Points of Departure: Stories Page 6

  Karen smiled tentatively. “The farmer was going to leave them to rot,” she said. “I guess that must have been it.”

  The thought passed through Michael’s mind that perhaps she was crazy, but he did not jump to conclusions.

  There was a basket of fresh oranges in his kitchen. “You want to come up for a cup of tea?” he asked. “Tea and oranges? I’m out of everything else.”

  “Tomorrow,” she said. “Let’s make a date for tomorrow. I just realized that there’s something I have to do today.”

  She gently freed her arm from his protective grip and he noticed that her wrist was reddened where the drunk had grabbed her and was starting to bruise.

  “But you can’t just walk away by yourself,” he protested.

  “I’ll be fine,” she said, and she walked away by herself.

  Michael awoke early the next morning and walked to the grocery store. The windows of Karen’s apartment were still dark when he left the complex. The grocery store was closed and the sign in the window read: Out of Everything.

  Someone who had not believed the sign had smashed the plate glass window. Through the shards of broken glass Michael could see that the shelves had been pulled down and the cash register knocked off the counter. Michael stepped closer to the door and heard a rustling in the litter of paper bags beside the counter. A furtive gray shadow ran from the shelter of the bags across the open floor.

  Michael watched the rat disappear into the back of the store and did not investigate further.

  From a corner dispenser, he picked up a newspaper.

  The headlines talked about the food riots in some sections of the city, about the strike, about an epidemic of a sort of fever-flu, about the ongoing gasoline shortage.

  He waited for a bus home, but after an hour he gave up and walked. The trash had not been picked up in the neighborhood for almost a month and the garbage had spilled from cans and bins into the gutter. More than once, he thought he saw a rat dart into the shadows.

  Karen was waiting for him at the door to his apartment.

  She wore a lacy blouse that could have been from an era that matched her hairstyle. Under her arm she carried a loaf of bread—a hard-crusted long loaf with the scent of sourdough about it. “This will go better with tea,” she said. “We did have a date to drink tea, didn’t we?”

  While the water boiled for tea, Michael sliced the bread, apologizing for the lack of butter for the bread or sugar for the tea.

  “Are you from out in the country?” he asked, trying to keep any note of envy out of his voice.

  “I was born in the city,” she said, “but I spend a lot of time outside these days.”

  “Where?” he asked. “It doesn’t seem like there’s anywhere in the city that you can spend time in the sun anymore.”

  Karen had picked up a white pawn from the chess set on the coffee table. Michael had played the game regularly with another tenant in the apartment complex, but the man had moved recently. Karen examined the plastic piece in her hand, ignoring his question. “You know,” she said, “when I was a kid I loved reading Through the Looking Glass, but I never learned how to play chess.

  “The book makes a lot more sense if you know how the chess pieces move.” He reached out impulsively and took the tanned hand that held the pawn. “I’ll teach you if you like.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’d like that.”

  He noticed the bruise on the wrist of the hand that he held—dark purple marking the positions of the drunk’s thumb and four fingers. The corner of his mind that cataloged such things recalled the day she had brought oranges: her hand reaching up to smooth back an escaping curl of hair and on her wrist, marked in purple, the print of a thumb and four fingers.

  “Had that guy hassled you before?” he asked, suddenly protective.

  “No, that was the first time I had run into him. And I could have handled it myself, I just …” She followed his gaze to the mark on her wrist and fell silent. “I’m used to taking care of myself.”

  “Some other drunk, then,” he persisted. “You had a bruise like that the first time I met you. When you brought the oranges.”

  She continued looking down at the chessboard, where the lines ran straight and the squares were neatly ordered.

  “You should be more careful,” he continued. “You shouldn’t wander around by yourself. You don’t know what the city is like.”

  “I was born here,” she said quietly. “I know what it’s like.” Gently, she freed her hand from his and set the pawn back in place. “Here. Show me how the pieces move.”

