My grandpop said nothing for a while, staring up at the ceiling.
Finally, after a while, he spoke again.
“Well, you won’t have to worry about it anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, I’m going to go back and fix things.”
“Right. With those magic pills. But I don’t think you’re going to be able to fix things, because no matter how hard you push, life has a way of pushing back even harder.”
“I can fix things.”
“No, you actually can’t. The pills are gone. Someone stole them.”
“Yeah, I know. I stole them.”
“What? That was you? How?”
“I hired some kid I know to break into the place, which technically isn’t breaking in, since it’s my place.”
“No it’s not. It belongs to the government.”
“Yeah and the government owes me for what it did to my family. They couldn’t kill my boy in Vietnam, so they had to get him with a bunch of loony pills. Well, I’m going to use those pills against the sons of bitches. I’m going to set things right.”
My grandpop had them in his hand. He forced the pills into his mouth and chewed on them like hard candy.
I lunged for him, forgetting that I was down to three good fingers, and they weren’t enough. He was eighty-four yet still strong as an ox. A lifetime of manual labor will do that for you.
He smiled at me as he chewed, pale eyes boring into mine.
“Don’t worry. You’re not going to remember any of this.”
Even now, he couldn’t bear to call me by my name. Mickey. He’d never liked it. Never liked that my dad had named me after a faggy fat-lipped singer in a rock and roll band.
“It doesn’t work that way! You can’t change the past. I’ve tried. It doesn’t work!”
“You just didn’t try hard enough.”
“What do you mean, I didn’t try hard enough? What did you want me to do, go back in time and kill a twelve-year-old kid? Is that what I should have done? Is that what you’re trying to do? Grandpop, you can’t just do that! You can’t!”
But I was talking to his unconscious body. His eyes were already closed; his other self had already left his body behind.
XII
How It Ends
The summer sun burned at the back of my neck and the top of my head as I walked home from the hospital. Where was my fedora now? At home, in the apartment.
I wanted to blow the last of my money drowning myself in beer, but I wanted it to be good beer. After all, it was time to celebrate, right? My grandpop just O.D.-ed on a bottle of time-traveling pills and was going to fix everything. So I stepped into the bodega and went straight to the counter.
“Do you sell Sierra Nevada?”
The guy behind the counter looked at me.
“Eh, no. Bud, Coors Light, Yuengling, Old English.”
“No microbrews? Really?”
“Hey, I like the stuff, too. But it’d never sell in this neighborhood. Aren’t you the guy who’s been buying up all of the Golden Anniversary?”
“Yeah.”
“And you live upstairs, don’t you.”
“Yeah.”
He held out his hand.
“Willie Shahid.”
“Mickey Wade.”
“Not that it’s any of my business, but where’s the cranky guy who used to live upstairs?”
“That would be my grandpop. You two didn’t get along?”
“Well, being called a mushin kind of puts a strain on the relationship. And I don’t even know what a mushin is.”
“It’s probably what you think it is.”
“Yeah, I figured. Look, this is also none of my business, but do you have any friends staying over? I thought I heard some noises upstairs earlier.”
“I don’t think so. Could be my friend Meghan—the attractive young lady you may have seen me here with a while back. Or it could be one of the other residents.”
“Other residents? You’re the only one who lives upstairs.”
“I’m what?”
“Yeah. Didn’t your grandfather tell you?”
“The rest of the apartments are vacant?”
“Have been ever since I opened this place five years ago.”
I keyed my way into the front door and was preparing to bound up the stairs when I heard a moaning noise. A woman’s voice. At first I thought it was Erna. Then I remembered no, it couldn’t be. This was 2009, not 1972.
Then it hits me, who else it could be.
No no no…
I don’t remember climbing the two flights. I just remember fumbling with my keys before remembering the lock was broken. I kicked open the door to the apartment. It was empty. No one on the couch, or in the bathroom, or under the desk or in the closet. I ran back out into the hallway. Hearing another moan.
I tried 3-B, which was locked. Now I did kick in the door, which opened a lot easier than I would have thought. Maybe it was the adrenaline, but more likely this building was outfitted with shitty doors back when Dr. DeMeo turned it into his little science lab.
Inside, 3-B was a frozen apartment setting, like a page out of a 1970s Sears catalog. Spare. Table, chairs, cheesy tablecloth with an awful paisley pattern. Three candlesticks. A plastic apple, a plastic set of grapes, and two plastic pears, arranged not in a bowl but at random on the table. The dust in here was unreal. I think I was the first person to set foot in this room in about thirty years.
At least, a physical foot.
By the time I kicked open 3-C and yelled for Meghan, pleaded with her to keep moaning, I could hear her, I realized what this was. His test control rooms. That’s why he needed an empty apartment building. His OBE subjects would lie on that psychiatrist’s couch of his and try to astrally project themselves into other rooms. If they made it, he or she would be asked to describe the contents of the room. One apple, doctor. Two pears. And the ugliest tablecloth I’ve ever seen.
“MEGHAN!”
Another moan—down on the second floor.
But now I knew where she’d be. She’d be in Erna and Billy’s old apartment—2-C.
Because Billy would have dragged her there.
She was on the floor of the empty apartment, trembling. She was covered in too much blood for me to see her wounds. Some of the blood had dried on the floor. She’d been here for a long time.
“Meghan stay with me, it’s going to be okay, the hospital’s just a few blocks away, I’m calling now, Meghan come on, look at me, I’m here, it’ll be okay.”
She mumbled.
I could barely make out the words.
Waiting for me.
Hallway.
He’d been waiting for her in the hallway, just before sunrise.
I fumbled with the phone. I don’t remember what I said to the 911 dispatcher, other than a woman’s been stabbed, please hurry, get here right now, please, God, PLEASE, followed by the address and the apartment number. I gave them Willie Shahid’s name downstairs.
I didn’t know first aid, other than to try to apply direct pressure and try to stop the flow of blood. But where was I supposed to start? Horrible gashes and scars covered Meghan’s face and arms, her pretty, elegant hands. The knife had slashed through her blouse, too, a number of times.