Red Dot Irreal by Jason Erik Lundberg Page A

under the comforter, passed her her clothes from where they’d been scattered on the floor, and got dressed myself. Once we were both decent again (although I’m sure Nicole would take umbrage at either of us being “decent”), I peeked out into the living room; Nicole sat on the couch’s left-most cushion, bent over, head in her hands, shoulders heaving, crying silently, while the Eurasian woman sat next to her, arm around her shoulders, patting Nicole’s knee, saying something I couldn’t hear. Mei and I edged out of the bedroom, past the two women on the couch, out the door of the flat, and down the corridor to the lift lobby. Downstairs, we stood on the curb waiting for a taxi, not speaking. Finally, after about fifteen minutes, a silver cab approached from down the block, and I said, “This can’t happen anymore.”
    “I know,” she said, waving the taxi down. “I’ve lost a lover and my best friend all at once. Stupid, so stupid. I’m going home to bash myself with a hammer now.”
    “Look, don’t blame yourself too much. I knew what I was doing. I’ll call you, when this whole thing blows over.”
    Mei nodded. The silver cab stopped, Mei opened the door, and then she closed it behind her without looking at me.
    Not eager to return to the domestic nightmare upstairs, I wandered to the rear side of the housing block. My path took me through the small park adjacent, with about a dozen carefully managed types of trees—palm, rain, angsana, yellow flame, mahogany, tembusu, sea apple, saga, sea almond, trumpet—all crammed into a compact public space. Mynahs, pigeons, crows, and diminutive brown sparrows noisily populated the branches above in cacophonous song. I sat down at one of the wrought iron benches along the cobbled path. Somewhere, in one of the seven housing blocks in the vicinity, a jackhammer indicated a housing renovation, the rat-at-at-at-at of pulverizing concrete and ceramic floor tiles.
    After a time, the Eurasian woman approached on the path from the direction of my block, her movements fluid. The breeze tossed her straight hair around her head in a way that immediately reminded me of Nicole. She sat down beside me.
    “Nicole has gone to her parents’,” she said. “She’ll take you back eventually, but not for a while, and you’re going to have to suck up like you never have before.” She opened her mouth to say more, and instead punched me hard in the upper arm. The next day, a bruise would blossom there in the shape of a backwards Om.
    “Ow!”
    “You stupid shit,” she said.“I told you. I told you that you couldn’t keep it in your pants. I’d hoped the warning would somehow make things different. I guess I’m the idiot here.”
    “How did you do that?” I said. “Enter the room without anyone seeing?”
    “I’ve told you already,” she said.
    “But it’s ... it’s just impossible.”
    “Nothing’s impossible, Dad.”
    I looked at this young woman, really looked at her for the first time. In her face I could see my nose, my ears, Nicole’s mouth and chin, and features from both her family and mine, or which were new and unique to the Eurasian woman, like her eye color, the dark grey of worn concrete. With everything that had happened, how could I deny it any longer?
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “For whatever I did, or will do, to you. I’ve been an incredible bastard. I’ll make things better, for all of us.”
    “I know you’ll try,” she said, “but I need to tell you something. Time travel tends to be a non-linear process for the traveler. I’ve visited important moments in your and Mom’s lives, not just as a tourist, but hoping to catch you when you’d be most open to listening.” She paused and looked into the middle distance. The wind rustled the leaves in the trees around us. “I’ve just come from about a year in your future. And I saw you die.”
    “What?” The blood drained out of my face. “But that can’t be right. You said I