Lavie Tidhar - The Apex Book of World SF 2

His song (Just Like) Starting Over has been rocketing up the charts. I am hoping he appreciates the reference. I continue: “You see that girl driving that Porsche up and down the street like a maniac? Well, her name is Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone, but in three or four years, everyone will know her as simply “Madonna”. She’s got a lot of talent, but right now, nobody knows her. I’ve changed all that. Bought her the Porsche, given her the money to bankroll her first LP, and I made her sign two hundred or three hundred autographs for me to sell in the future.”

After losing a couple of minutes in the cold Manhattan air, I manage to convince John Winston Lennon. It took revealing two or three state secrets, describing what Paul McCartney was up to on November 3, 1967, and showing him my portable time machine.

“But, look,” he says, “there’s not going to be any Beatles reunion any time ever. That’s finished. Over. Kaput. Capisce?”

Winter in Manhattan, a few minutes before ten o’clock. I get out of the limo, Yoko stands next to me. Chapman approaches from out of the blue and yells something I can’t quite make out. My mind is as lucid as ever, but my ears are deaf for the time being, or so it seems.

“Mister John!” he shouts and I can understand him this time.

I turn around, and he empties his pistol’s chambers into my chest.

The bullet-proof vest absorbs the impacts.

Then I empty my own gun into him.

The Dakota Hotel, snow falling over a dead man’s body with the swirling precision of a nightmare. Yoko begins to cry. John comes up to me and says, “So, that’s the guy.” Someone out there yells for an ambulance.

Lennon walks out onto the street, maybe to get a better view of the scene, or maybe to hail a taxi to move the corpse to the nearest hospital. Or the nearest morgue. However, at that very instant the ghostlike silhouette of a dark Porsche is crossing the street with the speed of a shooting star. It’s all over in a microsecond. Half a microsecond.

The car screeches to a halt, the squeal of its brakes can be heard all the way to San Francisco, and the body of John Winston Lennon goes flying some five metres into the air before crashing into a lamppost. And that’s that.

Mark David Chapman lying blood-drenched on the sidewalk, Yoko crying over John’s twisted body, and Madonna behind the wheel of the Porsche with those wild eyes, diamond eyes, a material girl watching me, watching the two bodies, and the night, and the snow.

Ambulance sirens pierce the heavy silence that has suddenly settled between us like a blanket of something far whiter and colder than this snow that falls down, and then the police arrive, asking questions and filling out reports. I slink away quietly, consoling myself with the fact that there was nothing I could have done for Lennon, and ain’t that a shame.

But it’s not all bad. Madonna’s autographs will certainly come in handy in my own present, in their own future. Just like the autographs I got out of Lee Harvey Oswald right before I had him ice Nixon.

When the redheaded woman with the baby carriage at last moved out of earshot, Phil said, “It’s easy, just get it down the back of your pants. You saw me do it a hundred times, come on.”

Lex looked nervously at the girl behind the news-agency counter and said, “She’ll see me. We come here every other day and never buy anything.”

“She doesn’t care. For twelve dollars an hour, think she cares if they’re missing a couple magazines? C’mon go, she’s not looking.”

Phil made it look easy. In awe, Lex had watched him walk out of shops with packets of corn chips stuffed in his shirt so he looked pregnant, watched him take show bags from stalls at the carnival, condoms from the chemist (they did nothing with them except leave them on the spouts of their school’s drinking fountains). Phil stole cigarettes and sold them to the older kids who played coin-op games. He stole CDs, once a DVD set from JBHiFi . His prize catch: an iPod, one of those nice thirty-two gig ones with a digicam inside. Close call, the Target woman turned her back for just a moment after he’d got her to take it out of the case for a look at it, not even planning to steal it till she took her eyes off them. A security guard chased them out of there and they couldn’t go back to Westfield Strathpine again any time in the next decade.

For his part, Lex had stolen two packets of bubble gum. It had been from this very news agency the girl had gone out to the back for a minute or two. “The register,” Phil had urged. “Go! There’s fifties in there.”

Lex had been unable to do it. People had been walking past the doorway; they’d have seen him. He took the gum instead. His hands shook for half an hour afterwards.

And right now the news agency was busy. Old people buying lottery tickets. A creepy perverted dude by the porn mags who hadn’t moved since they’d come in, probably had a big fat woody while he fumbled through the latest Picture . “Don’t worry about that perv,” Phil whispered. “That’s the retard who walks up and down the road all night. If he sees you, he won’t even remember it five minutes from now.”

“How do you know?”

“We threw rocks at him, me and Trent. He just looked at us, didn’t even care. Next day we walked right past him, he didn’t recognise us. So what are you worried about?”

I have a dad at home , Lex thought but didn’t dare say. Not like you. Your mother won’t pull your pants down right in front of everyone at any old excuse to do it and hit the crap out of your nude butt like it turns her on .

Well no, Phil’s dad wouldn’t do that exactly. Phil’s dad would visit once a week and his doped-out mum would sit there in a Valium cloud and list out stuff he’d done wrong during the week in a calm dreamy voice, while Phil’s dad slowly undid his belt. Alex, I think you should go home now. You’d hear it from three houses down: cries and pleads as if Phil were being killed in there, whack, whack, whack. Every Tuesday. Visiting Day.

Phil said, “Alex, listen. You eat the stuff I steal, you keep half of it. You never take anything yourself. Bubble-gum? How badass. Come on. Go-get us some titty mags and we’re even.”

Lex left Phil standing before the comics, sidled over to the magazine stand opposite the titty mags and looked nervously at the girl behind the counter, now selling smokes to some geezer who thought he was pretty funny. Lex snuck a glance at the glossy covers, heart beating faster with the alien allure of women as old as his teachers, posing on the Penthouse with legs open, a white sheet draped between them; on Barely Legal in roller skates with a lollypop and pig-tails; in this weird black leather outfit on Babes & Bikes . Suddenly he wanted each magazine very badly. He’d all but forgotten the pervy guy, who hadn’t moved, still thumbing through the Home Girls section in Picture . The pervy guy was just a pillar of legs beside him, as inhuman as concrete.

Lex grabbed a Penthouse and a Playboy . Down the back of his shorts they went, where they slipped and slid almost completely out till he tucked them into his underwear. Turning for the exit, not daring to look to see if anyone had witnessed it, he walked head-first into the pervy guy’s legs, his face striking the man’s hip.