Scatter, p.6
Scatter, page 6
For the few people in the world like me, however…
I pulled out the New York Times issue I’d been reminded of. It was dated May 25, 2021. In the international section, I’d circled a paragraph with a red pen. It read:
Xi Jinping party associate Kuang Dishi has been appointed to head a set of “strong parent” negotiations with Taiwan about the island’s scrambling of US-made fighter jets to practice defending their island from an invasion from mainland China.
In the same red pen, I’d drawn an arrow from the end of this paragraph to the top of the page, where I’d noted:
They deleted, “The Pan-Green Separatists have urged Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen to refuse to meet Kuang until the Beijing government acknowledges the 1895 Treaty of Shimonoseki and the 1951 Treaty of San Francisco as starting points for any negotiations.” Ad for Hyundai Ioniq 5 was enlarged to fill space.
Now if this hadn’t been some kind of random glitch, it meant a time traveler had done something to change the time stream between the first time I’d read the story and the second, both in the same copy of the paper I’d had on my table. The question would be why? Why convince Taiwan’s Green Separatists to not do something perfectly in keeping with their mission?
I licked the last of my plate clean like a barbarian and emptied my water glass.
The question of why make the Green Separatists step down became even more interesting when I considered the current issues of the South China Daily Post and the Epoch times that I’d just read. The January 6, 2022 SCDP mentioned Kuang Dishi’s negotiator position and said he’d just received death threats from some unnamed party. The January 6, 2022 Epoch Times didn’t mention the death threats but talked about Taiwan’s growing fear of being taken over by China.
I picked up my copy of the SCDP to circle where it had referred to death threats, just in case tomorrow…
I blinked. Forget tomorrow. The printed news had changed since I’d read it fifteen minutes ago. The paragraph on death threats now read:
A male assistant to Kuang Dishi, a member of China’s Politbureau Standing Committee (PSC) and personally appointed by President Xi Kinping, was tragically killed today when he opened a suspicious box addressed to Kuang. The Director-General of Taiwan’s National Police Agency says finding the bomber is the police agency’s top priority.
Okay. I shoved my dishes further to the side and circled the passage about the mail bomb. Then I put down my pen, and turned back to the Epoch Times. Its front page now had a grainy photograph of a crime scene on the front cover, and above the picture, the title: TAIWAN MILITANTS STRIKE BACK!
The story below went into great detail about the long, slow build of a military resistance in Taiwan that had been set in motion by the deliberately-provocative appointment of Kuang Dishi by President Xi to negotiate Taiwan’s capitulation to Chinese rule.
The most disturbing thing was that I had a clear memory now of seeing that photograph and headline on the front of the Epoch Times when I first reached to pick it up from the wire rack in the Big Little News at 5:40 p.m. or so when I’d been there, the rain dripping outside, the sound of people murmuring through their masks as they milled about around me, the steamy smell of them, the swish of their raincoats.
Nor had I lost my memory of the same time, the same day, today, picking up this same issue of the Epoch Times with a headline that had nothing to do with anything in China. The Epoch Times front page headline of that prior memory had to do with the crisis at the US southern border, how Joe Biden was failing, the usual right-wing stuff.
Sometimes the horses scatter, Cassandra’s voice repeated in my head.
I looked back to the South China Daily Post and saw the red ink I’d applied, along with the story it had circled, had vanished.
What the—?
In its place was a shortened story about the “strong parent” negotiations and how they would now be delayed as Beijing’s chief negotiator, Kuang Dishi, had been involved in a tragic automobile accident in a trip between the airport and the hotel in Taipei where he was going to stay during negotiations. Police were investigating, but no foul play was suspected.
Interestingly, the Epoch Times narrative was largely unchanged other than the front-page photograph now showed a police scene on a highway, and reference to the actions of “Taiwan militants” referred to their arranging an automobile accident versus an exploding package.
After a moment’s hesitation, I quickly circled the latest version of these stories in red pen, and noted the earlier versions with that same red pen. Then I placed my hands flat on the table in front of me, let my eyes unfocus, and combed my now multiple memories around the buying and reading of these two newspapers, setting them in order as best I could, recognizing the slippery quality that attached themselves to the memories that had been bumped in a way that didn’t happen when I was the one jumping my mind back and remaking reality.
It left me vaguely nauseous. Especially since the only memory divergence I could be aware of started from the time I bought these papers. When the timelines had actually changed could have been days earlier.
And given that the events had happened on the other side of the world and the only impact here had been some news outlets reporting, if I hadn’t been reading those outlets, I’d have noticed nothing at all. And if that was so, which time stream would I be in? One where Kuang was still alive, or this one, where he was dead? And if there was more than one existing time stream for Kuang, was there one of me in each time stream that had a different story about Kuang? Or had all earlier versions of Kuang’s life, and therefore of the newspaper reporting on him, been erased with the creation of the auto accident timestream.
Was there any way to know?
The weight of it took my breath away, so I was breathing high in my chest, close to panic.
