Now Wait for Last Year

  “Ten dollars plus the cost of the room; there must be in name of God a room. The sidewalk makes love into something sordid; you cannot do it here and respect yourself after.”

  “There’s wisdom in that,” Eric agreed. But he continued on anyhow.

  At night the robant peddlers and their enormous, useless, machine-made rugs and baskets, their carts of tamales, customarily vanished; the daytime people of Tijuana disappeared along with the middle-aged American tourists to make way for the night people. Men, hurrying, pushed past him; a girl wearing a crushingly tight skirt and sweater squeezed past him, pressing momentarily against him … as if, he thought, we had some durable relationship penetrating our two lives and this sudden heat exchange through body contact expressed the deepest possible understanding between the two of us. The girl went on, disappeared. Small tough Mexicans, youths wearing open-throated fur shirts, strode directly at him, their mouths agape as if they were strangling. He carefully stepped from their path.

  In a town where everything is legal, he thought, and nothing achieves worth, you are wrenched back into childhood. Placed among your blocks and toys, with all your universe within grasp. The price for license is high: it consists of a forfeit of adulthood. And yet he loved it here. The noise and stirrings represented authentic life. Some people found all this evil; he did not. People who thought that were wrong. The restless, roving bands of males who sought God knew what—they themselves didn’t know: their striving was the genuine primal under-urge of protoplasmic material itself. This irritable ceaseless motion had once carried life right out of the sea and onto land; creatures of the land now, they still roamed on, up one street and down another. And he went along with them.

  Ahead, a tattoo parlor, modern and efficient, lit by a wall of glowing energy, the proprietor inside with his electric needle that did not touch the skin, only brushed near it as it wove a cat’s cradle of design. How about that? Eric asked himself. What could I have etched on me, what motto or picture which would give me comfort in these unusual times of duress? In times when we wait for the ’Starmen to appear and take over. Helpless and frightened, all of us become essentially unmanly.

  Entering the tattoo parlor, he seated himself and said, “Can you write on my chest something like—” He pondered. The proprietor continued with his previous customer, a beefy UN soldier who stared sightlessly ahead. “I want a picture,” Eric decided.

  “Look through the book.” Huge sample-caselike ledger passed to him; he opened at random. Woman with four breasts; each spoke a complete sentence. Not quite it; he turned the page. Rocketship with puffs belching from its tail. No. Reminded him of his 2056 self whom he had failed. I am for the reegs, he decided. Tattoo that on me so the ’Star MPs can find it. And I won’t have to make further decisions.

  Self-pity, he thought. Or is there such a thing as self-compassion? Not much mentioned, anyhow.

  “Made up your mind, buddy?” the proprietor asked him, now finished.

  Eric said, “I want you to write on my chest, ‘Kathy is dead.’ Okay? How much will that cost?”

  “ ‘Kathy is dead,’ ” the proprietor said. “Dead of what?”

  “Korsakow’s syndrome.”

  “You want me to put that too? Kathy is dead from—how you spell it?” The proprietor got pen and paper. “I want it to be right.”

  “Where around here,” Eric said, “can I find drugs? You know, real drugs?”

  “Across the street at the pharmacy. Their specialty, creaker.”

  He left the tattoo parlor, crossed against the seething, masslike organism of traffic. The pharmacy looked old-fashioned, with displays of foot-ailment models and hernia belts and bottles of cologne. Eric opened the door, manually operated, and walked to the counter in the back.

  “Yes sir.” A gray-haired respectable professional-looking man in white smock, waiting on him.

  “JJ-180,” Eric said. He laid a fifty-dollar US bill on the counter. “Three or four caps.”

  “One hundred US.” This was business. With no sentiment.

  He added two twenties and two fives. The pharmacist disappeared. When he returned he had a glass vial which he placed close to Eric; he took the bills and rang them up on his antique register. “Thanks,” Eric said. Carrying the vial, he left the pharmacy.

  He walked until more or less by chance he located the Caesar Hotel. Entering, he approached the desk clerk. It appeared to be the same man who had taken care of him and Deg Dal Il earlier in the day. A day, Eric thought, made out of years.

