The Tourist - a short story by Paul Park



      The Tourist
      a short story by Paul Park 
      Everybody wants to see the future, but of course they can't. They get 
      turned back at the border. "Go away," the customs people tell them. "You 
      can't come in. Go home." Often you'll get people on TV who say they snuck 
      across. Some claim it's wonderful and some claim it's a nightmare, so in 
      that way it's like before there was time travel at all. 
      But the past is different. I would have liked to have gone early, when it 
      was first opened up. Nowadays whenever you go, you're liable to be caught 
      in the same pan-cultural snarl: We just can't keep our hands off, and as a 
      result, Cuba has invaded prehistoric Texas, the Empire of Ashok has become 
      a Chinese client state, and Napoleon is in some kind of indirect 
      communication with Genghis Khan. They plan to attack Russia in some vast 
      temporal pincer movement. In the meantime, Burger Chef has opened 
      restaurants in Edo, Samarkand and Thebes, and a friend of mine who 
      ventured by mistake into the Thirty Years War, where you'd think no one in 
      their right mind would ever want to go, said that even Dessau in 1626 was 
      full of fat Australians drinking boilermakers and complaining that the 
      17th century just wasn't the same since Carnage Travel ("Explore the 
      bloodsoaked fields of Europe!") organized its packaged tours. They weren't 
      even going to show up at the bridgehead the next day; my friend went, and 
      reported that the Danish forces were practically outnumbered by Japanese 
      tourists, who stampeded the horses with their fleets of buses, and would 
      have changed the course of history had there been anything left to change. 
      Wallenstein, the Imperial commander, didn't even bother to show up till 
      four o'clock; he was dead drunk in the back of a Range Rover, and it was 
      only due to contractual obligations that he appeared at all, the Hapsburg 
      government (in collaboration with a New York public relations firm) having 
      organized the whole event as a kind of theme park. Casualties (my friend 
      wrote) after seven hours of fighting were still zero, except for an 
      Italian who had cut his finger changing lenses--an improvement, I suppose, 
      over the original battle, when the waters had flowed red with Danish 
blood.
      And that period is less travelled than most. The whole classical era 
      barely exists anymore. First-century Palestine is like a cultural ground 
      zero: nothing but taxi cabs and soft-drink stands, and confused and 
      frightened people. Thousands attend the Crucifixion every day, and the 
      garden at Gethsemane is a madhouse at all hours. My ex-inlaws were there 
      and they sent me a photograph, taken with a flash. It shows a panicked, 
      harried, sad young man. (Yes, he's blond and blue-eyed, as it turns out, 
      raising questions as to whether the past can actually be altered in 
      retrospect by the force of popular misconception.) But at least he's out 
      in the open. Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, and the entire family of Herod the 
      Great are in hiding, yet still hardly a week goes by that Interpol doesn't 
      manage to deport some new revisionist. It's amazing how difficult people 
      find it to accept the scientific fact--that nothing they do will ever make 
      a difference, that cause and effect, as explicative principles, are as 
      dead as Malcolm X.
      Naturally they are confused by their ability to cause short-term mayhem, 
      and just as naturally they are seeking an outlet for their own 
      frustrations: Adolf Hitler, for example, has survived attempts on his life 
      every 15 minutes between 1933 and 1945, and people are still lining up to 
      take potshots even since the Nazis closed the border to everyone but a 
      small group of Libyan consultants--now stormtroopers are racing back in 
      time, hoping to provide 24-hour security to all the Fuehrer's distant 
      ancestors. Who wants to explain to that crowd how history works? Joseph 
      Stalin--it's the same. Recently some Lithuanian fanatic managed to break 
      through UN security to confront him at his desk. "Please," he says, "don't 
      kill me." (They all speak a little English now.) "I am a democrat," he 
      says--"I change my mind." These days it requires diplomatic pressure just 
      to get people to do what they're supposed to. It is only by promising the 
      Confederate government $10,000,000 in new loans that the World Bank can 
      persuade Lee to attack at Gettysburg at all--"I have a real bad feeling 
      about this," he says over and over. "I love my boys," he says. "Please 
      don't make me do it." Who can blame him? He has a book of Matthew Brady's 
      photographs on his desk.
      And in fact, why should he be persuaded? What difference does it make? 
      People hold onto these arbitrary rules, these arbitrary patterns, out of 
      fear. Not even all historians are able to concede the latest 
      proofs--confirmations of everything they feared and half-suspected when 
      they were in graduate school--that events in the past have no discernible 
      effect upon the present. That time is not after all a continuum. That the 
      past is like a booster rocket, constantly dropping away. Afterward, it's 
      disposable. Except for the most recent meeting of the AHA (Vienna, 
      1815--Prince Metternich the keynote speaker, and a drunken lecher, by all 
      reports), American historians now rarely go abroad except as tourists. 