  She avoided his eyes and he wondered if he had overstepped the bounds of their brief acquaintance. “I didn’t mean to tell you what to do,” he said. “It’s just … my younger sister was killed by a rapist when she was fifteen; my parents died in a fire set by vandals when I was twenty. The city—”

  “The city can’t hurt me,” she interrupted. “I can leave anytime I want.”

  He looked at the bruise on her wrist and his voice held a note of angry concern. “Right,” he said. “Two bruises in three days.”

  “One bruise,” she said calmly. “I brought you the oranges after you hit the drunk.”

  “You brought them the day before.”

  She met his eyes and in an even tone said, “I brought them after. I travel in time.” He remembered that when he first met her he had wondered about her sanity (but the stray part of his mind reserved for vagrant thoughts said—where did she get a loaf of french bread and a bushel of oranges in the city?) “If you had not come along when you did yesterday, I would have just vanished to another time, leaving that man behind.” She watched him with calm eyes that could have been honest or could have been mad.

  “Where did you get the oranges anyway?” he asked, because that question seemed to touch the heart of the matter.

  “There were orange groves here once. The farmers would pick the oranges when most were ripe. There were always a few left. If someone were to have taken them, it wouldn’t have mattered to anyone. They would have rotted anyway.” She shrugged. “I took them.”

  “Oh,” he said. And stopped, trying to think of something more to say.

  “Look, why don’t you just think that I’m crazy if that’s easier for you,” she suggested. He could tell by the tone of her voice that her indifference was feigned. “Why don’t you show me how the pieces move?”

  He showed her the moves and started to teach her the rules of the game. As they played, he watched her, noting the way her hands touched the pieces and her eyes studied the board. No, she did not seem mad.

  After they finished their tea, she stood to leave. “I’ll be back,” she said uncertainly.

  “I’d like to see you again,” he said. Then, still caught by confusion, he asked, “Tell me; why are you going to walk away out the door when you could just vanish?”

  She smiled for the first time since she had told him she could leave the city. She lifted a hand in farewell and vanished.

  The apartment was empty and he believed her. And that night the city seemed to close in around him. He could smell the smog in the breeze that came through his window. In the apartment below, he could hear someone coughing with a painful, racking repetition. Unable to sleep, he wondered where and when Karen wandered that night.

  She met him when he returned from work the next day with a bottle of red wine made of grapes grown in the Napa Valley in 1908. She explained that it was a very young wine; she had taken it from a cellar where it had been stored in 1909. The cellar was destroyed in a mudslide soon after she took the bottle, so no one missed it.

  “I can’t change anything back there. I can’t make a difference,” she explained. “If I did I couldn’t travel.”

  “How do you know taking the wine won’t change anything?” he protested. “Do you figure out all the possible repercussions of an action and…”

  “I don’t figure things out. I do what feels right. It’s a different
way of thinking.”

  He leaned forward over the coffee table, watching her closely. “You might be able to change all this.” He gestured to indicate the city, the smog, the garbage, the world in general. “Just by doing some small things. Stop Ford from inventing the car by …”

  “No, I couldn’t.” She reached across the table and took his hand. “If I didn’t accept the world as it is, I couldn’t travel.”

  “You won’t change things,” he said.

  “I can’t. It doesn’t work that way.” She squeezed his hand and said, “I’m sorry, Michael. That’s the way it is.”

  They played chess and drank wine and he tried to teach her some of the strategy of the game. But she claimed she could not learn to look ahead any further than the next move. She shook her head when he explained traps that a good player could lay for his opponent—thinking several moves ahead.

  She did not go home that night. She stayed—and when he learned she was a virgin, he was surprised. She laughed.

  “Who would I have slept with?” she asked him. “I started time-hopping when I was in high school. And back in time …” she hesitated. “I’m like a ghost back there. People look past me or through me. They don’t really notice me at all.” She shrugged. “And I’ve never told anyone else about time-hopping. I don’t know why I told you, really.”

