Originally published in Sycamore Review Summer/Fall 2019
It was easy for Marina to spot the future people who came to kill her baby. Most were so disoriented by their trip across time they would dart their heads like lost dogs, looking for anything familiar and finding nothing. Some were overtaken by coughing fits brought on by air that did not agree with their future lungs. Some just cried, great wails of fright and want not unlike her baby’s but so much more disturbing for possessing the depth of adulthood. These cues gave Marina more than enough time to identify the future people and lose herself in a crowd, for she was in the city now and there was always a crowd nearby. She adored crowds. The future people were large of face and frame, so even the more disciplined ones who resisted the impulse to cough or cry were betrayed by their size.
That is why Marina did not worry all that much when she ventured out in the morning to drop off her piecework from the night before and pick up the day’s load from the dress factory, with her baby clasped close to her breast in a sling, babbling and pointing with rapturous wonder at the streetcars as they clanged up and down the high street. She was sure any danger from the future people would make itself known to her with ample time to react and escape. Marina often wondered why they bothered to hide themselves at all. She wondered this much more often than she wondered how the future people came to her from the future, or why they were so intent on murdering her baby yet so helpless at the task. These realities of her new life had been established long ago and were not, in her opinion, worth pondering.
Marina was not surprised the morning she returned from the factory, her satchel full of piecework and her baby working a sore spot into her clavicle with the top of his head, when she heard a clamor coming from the other side of the front door of her tiny fourth-floor flat. She paused with her key inserted in the lock and waited for the the noise to play itself out. It sounded like a person who’d been shoved down a flight of stairs, the din of a clumsy flailing of limbs trying in vain to break a fall, oofs and ows and other exclamations of shock and pain. Then a low moan. They’ve come here now, Marina thought. Before this moment the future people had only come after her in the street, or in her father’s barn before she fled the countryside a few months ago, but never directly in her home. A new thing, she thought. What a marvel new things were!
Marina opened the door with her head held high. This was a skill she had only acquired once she came to the city. Back home she’d been taught to keep her head down, and the whispers of the old busybodies that darted over her head like knives helped to keep it down, But in the city a lowered head was an invitation to be shoved aside, to be cut in front of at the streetcar line, to miss one’s turn at the bakery counter. So she retrained herself to look up and look ahead. She found she enjoyed this much more than staring at the ground.
As Marina entered her flat she saw a future person sprawled out near the room’s only window, which was set a little too close to the floor, the sill no higher than her knees. He was pale, as the future people tended to be, his lack of color emphasized by the blinding glare of the morning sun charging through the window, so strong it overpowered decades of factory grime coating the panes in the color of a bruise. His head was shaved in the same strange manner as all the future people, uneven and patchy, as if sections of his scalp were attended to at different times. He wore the standard future people suit, the one that looked like it was made of sateen, though the comparison was far from exact, and Marina only thought of sateen because she could think of no other material it resembled. The suit was glossy and gray, with thin yellow stripes down the sides of both pants and jacket. Tags and buttons were affixed to its front, blinking with tiny lights of red and blue. Beacons flashing forward to his time, Marina thought.
The future person’s head was thrown back in agony. He was in a great deal of pain but determined to not cry out and give himself away, even though he had to know that Marina had seen him by now. Perhaps he did not because his eyes were clasped shut tightly, blocking out all light. Marina took note of his left leg, which was bent underneath him at a strange angle. He’d injured it during his trip, it seemed. Marina knew the travel was arduous from witnessing other future people clutching their limbs or heads in pain, but she’d never seen a future person in as much distress as the one collapsed on the floor of her flat.
“You should cry if you wish,” Marina told the future person. “I know you’re here. There’s no point in holding it in.”
The future person inhaled a brief gasp before letting loose a howl that echoed against the low ceiling and pressed harshly against Marina’s ears and caused her baby to start crying himself. Marina gently rubbed her baby’s back and shushed him until he was reassured that all was well. Her baby let go of his anguish in a succession of heaves and soon was cooing just like he did when he saw the streetcars. The future person was not so easy to placate. He expelled sobs and some noises that might have been speech in a tongue Marina did not know, or might have been nothing more than the universal language of pain.
