the assertion that not only must the technology be restricted, so to must knowledge of what those technologies are.
“Blah, blah . . .” the sound of pages being flipped, “Ah! Here we are . . . the possibility of not only defeating our enemies, but preventing them from ever having existed to challenge us! These 'Time Bombs' . . . heh, good one . . . would literally be an attack on time itself, and the consequences of . . . well, it goes on. Gets a bit dull. I couldn't figure out how the hell you wrote it, until... Well, here, this bit:
“Perhaps the most frightening thing about these weapons is that if they were used, we would never know. A historic general dies as a baby, and a nation disappears from our maps - from our present. We don't know it ever existed, because it never did.
“Now think if it wasn't a nation, but a friend, a brother, a wife. The events that created them never occurred. They disappear and you would not even know that your life had been changed.
“Hey, think about how they feel: You wake up Saturday morning with plans to spend the whole weekend existing, and then BAM! Now that's got to suck.”
The chair spun slowly around, and a sheaf of papers bound with strings was tossed onto the desk. The Dean flipped it open again, and Mike could see the tight, hand written scrawl. It had been in his desk when he left to teach class.
“You should be proud, Mike. Your first book.”
The Dean (never referred to by name, Mike wasn't even sure he had ever heard it) was young . . . too young, and somehow too beautiful - sharp bone structure, clear skin, perfect, white teeth, and pale blue eyes. There was a warmth in his voice - but even in the dim light, Mike could see that it never reached his eyes.
“Thank you, sir. And it's 'Professor Gladwell,' please.”
Mike didn't know what he was expecting - anger, surprise? - but what he got was a pure delight of laughter.
“That is right! Mike, what the hell was I thinking? Oh, lordy lordy lordy.” The Dean took a breath and shook his head.
“I am so glad to have met you. 'What do we need a history department when we don't even have a history?' That's what they said, Mike. I convinced them you'd turn up stuff - odd chants, weird bits of rituals we've lost - but this, “ he indicated the book, “this is beyond anything I'd ever hoped for. You, Mike, you have . . . potential.”
Mike was a bit taken aback. He had expected to be taken out back and executed. Not . . . complimented?
“Tell you what: an explanation. You like that crap, right?
“Here, look... cause and effect, action and reaction, all that causality shit, right? But what does it look like, a present without a past? What happens to the effect when the cause is blown to a shit pile of quantum vomit? Great wide blast craters stretching across centuries of human history, what then?”
The chair revolved again, and the lights went down. The two walls were floor to ceiling windows, and the view of the wastes, rolling out to the horizons and lit here and there by an burst of fire or a flicker of light - it was spectacular. Out there scavengers where searching and dying, half-real nightmares haunting sleeping minds and occasionally devouring unwary flesh.
“I'm glad we had this little chat, Mike. We're done.”
What happened next was confused. He remembered thinking of Ms. Maxie and starting to turn when there was the howl and burn of a constrained plasma field weapon and he was somehow on the floor in the corner and something horrible and chittering and metal was flying through the air and a searing arc of light burned the air and a wind rushed in and he had not even heard any glass break and he stared out into the night were the dark rubble had been skyscrapers reached to the heavens and their windows glowed brightly and he could see them, clearly see the people inside talking and eating and sleeping and they looked . . . warm.
Mike started speaking - there was a whisper in his ear, and he spoke. A translation of the Key of Solomon, a litany and prayer he had read a hundred times, but now he ignored the flashes and screams behind him and did not just recite the words. He closed his eyes and prayed.
When he finished, it was quiet. He rolled away from the jagged shards of what was left of the window, distantly wondering if anyone had been walking below. In the darkness of the office, he couldn't see much, but a figure emerged, highlighted against the sky. She lifted him up, threw his arm over her shoulder, and together they lurched forward.
“I can walk,” he protested.
“Not with a broken leg,” she replied. “Buddha on a stick, I hope we don't have to work together.” Past a sparking pile with the acrid stink of burnt metal. Out the door. “Nice one with the banish, thou.”
“Well, it was Solomon - a prayer for extending dominion over demons. My wife helped. Demons, of course, only makes sense. Never thought . . . I'm going to have to change the sylabus.”
He didn't see the small Asian girl smirk, and suddenly remembered . . . “There were towers.” He said. “They were . . . they weren't right. Or . . . we aren't right. We aren't right. It's not . . . it shouldn't be so cold.” The elevator arrived with a cheerful Bing! and they went in.
“So let's go fix it.” She jabbed the a button and the doors started sliding closed. He nodded in agreement.
“What broken leg?”
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