The angle was wrong, it made Gus look like a shepherd when there was much more pit in him. You could tell it in the eyes. The photo Liv took was all mouth, his eyes barely registered. He looked like someone else’s dog, not Gus. The xerox only made it worse. Les had searched his trailer before he left for the Kinkos, this old photo was all he could find. He looked for a spot on the telephone pole. Nails and staples rusted up every inch. He was bound to get tetanus if he wasn’t careful. Les couldn’t remember if he was up on his shots. He found a clear swath a little higher up and tacked on the poster. At least his number was right, though with that photo he doubted that he would get any calls. He knew he should have chipped him or invested in some kind of app. There was probably a whole section at Best Buy with trackers for pets. If only he had done a little more research instead letting that huckster at the pet store talk him into spending a small fortune on that damn electric fence that took two days to set up and produced a jolt so soft it gave Gus a red rocket every time he ran through. Les should have seen it for what it was.
Ray Brompton’s hounds yapped as he walked back to his Miata. Les felt like they were taunting him from behind that heap of kudzu Ray called a gate. He tossed the box of thumbtacks in the trunk with the stacks of unsold product and posters for his missing dog, then eased into the driver’s seat. The Mules were playing Emp State on one of the sports channels. They didn’t always get televised. But Gus had to go and get himself lost. Les knew he should have gotten a smarter breed, one of those Lassie types. They don’t lose themselves, they find what’s been lost, thought Les. But Liv insisted they visit the pound and Gus wouldn’t let her leave without him. He grabbed his Coke can full of Jameson. It was empty. He didn’t realize he had been drinking so much. Maybe he hadn’t filled it all the way. He reached into the backseat and unwrapped a box with the AlClear logo on it. Les believed in this product more than the others. It had almost made it onto Shark Tank. He didn’t quite know how it worked, but he understood the value of a top-of-the-line breathalyzer that could also detect six common cancers. He blew into the gizmo and it immediately spat out a number close to the limit. Then the screen flashed red and said he had melanoma even though he didn’t. You had to ignore the bugs, focus on the positives. Les rolled down his windows and listened to the crackling hum of the telephone wires drooping low overhead. There were no horse flies buzzing round his head, no cars blasting their horns at him for parking the wrong way, no former clients cursing a blue streak as they stalked him across their lawns. The heat had chased them off. If he ignored the sweat, it was almost peaceful. The Brompton hounds howled. Les eyed the cream-colored prefabs stretching down the endless subdivision. Driving would be quicker, but he wasn’t gonna risk another DUI. There was no danger hoofing it a few blocks until his mind got right.
He had just started down Brinkley Place when he spied the sign: Fresh Lemonade $2.10. Someone had painted a big black X over it and scribbled something underneath that he couldn’t read. He hoped they weren’t sold out. He was getting thirsty. The sun was a furnace. Les stumbled on the curb, spilling tacks across the asphalt, and continued over a patchy, yellow lawn. The faint smell of dying roses made his nose twitch. That sense had been pretty dull ever since Liv cracked him with a fire poker. Now his nose split his face at a declining angle. It looked like a backslash on a keyboard. Customers did their best to avoid staring.
The lemonade stand seemed cobbled together from old freight pallets, just looking at it could give you a splinter. Les noticed a cowlick peeking over top like a periscope. It belonged to a pale wisp of a kid, face and arms slathered in zinc, sitting so straight you would think he had an I-beam for a spine. The rest of him was hidden inside a coal black suit with the sleeves rolled up and a collared shirt so heavenly-white Les thought the boy must have only ever worn it to funerals. A red, power tie cinched his neck in a gordian knot. Little Danny Gorky. Selling lemonade like a regular kid. Les would have sooner expected a pig walking on its hind legs. There was something unnatural about the boy. He had seen it long before Danny got kicked in the head by that pony at the Grange fair. Sure, the boy could now read a dozen books in a few hours, but Les had seen stranger stuff at the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not in St. Augustine. There was a wrongness in him. Les recalled a gloomy afternoon a few years back, when they had Danny over to play with Junior. The boys couldn’t have been more than six or seven. Instead of playing with their son, Danny lolled around the shoreline, no fear of water moccasins or snapping turtles, not even caring about the stink. He walked till he found a tide pool full of tiny green frogs, the kind you hear singing all night trying to find a mate. He grabbed as many as he could, trapping them in his little fists, and squeezed and squeezed till all the guts ran out his fingers. Then he just laughed as if it were the funniest damn thing.
