"Stephen Gallagher - MY REPEATER" - читать интересную книгу автора (Gallagher Stephen)

MY REPEATER

 

MY REPEATER


WHAT CAN I SAY? IT WAS A job, and I was glad to get it. The money wasn't great, but I had no skills and nothing to offer beyond a vague feeling that I was meant for something better. My mother knew someone who knew the owner, and I got a message to go along and show myself. I started two days later. Training was minimal. Customers were few in number.
I'd been there six weeks when I saw my first returnee.
He must have got off the bus at the far end of town, and it had started to rain on him as he'd been walking through the center. I saw him coming up the road. The road was called Technology Drive, and it had been built to run north out of town and into the hills. Ours was the only building on it. You walked about two hundred yards to get to us, with open scrub on either side. If you wanted to follow the road further you could, but there was nothing much to look at unless you wanted to see how the weeds had broken up the concrete.
He walked with his head down, and with his hands in the pockets of his brown overcoat. The rain was light but he walked as if he was taking a beating.
He looked vaguely familiar. But at that point I hadn't considered the possibility that any of the people I'd been dealing with might ever come back.
He came in and went straight to the ledge under the window where we kept the boxes of forms. He didn't have to ask for any help. When he brought the paperwork over to the counter, the boxes had been filled in and the waivers were all in order and I'd little more to do than run through the questionnaire and then take it all through to my boss for his approval.
Morley was in his little back office, where he spent most of the days reading old magazines. He had a desk, a chair, and an anglepoise lamp that couldn't hold a pose without slowly collapsing. I think he had a framed picture on the wall but I can't for the life of me remember what it was of.
"Customer, boss," I told him, and showed him the papers.
He looked them over, and then tilted his chair back a couple of extra degrees so that he could see through the doorway to the main part of the shop. He stared at the waiting man for a moment, then gave me a nod and returned his attention to his reading. Most of his magazines were old technical publications, filled with page after page of fine print. They carried long lists of obsolete gear and they looked about as much fun as telephone directories.
I went back to the counter, and worked out the charges on the spreadsheet. The further back in time you wanted to go, the more it cost. Then there were other complicating factors, like body weight and geography.
When we'd sorted out the payment, I gave him a keycard to put in the machine.
"Booth five," I told him.
He went inside and closed the door. I made all the settings and locked off the switches, and then there was nothing else to do but press the big red button.
"Are you ready, sir?" I called out to him.
"Get on with it," I heard him say.
So I got on with it. It was no thrill, just a routine -- any buzz had gone out of it very quickly. But something jolted me in that moment as I realized why he'd seemed just a little bit familiar. It was the target settings that I recognized. I'd set them before. He'd been in about twelve days previously and he'd specified exactly the same destination.
But he'd been at least ten years older then.
IT WAS A NOTHING job in a run-down travel bureau in a town in the middle of nowhere. I could have been stacking shelves in a supermarket or earning merit stars in a fast-food franchise, but instead I was sending a small group of losers back in time to relive their mistakes. I know that's what they did, because the same bunch of people brought us so much in the way of repeat business.
There must have been hundreds of bureaux like ours, small-town operations all scraping by as the last of their investors' capital dwindled. They'd been set up as a franchise network when the technology had first become available. They were like those long-distance phone places where you buy time at a counter and they assign you a booth while they set up the call; only here, you paid your money to be sent back to a date and a place of your choice.
Anyone could walk in and do it.
But only a strange few ever did.
The predicted boom had been a bust. I suppose it was like space travel. Full of romance and possibilities until it became achievable, and a matter of doubtful value ever after.
Here's what I learned when I talked it over with Morley:
He laid his magazine facedown on the desk and said, "I bet there's something in your life that you'd change, if you could."
"That's got to be true of everybody," I said. "Hasn't it?"
"So why don't you consider going back?"
I suppose the correct answer was that it would be a huge and scary one-way trip, and to make it would involve abandoning the life I now had. And for what? No certain outcome.
But what I said was, "You don't pay me enough."
"I'm not talking about the cost of it," Morley said. "Say I offered you a free one. Would you consider it then?"
"That would depend if you were serious."
"I'm serious. You're hesitating. Why?"
"I haven't thought about it that much."
"Think about it now. It sounds like a great idea. But why doesn't it feel like a great idea?"
"I don't know," I said. "It just doesn't."
But the more I thought about it, the more I thought I understood. It was obvious that I would never successfully go back and fix everything with Caroline Pocock, the proof being that she despised me so thoroughly in the here and now. Whatever I might try to amend, that was the known outcome.
I said, "Does that explain why the only people I see coming through that door seem to be life's born losers?"
"That's exactly what they are," Morley said. "They're the ones who can't accept what became common knowledge after the first few years. Which is that you gamble everything, and nothing changes. Nothing significant, anyway. The status quo is like one big self-regulating ecology. All that happens is that the balance shifts and whatever you do to try to upset it, it just sets itself right."
"How does that work?"
"Nobody knows. The rules are beyond grasping. If you go back to meet yourself, you won't be there. The past that you return to may not even be the past you left behind. Whatever you try to alter, somehow it all still comes out the same. Or else it's different in a way that suits you no better. There's a whole new branch of fractal mathematics that tries to explain it and what it all comes down to is, there's an infinite number of ways for something to go wrong and only one way for it to go right."
I said, "So the overall effect is like, when you pee in the swimming pool and nobody notices."
Clearly this was an analogy that had never occurred to him, because he stopped and gave me a very strange look before carrying on. He wasn't a healthy-looking man. He had pale eyes and gray-looking skin. His hair had lost most of its color, as well. He dressed as if he didn't care about his appearance, in clothes that most people would have bagged up and sent to a charity shop.
