Steve Rasnic Tem - The Day Before the Day Before.pdf - Steve Rasnic Tem - widez2

THE DAY BEFORE THE DAY BEFORE

by Steve Rasnic Tem

Steve Rasnic Tem’s audio CD collection Invisible is a summer release from

Speaking Volumes LLC. In November, Centipede Press is bringing out In Concert , the

collected short collaborations between Steve and his wife Melanie Tem. The title story

appeared here in Asimov’s last December. The author’s new tale for us takes a sharp and

unsettling look at what could have happen...

When I was a child, a few dozen decades from now,our mother would have us say a

prayer every morning before breakfast just to, as she put it, “get your heads in the right place

before the day’s clock starts ticking.” She called it a prayer, even though we were agnostic

or atheist or whatever. My mother saw herself as scientific and full of a great number of

theories that sounded like so much fantasy to me.

In any case, she’d have the four of us—John with that breathing problem that so

annoyed me (and that would kill him before his ninth birthday), beautiful red-haired Liz (gone

missing after that terrorist attack on Denver that changed so many lives), Robbie (who left

after high school and hasn’t been seen since), and I, Kent (like Superman’s more interesting

alter ego)—bow our little heads and say in unison, “I may have made some terrible mistake

the day before yesterday, and the day before that, but today I promise to do better, and fix

what I can.”

It was a lot for four small children to say without error, much less understand, and I

always messed up, mumbling some inanity to cover my mistake, such as “the day before,

yada yada yada.” Liz always got it perfect, of course—I don’t know if she understood it or

not. Me, I was fixated on how our mother introduced our little morning mantra: “before the

day’s clock starts ticking.” Did that mean that whatever happened before breakfast didn’t

count? Could I make every mistake possible, without consequence, if I just got up early

enough? The very idea left me dizzy with freedom.

“Mister, your thingy is hanging out.”

I look around in alarm, see the little boy pointing, and discover that I must have

snagged my pocket watch chain on something and now it’s hanging out, dangling with its

two-faced fob. I put it away quickly, as if it were an unmistakable indicator of my occupation,

not some silliness the team had contrived in service of a forced sense of solidarity. I try not

to look too closely at the boy’s face—I always have trouble with the children’s faces. But I

make myself smile at him, and give him a little wave, and he turns away abruptly as if

suddenly alarmed at his own boldness.

The watches had been Carter’s idea. The team doesn’t wear uniforms, of course,

and isn’t really a team per se, since we all do our work solo. The door to our headquarters

simply states “Office 87” in unusually thin, Arial Narrow typeface—if you were to look at an

angle you probably wouldn’t see any words at all. The office is in an old industrial park

outside Washington, D.C., sharing a building with an import/export operation and a small

electronics firm. Williams claims these businesses are also fronts for secret government

agencies, but then Williams has been disturbedat least as long as I’ve worked there. He’s

ten years older than the rest of us, numbering six as of the last time I was in the office, which

was actually a long time ago. Sometimes I wonder if they’ve replaced me. Sometimes I

don’t care.

The boy has pointed me out to his parents, who are now staring at me strangely. Of

course, I don’t know what the boy told them; perhaps he was just fascinated by my eccentric

timepiece, but parents are naturally suspicious of a child’s random encounters with

strangers. Not that I blame them. “Random,” I think, is the most frightening word in the

language.

With our solo assignments carried out in secrecy and with minimal interaction, there

is very little feeling of camaraderie in Office 87. So Carter said we should all wear these

old-fashioned pocket watches, to symbolize that we’re part of a team—the “Time Team,” he

called it, laughing. Actually, we all laughed over that one. Then he made some reference to

television shows in the old days, and how pocket watches had a relationship to fictional

accounts of time travel historically, and though we smiled and laughed at his bit of erudition,

it was strained, because we didn’t really care. Most of the team, I think, care very little about

the past, except in a resentful, uncomfortable way. We have this lonely job, you see, which

we but vaguely understand. Except for Williams, we’re all young guys in our mid-twenties.

Even Williams went along with the watch idea, maybe just so that he, too, would feel

part of a team. The only point of disagreement among us was Carter’s insistence that all the

watches be broken—faces cracked into as many tiny pieces as possible, then glued back in

place—preferably with some of those pieces affixed, deliberately, into the wrong

places—so that they were like non-functioning timepieces converted into small works of art.

It was Williams who backed up Carter’s idea with his own words. “The broken watches have

double significance. The timepieces have no meaning for us, because we are working

through time and are unrestrained by it. But at the same time, we are there in the first place

to make some change, to fix something which, at least from our supervising agencies’

perspectives, is broken.”

You could tell from the way Williams said “perspectives” just how much he trusted the

bosses’ judgment.

The boy’s father looks over at me unpleasantly, but I smile and nod, and the idiot

routine appears to assuage him at least temporarily. “He was just admiring my watch!” I call

out foolishly, lifting it out of my pocket to display it again. All around me I’m aware of people

staring, but I soldier on. “You don’t see many like this anymore!” The two-faced silver fob

spins, four small emeralds for eyes.

