Work Text:
Most singles bars came in one of two types. There were the dim ones, with lights low enough that beer goggles could set in early in the evening, and those were for people looking for a quick hookup, a one-night stand, or at most Mr. Right Now. They were almost always seedy, and the alcohol was cheap, and candles guttered on the tables, and local cover bands played on Saturdays and sometimes people got up and danced and went home together. Then there were the brightly-lit ones, with lamps on the table and lots of track lighting, and mirrors on every wall, and those were the ones for people who were serious, because if you were serious you wanted to read the other person’s Words, and think to yourself: am I the sort of person who would say that to my soulmate? Could those be my parting words to someone it could be forever with?
Not that anyone really knew until the Words had been said, of course. Half the time, you didn’t realize it until it was too late, especially when someone’s Words were everyday, innocuous ones - “Good morning,” or “Don’t forget to pick up milk on the way home.” But for some people, you could guess. You knew whether you were the type of person to say “Burn in Hell, motherfucker,” to someone you loved in a fit of anger, or not. And if those were their Words, then this probably wasn’t going to work out anyway.
Of course, not everyone wore their Words where you could see them. Usually they appeared on your arms or legs, like a regular tattoo (if kids just learning to read ever got tattoos), but not always. Some people’s you couldn’t see even if they were wearing a bikini.
Then there were Harvey’s clientele.
The ground floor was the main bar, and the neon sign over the front door said Blank Parchment. Calling it a singles bar sort of missed the point, but on the other hand, it was also sort of an understatement. This was the only place in town where you could come if you were looking for something longer than a weekend and less than a lifetime, and you only came here if you knew a lifetime wasn’t something you were likely to get. Not all the arms in Blank Parchment were bare; full-sleeve tattoos weren’t that uncommon. Some of them had words, things they’d chosen for themselves to write on their skin, either to blend in or to defy fate. But none of them had Words.
No one really knew why some people never developed Words, whether it meant your soulmate had died before you were born, or just that you were destined not to have one, or if it was something even more complicated and incomprehensible. (For a few people, of course, it just meant they never learned to read. You always got to read your Words before anyone else did.) Whatever the reasons, it was rare, but not so rare that in a metro area the size of the Twin Cities there weren’t enough Blanks to support a place to meet, to dance, to sing a little karaoke, to just mingle without the pressure of someone reading your skin and rolling your Words in their mouth to see if they might belong to them, or gaping at you in horror and pity when they realized you didn’t have Words to read. Blank Parchment was usually packed on the weekends, and did a brisk business with regulars most weekdays.
Sometimes someone would walk in with their Words showing, and the core regulars kept an eye out for them, would chat them up before they got to the bar, to make sure they were in the right place. Sometimes they weren’t, and they were gently escorted to the door. Sometimes they were tired of looking, of reading other people’s skin so closely, and wanted to unwind somewhere they wouldn’t be scrutinized; they joined the throng at the main bar, or took a turn on the dance floor. And sometimes, they’d been found, and been lost again, and those the regulars directed to the stairway to the lower floor, where the light was dimmer and the drinks stronger.
That stairway led to Palimpsest.
Harvey enjoyed running Blank Parchment, and he took Mondays and every other Tuesday off altogether, but on half his weeknights and almost every weekend, he stood behind the downstairs bar as his other clientele came in, bearing (and often baring) marks that didn’t mean anything anymore. Or that meant the world, even now, but that belonged to a closed chapter in their lives.
Upstairs, Harvey wore a full suit, even under the stage lights when he queued up some Sinatra on the karaoke stage and showed the kids how it’s done. Downstairs, he took off the jacket and rolled the sleeves up to mid-bicep, to let the last couple of words of his Words show.
They still rang in his ears on the nights when the bar crowd was thin and sullen. I love you, but I can’t watch you do this to yourself. She’d said it on the steps of the courthouse, red-faced and red-eyed, before climbing into a cab and out of his life. He’d laid eyes on her once since, at a mutual friend’s violin recital. She’d waved across the room, and then left, alone.
He was in the minority in Palimpsest. Most people who found their way here were widowed, or as good as widowed. Their Words had been last words in every sense. The most common one was “Drive safely!” or a variation. Sometimes they hadn’t. Sometimes someone else hadn’t. Most of the bereaved would eventually find their way back upstairs, would put on long sleeves or dark trousers or a few dabs of concealer and join the others, erased skins among the Blanks, in ones or in twos.
