FutureImperfect Read online

  “Me, I’m a force for chaos and I don’t act out of character. In fact, I’m not even really helping you. I just am. You move closer or farther away from me.”

  But why? Harry thought, just barely managing to keep from asking out loud. Again, the expression on the thing’s face told Harry it knew what he was thinking. It was waiting, smiling, probably looking forward to thwacking him again.

  Biding his time, Harry rubbed his jaw.

  Bemused, the Fool said, “You know, you don’t have to ask me anything if you don’t want to. But this is where we’re alike, see? You’re like the scorpion, too. You’re going to ask, even though you know you’ll get thwacked. Then I’ll hit you and you’ll get up and ask again. That’s what I like about you, Harry.”

  It was right. Despite the certain pain, questions raced each other to his mouth.

  “What’s the voice I hear when I look in someone’s trail?”

  THUNK!

  Thud, thud, thud

  “Your filter, talking back. It does what’s easiest—turns everything into a story.”

  “Why could Todd Penderwhistle enter his life trail when I can’t enter mine?”

  SHUNK!

  This time after he hit the ground, Harry rolled for what felt like a half mile, slamming his side and shoulders into the curved tops of trail after trail before he finally came to a stop.

  But the Fool knew where to find him. Thud, thud, thud.

  “That you probably could have figured out yourself. Ever see anyone other than you unable to enter their own past?”

  “Uh…no.”

  “That’s because the rules of your filter don’t permit you to enter your life trail. It’s the way you set things up.”

  Harry shook his head. “That doesn’t make sense. It’s a rule of A-Time. I didn’t make this place up—the Quirks, the Glitches, the trails! I just named them! I only see it because my linear-time filter isn’t working. I don’t control reality!” Harry said.

  “No,” the Fool answered. “You don’t. But you create and control yourself. Scorpion stings the turtle. Harry gets answers in a way that thwacks him. Language makes the world. It’s better to hear your name than to see your face. Get it? It’s a joke. Godzilla versus Cremora. And you really should lighten up a little.”

  “But…,” Harry began. He gritted his teeth, trying to come up with the right phrasing. He thought he had it once or twice, but he didn’t want to get hit for nothing.

  As it waited, the Fool lay down in front of him, flopping on its belly across the terrain, resting its head on its white-gloved hands. It raised its gargantuan feet up, crossing them at the ankles and letting the moon-sized bells on its boots jingle. They sounded like the chimes of a thousand churches.

  Its eyes glistened. It smiled invitingly.

  “Go ahead,” it whispered. “Ask. You know you want to; you want to bad. And yeah, I know the answer.”

  The words appeared on the tip of Harry’s tongue, as if the Fool had conjured them. It was the question Harry’s father had always wanted him to answer. So he asked:

  “How does reality work?”

  It used a full fist on him this time, and didn’t hold back.

  POW!

  There was pain, great pain, really, really great pain, then flying, falling, landing—thud, thud, thud—and an answer at last.

  “It doesn’t,” the Fool said.

  Harry’s head listed to the side. He worried he might pass out, but he didn’t. It was a cheap answer. A cheat. The world had to make sense—it just had to.

  The Fool shook its head. “Working, not working, they’re all just what you call filters. They’re masks really. Everything is. Everything. Got that? Everything. All that terrifying, life-taking, debilitating, crippling, killing, overpowering, numbing, cracking, crunching, hating, separating, cultivating, inspiring, integrating, degradating, carbon-dating, creating, writhing, withering, deadening, deciding, hoping, coping, loping, doping, troping, trapping, winking, thinking, tree-hugging, exonerating, ozone-depleting, freedom-fighting, resource-wasting, conservating, renovating, aggravating, abdicating, syncopating, calculating, blinking, blanking, indicating, medicating, habituating, levitating, eradicating, irritating, flagellating, focusing, locusing, heat-seeking, exiting, activating, scintillating, decapitating, transposing, excruciating, invigorating, pixelating, cherry-picking, gerrymandering, deficit-spending, crawling, falling, mauling, calling, scrawling, scrolling, rolling, doling, molting, gloating, kicking, mixing, fixing, nixing, abstaining, abstracting, faxing, adultering, appropriating, backtracking, bloodsucking, counterpunching, nesting, resting, besting, testing, cresting, jesting, knowing, glowing, fascinating, compromising, condescending, fixating, obfuscating, breathtaking, whitening, brightening, canceling, carousing, normalizing, corroborating, agitating, characterizing, epitomizing, fantasizing, cleansing, clouting, clowning, lightly browning, napkin-tying, flirting, blurting, burning, boring, whirring, turning, tracing, facing, lacing, devastating, ingratiating, energizing, finalizing stuff is a mask, just a mask. And me, I’m one of them. And what you think of as yourself is another.”

