Last Thorsday Night #2
He turned so his back was to everyone in the room but me, and pulled a book out of his backpack. He put a finger to his lips, then handed it over.
I took it, turned it over, and saw the title. Wall of Rivers.
My title.
My heart started to race, and when I glanced at the author’s name, I had to sit down.
Nila Sturgess.
It was a new copy, printed beautifully by a publisher I’d never heard of. I opened it to the middle and out of habit sniffed the pages. There is no smell like book.
I turned to the copyright page.
And closed my eyes.
Wall of Rivers was in its thirty-seventh printing, with a copyright renewal in the name of the Estate of Tyler Boothe Mayall. And a print date more than fifty years in the future.
I turned to the back of the book, to the author photo on the inside flap of the dust jacket.
The picture was mine – one Tyler had talked me into having taken only a few weeks earlier.
“Because you’re so pretty,” he said, “and when you’re famous, you’re going to want a nice picture of you when you were young to go inside your books. ”
It was the stupidest reason I’d ever heard for someone wanting a photo. I figured he’d just wanted it for himself.
But . . . there it was. I turned to the first page. The words were my words.
I handed the book back to Per, and saw how badly my hand was shaking.
Per took it, and touched my fingers lightly in the process. What he said next was the biggest understatement I’d ever heard.
“We need to talk.”
We went to an all-night diner – one of those chains where you can have breakfast or dinner twenty-four hours a day.
It had the advantage of being public while still being anonymous.
Wall of Rivers was the manuscript Tyler had asked to read the night he stayed over because he said he was having trouble getting to sleep.
I would have been insulted, but Tyler did not exactly have a way with tact.
I’d put it down to him being him, and hadn’t thought about it again.
But now I needed an explanation. How and where had my novel come to be published, what did the date and number of printings on the copyright page mean, why did Tyler’s estate own the copyright? How had Per gotten his hands on it?
I ordered a diet drink. I didn’t think I was going to like what he would say, and diet cola was all I could trust my stomach to keep down.
Per, on the other hand, ordered half of everything on the menu.
He started by saying, “I’m not supposed to be here, and I’m screwing things up by doing this. But I love your books. You’ve been my favourite author for years.”
I shivered. He was heading into the territory I’d feared.
“You want a sweater?” he asked. “I have one in my bag.”
“I’m . . . fine,” I lied, which was clearly the stupidest thing anyone has ever said. I was a long damn way from fine. He shook his head, his half-smile telling me I wasn’t fooling either of us.
“No, you’re not. How could you be?”
“I started out being fine,” I amended. And that was true enough. He’d sat beside me at Thorsday Night, he’d smiled at me, and he’d made my heart beat faster. But now everything had gotten scary, and I had to ask. “You’re not from . . . here . . . are you?”
“Swedish Institute of Historical Research, Time Validation Division,” he said. “In Helsingborg.”
“That’s where. How about when?” I’d written time travel.
I was proud of myself for making the leap so sensibly, for not falling apart over the situation that was presenting itself to me.
I was, I thought, at least as cool as my characters right then.
I was a bit freaked out. But I’d seen one of my future books.
So at least I knew I was going to eventually get up the nerve to send out my work.
And that when I did, at least one of them would sell.
The idea that I might also end up marrying Tyler, though, wasn’t doing too much for the residual pizza churning in my stomach.
Per nodded. “I’m from about sixty years ahead. But you and I don’t have much time. We mustn’t talk about me. You have to know the truth about you before you go home tonight.”
Something about the way he said “tonight” made my skin crawl.
“Why tonight . . . specifically?”
He reached into his bag and pulled out a ring binder. It was gunmetal grey, and made of a material as cool and hard as metal, but as pliant as plastic, impressively space-age-y.
He handed it to me, and said, “Skim. You’ll get the gist of this quickly.”
The binder held copies of newspaper articles far more exotic than the originals had ever been: the paper was creamy with a semi-gloss finish, and the words on the first page scrolled down as I read them.
I didn’t have to touch anything. The paper seemed to be tracking my eye movement and helpfully putting the next words I needed to read where I needed them to be.