The boy was perched on top of an overturned milk crate, blue-grey eyes watching two squirrels skitter across the branch above. Selling lemonade seemed the last thing on his mind. He swiped away a strand of straw-colored hair and finally noticed Les. Danny’s freckled cheeks pulled wide, revealing an off-kilter smile that was missing a canine and a bottom incisor. He looked like the doll from that old movie, the one that talked on its own.
“Morning, Mr. Moore,” said the boy.
“Hey Danny,” said Les, “Got any lemonade for me?”
“My sincerest apologies, but I shuttered that division of the business,” said the boy, “I have moved onto bigger things.” Danny pointed a zinc-sheened arm behind him, to an enormous coffin hiding under a maple tree, big enough to fit a horse, though on second glance, Les could see that it was really two chest freezers soldered to a tin-roofed dog shed that looked a lot like the one they had bought for Gus at the Home Depot. A plastic, door flap on the end faced Pam Gorky’s prized rosebushes, which were wilting in the sun. The contraption’s joints were reinforced with sheet metal, probably old road signs, though it was hard to tell with the layers of craft glue and duct tape and all those tubes and wires poking out every which way. Green computer boards fanned across the top like vertebrae and even more wires connected them to what looked like a brand new laptop. It reminded him of the cardboard robot costume Liv made for Junior back when he was into that sort of thing, before he told them that only poor kids made their costumes. The breeze carried a stench of rancid lunchmeat that nearly made him gag, but got the Brompton hounds shrieking. Knowing Danny, the boy had built this thing to catch and kill squirrels. It got Les thinking.
“You haven’t seen Gus around, have you?” he asked, “Been missing since last Friday.”
Danny gazed back at his contraption, as if wondering himself what lay within.
“Can’t say that I have,” said the boy. “But I’ll keep my ears open and my eyes peeled.”
“I’m sure you will,” said Les. He fished a folded-up poster from his back pocket and offered it to Danny.
The boy stared at the photo, “Doesn’t look much like Gus.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying,” said Les. He peered over the lemonade stand and spotted a coffee urn packed with loose bills and pocket change next to a half-filled pitcher of lemonade. The glass was sweating. “How much for a cup?”
“I am sorry to disappoint you,” said the boy, “but I have set aside that pitcher of lemonade for my own consumption.” The grin reappeared on his face. “But if you want a different life, I can give you that for five dollars.”
The sun wrestled the maple’s swaying branches. Les shielded his eyes from its shifting rays. The boy’s words blared through the buzz in his brain, but he couldn’t make sense of them. A different life. He wiped sweat from his crooked nose as he searched the boy’s face for meaning. The heavy, August air weighed him and his thoughts down. All he could muster in response was a huffy, “Huh?”
“We’re actually running a special today,” said the boy, “We usually charge six fifty.”
“I don’t understand,” said Les.
“I wouldn’t expect you to, Mr. Moore, not on account of your intelligence, of course, but the novelty of this service. I stumbled upon the discovery a few months ago, but in all honestly, I only became confident in its results after a few rounds of testing, so you’re one of my first customers post-Beta.”
Les stared at the boy. “I just want some lemonade,” he muttered.
“As I already informed you, sir, we no longer offer that product,” said the boy, “But if you were to use my device to travel to some alternate timeline slash parallel universe, I am certain that you could find a beverage that would satiate you much better than my admittedly under-sweetened lemonade.”
