Elvissey Read online

  `Judy, I--

  She opened her eyes. "Excuse, Iz. You've concerns aplenty. Mine's an untempered tantrum, nothing more. All's not overmuch, once faced and considered. The worst's longb- ested, blood under the bridge. Look there." She aimed her finger toward the fireplace's painting as if feigning aim. "Reinstalled after twenty years. Distance enough at last regained."

  "Who are they?"

  "The Drydens," she said. "Bless their black hearts. Two tries the artist took before pleasing, it's told. The Old Man thumbed it, first time round. Demanded that he and his blood be captured as they were, not as they wished."

  "This pleased?"

  "This captured." Three oiled Drydens posed in a woodpa- neled room. Judy anecdoted as I vizzed each one in turn. "Susie D." Mrs. Dryden lounged in a wingbacked chair, squeezed twixt her men fore and aft, glaring at her onlookers with eyes appearing borrowed for the occasion. Her sky-gray gown was so haphazardly pleated as to resemble amateur's origami. "Rewired Mona Lisa with a surgical smile. Nasty bitch, she was. Sowdugged and flabby." Mrs. Dryden's hand rested in semblance of blessing atop her teenager's brow, who sprawled on the carpet before her, his head brushing her knees. "Sonny." His leggings' shadows revealed an untoward bulge, as if mother's touch comforted more than was proper. "He liked to play the girl, and me Mandingo,"Judy said. "I'd strap on a peacemaker, and work him till he bled." Thatcher Dryden stood behind his wife as if he'd crept up to surprise. "The Old Man. None like him." His face appeared to blaze from within; blue fire lit his eyes. In none living had I ever seen such unhealthy self-assurance. He wore his hair long, and leaned upon a baseball bat as if it were a cane. "His American pasttime," Judy said, laughing. "That was them, and this is now."

  "No descendants to reclaim a grip?"

  "Sonny and his wife spawned a son, wet-eared and awful." Her laugh decayed, and, at first seeming set to continue, she instead tangented, or so I believed. "Lessen competition, the Old Man told all timeover, lessen competition. He mottoed by that. Seamus and I, when time came right, we lessened." As Judy lingered her look over the Drydens, her expression stilled; her eyes gleamed wet as if, against odds and expectations, she missed her onetime owners. "You want your husband, Iz?"

  "Always," I said, contexting his word to my preference.

  "I wanted this." She eyed the clock. Blue light bounced off her windows. "The deadline's nearing. You'd best off. Aim expectations low in all matters, Iz. Return, and all else is clover. Just return."

  "Why'd you hang them here?" I asked, reading the inscription brass-plated upon the Drydens' gilded frame: IN LOCO PARENTIS.

  "To remind of what I've faced, pasttime," she said. "All else is minor, compared. And history demands honor, however dishonorable its participants."

  "Money spins the world," Leverett told us during the drive to Flushing; he, my husband and I rode backseated in our company car. Our transport was trucked over following their check, preliminarying our arrival, that all equipment might be again reexamined at the departure point.

  "Long-learned," said John. Rainsheets opaqued our windows; I pressed mine down, to clear air so well as sight.

  "While tripping, meant," said Leverett. "I've funding here, prepacked and document-accompanied." Giving John a wallet, he handed me a billfold. In both were licenses, IDs and three hundred paper dollars, green and gray crinkles free of holo, strip or mark, and each bearing a century-old date. My white gloves went unsmeared by their feel. Most were ones; two were tens. "Copied from models returned from Biggerstaff's visit. Excuse the unwieldy thicknesses."

  "Usable to recover parents' deferments?" I asked, flashing my new-printed Venezuelan resident card. Leverett grinned without smiling.

  "IDed names imprinted match your own," he answered.

  "Pseudonyming's undesired, undercovering," said John. My wad crowded my purse overmuch, but fit. "Attempts to keep in character brainrattle, sans purpose."

  "Be none but yourselves," said Leverett. "No advice betters. Suggestion, Isabel. Subtle your makeup."

  Daily cosmeticking was my exception, not rule; accurate colorization of my new skin still challenged, lending new befuddlements each time. With tissue I softened my rouge, slightened my lipstick; studying my redesigns in my green compact's mirror I marveled, seeing yet another strange face.

