Excerpt: The Life and Life and Life of a Time Traveling Pigeon
In Which Everyone Finds the Next Step Forward
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[ 33 / 33 ]
After a pause, she turned her attention to me. “Okay, Time Traveler, you got anything to add? Why were you so fucking desperate to convince me earlier?”
Suddenly put on the spot, I floundered for an answer. Because, see, I couldn’t tell her that it was because I wanted her to escape the island before it was quarantined. Because, as it stood, Dr. Tanner was going to be coming with us, and there was no way in fuck I was going to help him get onto the mainland. No. I am not setting this bastard loose.
“Um, because, um… Manhattan is going to be kind of a dangerous place this weekend. I wanted to get us somewhere safe while we waited for it to blow over.”
“What do you mean by ‘safe?’” she asked.
“Listen, between all these armed goons running around and the sundry shootings and explosions that are going to happen over the next couple of days… I was afraid you were going to get hurt in the chaos.” I looked aside, lowering my voice. “You do get hurt in the chaos. You die in the chaos.”
Wait.
“Or… I thought you did. You might have also been captured by these BlueCell guys. All I knew is that nobody heard from you again after tonight. We all thought you’d been in Pennsylvania Station during th—”
I was going to pretend to be ignorant about the details of the attack (mostly because the man responsible was within earshot and I didn’t want him to know that I knew,) but Dr. Tanner himself provided a convenient conversation stopper in the form of another migraine… or whatever it was. It was less severe (he managed to keep his balance this time,) but it was clearly present all the same.
“Are you sure you’re okay, Morgan?”
“Maybe?” He let out one last quiet grunt. “My head just fucking hurts.”
“Might be all the lead you’ve been eating tonight,” I snarked.
Dr. Tanner’s vaguely confused look was all I needed to know that the joke had gone so far over his head you could practically hear the whoosh. I guess the amnesia knocked out his sarcasm sensors, too. Or the headaches. Really, what is up with those?
Eh, then again, maybe it just wasn’t all that funny; Riley didn’t react much, either.
Instead, she asked, “So, let me get this straight. You thought I’d died, so you went back in time to try to save me?”
“Kind of? It’s complicated. It’s also…” I leaned over to check Riley's phone clock. “Past midnight. And thanks to everything that’s happened tonight, I’m about ready to collapse. Do you guys have any ideas for somewhere a bit more, um, long-term we can go?”
I was going to suggest my hotel room (I had no idea how I’d get a wanted terrorist past reception, but we were all flying by the seat of our pants at this point.) To my surprise, though, Riley supplied an answer.
“Yeah, I think I know a place. A couple of friends of mine, they’re off on some sort of missionary work in fucking Patagonia or something, so they left me the keys to their apartment. They wanted me to check in every now and again for them. Water the plants, dust a bit, make sure the place hasn’t caught fire, that sort of shit. It’s up in Midtown, about a mile and a half from here. If we can make it there, it’ll work. There’s just one problem, though.”
“What?” he asked.
She groaned, “I don’t have the fucking key with me. It was on my keychain. We’d have to go back to my apartment to get it, if those goose-stepping fucks didn’t just steal it. Fuck, they’re probably turning the place upside down right about now, looking for evidence or whatever the fuck they can get their greasy, trigger-happy fingers on.”
I raised a hand. “Actually, I can pick locks.”
“Seriously?” she said, flatly.
I shifted nervously under their combined stares. “It’s a long story.”
Taking a deep breath, Riley pushed herself back upright. Running her hand through her hair (wincing when she accidentally brushed the bruise,) she said, “Alright. Alright… I think we have a plan. Morgan, do you think you can get us there safely? You seem to have a handle on this sneaking around shit.”
“I’ll try.”
“Not very confidence-inspiring, but we don’t have many options right now. Col, how's your ankle? You think you can walk that far?”
