The Color of Paradox Read Free Page A

should see Willie’s doctor and take iodine pills—these they’d enclosed. I was to refrain from smoking while I recovered.
    The final wrapped lump with my name on it felt like a book.
    I untied the string and then, in the process of extracting the biography of a reporter I’d long admired, I tore the brown paper in half.
    My eyes drifted to the mattress in the middle of the floor and I pictured Willie suddenly: young, sick . . .
    (helpless, bleeding, delicious)
    . . . and dropped on concrete, onto the corpses of two previous agents. Using something—who knew what?—to scratch those words into the floor.
    “16—Hungry.” Begging the future for food, because she was too weak to fetch any for herself.
    I shook the image away and held two sides of the page together to see what it was I’d been sent back to do.
    “Bloody hell!”
    Willie looked down, offering an especially masterful performance of her incurious stare. I passed her the torn pages.
    She held them up and scanned. “Paperboy with the
Seattle Union Record
. Name of Peter Rupert, lives near Jackson Street. Ruin, spoil, or if necessary kill.”
    “Bloody Peter Rupert.” I waved the biography at her.
    “You know him?”
    “Don’t you?”
    She shook her head. “He wasn’t—in my 1937, he must not have had any significance.”
    “Well in
my
1937 he’s a bloody hero. Cottoned onto an attack Japan was planning on Hawaii, on the U.S. Fleet. He broke the story and stopped the whole—”
    “You have to forget about that,” she said. “It’s going to change. Whatever you remember is already gone. It will all unfold differently after you—”
    “Ruin a nine-year-old boy?”
    “Or kill him.”
    “What kind of a monster are you?”
    “If you are so certain that ruining someone is better than killing them outright, you’ve had something of a soft go at life.”
    “I’m not killing a child.”
    “All right.” She ignored my distress, looking over the book but far off, deep in thought. “If he were disfigured, people mightn’t talk to him. Or if his voice were damaged—did he file dispatches by telephone?”
    “Disfigure or cripple a nine-year-old,” I said. “A hero. He reported on the Russian counter-revolution. I dreamed about being like him.”
    “No doubt that’s why you were sent. Know thy—”
    “Enemy?”
    “Target.”
    “I have no intention of doing my target the slightest harm,” I said.
    She shrugged, passed the book back, and left me in the basement to fume.
    Anger drove me out of the house. I went and set up the bank account and investments, paying lip service to the idea of military obedience. I bought myself a new suit and an umbrella. Everyone looked young and hopeful. They were dressed in clothes that reminded me of my childhood. There were almost no automobiles on the streets: trolleys, carts, and pedestrians were everywhere.
    In the basement, at Willie’s, I might still have been in 1946. Now it sank in: I was living in my own past.
    Up ahead, just decades away, the world was turning to something far worse than ash. Peter Rupert would do something to bring that day closer.
    But it was probably one action of his, wasn’t it? Probably the Japan scoop. One single story of the hundreds he filed.
    I found myself a street corner that smelled of washed earth—not of horse, not of smoke or fuel. I stood there, snug under my umbrella, and watched the rain pour down as I formulated a plan.
     
    “What if I got close to him?” I said to Willie that night. “The Project must know more about whatever Peter does to . . .”
    “To bring on the Souring?” She sat in a rocking chair in the parlor, knitting in front of the fire, playing at being an ordinary woman.
    My mouth went dry. “The—”
    “Sorry—that’s what I call
it
. What we saw.”
    I swallowed. “It’s apt.”
    “It’s useful,” she said. “I use it in the journals. I’ve cultivated a conceit that losing my husband made me a bit odd.”
    “Ramblings