He said, "The people who set these places up thought they'd make a fortune. Most of them went bust within ten years. The rest of us squeeze a living from the same bunch of hopeless romantics who think they're the ones who'll beat the system." He gestured toward the public area beyond his office door. "You've seen enough of them by now," he said. "They keep coming back. They're older, they're younger, they're just in a loop thinking, I almost did it then, I'll do it for sure next time. Next time, next time. They scrape up the money and they come limping back. They can't even see how they've thrown away the lives that they set out to fix."
That first returnee of mine was back within the week.
This time, he was much older. I mean, seriously. He was recognizable but he looked as if he'd spent the last couple of decades scavenging for his life in a war zone. Maybe I exaggerate. But not by much. He didn't seem to have washed or shaved in ages. I could smell him from across the room. He just stood there holding onto the wall by the door, as if that last long walk up the road had taken everything out of him.
I said, "Hi."
He fixed on me. I wondered if he was drunk, but when he spoke I was fairly sure that he wasn't. The messages were just taking their time to get through.
He said, "I'm sorry. I've come a long way."
"Can I get you anything?"
He shook his head, and then moved over to where the forms were and pulled out a chair. I made a mental note to tell Morley that the whole area would need a scrub-down with disinfectant and then I realized, with gloom, that the job would fall to me.
I watched the man. The one I now thought of as My Repeater. I'd seen other returnees by now, but he'd been my first. It wasn't so much that he was now old, more that he'd become old before his time. He looked as if he'd been sleeping rough, and I wondered how he'd managed to get his latest stake together. By years of begging and spending nothing, by the look of him.
He brought the paperwork over. I held my breath.
"Just a few last details to get," I said.
"I know," he said.
I went through the usual questionnaire as quickly as I could and when he emptied the money from his pockets onto the counter, I had to force myself to pick it up. The grubby notes were in bundles, and there was a lot of small change. I felt as if I wanted to scrub the coins before touching them.
It always had to be cash. Travelers weren't creditworthy. They walked away from their futures when the Big Red Button was pressed, leaving no one to pay off the debts.
I said, "Do you want to take a seat while I count this?"
"I'll just wait here," he said.
And he did, too. He leaned on the counter and watched, with me breathing as shallowly as I could and trying not to rush it so much that I'd make a mistake and have to do it again.
Only days before, I'd seen him in good health. Now he was a shocking wreck. I couldn't imagine what he'd been through and I didn't want to ask. The part that I couldn't get my head around was that although the change seemed like a magical stroke that had happened in a matter of days, it wasn't. While his younger self had been standing before me, this older version had been somewhere out there, probably heading my way. They were all out there, at more or less the same time -- every one of his repeated selves, going over and over the same piece of ground. Never meeting, never overlapping, co-existing in some elaborate choreography managed by forces unknown. Causing no ripples, accomplishing nothing, scraping up their cash and heading right back here. The person he was, and all of the people he would ever be. Fixed. Determined. Tripping over the same moment, again and again and again.
I felt a sudden and unaccountable sympathy. It bordered on tenderness, and it was an awkward and unfamiliar feeling; doubly hard to deal with, considering the scent and the state of him.
Lowering my voice so that Morley wouldn't overhear, I said, "Second chances don't come cheap, do they?"
"You give it whatever it takes," he said.
He looked so bleak and downcast that it made me sorry I'd spoken at all.
I had an idea, and I pitched it to Morley.
I said, "If we kept one file on each repeater, it would save us having to cover the same ground every time."
"You lazy little bugger," he said.
"I'm not being lazy," I protested. "I thought I was being efficient."
"So somebody comes in here and we face him with a file that shows half a dozen returns that he doesn't even know he's going to make yet. What's that going to do to him?"
"Stop him from wasting his life?"
Morley said, "Watch my lips. It's already happened. Nothing's going to change it. All you can do is add to his misery."
And that was the last of my employee suggestions.
I got an hour for lunch, and some days my old school friend Dominic would turn up and we'd walk out along Technology Drive until we reached its lonely end way up in the hills. There we'd sit on a rock and throw stones at bottles until it was time for me to go back.
I must have seemed down that day, because Dominic said, "What's the matter with you?"
"Morley," I said.
"What about him?"
"He's depressing me."
Dominic knew Morley. Partly because it was a small town and everybody knew everybody, if only indirectly, but also because in my first week Morley had made one of his few front-of-house appearances to tell Dominic to stop hanging around the shop and making conversation with me.
He said, "Morley depresses everybody. Even his daughter took her own life rather than listen to his conversation." This was a surprise. "Seriously?" I said.
"Far as I know."
"When?"
"Years back. When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth."
I didn't know what to say to this, so I pitched a few more stones at the bottle we'd set up. One of them caught it a glancing blow, and knocked it over. It didn't break, but it fell amongst the remains of countless others that had.
"Who says so?" I wondered aloud as I went over to set it up again.
"My mum," Dominic said. "She used to know him, in the days when he was a human being."
On the walk down, he told me what he knew of the story, which was very little...just that Morley's daughter had written a note and then opened her wrists while stretched out fully clothed in the bath. She'd cut them lengthways rather than across which, according to Dominic, was proof that she'd meant it. She'd been nineteen. No one knew for certain what her reasons were. Morley had burned the note.
Technology Drive was like an abandoned airstrip. Just being there made you feel guilty and excited with the thrill of trespass, and for no reason at all. It was as wrecked and overgrown as any Inca road, and in its time had served far less purpose. We picked our way down it, stepping from one tilted block to another. The drains had fallen in and all of the roadside wiring had been dug up and stolen. There was also about seven miles of buried fiberoptic cable that no thief had yet been able to think of a use for.