Marina scanned the future person’s waist for a holster. The future people often had sidearms of some kind. She did not relish the thought of trying to disarm the future person, even if he was injured to the point of incapacitation. The future people could be relentless, for they were desperate creatures. She recalled a struggle with a future person who came at her in father’s barn and continued running toward her even after father had plunged a pitchfork into his back. Her father had not believed her about the future people before then, though she granted that it was difficult to believe stories of people from many centuries hence who were determined to kill her baby. She thought this encounter would convince father, but she was wrong. If anything, father denied the truth more vehemently afterwards, even after witnessing the future person disappear into thin air and the pitchfork drop to the hay in the spot he vacated. He had no alternative explanation for what he’d seen, but at the same time he believed Marina had done something to bring this on herself. He said this without saying it, for father said as little as he could manage with words and communicated the rest through grunts and silence. The whole countryside agreed with him. Everything bad that had happened to Marina was no one’s fault but Marina’s. Very well. Let them all think that, back in the countryside, so far away from her now.
She scanned the floorboards beneath the window, shielding her eyes from the glare until they adjusted to the light. A gun-shaped object lay on the floor, out of the future person’s reach. It did not look like any gun she had seen before, but it appeared to have a trigger and a grip and was the size of a handgun, and Marina had learned that things that look enough like guns tend to be guns. Marina approached the weapon with caution and lifted the barrel slightly with the toe of her shoe. It had the heft and sheen of a Bakelite telephone receiver. When the gun didn’t go off at her touch, Marina gave it a heel kick, knocking it behind her and away from the future person. Tomorrow on her way to the dress factory, she would stop at the bridge and drop the gun into the clouds of soap and oil that dotted the stinking river where all the manufacturing waste was deposited. She spared a passing thought to the idea of keeping it to protect herself, but remembered her baby was crawling and beginning to hoist himself up on two adorable chubby legs that looked like ham hocks. He would be walking and exploring soon. The time would come when he could easily find such a thing in the flat on his own. Best to remove any possibility of that danger.
The future person’s loud cries gave way to a steady groan. His hands were pressed against his eyes. Marina knew he’d come here with intent to kill her baby but nonetheless thought it cruel to leave him to suffer. Though his injured leg appeared to be bent at an impossible angle, she believed she could straighten it. On the farm where she grew up the cows who were about to calve would sometimes break a leg from carrying so much weight. Father had splinted their legs and brought them some relief. A straight leg can heal, he would say, as if it were the deepest and holiest wisdom. Helping the future person would be much like attending a cow, Marina thought. It was unlikely he would understand what she said or what was happening to him any more than a cow might, but he would know and appreciate relief when it came.
Marina placed the baby in the small crate full of excelsior and hay that served as his crib. He grabbed the crate’s borders hoisted himself into a standing position, curious about what was going on around him, but showed no interest in or ability to venture beyond its confines, much to Marina’s relief. She then stalked over to the future person’s side, hitting the floor harshly with her heels to announce her approach, for his hands remained pressed to his eyes and she couldn’t be sure if he saw her coming. She pulled his hands away from his face. Tears rolled down his cheeks. She held out her own hands flatly, to show she meant no harm. She grasped the calf of the injured leg at a spot near the ankle and lifted it from the floor until the rubbery sole of his laceless boot no longer dragged on the floor. Then in one quick unbroken motion she yanked the leg forward and straight. She felt a crack resound through her hands, the vibration of a thing fitting back into its place. The future person howled anew, a cry that was infantile in its expression of misunderstanding and helplessness. He heaved with exhaustion as sweat beaded on his brow.
Marina had nothing to offer the future person for his pain but a bottle of whiskey she bought after her last payday from the factory as a small indulgence to dole out to herself in miniscule portions when her baby was down for the night. The countryside would not have allowed a woman, no matter how old, to purchase a bottle of whiskey even if she did earn her own money, which the countryside would also have not allowed. But here in the city, the wonderful city, cash spoke up for you no matter who you were. Marina dug the bottle out from the depths of her cupboard and poured a generous amount into a tin cup, trying not to think how many sequins she had sewn, stabbing material until her fingers bled, to earn that much comfort.
She knelt at the future person’s side and pressed the cup to his lips. He refused to part them. He feared she meant to poison him. Marina brought the cup to her own lips and took the tiniest of sips to show she meant no harm. She expelled a small laugh as she offered the tin cup to the future person once more, thinking how strange it was that he had come intending to kill her baby and yet she was the one forced to prove she had no ill intentions.
The future person took a healthy gulp and coughed, not expecting the whiskey’s harsh burn. When his shock had faded, the future person began to speak, his words elongated and broken up by shortness of breath and his lack of fluency in Marina’s language.
“Do you, know why, I, am here?” the future person asked, his query suffused with the odd rhythms of the future people. These people have never learned how to speak to me, Marina thought as she nodded. “So then, you know what, I must do.”
“I know what you wish to do,” Marina said, slowing her speech so he could grasp every word, “but you won’t.”