Gingerly, I tried putting weight on the affected leg, and found that it held. It wasn’t great, and by the time we arrived I’d likely want to beat the everloving fuck out of it, myself, and reality (not necessarily in that order.) But, point was, I could walk on it, and at a reasonable pace, from what I could tell. And since just about anything was better than being carried around by Dr. Tanner, I gave her a thumbs-up.
“Good. Okay. We can do this,” she said, pulling the hood of her jacket up over her head. (I mirrored her motion; might as well go three-for-three.) “I’ll feed you directions as we go, Morgan. If we are where I think we are, it should be almost a straight shot north.”
He nodded, then stepped back outside the room and into the tunnel, motioning for us to follow.
Excerpt: The Life and Life of a Time Traveling Pigeon
In Which Columba Notices Just How Odd Morgan Is
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[ 30 / 33 ]
Now that the adrenaline had completely bled away, and I wasn’t feeling as much like I’d been punched in the face, I was finally able to take actually register what I was seeing. Specifically, two major things about Dr. Tanner stood out clear as day, even in the dim light.
First, you know how every time I’ve been able to get a decent look at him, I’ve mentioned that he looked consistently roughed up? As in, “half-a-dozen gunshot wounds, big ol’ cut on his face, and plenty of blood?” Yeah, there was currently no trace of that on him whatsoever. The gash on his face had healed without even leaving behind a scar. His hoodie was both completely intact and as grey as the day it’d been bought. And I got the feeling that, had I been completely and utterly insane enough to try, if I’d unzipped it and unbuttoned the shirt beneath, I’d find no evidence that he’d ever been shot.
(Hold on a sec, folks; I need a moment to get that image out of my head.)
Now, the super-fast and super-perfect healing I could easily pass off as being one of his superpowers. The lack of blood was a bit harder to explain, but, who knows, maybe he found a way to wash it out between when I saw him last and now. The bullet holes disappearing, though? Sure, he could have changed into a new set of clothes, but if I were a guy who was trying to hide from the Men in Black, I wouldn’t put on the same fucking outfit. At the very least, I would have added a jacket or something. What the hell?
Wondering about it was going to have to wait, though, because there was something much more immediate and much more obviously freaky that was staring me in the face. Literally.
Dr. Tanner’s eyes were fucking glowing.
Okay, not glowing per se, more like they were reflective. Not like a cat’s eyeshine, though; it was his irises that were weird. Normally, from what I’d seen, both in his wanted ad and as he was standing in the truck, his eyes were about the same shade of blue as Riley’s. As his gaze darted about, though, they’d sometimes catch the light and brighten, turning a luminous icy white. A little like a road sign, I guess, but it was dimmer, and not perfectly uniform. It also only showed up when the light was at an angle, rather than head on. Whatever the hell it was, it was very noticeable in the shadows, especially when the only source of light was the glow of the cellphone screen.
Excerpt: The Life and Life and Life of a Time Traveling Pigeon
In Which Columba Goes Back to the Drawing Board
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[ 24 / 33]
So, yeah, let’s review, people; I had, after four separate loops, spent a total of just eight days in Manhattan. And that was if I was being generous! I could not keep doing this; it would drive me honest-to-god insane. Fuck, it was already driving me insane! This first-hand eyewitness bullshit was getting me nowhere fast, and had, so far, only given me even more questions.
No, no, I needed to take a different approach, something that didn’t involve me sticking my face directly into the woodchipper that was this city. Something more remote.
It was at this point that I began cursing every single tech company on this planet for not having invented drones yet. Give me a quad-copter with a half-decent camera on it, and I could have this knot untangled in five loops, if that! But, no, I was stuck dealing with my squishy-ass self, trying to find that sweet spot between “line of sight” and “line of fire.”
God, and I couldn’t even swipe some blueprints from the future and hand them off to someone to make a one-off, custom model. Alas, my dreams of four-rotored air superiority were just that, dreams.
