Transposed

by Ryon Moody

The man sitting behind the desk pulled back on the rusty ball in the Newton's pendulum resting atop piles of old invoices and various other documents and let it go. The clicking of the rusty metal balls filled the empty air. "So," he said in a thick Russian accent, "you have requsite funds?"

I nodded and handed him a folder filled with bearer bonds. He yanked it out of my hands and flipped through it, his smile growing bigger as he perused each sheaf of paper in turn. "Is lot of money. You come by this legally?" He looked up at me and raised an eyebrow as the broad smile turned into frown.

"That's none of your business," I said, leaning back in the uncomfortable chair he'd sat me in, slowly rolling my cane back and forth across the thigh of my good leg, the one that could still feel. The other was a mass of dead nerve endings from a car accident a decade ago. Too long ago to still be a worthless piece of inert flesh that I had to drag with me everywhere I went.

His grin returned as quickly as it had vanished accompanied by a barking, window rattling laugh. "You are new to this," he said tossing the folder into pile on the desktop and, not looking to see where it landed, knocked over a coffee stained ceramic mug.

I returned his grin and thought about the other fifteen folders with an equal number or greater bearer bonds. Not that I'd be able to get at them but my twenty-year-old mistress would, and after putting up with a wrinkly old man heaving on top of her for the last five years, it seemed a fitting payout.

"Well, this is a delicate operation, as you are aware," he said, snatching up the folder, and turning, tossing it into a drawer marked with incomprehensible Cyrillic characters in a rusty, olive-drab file cabinet behind him. "Come," he said standing and knocking still more papers off the desk, "I will introduce you to Sergei." He patted me on my shoulder as he shut the door with a fractured window behind us. The ceiling of the hallway sagged with rot and mildew, and the stained concrete walls were cracked. A rat scurried underfoot as we turned a corner, stopping to chitter at us for a moment then going on its way beneath a rotted staircase. I held a hankerchief to my nose as the smell of dessication and standing water grew stronger.

"I must warn you," he said as he led me down the staircase, my hand holding his meaty shoulder for balance. "Sergei does not meet with many people. Please, ignore his rudeness."

A large, bulging metal port hole barely higher than my head awaited us at the base of the rickety stairs. Crammed into a space obviously designed for a much thinner door, it barely swung a foot before it struck the laast step of the staircase. Ivan struggled to fit himself between the wall and the thick plate of the door. I ducked under the low frame and followed him.

This new area, to me at least as Ivan seemed to have no trouble traversing the blackness, was unlit; the clack of my dress shoes on the metal grating echoed off far surfaces and I nearly lost my balance as the end of my cane slipped into one of the holes. The lights came on. I squinted as my vision adjusted to the sudden brilliance, and it returned to show me Ivan standing next to a gaunt man with a week's worth of stubble wearing a oiled-stained labcoat. He stared at me with his arms crossed and said nothing. Ivan patted him on the back hard, knocking him forward and not doing his temperment any favors as the thin man reaimed his glower from me to his boistrous compatriot.

"Sergei is best student of Moscow University," Ivan said, not looking to see his friends glare. "He is best mind in world for quantum mechanics. This transposition machine, everything you see, built with his own two hands. He won't let anyone else touch it. Brilliant mind." He talks with fourishes of his hands and body, looking for all the world like a fat ballet dancer in a cheap, brown suit.

"But university not pay very well. So he comes to me, his close friend, while I am in business school. I tell him, 'Sergei, you have a creation that could help change the world.' He tells me, 'Ivan, I just want to live in a big house instead of loft above foul smelling butcher shop.' I tell him, 'Alright, tell me how we can use your ideas." He smiles and clapped his hands together.

"Must we go through this with every client?" Sergei said, crossing his arms. "It is embarrassing."

"Shush," Ivan said glancing at Segei, then turning back to me, "He is modest. It is important for you, the client, to realize the skill and genius that is before you in this room. Otherwise, how could you possibly believe us when we tell you that you will be removed from this time and returned to a better one?"

"It's becoming more difficult the longer you go on," I said. "Perhaps the man who understands it should tell me about it."

Sergei actually cracked a smile for the briefest moment. "It is simple," he said. "We induce the quantum state of your mind to replace the state of your mind from a previous time."

"That is all then," Ivan said, his forehead wrinkling above narrowed eyes. "If you are more concerned with haste, then we shall begin."

They led me across the metal grating to a small chamber, a bathysphere-like bulging sphere dangling from the ceiling of the room by way of thick, musclar metal cables encircled with a multitudes of colored wires. Ivan patted me hard on the back once more. I turned to him and smiled, taking his hand and gripping it with both of mine until his knuckles turned white and his face blanched.

"Don't do that," I said.

He nodded with a brisk downward jerk of his chin, and I returned his hand to him. "Are you ready?" he said.

"Yes."

"Then you will need to remove your clothing for the procedure," Ivan said rubbing his swelling hand.

"Please, Mr. Jameson, this way," Sergei said, finally deigning to speak to me. "We have a small area for you to undress in near the chamber. You will of course need to remove your watch as well." He gestured towards a standing curtain divider nearby as he pretended not to notice my platinum Rolex.

I nodded and ignored his hungry look. If all went well, it wouldn't matter if he stole my watch, and if things went wrong... well, I would still be beyond caring. Behind the curtain was a metal folding chair, a robe draped over the divider, and nothing else. With a shrug, I undressed and laid everything on the chair. Covering myself with the robe despite having to balance on my one good leg while, I returned to my new-found friends. Sergei ignored me, his eyes focused on a small, cracked iPad. His face flickered from the light of the screen as his fingers swished this way and that.