“I must,” the future person said. “My mission is, to prevent him. Keep him from, being. You do not, know what he, will do.”
He pointed toward the dark recess of the flat, back toward Marina’s worktable and bed, where the baby peered over the edge of his crate-crib. The future person’s finger seemed so long and thin. Marina had not noticed this physical feature of any of the other future people she’d encountered. She had seldom gotten so close to one, however, save the ones who tried to attack her in the barn back in the countryside, or the future person at the city market fruit stand who tried to snatch the baby from her arms but tripped over himself in the effort, allowing Marina enough time to sprint and hop on an approaching streetcar. As the streetcar clanged down the high street she found herself laughing about the incident, much to her surprise. She was pleased to realize she was not frightened but delighted.
“It is true, I do not know what he will do,” Marina said. “It is a thing I need not know.”
“You do not, understand,” the future person said, a shiver of panic running through his voice that was palpable despite his strange emphases.
Marina held a finger to her lips, shushing the future person as she would her baby. She left his side so she could light the stove to warm the kettle for a cup of tea. She needed to get started on the piecework soon or else she would never finish the day’s work in time, and she could not work without her tea. She could allow herself small indulgences like these. The city offered them to her.
The future person let out another groan as Marina lit the stove. He had tried to stand up under his own power but could not, and collapsed back to the floor in frustration.
“You do not, know the suffering that, will come, because of, him” the future person croaked out.
Marina almost laughed again. They always said this, the future people, always in the same awkward, imprecise words.
Suffering. The word brought to mind her husband, her baby’s father, whose mind and spirit were toppled by the great war. He left the countryside carefree and returned from the front in one piece but with his soul burned to a cinder. She remembered that he was once a kinder man, but only in the abstract, as if it were something she once read in a history book. It was impossible to remember her husband’s old self when the mere thought of his face brought with it the memory of his fist against her cheek. This memory did not nauseate her nearly as much as that of the screaming and crying that would follow his blows, sobs demanding her forgiveness interspersed with accusations that the pain was her own fault because she’d used some careless word that set him off like a landmine. Then the memory of the sneers of neighbors that echoed around her, blaming Marina for the day her husband was found in the river. So many whispers that she’d driven to him to it, honed deep in the smiths of tiny minds. They never whispered about the bruises she brought to the market, or about two years of smelling death in trenches that curdled her husband into something sour, but they had plenty to say about her responsibility for his sad end. The clucking make Marina realize that they would never accept her, and worse yet, that they never had accepted her, that they had always marked her as different, that they had always been searching for a reason to shun her. The whispers stabbed at her shabby dress, the only one she owned, the one that was no worse than any dress owned by any other poor woman in the countryside, but somehow the whispers made her feel shame for it all the same, made her hate the pattern of flowers pounded into dullness by too many washings. Marina didn’t know this future person’s suffering, not specifically, but she would stack hers against anyone’s, if there must be a contest about such things.
“Are you speaking of other people’s suffering or your own?” Marina asked. The future person scowled. Some of the future people were confused or frightened by how much Marina knew about them, but most of them were annoyed, as if she had pried into their business and not simply acquired her knowledge over months of encounters. The future people were so alike one another that it was almost comical, and they were always perturbed to learn this of themselves. They asked questions like, What do you know of the future? How did you learn of us? She did not answer, for it was so obvious: They came to her, and she listened to what they screamed before they disappeared, and that is how she learned. Marina knew she was supposed to be scared of the future, scared of these people, scared of the strangeness and complication, but her life was neither strange nor complicated. Children cried, husbands went mad, future people came to kill her baby, and she thwarted them. It was simple, really.
“Would you like some tea?” Marina asked. “I know you will not be here for long but you’re welcome to a cup if you like.”
The future person began speaking in his own language before stopping himself short and restarting in Marina’s. “How do you know I, will not be, here for long?”
“You never are. I have seen your friends. They all disappear without warning. For a split second there will be a small crease in the air where they once stood, as if the world were being pressed inward by a tremendous fingernail, pushing them in an instant through a hole too small and thin to see, and then they are gone, leaving behind a smell like sulfur or a blown-out candle.”
