Peggy

Ships only flew over my house occasionally, when they were forced off course by something. Thus, I measured time by the sun in the sky, for the simple reason that I’d destroyed all the clocks in my house years ago. It was an impulse, but not one I feel terribly guilty for indulging. When the sun was at its highest, visible only through the odd dibit in the cover of clouds, someone knocked on my door. Never a good sign.

I looked at the man standing in my doorway and breathed out. I never expected to see Kurt Faulkner ever again. I wasn’t sure I wanted to.

Light snow, the kind that melts immediately upon hitting the ground, fell reluctantly from the sky. All the trees at Faulkner’s back were bare, the branches resembling broken fingers reaching out for him. His hair had grown out- I almost didn’t recognize him at first glance. His brown tresses was wet with melted snow and hung in thick strands down his face. He’d gotten older, but then what was I expecting? I had too. Maybe I wasn’t letting it show quite as much, but I had. And he wasn’t nearly as old as he should’ve been considering how long ago our last conversation had taken place.

“Peggy,” he said. He had a very low voice, smooth and heavy. “Are you gonna let me in?”

“Of course,” I said.

I walked away from the entrance, and Kurt came in from the cold.

I wore a long purple house dress and thick wool socks. I had heating, but the place wasn’t built for the cold- lots of thin windows, lots of drafts. I had two fireplaces, one in my bedroom and one in my living room. I sat Kurt down in front of the living room iteration, on one of my good chairs. I didn’t own any couches, just a lot of chairs. The floor was a beige carpet, and all the lights were off. The curtains up, so everything was drenched in rotting silver.

“You want anything to eat or drink?” I asked, walking towards my kitchen.

“The forties really did a number on you, didn’t they lady?”

“Not really. Some things are just polite. My dad was Italian, or at least mostly. First thing he did when anyone set foot in his house was offer them water, then booze, then food.”

“In that order?”

“That order exactly. Without fail, every time.”

“Mind if I have a drink, then?” Kurt asked.

“Brandy okay?”

“More than okay- heavenly.”

I poured two shots into two glasses and brought them out.

“Maybe it’s a little early in the day to start drinking,” I said, handing him a glass.

“It’s always too early in the day to start drinking. ‘Cept for when it’s too late.”

“Heh. Words to live by.”

He raised a glass. “To Ben?”

I raised. “To Ben Duncan. Salut.”

“Salut.”

We tapped glasses. He drank half a shot, I downed the whole glass. Then I sat down in the chair across from him, right next to the fire. It burned hot, and the woodsmoke smelled exquisite. I looked at the window behind Kurt: the snow was starting to stick to the ground. I hope it let up, otherwise Kurt mind wind up stuck here a day or two. I like Kurt a lot, and it was nice to see him again, but more than a couple hours in his company sounded like a bad plan for all parties involved.

Wasn’t looking good- the snow just kept on falling. It never used to snow this much in New Mexico, or at least not this far southron. I counted myself lucky for finding one of the only houses in the region with a built-in fireplace (and more than one at that).

“You look good,” Kurt said.

I’d looked into the mirror that morning to count the lines on my face. Fewer than expected, fewer than their probably should’ve been. My long black hair hadn’t even begun to gray, my copper skin only recently and reluctantly starting to crack. It made me want to vomit.

“You do as well,” I said.

“I’m a hobo. I’m not supposed to look good.”

“Well do you anyway, in a rugged outdoorsman kinda way,” I said. I meant it. He was a little slimmer, and the hair and beard were a pretty far cry from the jarhead look he’d been rocking erstwhile. It seemed… More sincere. More like him.

“Thanks,” he said.

“So what brings you here.”

“‘I was just in the neighborhood’ won’t work, I’m guessing?”

“There’s no neighborhood to just be in. And you’re one of the handful of people in literally the entire universe who knows where I live. I’m guessing you came here for a specific reason.”

Kurt sighed, and took another sip of his drink. “The Amaterasu government has worked out you’re still alive. And that you were at Contact Zero.”

“Pfft. That’s what they call that travesty? Little melodramatic, don’t you think?”

“I’d say it’s deserving,” Faulkner said softly.

After a moment, I replied, “Yeah. Yeah, you’re probably right.”

“So what comes next?”

“I dunno, you tell me. I’m guessing there’s a warrant out for my arrest?”

“Correct you are.”

“How long do you think it’ll be before they find me?”

“Charitably? A year. One of our years, I mean, not there’s.”

“Time to start running then,” I said, getting up from my chair. “Gotta get a head start.”

“Where will you go?”

I walked over to my kitchen, and searched for my ticket out. “I have a few friends, like-minded individuals from similar walks of life. I think they’ll be willing to extend the hand of friendship for a bit. Heck, if I introduce them all to each other we can even start a union.”

“Time traveler’s union? Sounds a bit on the nose.”

“Yeah, but so does a lot of my life when I say it out loud.” I finally found the right cabinet, the highest one up. I put a chair in place so I could reach it.

It was a cylinder. A bit of a magic wand, I suppose. Had that shape. Not much longer than my hand. It was hard to calibrate for that exact reason.

I walked back into the living room with my ride.

“You’re just gonna take off, then?” Kurt asked.

“No, no,” I said. “First I’m going to head over to one of my favors and see if she’ll accomodate me in the first place. If not, I’ll have to start running down the list. When I get a yes, I’ll come back here, pack my bags, and start running.”

“What if you don’t get a yes?”

“I dunno. I guess I’ll have to cross that bridge if I get to it. I’m kinda holding out hope that at least one of the folks in my rolodex is smart enough to know I wouldn’t ask for help if it wasn’t a matter of life and death, and that they’re also a good enough person to not immediately turn me away upon realizing that.”

Kurt blinked.

I blinked.

“I’m fucked,” I said.

“Not necessarily.”

“And what makes you say that? Why on earth would anyone care about me at this point?”

“I still care,” Kurt said. “And maybe having at least one other person in your corner when you go see your friends would help.”

“You… You’d do that for me?”

“Yeah.”

“After everything?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure?”

“You’re not talking me out of this,” Kurt said. From his chair, he offered me his hand, and I took it and helped him to his feet.

“Alright. Let’s go.”

I took his hand and set the coordinates onto the wand.

And we were off.



Ben

The sun beamed down harshly from a hot blue sky, and the desert was threatening to flood. Never a good sign.

I sat in my Hummer, watching the onslaught of filthy water falling from what appeared to be an invisible hole a few dozen yards off the ground. It was like somebody had turned on a faucet in Boston. It hit the ground faster than the hard-packed sand could soak it all up, and lurched forward in all directions. After twenty feet, it reached the deep moat we’d dug. I was genuinely unclear on the science of it, if it would all absorb into the sand or if now there would be a pond now. Was the circumference of desert over which the water had flowed an island now? Valid questions I couldn’t answer. Not really my forte- no criminal minds required, unless you were stealing water (and that’s more LA County’s hat, at least to my knowledge). The water stopped falling from nowhere after about thirty seconds, and there was only a bit of overflow- a bit of mist pawed at my face as I propped my head on the opened window.

The water had fallen from a nonexistent hole in a nondescript part of the desert ten feet off the ground. We’d received a set of coordinates from our radio observation tower, and given that it was our job description to look into nonsense such as that, we looked into it. This wasn’t the first time something like this had happened at this spot; the ditch had been dug about a month ago in case another flood fell from the sky. I was escorted by the marine driving the Hummer, plus two more in the back with rifles. They thought I was CIA, and sometimes I wish I was; those gentlemen’s lives seem so much less complicated than mine.

The marines were cursing. I filtered it out- never been much for profanity. Was raised better than that, frankly. I lit a cigarette and let them get it out of their system- if they wanted to be loud and profane than that was their right- they were soldiers, after all. And hey, water flooding from a random spot in the sky en masse and nowhere else wasn’t exactly something you saw every day. And neither was a naked woman crawling from the pit that’d been dug.

Everyone stopped screaming when they saw her. She was short, about five foot flat, and she was covered in wet filth. She had wavy black hair down passed her deriere, as well as tan skin and wide eyes. She started staring at us, probably because she was naked and probably because she hadn’t expected to be seen while naked.

One of the marines in the back, Edwards, jumped out with his gun at the ready. “Ma’am, put your hands up and get on your knees!” he said.

“Tell him to stand down,” I said, sighing and stubbing out my cigarette.

“Edwards, stand down!” the driver, Hardison, said.

Edwards reluctantly lowered his gun.

I stepped out of the car. I hadn’t expected this either, but I was more intrigued than anything else. After all, you don’t see things like this every day, and you’re not gonna get any answers by shooting the source.

“Ma’am,” I said carefully, my hands raised and my palms opened, “My name is Ben Duncan. May I ask you your name?”

The woman continued to stare for a moment, her plump lips totally closed. I’ll admit, I was more inclined to stare than speak as well. Even covered in dirt, she was something else.

And then she vanished into thin air.

The marines started cursing again. I lit another cigarette, silently bemoaning having wasted my previous one. I took a long, deep drag and then exhaled loudly.

I turned around and walked back to the car. Hardison and Edwards were acting like a pair of baboons, while the remaining marine quietly gripped his gun with shaking hands. He was directly behind my seat, and I hadn’t paid him much mind on the ride over. Now, though…

“You alright, son?” I asked him, leaning over and poking my head inside the car. I looked him in the eye and then he turned his head to the side.

He didn’t answer.

“You were asked a question, Faulkner!” Hardison bellowed from the driver’s seat.

“Sir!” the marine, who probably only shaved once a month, said. “I am fine, sir. Simply holding my weapon at the ready in case the situation escalates, sir!” His hands were still shaking.

“Sure you were, Kurt. Sure you were,” Edwards said as he slid back into the Hummer.

Hardison snort-laughed.

“What’s funny?” I asked, opening the car door and situating myself.

“The idea of Kurt shooting anyone, frankly,” Edwards said.

“You’re out of line, Marine,” Hardison said. “And also correct.”

Hardison turned the car back on and turned the Hummer around, heading back in the direction of the base. Kurt- Private Faulkner, never should call anyone by their first name without permission- simply sat there holding his gun. He’d stopped shaking, but I also noticed his continued determination not to look at anything. They were talking about him like he wasn’t even there, which I suspected was the boy’s preferred manner of being addressed.

“I’m still not getting the joke, I’m afraid,” I said. “I don’t have the best grasp of humor, or at least that’s what my family tells me.”

“Put it this way, Agent Duncan?” Hardison said. “That broad whose front entrance we saw in plain view? Even she has bigger balls than Faulkner.”

I considered this for a moment, and then said, “Mind your profanity, sir. Some consider it a mark of low intelligence.”

Hardison blinked, and then focused on the hard-packed sand road. Edwards, blessedly, was silent as well.

I noted Private Faulkner in the rear-view mirror, still shook if not shaking, and then retrieved my notebook and pen from my jacket’s inner pocket. I jotted him down, followed by, of course, the woman.

