Departures

THE BARBECUE, THE MOVIE, AND OTHER UNFORTUNATELY NOT SO RELEVANT MATERIAL

Part of this one comes from driving over forty miles each way back and forth to work for seven years. Part of it comes from having an unusual last name myself. And part of it is just pure silliness. When I sit down to write, I usually have an ending firmly in mind. This time I just had an opening scene and let things roll from there. The results are intended to amuse; if any deep profundity lurks herein, I certainly haven’t found it.

T.G. Kahn looked out the window at the traffic going by on imperial Highway. He wished he were under the warm Los Angeles summer sunshine, instead of sitting here cooped up in an office trying to put a newsletter together.

He sighed. He had gone through some impressive finagling just to get an office he could see out of. Until a few weeks ago, he had worked in an enormous interior room, the kind where you needed to leave a trail of bread crumbs to find your way through the maze of partitions. “Cubicle, sweet cubicle,” one typist’s sampler read, which perfectly summed up the place.

The newsletter he was writing bored even him. He sighed again. “It beats sleeping on a park bench, I suppose,” he said out loud, and mounted another dispirited attack on his word processor.

The phone rang, its chime booming like Big Ben over the soft, incessant Muzak. Kahn’s fingers jerked. A rash of consonants broke out on the screen. He stared at them reproachfully as he picked up the receiver. “T.G. Kahn.”

“Someone here to see you, Mr. Kahn.”

“Thank you, Doris.” His secretary still worked across the corridor in the huge office from which he had recently escaped. “Send him in.”

“Yes, sir,” Doris said, and giggled. Kahn wondered if his ears were playing tricks on him. Doris hadn’t even cracked a smile for the limerick about the crypt at St. Giles, whereupon he had given her up as a hopeless case.

The door to his office came open. So did his mouth. The door closed. His mouth stayed open.

The man who walked into his office was in his late twenties, a few years younger than Kahn, and looked vaguely Semitic. He had a thick Fu Manchu mustache and the strangest hairdo Kahn had ever seen-and, living in Los Angeles, Kahn had seen some lulus. The top of the man’s head was shaved. So was a strip that ran from ear to ear through the bare spot on top, and an inch or so on the forehead. The rest grew long, in greasy braids.

The man wore a heavy fur coat over leather trousers and boots. He must have been dying out there in the heat, Kahn thought. Two scabbards hung at the fellow’s belt, one holding a knife, the other a curved sword. He smelled of sweat and rancid butter. The worst thing was that Kahn recognized the costume, though not the person in it.

He rose from his chair, feeling hot blood rush to his face. He had not been in a fight since the sixth grade, but he wanted to punch this fellow’s lights out. “If you’re not a singing telegram, pal, you’re in big trouble,” he said between clenched teeth.

The man did not burst into song. Kahn, who tended to think too much for his own good, took another look at the cutlery the fellow was carrying and decided that trying to kill him might not be such a good idea after all.

He stood irresolutely, and the moment passed. His shoulders sagged. “Very goddamn funny,” he said bitterly, hearing the weakness in his own voice and hating it. “I presume you know my father.”

To his amazement, the man in front of him went down on his knees, then thumped his forehead on the cheap indoor-outdoor office carpet. The door clicked shut at the same time. That made the stale, greasy stench worse, but it also kept anybody walking down the hall from seeing what was going on inside.

Fat lot of good that would do, Kahn realized. He clapped a hand to his forehead in horrified dismay. Doris, damn her blabbing soul, would spread this all over the office, and so would everyone else who had sported this kowtowing weirdo. How would he ever be able to look people in the face again?

He had to drag his attention back to the fellow, who, his face still against the nubby knit nylon, had started to talk. “No, Excellency,” he was saying in a voice Kahn seemed to hear between his ears rather than with them, “never did I have the privelege of meeting that great hero Yesugei. I-”

“Say, you are good,” Kahn said with grudging admiration. Not one in a million knew who Yesugei was or cared. He wished-Oh how he wished! — he didn’t himself. “What are you, one of dad’s grad students? If you wanted to get hold of me, why didn’t you just call?”

