“I have two sevens,” Buddy says.
“What?”
Wrong answer. Suddenly he’s back in 1995, three days before the Zap. The end of history. There are no memories of future poker games. This is the last he will ever play. He will never win another hand from his brother, or watch his sister frown over her cards. And he will never see Cerise again.
Irene touches his arm. “Buddy?”
He tries to focus on his cards. There are no sevens in this hand, merely a loosely connected series of cards that will never become a straight or a flush, and he knows better than to try to bluff Irene. He mucks his cards, folding.
That’s okay. One less distraction. He can watch his family, all of them, play across the decades.
17 Matty
The blue envelope was tucked into the springs above his bunk bed. It was addressed to him, in black handwriting he didn’t recognize. Inside was a single page, from a yellow legal pad. The ink was faint and scratchy.
Dear Matty,
We’ve never met, and to my great sadness, we never will. Alas and alack, as my Gran used to say. I suppose this is my one chance to sound like a grandmother.
My apologies for the pen. It’s terrible, but I don’t want to ask the nurse for another.
I regret that I know only a little about you. I’ve been told that you’re quite the brain, that you work hard, and have a good heart. I also know that you’re my daughter’s son, and as such have been raised by a brilliant, caring, fiercely protective person who can be hell to live with. I hope she wasn’t too hard on you. If my own mother could tell when I was lying I never would have escaped to meet your grandfather.
I’ve also been told that you’ve recently experienced something that I know a bit about. If you’re worried about where your gifts might take you, don’t be afraid. But I do have one piece of advice.
First, can I tell you a secret? I’ve only told it to one other person, your grandfather. But you deserve to know.
I worked for the government from 1962 to 1963, then again this past year (1974). I was a “remote viewer,” though that title’s not accurate. I wasn’t remote at all. I flew. In the skies, deep in the earth, below the oceans. There wasn’t anywhere I couldn’t go. My job was to find out all the secrets of our enemies. I loved the flying. Do you? You must.
All of that is technically “Top Secret” but it’s not the secret I want to tell you, which is this: I almost immediately came in contact with the other side. My Soviet counterpart, and fellow psychic, is named Vassili Godunov. He is—was?—a good man who loved his country as much as I loved mine. We realized that together we could pinpoint every missile silo in both of our countries, find every submarine, track every bomber. We also realized that if we gave our governments this information, they might destroy the world. I know this sounds melodramatic, but it’s true. Neither superpower can ever be too confident. Neither can ever think they can strike first and wipe out the arsenal of the other. (Look up “Mutually Assured Destruction.” Are the Encyclopaedia Brittanicas I bought still in the house?)
So, we lied. I lied to Destin Smalls, the man I worked for. Vassili lied to his superiors. We reported trivial sightings with great specificity, to keep them impressed with our abilities. But for any high-value target, the details we reported were too vague to act upon. (I learned that trick from your grandfather.) We kept the world safe by keeping it ignorant.
I tell you this not to scare you, but because you deserve to know the stakes, and I’m the only one to bring the news. My advice is this: don’t let the bastards use you. If later you want to use them, go right ahead. Teddy would approve. Your only duty now is to take care of yourself and your family, and to let them take care of you.
I have to sign off. I’m tired and scrawling this with a cheap Bic from an uncomfortable bed, and I have one more letter to write before I drift off.
Safe travels,
Her signature was beautifuclass="underline" a mountainous “M,” a towering “T,” with beautifully spiky characters after each.
At the very bottom of the page was this:
P.S.
How can I love someone I’ve never met? A mystery.
Also tucked into the springs was a plastic baggie that contained the two joints Irene had confiscated: one full, one half consumed.
My grandmother, Matty thought, is delivering drugs from beyond the grave.
How did she know about what was happening to him? Could she travel into the future? Even if she could do that, who delivered the all-too-physical envelope and Ziploc bag?
The letter and pot were freaking him out, but the message of their simultaneous appearance was unmistakable: it was his duty to help Frankie.
A half hour later he snuck out to the nest behind Grandpa Teddy’s garage and lit one of the joints. He needed to get as much of it into his lungs before he was unable to keep smoking. He thought, This is not a healthy life choice. And then: Duty calls.
He stayed out of his body for hours, his longest trip on record. He hovered in Mitzi’s Tavern, in Mitzi’s office, practically in Mitzi’s shadow. Friday, payday, made her office much more interesting than in previous visits. He watched her receive visitor after visitor, all men, most of them white, who brought her envelopes of cash. Mitzi would put them into the desk drawer, chat for ten seconds, then send the men packing.
As soon as they left the room, she moved the envelopes to the safe. It was then that Matty would sweep in, push his ghost noggin close to hers, and steal a glance at the dial. But Mitzi continued to make it impossible to read the combination. She leaned over the safe from her chair, her bird hand covering the dial, and spun it fast, barely looking at the numbers. For all he knew she’d kept the same combination for decades and could do it blind. After a couple of hours, he thought he had the starting number—28—but even that was a guess, because the dial was hash marks between every fifth number, and it could have been 27 or 29.
Mitzi barely left the room. Between visits she smoked, ate from a can of peanuts, read the paper, and drank coffee. Matty read over her shoulder, and mentally suggested solutions to the crossword puzzle. (He was usually wrong; Mitzi was really good at crosswords.) He killed time by floating around the room, peering into nooks and crannies. How malleable was his shadow body? Could he shrink down to mouse size, and go looking between the walls?
He also spent time pondering the morality of stealing from this old woman, and whether this was what Grandma Mo meant by helping his family. Frankie said Mitzi was a major criminal, but to Matty she seemed like a bored old lady doing a boring job.
A big change to her routine came when she filled a tumbler of water to make a drink that wasn’t coffee. She opened up a canister of Goji Go! that was sitting on the floor and stirred in a healthy portion of powder. The canister wasn’t here yesterday. Embrace life! was written in marker on the lid. Frankie, evidently, could sell this stuff to anyone, even his worst enemy.