      They are both depressed and liberated to find that their work has no 
      practical application.
      That's not completely true. It certainly changed things, for example, when 
      people found out that the entire known opus of Rembrandt van Rijn 
      consisted of forgeries. But that's a matter of money; it's business 
      contacts that people want anyway, not understanding. So everywhere you go 
      back then are phalanxes of oilmen, diplomats, arms dealers, art 
      collectors, and teachers of English as a second language. Citibank 
      recently pre-empted slave gangs working on the pyramid of Cheops, to help 
      complete their Giza offices. The World Wildlife Fund has projects (Save 
      the Trilobites, etc.) into the Precambrian era-- projects doomed to 
      failure by their very nature.
      Of course the news is not all bad: world profiles for literacy and public 
      health have been transformed. In 1349 the International Red Cross has 
      seven hundred volunteers in Northern Italy alone. And the Peace Corps, my 
      God, they're everywhere. But nevertheless I thought I could discern a 
      trend, that all the world and all of history would one day share the same 
      dismal denominator. Alone in my house on Washon Island, which I'd kept 
      after Suzanne and I broke up, I saw every reason to stay put. I am a 
      cautious person by nature.

      But that summer I was too much by myself. And so I took advantage of a 
      special offer; there had been some terrorist attacks on Americans in 
      Tenochtitlan, and fares were down as a result. I bought a ticket for 
      Paleolithic Spain. Far enough away for me to think that things might be 
      different there. I thought there might be out-of-the-way places still. 
      Places pure and untouched and malleable, where I could make things 
      different. Where my imagination might still correspond in some sense to 
      reality--I might have known. My ex-inlaws had sent me postcards. They had 
      recently been on a mastodon safari not far from Jaca, where they had 
      visited Suzanne. "The food is great," they wrote me--never a good sign.
      I might have known I was making a mistake. There is something about the 
      past which makes what we've done to it even more poignant. All the 
      brochures and the guidebooks say it and it's true. It really is more 
      beautiful back then. The senses come alive. Colours are brighter. Chairs 
      are more comfortable. Things smell better, taste better. People are 
      friendlier, or at least they were. Safe in the future, you can still feel 
      so much potential. Yet the town I landed in-- my God, it was such a sad 
      place. San Juan de la Cruz. We came in over the Pyrenees, turned low over 
      a lush forest, and then settled down in an enormous empty field of tarmac. 
      The hangar space was as big as Heathrow's, but there was only one other 
      commercial jetliner-- a KLM. Everything else was US military aircraft and 
      not even much of that, just five beige transports in a line, and a single 
      helicopter gunship.
      We taxied in toward His Excellency the Honorable Dr Wynstan Mog (Ph.D.) 
      International Airport, still only half built and already crumbling, from 
      the look of it. For no perceptible reason the pilot offloaded us about 200 
      yards from the terminal, and then we had to stand around on the melting 
      asphalt while the stewardesses argued with some men in uniform. I didn't 
      mind. The sky was cobalt blue. It was hot, but there were astonishing 
      smells blown out of the forest toward us, smells which I couldn't 
      identify, and which mixed with the tar and the gasoline and my own sweat 
      and the noise of the engines into a sensation that seemed to nudge at the 
      edges of my memory, as if it almost meant something, just in itself. But 
      what? I had been born in Bellingham; this was nothing I recognized. It was 
      nothing from my past. I put my head back and closed my eyes, dangerously 
      patient, while all around me my 19 fellow passengers buzzed and twittered. 
      And I thought, this is nothing. This feeling is nothing. Everybody feels 
      this way.
      The men in uniform collected our passports and then they marched us toward 
      the terminal. They were not native to the time and place; they were big, 
      fat men. I knew Dr Mog had hired mercenaries from all over--these ones 
      looked Lebanese or Israeli. They wore sunglasses and carried machine 
      pistols. They hustled us through the doors and into the VIP lounge, an 
      enormous air-conditioned room with plastic furniture and a single 
      plate-glass window that took up one whole wall. It appeared to lead 
      directly onto the street in front of the terminal. Certainly there was a 
      crowd out there, perhaps a hundred and fifty people of all races and 
      nationalities, and they were staring in at us, their faces pressed against 
      the glass.
      One of the uniformed men moved to a corner of the window. A cord hung from 
      the ceiling; he pulled down on it, and a dirty brown curtain inched from 
      left to right across the glass wall. It made no difference to the people 
      outside, and even when the curtain was closed I was still aware of their 
      presence, their sad stares. If anything I was more aware. I sat down in 
      one of the moulded chairs with my back to the curtain, and watched some 
      customs officials explain two separate hoaxes, both fairly 
straightforward.
