Flirting with Forever

One

Peter pressed his exquisitely cobbled shoe against the side of the desk drawer and rubbed his aching temples.

Despite all the appointments of success—the fine clothes, the freedom to paint when and what he chose, the admiration of a highly appreciative king, row upon row of apprentices at his command, a full waiting room, and an even fuller account with his bankers—he felt nothing but despair.

Even the fat emerald ring, once such a prize, was a torture, for it reminded him of Ursula and how he had treated her.

It had been heartbreaking to live through that part of his life the first time.

And now to be asked to live through it again was a sorrow so exquisite he could barely speak.

“Peter,” Mertons said, “I hope you know how much the Guild appreciates this.”

Peter grunted. The Executive Guild managed the souls passing through the Afterlife, specifically those within the artists’ section, and Mertons was the time-jump accountant who had been assigned to this case.

Time-jump Accountant was his official title, but Peter knew the unofficial reason the Guild had sent him was to ensure the moody, unreliable painter they’d enlisted managed the mission properly and stayed within the prescribed rules, so perhaps “nursemaid” would be more appropriate.

“It wasn’t as if I had a choice.” Peter slitted his eyes and let the dying November sun warm his face. The evenings were the hardest. During the day he could lose himself in painting, but at night…at night, all he had was wine and his memories. How could he have once held success in such esteem?

Mertons shrugged. “You will get what you want, Peter—a new life as an artist.” The Guild had the power to choose the new life into which a member of its constituency—in this case, painters—would arrive, bundled in his or her new mother’s arms, with only an obscure hint of the sadness or joy of their former life to tint their memories.

And while Peter desperately wanted a new life as an artist—he couldn’t imagine himself, or at least his soul, spending the next sixty years as a barber or dairyman—what he really wanted was a chance to redeem himself, which he knew he would never find.

He had finally agreed to slip back into the pinched, desiccated skin he had sloughed off at his death two years earlier for one reason only—to try to return Ursula’s good name to her, an intention he had purposefully not shared with Mertons.

“Tell me again what we know.” Peter had heard the story several times since their arrival a week ago. Nonetheless, Mertons liked to tell it, and it would give Peter time to review his plan. He glanced at the clock and then at the small storage room off the office. Just before five. Good.

Mertons sighed and looked down at his clipboard. “To be honest, we know very little. The writer’s name is Campbell Stratford—a Scot,” he added as if that provided a significant detail to the understanding of the event. “The book will be an embarrassment to the Guild—”

“An embarrassment to Van Dyck, you mean.” Peter had immense respect for the work of the man he’d succeeded as royal portraitist—Van Dyck to the court of Charles I and he to that of Charles II—but it irked him that the Guild would jump through hoops to help certain of its dead members but not others.

“An embarrassment to one of our members is an embarrassment to the Guild, Peter. We don’t want Van Dyck’s ill-considered contretemps with a few women outside his marriage to overshadow a career that should be judged strictly on its professional merits—merits, I might add, that are both numerous and laudatory. ”

A few women? Peter, who had known Van Dyck well, rolled his eyes. “I expect the Guild doesn’t particularly like the idea of someone on Earth running around with access to a time tube, either.”

The muscles in Mertons’s jaw contracted.

The Guild, like every organization that managed souls in the Afterlife, had a stake in ensuring the tubes were tightly controlled.

Representatives of the Guild, or, like Peter, those chosen to serve their needs, were the only people allowed to travel the tubes as conscious adults, and then only under very special circumstances.

The thought that this Stratford fellow would find a way to breach the tube terrified the Guild, who claimed that alteration of the fabric of time could be as dangerous as an asteroid hit.

No one on Earth had done it in decades. Peter didn’t doubt there was some level of danger, though he suspected the Guild’s concern was just as much about retaining power as averting chaos.

“No, Peter, the Guild does not care for it, and neither should you. The results would be unimaginable.”

Peter made an ambiguous noise. A few more minutes, and then all he’d need was a way to distract Mertons long enough to do what he needed to do.

