he’ll proceed to his fate. Or he’ll ignore the detour and roar past on the shoulder with a one-fingered salute. Or he’ll take Highway 1 north from L.A. to Salinas.
In a Wobbly-B, phase space is unchained and events are malleable. We have a stiff, scientific acronym: Fluid-Event Branes.
I load the signs into the truck bed and kick the guttering flares onto the shoulder, hastily burying them under sand. A deep chime sounds inside my mind.
Hurry!
A two-tone Ford sedan wheezes by from the west, a lanky bespectacled young man behind the wheel. Mr. Turnipseed, saved from a lifetime of notoriety. Half an hour later another Ford will pass this spot trailing the Spyder, a station wagon driven by photographer Sanford Roth, with fellow racer Bill Hickman riding shotgun.
The sun, a fiery egg, slides behind the desert foothills. Soon people will shut their windows against the cold night air and the howl of coyotes prowling the Diablo Range like gray ghosts. And in the morning, James Byron Dean will stumble out of bed in a Salinas bungalow, his hair corkscrewed from sleep and his eyes sporting the dark bags immortalized in
Alive and ready to race on the first day of October, 1955.
Final Bid: $268M US
[bidder identity redacted pending prosecution]
It isn’t time travel. Please keep that firmly in mind.
Traveling to the past inside one’s home universe is impossible. Traveling to a precise multiverse spacetime coordinate inside an adjacent reality
It’s best if you don’t think about that part.
My identity was erased after I stole a Device and deserted my job as a military physicist, but we’ll use one of the aliases I take to deal with my carefully selected, extremely wealthy clients: Jason Blackstone, brane slicer. That’s the slang term for outlaws like me.
Finding Jimmy in this 1956 isn’t difficult.
The scene is the Villa Capri, Jimmy’s favorite Hollywood bar. It’s a popular hangout for stars, including the sexually indeterminate and closeted gay actors. I spot Anthony Perkins, buxom Terry Moore, bronzed Tab Hunter and an incredibly youthful Dennis Hopper. They stop at Jimmy’s table to pay their respects.
From my bar stool I make eye contact.
I’ve replaced the filthy overalls and dust with slacks and an open-throated shirt, dark hair combed back. No flicker of recognition.
Brooding is Jimmy’s specialty, so I step to his table and buy him a drink. He stops fooling with those bongos he carries everywhere. He has bags under his eyes and is dressed in the rig that so infuriated the studio heads until they realized its marketing potential—scuffed boots, T-shirt, faded jeans and a dirty leather jacket.
My face is familiar but he hasn’t made the connection. We drink and talk about the races and the new Triumph 650cc Tiger motorcycle.
In his nearby bungalow he falls asleep as I rattle on about classic films and performances. He would often fall sound asleep in restaurants during conversations. When he finally stirs, I recount our meeting on the road to Cholame and Paso Robles. His face hardens in a mask of suspicion. If a ten-gallon hat were pushed back on his head, the image of Jett Rink, the angry, loveless cowboy, would be complete. He glances at my bare forearms, looking for the needle marks of a heroin addict.
“You’re from the future and I’m a ghost.”
“It’s a lot to process.”
He laughs. “So is Eisenhower going to be re-elected? When are the Reds gonna drop an atom bomb on New York?”
I’m not about to discuss a technology that shifts a conscious organism through the multiverse, burrowing through infinite branes, if you’ll excuse the morbid turn of phrase. The time-travel hokum works best.
Jimmy stabs out his cigarette and vaults up from the sofa. He smiles, exhaling smoke from both nostrils.
“You’re a fruitcake.”
I stay seated, keeping my voice low and even.
“Jimmy, you should at least hear what I have to say.”
He slips on the black leather jacket over the crumpled T-shirt and is instantly transformed into Jim Stark, the volatile middle-class rebel with smoldering eyes.
“I think you better hit the road.”
I do as he says, but pause at the door.
“Your first dog, Tuck, used to piss all over your Aunt Ortense’s back porch in the winter, next to that little black potbelly stove. Stunk like hell. Your favorite ice cream is coffee and raspberry mixed together. Revolting. Your favorite book is
Jimmy doesn’t blink. “Anybody could have dug all that up with a PI.”
“And the detour near Cholame?”
His eyes narrow. “I’ve done lots of work on television. You recognized me. I just can’t see what your angle is.”
“Lola Barnes.”
That gets an instant reaction.
“She seduced you after the Sadie Hawkins dance your senior year in high school and you sweated until you were certain she wasn’t pregnant.”
He opens his mouth to reply, but I interrupt him in my omnipotent, time-traveler-knows-all voice.
“I’ve studied your entire life, Jimmy. Right up until the end.”
Stark is gone. He looks like a kid jarred awake from a nightmare only to discover that it has crawled out from under the bed.
“It was a near head-on collision with a 1950 Ford sedan driven by a kid named Donald Turnipseed,” I continue. “You weren’t traveling twice the speed limit as people reported for years, but you weren’t wearing a seat belt. Rolf was thrown clear, but you were declared dead in the ambulance on the way to the hospital in Paso Robles at 5:59 Pacific Time.”
He runs a hand wildly through his hair. “This is
“Would I make up a name like Turnipseed?”
“Next you’ll tell me you ride around in one of those flying saucers,” he says in a sulky tone.
Jung was right: flying saucers are a manifestation of our collective fears in an epoch in which mankind’s own creations are more horrifying than any brimstone Underworld. But parallel universes, which precede early Hindu mythology, are quite real.
This jaunt has almost expired.
“I protect unique, lost works of art, like twentieth-century motion pictures.”
