Surreal-Absurd Sampler Hugh Behm-Steinberg

“I like surrealism/absurdism/fabulism/whatever you want to call it because it’s fun, because that mode still gives you so much room. It’s protective gear to wear when facing danger; it’s good for pain. And if you want to write funny, it’s the royal road. Sort of like a time machine, in every way.” - Hugh Behm-Steinberg

Squirrels

One of the things that most frustrated me about living in B_________ was its absence of mammals. Except for people, their cats and dogs, and the bats that flitted around at sunset, I never saw a single squirrel, mouse, or wolf, anywhere. So I ordered five pairs of red breeding squirrels on Amazon using my ex-boyfriend Dug’s credit card. When they arrived I hopped into my time machine to glorious 1975, and while no one was looking I set all five sets loose in the city park above the stadium where they used to keep the political prisoners. Sure, it voided the warranty, but if you want to live in a more interesting world, you can’t always leave your mattress tags where the manufacturer put them. That’s what Dug said, before trying to convince me I wasn’t the mattress in his analogy.

When I came back to the future, B_________ looked pretty much the same. I wondered if I was in a time travel story where no matter how hard the protagonist tries to change the past, the future stubbornly refuses to change, which is a metaphor I think for why therapy doesn’t work. The future has to want to change, and it never does.

But when I went to my favorite joint, all they had on the menu was estuirol and potates brove. “How’s the estuirol?” I asked in my crappy tourist argot, and the waiter smirked, “Even gamier than the place down the street, which is how everyone here likes it, and so shall you.”

I kept looking around to see if Dug would be there, because Dug always showed up when I most wanted to avoid him: that’s what ex’s do. I looped in my head about whether he’d be eating a squirrel with a girl who looked like me but who didn’t know better, or if he’d be dining alone, expecting me to join him because he thought we hadn’t really broken up, even after, even after, or all those betrayals just never happened in this timeline. I tried to remember if I had ever eaten squirrel. 

I knew that my double (the copy that gets made as a byproduct when one profoundly violates the warranty on their recreational time machine) must have acquired a taste for it, as would anyone living in B_________, that now fabled city of squirrel eaters that, like her, I had accidentally on purpose created. Was my double still walking around not knowing I existed yet, nursing bad feelings about Dug, or worse, still in love with him, her heart this big fat balloon she thinks will never pop? Would the two of them be hanging out in our favorite café? Would they give me the look when they saw me, then pretended I didn’t exist?

So many branching paths, too many unknowns. Solve for your heart. Just in case, I ordered a double serving and a vermouth, then grabbed a table outside.

The squirrel was gamey, the sauce brown and garlicky, and though one part of me thought it was disgusting, another part of me liked it, even craved it a little. When in B_________, don’t fight being in B_________.

I was just about to dig into the other bowl of squirrel when my double showed up. She took one look at me and said, “You violated the warranty, didn’t you?” She said it like this wasn’t the first time this had happened to her, because she knew you were supposed to say that whenever you meet your double. It’s part of the warranty, the only part people pay attention to. She pulled her portion of brown sauce squirrel over and dug in until all that was left were a pile of small fine bones.

“So,” she said. “What did you do this time?” She looked at my scars, and even from across the table, she could smell it. That sort of stink never goes away. If you could bottle it and send it out across the 8G, you’d be despised, but you’d be rich from all the people who would pay anything to make it go away.

I told her about how Dug kept going on about how cool it would be to really time travel, not like a recreational lookey-loo, but to go back into the past and actually interact with it, get dirty in it and eat extinct fish you can’t get anymore, maybe try to stop __________ while we’re at it. Dug and I, we’d have fun, fun, super dangerous, change the world in every way fun, the kind that bonds you to your lover forever, and when we were done with that we’d finally make sure Dug’s parents never divorce and my dad never dies. “All you have to do,” he said, “is roll under the exhaust system here, remove this cap there,” while he sat at the controls, jacked into the navigation system, doing “the hard parts.”

So, like all the girls who haven’t figured out yet that their boyfriends are sociopathic time criminals, I got under the time machine my mother gave me for my 25th birthday. I felt it press down as Dug hopped on, I heard the sound of clicking and dinky chime tones, and I broke the seal on the cap with a ballpeen hammer and a screwdriver, thinking only adventures and deepening love awaited us, and anticipated a new memory, one of my middle-aged dad getting drunk at my graduation party because I had convinced him to get that screening back in ___________.

Instead, the worst foulness poured over me. Imagine that seven-day outdoor music festival, the one they still talk about, where all the services broke down, where they were selling bottles of water for €50 before the rioting started. Now imagine what might be at the bottom of one of the only ten portajohns the organizers had rented for 100,000 concertgoers. That’s the stuff. 

