The dream is sepia, colored in faded browns and reds like a vintage photograph. Movement in the dream is not fluid and smooth, but stuttered like thousands of tiny, barely perceptible adjustments. I see people. Sometimes they look familiar, but that may be an illusion of the dream. And these people shift. From one thing to another. Fat to lean, straight to hunched, shiny to ragged. Sometimes they shift from being to not being, completely vanishing in front of me. And sometimes the opposite, appearing out of nothing. Yet these shifts don’t have the feeling of change–not of one thing transitioning to another, but more like one thing replacing another. A woman now. But then empty space. Here was X, but now here is Y. Sometimes Y is similar to X, similar enough to know that X is what it’s replacing. And with these shifts, these annihilations, these creations, there’s no sense of destruction or pain or tragedy. It’s just benign replacement. It all seems so fundamental to the nature of things, so much at the core of what’s natural. And it isn’t just people. Other things shift, too. I sense it, know it, more than I see it. The scale of shift can be colossal–cities appearing, forests vanishing. And it can be microscopic–an electron that flips its orientation.
And I know the dream will be gone when I wake up. No memory of it. I’ll just need to wait until the next dream, tolerating my temporary illusions until I’m pulled back into reality.
SEVENTEEN
In Zhivov’s kitchen, I suck on a melting popsicle which is all I have the stomach for. Too much to process, too much to rationalize. For example, there’s acceleration technology available in 1996 that I knew nothing of a quarter of a century later. Asmus, an irritating prick for sure, but a ... time vandal? My mother and me and Tom laughing in the water sprinklers, oblivious to the feckless disease that will take her from us–did take her from us. And Prasad is so bloody secretive. I must be critical to his ‘cure’; otherwise, why am I in the loop at all, if I can call this being in the loop? And why am I being hidden away in Zhivov’s home?
Zhivov is out at the site right now and I’m alone. Prasad says I need to stay put. Gallie says I go nowhere without Zhivov. Zhivov tells me to not even think about leaving the house. All a good case for staying put. But the other side of that argument is Fuck Them! The keys to Zhivov’s truck are right in front of me.
A car clutch is Satan’s work, but I jog my way across town. What I’m looking for is the Big Red. It’s not far from where there will one day be either a strip mall, or a park, or who knows the hell what.
I enter and it’s dark inside, thick with cigarette smoke swirling under the dim, red-tinted ceiling lights. The wood-paneled bar is long and lined with high stools and brass foot rails. Behind it there are glass shelves of liquor with mirrors that double the bottle count. Only a couple of tables are occupied, each with a small candle lantern that doesn’t threaten the anonymity of the drinkers. There are four or five men sitting at the bar looking at the baseball game and exchanging opinions. I sit at a table. The waitress, a young but worn woman in jeans and stained T-shirt takes my order.
I squint at the small TV screen as I sip my beer. It lasts me thirty minutes during which I contemplate how stupid my plan is. I stand to leave. And it’s then that he walks in. I fall back into my seat. He walks with confidence to the bar without looking around him, sits and exchanges a few words with the bartender. Jesus, look at him. Dapper, slim, loose white open-necked shirt, pressed blue jeans and Docksiders. There sits the mighty manager of the Pacific Hardware South Risley Store. There sits my father.
He makes a joke with the bartender and the hunched, gray-hair sitting closest. I see him only in profile. His face is mine. Or would only I see that? It’s the face I shave each day. The face that gave my mother the life she had. So, are you going to slug him? Is that the plan? To do something the ten year-old Joad couldn’t? I wave over the waitress and order a second beer. He’ll be dead in–I do the calculation–thirteen years. A shelf of cherry lumber will topple and he’ll be right under it. A quick death. Nothing like my mother’s.
On impulse, I take my beer and seat myself at the bar. There’s no plan. Getting here was the only plan. He sips his beer and glances my way. He does a slow motion double take. We lock eyes for an instant but then there’s a loud cheer from around the room and we look up at the TV. I keep watching the TV but sense eyes on me.
“This is Rodriguez’s year,” he says in a voice I’d forgotten but now floods me with the familiar. I nod without looking. A pause. “Have you worked at Pacific Hardware?”
“No,” I reply. I look directly at him. What do you see, Father? I realize that over the years my memory of him had adjusted to make him look more like me than he really did. He’s no twin, but all the features are there and arranged the same. Hairline thin on the temples, jawline that juts, aquiline nose. And he must be about my age.
“I