The man lifted his head from the rug, and looked at Kahn with as much perplexity as Kahn was giving him. “I had not thought to find the phrase ‘grad student’ on your lips, mighty lord.”

Kahn’s head was starting to spin. The most likely idea he’d had-and it wasn’t very-was that the maniac who would not get off the rug was some Syrian or Egyptian studying with his dad who wanted a favor from him. That would explain the flowery speech, at least. Why the fellow had to get into costume for that, though, was beyond him.

“Look, tell me what you want and take off, okay?” he said.

The strangers head went thump on the carpet again. “Merely the boon of observing you for a brief while, mighty lord.”

That was so far from anything Kahn had expected that he blurted, “Who the devil do you think I am, anyway?”

“Surely your Excellency can be no one else but Temujin, Genghis Khan-“

“Yes, thanks to my old man, I am Temujin Genghis Kahn,” Khan said, wishing for the nine millionth time that his father had dug ditches for a living instead of being a professor of Mongol history. It had made him the only first-grader at Oakdale ever to be called exclusively by his initials.

The fellow on the floor went on as if he had not spoken: “-unifier of the Mongols, conqueror of north China, subduer of the Khwarizm Shah, ravager of Russia, builder of the hugest s ever see-”

“-tech writher, in debt, divorced, driving an old Toyota,” Kahn finished the litany. He looked down at the stranger groveling before him. “You’re carrying on as if I were the real one, or something.”

The hangdog, puzzled look was back on the man’s face.

“Again you use strange terms, O Khan. Assure me, I pray, the pangloss properly renders my words into the Mongol speech.”

“Mongol?” Kahn was too far out of his depth not to come with the automatic truth. “This is English.”

“English?” The stranger’s eyebrows rose. “I’ve heard of it, I think. Then this is not the imperial yurt at Karakorum?”

“It’s Los Angeles.”

“Where?”

They stared at one another, each plainly convinced the other was crazy. At last the stranger said in a small voice, “Tell me the date, please.”

“Huh? It’s July 16th.”

“The year?”

Now positive he was humoring a madman, Kahn gave it to him. The next question confused him for a moment: “In what era is that?”

He finally figured out the meaning. “Christian, A.D. Anno domini. The Common Era-C.E.-if you don’t care for Christian dating of any flavor.”

One of those terms must have been familiar to the stranger. He screwed up his face and began to swear in a style that was bizarre but effective just the same. Kahn filed a couple of the choicer epithets to use himself. “Lizard piss” could come in handy almost any time, but he decided to save “sucker at the tit of a syphilitic sow” for when he really needed it-say, when a Mercedes cut him off on the freeway.

When the stranger finally ran out of oaths, he turned a face full of storm clouds on Kahn. “You are certain this is not central Asia in what you would call-let me think-the early thirteenth century?”

“Not the last time I looked,” Kahn said solemnly. He wished he could remember the security guard’s extension.

But instead of turning violent, the man in the Mongol clothes burst into tears. Kahn watched, amazed, as he unashamedly wept until he had cried himself out.

At last the stranger pulled himself together. He smacked fist into palm in frustration. “Oh, to have come so close and still missed! What are seven hundred miserable little years against fifty or sixty thousand?”

Kahn’s head was aching badly by now. He had had as much of this exchange as he could stand. “I’m so sorry,” he said with exquisite, ironic politeness. “You must be a time traveler, sir, and all this time I took you for a nut.”

The stranger waved it aside. “A natural error. However, if I were a nut, I would not be able to do this, for instance.” Afterward, Kahn would have sworn the fellow only pointed his finger at the office window, the window he had schemed so long and hard to get. A ray of blue light shot from the stranger’s fingernail. The next moment, the glass wasn’t there anymore.

