Кейт Форсит - Relics, Wrecks and Ruins - Anthology of Speculative Fiction Short Works

“I’ve told you what Mother said the last time I saw her in the nursing home.”

“That was a terrible nursing home,” Norman said, remembering how the hallway doors clicked shut and locked.

“Pay attention, Norman! You’re not eighty-five anymore. You’re—”

“Thirty.” Yes, that was right, he thought. He was here… and he was there. It was like seeing double images. You’re thirty and you’re in law school. And you hate it. You want to be a writer, but your father’s will specified law school, all expenses paid, or no bequest. (I might add that Norman became—or had been, depending on your perspective point—a war correspondent and the editor-in-chief of a second-tier local news magazine. He never managed to finish law school. But all that was now in the future, and Norman’s problem was that he had already lived it… unless, of course, it could be changed.)

(Supplemental: Although Laura had no grand aspirations to be a writer, she would attend literary gatherings with her husband and begin what she called “noodling” after meeting an editor at a writers’ conference. Thereafter she would make a very comfortable six-figure income writing a series of best-selling novels in her spare time under the pseudonym Candy Cartman. All of this, of course, being dependent upon the above-mentioned reader’s perspective point and the mutability of time and alternity.)

“Norman!”

“Yes, I’m listening! And I remember: your mother told you to remove the mirror from the room as soon as she died and that you only live twice.”

Laura looked at him coolly, her eyes now blue green, her face perfect and unblemished.

No wonder old people want to be young, Norman thought, then said, “But as I’ve told you a thousand times, she was not in her right mind. She thought that she was James Bond. It wasn’t her fault, it—”

“It was true,” Laura said, musing, “and Mother was right. We lived once, and this—right here, right now—is twice. And, incidentally, Mr. Armchair Psychoanalyzer, she never thought she was James Bond!”

“It’s crazy, that’s what it is. You and I are hallucinating. Maybe we just died, and these are my last thoughts like in that Twilight Zone episode where the guy is being hanged, and the rope breaks or something; and he runs around happy as Larry until the last scene when his neck is broken because it was all a dream. Like that.”

“So we both just died in the bathroom. Both of us. At the same time.”

“No,” Norman said, “ I just died. You… you’ll live to a hundred and twenty. Or, more likely, I’m asleep and right now this minute I’m having a dream, or a nightmare about your mother.”

“My mother?”

“Yes, your mother and her mirror. So, I’ll tell you what… I’m going to go back into the bathroom, and maybe if I can push myself back through her fakakta mirror, I’ll wake up.”

Laura sipped her coffee, looked at him coolly again, and shrugged. “Knock yourself out. But why on earth would you want to go back to being…”

“To being what?”

“Old and smelling like an old towel.”

“Okay, that’s it!”

Norman rose, told Laura he really was going back ‘home’ (for a decent cup of coffee), admitted that the dream part of getting laid was terrific, and then shambled into the bathroom: his unconscious hadn’t quite caught up to his new situation, and he still thought his right knee was arthritic.

He stared at himself in the mirror. Pretty good looking: prematurely graying hair, manly scars from a terrible case of pimples in adolescence, cleft chin, well-defined pecs instead of saggy man boobs. He pressed his hand against the mirror. It was cool, actually cold. He pressed harder and told himself to wake the hell up. The mirror frame creaked from the pressure of his hand on the mercury-coated glass it surrounded. But he couldn’t push back into his old, or, rather, his other bathroom in Lighthouse Point.

And he didn’t wake up into his Floridian future.

He grimaced at himself, then raised his arms into a bodybuilder’s pose—he was scarecrow skinny, but muscular—and said, “Maybe this isn’t such a bad dream. Maybe…”

But he knew… oh, he knew.

He remembered the lines of a poem by Juvenal that he had inserted into a one-act play that never saw the proverbial light of day:

Like warmed-up cabbage served at each repast,

The repetition kills the wretch at last.

Thus the minutes, hours, days, and years passed; and repetition it was, repetitions of repetitions, (accompanied, of course, by the ever-pivotal soupçon of non -repetition): shower, morning coffee, Norman rushing to catch the D train to St. John’s Law School in Brooklyn, hot bagels and late-night study sessions with his five-member study group; and Laura kissing Norman goodbye before leaving for the advertising agency that just bordered on the Bronx, an advertising agency that she one day owned and relocated to the West Village (after she had signed Maria Chorale Cosmetics and Raimond International Resorts); and she worked late and met Norman at the Stage Deli to share a bowl of matzah ball soup and an enormous hot pastrami sandwich; and Sundays walking around the 79 thStreet Boat Basin, and movies, and cooking in the grease-stained kitchen; and Norman graduated law school with honors and (of course) passed the New York Bar exam and joined the law firm Hensley, Lowry, Graham & Gallagher, and started climbing the ladder to partnership, and then moving to Sea Gate in Brooklyn, and as every hour and every day of another life slipped from memory, they were replaced by the real moments of the ever-moving, punishing, dog-eat-dog present; and then moving back to Manhattan, this time to the Upper East Side, to a seven-figure-price-point, four-bedroom ‘residence’ in the Pierre on Fifth Avenue; and Laura opened satellite agencies in Boston, Palm Beach, and West LA, and…

…and as evidenced above and repeated again (for repetition is one of the leitmotifs of this story) they forgot. Forgot their old life, forgot all the joys and pains of what we might call their first life, as their trajectories toward another futurity worked themselves out.

And, yes, as you might have guessed by following the trail of metaphorical breadcrumbs I’ve left, they separated.

In 1985.

Well, it wasn’t really much of an adjustment, as they were rarely in the same place at the same time. In February of 1999, however, Norman was having lunch (yes, with Laura, for they were never formally separated or divorced, just “detached”) at Barbetta’s on West 46 thStreet when he inhaled a bite of aged Wagyu filet steak. The waiter, an elegant-looking young man from Ecuador, performed a perfect Heimlich maneuver, which worked, but for the fact that Norman suffered a massive heart attack just as the half-chewed piece of steak shot out like a projectile, smashing one of the electric candles in the overhead crystal chandelier.

Laura, heartbroken, gave a moving valediction at his exquisitely tasteful funeral, supervised his burial in the Mount Hebron Cemetery in Flushing (the very same cemetery in which Emanuel Weiss, an ex-member of Murder Incorporated, and Selig Grossinger, founder of Grossinger’s Resort, resided), and commissioned a monument commensurate with his status.

As Laura’s mother had always said, “Well, dead is dead.”

Mother’s aphorism, however, wasn’t strictly true.

Norman was certainly dead, and Laura grieved for his loss; grieved as we all do for all the “could have beens,” and then, as most of us do, she slid back into life, slid back into the moment-by-moment, numbing comfort of repetition and regularity until, yes, you guessed it: Wednesday, November 10 th, 2020, at 9:30 in the morning.