Okay, okay, okay… so direct and/or indirect visual confirmation wasn’t going to be the way to go. Fine. So, how else does someone learn about an event?
…
They watch the news.
Or read or listen to or whatever. That’s not the point. The point is that I already knew a journalist. I already knew a journalist who lived in the immediate area. I already knew a journalist who lived in the immediate area, and whose life I already wanted to save anyway!
Yep, that’s right; we’ve circled right on back to Operation: Save Riley. Only, this time, I was going to ask for her help a little closer to home. Her home, anyway.
Of course, the big problem with this new version of the plan was that I couldn’t cop out and just find a way to stop the Penn Station attack from happening. In the aftermath of that event was the thread I needed to follow to start untangling The Event. So it was staying on the table. Which meant that the quarantine was staying on the table. Which meant that the nuke was staying on the table. I had no goddamn idea how I was going to pull it off, but I was going to need to find some way to get her out of that city… without going in for a repeat of Loop 17. Oh, that was where things got screwy. Because I still technically don’t know how she’d died. Was it actually because she started digging in the Men in Black’s backyard? Or had it been pure happenstance? And if it was because she’d been targeted, I would need to find the happy medium between “enough information to convince her” and “enough information to entice her.” If that happy medium even existed.
Hey, here’s a shitty idea: just don’t give her time to investigate. Drop that shit on her at the last minute. The very last minute. As in, the day of. Keep her from dying in Penn Station, and then use that as the final bit of leverage to get her to come with you just before the quarantine goes up. Sure, it’ll leave her with nothing more to her name than whatever savings she had and a metric boatload of survivor’s guilt, but who cares? That’s what killing yourself to reset the loop is for! Yeah! That is an absolutely abysmal idea! Both because it probably won’t work and because it’s kinda fucked up.
Or, we could try to come up with something that isn’t so unilaterally stupid?
…
Nah. “Operation: Be a Complete Fucking Bastard” it is, then!
Excerpt: The Life and Life and Life of a Time Traveling Pigeon
In Which Columba Gets Whisked Away Into the Night
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[ 28 / 33 ]
I shot another glance over to Riley to gauge her response to all this bullshit. Yeah, I knew him as the vile bastard who had just killed a few hundred people (now with another three tacked onto that total,) but she didn’t. And I didn’t want to do anything that might make him suspect I was on to him (because, for all I fucking knew, he was the hypothetical enemy time traveler.) So, yes, tell me, Riley, how am I supposed to be reacting right now? What is the proper response to having some superpowered asshole kill the Men in Black that were trying to kidnap you?
Apparently, the answer was to be frightened by the sudden and violent change in her situation (okay, cool, right there with you;) then have that melt into bewilderment, presumably at the fact that this guy just pitted this van like an olive with his bare hands (I’m not bewildered by that, specifically, but it’s not like he knows that;) and then, finally… relief? Recognition? Wait, wait, wait, hold on…
He snaps the zipties on her hands… and she immediately drags him into a hug.
Oh, no.
I see him stop dead and go stiff as a board as she embraces him, before clearing his throat and muttering that he still needed to undo the gag. And as he turns to help me out of my own binds, I get a good, long look at his face. Juxtaposed against Riley’s, I couldn’t help but admit that there was more than a bit of family resemblance between the two.
No. No, no, no, you had to be joking. I don’t care if it answers a bunch of my questions, this can’t be right. You can not be telling me that my best friend’s brother is the world’s deadliest terrorist. This just isn’t allowed. Nope, nuh-uh, not at all.
It was official: my current reality was the exact opposite of what I had wanted to happen. First, I fall flat on my face trying to convince Riley I’m a time traveler. Then, we get jumped and hog-tied by the Men in Black. And then, we get rescued by Morgan fucking Tanner. This is like Han Solo trying to tell Leia that he’s there to save her, she doesn’t believe him, they both get ambushed by Jabba the Hutt’s goons, and then Darth Vader appears right the fuck out of nowhere and breaks them out. Oh, and Han is the last one to know that Darth Vader is related to her. What the hell is going on?
