Future Perfect

by Nora Bencsics

 

The sun blazed down on the back of my neck, as I crouched and shoved my trowel into the earth in jerky motions, trying to rip out the weedy roots. I had to dig a cavity big enough to drop my little Euonymus bush into. 

I hate gardening, I thought sourly. It was dirty, uncomfortable. Undignified. And I wasn’t particularly good at it. 

To make up for these toxic thoughts, I crooned at my bush: “Soon, soon you’ll be nice and cozy in rich black earth. Soon.” My sister, who had a green thumb, swore that talking lovingly to your plants made them grow.

Suddenly a wave of dizziness swept over me, along with the smell of a weird odour, like ozone before a storm. I staggered upright from my crouch; the earth itself unsteady under my feet. I’m going to faint, I thought incredulously, as I turned away from my plant. 

When I heard the air sizzle and saw the livid crack appear in it, I no longer thought I was about to faint but that I was losing my mind.

Then the man stepped through. 

The trowel fell from my nerveless fingers. “Uh..uh…” I grunted. “Uh…”

He was an astonishing looking figure, with a smooth pale face, small nose and nearly lipless mouth. His eyes in that face were huge, round, and intensely green. Other than his face, little of him was visible. A shining steel cap covered his head, and some kind of articulated bodysuit clothed him from the neck down, brightly hued in scarlet and gold. 

He moved stiffly towards me, I leapt back, disbelieving what I saw before my eyes.

“No!” he exclaimed, his rather high-pitched voice coming, weirdly, from his chest. “Don’t be afraid, I mean no harm at all, of course I don’t.” In response to my alarm, he babbled and wrung his gloved hands.

“What..who.. Where…?” (Later I would be embarrassed at how inarticulately I gabbled at him, no heroine I!)

“They told me it would be like this,” he said anxiously, apologetically. “I’ve spent years looking for my ancestor in this time period. Finally, I found you!” His mouth stretched in a tentative smile. “I’m your many times great-great grandson, Joyanti.”

“I don’t have children,” I said blankly. Nor even the hint of a relationship on the horizon in which to have a child.

Joyanti smiled, a particularly sweet smile. “But you will. And one day, many many years from now, I will be born.” There was something almost endearing about his anxious desire to calm me.

“So, you are from the future?” As the asinine words left my lips, I couldn’t believe we were having this ridiculous conversation.

“Of course! I had to come. I’ve so wanted to see and feel what it was like to be here, to get to know my forbears. To know you. I can’t stay long, no not long at all, must go before they realize that I … but I…” He looked wistfully at me. “It must be wonderful to be out in the world, with your body so free in the sun and wind!”

“Oh?” I thought of the tainted air and water, the increasingly hot summers, the fires and drought in many parts of the world. I didn’t like the way he said, “out in the world’’. Did it mean that the worst of the futuristic predictions had come true? That Earth had become uninhabitable? Was that why he wore that hard-looking bodysuit? 

I said then, “So what is it like, the world in your time? When is your time?”

“You know I can’t tell you any of that,” he looked pleadingly at me. “It’s bad enough that I’m here at all, talking to you. We’re not supposed to do that. Only to observe and not be seen or known. Otherwise…”

“Yes, yes,” I said, waving my hand. “The temporal paradox. I’ve seen that on Star Trek.”  Although it seemed to me that just by showing up and my seeing him was bound to change something.

Joyanti stared blankly, then shrugged. “Yes, that,” he almost whispered. “I mustn’t tell you anything.” Then he said, “Well I guess I should go back….”

Just then the back gate door was yanked open, and my less than congenial neighbour Branko came bursting in, a big bristle-bearded man in his 50s who always seemed to find excuses to “drop by’’, no matter how politely I asked him to let me know before barging in. Like now.

He was just saying hello, in that loud and obnoxious voice of his, when he noticed Joyanti gleaming in his suit in the sun. He stared. And stalked closer, right up to the unfortunate time traveller. I realized then just how small a man Joyanti was. And how young.