Les eyed the darkened windows of the Gorky home. The shutters were redder than he remembered. Liv used to get into with him about their color every time they drove by. She would insist they were puce, but Les could see clearly that they were maroon. It was a little fight. They were all little fights. At least they started that way. Les hid his hands in his pockets, worried what they might do. “I’d like to talk to your parents,” he said.
The boy shook his head, “I am afraid that’s not possible at this time.”
Les squeezed the breathalyzer like a stress ball and took a deep breath of sweltering air. It cooled him a bit. “When will they be home?” he asked.
“That depends on where or when they went,” said the boy.
Les squinted at the contraption. Waves of heat swirled above its metal body, obscuring the house behind. You would need oven mitts just to touch it.
“Is that a laptop on there?” asked Les through gritted teeth.
The boy shook his head, “My technology is proprietary, so I will not be sharing any details related to its components or function. I hope you understand, Mr. Moore,” said the boy.
“Junior got a laptop for his birthday. You remember my boy right? Funny thing, it went missing a few weeks back. He said he lost it at school, but then my dog goes missing too. Funny thing.”
Danny gave a quizzical look, “I’m not sure what’s funny about that, Mr. Moore. Sorry about your dog.”
Les slammed a fist on the lemonade stand. Danny didn’t even flinch.
“I don’t want your bullshit,” growled Les, “I wanna talk to your folks. And I want a drink.”
The boy lifted the coffee urn. That strange pyramid eye gazed out from the back of a dollar bill. Les always wondered what that was about. He didn’t think there were pyramids in Washington.
“Swear jar,” said the boy, “That’ll be a dollar.”
Les held the boy’s gaze as long as he could, but the heat dried his eyes out and he blinked first. “I’m not teasing here,” he sneered, “Where’s your mom and pops?”
The sun lit the boy’s hair with a golden halo. “They went in the Time-Shifter,” said Danny. “That’s what I’m calling it, patent and trademark pending. How else would I know that it worked?”
Les started to feel woozy. There was no longer any shade from the maple. Sweat singed his eyes. He dabbed his face with a crumpled poster of his missing dog. The air must have reached a boil without him noticing. The Brompton hounds began to bark.
“Where’d. They. Go?” demanded Les.
“They always wanted to see Mount Fuji, but they might have picked different places last minute. They weren’t exactly known for being on the same page,” said Danny, “My father liked reading about Ancient Rome. Mom was more into romance novels.”
Les conjured the image of a stout, Russian man with prematurely-greyed temples and a barrel chest standing beside a sinewy wraith with gossamer hair down to her thighs. He recalled selling Vik Gorky some kind of revolutionary household appliance a few years ago, but lost the specifics in the Jameson still sloshing around his brain. The alcohol seemed to be gaining a higher concentration with each drop of sweat lost.
“I’d hate to give ‘em a call and get you in trouble, son.” Les searched his pockets for his cellphone. His words felt loose in his mouth. “You seem like a…like a good… like a boy.”
All he could find were the breathalyzer and some folded posters. He must have left his phone back in the cup holder. His fingers clamped hard on the breathalyzer. The casing cracked. An embossed “L” popped off and landed in the grass. Les gazed up at the cloudless sky, searching for calm. The Brompton hounds kept yapping.
“How’s this,” said the boy, “I’ll give you one free spin in the Time-Shifter on account of you being my neighbor and all, and your sad situation with your dog. Though if you want a second go, you’d have to pay the full six fifty, but that’s a low low price for the life of your dreams, no? Perhaps you could travel to a tangent reality in which Gus was never lost, though I should warn you that the problem with some parallel universes is that there are often other differences beyond the desired change, especially when pets are concerned, but you’ll at least have your dog back.” He licked his lips. “What do you think?”
“I think your pitch needs work,” barked Les, flinging the busted gizmo at Pam Gorky’s shriveled roses.