The kettle screeched. Marina removed it from the heat and poured herself a mug. “There is plenty if you’d like some,” she told the future person, blowing across the mug’s surface to cool down her tea as she carried it with her to the workbench. She laid out her piecework there, producing one blouse and a sack of sequins from her satchel. It was far from exciting, but piecework allowed her to work at home with her baby nearby, and she had enough excitement from the future people to not need it from her employment. When she was still fresh in the city, she walked into the factory as if she’d been working there for years and told a boss that she deserved employment because her husband had been killed by the war, leaving her and her baby all alone. As far as she was concerned, this was the truth. It was not long before she worked her way up from the basic task of completing hems to the delicate job of sewing on sequins, intricate work and well paid, too. At home Marina’s mother had always yelled at her for her shoddy mending, and now here she was putting the flashy finishing touches on fancy dresses, dresses destined to be worn by rich ladies. The city was a wonderful place.
She wondered sometimes what she would do when her baby was old enough for school. She probably could not send him, certainly not when he was too young to spot the future people himself or understand what danger they posed. If she was still doing piecework for the dress factory at home, she would carve out some time each day to teach her baby all he needed to know. Their adventures would change with the years and take new forms and bring them to new places. It excited her just to think of the possibilities. More adventures, years of adventures, just the two of them, just as it had been ever since she boarded the train to the city in the dead of night and turned her back on the countryside, picking a seat that directed her eyes toward the city. She hadn’t even bought a ticket, for she had no money. She simply got on the train because she had to leave, could not take the countryside for one more day, and whenever the conductor came down the aisle looking for a ticket she pretended to nurse her baby, driving the conductor away with shame. She sat there with her back to the countryside and swore to keep herself turned that way forever.
The future person struggled to sit up. The best he could manage was to hoist his torso up partway, leaning back on his arms. They quaked from the effort.
“You must listen, to me,” the future person said.
“I am listening,” Marina said, though she kept her eyes trained on her work, flattening a blouse piece against her workbench as she prepared to stab it with glitter. “Did you believe I was not listening? If so, I apologize. I do not wish to appear rude.”
“People will die,” the future person said, his voice aquiver.
“I imagine so,” Marina said. “Most people do, from what I understand.”
The future person exhaled a groan quite different than the ones he’d expelled before, much higher pitched. Marina interpreted this as a sign of exasperation.
“Many people,” the future person said. “Many millions. Hundreds millions. I know he appears, as baby now. But time will, change him. You cannot understand, what he will do…”
“’You cannot understand what he will do to us all and that is why you must allow me to do this’,” Marina said, repeating the words she’d heard so many future people say to her. “I know your script. Surely you don’t believe you are the first one to visit me. You must know many others have come before you.”
Marina thought back to the first one. He came upon her in the barn as she was milking early one morning. Her baby was in the house with her mother, thank goodness. Her husband had been dead only a few weeks yet father would not spare her from the daily chores, not if she lived under his roof. Marina heard a rustling in the pen next to her but thought it was only a mouse or some other small creature of no concern to her. Then the future person jumped out from the pen, his arms outstretched as if he believed he could take flight, bellowing sounds she could not understand. He fell with a crash to the ground when Marina darted out of the way. She moved so fast she surprised herself. She was even more surprised when she brought the milk pail crashing down on the future person’s head as he lay on the barn floor, aiming its heavy bow at the base of his skull. He didn’t make a move after that. As Marina worried she might have killed the man, he suddenly disappeared. There was a slight fluttering before her and a great pressure around her head, and for a moment the landscape before her was drenched in light as if she were snowblind. This passed quickly, but it was the only thing that indicated someone had been here and then moved on. She could still feel the fright this first encounter gave her. Not the fright of being terrified, but the fright of excitement, the fright of learning what one truly enjoys and wondering when one shall be able to taste it again.
“I suppose I shall have to move now that I’ve been found here,” Marina said with a sigh. “It’s really too bad. This place was quite reasonably priced for a space I didn’t have to share with anyone else, and the landlord is a blind old crone who’s losing her mind and barely remembers to collect the rent from month to month. But who knows, maybe I can find something just as good, or even better. I will ask the girls at the factory. They have been so helpful to me. Everything really is wonderful here.”
“Please…” the future person croaked out, pushing all his pain to the front, choosing to sound pathetic now that his hopes of overpowering her were dashed. Marina had heard future people do this before. She was well beyond the point where such tactics could pull at her heartstrings.
“I wish you should know I am not upset with you,” Marina said. She turned toward the future person for a moment and smiled, which alarmed him. “I know you’re a prisoner of some kind. All of your friends have been prisoners, or at least the ones who have spoken to me were prisoners. I know you have no choice. I know you’ve been made to do this. At one point or another, we all must do things we don’t want to do merely to survive, mustn’t we?”
“I owe,” the future person confessed. “I only wanted, school and, now I owe.” She assumed he meant he owed money. She heard the shame in his voice even through his difficulty with her language, the shame of the poor she knew too well. She needed no translation for this.
