Miranda Read online

  “Doesn’t this strike you as odd?” she asked the next day. “Where is everybody?”

  I’d been wondering myself. We had our pick of where to go, could even wander right into King Tut’s tomb with no lineup. There were few tourists anywhere. The only people we really saw were the tour guides who would escort us into the tombs for a few Egyptian Pounds. Peanuts.

  “Very odd,” I said. “I thought this would be a busy place. Cairo was packed.”

  “I’m not sure I like it,” she said.

  “C’mon. Let’s hit Hatshepsut’s Temple and call it a day.”

  Queen Hatshepsut was the only female Pharaoh. We had both wanted to see her tomb, which was a short bus ride away, just on the other side of the mountains surrounding the Valley.

  The bus was packed with other tourists, which made us feel better.

  Until we saw everybody huddled in small groups, whispering and --

  Miranda said it first. “They’re crying.”

  I just stared and shook my head, wondering what had happened. What we were about to experience.

  My arm pulled Miranda to me protectively.

  The bus stopped, and its doors swished open.

  We ran off the bus and everybody started to scream, including us.

  Fuck, it was awful. I was frozen in fear, wanting to do nothing more than protect Miranda, but I couldn’t even seem to do that. I didn’t know why I was afraid.

  Miranda also looked terrified, and I knew it was fear of the unknown. For everybody else, it was the fear of what they had already seen.

  We sprinted backward to the large central area in front of the tomb.

  Dozens of tourists lay dead on the ground around us.

  Gunshots rang out. Lots of them all at once. Machine guns or other kinds of automatics.

  Terrorists. Like September 11, but in some ways worse, because we were there, not just watching on TV.

  “Help me!” somebody called.

  “Oh, God, the pain,” a woman screamed and yelled. Another round of shots flew from her body, and she stopped mid-scream, looking around in panic.

  The slaughter continued. Dozens of men and women sprung up from the ground and grabbed their bodies as the bullets shot toward the killers.

  There were blood stains everywhere, shrinking back toward their owners. Tourist police waved their guns in futility, not knowing how to react. Fear was etched into their youthful faces.

  Bodies popped up all around us, screaming as they rose.

  Then the shots stopped, and everybody looked around casually, pointing at the temple and the nearby mountains. They laughed as they saw the terrorists climbing up the hills and mounting the top, back to the Valley of the Kings. Nobody knew they were terrorists, of course. Only Miranda and I did. They just looked like a group of bizarre mountain-climbers.

  The few tourist police watched, bored to tears. “Same thing every day,” I could just imagine them saying. “Nothing ever happens here.”

  Miranda was shaking. I held her for a long time and we backed over to the bus that would take us to the airport and our flight to Cairo.

  It was time to go home.

  Chapter 7

  Back in Oakland, we spent many wonderful nights talking about the sights of Egypt. We never mentioned the terrorist attack. I don’t know why. Maybe because ugly things in our future should be clouded in mystery, like it was for normal people.

  Of course, we didn’t have any pictures of our trip, because they hadn’t existed before we went. Since we didn’t have any beforehand, that meant we couldn’t take any photos while we were there.

  If you follow.

  That thought was somewhat unsettling, because it reinforced Miranda’s notion we didn’t have the kind of free will other people had.

  Were we really just programmed to follow a particular course exactly? A path from death to birth, laid out ahead of time in a circuitous but unchanging track?

  How would we ever know? I thought we had made the decision to go to Egypt, but was that just a predetermined step? Predetermined since we had already been there?

  Hmm.

  I didn’t talk to Miranda about it.

  We went back to our normal lives. Me back at the Great Oakland Woodmakers, and Miranda back working as a purchaser at a book store just the other side of the Bay Bridge. She hated going over the bridge twice a day, and I can’t say I blamed her. Time lost can never be regained.

  Three years later, we took another holiday. I’d found a photo album showing us having a wonderful time in Venice, and as much as I wanted to say “Fuck it” to following that path, the photos looked so entrancing, we couldn’t pass it up.

  Venice in October was beautiful.

  We went for a gondola ride through the Grand Canal at sunset, and it was the most romantic night I’d ever spent. We made love for a long time before that.

  Our hotel was creaky and small, but it held an old-world charm. It worked.

  The next night, we were sitting at an outdoor café, right on the edge of the canal. Tourists walked by enjoying the warm autumn night just as much as we were. We spit up cold Nastro Azzuro beer into our frosted glasses and just gazed out at the water.

  Something about Venice drills into you -- captures the love you feel and magnifies it a hundred fold. I felt totally at ease and in love with my woman.

  “Hey,” I said.

  She looked over at me. “Hey right back at you.”

  “Amazing, isn’t it?”

  “It’s going to be hard to go home.”

  I paused and finally asked the question that had been hiding in my mind for the past several years. “You never told me about your sister.”

  I held tightly to her hand, even though I could feel her want to pull away. She spit up some more beer and filled up her empty bottle from her glass.

  “I don’t know much,” she finally said.

  “Tell me about her. What was her name? How old was she?”

