13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [74]
“What shall I take?”
Quicker than I thought a woman in a sickbed could move, Louise reaches for her nightstand and plucks up the tiny box of label ribbon lying there. She presents it to me on an open palm. I hesitate: “The same artifact that brought me here? If I take it back with the one I already have, does that not violate some law of the universe?”
“Isn’t that grand? I want to see if the universe collapses when you leave here.”
“It is likely that the universe will determine a way to go on,” I answer as I take the object from her hand and tuck it into my breast pocket along with its duplicate, next to my fluttering heart.
“Likely. Now give me something. Some piece of you.”
I consider giving her the picture of herself with Pauline, but that is a piece of her, not of me—and, besides, life will give her this artifact itself in a week’s time. I can feel myself disappearing, so in a fluster I invert both my trouser pockets, looking for anything that might be there. I am startled by the sonorous, clear ring of something hitting the ground. The sound galvanizes me into picking the item up and presenting it to her:
“See?” I say. “A bit of stray cash.”
She laughs and answers, “If I’d known all you men were going to keep throwing that pun back at me, I would have thought of a better one.”
“It is perfectly suited for our purposes.”
“Essentially meaningless, you mean.”
“Just so,” I answer as she looks over the dime with great interest, tilting it into the weak winter morning light streaming in through the window. “You are an American,” she observes. “I thought your accent was British.”
“Yes, American.”
“You are from farther than I thought,” she says as she flips the coin, then bursts into laughter when she sees the date it will be struck46— “a lot farther than I thought!”
“Do you like it? I’m glad that happened to be in my pocket to mark this day.”
“Yes, it’s wonderful. Tell me, who is that man?” she asks as she displays the dime to me. Without thinking, I answer, “He was the president of—oh, dear me.”
It occurs to me that the man in question will not be the president of the United States for nearly five more years. Is it possible that such an anomalous object will remain with her after I am gone? I reach out to lay my finger on the coin in her hand, but my hand passes through hers with no contact. Soon I will be gone, but my little memento will stay: I pass through it; it does not fall through her.
“He will be the president of the United States!” I shout, as I would over a failing telephone connection.
“Thank you!” she shouts after me, as my vision darkens to black and a roar like interference drowns out her voice. Before I lose consciousness, I hear another voice, a woman’s voice, ringing pure and true above the crackling confusion in my head:
Mais si je t’aime, si je t’aime, prends garde à toi!47
A flower is tossed and I will sleep now.
[NB: I wake up fully clothed sitting up in my hard-backed desk chair, with the record sprawled out before me. There is no interim half-dream state: I am dropped most unceremoniously into full consciousness, as if from a great height. The back of my shirt is drenched with sweat as if I have made some tremendous effort with my body, but really I feel fine. I shove my hand into my breast pocket and I pull out the small green cardbox box of label ribbon that I put there before I lost myself and—
oh, fancy that!
Now there are two.
When I went to sleep in the middle of my research, there was only one, and now there are two. Most anomalous. To say the least, I feel a bit unwound. (My name is Trevor Stratton, and it is not 1928.)
A bit unwound (I am smiling now; I can’t help it—this is entirely too loopy and wonderful for a reasonable man such as myself):
*
A bit unwound, yes.
With unsteady hands, I reach for the small box of change saved by Louise Brunet, stray cash that marks the important days of her life—even some that happened before she was born. The lid slides smoothly off, then I upturn the bottom half rudely onto my desk, the coins ringing loudly against