“I don’t understand,” Crash said, his head starting to spin.
“Time travel is strictly regulated and controlled. It’s against the law for people to travel through time. They fear that people going back in time can find a way to put their system out of business. Create a resistance. Fight the system.”
“I’m all for that,” Crash said. “But—”
“There’s so much more to tell you, but right now you have to keep moving.”
“What?”
“Phoning through time is traceable. Take the subway to Union Square. Whatever you do, don’t get arrested. I’ll send someone to you to insure you fade.”
“Arrested? Insure I fade? What? Hello?” There was a clicking, then, “Please deposit twenty-five cents for the next five minutes or your call will be interrupted.”
“Twenty-five cents?? Hello?”
The line went dead.
The subway station looked mostly the same. Crash always had tokens on him but there was no coin slot. He watched people going in through the turnstile. They were swiping a card. Over by the wall, he saw a lady stick dollar bills into a machine. (At least the dollar bills were the same.) She was touching the screen. Huh!? After she left, he checked it out, even touching the screen, but decided to take his chances with the token-booth clerk. The white-haired black man was hardly visible through the thick glass. Crash got behind someone and watched the guy slip a five-dollar bill in the slot. Five bucks!? What the fuck!? Crash followed suit. The clerk gave him a MetroCard. Took him awhile to swipe it right, but then he was through the turnstile and waiting on the platform for a train whose glimmery lights were already visible in the tunnel distance. The TV screens were new and he could see himself leaning over the platform to look. A train passing on the uptown side. Silver bullets on wheels, not the blue-grays from 1973. And these made a funny howling sound, all nervous jittery.
The roar and blast of subway train pulling into station. The inside of the train was brighter but felt more cluttered. Crash stared wide-eyed at the moving ads, the screens flashing messages. A solitary marker scrawl on the wall of no decipherable message, seemed like the last graffiti in the world.
He sat by the doors. The people in the car were not even looking at each other. Everybody was busy with something. The lady across from him was typing on her phone, her pretty fingers moving nimbly across the small screen. Many people wearing earphones. A girl across the way tapping the screen of a tablet. Everybody was busy. There was not one person staring into space, falling asleep, or reading a book. At least there was one guy at the end there, reading a newspaper. The mechanical voice on the PA: “Backpacks and other personal belongings are subject to random search.” The guy reading the newspaper got up and left the newspaper. Crash slid over and scooped it up. It was a copy of the Village Voice. The poster on the wall opposite showed a package beside a subway bench. Is that right, so America has a black president? Beware of Suspicious Packages. (A strange thrill.)
“I’m reading a paper from the future,” he said, needing to hear the words. The black girl across from him was looking right at him, but she didn’t react. Her eyes were glazed, head bopping to earphones. He flipped through the newspaper again.
“America’s first black president is running for reelection.” The Twin Towers in flames. “Since 9/11, America has been fighting the war on terrorism.” American soldiers in Afghanistan. “Protests call for an end to ‘Stop and Frisk.’” Who’s Kim Kardashian? “Of the six hundred thousand New Yorkers stopped and frisked last year, only nine percent were white.” American soldiers in Iraq. If You See Something, Say Something. What kinda shit is this? “The latest move from the city that’s set trends by banning smoking in bars and trans fats in foods involves banning sugary drinks sold at restaurants, fast-food chains, theaters, delis, office cafeterias, and other places that fall under the New York City Board of Health’s regulation, by March 2013.”
Crash started to feel weird. He shut the paper, looking up at an ad that showed a Mexican family. Learn English. Oh shit. The train rocked and whined. People were giving him weird looks. Something was strangely oppressive. He got off the train at Union Square, went up the stairs to the main concourse, and spotted a group of people dressed all funky crazy. One was a colorful jester, a black kid with bells on his hat that jingled. There was a jockey, a princess, and there was this pretty blonde in an Alice in Wonderland dress that walked right up to him.
“Well, well. What kept you?” Her eyes were green, her blond hair raining down in loopy curls. She looked somehow familiar to him. He wondered if it was because she had a vague resemblance to Susan Sarandon.
“Are you … ?” Crash couldn’t even say.
“Of course,” she answered, laughing, turning, and pulling someone over. “And here’s the Doctor!”
A young guy in a doctor’s suit, white and clean. Obviously not the old Dr. Robert! He pressed his stethoscope to Crash’s chest, took a listen.
“Yes,” he said, “definitely alive.”
“I love your hair,” the Princess said, almost touching it.
“Hey, man,” the Jester said, his bells ringing, “you a real sight. “You lucky they din’t stop you, lookin’ like that.”
“What does that mean?”
“New York cops got the hots for people of color,” the Jester said.
“What the hell’s people of color?”
“Thass you, dog.”
“Dog?” Crash frowned. “Hey, who the fuck are you people? Why are you dressed up like that?”
“We’re going to a party,” Alice said. She hooked her arm with his. “And we’re bringing you. It’s a costume thing, see? Jockey, Doctor, I’m the Alice, see? You’re ’70s Dude. And we even have a Jester and a Princess.”
Crash looked from one to the other.
“Are you people on something?”
They laughed, a drunken swimmy laugh, a rollicking happy vibe that irritated him.
“We kinda make you less conspicuous, don’t we?” Alice winked. “Come.”
They started walking, the Jester’s bells ringing, the Jockey twirling a walking stick, the Princess swinging her star on a wand. “Manhattan ain’t nothing anymore but a mall for NYU students,” Alice said. “The action’s in Brooklyn.”
L train. Sips from a canteen of rum and cola.
“Do you have a portal?” the Doctor asked. A young white guy, the boy next door.
“I don’t even know what that is,” Crash said.
Alice held a round mirrored disc in front of his face. It was the size of a coaster. Just a little round mirror.
“This is a portal,” Alice said. “Moon Dust? It’s made from this.” Alice was looking at Crash and just smiling, a weird spirit thing. Crash was feeling it. Like the almost-touch of acid. “Moon Dust is just one of many ways the Doctor has … invented … to introduce people to the resistance.”
“But why?”
“You see the way things are now. They’re going to get worse.”
“But there’s a black president!”
Their laughter drowned out the roar of the train pulling into Bedford. The station was crammed with young people. There were more white people there than he had ever seen in one place, except for maybe that Ten Years After concert he went to at Randall’s Island … that bevy of girl asses in skimpy shorts going up the stairs … On the street, a throbbing energy of lights, bars, cars, girls in tight pants and short skirts showing off long nylon legs … Crash was swimming a little from the rum maybe.
Bar after bar along the street, music blaring through open windows, and this one especially, blaring Hendrix.
“Now you’re talkin’,” he said.
Alice nodded to the others and they all went into the bar where Hendrix was singing about crosstown traffic. Alice bought Crash a beer. The Princess was dancing in a corner with the Doctor. The Jockey was poring over the pizza menu with the Jester.
Alice clinked beers with him, words coming in snippets and bits. Crash had too many questions. “I can’t answer all that.” But her eyes. The way she looked at him. Somehow, the promise of an eternal fuck. The music went from Hendrix to Cream, from Cream to the Rolling Stones. How was it Santana all of a sudden, doing “Samba Pa Ti”? The lilting congas and that crooning guitar. Pressing close, slow moving, and she was feeling fine against him. When the song ended, her hands slid up his shoulders and around his neck. Her swimmy eyes closed beautifully slow. She kissed him. It was a sloppy, sudden kiss, but not rushed. It had sincerity.