  "American-fresh," said Leverett. "Remember image im pressions. With such a look as previous, prices might be asked or offered, depending on who eyes the paint."

  "What's meant?" John asked, forwarding as if setting to avenge insult.

  "Nada, nada," said Leverett. "Idle social commentary, pertinent only to upcoming surroundings."

  Our windows defogged, easing our vision. On the East River a full-loaded garbarge hove toward Hell Gate and the Sound's dump beyond, drifting through the flames. Yellow scratches in the shipsides etched our corporate name above the waterline. Boatworkers clad in protective suits appeared through riversmoke as orange flecks sprinkled over foaming, nut-brown wastes.

  "Mind, John," Leverett said, "your hosts may phrase in untoward, because unfamiliar, manner. Your subject, when found, may especially do so. Ignore, unless harm appears meant. Then react as able."

  "Known," he said, sounding stringtaut. I'd watched him dose himself that morning; if I hadn't, I would have believed him slipping somehow into old mode, so tense and set to blow he appeared without; yet so innerpeaced, and loving toward me, all the same. "All ignorable, once understood."

  "Isabel?" Leverett asked. "Expectant?"

  "Rollable," I said; corrected. "Ready to roll."

  Leaving Bronx behind, we pulled onto the Triborough Bridge, unbombed throughout the Long Island vicissitudes; the Home Army preserved the span that troop transferrals might speed across with greater ease, to more immediate result. The war was so long over that its memory returned, ofttimes, as no more than dream, but if willed I recalled nightlong cannonades, false dawns in the east; remembered the look of my friends' older siblings departing, and their look when and if they returned, demonstrating full a reversed regooding. Judy's two sisters and three brothers, all older, all went willingly to serve their nation's masters; by thirteen, Judy was an only child.

  "Perfect weather," said Leverett, peering downriver, as if to discern the gray overlap where cloud kissed water. "Overcasting sharpens the Window's apparency, illuminating the route."

  The river hightided: shorelapped Long Island, crept along its sidestreets; flooded ground floors and scattered vehicles' shells wherever water broke against land. Manhattan's faraway towers appeared as afterimages in the wet fog, scars left unerased by regooding's surgeons, that present would not forget past's pox. Our car downramped, clattering across patches of metal; turning onto a cratered expressway, we passed kilometer after kilometer of charred walls and dry sockets, the places where houses were pulled. My mother grew up in Queens; from the look of the borough's leftovers, its remaining children could as well have grown up on the moon.

  "Expectations heightening?" Leverett asked, slapping his own knees.

  I nodded; new-experienced nausea's leavings roiled my belly. "Heightened enough," said John.

  We approached Flushing Meadows. On our left the old stadium's manglings lay oceaned round by shattered asphalt; brownleafed trees with anorectic limbs erupted between girders. All nearby was woodland or desert; the onetime park overgrew wherever prolonged shelling hadn't barrened the land. The red ribs of the Unisphere perched axised on a concrete dot, its continents disarrayed; North America, drifting far, lay crumpled beneath Antarctica. Army guards slowed us as we neared; we transversed their barricade beneath a razorwired roof. Some distance beyond, the sky ripped apart, fluttering and flapping independent of windwrack.

  "Behold," Leverett said. "The eighth wonder."

  The Window wasn't so much a window as a tear in the atmosphere's curtain. Behind its folds lay a blizzard's white; until we drew closer it appeared as a cloud attached at base to earth, and pinned at apex to a star. We stopped several hundred meter
s short of the Window, parking alongside our purple-and-yellow transport. We'd been shown photos and vids; nothing forewarned of the Window's immensity, nor of its awfulness.

  "Step clear," said Leverett, throwing himself coatless into gale's midst, hopping out bareheaded; his hair held its hold on his head. "Something, yes?"

  A dozen smock-and-uniform-clad officials waited near, sheltering themselves with wind-imploded umbrellas. Ozone perfumed the air; breathing in, I dizzied, and my stomach churned anew. Steadying myself, I noticed my hair, everyone's hair, uplifting as if staticked. Tingles shivered through my neck's nape; I uncertained if they quivered with electric's buzz, or with fear's. Birds of indeterminate species flew around the Window, their cries calling over rain and thunder; stragglers drawing too near its flaps vanished in midflight.

