The Time Traveler's Almanac

“Oh, it’s you, hi.” She says, then notices Dany and quietly adds, as if he’s not there, “My God, Marek, he looks just like you when we met. My god, he’s so beautiful.”

“Can we come in?”

She opens the door.

“Where’s Rick?”

“That bastard.”

Dany sweeps Max up from the corner and says, “Hello grubby-chubby.” Max grins, revealing a little tooth and letting out another big dribble to join the one connecting his chin and chest.

“I’m moving out of this place soon,” says Genie, sweeping back her limp mousy hair, only to have it fall back across her forehead, another symbol of the world’s resistance to her desires.

“I’m amazed you stayed so long,” I say, looking over to Dany and Max, who are playing with a toy that hovers in the air but avoids being caught when you reach out to it. Both have child-like expressions on their faces.

Genie looks over and says again, quietly, “amazing.”

“I’m thinking of going back and being a musician,” I say.

“Oh yeah.”

“No, really.”

Genie looks away from Dany and Max to me. “God, Marek. It would have been alright if you had really wanted to play music, but you always sat in that grey zone your whole life. You didn’t really try music, you always held onto it so you wouldn’t try anything else.”

“The openings were never there; you have to be lucky.”

“You were never ready, never good enough. You never wanted to work at it.”

“Jesus, Genie, you don’t understand how hard it is.”

She reaches over and takes my hand, and just looks at me.

After a moment I say, “I’ll try to come more often.”

“You won’t though, you know you won’t.”

There’s nothing else for me to say, standing there looking back and forth at the one real love of my life and the thin blond hair of my son, as he sits comfortably on Dany’s lap. Her hand feels soft in mine.

*   *   *

On Dany’s last day, before he shoots off to Centauri, I arrive at his penthouse and Christy the skip-girl is wandering about, topless, with a skirt that sits high enough to show her knickers underneath. “Where’s that top?” she asks no one in particular.

Dany is still in the shower and I can hear the running water above the soft sound of the ocean soundscape, carefully designed for relaxation but actually infuriating. Relaxation soundscapes make me want to smash something.

“Here it is.” Christy pulls the top out from under a couch, puts it straight on and then holds her stomach, looking down at it with curiosity.

Oh no, I think, not again.

Christy looks over at me, smiles, grabs her bag and heads for the door.

“Hey Christy?”

She turns.

“You…” My voice trails off with my confidence.

“Yeah?”

“Oh, it’s okay.”

She waits for a second to see if I have anything else to add, decides I don’t and then lets herself out.

A few moments later Dany comes in, drying his hair with a towel. “Turn that fucking sea-sound off would you?” he says. “It’s annoying.”

I smile, head to the panel and turn all the soundscapes off.

He throws the towel on the floor, sits down, and raises his eyebrows as if to say, well, there you go.

So I hit him with it: “So, you’re going to leave, just like that?”

A look of confusion crosses his face and he says, “Don’t.”

He gets up, walks across to the windows and looks over to the opposite Tower. “This place is so strange,” he adds.

I look at him, and he looks small and young and out of place. I know now, that it is time to let him go. I know who he is: He’s Dany; he’s my father.

“I came to say goodbye,” I say.

“Okay,” he says and continues to look out over to the mammoth structure, with its thousands of floors containing whole social ecosystems. Whole worlds even. And beyond that the suburbs: filled with people who fell short of their aims and now settle in the grey zone of their life, their quiet desperation muffled. And even further, beyond that, the tiny speck of the ruined city, the dead heart of things, where lights once flashed and people once gathered before everything slipped off track so subtly, so we didn’t notice and found ourselves in a world new and strange and hard to bear. That’s how I leave him, staring over the geographies of our lives, a man who should have looked older than me, but could have been my own son. He is gone the next day, back out to the stars where he belongs and a few days after that, as I sit in my chair at home, Mozart’s requiem surrounding me and filling me. Lord grant them eternal rest, the chorus sings, and let the perpetual light shine upon them. I know it’s time to call Leila. She is, after all, my sister.

*   *   *

When Genie opens the door she says, “Oh, it’s you.”

I shrug, as if to say, “well there you go.”

“Come in. Come in.”

The place is still a mess but I don’t mind. Max is in a high chair and waves his arms around. I stand awkwardly across from Genie as she starts picking clothes up from the ground. She always starts cleaning when I arrive.

“He’s gone,” I say.

“I know.”