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Laura skulked over to the sofa and puddled into one corner of it. “Igom repca,” she mumbled.
“I beg your pardon?” Logan said, which was something he thought his mother might have said, exasperated, that he wouldn’t have ever imagined himself saying.
“Fuck off,” she said. “I got my report card. Can I have a beer?”
He poured out a third of his shitty lager into a glass and topped it up with lemonade, depositing it on the coffee table. Sipped the lager, contemplated the degrees and depths of its shittiness, and topped his own up too. Laura laughed at him, but she drank the shandy instead of breaking into the Tamnavulin Speyside again, so he was happy with the solution. “Can I see it?”
“See what?”
“The report card, kiddo.”
“Oh,” she said. “No.”
She said it very firmly, although he suspected she’d made up her mind only when he’d asked the question and implied there was an option. There would be a fight if he pushed—he’d learned to intuit that one, and, slower, had learned that that didn’t mean he had to have the fight. He’d thought it was important to have the fights—that it was like some kind of bushfire or something, got all the shit out of the way and cleared the air. And it was, occasionally, but most of the time it was better if he just said, “Okay.”
He bullied some pasta into her—it always took a little bit of work to get her to sit down and eat, but as soon as she’d started she stuck right in. It wasn’t enough for him, of course; he suspected he’d always worry about whether she was eating enough, just as a fact of life. He ate his out of the pan, which was how he liked it. Stayed hotter that way, and there was less washing up.
Laura said, “They want me to stop taking Spanish.”
“What? But you’re great at Spanish.”
“Yeah, obviously,” she said, “I’m fluent. That’s why they want me to stop. They want me to do extra English.”
“But you get on great with Mr. Berks,” he said, pointlessly. “And it’s only really spelling that’s the issue with English, and that’s ‘cause English spelling doesn’t make any goddamn sense.”
She gestured with her fork to indicate that these things were all self-evident, and of no concern to school administration. It was an eloquent gesture.
What she wasn’t saying was that Spanish was the only thing she was getting decent grades in, and that without it the whole thing—‘the whole thing’ being school—would look as doomed an endeavour as she’d originally told him it was.
“Let me talk to ‘em,” he said. She smiled at him, and he packed it up tight in his heart to keep.
After dinner usually he took Mary Puppins for her constitutional and had his cigar. He’d be fine, Wade would be fine, Laura would be fine, but Althea had asthma and even if that hadn’t been a concern he was, in fact, worried about their security deposit on the new place, so he went down to the park and read his book and smoked his smoke under a street light most evenings.
Tonight he had a battered sword-and-sorcery paperback in his back pocket that promised a sexy warrior queen slaying eldritch monsters. He’d been looking forward to it his whole shift.
There was a guy under the awning of the store on the corner. Unassuming business casual, unremarkable, but he smelled like a lit match and when he saw Logan coming out onto the street he startled and looked at Logan like—like he was having what Wade would call a Big Feeling.
Kurt, he thought. “Wagner,” he said.
The holographic face he’d picked looked a bit like Charles, mostly like nobody at all. “Hello,” Kurt said, after a moment. “You’re—ah.”
“Yeah,” Logan agreed. “I’m.”
Mary Puppins registered her irritation at the lack of walkies by falling sideways onto Logan’s shoe. Kurt ducked out from between the crates of aging produce and said, “We thought you might be, you know, another clone.”
Another clone. They got that bullshit in every universe, he supposed. A clone wouldn’t have recognised him, unless they were cleverer and better informed than the original model. “Not a clone. But close, I guess.” He locked the door behind him and started down the street, and Kurt followed, hesitantly, with a surprised little hop that gave away the fact that underneath the hologram he had more complicated leg joints than most people. Logan briefly went to war with himself, and then made space on the sidewalk for him.
“It’s dimensions,” he said, once they were out of the crush of the main street. “I’m not the same guy you knew. I’m from somewhere else.”
Kurt received this in thoughtful, rare silence. The street lights were orange and thick on the edges of the leaves, and the park lawns were getting crunchy and dead. Logan held the gate open behind him for Kurt.
“You saw me on the news, I guess,” Logan said. When he said you, he meant the vague institution of the X-Men, in whatever form that took here—he’d tried to avoid looking them up, cataloguing his mistakes.
He guessed they wanted to retrieve their Logan. Figure out why or how he was alive and kicking, bring him back into the fold. Maybe that guy hadn’t done so many runners they’d given up.
“Yeah, ja,” Kurt said, in the accent that merged the two together. “We just wanted to—get in touch.”
“Sorry to let you down there, bub.”