      There was a desk at the back of the room and they had spread our passports 
      onto it. They were waiting for our luggage, and in the meantime they 
      checked our visas and especially our certificates of health. I was 
      prepared for this. The region is suffering from a high rate of AIDS 
      infection--almost 25% of the population in San Juan de la Cruz has tested 
      HIV positive. The government seems unconcerned, but they have required 
      that all tourists be inoculated with the so-called AIDS vaccine, a figment 
      in the imagination of some medical conmen in Zaire, and unavailable in the 
      US. Nevertheless it is now mandatory for travel in large parts of the 
      third world, as a way of extorting hard currency. I work in a hospital 
      research lab and I had the stamp; so, apparently, had someone else in our 
      group, a thin man my own age, deeply tanned. His name was Paul. Together 
      we watched the others gather around the desk, and watched them as they 
      came to understand their choice--to pay a fine of $150 per person, or to 
      be inoculated right there on the premises with the filthiest syringe I'd 
      ever seen. It was a good piece of theatre; one of the officials left to 
      "wash his hands," and came back in a white smock with blood on it--you had 
      to smile. At the same time one of the others was handing out bank booklets 
      and explaining how to change money: all tourists were required to exchange 
      $50 a week at the State Bank, for which they received a supposedly 
      equivalent amount of the national currency-three eoliths, a bone needle, 
      six arrowheads and two chunks of rock salt. An intrinsic value of about 40 
      cents, total -this in a country where in any case dollars and Deutschmarks 
      are the only money that anyone accepts.

      Paul and I lined up to buy our currency packs, which came in a convenient 
      leather pouch. "It's ridiculous," he said. "Before time travel they didn't 
      even have domesticated animals. They lived in caves. What were they going 
      to buy?"
      He had been working in the country for about five years, and was 
      knowledgeable about it. At first I liked him because he still seemed fresh 
      in some ways, his moral outrage tempered with humour and a grudging 
      admiration for Dr Mog. "He's not a fool," he said. "His PhD is a real one: 
      political economy from the University of Colombo--the correspondence 
      branch, of course, but his dissertation was published. An amazing 
      accomplishment when you consider his background. And he's just about the 
      only one of these dictators who's not a foreign puppet or an 
      adventurer--he's a genuine Cro-Magnon, native to the area, and he's 
      managed to stay in power despite some horrendous CIA intrigues, and get 
      very rich in the process."
      Someone wheeled in a trolley with our luggage on it. The customs men 
      spread out the suitcases on a long table. Paul and I were done early; we 
      both had packed light, and were carrying no modern gadgets. The others, 
      most of whom were with a tour group going to Altamira, stood around in 
      abject silence while the officials went through everything, arbitrarily 
      confiscating cameras, hairdryers, CD players on a variety of pretexts. 
      "This is a waste of our electrical resources," admonished one, holding up 
      a Norelco.
      But by that time Paul and I had been given permission to leave. We had to 
      wait in line outside the lounge to get our visas stamped, and then we made 
      our way through the chaotic lobby. I allowed Paul to guide me, ignoring as 
      he did the many people who accosted us and tugged upon our arms. He seemed 
      familiar with the place, happy or at least amused to be there. Outside in 
      the heat, he stopped to give a quarter to a beggar he appeared to 
      recognize, and conversed with him while I looked around. I was going to 
      get a taxi and find a hotel and stay there for a night or so before going 
      on into the interior. I haven't travelled very much, and I was worried 
      about choosing a taxi man from the horde that surrounded us, worried about 
      being overcharged, taken advantage of. I put on my sunglasses, waiting for 
      Paul, and I was relieved to find when he was finished that he expected me 
      to follow him. "I'll take you to the Aladeph," he said. "We'll get some 
      breakfast there."
      He was scanning the crowd for someone specific, and soon a little man 
      broke through, Chinese or Korean or Japanese--"Mr Paul," he said, "This 
      way, Mr Paul." Then he was tugging at our bags and I, untrusting, wasn't 
      letting go until I saw Paul surrender his own daypack. We walked over to a 
      battered green Toyota. Rock and roll was blaring from the crummy speakers. 
      The sun was powerful. "We've got to get you a hat," said Paul.
      A long straight road led into town, flanked on both sides by lines of 
      identical one-storey concrete buildings: commercial establishments selling 
      hubcaps and used tyres, as well as piles of more anonymous metal junk. Men 
      sat in the sandy forecourts, smoking cigarettes and talking; there were a 
      lot of people, a lot of people in the streets as we passed an enormous 
      statue of Dr Mog, the Father of the Nation with his arms outstretched-- a 
      gift from the Chinese government. We drove through Martyr's Gate into a 
      neighbourhood of concrete hovels, separated from the narrow streets by 
      drainage ditches full of sewage. People everywhere, but not one of them 
      looked native to the time--the men wore ragged polyester shirts and pants, 
      the women faded housedresses. Most were barefoot, some wore plastic shoes.