***

We got back to the base and reported our findings. I filed the necessary paperwork and then went home. I made a point to say good night to Private Faulkner on my way out, and he nodded in response.

My apartment was at the center of town, above a movie theater. When I was told my deployment to Flores, New Mexico would be indefinite, I made it clear to my superiors I would not be sleeping at the base and that I would not be staying at a motel the entire time. There’s making sacrifices for your work, and then there’s having self-respect. So they’d scrambled a bit and found me the only vacant apartment in town, a studio loft above the local nickelodeon. The ceiling was low and the walls were unpainted wood and there was no carpet at all (until I’d bought one a week in and laid it down next to my bed), but it was something. And I’d made this bed, both proverbial and literal, so I figured I may as well sleep in it. I got home and put my jacket on the rack by the door, followed by my fedora. I cooked myself some beans and rice for dinner and then sat down at my desk, jotting down the entirety of the day’s events.

The woman was interesting.

Private Faulkner was rather interesting as well, though not for the same reasons.

And of course, the flash flood in the middle of New Mexico, localized entirely to a one hundred yard radius with no apparent source. That the previous time this happened it’d been blood rather than water only served to make it more fascinating.

I thought to myself, Perhaps things will finally take a turn for the interesting around here.

***

I was somewhat correct. The situation did progress from that day’s events, though it took a bit of time. A month passed without incident. I spent most of it answering phone calls assuring whomever was on the other end that yes, this was a necessary position in a necessary outpost, and that yes, we were making good use of our limited funding. After a particularly long and stressful long distance call with some congressman’s assistant’s nephew’s mistress’ son, followed by the arrival of a telegram from my oldest sister, Priscilla, inquiring as to why I hadn’t been in touch with her or the rest of the family the past few months (to which I responded with ‘GOVERNMENT DUTIES. Stop. NOT ALLOWED TO DISCUSS. Full stop’), I decided I needed some air.

I walked over to Private Faulkner, standing by the main exit to the facility. “Private Faulkner. I’m going to take lunch in town and require a security escort. Do me the honor?”

Faulkner blinked rapidly, then looked over to Hardison, who stood a dozen or so yards away. Hardison shrugged and nodded, and Faulkner said, “Yes sir.”

“We’ll be going plainclothes so as not to arouse suspicion, so go change, and limit yourself to a sidearm. Refer to me as ‘Mr. Duncan’ while we’re in public, understand? I don’t wanna hear the word ‘sir.’”

“Yes, Mr. Duncan,” Faulkner said. I nodded and we departed soon thereafter.

***

The Early Bird was a diner a few blocks from my loft. It was one story tall, with windows on all sides and lights dangling from the ceiling. Faulkner wore a blue button down and tan pants, and we sat down on opposite sides of a booth near the front entrance. Outside, the day was dry and hot and bright; things didn’t change much around here.

“What’s good here?” Faulkner asked, opening the menu.

“Chicken’s not bad,” I said. “The brisket is pretty good too.”

“Always loved a good brisket myself.”

“Honestly, most of the food is good here, except for the fish.”

“Makes sense. We’re in a desert.”

“Yeah, there’s that. I think I’m just a bit selective about my fish in general.”

“Why’s that?”

“I’m ocean folk,” I said. “Grew up in Baltimore. Spent a lot of time in Washington, as well. Lotta good fish.”

“Amen.”

“Amen?”

“From Maine. Bangor.”

I smiled. “Hell of a town.”

“On that we’ll have to disagree,” Faulkner said with a smile. I heard a light New England accent now that it’d been pointed out to me.

I chuckled. “Fair enough. What brought you all the way out here, then?”

“Joined up with the Corps when I quit high school,” Faulkner said. “Got sent out here. Not much else to it.”

“Why’d you quit high school?”

“My grades were slipping. I didn’t think I was gonna graduate, so I decided to skip to the end.”

I looked at him, and I pin of sorrow pricked me. An image of my GED, framed on the wall of my loft, flashed in my mind. “And why the Marines?”

“My brothers’ service of choice during the war,” he explained.

“Plural?”

“Two. Plus a younger one, still at home. Parents are forcing him to finish school at gunpoint.”

“Got three brothers myself,” I explained. “And two older sisters.”

“Big family.”

“Old money,” I said. “Not much else for your parents to do when neither of them have full-time jobs. My mom painted and my dad wrote, and neither of them were good at it. But that didn’t matter since it could charitably be called ‘supplemental income.’”

“Dad’s a welder,” Faulkner said. “Mom keeps the house. I, uh… Well I always told my older brothers that I’d join up with them when I turned eighteen. Back then, the war seemed like it was gonna go on forever.” He broke off eye contact. “I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”

“Because you needed to tell someone, would be my guess,” I offered. “If you wanna talk about something else-”

“No, no, you asked. I should answer.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “I was in the Corps myself. Joined up right after Pearl Harbor. Got sent to the Pacific and took a bullet to the gut, got sent home right away. I keep my Purple Heart on the wall of my apartment, next to my GED.”

“I see,” Faulkner considered. “How, uh, how did you wind up out here then? If I may ask.”

“When I woke up at the hospital some government stooge, hundred pounds overweight and long devoid of his hair, was standing over my bed. Then I remembered my dad has a brother. Uncle Peter works for the government, and he asked me if I was still interested in serving my country. I said yes, and he got me a job working for the OSS.”

“And then you got carried over to the CIA after they folded?” Faulkner asked.

I blinked once. “Yes,” I lied. “How much do you know about what we do here? Purely out of curiosity.”

“Just what they tell me,” Faulkner grumbled. “So fuck all, I guess.”

“Language, son. We’re in public.”

“Right. Sorry.”

“Can I get anything started for you boys?” a new voice asked. It was high and sweet and feminine- the waitress had arrived. Her lack of an accent was such that I suspected she’d taught herself to speak like that. She was clad in a light green uniform with a white apron and a white hat. She wore bright red lipstick and heavy eyeshadow, and her dark hair was pulled back into a high bun. Her name tag said ‘Peggy’, though I got the sense that wasn’t a nickname so much as an alias. It was a bit jarring, seeing her done up like that: I’d only ever seen her naked before.

Faulkner was staring. His eyes were so wide they threatened to invade the remainder of his face. I wondered how he managed to go so long without blinking, especially in a desert.

“Well?” she asked. She turned to me and asked, “Is he okay?”

“Sorry, don’t mind my friend here,” I said, “He’s struggling right now, you see.”

“Struggling with what?”

“The revelation.”

“And what revelation’s that?” she said, her plump lips edging closer to a smile.

“That there’s a woman in the world even prettier than his girlfriend. No mean feat, I assure you.”

She giggled, and it was like seeing a rose bloom out in the sand wastes. “Well fair enough then,” she said. “And what would you like, Romeo?”

“To know what time your shift ends,” I said.

“And why’s that?”

“So I might walk you home later, maybe take you out for a drink. With the lovely lady’s permission, of course.”

“Okay, smooth-talker. I get off at five. You still gotta pay for your lunch though.”

“But of course. I’ll have the chicken.”

“Gotcha. And you, young man?” she said to Faulkner.

“Uh…”

“He’s really flabbergasted right now, isn’t he?”

“Well and truly,” I said. “He’ll have the brisket.”

“Sounds good. Bring you some waters to start? Or maybe some beers?”

“Just water please- we have to go back to work after this.”

“Roger that.”

She inked the order into her pad and walked away. With some ambivalence at my conduct, I found myself watching her rear as she went towards the kitchen. It was… Well, it was quite nice.

I turned back, reluctantly, to face Faulkner. “I’ll admit, a beer sounds tempting just now. Might help blunt the shock a bit.”

“So you saw it too?” Faulkner said, sotto voce. “That was who I think it was?”

“Seems the most logical explanation.”

“Do you think she recognized us?”

“Hard to say. Could be she’s just a good actor. Or maybe she has amnesia- it’s not uncommon to bury some memories after a strange or stressful experience, combined with a bit of head trauma.”

Faulkner stopped a minute, then said, “Permission to speak freely?”

“Granted.”

“I think you might be reaching for a rational explanation when there might not be one.”

I suppressed a laugh. “I see. And what makes you say that? Besides the obvious, I mean.”

“I mean… This isn’t normal.”

“And what aspect of our job is? Did you really think you’d be sent to the middle of the desert after enlisting in a group called the marines? Working a job you barely understand, guarding people who won’t tell you anything?”

“Well… No.”

“Exactly, Faulker, exactly,” I said.

I put a hand on his shoulder, and he flinched and reached for his gun instantly. I tore back my hand, and Faulkner froze. He looked at me, then at where he was reaching, then back to me. Tears welled up in his eyes and streamed down his face.

“I… I… I apologize, sir,” Faulkner stammered.

“You okay, son?”

“N… No… No, sir. I’m a coward, sir, and a madman.”

“No, Faulkner. May I call you Kurt?”

“Y… Yes, sir.”

“Kurt, do you have any leave coming up?”

“Yes, sir, in a week and a half.”

I took a pen out of my jacket pocket, and jotted down an address on a napkin. I slid it over to him and said, “I want you to go to this address in Los Angeles. I’ll pay for your train ticket if you’d like. I have a friend there, a doctor, who might be able to help you a bit.”

“T… Thank you, sir, but I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I need to… Need to be brave.”

“There’s a difference between being brave and not admitting you’re bleeding, Kurt.”

“I… Okay. Thanks, sir.”

“You can call me Ben, if you’d like.”

“Ben. Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. I saw this happen to a few guys back when I joined up- came back from a fight, they couldn’t sleep, couldn’t look at anyone; once saw a private beat our CO half to death when he snuck up behind him. It… Wasn’t pretty, and what happened to the private after wasn’t pretty either. I want you to get some help. Alright?”

“Yes, sir. Ben. Sir Ben.”

I laughed. “That’s the spirit.”

***

We ate lunch after that, talked about nothing in particular. We went back, and I spent the rest of the day anchored to my desk going through files and reports. I searched everything, including the stuff I’d already been through, for any sighting or mention of my mystery woman. It took me three hours, but finally, I found two references.

… Well, more like one and a half.

The first was that a department store up in Albuquerque had a break-in one night. One of the women’s boutiques had been ransacked, but the culprit had only taken a few dresses, blouses, slacks, a pair of flats, a purse, and about a hundred dollars in cash. It didn’t even make the news, which was probably why I’d barely paid it any mind when it first landed on my desk.

