Billie

Fiction by Jeff Harrell

I called her Billie. I never learned her real name. Whenever I asked, she just changed the subject.

Billie seemed to fit. You know, like Billy Pilgrim. Too obscure?

I can’t remember the first time I saw her. I assumed we were neighbors. I’d see her outside my apartment building when I left in the morning, standing in the little park across the street. She wasn’t alone. There were always other people around. They were walking their dogs. She was just standing there, staring off into the trees like she was waiting for something.

I got used to her after a few months. I’d see her every few days, sometimes twice a week, sometimes not at all for weeks at a time and then she’d be there three days in a row.

She was always dressed the same. Grey hoodie, dark blue sweats, flip flops. Even in the dead of winter, flip flops.

All right, fine. I first noticed her because she was easy on the eyes. Dark brown hair piled up on the crown of her head, a pale face hidden behind dark sunglasses, a body that I inferred had no particularly egregious flaws. I admit it. I noticed her because she was pretty.

But I think I would have noticed her anyway. Because she was strange. Always in the same clothes. That started to bother me after a while. Always the same clothes.

On the first day of autumn last year, she spoke to me.

It was muggy that morning. I remember that much. Muggy in the way that only D.C. can be muggy. One of those mornings when the air feels thick enough to support your weight, like you could ease backward on your heels and recline in a sort of humidity-filled bean-bag chair.

She was there. Across the street, standing on the sidewalk. She was looking right at me when I stepped outside.

I came down the steps, dodged a car pulling out of the lot, mounted the sidewalk.

“Do you like baseball?” she asked.

She was maybe fifty feet away. She didn’t raise her voice much, but there was no doubt she was talking to me. I stopped. Bizarre way to begin a flirtation, I thought.

“Sure,” I said. She cupped a hand behind her ear. “Sure!” I said louder.

She reached into the pocket of her hoodie, pulled out a scrap of paper. “Cardinals over the Tigers four games to one,” she said.

“Not a chance,” I called back, laughing.

“I’ll see you in six weeks,” she said. And she turned and walked directly into the rising sun.

First week of November. The World Series had come and gone. I should have taken her advice. I lost half a paycheck on a sure-thing bet on the Yankees, at a time when I couldn’t really spare it. I shouldn’t have been betting at all, but the list of things I do even though I shouldn’t is pretty long.

I saw her again Monday morning. Standing on the same spot, wearing the same clothes, looking at me through the same dark sunglasses. I didn’t even think about it. I crossed the street. She didn’t move.

“You know more about baseball than I do,” I said.

“I don’t know the first thing about baseball,” she said, her hands still stuffed into her pockets. It was chilly, and a cold wind was blowing.

“I figured as much,” I said. “I’m not going to freak out. You can tell me.”

“Tell you what?”

“That you come from the future.”

I expected her to laugh. I expected her to assume I was joking. Hell, I assumed I was joking.

I expected her to sneer at me. I expected her, in the utterly impossible event that I was right, to express some degree of surprise. She didn’t do any of those things. She just stood there.

I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t planned it out.

She reached up, pushed her sunglasses up onto her head. Hazel eyes. You almost never see true hazel eyes. They’re almost always a sort of dull brown. But hers were hazel.

“Now isn’t the right time,” she said. “But we’ve got a lot to talk about.”

“When?” I asked.

She looked right into the sun. “I don’t know yet,” she said.

And then she vanished.

Four days before Christmas. I’d spent the past six weeks looking for her. Every morning, every night. On Saturdays I’d get up early just to see if she was waiting for me. She never was.

I came home late that Friday night. I’d skipped a Christmas party to finish some things at work before the holiday. That was my excuse, what I told everybody who asked if I was going. The truth was more complicated.

I was exhausted. I hadn’t been sleeping, hadn’t been eating except when I remembered to which wasn’t often enough. I couldn’t stop thinking about her, about that look in her eyes, about the way she’d just … disappeared.

I’d convinced myself I was probably going crazy. Going? Hell, I was already there, all unpacked and settled in. Normal people don’t have conversations with people who just disappear. It just isn’t done.

I unlocked the lobby door, pushed my way in, mashed the elevator button. The doors opened silently — I was blasting Rachmaninoff on my headphones, the only thing that could drown out my obsession. I stepped into the elevator, pushed the button for my floor and stepped back to lean against the wall. And she was there.