      We passed the Catholic Cathedral, as well as numerous smaller churches of 
      various denominations: Mormon, Seventh Day Adventist and Jehovah's 
      Witness. We passed the headquarters of several international relief 
      organizations, and then I must have dozed off momentarily, for when I 
      opened my eyes we were in a different kind of neighbourhood entirely, a 
      neighbourhood of sleek highrises and villas covered with flowering vines.
      The cab pulled up in front of a Belgian restaurant called Pepe le Moko, 
      and we got out. Paul paid the driver before I could get my money, and then 
      waved away the bills I offered him; he had said nothing during the ride, 
      but had sat staring out the window with an expression half rueful and half 
      amused. Now he smiled more broadly and motioned me inside the restaurant-- 
      it was an expensive place, full of white people in short-sleeved shirts 
      and ties.
      "I thought we'd get some breakfast," he said.
      We ordered French toast and coffee, which came almost immediately. I 
      spooned some artificial creamer into mine and offered the jar to him, but 
      he wrinkled his nose. "I'm sure it's all right," he said.
      "What do you mean?"
      He shrugged. "You know the United States government pays for its projects 
      here by shipping them some of our agricultural surplus. It's a terrible 
      idea, because it makes the population dependent on staples that can't be 
      grown locally; at any rate, Dr Mog sells it, and then uses the money, 
      supposedly, to finance USAID, and famine relief, whatever. Well, my first 
      year there was a shipment of a thousand tons of wheat, which they packed 
      in the same container as a load of PCV's, which was being sent to some 
      plastics factory. When it got here, the customs people claimed the wheat 
      was contaminated and couldn't be sold. They sequestered it in warehouses 
      while the US sent a scientist who said it was okay. But as they argued 
      back and forth, the wheat was sold anyway. And then the raw PCV's began to 
      show up also here in San Juan, in some of the poorer restaurants. It's a 
      white powder, it's soluble in water, and it's got a kind of chalky, milky 
      taste, apparently."
      "Thanks for telling me," I said.
      "That's okay. It was a shambles. The Minister of Health was fired, before 
      he came back last year as the Minister for Armaments. Somebody got rich. 
      So what's a blip in the leukemia statistics?"
      He smiled. "That's horrible," I said.
      "Yeah, well, it's not all bad. And what do you expect? It's got to be like 
      that. People don't understand--they think it's every country's right to be 
      modern and industrialized. Mog's been to college; he knows what's what. 
      You and I might say, well, they're better off living in caves, chipping 
      flint and hitting each other with bones, but who the fuck are we? Mog, he 
      wants an army. He wants telephones. He wants roads, cars, electricity. Who 
      can blame him? But if you can't make that stuff yourself, you've got to 
      get it from the white man. And the thing about the white man, he doesn't 
      offer you that shit for free."
      Paul was looking pretty white himself. "What do you do?" I asked.
      "I work for Continental Grain. We've got a project in the bush. Near 
Jaca."
      I looked down into my coffee cup. "Do you know Suzanne Denier?" I asked.
      "Yeah, sure. She works for an astronomy project in my area. Near the 
      reservation there."
      I closed my eyes and opened them. I asked myself: Had she been to this 
      restaurant? Where did she sit? Did she know the story about the powdered 
      milk?
      "She's with the Cro-Magnon," I said. "Is that the only place they live? On 
      reservations? I haven't seen a single one since we've been here."
      "You'll see one. In San Juan they're all registered. It's one of Mog's new 
      laws. You can't kick them out of business establishments, and all the 
      restaurants have to give them food and liquor. So they're around here 
      begging all the time. You'll see."
      In fact, shortly after that, one did come in. She stood in the doorway and 
      watched us as we ate our toast. She was almost six feet tall, with 
      delicate bones, a beautiful face, and long, graceful hands. She had no 
      hair on her head. She had green eyes and black skin. At ten o'clock in the 
      morning she was very drunk.

      After breakfast I spent most of the day with Paul. We had lunch at the 
      Intercontinental and then went swimming at the Portuguese Club. Soon I 
      began to find him patronizing.
      In those days I was sensitive and easily annoyed. Nevertheless I stayed 
      with him, my resentment rising all the time. I allowed him to get me a 
      room, as he had mentioned, at the Aladeph--a guesthouse reserved for 
      people on official business. I think it amused him to demonstrate that he 
      could place me there, that he could manipulate the bureaucracy, which was 
      formidable. I was grateful, in a way. Jetlagged, I went to bed early, but 
      I couldn't sleep until a few hours before dawn.
      "Suzanne," I said when I woke up. I said it out loud. I lay in bed with my 
      throat dry, my skin wet. At six o'clock in the morning it was already hot. 
      White gauze curtains moved in the hot breeze.
      I lay in bed thinking about Suzanne. I thought of how when she was leaving 
      I had not even asked her to stay.