Who was doing this? The idea flashed through my mind that it might be some highly trained, time traveling operative. They try one thing to knock off Kuang and it doesn’t work, so they jump back to before the abortive attempt and try something else until they get it right. Here, it apparently only took a few tries, though who knew how far back the time traveler went each time and how much setup he or she had to do.
Or was it a team of time travelers? When Kansas had implied, back in March, that I wasn’t the only person who could time travel, I’d thought she was being rational, assuming that if I could time jump, surely there were others. Kenny, at least, since he shared my memory talents. But now I wondered if she actually knew about others. Possibly many others. An army of time travelers, or at least an elite attack unit.
Which begged the question of who was directing them? It certainly could have been some Taiwanese independence group, but it could just as easily have been a group from some other interested nation with a history of recruiting talented people to run secret ops.
And wasn’t that why Wilson and Dadashev had visited me a few days ago? Human Resources and Talent Acquisition for the CIA. Just how long might that organization have been using people like me and Kenny to mess with the world?
I felt like I was going to be vomit.
5
The trench coat stalker
I washed my dishes, checking to make sure the newspapers weren’t changing anymore, then I put on my sweats, and reflective rain gear and went for a night run around Volunteer Park to clear my head.
As I passed the lit glass Conservatory, I realized it wasn’t just the changing newsprint and the questions it raised about multiple timestreams and government skullduggery that had made me so sick.
Last March, after getting hit with both the ability to time travel and the knowledge that Kenny was still alive, the only thing I’d wanted to do was use my power to find Kenny and bring him home.
I still wanted that, but now I wasn’t sure it was even theoretically possible.
The only “home” I even considered bringing him back to was the symbolic one shared by Kansas, Kenny, and me. But if Kenny had been forced to work for a secret government strike group because he could time travel or detect time travelers, then the timestreams he knew, the worlds he’d experienced, might not match up with mine at all. In the same way that Kansas’s world of incomprehensible shadows and information flows would also be foreign to both Kenny and me.
We three didn’t just have different viewpoints on the facts. We’d literally been experiencing different iterations of the world.
As had I and Lena.
Could you ever be “home” with people who could never see what you saw, hear what you heard, experience or smell or taste or feel what you did? Not would not, but could not.
That question took the concept of each person being ultimately alone in the universe and ground it in my face.
Hell, maybe I should just give up trying to rescue Kenny and join him in slavery instead.
Needing a quick salve to this bout of existential despair, I called a meeting of the three musketeers—me, Patrol Officer Bryan Miller, and Ziggy Cheester—for lunch the next day at Ziggy’s studio in Capitol Hill, right across the street from the Seattle PD’s East Precinct. I suspected Ziggy could tell I was emotionally needy when I called him first because he not only agreed immediately, he said he’d make sure Bryan made it and would prepare the same amazing jerk chicken sandwiches on focaccia bread, with onion, garlic, lettuce, pickles, and mayo. He had three kinds of soda to wash it down with.
The artworks leaning up against the walls of his studio, a walled-off-but-open-roofed room inside the factory-like Chelios Design & Print, looked like a series commissioned for a movie company. The pieces portrayed lights cutting through a magical purple-green darkness to reveal some kind of glowing stone in one, a mutant fairy in another, a bloody sword in a third, all done with Ziggy’s surreal comic book style.
Made me want to see what this movie was about.
We laughed and caught up. I decided that friendship, at least, was a real and tangible good. Even if it threatened to make us all catch COVID from each other.
Then, noting the time and knowing I had to be back for a 1 p.m. client, I asked Bryan whether the CIA could operate domestically. It made him snort the orange soda he was drinking out of his nose.
“Nix, no, no way, can’t do it,” he said, wiping it up. He was the most cheerily optimistic Boy Scout cop I knew—smooth round cheeks, short chopped hair, clean body, clean language, clean morals—but also, I’d learned, very sharp. He’d actually written his LSATs and been admitted to three law schools, but finances and a commitment to look after his parents had streamed him into law enforcement. For now.
“Let me qualify that,” Bryan added. “Their mission is to collect intelligence from foreign nations, and they got into a lot of trouble in, like, the seventies, when they worked with the FBI and NSA to gather intel from US citizens. But they’re still allowed to interview US citizens who come back here after living in foreign countries. Just that. It’s the FBI and NSA you gotta worry about now.”
I ignored the last comment, knowing it was true because of the things Kansas could do. “So if a CIA guy was following me, that would be illegal?”
“Yes,” Bryan said cautiously, seeing Ziggy’s vigorous nodding to my question. “You got someone following you?”
“Yup.”
“And you think he’s CIA?”
“Pretty sure. Two guys claiming to be CIA broke into my apartment and waited for me to come home. They knew a lot about me and my family. They said they wanted to recruit me for my crazy memory. I think they sicced this guy on me to make sure I was clean or something before they approached me.” I looked at Ziggy apologetically. “They confiscated the picture of him that you drew.”
Bryan and Ziggy exchanged looks, and Bryan seemed to be mentally backtracking. “Maybe that’s a borderline case?” Bryan said to me. “Vetting a candidate? You want me to ask around about it? See if it’s legit?”
