It was quite the whirlwind encounter. For the most part, she didn’t do the picking up guys in the bar and bringing them home thing. But it had been a long week, she told herself, ending with successful exams, an evening in the bar with classmates, margaritas, with salt on the edge of the glass, the way she remembered from her coming-out party in Mexico.
And, well, a hangover in the morning, and this strange guy in her bed. And the unmistakable perfume of what they’d done together, mingling sweat with a stranger, clinging to the sheets, to their bodies, hanging in the air, like the smoke from a premature disassembly.
Like a market day in some place where there are lots of pale soldiers and disgruntled brown locals wanting their country back. You’re expecting trouble, but no, somewhere high on the hillside, boom. And then dust and smoke hanging in the air for a long time, while sirens scream and the army guys figure out (wrongly, of course) who was going to do what to whom. Only they’d made a little mistake.
She poured more tequila.
And she admired this guy she’d snagged, lying there vulnerable and comatose. She even liked the way he snored. She began working tangles out of her hair, while she watched him sleep. Wondering if he were dreaming, and if all that excitement was about her, or some other random bar girl. Guy. Whatever.
He groaned, rolled over to face her, and opened his eyes. She considered covering herself, or at least getting down from her perch, cross-legged atop the dresser, but decided against it. She liked sitting on the high ground, looking down on her, ahem, friends. Those deep brown eyes, on some kind of a recon mission on her brown skin; the whole situation thrilled her.
“How long can you stay?” she asked him.
He considered the question. “Right now? I have to pee. After that? Work, Monday. Longer term? I don’t really have any plans for the next forty years or so.”
She laughed. “Let’s see how it goes til Monday, before we decide on the forty years part, shall we?”
#
Monday rolled around, in a way rather analogous to they way they’d been rolling around. “What’s your name?” she asked, at last, once again trying to restore some kind of order to her hair.
“David.”
“Maria.” She paused. “But if you start singing about meeting a girl named Maria, you’re out on your ear. And I’m keeping your clothes.”
It was his turn to laugh. “Fair enough.”
“Come again?”
“It’s never a good idea to make jokes suggested by someone’s name. They’ve heard all of them before.”
She chuckled. “No, I meant, come back to me sometime. You know where I live.”
“I will. Not sure when, but I’ll be back.”
He rummaged around in his pile of stuff, in what became his corner of her bedroom. He unfolded something that looked like a garden tool, played with it for a bit, and asked, “So is there, like, a garage or something nearby?”
They went under the apartment house, he put a foot on top of the little platform, turned his machine on, and vanished. She had an impression of wings unfurling before he left her, but she knew from her studies that was the field generator settling in to protect him. She’d seen demonstrations, but never in low light, and the effect was rather like what she imagined that other Maria had seen when the Archangel Gabriel had left her, alone, barefoot, pregnant, and in trouble.
#
Maria set about straightening up her room, airing out the bedding, and, hello, what’s this? Something David had left behind. She played with it a bit, looking for some kind of mechanism, but whatever it was seemed pretty simple, though disguised to look like an ornament. Her mother had made similar things to hang around the little house in the Sierra Madre, to scare off evil spirits. Ojos de Dios, they were called; Eyes of God.
Knowing her mother, it would have been wise to ask which God. But somewhere far out of earshot from her father.
Whenever David had intended to return, it seemed delayed. In time, with a sigh, she gave up on him. There were other evenings of tequila, some resulting in overnight guests, but after David they were unsatisfying.
“You want to go out tonight?” Anne would ask. They had several classes together, and had taught each other a great deal about fixing stuff, and how to use the miniature tools of the trade. She also lived elsewhere in Maria’s building.
“No, thanks. You go.” And she would spend another evening alone. Wondering just what it was she had seen in David that made the rest of life seem so grey, so flat.
“What didn’t you see?” Anne had laughed, when she had voiced this question aloud.
Maria had done her best imitation of her mother’s smoldering inscrutability, which had always reminded her of a not-quite-dormant mountain, ready to blow at any moment. The multilingual cursing that came with her eruptions were something to see, unless they were directed at you. Then, whatever the volcano goddess wanted, she took.