  As before, each word flooded his mind with a million pictures, feelings, and smells, but this time there was no release. They kept coming, stacked miles high, words upon words, worlds upon worlds, lining up to invade his skull, as if he were chained to a rock as Niagara Falls came down upon him forever. And every single thought, even the smallest, felt as if it were being written in white fire in the darkest depths of his brain.

  And when it was finally, impossibly over, nothing lingered. It just raced through him without leaving a trace.

  Confused, staggered, exhausted, Harry Keller managed to say, “So…nothing’s real?”

  A big open-handed white-gloved hand swept toward him, slapping him full-body.

  WHUNK! Thud, thud, thud.

  “Of course it is! Masks are real!”

  “So…nothing’s important?”

  Again the hand rushed him, knocking him back a hundred yards. The terrain he landed in this time—dark, shapeless, and cold—was utterly unfamiliar, Harry wasn’t sure if it was past or future or if he was even still in A-Time at all. The only recognizable thing was the most horrific—the grinning giant that stormed up to him.

  Thud, thud, thud.

  “Of course it is! Masks are incredibly important. Ralph Waldo Emerson said all we ever deal with are surfaces, and what’s a surface if not a mask?”

  “So…if it’s real and important, what’s the difference if it’s all a mask or not?”

  Harry winced and closed his eyes, bracing himself for the blow. When it didn’t come, he slowly peeked out above his raised arm.

  That was when the Fool slapped him again.

  PHWAT!

  He burst through a flock—an hour?—of Timeflys, and landed in a section of A-Time colored completely in shades of blue.

  “Tsk, tsk!” the Fool boomed as it thudded up. “The point, Harry, is that even if everything you see is a mask, there still must be something beneath it. Masks may be the only way you have to understand things, but they’re not where everything lives.”

  It smiled. Harry furrowed his brow.

  “Where do we live?”

  He winced, buried his head in his shoulders, but this time the blow never came. Instead the Fool bent down, parted his enormous lips and whispered, gentle as a summer breeze, “Under the mask. You know, you can see when you’re wrong, but you can’t always see when you’re right. You were right about a lot, all on your own. Filters shape the way people see the world. But you didn’t free yourself from them; you just built a new one. A-Time is just another filter, still not the last word. Not a higher reality, not a lower one, just a different mask from what you were used to. Here, watch.”

  The giant snapped its fingers and the hard past became soft, the soft future hard. Another snap returned things to normal: hard past, soft future.

  If normal was ever what it was.

  But t
he clown wasn’t done. It waved its hand across the terrain. The Event Horizon, the sizzling line that stretched from one end of A-Time to another, the line that always moved, writing future into past, stopped short and moved back and forth a few times, like a windshield wiper.

  Harry shook. He’d discovered this new world when his old one fell apart, thought it was bigger, sturdier, but here it was collapsing, too. You just couldn’t find a good reliable reality these days.

  And the Fool wasn’t done yet. It pinched Harry’s face between its fingers and came close.

  “Pay attention. Here’s the prize. The only time you’re ever even close to reality is when you’ve just chucked one mask and haven’t had a chance yet to pick up another. It only lasts a moment, but moments can last forever. When you really want things to change, find that moment.”

  Harry shook his head. He furrowed his brow. He scrunched up his face.

  “That doesn’t make any sense.” And it all has to make sense! It has to!

