The Unfinished World Read online

  So Hugh can’t begrudge Polly the cheeseburgers, no matter how rancid. This morning I had the Crucifixion, he said. That’s never too bad. But this afternoon I have the Little Princes.

  She looks at him sympathetically, her mouth a moue of gray gristle. They had a thing once, he and she, a few years ago. It was more of an understanding, really: after the worst of them—the Little Princes, the Children’s Crusade, the Black Plague, Lidice, Nanjing—he’d spend the night at her place, nothing untoward, just hanging onto each other, really. As if the weight of all that death could be shared; as if the overflow of horror could be held, could be contained between two bodies. She finally put a stop to it—said it was just too morbid, and anyway she was planning on leaving the Cleaners soon. I’m getting old, she said. I want kids. I want to stop aging faster than everybody else around me.

  Of course, you don’t really leave the Cleaners. It’s too hard to adjust, after, to the slow molasses of real time wrapping itself around you. It’s too hard to count the seconds, the minutes, time steadily stalking forward, leaving you behind. It’s hard to be the fly trapped in amber.

  When the time machines were new, the public was furious they couldn’t visit the future. No matter how many times the scientists patiently explained about fixed and unfixed points in time, about the instability swirling around an unfixed point, the public didn’t get it. They were even angrier that they couldn’t change the past. They wouldn’t listen, they wouldn’t follow the rules, and they planned trips to save Lincoln, to kill the slavers, to stop Rome burning and change Truman’s mind about the bomb. They wanted to bring penicillin to the Plague, and artificial limbs to Civil War battlefields. They wanted to save the dodo, the rhino, the snow leopard, the honeybee, the whale. They wanted to save their loved ones, and sometimes, themselves. An astonishingly large number of them wanted to save Elvis. They planned lesser things, too, little things: revenges and romances and get-rich schemes. And so the machines were tightly secured, remained in the hands of the trained: the scientists, the military, the historians. Guided tours were given to special VIPs and reporters, to certain eras and events—but no solo trips. Of course the illicit machines sprang up anyway, badly made but worth billions, and the space pirates sprang up with them—and the Cleaners were formed to take care of these mercenaries of time.

  Hugh’s been a Cleaner now for ten years. It’s a difficult, unrewarding job, with shitty pay and benefits. Sure, you get to See the Centuries!—like the brochure says. That’s what hooked him. But all you see are the horrors of history. And all you do is stop people from stopping them. A year ago he brought the pox blankets back to the natives after a well-meaning group of illegal tourists stole them away. On return he had a sort of quiet breakdown. He took a month of leave, sat around eating garbage and watching TV, stared at the place in his wall where he put his fist through after his wife walked out. After they lost their little girl to the Avian Flu Pandemic. His wife had screamed and screamed at him to go back and save her, save her, but how do you save someone from a virus? There was nowhere in the folds of the world to hide, back then—the Flu was everywhere, from the biggest cities to the remotest villages. He’d almost died of it himself. His lungs have never been the same.

  The Little Princes run is rougher than usual. A couple of crazy British tourists are with the pirates and they keep shouting terrible things while they’re being handcuffed. They call him a child-killer. The two fair-haired little boys look on wide-eyed, too afraid and too proud to cry, and at last he lets Richard’s men get on with it, training his eyes on the stone floor so he doesn’t see it, though he can still hear the muffled shouts. Smothered. He’d always wondered, before this gig, and now he knows. It’s not a thing he’s glad to know. His daughter was blond. She was just learning how to read, and when she was stuck on a word she absently twirled her yellow curls into knots, over and over again.

  Sometimes he wonders if it would really be so bad, letting people flood into history like a tidal wave and sweep away the worst of it. Sure, the paradoxes would destroy us, but so what? Did a world that let happen the Holocaust and Hiroshima and the Trail of Tears and Stalin and Genghis Khan and Pol Pot deserve to be spared? He lies on his bed for a while, the two little princes’ blond heads drifting down the dark river of his brain. The terrain is more and more obscured in there; he doesn’t much like where his thoughts are headed these days. Night places. Tangled and pitch-dark. He messages Polly, hoping it’s still the same address.

