Time Perverts

Content Warning: Impossible sexual implications.

From the Peabody's mezzanine, I watch as the Duckmaster in his crimson regalia arrives to usher the ducks from the hotel fountain. What began as a 1930s prank fueled by Tennessee whiskey is now a time-honored tradition.

Each morning at 11, the ducks slip into the marble fountain with practiced ease, ripples of time spreading outward beneath the crystal chandeliers, a wholesome counterbalance to the sordid spin cycle of my own life. Now as dusk approaches, they will begin their gentle ascent to the rooftop Royal Duck Palace at exactly 5 pm.

They're never late, not like Shelly. Still no sign of her, and I'm supposed to die in the Peabody Memphis tonight.

It's also our anniversary—not of our wedding. Marriages come and go, but first meetings are for forever. 27 years ago today, that's when we found each other on this hotel's rooftop. The rest is either history or a story waiting to unfold.

As the five mallards waddle with quiet dignity down their red carpet, a hush falls over the grand lobby, across young and old alike. How could it not? With webbed feet tapping and Sousa's King Cotton march playing, it's a lullaby for a bygone era.

My throat catches as the birds enter the elevator and return to their palace in the sky.

Dead from a heart attack at 47. I take good care of myself, but it has to happen. It just runs in the family.

Perhaps my life is a spacetime prank, some Shadowlord's idea of a joke, but like the Peabody ducks, it's become something more in the meantime.

All I know is I'm nothing without Shelly.

I've learned to do what feels natural over the years, and it feels natural to call Paul Jr.

I subvocalize his name to pair my embedded Xfon with his. My ear tingles twice before he answers up in Chicago.

19 going on 20, he's fixated on his current college girlfriend, though I give it a 0% chance of working out. After some prodding, he mentions the wildly impractical romantic gesture he has planned.

Oh God, the chest tattoo. I bite my tongue, fighting against every fiber of my fatherly being.

<Dad?>

<There's nothing like a self-made man?>

<No, the other thing I always say.>

We talk for a while longer, but I'm not that worried about him to be honest. He'll figure it out along the way.

<Talk to you later son.> I lie and leave it at that.

I consider calling my daughter Michelle, but I'm worried about choking up and freaking her out. Plus, she's at summer camp and probably doesn't want to talk to her dear old dad. 9 going on 10, she came later in life. That's my main regret, not getting to see her grow up—well, that and Shelly not being by my side. She's supposed to be here when it happens.

The ducks have probably settled in their rooftop palace by now, so I head up there. I take the stairs all the way to the top. I'm barely out of breath and my heart feels more or less fine. Ridiculous.

Before walking out onto the open roof, I make a quick stop at the bathroom. Not to pee, but for the paper towels. Emblazoned with the Peabody logo and a line of ducks, they feel like fine linen. I slip a few into my pocket. Not that I'll need them but still... they're damn fine paper towels.

No one else is on the roof except for some gangly tourist taking pictures of a city past its prime. The Peabody still stands tall—I've seen to that—but the rest of Memphis sags under the summer heat.

And all these years later, pieces of Xcalibur are still strewn along the banks of the Mississippi like some hastily discarded exoskeleton.

Take me back to the 2027 Memphis skyline, booming and bustling in the midst of nationwide stagflation thanks to one man: Ely Kuck, the mad mogul who turned the Bass Pro Shops Pyramid into his own personal fortress.

Everyone called it the Kuckhold behind his back but kowtowed to him in person. How could you not? He was promising 80,000 jobs to piece together Xcalibur, humanity's space engine.

Those were the days when we'd just become aware of the Shadowlords fiddling with the fringes of our solar system.

We didn't know who they were or what they wanted—still don't—but there was really only one response to the possible existential crisis: Build a phallic monstrosity to rip through the cosmic folds and show the Shadowlords who was boss.

And Kuck was the man to do it.

Rumors of Shadowlords among us abounded. I'm not sure about back then, but it's true in this day and age.

Skip ahead to 2054 some months from now. Grieving and loveless, I will be young again, but I won't appreciate it. Instead, I'll be riding the late night Red Line up to Edgewater in the middle of a Windy City winter.

Dealing with the death of my own father and a bad breakup, my current plan will be to get off at Edgewater then walk out onto the ice lining Lake Michigan's shore.

I'll never get there. The only other person in my L train car will be a man wearing a trench coat and humming as he drifts toward me.

When he opens that coat, there'll be nothing there except for what I can only describe as soft sepia crystals. It'll be too late to turn back, the hum will become a roar, and then...

Bam! Back to 2027 Memphis, courtesy of what must've been a Shadowlord.

