him.
But in 1980, the closest thing he could find was my father.
I was my father’s killer.
I let Billy go. I dropped the knife. I climbed to my feet. I left through the front door. I climbed the stairs. I heard a door slam down on the ground floor. Billy cried out for his mother. His mother cried back, an awful shriek that echoed through the stairwell. There was the urgent clacking of high heels up the stairs but I didn’t care. I just wanted to go back into the office and collapse and close my eyes.
The daylight in the hallway scorched the skin on my face. It felt like the worst sunburn I’ve ever had.
I kicked in the door, just like I’d kicked in all the others in this building. There was a complete set now.
I collapsed to the ground, then got up on all fours. The half pill I’d swallowed was already wearing off. I felt dizzy.
Then Erna stepped through the open doorway, holding the gun.
“You hateful son of a bitch,” she said, then squeezed the trigger.
The slug sliced through my astral body and buried itself in the floor beneath me. I felt a searing pain in my abdomen, even though there was no entry wound, no blood.
I didn’t say anything.
She fired again, twice, and both shots were like hot needles in my chest, each stabbing me through my pectoral muscles. The pain made my eyes water. I dropped to my knees and lifted my left hand—the one with only three fingers.
“I’m going to kill you.”
I shook my head.
“It’s no use. You can’t, because I’m not actually here.”
“You’re not making any sense.”
Erna squatted next to me and lifted me up by the lapels of my borrowed overcoat. Her knuckles were raw, fingers bony. I’d never noticed how thin her hands were. It must hurt to be slapped by those hands.
I looked up at her.
“You think I’m dead but I’m not. I’m alive in the future. I just visit the past. So believe me when I tell you that unless you help your son, he’s going to grow up to hurt a lot of people. A lot of innocent people. He’s going to be a killer, Erna, unless you pull your head out of your ass and be a mother to him.”
“You’re from the devil! You’re here to torment me and my boy!”
“Today is June 18, 2009. My real body is laying in this apartment in the future. Billy’s in a mental hospital. You’re living on the streets, and you’re a goddamned mess.”
She repeated the date to herself.
“June 18, 2009.”
It couldn’t make sense to her. It must sound like the title of a science fiction movie.
I tried to make her understand.
“So you can’t kill me. It’s not even worth trying. But you can try to save your son.”
She dropped me. My head hit the floor with a thump. She didn’t quite react at first. My words had to be picked apart, analyzed.
Then she looked down at me, deranged smile on her face, and said:
“No…I know how to kill you.”
And then she began to rip the brown paper from the office windows.
Sunshine smashed through the windows, washing over my entire body. My overcoat began to sizzle and then fade away. My eyes burned as if I’d looked directly into the sun through a twin pair of high-powered telescopes. The skin of my face was beyond fevered; it was ablaze.
My ears functioned long enough to hear Erna ripping the rest of the brown paper from the windows. The nerves under my skin sensed the additional heat and light, and they curled up and withered inside my body.
And then I was gone.
I woke up in the same position on the floor. Belly down. Head turned to one side. Drool coming out of my mouth.
I don’t know how long I’d been there, or how long I would be there, because I was completely paralyzed, top of my head to my feet. Just like my fingers, just like my right arm, I knew my body was still there, every piece of it. But I had zero control over any of it.
I could die here.
I could die here and no one would know.
Many hours, I think, passed before the door creaked open behind me. I heard heavy footsteps.
“Hello, you bastard. It’s June 18, 2009.”
Oh God. No.
She showed herself to me first. She wanted to make sure I knew it was her, so I knew who’d be doing this to me. It was Erna, the bag lady from Frankford Avenue. Which was where she’d ended up after watching her son institutionalized, and her lover knifed to death under the El. She’d been crazy back in 1972, and the intervening years hadn’t done much to improve the situation.
But what made her real crazy, I realized now, were all the dead people she saw walking through her apartment and the empty apartments she cleaned. They’d make faces at her, because they were just goofing around, having fun. Dr. DeMeo’s patients, in their past and some even propelled forward into the future a few years. And she thought she was losing her mind, but was afraid to tell the doctor, because then she’d lose her place and her job and then what would they do? So she said nothing and she drank wine and tried to forget about all the dead people.
Except the one dead person who’d told her the truth. That he was actually alive, in another year altogether. He’d even helpfully supplied the date.
So Erna Derace had waited.
And on June 18, 2009, she went back to that apartment building.
And she used the last three bullets in the gun she’d been saving for thirty-seven years.
“Do you understand now?”
She shot me in the back three times, right between the shoulder blades.
Willie Shahid, owner of the bodega downstairs, heard sharp cracks, three in a row, then heard someone rumbling down the steps and out the front door. He made it out in time to see an old woman go shuffling down Frankford Avenue. What was that about, he must have wondered. Then he locked the front doors of his shop and walked upstairs to check it out, cell phone in hand.
Willie stood outside my apartment door—3-A. He knocked and waited. Something wasn’t right. He sniffed the air; the acrid scent of chalk and burnt paper filled his nostrils.
So Willie flipped open his cell and dialed 911, giving the address and even the floor.
A short while later the EMTs arrived, and then three squad cars from the Philly PD, 15th District.