  He made love to her gently. Afterward, as they lay in bed together, he asked, “How old are you, anyway?”

  “I was a sophomore in high school three years back according to your time. But I’ve been traveling around quite a bit in those years. I’d figure I’m about twenty-three.”

  “Your parents?”

  “Killed in a gas line riot.” She fell silent. “I wasn’t close to them anyway. I was different.”

  Michael lay still, one arm around her shoulders. The lady who lay beside him could run away whenever she wanted. Run away from shortages, from smog, from plague.

  “Can you take me with you?” he asked suddenly.

  For a long moment, she lay silent and he almost thought that she had not heard him. “I don’t know,” she said at last. “You would want to make changes. You would try to mess with the laws of the Universe.”

  “You could try to take me.”

  “I’ll try.” She pressed close to him in the narrow bed.

  “Hold me. And try to come with me.” He hugged her tightly, willing himself to stay with her, wherever or whenever she went.

  She vanished from his arms.

  He lay alone in bed, listening to the man who lived in the apartment below coughing. The air that blew in the apartment window carried the scents of the dying city.

  She met him at the door with a handful of wild strawberries when he returned from his job at the bookstore.

  “I’m sorry it didn’t work,” she said. “I didn’t think it would. You want to change the past and you can’t do that.”

  “Yeah.” He felt dirty and tired. He had seen a mugger attack an old woman just a few blocks from the apartment.

  Michael had arrived just as the young man had run away.

  The old woman had been crying and clutching her arm where she had been slashed with his knife.

  Michael had helped her to her house and called the police from her phone. The entry hall to her apartment had smelled of stale air and grease, and while he was on the phone he could hear the old woman whimpering to herself and coughing—a dry, hacking sound that ripped at her throat and lungs and made her double over in pain.

  He had waited with the old woman until the ambulance arrived.

  Karen relaxed on his couch, leaning back and looking tanned and healthy. Michael’s throat felt scratchy and sore and his eyes ached from the smog.

  “Where have you been?” he asked abruptly.

  “Back to when Indians lived here,” she said. “Interesting people. I tried to pick up a few words of their language while. I was watching the women grind acorns. I learned to grind acorns instead.” She grinned and pretended to be grinding acorns. “Every day, they get up—”

  “How long were you there?” he asked, knowing that he sounded angry.

  “About a week.” She did not try to tell him any more about Indians or acorns and he did not ask.

  As he made tea, he told her about the old woman. “The city is getting worse,” he said. “And it looks like this strike will go on for months.”

  They played chess and Michael tried not to think about the city as he played. But he could not help thinking—this lady can leave anytime. “It doesn’t affect you at all, does it?” he said at last. “It doesn’t matter what happens to the city at all. You can always leave.”

  She did not look at him. She looked down at the chessboard where the world was ordered by lines and squares. “I’m here,” she said softly. “I always come back here. I watch the city where I was born decay and I cannot halt the process.” Her eyes were angry and sorrowful.

  Michael reached out and touched her hand, but he did not respond. “I travel because I accept the world as it is. I watch and I run away.” She fell silent.

  “Hey, I’m sorry,” Michael started. “I didn’t mean to … I mean, you tried to take me with you, but …” He sat beside her on the couch. “Hey, let’s get out of this apartment tonight. We can go out to dinner. I know a restaurant that’s still open.”

  At his insistence, they went out. The wine was good; he managed to ignore the canned flavor of the vegetables. On the third glass of wine, he said, “You know what’s going to happen as well as I do.”

  She stopped, with her glass halfway to her lips. “No, I don’t. I never can see the next move.”

  “The city is dying—you know that. And those of us who live here will die with it. I’m dying with it. But you can leave.” He watched her and thought about how she had spent the afternoon picking wild strawberries. He suppressed his anger and envy, and continued in a calm voice. “I resent that. And I’m going to resent that more and more. You’re going to have to leave eventually, so you might as well leave now.”