      It's not as if our marriage wasn't difficult, wasn't unsatisfying, and I 
      remember my cold anger as I listened to her reasons why she should take a 
      job so far from home. Later she had written and told me that even then, if 
      I had just said something, anything, she would have stayed with me. Lying 
      in bed at the Aladeph, I remembered her walking back and forth next to the 
      dark long living-room window of the island house while I sat in the chair, 
      half watching her, half reading. I remembered how her face changed as she 
      made up her mind. I saw it happen, and I did nothing.
      Lying in bed, remembering, I made myself get up and take her by the 
      shoulders. I made myself apologize and made her listen. "Don't go," I 
      said. "I love you," I said, and with just those three words I saw myself 
      creating a new future for us both.
      But of course we know nothing about the future, though we must push into 
      it every day. We are frightened to look at it, and so we spend our lives 
      looking backward, remoulding over and over again what we should leave 
      alone, breaking it, changing it, dragging it forward through time.
      Lying in bed, I thought: these things are past. They don't have anything 
      to do with you now. 1 knew it, but I didn't believe it. Why else was I 
      there? Because I imagined we could go back together to some pure and 
      unadulterated time. I thought maybe if I could just get back about 30,000 
      years before I made all those mistakes...

      That day I went down to the Mercado de Ladrones, and I took a ride on a 
      truck out toward Pamplona.
      Every year the United States donates large sums for road development in 
      that part of the world, and every year the money is stolen by Dr Mog and 
      his associates, though the streets around the US embassy in San Juan are 
      obsessively repaved every few months. But in the interior the roads are 
      horrible even in the dry season, which this mercifully was--rutted tracks 
      of red mud through the jungle, and it took ten hours to go 200 miles. But 
      before we even got out of the city we passed 16 army checkpoints where 
      soldiers extorted money from passing motorists; I found out later that 
      none of them had been paid for over a year. They took pleasure in 
      intimidating me--fat, dark, sweating men with automatic rifles, and they 
      made insulting comments in Spanish and Arabic as they searched the back of 
      the truck where I was sitting on some lumpy burlap sacks. A green 
      Mercedes-Benz had overturned into a garbage ditch, and the traffic was 
      backed up for half a mile along a street of corrugated iron shacks. A 
      stack of tyres burned in a vacant lot, and the smoke from it hurt my eyes 
      and mixed with the exhaust fumes and the polluted air into a hot blend of 
      gases that was scarcely breathable.
      A little boy ran in and out between the trucks, and he sold me two 
      pineapples and a piece of sugar cane. He was smiling and chattering in a 
      language I didn't recognize; he charged me a dime, and he flicked the coin 
      into the air and caught it behind his back. It was a hopeful gesture, and 
      soon the truck started to move again, and soon we passed beyond the ring 
      road into a clear-cut waste of shantytowns and landfills, and then into 
      the jungle. I gnawed on my sugar cane and licked the pineapple juice off 
      my fingers, and I was rehearsing all the things that I was going to tell 
      Suzanne, rehearsing her replies--it was like trying to memorize the chess 
      openings in a book. And because my opponent was a strong one, my only 
      advantage, I thought, lay in preparation and surprise.
      I went over conversations in my mind until the words started to lose their 
      significance, and then the sun came out. When I looked up, the air was 
      fresh and clean. Yellow birds hung in the trees beside the road, making 
      nests of plaited straw. Occasionally an animal would blunder out the 
      bushes as the truck went past. I sat looking backward, and saw a couple of 
      wild pigs and a big rodent.
      We stopped at some villages, and three people joined me in the bed of the 
      truck: two men with jerrycans and a gap-toothed woman, who smiled and held 
      up her own length of sugar cane. Her yellow hair was tied back with a 
      piece of string.
      We were coming up out of the plain into the mountains, and toward sunset 
      we passed the gates to the Krieger-Richardson Observatory. I got out, and 
      the truck barrelled away. The air was cooler, drier here, and the 
      vegetation had changed. The trees were lower, and they no longer presented 
      an impermeable waIl. I walked through them over the dry grass. A one-lane 
      asphalt road came down out of the hills, and I walked up it with my bag, 
      meeting no one, seeing no one. Suzanne had described the place in one of 
      her letters, and it was interesting to see it now myself for the first and 
      last time-- the road climbed sharply for a mile or so until the trees gave 
      out, and I came up over the crest and stood overlooking a wide volcanic 
      bowl. Antennae rose out of it: this was the radio telescope, and beyond it 
      on the summit of Madre de la Nacion rose the dome of the observatory.
      Then the road sank down a bit until the telescope was out of sight. There 
      were pine trees here, and a parking lot full of identical white cars, and 
      beyond that a low dormitory among the rhododendron bushes. Light came from 
      the windows, a comforting glow, for I was tired and hungry.

