"My younger self… Frank Marrity ..." Marrity was dizzy, and wondered if he was going to vomit. "He saved my daughter's life, at that restaurant, yesterday. He did a tracheotomy on her. She was supposed to choke to death, she died there, in my original lifeline. In the real world."
Golze's eyes were wide behind his steamy glasses and a smile was baring his yellow teeth and pulling his beard up on the sides. The choker ribbon was fully visible around his fat neck.
"You want us to kill your daughter?" he said. "What is she, twelve?"
"Yes, she's twelve. But by the time she's thirty, she's a monster. And no wonder — she's unnatural, living past yesterday; like a dead body walking around and talking."
"But you told her to run, this afternoon. We'd have her now, maybe, if you hadn't told her to run."
"I wasn't telling her, I was telling my younger self! This morning you people tried to kill him! Which… obviously isn't what I want."
Golze bent down to pick up the red ant. "You get the ape," he said. And when the toys were buzzing and clattering away again, he slouched back on his seat and said, "So you want us to kill your daughter."
Marrity felt hollow, a frail shell around a vacuum, as if he might implode into himself. Why did the fat man have to ask for a yes or no answer? he thought. I can't say yes to him. The horrible old man took her away.
But all I want is justice! My real life, not the nightmare life that grew out of the crack in reality, like a weed, like a nest of scorpions. What I'm saying yes to is reality!
Marrity opened his mouth — but he was sure that if he said yes here, now, he would not ever be able to go back to being the man who had not said it.
But I want the life the universe originally gave me. It's mine.
He took a deep breath.
Twenty
Yes," Marrity said hoarsely. The boat seemed very unsteady, and he gripped the hot orange-painted wood of the gunwales.
Golze was staring at him curiously. "Not just — kidnap her, sell her to Arab slave traders in Cairo? Get the duck."
"No, I think there's a… a Law of Conservation of Reality, that would bring her back." Marrity was sweating — drops were running down his forehead and he could feel them crawling over his ribs under his shirt as he obediently bent over and picked up the toy duck. "We'd still wind up in that twenty-four-foot trailer, and she'd still back the Ford over me in 2002. I can't risk her coming back. And killing her would be" — he was panting with the effort of trying to believe what he was saying — "would be more merciful."
"Okay, we'll do it. So where's the machine?"
"You don't have her. She's escaped from you. And as far as I can tell, your blind woman still means to kill Frank Marrity."
Golze jerked the oars in opposite directions, splashing drops of water into the air and jarring the boat. "Where is the machine?"
"I'd need some assurances—"
"We'll give you what you want if you tell me now. If you don't tell me now, we'll give you what you don't want, abundantly. Where is the machine?"
Marrity's shoulders slumped and he shook his head. "It's at my grandmother's house. In her backyard shed."
"Can we move it? Get it into the car?"
"No!" Marrity involuntarily looked at his hands, to be sure they were still solid enough to twist the key in the duck. "If you move it, how will I use it in 2006?"
"We'll move it back later, don't worry. We need you to have come back to tell us all this, after all. We don't want to screw up your time line. But we need to move it now, because other people are going to try to take it, and they won't care if it interferes with you or not."
"Okay, right." I've lost all control, Marrity thought. "No, you can't get it in the car. Part of it is the cement slab from the Chinese Theater, with Charlie Chaplin's footprints and handprints on it."
"Good lord. That's part of it? But she didn't have that in 1933, did she?"
"No, the slab was still out in front of the theater then. My grandmother had Chaplin himself, in '33, and he wound up getting temporally dislocated too, at least an accidental astral projection of him did, though he meant to just be a, a nonparticipating observer. It scared the daylights out of him — well, there was the earthquake too— and that summer he burned all but one of the prints of A Woman of the Sea."
"And we'll get that back," Golze said. "Burned up by a twelve-year-old girl! But we'll get it back." He had begun rowing strongly toward the dock. "Got to get to a radio," he panted. His glasses were opaque white, reflecting the sun. "We're going to need some help, and a truck."
The elderly Frank Marrity gripped the edges of the car seat and wondered if he was going to be sick. Golze was driving Rascasse's car, too fast around corners, and the car reeked of melted plastic. What had been the stereo was a blackened crater in the middle of the dashboard.
They were nearly at Grammar's house, and Golze had driven up the 110 to get here, so they were approaching from the south, and Marrity's excursions during these last three days had been by way of California Street, to the north; he hadn't seen these streets for many years, and there was more of his childhood than of his adulthood clinging to these old trees and pavements.
Moira and I rode our bicycles up and down Marengo Avenue, he thought, in the 1950s and '60s. The old bungalow houses were rushing past in a blur now, but he remembered each one; there's where we used to jump from roof to roof with the Edgerly boys, he thought, and there's where Moira fell off her bike and cracked her head and I had to carry her all the way home, three blocks.
Golze made a leaning right turn onto Batsford Street, and Marrity could see Grammar's house ahead on the left — and he remembered riding his bicycle up the sidewalk here on many late afternoons in the winter rain, his canvas newspaper bags empty and slapping wetly against the front wheel fork, and the olive oil taste of Brylcreem in his mouth from the rain running down his face.
It was tears he tasted now, and he quickly cuffed them away.
Grammar's old gray wood-frame house was on the northwest corner of Batsford and Euclid, and Golze turned left onto Euclid— but he drove straight on past Grammar's back fence and garage.
Golze was saying, "Fuck fuck fuck," in a quiet monotone.
"You passed it," Marrity said.
"I know," snapped Golze, peering into the rearview mirror. "There's a U-Haul truck parked at the curb." He was biting his lip. "Our truck won't be here for another couple of minutes, at least."
"You think these guys are here to take the stuff out of her shed?"
"Maybe." Golze drove past half a dozen houses, then slowly turned into an old two-strip driveway and backed out again, facing south now. He pulled in to the curb and put the engine in park, but didn't turn it off. Fifty yards ahead they could see the truck and the cars by Grammar's back fence.
"They may just be family," Golze said, "getting furniture out of the house. But we can't go in while they're there. Give me the binoculars from the glove compartment."
Marrity opened the glove compartment and handed Golze a pair of heavy olive green binoculars. "They don't look like my family," Marrity said. They must not take the machine away, he thought.