Each of us chose our own fob. Carter’s was an antique ornament, a bit of

memorabilia from one of those ancient shows: a telephone booth. Williams attached a

warped and fire-scarred bolt onto his chain. We were all curious, but no one asked. Mine

was the two faces—Comedy on one side, Tragedy on the other—the only thing I had left

from my mother. I remember she liked the way the eyes appeared to glow in the faintest

light. I was fascinated by the way it spun between the two faces, always reminding me how

joy and sorrow arrive randomly into a person’s life, with equal possibility.

I really didn’t expect the powers that be would allow us to carry these watches on our

assignments, but after an initial investigation they didn’t seem to care. My guess is some

official personage somewhere up the line decided it would be good for morale.

The grocery store in Fraser, Colorado, is unusually crowded today, but I’ve learned

that a few seriously deep breaths and a practiced soft-focusing of one’s vision prevent the

worst of the anxiety attacks. Medicine to control such incidents was always standard issue,

but I ran out of the pills a long time ago. I’m not supposed to be here, after all, but thinking

that way gets me nowhere.

Most of the people in here today are tourists, including the young boy’s family, on

their way to some hiking or ski vacation. Most of the other children I see with guarded

glances are likewise strangers, so I’m not likely to have to deal with them to any serious

degree. Out of a population hovering around a thousand there are less than a hundred local

children, and they’re fairly spread out—on most of my trips in for supplies I’m normally

unlikely to encounter more than a dozen of them. On my drive I avoid the local school.

I found this all out before I came here. It’s why I came here—that, and the fact that this

town is very much the same as it was, will be, in my time. This was home. This will be home,

before I came to work for the agency. Oh, my mother’s house hasn’t been built yet, and the

names on the buildings, the brand names in the stores, are all different, but the feel of the

place is almost identical. I’m more aware of land and sky, mountain and stream, than I am of

people here. My initial jump was into Denver —that’s where the mission was—in my day that

city is twice the size, having consumed the western foothills almost entirely. It was like

traveling alone through a gigantic metropolis of the dead. I had to get out of there as quickly

as possible.

I turn around and discover a little girl standing in front of me. Our eyes lock, or rather,

hers lock on mine. She’s a local; I’ve seen her before. A little blonde, curly-headed slip of a

thing. I think dolls and hair-ribbons, afternoon daydreams and playing school. I have

convinced myself that children this age possess some sort of radar that informs them I do

not belong inside their particular circumstance, although none of the children I have ever

encountered on assignment have said anything that would verify this perception. Maybe they

simply don’t know how to put it into words. Her face goes soft, a runny pink. I can’t quite take

my eyes away when the effect begins. It is then I am painfully aware that I cannot feel her true

age. I watch as the life appears to burn out of her, leaving her a cinder, a stone without even

a memory of flesh. In my time she is long dead—in this time her life has hardly begun. As I

gaze at her she seems the oldest creature on the planet, her ageless face shimmering like a

ghost of everything we hold dear.

She smiles at me— love me! her new face appears to say. I give up a sliver of an

involuntary smile, then I turn and practically run to the checkout lane. I can feel people, all

these dead people, turning to stare, noticing me, examining me, but it cannot be helped.

Everything feels out of its proper order and, of course, it is. I am deranged and rearranged.

Everything I left behind exists in a kind of frozen death, and yet what moves around me

where I have come to is a walking death, a talking death of all that is gone. I pay the young

woman at the checkout with the practiced, fleshless smile, place these stinking, moist bills

into her bony hand, and flee.

* * * *

My ancient pickup whines as it struggles to take me farther up the mountain to my

cabin, rented with the rotting (but historically accurate) cash every team member carries for

emergencies. The bills aren’t really rotting, of course, but I will never get used to paper

money, the soft, greasy feel of it. It just feels worthless to me. The amount of money they

supply you for these “rare” emergencies, in fact, is phenomenal. So I have been forced to

conclude that such emergencies have not been so rare after all. Periodically team members

have gone missing. More than a few times we have been told a member required “medical

leave.”

We have been instructed that the adjustments we are to make on these assignments

are intended to be simply and briefly executed—we were never meant to be gone more than

a half hour or so. The reasoning is apparent—the briefer our voyage the less the chance we

will disrupt continuity for everyone else. The adjustments we’re sent to make are supposedly

well-considered, planned out in the finest detail, the possibility of some disaster because of

our meddling either eliminated completely or minimized to within acceptable parameters.

Our mandate is that only seemingly innocuous but absolutely essential adjustments

are ever approved, tiny actions that will save the lives of important personages, for example,

issues of national security and public safety. In other words, we don’t go in with guns blazing

to save some important diplomat or president’s daughter.

Small changes, the kind you’d supposedlyhardly notice. One of my assignments was

to break into a parked car, hot-wire it, and move it forward three and one-half feet. On

another assignment I went back forty years and stole a letter from a man’s desk. Another

time I picked up a candy wrapper and threw it away. Seriously—an entire, very expensive

mission just to dispose of a bit of trash.

