More Stories from the Twilight Zone (29 page)

“Let's start with some drinks,” the rocker guy said.

Reli wondered absently if they had enough cash for the tab or whether she should charge them per round.

 

A cop car passed on the street behind Beatrice and Devin, finally distracting her gaze. The car was dark green and cream-colored, with a single red domed light on top.

“Is someone shooting a seventies movie?” Beatrice asked. “Wait—what time is it?”

All around them, Tribeca's pedestrians ebbed and flowed. A
woman with a huge, halolike Afro brushed past in tight brown leather bell-bottoms on platform heels. Two shaggy-haired businessmen in bright blue plaid suits and large dark sunglasses checked her out as they strode by from the opposite direction. The street was full of cars—Cadillac Coupe de Villes, Buick Rivieras, a Triumph TR6. A girl in a flowery hippy dress with flat long hair rode by on a chromed chopped hog behind a biker guy with a very serious pair of muttonchop whiskers and a Pancho Villa mustache. An open car radio was jamming Led Zeppelin's “Communication Breakdown.”

“It's not a movie,” MacCleary whispered. “Turn around.”

Beatrice turned. Her entire field of vision was overwhelmed by the Twin Towers.

“But . . . but . . .”

“I told you I was taking you
to
a date,” MacCleary whispered.

“What kind of joke is this?”

“Most assuredly not, my dear. Come now, you're well-versed in history. Does anything here look like a joke?”

Beatrice took a long look around. A checkered cab grumbled by.

They disappeared decades ago.

“Does
that
look like a joke?” Devin asked, pointing straight up.

A small, barely visible figure was stepping out onto a thin, taut line, strung between the two towers, supported by two cavalettis—guy lines—that kept the cable taut. He'd planned the feat well.

He held a long thin pole for balance. And, wide-eyed far below, Beatrice and Devin watched him in silence.

Three or four minutes passed before another pedestrian spotted the man and pointed him out. Soon a crowd of onlookers stared up at the man on the line.

“Oh, my God!” gasped a black businessman in a dark, three-piece, pin-striped business suit. A cigarette fell unnoticed from his hand. Instantly, all heads tilted upward.

“Who is that man?” a woman shrieked. “He'll kill himself!”

Beatrice shook her head, entranced. “No . . . no, he won't . . . he'll be okay.” She broke her upward gaze momentarily to stare incredulously at MacCleary. “It happens the same way? The exact same way?”

Devin MacCleary nodded, smiling. “Unless you think you can change his mind from down here.”

MacCleary's gorgeous green eyes smiled right along with him. This was for real. Strangely assured, Beatrice craned her neck up again. Eyes on the sky, the pair's hands met without even needing to glance back down.

With her free hand, Beatrice waved at the sky. “Go, Philippe! Yeah! You can make it!”

A few cheers went up in the crowd.

“If that ain't the damnedest . . .” the businessman in the three-piece pinstripe chuckled. “Hell, yeah!
Break
the law of gravity, man!”

More cheers went up. Petit was almost across.

So he turned, and returned back the other way across the wire.

“I like the idea of those buildings,” the businessman mentioned, to no one in particular. “The reality is a lot uglier.” A few people around gave a still-dumbstruck laugh in agreement.

“I still don't see them as the tristate center of commerce,” another Wall Street exec in a six-hundred-dollar suit said.

The street was almost completely stopped. Horns honked either in anger at the human gridlock or in support of the man on the wire, as cabbies leaned out windows for a better look upwards. A policeman with an almost impossibly bushy mustache was speaking into his radio with slow, deliberate words, his eyes also fixed upward.

“I got an unidentified guy walkin' on a tightrope at One World Trade Center,” the cop stated, sounding like he barely believed his own words even as he spoke them. “On
top
of One World Trade Center. Goddamn.”

“Come on, Philippe!” Beatrice enthused, clutching Devin's hand. Even though she knew what happened, it detracted nothing from the situation.

“Don't mention him by name,” Devin whispered. “The cops might think you're an accomplice and take you in. The fun part is being incognito.”

“This is incredible,” Beatrice whispered. “All of this.”