I wasn't lost, since I knew Memphis, but this version of it looked bigger and busier though I couldn't put my finger on the differences just yet. Maybe I'd died or finally lost it, so there was only one thing to do. I went to Beale Street and found a bar that didn't card me.

The bartender stared at the $50 bill I handed him for a long moment, but he pocketed it all the same. By my second beer, I noticed people were giving me strange looks. I was still wearing my winter jacket, and it was the middle of summer here. While peeling off my layers, I popped the top few buttons of my shirt and unknowingly exposed my shame.

"Hey, that's my wife's name." A bearded man smiled and staggered into me.

"What?"

"Kimberly." He pointed at the fresh tattoo across my chest.

"Oh yeah, what a bitch."

The man's grin vanished. There wasn't time to tell him that I meant another Kimberly from 2054, the one who'd scoffed at her name across my chest then refused to go to my father's funeral. There wasn't time because he'd already punched me in my nose.

I flailed back but someone lifted me from behind. I found myself out on my ass back on Beale Street.

"He called myyy wiiife a bitch!"

I didn't stick around to see whether the man's drawn out vowels would rile up a mob.

A red light brought direction to my aimless running. It was The Peabody sign shining high.

My nose wouldn't stop bleeding and I knew their top floor bathroom had really nice paper towels. I hid my ruined face with my ripped shirt as if I were stifling a prolonged sneeze and no one in the lobby stopped me.

That damn fine Peabody paper towel was like a balm to my bloody nose. I plastered my face with more, then walked out onto the rooftop in hopes of a soothing breeze.

Someone cleared their throat over by the Royal Duck Palace, a marble and glass structure overlaid with a country home facade.

Peering from around one of its corners was this silver-studded goddess—seriously, back then Shelly had enough piercings to set off every metal detector in the tri-state area. Man, how she gleamed against the Memphis skyline.

Traveling back to 2027, dying in 2054, being born along the way, my life is a closed constellation of guiding stars, and this moment is the brightest of them.

My greatest fear is that I'll change something along the way, and this first meeting will never happen.

But it did, and it will again.

"You here to see the ducks?" she asked.

"For the paper towels."

"Okay weirdo."

She seemed so worldly that I thought she must be at least 25. I didn't know what else to say, so I espoused my love of ducks while still trying to staunch my nose.

"Everyone pays attention to them in the fountain, but barely anyone visits them in their palace," she said.

"Do you think they get lonely, the ducks?"

"I don't know, but people do."

As we drew closer, I noticed, to my relief, that the miraculous Peabody towels had soaked up all my Beale Street blood.

And God almighty, that first kiss was like riding a rollercoaster through a cinnamon haze.

We spent the night up there with the ducks.

And Shelly was right there beside me when I buried Kimberly's name in a landslide of ink.

She wouldn't give me any suggestions for a new tattoo. She just said go big or go home, so I got a giant duck across my chest.

It should have dawned on me then, but it didn't.

Back in 2054, I've got incoming on my Xfon. It's Shelly.

<You're kidding, right?>

<No, let's try something new this year.>

Graceland? I don't want to choke on a peanut butter and banana sandwich. I don't want to faceplant on one of Elvis's fancy antique cars. I don't want to die in Graceland. That's not how it's supposed to happen.

<I'm staying right here with the ducks in their palace. I don't know if they get lonely, but people do.>

<I'll buy Graceland for you if you come visit the duck palace first.>

<Please? Listen, something bad will happen if you don't leave there right now. Don't ask me how I know.>

"Right, I'm going to die, but how do you know?" I blurt it out instead of subvocalizing and the picture-snapping tourist glances in my direction.

<Wait, I—>

She kills the connection. She doesn't answer when I call back, so I set my Xfon to ping her every minute until she blocks my frequency.

So... if I leave this spot, I may never meet her for the first time. And if I don't leave this spot, I'll apparently never see her again. Stupid Shadowlords.

Wait, does she know? A cold stab of fear shoots through me despite the sun still blasting the bricks. Impossible, she can't know. I decide to stay put. I have faith she won't abandon me.

I wouldn't be here without her. She's the guiding light of my constellation, and back in 2027, she was the one who introduced me to Kuck.

We had a nice townhouse right on Turley Street thanks to Shelly's connections. She was a sort of executive whisperer. CEOs from all around would visit her, lay out their future plans (after a non-disclosure of course), then pick her brain. She called herself an intuitionist, and they loved that.

When Kuck heard about her, he put her on retainer. He was often at the Turley Street house and offered me a job on the Xcalibur project after one of his intuition sessions. When there was a problem with my social security number registering as nonexistent, he got me a new one. And, for the next 7 years, he owned me.

Meanwhile I was growing increasingly paranoid about running into my father, or, worse, running him over while driving.

