Тед Чан - Exhalation - Stories

Hey bro.

You want to tell me why I just paid so much for this prism?

Car crash, six months ago, Scott Otsuka and Roderick Ferris. Who survived in your branch?

Roderick Ferris.

Here it was Scott Otsuka.

Got it! Great find, bro!

Yeah, it’s your lucky day. Here’s what you have to do next.

Morrow had already found a printed copy of a six-month-old newspaper whose headline said Roderick Ferris died in the car crash while Scott Otsuka lived. Parallel Morrow’s job now was to find a printed newspaper in his branch that covered the same crash, the one in which Otsuka died while Ferris lived. They scheduled a time a few days from now when they would converse again.

Morrow folded up the keyboard and put the prism on a shelf at the rear of the storeroom. He grinned at Nat when he came back into the office. “You didn’t think we’d pull it off, did you?”

She’d had her doubts, and even now she could hardly believe it. “We haven’t pulled it off yet,” she said.

“The hard part’s done. The rest is going to be easy.” He laughed. “Cheer up, you’re going to be rich.”

“I suppose I am.” Which was worrying in itself; for an addict, a giant windfall could trigger a relapse just as easily as a traumatic event.

As if he were reading her mind, Morrow said, “You worried about falling back into old habits? I could hold your money for you, keep it safe so you don’t spend it on the wrong things.”

Nat gave a little laugh. “Thanks, Morrow, but I think I’ll just take my share.”

“Just trying to be helpful.”

Nat wondered about the version of herself on the opposite side of the prism. She and that parallel self had been the same person up until just under a year ago, when the prism had been activated. Now Nat was going to be rich, while her parallel self wasn’t. Parallel Morrow was going to be rich, but he wasn’t the type to share the money with parallel Nat. Not that she particularly deserved any of it; parallel Nat hadn’t gone to the support-group meetings, hadn’t done any of the work. Parallel Morrow hadn’t done any work, either; he was just lucky enough to have been working the counter when they made contact. If parallel Nat had been working the counter at that moment, she would probably have to split things with parallel Morrow—he was the boss—but she’d still be making a lot of money for being in the right place at the right time. So much came down to luck.

Someone had come in the front door, a man in his forties wearing a windbreaker, so Nat went to the front counter. “Can I help you?”

“Is there a guy named Morrow here?”

Morrow came out of the office. “I’m Morrow.”

The man stared at him. “I’m Glenn Oehlsen. You stole twenty thousand dollars from my mother.”

Morrow looked mystified. “There’s been a mistake. I was helping your mother stay in touch with her paraself—”

“Yeah, and you convinced her to give away her money. That money belonged to me!”

“It belonged to your mother,” said Morrow. “She could do whatever she wanted with it.”

“Well, I’m here now, and I want it back.”

“I don’t have the money, it’s been transferred into the other branch.”

Oehlsen’s face twisted with contempt. “Don’t give me that, I know you can’t send money into another timeline. I’m not an idiot!”

“If you give me a few days, I can see if your mother’s paraself would be willing to return—”

“Fuck that noise.” Oehlsen pulled a pistol out of his jacket and aimed it at Morrow. “Give me the money!”

Morrow and Nat raised their hands. “Okay, let’s relax,” said Morrow.

“I’ll relax once you give me the money.”

“I don’t have what you’re looking for.”

“Bullshit!”

From her vantage point Nat could tell that a customer in one of the carrels had seen what was happening and was calling the police. “There’s some cash in the register,” she said. “You can have that.”

“I’m not a goddamned robber, I just want what’s mine. What this guy cheated out of my mother.” With his free hand, Oehlsen pulled his phone out and put it on the counter. “Now you take yours out,” he said to Morrow.

Slowly, Morrow took out his phone and laid it next to Oehlsen’s.

Oehlsen tapped open the digital wallet on his phone. “Now you’re going to make a transfer. Twenty thousand dollars.”

Morrow shook his head. “No.”

“You think I’m joking?”

“I’m not paying you,” he said.

Nat looked at him incredulously. “Just—”

“Shut up,” said Morrow with a glare. He returned his attention to Oehlsen. “I’m not going to pay you.”

Oehlsen was clearly flustered. “You think I won’t do it?”

“I think you don’t want to go to jail.”

“You work with prisms. You know there’s some timeline where I shoot you right now.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think this is the one.”

“If it’s going to happen anyway, why shouldn’t I be the one to do it?”

“You kill me, you’re the one that goes to jail. And like I said, you don’t want that.”

Oehlsen stared at him for a minute. Then he lowered the pistol, picked up his phone, and walked out of the store.

Nat and Morrow both let out enormous sighs of relief. “Jesus Christ, Morrow,” said Nat. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

Morrow smiled weakly. “I knew he didn’t have it in him.”

“When a guy is holding a gun on you, you do what he says.” Nat realized her heart was racing; she tried some deep breathing to slow it down. Her shirt was soaked with sweat. “I better check on the customers—” Oehlsen was standing in the doorway again.

“Fuck it,” he said, “what difference does it make?” He raised the pistol, shot Morrow in the face, and walked away.

The police picked Glenn Oehlsen up a few miles away. Officers questioned Nat, the customers who were in the store, and an executive who came from SelfTalk’s main office. Nat told the officers she had no idea what Morrow had been up to, and they seemed to believe her. She admitted to the executive that she knew Morrow had been taking a prism out of the store and visiting Jessica Oehlsen at the nursing home, and was reprimanded for failing to report a violation of company policy. The next day a temporary store manager arrived; he ordered an inventory of all the prisms in the store and established new procedures for checking them in and out of the storeroom, but Nat had already taken home the prism that Morrow had bought from Lyle.

At the next scheduled meeting with parallel Morrow, Nat got on the keyboard:

Hey bro.

This isn’t Morrow. This is Nat.

Hey Nat. Why are you on the prism?

We’ve had problems here. Morrow’s dead.

What? Are you serious?

He ran a scam on a woman named Jessica Oehlsen. Her son Glenn came in here and shot him. I don’t know if you’re running a scam on her in your branch, but if you are, back off. Her son’s unstable.

Shit. That’s fucked up.

You’re telling me. So what do you want to do now?

There was a long pause. Eventually a reply appeared on the screen.

We can still go ahead with the deal. You’ll have to take care of things on your end by yourself. Think you can handle that?

Nat thought about it. Selling the prism to Scott Otsuka would mean going to Los Angeles, a bus ride of several hours each way. There would probably have to be a preliminary meeting before the actual sale could take place, which would mean at least two trips.

I can handle it.

For the first time, Nat wasn’t acting as the buyer; she was the seller. She would have to provide evidence of what made her prism valuable. Nat and parallel Morrow exchanged photos of their respective printed newspapers; these were harder to forge than screenshots of the newspaper websites.