‘Keep it on ice. When you’ve got a little more experience under your belt? Then we can talk. In the meantime, you know what the other most important word in journalism is? Discretion. Meaning, don’t tell Dan I said anything.’
Or mention that you’re screwing the pictures editor, she thinks.
‘Gotta run. Keep it up, worker bee.’ He skips out, no doubt hoping to catch up to Victoria.
‘Sure thing,’ Kirby says under her breath as she slides several files into her backpack.
Harper
ANY TIME
He relives it in his head, again and again, lying on the mattress in the master bedroom where he can reach out and trace the whorls of sequins on the wings while he tugs at his cock, thinking of that flicker of disappointment in her face.
It’s enough to satisfy the House. For now. The objects are quiet. The thick pressure in his head has retreated. He has time to adapt and explore. And get rid of the Polack’s body still rotting in the hall.
He tries out other days, careful that no one sees him coming or going after the encounter with the homeless boy with the bulging eyes. The city changes every time. Whole neighborhoods rise and fall, put on pretty faces, peel them away to reveal the disease. The city manifests symptoms of dilapidation: ugly markings on the walls, broken windows, garbage that congeals. Sometimes he can trace the trajectory, sometimes the landscape becomes wholly unrecognizable and he has to reorient himself by the lake and landmarks he has memorized. The black spire, the rippled twin towers, the loops and bends of the river.
Even when he is wandering, he walks with purpose. He starts by buying meals from delis and fast-food restaurants where he can be anonymous. He avoids talking so that he won’t make an impression. He stays friendly but unobtrusive. He watches people closely and steals appropriate behaviors to echo. It’s only when he needs to eat or use the restroom that he will engage, and then only long enough to get what he wants.
Dates are important. He is careful to check his money. Newspapers are the easiest to gauge by, but there are other hints for the observant. The number of cars that clot the roads. Street name signs that have changed from yellow with black type to green. The surplus of things. The way strangers respond to each other on the street, how open or defensive they are, how much they keep themselves to themselves.
He spends two whole days at the airport in 1964, sleeping on the plastic seats in the viewing area, watching the planes take off and land; metal monsters gorging on people and suitcases and spewing them out again.
In 1972, his curiosity gets the better of him and he shoots the breeze with one of the construction workers on a break from building the skeleton frame of the Sears Tower. And goes back a year later when it’s finished, to ride the elevator to the top. The view makes him feel like a god.
He tests the limits. He only has to think of a time and the door will open onto it, although he can’t always tell if his thoughts are his own or if the House is deciding for him.
Going backwards makes him uneasy. He worries about becoming trapped in the past. And he can’t push past 1929 anyway. The furthest he can go into the future is 1993, when the neighborhood has gone to utter ruin, vacant houses all around and no one to bother him. Maybe it’s Revelations, the collapse of the world into fire and brimstone. He would like to see that.
Certainly it’s the end of the line for Mr Bartek. Harper decides it’s safest to leave the fellow as far from his own lifetime as possible. The disposal is a laborious process. He ties a rope around the body, under the armpits and between the legs. The liquefying insides are starting to seep through the clothing, so that as he drags the body to the front door, leaning heavily on his crutch, it leaves a trail of slime across the floorboards.
Harper concentrates on far away and he steps out into the pre-dawn of summer 1993. It’s still dark, before the birds are stirring, although somewhere a dog is barking, a harsh hak-hak-hak that breaks through the stillness. Harper stands on the porch for a long minute anyway, just to make sure there is no one around, and then yanks the corpse untidily down the steps.
It takes another twenty minutes of sweating and heaving for him to drag it to a dumpster he has scouted out in an alleyway two blocks away. But when he flips open the heavy metal lid, there is a corpse already in there. The face is swollen and purple from strangulation, the pink tongue protruding between the teeth, eyes bloodshot and froggy, but the mane of hair is instantly recognizable. The doctor from Mercy Hospital. This should surprise him. But there are limits to his imagination. The man’s body is here because it’s supposed to be, and that is enough.
He hefts Bartek in on top of the doctor and pulls some trash over them. They’ll keep each other company, feeding the maggots.
He always returns home. The House feels like a no-man’s land, but when he steps outside, thinking about his own time, it is to find that the days have passed as usual.
He accidentally misses New Year, 1932, but on the day after he takes himself out for a steak dinner. On the way home, he comes across a young colored girl and is hit with the unmistakable lightning jolt of recognition and inevitability. One of his.
She’s sitting on the steps with a little boy beside her, both of them bundled up in jackets and scarves, tearing pages out of a newspaper and folding them into little darts.
‘Hello, there, sweetheart,’ Harper says, real neighborly. ‘What are you doing? I thought newspapers were for reading.”
‘I c’n read just fine, mister,’ the girl says, meeting his eyes, brazen. The kind of look to get you slapped, She’s much older than he first thought. Practically a young woman.
‘You shouldn’t be talking to no white man, Zee,’ the boy hisses.
‘It’s all right, we don’t have to stand on all those formalities,’ Harper soothes. ‘Besides, I talked to her first, right? No disrespect there, huh, little man?’
We’re makin’ airplanes.’ She flicks out her wrist, sending one of the darts swooping through the air for long graceful seconds before it nose-dives and plummets into the frosted sidewalk in front of him.
He is about to ask if he can have a go, anything to prolong the interaction, when a neighbor comes out from one of the adjoining houses, holding a potato peeler, the screen door banging behind her. She glares at Harper.
‘Zora Ellis! James! You get inside now.’
‘Told you,’ the boy says, equal parts smug and bitter.
‘Well, see you again soon, sweetheart,’ Harper says.
She gives him that cool look again. ‘I don’t think so, mister. My daddy wouldn’t like it.’
‘Wouldn’t want to make your daddy mad. You give him my regards, you hear.’
He walks away, whistling, his hands jammed in his pockets to stop them from shaking. It’s no matter. He’ll find her again. He has all the time in the world.
But his head is so full of her, Zora-Zora-Zora-Zora, that he makes a mistake and opens the House to find the goddamn corpse back in the hallway, the blood wet on the floorboards and the turkey still frozen. He stares at it, shocked. And then ducks back over the threshold, under the wooden X of the planks and pulls the door shut.
His hands are shaking as he fumbles the key back in the lock. He concentrates intently on today’s date. Second of January 1932. To his relief, when he bumps the door open with his crutch, it’s to find Mr Bartek gone. Now you see him! Now you don’t! A sideshow magic trick.
It was a misstep. like the gramophone needle skipping a groove on the record. Natural that he should be drawn back to this day. The beginning of everything. He wasn’t concentrating. He will have to be more focused.