  "Their birds or ours?" I asked, flattening my hair with a scarf.

  "It matters?" Leverett answered. Deadeyeing the Window, staring straight in, I saw nothing; the whiteness blanked all beyond. Our world horizoned plain on either side as if naught interrupted its line. Red and gold light-blobs floated from the opening's edges, skittering skyways, bobbing groundward; appearing and reappearing with the unpredictability of soap-bubbles.

  "Plasmas?"

  "Plasmaesque, undoubted," said Leverett. "Magnetic apparitions. Specters of the cosmos, looking for tables to tap against. Harmless, probably."

  A lightning-bolt flashed, rebounding along the Window's line; shot back into the overhead, new-streaked in blue and pink. When the lightning struck its birthplace a thunderpeal rang out to bleed all ears in hearshot, and my own drums felt set to pop, not with sound, but pressure. The Window had its own voice, I discerned, a headaching blend of hiss and sizzle, so lowpitched as to come through sole as subliminal throb.

  "Bizarreness overwrought," said John, his hair shining beneath rain's cascade. "It's unreal."

  "Real enough," said Leverett. "Invitation to adventure."

  "What stays it in place?"

  "Unceasing operation of the othersided Tesla coil that split it open, the lab says. Something about field fluctuation. They're mute to detail more, if they know. Science's socalled wondersense leaves my mind forever desiring. Mis- sionways, all's unmattering, however it's put."

  "People," a smocked woman said, shouting over thunder. "Proceed apace, please." I recognized her; she once addressed our physics class, and I'd not understood a word.

  "Timeframe's moving as planned," Leverett said. "What's problemed?"

  "We're rainsoaked," she said. "Please proceed."

  "Delays unnerve," said John. "Let's lookingglass."

  Climbing into the Hudson, fronting myself beside my husband, I marveled that a full meter nonetheless separated us, so spacious was the interior. Leverett and the scientist fingertapped the driver's window; John fumbled for a moment before finding the necessary opening knob. When he rolled down the glass the scientist thrust in her head, showering us as she shook herself dry.

  "Excuse," she said to John. "Give full ear. Drive lightfooted, as up a driveway. Five miles per transports at secure rate, allowing passage sans location displacement. Visibility returns, following whiteout. Speed at emergence point won't top thirty."

  "Certain?"

  "Certain. Proceed as per plan, tracking symptomologies at all times with twicedailied healthchecks."

  "All grasped and understood," John said, onehanding the wheel. He switched on the windshield wipers, sweeping clear a semiview; between the Window and ourselves the air heatshimmered, throwing no mirage equal to what lay ahead.

  "Mind, too, as told," Leverett said. "Minimize interaction with all. Readied?"

  "Readied."

  "Whatever results with primary goal, fulfill secondary," he reminded us. "Retrieve contemporary history text wherever availabled, to satisfy info needs. Facts forever best inference, however circumstanced."

  John pressed the ignition. "Later, alligator," I said.

  "Begone, then," said Leverett, slapping the roof. "Behave. Return."

  We unbraked; our car lurched ahead, bumping along a length of rutted concrete that led into the Window. Those seeing us off raced for their cars, tossing their umbrellas behind them, all but Leverett; he stood unmoving, his suit dark with rain, as if to ascertain that, attaining point zero, we wouldn't grow chary, and at the last moment reconsider, and steer away.

  "Handling easy?" I asked my husband.

  "Coasting, thus far."

  The rain's pelting loudened, as did the everpresent hiss; sounds of crackling audibled round, as if our air crumpled over us. Plasmas skated over the car's hood, leaping skyward, gravity-heedless as a fire's embers. From eyecorner I glanced clockways; expected without reason that I might see its numbers reverse, or transform in some manner, as we closed in, and of course saw only the seconds tick off as before. The Window loomed ever larger overhead, blotting our world; the rapping on the roof grew louder, and came faster; our tires skidded on the road.

  "What's falling?" John asked, demisting the inner windshield with his sleeve. "Hail?"

  "Frogs." All manner of unlikely events occurred midworlds-in the fence, our professors put it, theorizing-and so it evidenced. Hundreds of tiny frogs, likely extinct with all others in our world, showered onto our car, all spring-green, none larger than coinsize; they splattered the glass and crunched beneath the wheels, appearing no less surprised than were we. The fall tapered within the final few meters of our approach, and, as we brushed the Window's edge, ceased entirely.

