Loads of Futures

‘Obsession’ inspired short fiction w/the Eye Ra

Loads of Futures

I asked the kid behind the register if they had any wish sticks left.

“Sold the last one this morning,” he said, not looking up. “Really popular.”

“You got anything else?”

He gave me the look you’d give a guy who asked for the bathroom key with a little too much enthusiasm. “I don’t know, man. That’s kind of a personal question and stuff. What’s your life even like. What do you want it for.”

My phone buzzed against my leg. DANA. I sent it to voicemail. Dana wanted to talk about Mabel’s birthday — was I coming Saturday, could I do the cake, Mabel had been asking — and I loved my sister and my niece and I would deal with all of that later, when I had more to deal with it with.

“I need to know the future,” I said.

The kid’s whole face cleared, like I’d finally said something that made sense. “Oh. Why didn’t you lead with that.” He bent down behind the counter and came up with what looked like a brass doorknob with an eye scratched into the face of it, gone green at the edges. “Ra. Shows you loads of futures. One a day, though. Don’t ask me how it works. I just do mornings.”

Behind him the espresso machine was screaming, and the girl working it had her sleeves shoved up and a pen behind her ear, and she caught me looking and didn’t smile, which I respected. Her nametag said CASS.

“How much,” I said.

“Whatever’s in the jar. Karma thing.”

I put in everything in my wallet, which was forty-one dollars, and he slid the knob across and told me to hold it up to my eye like a telescope. So I did. And I saw the rest of my life.

A penthouse. A window the size of a tennis court with the whole city laid out under it like a lit circuit board, all that gold. A screen on the wall and on the screen a ticker — SUN — green, a number that used to not have a comma and now had one. And there was Cass, future-Cass, in one of my shirts and not much else, looking at me the exact way present-Cass behind the machine was pointedly not, and I figured that was the part I wanted.

But the part that got its hooks in, the part I’d replay, was smaller. Future-me’s phone rang and it was Dana, and future-me picked up without the little flinch I do now, and said, easy, not even turning from the window: “Dana. Dana. Stop. It’s handled. Tell Mabel her uncle’s got it. Tell Mabel to pick the expensive one.” And hung up. Like it was weather. Like being the guy who could say that was just the climate where I lived now.

I blinked and I was standing in a coffee shop and the kid said, “So? What’d you see?”

“I gotta go,” I said, and I put the knob down and ran.

The IPO was real. SUN — Sundial Logistics, they did something with trucks and an algorithm, I never fully understood it — went live at the open, and I had a position queued up like a man at a starting line. The difference now was that I’d seen it land.

I got to my desk at 9:31 and put my whole position in, then pulled my savings in behind it, because the future is the future and I am not a coward. The slider went all the way right and I let it.

It opened green. Up eleven percent in ninety seconds, and I made a noise I’ve never made, somewhere between a laugh and a sob, and slid out of my chair onto the carpet and rolled, a grown man, rolling, because you could watch it arriving.

Then there was a beep. Then a different beep.

It gave back the eleven and kept going, and I wasn’t on the floor anymore, I was very upright, and there was a minus in front of the number. Fifteen. Twenty. Twenty-five. Thirty-five, in about the time it takes to say no that many times, and somewhere down there I dumped the whole thing into a falling market at the worst possible second, which they tell you never to do, and then I went to the bathroom and was sick.

I sat on the tile and remembered I’d already used today’s look, and that the future was therefore closed until morning, like a bakery.

I went back to the coffee shop because I didn’t know where else a person goes.

Cass was still there, wiping the counter in slow circles. The kid was gone. I walked up and said, before I could stop myself, “Do you want to get dinner.”

She looked at me a second. I want to be clear that I had already seen this woman in a future, so I wasn’t nervous. I was patient.

“Sure,” she said. “I’m off at six.”

I went home and that’s when I saw it: after hours, SUN was ripping. Up nine. Up thirteen. The market had been wrong the way it’s always wrong right before it’s right, and I’d panic-sold the best thing I’d ever own, and it was running without me. So I bought it back. Higher than I’d sold it, and more — the rest of the savings, then the 401(k), which you’re not supposed to be able to touch in an afternoon, but you’d be surprised what’s possible when you skip the part about penalties. The future cost what it cost. You don’t haggle with a penthouse.

Dinner I won’t let anyone take from me. Whatever else is true, dinner happened.