The boy’s eyes followed the breathalyzer’s arc, then drifted off toward a lost horizon. His smile slowly unwound. For the first time since his arrival at the stand, Danny appeared to consider what Les had to say. In a flash, he fished something shiny from the coffee urn and offered it to the sweaty salesman. Les took the coin and flipped it round. He thought he had seen a coin like this in one of Junior’s books that he had gotten from school and refused to read. It was shaped like a lug nut and had skulls on both sides. Les bit the coin between his teeth like he had seen them do at the pawn shop. He couldn’t tell if it was gold, but it glistened in the sun the right way. It seemed genuine.
“They call it a memento mori,” said Danny, “Though the Hellenes have a different name for it.”
Les eyed the boy. He bit the coin again. The metallic taste stayed on his tongue.
“I tested it myself,” said the boy, continuing his spiel. “Though I came back, as you can see.”
Les noticed the eerie quiet of the neighborhood. He shivered in spite of the heat.
“You’re saying you got this…” Les gathered his thoughts, “That you got this in…”
“Thermopylae. It was pretty boring actually,” said the boy, “The movie was better.”
Les took a step back. The world shifted under his feet. He reached out for the lemonade stand, but the ground tilted again and the earth came up to greet him. Les grasped a flimsy plank and steadied himself against the stand. The coffee urn lay on its side. Greenbacks and coins littered the lawn. Les belched and tasted Jameson at the back of his throat. His balance returned, more unsure than before.
“I could use you,” said the boy, “A real-life salesman to assist in the marketing component of my venture.” He hopped off his milk crate and began scooping money into the urn. “It only struck me a few moments ago, but every world-changing discovery requires an apostle to spread the good word. One could argue we would have never heard of Jesus and his heavenly Gospel if not for his holy agent, Paul. The sheep need their shepherd.”
Danny plucked the strange coin from a tuft of crabgrass and returned it to the urn.
“Obviously, I cannot offer you much in the way of monetary compensation at this stage, but there will be a lucrative back-end component should you come aboard,” the boy grinned, wider than before. “Though I should warn you, Mr. Moore, that my contract language is strict. I do not tolerate the use of any inebriates on the job. I need you clear-headed. Thankfully I do not share the same low opinion of you as my father…”
Les seized Danny by his lapels and hoisted him into the air. “Listen here you… you lil’ freak,” he slurred, “I’m a spectacle businessman and… You… Uh… Shut your mouth!”
The boy stared back with curiosity, his legs dangling. Les let go and the boy returned to his perch. Neighbors might be watching. He didn’t need to give Liv more ammo. He had already lost Junior in the divorce, but there was always more to take, no matter how much he left at the pawn shop. At least she couldn’t take Gus, that was the only upside of him going missing. Something bumped his elbow. Les glanced down as a pudgy little kid scurried past him and dropped a handful of change in front of Danny. Pembroke Stanfield. Not even the booze could make him forget a name like that. The kid wiped a crusty sleeve across his permanently-runny nose and fished another handful from his pocket, “That’s two dollars and twenty cents,” announced Pembroke, “I wanna go to Mars.”
Danny slid back two nickels, “It’s only two ten, Pemmy.” He mouthed to Les, “Kid’s price,” then continued with the child, “You don’t have to tell me where you wanna go. Just think about it strong when you go in the Time-Shifter. Though you might wanna pick a place with oxygen.”
Pembroke scrunched up his face like he had been asked the meaning of life and held it like that for much too long before he responded, “Then I wanna go to Mars in the olden times, when you could breathe and there were aliens there. But not the scary kind of alien ‘cuz I’m gonna need friends. I’ve never been to Mars before.” Pembroke was all of six-years old. He wore an off-price polo buttoned up to the neck. Cheeto dust stained the pockets of his beige khakis, freshly-pressed for church. Hair gel dripped down around his ears. Les couldn’t blame Junior for giving that kid a wedgie last year, even an alien would know to beat him up.
Les watched Danny count Pembroke’s change at breakneck speed. Pennies plinked into the urn. It reminded him of those coin counters they used to have at the Food Lion. Les was just getting to thirty cents when Danny finished. Maybe he was a genius.
“I can’t let you take this kid’s money,” said Les, “You shouldn’t be lyin’ at your age.”