I knew he'd lived in Memphis around this time and even worked for Kuck as well. Would bumping into him knock me out of existence? Believing in alternate timelines helped me stay sane.

Those were some of the worst and the happiest years of my life with Kuck grinding me down with his halitotic mismanagement then Shelly building me back up with her cinnamon haze.

Then, in 2034, we welcomed a new addition to the family: Paul Jr.

One night, while I was staring at his tiny toes, I almost dropped him. The two middle toes of his left foot were slightly webbed with a patch of skin between them. I'd noticed it before of course, but...

I took off my sock and checked my own left foot.

Yeah…

"There's nothing like a self-made man." My dad would always say that like it was some kind of joke. The bastard, he knew.

As for Shelly, my mother and wife, I couldn't bring myself to leave her, but I grew distant.

The Xcalibur project was grossly overbudget and behind schedule, and I convinced myself that I could fix it. The Kuckhold Pyramid became my second home as Shelly spent long nights alone with our colicky baby.

She cajoled and coaxed me, but mostly, she just seemed puzzled, and it broke my heart.

This went on for months until it finally clicked: I was denying myself the greatest love I'd ever known and risking my existence out of some sense of chronological prudishness.

I have Kuck to thank for that.

"How's my #1 Kuck boy?" He startled me at my desk in the wee hours of the morning. "And how's that frisky wife of yours?" he said without giving me time to respond. "Listen, I've got a proposition for you…"

"Yes?" I grit my teeth, caught in between a husband's possessiveness and a son's defensiveness.

"Next time I see Shelly, she needs to give me a definite yes or no on Xcalibur. No intuition. Just a measure of success."

"Don't bother. I can tell you that Xcalibur is going to fail in the next 5 years tops."

"So… you're saying I should fire you?"

"I've got a proposition for you. I'm going to cut something out of my head and give it to you."

"Metaphorically?"

"No, I need a knife."

"Oh, this should be interesting."

Together we found a penknife, then he took a big step back as I went to work on my ear. When I was finished, I had the Xfon from 2054 in my hand.

"This is going to replace smartphones, and you're going to make it happen."

Kuck's eyes widened at the Xfon's intricate circuitry then glazed over as he did some quick mental calculations.

"Yes, of course, how'd you get that prototype from my lab? It's called an Xhear. Give it to me and leave now, and I won't press charges."

"No, it's called an Xfon. X, lowercase f, o, n. Don't Kuck it up."

After that, I put every last penny into X stock and every last ounce of effort into making things up to Shelly.

I went from hating my father to becoming him to learning to love him again.

I took control of my life because I was a self-made man.

Now, all I have left to do is die, one more point along the constellation that will send Paul Jr. off along a series of bad decisions turned good in 2027 Memphis.

I just wish I could see Shelly on the Peabody rooftop one last time.

"You here to see the ducks?" She walks towards me like a dream.

"Nope, just the paper towels."

Instead of smiling, she starts sobbing.

"Baby, what's wrong?"

"H-heart attack. You have it if you stay here, stupid!"

Her words leave me weak in the knees. When she beats her fists against me, I fall on my ass.

"No no no, I didn't mean to. Oh God, it's happening!" Kneeling down beside me, she rips open my shirt and starts pumping my chest.

"Stop. It's not a heart attack. Not yet."

"How do you know?" I don't know who says it first, but Shelly already has her explanation ready.

"Paul… I am Michelle."

"Yeah, I know. Shelly, it's short for Michelle."

"No, I'm Michelle. Our daughter."

She recoils at the initial look of horror in my eyes, but she doesn't look away.

"Let me guess. Shadowlord?"

"Hey! Don't treat me like I'm crazy. You have no idea—"

"No, I believe you. It's just… well, I have something to tell you too."

Then it's her turn. We panic, but we do it together.

"Shelly?"

"Yes?"

"I don't know how much time I have left, but I want you to know... I wouldn't change a damn thing. Don't you see? We were made for each other."

And I'm lost once more in her cinnamon haze until I notice there's someone standing over us.

It's the picture-happy tourist. Perhaps, with my duck chest tattoo exposed, he thinks I'm part of the Peabody experience.

That's when I see he's wearing a trench coat. I hear the hum.

Shelly and I get to our feet.

The Shadowlord opens his coat to expose the soft sepia crystals within.

"I think this one's my turn," I say.

"What will I tell the kids, I mean, us?"

"Heart attack, you already know."

"How will I find you?"

"Today by the duck palace, no matter the year!"

I have to shout as the Shadowlord's hum becomes a roar, but I think she hears me.

Either way, there's no turning back.

Menu

22 likes 11 comments