  Want to come over? he asks. The answer flashes back fast: Can’t. BF’s here. Sorry.

  Hugh stares at the fist-sized hole in the wall. He never bothered to get it fixed after she left. He’s never bothered to clean up the place, either, after the wild hurricane she became before she packed up and blew out of town. He has no idea where she is. He hopes she’s okay. If he’s perfectly honest with himself, it was bound to end badly; they weren’t well-suited and they fought much of the time. He was never faithful to her. The only good they ever made together was the little girl.

  He puts his fist into the hole, feels the sharp edges of cheap plaster crumble around it. He wishes he could push his whole body into the wall, through the wall, to somewhere outside history entirely.

  At work the next day he suits up and heads to the dock. Polly is there and she touches his arm; You okay? she asks.

  Fine, he says, shrugging. Just a bad night last night, that’s all. I shouldn’t have messaged you.

  It’s cool, she says. I’m around if you need to talk, okay? Just not when Pete’s there—he doesn’t understand. How hard it is for us, you know? It seems harder these days . . . Her voice is braided with tension, rough. He wonders.

  Where you off to this morning? he asks.

  Theresienstadt, she says, and frowns. A hypothermia epidemic, November ’43.

  Theresienstadt. The name the Germans gave to Terezin, long ago christened after the Emperor’s mother. Hugh’s Czechoslovakian great-aunt is still there in 1943, just shy of her sixth birthday. She acts in the little plays they put on at the camp for the Red Cross officials. She still, despite everything, loves to sing. In time, in this machine-bound stretch of time, she is still alive; it is documented, it is a fact. It is a gift.

  Hey, I just have Caesar’s assassination today, he says. Let me switch with you. Please?

  I don’t think so, Polly says, shaking her head. We could get fired.

  Just tell them I stole it, then. Just tell them I made you. Tell them anything, I don’t care, he says, and he’s already running to her machine, he’s already climbing in, he’s already checking the controls, the location, the date: November 13, 1943—the Bohuovicer Kessel Census in the yard at Terezin. Polly is shouting but he’s already closed the door against her face, a mouthing fish in the cold blue light of the docking bay, then gone, forgotten in the time blur, everything forgotten on the way to save the only child he can.

  And now he understands the tourists. He knows, even in the blur he knows they’ll come for him, they’ll find her, they’ll make sure she’s on that cattle car in 1944. But for right now—for an hour maybe, for a minute, for just one revolution of the second hand in space—he’ll have sounded a note, he’ll have saved a life, he’ll have wiped a stain from history before the men and women like him come and put it all to wrong once more.

  Things You Should Know About Cassandra Dee

  One. Cassie is an ugly girl. A rawboned, odd-angled, horsey girl. A soft, too-big jaw, drooping-eyelids, fat-under-the cheeks-that-seems-to-melt-into-the-neck girl.

  Ugly people usually have at least one redeeming feature: haunting eyes, straight white teeth, perhaps a good complexion. But not Cassie. She is pale and mauve-colored, with thin brown hair and yellowy teeth—even her eyes are small. And while she isn’t exactly fat, she is large, her body too wide for her head. Her ears stick out like jug handles. She is awkward, unfinished, like the bad clay sculptures kids in kindergarten make.

  At school, kids call her The Lump. H
er parents call her Babydoll, but they put her class pictures away in a drawer instead of hanging them in the hall with her brother’s.

  Two. Cassie can See things. Ever since she was four years old and collapsed under the tree at Aunt Betsy’s Christmas party, told her mother when she came to she saw Uncle Mo’s truck drive into the Platte River, and not an hour later they had a phone call from the police that there had been a bad accident and would Betsy come down and identify the body? Since then, Cassie’s always been able to see things nobody else can, things that make bright flashes in her head and play like a filmstrip over her eyes. It isn’t just seeing things. It’s Seeing Things. She usually faints, and that for sure means that the thing she sees is important and true. Or rather, that it will be true one day. Like when she Sees the dark blue minivan is going to run over her brother’s new puppy, or when she Sees her cousin Debra get her legs blown off in the desert.

