TT – REBORN

I must have the flu. I’m so hot. Feverish.

Did I get it meeting Stevo? Certainly not from his friends. They were very cool ‘people’ and not at all what I expected. They looked very human. They felt that way, being touched by them.

It was a lot like Bombay, being there among them in their city. Thousands of them surrounded me. They walked three-deep past me on either side, with their hands extended out to me. I felt a continual brushing of their hands as they moved along, in a continual, choreographed conga line. I had not expected the singing. Odd. Otherworldly. But beautiful.

The line around me moved for an hour or more. Stevo stood in front of me, grinning. But unlike Bombay, it was not a filthy place at all. It smelled of Spring. The air was a tonic. These people were not filthy, with human smells. There was not the overwhelming smell of spices and perfume to hide the stench, like Bombay. Does silicon have a smell?

I appreciated meeting Mary, best of all. She is beautiful, and serene. And older than any woman I’ve ever met. She just doesn’t look it. Stevo said these people never die. Are they immortal? How can anyone know that?

But thinking about their city made me remember that I was now sick, somehow. That made no sense. I almost never get sick. People with cancer don’t get colds, or the flu. Their immune system is too busy fighting tumors.

I need to leave. I came home, after the abortive attempt to go elsewhen, after leaving Stevo.

I couldn’t have left where Stevo was anyway, since I did not have my collector. The Inspector had mine, having removed it at that crime scene I stumbled upon. Probably had it locked in his desk; a souvenir of the murderer he had captured.

Stevo provided me with another collector. One that looked exactly like the one I had lost. (What? no miniature technology?) I didn’t let on my disappointment at all. He could have stranded me there in his time, and there was nothing I could have done about it. I was glad just to have a collector again.

After long good-byes all around, I set the collector for 1957, because that was my year. The perfect summer of my childhood. I was 12 that year, living in San Antonio with my parents and brothers. I wanted to experience it again, as an adult.

But the downtown narrow street or alley near the river walk was where I encountered that man who briefly grabbed my collector, as he ran by me, making his own portal and leaving who-knows-where?

Where am I? Oh yes. I’m home. I need to leave. My wife, and Roger will be home soon. I cannot stay. I made a hole in the wall, to my motel room in Barstow. Man, that place stinks! But I have no where else to go in the present.

I should plan to find a place in time, where I know I can always retreat to. Someplace safe. (Who am I kidding?)

I lie down on the questionably clean bed. I had already put my own blanket over the cover. I never sleep between the sheets of such places. At least this place did not have bed-bugs. More and more hotels and motels of the present are infested with them. Google the topic before you travel. There were no bedbugs anywhere in the fifties and sixties. DDT killed them all.

But I can’t close my eyes. Resting, it seems, is out of the question. I’ve had my Vicodin, so I’ve no pain to speak of. Just the mild headache high of the meds. Come to think of it, I don’t have a headache. I said I had the flu, but my head is not stopped up.

Standing in the tiny bathroom, I look at myself in the mirror. I stare.

Somehow, I do not look as bad as I feel. More than that, I look somewhat younger. I blink my eyes, then I rub them. I look again. No. Its not the meds that are playing tricks with my vision. I am younger!

How? . . .

Ah. I remember reading about Stevo, in one of Roger’s stories. How the dust of the long-dead Mary and the others of that place had changed him. He was dying of several things, besides old age, but the nanocytes (nanites?) of that place had healed his body, effectively making him young again.

Is that was is happening to me? Could it be?

If so, does that mean I no longer have cancer?

Does it mean that my weak, bypassed heart will be healed?

I go again to the bed, lying down on my blanket, trembling. I scarce know what to do.

Then I get up, go out the door and walk across the bare lot to the Dennys next door. I order several things and stuff myself. Then I order more. I’ve rarely had an appetite, but I do now!

Wowser!

(to be continued)

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