“No, no, not at all. There were copy-cats. There was this one fellow who just had a yellow hoodie and some knives and some springs, and Scott had to go and give him a talking-to.”
“So, you’re saying that I’m at least better than hoodie guy.”
“Much better.”
Logan would take that, he thought.
Mary Puppins only had little legs, so by the time they got to the park she was usually tuckered out and ready for the sniffing-things portion of the evening; Logan found them a bench and gave her some lead.
Kurt stuffed his hands in his pockets. “You’re from somewhere else,” he said, “But you know me?” It turned into a question at the end, flicking up.
“I knew a Nightcrawler.”
“I… see.” He looked like he might. That was Kurt; he figured things through. He couldn’t read minds, but he was very good at seeing through other people’s eyes. “That doesn’t sound like a particularly nice memory, my friend.”
He was a good person to send. God, if they’d sent Jean…
“The problem is, I’m not actually your friend,” Logan said, chest full of lead. “You knew someone who was a lot like me. I knew someone who was a lot like you. But we—you and I—we met for the first time five minutes ago. I’m not—your friend hasn’t come back.”
“Ah.” Kurt watched Dogpool snuffle in a circle through leaf litter, getting herself tangled up in cord. Then, in a burst of movement, he seized Logan’s free hand in both of his. “Hallo—“ he shook vigorously in a manoeuvre that nearly lost him some fingers— “My name is Kurt! I teach comparative religion and philosophy, and I like fencing and martial arts movies. It’s very nice to meet you. Once you know me you will know that I address everybody as ‘my friend.’ The bus driver. Gentlemen who try to convince me to purchase magazines on the doorstep.”
His hands were his hands, underneath the hologram. That was what had stopped Logan from reflexively slicing through him when he was startled; he knew what Kurt’s hands felt like, the odd wall-clinger texture of his exposed palms, the layout of his fingers. Logan laughed. He laughed for a long time. Kurt held on.
“Hey,” he said, eventually. “You can call me Logan. I work as a mechanic down the street and I pick up shifts at the whiskey joint a few blocks over. I know a little fencing, but mostly I know kendo.”
It felt like a bad support group.
“There we go. Now we’re introduced,” Kurt chirped. “Now you can duzen me, and all is right and proper.”
“Oh, very forward of you,” Logan said. A woman walking her obviously inferior dog gave them an odd look.
“If it is unpleasant to you, then of course, do as you please,” Kurt said, carefully. “But—there were elements of your counterpart that made me disposed to like him, and that I believe you probably share. Perhaps I’m wrong. I don’t know how different you are. But I would like to see if you and I could be friends, as ourselves, if not as other-you and other-I were.” He paused, and said, “Do you see?”
“Yeah, I got the idea already, thanks, pal.” He’d been practically holding hands with Kurt for too long, now, and it was starting to send prickles up the back of his neck, the not in public kind, a vague feeling of weirdness. He reflexively went to cuff Kurt on the shoulder, a classic bro move, but his hand was occupied, and the residual energy from the movement went into just awkwardly compressing Kurt’s hand under his fingers.
Generally, if you make a weird face after you’ve done something weird, to indicate that you understand it was weird and regret it, people will forgive and forget more readily. Kurt, who was, as always, more socially graceful than Logan, smiled like he hadn’t noticed and extricated himself smoothly.
Kurt made a dive for another topic, and picked the worst one possible. “If I may ask—if you know—my other friend Logan—“
“Definitely still dead.” Logan really wanted that smoke. “He, uh. We asked. Can’t be done.”
“Ah.” Kurt pressed his lips together. “Do you know—do you know what we did wrong?”
“What? No!” That was—insane. “It doesn’t work like that, it’s not like that at all,” he said, and grabbed Kurt by the shoulder. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Okay?”
“But you’re…”
“Yeah, I’m still kicking. That doesn’t mean there’s a reason for that. It just—is. You couldn’t have done anything, there wasn’t any mistake. He—”
Logan meant to say, he probably wouldn’t have wanted you to stop it if you could have. I wouldn’t. But that wasn’t true. The other Logan had had Laura, too. “He just ran out of time.”
“Oh,” Kurt said, quietly.
An ambulance shrilled somewhere far away; a wet autumn wind kicked up the sky. Logan knuckled at Kurt’s folded-in shoulder, ineffectually, stupidly, and looked at the ground.
Later, he got up to do his civic neighbourly duty with regards to Dogpool. When he turned back from the trash can, Kurt was perched on the bench with his feet pulled up, as if he might launch off it, looking back at Logan. Logan walked back; Kurt smiled.