They talked of it as the Boulevard of Failed Business Plans. The cargocultists' landing strip for a prosperous future that never came. Crap like that.
Nineteen years old.
I wondered what she'd looked like.
THE AFTERNOON was uneventful. That evening, I borrowed the car and went out with Dominic. We spent most of it in the Net cafe attached to the local Indian restaurant, and then after I'd dropped him off at home I contrived to drive past Caroline Pocock's house a few times, which is no mean trick for a place down a cul-de-sac. Then I parked and watched for a while. I didn't know which window was hers, but long ago I'd picked one at random and by now I'd convinced myself that it was her bedroom. I stayed there until her father came out in his pajamas and stared at the car and then I took off.
It was after one in the morning when I passed the end of Technology Drive and saw lights in the Bureau's windows. I stopped the car and walked back to the junction. Someone was moving around inside.
Burglars? Looking for what? There was nothing in the place worth stealing. I didn't get too close because I didn't want to be seen. I stayed back in the darkness and waited for another movement. After about a minute, I saw who was in there. It was Morley. He wasn't doing anything much. He was just mooching around.
I saw him polish the glass panel in one of the booth doors with his sleeve, I saw him straighten one of the disclaimer signs on the wall. He mostly looked as if he couldn't quite bring himself to go home.
I couldn't imagine why. He lived on his own. There'd be no one waiting there that he might want to avoid.
I didn't get to bed until after two o'clock. I had a restless night. My thinking kept going around in the same circles. If life is lousy and you go back to change it, all that happens is that you fulfill the pattern that delivered your lousy life. Your choices are no choices at all. It seemed all wrong but think about it long enough, and you'd be scared even to breathe. After all of that, I overslept and had to scramble.
I was late getting in. Morley was there already. I don't think he'd been there all night. He muttered something sarcastic and went off into the back office. The fact of it was that he could have run the place single-handed and saved himself the cost of my miserable wages, if he'd chosen to. What he had me doing was mostly dogsbody work. When I wasn't behind the counter I pushed a mop or answered the phone. The technology, though it was getting pretty old, was maintenance-free and the operation of it was idiot-proof.
I think it was just that he didn't like to go out there and face the clientele anymore.
Around ten-thirty that morning, a taxi drew up outside and this young male of around my own age got out. He was well-dressed and had a sharp-looking haircut. You could tell just by looking at him that here was someone from a good family with money, and that he'd been favored by the education system. Almost everyone from my school slouched, and their mouths hung open in repose. He stood looking the building over as the taxi pulled away, and then he came inside.
He spent twenty minutes or more reading through the forms before he brought them over to the counter.
He said, apologetically, "You'll have to help me with these. I can't work out what I'm supposed to do."
"Sure," I said, and I started to go through everything with him. He'd filled in some of the stuff, and he'd left blank the parts he wasn't clear about.
This time, I knew it way before I saw the name.
"You've never done this before?" I said.
"Nope," he said. I tried not to stare at him. Here, in the midst of his pattern of recycling visits, was the visit that began it all. He was bright, springy, full of confidence. The only giveaway was a dangerous-looking light in his eyes, but it was like the nerve of a bungee-jumper getting ready to go. In his own mind he knew exactly what had to be done, and he was about to step out and do it.
I went to get Morley's approval on the paperwork. My thoughts were racing.
Back at the counter, the young man was waiting. He was tapping out a drumbeat on the counter's edge with the fingernails of both hands.
"Everything all right?" he said.
"Everything's fine," I said with forced brightness.
"When do I go? Do I go right now?"
I lowered my voice and said, "Can I say something to you first?"
My repeater stopped his nervous drumming and looked at me; polite, puzzled, curious.
I said, "Walk away from this. Get on with your life. Whatever you think you're going to change, I can tell you for certain it won't work."
"Thanks for the advice," he said. "But I know exactly what I've got to do."
So then I did what I'd been warned against. "lust one moment," I said. Then I went and got the records of his last few visits. The ones that I'd witnessed, but that he'd yet to live through.
I laid them on the counter for him to see.
He looked at them. Then he looked at me. The light in his eyes was still there, but it had changed. He wasn't so certain anymore, and I could see that he was scared.
"What's all this?" he said.
"That's you," I said. "That's your entire life if you don't walk away."
He stared down at the papers again. They all carried his signature.
I've got him, I was thinking. It was a risk, but it's working.
"Fuck you," he said. "Do what I've paid for, or get me your supervisor."
But Morley was already coming out of the back office. "All right," I started to say, "forget I even spoke." I could hear the desperation in my voice as I started to backtrack, but it was too late. Morley said, "What's the problem?"
"I thought you people gave a service," my repeater said, and he pointed toward me. "Since when was it his job to interfere in my private business?"
Morley looked down, and saw the files on the counter.
"There's been a misunderstanding, sir," he said then, raking them toward him and dropping them under the counter without giving them a second glance. Then he looked at me and said, with a considerable chill factor, "Go and wait in my office."
I went into the back, but I could still hear them talking.
"Booth four, sir," I heard Morley say. "I hope it works out for you."
"I reckon it will," I heard the young man say.
A couple of minutes later, the young man was on his journey and I was on the carpet.
"What do you think you're playing at?" Morley said.
"I was just trying to save him a load of grief."
"He's got a load of grief. Sometimes it's just a person's lot to live it out."
"You didn't see his face when he looked at his file."
"I told you, no files. Didn't you hear me?" He rammed the point home with his forefinger in my chest, stabbing me with every word. "You don't... show... the clients... their... fucking... files."