The second was a transcript from a phone call made by one of the more well-off locals to another: Hedly Chamberlain, owner of the town’s only hair salon, making a call to her friend Rosa Elias, a local housewife. It was pinged as ‘possibly significant’ and jotted down for us: evidently, Chamberlain had encountered a difficult client recently, a youngish woman she’d never seen before whose hair was in approximately the most horrid condition she’d ever seen; a woman who’d apparently not had a haircut in over four years and who’d apparently never had so much as a curler in her long black locks. The woman walked in wearing slacks a size too big for her and asked Mrs. Chamberlain to simply do whatever she wished, she only wanted normal, stylish hair that would help her fit in. While Mrs. Chamberlain was proud of the work she’d done, the woman had been quiet the entire time and barely engaged in the sort of conversation Mrs. Chamberlain was accustomed to having with her clients (a particular shame for Chamberlain, whom I gather quite enjoyed talking- the total conversation was over 15 minutes). The client’s name? Peggy. No surname given, either. Peggy had sat in silence while her absurdly long (Mrs. Chamberlain’s words, not mind) black hair was clipped to collar length and permed, nodded in agreement when asked if she’d like her makeup done, and then asked if Mrs. Chamberlain knew of anyone in town who was hiring. Mrs. Chamberlain pointed Peggy towards the diner, and then strange young woman went on her way.

In fairness to myself, there’s another reason I didn’t catch these particular sightings when they initially occurred: they both took place three months before Peggy fell from the sky with the rest of her deluge.

I thought backwards, combed through memories in search of her face. It didn’t make an ounce of sense, but given my line of work and the context of the specific situation, I decided I would just need to accept that time travel was now on the table. I’d had an abundance of free time in the hospital, and brother Eugene, the closest to me in age, brought me whatever book he’d just finished- Lest Darkness Fall, By His Bootstraps, and Armageddon 2419 A.D. were all among the library he’d shared, and my mind’s eye conjured images from those amazing stories like a mental zootrope. They danced on the walls of my brain, and gave me an idea of the particular variety of nonsense I was in for.

It seemed the facts were these:

Peggy had fallen from the sky naked one month prior, only to then vanish.

Peggy had somehow manifested three months erstwhile, gone on a brief tour of New Mexico, and then returned to Flores.

Peggy went about changing her appearance in order to blend in, initially with limited success.

Peggy had then acquired a job as a waitress and, most likely, taken up residence in this town. I didn’t know to look for her when she first arrived, and in that time she’d become good at blending in. Obviously the nudity wasn’t a constant, but in appropriate apparel she looked like any other local. While she was quite pretty, there wasn’t anything mind-blowing or abnormal about her appearance. I suspected my attraction to her (I saw no point in denying it, I was intrigued if nothing else) was informed by having seen a bit more of her than most people had. She had a slightly darker than average skin tone, but this was New Mexico- even I’d picked up a farmer’s tan after six months and a dozen or so sunburns.

Logical conclusion: Peggy was a time traveler.

Remaining questions: was she from the past or the future, and if so at what point in either one? How did she get here? How did she keep changing her location in the flow of time? And of course, what was her end goal? Speaking from personal experience, Flores wasn’t the sort of place you came to without a specific reason.

I suppose I would find out: it was time to go pick her up for our dinner date.

***

She wore a tan floral-print dress, the hemline just above the ankle. She’d freshened her makeup and let her hair hang freely, and when she got close enough I realized she’d spritzed herself with a bit of perfume. I suddenly thought myself a blind idiot: I’d said there was nothing mind-blowing about her appearance, like a complete fool.

I recognized more or less immediately that I had ulterior motives for coming here- this was definitely not just for the mission. But what can I say? I’m interested in people, and she was all sorts of interesting.

She stood outside the diner, her purse in hand and her uniform packed into a tote slung over her shoulder. “I wasn’t sure if you’d show up or not.”

“And why’s that?”

“Oh, I dunno. Girl doesn’t wanna get her hopes up, does she?”

“Well perhaps I can raise your expectations a bit.”

“Here’s hoping.”

“May I offer you my arm?”

“You may indeed.”

We walked arm-in-arm against the backdrop of the setting sun. We made our way slowly to a restaurant a few blocks away, a higher-end type of place. We were seated relatively quickly- not a huge rush on a Wednesday night. A candle was lit between the two of us as we looked at each other from across the table. By the time we’d ordered food, she a salad and I a steak, the dusk had mellowed to the dark blue that proceeded full-dark.

“So tell me about yourself,” I said.

“What would you like to know?” she asked.

“Your last name, for one thing.”

She laughed. “Smith.”

Peggy Smith, I noted. That sounds like an alias- the only more blatant one she could’ve chosen would be something like ‘Mary Brown’ or ‘Sarah Jones.’

“Lovely,” I smiled.

“And you’re the illustrious Ben Duncan.”

“Illustrious? Not a word I’d use to describe myself.”

“Well you’re something of a local celebrity.”

“Am I now?”

“Well, maybe not celebrity.”

“Then what?”

She considered her words a moment. “More like the local urban legend. Like Bigfoot or Mothman.”

“Mothman?”

“Maybe that one’s not so big out here. You on the other hand,” Peggy said, “People talk about you.”

“And what do they say?”

“You’re the mysterious man in black. You work for the government, doing fuck-knows-what at that mysterious federal facility.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Surprised at the idea?” she asked.

“No, just at your language.”

“Well that’s something you’ll have to get used to if you wanna spend more time around me. I feel I should just warn you of that now.”

I raised both eyebrows, but smiled. “Fair enough.”

“I take it you’re not used to this.”

“To a lady cursing?”

“Or to being this up front, I’d imagine.”

“Not necessarily. Some family friends were of this disposition. Some of my mother’s social associates, as such,” I explained.

“Ah, of course. I know the kind you’re talking about- rich, high society types, I’m guessing?”

“You guess correctly. Am I to assume such a statement applies to you as well?”

“Not in the slightest,” Peggy said.

I replied, “I see. And what does?”

“Hmm, I dunno if I wanna tell you just yet,” she answered. “Right now we’re talking about you. You’re the boogieman around here.”

“I give children nightmares?”

“Oh, absolutely. You don’t think people wonder about what you strange government types get up to in that place?”

“I see, I see. Is there any sort of consensus, or is it merely wild mass guessing?”

“Well there’s one: the women, especially the local housewives, all love to talk about how mysterious and handsome you are.”

I laughed. “And what do you think?”

“Well the mysterious part most certainly applies, though the handsome part is a lot more questionable.”

I laughed once more. “Anything else?”

“Oh, the men don’t trust you, but most of them probably never met anyone who works for the government before you. I don’t think they’d trust you even if you took them all out for drinks.”

“I had no idea.”

“Well think about it: you’ve been there for months, and nobody knows what it is you’re doing. You’re the only one who lives here in town- you’re the one they know the most about, and yet they know nothing of substance. They can put a face to you, and maybe some of the others who stay at the hotel at the edge of town.”

“I doubt it. They’re consultants and contractors; they come and go.”

“But not you.”

“No. I stick around. That’s part of my job.”

“And what is that job, exactly?”

“I’m not really allowed to tell you that.”

“What are you allowed to tell me, then?”

“Not much. We’re doing-”

“The Lord’s work?”

“No, no,” I said. “I’d never claim that. Separation of Church and State.”

“I wonder what that’s like,” she said, almost absent-mindedly.

“What’s that mean?”

“I, uh, grew up somewhere where that idea wasn’t considered… Prudent.”

“Okay. And where’s that?”

“Wyoming, originally,” she said. “Tiny town you’ve almost certainly never heard of.”

“Try me.”

“Jacobson.”

“That’s the name of the town?”

“And just like that, you’ve proven me right.”

“Religious area, I take it.”

“At times. Very… Calvinistic.”

“Huh. Not something I hear much. My family’s Episcopalian, but they’re rather relaxed about it.”

“I reiterate: wonder what that’s like,” she said.

“You sound a bit bitter.”

“I try not to, but I suppose it rears its head on occasion.”

“So what brought you out here?” I probed.

She hesitated, but said, “Needed to find myself.”

“Rather vague, that.”

“Mostly I just wanted to get away from where I was. I didn’t really care where I wound up.” She was making eye contact, not blinking- she was trying very hard to say all this with conviction. Up until now I could buy most of this as the truth- she probably was from the middle of nowhere, probably was from Wyoming, probably was from a religious community. But she had absolutely intended to come to this town specifically, and she certainly wasn’t looking for herself, whatever that meant. Her goal, whatever that was, was primarily external. And that was, to me at least, very interesting indeed.

I asked, “And how are you liking it? Have you found yourself here yet?”

She said, “Not all of it, but definitely some bits and pieces. It’s an ongoing process.”

“Am I allowed to ask what they are?”

She bit her lower lip briefly. “Not just yet. I want to put it all together, get a look at the whole, before I show anyone. Trying to describe it while it’s incomplete seems disingenuous.”

Now that was an odd way to describe yourself. Decided to turn that one around on her, try to trip her up. “But if you don’t reveal any of yourself before you think you’re ‘done’, whatever that means, nobody’s ever gonna be able to get near you.”

“Yeah, but nobody should have to put up with me before I’m all the way there,” she said. “That’d be cruel.” She said it without hesitation, and with a palpable sincerity in each word. She was either an exceptionally skilled actress, or…

… Or she was telling the truth, and this was all just a staggering coincidence. I mean I doubted that, a lot, but I had to acknowledge it as a possibility.

Which gave me an idea.

“You shouldn’t think of yourself like that,” I said.

“Like what?”

“As incomplete. It’s not healthy. And you’re never gonna get all the way there if you don’t let anyone help you. Let anyone inside.”

She blushed. “I… I think I know me better than you do.”

“I dunno,” I said, pressing my luck. “I’d say I’d know you pretty well. Seen all sorts of sides to you.”

She didn’t blink as she looked at me. Her eyes darted back and forth, but she didn’t blink, and she didn’t turn her head at all. Finally, she leaned forward, her dark eyes illuminated by candle light. “Just because you’ve seen me in the nude doesn’t mean you know everything about me.”

I nearly choked on a sip of wine I took while she spoke. “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” she said. “We met before today. At the flood. I was underdressed.”

“You could say that,” I said, my hands shaking a bit. I refused to blink, in fear she might vanish if I took my eyes off of her for half a second. “And you’re just… Confessing to all this now? Out in public, no less?”

“It’s where I give my best performances.”

“In what kind of art? Acting?”

“Exhibitionism,” she said. And then I felt myself blush. That hadn’t happened since I was sixteen and Patty Llewellyn put her hand on mine while we were at the movies. What was going on- how was this woman I didn’t know affecting me this much?

She smirked. Evidently, the desert rose had thorns. “Oh come on, there’s no shame in admitting you liked what you saw. Did you?”

I took another swallow of wine, then placed the glass and the bottle beneath the table. “Yes,” I said. “Quite a bit, in fact.”

“Well I’m glad- I aim to please, after all.”

“I thought you said you were religious.”

“No, that’s my parents. I never really shared their faith in a lot of things.”

“Fair enough. So are you going to finally tell me what it is that brought you to this town? And don’t say the scenery- if you’re going to lie, at least put some effort into it.”