  “Her name was Ricki. She was blonde, a bit overweight, old when I met her. Seemed very nice.”

  “Was she -- like us?”

  She shook her head. “That’s what made it so hard. I only met her the one time. When we were both in the hospital just after I un-died. She came to see me. Said she hadn’t seen me in fifty-five years.”

  Miranda pulled her hand away and rubbed her cheeks. “I was senile, of course, and I was just starting to learn English. Just enough to get by on, I guess. She spent hours with me, but only that one day. Told me everything she had done since we last met.

  “I didn’t remember her. And back then, I didn’t know why. It was just so terrifying. This old woman talking about playing together when we were young. Then she laughed as she told me more details of her life. Her husband, her kids.”

  I nodded and kept quiet, hoping she would keep talking. I never knew she had a sister.

  “What are their names?” I finally asked.

  She looked out to the calm water and watched another gondola drift by. “I don’t remember. Isn’t that awful?”

  “No.”

  “She told me she went to Cairo once and saw the Pyramids. I remember that.”

  Miranda paused, trying to think back to that long ago meeting. “I’m sure she told me what the occasion for her trip there was -- birthday, anniversary, whatever. But, I can’t remember it. That was so far in our future.”

  “I know what you mean. Time goes so fast.”

  “I suppose that’s why I wanted to go to Egypt. To see what she saw and have some kind of small connection to her.”

  “You said she never saw Luxor.”

  She stared at me and frowned. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have kept all of this such a secret. She only got to Cairo, nowhere else. Loved it.”

  “Do you know when you’ll meet her again?”

  In the distance, I could hear “O Solo Mio” drifting through the city.

  “She said the last time we saw each other was 55 years earlier. That would make me 25.
I have no idea how she ever found me in the hospital.”

  I took another drink, savored the taste of the beer in my mouth before spitting it in the glass. “Sounds like you have a nice surprise waiting for you down the line.”

  “Yeah. If you believe we don’t have any free will.”

  “Is that where you got that?”

  “How can we have any choice in our lives if we know it’s been determined more than a half-century ahead of time that I’ll meet my sister? I’ll be 25 in only six years, and I know she’ll be there.”

  I didn’t have an answer for that.

  Chapter 6

  Sometimes it seemed like the natural state of the world included war. It was so normal, I never thought of it. Dying was a part of living, so why wouldn’t war be a part of peace? There was war almost all the time from my first memory after learning English.

  TV loved war. I remember seeing a dumb prime-time game show that only lasted one season. It was called Invasion, where teams had to decide which country to bomb. The show itself was the ultimate bomb, only lasting six episodes.

  Central America. Before that, North Korea. Before that, several other quickies in the middle east. Then Iraq 2 followed a decade earlier by Iraq 1. They didn’t call it that, of course. It was just the Gulf War then.

  I never understood any war. I’d see the devastation of the country that lost, followed by the live telecasts of thousands of soldiers trying to kill other soldiers, bombs flying back up into their bays on their planes or to faraway ships. Diplomacy would begin, and then the shouting would really start. Eventually the two countries complained about each other sporadically and went their own ways. I never understood why they didn’t just choose that course without going through all the wars.

  Shortly after the Gulf War ended, the smart bombs were flying all over.

  I found myself walking back down the street to St. Joseph’s Hospital, where I had died.

  The whole building was very familiar, of course, and I didn’t have any trouble finding her room.

  Her.

  Mom.

  I was feeling very anxious when I backed into the room. Sadness, but also relief. The smell of death hung in the air like cigarette smoke.

  She was the only patient, although the room could have held another. The doctors knew her time was up and wanted to give her some dignity and peace in her last days.

  Her face was covered with a white sheet. I pulled it back and stared at the unfamiliar face of my mother.

  White hair, all crinkly, like it hadn’t been washed in weeks. There were bits of dandruff sprinkled around her.

  I pushed her eyes open. Lifeless, but I knew that would change soon.

  Her hands were warm. Hard and unyielding, but warm. They were mapped with coarse veins looking like they might pop any second. She was ancient. Looked a hundred, but I knew she couldn’t be. A hard life had destroyed her.

  I gained comfort from remembering Doof springing to life. Mom was close.

  Her face reminded me of my own. I probably should’ve anticipated that, but I didn’t. She was ridiculously older than me, but I remembered having my own sunken cheekbones and darkened eyes in this very same hospital. Her lips were pale and thin, just like mine.

  We were like a set of deformed twins. Something clearly the same but so different.

  Mom’s snowy hair had only a few streaks that might have been black in her youth. For a moment, I wondered if she had ever been pretty. One day I’ll find out, I knew.

  In the background, I could hear Bernard Shaw talking in a fast and loud voice about the bombing in Baghdad.

  She breathed.

  “Good-bye, son.” I could barely hear her. I replayed the sound over in my mind to be sure I’d heard her right.

  She started to wheeze and took big gulps of air.

  I reached down and held her. “I wish I’d known.”