  “You remember the reeg I came here with?” he asked the clerk.

  The clerk eyed him silently.

  “Is he still here?” Eric said. “Was he really cut to bits by Corning, the ’Star hatchet man in this area? Show me the room. I want the same room.”

  “Pay in advance, sir.”

  He paid, received the key, took the elevator to the proper floor; he walked down the dark carpeted empty hall to the door of the room, unlocked it, and stepped in, feeling for the light switch.

  The room lit up and he saw that there was no sign of anything; the room was simply empty. As if the reeg had gone. Stepped out, perhaps. He was right, Eric decided, when he asked me to take him back to the POW camp; he was on the right track all the time. Knew how it would end.

  Standing there, he realized that the room horrified him.

  He opened the glass vial, got out one capsule of JJ-180, laid it on the vanity table, and with a dime cut the capsule into three parts. There was water in a pitcher nearby; he swallowed one third of the capsule and then walked to the window to look out and wait.

  Night became day. He was still in the room at the Caesar Hotel but it was later; he could not tell how much. Months? Years? The room looked the same but probably it always would; it was eternal and static. He left the room, descended to the lobby, asked for a homeopape at the newsstand next to the reservations desk. The vendor, a plump old Mexican woman, handed him a Los Angeles daily; he examined it and saw that he had gone ahead ten years. The date was June 15, 2065.

  So he had been correct as to the amount of JJ-180 needed.

  Seating himself in a pay vidphone booth, he inserted a coin and dialed Tijuana Fur & Dye. The time appeared to be about noon.

  “Let me speak to Mr. Virgil Ackerman.”

  “Who is calling, please?”

  “Dr. Eric Sweetscent.”

  “Yes of course, Dr. Sweetscent. Just a moment.” The screen became fused over and then Virgil’s face, as dry and weathered as ever, basically unchanged, appeared.

  “Well I’ll be darned! Eric Sweetscent! How the hell are you, kid? Gosh, it’s been—what has it been? Three years? Four? How is it at—”

  “Tell me about Kathy,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  Eric said, “I want to know about my wife. What’s her medical condition by now? Where is she?” “Your ex-wife.”

  “All right,” he said reasonably. “My ex-wife.”

  “How would I know, Eric? I haven’t seen her since she quit her job here and that was at least-well, you remember—six years ago. Right after we rebuilt. Right after the war.”

  “Tell me anything that would help me find out about her.”

  Virgil pondered. “Well Christ, Eric; you remember how sick she became. Those psychopathic rages.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Raising his eyebrows, Virgil said, “You were the one who signed the commitment papers.”

  “You think she’s institutionalized now? Still?”

  “As you explained it to me it’s irreversible brain damage. From those toxic drugs she was taking. So I presume she is. Possibly in San Diego. I think Simon Ild told me that one day, not long ago; you want me to check with him? He said he met somebody who had a friend in a psychiatric hospital north of San Diego and—”

  “Check with him.” He waited while the screen showed nothing, while Virgil conferred on the interdepartmental circuit with Simon.

  At la
st the elongated, doleful face of his former inventory control clerk appeared. “You want to know about Kathy,” Simon said. “I’ll tell you what this fellow told me. He met her in Edmund G. Brown Neuropsychiatric Hospital; he had a nervous breakdown, as you call it.”

  “I don’t call anything that,” Eric said, “but go ahead.”

  Simon said, “She couldn’t control herself; her rages, those destructive binges where she’d break everything, they were coming every day, sometimes four times a day. They kept her on phenothiazine and it had helped—she told him that herself—but finally no matter how much phenothiazine they gave her it didn’t help. Damage to the frontal lobe, I guess. And she had difficulty remembering things properly. And ideas of reference; she thought everyone was against her, trying to hurt her … not grandiose paranoia, of course, but just the never-ending irritability, accusing people as if they were cheating her, holding out on her—she blamed everyone.” He added, “She still talked about you.”

  “Saying what?”

  “Blaming you and that psychiatrist—what was his name?—for making her go into the hospital and then not letting her out.”

  “Does she have any idea why we did it?” Why we had to do it, he thought.

