The Hard Way
“1980s and 2020s compete for worst dressed decade.”
Cherry taps away at her phone now that she’s in the privacy of her apartment. She follows the text with a photo of a young couple standing in front of the Painted Ladies, the woman’s teased fringe and the man’s acid wash jeans a visual assault even through the poorly focused image. She sets her phone down on the nightstand, smiling to herself because she knows Dylan will get a kick out of the photo. Is it going to help the CIA decide whether or not to alter the history of the world? No. Will it assure Dylan she’s surviving her most dangerous job yet with her humor intact? Yes. Cherry is as still as a rock, but she can’t be more thankful that the Inspector General assigned Dylan as her main point of contact. Dylan is her longtime colleague — and her secret lover — after all.
She’s been in San Francisco for two weeks; it’s the first of four locations she’s been assigned to on the year-long operation. Her apartment nests inconspicuously on the fourth floor of an old building in Chinatown. The plumbing is clogged, the single window faces a brick wall, and her fingers and toes touch opposite walls when she does yoga in the morning. She’s only in the apartment for another month, though, and the cha siu bao from the bakery on the ground floor is good enough to keep her around for even months longer.
Cherry picks up her phone again, the screen lighting up to a wallpaper of a ladybug. No text back, even though it’s safe messaging hours. After five years, Dylan still feels like sand slipping through her fingers. It’s not just that they have to keep their relationship under wraps at work, but that Cherry doesn’t even know his parents’ names, his favorite song, his biggest fear. Then again, he doesn’t know these facts about her, either.
Cherry sighs at the time and finally sets her phone down for the night — well, morning. It’s 4 a.m. both in 1984 and 2023. Two years simultaneously with the same time of day but different times completely. Cherry curls up on her side and tries to quiet her mind. Instead, she falls asleep ruminating over time theory, which, like the past few nights, sends her into dreams of talking shadows and a grassy knoll.
***
The next morning, the cha siu bao is unusually stale. Cherry stuffs the half-eaten bun back in its brown paper bag, then grabs the styrofoam cup wedged between her knees to chug down the rest of her coffee. Dylan never messaged her back, and now she has to wait until safe hours start at 1 a.m. until he’s allowed to contact her again.
“You gonna eat the rest of that?”
A red, calloused finger brushes Cherry’s sleeve. She follows the finger to a man sitting across from her on the bus. He can’t be more than twenty, but the way his features droop despite forcing a smile tells Cherry he’s packed a hundred years worth of anguish into his life. She hands him the bag, gives him a nod and turns away to the window; she watches his reflection in it, surprised that instead of digging into the food, he stuffs it in the backpack on his lap. He tucks strings of his shoulder length hair behind his ears, which makes Cherry smile, though she can’t say why.
Her focus shifts outside when the bus makes a rough, tugging stop. She peers down at the people under and around the bus shelter, some moving to get on the bus, others sleeping on their belongings and one woman nodding off. It’s too risky for Cherry to pull out her phone and take photos now. As the bus drives off, the new passengers move down the aisle, some filling unoccupied seats while others stand at poles. One newcomer takes the seat next to Cherry, her hair long and crimped and gathered into a yellow scrunchie on the top of her head. She pulls a book out of her bag and opens to the dog ear about a third of the way in, pushing the earlier pages back firmly as she continues where she left off. Cherry catches a glimpse of the blue letters on the cover. Neuromancer.
A few blocks of restaurants, liquor stores and hotels later, the bus makes another stop, Cherry’s. She steps off the bus and takes in her surroundings. She’s in the heart of the Tenderloin. Two strangers from the bus walk into a restaurant with an awning that simply reads “Pho & BBQ” in cracked white letters. Must be a local favorite, Cherry thinks. She doesn’t want to catch attention looking lost, so she follows her instinct and begins walking south, behind the man she’d given the cha siu bao to. The stretch of the block is quiet, shaded, almost peaceful. But a few yards down, Cherry can see a group of people at the next corner. It’s a calm gathering, some carrying on conversation while others are still asleep or just beginning to stir from beneath their blankets on the ground. The man from the bus greets a few of them before squatting down to rub the shoulder of someone nestled inside a sleeping bag.
These were the people the Inspector General wanted her to engage with. She was the humanity part of the operation — get into the minds of the financially disadvantaged to see how the government could better target them in their campaigns compared to the “first time” 1984 came around.
“Figure out how to better manipulate these people,” Dylan put it bluntly when he and Cherry were lying in bed the night before her teleportation. “The underbelly of society is so pliable. It’s time for us to use them for change instead of ignoring their existence.”
Cherry’s mind flashes to Dylan’s face on her pillow, the way his cheek squished into the cotton as he looked at her with eyes she could never read. She walks around the group of people and into the liquor store they’re loitering in front of. She goes to the nearest set of shelves against the front window, catching glimpses of the man from the bus between the display of chips and candy. He’s still trying to coax his companion out of their sleeping bag, sticking a hand inside to pet what was presumably a head. After a moment, that head does emerge, along with a curtain of long red hair, matted on the side they’d been sleeping on. The man pulls out the bag of cha siu bao and offers it to the young woman. Cherry can read his lips when he says, “Your favorite, ladybug.”
