TT VISIT TO AN UGLY PLACE AND TIME

I stepped out of the wall, into an alley. There were shadows all round, punctuated by distant street lamps of an unfamiliar color. I resisted hugging the shadows. I wanted to know where I was, and when. The hardest part of time travel is that it takes so long to find out what the date is, where you are. When I took my wife to 1953, it was two days before I saw a newspaper in a rack. I had hit the date perfectly, because the past is easy. It is the future that is hard. When do you want to arrive? No remembered targets. You can aim at a city or town, but when is it that you’ve arrived?

Well, it looked like the middle of the night. It was foggy, which didn’t help my sense of aversion to this place. No news stands around. It all looked deserted. It also looked like hard times. No cars anywhere. No litter. No graffiti. This didn’t look like a slum, but it felt like one. I melted back into the shadows, thinking hard. It might be best if I just opened a portal and when elsewhere. Anywhere but here.

Suddenly, light seemed to surround me. Two men came quickly down the alley. They too, had been in shadows. Their actinic lights hurt my eyes. They seemed to be authority figures, and not thugs, thankfully. But I was soon to change my mind.

“Well, well. What have we here?” One said to the other. 

His voice was light, but I felt the somberness of it.

“Where’s his clothes? Does he dress that way to show he’s better than the rest of us?” Said the other one.

I was wearing what I wore on the trip with my wife, but these two looked like those people in China, in their green cotton pajama uniforms. All that was missing was their Maoist hats. These two had no head coverings, despite the coolness of the evening/morning.

“Lets see your card, N.P.!”

I starred. “What card would that be? You want my driver’s license? I don’t have it with me.”

“He’s funny, Citizen.” Exclaimed one to the other.

“But you see we are not laughing. Show us your card!” The other one put his hand on my shoulder roughly.

I saw then that they carried batons, and I could picture blows coming.

I quickly said, “I don’t have my card. I was robbed by someone with a knife to my throat, and he took it. He took everything, including my money.”

“Money? No one uses money here. It is illegal for you to have any.”

I asked, “How do you buy things, then?”

“With your National Identity Card. How can you not know that, you non-person?” He forced his words using jabs to my stomach with his baton.

I now had my back to the wall, and they were close on either side of me. I could see I was going to be detained.

“What is this you are carrying?” One said, pointing to my collector in my hand.

“It is a toy. I’m bringing it to a child.” I rolled it over in my hand, so that they could see it was nothing much. Just a featureless rectangle of a box, with a button on one side. I should have kept it in my pocket, but they came up to me too fast.

“Well, Citizen, we seem to have caught us a renegade. Captain will be glad to see him.” The one on the right spoke to his friend, but they both had me by my arms, and I was quickly following lockstep wherever it was they were going.

By then, they had relieved me of my collector, and I had no idea if I would ever see it again. Whatever plans or hopes I had had, they were obvoiusly down the toilet. And so, it seemed, would my life follow close behind. I could only go with them in silence. The less I said, the better.

We were soon in front of a station house; our destination. I saw cars for the first time, parked at the curb, but they were all flat surfaces and odd angles. They were built heavy, like trucks, but they were small like sub compact cars. The only thing that kept them from being pickups was a proper short trunk where the pickup bed would be. Their wide tires were small, and they had no hubcaps. The gray paint with which they were covered was flat, without reflection, reminding me of army trucks. I could tell they were some sort of police, or government vehicles, but I would had fired the designer of these relics. They were hideous. Where was this place where I came to be?

Still in their grip, I was led up a few steps into the building. It was as drab as anything on the street, but it seemed to be clean, at least. I was booked as a non-person, whatever that was, and brought into a room in the back of the building. At least it seemed to be the last room, because the hallway ended near the open door I was pushed into.

In the room was a small metal table and two metal chairs, without cushioning. Near a corner was a concrete post, about three feet high, with a metal loop in its top. There was a single, bare bulb in the ceiling. The room was painted in featureless flat gray, like the rest of the building. For all I knew, it could have been a movie set, for some dystopian horror flick.

The door was shut and locked on me, so I sat in one of the chairs. I suddenly felt too old to be doing this. All I wanted was to find someplace where my cancer could be treated, or at least where I could get some medicine that could knock it out of my body. Clearly, this place was not that place. Not at all.

I waited, it seemed for hours. I had no watch. My iPhone was in my bag, back at the motel. I never brought that with me. I probably should have gotten a cheap timepiece at some store in the present, before I left, but I did not envision ever needing one. I waited a very long time.

I had laid my head down on the table, and I guess I slept. I did not hear anyone come in, but he rudely kicked my shin as he sat down, and I sprang suddenly awake. I resisted rubbing my eyes. I only looked at him, sizing him up, as he was doing the same to me.