  “She said she loved you, but you wanted to get rid of her so you could marry someone else. And you had sworn, at the time of the divorce, that there wasn’t anyone else.”

  “Okay,” Eric said. “Thanks, Simon.” He cut the connection and then called Edmund G. Brown Neuropsychiatric Hospital in San Diego.

  “Edmund G. Brown Neuropsychiatric Hospital.” A rapid, overworked middle-aged female at the hospital switchboard.

  “I wish to ask about Mrs. Katherine Sweetscent’s condition,” Eric said.

  “Just a moment, sir.” The woman consulted her records, then switched his call to one of the wards; he found himself facing a younger woman, not in white uniform but in an ordinary flowered cotton dress.

  “This is Dr. Eric Sweetscent. What can you tell me about Katherine Sweetscent’s condition? Is she making any progress?”

  “There hasn’t been any change since you called last, doctor, two weeks ago. I’ll get her file, however.” The woman disappeared from the screen.

  Good Lord, Eric thought. I’m still watching over her ten years from now; am I caught in this one way or another the rest of my life?”

  The ward technician returned. “You know that Dr. Bra-melman is trying the new Gloser-Little unit with Mrs. Sweetscent. In order to induce the brain tissue to start repair of itself. But so far—” She leafed through the pages. “Results have been meager. I would suggest you contact us again in another month or possibly two. There won’t be any change before that.”

  “But it could work,” he said. “This new unit you spoke about.” He had never heard of it; obviously it was a construct of the future. “I mean, there’s still hope.”

  “Oh yes, doctor. There’s definitely hope.” She said it in such a way as to convey to him that this was merely a philosophical answer; there was hope in every case, as far as she was concerned. So it meant nothing.

  “Thank you.” And then he said, “Check your files, please, and see what it says as to my place of business. I’ve changed jobs recently so it may be wrong.”

  After a pause the ward technician said, “You’re listed as Chief Org-trans Surgeon at Kaiser Foundation in Oakland.”

  “That’s correct,” Eric said. And rang off.

  He obtained the number from information and dialed Kaiser Foundation in Oakland.

  “Let me talk to Dr. Sweetscent.”

  “Who is calling, please?”

  That stopped him momentarily. “Tell him it’s his younger brother.”

  “Yes sir. Just a moment, please.”

  His face, his older, grayer face, appeared on the screen. “Hi.”

  “Hello,” Eric said. He was not sure what to say. “Am I bothering you when you’re busy?” He did not look bad, ten years from now. Dignified.

  “No, go ahead. I’ve been expecting the call; I remember the approximate date. You just called Edmund G. Brown Neuropsychiatric Hospital and learned about the Gloser-Little unit. I’ll tell you something the ward technician didn’t. The Gloser-Little unit constitutes the only brain artiforg they’ve managed to come up with. It replaces portions of the frontal lobe; once it’s installed it stays as long as the person lives. If it helps. To be truthful with you, it should have worked right away.”

  “So you don’t think it’s going to.”

  “No,” the older Eric Sweetscent said.

  “Do you think if we hadn’t divorced her—”

  “It would have made no difference. Tests we give now—believe me.”

  Then even that wouldn’t help, Eric realized. Staying with her, even for the rest of my life. “I appreciate your help,” he said. “And I find it interesting—I guess that’s the word—that you’re still keeping tabs on her.”

  “Conscience is conscience. In some respects the divorce put more of a responsibility on us to see about her welfare. Because she got so much worse immediately after.”

  “Is there any way out?” Eric asked.

  The older Eric Sweetscent of the year 2065, shook his head.

  “Okay,” Eric said. “Thanks for being honest with me.”

  “Like you yourself say, you should always be honest with yourself.” He added, “Good luck on the commitment proceedings; they’re going to be rough. But that won’t come for a while.”

  “How about the rest of the war, in particular the takeover of Terra by the ’Starmen?”

  The older Eric Sweetscent grinned. “Hell, you’re too bogged down in your own personal troubles to notice. War? What war?”

  “So long,” Eric said, and rang off.