I didn’t say anything. I was afraid to speak, afraid to talk to someone who shouldn’t be, couldn’t be there. Maybe she saw it in my eyes. Maybe she had her own reasons. But whatever the case, she didn’t say anything either.

We rode the elevator up eight floors in silence.

“Drink?” I asked, hanging my coat in the small closet by the door.

“I’d kill for a beer,” she said, glancing at the magazines on my coffee table.

I brought out two bottles, twisted off the caps. We clinked them together and drank.

What would a sane person see in this room right now? A dropped bottle of beer slowly emptying itself into my carpet while I drink from the other one in my hand? Did I just imagine bringing out two bottles? Is the other one still in my fridge?

She looked down again, fanned out the magazines. I got it.

“You’re looking for dates,” I said.

“It’s not really helping,” she said. “Don’t you ever throw these things away?” June’s Playboy was right there on top, cover dulled with a thin coat of dust.

“It’s December,” I said. “December 22. Four days to Christmas.”

She took a long pull on her beer. “Christmas,” she said, wiping a stray drop from her chin on the cuff of her hoodie. “It’s been a long time since my last Christmas.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“Do you have any cigarettes?” she asked.

I did, half a pack left over from before I gave it up, stuffed in a drawer and all but forgotten. They were stale. It was like smoking sawdust. She didn’t seem to mind, and I barely noticed, my hands and fingers picking up old habits without conscious intervention.

Conversation was a long time coming. All I could think of to ask were the usual things — where did you grow up, what do you do for a living — that seemed so absurd in that context. Life hadn’t prepared me for making small talk with a time traveler.

Time traveler. God, I nearly choked on my beer just thinking it. It wasn’t just ridiculous. It was crazy. I’d always suspected that I was a little different in the head, you know, but never like this.

Finally I settled on the one thing we had in common: baseball. I asked her about baseball.

Turns out she really didn’t know a damn thing about baseball, just like she’d said. When she found herself in that park across the street, she’d gotten the date off a copy of the Post sitting in a newspaper machine on the curb. When she found herself … elsewhere, she’d looked up the relevant facts and written them down just in case she needed them.

“What if I didn’t like baseball?” I asked.

“I’d have tried something else,” she said, blowing blue smoke out into the winter night.

“Like what?” I asked.

She didn’t say anything. She looked tired.

We finished our beers, started on two more. Halfway through, I finally asked her.

“Where were you born?”

And she told me.

Her story wasn’t as dramatic as I thought it would be. She was born in Modesto, California, on November 19, 2058. I did a double-take when she told me that, asked if there was some kind of cosmic significance to it, if she picked me because we had the same birthday.

She laughed and said it was just a coincidence.

Then she laughed harder, laughed until she cried. “Jesus Christ,” she said, gasping. “Do you have any idea how great it is for something to just be a coincidence?”

I was laughing too. I don’t know why. I didn’t know why then and I don’t know why now. I guess some people just have one of those laughs. Contagious. You can’t help getting sucked in.

By and by she calmed down, drank the rest of her beer, told me the rest of her story. She grew up in a world not visibly different from mine. House in the suburbs, single mom working as a pediatrician treating her share of ear infections and sore throats. Little brother, dog named Brady. School and friends and eventually boyfriends and then college — San Jose State — and then … it happened.

“I slipped,” she said. “Like slipping on a patch of ice. That’s exactly what it felt like. One second I’m walking to the mailbox, then all of a sudden I’m falling, and the next second I’m somewhere else.”

“Where?” I asked.

“Anywhere,” she said. “Towns, deserts, a jungle once. One time a city on fire, air-raid sirens going off all around me. I think it might have been Dresden. Or London. Or Riyadh, or Jerusalem, or … anywhere. There weren’t any signs left, and architecture doesn’t mean much when everything’s burning. I wasn’t there long. Five minutes, maybe less. And then I slipped again, and I was someplace else.”

A plane flew overhead, low enough to drown out conversation. She watched it, and I watched her. Those hazel eyes. When the plane disappeared behind the trees, she looked at me. Saw me looking at her. I jerked my eyes away, stared at the rough-finished and weather-stained concrete balcony for a minute.

“How long?” I asked.

She didn’t answer.

I looked up. She was gone, an empty beer bottle sitting on the edge of the table, and a smoldering cigarette consuming itself beside her chair.