“I thought you'd like it.” MacCleary gave her a quick sideways grin. “Even though I'm not a
practicing
historian.”

A quarter of a mile in the air above them, Philippe Petit paused on his wire in the middle of the void and slowly, reverentially, knelt down.

 

After the squad cars, paddy wagon, and NYPD helicopter had all descended on the scene, a full forty minutes later, Petit was arrested. Beatrice and Devin watched as the sweet-faced, mischievously grinning young Frenchman was thrown, handcuffed, into a police cruiser and carted away, amid cheers from the vicariously invigorated crowd. Devin turned amiably to Beatrice.

“All this action makes me hungry. May I buy you dinner?”

“But it's morning!” Beatrice pointed out.

“It's whenever we want it to be,” Devin responded. “Besides, when we left the bar, it was night, and your body probably still thinks it is. You can only reset so many clocks.”

He had a point. Beatrice hadn't eaten since lunch that day, which was now over thirty years in the future. She wasn't thirty years' worth of hungry, but she was hungry.

“I know a great place in the Village,” continued MacCleary. “Shall we?”

This sort of thing could get addictive,
thought Beatrice, who replied, “Definitely.” She put out her hand for a cab.

“No need for that,” smiled Devin. “Follow me.”

Devin took her arm in his, led her around a vacant street
corner, and pulled out the shiny device. A few taps of his finger later, and they were standing beneath the gnarled limbs of an ancient oak tree in Washington Square Park.

Beatrice looked around furtively. No one had noticed them. It was dark out, but the street traffic was still active. Not removing her arm from his, they began to walk.

Almost instantly, Beatrice realized they were farther from more than the Twin Towers site. The cars on the street had fins and lots of chrome. Almost every woman passing by wore a skirt or dress; nearly every man wore a hat. Devin noticed her noticing as they walked.

“Guess,” he cajoled.

Beatrice was amusedly awestruck. “I . . . I can't say!” she stammered. “The fifties?”

“Close! It's 1960. Forgive me, I just find it much more charming.”

Beatrice could not even
begin
to tell him how charming she found all of it.

They strode smiling toward the neon and noise of Bleecker Street. “So you can travel though time
and
space,” Beatrice asked, more confidently than she had thought it would sound.

“That's the deal,” Devin replied, casual to an almost absurd degree. “Einstein called that one, not me. They go hand in hand. The real trick is not getting noticed. Ending up in the wrong space at the right time, or vice versa, gets kind of messy. That's why I like jumping around in New York, because people appear at random here all the time . . . it doesn't seem out of the ordinary . . . most don't even need a time-travel machine.”

“That's what it's called? ‘Jumping'?”

“Jumping, jaunting, hopping, skipping, skedaddling, whatever you like. I've never met anyone else who's been doing it at the same time as me . . .
any
of the same times as me . . . so I guess I get to coin the term.”

“You're the only one? You're all alone in this?”

“I don't know about that, honestly. But thankfully, I'm not at the moment.” MacCleary smiled his magnetic smile at her, disconcertingly handsome again. They were outside a bar with a staircase leading into an unseen subterranean spot. “Here we are. Do you like folk music? You said something about liking . . . Bob Dylan.”

Beatrice almost gasped. “I thought I was the only one left.”

Devin laughed. “Not anymore, my dear. Not by a long shot.”

They walked, still arm in arm, down the stairs.

 

The subterranean spot opened up into a long, large room filled with tables, benches, a stage, a bar. Dim lamps and candles illuminated faces, smoke, reflections from cocktail and beer glasses. A smoky-voiced young guy in skinny jeans and a black corduroy fishing cap jammed on acoustic guitar from the small stage. A waitress dressed in beatnik black led them to a small table off to the side of the stage and lay down a menu.

“Wine or beer?” the waitress said, bopping casually to the raucous harmonica line in the tune being played.

“I'll have a glass of red wine,” said Beatrice, trying not to sound too dreamy.

“Well, I'd like to have an old-fashioned . . . but I guess I'll have a beer,” MacCleary said.