July smog immediately started competing with the bland but breathable product the air conditioner turned out. Kahn coughed.

The stranger’s eyes went ecstatic (they also began filling with tears that had nothing to do with emotions). “The scent of burning hydrocarbons!” he exclaimed, breathing deeply, at least until he choked. “Undoubtedly from buildings torched in the search for loot.”

“No, from dinosaurs torched in the search for a parking space.” Kahn’s tongue led its own life, wild and free, while he tried to figure out whether he believed what he had just seen. He decided he did. His eyes might fool him, but he trusted his lungs. No way they could hurt so much unless the window glass really had disappeared.

“To have come so close!” the stranger said again. Now that he was no longer abasing himself, Kahn saw that the motions of his lips did not match the words the tech writer was hearing. The fellow shook his head in chagrin.”There goes my academic career, all because the scrofulous temporal phase link dropped me into the Late Middle First Primitive instead of the Mid-Middle.” He started to cry again.

He seemed to be talking more to himself than to Kahn, but his-what had he called it? — his pangloss kept working. “I can’t understand it. I was supposed to home on the mental vibrations of Temujin, Genghis Khan-”

He and Kahn realized at the same time what must have happened. Fury replaced the tears. Kahn waited for that finger to blast him to wherever the window had gone. The look on the fellow’s face said that might not be good enough-the sword might come out instead.

Then the stranger tried to master himself. It was a visible process, and audible. “Because I observe savages,” Kahn heard, “must I behave as one?”

His earlier wild mood swings made yes an all too likely answer to that. Kahn said quickly, “Can’t you just go on to the Temujin you really wanted to see?”

“It doesn’t work that way,” the stranger answered bleakly. “Once I am out of the temporal flow, returning only snaps me back to my own time, and then what am I? A graduate student in ancientest history without fieldwork, without a dissertation- and a laughingstock for the entire collegium.”

For the first time, he seemed a real person to Kahn, because the tech writer understood what he was feeling. His own education had ground to an ignominious halt a few months after he’d got his bachelor’s degree, when he had to admit his brain simply was not up to graduate work in physics-that being a subject as remote from Mongol history as possible.

He said, “Maybe you could do your work on twentieth-century America instead of the Mongols.”

“I don’t know anything about the Late Middle First Primitive,” the time traveler said petulantly-narrow specialization looked to be a universal constant.

“Maybe if you had a guide.” Anything, Kahn thought, to get the fellow’s mind off his anger, and off his ferocious finger. “I could do it, if you like. We’ve come a long way since the thirteenth century, you know.”

“I doubt it.”

Stung by the morose dismissal, Kahn snapped, “I’m going home in a few minutes. Come along if you want, or else don’t.”

“I’ll come,” the stranger said, sighing. “I may as well. It won’t help, though. Nothing will help.”

He was so woebegone that Kahn’s sympathy revived. “It won’t be so bad. You’ll get to see just about all of Los Angeles during the ride.” As far as he could remember, that was the first time he had ever had anything good to say about his daily commute. He lived in Reseda, in the western part of the San Fernando Valley, about forty-five miles northwest of where he worked. Some days it felt as if he spent more time in his car than on the job.

After saving the document he had been working on when the time traveler had arrived, Kahn undid his tie, slung his sport coat over his shoulder, and said, “Well, let’s go, uh-what do I call you, anyhow?”

“My name is Lasoporp Rof. My friends would call me Rof. You call me Lasoporp.”

So there, Kahn thought as they walked out of the building. The security guard gave Lasoporp Rof an odd look, but only a brief one. Clothes did not make the man, not in L.A.

The time traveler showed a small revival of interest in the parking lot. “This is your trusty Mongol steed, Temujin Genghis Kahn, able to travel long distances without tiring?”

“You can call me T.G.,” Kahn said, pleased to get a little of his own back. “And this is my trusty Japanese Toyota, Lasoporp, able to travel long distances without running out of gas.”

