Authors: Robert Kroese
We tail the couple across the street and down the pier. I
’m sort of laughing to myself, because I thought I’d be smeared along train tracks by now and instead I’m taking a nice walk on Pier 39 with a pretty girl. I have no idea who she is or why we’re following some random couple down the pier, but still, nice.
She holds her hand up to indicate we
’re stopping. She’s looking at her phone again. I can’t see the screen very well, but it looks like a GPS app.
“
They’re getting away,” I say. Maggiano’s is about a hundred feet down the pier on the left.
“
Can’t get any closer. Too dangerous.”
Sure, that makes sense.
The couple is about to walk into Maggiano’s when the guy stops abruptly, holding the door open. The woman continues into the restaurant, not realizing he isn’t following. He seems to be watching something, and I follow his gaze: a man, tall and heavy-set, wearing a trench coat, has just pulled a ski mask over his head.
“
Oh, shit,” I mumble. There’s no skiing on Pier 39.
The man in the trench coat and ski mask is standing in the middle of the pier, surrounded by hundreds of tourists. The Hispanic guy has let the door go and his right hand is in his jacket. He
’s maybe fifty feet from Ski Mask. I found out later that the Hispanic guy’s name was Dave, so that’s what I’m going to call him, even though I didn’t know that was his name at the time, because I’m sick of calling him Hispanic guy. Whatever.
Ski Mask reaches into his coat and pulls out a sawed-off shotgun. Before anyone can react, he
’s firing into the crowd, seemingly at random. An elderly man and a teenage girl fall before Dave blindsides Ski Mask, tackling him to the ground. Ski Mask must have fifty pounds on Dave, but Dave doesn’t give him a chance to use his weight. He’s grinding his left knee into Ski Mask’s right hand, making it impossible for him to fire the shotgun or even lift it off the wooden planks that make up the pier. With his right hand, Dave is pistol-whipping the guy. Ski Mask is wriggling around like crazy, so it takes Dave seven or eight tries to subdue him. Finally Ski Mask lies still and Dave pulls off the mask. For some reason I kind of expect to recognize the guy, like at the end of a movie where they pull off the bad guy’s mask and it turns out that it was the prosecuting attorney all along. But of course I don’t. He’s just some random asshole with a shotgun. In any case, I don’t think his own mother would recognize him in his present condition: his face is pretty fucked up after what Dave did to it. Good for Dave.
I lean over and finally puke. Moon
Over My Hammy from Denny’s – what was supposed to be my last meal. It had been trying to get out ever since I got on Hussein’s Wild Ride, and the sight of Ski Mask’s crumpled-in face pretty much did me in. By the time I straighten up, a crowd has gathered, cutting off my view.
“
Let’s go,” says the brunette.
“
Shouldn’t we stick around? Those people might need our help.” I hear sirens in the distance. “And we’re witnesses.”
“
They don’t need us,” says the girl authoritatively. “What’s going to happen is going to happen.” Ordinarily I hate that sort of bullshit platitude, but the way she says it gives me chills, like this whole thing is just a scene in a movie she’s already seen. She turns and walks back the way we came. And to be honest, I have no desire to stick around and contemplate my breakfast any more. I go after her. As we reach the start of the pier, a team of paramedics runs past us the other way.
She
’d offered me coffee, but we both need something a little stronger by this point. I’m feeling better, having emptied my stomach, but now I’m weak and shaky. She doesn’t look much better. She’s been on edge since I first saw her at the BART station, and I can see she badly needs to sit down and decompress. We find a bar a couple blocks from the pier. I go to the bathroom to clean up. My bottom lip is swelling up pretty bad, but there isn’t much I can do about it. I splash some water on my face, rinse my mouth out and head back into the bar. I flag down the bartender and ask him for some ice for my lip. He gives me a glass full. I see the brunette sitting at a table near the window and I go sit down across from her. Before I can say anything to her, a waitress comes by and asks us what we want. Thankfully, it’s now just after noon, so we can order drinks. Gin and tonic for me; whiskey for the girl. She orders a sandwich too. I’m not hungry. That out of the way, I finally get around to asking the girl her name.
“
Tali,” she says. Nice name. It doesn’t seem to come with a last name. Not yet, anyway.
“
I’m Paul,” I say. “But you must know that.”
I see some color return to her face. She
’s blushing.
“
Seriously?” I say, holding an ice cube to my lip with a napkin. “You don’t know my name?” For some reason I had thought she must know something about me to have figured out what I was doing at the BART station. My fucking
name
, at least.
“
I never know their names,” she says. “That’s just how it works.”
“
Their
names? Who is
they
?” I take a sip of my drink. The alcohol hits the split in my lip and I wince.
She sighs.
“It’s complicated. And I don’t mean, like, Mah-Jongg complicated. I mean quantum physics complicated. Look, Paul, I know I said I’d tell you everything, but trust me, you’re better off not knowing. I wish
I
didn’t know.”
“
Better off not knowing?” I ask. “Is this one of those red pill/blue pill situations? Because lady, I’ve been on the blue pill for a while. Pills, actually. Prozac, Zoloft, Celexa, Lexapro, Cymbalta, Effexor … probably others I can’t remember. The blue pill isn’t really working out for me, in case you hadn’t noticed. What’s the worst that could happen? You tell me that I’m actually a brain in a vat in a laboratory on Mars? Because that’s a step up from where I’m sitting.” I’m exaggerating, of course. Finding out I was a brain in a vat would be pretty devastating. And of course I don’t really think she’s going to tell me that. But I get the feeling she’s trying to play Morpheus to my Neo, so I play along.
She thinks for a moment, taking a sip of her drink.