The long-timers, the ones like him, though - they stayed down here, with each other for company. When a hole’s been torn in your soul, and there’s no patching it, it’s at least some comfort to share a good stiff drink with other people who know the feeling as intimately as you do. The pain doesn’t go away, but there’s some solace in company when it fades to a dull ache.
Harvey was swiping the remnants of a spilled lager from the bartop when he saw them come in together. Just one look told him they were going to be trouble.
One of them was a regular, a peculiar fellow named Oscar Schlumper who wore mirrored Lennon-style sunglasses indoors in the dark and claimed to have grown up in a different timeline than the one he currently found himself in. He was clearly off his rocker, but he was harmless; he’d gotten hired to teach physics and chemistry at the high school, and by all reports was a pretty good teacher who ran some spectacular labs. On the weekends he would come in, drink too many rum and colas, and mumble in the corner about books never published and songs never recorded. He’d found his way to Palimpsest more or less by accident, as far as Harvey could tell, but he tipped well and was polite to the waitresses.
His companion was clinging to his arm, and at first Harvey had assumed Dr. Schlumper had brought a date. On second glance, Harvey wondered darkly if Oscar was dating one of his students - that was a kid on his arm, couldn’t be out of college yet and probably not even out of high school. He was also wearing shades inside in the dark, although at least his weren’t mirrored. His shorts technically didn’t meed Palimpsest’s dress code, although they were just barely okay for Blank Parchment. An orange ball cap, worn backwards, was pulled down low on the kid’s brow.
Oscar all but dragged the kid up to the bar. “Harvey,” he began, “something dreadfully peculiar has happened, and everything I know about science is powerless to explain it. You’ve seen - well, just about everything. Maybe you can point us in the right direction.”
“The right direction is not diddling an underaged kid,” Harvey replied gruffly. “Or hauling him into my bar.”
“Dude, I’m not technically underage,” the kid protested. He fished a thick wallet out of his pocket and handed Harvey a student ID from the local community college and a long-expired out-of-state learner’s permit. Both listed a birth date of April 21, 1986, which would make the kid 24 going on 25. “He’s not banging me, either,” he added as an afterthought.
Harvey looked the kid over from head to toe. That date was clearly not right. He didn’t look a day over sixteen.
Glancing back at the ID, Harvey scowled. “Evelyn?” he said, cautiously.
“Yeah,” the kid grunted back. “Evelyn Neunzig. Didn’t pick either one.”
“Neither of these is a valid state ID,” Harvey complained.
“He’s not here to buy alcohol,” Oscar interrupted. “Ev, tell him what you told me this morning.”
Evelyn swallowed. “Like, so, I don’t really drink anyway, but I’ve come here before,” he started. “Upstairs, I mean, not down here. My Words never came in - not when I learned to read, not even at puberty. I just figured I was a Blank, and like, doomed to be forever single, y’know?”
“Doesn’t necessarily mean that,” Harvey pointed out. “I wouldn’t run the place upstairs if it did.”
“No, I know,” Evelyn rushed to reassure him. “But then - a couple of months ago, I got a really ugly rash, with blisters and oozing and everything.” He pointed to his right sleeve. “Right here on my arm. It was gnarly. And then, when it started clearing up -” he paused to swallow. “Can - can your Words show up this late?”
“Never seen it happen before,” Harvey admitted. “That don’t mean it can’t, ever, but I’ve been talking to Blanks for twenty years and I ain’t never seen it. Latest I’ve ever seen was age 9, and that was a dyslexic kid.”
“And what - what if there’s something wrong with them?” Evelyn said, in a voice barely audible over the classic jazz that played over the loudspeakers.
“Wrong?” said a sharp voice from behind Oscar. “What do you mean, wrong?”
“Mind your own business,” Oscar snapped, but as he turned around, he froze.
Harvey chuckled. “Have you two met?” he asked. They probably hadn’t; Oscar was usually a weekend patron, and these two almost always came in during the week. “Dr. Schlumper, this is Linkara and Spoony; guys, this is Dr. Schlumper from Douglas High.”
“Pleased to meet you,” Oscar said, cautiously extending a hand to Linkara, who might well have been his younger brother. Same bone structure, same height if you allowed for Oscar’s stoop, same hair color.
“Charmed,” Linkara said. If meeting his doppelganger shook him at all, he didn’t show it.