Any doubts I had about the legitimacy of my printed book were laid to rest by the binder with its tech-we-don’t-have-yet paper. Per Tordonsson was from the future.
And the date on the first article was tomorrow .
. . no. We weren’t in the middle of Thorsday Night any more.
We’d slipped into plain old Friday morning.
The paper’s date was today. The headline read WOMAN SLAIN BY INTRUDER IN HOME INVASION.
The photo Tyler had badgered me into getting identified me as “woman slain”.
I closed my eyes and wrapped my arms around myself. “I should have let Tyler take me home,” I said.
“No,” Per said. “You did the right thing. Just keep skimming.”
There was an article where Tyler said my murder was a huge tragedy, that I’d just sold my first novel, that we were engaged, that I had no one else in the world. That we’d been so happy together. The bit about me having no one else in the world was true enough. But everything else was a lie.
Through newspaper articles, videos (also on the amazing paper, with sound included) and copies of legal documents dated well into the future, I discovered that Tyler had somehow had himself designated the executor of my estate.
He’d managed my first novel sale into a bestseller by playing heavily on my emerging talent cut short by the tragedy of my brutal murder.
I tried hard not to think too much about the “brutal” part.
It didn’t hurt that the books had been good. But the promotion had been . . . well . . . inspired.
I looked up at Per.
“I’ve loved you . . . your work . . . since I found the first book by you,” he said. He put his hand on mine and said, “You are a brilliant writer. And I lo—” He shook his head.
I couldn’t catch my breath. “I . . . you . . .”
He touched a finger to my lips and said, “You have to understand the situation – quickly – because there are some choices you must make. I need to know what you want. Your work has become classic in my time. Millions of people have read you, have had their lives changed and made better by your stories. You’re famous, you’re beloved.
” He took a deep breath, and continued, “But all the probabilities suggest that your work only found its audience because you died so horribly – and because Tyler Boothe Mayall jumped in to market your just-sold book on your death. The odds are that if you had lived, all seven of your novels would have stayed in the trunk in your bedroom, along with any others that you might have written, and neither I nor anyone else would have ever heard of you.”
So.
If I died later this morning, I could be famous. Big-time famous. My words would live on long past my final breath. I would achieve the sort of literary immortality most writers dream of – and almost none get.
If I lived, odds were good that when I was dead no one would know I’d been here.
He was watching my eyes, looking for answers there. I doubted he could find any.
I buried my face in my hands.
I loved writing. And I loved the stories I told, the characters I created, the themes I explored and pursued and eventually pinned down and answered. I wanted people to read what I’d done, to love it as much as I did. And I wanted to leave something of me behind when I was gone.
But I loved breathing, too. I loved waking up in the morning to the sunlight falling across my face.
I loved walking the block to work, where I was a copywriter for a small ad agency.
I loved the taste of cherries in summer and apples in autumn, the way my muscles burned when I stretched, and the way my heart pounded in rhythm with my feet when I ran.
I could be immortal if I died today.
I could be nobody at all if I lived tomorrow.
But the odds were I couldn’t have both my life and my fame.
“Writers dream about reaching millions,” I said. “But we also dream about being around to enjoy it.”
He nodded. “I know. And I can’t know how long you will live if you don’t die today, or how much more you will write.
There are no odds for that, no way to predict, no way to track what didn’t happen.
But I can tell you . . . having heard the first chapter of your new book, I would give anything to read the rest of it. ”
I frowned. “Only . . . whether I live or die, you never will. Because either I won’t live to write it . . . or I won’t manage to publish it.”
“Those aren’t exactly the options. Don’t worry about what comes next.
Or about me. Tell me what you want now. Do you want to become as famous as .
. . well, not Shakespeare, but as famous as Tolkien?
If you have to die today to do it? I know some writers would give anything for that guarantee.
” He took a deep breath, and said, “Or would you want to live, knowing that if you do, odds are no one will ever know who you were?”
I drank the last of my diet soda and put my hand over his. “How long do I have to make up my mind?”
“Your murder happens at 7.24 a.m.”
I looked at my watch. It was 4.10 a.m.
I put my hand on his and said, “I have to go home. I want you to come with me.”