Terry Bisson - Bears Discover Fire

“I beg your pardon!” said Borogove. “Nobody tells me who will or will not hang in this gallery. Not even guys from the future. Besides, who’s ever heard of this Rosado?”

“I didn’t mean to be rude,” said Stretch. “It’s just that we already know what will happen. Besides, we’ve already deposited three hundred thousand dollars in your account first thing tomorrow.”

“Well, in that case…” Borogove seemed mollified. “But who is she? Do you have her phone number? Does she even have a phone? A lot of artists—”

“How many paintings are you going to buy?” I asked.

“You stay out of this!” she whispered in ingles .

“But I am Teresa Algarin Rosado,” I said.

I quit my job as a security guard. A few nights later I was in my apartment when I noticed a shimmering by the sink. The air began to glow and… but you’ve seen Star Trek . I barely had time to pull on my jeans. I was painting and I usually work in a T-shirt and underpants.

“Remember me, one of the two guys from the future?” Shorty said, in Spanish, as soon as he had fully appeared.

“So you can talk,” I said, in Spanish also. “Where’s your companero ?”

“It’s his night off. He’s got a date.”

“And you’re working?”

“It’s my night off too. I just—uh—uh…” He blushed.

“Couldn’t get a date,” I said. “It’s all right. I’m about ready to knock off anyway. There’s a Bud in the refrigerator. Get me one too.”

“You always work at midnight? Can I call you Teresa?”

“Please do. Just finishing a couple of canvases. This is my big chance. My own show. I want everything to be just right. What are you looking for?”

“A bud?”

“A Bud is a cerveza ,” I said. “The top twists off. To the left. Are you sure you guys are from the future and not the past?” (Or just the country, I thought to myself.)

“We travel to many different time zones,” he said.

“Must be exciting. Do you get to watch them throw the Christians to the lions?”

“We don’t go there, it’s all statues,” he said. “Statues won’t fit through the Chronoslot. You might have noticed, Stretch and I broke quite a few before we quit trying.”

“Stretch?”

“My partner. Oh, and call me Shorty.”

It was my first positive illustration of the power of the past over the future.

“So what kind of art do you like?” I asked while we got comfortable on the couch.

“I don’t like any of it, but I guess paintings are best; you can turn them flat. Say, this is pretty good cerveza . Do you have any roll and rock?”

I thought he meant the beer but he meant the music. I also had a joint, left over from a more interesting decade.

“Your century is my favorite,” Shorty said. Soon he said he was ready for another petal.

“Bud,” I said. “In the fridge.”

“The cerveza in your century is very good,” he called out from the kitchen.

“Let me ask you two questions,” I said from the couch.

“Sure.”

“Do you have a wife or a girlfriend back there, or up there, in the future?”

“Are you kidding?” he said. “There are no single girls in the future. What’s your second question?”

“Do you look as cute out of that shimmery suit as you do in it?”

“There’s one missing,” said Borogove, checking off her list as the workmen unloaded the last of my paintings from the rented panel truck and carried them in the front door of the gallery. Other workmen were taking Bucky’s giant tits and asses out the back door.

“This is all of it,” I said. “Everything I’ve ever painted. I even borrowed back two paintings that I had traded for rent.”

Borogove consulted her list. “According to the two guys from the future, three of your early paintings are in the Museo de Arte Inmortal del Mundo in 2255: ‘Tres Dolores,’ ‘De Mon Mouse,’ and ‘La Rosa del Futuro.’ Those are the three they want.”

“Let me see that list,” I said.

“It’s just the titles. They have a catalogue with pictures of what they want, but they wouldn’t show it to me. Too much danger of Timesplits.”

“Slips,” I said. We looked through the stacked canvases again. I am partial to portraits. “De Mon Mouse” was an oil painting of the super in my building, a rasta who always wore Mickey Mouse T-shirts. He had a collection of two.

“Tres Dolores” was a mother, daughter, and grandmother I had known on Avenue B; it was a pose faked up from photographs—a sort of tampering with time in itself, now that I thought of it.

But “La Rosa del Futuro”?

“Never heard of it,” I said.

Borogove waved the list. “It’s on here. Which means it’s in their catalogue.”

“Which means it survives the holocaust,” I said.

“Which means they pick it up at midnight, after the opening Wednesday night,” she said.

“Which means I must paint it between now and then.”

“Which means you’ve got four days.”

“This is crazy, Borogove.”

“Call me Mimsy,” she said. “And don’t worry about it. Just get to work.”

“There’s pickled herring in the nevera ,” I said, in Spanish.

“I thought you were Puerto Rican,” said Shorty.

“I am, but my ex-boyfriend was Jewish, and that stuff keeps forever.”

“I thought there were no single men in New York.”

“Exactly the problem,” I said. “His wife was Jewish too.”

“You’re sure I’m not keeping you from your work?” said Shorty.

“What work?” I said forlornly. I had been staring at a blank canvas since ten P.M. “I still have one painting to finish for the show, and I haven’t even started it.”

“Which one?”

“La Rosa del Futuro,” I said. I had the title pinned to the top corner of the frame. Maybe that was what was blocking me. I wadded it up and threw it at the wall. It only went halfway across the room.

“I think that’s the most famous one,” he said. “So you know it gets done. Is there a blossom—”

“A Bud,” I said. “In the door of the fridge.”

“Maybe what you need,” he said, with that shy, sly futuristic smile I was growing to like, “is a little rest.”

After our little rest, which wasn’t so little, and wasn’t exactly a rest, I asked him, “Do you do this often?”

“This?”

“Go to bed with girls from the past. What if I’m your great-great-grandmother or something?”

“I had it checked out,” he said. “She’s living in the Bronx.”

“So you do! You bastard! You do this all the time.”

“Teresa! Mi corazon ! Never before. It’s strictly not allowed. I could lose my job! It’s just that when I saw those little…”

“Those little what?”

He blushed. “Those little hands and feet. I fell in love.”

It was my turn to blush. He had won my heart, a guy from the future, forever.

“So if you love me so much, why don’t you take me back to the future with you?” I asked, after another little rest.

“Then who would paint all the paintings you are supposed to paint over the next thirty years? Teresa, you don’t understand how famous you are going to be. Even I have heard of Picasso, Michelangelo, and the great Algarin—and art is not my thing. If something happened to you, the Timeslip would throw off the whole history of art.”

“Oh. How about that.” I couldn’t seem to stop smiling. “So why don’t you stay here with me.”

“I’ve thought about it,” he said. “But if I stayed here, I wouldn’t be around to come back here and meet you in the first place. And if I had stayed here, we would know about it anyway, since there would be some evidence of it. See how complicated Time is? I’m just a delivery guy and it gives me a headache. I need another leaf.”