      I came up the concrete steps and knocked on the door. It was locked, but 
      after a minute or so somebody opened it, a teenage girl in a Chicago Bulls 
      sweatshirt. "Excuse me," I said. "I'm looking for Dr Suzanne Denier. Does 
      she live here?"
      She stared at me for a while, and then shrugged, and then peered past me 
      at the sky. "She's at work tonight. It's supposed to be clear after nine 
      o'clock."
      "But she lives here?"
      "She came back from Soria on Wednesday. We've had terrible weather for the 
      past two weeks."
      She opened the door and stood aside, and I came into a corridor with brown 
      carpeting. "Who are you?" she said.
      "Her husband."
      She stood staring at me, measuring me up, and I tried to decipher her 
      expression. Lukewarm. Interested, so perhaps she had heard something. "Do 
      you have a name?" A wise-ass--she was half my age.
      "Christopher," I said.
      "I'm Joan. Does she know you're coming? We don't get too many personal 
      visitors, so I thought..."
      "It's a surprise."
      She stared at me for a little bit with her head cocked to one side. 
      Finally: "Well, come in. We're just finishing dinner. Have you eaten?"
      "Please," I said, "could I see Suzanne? Where is she?"
      I waited in the corridor while Joan went back to check. I looked at the 
      travel posters on the wall: the Taj Mahal. Malibu beach. 
      Krieger-Richardson with a flock of birds passing over the dome. Some 
      health statistics and some graphs. Then another, older, woman came back 
      whom I recognized from a group photograph Suzanne had sent me. "You're 
      Christopher," she said.
      Her name was Anise Wilcox. She drove me out to the observatory, a 
      20-minute ride up along the ridge of the mountain. We spoke little. "The 
      phones are down," she said, and I didn't know whether she was giving me 
      the chance to say that I had tried to call and failed, or whether she was 
      telling me that she had not been able to inform Suzanne that I was here.
      "Wait," she said. We stopped in the parking lot in front of the 
      observatory, and she slipped out of the driver's seat and ran up to the 
      door. I sat alone in the twilight listening to the engine cool; I rolled 
      down my window and looked out at the unlit bulk of the dome against the 
      sky. An insect settled on my arm, a tiny delicate moth unlike any I had 
      ever seen.
      Then Dr Wilcox was there again, standing by the car. "Come in," she said, 
      and I got out and followed her. She opened the metal door for me. There 
      was a dim light inside next to an elevator, and I turned back and saw her 
      face. She seemed nervous; she wouldn't look me in the eyes. She closed the 
      door and locked it, and then she moved past me to the elevator. It was not 
      until we stood next to each other inside the elevator car that she glanced 
      up and gave me a worried smile.
      "Good luck," she said when we reached the third floor.
      Inside the observatory all the rooms were cramped and small until I pushed 
      through those final doors and stood under the dome. The air was cold. And 
      it was dark underneath the enormous y-shaped column of the telescope; I 
      stood looking up at it, until I heard a movement behind me, off to my 
      right. Suzanne was there at the top of a wide shallow flight of stairs, 
      maybe five steps high. She looked professional in a black turtleneck 
      sweater and black denim overalls, with two pens in her breast pocket. She 
      was carrying a mechanical notebook under one arm.
      "Chris," she said, and she came forward to the edge of the top step. Light 
      came from the windows of the observation room. Computer screens glowed 
      there.
      I could feel her anger just in that one word. It radiated out from her 
      small body. But I was prepared for it. I have my own way of protecting 
      myself. I had not seen her in ten months, and as I looked at her I thought 
      first of all how plain she was with her pinched face, her scowl, her 
      stubborn jaw. Her skin was sallow in that light, her black hair was 
      unbrushed. A small-boned woman with bad posture, that's what I told 
      myself, and I thought, what am I doing here? Oh, I deserve more than this.
      Because she started in immediately: "I can't believe you're here," she 
      said. "I asked you not to come. No, I told you not to. I can't believe you 
      could be so insensitive to my wishes after everything you've done."
      "Please," I said, and she stopped, and I found I didn't have anything to 
      say. Much as I had rehearsed this scene, I had not anticipated that she 
      would speak first, that I, not she, would have to react.
      "Please," I said. "Just listen to me for a few minutes. I came a long 
      way..."
      She interrupted me. "Do you think I'm supposed to be impressed by that? 
      What am I supposed to do, fall into your arms now that you're here?"
      "No, I certainly didn't expect..."
      "Then what? Christopher, is it too much to ask that you leave me alone? I 
      have a lot of things to sort out, and I want to do it by myself. I can't 
      believe you're not sensitive to that. I can't believe you think you have 
      the right to barge in here and disrupt my life and my work whenever you 
      feel like it. Don't you have any respect for me at all?"
      "Please," I said. "I knew you'd be like this, and I still risked it just 
      to come. Is there any way that you could take a smaller risk and talk to 
      me, instead of just yelling at me and closing me out?"
