The Time Traveler's Almanac

Feeding our child has made Cecilia’s breasts sit lower on her ribcage. Her hips stretch out the nylon of her nightgown. Through the translucent fabric I can see the shadow of pubic hair and the valley that the curves of her thighs make. Her eyes are full of sleep, and her hair is a tousled mess, and she’s so beautiful I could tumble her right now. But there’s this frightened kid waiting to talk to me. I kiss Cecilia goodbye and promise to call her as soon as I’ve learned more.

Kamla’s waiting for me outside the house when I pull up in my car. The night air is a little chilly, and she’s a lonely, shivering silhouette against the front door. She makes to come in the passenger side of the car, but I motion her around to my side. “We’re going to leave a note for your parents first,” I tell her. I have one already prepared. “And we’re just going sit right here in the car and talk.”

“We can leave a note,” she replies, “but we have to be away from here long enough so you can hear the whole story. I can’t have Sunil and Babette charging to the rescue right now.”

I’ve never heard her call her parents by their first names; Babs and Sunil aren’t into that kind of thing. Her face in her weirdly adult head looks calm, decisive. I find myself acquiescing. So I slip the note under the front door. It tells Babette and Sunil that Kamla’s with me, that everything’s all right. I leave them my cell phone number, though I’m pretty sure that Babette already has it.

Kamla gets into the car. She quietly closes the door. We drive. I keep glancing over at her, but for a few minutes, she doesn’t say anything. I’m just about to ask her what was so urgent that she needed to pull a stunt like this when she says, “Your installation had a certain antique brio to it, Greg. Really charming. My orig – I mean, I have a colleague whose particular interest is in the nascent identity politics as expressed by artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and how that expression was the progenitor of current speciesism.”

“Have you been reading your mum’s theory books?”

“No,” she replies. There was so much bitterness in that one word. “I’m just a freak. Your kid’s almost three, right?”

“Yeah.”

“In a blink of an eye, barely a decade from now, his body will be entering puberty. He’ll start getting erections, having sexual thoughts.”

“I don’t want to think about all that right now,” I say. “I’m still too freaked that he’s begun making poo-poo jokes. Kamla, is this the thing you wanted to tell me? Cause I’m not getting it.”

“A decade from now, I’ll have the body of a seven-year-old.”

“You can’t know that. There aren’t any DGS kids who’ve reached their twenties yet.”

“I know. I’m the oldest of them, by a few weeks.”

Another thing she can’t know.

“But we’re all well past the age where normal children have achieved adolescence.”

Goggling at her, I almost drive through a red light. I slam on the brakes. The car jolts to a halt. “What? What kind of shit is that? You’re ten years old. A precocious ten, yes, but only ten.”

“Go in there.” She points into the parking lot of a nearby grocery store. “It won’t be open for another three hours.”

I pull into the lot and park, leave the engine running so we can have some heat in the car. “If the cops come by and see us,” I say, “I could be in a lot of shit. They’ll think I’m some degenerate Indian perv with a thing for little girls.”

Shit. I shouldn’t be talking to a ten-year-old this way. Kamla always makes me forget. It’s that big head, those big words.

“DGS people do get abused,” she tells me. “Just like real children do.”

“You are a real child!”

She glares at me, then looks sad. She says, “Sunil and Babette are going to have to move soon. It’s so hard for me to keep up this pretence. I’ve managed to smartmouth so much at school and in our neighbourhood that it’s become uncomfortable to live there anymore.”

My eyes have become accustomed enough to the dark that I can see the silent tears running down her cheeks. I want to hold her to me, to comfort her, but I’m afraid of how that will look if the cops show up. Besides, I’m getting the skin-crawly feeling that comes when you realise that someone with whom you’ve been making pleasant conversation is as mad as a hatter. “I’m taking you back home,” I whisper. I start turning the key in the ignition.

“Please!” She puts a hand on my wrist. “Greg, please hear me out. I’ll make it quick. I just don’t know how to convince you.”

I take my hand off the key. “Just tell me,” I said. “Whatever it is, your parents love you. You can work it out.”

She leans back against the passenger side door and curls her knees up to her chest, a little ball of misery. “Okay. Let me get it all out before you say anything else, all right?”

“All right.”

“They grew us from cells from our originals; ten of us per original. They used a viral injection technique to put extra-long tails on one of the strands of our DNA. You need more telomeres to slow down aging.”