Miranda Page 4

  Doof’s eyes were shaped like tiny almonds and had thin black outlines. I stared into those eyes for hours, trying to reassure him. He didn’t understand me when I said, “Everything will be all right,” but I’m sure my patting him and holding him and kissing him gave him the message. We’d make it through this together.

  I rubbed his small velvet ears and just held him.

  At about two o’clock in the morning, I carefully put him down in the small dog bed resting beside my own. He cried out in great pain, and I hopped under the blanket and fell asleep.

  A few hours earlier, Doof was perfectly healthy. He woke up when I did and followed me into the living room. We watched CNN together, him blinking and yawning quietly beside me.

  I knew I had the friend of a lifetime. Finally.

  Doof and I spent many wonderful years together. I’m sure I confused him, speaking forward sometimes and backward at other times. It didn’t matter which way I spoke to him, since he didn’t ever really understand anything I said.

  I’m sure he was retarded, but that only added to his personality.

  For his whole life, he seemed to be like a puppy. Even just before his stroke, he would bounce around and want to play, just like a three month old pup. It didn’t take long to realize Doof was short for Dufus, a loving name that fit him perfectly.

  As the years moved on, Doof’s white hair shaded back to brown, and he became more and more energetic.

  I couldn’t imagine life without him.

  Chapter 9

  The next year, I aged back to thirty-eight. Two major events happened, and with them the world seemed to be rebuilding like the Phoenix.

  In September, the World Trade Center grew out of a mountain of ash and dust, morphing into America’s tallest towers.

  I was glued to CNN when they rose, and I watched in amazement. They were so big. It was incredible. I knew there were taller buildings in Malaysia or somewhere in the mid-east, but these were American, our own miracles, springing up from their graves.

  The news stations had been following the cleanup for days prior to the resurrection of the twin towers, so I knew exactly when they were going to grow. It still seemed like a miracle.

  Doof sat with me that whole week. I loved how he would squat for hours on my lap as we watched the tube together. Sometimes, he’d roll on his back, sleeping with his tiny paws dangling upward.

  Even better news happened in March. The Nasdaq stock market soared, taking my measly stocks and multiplying their value five-fold in just a few weeks. It was astonishing, and I found myself checking my stock portfolio online every few days, not believing how much they were worth.

  Following the un-crash, the stocks slowly lost value over the next few years, though. I was occasionally tempted to sell my shares, but somehow never managed to do that until they were back down to a piddling level a few years down the road. Live and learn.

  Then came 1998.

  August 13, 1998 to be exact. The dog days of summer brought happiness to me in a split moment.

  Over the years, I’d managed to get myself into terrible habits. My worst one was drinking too much. Wine or beer -- it didn’t matter; I was an equal opportunity drinker.

  Many nights, I’d wake up and find myself completely drunk. I’d weave out into the cab that would be waiting at the curb outside my home and take money from the driver. He’d cart me down to one of the bars across the bridge, down by Pier 39. I’d shout to him as I left the cab and backed into one of the local bars. The guys I worked with would be there. I’d back-talk to them and choke up a bunch of beers until I felt more clear-headed. Sometimes, I’d un-swallow some shrimp or other seafood, chew it back into one piece and arrange it carefully onto the plate for the server to take away.

  More often than I’d like to admit, I’d end up eating cheese and bacon burgers, full of grease. No wonder I died so young.

  There were three guys I hung out with. Dom, Jamie, and Mark. Tom never joined in, which was fine with me. I heard enough of his nasal voice at work every day.

  Dom always had the most to say, arms swinging with every sentence. It was on one of these nights out with them that I met Miranda.

  I’d learned over the years not to even try to meet women. I couldn’t. If you think about it in the opposite way, the way most people move through time, you meet somebody and get to know them, then you fall in love, and you do whatever lovers do.

  This was the biggest disappointment with my living backward. If I met a woman for the first time, it meant it was the last time from her perspective. She knew me as well as she ever would, but she was a stranger to me. As I got to know her better, it was my turn to become the stranger in her eyes.

  Hard to form a meaningful relationship.

  The only people I actually knew were people I worked with, and only because they initially assumed I remembered them. I gradually picked up details about their lives and could fake my way through superficial conversations. We weren’t close enough for them to realize I didn’t really know them at all.

  There were no women at my job site, so I had no way to meet them.

  But then came Miranda.

  She had jet-black hair, long and silky, shining even in the dim light of the bar. I pulled out a piece of crab from my mouth and put it on the platter as my eye caught her at the next table.

  Looking at me.

  Eyes locked onto mine.

  Something about her eyes. Clear and sharp. A slight Oriental look merged with her smooth, golden skin to entrance me.

  I felt my heart catch with excitement, a feeling I’d never experienced before. My first thought was that this must be somebody I knew, and maybe I was wrong, that I did have a girlfriend. She was looking at me with an upturned smile, tilting her head up as if asking me a question.

  She looked to be about my age, mid-thirties. I just stared at her.

  Something about her. She was different.

  Then she shocked me completely. She got up, walked to me and said, “My name is Miranda.”