  “I wish I had protected you more.” Mom tried to squeeze my hand. “After he put me in the hospital one last time. I left him five years ago. He beat me once too often,” she said.

  “Whatever happened to him?” I held her hand with both of mine.

  She coughed. “Me, too.”

  Her breathing was so shallow and harsh, I could feel her pain as I listened to her.

  I hesitated. I didn’t want to lie to her, but I’d never have another chance to talk to her. “Sometimes, I wish things worked out better all around, but I’m here now.”

  “I wish you had come back to me,” she said.

  “Seven years, I think.”

  “I’m glad you came. It’s been so long.”

  She blinked her eyes and fell asleep, peacefully.

  I stayed with Mom for awhile, then left when it was clear she wasn’t going to wake up any time soon. I talked briefly with her doctor.

  I’m glad Mom’s last years were free from that jerk, but I wouldn’t be able to go back to see her when she left the hospital. Too much water under the bridge. I was as angry at her for what had happened as I was at him.

  The most frustrating part was that I didn’t even know what it exactly was that happened. Just that I felt hatred to my core for my father.

  Part of me wanted to go hunt him down, to fucking well bury him for the grief he had caused my mother.

  But I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

  I briefly spoke to Mom’s doctor before leaving the hospital. He wasn’t very hopeful at all. He shook his head a lot and frowned.

  A day later, I found out Mom was very, very sick, and might not live another day.

  Chapter 5

  I left Mom at the hospital, knowing it would be a long time before I would have the balls to go visit her. It just made me angry knowing what was waiting for me in my childhood. And it wasn’t like she was innocent; she was there in the house.

  For awhile, I almost believed in telepathy. Could feel his fists hitting me, but of course that was just a fantasy.

  I was 28. How long could I be independent anyway? I’d cool down and go see her, I knew, but it wasn’t going to be soon. She was back alive now and would be a big part of the rest of my life; no use rushing it.

  I went back to our apartment, back to my wonderful Miranda.

  It was about 9:00 in the morning, and I hugged her as we sat down to spit up some coffee together. I knew I was being quiet.

  “It’ll be another seven years?” she asked.

  “What will?”

  “Before you see your mom again. Isn’t that what she said? Seven years?”

  I shook my head and smiled. The same old argument. “We have free will. I could go visit her tomorrow if I wanted to.”

  “Great. Why don’t we go together?”

  I looked at her and saw that amazing smile of hers. Her eyes locked onto mine and held. Every time she looked at me like that, my heart seemed to jump. God, I’m so lucky, I thought to myself.

  “There’s more to the story than you know,” I finally said. “I’m just not ready to see her again.”

  Miranda had been browsing through the Sports section of the newspaper. She folded the paper neatly and quietly took it outside and placed it on our front porch.

  “I told you about my sister. Tell me about your mother.”

  I squirmed, knowing how my answer would sound. “My father beat her. She told me that.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry. That must have been awful for her.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. But, he must have done more than that. Something to me, I think. Of course, I don’t know what that might be. I think maybe he hit me, too.”

  “You could go ask her.”

  “No. You know the funny looks we get when we ask things we should already know. She’d think something was really wrong if I asked what happened to me.” I shook my head and squeezed her hand tightly. “I’ll find out soon enough.”

  She stood up and hugged me from behind. “I wish we could prove it. Prove we can do whatever we want.”

  “Well, let’s go do something we wou
ld never normally do. Bowling. Mountain climbing. Go watch an artsy movie. What would prove it to you?”

  She laughed. “None of those. Maybe we’re supposed to go mountain climbing today because we’ve already done it.”

  I took my steaming coffee over to the Mr. Coffee machine and had it suck the coffee back up into the pot. The hot coffee started to drip up to the machine while I put my mug back in the cupboard.

  This whole free will thing was really bugging Miranda, and I didn’t understand why. As far as I was concerned, I could do whatever I wanted. I just didn’t feel any different from the rest of the people around me. How do they know they have free will?

  “You know how I view things?” I asked. “I think of time as a railroad track.”

  “Yeah? How’s that?”

  “Think of a train going in one direction on the track. On the track right beside it is another train speeding in the opposite direction. One going east, one west.”

  “Okay. So?”

  “The trains pass each other. But, the east-west axis is now time. One going forward in time, one going backward. From the outside, we can’t tell which is which. They look identical, just going in opposite directions.”

  Miranda thought about that for a few seconds.

  The coffee had separated into the grounds and the water. I scooped the grounds back into the Starbucks tin and let the water flow up into the tap.

  I didn’t know if my analogy was clicking. Miranda was thinking about it but not saying anything.

  I added, “You think we have problems because we can’t see our past, but everybody else has the exact same

  problem -- they can’t see their future. “But we can.”

  “Yes.”

  “We know exactly where your sister will be forty-odd years from now. We know when most of the people around us get married, have children. Die. They have no more free will than we do.”

  I took her hand and walked into the bedroom with her. “We’re the same as everyone else,” I said. “Just different.”

  That morning we fell asleep with a thud as soon as the alarm went off. When we woke up the night before, we were in each other’s arms.