  The things she Sees are always death or hurt or pain. Her aunt calls it the Lord’s gift, but then why did Reverend Matthews ban her from service after she Saw the grocery store fire while singing in the church choir on Sunday? He thinks it’s a gift from Satan, and Cassie is inclined to agree. Especially because she knows one day she’ll See her own death. And then one day she does.

  It happens during Freshman Homeroom. She Sees her own body spread-eagled on a patch of grass surrounded by pink and purple flowers, big ones with wide petals. Only, it isn’t quite her. It’s a pretty her, a slim, shining, fair-haired copy of her. But she knows it’s her just the same. And she knows it means she’ll die, and soon.

  She throws up on her desk and Mrs. Carver has to get the school nurse. The school and the doctors call the Sight “epilepsy,” but she knows it isn’t. It’s a curse, that’s what Cassie thinks. She’s never prevented anything bad from happening. All she can do is watch.

  Three. Cassie wants to be pretty, wants desperately to be pretty, would trade away the moon, the sun, and all the oceans to be pretty. Especially now that she knows she’s going to die.

  She hits upon the idea of plastic surgery when watching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The idea of lying on a bleached silk cushion, Plexiglas covering the top; she would be a delicate doll figure, with small hands and feet and a beautiful face and beatific smile. Her arms would be folded and her eyes closed in rapture, like the picture of St. Catherine in her saints book. People would pass by and speak in worshipful whispers, would say how beloved she must have been—and the echo of her body would be smiling, smiling and waving like a beauty queen wherever it was you went when you died.

  Her parents try to grant her wish, but all the doctors say no. The specialists, the plastic surgeons, even the celebrity doctors—they all say no. “No, no, no,” they chant in unison, a Hippocratic chorus. Soon the naysayers crowd into her dreams. They stand strung together, identical and frowning and folded arms, paper-doll doctors.

  Four. Cassie has blind spots, too. When she gets home from school one day, Cassie’s aunt and her mother are sitting in the living room waiting for her. Her mother is smiling, and her aunt is frowning. There is a strange man with her father in the kitchen, and he is a doctor who has heard all about Cassie and has volunteered to make her pretty.

  He’ll do it for free, Cassie’s mother says, holding out her arms to her ugly little girl. Cassie’s heart explodes like trumpets, like fireworks and streamers. She’s going to be beautiful. It suddenly seems okay that she’ll die, now. It suddenly seems like a natural price to pay. She will be a flower, yes, a moonbeam, yes, shining briefly but bright—a silvery, shimmery memory forever.

  Oh, child, says her aunt. I wish you wouldn’t. Everyone loves you now. What do you need prettiness for?

  Cassie says nothing. She knows she can’t possibly explain. How the love people give you when you’re ugly just isn’t the same.

  Oh, hush, says Cassie’s mother. She holds Cassie to her, while her daughter cries without knowing she’s crying. Her face is even uglier with the redness and the squinty eyes and tear tracks. Cassie’s mother tries not to look. She was the Caton County Corn Festival Queen once, and she’s still the prettiest cashier at the Safeway. Prettier than most of the other girls twenty years younger. Oh, Babydoll, won’t it be nice, she murmurs into her daughter’s mousy hair. Won’t it be nice.

  The doctor is young and good-looking, with long slender hands that will work magic on Cassie. The doctor has heard from another doctor that Cassie is going to die, and nobody exactly disabuses him of that notion. Everyone in Cassie’s family believes at least a little in her Sight.

  The doctor says it will take six months, and does she have that long? Cassie thinks about it, and it feels right to her. So she says yes, and the family echoes her. Yes.

  Then he rolls up his metaphorical sleeves, and Cassie rolls up hers, and they get to work. He breaks her nose, puts in a chin implant, performs eyelid lifts, pins back her ears, plumps her lips up with injections, liposuctions her thighs, and gives her breast implants. It is all very painful, but Cassie has a mantra, though she doesn’t know that word. I will be a moonflower, she says, over and over, when the pain gets so bad she feels she might black out. I will be a moonflower. I will.

  Five. Cassie is a little in love with her doctor. This is one of her blind spots. He tells her that he will throw her a party when the bandages come off, just like Cinderella. She tries to tell him Cinderella was always pretty, but he cuts her off and smiles wider. You’ll be the belle of the ball, he says.