"One last time, are you sure about this?" Ivan said putting his hand on my shoulder.

"Yes," I said.

"Good," he said, and jammed a needle into my neck.

~~~~

"Brian?" My sister, who had been dead for ten years and sixty-five when she did so, looked down at me. I felt grass on my neck and could smell the silage from the farms that had surrounded the small town in Northwest Ohio in which I'd been born and spent the first twenty years of my life. Angie's pigtails brushed my face and I batted them away.

"He's fine, he just got hit in the head with a frisbee," Brad said. My eyes opened wider. Though the Russians might have been able to find out about my sister, I felt certain they wouldn't have found out about my childhood friend Bradley. He had died--

"What year is it?" I asked, then felt my throat with surprise at my juvenille voice. Instead of the jowls and wringkles of an old man, there was taunt skin. I sat up quickly. Brad and Angie were crouched in the tall grass beside me, Brad in overalls and bare chested, Angie in summer shorts and a with most of the buttons undone which I know Mom would have killed her for wearing that way if Mom had ever seen it.

It had been (or was) the day after my... thirteenth birthday? Yes, definitely, if Angie had started wearing her shirt like that around Brad. She was a year older than me, but only six months older than Brad. I had been riding my bike down the side of the resevoir after Angie had dared Brad and I, and I had wiped out hard, flipping through the air after hitting a large rock hidden by the thick, green grass.

"1996 dumbass," Angie said as she poked my face with a long blade of grass. "You don't have nothing to get hurt up there, quit pretending."

"Up yours," I said swatting it away. I tried to remember when Brad had died, and how.

"That was frigging hilarious man, like, wham, you were flipping and shit," Brad said, brushing off his knees as he stood up. I got to my feet dusting off my baggy jean shorts. He was taller than me by a good inch or two, which was funny to me because when I'd gotten measured for my last suit I'd been six feet even and the last mark in the treehouse we all played in with his name on it was a good three inches shy of my adult chin.

Angie cocked her head to one side and looked at me, though keeping Brad in her line of sight. Her brown pigtails swayed ever so slightly in the breeze. "Brian? You OK?" She frowned a little.

"I'm fine," I said. I rubbed my eyes clear. I hadn't seen her for six years when I got the phone call that she had died in her sleep. Her grandson had called my office and told my secretary "to tell the old bastard that his sister was dead", then hung up before she could transfer the call to my phone. I probably wouldn't have answered it anyhow.

"Too bad," she said. She took Brad's arm and pulled him down the hill towards our home. Our house lay a few hundred yards from the resevoir, in the middle of a swaying, emerald corn field. I saw my Mother waiting on the porch for us, and could just barely hear her calling. Angie always did have good ears. Then again, Brad always took suppers at our house if he could.

How had he died?

He tripped a little running down the hill with my sister, laughing as he ran, his blonde hair a waving mess of greasy tangles. What my sister had ever seen in Brad was unfathomable; maybe it was just that he was there, reasonably handsome and a friend. As they reached the bottom of the slope, she pulled away from Brad and tugged her shirt down over her belly.

I was hungry, and picked up my pace. I knew Mom was cooking something good.

Would be cooking something good.

It was leftovers from my birthday supper yesterday, chicken pot pie, and the remains of a store-bought sheetcake. I knew before I got to the door of the house. There was something else I was trying to remember as well, something Ivan had warned me about. I shook my head and concetrated as I sat down at the round pine dinner table in the kitchen of our family's ranch house. My father had built the table before I'd been born, and it bore the scratches and dents of hundreds of meals. Brad and Angie were sitting opposite each other and pretending to study the food in the center of the table.

Dad sat down with a thump and began eating which signaled to the rest of us to dig in, but Mom my Mother clicked her tongue and cleared her throat. He stopped, removed his black-formerly-green John Deere ballcap and resumed. Angie and Brad shared a smirk.

I sat and ate quietly. Something was nagging at me, something I had forgotten to do. Something about Brad. Him and Angie kicked at each other under the table. I watched him eat, and I noticed the bruise on his upper arm. I guess he'd gotten it today or yesterday because it was a fresh one. Probably today going down the hill, but it was a funny thing for that since it went all the way around his bicep like somebody had grabbed him real hard.

For all her manners, Mom finished first despite having a good sized portion on her plate, and began clearign the table without a word, occasionally glancing at Brad. He was unaware of her watching him for he was fixated on Angie. She had a routine with the chicken pot pie, first digging the filling out from under the crust, scooping under the crust with her fork, retrieving every little bit of carrots and chicken and corn; then eating the glistening yellow crust itself, the buttery shell flaky and glistening with egg glaze [?]. Brad tried to copy her method, but only managed to mangle his beyond recognition.

I simply dug in, eating without abandon, scraping my plate clean. "Brian Jameson," my said putting her hands on her hips. I stopped licking the plate for a second.

"What?" I said.

"You know what," she said. Angie laughed.

"You did too," I said, flicking some food at her, and Brad for good measure.

I needed to remember when Brad died. Why did I think he was going to die? Ivan had warned me about the transposition occasionally failing to fully take. I'd have memory loss, or more accurately, memory loss regarding my transposed waves.

Who was Ivan? What were transposed waves?

I was on the floor of the kitchen, my parents standing over me.

"Geez, he passed out again?" Angie said, resting her chin on her hands.

"Again? When were you planning on telling me this young lady?" Mom said. She had her hand on my forehead.

"I'm OK mom, let me up," I said climbing to my feet.