"If you'd only stayed out of it," I pressed on, "I'll bet you anything I could have convinced him. I was almost there. I could have rescued a wasted life."
"You know nothing," Morley said, but I was warming to my theme now; now that there was no chance of being proved wrong, I was starting to believe that I'd had control of the situation prior to Morley's interference.
"I bet he was just about to turn," I said, "and then you had to come wading in."
"He's on rails," Morley said dismissively. "We're all on rails. Knowing it won't make any difference."
"But what if things do change?" I argued, and suddenly the doubts that I'd been unable to articulate all fell into place like jointed plates.
"What are you talking about?"
I said, "Maybe things change all the time and we just don't know it. Maybe your daughter wouldn't be dead now if you weren't too pigheaded to go back and fix what went wrong."
Bad move.
I knew then that I'd gone too far. I also knew that it was too late to take it back.
Morley just stood there and closed his eyes. I could see the whites flickering where the lids didn't quite meet. He took a shuddering breath and swayed a little. I thought for a moment that he was starting a fit, but it was just that I'd never seen anyone in the grip of such bone-shaking, overwhelming anger before.
He said, "Get out of my place."
He was barely audible. My hands were shaking as I gathered my stuff together and as I was going out of the door that he held open for me, I couldn't bring myself to look back at him.
I heard him say, "I've forgiven you an awful lot since you came to work here. I can see now I let you get away with too much." "Sorry," I said.
"Not sorry enough," were his last words to me.
I couldn't eat that night, and I felt so sick about it all that I couldn't tell anyone why. It wasn't just that I'd never been fired from a job before. And it wasn't because I'd failed with my repeater, because I'd been onto a loser there from the beginning -- the very evidence that I'd tried to show him had been proof in my hands that he'd continue. I just wished I could have taken back what I'd said to Morley about his daughter.
But there it was. You can't change what's passed.
Unless.
Unless I was right. For some odd reason I kept thinking about the spreadsheet we used to work out the charges. When you changed one little thing deep down, everything shifted around as a result. It made a whole new picture.
Maybe we're just talking about the spreadsheet of everything. There's no past as such, there's just the big "is." No final, bottom line, just an endless middle. Updating all the time, undergoing constant changes in the always-has-been. Our certainties rewriting themselves from one instant to the next. For every miserable repeater, maybe there are a thousand happy and successful travelers whose journey simply vanished from the record once their misery was removed and the journey became unnecessary.
Not a bad leap. For someone so young, naive and stupid.
I know that there are brain-damaged people who live entirely in the moment, whose memories fade in the instant they're formed. They need a notebook so they can keep checking on who they are, where they live and where they're from, who all these strangers around them might be. Maybe this whole time thing's just a magic notebook. And we're just the readers who believe all that we see.
THE NEXT MORNING, I confessed to my mother about losing the job. It was that, or go through the pretense of getting dressed and going out early with no reason. She wasn't as surprised as I thought she'd be, but she asked about my unpaid wages. I hadn't even thought about them, and I really didn't feel like facing Morley again. But then when she started to talk about going with me to make sure that I got what I was due, I made hasty arrangements to go back alone.
The building on Technology Drive was all closed up. I looked in through all the windows but nobody was there.
So I went away, and returned late in the afternoon. By then someone had called the police out. Two uniformed officers had turned up in a van, along with a man that I recognized as the owner of a big women's wear shop in the middle of town. I mean it was a big shop, not that it sold stuff to big women. It was called "Enrico et Nora" and he was Enrico. I didn't know it at the time, but he was Morley's sleeping partner in the business. The policemen were getting ready to break the door in.
I said, "Can I ask what's going on?"
"It's bolted on the inside," Enrico said. "Who are you?" The police wanted to know who I was as well, so I told them.
Then they brought this heavy thing on handles out of the van, and used it to batter the door in.
Nobody said I couldn't follow them inside, so I did.
I'd walked through the same door every working day for the past couple of months, but now it didn't feel right. All the lights were on, even though it was daytime. I was tensed for something awful. I know it may sound melodramatic, but it felt like the kind of scenario that precedes the discovery of a lonely death.
One of the officers had his head inside one of the booths. He pulled it out and said, "How do those things work?"
"It takes two people," I explained. "One to travel and one to operate from the outside. There's a system so one person can't do both."
They started looking in each of the booths, I'd guess in case Morley was lying in one of them.
But I was looking over at the counter.
The anglepoise lamp from Morley's office was standing on it. When I glanced over into booth five, I could see that there was one of our keycards in the activating slot. Back on the counter, the lamp was positioned in such a way that the edge of its metal shade rested squarely on the Big Red Button.
He'd have had maybe a minute to get himself into the booth as the lamp slowly descended.
The settings on the machine meant nothing to me, but I could imagine where they'd led. I don't know if he'd aimed to get there hours before, to prevent the child from killing herself, or months before, to divert her from wanting to.
I told them all about it.
And even as I was telling them, I looked out through the window.
I knew that he couldn't have succeeded, of course, I knew it because I lived in a world where Morley's daughter lay long-dead in her grave and I'd seen the damaged plaything that loss had made of her father. If he'd gone back and saved her, then none of that could ever have happened. But it had.
I could see a figure heading up Technology Drive, walking from where the bus had dropped him off. I couldn't see his features yet, but I could read the determination in his stride.
Next time, his attitude seemed to say. I almost did it then, I'll do it for sure next time.
The police went into the back to look through the papers in Morley's desk. Enrico went looking for a phone to call his lawyer. I moved around to my usual place behind the counter.