Anne left her alone.
Maria cried herself to sleep that night. Which, even while she was doing it, annoyed her intensely. So she was furious when David showed up in her dream, smiling, naked, except for a skullcap, and very, very, Jewish.
It was not something she’d noticed about the real-life David.
#
He seemed to be in her dreams more often, after that. Sometimes she screeched at him, keening her grief at his absence, or her anger at herself for letting him in at all. Other times, they slept peaceably together, like man and wife who’d been doing it for years and found it comfortable, like an old shoe.
Another term at school, another cleaning of her room reminded her of the ornament he had left. She found a string and hung it from her curtain rod, in the morning sun. She thought perhaps it was humming quietly after she handled it, but it could have been the electricals in the wall.
No, actually, it couldn’t. Those would hum at 60 cycles, sort of B-flat and a half. This was lower than that. The mystical 52 cycle hum of the timewarping equipment they’d been working on at school. More like a G, an octave or two below middle C.
And, well, mystical wasn’t quite right, really. The relativity prof promised it would fall out of the equations early in the following term, and then it would be obvious. Until then, trust him, he said, it’s natural. Though she wondered what would have happened if Westinghouse and Tesla had picked 52 cycles for their fancy newfangled alternating current electricity.
Whatever. Saturdays were for napping. The days were short at the end of the fall term, and she always felt like a tree transplanted from sunny Mexico to the dark Norteamericano wastelands. So she lay down on the bed in the sun and dozed off.
A whir awakened her, fading to a 52 cycle tone. Thinking back it had been quite loud in her dream. She moved over and David snuggled into bed with her.
With, now, a mustache. Which was grey. Not even six months after, well, that weekend. She turned in his arms, happy that, at last, he was real.
“Wait,” she said. “You’ve gotten old.”
“40 is hardly old,” he said.
“But you were more like 25 before. Last spring.”
“Was it last spring? I guess maybe it was.” He dozed off.
She wanted to erupt at him, ask him where he’d been, what he’d been doing. Who he’d been doing.
“Just you,” he said. “I can never get enough of you.”
“You waited long enough between tastes,” she chided.
“Not so long as it seems to you, my beloved,” he said. She decided she liked the silvering hair and crow’s feet.
“But why now? Why me today?”
“You turned on the dream catcher.” He seemed to think he’d explained something.
“I what?”
David opened his mouth to explain, but events spun away from them. There was another whir, another experience of the folding of angel wings, and there stood David. One more like the 25-year old David she’d, well, picked up in a bar, not to put too fine a point upon it, after the last time she’d done finals week.
Looking. At Maria and David. In bed. Together. The 40-year old David. His mouth opened. His face twisted slightly with unwelcome surprise. And then Maria decided she should do something.
She laughed.
“David, meet David,” she said.
“Pleasure, I’m sure,” neither said, honestly.
“David was just leaving,” said Maria, elbowing the elder one out of bed. He dutifully found his clothes, put most of them on, stuffed the rest in his messenger bag, turned on his gear, and vanished, in a flurry of whining wings.
“Isn’t the universe sorta supposed to implode when the younger me catches the older me in bed with his wife?”
“Wait. Wife? We’re married?”
“Well, I am. To you. You’re not. At least not yet.”
“Ah,” said Maria, trying to pretend she understood. “So…”
“Yes?” said David.
“You–the other you–were about to explain something about this, um, thing I found in your corner.” She gestured in the direction of the corner of the apartment where he’d stacked his things on that previous, first, visit. “OK, that was a bit breezy,” she said, pulling the sheet over herself.
“Speaking of… Do you mind?” said David, unbuckling his belt.
Another whir of 52-cycle wings interrupted them. “Get in line,” she said, before it was clear who’d answered whatever call she seemed to have put out.
“Oh, sorry,” said an older version of herself, when the field had collapsed around her. “Have you seen my David?”
“Think so,” said Maria. “Just left.”
“Sorry,” she said again, and began powering up her velocipede.