I didn't have much time to protest this insanity. In fact, we didn’t have much time at all; Dr. Tanner, in addition to already being a wanted man, hadn’t exactly been stealthy these last few minutes. If the fact that their transport hadn’t arrived on time didn’t tip them off that something was up, the very loud screaming over the radio sure as fuck would have.
Still bewildered, but not really having any other options, I followed behind Riley as Dr. Tanner hopped out the back of the truck.
Excerpt: The Life and Life and Life of a Time Traveling Pigeon
In Which Columba Reaches the End of the World, and Thus Begins Their Journey
[[INDEX || NEXT]]
[ 1 / 33 ]
[cw: car crash]
So.
It’s three in the morning. I’m still awake, as usual. And I’ve been told that I should write a book about the insane clusterfuck that is my life. I’m not going to be falling asleep any time soon, and I’m bored out of my mind, so I guess now’s as good a time as any to follow through on that advice.
First thing’s first: my name’s Columba. I’m a time traveler. Specifically, I’m stuck in a time loop. Yes, that’s right, an honest-to-god, Groundhog Day style time loop (it lasts a lot longer than a single day, but that’s beside the point.) How? Don’t know. Why? Likewise, don’t know. All I do know is the rules by which it operates, and that was all through trial and error.
For instance, the first rule is that something terrible happens on July 17th, 2012, at 3:32 PM, Pacific Standard Time. Like, really terrible. Apocalyptically terrible, even.
It’s a beautiful day, now that the morning clouds have burned off. “June gloom” we call it around here; overcast and chilly in the early morning as the marine air flows inland overnight, before the sun comes in and bathes us in that classic Southern California sunlight.
We’re coming down the 5 after having spent a long weekend up in Mammoth. Aug, my best friend, hailed from a snooty upper-middle-class family and had an aunt who owned property up there (a little cluster of timeshare vacation homes, in fact.) She’d been more than happy to let us hang around during the off season… as long as we promised to keep the place in good shape and not bother whatever actual guests she had at the time, of course. As if she’d needed to ask; I tended to keep to myself, and Aug was one of those folks who’d go to clean up his own mess and find, an hour later, that he’d cleaned the whole damn room. Blessing and a curse, honestly, thinking in straight lines like that. He can power through grading a thousand essays, but heaven help him if there’s anything else he needs to do.
The windows are down, and the cool mountain air rushes in. His hair’s a disaster, my hair’s a disaster, but it sure as hell beats wasting fuel running the air conditioner. It seems more real, too. Without that glass between me and the outside world, I can feel the empty distance stretching out all the way down to Pyramid Lake, nestled in the valley this highway skirted. Watching all those little boats and jetskis glide around the surface of the lake makes me thankful that I’m riding shotgun. How could I be expected to keep my eyes on the road when I had this sitting right next to me?
The two of us are getting antsy from driving for so long. It’s been over three hours since we finally managed to pack everything back into this little sedan of his, and we’re desperately in need of a stretch break. Next rest stop’s maybe fifteen miles ahead, going by the last sign we saw. We start debating whether we want to stop for an actual lunch or just grab some gas-station snacks and keep rolling. His vote is for the former, he says. In mock indignation, he explains that if he so much as sees another pack of corn-nuts again, he’ll drop me on the side of the road and let me find my own ride home.
I relent, emphasizing how burdensome his demands are, but, since we’re friends, I’ll shoulder them out of the kindness of my heart.
Our stern looks melt away as we break into a giggling fit. I comment on how neither of us can ever keep a straight face. He quips that it’s because neither of us are straight, period, and I just start laughing so hard, my sides begin to hurt. Was it that funny of a joke? Yeah, kinda. But, see, Aug has this laugh that is incredibly fucking infectious, so once he joined in, I was as good as doomed.
