A story I wrote some time ago – possibly a riff on a dream I had. What if someone else was also me? What if people meant two people when they said “I”? This was fun to write, and almost as much fun to leave some stuff unwritten.
Then
“Whoa.”
A flashlight’s beam works its way towards me across the chalkboards filled with scribbles and desks filled with photocopies. I’m there, sat in the half-darkness, hunched over a laptop that’s bleeding battery life. But the flashlight’s owner job is to make sure, politely.
“Evening, Professor Kovacs.”
“Good evening – sorry, I don’t remember your name.”
“It’s Raymond.” The guard shuffles his feet as he walks to my desk. He’s even younger than me and even more tired. “I’m going to leave you the parking lot access card. In case you want to leave before I come back around. So you don’t have to walk to another building to get it open.”
“I think I may walk home tonight, but thank you anyway, Raymond.”
“No problem.”
He tries to find a paper-free spot on the desk to lay the plastic card on. I chuckle as I take it from his hand.
“Sorry, it’s messy here,” I say. Very British. Apologizing for work.
“You should see our office once,” says Raymond, dead-pan. “Busy changing the world, I see.”
“I wish it was that.”
“Well, I’m going to leave you to it. Goodnight, Professor.”
Back on my fading laptop screen, any hope I had is gone. As Raymond’s steps fade away, I realize I should get going. Maybe a brisk walk will freshen me up. Maybe it will just make the bed more appealing.
It’s really foggy outside, and I quickly congratulate myself for not taking the car back home tonight. As I cross the street, a black car turns the corner towards me. I scurry out of its way. It brakes, spins twice on the slippery ramp road. The windscreen is dark and the car’s got no lights on. Then it decides to reverse, make a screeching turn and drive back into the foggy night across the bridge. I watch it careen and carom away, and for a second its engine sounds like that of a really old car.
I’m about halfway across the bridge when I see the fog above me flash red and blue and hear muffled rotor. There are six lanes for car traffic, three in each directions, and as I’m approaching the part of the fog that’s now buzzing with lights, sirens and radio static, I’m beginning to hope that this – whatever happened – is on the other side of the bridge. I’m too tired to be a witness, and flashing lights give me seizures.
It’s messy, whatever it is. I walk on and cross puddles of liquid – tangles of wire – bursts of music and chatter. Something confetti-like hangs in the air around me. Something rocket-like flies across the sky, sputtering. I try not to look directly at it. Wouldn’t see anything anyway, but the vapours are now pulsating blue-and-red, and I’m taught to look away from such stuff, cover my eyes.
I see the pedestrian ramp now and speed up, trying to remember if I need to cross the street to get to the park. A gentle voice calls out.
“Um, Sir?”
If it’s a police officer, she’s wearing a new type of uniform. I stop and wait for her to cross the central reservation to my part of the sidewalk.
“Are you okay, Sir?”
I tell her I was just trying to walk home and I am not sure what is going on.
“We’re working on it, Sir,” she says unhelpfully. “Can I just ask your full name, please?”
Here we go, then.
“It’s Paul Kovacs, but really, I didn’t see-”
She looks at me, wide-eyed, then shines a flashlight into my face.
“Professor Paul Kovacs, did you say?”
“Well, yes. Now if I could just get home.”
She extends her hand. It’s the kind of gesture a firm mother would make without effort.
“Follow me, professor, please. We will take you there.”
Now
Professor Paul Kovacs stares me in the face and calls me names. His nurse, his wife and the police officer sit around, dutifully stiff and embarrassed. I take two minutes to realize that this is a phase, a moment, a bad day. Then, somehow, I take it in and focus on the other things instead.
Like, for instance, on the fact that he is me.
The eyes are similar. The photograph in his ID – taken years ago – could show an older version of me. And the fingerprint analysis results, which officer Nella talked me through, leave no doubt. We are both who I said I was.
Professor Kovacs sits back for a while, exhausted, and smacks his lips. As he prepares another salvo, I turn to his wife and his nurse.
“I know I’d love to talk to…him…but if this is a bad day, as I can see-”
They both nod apologetically. Officer Nella clears her throat and takes her leave, saying that she needs to “file this back in the headquarters somehow” and that she’ll be in touch. She times her exit well. Professor Kovacs found more names to call us, just as I and his (my?) wife see Nella off.
“I’m sorry, wait here,” says his wife, checks back with the nurse and then walks back, showing me into the kitchen.
“Coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
“White, two sugars, cinnamon?”
“Yes. How -”
She manages a short, sweet laugh. Obvious, right? We sit at the tiny kitchen table. This is the only thing that hasn’t changed here. Everything else is new-ish and some of this equipment I find hard to recognize. It’s 2053, after all. Or so everyone tells me.