“You wanna go for a walk?” she asked me. “I’m about done with my food, and I could use some air.”

I nodded, then called over the waiter for the check. We stepped out into the warm, dry air. Fingers of starlight reached down towards us, kept at bay by mere streetlamps. I guided her towards my apartment; my footsteps heavy and solid on the pavement, while the click of her high heels was light and narrow. Trying to make as small and precise and impact as possible.

“So,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“Well, to be perfectly honest, I came here to kill someone,” she said.

Oh boy. “Do I know this person?”

“Yes.”

Ohhhhh boy. “Am I this person?”

“Maybe.”

“‘Maybe’? What does that mean?”

“It means I’m not sure who it is yet. I’ll know him when I see him.”

“That’s not a great plan. Also, if that’s the case, shouldn’t you know if it’s me or not?”

“Not necessarily- it’s all about the circumstances in which I see him. Right time, right place sort of thing.”

“I see. And I’m guessing you have the place but not the time, then?”

“That’s correct. The place is indeed this town.”

“And the time? Any leads?”

“It’s gonna be soon,” she said. “I know that.”

“And where did you come from originally? The future?”

“How do you figure?”

“The possibility comes up in my line of work,” I answered. “But I’m guessing you knew that.”

“I did.”

“And what else do you know?”

“Not much. For instance, I don’t know anything about you, other than that you’re apparently smart enough to get this far. From where I’m standing, that’s a bit concerning.”

“I take it I’m not famous in the future?” I asked, deadpan.

“At least not as far as I’m aware, but I had a pretty sheltered childhood,” she said.

“And you think you might have to kill me?”

“Maybe. I’m hoping I won’t, though.”

I paused. We were a block from my apartment, and we stood beneath a bright golden streetlamp. A bench, green-painted wood, stood between us. I kept hoping a car would drive by, something else to disrupt the bizarre, miniature world I found myself engulfed in. A world in which only she and I existed. It was irrational, I realized that, but…

She was mesmerizing.

A minute died in agony as she stood in front of me, her back towards me. Every inch of her demanded my full attention.

Finally, I said, “And why’s that?”

She turned around, looked at me like she was sizing me up. Then gradually, taking only the smallest of steps in her, she approached me. When she stopped, the gap had been reduced to only a few inches. “Because,” she said, looking up at me, “I find you interesting.”

I blinked first.

And then I kissed her, under the light of the lamppost. I was grateful, then, for the lack of cars.

It ended after only a few seconds. Only a small bit of tongue was involved. She pulled back first, then said, “That’s your apartment up ahead, isn’t it?”

“Yes, it is. I don’t know if we should be going up there together, though. It might be a bit… Unseemly.”

“Are you scared of someone talking about us?”

“Not especially. It’s not like I know anyone here.”

“Well then what are you scared of?”

I didn’t have much of a response to that. I took her by the hand and led her up to my apartment.

It was a long, exhausting, rewarding, tender, brutal, quick, slow, steady, spirited night. I recognized it as a mistake, an impulse born of lust and fixation, of infatuation cooked too hot too fast. I also didn’t particularly care, at least not until the next morning.

She wasn’t there. I didn’t see her again for three weeks, and she didn’t recognize me.

***

I went back to the restaurant a few times and they said that she’d quit her job. I looked around town, asked people where she was. They said they knew who I was talking about but that she’d simply vanished.

I didn’t know what to make of it, how to handle it. But it occurred to me early on that regardless of what I felt, I still had a job to do. I filed a report about my dinner with Peggy, and was entirely sincere in what had happened and what she and I had discussed. My superiors were… Less than enthused.

My uncle came to see me. Personally flew out to lecture me, in fact. “You gave away our secrets to someone who will almost certainly use them against us.”

“Yes.”

“You are only still on this mission because you’ve made contact.”

“I’m aware.”

“Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

“Yes.”

“And?” my uncle said.

“Will you be using me as bait?”

“In all likelihood, yes.”

“I see. Am I now to be considered expendable?”

My uncle paused.

“Am I to be considered expendable going forward on this mission?” I asked. It seemed a fair question.

“As your kin, you understand why I’m not comfortable answering that question?” Uncle Peter asked.

“And as your employee, you understand why I’m not comfortable going forward without a clear answer,” I said.

He chewed his gums. “Yes. Yes, you are now expendable.”

“I see. And afterwards, will I be continuing as part of the OSS?”

“No. You’re not. You’re to complete your mission and then you’re released from your contract.”

“And after that?”

“Well I’m sure your family would be happy to see you again. They haven’t heard from you with any regularity or intimacy in some time. Why is that?”

Maybe I just don’t find them terribly interesting. “Not sure. Lack of social graces on my part, would be my guess.”

He eyed me, lids half-closed. “Right. Dismissed. We have a big day tomorrow. Get some sleep. Try not to sin all night, for once.”

***

I crashed at the facility that night. I’d done so the past few nights; I had no desire to see the inside of my apartment- not until the smell of her was finally gone. Faulkner shook me awake at 0400, and we went to make our rendez-vous.

I piled into the back of the car, our payload in the back behind us. Our friends wanted to retrieve their fallen comrades, and had arranged the meeting. We’d gotten the message, and agreed to a specific point: the sight of the rift in the desert, where we’d first met them.

I didn’t especially want to go, but it didn’t matter. It was my job, and I was going to see it through to the end.

The early morning silver of the sunrise slowly crumbled to the gold and red. The sands of the desert began to warm. Ahead of us was the ditch, followed by the hole in the world. From above the hole flew the ship, a white and silver cylinder that rotated in the air and lowered to the ground. It placed itself on the sand and rock, and the front face of it slid open from the bottom-up.

Three of them came walking out. They were tall and lean, with massive bulbous heads and silver skin. Their limbs were proportional with their seven feet of height. Their eyes were massive black-and-white slants, and their nostrils were slits above their mouths. They had six fingers on each hand, and they wore black and purple jumpsuits. Their helmets were like the ones test pilots wore, but covered more of them. They took them off, slowly, and held them under their arms.

They called themselves ‘the Grays.’ Wasn’t sure if that was their real name or some sort of translation- an approximation for a language it had no context for that obliterated everything that made it itself.

But it was something.

“Hello,” my uncle said.

“Hello,” the one in the middle said. I wasn’t sure if it was male or female. In fact, I wasn’t sure what to call any of them at all- the autopsies had concluded they were hermaphrodites.

‘It’, I concluded, would suffice.

Its voice was low and soft, smooth edges for something of immense size and depth. It kept talking: “you have our friends?”

“Yes,” my uncle said. “Here. We’ve preserved their bodies as best we could.”

“Thank you,” the middle Gray said. At which point the middle Gray dropped dead. The sound of the gun going off didn’t fully register until after the body hit the ground; nor did the sight of the bullet reaching through the Gray’s head and falling onto the ground in front of it.

From out the front of the ship emerged Peggy, clad in jeans and a strange sort of bra, holding a pistol. A girl’s gun- tiny, the kind she probably bought because it was cheap and fit into her small hands. The kind that jammed pretty regularly.

She pulled the trigger again, leading to a misfire. The remaining two Gray turned and lunged at her, and everyone save for myself raised their guns and aimed.

Then I noticed Faulkner wasn’t raising his gun either. His hands were shaking again.

She vanished, then reappeared a dozen feet away, off to the side of the ship.

“Guns down!” I shouted.

“You don’t give orders, Ben!” my uncle bellowed.

“Yes, and according to you, I don’t take orders anymore either!” I spat.

I sprinted after Peggy. She was fast, and her clothes allowed for a much greater mobility than my suit. My fedora was torn off my head. I heard my uncle say something to the effect of ‘hold your fire’ as I continued my mad-dash.

My brief joy at the prospect that my uncle loved me enough to not let me die by friendly-fire was short-lived: the Grays, owing to their rather long legs, gained on me within a minute. They were just as interested in chasing her as I was.

And they were faster. Quick as she was, Peggy’s legs were tiny. Beneath their grasp, she looked smaller still. They pinned her to the ground, pried the gun from her hands and tossed it away.

I slowed to a halt, a few feet from them.

“Wait,” I said. “Please, just wait.”

One of the Grays turned its massive head around one hundred and eighty degrees and looked me in the eyes.

“Why?” It said.

“Because I know her,” I said. “I’ve met her. She’s up to something. You have to let me talk to her.”

The Gray said, “In what capacity do you know her?”

“None whatsoever,” Peggy said. “I’ve never seen this man in my life.”

“What?!” I said. “Peggy! What are you talking about? You know me.”

“Who the hell are you?” the woman sneered.

“Do you know this man or not?” the Gray facing her asked.

“I don’t,” she said. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

On her face was not anger or frustration, not sorrow or subterfuge, but confusion. Maybe irritation, in small traces, but mostly she was perplexed by me.

She vanished again, and I felt the pinprick of a dart enter my back.

I pivoted around, and saw my own people, my uncle, holding the source. Dizziness slowly overtook me until I met the ground face-first.

***

Upon waking up, I was told in no uncertain terms I was no longer welcomed at the base. Or in the employ of the United States government ever again, save for maybe the Postal Service (if I was lucky- my uncle insisted he had friends in quote ‘every crevice of the government.’) I was still spinning from the ketamine when I woke up, but the news tore me from heaven pretty quickly. I was handed all my belongings from the base in a single cardboard box and then sent on my way. My uncle had done me the ‘favor’ of telegramming my parents to explain all this, and how I would need some help getting home if they were so inclined to offer it to me (though he was more than willing to emphasize that they did not have to do this).

I walked to my loft. It was the fifteenth; theoretically I was able to stay in Flores until the end of the month, though my limited savings made access to things like food and water a bit of a problem. At the front door, I set my box on the ground, my scalp rich with sweat beneath my hair and hat. I took out my keys and opened the door, then made my way up the stairs while barely feeling my own legs. I needed a drink. I needed five or six cigarettes. I needed some of that ketamine they’d shot me with. The blinds were opened in the loft, letting in the midday sun cast itself across the floor. It was too hot, too bright, too dusty- pretty much everything fell under the banner of ‘too much.’

That included Peggy, standing in my kitchen.

Her hair was in victory rolls, and it had taken on natural highlights from the sun. She wore a teal dress and white shoes and light makeup, and she sipped at a cold beer through a straw.

I screamed.

Not proud of that, but I did. Screamed pretty loud, in fact. It’d been a long day, and I hadn’t expected to see her.

Finally, I ran out of breath.

Then she took a step forward and I screamed again.

Like I said, long day.

She opened my fridge and took out a beer, uncapped it, then walked over and handed it to me. The bottle was cold, and condensation manifested on it immediately.

“How do I know you didn’t poison this?” I asked.

“Why would I do that?”

“I don’t know. I clearly don’t know you- just like you said you didn’t know me.”