“Will they kill you if you do not complete your mission?” Marina asked. “Or will they torture you?”
“No, the rates, go up. Still in hole. Forever in hole, no way out.”
Marina heard her baby begin to whimper, then erupt into full-blown crying. She sensed from the quality of his yowl that he merely craved attention, that he was annoyed by his mother addressing this stranger while he was awake and here and hers. It wasn’t the plaintive wail of hunger or discomfort, but the jabbing yelp of an insistence that refused to be ignored. She indulged him anyway and picked him up and jostled and rocked him and assured him that all would be okay. She would have no peace otherwise, and it made her feel good to bring him comfort, to solve such a simple problem. It was so wonderful to have an answer.
“But it’s only money,” Marina said in between shushes as she rubbed her baby’s back. “If they will not take your life and you don’t have the money, what can they take from you?”
The future person expelled a noise, something like a but or a well, but he traveled no further. He wished to object but abandoned the argument for lack of counterpoint.
Marina’s collarbone stung from the pressure of her baby nestling his head into his favorite spot. His little hands grasped at her dress but could not hold on to the material and so they balled into fists and knocked against her with the weight of exhaustion.
“So odd you and your friends come for me now,” Marina said. “You could have come for me as a child and destroyed me then, so very easily. You could have even gone after my husband before we were married. He was in the war for two whole years. You could have sent a man into the trenches and shot him there and no one would have ever been the wiser. He would have been just another pine box on a train. But no. You come for me when I am alone. When I am more than alone, alone with a child. I should be so helpless. And still you fail.”
Marina walked in the direction of the future person. She advanced slowly, as if wishing to sneak up on a skittish animal. The future person flinched. He jerked backward before remembering there was little he could do on his compromised leg.
Marina stopped and crouched before him, her baby still pressing with his little fists but much softer. He was almost asleep now.
“I am grateful you have come for him,” Marina said, nudging the baby in his direction for a moment. “Do you know why? Because you make every day a new question to answer, a new mountain to climb. There is so much more excitement in this life than the one I was doomed to live before you and your friends began visiting me. Imagine I was still in the rotten countryside. If I spent another day under father’s roof I might have followed my husband into the river. But now I am here in the city, where every day is new, and it’s all thanks to you!”
The future person grasped at the zipper that ran down the front of his suit. Marina reached out her left hand to grasp his. The gesture was tender enough that her baby, now fully asleep, did not budge.
“Are you trying to remove the suit?” she asked. He nodded. “I do not think it wise. I have seen some of your friends do this because they wish to remain here and escape their fate. All of them experienced quite a bit of pain. Something about the suit allows you to exist here and without it…existence appears to be unpleasant. Please trust me on that. Of course, I cannot stop you. You are free here, as free as I am. Remove it if you wish, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
The future person let go of his zipper and clasped an arm over his eyes, blocking out the light again.
“I know I have said this already, but I am truly grateful to you,” she said. “The fact that you are here tells me I have won. Every time I see one of your friends, I know you have not succeeded. Otherwise, why would you keep coming? When I see your suits and fat, confused faces, I know my adventure will continue. This is such a gift to me!”
The future person began to sob. Marina knew these were not crocodile tears, but the result of true anguish. The future people often cried when they knew they would have to return to their time empty handed. This was uncomfortable to watch and hear, no matter how many times she witnessed a future person weep at the realization of his failure. But the alternative was to let them do what they had come here to do, and Marina would not allow the adventure to end yet.
“I do wish you the best, once you leave here of course,” Marina said as she rose again. She placed her baby in his crib and watched his tiny lips burr as deep breaths passed between them. His eyes seemed to dart behind the lids. Perhaps he was dreaming, though what a baby might dream of she could not possibly imagine. Perhaps he too dreamed of adventures.
Marina sat back down at her workbench and resumed her work as she hummed a song to herself to drown out the sobs of the future person. The song was “After You’ve Gone.” It was the first tune that came to mind. She wondered if the future person knew the song and, if so, if he considered it an ironic choice or merely a joke at his expense. And then she felt the great pressing that drove the future person through a seam she could not see back from whence he came. There was no sound, no whoosh or rushing of wind, only a feeling like that of rising up suddenly when one has been lying down for quite a while, the rush of blood to the head that makes everything seem a bit too bright and unreal for a few moments before the moment passes and one forgets that sensation of difference. The snuffed candle smell followed soon after. Once that was gone there was nothing left in Marina’s flat but the sound of the baby’s breaths and the murmur of an entire wonderful city bustling beneath her feet.