Now you know: time machines are lubricated by despair.

The time machine shuddered, then it turned into a metallic cloud and just hung there above me with Dug in the center of its roaring. He waved down to me, making that half-assed shrug you get right before the it’s not you it’s just I need to see where this is going with that redheaded chick I met at that café we like to visit. My boyfriend disappeared, and as that time machine coalesced back into my time machine, I realized that Dug had just dumped me.

Yes yes! The present sucks; the future, no matter how bad it is, is always better, so don’t drag your present into the future. I asked my double, “How’s life in B_________ these days?”

“Half the city’s been lost to the squirrels, the parakeet population has crashed; it’s free to visit the unfinished cathedral, but no one goes there anymore, because there’s just too many fucking squirrels.” She gave me that look only your double can give you. “This is your fault. Everyone can feel the great wrongness, even if no one will admit it.”

“Ok, ok, I’ll fix it.”

I ordered a pack of wolves, this time from Nile, and with my double we all squeezed into the time machine. We went to 1976 this time so we could both let the wolves loose in B_________ (who would by then find more than enough squirrels to eat) and then go to New York and see the fireworks before everything cool began to die.

The wolves scampered away, the fireworks were awesome, we even hung out with Yoko, but you can’t live in the past because you keep leaking your present into it and start seeing your ex everywhere when he isn’t even there at all, and your dad will never listen to anything you have to tell him. Plus there’s the stupid time machine insistently beeping in our heads that it’s time to go all the goddamn time, like the time cops are on their way to send us all to time jail, it just ruins everything so back to our B_________ we went.

But of course it wasn’t our B_________; it belonged to our many, many, many doubles, and the wolves, surprise, surprise, surprise.

All the howling we heard was unnerving. “Get off the street!” our doubles all cried, as they pulled us into their building, past all the smoldering and abandoned time machines. The concierge lowered her automatic rifle. “Idiotes,” she muttered. “Fotuts viatgers del temps!”

“Viatge amb karma!” I cheerfully replied, hoping she didn’t think this was all my fault.

“Yeah, if you actually knew what that meant B_________ wouldn’t be a city ruled by packs of wolves now, would it?” one of the doubles said. “Wolves and tourists!” another one of my doubles corrected her.

“Rent and the price of squirrels!” spat another, and everyone nodded sarcastically like they all knew what that meant.

The foyer was now full of doubles. How many times had I travelled to the past, trying to fix things, making them worse, multiplying and multiplying? It was a wonder I hadn’t already turned into my mother and given birth to myself. All I wanted to do was put out a cigarette in Dug’s eye.

“Everyone here has so gotten over Dug. What kind of person is dumb enough to use a time machine to save their parents? And when are you going to call the Time Machine Company and ask them how to clean up this mess?” said the double who looked the most adult of us all.

“We still haven’t tried going back in time and convincing myself not to order the squirrels,” I said.

“Yes, we have!” said one of the doubles. “And we’ve also tried killing you and/or Dug on multiple occasions, but nothing’s worked!” another one cried. “Every time we tried more of us just kept showing up!”

“And before you tell us that we should be the ones who call the time travel company to fix this mess, remember what the fine print says.”

“In case of malfunctions only the original owner is allowed to contact the Time Machine Company,” I recited from memory, like any well-trained time traveler. “That is so stupid!”

“A grownup isn’t afraid to ask for help,” another double said. She grabbed me by my cheeks the way only a double who doesn’t have to do what you have to do can do. “Are you a grownup?”

“I am a terrible person,” I said.

“She won’t do it,” screamed the double with horrible bite scars all over her arms. “We should just brace ourselves for the next shitty thing to happen because she still thinks if she kept filling B_________ with mammals Dug will forget about his parents, come back and be her boyfriend again.”

“Yeah, because Dug just loves his mammals, doesn’t he?”

“Because his parents met in veterinary school.”

“Stupid parents!”

“Fucking mammals! It’s why I moved to B_________ in the first place!”

“But all of you all had to keep wrecking it! You’re worse than the tourists!”

Ever been in a room where several dozen versions of yourself all collectively decide to lose it? Let me tell you: being devoured by wolves, or never seeing the person you loved most in the world, or just dealing with your mistakes, after awhile any of that would seem preferable.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll call the Time Machine Company.”

“Someone is going to have to unlock the spatial anchor and drag the time machine inside before the wolves or tourists run off with it,” said the grownup version of me who was so fond of touching my face and acted like she knew everything. “And we’ll need the VIN number to get any help.”

“Not it!” cried all the other doubles. We each took turns staring at each other, waiting for one of us to snap. The howling outside kept getting louder. Who knew wolves were attracted to temporal disruptions?

