“I’m Zoe, by the way.”
“Felix.”
“Cool.”
In the silence that followed, I could hear both the argument and the faint sound of porn continuing down the hall. The computer the woman must have been writing on glowed through her open bedroom door.
“Sorry,” I finally said. “I’m not much of a conversationalist.”
She ran her fingers through her hair. “That’s okay. Neither am I.”
The unicorn in the poster looked unsettlingly realistic. I wondered if they’d attached a prosthetic horn to a horse, or added the detail digitally after the fact. “So…” Zoe said after a minute. “Do you want to see my art project?
“Sure,” I said, wondering if it would involve unicorns.
“Okay. Give me a second.” She went into the bedroom and emerged with a large photo album. I opened the front cover and felt my face get very warm. I thought she’d been joking about the penis pictures, but here they were, six different cocks on every page of one very thick book. With Zoe looking over my shoulder, I experienced a confused rush of embarrassment and sexual excitement. I started to laugh, but she remained perfectly serious. I cleared my throat and turned the page. The photos were obviously self-portraits, some showing a man’s entire naked body in a mirror, most confined to the genitals.
“Hmm,” I said, thoughtfully. My initial excitement faded as I turned the page, confronted by organs of every size and colour, some circumcised, some not, some flaccid, some erect. Not one stood out as being remarkable in any way. I might as well have been looking at a catalogue of noses, or elbows. I turned another page.
“I try to make sure that there’s no doubles,” Zoe said. “To keep it fair.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well…” She frowned to herself. “Having a hundred pictures of the same man would defeat the whole purpose. It isn’t a turn-on for me. The way I see it, I’m doing these men a kindness. They want someone to look at them. So I look.”
I kept turning pages, feeling increasingly ashamed, as if I’d taken every one of those pictures myself. When I came to the end, I sat with the book in my lap.
“Do you think I’m strange?” she asked, timidly.
“No.”
“Really?”
I tried to find her eyes behind the dark lenses. “I’m pretty strange myself.”
“Like with the time travelling?”
“For starters.”
“Where do you go?” she asked, intrigued.
“To the past, mostly.” It felt odd, discussing it so frankly. “But every once in a while I see things that haven’t happened yet.”
“The future.”
“More like a possible future. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just crazy.”
“I don’t think you’re crazy,” she said decisively. Although we hardly knew each other, I found her confidence reassuring. “Did you see all this before it happened?” she asked. “Coming here? Meeting me?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“So… what happens next?”
Still holding the penis album, I looked at Zoe, seeing my own face reflected in her dark lenses. I shook my head. “I’m not really sure.”
CHAPTER NINE
The chestnut trees lining the sidewalk gave almost no shade. The humidity added ten pounds to my clothes. I wasn’t sure where I was going but felt that it must have had something to do with Zoe. We’d been seeing each other for weeks. Whenever I felt lonely or out of sorts, I’d stop by her place, and feel instantly at ease, consoled by the sight of her eccentric sunglasses and unkempt hair. She’d put on coffee and we’d commiserate about the awfulness of our lives before moving to her bedroom and having urgent sex. I never felt pressured to stay the night, or to visit more often. In fact, she seemed to have no expectations of me whatsoever, accepting my erratic arrivals and departures with perfect equanimity.
I came to an abrupt stop. If I’d been going to Zoe’s place, I was heading in the wrong direction.
“Excuse me,” a woman behind me said.
“Sorry,” I muttered and kept moving.
The sidewalk was crammed with attractive young people, swinging their naked limbs confidently through space. Wearing long sleeves and jeans myself, I slogged downhill until I came to a pit in the earth, surrounded by an eight-foot-tall chain-link fence. On one side of the fence, half a dozen men in hard hats and orange vests lounged around smoking as a large back-hoe tore up the ground. On the pedestrian side, my next-door neighbour, the old door slammer, stood watching them intently, his hands knotted in the wire. As I hurried past, I heard him mutter, “Kill it.”
The ocean must have been close. I could smell salt and decay. The sun burned on the back of my neck. I wanted to shrug off my clothes and leave them heaped in a pile on the sidewalk. As the seawall came into sight, along with dozens of joggers, bikers, and rollerbladers, I stopped in the middle of Coast Road, not realizing where I was until a horn blared. I hurried the rest of the way across and a red pickup roared past, the exact make and model that I’d seen on the night of the storm. The driver looked similar. Even the intersection was identical. I looked out past the seawall, half-expecting to find a tidal wave rolling in, but the water remained calm, the sky clear. The truck parked at an angle on the road, and the driver—the living image of my father—got out with what looked like camera gear and walked off down a sloping path to the beach. Gravity and light. The air in my lungs. As I approached the truck, I saw a little film canister wedged between the windshield and the dash. The passenger window was open. No one was looking my way. I walked up to the truck like it belonged to me, alarm bells jangling in my head as I punctured the invisible membrane between public and private space and snatched the film off the dash. The maneuver took all of three seconds, but the world changed dramatically in those three seconds. No one shouted or confronted me, but people suddenly looked uneasy, as if sensing my transgression. Inanimate objects leaned towards me: buildings, street signs, vehicles. I jammed the film in my pocket, then jogged across the street and ducked down a side road, nearly falling more than once as I looked over my shoulder, expecting the red truck to come roaring around the corner, the driver leaning grimly into the wheel. After a few blocks, I forced myself to slow to a normal pace, taking the long way home, through a trendy neighbourhood filled with coffee shops, where I stopped and pulled out the stolen canister, confirming that it in fact held a roll of used film. As I snapped the canister shut, a harsh cry rang out, and a dark shape swooped down from a tree, passing inches from the top of my head. A crow, flapping over the treetops. It hurled itself back down at me and I ducked and kept walking. I tried to keep a casual pace, as if nothing unusual was happening, but the crow buzzed me again, and people on the surrounding patios were starting to take notice. On the fourth pass, the bird made contact, raking its claws across my scalp. Abandoning any pretext of calmness, I covered my head and ran, past rows of townhouses and character homes with pristine lawns. Whenever I paused to look up, a dark flurry battered my face and drove me on. People were staring now, accusingly, as if I’d antagonized the bird, and deserved to be attacked. I sprinted the last few blocks to my apartment and slammed through the front doors, spinning to face the crow, who’d landed on the welcome mat outside. “Go away!” I yelled through the glass door.