Lasoporp Rof grunted and got in.

“How far must we fare to your yurt?” he asked when the tech writer had joined him.

“My condo,” Kahn corrected absently. “How is it you know all this Mongol history without knowing anything else?”

“Some records of the Mongols survived the First Great Lacuna to be translated into Snoit.”

“That’s your language?”

“Gods and goddesses, no! But it was a liturgical language all through the First Intermediate and the Second Primitive, up to about nineteen thousand years before my time.”

“Oh.”

“How long will the journey to your yurt take, T.G.?” Lasoporp Rof asked as Kahn got on I-605 going north.

The tech writer ignored the slip; he was concentrating on his driving. “An hour if there were no traffic, an hour and a half on a regular sort of day, two hours if things jam up bad.” Close to a dozen different combinations of freeways would get him home. None was much faster than any of the others.

The first choke point was on the Santa Ana Freeway, where it narrowed from four lanes to three a little south of the junction with the Long Beach Freeway. Traffic crawled along, but by moving from lane to lane Kahn was able to stay right at sixty. He blinked; he couldn’t remember holes opening up so conveniently. He was not about to complain, though.

“We are passing cattle?” Lasoporp Rof asked.

“We’re passing trucks,” Kahn said. He glanced over at his passenger. “Don’t you know the difference between animals and machines?”

“What is a machine?”

Defeated, Kahn gave his attention back to the road. The Santa Monica and Hollywood freeways branched off the Santa Ana a little east of downtown. He took the Hollywood. That was the shortest route, even if it always did knot up just north of the civic center.

And it was knotted, except that, as before, spaces kept appearing like magic for Kahn. Other drivers looked at him with envious disbelief as he slid from one to the next. He had never seen anything like it. The second time he had that thought, his head snapped around toward Lasoporp Rof. He’d never ridden with a time traveler before, either.”Do you have anything to do with this?” he demanded.

“With what?” Lasoporp Rof asked. “Oh, do you mean am I helping us get through the herd? I find this nomadic excursion grows boring after a while, so I’m exerting a slight probability distortion to help us along. I can take it off if you like.”

“That’s all right,” Kahn said hastily. He did not even bother correcting Lasoporp Rof about the right name for the traffic jam; plenty of times he’d felt like one wandering sheep in a million. “I wish I could do it, that’s all.”

“Can’t you?” Lasoporp Rof said, surprised yet again. “Here, let me induce you. It will help pass the time.”

He put his hand on the back of Kahn’s head. As the tech writer drove, he began to have a feel for where a hole in traffic might be, could be, would be, was. Guiding the car into that hole was as easy as breathing. They were nearly at the junction of the Hollywood and Ventura freeways when Lasoporp Rof said, “Now you’re doing it all yourself.”

“Am I? By God, I am!” Maneuvering the Toyota as if it were a halfback dodging clumsy tacklers, Kahn felt grateful enough to do anything this side of human sacrifice for Lasoporp Rof. He even thought about putting the time traveler on a plane to North Carolina to meet his father. To him, though, anything to do with his dad was not this side of human sacrifice.

He had an idea. Instead of staying on the westbound Ventura, he went north on the San Diego Freeway several miles to Devonshire, got off, went up to Chatsworth Boulevard, then headed west. He was whistling when he pulled into the parking lot.

“This is your yurt? No, your condo, you called it?” Lasoporp Rof asked.

“No, this is a Mongolian barbecue place, a restaurant that serves Mongolian-style food,” Kahn said. When Lasoporp Rof looked blank, Kahn went on. “When you go back to whenever your own time is, won’t you want to be able to tell everyone about the authentic”-well, sort of authentic, he amended mentally-”Mongol feast you had back in the First Primitive? You wouldn’t even be lying.”