Christmas came and went, and I barely noticed. I had the last week of December off. I stayed home, secluded away like an amateur hermit. I stopped shaving. When I went back to work after the holiday, I told everyone I was growing a beard. It was a lie. The truth is I’d just forgotten to shave.

Every morning, and every night. I looked. She wasn’t there. One rainy morning in February I saw a blonde walking her Weimaraner puppy, a plastic raincoat pulled up over her face. She was soaked. The puppy was having the time of his life, snatching raindrops out of the air with his snout and splashing every puddle he could find. She pleaded, cajoled, yelled at him. He just kept playing.

I stood there under the awning for a long time, just watching them. Missed one train, then another. I could hear them from two blocks away, the steel-on-steel sound as each one passed.

I was late for work that day. My boss had stopped mentioning it. He just glared at me when I came in.

I was in a fog. I’d been living my life in a fog. Not just for the previous five weeks, but going all the way back to October, all the way back to the damn World Series. It happened so slowly I didn’t notice it at first, but there I was, sitting at my desk staring at my computer trying to remember what the damn thing was for.

I was in a fog.

I spent the winter like that, becoming increasingly disconnected from reality. I started dreaming. Vivid dreams, the kind I hadn’t had since I was a kid. I dreamed of burning cities.

The last week of March brought an unseasonable snowstorm. Thick grey clouds started unloading fat flakes in the middle of the afternoon. Most everybody went home early. By closing time everything was white, and drifts were starting to pile up between the office buildings. Finding a cab was impossible. I took the train home, with four hundred thousand other people, all crammed in elbow-to-eye-socket.

It took three hours to go eight miles.

She was there when I got home. Sitting in the chair on my balcony, right where she’d been the last time I’d seen her. Same clothes. Grey hoodie. Dark blue sweats. Flip flops. Her toes were starting to turn blue.

“Why didn’t you come inside?” I asked as we collaboratively dusted the snow off of her hoodie.

“Door was locked,” she said through chattering teeth.

I felt so guilty I wanted to hang myself, and then so angry I could barely speak. What was I supposed to do? Leave the door open for months at a time on the off chance that she happened to materialize on my porch?

She was shivering uncontrollably. She had her hands stuck under her arms. She was rocking slowly from one foot to the other.

I turned away so she wouldn’t see the tears in my eyes.

“Let’s get you in the shower,” I said.

I ran the water up as hot as I could get it. Steam poured out. My glasses fogged up. I took them off. When I turned around her back was to me. She was peeling out of her hoodie like it was stuck to her. I didn’t make eye contact as I slipped past her and out into the hall. A thought hit me. I called through the door, raising my voice to be heard over the water.

“Are you sure you won’t … you know.”

“Disappear?” she called back. “I sure as hell hope not. It’s bad enough without getting stuck someplace naked and wet.”

She opened the door a crack and threw out a wad of clothes. Hoodie. Sweats. A tee shirt that smelled like it had been through a war, which I guess it probably had been. The whole pile went straight into the wash, on hot, with extra detergent. I tried not to pay any attention to her underwear. I wasn’t entirely successful.

She stayed in the shower for a long time. For the first few minutes I could hear her moving around, water splashing up against the curtain as she washed. Then it got quiet. I knocked on the door. Nothing. Knocked again, louder. Nothing.

I pushed the door open. A wall of steam hit me. The floor was wet. I stepped carefully, not wanting to slip on the tile. I pulled the curtain back an inch.

She was standing under the nozzle, her back to me. Water was cascading off of her shoulders and her elbows and everything else.

She looked back at me, over her shoulder. Wiped the water from her eyes with the index finger and thumb of her left hand.

After a long moment she said, “What took you so long?”

She was still there when I woke up. There and warm and real and snoring gently with her face tucked into my shoulder. Her hair smelled like my shampoo.

I slid out from beneath her as gently as I could. She grumbled at me once, but didn’t wake up. The moonlight lit the topography of her bare back. I saw the ghost of what had once been a brutal scar stretching from her right shoulder blade down to the cleft of her buttocks. I touched it, felt the knotted skin. She sighed and snugged the pillow.

I tiptoed out of the bedroom, found my laptop and fired off an e-mail to my boss. Up all night with food poisoning, I said. Wouldn’t be in, I said. Would have my phone on if any emergencies came up, I said.

Then I dug in my messenger bag for my phone and mashed the “off” switch until I heard the plastic crack.