Something in Cherry already knows, even before the woman turns her face enough for Cherry to see it, and her acceptance of it is instant, unquestioning — it’s her.
It’s Cherry in another lifetime.
And—
“Oh my god,” Cherry whispers into her palm. For the first time since she was a kid, she’s struggling to keep her composure.
“Are you okay?” the old man behind the register asks. It immediately snaps Cherry back into place.
“Yeah,” she answers with a laugh. “I’ve been looking for this flavor everywhere, and I finally found it.” She picks up a pack of Freshen-up gum in cinnamon — she’s never heard of the brand in her life — and brings it to the register. “Same people always hanging outside the store, huh?”
“Mhm. They’re harmless.” He taps his knuckles lightly against the counter. “Twenty.”
Cherry hands him two dimes and heads out of the store. She goes to stand by a trash can just a few feet away from herself in the sleeping bag, then tears into the pack of gum as she looks up at the cross streets. O’Farrell and Jones. She throws the wrapper into the trash can, tosses the gum into her mouth and begins walking back up the street she came from. She doesn’t dare look her other self in the eye, though she’s sure she’s been seen by her and gone unrecognized.
Once she’s on the bus again — a premature return back to her apartment for the day — the man she’d given the cha siu bao to flashes in her mind. Dylan.
***
Cherry paces ten steps one way, ten steps the other way, back and forth in her cramped apartment. Her thumb hovers over the numbers on her phone. She knows she should be making a call to the Inspector General — she has solid proof of reincarnation, for crying out loud. Or does she?
The 1984 Cherry looks nothing like her 2023 self. In 1984, she is a white woman. In 2023, Asian. How could she possibly present this as evidence of reincarnation? How could she convince the Inspector General that a pull in her chest just told her it was herself, that the missing piece to the puzzle suddenly snapped into place the moment she saw herself sitting there on the ground, that the shadows in her dreams were the infinite versions of herself and the grassy knoll was where her selves came to reunite?
Cherry taps on her phone to wake the sleeping screen, revealing the wallpaper.
Your favorite, ladybug.
A chill runs down her spine. 1984 Dylan looks nothing like his 2023 self, either. But she knows that in every lifetime, Dylan is the only one she’d ever let use that nickname. She considers sending a message to him, but even after all they’ve been through, she doesn’t trust him to leak her discovery to the department. She’s not ready to let the world know. Now, this is a personal job.
***
The next morning, Cherry buys a cha siu bao and coffee. She drinks the coffee on the bus, finishing it just as she gets to her stop. Dead leaves and trash swirl around her feet just as she steps off the bus. It’s windy today, the first day of spring. Cherry pulls the collar of her jacket up around her neck and immediately heads one block down to O’Farrell and Jones. At first, she’s disheartened when all she sees is one man leaned up against a wall smoking a cigarette. But as she nears closer, she hears voices arguing at a volume that breaks the early morning peace. She rounds the corner, dismayed to see that the voices belong to the other versions of her and Dylan. They’re a little further down from the liquor store than yesterday, the other Cherry on the ground in her sleeping bag while the other Dylan stands towering over her. The other Cherry is in tears, hair even more matted than before, white hands grabbing at the other Dylan’s pants.
“I’m done, Candy! I’m done!” the other Dylan yells, jerking his legs away from her reach.
Cherry is scared looking at herself — Candy. Candy with arms littered in bruises and scars, legs tangled in the sleeping bag, pleading through her tears. “Don’t go!” she lets out with a strained voice, her elbows nearly touching the ground as she leans forward to grab the other Dylan’s feet. “Please don’t leave. I promise, I promise…”
The other Dylan goes quiet, takes a deep breath and runs his hands over his hair. He stares down at Candy crying at his feet. “Listen,” he says with a sudden calm, squatting down in front of her. “I can’t stay. I stay, and nothing changes. We go through this every few weeks, ladybug. You gotta be able to stand on your own two feet. You gotta want it for yourself.”
Candy shakes her head, presses the heels of her palms against her eyes and lets out a sob. “I can’t do it. I can’t change.”
Her words seem to snap the other Dylan out of something, and he gets up slowly, his expression unreadable and almost cold. Candy is still crying into her hands as the other Dylan grabs his backpack from the ground and walks off without a glance back.
“It’s a shame.”
Cherry looks back at the man by the wall, tears in her eyes.
The man takes a long drag from his cigarette, the wrinkles in his face deep and wise. “Some people just gotta learn the hard way, and by then, it’s too late.”
Cherry watches Candy lie back down and bury her face in her sleeping bag. Cherry walks over to her, pulls out the bag of cha siu bao from her jacket pocket and quietly sets it down next to her other self.
***
Back at her apartment, as Cherry lies in bed staring at her unanswered message to Dylan, she makes a horrifying realization — she was born in 1985. She has seen Candy in her last year of life.
She types out another message to Dylan: “To Mars.”