And there I waited, to see which of my repeaters it would be.

 


MY REPEATER

 

MY REPEATER


WHAT CAN I SAY? IT WAS A job, and I was glad to get it. The money wasn't great, but I had no skills and nothing to offer beyond a vague feeling that I was meant for something better. My mother knew someone who knew the owner, and I got a message to go along and show myself. I started two days later. Training was minimal. Customers were few in number.
I'd been there six weeks when I saw my first returnee.
He must have got off the bus at the far end of town, and it had started to rain on him as he'd been walking through the center. I saw him coming up the road. The road was called Technology Drive, and it had been built to run north out of town and into the hills. Ours was the only building on it. You walked about two hundred yards to get to us, with open scrub on either side. If you wanted to follow the road further you could, but there was nothing much to look at unless you wanted to see how the weeds had broken up the concrete.
He walked with his head down, and with his hands in the pockets of his brown overcoat. The rain was light but he walked as if he was taking a beating.
He looked vaguely familiar. But at that point I hadn't considered the possibility that any of the people I'd been dealing with might ever come back.
He came in and went straight to the ledge under the window where we kept the boxes of forms. He didn't have to ask for any help. When he brought the paperwork over to the counter, the boxes had been filled in and the waivers were all in order and I'd little more to do than run through the questionnaire and then take it all through to my boss for his approval.
Morley was in his little back office, where he spent most of the days reading old magazines. He had a desk, a chair, and an anglepoise lamp that couldn't hold a pose without slowly collapsing. I think he had a framed picture on the wall but I can't for the life of me remember what it was of.
"Customer, boss," I told him, and showed him the papers.
He looked them over, and then tilted his chair back a couple of extra degrees so that he could see through the doorway to the main part of the shop. He stared at the waiting man for a moment, then gave me a nod and returned his attention to his reading. Most of his magazines were old technical publications, filled with page after page of fine print. They carried long lists of obsolete gear and they looked about as much fun as telephone directories.
I went back to the counter, and worked out the charges on the spreadsheet. The further back in time you wanted to go, the more it cost. Then there were other complicating factors, like body weight and geography.
When we'd sorted out the payment, I gave him a keycard to put in the machine.
"Booth five," I told him.
He went inside and closed the door. I made all the settings and locked off the switches, and then there was nothing else to do but press the big red button.
"Are you ready, sir?" I called out to him.
"Get on with it," I heard him say.
So I got on with it. It was no thrill, just a routine -- any buzz had gone out of it very quickly. But something jolted me in that moment as I realized why he'd seemed just a little bit familiar. It was the target settings that I recognized. I'd set them before. He'd been in about twelve days previously and he'd specified exactly the same destination.
But he'd been at least ten years older then.
IT WAS A NOTHING job in a run-down travel bureau in a town in the middle of nowhere. I could have been stacking shelves in a supermarket or earning merit stars in a fast-food franchise, but instead I was sending a small group of losers back in time to relive their mistakes. I know that's what they did, because the same bunch of people brought us so much in the way of repeat business.
There must have been hundreds of bureaux like ours, small-town operations all scraping by as the last of their investors' capital dwindled. They'd been set up as a franchise network when the technology had first become available. They were like those long-distance phone places where you buy time at a counter and they assign you a booth while they set up the call; only here, you paid your money to be sent back to a date and a place of your choice.
Anyone could walk in and do it.
But only a strange few ever did.
The predicted boom had been a bust. I suppose it was like space travel. Full of romance and possibilities until it became achievable, and a matter of doubtful value ever after.
Here's what I learned when I talked it over with Morley:
He laid his magazine facedown on the desk and said, "I bet there's something in your life that you'd change, if you could."
"That's got to be true of everybody," I said. "Hasn't it?"
"So why don't you consider going back?"
I suppose the correct answer was that it would be a huge and scary one-way trip, and to make it would involve abandoning the life I now had. And for what? No certain outcome.
But what I said was, "You don't pay me enough."
"I'm not talking about the cost of it," Morley said. "Say I offered you a free one. Would you consider it then?"
"That would depend if you were serious."
"I'm serious. You're hesitating. Why?"
"I haven't thought about it that much."
"Think about it now. It sounds like a great idea. But why doesn't it feel like a great idea?"
"I don't know," I said. "It just doesn't."
But the more I thought about it, the more I thought I understood. It was obvious that I would never successfully go back and fix everything with Caroline Pocock, the proof being that she despised me so thoroughly in the here and now. Whatever I might try to amend, that was the known outcome.
I said, "Does that explain why the only people I see coming through that door seem to be life's born losers?"
"That's exactly what they are," Morley said. "They're the ones who can't accept what became common knowledge after the first few years. Which is that you gamble everything, and nothing changes. Nothing significant, anyway. The status quo is like one big self-regulating ecology. All that happens is that the balance shifts and whatever you do to try to upset it, it just sets itself right."
"How does that work?"
"Nobody knows. The rules are beyond grasping. If you go back to meet yourself, you won't be there. The past that you return to may not even be the past you left behind. Whatever you try to alter, somehow it all still comes out the same. Or else it's different in a way that suits you no better. There's a whole new branch of fractal mathematics that tries to explain it and what it all comes down to is, there's an infinite number of ways for something to go wrong and only one way for it to go right."
I said, "So the overall effect is like, when you pee in the swimming pool and nobody notices."
Clearly this was an analogy that had never occurred to him, because he stopped and gave me a very strange look before carrying on. He wasn't a healthy-looking man. He had pale eyes and gray-looking skin. His hair had lost most of its color, as well. He dressed as if he didn't care about his appearance, in clothes that most people would have bagged up and sent to a charity shop.