The table was small and circular and their legs entwined beneath it. She was loving this more than any date she could ever remember being on. No, wait, the future. No, wait,
her
past. No, wait . . . oh, whatever. This was awesome, so flipping cool.

“So you said you're in finance,” Beatrice said, trying act nonchalant, as if time travel was no big deal.

“Yes, but it's boring,” MacCleary said. “My work life is very boring. I just buy stocks. I have stocks from here to next Tuesday. And the Tuesday after that, and the Tuesday after that. Oh, and from a thousand Tuesdays
before
that.”

“That's nice,” Beatrice said.

Devin nodded knowingly. “It's nice that I enjoy the simpler pleasures—music, the arts, hanging around, good conversation. What about you?”

Beatrice took a deep breath. “Well, my work life is pretty boring, too. As I said, I'm into history, struggling to understand how people lived and what they really did with their lives. It's like I'm trying to solve this great big puzzle. But I love music and art, and I'm pretty sure that with all of your adventures, I could ask you questions until you begged me to shut up.”

“Don't worry, I won't do that. What adventures do you want to hear about?”

She was reluctant for a moment. “Um . . . well . . . I mean . . .”

Devin knew the word she was looking for. “How?”

Beatrice giggled, a little embarrassed. “Yeah.”

“A fair enough question. You already know the who, and the why, and the where, and certainly the when, but it is the what and the how that you require. And I shall tell you.” He pulled the personal data organizer from his pocket. It was a rectangle about the size of his palm, with only a smooth glass screen on the front and a shiny silver back. He tapped the screen and instantly a photo of the Egyptian pyramids appeared. He touched the middle pyramid and a menu appeared. With a flick of his finger he scrolled down to an icon that said simply
SETTINGS
, then,
DATE AND TIME
.

“Very straightforward really, an exceptional piece of technology. All one must do is scroll here”—he dashed his finger over a slot-machine-like wheel of numbers and dates on the screen—“and there you have it. That's the time, any time, down to the second. As for place”—he went back to
SETTINGS, then to WORLD MAP
—“you just zoom in and fly out.” He was careful not to alter the settings. “Of course, there's the homepage, which tonight would return us back to Trooley's in the same time we left—that's my default setting for now . . . otherwise, we're anywhere.” He
touched the bottom of the screen and it went black. “It's also got a camera and music storage, but you know, everyone's got that stuff onboard their phone these days.”

“Those days,” Beatrice giggled.

“Yes,” Devin smiled. “Those days. Of course, the phone and Internet only work if I'm jumping into an era with satellites capable of such transmissions . . . I can break the rules of time and space, but I can't break the constraints of technology. It's only as perfect as the times.”

The waitress brought their drinks. As she left, Devin raised his glass in toast.

“May our futures' least be more than our pasts' most,” he stated.

The youthful, undiscovered Bob Dylan was really into his set now, groaning and yowling through his Woody Guthrie phase, whanging on his guitar and wailing on his harmonica. Beatrice had never had an experience—not even a dream—as good as this. She and Devin clinked glasses and sipped.

Devin stared deep into Beatrice's eyes.

“In the year 2027, you break my heart, Beatrice.”

Beatrice blinked.

“That's when I'm from, my dear. I meet you . . . I
met
you . . . at Trooley's in 2031, when you're forty-nine, and I'm twenty-one. That was a few months ago for me, so I traveled back to you here from then. In 2031 you've become what people used to call a ‘cougar,' an older woman who chases young men, and in my case, you broke my heart. I'm here tonight to make sure that it doesn't happen, that we will be together. I know we're technically in another dimension, and that the laws of space and time get iffy when run through gadgetry, but I love you. I don't care when or where.”

What . . . the hell . . .
Beatrice thought.

“I know you love bike riding, and good mystery books and Bob Dylan,” MacCleary stated. “You're brilliant and successful in
every time frame I could probably think of landing in. When I met you, in 2031, your chateau in Quebec was on a ski mountain and had a wall-sized shark aquarium. But I can't take you to where you already exist, so I'll take you to where you haven't existed yet, and we'll take in the sights and try out some new drinks. Okay?”