Perhaps knowing that I wasn’t going to stop until he did, he turns on the radio to distract us. It’s a hell and a half getting a signal up here, between the mountains and the trees, but, finally, one station comes through strong.
I… honestly don’t remember what the song was. I can guess, sure; "Karma Chameleon” by Culture Club fucks me up for no good reason, so I’m putting my money on that being what was playing when…
Aug’s voice cuts off midway through one of the lines of the chorus. Sudden. Unnatural. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him go rigid for a split second, before slumping forward over the steering wheel. He’s not breathing.
I scream his name (I tried to shake him awake, too, I think.) He doesn’t move. Or, rather, he does move; he begins to fall towards me, dragging the steering wheel with him.
Turning right.
Sharply.
Towards the lake.
Off the road.
Over the edge of the road. And down the side of…
…
You know, I don’t even remember the impact. The impact with the ground, I mean. We hit the guardrail full-force, the airbags exploded, and gravity picked a new and exciting direction to start pulling me in, but… yeah, no, I don’t actually remember us hitting the ground. Doesn’t really matter, in the end. Or at all, honestly.
Because, see, the second rule is…
Three dozen heads instantly turn towards me, aka, the weird kid who’d just screamed. Loudly. In a calculus class. During the final. For no goddamn reason.
It’s August 8th, 2008, 9:28 AM, Pacific Standard Time, and I’m sitting in the back of Room 404 at the local community college.
As soon as the world around me finally registers, my hands fly up to cover my mouth (and also to help hide the fact that I’m blushing bright red from shame.) In the process, I drop my calculator onto the floor, just adding to the noise. Great.
And then the people around me register. A few scattered individuals are still looking around wildly, presumably to find whatever bug must have startled me (this particular building has a reputation for being a roach magnet.) The rest, though…
Oh. I know those looks. Mentally, I sigh. Damn it. Well, with any luck, I’ll never see any of these assholes again after today. And if this kicks up my reputation again? Fuck it, I’m going to be waving goodbye to this place by the end of next… year?
Wait. No, that’s not right. I’ve graduated. I know I have. I remember, because that weekend, Aug and I celebrated by…
Excerpt: The Life and Life and Life of a Time Traveling Pigeon
In Which Columba Gears Up For the Challenge Ahead
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[ 20 / 33 ]
Back to the grind, I guess.
But this time? Oh, forget what I said about fighting Manhattan before. Now it was really on. Like, really, truthfully, cut-to-a-training-montage on. I mean it. No more bullshit, no more tourism. We’re getting serious about this.
First order of business: if I’m going to be doing some hard-core detective work, I’m going to need some way to do some hard-core snooping, and that means having some way of getting into places I’m not supposed to be. The easy option, of course, would be to just lug around a crowbar and some bolt-cutters, but that was the sort of shit you used when you actually wanted to steal stuff. Besides, they weren’t exactly stealthy. Lockpicking, on the other hand, was a much better choice for my purposes; it was quieter, the tools were easier to conceal, and, most importantly, it was cooler.
Turns out, there are YouTube videos out there on how to do damn near anything. That said, practicing got me plenty of strange looks, and actually procuring the tools was a minor adventure in and of itself. Trade school was involved. I’ll say this much, I’m honestly really proud of how good I was at the end of those eight-ish months.
(And these days, in the present-tense? I’m a goddamn master, if I do say so myself. Granted, I kind of cheat, but, whatever. I can unlock locks without using the original key, that’s all that matters.)
I briefly considered learning how to hotwire a car, then thought better of it, seeing as I’d most likely be using those skills in fucking New York City, also known as “the traffic jam capitol of the world.” It’d be like learning to drive a speedboat in Venice: theoretically helpful at first brush, but practically a lot less efficient than just walking or catching a ride.