“I did say that when I first met you, didn’t I?” she said, breaking off eye contact. Her brown eyes were so big and lovely, and I wanted to get lost in them (but not as much as I was kicking myself for thinking that).

“How do you mean?” I said, tilting my head.

“You’ve been seeing me out of order,” she said. “This morning- that was the first time I ever saw you.”

“I see.” I didn’t. “And what about when I first laid eyes on you?”

“That was the second time for me. I came back with a specific goal in mind, and when I didn’t accomplish it I tried coming back to an earlier point in time,” she said.

“And that was a few months ago.”

“Yes. And I recognized you, and I remembered you said you knew me, and so I got freaked out and ran.”

It was starting to compute, however gradually. “And so then you went back to even earlier, and then you came here to town and assumed your current identity, got your job, the whole bit.”

“That’s right,” she said. “But I kept running into you- at that point I figured it might be significant.”

“And is it?” I asked. “Am I?”

“Yes,” she said, biting her lower lip. “Yes, you are.”

“So who am I talking to right now then?” I asked. “Where are you in all this? How long have we known each other. How long have you been at this?”

“Isn’t it considered rude to ask a lady her age?” she said smiling.

“Peggy, I just lost my job! I just ensured my status as the family fuck-up in perpetuity!” I said. “And it’s at least somewhat your fault, I might add. My own utter stupidity is certainly playing a role in my proverbial fall from grace, but still: you haven’t exactly been helping.”

She looked at me with her big sad eyes, took the straw out of her beer, and then downed the remainder of the glass’ contents. “I was twenty-eight this morning, and now I’m thirty-three.”

“I see,” I said. I mostly did, this time. “And where’ve you been the past five years then?”

“Here and there. Now and then. And later.”

“Seriously, Peggy, I need you to stop being vague with me here. I’m not sure why you’re even here right now, but there better be a good explanation.”

“I went home to my own time.”

“And when is that?”

“2099.”

I sat down on my couch. I’m not sure, in that exact moment, I was ready to accept any words out her mouth. In deadened monotone, I said, “Wow. What are things like then? Have we finally found world peace? Have we learned how to eat our own feces?”

“Are you gonna listen to me or not?” she snapped back at me. “Because I’m trying here. Explaining this stuff to myself is hard enough. Someone else is an even higher precipice to reach.”

I inhaled, exhaled. Felt like a mule. Ran a hand through my damp hair and took a sip of beer, and looked at her through eyes that would believe what was in front of them. “Alright. Go ahead. Tell me: what’s the future like?”

“Not so different from now. We’re still our own worst enemies. And the Grays have come back. They’ve made official first contact with humans.”

“And so what are you doing here then?”

“Trying to stop them from ever coming back. Trying to derail the unofficial first contact so thoroughly that they never try to make an official one.”

“But why?” I demanded. “What could you possibly stand to gain by doing this?”

“Peace,” she said. “The Grays, they’re not interested in making friends. They’re interested in acquiring cannon fodder.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“In my time, the Grays are at war with another alien race. The Kayzhourians. They’ve been at it for decades, and they’re in a stalemate. Neither side is willing to back down. After we, the human race, achieve faster than light travel, the Grays decide they want to bring us into the fold, to form an alliance with us- so they can throw us like grenades at the Kayzhourians. They need more soldiers, and human beings are some of the best soldiers in the known universe.”

“Why the heck do they think so little of us, though?”

“I don’t know. Nobody knows. But they don’t see us as people, they see us as things. Greasy, hairy, violent things good for war and little else. I’ve been further ahead as well, after the war ends: the Grays win, and everybody else loses. The Kayzhourian Empire is dismantled and their population halved- literally halved. Approximately fifty percent of their total population was wiped out. Some madman went and exploded their home planet- nobody knows why. That whole solar system is barely habitable anymore because of all the debris. And the humans didn’t fare that much better- we’re broken, scattered, at each other’s throats, and collectively traumatized.”

“Traumatized?”

“Shell-shocked, is what I believe you call it. Or maybe battle fatigued, by this point in history. Like your friend Faulkner.”

“That sounds like hell.”

“It is. So you can understand why I want to prevent it.”

“And why should I believe you?”

“Why wouldn’t you?”

“Because I barely know you. Because you’ve not given me any answers before now, and I still have a million more questions. Because you don’t have any proof. Because I don’t even know your real name.”

She paused a moment, then she went up to me and got in close. I flinched, stepped back, and then she grabbed my hand.

The world vanished, and when it reappeared we were swimming amongst the stars.

A thin layer of glass separated us from the void, and in the distance the echoes of stars called out to us. Earth was behind us, Mars in front of us. Beyond Mars was the asteroid belt, then Jupiter and its moons, and beyond that Saturn. Below us was a vessel, roughly the size of a medium landing ship. It was sterling silver, and it swam in the black. I took it in, all of it. The sun, the stars, the moon, the worlds. Another ship was approaching us, slowly, and in the distance I saw…

I saw a city floating in the black, surrounded by glass, much like we were.

I breathed in slowly, afraid I wouldn’t find any air. When I did, I noticed I was gripping her hand tightly. She looked up at me with a contented smile. She grabbed my tie, pulled me in, and kissed me open-mouthed.

When it was over, she took my hands again. “My real name is Margaret,” she said. “But you can still call me Peggy. Everyone does. Like I said on our first date, my parents were old-fashioned.”

Then the heavens vanished from sight, and we were back in my loft.

In need of a seat, I fell onto my bed. I didn’t stop at sitting- I collapsed onto my side and stared at the wall, interrupted only by my own need to blink.

“So that was the future?” I said after a moment.

“It was,” Peggy said. “What did you think?”

I blinked a few more times, took in the harsh, hot desert air. “It was…” Just for a minute, new worlds were within my grasp. All of it- I saw the cosmos.

I looked at Peggy. “It was the second most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

She turned red like a fire. She came over and sat with me on the bed, holding my head in her lap for a while. She ran her long, delicate fingers through my dusty brown hair. Beneath her skirt, her legs were smooth and bountiful, her thighs thick and inviting. She gradually took off her stockings, revealing her bare brown legs, a trail up to heaven. She kept caressing me as she undressed, revealed more and more of herself. Finally, I saw her in her entirety. It was a closer, better view then what I’d been offered last time. Before, the world had been watching, via a few unqualified representatives. Now there was just… Us.

Just us and the stars.

I entered her, and what she gave to me then, and what I gave to her, was everything we had. Finally, after the sun had begun to set, I reluctantly lost consciousness. I drifted off and danced amongst the stars as I saw them in my own mind, in a land just as alien to me as the heavens. And when I woke up, I had tears in my eyes, because she was still there.

She let me hold her awhile. I gripped her in my arms, navigated her into the curve of my body, and we laid there as the sands of the desert turned dark and cold. I put on the radio next to my bed and we listen to local broadcasts- news, the weather, and finally some music. Jazz and swing mostly, the kind of stuff my parents and uncle thought was trash and that I’m sure any hypothetical children I might have would call boring- after all, that’s what I thought of my parents’ music. We’d forgotten to close the window, or even pull the blinds shut. Outside, we saw the night over the town. The building across the street, a general store, was dark and empty, while the bank next to it had a single light on as a custodian swept away the day’s remains. Every so often a car drove by and provided a gust of wind to wash over us. The scant streetlamps and the many myriad stars worked in tandem to offer light in the darkness.

“So what comes next?” Peggy asked after a while.

“I dunno,” I said. “I was kinda hoping you’d be able to answer that.”

“This… I don’t if this is a balanced sort of relationship,” Peggy said.

“Is that what this is?”

“Well that’s just it- I’ve known you a lot longer than you me.”

“That’s true.”

“And I know more than you in general.”

“That so?”

“Tell me something, do you know the difference between hardware and software?”

“Uh…”

“Or the significance of Vladimir Putin and his death?”

“Well…”

“Or why genetic engineering is illegal?”

“Okay, you’ve made your point,” I said. “But that’s just it- I don’t know that much, least of all what I want. I don’t think I’ve ever known what I want, not really. I’ve always either… Gone where I’ve been told, where my parents and my uncle said I needed to be, or I just sought out what looked interesting. Who looked interesting. As I work towards understanding myself and my many mistakes, I see more and more that my problem isn’t ignorance or lack of will. My problem is that I believe in people. I find them interesting.”

She smiled at me. No teeth, but her lips huge and gentle, her eyes shining. “That’s not a problem, Ben. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that it is. And it’s probably not right for me to be here, doing this, but… I didn’t know where else to go. Everything that’s happened to me, the long and winding paths I keep stumbling over… I see you in all of them, and I realize I want to keep seeing you there. I realized after a certain point that the truth of us was simple, so much so I didn’t wanna admit it to myself at first because it seemed… Well it seemed trite. Unrealistic. Impossible.”

“And what’s that?”

“That I was interested in you as well. That I found you interesting, and that I still do.”

“What on earth makes me so special?” I said in jest.

“Still figuring that out. But then I guess so are you with me, and so is everyone else with everyone else.”

I smiled back, kissed the nape of her neck, her shoulder, her cheek, her mouth. She rolled over, and I put a hand to her breast and gave it a squeeze. She reached below my legs with her dexterous fingers and we played around for a while. Finally, after we were both sweating and panting again, we collapsed onto our backs. A shift in the drumline made me realize I’d forgotten to switch the radio off. She must’ve noticed too- she was giggling. God, she had about the loveliest laugh I’d ever heard. I laughed along with her, because it felt practically like sacrilege not to.

My stomach growled, and I wanted to shush it. “Welp, that’s that I guess.”

“In fairness,” she said, “It was quite the workout.”

“Workout?”

“Uh… An idiom that’ll catch on in a few decades,” she said. “It sticks around for a while.”

“Fair enough. You hungry?”

“Famished.”

“I’ll see what I can scrounge in my kitchen.”

“You cook?”

“To varying levels of success. It’s improved over the years, though.”

“That doesn’t inspire confidence.”

“Well I wasn’t about to ask you to cook. I don’t know if women still reside in the kitchen in the future. I thought it might be rude to ask.”

She laughed again, and this time it transmuted into a snort. “You’re awfully open-minded for someone in this time period.”

“Not really, I just remember how annoyed my sisters were when the war ended and they were expected to abandon their factory jobs and find husbands. And then my brother Ken made a joke along the lines of ‘so you’re trading the munitions factory for the baby factory, what’s the big deal? Not so different.’”

“And then?”

“And then my sister Sharon left his ability to procreate in question.”

“I see,” she chuckled. “Well why don’t you pull together something in the kitchen while I shower. And then we can get back to talking about ‘what comes next’ over dinner.”

“Ma’am yes ma’am.”

She walked over to the bathroom, and I took in a healthy gaze at her bare rear before it vanished from sight. Then I hobbled over to the kitchen area and dug through the fridge until I found some vegetables and bacon. A glance through the cabinet revealed an unused package of risotto as well.

