“We don’t go there, it’s all statues,” he said. “Statues won’t fit through the Chronoslot. You might have noticed, Stretch and I broke quite a few before we quit trying.”
“Stretch?”
“My partner. Oh, and call me Shorty.”
It was my first positive illustration of the power of the past over the future.
“So what kind of art do you like?” I asked while we got comfortable on the couch.
“I don’t like any of it, but I guess paintings are best; you can turn them flat. Say, this is pretty good cerveza. Do you have any roll and rock?”
I thought he meant the beer but he meant the music. I also had a joint, left over from a more interesting decade.
“Your century is my favorite,” Shorty said. Soon he said he was ready for another petal.
“Bud,” I said. “In the fridge.”
“The cerveza in your century is very good,” he called out from the kitchen.
“Let me ask you two questions,” I said from the couch.
“Sure.”
“Do you have a wife or a girlfriend back there, or up there, in the future?”
“Are you kidding?” he said. “There are no single girls in the future. What’s your second question?”
“Do you look as cute out of that shimmery suit as you do in it?”
“There’s one missing,” said Borogove, checking off her list as the workmen unloaded the last of my paintings from the rented panel truck and carried them in the front door of the gallery. Other workmen were taking Bucky’s giant tits and asses out the back door.
“This is all of it,” I said. “Everything I’ve ever painted. I even borrowed back two paintings that I had traded for rent.”
Borogove consulted her list. “According to the two guys from the future, three of your early paintings are in the Museo de Arte Inmortal del Mundo in 2255: ‘Tres Dolores,’ ‘De Mon Mouse,’ and ‘La Rosa del Futuro.’ Those are the three they want.”
“Let me see that list,” I said.
“It’s just the titles. They have a catalogue with pictures of what they want, but they wouldn’t show it to me. Too much danger of Timesplits.”
“Slips,” I said. We looked through the stacked canvases again. I am partial to portraits. “De Mon Mouse” was an oil painting of the super in my building, a rasta who always wore Mickey Mouse T-shirts. He had a collection of two.
“Tres Dolores” was a mother, daughter, and grandmother I had known on Avenue B; it was a pose faked up from photographs—a sort of tampering with time in itself, now that I thought of it.
But “La Rosa del Futuro”?
“Never heard of it,” I said.
Borogove waved the list. “It’s on here. Which means it’s in their catalogue.”
“Which means it survives the holocaust,” I said.
“Which means they pick it up at midnight, after the opening Wednesday night,” she said.
“Which means I must paint it between now and then.”
“Which means you’ve got four days.”
“This is crazy, Borogove.”