I… also tried my hand at learning how to use a gun. I got as far as passing the basic safety tests before I took an honest look at myself and decided that it just wasn’t a good idea. It was too much power, and I didn’t trust myself to not point it in the wrong direction… again.
The final piece to this puzzle was one I already had well in hand, literally. Namely, my badass birding binoculars. True, they weren’t exactly top of the line, but they could hardly be considered beginners’ optics, either. In experienced hands, these babies could pick out a hummingbird at a thousand yards. And whose hands would be more experienced than those of someone who’d been using them for close to a decade, even before the time loop bullshit? Oh, yeah, that’s right. And if I could successfully track a six-inch swallow as it darted after bugs, I could sure as hell track a human-sized target, Spiderman wannabe or no. Plop me down in a good spot, and I’d become a surveying machine.
Now all I had to do was find said good spots. First on the list was finding somewhere to watch what Dr. Tanner was doing at the CytoCen complex, which was easier said than done. For starters, due to the buildings surrounding the central courtyard, I needed to be decently above ground level if I wanted to see what, if anything, was going on in there. Further, that main tower blocked all view from the east. Unless I wanted to become an expert in scaling buildings, my spot also needed to be somewhere that was accessible with only mild physical exertion, while also being somewhere I wasn’t likely to be bothered.
I found myself, on October 2nd at 5:40 in the afternoon, on the roof of an apartment building that was way too tall for its own good, binoculars in one hand and a caffeine-laced energy bar in the other, wondering just what the hell my life had become.
Excerpt: The Life and Life and Life of a Time Traveling Pigeon
In Which Columba Makes a Break For It
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[ 29 / 33 ]
The going was slow as we meandered about, trying to escape detection. Dr. Tanner had spent much of the night being forced to learn how to avoid the Men in Black’s gaze, and he was putting those skills to good use now. We kept off the streets for most of it, ducking in and out of alleyways, in no small part due to the fact that a couple of college students who looked like they’d just lost a boxing match were something of a noticeable target.
A lot of it passed in a blur for me, between the pain and the last few dregs of adrenaline in my system. Eventually (after a very harrowing fence jump,) we found ourselves underground. It looked like some sort of utility access tunnel, probably for the subway system, but could have served any number of infrastructure needs. The only thing that mattered for our purposes was that it was out of sight from both the street and the air.
As the light from the city outside began to fade, Riley pulled out her cellphone to use as an impromptu flashlight. It was a cheap, bottom-of-the-barrel flip phone, and its glow was barely enough to keep her from tripping over her own feet in the gloom.
Speaking of, we’d come upon a door of some sort, only really distinguishable by the dull reflections off the metallic handle. Riley muttered something about a dead end, and I was about a half-second away from offering up my lock-picking abilities. Sure, I didn’t have any sort of tools on me; and my dominant hand was kinda fucked up; and if this was a city-owned, utility-workers-only sort of thing, it was probably above my skill level anyway, but—
Dr. Tanner simply placed one hand by the handle, pushed, and the door broke open with the too-loud metallic crack of the entire latch mechanism being shattered by the force.
Right. Superpowers.
Well, that thing’s never locking again.
The doorway opened up into a small room that was little more than a glorified closet, the walls lined with an eclectic mix of cables, pipes, meters, levers, and valves. A pervasive hum filled the air, and (once I’d found a suitably flat patch to lean against,) I could feel it likewise through the walls. It was decent enough white noise, I suppose, and the space was big enough for all three of us to fit comfortably, so it would work for us to catch our breath, mentally and physically.
There was a light switch just inside, but Dr. Tanner advised against turning it on; he didn’t know if the light would be visible from the mouth of the tunnel, but it probably wasn’t a good idea to show that there was a room down here, much less one that’s currently occupied.
And so there we were: me, my best friend, and the superpowered mad scientist that was apparently her brother, all lit only by the glow of a cheap-ass cellphone.
