Tanya opened her eyes in the town of her youth, in the parking lot behind the FoodMaster. She was seated on the still-warm hood of a green Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme. The first thing she did was poke her tongue over to one side of her mouth, then to the other. No teeth missing. Not even a filling. She pulled her tee shirt up to find her stomach flat and free of scars; the pain gone from her shoulder and knee as if lifted with a pair of celestial tongs. When she pinched the skin on the back of her hand it snapped right into place. Her fingernails were painted a lurid purple. She threw her head back and laughed up at the wet black sky.
An elderly man approached the car, buttoned to the chin in his raincoat, pushing a loaded grocery cart. The cart had a bad wheel, and wobbled. "That's my car," he barked.
Tanya slid to her feet. "Do you know what time it is?" she asked.
The old man did not look at his watch. "It's late, that's what time it is," he said.
"Thanks." Tanya began to walk away. Then she spun around and added, "by the way, do you know what year it is? I do! It's 1987, and I know now what I didn't know then!"
The man put his grocery bags into his trunk and slammed the lid, keeping his back to Tanya. She turned and ran out of the parking lot into Jefferson Avenue, then took a left on Decatur, joy flooding her limbs like sweet coffee. A fine, cold mist was falling. The pedestrian walkway on the Grand Street Bridge was slick with it. The trucks rumbling from one end of town to the other were almost close enough to touch.
First Tanya caught the scent of strong tobacco, then she felt a buzzing blue energy all along her right side. That was when Joe materialized and fell into step beside her."I wish you wouldn’t keep doing that," she muttered. "It freaks me out."
Joe didn't answer. He blew a smoke ring. As Tanya watched, it grew a tiny pair of wings and flew off over the Passaic. "What are you doing here, anyway?" she asked.
"Just thought I'd remind you why I granted your wish in the first place." Joe tossed his cigarette in the gutter, where it sprouted into a clump of daisies. "Just making sure you don't get distracted by matters of a personal nature."
Tanya turned to look at him, but his eyes were hidden as always by black plastic sunglasses and his long pale face was impossible to read.
"I thought," she began, "that I might be able to do this one tiny thing for myself before I go off to save the world."
"And you can," Joe laughed. "But I'm going to be your nanny."
Spratt's band was already on stage. They were called Juliet and the Spirits, and Tanya smiled at the memory of explaining to her mother that not only were there no girls in the band, but that none of the boys were gay. And there he was — Spratt. He played lead and sometimes sang, but he wasn't singing now. He was as thin as a greyhound and his hair was laquered into bright purple knitting needles. He played his black Telecaster with great urgency, like an overwound toy robot. The veins stood out in his arms and neck.
Joe leaned close to Tanya. "Might have got somewhere without that git of a singer," he shouted. But then he seemed to see something in Tanya's face — something that made him push his sunglasses up onto his forehead. His eyes were quite fierce, and Tanya tried very hard to determine what color they were but couldn't, and she realized then that Joe never seemed to have much color about him at all, but existed in black-and-white like an old photograph, and all at once she was terribly afraid. At the snap of his fingers they were out on the sidewalk in front of the club. Tanya's ears rang in the sudden silence. She clapped her hands over them.
"Your wish," said Joe, lifting her chin gently with one finger, "was to come back to this particular year so that you could see your mother again, and then to fix up all of this, remember?" And he pulled a crumpled postcard of the New York skyline out of the very air, and held it in front of Tanya's eyes.
"I know. But it's Spratt. I have to save him, too." Tanya didn't know what else to say; she just looked up into Joe's black-and-white face. He was a little bit like her big brother Sal, a little bit like Humphrey Bogart. Joe knew all about rock'n'roll and youth and passion, surely he would understand.
"May I point out that even in your own time this lad Jimmy is still alive and well?" he asked.
"If you call that living. With that simpery poetess and her goats on the cheese farm."
Joe laughed. He produced a cigarette from his shirt pocket. It lit itself with a tiny blue flame and he tucked it into the corner of his mouth. He looked at Tanya and waited.
She kicked at the pavement with the toe of her boot. "I wouldn't have made the wish at all if I thought you'd really stick to the restrictions," she said. "Anyway, how do you know that by changing Spratt’s life — okay, and mine — I won't still somehow do that other thing? Isn't the personal political, after all?"
Joe frowned, then reached out a white hand to tousle Tanya's hair. "Some restrictions may apply," he said, "and the future is unwritten."