“Same,” Spoony broke in, clasping Oscar’s hand. Oscar took a step back, involuntarily it looked like, before returning the handshake. Harvey wondered what that was about.
Spoony settled back onto his barstool. “Now,” he continued, “what do you mean, wrong?”
“It - it hurts,” Evelyn said, cradling the forearm he’d pointed at in the crook of the other arm. “Not all the time, but at night especially. And - it’s not always done?”
Linkara looked at Harvey. “Don’t they just appear all at once?” he asked. “I mean, I was a little kid, but I went to sleep one night and they were just there the next morning.” He rubbed at his wrist nervously.
“That’s how it usually happens,” Harvey agreed.
“I can’t even begin to tell you how startled I was,” Oscar grumbled. “The first time I took off my socks after I came here, there it was. I was racking my brains trying to figure out when I’d been drunk enough to get a tattoo and forget about it before I found out that’s normal here.”
“Came here from where?” Spoony asked incredulously. “Were you born somewhere that didn’t have a written language yet?”
“No, I was born on a parallel Earth where people (a) don’t develop mysterious writing on their skin that demonstrates testable precognitive ability and (b) don’t by default believe in soulmates,” Oscar explained patiently.
Linkara’s eyes widened. “Run through that again?” he asked.
“It’s not important right now,” Oscar said, waving his hands. He perched one foot on a barstool, rolling his pants leg up and his socks down. “My point is, this only appeared when I landed here, six years ago.”
Out of curiosity, Harvey leaned halfway over the bar. Oscar’s Words were in a clean, sans-serif font, and they read, “You’ve got to stop following me!”
“And you’d heard them already,” Harvey said, not quite asking.
“My girl-next-door crush,” Oscar agreed. “The last thing she said to me before she left for college. Her parents sold the house and moved to a smaller one out in the suburbs, and I never saw her again.” He sighed. “It’s actually not quite as harsh as it sounds. She was telling me I should apply to the same college my brother went to, instead of settling for State to be near her. She was right, or at least I thought she was at the time.” He glanced up, then back at his ankle. “If we really were soulmates, now I’m not so sure. Then again, half a decade later, it wouldn’t have mattered anymore.” He shuddered.
Harvey tried to imagine living in a world where you didn’t know whether or not you had a soulmate. Where either you didn’t have a reminder that the best thing in your life would eventually end literally written on your own skin, or its absence was a reminder that no matter how much you loved someone, they’d never quite be your other half.
Where every bar was Blank Parchment.
He couldn’t do it.
He turned back to Evelyn. “You don’t have to if you don’t wanna,” he said as gently as he could muster, “but if you let us see what’s going on, we might be able to be more help.”
Evelyn let out a shuddering sigh. “I don’t really want to look at it,” he admitted. “Dr. Schlumper’s best guess is that another dimensional slider arrived and that they’re my soulmate, so the Words appeared when they got here. Which would be excellent, but it doesn’t explain why it hurts so much, or why it’s not always all there.”
“Maybe they’re not all the way here,” Linkara suggested. “Maybe they’re caught between this dimension and another one, and the Words won’t manifest correctly until they fully arrive here?”
Spoony scowled. “But our crazy doctor here says the Words appeared on him as soon as he got here,” he pointed out, “without his soulmate having to be in the same dimension. If you believe any of his bullshit schpiel. Which, let me point out, I don’t.”
“It’s entirely possible she’s not even alive at this point,” Oscar mumbled as he rolled his trouser leg back down.
“We want to help you,” Linkara told Evelyn gently. “Which, I realize, is probably a little hard to believe coming from a complete stranger.”
“Weirder things have happened,” Evelyn replied. He nodded and began rolling up the sleeve of his unkempt green plaid flannel. Underneath was a gauze pad taped to the length of his forearm.
“It might still be a little gross,” Evelyn apologized.
“‘S’okay, kid,” Harvey reassured him. “I’ve seen worse, I can almost guarantee.”
Evelyn took a deep breath and peeled back the gauze.
At first, Harvey wasn’t sure what he was seeing. The inside of the kid’s arm looked like it had been peppered, or possibly sprinkled with ashes. Tiny specks of black and white ran in an almost random pattern from his wrist to his elbow.
Almost random. They were loosely arranged in lines.
“That looks like what happens when an e-ink tablet glitches out,” Spoony said.
The speckles were changing as they watched. Some faded out, new ones faded in, still more or less in lines.