Excerpt: The Life and Life and Life of a Time Traveling Pigeon
In Which Columba Does Some Spying
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[ 21 / 33 ]
Now that I was able to get a better look at the overall layout of the place, I saw that the complex was laid out as something of a ring of lower buildings surrounding a tall, glass tower. Really, really tall. Even as high up as I was (which I think was, like, fifteen stories,) it still loomed over me.
Between the outer ring and the tower itself was a broad expanse of concrete (with what I presume to be their logo laid out in darker asphalt just inside the checkpoint. Cute.) A thin strip of curbed sidewalk skirted both the tower and the smaller buildings, lined with marks for parking stalls. Visitor, VIP, and/or handicapped parking spots, obviously; there was no way in hell that the company’s entire workforce could fit their cars in there. The rest looked to be used as either long-term utility vehicle parking or loading/unloading zones, with a couple of dedicated loading docks on the outer buildings. As of right now, the only things left in the lot were a pair of nondescript white vans; three cars; a couple of dumpsters; and a portable generator, hooked up to a street lamp, throwing harsh light across the lot. In fact, the whole area was very well lit, practically drowning in the blue-white glow of mercury-vapor lamps.
All in all, the place looked about as drab and sterile as I’d expect from some high-tech research facility. Which meant that it was going to be a boring five hours. Jesus, would it have killed them to plant a tree or something?
You know, I’d picked this time slot just for sheer convenience; as I’d mentioned, the ebb and flow of people was a nice bit of human-shaped white noise for me to hide in. But it also turned out to be one of the luckiest breaks I’ve had. At 5:51 PM, an unexpected piece of the puzzle played out down in the central courtyard. The scene barely lasts five minutes, but it brings up as many questions as it answers.
Dr. Morgan Tanner, in that stupid getup of his, storms out of the main entrance to the CytoCen building, cutting a fine line between “striding confidently” and “running away.” Immediately, I notice something different about his silhouette, stark black against his grey hoodie: he’s wearing a backpack. One that he definitely won’t have four hours from now. Huh.
Though he was clearly moving to not draw attention to himself, he nonetheless catches someone’s eye. Before he can make it even halfway across the lot to the checkpoint, a dark-haired man (Filipino, if I had to guess,) in black business attire runs out after him. Dr. Tanner, being the asshole he is, doesn’t even acknowledge his presence until the guy literally grabs him by his arm. He turns, (or, rather, the man turns him,) and I catch the faintest reflection off his glasses. Another thing he’d lose between now and 10:45. Whatever, not important. Focus.
I’m no lip-reader; I can’t make out the brief dialogue between them. Hell, from this angle, I’m even having trouble seeing their faces. But even from all the way up here, I can tell it’s emotionally charged.
With Dr. Tanner finally facing him and making eye contact, he lets go, but stays close. Dr. Tanner squares off against him, raising his shoulders and straitening up as he presumably tries to intimidate the man. To the guy's credit, he stands his ground, drawing himself up to match his body language. Gesturing sharply, the two of them exchange what I can only assume to be harsh words; broad arm sweeps, agitated hand shaking, various indications of disbelief, and lots of pointing. Oh, so much pointing; at each other, at themselves, up, down, ahead, behind, and off into the vague elsewhere.
During all this, the man manages to maneuver himself between Dr. Tanner and the checkpoint. It doesn’t do him much good; after a final, parting shot, he literally pushes past him and continues on his original path.
I had a feeling I knew exactly where he was heading.
In the aftermath, I can see that the guy is shaking, whether it be from nerves, exhaustion, or the chill of the evening air. He subtly draws herself inward, one hand over his mouth, the other wrapped loosely around him. Worry? After a few moments, he recovers his resolve and begins fishing a cellphone out of his pants pocket. A few quick taps, a call is placed, and he walks out onto the street, heading around the corner and out of view.
Interesting. It was a good thing that I had roughly four hours to ruminate on this until Dr. Tanner showed up again, because, oh, boy, was there a lot to pick apart here.
