The Bright Spot Read online

  Terms aren’t everything. I don’t like to be rushed, and his story didn’t hold together. “I don’t get it. He could hire us to play anybody he wants three times a day and tuck him into bed every night with milk and cookies for this much money—and, no offense, he wouldn’t have to go through you.”

  “But it wouldn’t be real.”

  “Neither is this.”

  Tap, tap on the forehead again. “He doesn’t know that.”

  “What? How could he not know? Is he senile?”

  “Perhaps. He’s also taking quite a few medications. You know how those side effects can affect a man’s judgment. Or maybe I’m just persuasive. I’ve got him believing he won’t be seeing a mere performance by actors, oh no, he’ll be time-traveling to have a look at himself as a younger man. That is why he’s willing to pay so handsomely, and it’s that illusion we must deliver. Don’t worry. He’s a babe in the woods. If we didn’t take him, someone else would. Basically, I’ve got him convinced a box is a time machine. He’s never used a box before. He doesn’t believe in it.” Salvador chuckled, finding it laughable that anyone believed or disbelieved in anything. Maybe he was right.

  “But even if he believes he’s traveling back in time,” I said, “how can we hope to fool him? Chances are if it’s a woman he wants to see again so badly, he has some pretty vivid memories of her. It’s not enough just to look right. What are we supposed to say?”

  “And do,” Mr. Salvador added. “The slightest touch might be important. But we’re not going blindly into the past. We haven’t chosen the time at random. We not only have a video of their meeting, we also have a recording of their conversation. Mr. Dumfries understands that because of the tremendous energies involved in time travel, this is a one-time trip of short duration limited to a specific place. Fifteen minutes in this diner. That’s it. He gets a front-row seat in the booth across the way there. We have more than enough video to string him along so he gets his money’s worth. You in or out?”

  “Show me first,” I said. “Play the recordings.”

  “All right.” He pointed to the TV hanging up over the counter. He showed it there. The surveillance camera showed a couple talking intently, the date and time ticking off in the corner. The audio wasn’t perfectly synchronized, so their lips moved before they spoke. I didn’t listen that closely to what they were saying. It was one of those scenes you knew what was going on even if you couldn’t hear the exact words. She was dumping him. I’d played his role enough times not to need to listen to some other guy playing it. He was going down in flames, and he knew it. But why, I had to ask myself, was there a sound recording in the first place? Who would want to record these two and their troubles? Then I noticed— each time she moved in the video, a rustle followed in the audio. She was the one recording their conversation. The recording device was probably in her jacket pocket. There was no telling how Mr. Salvador came into possession of the recording, and I didn’t expect he would tell me.

  After twelve minutes, the video showed Galatea leaving the table, and the sound followed her into the bathroom. Dumfries sat staring into space like his heart just fell out of his chest, and he was trying to decide whether to drive a stake through it or not. The audio was a woman sobbing in a stall. The echoes overwhelmed whatever tiny microphone had recorded her, so the sound was badly distorted, but there was no doubting her agony. If it felt this bad to dump the guy, I wondered, why was she doing it? When she returned, they wordlessly exited to the street. For a few seconds, the sound followed them into the traffic that wasn’t there in Salvador’s virtual, then went abruptly silent. The video lingered on the empty booth for a moment, then went blank.

  “What’s on the rest of the audio?”

  “We don’t have it.”

  Right. “This Galatea Ritsa, why doesn’t the old guy just look her up now?”

  “Because she’s dead.”

  “When?”

  “A long time ago.”

  “Can you be more specific?”

  “What does it matter?”

  “When?”

  “The day after, according to the papers. Hit by an SUV while jogging. She was a big jogger, apparently. We’re a little late for the funeral. When I cooked this thing up, the first thing I did was look her up to make sure she wouldn’t present a problem. Look. We’re almost there. We’re good to go, today. You in or not?”

  “In.”

  “What about you?” he asked Lu.