  She spoke in my temporal direction, not reversed like everyone else.

  Before I could stop myself, I blurted out, “I’m Michael. Michael Johnson.”

  I should have spoken in the same direction she did, but old habits die hard and all that. I spoke like a normal person, then immediately repeated myself, reversed.

  “Glad to meet you, Michael.”

  I didn’t know what to say, even when she reached out her hand. I grabbed it and then couldn’t stop myself as I pulled her to me and hugged her. I heard her laugh.

  “Is it true?” I asked.

  “Yes.” She pulled back and stared. “I didn’t think I’d ever find another person like me,” she said. “I thought I was the only one. But, I was watching you eat, and I could tell you have the same hitches I do. I knew you were going backward, just like me.”

  “I’ve got to talk to you,” I said. “Can we find a place to sit without -- ” I waved at her table of friends and the one with my co-workers. “ -- without them?”

  Her name was Miranda Carlson.

  She had un-died when she’d been eighty and had similar experiences to me, having to learn how to deal with everybody while they all thought she had Alzheimer’s. She hadn’t met another backtracker before me. In more than forty years, I was her first and she was mine. Both of us thought we must be dreaming.

  I couldn’t help but gawk at her when she told me her story. I felt like pinching myself, not truly believing there really was another person out there just like me.

  And I’d found her.

  I gave her a summary of how I’d come to life and found myself at St. Joseph’s. She had a similar story, but hers was harder than mine.

  When Miranda un-died and later left her hospital in Philadelphia, she became a bag lady. She was still very sick when she was un-admitted, because she had little money, and the hospital had refused to take her for a long time. She was lucky she hadn’t frozen to death instead of dying in the ps
ych ward.

  After she learned how to speak, she moved to northern California from Pennsylvania, to enjoy the warmer climate. She didn’t know that, of course, just found herself backing up the steps of a Greyhound bus that drove in reverse across the country. She found herself taking money from the ticket office when she got off the bus in San Francisco and was glad she was there.

  Over the years, she climbed her way out of being a bag lady, and by the time she was fifty-two, she took a part-time sales job at a local coffee bar. She liked giving tips to customers and following up with the kind of service they earned, separating their lattes into steamed milk and espresso, before coming back to ask what they wanted to drink.

  We talked for hours that first day, sitting alone while the rest of the world was made totally irrelevant to us.

  Miranda’s black hair hung to below her shoulders and curled up slightly at the bottom. She had a small dimple on her right cheek that popped out whenever she smiled, which was a lot. She loved being with me as much as I loved being with her, and it showed.

  After spitting up one beer together in the bar, I took her hand and we walked out into the afternoon light. We both squinted a bit at the shock of the sunshine after being inside for so long.

  “I’ve never held a woman’s hand,” I said to her as we walked. “Never thought I could.”

  She rubbed my arm and squeezed my hand. “It feels wonderful.”

  “Did you ever find a way to . . . ?”

  She looked puzzled. “To what?”

  “You know. Meet guys. Have a boyfriend. Whatever.”

  I wasn’t sure I really wanted to hear it, but she was like my twin, and I needed to know everything.

  “I’ve been in a couple of relationships,” she said. “Neither one worked out at all. I met them at the end of our time together. They would be strangers to me, but they knew me inside and out. It was so hard. I barely knew them, but they’d kiss me and -- ” She shrugged. “And then by the time I got to know them, they wandered off, not caring about me at all, and I never saw them again.”

  “That must have been awful.”

  “The hard part was not being able to chase after them, but of course that didn’t happen. Both times, I was only with them for a couple of weeks. Our kind doesn’t mix well with theirs.”

  I stopped walking, turned to her and gave her a long hug. I could smell her perfume as I ran my hand through her hair.

  That day we met, we made love. We went to her place because it was closer, and we backed up into her bedroom, slowly taking our damp clothes off. Miranda went to wash some semen onto herself before we both jumped into bed and almost immediately had simultaneous orgasms. It felt amazing to be with her. We moved together quickly, me pushing inside her over and over until we slowed down and I pulled out of her, my erection as hard as I could ever remember. I kissed her body and sucked on her breasts, and that was almost as amazing as coming inside her. I moved up to kiss her lips and we continued our foreplay for a long time, not wanting it to end.

  Finally, we tentatively crawled out of bed and cautiously put our clothes on, almost embarrassed at seeing each other naked. We then kissed gently and backed out of the bedroom.

  While we made love, we had several candles burning, growing taller with every passing moment. It was the best day of my life.

  Within three of our backward days, Miranda moved in with me.

  Chapter 8

  Miranda became the only true friend I ever had. (Well, Doof was certainly up there, but no matter how wonderful, he wasn’t Miranda.) We understood each other like nobody else ever could.

  We spent every spare minute together, choking up wine and uncooking wonderful dinners. We loved each other more and more.

  Some people might say we jumped the gun, moving in together so soon after meeting, but we knew we were meant to be together. The passing days and weeks confirmed that for both of us.

