Testing Time

 Written for Globe Soup. Prompt: Location - tachinomiya

Testing Time

Teleportation is hard. It requires you to send your mind ahead, and then pull your body through along the thin connecting thread of your lingering consciousness. You need to plan your place of arrival (not inside something, or in front of a speeding train, for example) and you need to rely on your body’s desire to remain intact as a unit. It has to do with particle physics and the action of the fermions, ideally while you distract the Pauli exclusion principle with a foot massage and maybe a generous gin and tonic. 

Make it teleportation with time travel, and suddenly you have to bribe a whole other set of natural laws. Add in being drunk, and it’s getting into near impossible level. For one thing, your body’s cohesiveness is not a given. Jim Kunyato arrived at the tiki bar, which was only our second stop, missing the fingertips of his left hand and an exasperated Professor Glauto had to put him back together before sternly sending him home with a D. I don’t think Jim had ever had alcohol before tonight.

You might think a pub crawl is a pretty cool idea for a final exam. That is, you might think this if and only if you have never taken Advanced Teleportation with Professor Glauto. You only get an A+ if you make it to the final stop, which is an obscure underground club in Germany. In the 25 year history of the course, only two students have done it, and one is now the Dean.

Ten years ago, Glauto lost five students into a whirlpool in the Pacific because they overshot the fourth stop. Insurance agents appeared at the school and muttered darkly about risk rate increases. Since then, Glauto has allowed students to work in partners. 

We are at the B- level now, my partner Reika and I, still standing, carefully sipping our Guinness in the Dublin pub and planning our leap to the next stop, in Tokyo. If we manage it, we will be in an early 80s tachinomiya in Tokyo. 

“Bottoms up, everyone!” hollers Glautto, and then he blows the whistle. We are standing next to two unwary Trinity students who benefit from our inability to chug. We dump our drinks into theirs and then teleport within five minutes. I check Reika’s figures, for no good reason. She’s twice the math witch I am – literally, since her fox familiar is a computational whiz. 

We clasp hands and focus, build the spot to land in our consciousnesses, and then send our minds there. So far so good. We start pulling our bodies along. Reika mutters, as she realises that in the blink her consciousness has been gone, one of the students has planted his hand on her breast. Reika’s fox sinks her teeth into the frat boy’s ankle before she makes her way to us, following Reika’s trail. As our eyes snap open, the salarymen around us make space without really looking. 

Professor Glauto  thrusts drinks into our hands as soon as we are substantial. Two young businessmen move aside and gesture an invitation for us to join their table, their skinny ties askew and their eyebrows waggling. 

“Tetsuo Imazawa,” says the first one, pointing at himself. And then, “Hidehiro Fujiwara,” pointing at his companion. Between them is a paper bearing rough sketches. 

Reika introduces herself and says, “Gretchen,” pointing to me. I incline my head. Fujiwara-san asks where we are from. When Reika leans in and whispers “the FUTURE!”  I realise my partner is hammered. 

Imazawa-san apparently understands English because he stares at Reika, agape. Her blue fox has slunk up and around her neck and now looks like a scarf. They chat a few minutes in animated Japanese. I wish I had fared better in Modern Translation. At the next table I see a distracted suited man making notes in code, as in computer code. Assembly to be exact. At least that is a language I recognize. This tachinomiya must be near some video game offices. 

Suddenly, Imazawa starts scribbling wildly with the pencil, looking up at Reika as if for reference. I look across the table and recognize he is drawing her. He is chattering to Fujiwara much too quickly for me to pick up what he is saying but he keeps repeating what sounds like “he-CAN”. 

Reika giggles into her hand and tosses back her drink. The whistle blows and I scramble to get the coordinates established for the St. Petersburg vodka bar that is next. As we start to vanish, the fox mutters to Reika, “Time Gal? Really? You couldn’t resist?”

Reika shrugs. “I always wanted to be in a video game!”

Eurotrash disco decor greets us and we toast our minimum B+ grade.

Cultural Inappropriation

Written to the prompt "Scotch / Scottish / Scotland"

One thing about white privilege that no one talked about, thought Midge, was the way you felt rootless. What was her culture? Greek and Roman culture? Elementary school mythology, history full of galloping white saviours? More like mayonnaise, Sesame Street, boiled peas, Tommy Hunter.

Her parents had been children in the Great Depression and so she saved twist ties, elastics and pop tabs compulsively. But she herself was Gen X, apparently, a late surprise to her mother who had expected menopause. Was her culture set in time? Memories of disco, the Berlin Wall falling, Curt Cobain dying?