  "Iz," my husband said, "I love-"

  "You too," I completed. As whiteness enclosed us, I imagined we stopped; knew at once a frozen feel, as if we'd been sealed within a glacier. Neither John nor I worded during that motionless eternity; as void swallowed us, my worries left me for the first time in months, and peace overwhelmed. The thought that this might not be so dissimilar from death struck deep; would this be so bad, after all?

  A smile came to my lips; without intended effort stretched into sneer, and then grimace. When I attempted to draw breath, I couldn't; felt myself pressing into the seatback as if flattened by unseen Godness. A harsher light flashed, halfblinding us; I heard a scream, and as my breath returned I saw our car smashing through a fence, and a uniformed man flying off the front fender.

  "Iz!! Hold-!- John braked our car, steering left, his hands slapping the wheel; burning rubber's odor extinguished ozone's and we stopped short of plunging into a long reflecting pool. Sunlight's glare shone upon our backs as we stared into night; it wasn't raining on the other side. "Thirty per," he shouted, highvoiced, as if in transit he'd recovered so many years as to be left prepubertied. "Sixtyplus, rather-"

  Wheeling right, he steered us onto a roadway alongsiding the pool, and floored the car, accelerating full. "You're safe-?" I asked.

  "Our casualty," he said, fixing eyes on the straightaway, speedheedless. "Moving? Dead? Others seen?"

  Rolling down my window, staring behind us, I saw a kneel ing silhouette evidence sustained, if shaken, life. "Moving. No others visible."

  "What's that light?" John asked.

  "Drive!"

  Beyond the actual fence through which we'd crashed, a house-wide pillar of light shot skyward from our arrival point, tossing sparks, streamlining as it flowed; at azimuth, it split and medusaed into churning coils of lightning. As we further distanced, I clarified that the yellow-white current streamed groundways, rather; poured down from a framework encircling a tall spire's tip. The spire and its alongsiding ball familiared; Luther kept their correspondents' photo on his wall. Here, however, the Trylon had no red warning lights attached, and the Perisphere was not illumined as to resemble a globe; imprinted upon its curve was the single letter T.

  "This way to exit?" I asked.

  "So believed. Still no followthrough?"

  "Nada." Looking out, letting my hair fly as it never had before, I felt this world's breeze blow twenty degrees warmer. Stationary searchlights, interspersed amid shrubbery, outline
d the road ahead, showing it as a high white hallway; over the distancing electrical roar I heard a flapping at the front tire, a sound resembling wings beating against glass.

  "Give a noisecheck, once cleared," John said. Two large windowless buildings faced off across the road, exit-near; along their smooth cornices ran backlit black letters reading NEW YORK CONSOLIDATED POWER AND LIGHT. No workers or guards showed, no sirens sounded; we drove through the gate, a brick archway outlined with small incandescents and topped with a figure limbed with lightning bolts, crowned with a lightbulb head. Slowing, feeling more secured, we moved undisturbed along the streets beyond, passing long rows of small buildings, and smaller houses; all must have semimatched Queens's onetime look. "Iz," my husband said. "We're-"

  "Safe," I said. "Pull over. Let's exam."

  John curbsided and stopped the car, switching off the engine. Closing his eyes, inhaling as if to hyperventilate, he slid closer, took my hand and kissed me. His hand's tremble ran body-wide.

  "All'll better now, Iz," he said. "All's recoverable again." I eyed the street updown, certifying that we'd not been trailed by the man we'd struck or any others after speeding away from where we'd crossed. Neither cars nor passersby showed; we were as alone in this world as we were in our own. "None to interrupt."

  "We'd best damage-assess," I said, opening my door. Judging the lightening east, I estimated dawn wouldn't be long in coming. John got out and lowered himself to examine underwheel. Staring past the Trylon's glowing discharge, sighting New York's skyline lights, I saw that they outlined so much lower here as to seem another city's.

  "All's fine," John said, favoring his leg as he stood; I suspected the day's earlier damp was working delayed effects upon his joints. Limping around to where I stood, he embraced me. "Love, Iz."