The cabin is as simple a living space as I can imagine. Two rooms plus rudimentary

toilet and shower. Both the main room and the sleeping quarters have large enough

windows you can almost feel as if you are living out of doors. In one corner of the main room

are a sink, stove, and refrigerator. I have seen such things in movies, but I’m embarrassed

to say that even after six months here I am not comfortable using these appliances.

I have tried as much as possible to furnish these quarters with simple, ageless

furniture of no particular era or style. Something to sit on. Something to lie down on. A table.

Planks and stiles and some upholstery. I want to find a kind of stillness here. I do not want

the sensation of floating through time.

In the opposite corner is a stone fireplace—the true wonder of my living arrangement.

Unaccustomed as I am to an open flame, I could sit here for hours gazing into the various

patterns made, the subtle variations in color, and feel the oh-so-present, palpable heat. But I

don’t. Knowing the tree shortages to come, how could I? Still, I have to confess I’ve burnt

more wood during my time here than I needed for warmth. At least, I believe, right or wrong, I

have a relatively clear view of the choices I am making.

In Office 87 we never had any idea what our actions were supposed to be preventing,

whom we were saving, whose day we were making the slightest bit better. That has been an

essential part of the protocol under which we operate. Someone else—in fact a room of

someone elses, one would hope—decides everything, including, most importantly, whether

the mission meets that criterion of essentiality via minimal change. We’ve been told it’s all

done by committee, that there are checks and balances, and that everything we’re going to

do on the assignment has been researched thoroughly to minimize the consequences.

None of us completely buys that, of course—we’re not fools. In every government

there are pressures, there are favors owed, advantages to be gained. Not all my

assignments, I am convinced, were in aid of the common good.

But we always hoped for the best. They chose people with minimal ties who wanted

to make the world better through small actions. These were people who had little to hold

them to today. These were people in need of a mission.

These were foolish people who had no idea what they were getting themselves into.

Before our brief jaunts into dead people’s lives they would scan us thoroughly,

looking for foreign substances, chemicals in the blood, anomalies and, I suspect,

contraband. They removed splinters, grit trapped under nails, even microscopic organisms

in some cases. We were to fast for twelve hours before missions. I tried to stretch that to

sixteen whenever possible. We were always told that these were purely precautionary

measures, that there had never been a “negative incident.”

They continually emphasize that their understanding of what we do is incomplete.

Carter says he heard that before any of us were recruited the technicians missed a tiny

wood splinter in a fellow, and when they sent him back it virtually exploded into a tree, with

obvious consequences for the traveler. Williams says that story has been making the rounds

for years and it’s complete crap. Still, I thoroughly check myself over before they do their

scan, just to reassure myself. People make mistakes.

For the trip itself they strap you into a device resembling a boat mounted vertically

onto a metal scaffold. You are not merely strapped to this device, but transfixed by means of

cords, ties, and cuffs which bite into the skin and restrict breathing and movement. A device

resembling some sort of sports helmet, complete with face and mouth guards is squeezed

over your skull, which still isn’t sufficient to shield you from the extraordinarily bright lights

shining onto your face from eight different directions. In the background a technician reads

off blood pressure, respiratory, and electromagnetic readings, which only serves to increase

your panic until, on the verge of nervous collapse, you are launched into sometime else. Or

at least that is how it always was for me. I don’t know how it was for the others—it was

something we all seemed hesitant to discuss.

At the end of your quick assignment you are returned to that same launch chamber,

dragged, or so it seems, from the end of your spine. The force is so great you imagine that if

that segmented column weren’t fully attached to muscle and rib it would slip right out of you

like a snake. The one major difference in your return is that the launch room is dark, quiet,

seemingly abandoned. I’m sure they have their reasons for it—maybe it’s to conserve

power, maybe it’s to minimize agitation during re-entry—but every mission for me it was as

if I’d gone to the end of the world, beyond the years of humankind, with no way to get back to

my own time.

Anomalies have occurred, despite their lame assurances. On one trip Williams came

back with the front half of a small lizard growing out of his left arm, near the elbow. If he bent

his arm too far it squealed in pain. I came back once with a small shiny protuberance on the

inner side of my left foot. They decided it was an additional toe and severed it a few weeks

before my next job.

Carter returned in a state of shock his last mission before I came here, his face

covered in ridges and folds of skin a half-inch deep. Initial speculation was that this might be

some sort of aging after-effect. Carter was terrified. “But I feel fine!” he kept saying. As it

turned out it was just an accumulation of loose, dead skin. The body manufactures a great

deal of it during the course of an average year. Somehow Carter had collected a deposit of

numerous decades’ worth, and all on his face. They just shaved it off, basically. The bottom

layer of skin, the one Carter had departed with, was a bit raw, but none the worse for wear.

Simply one of the many random vagaries of time travel, they explained. I don’t think any of us

found comfort in this statement.

One of the things I do here is walk the woods surrounding the cabin, picking up any

trash I can find, down to the tiniest bits, and examining every plant, every tree, committing

these things, and the land and rock that support them, and the line of sky that backgrounds

them, to memory.

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