“Tell me, how did you come to know the writer would be traveling here?” This was the one part of the story Mertons had not shared with him, and pride showed in the man’s eyes.

Fortunately, Peter thought, there’s nothing like a time-jump accountant for long-winded self-aggrandizement, especially when it comes to the intricacies of time travel.

“I probably shouldn’t be telling you this—”

Peter gave him a conspiratorial nod.

“—but it was me. Dawson, the associate in External Affairs, was reviewing the daily log and saw Stratford’s book had spiked a seven-point-three on incongruity.

Normally you’d ignore something like that unless it happened again, but when Dawson brought it to me, there was just something odd about it.

A seven-point-three on an art biography?

An art biography by an unknown author? I got permission to check it against the Alexandrian tables, the safest way for someone in the present to examine future occurrences, and the book—that is to say, the book that Stratford will write if we don’t stop him—was filled with details knowable only to someone who’d been back in time. ”

“Perhaps he guessed. Some writers are very good at that, I hear.”

“Perhaps he guessed Van Dyck liked his eggs poached in cream and sprinkled with nutmeg? Perhaps he guessed Van Dyck entertained his closest friends with a portrait of Lord Harwich painted with horns and a snout?” Mertons lowered his voice to a whisper.

“Perhaps he guessed Van Dyck needed a brisk paddle to ensure the structural integrity of his ‘monument to Cupid’?”

“Oh dear.”

“And it’s worse than that.”

“I’d rather not hear.”

“Stratford gave himself carte blanche to fill the rest of the book with whatever lies he wanted. He calls it a ‘fictography.’ Do you see? A fictional biography. An abomination, if you ask me. Why can’t writers stick to the truth?

” Mertons returned his gaze to his ever-present clipboard.

As tall as a boat pole and nearly as thin, with a crown as hairless as a baby’s, Mertons looked about as much like an apprentice painter in 1673 as he did a centurion at the Battle of Thermopylae.

Nonetheless, that was the cover the Guild had instructed Peter to provide him.

“And why does Stratford come to me?”

Mertons shuffled his feet. “We don’t know.”

“Don’t know?” Peter cultivated surprise. This was his favorite part of the story since the answer could not be found on Mertons’s clipboard.

“No. Perhaps he’s broken the security algorithm. Perhaps he’s found a tube we’re not aware of. All we know is this biography—pardon me, fictography—will change the way thousands of people feel about Van Dyck. So our job is to stop Stratford from writing that book. The book is nothing but lies.”

“Nothing but lies? You mean Van Dyck didn’t pass around a portrait of Lord Harwich?” Peter had seen it himself once. He declined to call to mind the other, more picturesque details of his colleague’s personal life.

Mertons flushed. “There’s a difference between telling a story and appealing to the prurient interest of readers.

Stratford takes the story, embellishes it, and with The Girl with a Coral Earring, makes the entire seventeenth-century art world seem like some sort of giant sultan’s tent in which artists run, satyr-like, over pillowed beds, chasing willing and unwilling women to their reputational doom. ”

Peter considered the artists he had known, including himself before the settling influence of Ursula, and found the description to be more accurate than not.

“I see you’re amused.” Mertons crossed his arms. “I wonder if you would feel the same if the subject of the biography was you.”

Peter stiffened. He hated to admit it, but Mertons was right.

Seeing his own life splashed across the pages, stripped bare for the amusement of a reading public who would not care what parts were true, so long as the salacious bits of intrigue kept them turning pages, would be more than he could bear.

There was a special place in hell for a writer like Stratford, who picked the bones of the dead to further his own career, and Peter supposed he should be glad he’d have a hand in bringing the blackguard down.

But the thought brought him little joy, trapped as he was in one of the most unhappy times of his former life.

He wished another artist in the Afterlife had been given the opportunity.

He glanced again at the clock. “And here, in this studio, in this particular time, is the only—what do you call it?—point of intersection?”