  She started. “In,” she said. She’d been watching me and Salvador with rapt attention. She said later she saw a side of me she’d never seen before. That’s me. Multifaceted.

  The limo stopped, and we stepped out into a big empty warehouse, somewhere on Planet Earth. The windows were all painted over. The diner set was built in the middle of the place. The clock on the wall was running, the second hand sweeping around.

  They weren’t taking any chances. Lu and I looked like the people we were impersonating, and we were shooting on a set that was an exact match of the place in the video, shooting action and place together. We use mostly stock locales on the show, but even the best virtual can distort sometimes, go wonky, so the Eiffel Tower flickers or the ocean skips a roar. This way, Dumfries would still be looking at what he wanted to see. If he was like most guys, he’d see what he wanted to see anyway. For his part, Dumfries would be inserted into the virtual remotely, along with digital extras like the waitress and the other customers. Lu and I would go virtual during the performance so we could track it all. There was a box under the table, the contacts in the tabletop.

  We watched the video half a dozen times. Then we had a couple of hours to get it down. There wasn’t much to it. They were breaking up. He was trying to talk her out of it and getting nowhere. When she started crying, he took her face, kissed her tears, but she broke away and split for the bathroom. She came back, they left. The hard part was not rushing the lines. They didn’t say that much, saying things like “I know, I know” in the midst of silence, as if half their conversation was telepathic. Even when they did speak, they were hard to hear.

  The “Is there someone else?” part came out loud and clear, however. Once she said, “Yes, there is someone else,” there was no stopping him. That’s what got her tears going. He had a particularly bad moment where he started naming what sounded like every guy they knew, trying to find out the one. “It’s Gus, isn’t it? Carl. Terry. Arthur. It’s Alan, isn’t it? Don’t lie to me. It must be George....”Jesus, man, let it go. She never would say who it was. Maybe it wasn’t any of them. Maybe it was all of them. Maybe it was some other guy altogether. A woman maybe. But the thing was, it wasn’t him. Not anymore. Not ever again.

  As we worked on the scene, I kept imagining a virtual James Dumfries in the booth across from us, watching, listening, reliving, thinking he was watching himself forty years ago. What was the point? If you wanted to relive a moment of your life, why this one? Why this heart-breaking pathetic fifteen minutes? But then, he hadn’t picked the time, I reminded myself. Salvador had. Dumfries had only picked the person he wanted to see. The crew ignored us. The driver watched us rehearsing for a while, then went and sat in the limo, still looking through old news.

  I thought of a thousand questions I should’ve asked Salvador, but there wasn’t time. We kept rehearsing while we made ourselves up. Lu looked pretty hot as a blonde. With a phony beard, I looked exactly like Dumfries.

  “Try to look more scared,” she coached me.

  “What am I scared of?”

  “I don’t know. But he looks scared to me.”

  “The truth probably.”

  The old guy had nothing to be scared of today. Whatever he got from us, it wouldn’t be the truth. This was how it worked supposedly: Somewhere else, with Salvador at his side most likely, the drugged old man believed a box was the controls for a time machine, and when he switched it on, he blacked out for a moment— one of the side effects of time travel—and then he woke up to our chara
de in virtual space. All the extras—the counter waitress filling catsup bottles, a guy eating stew in a corner booth, a woman on the phone—had been worked up earlier and were inserted into the virtual. We’d be sunk if he tried to get the waitress’s attention.

  We found the box contacts in the tabletop. We got the cue and went virtual. The extras seemed to appear out of thin air.

  Dumfries made his appearance in our shared virtual reality, woke up, and we played the scene. Though like anyone in a virtual he could have the illusion of moving around while sitting on his duff, this was supposedly time travel, and he’d been cautioned that even stirring from his seat could tear the very fabric of the space-time continuum, or some such hokum, and for most of the time he watched our dead-on performance with tears streaming down his face like a baby without moving a muscle.

  But as soon as Lu went to the bathroom, he popped up out of his booth and headed straight for me.