  No one has ever checked the doctor’s credentials. He just showed up on Cassie’s doorstep, and the family has attributed it to Providence. If anyone had checked, they would have noticed he was no longer allowed to practice medicine. If anyone had checked, they might have seen some scary things.

  Six. Cassie has always disliked mirrors. Tonight, though, she is almost dizzy at the thought of what they might reveal. Tonight, the bandages come off. And Cassie gets a haircut and highlights and her teeth whitened and even a pedicure and a manicure, and the doctor pays for it all. Tonight is the night Cassie will be reborn, briefly, before she dies. A phoenix in reverse.

  Cassie puts on the dress first. It’s a new silver lace froth, long and grown up, and the heels are pale pearl. She is leaving the mirror for last. She is terrified of still being ugly. The doctor’s nice blue eyes widen in appreciation. You look like a beautiful fairy princess, he says. Cassie snorts—she’s not a fool—but then she realizes, she might. She might be that lovely now. The thought makes her tingle and light up from head to toe, like fireflies are dancing all over her skin.

  The doctor puts his hands on her bare shoulders and gently spins her around, until she’s facing the full-length mirror. And then Cassie forgets all about dying, forgets about her fears and her family and everything but the floating girl before her in the glass. That’s me, she whispers, and the doctor laughs. You’re my very finest creation, he says. My Galatea.

  He leads Cassie into the backyard, tells her the guests will be arriving soon. Will you dance with me first? he asks, and though she’s never danced before, she knows she can. She’s not afraid. Not even when the doctor puts his arm around her waist, and her breath catches. She ignores the strange warmth in her blood and concentrates on stepping in the right places. She’s so beautiful, she realizes, is it any wonder he would want to dance with her?

  And as they dance he starts to sing to her, softly, Oh, you must have been a beautiful baby, you must have been a wonderful child . . .

  Cassie smiles to think of her own history rewritten. She looks down, shy in her new skin now, and sees her pearl shoes sink into a green patch of grass, edged by pink and purple flowers. Big flowers. Her vision goes black for a moment, then as her sight ebbs back in waves she looks up, really looks, right into the doctor’s nice blue eyes. They have gone soft, unfocused, pupils wide, and she sees her new pretty face reflected in the empty blackness.

  And she doesn’t See it but she sees it just the same: her mother weeping prettily
beside a casket with pink and beige insides, her aunt’s head bent in sad disapproval. Her cousins shifting, uneasy at the funeral, uncomfortable and bored in stiff black suits and ties. Her class, politely shuffling by at the wake, puzzled by what they suppose are the wonders of mortuary makeup. She looks better dead, an unkind classmate will whisper, and Cassie’s father will clench his fists and plant his huge, useless bulk on the front pew because what else, whatever else can he do?

  But now she twists away, she tries to run, shedding one shoe; but the doctor catches her hard by the wrist and throws her to the ground. Please don’t hurt me, she says, but she knows he will hurt her, hurt her so badly she will never get up again. She’s been resigned to her death, but now that she knows how she’ll die it seems wrong, it seems bad and unfair and a cheat. And so she cries for the beautiful little girl she had living inside of her all along, like a wood spirit trapped in a tree.

  Seven. Cassie can no longer See, and she sobs and sobs as the man kneels stiffly down beside her to whisper the rest of his song in her pinned-back ear. You must have been a beautiful bay-ay-bee, he sings softly, his fingers long and slender and working fast. She opens. She closes. She is a single flower, born and then gone under the silver strands of moonlight.

  The Fires of Western Heaven

  Sandbags rim the mouth of the trench, swarmed by tangles of barbed wire. The sentries lie here and there with their periscopes, improving their loopholes, bolstered by the approach of dawn. You climb the fire steps and look through the early morning mists, silvering the white and chalky soil. The dreams of the dead seem to swim through the shadows of No Man’s Land, just past what you can see. There is almost nothing to mark the horizon: farms, churches, landmarks—even the ruins have been ruined, pounded into oblivion by the constant shelling. One small cottage is all that remains of the broken village past the field, just bits of plaster and a wall.