I crept into the laundry room. I wanted her clothes to be folded and ready when she woke up. I didn’t know why. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

The dryer was empty. I checked the washing machine. Maybe I forgot to put them in the dryer last night. Also empty.

I went back to the bedroom, knowing what I’d find.

She was gone.

The bed was still warm.

I spent the day sitting on my balcony, occasionally brushing the snow off my jeans, smoking cigarettes until my lips were chapped and my throat was raw.

Waiting.

On the first day of spring, my boss scheduled a meeting with me for just after lunch. He did it formally, in writing. I knew what was coming.

I didn’t make a fuss. I knew my work had suffered. I had no illusions about that. Hell, at that point, I wasn’t even completely sure I remembered what my job was, much less how to do it.

I came home with a half-full cardboard box I knew I would never open again, expecting to find her in my bed, waiting for me.

She wasn’t there.

It was almost a year before I saw her again. It was a glorious spring day. The cherry blossoms were in bloom. The city was packed with tourists, families with kids on spring break, college students too poor or too socially awkward to go someplace more fun. Making my way from the train station to my job interview was like trying to get to the bar at happy hour. I kept fighting down the urge to elbow a fat Midwesterner in a CIA tee shirt.

Waiting for don’t-walk to change to walk, and there she was. I blinked, and there she was, across the street. Hair pulled up in a sloppy bun on top of her head. Fists jammed into the pockets of her hoodie. Dark blue sweats streaked with what looked like plaster dust. Hazel eyes behind dark sunglasses. Staring at me.

I bolted without thinking. A cab screeched to a halt — thank goodness for small mercies — and the driver expressed himself at length in Pashto. I didn’t hear a word of it, and I wouldn’t have cared if I had.

She was smiling when I got to her. God, that smile. “I’ve never actually stopped traffic before,” she said.

A thousand sentences exploded in my head. I couldn’t make sense of any of them.

“What’s the date?” she said.

I told her.

Her smile melted. “That long?” She pushed her sunglasses up onto her forehead. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“Where’ve you been?” I asked. Where the hell have you been? Why did you leave? Why didn’t you come back? I said none of these things out loud, but I think she heard them anyway.

With the flip of a finger, she dropped her sunglasses back in place and pushed them up her nose. “It’s complicated,” she said.

She turned her back to me. I thought she was going to walk away. Then, without looking, she took my hand. Her fingertips were cold. She led me away from the corner and down the block, to an alley that smelled faintly of raw sewage.

She didn’t turn around. Instead she pulled my hand, wrapped by arm around her waist. I nestled my face in her hair.

It still smelled like my shampoo.

“I wouldn’t have left,” she said softly, so softly I didn’t so much hear the words as feel them conducted from her skull into mine. “If it’d been up to me, I wouldn’t have left.”

“I know,” I lied.

A horn blared behind us. A tourist yelled in what sounded like Greek.

“Come home with me,” I whispered into her hair. I couldn’t stop smelling her hair.

“You’ll be late for your interview,” she said.

“I don’t care. Come home with me.”

She ran her thumbnail along mine, tracing intricate shapes along the cuticle.

“Just hold me for a minute,” she said. “Just one more minute.”

I could feel her heartbeat through her back, pressed up against my chest. It was pounding, like she’d just run a marathon. She turned her head a fraction of a degree, just enough to press her cheek to mine. I felt hot tears.

“Just one more minute,” she whispered, her lips brushing mine. It wasn’t a kiss. It wasn’t remotely like a kiss. It was exactly like a kiss, and like so much more.

She pulled my arms tighter around her, up under her breasts, tighter still, tighter until I was afraid she wouldn’t be able to breathe.

“Come with me,” I started to say, but she interrupted me, pressing her lips to mine. Fiercely, hotly. She made a sound, half gasp and half sob.

My eyes were closed. I saw the flash right through my eyelids. A hot wind tore through the alley.

“Now,” she whispered into my mouth through clenched teeth.

She pushed her hips back into mine, throwing me off balance. I pitched forward as she pulled. I took a step reflexively, and my foot landed on a patch of ice. A patch of ice that couldn’t possibly have been there. My feet went out from under me, and I was falling.

I hit the ground hard, flat on my back. Dead grass and dry earth where there should have been asphalt. When I opened my eyes, all I saw was purple, the afterglow of the end of the world.

Then, gradually, one by one, the stars began to come out.

Copyright © 2007 by Jeff Harrell. All rights reserved.