      "Yelling? I'm not yelling. I'm telling you how I feel." But then she was 
      quiet, and I realized she was giving me a chance to speak.
      "Suzanne," I said, and I really tried to sound sincere, even though half 
      of me was whispering to the other half that I couldn't win, that I had 
      never won and never could, and that my best tactic was to run away. "You 
      sounded so distant in your letters and I couldn't stand it. I couldn't 
      stand to feel you pull away from me and not do something. I love you. I'm 
      more sorry than I can tell you about what happened, about what I did. I 
      want to make it up to you. I want"

      It sounded weak even to me. She jumped on it: "But what about what I want, 
      Chris? Did you think about that at all? Did you think about that for one 
      minute? Things are different now. How can I trust you when you can't even 
      respect my wishes enough to leave me alone here to think about what I 
      want? What's best for me. I needed time. I told you that."
      "It's been ten months. Ten months and thirty thousand years," I said--a 
      line that I'd prepared. She didn't think much of it. I saw her eyebrows 
      come together, her eyes roll upward in an expression of irritation that 
      I'd always hated. "Suzanne," I said, "I know you. I know you could just 
      seal yourself up here for the rest of your life. We had something 
      precious, and it made us both happy for a long time. I can't just give it 
      up."
      "But you did give it up. Sometimes I think you forget how this all 
      started. You're right-we were very happy. So how could you do it, Chris? 
      She was my friend."
      "No, she wasn't."
      "Oh, so it's her fault. I can't believe you. I still can't believe you. 
      How could you hurt me like that? How could you humiliate me so publicly?"
      "It wouldn't have been so public if you hadn't told everybody."
      "Oh, and I was supposed to just smile and take it? You hurt me, Chris. You 
      have no idea."
      "Yes," I said, "I do. I'm sorry."
      She turned away for a moment, and stared into the glass of the observation 
      window. I could see the reflection of her face there, and beyond it the 
      flash of the computer screens. "And that's supposed to make it all right? 
      You don't understand. I've got some thinking to do. Chris, I don't want to 
      be the kind of woman who just takes something like this. Who tolerates it. 
      Who just hangs on year after year, hoping her man will change."
      You could never be that kind of woman, I thought. But I said nothing. "You 
      don't understand," she said. "I trusted you. I really trusted you. Chris, 
      I'd given you my soul to keep, and you dropped it, and things changed. I 
      changed. I know I'll never trust anyone like that again. What I don't know 
      is, whether we can go on from here."
      You never trusted me, I thought. I stared at her, my mind a blank.
      "Well," she said finally. "I've got to get to work. I'll tell Anise you 
      can spend the night in my room. I'll be back a little after sunrise, and 
      I'd appreciate it if you were gone. I'll tell Carlos to give you a ride 
      back to San Juan."
      I looked up at the big telescope and shook my head. "Aren't you going to 
      give me a tour? You said in your letter you were close to something new."
      "Yes." She came down the steps. And then things changed for a little 
      while. Because we knew each other so well, even then we could slip down 
      effortlessly and immediately into another way of being, a connection that 
      seemed so intimate and strong that I had to keep reminding myself during 
      the next hour that it was all gone, all ruined. She showed me her work, 
      and I took such pleasure in seeing her face light up as she explained it.
      She took me all over the observatory, up into the dome, into the camera 
      room. Then back down again into her office, where we sat drinking coffee 
      in the dim light, and she smoked cigarettes and showed me photographs of 
      stars. "We knew the galaxies were moving, because of the red shift. And we 
      assumed that they were spreading apart, because it fit the theory. But of 
      course we didn't know, because we could observe from one point only. But 
      now of course we have two points thirty thousand years apart, and we 
      thought that we could see it."
      She sucked the cigarette down to the filter and then ground it out. I sat 
      looking at her face, reminded of how she used to come over to my apartment 
      in the early morning, when she was working on her dissertation. She would 
      wake me up to talk to me, and she would grind her cigarettes out in a 
      teacup that I had, and I would force myself awake, just for the pleasure 
      of looking at the concentration in her face, as she described some theory 
      or some project. "So?"
      "What do you think? Our results have been extraordinary. The opposite of 
      what everyone predicted."
      "So?"
      She smiled. "I don't know if I should tell you. I don't know if you 
      deserve to know."
      "It sounds like it's important."
      "Sure. But I don't know. Anise would kill me if I told you."
      I looked up at the ceiling. Someone had pasted up a cluster of 
      phosphorescent stars. "Okay," she said, "so here it is. We think some 
      galaxies are farther apart now than they are in the 20th century."
      For me at least, time had gone backward in that little room. Not because 
      of what she said--I didn't care about it. I sat watching her face.
      But I was afraid that she'd stop talking and I'd have to go. She'd bring 
      us back up to the surface again. I said: "And what's your explanation for 
      that?"