  “Jim, we don’t have much time,” he said, and slid into Lu’s place across from me.

  And I had no script. All I could hope for was to keep him going without blowing the illusion until Salvador got wise and arranged another blackout. “Who are you?” I said, sure I wasn’t getting the tone right. Who are you? Who are you? Who are you?

  “Jim,” he said, “look into my eyes. You must recognize me. I’m you from the future, an old man. I’ve traveled through time to see you. You must do what I tell you. Everything depends on it.”

  Of course. In spite of what he might’ve told Salvador, he didn’t want to just visit the past. He wanted to change the future. That’s what time travel was all about. He wasn’t a mere tourist passing through. He wanted to give the space-time continuum a swift kick in the butt. Unfortunately, instead of a time machine, he was stuck with a couple of actors pulling a cheap scam to bilk some poor old man out of his money.

  I wondered how he came by it, who the hell he was. There was something about him that looked familiar. Something in the eyes, like he said. But it wasn’t me I saw there. It was his intelligence, his genius. I’d seen his picture somewhere, and you could see it even in an image, even in this aged man. A certain fire.

  “Why should I believe you?” I said. “I mean, if you were me in the future, you would remember me, right? You would remember meeting yourself because it would’ve already happened. Do you have such a memory?”

  I’d read a story like that once and was stalling with this bit of sophistry, but he nodded at the justice of my argument, then smiled apologetically. “These days, I don’t know which memories are real and which aren’t. That I can’t remember something doesn’t mean it never happened. Maybe paradoxical memories are the first to go. It doesn’t matter. Because one thing I do know, and you will find out too soon yourself if you ignore me, is that Galatea will be killed tomorrow. You must stop it. Forget maintaining silence. Go to Kennemeyer. He’ll know what to do.”

  “Can’t I just tell her to be more careful? Or why don’t you tell her yourself? She’ll be out soon, I’m sure.”

  “Yes, she will, and you will leave and say nothing further to each other, just as you’ve arranged. But things won’t work out as you’ve planned. You will never see her again. You must do something different. You must change things. She mustn’t know we’ve spoken. She must never know. She can’t see us together. Find Kennemeyer. Will you do it?” He glanced nervously toward the bathroom, poised to leave once I agreed to the impossible.

  “Yes,” I said. The show must go on. I had to stay in character. If I was who I said I was, how could I say no to myself?

  He scuttled back to his booth as Lu emerged from the bathroom, clueless everything wasn’t going according to script. I may have rushed my exit a bit, springing up from the booth like we were going on a picnic instead of trudging out into oblivion. James Dumfries watched us hit the doors like some sad story coming to an end, tears still streaming down his cheeks, obviously totally taken in. His eyes burned with hope. Then he winked out of sight—his time travel over.

  Lu and I returned to reality, but since we were in the set, it looked just like the virtual, sans extras. I wondered what reality Dumfries was waking up to, with all his newfound hope that I—he—would change the past and save a woman long dead.

  Now I’ve done it, I thought. Now I’ve totally fucking done it.

  WHAT DID WHO SAY?

  5

  “Who’s on first?”

  “That’s what I just said. Who’s on first.”

  —BUD ABBOTT AND LOU COSTELLO

  “WHAT DID HE SAY?” THE LIMO DRIVER WANTED TO KNOW.

  The tech people were already packing the equipment, striking the set. In a few hours, this place would once again look like it did a hundred years ago when it went belly-up. This whole thing seemed like an awful lot of trouble to go to for what amounted to a simple shell game.

  “I asked you a question,” the driver said.

  “I’m sorry. What did who say?”

  “The old guy. He talked to you. I was watching on the monitor.” He pointed to where a monitor had been. It was already packed away. These guys were fast.

