The Color of Paradox Read online

  Inside the satchel I found bundles of letters and a paper-wrapped package, tied in string and all neatly labelled, like an odd Christmas parcel. Names: mine, hers, someone named Robert Chambers and Kenneth Smith.

  I opened a package with “Jules Wills III” on it, and found a wallet containing thirty dollars in American bills. A small fortune.

  The brown paper the wallet came in had been inked with facts and figures I was meant to memorize: my birthday in 1898, Willie’s in 1895, our parents’ names. There were notes outlining a sketchy little cover story about growing up on an estate in the West Dorset countryside, and the circumstances that had brought us to America.

  The tale was Willie had married a man who’d brought her here. He’d died in the Great War and so she’d set up the convalescent home. Our parents had sent me out to check on her.

  “Is the post in?” Her voice at the top of the stair made me jump. “I smell smoke.”

  I coughed, stood, passed it up. Her eyes travelled over the basement—she saw the soot-mark from the bag on her virginal mattress and I realized I wasn’t meant to have brought up the tarpaulin.

  “You put the mattress there?” I asked suddenly. “You’d have fallen onto—”

  I gestured at the floor and wondered if she’d broken anything when she hit the concrete.

  She extracted the bundle with her name on it and passed me a bunch of letters. “From Father,” she said. I could sense she was debating her answer.

  “Please, Willie. I don’t mean to be beastly. None of this is what I expected.”

  She shook her head. “There was no mattress. How could there be?”

  “It’s only a yard, I suppose. Were you hurt?”

  “Grady and Biggs broke my fall.”

  “Who?”

  “Agents fourteen and fifteen. What remained of them, anyway.”

  I’d have expected her to leave after that grisly revelation—Willie seemed to love a good exit line—but instead she gave my shoulder an absent pat and started opening her letters. “The brown sheets speak plainly—they’re meant to be burned. The letters we can keep. They don’t say anything revealing.”

  “Aren’t they afraid we’ll miss one of the brown sheets—fail to burn it?”

  “They don’t last. The ink fades and the paper tatters within a month or two.”

  The letters from my false parents ordered me to mind my sister, mind my health, and remember the considerable spiritual benefits of prayer and clean living. In other words: obey my C.O., stay physically fit, and try to avoid going mad.

  The note from ‘Father’ was written in the Major’s hand. He wanted me to set up a bank account and asked me to make some modest but specific investments. Cash would be provided for further deposits. There was also an allowance: this much for clothes and kit, that much for expenses as I ‘made myself useful.’

  Useful. The letter hinted that I might indulge a bit of a carousing and gambling habit, by way of ingratiating myself with local gossips and crooks. This would be funded as long as I wrote home about whatever they told me.

  A license to drink and gamble. There were worse things.

  “Mother,” whose handwriting I didn’t recognize, said I should see Willie’s doctor and take iodine pills—these they’d enclosed. I was to refrain from smoking while I recovered.

  The final wrapped lump with my name on it felt like a book.

  I untied the string and then, in the process of extracting the biography of a reporter I’d long admired, I tore the brown paper in half.

  My eyes drifted to the mattress in the middle of the floor and I pictured Willie suddenly: young, sick . . .

  (helpless, bleeding, delicious)

  . . . and dropped on concrete, onto the corpses of two previous agents. Using something—who knew what?—to scratch those words into the floor.

  “16—Hungry.” Begging the future for food, because she was too weak to fetch any for herself.

  I shook the image away and held two sides of the page together to see what it was I’d been sent back to do.

  “Bloody hell!”

  Willie looked down, offering an especially masterful performance of her incurious stare. I passed her the torn pages.

  She held them up and scanned. “Paperboy with the Seattle Union Record. Name of Peter Rupert, lives near Jackson Street. Ruin, spoil, or if necessary kill.”

  “Bloody Peter Rupert.” I waved the biography at her.

  “You know him?”

  “Don’t you?”

  She shook her head. “He wasn’t—in my 1937, he must not have had any significance.”