For the first time since Lasoporp Rof had discovered Kahn was not a world conqueror and mass murderer, the time traveler actually looked happy. “Thank you, T.G.; perhaps I may yet bring some valuable knowledge with me, after all. Yes, let us go in.”

A bored Oriental woman seated them and handed them menus. “She does not even recognize my costume,” Lasoporp Rof said plaintively. “How can she be a real Mongol?”

“She probably isn’t. Mongolia and the United States-this country-aren’t friendly with each other.”

“Ah, still you live in fear of the savage Mongol horsemen!”

“Not quite,” Kahn said, and was saved from disappointing Lasoporp Rof with further explanations when the waitress came back. He ordered tea for both of them and steamed rice, then pointed to the trays of meats and vegetables lined up in front of the barbecue, saying, “We’ll build our own.” That was what most people did; she nodded and left.

Kahn led Lasoporp Rof up to the food. After they had taken bowls, the tech writer said, “There’s lamb, beef, pork, and turkey. Help yourself.” He wielded the set of aluminum tongs in each tray.

Imitating him, Lasoporp Rof said, “These are sliced thin so as to cook quickly?”

“That’s right.” Kahn grinned; it was the first question the time traveler had asked that actually made sense. Kahn added sliced onions, bean sprouts, celery, and cilantro to his bowl, then splashed hot barbecue sauce and curry sauce over the contents. “Spicy,” he warned, but Lasoporp Rof again followed suit.

Then Kahn handed his full bowl to the cook behind the round barbecue griddle that was the most nearly genuine part of the whole operation. The cook grinned, displaying gold teeth. He upended the bowl. Meat and vegetables snarled as they hit the hot iron. The cook stirred them with a long-handled wooden spoon, chivvied them three-fourths of the way around the griddle, and deftly put them back in the bowl. Kahn returned to his seat while the cook barbecued Lasoporp Rof’s dinner. The time traveler watched, fascinated.

When he rejoined Kahn, the tech writer had to show him how to use a fork; he held it as if it were a dagger. His eyes watered at the first mouthful, but he bravely emptied his bowl, exclaiming, “I feel as if I’m tasting history!”

Having no atmosphere, the place was not expensive. Kahn peeled off a ten, a five, and a couple of singles and left them on the table as he and Lasoporp Rof walked out. The time traveler said, “Though you are enemies of the Mongols, I see your people has adopted their custom of paper money.”

“Uh, yes.”

Lasoporp Rof looked around as they were getting back into Kahn’s car. The landscape was typical Valley urban sprawl: a couple of gas stations, a 7-Eleven, a donut shop, streetlights, and cars, cars, cars. The time traveler sighed. “This is not the steppe, I suppose?”

“Does it look like the steppe?” Kahn asked. He had meant it as a rhetorical question, but realized it wasn’t: how would Lasoporp Rof know what the steppe looked like?

“I really wish I could see the steppe.” Lasoporp Rof sounded so sad that Kahn wished he had kept some of the books his father had pushed on him instead of unloading them because they reminded him of his godawful name. They would have given the time traveler some picture of Mongol life.

“Picture!” The force of his inspiration made Kahn want to hug himself with glee. He fired up the Toyota. “Come on, Lasoporp, I’ll show you the steppe, by God.”

“It is close by?” the time traveler asked eagerly.

Kahn drove through several lights that probably should have turned red but stayed green. (He was learning.) He pulled into a small shopping center. “Wait for me here. I won’t be long- amuse yourself quietly till I come back.” He hurried into the record store across the way.

When he got back with his package, he gasped and thanked his lucky stars he hadn’t parked by the big display window. “Close your coat!” he shouted.

“You told me to amuse myself.”

“I said ‘amuse,’ not ‘abuse.’ “ Sweating, Kahn shook his head in relief that no one had happened by. “Never mind; not your fault. It’s not our custom to do that kind of thing in public, that’s all.”

Lasoporp Rof let out an audible sniff.