I wasn’t about to drag Bryan into another part of my Kenny search. The first part had almost gotten him killed. So I shook my head. “Not yet. But…if this guy keeps following me, what happens if I make a citizen’s arrest?”
Bryan shook his head. “You’d probably get charged with false imprisonment. Only allowed to make citizen’s arrest when you see someone committing petit larceny, like shoplifting. Maybe you could accuse him of stalking, but you’d have to prove repetition and intent.”
“Then you call Bry-ahn to arrest him,” Ziggy blurted.
“Definitely,” Bryan said.
I grimaced. “Maybe I’ll just politely corner him and ask a few questions.”
Despite having Bryan and Ziggy tell me to not start challenging strange CIA men in trench coats, I still left their presence feeling both invigorated and impatient as I masked up and hurried the three blocks back to 14th St. where I’d parked my car. Neither Bryan nor Ziggy knew anything about my time jumping ability and we’d built a friendship anyway. Across ages. Across ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. We’d just shared the simpler joys and struggles of our lives—what it was to be human.
Kenny deserved to have that too.
Which brought me back to my simple goal of finding and saving him. Should I be infiltrating the CIA to find him?
No. Kenny could have tapped out “C-I-A” to me when was getting tortured by Cutter with him watching through his remote connection. But Kenny hadn’t. He’d typed the name Zhou Wenling. That had to be the way in, and Kansas was going to find it.
I had to just had to be patient and—
Something flashed out of the corner of my eye—a tan trench coat amidst the Friday lunchtime walkers around me. I was at 14th Street so I turned down it and began to run, taking a hard right maybe thirty feet down the block into an underground parking garage. I backed up against its cement north wall, behind an entrance pillar, breathing hard. I ripped off my mask to breathe quieter and tried to blend into the shadows.
Waited. Stilled my breathing.
I watched one, two, three, people, then a group of four walk past on the 14th Street sidewalk.
Then hurried steps.
A second later, there he was, hunched forward in his trench coat, no mask, his balding head and glasses twisting back and forth, looking for his lost prey. From this close, I saw he was about forty-five, shorter than me but carrying a big gut, saggy jowls, and pinched mouth. A mean, fat iguana. Looking for me. Spying on me. Keeping track of me for his overlords.
It was really starting to piss me off.
He’d obviously missed the edge of me that was visible from the street because he now hurried past, oblivious. If I just let him go, he’d vanish in a few seconds and I could still make my one o’clock. In three…two…
Fuck that.
I stepped out behind him and called, “Hey, asshole!”
He obviously recognized his name because he slowed, stopped, and turned. His jowly face was red, shaking, and covered in sweat. I was sure his whole body stank.
For a second, it crossed my mind that if he carried a gun, he might pull it now and fire at me. Even with a handgun, he’d probably hit me. We were only about twenty feet apart.
But that clearly wasn’t part of his job, however angry he was at me turning the tables on him, because his bare hands stayed out at his sides. They looked stiff, like he was ordering them to not clench. Like he was worried if he came at me with clenched fists, the awesome strength of his flabby fists and shaking gut might knock me dead. And the look in his eyes said he really wanted me dead.
Eight months ago, that look would have made my eyes water and my body instinctively back away. But since that time, the training Lena had insisted on had strengthened my body, my fighting skills, and, evidently, my intestinal fortitude, because almost without thought I found myself walking toward balding-trench-coat-man with my own fists forming and re-forming, my eyes picking out his best strike points—neck, groin, face, gut, shins, in that order.
“You want to talk to me, pervert?” I called to him as I walked. I chose a name that would tell all the other lunchtime walkers who the bad guy was, even as my over-developed sense of how I looked to others said I looked like the aggressive party.
The same thought seemed to have entered the balding guy’s head too because his face and body suddenly went from shaking rage to puzzled fear at my approach.
“Wh-what? Do I know you?” he said in a quavering baritone voice as I reached spitting distance.
A few people had indeed stopped to watch. One young woman had lifted up her phone and looked to be filming us. Great. Especially as the sun had just come out fully for the first time today, so I and my stalker were perfectly lit for the video. Just two unmasked, belligerent goons getting into a fight.
I made myself calm, playing his game. “Why have you been following me?”
“I don’t know what you mean.” His jowls shook as he said it. The guy was good.
“You’re totally innocent. Just some random guy.”
“Uh…yeah.”
“Okay.” I turned to the young woman filming us. She’d moved to within about fifteen feet, close enough to record everything but far enough back to run. “Miss? Feel free to record my face. My name is Jackson Traine. I’m a professor at the University of Washington and have a private psychology practice on East Madison, near Washington Park. Now perhaps this ‘innocent’ gentleman who hasn’t been following me around would be kind enough to let you tape his face and identity.”
The young woman and I both turned toward my stalker to see that he’d turned and was hurrying away. His usual disappearing trick.
But I was so done with that.
“No!” I called out as I hurried after him. “You don’t just get to hurry away like that! I’m making a citizen’s arrest!” I called out like some Oath Keeper crazy-head and leaped forward to grab the back of his trench coat.