I started cooking. I listened to the melody on the radio, the soft-spoken night in the town, and the patter of the water from the shower. I cooked, the scent tantalizing, and after half an hour I was finished.

I walked over to the bathroom and rapped on the door. “You about done in there? The food is ready.”

After a minute without response, I opened the door. The shower was still on, the curtain drawn, the water running cold from overuse. I pulled open the curtain to find she wasn’t there.

I screamed again, turned around and started tearing through the loft looking for her. I saw a note on the ground of the main room. I scrambled over to it and scooped it up.

I didn’t have a choice in leaving this time. Please, I’m begging you, I need you to go to the OSS base. You’ll find an explanation there.

Love,

Peggy.

I crumpled it up and threw it in the trash.

After that I fell onto the floor and started crying, and I didn’t get up for a while.

After that I took a handle of vodka into the bath and drank it while the ever-cooling water drenched me head to toe.

***

I woke up in the bath, fully clothed in a full tub. The water was room-temperature in a desert-bound apartment without air conditioning, and my sweat was adding to the pool. As was my blood- there was a gash in my palm, and I looked over and noticed the bottle of liquor on the floor next to the bath in a dozen or so shards.

I smelled smoke.

I was reasonably sure I hadn’t left the stove on, but I forced myself against the combined weight of my hangover and the earth’s gravity to rise from the tub. I was still wearing shoes, so I stepped over the glass.

I hadn’t left the stove on: the kitchen was fine. My apartment was fine. It was everything else that was on fire.

The inferno had engulfed the buildings across the street from my apartment, and the streets were empty as the fire crawled forward. I ran down the stairs, trying to map out an exit route in my head.

In front of the building was Faulkner. He was displayed on the ground, his stomach torn open.

“KURT!” I cried. I bent down and checked his pulse- faint, but active. Struggling. “HELP! Somebody help! We’ve got a man down!”

The sky was red and black with smoke, and the world spun far faster than it was ever meant to. In the distance, somebody answered my cry for help: a short, feminine figure lumbered towards me.

It was Peggy. She didn’t seem surprised to see me, even as she closed the gap. Mostly, she seemed horrified at my presence, and agonized from her own state.

“Peggy, what the heck is going on?” I asked, my voice fragile like glass.

“No time,” she breathed. She bent over and put something in my palm. “I’m sorry for this. Sorry I dragged you into it. I love you.”

A gun went off, and the bullet came out her forehead and flew over my shoulder. It landed on the ground next to me, making a dibit in the pavement. She fell on top of Faulkner’s withering form, and the ringing in my ears was the volume of an orchestra.

I had no desire to look up from the sight before my eyes. I didn’t want to see anything else. I barely saw that, but I forced myself to hold onto it, even as footsteps came closer, even as a gun was cocked.

“Look at me, Ben,” my uncle’s voice said.

Finally, I did. My uncle wore a suit, held a gun, and was splattered with blood. I could only assume none of it was his- he didn’t appear to have a scratch on him. He wasn’t wearing his glasses- it was the first time I’d ever seen him without them.

“You sure you should be using a gun, Uncle Peter?” I asked. There was no emotion in my voice. Only raw honesty. “How well can you see without your bifocals?”

“Well enough,” he said. “I know what I’m looking at right now, Ben. Be assured of that, if nothing else.”

At my uncle’s side was one of the Grays. This one, though, was different. Not as tall, but more muscular, with a smaller, more ovular skull. Its lips were thicker, and its nose more prominent. It was a darker shade of gray, with a bit of green mixed it. It looked a bit closer to human, though still far from it. Was this some kind of ethnic minority, from a different part of whatever world the Grays called home? Or maybe this was the majority. Maybe the ones I’d met before were from some oppressed population- indentured servants. Slaves, even. Sent by the ruling class as the recon team, dispensable if the mission went sideways. Perhaps this one was more akin, in its own society, to what I was: not important, but afforded social capital it hadn’t earned. Sent on a faraway mission because it was a failure in a crowded market of undeserving brats and something had to be done with all of them.

Or maybe I was projecting.

Looking at the thing, I suspected I wanted to think we were alike. Or part of me did, at least- part of me also wanted to assume the Gray and I were utterly, totally different from each other. We call them ‘aliens’ for a reason, after all. They were meant to be strange, unfamiliar, unfathomable.

Probably it was a bit of both. I’d been having a rough morning.

“So what comes next?” I asked.

“What do you think?” Peter asked.

“The expected, I imagine. You’ve always been so predictable, Uncle Peter. I think that’s why we never got along.”

“How’s that?”

“I’m interested in people,” I said. “But you, you’re boring.”

The gadget Peggy handed to me, I should probably mention, had a button attached to it. Given the nature of her stay in this town, it didn’t take a genius to figure out what she’d slipped me.

I hit the switch, and there was a swirl of light.

***

What happened then can only be described as total sensory deprivation. For a moment there, life, the world, the universe, stopped. Everything save for me. It was like I was blindfolded and bound and thrown into an ocean of stagnant, distilled water.

Honestly, that seems a poor description. But it’s the closest I can manage. I suppose I was rather out of my element by that point (assuming, charitably, I hadn’t already been for the duration of my time in New Mexico).

***

I was where I’d been, but earlier. No smoke, no fire, no blood. No bodies. Just me, on my knees. On a street corner.

People gave me weird looks as I passed by.

One of those people was Kurt Faulkner.

“Ben?” he asked. He must’ve been off-duty- he wore a shirt and khakis, and he was simply walking through the town. The sun had gone down, and the night air was cool.

“Kurt, what day is it?”

He balked. “The fifteenth.”

Yesterday. “What time?”

“Er… eleven at night.”

So upstairs right now, I was drowning my sorrows in the bath. “I see. What are you doing here?”

“I was on a walk. I couldn’t sleep. What are you doing here?”

“I live here.”

“For how much longer, though?”

“That’s going to depend on how I spend the rest of my night.”

“How do you mean?”

I got onto my feet and backed up into the stairwell leading to my loft. Kurt followed me in, and after closing the door, I said, “I’m still fired from the OSS, aren’t I?”

“OSS? I thought you were CIA.”

“That’s my cover. Or it was- after the Roswell incident, Truman repurposed the OSS for more… Esoteric assignments, while the CIA takes the more conventional ones.”

“Why wasn’t I told this?”

“Because you’re a Private,” I said bluntly.

“That’s… That makes sense. Should we be discussing this out in the open?”

“Almost certainly not. But we can’t go upstairs right now. Walk with me,” I said, opting to stretch my legs.

We left the stairwell and journeyed into the night.

“Who does know about this, then?” Faulkner asked.

“Which part?”

“I don’t even know what I don’t know, do I?”

A bitter grin sprouted like a dandelion on my face. “Not remotely. In fairness, same can be said for me.”

“Okay, did you know about the al-”

“Don’t say it, we’re in public.”

“There’s nobody here,” Faulkner said, gesturing to the empty stretch of street laid out before us. The desert village’s populace had dug deep into dreamland and did not desire excavation.

“Doesn’t matter. Rules are rules.”

“Didn’t you just get fired?”

“Yes. What of it?”

“Nevermind,” Faulkner said slowly. “So how many people know about the a-word then?”

“Don’t say ‘a-word’ either, they’ll think you’re talking about atomic bombs,” I said. “And to answer your question, most of the people at that base, save for the custodians.”

“Okay, so what don’t I know?”

“Well the big one is ‘why?’” I said.

“I’m guessing it’s got something to do with Roswell?” Faulkner asked.

“Indeed, sir. Same group of visitors. They crashed, we patched them up and sent them home. They told their friends, and suddenly they’re interested in us.”

“Okay, so are they hostile?”

“According to Peggy, extremely.”

“Who’s Peggy?”

“The waitress. The one who fell naked from the sky.”

“Wait, what?!”

I explained it to him. When I got him up to speed, including the part about my own recent time travel escapade, he stopped walking and sat down against the red brick wall of an ally.

I stood in front of him, trying to look down at him rather than on him. “Are you okay?”

He didn’t respond. He didn’t blink. He didn’t seem to look at anything at all. One of my brothers, Ethan, had that look on his face most of the time I saw him these days. He’d gotten back from the war, from the European Theatre, from Normandie, with that look on his face. I sat down on the ground next to Faulkner, looked directly at him. I resisted the urge to put a hand on his shoulder- experience with Ethan taught me he wouldn’t respond well to that. Our father had been quick to write off Ethan as a coward, and I’m sure he’d have similar thoughts about Kurt Faulkner. Our father had spent the First World War at a comfortable distance from any battlefield, having bribed his way into a cushy intelligence officer’s position at the tender age of twenty-three and spent the war ordering better men to go march off to their deaths. Fuck my father; fuck my uncle; and fuck the Grays. Ethan Duncan is one of the bravest people on God’s Green Earth, and the mere fact that Kurt Faulkner took this long to fall to his feet indicates he’s of a similar caliber.

“We’re so small,” Kurt said. “We’re all so small compared to… Everything else.”

“It puts a lot of things into perspective, I’ll readily admit.”

“So what do we do?”

“We?”

“I want to help you.”

“Why?” I asked. “You barely know me. And I’m a traitor. I’m lucky I wasn’t executed via firing squad this morning.”

“If what you say is true, then… Then orders don’t matter right now. I can get you into the base, so you can do whatever you need to do.”

“You sure you’re up for that, Marine?” I said carefully. The boy had suffered enough; assuming what I was about to do worked, I didn’t want his career getting stuffed through a woodchipper because he helped me. I certainly didn’t want him in the electric chair right next to me while my uncle threw the switch.

He slowly turned to look at me. “I lied to you about something. I didn’t join up with the Corps after the war ended. I joined up during the final year of the war. I got sent to the Pacific, hoping to find my brothers. We were all holed up on this island in the South Pacific for a while, us and the Japanese. We didn’t know each other’s locations, but the place was strategically valuable, so nobody wanted to leave. We kept getting hit with Kamikaze attacks- wave after wave. It was hell; best way I can put it- that island was hell itself. We were on a nightly patrol, and we stumbled upon the Japanese camp. There they were, dozens of them, asleep in the woods. My CO gave the order to execute all of them in their sleep. I tried to speak up, tried to point out that their were rules against that, laws. That it was inhumane. My CO told me that if I didn’t help kill them, he’d personally ram a Jap officer’s katana through my chest and make the official story that I was killed running away from a fight. After that… I did what I was told. We slaughtered all of them while they slept, and when it was over I tried to put a bullet through my own brain. My clip was empty, though, and then my comrades tackled me and handcuffed me and sent me packing. The only reason I wasn’t given a Section Eight Discharge was that they were afraid I would talk if they cut me loose, and the only reason I wasn’t promoted to some office position in Washington was they were afraid that then I’d keep asking for more. So they sent me to every useless, understaffed outpost they had. Eventually the war ended, so they sent me here.”