Danny studied him for a moment. Les had seen the same look on Junior’s face at the zoo. He used to make the painfully-long drive once a month, just so he could see his son interested in something other than his phone. Junior loved the chimps. He would stare for hours, hoping the apes would wallop each other with sticks, though they never did. The closest they got was the time a splotchy-faced male found a fart machine some tourist must have dropped over the fence and terrorized the others with electronic flatulence all afternoon. It got so bad the chimps starting pulling out their hair and had to be tranquilized by the zookeepers. Junior wouldn’t stop talking about it for months and kept bothering Les about buying him a “no-see monkey whip.” Les explained that they were sold out, but if he told the judge he wanted to live with Daddy maybe he’d get one.
“Your words imply that if I were older I would somehow be allowed to lie,” said the boy, “As if there is some federal law against dishonesty related to one’s age, but I’d argue that children are expected to lie, as their minds are not yet fully-formed enough to comprehend the difference between reality and fiction, hence the whole Santa thing. It could even be reasonably argued that their mistruths are key to their cognitive development as it represents the cornerstone of their creativity, for what is invention if not a lie that becomes truth?”
Pembroke looked up at Les and beamed, “I’m going to Mars.”
Les rubbed his throbbing temples and took a deep breath. He needed to sober up, but the heat had him all discombobulated. The world was starting to spin. He watched the boys swirling across the lawn, getting closer, then further, then closer again, until Danny lifted the flap on his contraption and ushered the child inside.
A voice squeaked, “It’s dark in here! And hot!”
Danny walked around to the laptop and pressed a key. The machine began to whir.
“Remember to think hard about where you want to go,” said the boy, “Visualize it.”
“What does that mean?” hollered Pembroke.
“Try to see it in your head,” said the boy, “Close your eyes.”
Danny flicked a series of switches and the contraption hummed ominously, then it roared with an electric wail that drowned out Les’s thoughts. It shook so violently its edges began to blur, as if Les was looking at it through a fogged windshield. Finally it stilled. The air was cool and damp and smelled like Les’s roof after a lightning strike. He watched Danny stroll back over to his milk crate. The Brompton hounds broke the long silence.
“You kin come out now, uh… kid ,” shouted Les, “I’ll take you home to yer folks.” He tried to sneer at Danny, but the Jameson had him seeing double. He wasn’t sure if he picked right. “I suspect you give ‘em back his money, Danny boy.” Les stumbled over to the contraption and lifted the flap. The inside was too dark to see.
“Where would you like to go, Mr. Moore?” asked the boy, “It doesn’t have to be as cool as Mars.”
Les made two wobbly circuits around the Time-Shifter, but couldn’t see any other way in or out. Needs an escape hatch, thought Les. Things don’t always go right. He had been selling the future long enough to know what was possible. Les knew what this was. He grabbed hold of what seemed to be the contraption’s rear and pushed. It wouldn’t budge.
Danny shrieked, “Please stop, Mr. Moore! That is a finely-tuned machine. You’ll throw it outta whack!”
Les staggered back to the entrance and skittered through the flap, ignoring Danny’s protestations. “I know what this is,” he spat. His heavy breaths echoed in his ears as he pulled himself into the machine’s bowels. I know what this is.. The walls got tighter the deeper he went. White-hot baffles scorched his forearms. Stale, sweltering air spasmed his lung. It felt like he was crawling through an oven. _I know what this is_. His head felt eighty-proof and his thoughts wore concrete shoes; they sank deeper each time he banged his skull against the ceiling or caught his neck in the wires hanging from above. His elbows began to chafe. He felt sweat pooling around his ass. The contraption hadn’t seemed so big from the outside. I know what this is. He didn’t care about saving the kid, but he would do it and he would be a hero. He would get his life back. “Where you at, boy?” he shouted.
“Mr. Moore?” Danny’s voice echoed through the walls like the voice of God. “Would you like to take up my offer and give the Time-Shifter a spin? Remember, this run’s gratis.”