He was a short, stocky man, with a short gray buzz-cut hair style. He wore the same featureless outfit the others were wearing. I felt out of place sitting in front of him.

I waited for him to speak.

“You have a name?”

“Roger Born.”

“How is it you do not have your card?”

“I actually never had one. I was not aware I must have one, coming here.”

“How did you arrive?”

“I drove.”

“From where?”

“Out West. California.”

He raised his voice sharply. “You are lying! Only officials drive vehicles. There is no longer any such place as California. How did you get here?”

“I am not sure you would believe me, even if I told you.”

“What is that you are wearing? Where is your proper suit?”

“You mean what you are wearing? I’ve never worn anything like that. I wouldn’t want to, Comrade.”

The man suddenly frowned at me, raising his voice. “We never use that term! Only Communists use that word! We are Socialist Citizens!”

I was taken aback. I quickly apologized. “I meant no offense. I do not understand this place where I am. Nothing makes sense here, except to think it is some gulag I’ve fallen into.”

The man then laid my collector on the table, out of my reach. “How did you come to be here?” He asked again, quietly.

His words sent a chill through me, for some reason. It was the way he said it, as if I somehow was being tortured, and he was near the end of his questioning. All sorts of visions came into my head, and none of them were pleasant.

He pointed with his head toward the post in the corner. “We tie uncooperative people up to that post, so they cannot sit down. The must remain standing. The slug-soft illiterate people of our land cannot stand such ‘torture’ for very long. After a few dozen hours, they are ready to admit to anything, just be be able to sit or lay down. They disgust me. You, however, seem to be somehow of stronger stock. You are old, and I can see that you are ill, but there is a bit of steel in you. And I suspect you are also an educated man. How is it that you came to be here?”

I pointed to the collector between us, “With that.”

“You called it a toy. What does it do? We’ve already scanned it. It has very old electronics, but we cannot ascertain what it does.”

“It collects Muons, which are harmless subatomic particles, and it focuses them to make a portal, through which I walk. It allows me to come places I could not reach otherwise.” I refrained from calling it a time machine. Most people do not believe in such things.

“Why are you here?”

“I am looking for a cure for my cancer. It is a slow-growing transitional cell bladder cancer, and where I am from, there is no cure yet.”

The man looked surprised. “Here, we have great doctors and wonderful medicine. However, due to population pressure, we do not treat cancer at all. When you get it, we wait until the pain is unbearable, and we offer euthanasia. It is painless and quick. Sometimes, a person takes it right away, after finding out that he has cancer. Neither do we treat most ailments, preferring that the majority of our Citizens are healthy enough to work. I see, however, that you have had some sort of surgery, which is improbable at the least and quite impossible otherwise.” He was starring at my bypass scar on my chest, at my partially open shirt.

It was my turn to show surprise. “That seems rather barbaric, letting people die!”

“Not at all. All of our Citizens serve the State. Only healthy ones can do it well. Those who cannot, become a burden on the State. There is already not enough food and basic goods to go around. Ours is an ‘equitable’ solution; one that everyone agrees is good, and which is in line with Evolution, don’t you agree?”

I was silent at this, but only for a moment. “How long has this been going on?”

“Ever since our first Socialist President, about 17 years now.”

I had guessed who that might be, whom he was referring to. I was very glad, because if that were true, then I would be alive nearly two decades into my own personal future, because I could not time travel beyond the day of my death!

He could see the bright gleam of gladness that swept across my face. It was too late to hide that, even though I quickly put on my best poker face again. I did not know how I did it, but I barely kept myself from asking what the date was.

The man across from me kept looking at me. He was silent for a long time. Then it seemed that he reached a decision, because he stood and went to the door. He turned once more to me, and said, “I can see that you are an accomplished liar. How good a liar you are, will determine your fate right now. I am going to leave this room, and lock the door. Don’t worry, it is soundproof. You can see that there is nothing in the room but what appears here. There is no water tap. There is a sewer hole in the floor over there, covered with a cap, so you can relieve yourself.” 

“Please note that I am leaving you your ‘toy.’ But. . . If you are a liar who is telling me the truth, when I leave, so will you. And you should never come back. But if you are not the great liar I think you are, in three or four weeks, I will come here and find your rotting corpse. I will then have to deal with it. In either case, you will be gone from this place where you do not belong. Whoever you are, good-bye.”

“Wait!” I said, “At least tell me your name.” I scarcely believed this man, this obscure official, was giving me my freedom! I almost did not believe my good fortune, found so unexpectedly in the middle of such hopeless madness. I think I had been here almost a day.

I was quickly standing, with my collector in my hand, pointing it at a wall. The portal was forming as he opened the door. Walking out, with his back to me, he said, “My name is Zumwalter.”

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