I looked at him a while. He’d broken off eye contact again about halfway through all that. His hands spasmed, and sweat leaked from his brow.

“You’ve never told anyone that, have you?” I asked.

“No sir.”

“My name is Ben.”

“No, Ben,” he said, more calmly this time.

“I’m sorry for what happened to you. For what you went through. You’ve been through enough.”

“No, I haven’t. I wanna make up for what I did.”

“You were forced to do it.”

“No, I was just too cowardly to refuse.” He turned and looked at me again. He smiled. “Let me help you.”

Slowly, he raised a hand and put it on my shoulder.

Finally, I nodded.

His smile widened. “So where do we start?”

***

I was crammed into a sack and thrown into the back of a Hummer. Getting snuck in via body bag seemed like a bad omen, but it was all Faulkner had access to. It was around two in the morning, and the bag had a few small holes pricked into it so I could breathe. I heard one gate open, then another, then another. Finally, I was placed onto something and unzipped. I looked up at a white light dangling from the ceiling, the sterile surroundings of the morgue readily apparent.

On both sides were Gray cadavers on slabs.

I jumped, and Kurt put a hand over my mouth to muffle any noise I made. Probably for the best. I calmed down, then maneuvered out of the body bag and got to my feet.

“Okay,” Kurt said. “So what comes next?”

“Not entirely sure,” I confessed. “The note just said to come here.”

“That’s…”

“Infuriatingly vague? Yes, welcome to intelligence-gathering.”

“Fair enough. Guess we’re just gonna have to look for clues.”

“Seems about right.”

Kurt had a spare uniform for me. We were about the same size, fortunately. My hair wasn’t quite regulation and I didn’t have time for the barbershop, so a hat was going to have to do. The only real problem was the name tag. Since anything was better than hoping nobody noticed there were two Private Faulkner’s, Kurt took a lit match and ignited a phone book, then smeared ashes on the name. After that, I was simply General Issue.

The base was mostly uninhabited during the night shift. My uncle would be there, by simple virtue of the fact that he never left. We’d also have a few technicians, custodians, and guards. No more than twenty people, twenty-one including Faulkner, twenty-two including myself, twenty-three including the seemingly guaranteed appearance by one Peggy Smith.

I had no idea whether I wanted to see her, but I strongly suspected the universe didn’t much care what I wanted.

The base was somehow even more depressing at night then I’d imagined. High roof, too much artificial light, stale desert air that was cooler than anyone wanted to admit. A few scientists were gathered around a table in the center of the place, tinkering with something the Grays had given them. They assured us it wasn’t a weapon, but who the heck knew?

It took, I kid you not, less than a minute for us to bump into Peggy.

Yes, I mean that literally.

I was taking in my surroundings, while Kurt was keeping an eye out for my uncle (or anyone else who could clock me). She must’ve been doing something similar, as she crashed into my chest when we were both looking in opposite directions.

She looked at me, clearly frazzled. Her gaze climbed the considerable gulf between us. I have no idea what my face looked like, and I didn’t care to find out. “Oh thank God. I’ve been looking for you,” she said.

“Were you now?” I said. “I saw you earlier this very evening. Naked beneath my sheets in fact.”

“Yeah, but for me, that was a while ago. Months, in fact.”

“Okay, first of all-”

“Maybe we should discuss this in private?” Kurt suggested in a harsh whisper.

We nodded, and the three of us retreated back into the morgue. Better discussing this with dead aliens than live ones, I suppose. I had a strong suspicion our twenty-fourth man would be a certain Gray I saw during the Morning That Wasn’t.

She’d changed her appearance again. Her hair was lighter, more of a chestnut color, and worn in a crown-braid updo. Her eyes were green, somehow- I’ve heard talk of some people developing colored contact lenses, stands to reason they’d be available in the future. She wore thick-framed glasses over them, and her eyebrows were much thinner and more arched- it was subtle, but it reframed her face. Her makeup and jewelry, white blouse and blue skirt and red heels, told me how she’d gotten in- she’d disguised herself as a secretary. Not bad- my uncle had a reputation for firing his assistants after less than a week. The longest any individual secretary had ever lasted was a month and a half. Most of the other men here didn’t have much better reputations in that regard.

Peggy took a long, thorough look at me. She removed her glasses, and raised her hand but ultimately resisted her evident urge to touch me. “Okay,” she said, “I’m guessing we just fucked.”

I strongly suspected I was turning red. Then Faulkners said, “Wow, you are wicked red.”

I shot him a side-eye and he stopped talking. Then I said, “Not how I’d put it, but yes.”

“Okay, so you got the note?”

“Yes.”

“And then you came here?”

“No, actually I ignored you. I chugged a bottle of vodka in the tub and sinned against my body until I passed out.”

Then Faulkner side-eyed me, but I ignored him.

“And then what happened?” Peggy asked.

I brought her up to speed, and both she and Faulkner had paled by the time I finished.

“I see,” Peggy said, her voice thin.

“That wasn’t supposed to happen, was it?” I asked.

“No. In part because I have no memory of that happening.”

“So maybe it just hasn’t happened for you yet.”

“It’s possible, but I sincerely hope that’s not the case. And given what you just described, the fact there’s an explicit difference in how today is unfolding due to your actions… I don’t think that’s ever going to happen now. Or at least, not like that.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying you went back in time and changed the future. You’ve already changed at least one variable that caused that happenstance to play out- your presence here. And probably Faulkner’s as well. Congratulations, Ben. You’ve altered the course of history.”

There were a lot of things I could’ve said in response to that. I said, “Huh.”

“Understated as always,” Peggy said. “God, it’s so hot when you do that.”

“Er… Peggy, maybe now’s neither the time nor the place?”

“Sorry, sorry, I just…,” she stammered. “Well I got back here, to 1948, then grabbed my naked self out of the shower quite literally right after you two had had your fuckathon- sorry, sorry, love-making session. I may’ve picked up a little residual friskiness from her.”

“Okay, but why did you do that?” I said, attempting to put a lid on the frustration and resentment bubbling over in my mind.

“Because there was something I needed her to do right away, or otherwise there’d be a shift in the timeline.”

“The future would change?”

“Mine would. I’m experiencing things out of order with everyone else, so sometimes my future is in the past and vice versa.”

“That sounds absurdly confusing.”

“Oh believe me, it is. And it means that I have to make sure certain things happen and don’t happen to prevent the whole thing from collapsing on itself. Because that would mean my timeline is changing without my knowledge, and I might just have all my goals and priorities changed without even knowing it. Or I might accidently ensure my own death- thanks for the heads up about the bad future, by the way.”

“Not a problem,” I said, attempting to contort my mind around the ideas being bandied about.

“So what comes next?” Faulkner asked.

“Yes, what indeed?” I asked. “What did you want me here for? And what did you need your past self to do so badly?”

Peggy looked at me a minute. She placed her glasses back over her eyes. “You’re mad at me.”

“Yes. But that’s beside the point.”

“I don’t know if that’s true.”

“We have higher priorities at the moment. Bigger fish to fry; that aphorism still around in the future?”

“Actually yes, though frying food has fallen out of fashion in a lot of places so everyone’s a little confused on its construction. Also, if you’re mad at me, you’re more likely to make a mistake, and this is a sensitive operation,” she said. And I thought marine corps officers were blunt.

Heaving a thin, sharp sigh, I said, “Okay, fine. I’m a bit cross. I’m assuming I don’t need to spell out why?”

“I’m gonna stand guard,” Faulkner mumbled while going off to do exactly that. Smart lad.

Once we were alone, Peggy said, “No, no I get it, I… I forgot, again. How this would affect you. Look, past-me: she’s on the way to becoming present-me right now. She’s going to get some distance from you for a few months and get more used to the idea that she has to separate us again later on.”

“But why?”

“Because it happened that way for me, so it has to happen for her. I have to preserve the timeline.”

“You’re trying to change the timeline,” I pointed out.

“Yes, but mine personally… I can’t allow for the risk. I had to make sure I’d be… I had to make sure I stayed on mission. There’s another future, one where I stayed with you tonight, and we ran off and went to your parents house, and I stayed with you and we were talking about getting married. Your mom even let me try on her old wedding dress. And it was… It was beautiful, and so was I, and so were you, and so was everything… It was perfect. It was the happiest I’d ever been in my life.”

“So what? You got cold feet? Or did our primitive technology scared you off? I imagine my mother bragging about how she’s one of the few people in the country who owns a television set would sound rather quaint to you.”

She considered it a moment, and then said, “A bit of both. The latter… Well it occurred to me. That and the fact that we’re not in a great time period as far as women’s rights are considered. And your dad kept trying to figure out what race I was, so that wasn’t great either. But there was biting feeling inside me, that I’d acted irresponsibly. That I was being selfish. I was waking up in a cold sweat every night and losing weight and lashing out at people for no reason. I came to this time to make sure a very bad thing didn’t happen and then I wound up running from it. The tipping point was when I heard something on the radio about how this whole town had gone up in flames and there were bodies- carefully mutilated bodies- everywhere, and that your uncle was one of them. That was I decided I needed to come back and change things. I had to. I even talked to you about it.”

“And what did I say?”

“You said yes. You said it was the right thing to do. You even suggested I do it alone, come back here and erase him- erase that version of you- entirely, because he figured balancing two people’s personal timelines would have been too much even for me. And he was right. God, why did you have to be right?”

A few tears started to fall, and I took a kerchief out of my pocket and offered it to her. She dried her eyes, and I put a finger beneath her chin.

At that moment, my chest was very, very warm. A heart on fire- guess that’s what it feels like. It’s not a good description, really, but it’s something. Hard to put into words. But then, so are a lot of feelings. Maybe that’s what makes them important: that we struggle so much to define them, and to define ourselves through them.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I’m still here. And that other me, the fact that he agreed to your plan, even suggested some improvements- to me that says he knew you very well. It says he knew you as well as I’d like to know you.”

She jumped into my arms and gave me a kiss. I kissed her back and set her down, looked into her eyes.

“I…,” I started.

“What?”

“I never thought that… It’s stupid.”

“No, it’s not. You can say it if you want to.”

“I never thought I would matter this much to anyone.”

“What are you saying? Your parents-”

“You have met them, haven’t you?”

“… Okay, point taken.”

“And my siblings aren’t much closer to me. And Uncle Peter is… A problem, to be blunt about it.”

“And there was never anyone before me?”

“There were a few girls, here and there. Nothing serious. One of them, my parents tried to fix us up, but her family decided we weren’t rich enough. Another was one whose parents approached me but my folks decided she wasn’t rich enough. Another one was a nurse I met in the Pacific. We got involved, but then the morning after, she told me she was engaged and that it couldn’t happen again. And then she got blown up by enemy artillery.”

“Oh. Wow.”

“Indeed. You, though… You’re something else.”