He ignored the boy and continued fumbling in the dark. His chin hit a wet slick. Les stopped cold. I know what this is. His trembling fingertips explored the warm, wetness and found little fibers that felt like hairs. Panic gripped his aching muscles. He forgot about the boy. “Gus!” screamed Les. He wriggled forward and bashed his gnarled nose against a cold, steel wall. He had reached the end. He tried to turn around, but there was no room to maneuver. “Gus!” wailed Les. All he heard in response were the shrieks of those cursed hounds. Ray Brompton must’ve adopted ‘em from hell itself, thought Les. He imagined his dog, lost somewhere in this contraption. He had to find him. Gus was all he had left. The walls began to glow a dull red. Les pounded them with his fists, screaming every curse he knew. A white light blazed around him like a thousand stars going nova in a cloudless night sky. He closed his eyes, but the light got brighter behind his lids, and when he opened them again all he saw was whiteness. And then it was black again. Except for the after-image flashing across his vision, the hazy negative of a round-bellied kid clambering over a pile of alien rocks with a distant sun behind him. I know what this is.
“Sorry about that,” said the voice from the darkness, “Opening a wormhole isn’t exactly like opening a door, especially when you’re cutting through the fabric of reality. The best metaphor I can come up with is cracking open a window on a submarine. It can be hard to get it shut again, as you can imagine. But have no fear, I’m working out the kinks.”
Les heard a soft rap on the outside of the machine. The voice echoed again. “You given any more thought to where you might wanna go, Mr. Moore? Remember that you can visit any reality, practically any place you could dream. You could be whomever you wanna be. But you gotta see it clearly.”
Les ignored the boy, and the heat, and the sweat stinging his eyes. The gizmo’s real, he thought. The gears in his head began to turn. He thought about finding Gus. Fixing his nose. Winning his boy back and getting that second chance he knew he deserved. An image surfaced from his whiskey-stewed brain, of perfect blue water, white sand beaches, and a beautiful Italian woman with a nothing bikini hanging off his tanned arm. San Dimas, he thought. Heaven on Earth. He had seen pictures in one of Liv’s magazines when he was packing up his stuff and stole it just to spite her. Les kept it in under the front seat of his Miata and would jerk off to the photos in between sales calls. It was the type of place that rich guys take their model girlfriends on their yachts. It was the life he deserved. That little weirdo built a real-life dream machine, thought Les, but he’s too young and dumb to know what he has. Not even charging a sawbuck… He don’t know what this is. Les would be doing the boy a service, stealing it out from under him. World-changing discoveries like this needed to be properly monetized, so they could change the world. He waded through the thoughts in his head, hatching a plan as he lay there in the stifling darkness.
“Remember to picture it,” shouted the voice, “You gotta see…”
The words got lost in a deafening buzz. Les covered his ears and closed his eyes. He needed to focus. He imagined that beautiful beach with its snow-white sand, his yacht in the distance. The booze made the image hazy, but he could still see his model girlfriend’s perfect, sun-kissed ass climbing the ladder to his yacht. He saw the endless riches of the Time-Shifter, which he would invent in this reality, though he would have to change the name to something with a bigger hook. The stars went nova behind his eyelids. It was beginning. There was an unbearable heat this time he hadn’t noticed before. Les ignored the pain and pictured the pages of the magazine. He saw the words printed in the caption. Shit, he thought. It said San Sebastian, not San Dimas. He didn’t even know where he had heard of San Dimas. It sounded like one of those made-up places they use in movies so the bigwigs don’t get sued. Les tried to picture a different life, but he couldn’t catch the thoughts bobbing around his head. They dissolved into the whiteness that swallowed him whole and were gone.
#
The Time-Shifter stilled. The air smelled like burnt flesh. Danny eyed his mother’s lifeless roses for a few moments, then returned to his lemonade stand. He jangled the coins in the urn and thought about what treat he would buy for Gus. The sun was barely a memory on the horizon. Danny grabbed a tarp from under his milk crate and went to cover his invention. The Brompton hounds barked all night and into the next day.