“So,” Kurt said. That stymied him. He recovered: “You said you were working in a liquor store?”
“I know, it sounds like the worst idea anyone’s ever had—but it’s working pretty well, actually.”
“I wasn’t going to say it,” Kurt said.
“The thing is, I have the nose for it,” Logan explained. He didn’t need to explain it, but he did. “I got nearly too much of a nose for it. The place is pretty fancy, we do, you know, tastings and shit. And now I know too much about fancy single malts to drink Jim Beam from the bottle. Although they do make me wear a shirt with a collar.”
He’d tried going cold turkey probably about three hundred, four hundred times, give or take. But he had some kind of demon in his head that wanted to wreck things, and it had never lasted. If Laura playing bloody-minded Simon Says with all of his bad habits hadn’t got him to put down the bottle altogether, nothing would. But approaching alcohol as a thing that wasn’t just for shutting down his brain, as something that it could be nice to have just a little of, had—it hadn’t fixed him. But it had done something important.
“When we falsified all my paperwork, you know, when I got here,” he continued, “The guy who wrote my fake resume, he put ‘whiskey’ in the skills box. And I missed that, and then I got a call from this place wanting to know if I was serious.”
Kurt laughed at that, and Logan marked down a point on some imaginary scoreboard, after the major penalty of—earlier.
Logan thought about it all the time. What if he ran out of time, too. What if his clock wound down, and it happened to Laura for a second time. “The school,” he said. “Do you guys got places open? Not, in case it needs clarification, f’r me.”
“Yes, at the moment we do.”
“I got, I guess you could say, a stepdaughter, something like that. I got a little girl, anyway.” He walked that back. He’d learned. She’d had objections. “Not actually all that little, mind. And she isn’t getting on very well with her school right now.”
“Well. We do tours. And things. If she wants to visit.”
“Yeah. Yeah.” He remembered, when they all died, the way the bones of the house had been mostly fine, but somebody—a looter—had smashed all the lamps on the drive, how the glass sounded underfoot. He didn’t remember it very well. He’d been drunk. He didn’t want Laura going back there. “I’ll talk to her. Give—give me your number, I’ll work something out if she wants to see the place.”
Kurt did. His number was the same, except that the second nine was a two. Logan contemplated the mysteries of the multiverse.
Mary Puppins trundled back towards the bench and made malicious eye contact. “I think,” Logan said distantly, “I should be getting home about now.”
“Right.” Kurt stood up, rocked back and forth. “If she does want to visit. You can come as well, if you like. Or I can pick her up. Whichever you prefer.” He waited. “Spare you the drive, at least.”
Logan stood as well; he stepped back from too-close. The allowable distance from other people was shorter seated than standing. “You’re too sharp. That’s your problem,” he said, unnecessarily. “I’ll let you know.”
They walked home. Or, more accurately, Logan walked home and Kurt walked beside him.
“Come up for a drink?” he asked, in the shadow of the fire escape with his keys in his hand. “We’ve got—uh.”
Logan couldn’t in good conscience serve a German the swill they had for beer that Wade bought. And he didn’t want to give him any of the Yamazaki he had stashed down the back of the TV console, because, A., Kurt wasn’t a whiskey drinker and wouldn’t appreciate it the way it deserved, and B., Logan was possessive of the Yamazaki, like a bad boyfriend.
“Lemonade,” he finished, weakly. “Or coffee, I guess.”
Kurt looked at him like he’d produced a kitten from his breast pocket, pleased but confused. “Yes, please,” he said, very primly. His feet didn’t make a sound on the metal steps. Logan let them both into the kitchen.
Kurt looked at the countertops and the fridge with what Logan thought was wonder. That was fine, it wasn’t insulting. Logan was surprised too, most days.
The place was, unusually, quiet. The radiators buzzed. Laura was holed up somewhere—he imagined, because it did him no harm to imagine, that she was doing her homework—and Wade was working. Althea was a mystery.
“You can take it down, if you want,” he said, and tapped his own cheek. “Nobody home except the kid and I tonight.”
“Ahaha, thank you,” Kurt said, one of the odd little sounds he used as punctuation in English like he was reading them out of a magazine, which was probably where he’d learned most of his colloquialisms. The nobody-man dissolved.
He was older than Logan had ever known him. There were lines beside his mouth.
“What?” Kurt said. Another Kurt-ism: Vot?
Remember last time, you stupid motherfucker, Logan thought. Don’t do it like that again.
“It’s good to see you again,” Logan said. “Any version of you.”
Kurt grinned and grinned and showed his eyeteeth. Logan poured him a lemonade.