“OK,” she says. “But you can’t tell anybody. I mean,
no one
. It’s for your good as well as mine. Anybody you tell will think you’re delusional, and with your history …”
“
My history?” I ask, a little irritably. “I thought you didn’t even know my name.”
“
No, you’re right,” she says. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said that. But I do know that you’ve seriously tried to kill yourself at least once, and you’ve told me that you’ve been on just about every antidepressant known to man, so I’m extrapolating. If you start talking about this to the cops or whoever, people are going to look into your medical history. I don’t mean this as a threat, but trust me, it’s not going to go well for you.”
“
Why would I tell the cops? Are you involved in something illegal? Did you know that guy was going to start killing people at the pier?”
She shakes her head.
“No,” she says. Then: “Well, yes, I knew there was a high probability of a mass murder on the pier.”
I
’m stunned. “What? Why didn’t you tell someone? That guy shot at least two people. They could be dead for all we know. You could have prevented that!”
She shakes her head again.
“It doesn’t work like that.”
“
Why did you stop me?” I say. “At the BART station.”
She bites her lip.
“I … interfered.”
“
That part I know,” I say irritably. Her phone rings. “Shit!” she says and grabs the phone from her coat. “I’m sorry!” she says into the phone. “I had to get out of there in a hurry and I forgot to check in. What? No, Pier 39. No, there was a problem with the first crux. No, I just … didn’t get there in time. No, I’m fine. I know, I know, I said I’m sorry. I don’t know, maybe an hour or so. OK, see you then.” She mutters something to herself and slips the phone back into her coat. “Where was I?”
“
You interfered.”
“
Right! I interfered with the coin toss. What did it come up as?”
I
’m confused now. “Tails,” I say.
“
Then it was going to be heads. Before I interfered. You’d have walked away from the platform and gone back to your life.”
Some life, I think. I suck at my job, I can
’t get a novel published, my wife just left me, taking our two kids … Anyway, all the shit you didn’t want to hear about earlier.
I pull the 50p coin from my pocket, regarding it.
“You
made
it come up tails? That’s impossible.”
“
Technically, I made it more probable that it would come up tails. And then I felt bad about it. That’s why I called out. I’m … not very good at this.” I realize she’s on the verge of tears.
“Hey, it’s OK,” I say, because I’m fantastic at comforting people. That’s why my wife left me. “I’m lousy at my job too.” Nice, you just compared her to a suicidally depressed loser. Keep going! Finally I think of something helpful to say. “You stopped that guy on the pier. I don’t know how you did it, but you sent that cop down there. If he hadn’t been there ….”
She smiles weakly, tears in her eyes.
“Yeah,” she says. “That’s true.”
Her sandwich arrives, and she pecks at it a little. At this point I
’m not sure I even believe her about controlling the coin toss, but she seems to believe it, so it helps. I’m starting to think she’s the crazy one. Only one way to find out. “So tell me how it works.”
She asks me if I believe in ghosts. I say no, even though I don
’t really have any feelings on the matter, one way or another. What do ghosts have to do with anything? Another mark in the crazy column for her.
“
Some people think that when someone dies violently, they leave some of their life energy behind, and that’s what we experience as a ghost. It’s a sort of impression, or a shadow of the person left behind after their death.”
“
Uh huh,” I say, trying not to sound skeptical.
“
I’m not asking you to believe in ghosts,” she says. “I don’t, at least not in the typical sense. But it’s a helpful way to think about this.”
“
All right.”
“
OK, so someone dies violently –”
“
Like those people on the pier.”
“
Well, yes, theoretically,” she says. “But let’s use a different example, because I don’t want to confuse you. You remember that gas main explosion in San Mateo three months ago?”
“
Yeah, somebody hit it with a backhoe. Killed a bunch of people.”
Eight,
” she says.
“
If you say so.”
“
So these people die violently –”
“
You consider that violence?” I interject. “It was an accident.”
“
When I say violent, I mean suddenly and unexpected, as a result of external causes. Not somebody dying of a heart attack in his sleep.”
“
OK.”
“
So these eight people die suddenly, and they leave behind a sort of shadow of their life force, for lack of a better term. Maybe think of it like those shadows of people burned into the buildings at Hiroshima. Some remnant of their living existence left behind.”
“
I think I’m following you so far.”
“
Yeah, so here’s where it starts to get complicated,” she says. “Let’s say this ‘life force’ actually exists partially outside of time as we understand it. So that the shadow not only goes forward; it also goes
back
.”
“
You mean back in time.”
“
Yes. The trauma of the event of death is so strong that it projects both into the future and into the past. So that the person’s ghost, if you will, haunts the location of the person’s death even before their death actually occurs. This would be one way to explain premonitions of train wrecks and other horrific events. Maybe some people are more sensitive to these impressions, so they can sense the tragedy before it occurs.”
“
Sounds like bullshit,” I say, starting my third drink. “But I’m still following you.”
“
Anyway, most of this is academic. The thing you need to understand is that it’s theoretically possible to know in advance about some tragedies. The more people that are killed, the greater the impression and therefore the easier it is to predict. Impressions fade over time, both forwards and backwards, and with distance. So the easiest tragedies to predict are those that involve a large number of deaths and that are going to happen nearby, in the near future.”
I
’m pretty buzzed at this point, having downed two G&Ts on an empty stomach. My lip isn’t bothering me anymore and I’m starting to notice how attractive Tali really is. Thick, curly dark hair, big brown eyes, tiny little freckled nose. She takes off her coat and I catch a glimpse of some significant cleavage down the V of her blouse. Focus on the nose, I tell myself. I don’t really care what she’s talking about anymore; I just want to keep her talking. “So you see that something bad is going to happen, and you stop it. Like with me at the BART station.”