The Time Traveler's Almanac

I follow him. Neither of us speak as we make our way to the elevator and then wind through one of the prospects: a wide boulevard with ground cars and unicycles zipping along in a chaotic frenzy, the stall holders at the side of the road, with their designer tattoos, calling to us as we pass. Another elevator, spiralling through the Tower in odd directions, takes us up to the Hotel Sector in the fifteen hundreds where Dany has been given a room.

He has an amazing sense of direction amid the massive structure of the Tower, with its thousands of winding corridors. He finds his penthouse calmly and easily. When he arrives he says to me, the first words in some time, “I’m going to get ready. I have to see some of this.”

He retreats to the bathroom while I sit and wait.

The view from the giant windows is magnificent. Two Towers, one at an oblique angle, and then the lights of the suburbs, flickering like a thousand shining insects. The clarity of it strikes me.

“We don’t wear makeup much anymore,” I say.

“Oh … What do you wear?”

“I don’t really know. I mean, I’m not really up with it. But there’s a fashion channel.”

Dany comes out, fully shaven. He looks even younger, though the dark makeup around the eyes makes him look like a thirty-year throwback. “Should I take it off?” He looks suddenly anxious.

“No, don’t worry. Some people still wear it.”

“I’ve got this card.” He says, “They gave me this card. It’ll get me clothes, all sorts of things.”

“Leila called me a couple of days ago.”

He walks across the room, presses a button and the fridge door slides up.

“Drink?” he asks, ignoring me.

“She’s doing well. All settled down: husband, kids, you know.”

Dany takes a big swig of something, throws back his head, and lets out a roar. Turns around, passes me a glass. “C’mon boy, this’ll put a glint back in your eye.” He grins his distinctive grin.

I sip the drink and try to stifle a cough. My throat is on fire, my eyes blurred. I hear a laugh off in the distance. “God,” I say.

*   *   *

Nightville, up in the eighteen and nineteen hundreds, is a complex of Middle-Eastern and African restaurants, hanging gardens filled with the scent of stone-fruit and dotted with indoor lakes, labyrinthine clubs climbing up through the Tower like ant-colonies so that after a few hours you don’t know what level you’re on. Nightville is a carefully planned planlessness, designed to give the sense of spontaneity, of a vast and sprawling confusion, imitating the red-light districts in the old cities. But nothing in the Towers is unplanned. So there’s always the element of irreality to it, a sense of the manufactured. Shambling through a club one might, lo and behold, stumble upon an Armenian restaurant run by the club’s owners, aimed at the very same patrons, in an expression of monopoly apparent only to those not doped up on rapture or blurred by alcohol. Nightville is one big franchise.

We’re in Arabian Nights, one of the popular clubs in the sector, a ramshackle series of levels where patrons surround hookahs in dark tent-like chambers, where everything is in the deep colours and intricate patterns of the Middle East, where belly dancers and pipe-players, tootling in exotic quarter-tones, make their way through the passageways, where camel-trains ridden by adventurers head for the mini-desert on the western side of the club.

Dany, dressed ridiculously in his space-suit and dark makeup (all blue shadow and grey undertones), is entertaining a small crowd in a side room. I’ve been edged out of the circle and have to crane my neck over a couple of skip-girls.

“Of course,” he says, “you’re unconscious during close-to-light-speed. A deep dark sleep filled with magnificent dreams. And then, suddenly, consciousness hits you like a blow, and you’re throwing up all over yourself, and you’re wondering who you are and what you’re doing there. And me, I’m thinking I could have bought this feeling for a hundred bucks at Arabian Nights.”

He pauses for the laughter and then continues in slightly more hushed tones.

“But then you look out and you see Centauri and everything is in a strange new light, filled with blues and greens that you’ve never seen before, as if you’ve been reborn into a world just slightly different from this one, and you know nothing will ever be the same again.”

Around him there is hushed silence, only the bass from dance music in the main rooms, audible behind his voice.

One of the skip-girls puts her hand on his thigh.

“Hey,” he says to me, “Come here.” He pulls me toward him and wraps an arm around my shoulder. “I want you to meet Marek. You have to look after him.”

Someone passes me a fluorescent blue drink, Ottoman Ice, and I down it in one hit.

He continues to tell his stories but his arm is around my neck and I keep thinking to myself: isn’t this what you came for, isn’t time with Dany what you wanted?