  He left the vidphone booth. He’s got a point, he admitted to himself. If I were rational—but I’m not. The ’Starmen are probably assembling an emergency plan right now, getting ready for the jump-off; I know this and yet I don’t feel it, I feel—

  The need for death, he thought.

  Why not? Gino Molinari made his death into an instrument of political strategy; he outwitted his opponents through it and he’ll probably do so again. Of course, he realized, that’s not what I had in mind. I’m outwitting nobody. Many people will die in this invasion; why not one more? Who loses by it? Who am I close to? He thought, Those future Sweetscents are going to be sore as hell about it but that’s just too bad. I don’t particularly give a damn about them anyhow. And, except that their existences depend on mine, they feel the same about me. Perhaps, he decided, that’s the problem. Not my relationship with Kathy but my relationship with myself.

  Passing through the lobby of the Caesar Hotel, he emerged on the daytime, busy Tijuana street of ten years hence.

  Sunlight blinded him; he stood blinking and adjusting. The surface vehicles, even here, had changed. Sleeker, more attractive. The street, now, was adequately paved. There came the tamale vendors and the rug vendors except that now they were not robants; they were, he saw with a start, reegs. Evidently they had entered Terran society at the bottom rung, would have to work their way to the equality he had witnessed a century from his own time, ninety years from now. It did not seem fair to him, but there it was.

  Hands in his pockets, he walked with the surging crowd that inhabited the sidewalks of Tijuana throughout all the ages, until he arrived at the pharmacy at which he had bought the capsules of JJ-180. As always it was open for business. It, too, had not altered in a decade, except that now the hernia belt display had gone. In its place he saw a contrivance unfamiliar to him. Halting, he examined the Spanish sign propped behind it. The thing evidently increased one’s sexual potency, he decided. Permitted—as he translated the Spanish—an infinitude of orgasms, one immediately following the other. Amused, he continued on inside the pharmacy, to the counter in the rear.

  A different pharmacist, this one a black-haired elderly female, greeted him. “Sí?” She leered, sho
wing cheap chromium teeth.

  Eric said, “You have a West German product, g-Totex blau?”

  “I look. You wait, okay?” The woman trudged off and disappeared among the pharmaceuticals. Eric wandered around the displays sightlessly. “G-Totex blau a terrible poison,” the old woman called to him. “You have to sign the book for it; sí?”

  “Sí,” Eric said.

  The product, in its black carton, was laid on the counter before him. “Two dollars fifty US,” the old woman said. She lugged the control book out, put it where he could reach it with the chained pen. As he signed she wrapped the black carton. “You going to kill yourself, señor?” she asked acutely. “Yes, I can tell. This will not hurt with this product; I have seen it. No pain, just no heart all of a sudden.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “It’s a good product.”

  “From A. G. Chemie, Reliable.” She beamed in what seemed approval.

  He paid the money—his ten-year-old bills were accepted without comment—and left the pharmacy with his package. Weird, he thought. In Tijuana it’s still as it was. Always will be. Nobody even cares if you destroy yourself; it’s a wonder they don’t have booths at night where it’s done for you, at ten pesos. Perhaps there are, by now.

  It shook him a little, the woman’s evident approval—and she did not know anything about him, even who he was. The war did it, he said to himself. I don’t know why I let it surprise me.

  When he returned to the Caesar Hotel and started upstairs to his room, the desk clerk—unfamiliar to him—halted him. “Sir, you are not a resident here.” The clerk had moved swiftly from behind the counter to bar his way. “Did you want a room?”

  “I have one,” Eric said, and then remembered it had been ten years in the past; his occupancy had lapsed long ago.

  “Nine US dollars each night in advance,” the desk clerk said. “Since you do not have luggage.”

  Eric got out his wallet, passed over a ten-dollar bill. The clerk, however, inspected the bill with professional disavowal and mounting suspicion.

  “These were called in,” the clerk informed him. “Hard to exchange now because no more legal.” He raised his head and scrutinized Eric with defiance. “Twenty. Two tens. And maybe even then I not accept them.” He waited, devoid of enthusiasm; he clearly resented being paid in currency of this kind. It probably reminded him of the old days, the bad times of the war.