  She sipped her wine, blue eyes considering him over the rim of the glass. “Would you leave me?”

  His laughter scratched his sore throat and his face felt hot from the wine. “Don’t be silly, Karen. We hardly know each other.”

  “That doesn’t answer the question,” she said. He did not reply. She regarded him steadily. “I wouldn’t leave a friend to die alone,” she said.

  “Don’t be silly,” Michael repeated. He was sweating and the chair did not feel solid beneath him. He reached across the table to touch Karen’s hand to assure himself that she was still there.

  They walked back to the apartment complex, hand in hand, after waiting half an hour for a bus that did not come. The driveway of the apartment court was blocked by an ambulance. The driver stood beside the vehicle, smoking a cigarette, and the spinning light above his head illuminated his face, flashing red, red, red.

  Michael asked the driver what was happening. “A drunk living in that apartment died of the fever,” the driver said.

  “Part of the epidemic. They’re going to quarantine this part of the city, I hear.”

  The news bulletin on the radio said that the quarantine was not just of one section of the city. The entire city was cut off, quarantined from the rest of the world.

  Michael sat on the couch, his head cradled in his hands.

  Karen laid an arm over his shoulders and he turned to face her. He was hot again, angry. He felt suspended in a world that was disintegrating around him. “Don’t—” he started, and his words were interrupted by a racking cough. The world whirled.

  “Michael, I’m sorry. I want you to come with me. But …”

  Again, the coughing, the heat, and the pain deep in his chest. She was crying and he remembered, as if from a great, dim distance, another time that she had been crying and he had reached out to her. He could not reach out.

  “I wanted to change the world for you, I could not go away,” she
said.

  “Go away,” he said dully, repeating her last words. Then in an angry tone, “All right. Go away.”

  She left, a quiet vanishing. The room was too hot and it kept spinning and shaking, and presently, he slept.

  A cold hand on his forehead. The rim of a glass pressed to his lips. He tasted sour juice on his tongue and felt it dribbling down his chin. “Orange juice,” said Karen’s husky voice. “It’ll help some.”

  He opened his eyes and in the dim light of an early morning (not knowing which morning) saw her face. Large blue eyes in a face thinner than he remembered. “What morning?” he managed to ask.

  She murmured, “Your time? The morning after, I think.”

  Orange juice trickled down his chin and the room whirled. Like a petulant child, he turned his head from the glass and tumbled down through the levels of fever and sleep.

  A scent of flowers. He opened his eyes to her face in the afternoon light now, filtered through the layer of smog over the city. Gray light. Behind her, a bouquet of flowers rested by the chess set on the coffee table. The plastic pieces were set up as if for a game, but the white queen was missing. Karen held it in her hand.

  “Karen,” Michael said. “I want to come with you. I don’t want to care about the next move.” His tongue was dry and clumsy.

  She looked at him and he noticed wrinkles in the skin around her eyes. The skin of the hand that held the white queen was translucent, parchmentlike. “When you were young you figured out the chess moves. I didn’t care about them. It’s a different way of thinking and I can’t change you, Michael.” She twisted the chess piece restlessly in her hand.

  “I’m getting better,” he started. “Much better.” He tried to lift his hand to wipe away the tears that trickled from her weary looking eyes. But his arms seemed so heavy and the room whirled around him. He closed his eyes against the gray light of afternoon and whirled down, listening to Karen’s husky voice—huskier with age—saying:

  “I won’t lie to you, Michael. You aren’t getting better. The fever is fatal …” Then the voice faded in the distance.

  Again, the touch of a hand—feather light and cool. “Tell me about the Indians, Karen,” he whispered through a dry throat. She had never told him about the Indians because he had not wanted to hear. And she told him about the taste of acorn stew and the warmth of the sun and the drink they made with manzanita berries and the way the little children played and laughed. And he whispered, “Tell me about the nicest time you’ve been to. Tell me.”