“I’m Veronika,” she says. We haven’t actually had a chance to say hello.
“I’m Paul,” I say, making her chuckle again. “I know this much.”
She manages to tell me stuff before lunch, and more after lunch, too. How I married her when she was 18 and looking for a visa out of New Ukraine. How I went to pieces just two years after this. How my memory and thinking went to shit. How my research fell apart. She tells me about the two weeks they could never, ever account for.
“You just walked home from the campus, and showed up two weeks later, dirty as hell. No use asking you anything then. You denied ever being anywhere.”
“You mean I walked, just like I did just then – ”
“The last thing we had was a campus CCTV camera, you turning towards the bridge ramp.”
My coffee is just the way I like it. I hesitate about the next question, but ask it anyway.
“Was I…OK for you? In the years before…”
She shrugs, smiles sadly.
“You were nice when we met, and very nice after we married. Then it got worse, but I was used to it, with my family back in Lviv, you know.”
The nurse sticks her head through the kitchen door and says she’s ready to leave. I tell Veronika I’m off to a hotel, too.
“You can stay,” she says. “The guest bedroom, you know?”
“I know, but it’s just…”
She waits for the nurse to close the door, then grabs my hand.
“You get better late at night, maybe you’ll talk then. And if you don’t, I want to talk with you.”
“Why? What for?”
“You stopped making sense two years after we got married. That’s five years, Paul. Five years in which you told me nothing, you heard nothing I said.”
It’s my turn to chuckle. “You make it sound like I owe you.”
A fresh stream of dada invectives reaches us from the living room. Just before she rushes to my help, she turns back in the kitchen door and winks at me.
“You show up in 2053, like that. I like to think there’s a reason. And I’m selfish, so, you know.”
Now, then
I peer into the kitchen as Veronika and I sit around the remains of a pizza delivery. I walk up to the carton box and pick up the last slice, gingerly. Stare at myself as I chew off the half-solid cheese.
“What’s up,” asks the old me.
“All’s good, old man,” I say.
“Far out, far out.”
Officer Nella, who agreed to chip in for the pizza only on condition that she can requisition all the stuffed crust and BBQ dip, looks up from the pile of reports. I get a new idea.
“Paul,” I ask. “Do you still have the safe?”
“You still have the safe, yes.”
“Same place as always?”
“Same.”
“Mind if we…”
“Just some old shit in there. Be my fucking guest, man.”
Nella follows me to the boiler room. There it is, still bolted to the concrete wall. It takes me a while to clean the dust from the fingerprint scanner.
“Record, please.”
Nella switches on her body cam.
“There will be a signed white Iron Maiden T-Shirt inside. And a grey textile emblem, an eagle, off my grandpa’s uniform. My Master’s Thesis, bound in green faux leather. This much I’m sure of.”
I place my thumb on the scanner and the door whirrs and clicks open. Nella just sighs. More reports to fill. “Good thing you told me to record that.”
I display everything for her body cam to see: the T-shirt. The eagle emblem. The thesis.
“What’s that on a lanyard there?”
I reach and take out a plastic parking pass. Raymond’s.
“There’s, um. There was? A security guard working at the campus. He lent me his card, and – ”
From my jacket pocket, I produce for the camera an identical card, and we all get to watch the photograph on the jacket card fade, the writing and the holograms turn to multi-coloured dust and settle on the floor of the boiler room.
Veronika sneaks up on us instead of the applause.
“You want to go for a walk.”
**
The bridge is foggy, and we can hear the sirens again.
“There’s always something on this bridge, I swear,” Says Nella, barks some arcane code into the radio and gives us a wave as she runs towards the blue-and-red flashing cloud.
The old me walks alongside me and Veronika, up the ramp.
“I can’t stare at the lights, it gives me seizures,” I say. She says she didn’t know that about me.
“That’s OK though, just walk on,” she says. Walks behind me, places her hands on my eyes. They smell of pizza. We laugh and sway a bit as we coordinate the four-legged ramble up the bridge, past the incident. I see nothing. I smell the wet air, Veronika’s hands, the night.
“Done,” she says and stays behind me for a split-second more. Gives me a quick hug.
We look around.
“Where’s…where am…?”
She frowns.
“Wait here,” she says. Just before she runs back into the fog, she turns back and squeezes my hand really really hard. “Don’t. Go. Anywhere.”
Her footsteps echo across the bridge, disappear.
Then nothing.
Then she walks back, stands opposite me, wipes a tear off her face.
“You’re here.”
“I’m here.”
She nods her head. “That’s good. That’s OK.”
“Let’s go home.”
I turn around as she walks on.
“Is it not – ”
“No, it’s this way. Come on, don’t be daft.”
We walk off the bridge and into the park.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.