He said, "The people who set these places up thought they'd make a fortune. Most of them went bust within ten years. The rest of us squeeze a living from the same bunch of hopeless romantics who think they're the ones who'll beat the system." He gestured toward the public area beyond his office door. "You've seen enough of them by now," he said. "They keep coming back. They're older, they're younger, they're just in a loop thinking, I almost did it then, I'll do it for sure next time. Next time, next time. They scrape up the money and they come limping back. They can't even see how they've thrown away the lives that they set out to fix."
That first returnee of mine was back within the week.
This time, he was much older. I mean, seriously. He was recognizable but he looked as if he'd spent the last couple of decades scavenging for his life in a war zone. Maybe I exaggerate. But not by much. He didn't seem to have washed or shaved in ages. I could smell him from across the room. He just stood there holding onto the wall by the door, as if that last long walk up the road had taken everything out of him.
I said, "Hi."
He fixed on me. I wondered if he was drunk, but when he spoke I was fairly sure that he wasn't. The messages were just taking their time to get through.
He said, "I'm sorry. I've come a long way."
"Can I get you anything?"
He shook his head, and then moved over to where the forms were and pulled out a chair. I made a mental note to tell Morley that the whole area would need a scrub-down with disinfectant and then I realized, with gloom, that the job would fall to me.
I watched the man. The one I now thought of as My Repeater. I'd seen other returnees by now, but he'd been my first. It wasn't so much that he was now old, more that he'd become old before his time. He looked as if he'd been sleeping rough, and I wondered how he'd managed to get his latest stake together. By years of begging and spending nothing, by the look of him.
He brought the paperwork over. I held my breath.
"Just a few last details to get," I said.
"I know," he said.
I went through the usual questionnaire as quickly as I could and when he emptied the money from his pockets onto the counter, I had to force myself to pick it up. The grubby notes were in bundles, and there was a lot of small change. I felt as if I wanted to scrub the coins before touching them.
It always had to be cash. Travelers weren't creditworthy. They walked away from their futures when the Big Red Button was pressed, leaving no one to pay off the debts.
I said, "Do you want to take a seat while I count this?"
"I'll just wait here," he said.
And he did, too. He leaned on the counter and watched, with me breathing as shallowly as I could and trying not to rush it so much that I'd make a mistake and have to do it again.
Only days before, I'd seen him in good health. Now he was a shocking wreck. I couldn't imagine what he'd been through and I didn't want to ask. The part that I couldn't get my head around was that although the change seemed like a magical stroke that had happened in a matter of days, it wasn't. While his younger self had been standing before me, this older version had been somewhere out there, probably heading my way. They were all out there, at more or less the same time -- every one of his repeated selves, going over and over the same piece of ground. Never meeting, never overlapping, co-existing in some elaborate choreography managed by forces unknown. Causing no ripples, accomplishing nothing, scraping up their cash and heading right back here. The person he was, and all of the people he would ever be. Fixed. Determined. Tripping over the same moment, again and again and again.
I felt a sudden and unaccountable sympathy. It bordered on tenderness, and it was an awkward and unfamiliar feeling; doubly hard to deal with, considering the scent and the state of him.
Lowering my voice so that Morley wouldn't overhear, I said, "Second chances don't come cheap, do they?"
"You give it whatever it takes," he said.
He looked so bleak and downcast that it made me sorry I'd spoken at all.
I had an idea, and I pitched it to Morley.
I said, "If we kept one file on each repeater, it would save us having to cover the same ground every time."
"You lazy little bugger," he said.
"I'm not being lazy," I protested. "I thought I was being efficient."
"So somebody comes in here and we face him with a file that shows half a dozen returns that he doesn't even know he's going to make yet. What's that going to do to him?"
"Stop him from wasting his life?"
Morley said, "Watch my lips. It's already happened. Nothing's going to change it. All you can do is add to his misery."
And that was the last of my employee suggestions.
I got an hour for lunch, and some days my old school friend Dominic would turn up and we'd walk out along Technology Drive until we reached its lonely end way up in the hills. There we'd sit on a rock and throw stones at bottles until it was time for me to go back.
I must have seemed down that day, because Dominic said, "What's the matter with you?"
"Morley," I said.
"What about him?"
"He's depressing me."
Dominic knew Morley. Partly because it was a small town and everybody knew everybody, if only indirectly, but also because in my first week Morley had made one of his few front-of-house appearances to tell Dominic to stop hanging around the shop and making conversation with me.
He said, "Morley depresses everybody. Even his daughter took her own life rather than listen to his conversation." This was a surprise. "Seriously?" I said.
"Far as I know."
"When?"
"Years back. When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth."
I didn't know what to say to this, so I pitched a few more stones at the bottle we'd set up. One of them caught it a glancing blow, and knocked it over. It didn't break, but it fell amongst the remains of countless others that had.
"Who says so?" I wondered aloud as I went over to set it up again.
"My mum," Dominic said. "She used to know him, in the days when he was a human being."
On the walk down, he told me what he knew of the story, which was very little...just that Morley's daughter had written a note and then opened her wrists while stretched out fully clothed in the bath. She'd cut them lengthways rather than across which, according to Dominic, was proof that she'd meant it. She'd been nineteen. No one knew for certain what her reasons were. Morley had burned the note.
Technology Drive was like an abandoned airstrip. Just being there made you feel guilty and excited with the thrill of trespass, and for no reason at all. It was as wrecked and overgrown as any Inca road, and in its time had served far less purpose. We picked our way down it, stepping from one tilted block to another. The drains had fallen in and all of the roadside wiring had been dug up and stolen. There was also about seven miles of buried fiberoptic cable that no thief had yet been able to think of a use for.
