Песах Амнуэль - Zion's Fiction - A Treasury of Israeli Speculative Literature

“And then he fell ill. The doctors found lung cancer, too advanced to be cured. They tried, the doctors. He tried. He told stories of doctors finding cures for cancer, and I know that they did, but they were too late to help him. He died in hospital, a few days ago. He did so much good for the world, but he couldn’t do himself a favor and quit smoking, the silly man.” Her voice breaks at the end. She squeezes my hand and falls silent.

It couldn’t have been. She must have gotten it wrong. “I…,” I gasp, “killed… me.”

“Huh, what?” Her thoughts return to me from elsewhere.

“Ah…” I start to say, but my voice betrays me. I force my head to my right, to the stand where my laptop sits. I’m not sure if I truly thought I’d write any stories here, or whether I just enjoyed the disapproving looks from Ray, who likes to act as if computers are demons taken form.

When it boots, and the word processor opens, she helps guide my feeble hand over the keys, “i killed me,” I write, “time machine.” Could I have helped create one with my stories, in that other reality? Did I really have that much power to change the world?

She thinks for a while, probably trying to decide if my illness had made me delirious.

“Well,” she finally says, “It sounds rather fantastic, but a time machine could explain why the other path felt more natural. It would take something that could really warp reality to change the natural path of someone’s life. But I still don’t understand what you mean by ‘I killed me.’ You mean literally?”

I don’t answer her. I’m too weary to make a sound or even nod.

“Simon, I’m sorry. I’ve tired you with my story. I guess I’ll come back later, after you’ve rested a little.”

She gets ready to let go of my hand, and I force my fingers to tighten around her. I know that there’s no way I can hold on, so I’m grateful that she stops and sits back down.

“Simon,” she says, and I can hear the humor in her voice, can almost see her smile. “It’s about time you didn’t let go so easily.” She pauses, probably smiling again. I open my eyes, and sure enough, there she is, smiling and looking into my eyes. Her smile grows wider. “Good,” she says.

“I know you’re tired, but I’ll tell you what we’ll do. I’ll ask you questions and you can squeeze my hand for the answers. One time for yes, two for no. No, bad idea—wouldn’t want to tire you. Nothing for no, then. I’ll just wait enough to make sure.” She smiles again. “Okay, let’s see if I get this straight: the older you, from the other reality, came back in a time machine to the time you were about to go to war, and you ended up killing him. Is that what happened?”

I hesitate for a second, then squeeze her hand feebly.

“That’s what I thought. Not that it makes any sense. I’m quite sure now that the possibility I followed was your natural path, and you never got near a time machine there. There probably never was one to be near. So it must have been something else. But what? I wish you could tell me more. Maybe after you’ve rested.”

No way. I’m not letting her go. I have to finish this now. There might not be another day. What was the signal for “no”? Nothing—no, that’s no good. I guess I’ll just have to squeeze “yes.”

“Yes? So you want to rest?”

I guess that saying “no” now would be okay.

“No? Or are you just resting? Not a very smart signal scheme I came up with, is it?” She smiles. I smile back, which probably looks grotesque, with half my face paralyzed.

She smiles a big smile back. “Well, if you can smile a big smile like that, I guess you don’t need to rest. So, you want to continue?”

I squeeze “yes.”

“You want the computer?”

No. I just need to think.

“You need some time to think?”

Hey, she didn’t tell me she has ESP too. I smile in my thoughts and squeeze her hand.

I think back to that day, fifty years ago. My memory is as sharp as ever, but emotions still cloud my view. I push past them, try to see the scene as I saw it then: two men stepping out of a strange contraption that hadn’t been there a moment before. One of them old, feeble, and unfamiliar; the other, Ray, old but recognizable. I remember him telling me the other guy was the old me, and I then saw myself in him. I nearly freaked out then.

There’s some detail here, some buried realization that I must uncover. I stop thinking and let the scene take over, as if it were part of a story, as if these were characters of my own creation that I’m trying to get to understand.

Obviously, Ray was the protagonist. He was the one who talked to me, the one who acted. The old me did little. What did Ray want? He asked me not to become that guy. He wanted me to continue writing. He brought that guy to show me what I would become, and then took his body away. Yet Sedef says that I died in hospital. Perhaps he snatched me from there, then returned me back, dead. Did she miss that moment? She probably couldn’t follow every moment of my life—that would have left her no time for her own.

No, that doesn’t make sense. That old me looked old and muddled, but he didn’t look like he was dying. How did he look? I try to picture that guy—his face like mine, but wrinkled, gaunt; his body thin, shriveled. That’s nothing like me, even after the cancer started taking its toll. I might have imagined this to be me, fifty, even twenty years ago, but not now. Could I have aged differently in that other reality? I find it unlikely.

Ray, the bastard! Did he hire an actor to impersonate me?

“Ray!” I cry. It comes out as a croak. I look to my laptop. When she gets it for me, I type, “Can you check him?”

I wait.

“Ray… Bradbury; the writer, right? I remember now. You knew him before you went to war. You don’t meet him again in the other possibility, but I remember that my research of you mentioned him. I guess you’re friends here. Now that I think of it, I saw him interviewed once. He thanked you for putting science fiction in the limelight. That stuck in my mind.”

It was really Ray who deserved the fame. He was the real artist, with his prose that was poetry. I’ve always thought it unfair that it was my straightforward style that won people’s hearts. Ray never agreed with me, of course. “Simple people need a simple style,” he used to say. It was enough for him that they were reading.

“So Ray had something to do with the time machine? And you want me to check his alternate life?”

I squeeze “yes” to both questions.

“I’m not sure I could follow someone else’s life based on your decision. I do have some feeling for him, from that interview and what I saw in your own life….I guess I’ll just have to try.”

I find it funny that she uses the same Rodin posture that she did twenty years ago. She does have nice lips, I notice when her fingers brush them. I wonder if she has anything of mine on her bookshelves now.

I imagine her mind flying from the east coast to the west, finally settling on Ray’s house, dropping down to the mess he calls a basement to see him sitting among his books, writing his next story on his old typewriter.

A touch on my arm wakes me up. “Simon, are you asleep?” I open my eyes, and I see her smile. “Not a very clever question, is it?

“I’m sorry,” she says, “but I couldn’t really see Ray. I did find something. It jumped into my mind when I tried to look for Ray in that other possibility. I guess I could see it because it had something to do with you. He wrote a story about you, you see. He even got it published very recently, so I guess we’re lucky that I’m just checking for it now. Wouldn’t have been able to see it before.”