“Fuck all of you and the time machines that made you,” said the double with the bite marks who at least smelled better than me. “I’ll do it.”

She turned and gave me the eye. “You better learn how to be fucking brave by the time I get back.”

It took thirty minutes, plus a lot of automatic rifle fire and some tear gas, to retrieve the original time machine plus one profusely bleeding double.

While some of my doubles were bandaging up the one of me who was going to have even more scars than before, I called the Time Machine Company; they put me on hold with an endless loop of Cyndi Lauper Muzak while I contemplated all the things I could have done with my life instead of playing around with time machines. I could have moved to D_____ or Sf_______; I could have gone to the beagle store and got myself a whole gang of beagles, training them to smell time travelers so I’d have a warning the next time I fell in love.

It was a long hold and I had a lot of time to think, enough to stop thinking about how I was going to fix the past and instead start worrying about what the future held for me. As in I wondered if violating the warranty would really put me in time jail. Given how badly I wrecked this part of the universe, I began to doubt the time cops would let me skate away with community service. Maybe when you’re serving your sentence, if you’re not that guilty, you don’t have to keep seeing your doubles all the time. The only person you’d ever get to see is yourself, the original, a whole bunch of French furniture, and, if you’ve been a very well-behaved prisoner, a giant black monolith that doesn’t reflect anything at all except your crimes.

“Time Machine Company, how can we help you?”

The phone person sounded so nice and sweet and understanding at that moment, just like the big sister I never had, the one I would have looked up to because she would have made dad go to the goddamned doctor, she would have always been there whenever I made it home with my tail between my legs from giving my heart to men like Dug. 

I told my story, I let all of it out, including Dug and all the safety modifications I let pour out of my time machine, and how I let myself do that, because I let him do that to our relationship, and I didn’t understand why I kept letting him do that to me. She asked me, very gently, about the warranty, and I just started sobbing. “I don’t want to go to time jail! I just thought B_________ could use some squirrels! And then I wouldn’t have to think about Dug all the goddamn time! I’m so sorry!”

“Ok, please hold.”

I held. I really tried.

The phone made clicking/whirring transfer sounds. “Lana, is it true that you broke the warranty on your time machine by setting loose squirrels in B_________?”

I clutched the phone to my chest. “It’s Mom,” I said to all the doubles.

“We’re not here!” they all said, and they scattered just like that.

I had never felt so embarrassed. I should have known that if you broke the warranty, one of the penalties would be that they would tell your mother, especially when your mother is the CEO of the Time Machine Company. It was all I could do to not hang up the phone and run off to be devoured. That would have been so MUCH easier. 

But I’m a grownup, and I love my mom, so I steadied myself and whispered, “Yes. I’m so so so so so so so sorry, mom.”

“You know what you have to do,” she said, more gently than I possibly deserved. 

So yes, yes, yes, I entered the factory settings, one after the other, and then I typed in all the correct codings so that the safeties self-repaired like the opposite of cancer. Then I went, not to time prison, but back to the present, to B_________, to that moment lying there with stink all over me, right after Dug. It hurt, it really, really hurt, but that’s where I stayed, I made myself stay in the present. The time machine recalled itself back to its factory (time criminals like me don’t get to keep their time machines). I got up, feeling what I had been trying so hard not to feel. 

A few days later, after fifteen or twenty showers and several tomato juice baths just to get the stink off me, I set out to visit the café of Dug’s countless ex-girlfriends. On my way there I caught myself looping, and decided no, I don’t have to frame it that way: it’s just a café, MY café, with ok food and people who knew me. Dug, or whichever variation of Dug, could enjoy their bowl of nuts. I’ll just drink. Or maybe I won’t. But I will feel better, eventually.

I was sitting alone outside beneath a holm oak tree, ruminating with my coffee, contemplating the possibilities of free will, when a red squirrel finally, casually climbed down from one of the branches to sit hunched up on my table. 

“Visca C_________,” I said, and tossed her an almond. Her beady eyes gleamed like two chips of monolith.

The squirrel nibbled away on it, then helped herself to three more. “I hear you’ve been having issues with Dug,” the squirrel chirped, as two more squirrels joined her, helping themselves to my bowl. 

“Want to do something about it?” they said. “We have a time machine.”

Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s prose can be found in X-Ray, Grimoire, Joyland, Jellyfish Review, Atticus Review and Pank. His short story "Taylor Swift" won the 2015 Barthelme Prize from Gulf Coast, and his story "Goodwill" was picked as one of the Wigleaf Top Fifty Very Short Fictions of 2018. A collection of prose poems and microfiction, Animal Children, was published by Nomadic Press in January, 2020. He teaches writing and literature at California College of the Arts.