They talked of it as the Boulevard of Failed Business Plans. The cargocultists' landing strip for a prosperous future that never came. Crap like that.
Nineteen years old.
I wondered what she'd looked like.
THE AFTERNOON was uneventful. That evening, I borrowed the car and went out with Dominic. We spent most of it in the Net cafe attached to the local Indian restaurant, and then after I'd dropped him off at home I contrived to drive past Caroline Pocock's house a few times, which is no mean trick for a place down a cul-de-sac. Then I parked and watched for a while. I didn't know which window was hers, but long ago I'd picked one at random and by now I'd convinced myself that it was her bedroom. I stayed there until her father came out in his pajamas and stared at the car and then I took off.
It was after one in the morning when I passed the end of Technology Drive and saw lights in the Bureau's windows. I stopped the car and walked back to the junction. Someone was moving around inside.
Burglars? Looking for what? There was nothing in the place worth stealing. I didn't get too close because I didn't want to be seen. I stayed back in the darkness and waited for another movement. After about a minute, I saw who was in there. It was Morley. He wasn't doing anything much. He was just mooching around.
I saw him polish the glass panel in one of the booth doors with his sleeve, I saw him straighten one of the disclaimer signs on the wall. He mostly looked as if he couldn't quite bring himself to go home.
I couldn't imagine why. He lived on his own. There'd be no one waiting there that he might want to avoid.
I didn't get to bed until after two o'clock. I had a restless night. My thinking kept going around in the same circles. If life is lousy and you go back to change it, all that happens is that you fulfill the pattern that delivered your lousy life. Your choices are no choices at all. It seemed all wrong but think about it long enough, and you'd be scared even to breathe. After all of that, I overslept and had to scramble.
I was late getting in. Morley was there already. I don't think he'd been there all night. He muttered something sarcastic and went off into the back office. The fact of it was that he could have run the place single-handed and saved himself the cost of my miserable wages, if he'd chosen to. What he had me doing was mostly dogsbody work. When I wasn't behind the counter I pushed a mop or answered the phone. The technology, though it was getting pretty old, was maintenance-free and the operation of it was idiot-proof.
I think it was just that he didn't like to go out there and face the clientele anymore.
Around ten-thirty that morning, a taxi drew up outside and this young male of around my own age got out. He was well-dressed and had a sharp-looking haircut. You could tell just by looking at him that here was someone from a good family with money, and that he'd been favored by the education system. Almost everyone from my school slouched, and their mouths hung open in repose. He stood looking the building over as the taxi pulled away, and then he came inside.
He spent twenty minutes or more reading through the forms before he brought them over to the counter.
He said, apologetically, "You'll have to help me with these. I can't work out what I'm supposed to do."
"Sure," I said, and I started to go through everything with him. He'd filled in some of the stuff, and he'd left blank the parts he wasn't clear about.
This time, I knew it way before I saw the name.
"You've never done this before?" I said.
"Nope," he said. I tried not to stare at him. Here, in the midst of his pattern of recycling visits, was the visit that began it all. He was bright, springy, full of confidence. The only giveaway was a dangerous-looking light in his eyes, but it was like the nerve of a bungee-jumper getting ready to go. In his own mind he knew exactly what had to be done, and he was about to step out and do it.
I went to get Morley's approval on the paperwork. My thoughts were racing.
Back at the counter, the young man was waiting. He was tapping out a drumbeat on the counter's edge with the fingernails of both hands.
"Everything all right?" he said.
"Everything's fine," I said with forced brightness.
"When do I go? Do I go right now?"
I lowered my voice and said, "Can I say something to you first?"
My repeater stopped his nervous drumming and looked at me; polite, puzzled, curious.
I said, "Walk away from this. Get on with your life. Whatever you think you're going to change, I can tell you for certain it won't work."
"Thanks for the advice," he said. "But I know exactly what I've got to do."
So then I did what I'd been warned against. "lust one moment," I said. Then I went and got the records of his last few visits. The ones that I'd witnessed, but that he'd yet to live through.
I laid them on the counter for him to see.
He looked at them. Then he looked at me. The light in his eyes was still there, but it had changed. He wasn't so certain anymore, and I could see that he was scared.
"What's all this?" he said.
"That's you," I said. "That's your entire life if you don't walk away."
He stared down at the papers again. They all carried his signature.
I've got him, I was thinking. It was a risk, but it's working.
"Fuck you," he said. "Do what I've paid for, or get me your supervisor."
But Morley was already coming out of the back office. "All right," I started to say, "forget I even spoke." I could hear the desperation in my voice as I started to backtrack, but it was too late. Morley said, "What's the problem?"
"I thought you people gave a service," my repeater said, and he pointed toward me. "Since when was it his job to interfere in my private business?"
Morley looked down, and saw the files on the counter.
"There's been a misunderstanding, sir," he said then, raking them toward him and dropping them under the counter without giving them a second glance. Then he looked at me and said, with a considerable chill factor, "Go and wait in my office."
I went into the back, but I could still hear them talking.
"Booth four, sir," I heard Morley say. "I hope it works out for you."
"I reckon it will," I heard the young man say.
A couple of minutes later, the young man was on his journey and I was on the carpet.
"What do you think you're playing at?" Morley said.
"I was just trying to save him a load of grief."
"He's got a load of grief. Sometimes it's just a person's lot to live it out."
"You didn't see his face when he looked at his file."
"I told you, no files. Didn't you hear me?" He rammed the point home with his forefinger in my chest, stabbing me with every word. "You don't... show... the clients... their... fucking... files."