“Thank you. So much.”

“So we do this, and we figure out what happens next. How does that sound?”

“Sounds perfect. And I know the next step. That Gray you saw in the other timeline, that’s a member of their command staff. They’ve augmented themselves for certain purposes. If it’s here, and we can get it to leave, then we’re in a good place.”

“Alright. Let’s start looking then.”

We went back outside, communicated our plan to Kurt, and began the search. We moved quietly, clinging to the edge of things. Finally, we came upon my uncle’s office. The lights were off, but we decided pertinent information might be available. Kurt asked for one of Peggy’s hairpins and used that to pick the lock, and we went inside.

My uncle waited for us in the dark. The mutant Gray was at his side.

Peter flicked his lighter on, and the small flame gave us a clear view of both of them. He held his Zippo in one hand and a .45 Glock in the other. He sat at his desk, while the Gray stood on his left and towered over him like Goliath.

“Hello, nephew,” he said.

“Peter,” I replied.

“What? Not ‘Uncle Peter’ anymore?”

“I’d say it’s up for debate, at the very least.”

“And this is the girl you’re throwing everything away for? Not bad, I suppose, though you… Actually, no, I don’t think you could do better.”

I couldn’t actually see it because of the darkness, but I was reasonably sure Peggy rolled her eyes.

“And… Private Fairfax, is that you?” Peter said.

“No,” Kurt said a low, shameful voice.

“It’s not you?”

“My name is Faulkner.”

“You changed your name?”

“Oh for God’s sake,” I grumbled. “Really? You’re going to play the buffoon now of all times? Really? You pick this exact moment to develop a sense of humor?”

“Well why on earth wouldn’t I?” Peter said, placing the lighter on his desk. It put the Gray’s face out of view- I could discern only its torso and its long, long limbs. “This is clearly a farce, so why not play along? Get in on the joke? If you’re going to make a mockery of yourselves I see no reason whatsoever not to participate.”

“You weren’t kidding, dear,” Peggy said. “He really is a complete cunt.”

“Language! Such harsh words are unbecoming of a lady. Has the world of man really fallen so far in your time that women are permitted to say such things? To do such things as you’ve done?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Peggy said.

“Oh don’t play stupid, Ms. Smith, or at least not any more so than you evidently are. My associate here has told me all about you.”

“What? How the hell could he-”

“How much do you know about the Grays? Really know, I mean? Do you know how they think? How they function? How they perceive their surroundings? They’re different from us in quite a lot of ways- they have bigger brains than us, and more complex ones as well. A humbling thing to realize, of course, but I saw no reason to try to argue against hard fact. Especially not after my friend here demonstrated the biggest difference between the Grays and us: telepathy. Quite a few of the Grays can read minds, and communicate with each other through such methods. In fact, in a one-on-one conversation, a telepathic Gray can beam his thoughts directly into the mind of a less evolved creature. Such as myself for instance.”

“I actually did know about the Grays having psychics,” Peggy said.

The Gray placed one of its hands on my uncle’s shoulder, and my uncle said, “Ah. Why so you did. But don’t you suppose that such a being would be able to spot a kindred spirit a mile away? Someone who lives non-linearly, I mean. Of course, that your actions don’t end here certainly helps with that.”

“W… What?”

“Simply put, Ms. Smith: your reputation proceeds you. In the most literal sense.”

“I… I don’t stop here, do I?”

“No, my dear. You don’t. Not remotely.”

“How far-”

“No. You’re done asking questions. It’s time you started answering them,. Your crimes, your many, many crimes, you must answer for those as well. And you must do so now.”

My uncle pulled the trigger on a gun aimed at the woman I knew I would come to love.

No.

No, who I love.

Yes.

Yes. I love her.

I’m in love with her.

I jumped in front of the bullet. Peter had aimed for Peggy’s head, which meant it pierced my heart. I was only wearing fatigues, so there wasn’t much stopping it.

I fell to the earth, and I looked up as the blood rushed out of me. I couldn’t see the stars, but I got the next best thing: Peggy looking down upon me. She really did have a beautiful face, and I knew that it matched her soul.



Peggy

I wondered for a long time what the moon would be like, to stand on, to walk on. I had hoped, for as long as I could remember, that it would be magical.

It met my expectations, rather unexpectedly. But it’s important to remember that ‘magical’, unto itself, can be good or bad. It didn’t have to be either, and sometimes it could be both, but whatever it was… It was. We didn’t get a say in that. We only got to decide how to deal with it.

I stood on an unsettled, un-terraformed section of Luna, my spacesuit the only thing shielding me from the vacuum. I looked up at the living memories of the stars, and I wanted to touch them.

I reached out, and something reached back.

The Gray ship headed for earth. I didn’t know what it was then, only that it was aiming for the clusterfuck I called a home planet, and that some kind of silver lightning crackled in its wake. A bolt struck me. I was pushed back, or perhaps forward.

And then I saw the end of things.

The moon was a graveyard, covered every inch in the bodies of humans, Grays, and what I would later call the Kayzhourians. I did what I thought any person would do: I turned and ran.

Then I was back where I was. Luna’s capital, Usagi, was only a half a mile’s walk from where I stood. I turned around once more and saw no corpses. I turned to the earth and saw the ship was still flying towards it. It headed for what looked like New Mexico.

I ran back home, to the domed city I resided in. I stripped off my spacesuit, and found a surprise nestled in the palm of my hand: a glowing white crystal. It crackled with silver lightning.

***

The news filled me in on the day’s events. First Contact. Combined with all the other weird stimulus I’d interacted with that day, it was all too much to process. I wanted to lie down on my back and stay that way ad nauseum.

In my apartment (more like a hall closet), I slept. I lived alone, and I wanted only to be alone. People always… Dragged you into things. Made things matter. My parents were convinced a whole bunch of things mattered that probably didn’t. My father even argued it decently well- people gave him money, voluntarily, because they liked what he had to say. So naturally, he had to fucking die. Or at least, my mom thought so. I guess they had a disagreement over what was important and what wasn’t. It still baffled me, how two people so capable of hurting each other could fall in love, or how two people so in love would be willing to hurt each other so much. My mom was an extreme example, but then when your husband attempts to start a religious cult I guess going to extremes seemed appropriate.

I woke up, and the crystal was still in my hand. The light didn’t seem to wanna go out. I wasn’t sure why I was awake. I didn’t have to use the toilet, and it was pitch black in my niche save for the crystal. I wasn’t having any bad dreams that I could recall. But there I was, awake and confused. Then my doorbell rang, like I’d needed to wake up first so I could hear it and my body forced itself to pre-emptive attention.

I put the crystal on my nightstand, a chrome plank jutting out from the wall. The lack of space made it necessary for my bunk to be way up high, accessible only by ladder. I swear, tall people had designed everything in the past hundred years specifically to spite the less vertically inclined. I ambled down the ladder, to the carpeted floor of the room, and headed for the door. I pressed the ‘open’ button without checking who was outside. Wouldn’t have done much good if I had: I’d never seen this person in my life. He was very tall and very pale- you barely saw people that white these days, save for in eugenics communes. His brown hair was cut high and tight, his eyes gray-green. He looked underfed and underloved and very, very tired. “Hi Peggy,” he said.

“Hi,” I replied. “How do you know my name?”

“You haven’t met me yet,” he said. “My name’s Kurt Faulkner.”

“Like the writer?”

“No relation, actually, but I get that a lot.”

“Okay. And what did you mean by us not meeting yet? Bit of a weird thing to say. Care to explain?”

And then he said, “You time traveled today.”

My mouth opened slightly, but I didn’t say anything. Time travel wasn’t… Even if you took for granted that it was real (which a lot of people didn’t), it wasn’t something you did, it was something that happened to you.

Actually, no, not even that: it was something that happened to other people. To people who know people you know. I didn’t… I hadn’t…

“Are you gonna tell me you’re a time traveler too?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said flatly. “Can I come in?”

“No!” I snapped.

“Fair enough. Here. Take this.” And then he handed me a chrome rod. More like a stick, honestly. A twig.

“What is this, your time machine?”

“Yes,” he said in a pronounced monotone.

“Oh really? And where did you acquire such a wondrous device?”

“You gave it to me.”

“What?”

“Or you will, anyway. Later. The one condition was that I had to give it your younger self later on, so that she could give it to my younger self, and so on and so forth.”

“What?”

“Yeah, I know,” the man sighed. “‘I hate temporal mechanics’ and all that.”

“Is… Is that from Star Trek?”

“Huh. Good to know that’s still popular in the future.”

“Wait- you’re from the past,” I said.

“Yes.”

“But you’re from my future?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re here to make sure I can give you this in the future,” I said.

“So that I can give it to you.”

“Okay but where did it initially come from?” I said.

“That’s a very good question,” he said.

“One you don’t have the answer too, I take it?”

“Correct.”

“How old are you now?” I asked. He looked around thirty, thirty-five at first glance. Though the more I looked at him, the older he seemed. He had that quality of someone whose soul had grown old before their body.

“You’re not gonna believe me,” he said. I braced myself to hear forty or forty-five.

“Try me.”

“I am one hundred years old.”

“What.”

“Told you.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“I’m not.”

“How?”

“Time travel.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“It’s time travel,” he said.

“I hate temporal mechanics,” I grumbled.

“Yeah, well, my girlfriend doesn’t,” Faulkner said.

“Okay, when and how did we meet?” I asked.

“We met in 1948, when I was twenty-one. I don’t think I should tell you how we met, though.”

“I see,” I said, a barbed wire knot of frustration tightening in my mind. Didn’t seem like a stretch to assume this guy was on a time table, so I had to budget my inquiries carefully. “How many more questions do I get?” I asked.

“One more,” he said. “And then I have to leave.”

“Where are you going to go when you leave?” I asked.

It caught him off guard. His eyes broke off contact, and he took a step back. “Can’t answer that,” he said.

“Which part?”

“The second part. I said only one question.” He smiled. Tried to play it off as a joke. But he seemed disturbed by the question.

“So what’s the answer?” I asked.

Finally, he said, “I’m going back to you, and the others.”

“What others?”

“Sorry, can’t tell you anymore.”

And then he vanished. I stepped out into the hall after it happened, looked for any trace of him. Nothing. Even his body heat seemed to have dissipated. Not the worst experience I’ve had of a guy pulling an Irish good-bye, but still. Not great.

I went back into my room. Not sure what else to do, I took the crystal from its hiding place and held it up next to the wand. I turned on my lights, and ran my fingers over the alleged time machine. It was slick, smooth, and seemingly without purpose. I kept running my hands over every inch of it, until I found the only interruption in the entirety of the thing: a single dent, less than half an inch in depth. I put my sole remaining fingernail into it, the only one I’d yet to bite off (I’d been trying to break the habit, and having a single intact cuticle was, in my mind, a start). A mild blue glow came from the dibit, and a line of comparable light ran in bot