  The monitor pulled together the visuals. Only the crew listened to the audio. You can’t have amplified sound drifting into the illusion—Lu and I would’ve sounded like a couple of gods having a reverberant chitchat. The driver couldn’t have heard my low conversation with Dumfries from where he stood, and even if he had, he would’ve only heard my half. “He lost it. He begged me to patch it up with the girl someway. I told him there was no hope.”

  The driver gave a quick little shake of his head as he tilted it back, frowning. “Isn’t that always the way? Pathetic, isn’t it? I couldn’t listen to that damn recording of the two of them. Breaks your heart. A thing like that. The way I see it, if the bitch was two-timing him, he’s better off without her, and that’s the truth. But tell a guy that. Just try. She was probably fucking all those guys.” The driver talked to me as if Lu wasn’t even there. I could feel her doing a slow burn beside me.

  Maybe she wanted me to defend womanhood, but I just wanted to get going. The way I saw it, you don’t piss off the ride home, especially when you don’t even know where you are. I thought he was wrong about Galatea, though. I didn’t know what was right, but I didn’t like his theory.

  “Dumfries spoke to you?” Lu asked me when we were inside the limo.

  “Yeah.”

  “What did he say?” She still seemed angry. Was this all about the loutish driver? Try to look more scared, she’d told me. What would I have told her? Look angrier. But what were Galatea and Lu so pissed about? Surely, it couldn’t just be the exasperating stupidity of tactless men.

  “Like I told the driver: ‘Don’t let her go’—he said— ‘you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.’ What could I say? I told him I didn’t know that there was a whole lot I could do about it.”

  “And he just took that and let it go?”

  “He saw you coming and skedaddled. Maybe he was afraid of being dumped twice.” I laughed at my weak joke, but it sailed right by her. She was lost in her own thoughts. Something in all this was confusing her, and she was trying to figure it out. I was plenty confused myself, but I knew I didn’t know enough to figure it out, so I didn’t even bother, and I knew more than she did, or at least I thought I did. Does she know something I don’t, I wondered, or am I only thinking that because I just lied to her? Guilt does funny things, I reminded myself.

  I’m not sure why the lie came so readily. Sure, the driver might’ve been listening. That’s probably why he was there in the first place, a backup to electronic surveillance, which this little space buggy probably had in abundance if anyone was interested in our conversation. But that wasn’t why I lied. I didn’t tell Lu the truth even when limo and driver were long gone. The old guy had said Galatea must be kept in the dark, and somehow I thought it was a good idea to apply that to Lu. Something about this whole thing was seriously not right. Did I not trust her? Was I t
rying to protect her? Hell, I don’t know. Nicholas Bainbridge didn’t either. But he was a careful sort, was Nick.

  “I should tell Salvador,” I said, pointing to the box.

  She nodded, looking at me funny. She knew I was lying to her. Maybe she could’ve told me why. “I doubt if he’s plugged in, but you can try. I’ll sit this one out. I’m in no mood for Salvador.” I didn’t ask what a Salvador mood might be. Greedy? Foolish? Once was enough for me, and she’d met the guy a couple of times before today.

  I touched the box, returned to its last locale, but this time, as Lu predicted, it was sans Salvador. I even hollered out his name like I was calling an order into the kitchen, but he was nowhere to be found. I wasn’t surprised. He was as much a fiction, I was guessing, as Lu and I impersonating Jim and Galatea, as big a phony as his time machine. I called up the photos he’d laid out on the table from the box’s memory, and sent copies to myself. But the most important images I already had burned into my brain, those eyes looking into me, pleading with me. You must do something different. That’s what I like, I thought. Clear direction.

  I was dead tired. We’d been at this all day. I checked the time on the wall clock, but in this saved reality, the second hand had halted its sweep about the time Jim and Galatea hit the mean streets. It was a lot later than that. We probably wouldn’t get home till after dark.

  “What did Salvador have to say?” Lu asked when I returned from the box.

  I shrugged. “He wasn’t there.” No reason to lie about that.

  She nodded. “Did you notice the crew?”

  “What about them? Efficient as hell.”