Gus and the kid exchanged looks but stopped. I wanted to kill them both. How could they keep going while I felt like a boulder was sitting on my head?
“Are you okay, Frannie?”
“No I’m not okay! Just wait a minute, willya?”
“No problem, partner.”
“Is that a hot dog stand? What’s a wurstel?” The kid pointed to a small kiosk nearby that had different pictures of hot dogs taped to its windows. “I’m hungry. I’m getting one.”
Between gasps, I asked if he had any money.
“Nope. You got any?”
Without a sliver of surprise, my hand slid over a bunch of cards in my pocket. I took them out to see what they were.
Gus said, “Use your Visa card.”
“They take credit cards at a hot dog stand?”
He made a face that said I couldn’t be that dense. “Are you going to pay with a five-dollar bill? When was the last time you saw paper money?”
“I got a card too. I got one of those. I had it all along.” Junior waved a shiny pink card and moved toward the stand.
I could not catch my breath. My entire body felt outraged at having had to walk so far so fast. Yet I knew we hadn’t come far at all. Besides all the other shocks whirling around like multiple cyclones, I couldn’t believe this was me inside me—an aching, whining, grumpy, exhausted, old... shithead.
“So tell me about your grandson, Frannie. He’s a good-looking boy.”
We watched good-looking boy buy his hot dog, with much pointing and nodding until the seller understood what he wanted. It had been so long since I was in a place where I didn’t speak the language. Now suddenly I was in two simultaneously– Austria and Old Age.
While concocting some piece of nonsense about my “grandson” to tell Gus Gould, I heard a huge high sound. Instinctively I knew what it was because I’d made the sound myself many times on my Ducati—the high ripping whine of a downshifting motorcycle. Turning from Gus toward the street, I saw the last thing I would ever see: A most beautiful silver and sleek motorcycle, airborne, was sailing straight at me.
The End.
Holes in the Rain
The next thing I knew, I was staring at my hands. They were holding a strawberry milk shake in an old-fashioned fluted glass. They were “my” hands again—no liver spots, bread-dough skin sagging in tired layers, no knuckles the size of walnut shells protruding from beneath. Instead, the skin was a healthy color, not the patchwork quilt of sickly hues and spots it had been in Vienna.
Slowly, I curled one into a fist and was thrilled as a child to feel no pain slither up through it. But before I got too excited, I uncurled the hand just as slowly to see if it worked the other way too. Success. Was I back? Was I me again? Putting the hand flat down on the red Formica counter, I felt the cool of the plastic beneath my reborn palm. I slid it back and forth across the smooth surface. Then I lifted my hand a few inches and had the fingers do a little dance to celebrate our return.
“Are you going to drink that milk shake or are you trying to hypnotize it?”
I knew it was too good to be true. I knew the voice and did not want to see the face it came from. But against the advice of every atom in my body, I turned the rotating stool to look.
I was in Scrappy’s Diner in Crane’s View. Scrappy’s is never empty from the minute it opens at six in the morning until it closes at midnight. But the joint was empty now. That is, except for me and good old Astopel sitting way down at the other end of the counter. Watching me, he smiled like a son of a bitch.
“Couldn’t I just have had thirty seconds of happiness alone before I saw you again? Isn’t there a law against too much you in one lifetime?”
“You can have all the time you want, Mr. McCabe. But your clock is ticking.”
My throat was dirt-dry so I sipped the milk shake, which tasted as good as sex at that moment. In fact I couldn’t stop sipping, which turned into glugging until the glass was empty. Even my throat felt younger, it was so happy and eager to belt the sweet stuff down.
I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “All right, what clock is ticking?”
“How did you like your death? It’s certainly dramatic.”
“Is that really how I’m going to die?”
“Yes, a motorcycle in the head.”
“I’ll be killed by a motorcycle in the head in Vienna when I’m a hundred years old and so worn out and cantankerous that I should have died years before. Now that’s something to look forward to.”
“Not quite one hundred, I’m afraid.”
“How old?”
“I cannot tell you. You must find out all those things yourself. But at the rate you’re going, you won’t even find that out before your time is up.”
“Explain.”
He slid off his stool and went behind the counter. He walked toward me, picked up my glass, and poured more into it from a metal shaker. He placed it in front of me. “Strawberry, right? That’s the flavor you prefer?”
“You made this? It’s good.”
“Thank you. ‘Consider the last of everything and then thou wilt depart from the dream of it.’ Do you know that line? It’s from the Koran.” He drew a glass of Coke from a machine and to my astonishment, put it in a microwave oven. Setting to its highest temperature, he waited till it pinged seconds later. Removing the glass, he took a sip of what must have been six-hundred-degree Coca-Cola and smacked his lips in delight.
“Astopel, tell me you didn’t do that. Is your tongue asbestos? Or are you the devil? Is that what all this is about?”
“You keep looking for easy answers, Mr. McCabe. Unfortunately there are none. Perhaps you should find a better way of looking.”
“Yeah? Well, a moment ago I was too busy being traumatized as an old man and wearing a motorcycle for a hat.”
“That’s a pity. Because you only have four more chances to go back to your future before the week is over. When you return is up to you, but you have only these six days—
“What do you mean, six? You said seven. You said I had a week.”
“Look outside.”
It was pitch-black out there. “Today’s over?”
“Today is over.”
“Today is Tuesday.”
“Was.”
“I have until next Tuesday either here or in my future to figure this out?”
“Correct.”
I tapped the edge of my glass on the counter. “Or else?”
“Well, remember what Antonya Corando told you.”
“She said she didn’t kill herself. Said someone else did it to her.”
Astopel nodded. “And not only your own well-being is at stake now. A great many others’ as well. You have seven days because you have seven days. You can spend your remaining time trying to understand why, but I think that would be a waste.
“Perhaps it will comfort you to know there are others in the same situation as you right this minute, Mr. McCabe.”
“Who have to do the same thing as me?”
“Yes.”
“They’re in Crane’s View?” “No, all around the world.”
I drank the last of the strawberry shake. It didn’t taste so good this time.
“Two other things to know, Mr. McCabe. You can return to your future whenever you want this week. Say the phrase ‘holes in the rain’ and you will go. Once there, however, your return to the present is out of your hands—it will simply happen.
“The second thing to know is when you visit the future, it will always be to the day previous to the one you experienced. So your next visit will be to the day before you died.”
“This is completely crazy.”
“Hopefully it will eventually make sense to you.” He finished his drink and came around the counter. Without looking back, he moved toward the door.
“Wait! One more thing: Why did I marry Susan Ginnety? Did something happen to Magda? Will something happen to her?”
He raised his head and looked at the ceiling. “Something happens to everyone, Mr. McCabe.” And then he left.