  “Well in my 1937 he’s a bloody hero. Cottoned onto an attack Japan was planning on Hawaii, on the U.S. Fleet. He broke the story and stopped the whole—”

  “You have to forget about that,” she said. “It’s going to change. Whatever you remember is already gone. It will all unfold differently after you—”

  “Ruin a nine-year-old boy?”

  “Or kill him.”

  “What kind of a monster are you?”

  “If you are so certain that ruining someone is better than killing them outright, you’ve had something of a soft go at life.”

  “I’m not killing a child.”

  “All right.” She ignored my distress, looking over the book but far off, deep in thought. “If he were disfigured, people mightn’t talk to him. Or if his voice were damaged—did he file dispatches by telephone?”

  “Disfigure or cripple a nine-year-old,” I said. “A hero. He reported on the Russian counter-revolution. I dreamed about being like him.”

  “No doubt that’s why you were sent. Know thy—”

  “Enemy?”

  “Target.”

  “I have no intention of doing my target the slightest harm,” I said.

  She shrugged, passed the book back, and left me in the basement to fume.

  Anger drove me out of the house. I went and set up the bank account and investments, paying lip service to the idea of military obedience. I bought myself a new suit and an umbrella. Everyone looked young and hopeful. They were dressed in clothes that reminded me of my childhood. There were almost no automobiles on the streets: trolleys, carts, and pedestrians were everywhere.

  In the basement, at Willie’s, I might still have been in 1946. Now it sank in: I was living in my own past.

  Up ahead, just decades away, the world was turning to something far worse than ash. Peter Rupert would do something to bring that day closer.

  But it was probably one action of his, wasn’t it? Probably the Japan scoop. One single story of the hundreds he filed.

  I found myself a street corner that smelled of washed earth—not of horse, not of smoke or fuel. I stood there, snug under my umbrella, and watched the rain pour down as I formulated a plan.

  “What if I got close to him?” I said to Willie that night. “The Project must know more about whatever Peter does to . . .”

  “To bring on the Souring?” She sat in a rocking chair in the parlor, knitting in front of the fire, playing at being an ordinary woman.

  My mouth went dry. “The—”

  “Sorry—that’s what I call it. What we saw.”

  I swallowed. “It’s apt.”

  “It’s useful,” she said. “I use it in the journals. I’ve cultivated a conceit that losing my husband made me a bit odd.”

  “Ramblings of a daft young widow?”

  She nodded. “Just in case someone unauthorized gets a look.”

  “Whatever Peter does to bring on your Souring,” I said, “it’s bound to be one story. They chose him because he’s key, am I right? Because he’s a simple target?”

  “So?”

  “The Project must tell me which story. If he sees me as a friend, an older brother, or even a father figure—his own father died in the flu epidemic—”

  She flinched, for some reason.

  “It’s why he’s working as a paperboy, to support his mother. In any case, I’ll keep hi
m off that one story.”

  “You’re proposing to chum around with him for years?”

  “Why not? I’ll make myself useful meanwhile: keep investing money, reporting gossip, maybe help dig out the next basement . . .”

  “Jules.”

  “. . . I’d need someone to explain the engineering to me, obviously. How does one secretly dig a second basement in a house that already exists?”

  “Jules.”

  “I needn’t live here in the house if you don’t want me underfoot.”

  She pulled herself upright in her chair, sitting as prim and proper as a schoolteacher. I imagined I heard her sleeve tearing, and thought about running my tongue over the freckles on her arm: how far did they go? She folded her hands, seemed to fight an urge to wring them, and waited for me to run down.

  “What is it?”

  She said. “The timepress uses a radiant form of energy. It’s what makes us so sick. They told you that, didn’t they?”

  “I’m not going to relapse on you. I live, I know it.”

  She didn’t smile. “Chances are you will die of cancer within the year.”

  “Chances?”

  “Rufus has survived almost fifteen months, but...”

  She meant the sickly Negro man.