  The Fool shook its head. “Thinking the world has to make sense is like using a screwdriver on a nail. Wrong tool. The world has sense in it, but it’s bigger than sense. It’s the Atman, you know, like Batman without the B? The All.”

  “Like Ball without a B?”

  WHAP!

  Harry went flying. But this time, a giant hand caught him, and he found himself staring into the Fool’s enormous pupils, two swarming blacknesses that looked like the primordial seas in which life formed, the waters above which God’s spirit hovered in the moments before creation. And in that dark, the clown’s voice boomed:

  “Exactly! Saying everything is an illusion is as meaningless as saying everything’s real. All things are contained in the world—good, bad, day, night, sense, nonsense—so everything has to be more than just sense. Make sense?”

  Harry scrunched his face. “Is that a trick question?”

  WHAM!

  Rather than flying through the air, Harry felt his torso crunch into his legs as the force of the blow drove him not up, but deep into the terrain. When he opened his eyes, he saw he was pinned, buried up to his neck. The Fool, Harry realized, had made a fist, and used it to drive Harry into the ground.

  Smiling all the while, the clown of his childhood, the clown of his visions, the clown of his nightmares, reached out and ripped Harry’s head off.

  It was funny seeing his own headless body like that, funnier still as the Fool seemed to warp and suck itself into the base of Harry’s neck, pulling itself bit by bit into his aching skull. Harry’s head was so full of Fool he thought it would pop. Instead, his head just floated gently down, back onto his neck where, he supposed, it belonged.

  Though the Fool was inside him now, he could still see it winking, still hear it whisper, as it said, “They’re all trick questions.”

  6.

  Harry opened his eyes. He was back in his padded cell. Blinking, he felt the familiar sleepy grit around his eyes. The ceiling was right where it had been, no sign it’d been torn off by the hands of a god.

  What about the book? Wasn’t there a book?

  It was gone, too.

  The extreme clarity he’d enjoyed in the presence of the Fool had also vanished. Aside from the eye-jam, he was groggy, dry-mouthed, again feeling the numbing drugs course through his veins, making his every thought march through a bog.

  It was likely he’d imagined it. After all, even in his addled memory, talking to the Fool felt a lot like talking to himself. Only worse.

  A-Time was real, though; he knew that. The things he saw there affected linear time, changed destinies, saved or ended lives. Unless he’d been imagining everything.

  And saying everything’s fake is the same as saying everything’s real, isn’t it?

  And no matter where you go, there you are.

  Was there anything, anything at all different in the cell? Anything that could prove something had actually happened somewhere other than in his head? He strained his neck left, then right, looked around, scanned every inch of whiteness, hoping for anything that might be even slightly out of place.

  White walls, floor, ceiling. And, well, there was the door. That was different.

  It was open.

  Open?

  Light from the hallway was flooding in, highlighting the stains on the canvas.

  Can it be? Can I get out?

  Excited, he tried to stand, but his legs were too wobbly. He flopped to his side, unable to stop his fall because his arms were pinned by the straitjacket.

  Ungh!

  Since he was lying down now, the drugs wanted him to fall asleep, but he couldn’t miss this opportunity, not with the door just open like that. He rolled onto his back, then used his legs to push himself along the floor until he hit the wall. He bent his head forward and kept pushing, flattening his torso. Slowly, he wriggled his back up the coarse surface, and once he was up high enough, he stood.

  Feeling like a drugged, giant white penguin, Harry waddled across the springy surface to the open door. Cautiously, he peered into the hall. It was thin and severe, a gray flatness interrupted only by several thick doors—more cells, containing fellow crazy people. Every other ceiling light was off. That meant it was late. They conserved power at night, left on only what they needed.

  But the most interesting thing in his field of vision was Jesus, the guard. He was lying in a heap in the center of the floor, snoring.

  “Wow,” Harry said, surprised.

  At the sound of Harry’s voice, Jesus snorfled and smacked his lips.

  Crap! Harry thought, wishing he could slap his pinned hands over his stupid mouth.