The drive back to Kahn’s condominium went faster than it had any right to. Lasoporp Rof was sulkily silent until they were actually inside and Kahn flicked on a light. “That is not fire. I’ve seen fire. It flickers.”

“It’s done with electrically heated wire.” When Kahn saw that meant nothing to the time traveler, he asked, “Well, what do your people use for artificial light?”

“Sun pills, of course,” was what he heard through Lasoporp Rof’s pangloss. It made no more sense to him than his explanation had to Lasoporp Rof.

He gave up. Waving the time traveler to his couch, he said, “Sit down, make yourself at home. Can I get you a beer-a cold, mildly alcoholic drink?” Kahn laughed at himself. He was starting to give definitions without even thinking about it.

“Yes, thank you.”

When the tech writer came back with two cans of Coors, he found Lasoporp Rof examining the Israeli-made menorah that decorated his coffee table. “What a strange coincidence,” the time traveler said, picking it up. “If you had one of these in my own time, I would think you were Jewish.”

“Very strange,” Kahn mumbled. With some reluctance, he let it go at that: it was either let go or spend the next three weeks asking questions.

He tamed on the television. Lasoporp Rof watched curiously as the screen lit up in bright colors and music came out of the speaker. It was a denture-adhesive commercial. Feeling his cheeks grow hot, Kahn was glad to get rid of it and turn on his VCR. The warning about unauthorized duplication at the front of the tape meant nothing to Lasoporp Rof, and this time the tech writer did not bother to explain.

Then the movie came on: a 1964 epic starring James Mason, Omar Sharif, Robert Morley, and a Telly Savalas who still had hair. Kahn realized the time traveler could not read the credits rolling across the screen. “It’s called Genghis Khan,” he said helpfully.

Lasoporp Rof almost jumped out of his furs and leathers. “This is a real record of his life?”

“No, a drama based on it. How could it be a real record, Lasoporp? We can’t travel in time.”

“First Primitive,” Lasoporp Rof said, as if reminding himself. That did not keep him from being a spellbound audience for the Far Eastern horse opera. Kahn had only seen parts of it on late-night TV. The knowledge of Mongol history his father had crammed down his unwilling throat made him wince at the inaccuracies, but Lasoporp Rof was plainly eating it up, battles, overwritten love scenes, and all.

When it was done, the time traveler said, “Let me see it again, so I am sure I have the sense impressions fixed in my memory. Together with the meal, it should give me enough material to keep my professors happy.”

Kahn blanched. Watching this two-hour turkey once had been bad; going through it twice came too close to cruel and unusual punishment. As he watched, he felt a twinge of guilt at what he was doing to far future historiography. He stifled it, but it made him wonder how much of what his father called historical fact was based on similarly trashy sources. A good bit, probably. He smiled, liking the idea.

At last the ordeal was over. Lasoporp Rof leaned over and kissed Kahn on both cheeks, then square on the mouth. “Thank you, T.G., thank you, thank you,” he said, and then he was gone, vanishing suddenly and silently as a popped soap bubble.

Kahn blinked and shook himself like a man emerging from a dream. He wondered if the evening had been just that, or an out-and-out hallucination. But his living room still reeked of rancid butter, there were beer cans on both ends of the coffee table, and never in his wildest nightmares would he have rented Genghis Khan. Besides, tomorrow morning the janitor would be asking him where his office window had gone. And there was that probability distortion stunt-He looked at his watch and saw to his surprise that it was only a little past ten. Thanks to Lasoporp Rof’s trick, he really had made good time on the road. He got out his address book, picked up the phone, and punched buttons. “Hello?”

“Jennifer? Hi, this is T.G. Feel like dinner and a movie Saturday?” He held his breath with the effort of bending the odds, then let it out in a disappointed gust as she said she was going to a party that night. That made the third time she’d told him no.

“-but I’d love to, the weekend after,” she finished. Kahn made the arrangements and hung up, feeling a bit like a world conqueror, after all.