  “You have no great span of time in which to befriend Peter Rupert. You can’t jolly him along for a decade and hope to break his leg before he leaves for Japan. You—”

  I was across the room before I knew it, grabbing at her, tipping the rocking chair. We ended on the floor, my hand wrapped around her jaw, and again that red desire swam up. To smash, to smash, to taste of her blood on my knuckles.

  “You’re. Not. Dead,” I snarled. “It’s been years and you’re not dead.”

  A little flicker. Fear? I am ashamed to admit I hoped so. I needed to see something beyond pity or contempt in her.

  “Go ahead, then,” she said, and I realized my other hand was resting atop—was squeezing—one of her strangely firm breasts.

  Trying to buy her life? Well, she’d all but opened her legs now: I gave her blouse a swift tear as my defeated sanity—the despairing, quashed part of me that knew better—protested.

  I found: a padded bodice, formed like a woman’s body.

  I pushed it aside, exposing her belly...

  ...and found nothing but scars.

  The slices had been pulled up and then stitched tight. Everything below her collarbones was purple and red, twisting lines of hashed-together tissue.

  “About a week after I finished my mission.” Her words were distorted by the grip I had on her—she couldn’t really move her jaw. “I woke up with a terrible feeling. It wasn’t physical—I’d never felt so well.”

  “Feeling?” I was staring at her torn-up body; I couldn’t look away.

  “Panic, pure and simple. I went to a surgeon and paid him to cut away everything that made me a woman.”

  I gagged, released her, and pushed myself back, back, until I was almost in the fireplace. I got entangled with her knitting bag and it came with me, my slippers trailing a half-knit Christmas stocking and strands of red and green wool.

  Willie sat up. “This city is full of sweet, bright, talented boys, Jules.”

  “But the future won’t have anyone, bright or otherwise, unless I fulfill my mission. Is that what you’re saying?”

  She struggled to anchor her bodice over the ruin of flesh under her throat. Those empty scoops. Then she hunted on the carpet for the buttons I’d torn off her dress. She got to her feet, righted the chair, and peered out before creeping off into the house, holding her blouse shut.

  I disentangled my feet from the red and green yarn, spilling Willie’s journal in the process. Snatching it up, I fled the house.

  The Major had recommended a particular neighborhood speakeasy to me and it was there, with a whiskey in front of me, that I opened up the journal.

  I suppose I expected to find an account, cleverly couched, of Willie’s earliest days. Or that first mission of hers.

  Who did you ruin, spoil, or kill, Willie?

  But that first journal was long since filled, I’m sure, filled and locked away, waiting for the project to discover its secrets. This one had only been on the go for a month or so.

  It began with a brief account of the death of one of the gents upstairs, and a note to the effect that she was glad he’d got to see the Great Pyramid on ‘his recent business trip to Egypt.’

  They had briefed me on that mission: Smitty had interfered with the mail in the Middle East, stealing correspondence and replacing it with false letters to a number of gentlemen in Jerusalem. This had eased tensions there and thereby delayed the onset of the second Great War until 1936.

  All the sick men upstairs in the bedrooms. They’re not tenants, they’re time agents. They’ve served their purpose and now . . .

  “What’re you doing, Mac?” A drunk nudged me, apparently hoping I’d stand him a round.

  “Reading my sister’s diary,” I said, which got a general laugh.

  Ruin, spoil, or kill. The thought crept in, despite my resolve to refuse the mission. Peter Rupert, the reporter, had terrible problems with drink.

  I paged ahead, past an account of some Boeing engineer and his odd friendship with Rufus. Beyond that was the account of my arrival Willie had written, just days before. I checked that last line, the one I’d believed was her tale-telling about my intransigence.

  She had written: “What’s best about him, so far, is that he’s stubborn.”

  There was more about the engineer, and an entry saying someone named Valois had written with an address in France and a request that she forward his mail. He was settling down with a girl in Paris, for ‘however long he had.’