  Jesus moaned slightly, twitched, then snored again.

  Lighten up, hell. What I really need to learn to do is keep my stupid mouth shut!

  Satisfied the guard was out, he tiptoed over quietly and saw two bottles on the floor near the sleeping body, one of ibuprofen, the other sleeping pills, their contents spilled. The little white pills looked remarkably alike. An image flashed in Harry’s head of Jesus, his head throbbing, mixing up his pills and suffering the consequences.

  Quite the coincidence. Like the door. Exactly the sort of thing Harry would expect from someone mucking around in A-Time. Maybe the Fool, the big lug, was helping him escape. Whatever. No reason to look a gift horse in the mouth.

  The linoleum in the hallway was cold compared to the padding, and his feet were only protected by the thin cloth coverings that passed for a crazy person’s shoes. He padded quickly to the end of the hall, only to find the door to the stairwell locked. A card reader was mounted on the wall next to the silver door-handle.

  Damn.

  He waddled back to the guard. It didn’t look like there was anything in his shirt, but he saw the tip of an old brown wallet jutting from the pants pocket, the fabric stretched thin by Jesus’s enormous butt.

  Carefully, gently, Harry went down to his knees, put his face near the butt, and used his teeth to pull at the wallet.

  Please don’t let anyone see me like this….

  With a bit of tugging, it slid free and landed on the floor. Harry kicked it away from Jesus, then, using his nose, managed to unfold it and pull sundry plastic cards free—credit card, license, library card, and yeah, Windfree employee ID.

  Getting the thin, flat plastic rectangle up from the floor proved the hardest part. Harry nearly broke a tooth trying to pry the card up but finally managed it. Card in teeth, he waddled back to the door, slid the card through the reader, and pressed the handle.

  Click.

  Now he was in the stairwell, leaning against the door with his shoulder, looking down at the concrete and steel stairs that led to the floors below.

  Ha! I made it! Now it’s down to the basement, and maybe I can sneak out of the building! Or better yet, up, up, up to the roof where I can jump off! The building must be six, seven flights. That should be high enough to—

  Wait a minute! What am I thinking?

  But it wasn’t him thinking
at all. It was the Quirk-shard. With the sedatives and antipsychotics in him, Harry’s will was weak, and the shard had no such vulnerabilities. His body wavered at the top of the stairs. He wanted to walk down, but the shard was pulling him in the opposite direction.

  Down, boy! Down!

  No! Up, up, up!

  Much to his chagrin, Harry watched his right foot move onto the stairway headed up, followed by his left. He pulled back, but not too hard, so it wasn’t a very effective pull. Being in a straitjacket, he didn’t want to pull hard enough to make himself fall. In a few seconds, despite his efforts, he was halfway up the stairs.

  Not good. Definitely not good.

  Step, step, step.

  He could shout for help, if the shard let him, but then he’d just be tossed back in his cell.

  Step, step, step.

  Maybe there was something he could do in A-Time. He concentrated, trying to conjure the timeless state. The edges of the stairwell lights got a little blurry, but it was no use. The drugs were keeping him in linear time.

  How had the Fool gotten him into A-Time? Maybe because he was a god and gods could pretty much do whatever the hell they wanted. Or maybe, if Harry could infest other people with his thoughts, giving them temporary access to A-Time, the Fool had just done the same to Harry.

  What had the Fool said about finding a new mask?

  Step, step, step.

  He reached the first landing and rounded it.

  Heh. The thought was so strange. An archetype generating a state of mind in Harry. Weren’t archetypes just made up of people? Lots of people, yes…unless maybe it was the other way around, and people were made up of archetypes.

  Weird.

  Step, step, step.

  There were more pressing issues at hand. The next flight was coming up. The Quirk was practically singing:

  Jump, Harry! Jump! Jump, jump. jump!

  At the next landing, he bit his tongue, hard. Pain lit his nervous system. His body reflexively jumped backward, into a wall. For a scant few seconds, the jumping urge disappeared. Harry used the moments to veer toward the door. He opened it, stepped into another hall, and slammed it shut.