She came in jeans and a green coat and she’d taken the pen out of her hair, and she ordered the second-cheapest thing on the menu and then talked me out of the cheapest thing on mine, said the move was always one up from the bottom, that’s where the kitchen hides the dish they’re proud of. She was right. She was right about a lot of small things in a row and it started to feel like a talent.

I told her I was between things. Close to being between better things.

She didn’t laugh. She put her chin on her hand and looked at me and said, “No, you’re not. You did something today. You’ve got the look people get when they did something.” She said it like she was letting me off a hook I didn’t know I was on. “I see a hundred faces a day over that machine. Yours came in this morning looking for the future and walked out looking like it found it. What was it — a girl? A job?”

“A stock,” I said, which was the most romantic thing I had.

She laughed then, finally, and it was a good laugh, no edge in it, and she told me about a guy who came in every day and ordered a small drip and tipped in nickels he counted out of a film canister, and how she’d decided he was either the loneliest man alive or the happiest and hadn’t figured out which in two years, and that was the thing about people, you mostly never find out.

And then — I only caught it because I looked up from the menu when she wasn’t expecting it — the whole thing switched off. For a second she wasn’t talking to me, or to anyone. Her face went flat and far and tired, the face of a woman who’d been on her feet since six and would be again tomorrow, doing some private arithmetic that had nothing to do with this table. No charm in it. Nothing aimed anywhere. Then I shifted in my seat and it came back on, warm, lit, mine. I decided I’d imagined it. I think about that second more than almost anything now.

When the plates were gone she said, “I know a place. Not a place place. A spot.” She zipped the green coat to her chin. “You want to see it?”

I had been shown a future in which this woman loved me. A man who has seen that does not stop walking when the streetlights do.

She took my hand — the right hand, the future hand — and led me off the lit part of the street toward the part that wasn’t, and there were two of them waiting, and it was quick and almost polite. They took the watch and the phone and the eighty dollars I had left in the physical world. When I looked up to find her she was most of the way down the block, just the sound of her getting smaller, and one of them said, not even quietly, “Thanks, Cass,” like it didn’t matter whether I heard.

I walked home. Two hours. I kept expecting the streetlights to come back, and eventually they did, near my place, where they’d been the whole time.

I woke up and reached for the knob before I reached for anything else, the way you reach for water, and held Ra to my eye.

The penthouse. The window. SUN with the comma. Cass in the shirt. And future-me on the phone again, not even looking at it: Tell Mabel to pick the expensive one. I lay in my actual bed and let it run as long as it would, which felt like a long time, much longer than a morning, and I came out of it feeling better than I had any right to.

Then I dug the backup phone out of a drawer, because my real one was being sold for parts across town, and checked SUN.

Down fifty percent.

But I’d seen it. The number on the screen and the number in the future were two different numbers and only one of them was real, and it wasn’t the one with the minus in front of it. They just hadn’t agreed yet. All I needed was time.

I called work and told them there’d been a family emergency. There hadn’t. But the future is a kind of family if you think about it, and it was very much an emergency, so the words came out almost true.

This morning I woke and I ra’d before my feet hit the floor.

It’s gotten bigger, somehow — more gold in it, the comma’s got company. But the call never changes. Dana on the line, future-me not even looking down: Tell Mabel to pick the expensive one. I could say it along with him now. I stayed in there a while — there’s no clock in the future, which is one of the kinder things about it — and then I came out and checked.

Down eighty.

I sat on the floor by the radiator where the carpet’s gone through to the backing, and I cried, the real kind, and the drawer phone lit up while I was doing it. Seven missed calls. Dana. And a text from this morning: party’s at 2, Mabel keeps asking if her uncle’s coming, just tell me yes or no so I can tell her something.

It was four o’clock. The party was the future now too. Already over, in a world I hadn’t gotten around to checking.

I should have called back. I know how that reads. But here’s the thing nobody tells you about the bottom: you can see the future from down here just as well. Better, maybe. Less in the way.

I did the math on Cass, too — the receipt, the spot, thanks, Cass. I’m not slow. I know what she did. But there was that one second at dinner when the light went out behind her face and she forgot, for just a beat, to be anyone, and you can’t fake tired like that. That second was real. That’s the Cass that’s coming back.

Because in the future she does. In the future Dana doesn’t have to ask twice and Mabel picks the expensive one and Cass is at the big window in my shirt, looking at me the way she’s going to, and a man who has seen all of that — what’s he going to do, pick up the phone? Hold a grudge? When they get here I’m going to forgive every one of them. I’ve got it worked out for when they arrive.

I just have to keep watching for them.

One a day. Whatever’s in the jar.