Free The Time Traveler's Almanac by Jeff VanderMeer Page A

female calico. Neither did Janine, although she had accepted the presence of the cat without surprise. As for Gus – Max – he was getting foggier about his name, and Janine couldn’t even remember what he looked like. But she did recall that he had been a wedding gift from some close friend, and Mikkelsen remembered that the friend was Gus Stark, for whom they had named him, and Janine was then able to dredge up the dimming fact that Gus was a close friend of Mikkelsen’s and also of Hambleton and Janine in the days when they were married, and that Gus had introduced Janine to Mikkelsen ten years ago when they were all on holiday in Hawaii.
    Mikkelsen accessed the household callmaster and found no Gus Stark listed. So the phasing had erased him from their roster of friends. The general phone directory turned up a Gus Stark in Costa Mesa. Mikkelsen called him and got a freckle-faced man with fading red hair, who looked more or less familiar. But he didn’t know Mikkelsen at all, and only after some puzzling around in his memory did he decide that they had been distantly acquainted way back when, but had had some kind of trifling quarrel and had lost touch with each other years ago.
    “That’s not how I think I remember it,” Mikkelsen said. “I remember us as friends for years, really close. You and Donna and Janine and I were out to dinner only last week, is what I remember, over in Newport Beach.”
    “Donna?”
    “Your wife.”
    “My wife’s name is Karen. Jesus, this has been one hell of a phasing, hasn’t it?” He didn’t sound upset.
    “I’ll say. Blew away your marriage, our friendship, and who knows what-all else.”
    “Well, these things happen. Listen, if I can help you any way, fella, just call. But right now Karen and I were on our way out, and—”
    “Yeah. Sure. Sorry to have bothered you,” Mikkelsen told him.
    He blanked the screen.
    Donna. Karen. Gus. Max. He looked at Janine.
    “Tommy did it,” she said.
    She had it all figured out. Tommy, she said, had never forgiven Mikkelsen for marrying her. He wanted her back. He still sent her birthday cards, coy little gifts, postcards from exotic ports.
    “You never mentioned them,” Mikkelsen said.
    She shrugged. “I thought you’d only get annoyed. You’ve always disliked Tommy.”
    “No,” Mikkelsen said, “I think he’s interesting in his oddball way, flamboyant, unusual. What I dislike is his unwillingness to accept the notion that you stopped being his wife a dozen years ago.”
    “You’d dislike him more if you knew how hard he’s been trying to get me back.”
    “Oh?”
    “When we broke up,” she said, “he phased me four times. This was before I met you. He kept jaunting back to our final quarrel, trying to patch it up so that the separation wouldn’t have happened. I began feeling the phasings and I knew what must be going on, and I told him to quit it or I’d report him and get his jaunt-license revoked. That scared him, I guess, because he’s been pretty well behaved ever since, except for all the little hints and innuendoes and invitations to leave you and marry him again.”
    “Christ,” Mikkelsen said. “How long were you and he married? Six months?”
    “Seven. But he’s an obsessive personality. He never lets go.”
    “And now he’s started phasing again?”
    “That’s my guess. He’s probably decided that you’re the obstacle, that I really do still love you, that I want to spend the rest of my life with you. So he needs to make us unmeet. He’s taken his first shot by somehow engineering a breach between you and your friend Gus a dozen years back, a breach so severe that you never really became friends and Gus never fixed you up with me. Only it didn’t work out the way Tommy hoped. We went to that party at Dave Cushman’s place and I got pushed into the pool on top of you and you introduced yourself and one thing led to another and here we still are.”
    “Not all of us are,” Mikkelsen