“You should be happy! Now you know you’re going to live a long time. That’s what you get for punching Astopel.”

“The guy stole my watch!”

“Yeah but you weren’t exactly diplomatic taking it back.”

I shook my head. “You would’ve done the same thing! What about the guy you hit at the Schiavo house?”

“That was different.” He crossed his arms to indicate that discussion was finished.

“My grandson! If I had a grandson like you I’d move to Sumatra.”

“If you were my grandfather I’d buy you the ticket.”

“So are you fellas catching up on family business?” Droopy came up and was all smiles again.

“What’s your name?” I had to start somewhere and knowing who he was might lead to something.

“August Gould, Gus to my friends; pleased to make your acquaintance. Again. You want to shake hands now and make it official?”

“Gus Gould.”

“That’s right, sir.” He was smiling like a carved Halloween pumpkin.

“Gus, my memory is a sieve today. Tell me exactly where we are and what we’re doing here.”

“We’re in Vienna, Austria, Fran. This is a two-week tour of Europe and we got one more week to PO. After here we go to Venice, Florence, Rome, Athens, and then home.”

“Where’s home?” I almost didn’t want to ask for fear he’d say some place like Yanbu, Saudi Arabia.

“Yours is New York. Mine is St. Louis.”

“Crane’s View, New York?”

“No, the city. Manhattan.”

The kid looked at me. “That’s cool. I wouldn’t mind living in the city. But what happened to Crane’s View?”

I shrugged and turned back to Gus. “And you say my wife’s name is Susan? Not Magda?”

“Come on, Fran, now you are pulling my leg! You can’t not know who your wife is, for crying out loud. If your memory was that bad she’d have to lead you around on a leash.” He sighed like my little game with him had gone on too long. “Susan Ginnety. That’s her name as far as I know. Although I don’t think I’d be so happy having a wife that didn’t want my last name when we got married.”

Both the kid and I yelped in disbelief the instant we heard her full name spoken. Susan Ginnety? I had married Susan Ginnety? The kid was so overwhelmed by the news that he jumped away from me, grabbed his head, and did an agony dance right there on the spot.

“Susan Ginnety?! Eeyow! You married that spaz? First Magda Ostrova out of tenth grade and then Susan Ginnety? What happened to your brain? No, what happened to my brain? You killed it!”

“Cut it out! I know as much about this as you do. Susan’s already married! She’s—Uh-oh.” I suddenly remembered right before all this happened she and her husband had separated. “We gotta find her. We gotta talk to her. Gus, where is she? Do you know where Susan is now?”

He glanced at his watch. It was a strange-looking thing. Appeared to be more a black rubber bracelet than a watch. And from what I could see, the numbers on it made no sense, watch-wise. He brought it close to his mouth and said, “Call Susan Ginnety.”

The kid let fly a low whistle. “That’s a phone?’

Gus raised his eyebrows but said nothing, obviously waiting for some kind of response from his phone. Suddenly he began talking. “Susan? Hi, it’s Gus Gould. Yeah, I’m keepin’ an eye on him and that grandson of yours. What? Yeah, your grandson. No wait, wait. I got Frannie right here. Says he wants to talk to you about something.” He smiled at me. I frowned. “Well, Fran, go ahead, talk to her.”

“What do you mean?”

He pointed to my wrist and for the first time I saw/realized I was wearing one of those bracelets; the kid too. Hesitantly I brought it up toward my face but didn’t know how far away I was supposed to keep it when I spoke. From afar it must have looked like I was afraid the bracelet was going to bite me. “Susan?”

“Hi, Frannie. What’s up?”

Her voice was crystal-clear, but how the hell was I hearing it? I felt around and inside both ears but nothing was in either. “How am I hearing this? How does this work?”

Gus announced authoritatively, “Linear matrix tubing.”

“Say what?”

“Linear matrix tubing. There’s a deliberated fiber-optic conduit bleached through an open-end ekistics feed—”

“Forget it! Susan, where are you? We gotta talk right now.”

“At the cafe, Frannie. Don’t you remember? You and Gus said you wanted to go—”

“Yeah yeah, forget it. You and I gotta talk immediately.”

She was silent too long and then sighed like a martyr giving up the ghost. “I hope you’re not going to complain about this trip again. I really don’t want to hear another rant—”

“I ain’t going to rant, Susan, and what I’ve got to say is not about the trip. I just gotta ask some things.” I could hear my voice going weird and desperate. If it went any higher, pretty soon I would sound like a teakettle whistling.

“We’re at the cafe. But you know that.”

“No, Suze, I don’t know that. I didn’t even know where I was until about five minutes ago, but I won’t dwell on that one. What cafe?”

“The Sperl.”

“The Squirrel? You’re at a cafe called the Squirrel?”

“Sperl, Frannie, Sperl. Turn your hearing aid up, dear.”

“All right, I’ll find it. What do you look like now?”

She chuckled in her trademark way. I’d heard it often enough at our weekly meetings when we discussed the goings-on in Crane’s View. “What do I look like now? Well, like I did this morning, in case you forget. Byyyye!”

Gus Gould thought that was the funniest thing and again his annoying heehaw laugh broke out of the corral. I’d forgotten he could hear both sides of our conversation. “I’ll point her out to you, Fran.”

“Yeah, great, thanks. Where is this Cafe Sperl, Squirrel, whatever?”

“Right near our hotel.” Gus gestured for us to follow him and strode away.

I looked at the kid. “Our hotel? What hotel? I have no idea what the hell is going on here. What’s wrong with this picture?” I started walking.

“It didn’t have to be like this. It’s your fault! If you hadn’t been so stupid and hit Astopel—”

“Change the channel willya, sonny? You already said that nineteen times. If you’re expecting an apology you’re not getting it. Anyway, you still haven’t said what you’re doing here.”

“I don’t know. One moment I’m living my own life, minding my own fucking business, then whoomp, I’m in yours, and now I’m here.”

“I don’t believe this. Plus if we’re so far in the future, how come things don’t look different?”

Which was true. If I was now somewhere between seventy and eighty years old, at least three decades had passed. But from what little I’d seen of the surroundings, the world hadn’t changed much. Stores were stores and cars rolled by on streets, not in the air a la Back to the Future. Most of them looked sleeker and more aerodynamic, but they were still cars.

Junior interrupted my thoughts. “It was the same for me. When I got to your time I thought what’s so different? Same kind of clothes, a TV’s still a TV—”

“Who sent you up to my time?”

He shot me a quick, sneaky glance and looked away real fast. Then he started walking away at a frightfully brisk pace. The little fucker was trying to make a fast getaway. Hobbling after him, I managed to catch up and touched his shoulder. He shook me off.

“Astopel! It was Astopel, wasn’t it?” I must have said the magic word because he moved away so fast that if he had been a car his tires would have laid down a patch of rubber thirty feet long. Watching him and Gus Gould go, the truth suddenly dawned on me. “Because you hit him too! You hit Astopel too, didn’t you?”

The boy didn’t answer, but I knew I’d hit the bull’s-eye. That’s why the boy had been so worried about how I’d react to the black guy when I first met him. And that’s why he’d started hollering when I knocked Astopel down. Because he knew what was going to happen! Because he’d done exactly the same thing and ended up being shot into his future, just like me.