“Or like a TV tuned to a dead station in slow motion,” Harvey muttered.
The motes of ink continued to blink. Slowly, some parts darkened and stayed that way; others flickered back to white and on to grey and black again.
“It’s like it knows we’re looking at it,” Linkara realized aloud.
“Maybe,” Oscar conceded. “It did this when I inspected it before, but I never got it to coalesce into a whole word.”
“Could be that having more eyes on it helps,” Harvey said.
Oscar raised an eyebrow. “Multiple observers?” he mumbled to himself. “What kind of quantum phenomenon -”
Looking up at Evelyn’s face, Linkara asked, “Is it hurting?”
“Not exactly,” Evelyn said in a small voice, “but it - right now it feels like I have the most bogus case of pins and needles in the history of the world.”
“Did it get worse when we uncovered it?” Oscar asked.
“Yeah,” Evelyn agreed. “It’s sort of been ramping up since I took the bandage off.”
Spoony sucked in his breath. Everyone else looked at him, then followed his gaze back to Evelyn’s arm.
The pixels had formed a Word, in the way that one might scratch a word into a hard surface with a sharp piece of scrap metal. The letters were more like sticks of random lengths that had been arranged to make letterlike shapes. They weren’t the same size, or the same shape, or in any way consistent. If someone did a jailyard tattoo with a nail and a knife, and then scanned it using a cheap flatbed scanner, it might look something like that.
The Word was “HUMAN”.
“What the fuck,” Spoony whispered.
Harvey shot the kid a sympathetic glance, then froze Oscar in place with a stare. “I haven’t ever seen anything like it before,” he stated. “And I don’t want to see it on anyone else.”
Linkara nodded. “If you really have broken through from another dimension,” he said, “is there any way we can tell if someone else comes through, too?”
“Or followed you?” Spoony added.
Oscar stood very still for a moment. “Yes,” he finally said, “but not with the equipment I currently have. We’d need access to a full science lab.”
Linkara and Spoony shared a long look. For not being a soulmate couple, they could still do the talking-without-speaking thing pretty well. It was Spoony who finally broke the silence: “The house I’m renting out back in Illinois has a pretty well-equipped lab in the basement that nobody’s using.”
The word “why” formed on Oscar’s lips, but died before it gained voice. Instead, he shrugged. “I can’t afford to miss work,” he said, “but perhaps over the weekend we could see if it’s adequate for what I’d need.”
Harvey turned back to Evelyn. “Where do you live, kid?” he asked. “With your folks, or somewhere else?”
“No, they - I don’t hear from them much,” Evelyn answered vaguely. “I’m working part-time at the skate shop, and one of the other guys there is letting me crash on the couch at his place for, like, $150 a month in rent.”
Harvey looked Evelyn up and down slowly. “Do you feel safe there?” he asked.
Suddenly Evelyn looked very young indeed, almost like a little kid. “I sort of did, until this happened,” he whimpered. “Now, not really.”
“There’s a spare bed at our place you can crash on,” Linkara offered. “We have very good security.” Spoony chuckled at that, as if it were some private joke.
Harvey wasn’t sure what was funny about that. He knew Linkara packed heat; he’d seen him use it, once. He was one of the very few patrons Harvey didn’t kick out for bringing a gun on the premises.
“Actually, yeah,” Evelyn said, and he looked like he might be about to cry. “I’d like that, dude.”
“Let’s get this covered back up before you go,” Oscar suggested. The doc looked relieved, like a weight had been lifted off his shoulders.
As the kid rolled his sleeve back down, Harvey sighed. He tried not to get involved with his patrons’ troubles, he really did, but sometimes it was just too hard. “Oscar,” he said, “keep me informed on what you find out. Linkara, it might be a good idea if someone can keep an eye on Ev here - why don’t you drop him off with me here when youse guys head down to Spoony’s place?”
“Sure thing,” Linkara said, and he sounded relieved, too.
Harvey gave Evelyn a grin. “We’re gonna take care of you, kid,” he said firmly.
“I hope you can,” Evelyn said, cradling his arm again.
“We will,” Linkara said. “I swear.”
As they left, Harvey felt something on his upper arm itch. He brushed at it, then glanced over and down.
Were his Words a little fainter than they’d been before?
Nah, it must be the light. People didn’t lose their Words, even once they’d been said. That would mean something was changing your entire destiny, the course of your soul.
And that couldn’t happen, right?