  She’d got back to me in her final entry: “Julie has survived his first week in America. His spirits are in turmoil. Homesickness, I expect. Nothing out of the ordinary. He’s wonderfully strong. Father expects rather a lot from him, and he is mulling over how to make the family proud.”

  I had one more shot of the bathtub whiskey, then paid for a flask to take away.

  On the way back, I passed a school. It was late in the day; the children were gone.

  On a whim, I went in and wandered the halls, waiting for someone to challenge me. Nobody did; nobody took notice of me at all.

  I stepped into a classroom and found myself contemplating a long ruler and a piece of chalk. The smell of the chalk was like the bare cement walls of the project basement: dust and bone, calm, a scent of earth and eternity.

  “Are you here to fill in for our art teacher?"

  I turned. The man who’d addressed me was cut from the same pattern as my father: round, pink, affable. He had green eyes, emerald chips, bright and long of lash. His wedding ring was plain and a little too tight for his finger; the valise he clutched was well-worn.

  “Veteran?” he said, and I nodded.

  “There aren’t enough thanks in all the world, sir, for what you’ve done.”

  “I accept pound notes,” I said.

  His laugh was like Dad’s, too, a boom that came from the soles of his feet. “Principal’s at the end of the hall, on the left.”

  I found Willie tucking her heavy tarpaulin back into place on the mattress in the basement. There was an ugly bruise around her mouth, but when she saw me, her lips twitched. Trying not to laugh?

  “Sorry.” What else could I say?

  “It’s nothing.”

  I lifted the edge of the mattress so she could smooth the tarpaulin under. “What are you doing?”

  “Preparing for the next one.” She handed me the sheet.

  That should have been my cue to tell her it wouldn’t be necessary to send another man, that I’d take on the mission. But there would be someone else, wouldn’t there?

  “Have you got my book, Julie?”

  I passed the journal to her. “Lots about Boeing.”

  “The airfield’s one reason we’re in Washingt
on. A hint to an engineer here, a line on a blueprint there . . . the planes make an immense difference to how it all plays out.”

  “Is that what you did—help make planes?”

  “Rufus is the engineer,” she said. “Who would take plane-building notes from a dotty old widow?”

  “So your mission: was it ‘ruin, spoil, or kill’ too?”

  “Well.” Her voice was dry. “We are siblings.”

  I took that as a yes.

  She said: “You’ve thought it out, haven’t you?”

  I showed her the flask. “Peter Rupert has a compulsion. If I start him drinking early, especially given the poisons they’re putting in alcohol right now . . .”

  Willie nodded. “Might be kinder to shoot him.”

  “Kinder for him? Or me?”

  “You, of course.”

  If he became a drunk as a youth, he might yet pull a less illustrious life together later. “It shouldn’t be easy.”

  “That’s simply masochism.”

  “You’re afraid it won’t work? That I’ll die before he’s—”

  She gestured at the mattress. Meaning: if I failed, someone else would come and finish the job.

  I took up my ruler and walked to the wall, drawing the line I’d seen there. Working slowly, I made notches at one-inch intervals, and wrote 1900, 1914, and 1916 at the appropriate heights. They looked just as I’d remembered. There’s an odd curl to my nines I never managed, quite, to amend.

  I counted forward to 1937, the year they pressed Willie, and wrote an encircled “1” beside it.

  “The first Souring?” she said.

  “Yes.” I counted forward through the nine years she’d bought us, to my own time, and noted the second.

  “They’re learning more with every press,” she said. “Rufus has been doing quite well.”

  I nodded, but I wasn’t paying attention. The scent of the chalk had caught me again, along with the odd little miracle of the bright yellow line it made, here on the rough grey wall, and the residue left on my hand. It was the same feeling I’d had when talking to the old teacher, an almost painful awareness of . . . was it beauty?

  “Sorry, what?” I said.

  She wore, to my shock, a smile. “One of the effects of having been—what was your word? —skinned,” she said. “Little things shine out like that. It’s never the things that are meant to be attractive, I find, but—”