      She gave a shrug. "It's complicated. Either our observations are mistaken, 
      and we're about to make fools of ourselves. Or else maybe the universe is 
      contracting. Or part of it is. Or else it fluctuates. I have my own 
      theory."
      I said nothing, but sat watching her, and the moment stretched on until I 
      smiled and she laughed. "I'll tell you anyway. I think time goes the other 
      direction from the way we imagine. I think that's why the past doesn't 
      affect the present like we thought."
      Not like we thought. But it does have some effect. I looked at Suzanne, 
      her beautiful and well-loved face. "So why not forgive me?" I said.
      She glanced up at me, a quick, sly look.
      "We can make the past into the future," I said.
      She smiled, and then frowned, and then: "Sure, that's what I'm afraid of. 
      It's just away of talking. It's not like when we're born we actually die."
      She ground out her cigarette butt. "Seriously," she said. "But maybe time 
      flows in two directions. One of them is the direction of our ordinary 
      experience. Our personal sense of time. But maybe cosmological time flows 
      back the other way. Maybe the conception of the universe happens in the 
      future from our point of view."
      I thought about it. "Why do you think we don't meet anybody from beyond 
      our own time?" she said. "From our own future? Certainly the technology 
      would still exist."
      It took me a little while to understand her. Then I said: "Perhaps they 
      lost interest."
      "Forever? I don't buy it. No - maybe we're talking about two big bangs, 
      one at the end of one kind of time, one at the beginning of the other. One 
      manmade and one not."
      I considered this. Falling in love is one. And then breaking apart. I 
      said: "So you're telling me that there's no future and the past is all we 
      have."

      Soon after, Dr Wilcox drove me back to the dormitory and gave me something 
      to eat. She heated up some spaghetti Bolognese in the microwave. She 
      didn't say much, except for one thing which proved to be prophetic: "You 
      must know she won't forgive you. She can't."
      She showed me back to Suzanne's room and left me there. It was a small 
      bare cubicle with a window overlooking the parking lot. She had put some 
      curtains up and that was all. There was nothing on the walls. I didn't 
      take off my clothes. I lay down on her narrow, white bed; I lay on my back 
      with my hands clasped under my neck, staring at the ceiling. From time to 
      time I got up and turned on the light. I opened her bureau, and the smell 
      from her shirts made me unhappy. She had a picture of me tucked into a 
      corner of her mirror. I was smiling. Underneath, on the bureau top, stood 
      a framed photograph of her parents, taken at their 40th anniversary. They 
      were smiling too.
      There was a package of my letters in a corner of the drawer, maybe 
      seventy-five or a hundred of them, wrapped in a rubber band.
      I had spoken to Carlos and had plotted an itinerary for the rest of my 
      vacation. He told me there were some beautiful beaches on the 
      Mediterranean, which I could reach on a rail link from San Juan. I set the 
      alarm clock for five-thirty and lay down on the bed and listened to it 
      ticking on the bedside table. I imagined time passing over me, forward 
      into an uncertain future, backward into a contented past. Perhaps the ebb 
      and flow of it lulled me, because toward three o'clock I slid beneath the 
      surface of a dream.
      I dreamt that I woke up to find Suzanne sitting beside me. "I wanted to 
      show you something before you left," she said. "You know we're close to 
      one of the big reservations here?"
      "You told me in your letter."
      "Yes. Well, there's a big family of Cro-Magnon that's moved in close by. I 
      wanted to show you."
      I dreamt she took me out into the fresh dawn air, and we walked down a 
      path through the woods behind the dormitory. Soon we were in a deciduous 
      forest of aspen trees and mountain laurel, and the breeze pressed through 
      the leaves and made them flicker back and forth. Once out of sight of the 
      buildings, all traces of modernity were lost. We climbed downhill. "Wait 
      till you see them," said Suzanne. "They're so great. They never fight. 
      They're so sweet to each other. It's because they can't feel love. They 
      don't know what it feels like."
      A bird flickered through the underbrush, one of the yellow birds I'd seen 
      that morning in the real world. "So you're saying maybe evolution runs the 
      other way."
      She frowned. "Maybe we're the ones who are like animals. You know what I 
      mean."
      We were standing in an open glade, and the light filtered through the 
      leaves, and the little path ran backward, forward through the brush. Then 
      I bent down and I kissed her, and even in the dream she smelled like 
      cigarettes.

       Paul Park 1994, 2000 
      This story was first published in Interzone 80, February 1994. 
       
      Elsewhere in infinity plus: 
        features - Paul Park interviewed by Nick Gevers. 
      Elsewhere on the web: 
        Paul Park at Amazon (US) and at the Internet Bookshop (UK). 
        Get a Grip - a short story in the Omni archive. 
        Paul Park's ISFDB bibliography. 




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