  She stood five foot eight, just exactly as tall as me. Her hair was sweet and black. And she had that dimpled smile. Nobody else ever smiled at me like her. I’m sure part of that was a subconscious thing; she smiled in the right temporal direction, which just gave me shivers.

  I watched her every minute I was with her. I was addicted to her. And so happy.

  We’d been together for a little over a year. One day, after we finished dinner and were getting ready to go to work, Miranda gave me a big hug and a long passionate kiss. She pulled back and smiled. “Let’s go on a vacation.”

  A vacation? My mind sprung full of great places I’d thought of visiting. New York? Las Vegas? New Orleans?

  That was something I’d never done. Here I was, only thirty-four and never had a holiday. I jumped right in. “Where?”

  “Egypt.”

  I shrugged. “Why Egypt?”

  “Why not?”

  Why not indeed?

  We left two months later.

  It was the most amazing time. We started in Cairo, wandering back through the old streets of the Khan al Khalili bazaar. It covered many square miles and looked like a scene out of an old Indiana Jones movie, with donkeys and camels moving side by side with people and cars through the narrow streets. Vendors yelled all over the place, trying to sell their food and souvenirs.

  Miranda smoked a hookah pipe; apparently it tasted like smoky apples. We watched a snake charmer lower a cobra into a small bamboo bucket.

  We toured the Egyptian Museum, which housed all of King Tut’s gold.

  And the Pyramids and the Sphinx. We crawled backward through one of the largest Pyramids, seeing the sparse walls of the huge tomb, and feeling the power the ancient Pharaohs held over their people.

  “Can’t you feel the strength?” asked Miranda when we were alone in the center.

  I nodded. I could sense a million tons of rock above our heads.

  As we left the central area, I took a small pebble from my pocket and placed it on the ground as a souvenir.

  “Just amazing.” I grabbed her hand, and we reluctantly walked back to the surface.

  We stopped at a nearby KFC. The Sphinx stared at us while we un-ate our chicken breasts and fries and slurped our Coke back through the straws into paper cups.

  Miranda looked at me, with a serious look on her face. She was quiet, which was unlike her after such an amazing afternoon of sight-seeing.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  She hesitated at first. “You always talk about freedom,” she said. She twisted her straw. “Do you really think you’re free?”

  “Of course. Why in the world would you doubt that?”

  She added some meat to a drumstick before replying. “Well, our whole lives are predetermined. We don’t really have any choice in anything. We’re not like the others.”

  “The others?” I looked around us. The small restaurant was filled mostly with American tourists taking a break from the hot sun outside. “Normal people, you mean? Not backtrackers?”

  “They have choices. We can’t. Everything we do has already been done, since it’s in the past. We don’t know what we’ve done, but everyone around us does. Dom and Jamie and the others remember you working on houses you haven’t even started on yet. Those jobs are already done. You’ll go work on them exactly like everybody remembers you doing.”

  I was totally confused. This wasn’t the Miranda I knew.

  “Where’s this coming from? You’ve never talked like this before.”

  “Maybe it was from being inside that Pyramid. Seeing the power history holds. History is the past. The past is written in those huge boulders. We can’t change it.”

  I reached out and held her hand, but she pulled away from me and shook her head. Her face held an ugly frown that cast a shadow over our table.

  “Look around us,” I said. “We’re in Egypt, for God’s sake! That was our choice. If that doesn’t show we have free will, what could?”

  “Nothing could, because it isn’t true. Everything we do has already been written in the histo
ry books or carved into granite stones. We came to Egypt because we had already gone to Egypt, long before we planned it.”

  “You suggested Egypt.”

  “Yeah. I guess I was supposed to.”

  I didn’t know what to say. Miranda was like a different person. Not just what she was saying and that dark frown, but everything about her seemed changed. Her eyes were sharp and focused, and even her hair seemed to cast a wicked tint.

  I didn’t like this side of her.

  “We should go,” I said quietly. We have to get ready to fly to Luxor.

  She nodded and as we gathered our fresh meals onto the tray and took them up to the counter, I heard her whisper a few words. I didn’t know if I heard her right. “What did you say?”

  “Nothing important.”

  I was sure she said, My sister never made it to Luxor.

  The bus drove us backward to the center of Cairo, back to the Marriott we were staying at. It was only an hour’s ride from the antiquity of the Pyramids to the huge, modern capital of Egypt. We both had a quick rest and packed our bags. We had an early flight to Luxor and wanted to be sure we were on time.

  The rest did her good. Miranda was back. My Miranda. All smiles and laughs with her beautiful dimple. I held her so tightly and promised to love her till the day I was born.

  An aging Egypt Air 737 flew us south to Luxor, to the Valley of the Kings, the Temple of Karnak, and all the other amazing ancient temples and tombs of the Pharaohs.

  The two days we spent in the Luxor area were unbelievable. I had no idea of the treasures waiting for us.

  Some of the tombs in the Valley of the Kings were long, colorful tunnels stretching under the mountains. The walls were painted with intricate details of the life story of the dead kings and the Egyptian Book of the Dead to help the Pharaohs find their way to the afterlife. Miranda and I just held hands as we walked through the tombs, pointing out small details to each other.