"If you'd only stayed out of it," I pressed on, "I'll bet you anything I could have convinced him. I was almost there. I could have rescued a wasted life."
"You know nothing," Morley said, but I was warming to my theme now; now that there was no chance of being proved wrong, I was starting to believe that I'd had control of the situation prior to Morley's interference.
"I bet he was just about to turn," I said, "and then you had to come wading in."
"He's on rails," Morley said dismissively. "We're all on rails. Knowing it won't make any difference."
"But what if things do change?" I argued, and suddenly the doubts that I'd been unable to articulate all fell into place like jointed plates.
"What are you talking about?"
I said, "Maybe things change all the time and we just don't know it. Maybe your daughter wouldn't be dead now if you weren't too pigheaded to go back and fix what went wrong."
Bad move.
I knew then that I'd gone too far. I also knew that it was too late to take it back.
Morley just stood there and closed his eyes. I could see the whites flickering where the lids didn't quite meet. He took a shuddering breath and swayed a little. I thought for a moment that he was starting a fit, but it was just that I'd never seen anyone in the grip of such bone-shaking, overwhelming anger before.
He said, "Get out of my place."
He was barely audible. My hands were shaking as I gathered my stuff together and as I was going out of the door that he held open for me, I couldn't bring myself to look back at him.
I heard him say, "I've forgiven you an awful lot since you came to work here. I can see now I let you get away with too much." "Sorry," I said.
"Not sorry enough," were his last words to me.
I couldn't eat that night, and I felt so sick about it all that I couldn't tell anyone why. It wasn't just that I'd never been fired from a job before. And it wasn't because I'd failed with my repeater, because I'd been onto a loser there from the beginning -- the very evidence that I'd tried to show him had been proof in my hands that he'd continue. I just wished I could have taken back what I'd said to Morley about his daughter.
But there it was. You can't change what's passed.
Unless.
Unless I was right. For some odd reason I kept thinking about the spreadsheet we used to work out the charges. When you changed one little thing deep down, everything shifted around as a result. It made a whole new picture.
Maybe we're just talking about the spreadsheet of everything. There's no past as such, there's just the big "is." No final, bottom line, just an endless middle. Updating all the time, undergoing constant changes in the always-has-been. Our certainties rewriting themselves from one instant to the next. For every miserable repeater, maybe there are a thousand happy and successful travelers whose journey simply vanished from the record once their misery was removed and the journey became unnecessary.
Not a bad leap. For someone so young, naive and stupid.
I know that there are brain-damaged people who live entirely in the moment, whose memories fade in the instant they're formed. They need a notebook so they can keep checking on who they are, where they live and where they're from, who all these strangers around them might be. Maybe this whole time thing's just a magic notebook. And we're just the readers who believe all that we see.
THE NEXT MORNING, I confessed to my mother about losing the job. It was that, or go through the pretense of getting dressed and going out early with no reason. She wasn't as surprised as I thought she'd be, but she asked about my unpaid wages. I hadn't even thought about them, and I really didn't feel like facing Morley again. But then when she started to talk about going with me to make sure that I got what I was due, I made hasty arrangements to go back alone.
The building on Technology Drive was all closed up. I looked in through all the windows but nobody was there.
So I went away, and returned late in the afternoon. By then someone had called the police out. Two uniformed officers had turned up in a van, along with a man that I recognized as the owner of a big women's wear shop in the middle of town. I mean it was a big shop, not that it sold stuff to big women. It was called "Enrico et Nora" and he was Enrico. I didn't know it at the time, but he was Morley's sleeping partner in the business. The policemen were getting ready to break the door in.
I said, "Can I ask what's going on?"
"It's bolted on the inside," Enrico said. "Who are you?" The police wanted to know who I was as well, so I told them.
Then they brought this heavy thing on handles out of the van, and used it to batter the door in.
Nobody said I couldn't follow them inside, so I did.
I'd walked through the same door every working day for the past couple of months, but now it didn't feel right. All the lights were on, even though it was daytime. I was tensed for something awful. I know it may sound melodramatic, but it felt like the kind of scenario that precedes the discovery of a lonely death.
One of the officers had his head inside one of the booths. He pulled it out and said, "How do those things work?"
"It takes two people," I explained. "One to travel and one to operate from the outside. There's a system so one person can't do both."
They started looking in each of the booths, I'd guess in case Morley was lying in one of them.
But I was looking over at the counter.
The anglepoise lamp from Morley's office was standing on it. When I glanced over into booth five, I could see that there was one of our keycards in the activating slot. Back on the counter, the lamp was positioned in such a way that the edge of its metal shade rested squarely on the Big Red Button.
He'd have had maybe a minute to get himself into the booth as the lamp slowly descended.
The settings on the machine meant nothing to me, but I could imagine where they'd led. I don't know if he'd aimed to get there hours before, to prevent the child from killing herself, or months before, to divert her from wanting to.
I told them all about it.
And even as I was telling them, I looked out through the window.
I knew that he couldn't have succeeded, of course, I knew it because I lived in a world where Morley's daughter lay long-dead in her grave and I'd seen the damaged plaything that loss had made of her father. If he'd gone back and saved her, then none of that could ever have happened. But it had.
I could see a figure heading up Technology Drive, walking from where the bus had dropped him off. I couldn't see his features yet, but I could read the determination in his stride.
Next time, his attitude seemed to say. I almost did it then, I'll do it for sure next time.
The police went into the back to look through the papers in Morley's desk. Enrico went looking for a phone to call his lawyer. I moved around to my usual place behind the counter.
And there I waited, to see which of my repeaters it would be.