“Who the hell are you?” Branko said. I winced at his bellow. Joyanti shrank back, looking at me in alarm. 

“Branko,” I tried to sound firm. “Who he is is none of your business! I’m busy now, so if you would just …”

He wasn’t listening. Instead, he poked Joyanti in the chest. “Ha!” he said. “Interesting. What is that made of? I’ve never seen anything like it?”

Of course, Joyanti was my first time traveller, but even so, I knew he shouldn’t have said what he said next.  He was obviously an amateur. Like a kid on an escapade, he’d be in a lot of trouble when this was over.

“It’s praxilactisone,” Joyanti said proudly. “Its discovery made it possible for us to…” He saw me shaking my head at him. He was my great-great, many times great, grandson, after all.

“Never heard of it!” Branko’s eyes focused on Joyanti’s gloved hands. “Here, take those off and let me try them…” 

The rude bastard tugged at the gloves, actually tugged!  

Joyanti now looked horrified, and stared desperately at me, as he tried to pull away from the much bigger Branko.  I grabbed at Branko’s arm to pull him away, gasping, “Stop that, what the hell do you think you’re doing? This is my guest!”

In the midst of our struggle, there was a sudden sucking sound as Branko managed to pull one of Joyanti’s gloves from his hand. A crack ran up the side of Joyanti’s suit and Joyanti made a sound between a scream and a moan as he staggered to the ground.

Branko and I stared down at him in shock.  He was oozing out of his suit.  Yes, his hand had fingers, little fingers, appendages that appeared boneless. His arm was a limp stalk that flopped out onto the ground.  Some of the rest of his soft body followed.  

I realized then that the suit served the same purpose as the casing that contained a sausage.  Oh my poor Joyanti! What had happened to him in the far future?

“Because,” he gasped, no longer seeming to care about the temporal paradox. “Over time…we had less and less need to move or do anything physical. Machines do that. They do everything. Now we spend our time thinking and planning and imagining.” He stared at his flaccid fingers, and one of them moved a little. From his face, it looked like that took quite some effort. “We…”

“Your bodies atrophied,” I said softly, feeling sad. Sad for him. And sad for humanity, if this was where we were headed.

Branko couldn’t keep silent anymore. He looked sick, the way one does when seeing another’s disfigurement for the first time.  “Man,” he said, “I’m so sorry, fuck, I had no idea, let me help…” He knelt beside the time traveller, who struggled to move away from him. 

“No,no!” Joyanti squeaked. “No, you’ve done quite enough, I need to…” his head moved back and forth, as though trying to figure out how to stuff himself back inside his suit.

I shoved Branko out of the way. “I’ll do it!” 

It was a lot of work stuffing Joyanti back into his suit, and in the end, we had to let Branko help. And unfortunately, the suit was cracked now and compromised.  Branko stomped off to get something to temporarily seal the cracks.  

As we waited for him to return, I pulled Joyanti to his feet.  There were tears in his eyes. 

“Did that hurt?” I asked softly.

“Noooo…” he said. He sniffed. “I wish I hadn’t come. Not,” he said hastily, “that it hasn’t been exciting meeting you but it’s made me realize….”  He fell silent.

“What?”

“This world,” he looked around. “This time. Such a mess. Humanity has done such damage. To itself. To its world. But…” he looked at me and then down at himself. “But are we in our time even really human anymore? When I first got my suit, I loved how it felt to move on my feet. I can’t without it, you know.  And look at you. Walking and running and everything, using just your body!”

He took a deep breath. “I must go.”  

I hugged him.

He pressed something I couldn’t see on the top of his steel cap. He smiled at me, that particularly sweet smile. “I don’t think I’ve changed your time. But maybe, just maybe, I’m going to work at changing ours!”

Branko was just rushing back with his sealant as the crack in the air appeared, the ozone sizzled, and the world spun. Branko staggered. 

A moment later, Joyanti was gone.  

THE END