“Tell me, though,” Maria said to her senior self. “Did we actually marry this scumbag?” But she was gone.
“Scumbag?” said David.
“Kidding. You’ll have to admit this is confusing.”
“I remember my first encounter with multiple editions of you,” he said.
“You remember? So I didn’t just pick up some random barperson after three shots of tequila?”
“No, no, I’d remember that,” he said. “Three shots? Maybe I’d remember. Anyway, I figured you might want some cheering up and cheering on after your finals.”
“I think my head just explo–.”
David crawled into bed with her, and kissed her on the lips to silence her.
#
David set down his coffee and smiled at Maria. She took advantage of the opportunity to admire the musculature and hair on his chest, prominently visible under the larger of her two robes, which it seemed only fair to lend to him.
“What?” she said.
“I love you,” said David. For, she was pretty sure, the first time, at least in her life. Perhaps he’d told her that before, in his life.
“This is supposed to be where I thoughtlessly reply that I love you, too,” she said. “But I want to be sure, before I do that, tell you that, for the first time.”
“And that, my love, is one of the reasons I love you.”
She shook her head, trying to clear the early-morning after a late-night cobwebs, trying to think in nonlinear ways about time, her life, his life, their apparently multiply-looped life together.
Which would violate pretty much all the rules she knew.
“There are no rules,” said David, smiling.
“We’ve had this discussion before,” she said. It wasn’t a question. Well, it was a question, but she knew the answer.
“We’ve had it later,” he said. “You invented the idea of semi-fornication to cover the situation.”
“Sounds delightfully illicit,” she said.
“Indeed.”
The shake of her head resulted in a shaking of her body, which in turn opened the delightfully impractical satin robe she was wearing. If she sat very very still, it could in fact be made to cover both breasts more or less indefinitely.
“And I’m supposed to decide?”
“Decide what?” he asked.
“Consent. As in adults, comma, consenting. Whether to become.” She draped the robe over herself again.
“When you get around to it, yes. No need to rush things.”
“Except that I seem to be the target of multiple visitations from the various Davids of the future. The object of their desire, it seems. Or something.”
“Of my desire. And object is not a word I’d choose.”
“Still. I like to at least have the illusion of choosing my bedfellows.” She mused for a moment. “Or, given my own future apparition, whatever the female equivalent of fellows would be. Though she seemed more interested in you. Or you-later or something.”
“That’s another reason I love you. Wandering off on tangents. With your knee under your chin, and way lots of skin looking at me at the breakfast table.”
“Sorry,” she said. She put her foot down out of her chair, her knees together, and laid her robe across the resulting lap, tucking it chastely under the sash. Where, she knew, it would stay for perhaps ten minutes, or until she breathed, whichever came first. “Don’t be. I like your skin.”
“I’m glad. I think. I don’t really know you. Well, I did, but you know what I meant.”
“You will, in time. Meanwhile, turn off the dreamcatcher. It’d make you a whole lot harder to find in the wilds of the great space-time continuum.”
“Ah. So it’s like a blinking red light, summoning time travelers and stuff.”
“Essentially. Summoning me, in particular. And, it seems, at some future time, yourself. Not sure how you accomplished that. Unless you borrow my ride sometime.”
“And you turned it off, right? That would explain why no more copies of you interrupted us last night?”
“Smart girl. I prefer making love with the shades closed, as it were.”
“And there you are again with the presumption thing.”
“I’m getting mixed messages here.”
“Or maybe whatever shared experience you’re referring to hasn’t happened yet, for me.”
“Ah. Right. Much abject sorriness.” He stood up, bowed to her, took he hand where it lay in her lap, raised it to his lips, and kissed it.
Her robe, of course, fell open. He had the grace to ignore it.
“You know how to summon me if you want me,” he said. The switch is just here.”
He led her back to the bedroom, where he dressed, gathered his things, pressed the Eye of God into her hand, and kissed her.
When he was gone, she held the gadget to her ear, carefully listening. The 52-cycle hum was gone, replaced by the mundane 60-cycle version, of some light bulb around the place, about to burn out.