Or maybe her legacy was family lore: a baked bean recipe, a few funny catch phrases, an internal belief that her family were storytellers, despite none of them being writers except her one cousin that wrote romance novels. (Which hardly counts, Midge thought uncharitably as she filed another half-novel into the graveyard of writing in her Google Drive.)

None of this compared to the rich culture of her friend Darren, whose Mi’kmaq family had invited her to a Powwow. She had been enchanted with the jingle skirts, awed by the smudging, and irrationally jealous of the mantle of separateness, difference that they wore.

 
She knew that this was in spite of it all; that this culture had persisted like rhizomes, had grown like a callous in reaction to the horrible actions of white people who had come before her. Kidnapping children, ripping them from their homes and telling them they were subhuman; starlight tours, a ghastly tradition of dumping vulnerable men into a frozen landscape to die; thousands of women and children just gone. Murder, cruelty, genocide.

 
Was that the whole of her heritage? Terror, horror, blood, conquest? Better to be rootless.

 
Still, she was curious, so she spit into the vial, mailed it off, crossed her fingers that she wasn’t selling her genetic information to a Marvel supervillain.

Two months later, when she wasn’t expecting it, the results arrived. 53% Scotland/Ireland, she read with wonder. She’d always been told her last name was from French, so this was curious. 35% UK. 7% Finland. 5% southern Europe.

 
Mayonnaise indeed. It didn’t get whiter. Of course, her own fishbelly-pale arms told her this tale, but now it was backed by science. Still… Scotland/Ireland eh?

 
A month later the system was ‘refined’ according to the website. 52% Scottish. 22% Irish. 14% UK.
She impulsively logged onto Amazon and bought a plaid skirt.

 
The next day, she set out on a quest for haggis but even the European grocer told her to wait for Robbie Burns day. January 25 was a bit of a wait. A few days later Midge, enjoying the late autumn warmth in her new skirt, took a new tack. She headed to the liquor store.

SCOTCH! Of course. Scotch whisky?, the pert missus at the liquor store asked.

 
That’s right, lassie, muttered Midge. What kind though?

 
She was aghast at the prices. She’d thought the Scots were supposed to be frugal! Also, she was pretty sure she could not pronounce most of these… Laphroaig? Aberfeldy? Glenfiddich? Cutty Sark seemed easy enough, but would she look like a non-Scot chump buying the cheapest one? And wait, didn’t cutty sark mean lice shirt? (She was pretty sure this was a fact, having gleaned it from an L.M. Montgomery story. Montgomery, after all, was as Scottish a name as they came.)

She settled on Bowmore, which seemed pronounceable and still within a reasonable price (whatever reasonable was).

 
Arriving home, she pulled out what her research told her was the right sort of glass for enjoying one’s Scotch whisky.

She had asked someone on Twitter about mix, but was told curtly that one does not mix proper whisky, so there you go. She dumped in about an inch and then remembered a mystery novel mentioning “two fingers”...she stacked her fingers and eyeballed the glass, then added a bit more. She had no ice, but that was fine, from what she had read.

She picked up the glass and saluted herself, letting the light from her window filter through the amber liquid. “Here’s ta knowin’ yer people!” She didn’t quite feel up to attempting a Gaelic toast yet.

 
She tipped the glass back and swallowed a mouthful. In her mouth was a warm, grainy, cardboard taste and in her throat was a hot fire. She coughed for a minute, and managed to croak “smoooth” like a character in a 1980s sitcom.

 
Maybe it tasted better when you were an embittered cop. Or when you were eating haggis. 

Maybe a deep fried Mars bar would be better.

 
Sighing, eyeballing the full bottle, she sipped another bit out of her glass. It was an investment in her past. She’d learn to like it.

 
Her doorbell rang. Darren stood outside with a bag of Taco Bell.

 
“Hey!” she said. “I wasn’t expecting you!”

 
“I had a buy one get one burrito coupon,” he replied. “I thought I’d see if you want one.” He glanced at the whisky bottle.

 
“Drinking alone?” his eyebrows shot up.

 
“Turns out my people are Scottish,” Midge replied airily. “I’m having Scotch.”

“Well, there’s no oatmeal in this burrito,” Darren replied.

 
She pulled the bag over. “I love bean burritos so much. Why can’t I be Mexican? Hey, do you want a drink of this stuff? I don’t think I really like it.”

Darren looked at her soberly. “Are you offering me firewater?”

Her face blanched.

“Nah, I’m just shitting you. I bet the third glass will taste better than the first!” He topped up her glass and poured some in a juice glass he pulled from her cupboard. “Here’s to multiethnic meals!”
Midge clinked with him. “I’ll drink to that!”